My Bicentennial Summer

Ann Arbor, 1976.  I had friends then, and family members who loved me, but they were scattered to the winds.  I was doing legal piecework, for a pittance, in the Great Hall of the University of Michigan Law School.  I had found a small and spartan room, also for a pittance, in a fraternity that was all but otherwise empty that summer.  While I must have, I can't recall exchanging a single word with another person in that house while I lived there.  I was broke, lost, lonely, a loser.

I did not know it at the time, but back home my mother only had months to live.  Perhaps her suffering, and the gloom that pervaded the little household that she shared with my father and my sister, made their way subliminally to me, collecting red rust and hopelessness as they traveled through and around Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Youngstown, Cleveland and Detroit, all of them emblems of decline, decay.

The thing about that summer: even if an angel or a psychic healer had descended to show me then the life trajectory that was to follow -- many more friends, a wife and two kids, a complex and successful career, material rewards that were beyond my childhood imagination -- I don't think it would have made much difference.  I was locked in a near suicidal space like a bug in primordial amber.

What would have made a difference?  A girl of a certain sort, I think, of which there were many still in those late hippie days.  She might have dropped me a friendly smile across the bar at the old Blind Pig, a locally famous blues joint that I did not exactly frequent, but dropped into from time to time, always alone, to nurse a beer.  Her gesture would have had to be direct and unambiguous, because I always assumed that if the girl was sending signs of availability, it was not availability to me, and even then I would have been awkward on the uptake.

If anything had happened at all, it would have accelerated very quickly.  It was as if I had two, discrete pressure vessels within me, both about to burst.  One was called "Accumulated Grief" and the other "An Aching for Love."  I could have turned the spigot on the first in the privacy of my chamber at the fraternity, and the second in a spontaneous embrace under a streetlamp, at the tail end of one of those strong Midwestern thunderstorms, just down the block from the Blind Pig.  From such beginnings often spring heartbreak sooner or later, but the ride would have been worth it.