I never saw my parents be affectionate, so I assume I was born as a result of immaculate conception. That happened 73 years ago today at 1730 hours GMT, at Kadlec Methodist Hospital in Richland, Washington. Like my house, my school, the Catholic Church and the science center, Kadlec had been built ten years earlier by Leslie Groves’ Manhattan Project. Pat and Mike took me home to our 372 square foot one-bedroom government house on Potter Street. I don’t actually recall this, but so I’ve been told.
Most of the adults in my life had participated in producing the plutonium used to kill up to 70,000 or more Japanese citizens over seven years earlier, only 150 of whom were actual military members. More than double that would eventually die. But we never spoke of this. There was quite a lot we didn’t speak of, such as there being no Black people in my town, or where did the original inhabitants of our desert region go.
But I was the beneficiary of this legacy, with clean, paved streets, good schools, nice cops, and the idyllic safety of a small town in the fifties. I could leave for a daylong bike ride, and no one worried about me being recruited into a cult.
Harry Truman was the US president for the first eighteen days of my life. I had not voted for him. I would become interested in electoral politics at seven, in 1960, watching the rise of JFK. My heart was broken three years later.
Our one telephone was on a party line and occasionally you had to wait until a neighbor finished their call. We never thought about if they were listening in. By ten I had fired guns. Our bikes were fixed gear and any bike with gear shifts we called English Racers. Our first skateboards we made by screwing roller skates onto a board. I bought Meet The Beatles for a dollar, which I earned mowing lawns.
1953 would turn out to be quite a year. The CIA toppled Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran. The US executed the Rosenbergs. Stalin died. James Baldwin published Go Tell it on the Mountain. The first color television sets went on sale. Hillary and Norgay summited Everest. Hugh Hefner debuted Playboy magazine with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Watson and Clark shared their double-helix DNA model with the world. Aldous Huxley took mescaline, inspiring his book, The Doors of Perception. Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery was published. Joseph McCarthy gained significant power in his proto-MAGA crusade. Gary Snyder worked as a fire lookout on Sourdough Mountain in the North Cascades, then enrolled at UC Berkeley where he began translating Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poems.
All of which had a later effect on me.
And, among millions of others, Paul Krugman, Mary Steenbergen, Carl Hiassen, Kim Gordon, Alex Van Halen, Xi Jinping, Kim Basinger, Django Reinhardt and I were all born. Many of us are dropping dead at an escalating pace. Average life expectancy for US men is three years away, so I’m not going to worry yet.
I was born at exactly the mid-point in what demographers refer to as the Baby Boom, that fourteen year stretch between 1946 and 1960. While sometimes directional, these generational designations are as useless as The Brothers Karamazov on Trump’s desk. In Vonnegut’s Bokononism, Baby Boomers would be a granfalloon or a “false karass”, a group of people affecting a meaningless association. After all, Kim Gordon and I have nothing in common with Karl Rove or Steve Bannon.
We have a fixation on ascribing meaning to events. I train myself to avoid this. But surely, there are connections between events over time. The Dulles brothers and MI6 overthrowing Mosaddegh in 1953 set up the Pahlavi dynasty for another 26 repressive years which ushered in the Islamic State of Iran and all that’s come since. And of course it was always about the oil, not democratic “values”, just as it is in Venezuela. But that’s causality not meaning.
Seventy-three is a prime number. Perhaps there is some meaning in that. But I doubt it.
I’ve grown comfortable seeing things just happen, without meaning. It’s taken me many prime number years, but I’m happy being here.
So, for now, the next thing just happens. Sandy brought me a dark Peet’s roast coffee with agave, cacao, cinnamon, whipped milk, and mescal. Biscuits are in the oven and I can smell bacon.
Happy birthday to me.
Completely freed from yes and no
Great emptiness charged within
No questions, no answers
Like a fish, like a fool.
Inscribed on the han at Robert Aitken’s Koko-an zendo
As good as writing gets. Right there. For a moment I was a kid once again, fixed gear bike under the Columbia sun. Thanks for that.