A Freewheelin' Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

home together that day.
             
    T he year my father died I was reading the poetry of Lord Byron and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I came across her poem “Lament,” which begins:

    Listen, children:
    Your father is dead.

    And concludes:

    Life must go on,
    And the dead be forgotten;
    Life must go on,
    Though good men die;
    Anne, eat your breakfast;
    Dan, take your medicine;
    Life must go on;
    I forget just why.

    Its accuracy stunned me.
    As I grew up and older and my life became what I made of it, I acquired a habit of taking special note of technological developments. I would think of a way my father, who died in 1958, might regard these new inventions. We had a telephone back then and a TV, and Dr. Rosen had given us a reel-to-reel tape recorder. So reasonably my father could have grasped the technological evolution to cassette tapes and portable music. Cell phones, CD players, DVDs, and videos—he could have handled all that. Computers were problematic, but once I walked him through the other stuff, he might grasp it.
    It was a game, really. I didn’t for one minute believe anyone could come back alive. It was a way to think about the world as it was and to inventory the changes I would normally take for granted.
    A trauma creates a freeze frame, stopping time in a still series of snapshots that pop up in total recall if the day or subject is referenced in some way. The year 1958 became my yardstick.
    But a thought struck me as the century ended and the new one began. It’s not so much the technological advancements that show how different our world is: it is the change in people. The people of New York City in 1958 were predominantly white or black. Immigrants came from Europe, as my father had. To compare the faces on a subway train in 1958 with the faces in the twenty-first century becomes incomprehensible. I couldn’t possibly walk someone through the immense cultural changes, both the visible and the invisible. So I let my father go. I no longer idly sift through the changes around me and attempt to define them. I let them accumulate and use what I need to live in the present.

Beginnings
    McCarthyism reigned supreme during the 1950s, its influence—like a slowly retreating flood—permeated the decade, and the damage left in its wake was evident in the beginning of the next one. In the span of ten years Stalin had died and the Rosenbergs had been sent to the electric chair. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was elected president in 1952 and served two terms. A notable act he was responsible for, in addition to denying executive clemency to the Rosenbergs, was completely desegregating the armed forces.
    Since we didn’t own a television set until 1957, the radio and the phonograph held sway. The music we listened to included recordings of folk music from around the world, the Édith Piaf and Billie Holiday records my mother loved, opera arias my father sang along with, classical music, and Toscanini conducting the NBC Radio Orchestra. A program called
Make-Believe Ballroom
delivered mostly bland popular music until the day the DJ placed a single titled “Sh-Boom” on the turntable, inaugurating the arrival of rock and roll on mainstream radio.
    Folk music had been sidelined as being for radicals, especially after the nationally known folk group the Weavers, with the Communist Party member Pete Seeger on banjo and vocals, had become victims of the blacklist, making it impossible for them to appear on TV or in concert halls and clubs. The Cold War had hit its stride.
             
    M y sister Carla was seventeen in 1958, in her first year at Hunter College. She had a group of friends whose families had a political background similar to ours. I was a withdrawn fourteen-year-old, and our mother might have asked her to take me under her wing. For whatever reason, she decided to bring me along to a party she was going to. She and a girlfriend put a few tissues in my bra, undid my ponytail,