Coming of Age

I remember the air, the intoxicating exhiliration of wild,
delirious youth. Our hearts throbed to the beat of these
romantic times as our minds soared into deep space.
Something was in the air, and in our ears, a delightful, wistful call.

It came into our beautiful innocence, at a tender time of life.
I hear ard it on the front porch in a sleeping bag, as the rich textures of a summer night blended with chorus the of our burgeoning awarenes.

To come of age at the end of an age!

To come of age at the beginning of an age!


The communal culture called. The echoes of history rang.
The waves of history washed upon our shores. The sounds of distant eruptions reached our ears, and blew our minds.

Something was indeed blowing in the wind, but it wasn't
an answer, only questions.

I remember when it started. I remember well returning home
from school one sunny afternoon, after another blissfull day of childhood

There it was on the mantle, a black background with big red letters
announced the end of the age. "God is Dead ", said Time magazine,
and I didn't even know he was sick.

I didn't read the article, but looking back I see that this iswhere our world changed. Time reported Nietchzse's famous
pronouncement but didn't mention his after thought,
"If God is dead, then who will wipe the blood from our hands".

We were changing, we were rolling. How prophetic.
How does it feel, to be own your own, with no direction home, just
like a rolling stone, how would you like to be scrounging for your next meal.

More than Nietzse and Picasso, Dylan sang of our psychic
homelessness, the empty his words foretold and as the music danced
amid the ruins of our shattered psyches, our gutted civilization.
Our cultural edifice was gone and we were without a home.
Small wonder we danced nude in the streets.

It was blown apart after the first world war, along with all our icons, values, and ideals.

David Halberstam'ss describes the 50's well in the openining words of his book (The 50's) "The pictures tell the story, black and white. Like the polarized political climate of the time which reflects the underlying philosophy of the age. But we were in a technicolor, kaleidiscope landscape now-shifting, evolving, exploding. We wern't in Kansas anymore.

This is a generation that has never known stasis, stability,
never knew order-you know , before it befriended chaos.

Pre war times had been more stable, the pace of change
much slower, slow enouhg to be noticed. But those born after or
during the 60's are so engulfed in change that they don't notice it.
They don't really know what change is since it's all they've ever known, much like a fish in water. Having been born into moving water, they don't know what dry land is.

http://understandingamericanpie.com/