MLK Jr. in St. Augustine: a month in the life

In January of 1990, I was working as a daily reporter for the St. Augustine Record. I had been making a living as a journalist for a couple of years at even smaller newspapers in Florida, but I viewed the Record as a significant step up the ladder for me. Its circulation was still modest, at about 16,000, and the pay was dismal, but the paper had a reputation for integrity and objectivity. Besides that, St. Augustine was the sort of town that pulled you in: despite  unchecked real estate development outside the town limits and a roaring tourist trade, it retained a laid-back Old-Florida vibe. At lunchtime, I could walk down to the Pharmacy on St. George Street, hobnob with two-bit attorneys and town councilmen, wolf down a greasy cheeseburger, and be back at the office in time to file my stories for the next day’s deadline. Then it was straight down to the Mill Top or Scarlett O’Hara’s or the Trade Winds for a beer or two to wash away the day’s dust.

On the morning of the third Monday that month, my editor, Steve Cotter, said to me: “Trippe. Assignment for you. Run down to the town plaza around one o’clock this afternoon. And take a camera with you, ‘cause I think Studwell is tied up already. There’s supposed to be some kind of memorial down there for Martin Luther King Day.”

The paper had given me the use of an old Pentax that I loved ardently. Our staff photographers (all two of them) were excellent, but I often had to take photos for my own stories, and that Pentax had become my traveling companion, reliable, with manual functions, although it was dented up, and the external flash stood at a crooked angle like the Tower of Pisa. But the images it produced were consistently good, and I surprised myself at times with the quality of my own pictures. “Damn, Trippe,” Studwell would say. “Not too shabby.”

Of course, at that time, very little that I did - professionally at least - was planned, and everything that just happened to turn out well for me seemed simply another stroke of good fortune. Nevertheless, looking back now, I see that what I considered pure dumb luck, especially for someone who had no real training in journalism (my degrees were in English and creative writing), I actually owed to a certain man. His name was Pete Osborne, and although I didn’t know it at the time, he was a significant mentor in my writing life.

Pete’s title at the Record was ‘Senior Reporter.’ He was 56, and not too terribly long before I arrived there, he had been the newsroom editor. Over the lunch table, he was a raconteur of the first calibre, and most of his stories were so disarming as to be true. For instance, he made a strong case that as a cub reporter at the Mount Dora paper, he had broken the Cuban Missile Crisis story. As he told it, he was looking out the window one morning and noticed dozens of military trucks passing by on Highway 441, and simply called the Florida National Guard to ask what was going on. He also claimed to have been the first news reporter in the state to ask for copies of  911 tapes under the Sunshine Law: one night in the fall of 1988, a young girl at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind became disoriented in the school’s showers, and she was scalded to death. The tapes Pete requisitioned showed that the ambulance that was dispatched to the scene that night was inadvertently re-routed, and the girl died in those crucial lost minutes.  

When he told me that story, I could read the pain in his eyes. He was relentless on the job, but his savvy was tempered by compassion.

He was also an alcoholic. That was why he had been demoted from news editor to reporter. Apparently, the day after he had spent the night in the St. Johns County jail for driving under the influence, he managed to arrive at work on time, only to find himself in the uneasy situation of having to write the news story about his own arrest. It was a crisp, six-column-inch piece of reporting, and it appeared in that afternoon’s edition.

When I met him, though, Pete had been sober for about ten years. And as a sober man, there was no one more trustworthy or well-meaning. His intelligence and his memory for detail were as keen as a well-whetted band saw, and his professional advice, which never actually sounded like advice, was offered in such an offhand way that it all seemed just a matter of common sense. Nearly all that he said came with a sly smile beneath his thick grey mustache, and that sort of humor that assumes you are in on every joke. 

There is much more to tell about Pete, and I hope to tell it all eventually, but suffice it to say for now that on the third Monday in January, 1990, he had a few words for me as I passed his desk on my way out of the newsroom to cover the Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration ceremony at the town plaza. He was just hanging up his phone, and he swiveled about in his chair to face me.

“Hey there, kid, hang on just a sec before you roll out. Do you happen to know what’s up on the third floor of the building we are in at the present moment?”

“Of course I do, Pete. The archives.”

“Correct. You continue to exhibit potential. I’m only asking because I thought that if you’re going to cover the MLK event, you might want to wander upstairs as soon as you return, before you write your story. Far be it from me to tell you what to do, but I assume you’d like an interesting angle on this.”

“Always.”

“Okay, well then, I suggest you look in the photo file cabinet marked June of 1964. To be more exact, you’re looking for June 5th to roughly June 20th, I believe. You’ll find some pretty interesting things in there.”

“Can you give me a hint at least?” I said. “I was only six in 1964.”

“Well, for one thing, there was a piece of legislation called the Civil Rights Act, but I’m referring in particular to the events  of that summer in St. Augustine. Dr. King was in town then with a number of his followers, protesting segregation. In fact, he was arrested here. Big doings up at the Monson Motor Lodge. You’ll see Jimmy Brock’s name in those files, too, I think.”

Pete had introduced me to James ‘Jimmy’ Brock, the owner of the Monson Motor Lodge, at a chamber of commerce soiree some months earlier. He was in his mid-sixties at the time, and he had that wide smile and southern affability that said, “Welcome! I don’t know who the hell you are, but welcome!” As Pete affirmed afterwards, most everyone in town regarded Jimmy Brock as ‘a great guy,’ and I had no reason to believe otherwise.

He went on: “You’ll find lots of photos up there from Dr. King’s visit. Just a little background info for you, that’s all. Use it as you see fit. But remember - a newspaper is a historical document…” Now his forehead became wrinkled in thought. “You know, the more I hear myself talk about this, the better this gets. This could be a dern good story for, you know. Juxtapose your photos with some of those from ’64. Yeah. If I were you, I’d make sure I get up to the archives.”

“Thanks, Pete, I’ll try and make time for that. I’m under deadline, you know.”

“Yep. Every minute of every day.”

And then I swept out the door, a young reporter in a hurry, my Pentax swinging from my shoulder and my notepad in hand.

As it turned out, the commemoration ceremony, which was held, ironically enough, near the old slave market that fronted Matanzas Bay, was rather low-key. About two dozen people, white and black folks of varying ages, listened to an impassioned but barely audible speech delivered through a whistling p.a. system by a professor from a local private college. Everyone clapped politely, nodded, smiled, and then went about their business. After all, it was wintertime, and even in St. Augustine, when the saltwater-laced wind whipped over the railings along the waterfront, a damp chill would press into one’s bones.

I did see a familiar face, however. Moses Floyd, whom I had interviewed the preceding September for a story about his collection and transportation of food and other supplies for South Carolinians affected by Hurricane Hugo, was striding intently across the plaza, head down, when I sidled up next to him.

“Hey, Moses.”

He looked up and smiled. He was only a few years older than I was, but he was well into his career as a teacher and coach at the local high school. “Oh, hey there, Jeff,” he said.

“So, what’d you think of the speech?”

He shook his head. “She meant well. Kinda hard to hear, though.”

“I agree. Disappointing. I was able to catch a couple of sentences that I guess I can use in my story. Got a couple of decent pics of the speaker, too, I think.”

“At least she was standing still for you. You know, Florida only started recognizing MLK Day as a national holiday the year before last. And for all the big talk you hear sometimes, we’re still kinda backward around here, I guess. Old Jim Crow ain’t all that far behind us.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it.”

“You’re a good fella. I got to make haste. Doing some painting up at the church. You take care, now.” He turned to head toward King Street but then stopped abruptly and turned.

“Hey, Jeff, you’re not going to quote me, are you? That stuff about Jim Crow?”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Hm. Well, if you do, you can just refer to me as an unidentified negro.” He gave his big, toothy laugh and then went on his way.

As it happened, I returned to the Record’s offices with ample time to spare, and as Pete had suggested, after I stowed the Pentax and my notes, I climbed the narrow, sagging steps up to the top floor. Mind you, this was when the paper’s offices were in their former quarters on Cordova Street, just a couple of blocks from the old courthouse, and the building itself seemed to quake and quaver in a strong wind, and the smell of ink and paper from the presses down below permeated the workaday life and stuck to your clothing like stale sweat. I prowled deep into the grey metal file cabinets lined up like rickety headstones until I found the one containing local photographs published in1964.

Most of the pictures themselves, tinged by time to a watery sienna, slept their eternal sleep quietly in their bulging folders, and the faces of the deceased, surprised to be awakened thus, gazed up at me: action shots from American Legion baseball games, sour faces at county commissioners meetings, a woman in a bikini walking a poodle in the Spanish Quarter…and then at last, my index finger found it: June, 1964.

But the folder was utterly empty. 

“There’s nothing in there,” I said, as Pete swiveled around in his chair.

“In the archives?”

“In the folder for June, 1964. Nothing. Nada. Not a single photo. Everything else is there, every other month, but nothing for June.”

He leaned forward, put his chunky elbows on his knees, and looked down at the coffee-stained carpet. I noticed that the swoop of gray hair on top of his head had shifted to expose a bald spot. After a few moments, he said, “Let’s just think about this for a minute.”

We thought.

“You looked in the bottom of the drawer? They hadn’t fallen out? You’re sure?”

“Clean as a whistle. Empty as a grave on Judgment Day.”

More thinking. Finally, Pete stood up, put his hands on his hips, and then thrust them into his pockets. “All I can figure, then, is that somebody took them. The question is…who? And why?”

“Who was the photographer back then? Maybe we can get in touch with him. He might know something about it. Or maybe he kept them for posterity, or else he realized they could be valuable someday.”

“I doubt it. News photographers usually can’t think that far ahead. Anyway, I have no idea who took those pictures, and neither will anybody else around here. It’s too long ago, now. For all we know, he could be dead.”

“You’re sure they were in there? June of ’64?”

“Absolutely. I’ve seen ‘em. Ran across ‘em a few years back when I was researching some piece of crap story about some St. Augustine High School alum opening a golf course, or some such crap.”

“Weird,” I said. “It’s almost like it never happened at all.”

At this, Pete looked at me closely, mouth slightly open, eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to figure something out about me, or perhaps had just noticed something in my appearance that he hadn’t quite caught before. Then he gave a raspy cough and said, “I’m going outside for a ciggie. You’d best get on that story. Just go with what you have.”

What I had was not much. It sucked, to be truthful. As I recall, it ended up on page two of the local news section (no photo) instead of on the front page, above the fold, as I had anticipated it would when Steve Cotter had approached me that morning. Nevertheless, I shrugged it off, and when that afternoon’s paper went out, my story was widely overlooked, no doubt, merely another unread chronicle destined for deep sleep in the archives. Oh, a few people - aside from the handful that had actually attended the “event” - might have glanced at it and muttered something like “Well, isn’t that good to know? Says right here: ‘Martin Luther King Jr.: Not Forgotten.’”

__________

In the world of newspapers, there is always the next day. The story the reporter wrote and filed today is no longer of concern to him. Like dust across a creaky wooden floor, it is swept away, and it is tomorrow’s story that really matters. Seldom does he pause to heed Pete Osborne’s simple observation: a newspaper is a historical document.

It took me years, long after I had left journalism to become an English teacher, to piece together what had actually taken place in St. Augustine in June of 1964. The events of those few weeks may seem a redundancy in our country, sadly, a tale of suffering, violence, and immutable courage. They are well-documented and easily accessible to anyone who can use a search engine on the internet today, but even now, although they proved to be an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement, I don’t believe they are widely known or discussed.

Dr. King arrived in St. Augustine around June 5th, at the behest of Robert Hayling (the first black dentist admitted to the American Dental Association, by the way). Hayling had become deeply involved in protests against segregation in the Ancient City and had founded a chapter there of the NAACP Youth Council in 1963. Hayling and members of his chapter met brutal resistance from the local Ku Klux Klan when they attempted to use whites-only swimming pools and other public facilities. Tensions rose significantly when African-American youths staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, where a number of them were arrested. Hayling promised that he and his followers would defend themselves against attacks by the Klan, with firearms, if necessary. Conflicts continued through the spring of ’64 at beaches on nearby Anastasia Island.

Enter MLK, Jr. Accompanied by Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and other friends and associates (including white supporters), he worked closely with demonstrators to draw attention to the injustices of segregation in St. Augustine. King himself went to the Monson Motor Lodge and attempted to dine at the hotel’s restaurant. He found himself in a face-to-face confrontation on the front steps with the owner - one James ‘Jimmy’ Brock. Dr. King was arrested.

That was on June 11th. On June 18th, several demonstrators jumped into the swimming pool at the Monson. In a response that would bring him a degree of infamy, Brock poured what he claimed was muriatic acid into the water. Although that substance, commonly used in pool maintenance, is not especially life-threatening, it can cause severe burns to the skin. A few minutes later, in a curious act of what he no doubt believed was devotion to duty, a policeman jumped into the water and arrested members of the group. If the eyes of the nation were not already upon St. Augustine before that moment, Jimmy Brock’s actions ensured that they would be.

Shortly thereafter, the governor of Florida at the time, Farris Bryant, himself a segregationist, did what bureaucrats often do when faced with a crisis: he formed a committee to look into things. In the meantime, King had left for Washington DC to witness Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act on July 1st.

Although the Record’s own pictures of those events vanished mysteriously, there are in existence numerous photos from those tempestuous days, most of them taken by the renowned Associated Press photographer Horace Cort. They are still startling in their black-and-white starkness, with their difficult truths that we may wish would go away, but which must not.

I am guilty, too, in that I did not know my own history. I grew up in Jacksonville, half an hour up the road from St. Augustine, and yet even as a would-be chronicler of life in that particular place, I knew nothing of the town’s role in the story of Civil Rights. It’s no excuse, but the bloated tourist and real-estate industries along the east coast of Florida do not exactly use the legacy of racism as selling points in their brochures. Such are the sins of our past; we choose to turn away from them, bury them, “put them in context” and rationalize that they had nothing to do with us. Still, I was ashamed of my ignorance of the sufferings and heroism of others, and  I still am. It makes me wonder what else I may have missed.

My friend Pete Osborne could have told me, no doubt, but alas, he died of pancreatic cancer in   December of 1991.

The Monson Motor Lodge was torn down in 2003. James Brock died in 2007.

Photo by Horace Cort

Photo by Horace Cort 

Windows On A Youth

with some thoughts on systemic racism

I have three true stories to tell here, although “confessions” might be a better term for them. At least one great teacher has told me that it is a mistake for a writer to be too self-conscious, as if to say, “Look at me! I’m writing!” In this case, however, I should clarify that I have been searching now for quite some time for the correct way to present these events, and I have finally realized that for these particular episodes, there will never be an easy method or time, for they are too personal. And yet, they clamor within me to be told.

I should start by saying that I was born and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Often, on hearing this, people I have met in other parts of the U.S. will say something like: “Oh, Florida? That’s not really like part of the south, is it?” They think of Miami, retirement communities, transplanted northerners, those people we have always called “snowbirds” because, if they have enough money, they flee their home states at the first sign of seriously cold weather and make their way to the land of palm trees and Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth. However, I wish to assure you that the town in which I was raised is unquestionably southern in both culture (if that’s the correct word) and temperament. And like many who are from there, I am “bona fide,” in that my grandparents came down from the tobacco farms of rural Georgia and settled in the first big city they happened upon in the hopes of escaping poverty (they didn’t).

Racial segregation and the inequalities and tensions that have resulted from it have long existed in Jacksonville just as they do in many  other southern towns - as hidden bruises (at least to me and my cohorts) that have, on occasion, become too painful to ignore completely. It has taken me a very long time to begin to come to grips with the ugliness and insidiousness of the sort of hatred I grew up around, largely because it was impossible for me for so long even to recognize it. It remains an ongoing effort, and I am sure it will be so for the rest of my life.

So, imagine this: a boy of no more than four years goes to the local Winn-Dixie grocery store with his mother on a typically steamy Saturday morning in July. He loves going, in part because unlike his own home, it is air-conditioned there, and because he enjoys the sensations of seeing, smelling, and touching (if he can get away with it) all of the various-colored fruits and vegetables and cans and baked goods and so on. Besides this, he is with his mother, and he knows that if he is good and does not actually ask, she will likely buy him something special: an oversized cookie, or even better, a freshly made chocolate eclair, his favorite.

But on this particular Saturday, the boy does a very bad thing. He does it unwittingly, but it is bad nonetheless, and he must learn his lesson from it. He spies a water fountain by the back wall of the store, and even though he is not really thirsty, he cannot resist racing to it and hopping up on the little step placed there especially for people just his size, so that he can take a nice long drink. Gulp, gulp, gulp…what a fine thing it is to know the wonders of the Winn-Dixie on a Saturday morning. Then, suddenly, something or someone has him by the ear. It is rather as if some awful bird of prey has dug its talons into him, and he finds himself being yanked abruptly off of the little step and away from the fountain. He reels about and is mortified to see that it is his own mother who has him, who is wrenching his tender ear as though it were a rotten lemon rind to be stripped away.

In shock, he looks up at her pitifully, as if to say, What have I done? and pointing to a larger fountain a few feet away from the one he has used, she hisses, “That’s our fountain there! You were using the colored one!”

He does not understand her. The fountain from which he has just drunk is a plain white basin; it does have a thin crack in it, but the water seems as wet and cold as any water. The other fountain is a tall, grayish column with a glistening steel top. The boy knows about colors, and neither of the fountains is actually colored at all. And then, he turns and sees a black girl about his own age, who had apparently been waiting to have a drink as well. But now, for some reason, she is smiling at him.

“See?” Mother says. “She knows the difference.”

It is painful for me to recount this incident because I sincerely have never thought of my mother as a hateful person. She has been Mom, my nurturer and great supporter, my strength, and the source of whatever creativity I possess, for my entire life - for which she is also responsible, of course. By no means could I ever have asked for a more loving parent. Therefore, my only possible conclusion about her actions and words on that day? It was a behavior she had learned long ago, and no one had ever shown her otherwise, no one had ever offered a different vision of the world and the people in it. In fact, she was diligently following the rules that had been set down for her through a warped vision. Does that make it tolerable in the greater picture? Not at all. Nevertheless, in general, we are all at the mercy of the life and the ideology that are handed to us from a young age.

Please note that I use the phrase “in general.” This is because, once in a great while, even as we are being indoctrinated into a destructive and unjust system, an odd moment of light shines through. Such a moment came for me a few years later, when I was twelve, and I am still not sure how or why I reacted as I did, but I look back on it now as one of the few times I have done something right purely by instinct. There was no good reason for it, otherwise; it was simply a moment of grace granted to a kid who was still ignorant and undeserving, for the most part.

Growing up, I always heard that the world’s first Burger King fast-food joint was established in Jacksonville. I think there remains some dispute about that, but for my purposes here, it doesn’t matter. What was important was that every day during the summertime, with utter sovereignty and the unmerited trust of our parents, my best friend and neighbor John Sharp and I would walk the three blocks or so from Ligustrum Road to the Burger King on Merrill Road - sometimes with less than a dollar in hand between us - place an order at the walk-up window (there was no drive-thru or dine-in service in those days), order something, anything we could get, and then, fancying ourselves social elites, sit and eat our goodies at one of the picnic tables on the adjacent patio. 

One day, we arrived just in time for the lunch rush and found ourselves at the end of a long line of customers. As we stood there on the sidewalk, the soles of our bare feet too thickened by summertime to feel the scorching heat emanating from the cement, a city bus pulled up to the stop a few yards away, and an elderly African-American man walked briskly over and got in line behind us. He was well-dressed, in a checked blazer and a white fedora, as I recall, but no tie. He had a thin, well-trimmed mustache. Then, very soon afterward, a young white girl of about ten, I’d say, with short-cropped dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, walked up. John and I were astonished to watch her walk straight past the older man and wedge herself in front of him, right behind us.

In high school, I had to read Ralph Ellison’s literary masterpiece called Invisible Man (definitely not the sci-fi story by the same name). In it, the narrator describes the distinct feeling that he is actually invisible on the streets of New York’s white neighborhoods. It is not so much that he is disdained by others, but rather, that he is not even seen. I remember reading that passage and vividly recalling the manner in which that little white girl stepped past the older black man as though he was not even standing there. I think the phenomenon Ellison is getting at is exactly what I witnessed that day in the Burger King line.

Even though John and I were well familiar with the social conventions of the time period, we were still young enough to be appalled. Then I looked at the man in his checked blazer and fedora, and he shrugged his shoulders and gave me a look of sad understanding that seemed to say, “Do you see how it is? Do you see?” Maybe that - his expression, his simple resignation in the face of inhumanity and his awareness that we young boys had now seen it up close - maybe that is why I did what I did, said what I said. Or maybe, even at twelve, some anger deep within me sparked upon the moral flint that is buried in us all. I do not really know.

In any case, I addressed the girl: “Hey, you. Girl. That’s not the end of the line.” I gestured to the empty air behind the man. “That’s the end of the line. Now get your butt back there.”

Her mouth opened slightly, and for just a moment, I could see she was weighing some sort of retort. Then, silently, she moved.

Retelling it, I realize it may seem a trivial episode. But bear in mind that I was still twelve and had explored very little of the world, if any, and had read hardly anything except for sports novels and Hardy Boys books. It was a small thing in the vast sea of terrible things that happened (and continue happening) with every day’s tidal surges. And maybe the African-American gentleman remembered it for a long time, too, and had at least the passing thought that there might be hope someplace, someday, for us white folks. Still, I also realize it is pathetic that in my sixty-two years, I mark that as one of the very few times I acted morally and correctly through sheer instinct, for I have made a great mess of most such opportunities.

And that brings me to my last related anecdote. Again, it will no doubt seem a trifling occurrence to some readers, but for me, it was another of those fleeting moments in which something about myself was made clear to me. And I take no pride in what I saw.

I had transferred to the University of Richmond in the fall of 1977. Richmond is a private institution, and at that time, it was predominantly white; I’m sure that it cost more money than my parents could really afford, but they had taken out loans to assure that I would complete my college education. I had only one true reason for enrolling there - I had a girlfriend there. Whatever other rationale I came up with was utter garbage, and as it turns out, I would only be there for one semester (can you imagine why?). But on move-in day in September of that year, I experienced one of those moments that is so embarrassing that it still makes my face go red remembering it, and I despise myself all over again even some forty-odd years later.

I was in one of those large, gray-stone dormitories intended to bring to mind the grand structures of Oxford and Cambridge. I didn’t have much to move, really - my typewriter was my most cumbersome possession, and I had managed to fit that and everything else into my little olive-green Datsun truck. Within a few minutes, I had hung up and put away my clothes, stacked a few books on the shelf above my appointed desk, put a couple of family photos my mother had framed for me on top of the dresser, and slid my guitar under the bed. There were many parents strolling about the hallways and looking curiously into the various rooms, but since I was a sophomore and therefore far more worldly than I had been only a year ago, I had told my own folks that they need not make the trip this time. Next, I took a few minutes for some friendly chat with my new roommate (he was a good fellow from the Shenandoah Valley, but I knew I wouldn’t see him much), and then I left to find my girlfriend.

First, though, on my way down the corridor, I stopped into the men’s room for a quick leak, but when I flushed the urinal, it instantaneously overflowed, sending a small flash flood across my new sneakers and wetting my socks and the cuffs of my pants, and I stepped backward in annoyance. “Damn,” I barked.

I walked quickly to the sink, washed my hands, and then grabbed handfuls of paper towels and attempted to dry my shoes. At that moment, a heavyset black man in what I took to be a maintenance worker’s khaki shirt came in and began to wash his hands. 

“Oh, hi,” I sad. “Good thing you came in. I just want to let you know, that urinal over there is not working properly.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I definitely won’t use it, in that case.”

“No,” I replied. “I mean to say that it needs to be fixed…” My voice trailed off as he stared at me oddly, as though I had suddenly begun talking in a different language.

Now a much younger black man, about eighteen years old and dressed in an Izod shirt and jeans, appeared in the bathroom doorway. “Come on, Dad,” he said. “The dean wants to meet with all the freshmen and their parents.”

The look on the older man’s face changed: his furrowed-up brow now fell into a narrow, knowing gaze. Now I know who you are, the gaze seemed to say to me. I realized that it had dawned on both of us at once what my awful mistake had been, of course. I had assumed that he was a maintenance man for the college, and worse yet, it had not even occurred to me in any way that he might be a student’s father. The cold and unmitigated reality was that I had made this assumption based on one thing only: his color.

____________

Now that I see these three anecdotes lined up in their proper sequence, one thing is clear to me: there is no sequence. I see a back-and-forth internal struggle, with fits and starts, noble ambition and sputtering failure. There was no turning point at which I threw off my own mental bonds, the ones placed upon me long ago by those people who came before me. Oh, as a college sophomore, I would have argued that I had done so, that I had cleansed myself of all racist views, but a few words exchanged in a college dormitory showed me that I really hadn’t even begun to do so, even then.

The boy that I was in the Winn-Dixie merely wanted a drink of water, so I am not sure he can be faulted in any way. He did not make the signs that said “COLORED” and “WHITE.” He could not even read them, but he was speedily, gruffly, and expeditiously indoctrinated into the world that did make them.

That kid of twelve, though, the middle one, standing in line at the Burger King, who was compelled by his boy’s heart to speak and to act in order to perhaps correct at least one moment of indignity on a sidewalk in Jacksonville… He is the one I hope is really mostly me. Maybe it can be as simple as trusting and acting upon our instincts. By doing just that, children show us our potential goodness all the time.

Often people wish to talk about the complexities and nuances of race relations in the south. There can be no doubt that the south still has the greatest share of the work still to be done, because of the long scourge of slavery. However, from what I observe right now - not just in the news but in day-to-day real life - there is no region in this country, no neighborhood or block or household, for that matter, wherein citizens ought not to be examining their own consciences concerning the worth and dignity of black lives.

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Three Places, Three Memories

This is the last piece in a three-part series.

Pleasant Beach

(South Thomaston, Maine)

Sometimes a place seems to come to you, as though the world has tilted and you find yourself sliding towards it through no effort of your own. It happened to me this way at Pleasant Beach, a little scoop of a cove between Rockland and South Thomaston along Maine’s midcoast, a short paddle from the mouth of the Weskeag River. There on a thin lip of rock stands a small yellow cottage that has been in my wife’s family for well over a century, and my convergence with it twenty-four years ago has made an inestimable difference in my life. Without this place, undoubtedly, most things would be very different for me today, and I would be a very different man. Of course, I can only speculate as to what those differences might be, but I can say for certain that I would not…

- know very much about the high, roaring tides of the North Atlantic

- know very much about the habits of lobsters and lobstermen

- from a distance, be able to distinguish a loon from a cormorant (visually, that 

  is; the loon’s cry is unmistakable)

- know how to drive in fog so blinding you wonder if it is not inside your own skull

- know how to drive in heavy snow and ice

- etc.

You see, after ten summers as “rusticators” here, we became full-time residents of Maine in 2006. Nearly fourteen years later, it still seems that first Strawberry Moon is just now emerging from the sea.

After all of this time, even under winter’s blanket, the magic of Pleasant Beach in the summer asserts itself. Where do I begin to tell of its charms? In the morning, if I am up early enough, I can walk out to the porch of the yellow cottage and witness the beginning of the day. If the weather is clear, the sun makes a king’s entrance, glittering across the Gulf of Maine wearing a golden and bejeweled crown, as the birds begin their songs of worshipful ecstasy. And if it is low tide, when the shiny mud reaches out toward the channel like fleshy hands, the seagulls begin their aerial ballet, an artful ritual of coldblooded killing and savage feasting. The gull knifes downward and plucks a crab or a snail from the exposed seabed, then wheels up and in toward the shore, hovering there, and then airdrops his prey thirty or forty feet to the big rocks below, where it explodes with a meaty crack, and the seagull plunges down to enjoy its breakfast. Imagine all of this from the point of view of the unsuspecting crab, though: is he terrified in his own juices, or does he simply accept death-by-smashing as a vocational hazard?

When the carnage is over and the sun lolls in the vast blue air, the fishermen come out with the tide, some of them solitary, purposeful, each one a lonely traveler in the old quest to haul from the mystery below a living, a livelihood, a life; still others roar past us indifferently, commanders concerned with more important matters, radios cranked up, the better to blast above the big engines their country music and classic rock. They don’t gaze over at us, but the posture of each crew member clearly says to us, “Fuck all you shore people.”

But we don’t care. For a while, we have the sun and the breeze, and the slow but extraordinary shifts in the light and the cloud-shadows as the day makes its journey. There is no regret in this, for the day lives its life fully - proud, sorrowful, coming, going, briefly crowning the western treetops in homage to itself and then fading off down the Weskeag River, bidding “Goodbye!” to us and to the sea and moving on into the valleys and the hills beyond, as the lobstermen return to their home ports, trailing their gouache wakes. We will miss you, Day, but welcome unto you, Night; let us see what you have in store.

Someday, when I am a very old man, I hope, that full moon that rises over the gulf (and especially over our little cove) will be at the beginning of my very last book; or maybe it will be the ending of it, but either way, it will be as prominent a marker there as it has been in my own life. I have looked upon it and seen the sad furrow in the brow of the woman I love, and I have seen my children’s eyes. So many nights we have built our fires on the edge of the world, giving shape to the wildness of the sea and the uninhabited islands that rise black and humped against the burnished pewter of the sky. This is where all sound begins, in an audible perfection that no recording studio can ever reproduce because one is in the midst of it: the cracking of the flaming wood, bright and round against the rolling cymbal of the tide upon cretaceous bedrock. So deeply did the glaciers etch the record of their journey that the dark eyes of the crevasses watch us hungrily, like the fissures in our dreams, into which we dare not step.

Above is the same sky that Adam saw and wondered at, and our hearts find the old lines, the old zeniths…but only for a few minutes. Aside from the brave passage of a satellite every so often, it is a drama of absolute stillness, a cloudburst of lights frozen by the breath of God. Down here we are small, wandering seeds, grateful to be in the world at all - the only world we are certain of, at least. Finally, though, our gazes must come back to the horizon, and to the things that perhaps lie within our ability to comprehend: the dark slab and glowing green points of a tanker passing out in the channel; the racing silver sliver thrown by a lighthouse against a far-off fog bank; and something that looks like a coffin seeping along on the current just beyond the wharf.

Now our beds begin to call to us, but they must wait as one last beer puts its fine sheen on the evening. Be careful on the short path up to the cottage - there are loose rocks there. Take a last chestful of that air that was nowhere else so precisely contrived to bring us the yearning we will feel in February, when summer will be someplace between a forgotten dream and a melody we cannot quite hear yet but whose strains we know well. So to bed, finally, to fresh sheets and warm quilts, having opened the windows to the cool July night and to the gnashing of the tide. The water comes so hard, we will wonder, in the morning, that all has not been washed away.

Soon, though, it doesn’t matter, for I am not here anyway. I am out there, in that little white dinghy that is always moored beside the wharf, the one no one ever uses. I lie snugly along its bottom, arms folded, marveling that a mere two inches of weathered wood separates me from the cold Atlantic water, and staring upward into the sky once again, wherein I can now plainly see the unending story of a billion years. I am not even a snail dropped from the beak of a seagull. Then, slowly at first and now faster, I am moving, for the dinghy has somehow slipped its moorings and I am simply drifting, headed for who knows where. 

Three Places, Three Memories

This is the second installment in a three-part series.

Bathampton

(Somerset, UK)

I am not certain of the moment I felt it, that sense that I was going home rather than traveling to a country where I’d never been before. Maybe it came over me as I was looking down from the plane’s window as it descended, watching the patchwork quilt of farmers’ fields growing larger, and then seeing the great city unfold itself, agleam and white, with the dark river gashing its way through.

Or maybe it was seeing the face of my friend Chris, whom I had met through a mutual friend when I was in grad school, as he stood there waiting at the gate. With that smile, crooked though it was, all of England seemed to say to me, “Welcome back. How long we have been waiting for you.” And just as I had suspected would happen, upon Chris’s recommendation, our very first stop was the airport pub for two pints of John Smith’s Yorkshire Bitter.

Maybe that was it: the feeling of the pound coins in my palm and then the sound of them as I plunked them onto the wooden bar, and then the barman’s voice uttering the phrase: “Thanks, mate.” In the ensuing days and weeks, how many times I would hear those words as I stood in some pub or other, looking up at the stout beams that had sustained the same roof for centuries,  then gazing at the rows of pewter mugs, many of which had hung patiently on their pegs since their owners had died long beforehand; and then there was the taste of the beer, stinging a bit if it was lager, dark and earthy if it was bitter.

In any case, the feeling that I was returning to England instead of visiting for the first time never left me. I would go back numerous times over the years, and it was always the same, with my heart and gut saying to me, “You are home again at last.” And each time, after the plane and the bus and the train ride into Bath Spa station, my steps would lead me along the Kennet and Avon Canal to Holcombe Vale in the small village of Bathampton. 

Forever frozen in my mind, that village is: the crisply-attired postman coming up the walk and opening each little iron gate to approach each door’s brass mail slot; the red and white and pink roses, so big you would need two hands to hold one (if you dared to pick it); the gravel alley that leads down past the primary school and then spills out onto the little bridge that spans the canal; and just beyond that is St Nicholas Church with its mossy graveyard (where my friend is now buried); and then you arrive at the George Inn.

The George Inn in Bathampton

These days the George is a chain pub, or so I am told, but I do not believe that was true in 1985 when I first drank there. I doubt it matters much - a British chain pub is not like an Applebee’s, where the food and drinks are just as bad in Miami as they are in Omaha. In the British Isles, the local charm and character of every pub is ineradicable. There remains some debate as to whether the George was established in the 12th or 17th Century, but either way, it has obviously long outlived its most faithful patrons, and I daresay it will also outlive those who might be sitting there at this very moment, quaffing an ale or a cider and laughing over a good story. As in most pubs, conversation is the primary source of entertainment; in general, there is no loud music or TV to upstage a punchline or quip. The stones, the timbers, the old, comfortable furnishings, the bright glow of lamps and hearths - all things here lend themselves to social gathering. On warm afternoons, the outdoor tables by the canal, with their colorful umbrellas against the pub’s gray stone facade, are always full, as the day demands that we stop here for a drink and a chat. The world will wait for us.

Of course, that would occur only when my friend was not in a state of exile. Sometimes when I visited Bathampton, Chris had been banished from the George by the management, though it was never a permanent condition. He was not a bad sort at all, so I’m not sure exactly why this would happen to him. Granted, he could become excited and animated, but I swear that he had no malice in him whatsoever. In truth, he was a fabulous conversationalist, with that wonderful working-class temperament, at peace with himself, with strong opinions, but as bighearted a host as one might ever wish for. He and I were “best mates,” as he put it. Maybe the publican at the George was an arsehole, or maybe it was just some sort of game he and Chris played with one another. Anyway, I would say,

“So, shall we go to the George tonight?”

And Chris would say, “No. I’ve been banned.”

And I would say, “Again? Why?”

He would say, “I’m not sure. May’ve been something I said.”

In such cases, we would spend a few evenings at the Wagon and Horses in Bristol or at the Saracen’s Head in Bath (fine alternatives, both) until Chris was allowed to return to the George.

Often his sister, Jill, would join us. Both of them were still living at home with their parents, a lovely white-haired couple who, from the moment I met them, contributed greatly to my sense that I had come home. For example, on the day I arrived, his mother had drawn a warm bath for me, something my own mother hadn’t done since I was about five. Mrs. Banbury was an English matriarch straight out of a storybook - quiet, with a soft, lilting laugh, but clearly the final authority on all family goings-on. She also happened to be an excellent chef and baker, and the first time I experienced a real British afternoon tea with fresh biscuits, in her back garden, I understood why it has been such an enduring tradition. His father, Ken, a grand old guy with a stunning hank of hair falling just above quick, intelligent eyes, had been a flier in the Royal Air Force during World War 2 (his decommission, signed by the queen, hung over the fireplace mantle). He was well-read and possessed a whiplash wit, and he immediately took me as a second son, showing me around town the next day, since Chris had to go to work. He suggested that I spend my afternoon hiking into the hills above the village, just to get the lay of things.

“See that? Just up there?” he asked, pointing. “If you look closely, you can make out a stone structure. It’s a sham castle.”

He explained that this was an old facade with turrets on either end, designed to trick passersby into believing it was a medieval fortress, when in actuality it was merely a single wall, built long ago by a wealthy landowner “to improve the view.” 

“It’s all about appearances, you see,” Ken said. “In any case, if you do go up there, look for my name on the wall. I etched it there with a pen-knife when I was just a lad.”

I did go, and I did find his name: ‘Ken Banbury, 1927.’ There were many other names carved into the stone, too. Just above his, I saw ‘David Worthington, 1770.’ Perhaps it wasn’t a medieval castle, but it was still older than almost anything one might see on an afternoon’s hike in the U.S.

This led me to the startling realization, in fact, that nearly everything around me, all that I saw and touched, was somehow both an artifact of the past but also very much a useful piece of the present-day world. It was very odd. In America we are quite used to seeing buildings demolished, with new ones hastily put up in their places, and to abruptly tossing out cheap furniture, say, when it is no longer trendy, but in England, old things are not valued simply because they are old: they are well-made and well-kept and used for their original purposes for years and years, even for centuries. For instance, in most pubs and parish churches - the two essential gathering places in every English village - you must finally understand that the floorboards on which you stand, the bar upon which you rest your elbows, and the altar at which you kneel have known many thousands of feet, elbows, and knees over hundreds of years. In this way, you are eerily but solidly adhered to the inhabitants of the past through the things they used.

The structures and their tables and pews and beams may survive the ages, through wars and pestilence, storms and revolutions, but alas, the people do not. When I went to Bathampton again a few years later with my young son, Chris’s mother had died during the winter. This time his father did not squire me around the town. Instead he wandered about the house, watched television, and pruned his magnificent roses. Oh, he was still friendly enough and full of humor, but he had changed markedly overall: he was tired, stooped by the wearying weight of age and loss. When two more years had passed and I visited again (with my new wife this time), Ken had gone from this life as well. Even in that unchanging, lovely village in which so many things are preserved, where the postman continues to come along daily and carefully to open each little iron gate, and where the pewter mugs still hang in neat rows at the George, death must have his share.

One evening in the spring of 2016, my wife and I were reminiscing about England and about the possibility of going back to Bathampton to see Chris again. I had fallen out of touch with him for several months, but that was typical of our long-distance friendship. He had always sent us postcards from his trips to Spain and Thailand and Amsterdam (he had also come to see us in Florida several times over the years), and he never failed to send a card at Christmastime. Now I could not recall whether we had heard from him during the previous holiday, and then my spouse, who seems to have an uncanny talent for such things, had a sudden intuition. Very soon, a search of the Internet turned up this simple obituary in the Bath Chronicle:

BANBURY, Christopher, passed away peacefully on the 23rd October, 2015, aged 62. Much loved brother to Jill. 

There was no chance of wishing it away. It was not some other Chris Banbury who also happened to have a sister named Jill. It was my friend, as certain as the tolling of a clock, but those few printed words did not seem to be enough for me somehow. I attempted a number of times to contact Jill, simply to try and cauterize something in my own mind, as though talking to her and learning exactly what had happened might help me to stash all the memories where they could be taken out, looked at, handled, and then put away again. But I was unsuccessful, and unlikely as it seemed, I wondered if she had sold the house and moved someplace else, maybe Bath, maybe London… I considered flying across the ocean once more and taking the old path along the canal, just to knock on the door at Holcombe Vale and see who might answer. Or perhaps I could go into the George Inn for a pint, and if I found him not, I could smile and ask the barman if Chris had been banned again. However, the school year was at full tilt and my duties as a teacher were clamoring and hectic, and I simply couldn’t get away just then. Or so I told myself.

In any case, it has taken me this long to understand why Bathampton, for me, remains an unresolved story, an unfinished memoir: I was not as good a friend as I ought to have been. This is the bitter truth. Had I been as good a friend as I ought to, somehow I would have known, and I would have been there. I might even have been at his side when the moment came. Still, we travel on, we people with good intentions, bound for God knows where.

Three Places, Three Memories

As the title suggests, this post is the first of a three-part series about places I have known and loved well. To truly be in a place means that one’s senses are alert to the present moment. In turn, this means we can later - perhaps many years later - appreciate the gifts that specific places have given us only by recalling them well, vividly, and with the perspective that time affords. This is what I have tried to do here.

The Plaza of the Americas

(Gainesville, Florida)

I enrolled at the University of Florida as a sophomore in the spring of 1978. It was my first time on a big college campus in a real college town, and in my mind and memory, the Plaza of the Americas - a large, grassy area that fronted the main library - was the heart of the university. I saw many things there, some of them inspiring and others quite ugly, and still others just plain weird, but in all, it seemed the headwaters of the wild currents that flowed outward and through the veins of the entire community of scholars, hippies, park-bench evangelists, musicians, vagabonds, political firebrands, doomsayers, and through my own veins as well.

I confess that as a young man of twenty, inexperienced, awkward, and with raw and un-sanitized thinking, the girls were the first attraction that drew my gaze in that wonderful and vibrant world. Now, I will say that in those days I was still extraordinarily idealistic in all things, so I was not necessarily “on the hunt” for pretty faces and tanned, lithe bodies (though they were plentiful). After having come fresh from small, private school campuses with their wool-skirted and collared coteries, I was seeking to know many kinds of people; I was more interested in the human character and in encountering different views of the world than I have been at any other time in my life, but naturally, that is what a university should be. If I happened to meet a free-spirited and intelligent woman who was also beautiful, so much the better, but it didn’t really matter that much. I did meet a few, in fact, but suffice it to say that those intrigues were not often mutual.

The Plaza of the Americas was a people-watcher’s paradise, and I knew of nothing quite so satisfying as lying on the grass on a warm and breezy April afternoon, watching the human parade. Aside from the eager young academics bustling to class in their shorts and sleeveless tee shirts, gripping the straps of their backpacks as though they were stuffed with gold, and aside from the rumpled, often wild-haired professors ambling along the walkways, there was an odd cast of characters about whose connections to the university I was unclear. Were they homeless? Were they exiled radicals? Escapees from the local psyche ward? Were they art students? In any case, they were on the Plaza every day, these stringy, bare-chested, barefooted insurgents who danced and sang the day away, seemingly without a care in the world.

There was one fellow in particular, perhaps in his mid-thirties, whose only opportunities for bathing seemed to be those spring and early-summer afternoons when the skies would fill with bulbous purple clouds and then dump steady troughs of water over the plaza, where he would stand in his shorts with his face upturned. Much to his credit, he was a decent guitar player (yes, he would even play in the rain) and seemed to know the words to every song Bob Dylan had written up to that point in his career. I never knew his name, but I heard rumors (possibly started by himself) that he had once been a nuclear physicist but had experimented a bit too daringly with hard drugs.

Then there were the true revolutionaries, those bearded, intrepid political extremists who were not kidding around. They railed against the system and against convention, handing out socialist pamphlets, harassing the frat boys in their Izod shirts, expensive sandals, and crew cuts, and seeking to lure the most naive girls into their outlaws’ clan with pot and quaaludes and wine. But aside from these kinds of annoyances, they were harmless; they were peace-niks, really, and we knew them by nicknames such as Reprobate and Radical Joe. None of them ever bothered me, except for one or two of them who would routinely ask me if I would give them half of whatever I had just bought from the vending machine under the library archway, in the interest of brotherly love, they said. Usually I would comply.

When an evangelical Christian preacher named Jed Smock would show up on the plaza, the stage was set for some grand entertainment. He and the socialists were meant for each other, as they played into one another’s hands like well-rehearsed professional wrestlers, and their arguments, while not always eloquent, were vehement and laced with insults, and they would typically attract a crowd of fifty to a hundred or so onlookers, kids on their way to class who could not resist an old-fashioned knockdown between a crowd of atheists and a hardline, grim-faced character straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. It was not just fire and brimstone versus cold unbelief: it was the sulfurous furies of hell and damnation thrashing in the smoldering ditches and rank waters with the blunt trauma of death as master. It was some of the finest showmanship you were likely to see anyplace.

Jed was a sweaty, hyped-up version of those horribly mean, judgmental, accusatory “Christians” you run across once in a while, especially in the south, and he had a gift for looking you in the eye, probing your soul, and then loudly identifying your most shameful sin:

“SO, you like those freshman girls, I see. You will rot in hell with your genitals in your mouth.”

Or…

“I can spot a masturbator from a mile away, young man. Go wash yourself and ask God for forgiveness.”

Despite that, good old Reprobate was a fair match for Jed, circling him like a hungry wolf waiting for a chance at the bare haunches, distracting him with barbs from Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and daring him to call down the thunderous wrath of God upon him at that very instant, at which Jed would simply laugh and say, “Oh, it won’t be God you’ll be meeting at the end. The Devil is preparing a special rotisserie just for you.”

Perhaps ironically, Jed eventually married a UF coed, Cindy Lasseter, a skeletal, self-proclaimed disco queen whom he had called out in the crowd as a “wicked woman.” Then the two of them would double-team their audience of skeptics and cynics, Cindy pacing about and waving the Good Book on high as Jed unlocked his word hoard. 

When summer came on and the second semester would draw to a close, Jed and Cindy would pack up their Bibles and head off to scout out other colleges, promising all of us that he would return in the fall, seeing as how Gainesville and the University of Florida was the most sinful place he’d ever been called upon to minister to.

If you had seen what I saw on Halloween nights on the Plaza of the Americas, you might be inclined to agree with Jed. In 1970, the university began hosting the infamous Halloween Ball, little suspecting the sort of debauchery that would ensue, and finally nixing the party in 1983 because of ongoing illicit behavior by student participants. I was attending UF in the ball’s heyday, and I can attest to the unfettered wildness of the occasion. The costumes themselves were provocative enough: for instance, 1978 was “the year of three popes” because of the untimely deaths of Paul VI and John Paul I and the resulting election of John Paul II, and one group of merry pranksters commemorated those events by dressing as bishops carrying a dead pope atop a funeral bier for all to see. I’ll never know where they found such authentic-looking costumes. In consideration of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a friend of mine dressed as “an abortion,” wearing a hospital gown with a huge blood stain on its lower half (I know - very poor taste no matter what your opinions are). Of course, there were giant penis and breast costumes, and the obligatory werewolves and vampires with blood draining from their fangs, but as for me, I went as Hawkeye Pierce from the TV show MASH, which meant that all I had to do was don a bathrobe and a cowboy hat and carry a martini around.

Drugs were by no means in short supply at the Halloween Ball. It was open carry season for marijuana, and I suspect that far more dangerous substances were also being ingested. I remember seeing one young man taken away on a gurney from the first aid station; it was very frightening, he was pale and absolutely unconscious, unmoving, eyes open and glazed over, and I recall someone saying, “Whoa, that guy’s dead.” Another year - maybe it was ’79, when I was living in the area near campus called the Student Ghetto (no explanation necessary) - I was sitting with some neighbors in the apartment building’s courtyard when a slim young woman wandered in from the street. I had to look twice - she was completely naked but had spray-painted herself from her neck to her toes with neon-green paint, and she was…well, let’s just say she was not at all sober. She stood there silently for a few minutes listening to our beer-stoked conversation, and then someone gave her a couple of pills, and she toddled off into the night.

There was usually good music, too, to soothe or further stimulate the crowd, surging from stacks of amps and speakers on a stage erected in front of the library. My favorite was the high-energy band the Dixie Dregs, with guitarist Steve Morris’s note-crammed solos and technical fluidity. It all made for a surreal experience - the air thick with marijuana smoke and electric guitars, the kids writhing weirdly in their weird costumes, all surrounded by the stately academic buildings where, during the day, none of this had even been conceivable. 

Alas, with ever-spiraling madness and reports of spontaneous sexual orgies (none of which I ever witnessed) and heavy drug use, UF wisely decided bring an end to the Halloween Ball, probably more to avoid the inevitable lawsuit than to protect student safety. I really cannot imagine what administrators thought would happen when they originally allowed the event to be held on campus, but for the anarchists, it had been a great success. I think the fact that in 2016 the university began offering round-the-clock counseling for any student offended by another’s halloween costume tells us everything we need to know about recent changes in our public education system.

In sharp contrast, one of the most peaceful groups ever to set up camp on the Plaza of the Americas has been the Hare Krishnas. The Hindu devotees have been serving a cheap lunch on campus since 1971, and when I was there, they still wore chiffon robes and shaved their heads, and they intoned their hypnotic chant with percussive accompaniment. The chant continues, apparently, but I’m told that the Krishnas now dress conventionally. I admit that when I was a UF student, I thought they were simply another sideshow in the Plaza Carnival, and their food did not appeal to me, but it seems they have stood the test of time, feeding millions of broke young people over the decades. Besides, given the ever-loudening media bombardments and distractions that students contend with today, meditation seems like a pretty good idea.

Of the many noteworthy, quirky individuals who frequented the Plaza in those days, perhaps the quirkiest was Gator Man. His real name was Curtis Read, and he possessed two very unusual talents: he could commune with the alligators in their natural habitat at Lake Alice, on campus near the agricultural complex, even getting in the water, cavorting with them, and riding on their leathery backs. On the Plaza of the Americas, he had a meager income as a live mannequin. He would often stand near the library’s entrance, or perhaps with one foot up on a bench along the sidewalk, utterly still, reputedly not even blinking for as long as three hours at a time. It may seem odd that passersby would lay coins and dollar bills at his feet for doing absolutely nothing at all, but I suppose that given the typically frenetic pace of life on campus, total inertia was deemed a genuine gift.

In summary, I find that I cannot say that the Plaza was a microcosm, or any of that kind of nonsense, but I will say that it was (and to a great extent still is, I’m sure) a very real place whose faces live in full color in my memory. I hear the voices of youth there, and the smells of marijuana and of the Krishnas’ Indian dishes return to me sometimes, and I long to go back there and do it all over again, paying more attention to everything this time. I often wonder what I might have missed, but I do not wonder what happened to them all. I prefer them just as they are - as sharp as glass figures in the living museum of my brain.