Stoned English Majors
On a late-spring night half-a-century back, best as I recall, I drove a Plymouth through a restaurant napkin and entered another universe. Of the first I’m reasonably sure; second, certain. It was a time of infinite possibility, near-probability, life all full ahead, fears masked in male bravado, if there at all, and as the black rotary phone in my bedroom shot unanswered rings at Phil’s place, it was like I could hug the future. And expect it to hug me back. 1970, 18-edging-toward-19, was the last year I’d live with my folks in their West Oak Lane, Philadelphia home, which has housed...
Read MoreFor What It’s Worth
Woolworths at Cedarbrook Mall, just outside my home town of Philadelphia, didn’t look like much, but that was beside the point. Back in the Sixties, it was a great place for teenagers like me to visit during trips to the mall, especially the variety store’s record cut-out bin. Filled with carelessly tossed-in crap, near-crap, and the occasional gem, at 33 cents for a 45-rpm single, a buck for an LP, it invited those long on musical thirst and short on cash to find keys to their universe. One afternoon in 1968, I found one of mine, a rare version of Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled...
Read MoreChicken Noodle Soup Maiden
Nineteen fifty-nine was a year of great uncertainty. What about the Russians? Why so many TV Westerns? But in Stuart Nation, Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane neighborhood, I tripped over my own vexing questions like they were too-long shoelaces—all swirling around a girl in my fourth-grade class whose disinterest intoxicated me. I was a happily-chatty kid most of the time, except when I was around Carol, whose studied cool and blond, bowler-cut hair usually left me incapable of saying more than hello. To the actual Carol, that is; I shared some incredible phantom-afternoon interludes with...
Read MoreLunch, 1968
“This is important,” my buddy Walter bellowed one lunchtime across the chatter and clatter of Germantown High School’s vast cafeteria. “And I can only say it once.” The topic that day in 1965 was color—specifically, orange, the hue of a stack of cheese crackers piled high and majestic near the cash register. I’d questioned the wisdom of paying for food we each had access to at home, albeit connected to peanut butter in the form of Lantz snacks. Why buy them when we have them in our kitchens? “These crackers,” the tall, handsome 10th grader said in stentorian tones...
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