by Chris Crowe
campus. It was hard to think
my mom had become
a pothead, but who
could blame her? Maybe getting
high helped her deal with
her failed marriage and
all the crap going on in
the world around her.
May 1968
Week Eighteen: 383
Angela and I
had our first “disagreement”
over a movie.
She wanted to see
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
but I wanted to
see Bonnie and Clyde,
and as we argued about
it, I felt myself
acting like my dad.
I stopped. Arguing. Talking.
Looking, listening,
that was better, way
better, and the longer I
looked at her, the less
I cared about what
movie we went to. I just
wanted to be with
her. Standing outside
the theater, watching the
soft curve of her lips
and the light from the
marquee glittering in her
chocolate brown eyes,
I wondered when Dad
stopped feeling this way about
Mom. When did they start
to care more about
ideas than each other? I
took Angela’s hand,
pulled her to the box
office, and bought two tickets
to Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner. Even
if I had known in advance
that she was going
to cry through the whole
movie, I wouldn’t have changed
anything that night.
May 1968
Week Nineteen: 562
Angela’s parents
welcomed me into their home,
and their kindness stirred
a rush of envy
in me. They appeared to be
everything I’d hoped
my own family
could have been. Mr. Turner,
a political
science professor
at ASU, shook my hand
like we were old friends.
“Angela’s told us
a lot about you, so we’re
glad to finally
meet the famous Ashe
Douglas.” We sat around their
kitchen table and
talked and laughed and ate
peanut butter cookies and
filled the room with a
warmth I’d never known.
But I wrecked it all when I
asked about their son.
“Kelly?” Angela’s
mother faded like someone
had punched her off switch.
“He . . .” A panicked look
to her husband, and he slid
his hand over hers,
patting it gently
while he told me they hadn’t
heard anything from
Kelly, Angela’s
older brother, for a while.
“Army mail isn’t
very efficient,
especially coming out
of Vietnam, and
our son’s never been
much of a letter writer,
but still, we worry.
When you’ve got a boy
at war, it’s tough not knowing
if he’s okay or
not.” Angela nudged
me with her foot and nodded
at the door. “I’m sure
he’s fine,” she said. “But
he should know we need to hear
from him more often.”
★ ★ ★
Angela walked me
outside and told me how her
brother’s silence had
tied her family
up in knots. “Dad handles it,
but it’s killing my
mother. She can’t stop
worrying about him, if
he’s dead—or worse.” When
I wondered what was
worse than dead, Angela said,
“Missing in action.”
May 1968
Week Twenty: 549
Seventeen is my
favorite prime number, and
not because I’m a
number nerd. Dad wore
seventeen in college, just
like Dizzy Dean, his
old baseball hero.
I wore it too, of course, but
it wasn’t just sports
that made me like it.
When I was young, Mom really
loved a Beatles song
that had the line, “Well,
she was just seventeen, you
know what I mean . . . ,” and
I thought it was cool
to hear a song based on my
birthday, and then I
started noticing
seventeens everywhere, and
it made me feel like
I belonged to a
secret club. The Celtics’ John
Havlicek wears my
number, and it’s the
number of syllables in
a haiku poem,
and it’s the day in
May when Brown versus Board of
Education was
announced, and it’s the
age you can give blood, join the
military, and
get married, and it’s
the name of a magazine
for girls, and it’s the
number of years a
weird kind of cicada lives
underground before
coming out to mate,
and it’s the day I was born,
and for years I’d been
looking forward to
turning seventeen on May
seventeenth. I can’t
say for sure what I
expected to happen the
day when my birthday
stars all aligned, but
I figured something special
would take place, something
I’d never forget.
In a way, I felt like that
cicada, and I
was ready to dig
out from underground and get
on with adult life.
★ ★ ★
But my birthday got
off to a lousy start when
I heard on the news
that the past two weeks
were the bloodiest ever.
More than one thousand
Americans died
in Vietnam in those two
weeks, and Angela’s
family still had
no word from Kelly, and Mom
was in bed acting
sick the whole time. How
could I celebrate when so
much was going wrong?
May 1968
Week Twenty-One: 426
When you start to love
someone like Angela, you
learn how to talk and
how to listen, and
you start talking about things
you’ve never before
dared to say out loud—
all kinds of things: dreams, goals, and
fears. Angela planned
to change the world by
joining the Peace Corps and then
teaching grade school kids.
“If we want to change
things,” she said, “that’s where we’ve got
to start.” I loved her
confidence, her faith
in the future, and I wished
that I had some of
her rock-solid self-
assurance. I thought a girl
like her feared nothing,
bu
t I was wrong. She
was worried about what might
happen if Kelly
turned out to be a
POW or, worse,
missing in action.
“I don’t know if Mom
could take it.” Her voice soft now,
edged with dread. “I don’t
know if I could take
it.” She sighed, and a heavy
silence filled the air
between us before
she spoke again. “And sometimes
I’m afraid, just plain
afraid of all the
craziness in the world right
now. There’s so much I
want to do, Ashe, but
what if something happens that
blows up all my dreams?”
The ache in her voice
surprised me, and I didn’t
know what to say, but
I knew that if I
had to, I’d gladly dive on
a grenade for her.
★ ★ ★
Angela knew that
I was afraid of getting
drafted and sent to
Vietnam. She knew
it wasn’t politics that
made me oppose the
war, it was plain old
fear. I can’t explain it; I
was as loyal as
the next guy, but the
thought of battle turned my spine
to ice. I didn’t
want to die, but I
also worried that in a
life-and-death battle,
my hesitation,
my fear might cause someone else
to die. With bullets
flying and mortar
shells exploding all around,
would I have the guts
to sacrifice my
life to save my buddies? If
a live grenade rolled
into camp, it would
kill me if I covered it
or if I didn’t.
In my heart I knew
that if I went to war, I
wouldn’t make it back—
or if I did make
it, I’d be in pieces, a
ruined, useless shell.
★ ★ ★
Angela knew my
stupid dream, too. I used to
think that a baby
sister would heal my
family, and I hoped and
prayed that Mom would get
pregnant and that a
new sister would bind all of
us together: two
males, two females: a
perfect balance. “It sounds dumb
now. I realize
my family is
too fractured to be fixed, too
off-kilter to be
balanced, but growing
up, I was desperate for
a little sister.”
Angela’s eyes turned
soft, and she touched my cheek so
gently I almost
melted. “Be careful
what you wish for, Ashe. Sometimes
girls can create more
problems than they solve.”
It turned out she knew what she
was talking about.
May 1968
Week Twenty-Two: 438
I’m an idiot.
Mom wasn’t smoking dope, though
I almost wish she
had been. I see now,
the symptoms were obvious:
she was pregnant, not
stoned. Some guy she met
at an anti-war rally;
she wouldn’t tell me
anything about
the man, not even his name.
“Later,” she said, “please.”
At first I’d assumed
it was Dad, because even
with overwhelming
evidence to the
contrary, I still had my
childish hope that they
might work things out. Well,
they did work things out, but not
how I had hoped. Dad
moved out, furious
at Mom’s betrayal, but he
also seemed almost
relieved that he could
leave and blame their failed marriage
on her. When she talked
to me, she didn’t
make excuses or try to
explain; she pulled me
into a hug and
whispered over and over,
“I am so sorry.”
★ ★ ★
The last day of school
felt like a wake before an
Irish funeral.
Everybody was
signing yearbooks and talking
about parties and
summer jobs. All the
hallways looked like a whirlwind
had blown through, strewing
crumpled worksheets and
notebook paper everywhere.
Students wandered in
and out of classes
without hall passes because
everyone knew that
summer vacation
had begun even if school
wasn’t yet over.
I felt the happy
vibe, too, but bittersweetness
dogged me all morning.
Seeing Angela
turned the bitter to sweet, and
the fog began to
lift. Like everyone
else, I looked forward to our
summer vacation,
but I knew I’d miss
the routine of school. Classes,
homework, sports—it gave
me something to do
besides worrying about
the chaos at home.
★ ★ ★
Before he turned class
over to yearbook signing,
Mr. Ruby told
us he’d be teaching
a new senior course next year,
Contemporary
Civilization,
it would be called, and it would
focus on current
world affairs. He glanced
around the room. “It will be
challenging, even
controversial,” he
said, “but I guarantee that
it will be a real
education.” His
gaze settled on me when he
said, “I sincerely
hope some of you will
enroll.” Angela’s pat on
my shoulder confirmed
what I already
knew. When fall rolled around, we’d
both be in that class.
June 1968
Week Twenty-Three: 380
My mom loved Bobby
Kennedy. He stood up for
everything Nixon
didn’t, and even
though he couldn’t possibly
replace JFK,
he could pick up where
his older brother had left
off when his life was
snuffed out in Dallas
in 1963. When
Bobby entered the
presidential race,
even pregnancy couldn’t
slow Mom down. She made
phone calls, wrote letters,
and attended rallies like
it was going to
