After the Bicentennial

I watched a tribute to Johnny Cash on PBS last night--an old show, filmed before he died so that he came on at the end and sang, along with June. He looked awful, said it was his first time on stage in 19 months. He was old and puffy and truly had something wrong with him but his voice was wonderful and true when he sang about Folsom Prison. The performers who sang were all great, Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews (who sang "Long Black Veil," which we used to listen to when I was a kid, sung by the Kingston Trio), Lyle Lovett and of course Kris Kristofferson, who sang a duet with Trisha Yearwood of a song deeply embedded in my past, "Sunday Morning Coming Down." This was the theme song for my pack for a while during the second half of the 70's, and at the time I thought it was cool. Now I see it as a very depressing song, especially the following:

'Cause there's something in a Sunday

That makes a body feel alone.

And there's nothing short a' dying

That's half as lonesome as the sound

Of the sleeping city sidewalk

And Sunday morning coming down.

Basically the song is about an alcoholic who's alone, and at the time I was living with an alcoholic who'd just ended his shotgun marriage and was a career waiter, embroiled in the lifestyle that that entails. I'd never been exposed to that life before and, being in love and naive thought it was interesting and cool. This man was charming and intelligent but was of course wasting his talents. He had a 4-year old son who stayed with us 2 days a week, another experience I was ill-prepared for.

The country was in an odd way too, facing a recession, just recovering from Vietnam so we were dealing with a peacetime economy for the first time in decades. There were no jobs for people my age. At first I was a Kelly girl, then I got a job at Rhode Island Trades Shops School, where "Auto Body Technicians are always in demand." I worked 4 nights a week. Finally I was lucky enough to be a librarian in my first real job, making a whopping $9,000. We had a hard time identifying an enemy other than the Soviet Union until Iranians took Americans hostage, then we couldn't figure out why they did that (Why would anyone dislike America?) but middle America knew they had to hate Iran. We were coming down as a country from the high of celebrating our Bicentennial, which we'd been psyching ourselves up for for several years. Did it live up to the hype? In some ways, I suppose. Jenica was born, that was the best part of 1976 for me. I spent 7/4/76 on a campground in New Hampshire with my pack, watching fireworks reflected in a small, calm lake with a relatively small crowd, drinking a lot of beer.

We listened to odd music, since there wasn't that much music that was really good to listen to. Kris Kristofferson, who we got to see live with Rita Coolidge, when they were married to each other. Fleetwood Mac, who we also got to see live early in their career. These crazy people liked Tom Waits and Leon Redbone, so we saw them live too. I thought that was a really boring concert. At the end of it Tom Waits brought out an easy chair and TV and started watching the TV to convince the audience that the show was really over. We listened a whole lot to Elvis Costello, the bright spot in it all for me. Who else were we going to listen to? Wham?

I bought my first new car, a 1975 Fiat 128. Three of us living in the same house had Fiats, of which there were many in Rhode Island, for some reason. They were wonderful cars (still are) and I adored mine. I paid $3000 for it. It was great in the snow, invincible, but only had 2 doors and you had to lift the front seats all the way up to the windshield to get into the back seat. And of course the real kicker about Fiats was that they wouldn't start if it rained really hard or dipped below 20 degrees. Needless to say that was my last Italian car. But there aren't many cars I've enjoyed driving more than that one.

I had my first dog, Megan, a 90-pound female who looked like a beautiful black golden retriever. She was an incredibly sweet dog I got when I graduated from college in 1974. Her mother was a golden retriever and her father was a Lab/husky/St.Bernard mix owned by someone I was in love with in college. She sort of had the best of all breeds and lived to be 14. I got my second dog, a mutt who wandered in to my night job as a puppy with a broken leg during a blizzard on Valentine's Day. I named her Solo and she became Megan's best friend. She was my first dog to get hit by a car and killed (Megan had been hit by a car and broken her jaw earlier, but that didn't phase her, probably damaged the car: it was at night and I never saw the car). I adored Solo and mourned deeply for weeks. It was after that that I got my first Lab, Jestr, whose name was an acronym for my boyfriend's and my initials. Ah, sweet love.

And that, my friends, was me during the second half of the 70's. Brought to you by Johnny Cash.