Barbara
and I had planned the Big Trip so as to conduct our sojourn in the Northeast
during the autumn, for viewing the foliage along with the myriad historical and
cultural sites, and thus exiting before the winter months ensued. We had a propane heater but used it only
three times, most notably in the midst of a winter wonderland bestowed on us by
Divinity while we camped within Great Smokey Mountain National Park.
The
months ahead continued to present us with scenes bespeaking the wonder and the horror
that is the United States. We witnessed via
mental images provided by forts and battlefields and plantation homes and
national parks the spectacle of Lee surrendering to Grant at Appomatox; the foremost advocate of liberty retreating
to his slave-powered plantation at Monticello;
the architect of the leader of colonial army and nascent nation
overseeing his own human chattel at Mount Vernon; and the genteel aristocracy of South Carolina
sustaining slavery beyond slavery in the quintessential city of the Old South,
Charleston, South Carolina.
We
swept into Florida to see Augustine, the old fort of the Spaniards and the
longest-lived continuous community extending from colonial days to the
present; Everglades, full of alligator and
tropical splendor; and Miami, with marvelous
beaches and an amalgam of American ethnicity;
the Keys, where wealth abides and respite from urban tension is sought
and found.
On
we traveled into the deepest of the Deep South, inviting more images to assume their
vital task in promotion of the cognitively dissonant USA: Underground Atlanta; Tuskegee Institute; the capital and capitols
of Montgomery, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis, where Jerry Lee rubs elbows with Elvis
and Elvis imbibes African American sound and culture on Beale Street; New Orleans where ethnicities blend tonally in
the French Quarter while atonal discord describes other corners of the city and
most of the state; and Little Rock, Arkansas,
home of Central High School, the Little Rock Nine, Daisy Bates, Orville Faubus,
and National Guard troops belatedly cast into the chaos by a dithering
Eisenhower.
………………………………………………………………….
By
the light of a propane-fueled lantern at roadside campsites in Louisiana, I devoured
two 500-page books covering the expanse of European history that dominates the
specialized subject area history test of the SAT that I decided would work to
my advantage as Barbara and I focused our applications for graduate school on
the Philadelphia’s Temple University, the University of Indiana, and the
University of Iowa. All of these
universities were offering us good financial aid packages and featured the programs
in Asian studies that we sought. Temple
for me had the advantage of location in an urban center, where my focus on life
at the urban core could be combined with my academic quest.
I
took the test at Tulane University amidst our exploration of New Orleans.
After
the familial holiday visits and Jan’s January 1976 marriage to Phil Whitcomb,
Barbara and I went forth to the Tucson period of work and monetary
replenishment. I worked a shift extending
from early morning into early-mid-afternoon at a McDonalds that left me lots of
time to read as the sun rose high and the splendid sunsets loomed. Barbara, she of the genius IQ and future professorship,
had the ignominy of being turned down for a job hawking pretzels at a stall in a
mall; she soon settle into a server’s
job at Bob’s Big Boy, as in the national chain from which McDonald’s ripped off
the so-called triple-decker Big Mac.
Tucson
afforded us never-ending fascination. We
were on a tight budget that yielded my productions of meatless spaghetti, bean
burritos, and the occasional utilizations of ground beef in chili and
hamburgers. Our entertainment on Friday and
Saturday evenings tended to be to hang out at a shopping mall watching people
while luxuriating in the delights of a five-dollar plurge for two fudge ice
cream cones from the purveyor of the moment, Swenson’s.
Our
$100 per month apartment was located at an intersection at which the point of a
“V” was formed from the coalescence of two of the busiest streets of the city. The fire and police sirens, along with nocturnal
knockings from folks inquiring as to the whereabouts of the unstable and
seemingly unseemly assortment of recent residents in our abode provided many an
exciting overnight cavalcade of human drama.
The
Tucson experience was formative:
As
long as good health abided and our skin remained white, Barbara and I knew that
we need never fear economic dislocation or the need to adapt to the
circumstances of the moment.
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