1955

 

It's Thursday. This is what I know:

the sun is shining down on a perfect

West Coast September morning.

I raise my face and my smile to greet it,

and totter into town at a snail's pace.

Each time I make this walk, it feels like

I go more slowly. And yet

happiness curls in my heart like a swirl of cream

into coffee. How I love this village,

the people, the beauty, my life here!

This morning at the CoOp my bill came to 1955 -

"A good year" I joked to the man at the till.

"It was before my time," he smiled back.

It got me remembering.

My sister was born that year, and I was nine.

Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus

and Martin Luther King Jr. started a movement.

Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden were playing

at the Paramount, but I was too young to go.

Eisenhower was President of the USA. He suffered a coronary

that year. Being President is a hard job.

It is much harder now that
the opposition is a cult,
enamored of a gangster oligarch
who holds them all in thrall.

In 1955, my uncle drove a two-tone cream

and salmon coloured convertible, with fins.

Kelowna was a sleepy little town then,

full of apple orchards. Grandma fixed my hair in a pony tail

to "expose your noble brow".

I clawed my bangs back down
as soon as she was out of sight.

In my t-shirt and pedal pushers
I spent summer afternoons

reading in my grandma's hammock
under the weeping willow.
I could smell the pinks.
All my life I have searched for pinks
and never found them.

In 1955, I never would have dreamed I'd see

the world in the shape it is now.

The bill for capitalism is coming due

and the poor are paying the price.

But 1955 was a very good year.

There was an innocence then
that is sheer nostalgia now.
It was a time of dreams and hope.
I wish those for the children of today
who are viewng a topsy turvy world
on their little screens.

Wild Writing Day Three