Born in the USA in 1957, I graduated from public high school in 1975. Change was the constant throughout my childhood and adolescence, my father’s jazz albums the background music for people rising up, first in black and white on two channels, later in all the colors of the NBC peacock plus CABLE.
My insulated, mostly white, small Midwestern city suffered only one high school riot and one roaring crowd of union strikers on the downtown square. Other than that, life was quiet, safe, except for all of the shocking local suicides and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
I was a good girl, a straight A student, the daughter of a WWII vet union member who walked the picket line to secure adequate wages, benefits, and safe conditions for the workers at the factory where he worked and a telephone operator who was driven across the picket line by the owner of the factory where she worked to keep the business going.
My parents navigated murky family dynamics via card-playing and TV watching, alcohol and gambling. My older sister sewed, swam, sang, made fudge, and ran around with her friends. I studied, aced tests, took long walks, asked questions, and never practiced the cello enough.
And then there was all that business with the dialysis machine at home during my junior and senior years, my mother acting as medical assistant while technology cleansed my father’s blood. Oh, yeah. That was a big deal.
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