By Sally Friedman
“So what were the 1960s like?” Hannah asked me. She had been studying the ‘60s as ... history.
I think what Hannah wanted was to hear that her grandmother had been a wild radical activist who marched, shouted, carried banners and maybe even got arrested.
I had to disappoint her.
To me, that decade wasn’t about its glamour or its wildness or going gourmet with Julia Child. Not when I was bringing babies into the world, and trying to catch up on sleep that seemed lost forever. Not when their father, a new lawyer, was working days and nights to keep moving forward and I was a stay-at-home mom (as were so many of us, despite our degrees).
Home was where the heart was — and the mommy too.
I was not stoned in a commune or burning my bra or marching for causes in which I passionately believed, because I could never get a babysitter willing to stay with three kids under 5.
Hannah seemed crestfallen.
Had I missed out on the rock festivals and the incense? I had, indeed.
The aromas surrounding me were less likely incense than baby powder, and my “concerts” consisted of rousing renditions of “Three Blind Mice.”
But I can recount, with almost perfect recall, the pain of the assassinations. Just when the world was supposed to be straightening itself out, just when our gallant young President asked about what we could do for our country — it all came crashing down around us.
The horror of JFK’s death is a permanent scar on my psyche. That one, nobody forgets. Not even with the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, superimposed.
Those assassinations — President Kennedy and his brother Bobby; Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; and Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, the young idealistic civil rights workers whose deaths seemed an assault on all of us.
For me, some of the most searing images of the decade are associated with violence and mayhem, nightsticks and riots, and always, always, that riderless horse and the wrenching salute of a little boy at his father’s funeral. And now, even that “little boy” is gone.
Yes, other things were going on. The Rat Pack was out there making mischief. The Mamas and the Papas had nothing to do with Goldilocks. And too many of my contemporaries were dropping out, and dropping acid.
But I have a sweeping remembrance of sadness — Kent State, riots and the baffling specter of the Vietnam War.
I hated to spoil it for Hannah, but I don’t miss that piece of the past. It was, for me, an era that began with grace and hope and staggered to a close, heavy with disillusionment.
It’s not what my granddaughter wanted to hear. But it’s my truth. And it’s the least — and the best — I can give her.
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