Where were you for the Summer of Love?

[randy_byers]

The wave of reminiscence about the 1969 moon landing has got me thinking about the significant lacunae in my shared experience with even Americans of my own generation. We were on Yap island in Micronesia from the summer of 1966 until the summer of 1970. I was five when we moved out there and nine when we moved back. One thing that means is that I didn't watch TV for those four years, so for example I missed Star Trek on its first run and only caught up with it in reruns. It also means that I missed following the first moon landing on TV.

Yap wasn't completely cut off from the world, but it was pretty close. One memory I have is of sitting in our neighbors' parents' airconditioned bedroom listening to Sgt Pepper's on a reel-to-reel tape deck. The cover fascinated me. Both my brother and sister went to school on Hawai'i, and I remember my brother bringing albums back with him. For some reason the one that sticks in memory is the Lovin' Spoonful. "Hot town, summer in the city/Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty." I think the Animals was another one. On the other hand, the radio station out there played almost nothing but country western, and I got a good dose of Hank Williams and Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. I didn't catch up with the pop music of the era until we got back to the States. My sister's copies of the red and blue Beatles anthologies and Abbey Road, which she left behind when she went to college in Indiana, were instant favorites.

For the most part I got caught up with everything I missed, but it's like getting caught up with a historical era you weren't around for. holyoutlaw remembers tanks in the streets in Chicago during the riots of the late '60s. To me, those riots are something I've only read about in books and seen in documentaries. I'm not sure the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations even registered on me at the time, although I started taking piano lessons when we got back in 1970 and one of the songs I taught myself to play and sing was "Abraham, Martin and John".

One of the odd things about all this is that I've read enough about and from the era and listened to enough of the music, seen enough of the movies and TV shows and documentaries, heard enough first hand stories from friends that it seems like I was there. American culture is permeated with the Sixties. It almost comes as a shock, as when thinking about the first moon landing today, to remember that I actually wasn't around. Then I remember how much I felt like a stranger in a strange land when we returned from Yap. I was an outsider, just slightly out of key with my peers. Even in college one of my favorite professors (she taught Shakespeare) told me that learning that I'd lived on a distant island as a child finally helped her understand something she'd sensed about me. (I was vainly pleased that there was something mysterious about me in her eyes.) It took me a long time to get over that feeling of not quite belonging, and it is only these little jolts of estrangement that make me realize that for the most part those feelings are a thing of the past. It's just that it was a past I didn't share with you.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if it's a Bug, or a Feature. Not that I lived abroad during childhood, but in several ways I might just as well have. Never much interested in the Pop Culture that perfused the lives of most of my age-mates -- music, movies, or (though it came along a bit later) Television -- I picked up only little bits of it, here and there... just enough to get a vague idea of the significance of most people's References. So, yeah, there are considerable amounts of life/cultural background that I don't share with others -- even others of my generation, which is about two generations ahead of yours (& at least that of most of the people I know), I guess. Still... everybody seems to manage, somehow.

And every once in a while something Pops Up. The discussion thread of a non-fan Blog I was skimming recently got diverted to talking about the movie "You Can't Take It With You" -- released when I was about ten years old, I didn't see it for another five or so years, but was Extremely Influenced by it (probably more than I realized until almost twenty years later, when I discovered people somewhat like that in Fandom). A surprising ot of those bloggers -- three or four generations younger than I -- turned out to be familiar with the movie, and to appreciate it.

But not sharing big parts of "the common culture" might help enable one to have a somewhat different perspective, which might benefit all concerned.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It does seem that one thing that a lot of fans have in common is feeling estranged from the common culture in one way or another. Loud and pronely, that's us.

You Can't Take It with You is the Capra film? I don't think I've seen that one. In fact, I'm not sure I've seen any Capra other than It's a Wonderful Life. I keep meaning to check out It Happened One Night sometime. Seems like I've been watching a lot of Claudette Colbert movies lately.