Half a century since a truly memorable time of life

The older I get, the more time's distances seem amazing to me.

I think it was Tennessee Williams in the wonderful "Glass Menagerie" who called time the longest distance between two points, and as I slip uncontrollably into old age I see how right he was.

Fifty years ago this spring was one of the happiest times of my life up to that time. Although I didn't really know it at the time, May 1970 marked the final weeks of my first real relationship.

It was about three weeks till the lovely Shelley Marcus would return home to Connecticut for the summer, and except for a strange week in September, that was it for us.

There are two things I remember vividly about that time.

First was Kent State. The killing of four antiwar protesters by the Ohio National Guard on the sunny Monday in Kent, Ohio, sent shock waves through our generation. And some of the responses around the country showed us that what was called the "Generation Gap" was maybe as wide as that big hole in the ground in Arizona.

"They got what they deserved."

"They should have killed 400 of them."

"Bums."


That last one came from the president of the United States, who had been going to great lengths to pretend he wasn't affected at all by the millions of young people protesting the Vietnam War.

Of course he was. As we would later see, Richard Nixon was probably the most thin-skinned president we ever had until the current one.




The second memory is a happier one. May 1970 was the first time -- thanks to Shelley -- that I heard "The Circle Game."

"There's this great song," my girlfriend told me. "And it might as well be about you."

She put Joni Mitchell's album on the stereo and cued up the last song on side two.

"Yesterday a child came out to wonder, Caught a dragonfly inside a jar. Fearful when the sky was full of thunder And tearful at the falling of a star…"

It was a song that had been around in other versions for three years. Buffy Sainte-Marie had put it on an album in 1967 and Tom Rush did the same in '68, but I had never heard it before.

The boy at 20.

"And the seasons they go round and round, And the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on the carousel of time. We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game."

It blew me away. I wasn't that familiar with Mitchell. I knew she had written "Both Sides Now," with which Judy Collins had a hit a couple of years earlier, and I had heard her song "Woodstock." But I had never heard "Circle Game."

Then came the climax.

"So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty, Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true. There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty Before the last revolving year is through."

We broke up that fall, and we have seen each other face to face only once in the last half-century.

We ran into each other in August 2000 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. I was there as a newspaper columnist and she was a delegate from Connecticut.

And at 70.

An awful lot of seasons have gone round and round since 1970. Two hundred of them, to be exact. There are so many things about those years I no longer remember, but I remember hearing that song for the first time as if it were yesterday.

People like to say the only certainties in life are death and taxes, but the passage of time belongs on that list as well. The winter and spring of 1970 was a wonderful time for me.

"We can't return, we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game."

***

NOTE: Two pictures of me and none of her? Sorry, but I have no pictures from that time. A friend talked me into burning them to help get over her.