Somewhere in Ohio, once upon a time in the 60s. 

Say what you will about the Internet, it's a way for people to find people, no matter how many times you have moved, changed jobs or entered witness protection.  I received this image at Christmas by e-mail from an old acquaintance I haven't seen or spoken to since ninth grade.  A nice surprise.  You can run but you can't hide, but it doesn't need to end badly.  Plus it's not like I went to Canada to dodge the draft and couldn't come back again.

I can't remember but I think this photograph was taken at some sort of end-of-summer picnic for members of the school orchestra.  I'm the one in the middle of the back row.  I can't remember a lot of things but I remember a little.  I remember John, Jim, and Karen, and I remember Jim played bass and Karen played violin.  I remember the girls giggling a lot.  I remember thinking the guy in the white t-shirt and shorts seemed to know something he wasn't sharing with the rest of us.  I remember wondering what it could be.

I remember thinking that some day I would be very far away from where I was then, and I would be doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.  And it would be great.  I remember thinking I was clever, and also wondering just how clever I really was.  Which is the point of life, of course, to find out just how much of something -- cleverness, ambition, stamina, conviction -- you've really got.

At some point last week I posted my five-hundredth blog entry here.  I can assure you it was not my plan when I was in the orchestra in the ninth grade to be doing this, or in fact to be doing pretty much any of what I am doing now.  I don't think I had an actual plan back then, but if someone had told me how things would turn out I think I might have tried to come up with one.  Tried to, at least.  Maybe. 

Maybe not.  I was something of a rebel in those days believe it or not, different drummer, my own beat, path less taken, that sort of thing.  As I remember it at any rate.  I was also fairly convinced that I was right about the way I saw things -- that the Vietnam War was a bad thing, that the Equal Rights Amendment was a good thing and we'd be sorry some day if we didn't get it passed.  Not everybody agreed with me, as you might imagine (it was Ohio) but I was pretty certain I was right.  Looking back, I still think so.

Of course I underestimated the opposition.  The wife of my high school health and civics teacher spit on me for something I said, either about the War or about equal rights for women, I don't remember which.  I don't think she knew her husband who was also the basketball coach was sleeping with one of the cheerleaders, but then you never know.  Maybe she did.  Everybody else knew.

I was reading this morning about the tea-bag people.  It is very hard sometimes to have compassion for people with whom you disagree, and I'm sure they feel the same way.  I think it's because you have to wait so long to see how things turn out, in order to know who's really right.  What seemed radical in the 60s seems like common sense now.  But not then.  Speak out against the war back then and you got spit on.  Or killed.  Four dead in Ohio, as you may recall.

I don't know what happened to all of my brave comrades in the orchestra.  I wonder if they are ever surprised by the way things have turned out.  I wonder if they have found out yet just how much of what they thought they might need for the journey they already had.  And I wonder if they know yet who ended up being right about the way things would be when we got to where we were going.