Power and Passion: An Epic Novel of the 1960S

Copyright © 2019 Donald Miller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7654-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7655-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7653-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019907070

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/08/2019

CONTENTS

Reader’s Note

Past Becomes Prologue

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Acknowledgments

About The Author

What you are about to read is the contemporary version of, War and Peace, but with a mysterious twist. Like Tolstoy’s Natasha and Pierre who are transformed by the Napoleonic Age, our modern duo find camaraderie.

Days after president Kennedy’s death we meet two high school students who find themselves tumbling into the 1960s like matter to a black hole. The period reads like a Greek tragedy where at its ascendancy, seeds are sown of its demise.

But more importantly it asks the question, what would it be like to actually relive the best day you’ve ever had? Or maybe a decade. Erich Metzger seems to have accomplished the latter! But was it a dream or did he really experience again the wildest roller coaster adventure of his life.

On November 26, 1963 he would meet a girl who would take him there. She is the descendant of actual civil war general Oliver Otis Howard. Fairly unusual but how does a teen with a new boyfriend and fully involved in modern life feel she’s lived before. Transfixed by her father’s civil war tales she hears the reverberation of unresolved civil rights challenges from that era awakened from a century old slumber. A 19th century Romantic era she believes she played an integral part, asks why some are taken so young and for which a proper goodbye was never spoken. A distant echo from an age like no other is now more relevant than ever.

READER’S NOTE

America during the 1960s found itself in the second Romantic Age, its origins rooted in nineteenth century England. That earlier generation of English idealists sought intuition, gut instinct, nature and revolution as a path to enlightenment. Across the Atlantic pond, Hawthorne, Dickinson and Emerson established an American counterpart. Worshipping identical values as the ultimate chamber of non-artificiality. With self-reliance running counter to the unyielding structures of society.

In contemporary times resonances from that earlier period could be heard as cultural rebellion, unbounded egalitarianism and free love became central to a post-World War II generation’s search for meaning. Math and empirical sciences were jettisoned in favor of, whatever gets you through the night, as John Lennon proclaimed. 19th century troubadours who once wrote ornate prose and gushing poetry found successors within the ranks, of 1950s era beat poets and the late sixties counterculture. While others celebrated the virtues of peace and anti-materialism through eastern religion, folk music further pried open the generation gap.

"Senators, congressman please heed the call.

Don’t stand in the doorways don’t block up the hall…

For he who gets hurt is he that has stalled.

For the times they are a-changin’"

The Times They Are A-Changin’ by Bob Dylan

And so, generations climb on the back of others to expand the boundaries of human understanding. 1960s definitions of being would no longer come from Lord Byron or Tennyson but through rock and roll’s passionate poetry of self-expression. Themes of wisdom, peace and love gushed alongside a Tsunami of lyrics that repudiated a cruel twentieth century that tallied the most carnage, as a result of war, since the beginning of time. Other socially relevant themes resonated that earlier English Romanticism.

Hendrix, Morrison, Donovan and Joan Baez came upon their craft not only from that past but the rhythm and blues that reflected the Negroes’ emerging sense of liberation. Brown vs. Board, the Woolworth sit-in, Freedom Riders and Selma inspired black Romantics to have Soul music define their distinctive form of emancipation.

It was as if youth from every background worshipped the hypnotic lure of idealism as they boarded the flower power bus to change the world or regretfully be left behind. And so, the two eras commonality lay in one simple notion. With that being the struggle to explain a universe that was not only enormously irrational, mystifying and incomprehensible but most importantly had an inexplicable tendency to repeat itself. That is where this tale of two centuries erupts.

PAST BECOMES PROLOGUE

Destiny is not necessarily found in the future but is sometimes located in the past.

Author unknown

WITHIN THOSE ONE hundred years book-ended by the assassinations of two presidents we discover something that is possibly more than coincidence. Consider an intriguing fact that ties the middle of the nineteenth century to that corresponding part of the twentieth.

Kennedy was killed in a Lincoln built by Ford while Lincoln was killed in a theater owned by a man named Ford. Both of their vice presidents were named Johnson, born in years ending in’08. Both vice presidents when becoming president were under severe pressure to resign. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were elected to congress in years ending in ’46. Both had a sister that died before their election. Both were shot in the head on a Friday in the presence of their wives before a major holiday. Lincoln had a secretary by the name of Kennedy who warned him not to go to the theater while Kennedy had a secretary by the name of Mrs. Lincoln who warned him not to go to Dallas. Each was elected in the year ‘60. Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy from a warehouse and ran to a theater while Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and ran to a warehouse. Both assassins had fifteen letters in their names and were southerners. Both assassins were murdered before they went to trial. Both presidents sought civil rights for Negroes. And remarkably Lincoln became the last fatality of the first American Civil War while JFK was the initial casualty that led to the most divisive era since the 1860s.

Is this only a statistically improbable happening that cinch those murders to their respective eras or something that stretches the boundaries of incredulity? Maybe it was only a unique happenstance captured in an odd twist of fate. Or could it be preordained where specters from those two eras creep onto the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and the balcony of Ford’s theater.

To quote Shakespeare. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be dreamt of in your philosophy, that drives this possibility.

Yet when Diane Howard meets Erich four days after president Kennedy’s assassination, we can’t help but speculate something about her that is not easily explained away. Desperately she wants to be involved in the modern civil rights movement that has been awakened from a century of hibernation. Or as improbable as it may seem could a teacher, hired by her great, great grandfather, general Oliver Otis Howard to integrate a Freedman school, have an unearthly link to this contemporary girl from upstate New York? Subtle hints suggest that this 19th century schoolmarm turned civil rights advocate mirrors the same objectives as the general’s contemporary descendant. Past becomes prologue, now takes on a most intriguing perspective.

Erich listens with stubborn skepticism to his new girlfriend as she describes dizzying Déjà vu whenever her father recounts yarns from the Civil War period. Forcing him to believe she once existed during those turbulent times he portrays with vivid clarity. The young man stands against such outrageous claims but is at the same time struck by an alarming sense that whenever he gazes into her enigmatic Mona Lisa like eyes, she isn’t all who she appears to be. As she seems to be endlessly searching for something, someone or some place in time.

In his diary, Erich speaks of the 1960s starry-eyed idealism they were involved in and that past century she feels she played a part. I know her ultimate objective wasn’t to be with me forever but to discover who she once was and where she came from. Although I have followed my life’s purpose, Diane intrigues me with the likelihood, as preposterous as it seems, that her destiny wasn’t to be found in the future but within that Romantic Age from where she came.

INTRODUCTION

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession and least of all an adventure. For death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.

Erich Maria Remarque, Prologue from, All Quiet on the Western Front.

HIS NOVEL WAS grim in its stark depiction of World War I and yet I know they weren’t the first time, I’ve read those lines. Probably high school maybe again in college. Forced to read it is a harsh indictment, for no one had the point of a gun leveled at me to exhort interest. His classic became one of my favorites, yet I never could tell what drew me to it. Perhaps it was his realistic prose but whatever it did speak to me across the years.

Years have a way of bringing forth new generations. The boomers, were my group born after WWII. A screaming gaggle of pint-sized barbarians who wanted no more part of this existence than a hapless Maryland crab thrown into a kettle of hot rocks. Nonetheless we arrived kicking and screaming whether the world wanted us or not. We were different yet similar, to those first teenagers of the century as our reason for existence would eventually become apparent.

Some who came of age during the middle of the twentieth century did become lost as Hemingway referred to his assemblage after the, Great War. Still others found significance in more remarkable ways. Our trek towards maturity involved hopping and bopping to syrupy sweet love songs played on our hangout’s Rock Ola jukebox. Most days were filled with the exhilaration of drag racing, baseball and skateboarding that stood in stark contrast to John Kennedy’s more cerebral, New Frontier. His unfinished journey challenged us to, ask not what the country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Not long after his passing all that would change.

The Western Front, spoke not only about transformation but how things re-emerge as the book’s copyright years contained a remarkable pattern. One professor told us that over the years the novel held such an anti-war appeal that since the end of the Great War it was perennially published as an enduring reminder whenever new tensions threatened world peace. The prefix of the century remained the same while the suffix reads like a chronology of modern conflict. 1928, the post WWI era when it was first published, then again in 1939, 1951 and now my own common era, 1966.

Thankfully, I didn’t have a teacher as gung-ho as that novel’s headmaster Kantorek. He had been so driven to whip up nationalist fervor in his charges that when his former student Paul came home on leave, the German instructor was shocked at how the war had changed him. Yet it wasn’t in the way he believed his propaganda would accomplish. For as the youthful soldier addressed a fresh crop of future enlistees, he told them the war was terribly wrong and an insensate brutal slog that had nothing to do with German national pride. He told the class that the war had degenerated into a senseless genocide of the French people who were in every way identical to them. The teacher listened angrily to this obviously brain washed heretic yet let him go on. The articulate young man spoke with great sadness that after he’d murdered a French soldier, he found in his belongings things that brought him to the stunning realization that his adversary was more like his brother then he could believe. Finding photos of his wife and a snapshot where he was mugging joyfully with classmates, similar, to his own. The Frenchman had been a printer at a country newspaper, identical to the one where Paul had worked. The soldier described the war as a monstrous quest for power and couldn’t be justified with any amount of zeal. He implored the class to reconsider before enlisting in the army of, Der Fatherland. The rebuke of his one-time instructor and his misinformation campaign was complete as he stormed out of the room.

As day is to night I become amused when I recall my own history teacher, the rotund frog eyed Mr. Lewandowski, back at Victory High. Thankfully he was nothing like the one Paul had aimed his criticism at but was so mind-numbingly lackluster that when he lectured with that dreadful unyielding monotony, the students would whisper that someone ought to check his vital signs.

Put a mirror under his nose, another would snicker, to see if he was still pumping air. My friend Lenny with his sick humor would tell everyone that he wasn’t alive but standing stiffly upright because rigor mortis had set in. Not exactly the rabble, rousing type one thinks of inspiring you to risk your life for god, country or the Freedom Summer voter registration drive now raging in Mississippi, 1964.

Without ambiguity one could say that to endanger our pleasure, seeking impulses wasn’t, our bag. We were too self-absorbed in the not so subtle nuances of rock n’ roll and chasing prematurely endowed chicks to pay much attention to the more important issues of war, peace and civil rights. That was only temporary refuge, for a while later the noble if sometimes tragic struggles of the 1960s would rear its head like some mythological siren of the sea to lure many into an unwanted fate.

Yet here we were born into a life not unlike Remarque’s protagonist. He like us facing life’s promise full ahead only to get mired in a reckless era that surged over both generations in a grotesque tidal wave of political irresponsibility and lies. In that way the similarities to that young soldier and myself are remarkable. Except for a few wars aren’t they all reckless blunders that terminate hope? With casualties totaled on the final scoreboard and the announcer telling everyone to drive home safely, did anyone care how it started or what it had been about?

It isn’t unique that all generations are shaped by the times when they, come of age. Theirs and ours was no exception. We could never be pigeonholed as all rich, poor, liberal, conservative or as that earlier writer stated, destroyed by their times. Many prospered some didn’t. Others became materialistic beyond their wildest aspirations while many were hopelessly mired in an idealism that had been the 1960s. The intersection of civil rights and Vietnam altered us as newscasts flashed an unending stream of images that both horrified and moved us.

Being part, of this generational assemblage, I feel as though I’ve gone through a personal conversion. A change that has taken me from an unthinking adherence to the past towards ways that practical experience has not only forced upon me but my other. Diane Howard is that individual who has the most common of Anglo-Saxon names that if used as a book title few would be intrigued enough to look inside. Yet her life was most remarkable in ways I find difficult to express much less comprehend. You don’t know her, personally, but you could surely relate to what she was about. That said in past tense, and with reservations, for I’m not totally sure she has gone. As it is my belief that she will live on in the idealism and optimism, many like her hold dear.

Her ancestor was the abolitionist general Oliver Otis Howard. Not too unusual for many had ancestors who were involved in that War of the Rebellion. Yet he was more than an anti-slavery man as he, like only a few others, believed that the Constitution wasn’t worth the paper it was written on until that peculiar institution was abolished.

When her father, William, narrated this civil war hero’s life she became transfixed and then changed in ways I find remarkable. Even now I find it impossible to explain how that cruel struggle from a centennial past had so profound a hold on such a sensitive person as she. It was if she’d become inextricably tethered as would by a belt to the midsection of that other time when that War Between the States was raging. Ironically it was her father’s fascination with that period that energized her involvement in the current domestic struggles rooted in not such a long time gone.

The nineteenth century was a full-throated era when larger than life figures like Lincoln, Douglas and that other African American Douglass strode the earth with their challenges that have never been completely disentangled from us. Their unsettled issues drifting into modern America with a haunting repetitive rhyme. As the stories Mr. Howard told Diane gave her purpose and direction, to me it offered only puzzlements as to who she was and where did she come from. And that is what perplexes me as I struggle for explanations.

And so, to alter slightly that novel of the century’s first conflict, the times may have changed who we were but didn’t destroy us or her. My transformation might have begun in present times but for Diane Howard it started much earlier. Exactly one century earlier!"

The past is never dead, it isn’t even past.

William Faulkner

ONE

"It’s been a long time coming,

it’s been a long time gone.

But you know the darkest hour

is just before the dawn."

A Long Time Gone, by Crosby, Stills and Nash

Erich’s diary; November 9, 1979:

WE MET FOUR days after the death of Camelot and yet the spirits from those turbulent times still reach out to haunt me. Similar I suppose to those apparitions Diane and I thought we could see floating eerily around the trees down at Greenstone Creek. Those early days were the most joyous as we’d linger by that lazy brook secretly preparing for a more daring late, night rendezvous. We’d jokingly tell friends that we were going to attend that midnight’s running of the, submarine races. Even the most naïve recognized it to be code for more passionate encounters that would leave us with more damp and muddied clothing than the time my Bulldog football team played that overtime game so many Octobers past. And with that we were in the eyes of many, beginning to acquire a somewhat improper reputation. That being one of the more charitable things uttered behind our backs.

Yet it wasn’t even a passing care as we looked forward to those endless turned down days spent under a venerable Weeping Willow in the not so arduous pursuit of counting multicolored leaves drift to a meeting place only they knew. That analogous to when we would again hide our shameless promiscuity under the moonlit sky that had replaced the sultry summer sun.

Even as we were easily delighted by the filtered light through those sad boughs, there was always a sense of joyous good fortune which had been brought our way. Nothing during our first season together could discourage us, as we celebrated life’s simplest of wonders. Yet with that there was always a sense of change we were helpless to deny.

Hours wiled away amused by frogs and minnows that hopped on or floated beneath the lily pads seemed like a microcosm of human endeavor. Their busy pursuit, only they could comprehend. Yet they held our attention as we planted our bare feet onto slippery stones overgrown with green moss. Predictably a small fish or free-floating algae would slither up our ankles to jar us out of our tranquility, as the whatever it was continued on its watery trek."

True to form she would grab my shoulders screeching to protect her from what she was sure was some crawly thing about to have her for his evening feast. A predictable cue to put my arms more firmly around her taut waist as if to reel her in like that, big fish in Hemingway’s, Old Man and The Sea. Not too convincingly she’d rebel against my advances while telling me with phony mortification that someone might be watching. For it was more times than not I could see through her feeble justification for shyness. In the next moment with coyness blossoming across her she would urgently dip her hand into my pocket while asking if I had any coins. At first puzzled, I realized in the next instant why. Nearly pushing me into the water while yanking some pennies loose, she would stand up clasping her hands in a praying motion. And then with her seductive New England style say something indiscernible and then spin the brown discs into the stream.

They would skip, bouncing wildly across the shimmering surface to find a swirling twinkling patch of light to reside forever in the muddy abyss.

With a dazzling grin, as if to overshadow the sun, she would implore me with that unique quality of hers to think of something I can’t live without."

A penny for your thoughts, Erich, only one cent and the whole world will be yours," she’d repeat with an animation that was impossible to draw away from.

Have to make a wish before they hit bottom, she’d say. Come on babe tell me quick what it is. What do you want more than anything, go on tell me if you dare? But if you do, it might not come true. Take a chance for isn’t that what life is all about." Her comments were true to form as she loved taking risks for all the time I knew her.

She completed the thought. I’m sure of what I want but I’ll never tell because I want it to so badly that I ache for the day it will be a reality.

I knew what it was as I would never let on and ruin her exuberance. Always being together was not only her desire but mine also. In that way she was flattering to my youthful ego and to this day I can’t let go of that."

When I look back at those days, we were young, naïve and with so much to learn within life’s context. It might have been poetic justice or something else but as we started out in that November of 1963 every year thereafter tended to be shaped by that ominous departure. The prophetic warnings the late president spoke of in his inaugural address was impressed into our national conscience as the news media played an endless reprise of his one thousand days.

It was as if he were speaking directly to me when he told of, bearing any burden…and paying any price, a reference to the struggle going on in southeast Asia. And to her concerns he spoke passages from the prophet Isaiah when he implored those, to let the oppressed go free and remove the shackles of the enslaved. An allusion to the Negroes heroic struggle for civil rights. Through that visionary speech it was like a roadmap had been drawn that we felt obligated to follow. And follow it we did as it was a journey that made us who we were.

Indeed, there were specters that sprang from that moment and continue to haunt all who remember where they were. Yet I believe from this vantage point neither the nation nor Diane and I ever quite recovered from the Fall of that year but that is not what is on my mind. To all who knew us we seemed destined for one another. The perfectly matched pair with astrological stars in precise harmony. Yet realistically I wonder if we were truly meant to share as many years as I would’ve wanted? Maybe quality does trump longevity as in hindsight that is what I cling to.

Oliver Wendell Holmes made, an observation, on his days fighting for the cause of anti-slavery. It was the great adventure of my life, he said with simple clarity.

I can only give modest postscript by noting that in our era we too had the great adventure of our lives. That is something I don’t regret as I’d do it all again in a flash if it were in my power.

You are more than a bit curious about that other person of whom I speak. Although, I, have, to admit she wasn’t the most striking girl in the Walden high school class of 1967, there was that obscure indefinable something that drove me to be with her all those years. To this day it’s hard to explain but there was that ever, present sense of perplexity that always surrounded her. The black piercing gaze that peeked through her long free flying dusty brown hair that on many occasions mesmerized me. There never was a moment I could recall when her expression didn’t exude some restless sense of searching. Looking for something in some part of her soul or cavernous crevice in time that drove her on. Yet maybe it wasn’t a place she was seeking but someone from her past that not even she knew existed. An unrevealed secret she couldn’t comprehend.

That ever, present capacity for baffling ambiguity that couldn’t help but attract me. A quality much more beautiful girls would have died to boast of, yet she possessed it in un-tolled abundance. Always seeking that missing part and for which she could never find true peace until it was found. The search continued all the way to now and then I believe against all that can be explained in this earthly plane is when she discovered it.

There were many instances I believed she didn’t fit into the modern world. Yet oh how she did! I can’t explain it and it sounds impossibly crazy but maybe those war torn, much repeated civil war stories her father would tell was the vehicle that not only guided her through our modern world but propelled her towards somewhere else. On the surface she appeared bored to catatonia by his lectures on seemingly irrelevant battles from that century ago ‘60s. Yet little did he realize how profound a way they had of motivating her to action in the present. She’d tell me how she would experience dizzying light shattering, sometimes painful Déjà vu whenever he spoke of them. There were more than a few times I would steady her when she was about to faint. It baffled me as she described in such phenomenal detail a scene from that other century. Of an 1860s school teacher with a crisp white apron waving goodbye at the end of the school day to her Negro and white students. In the next instant the beaming young woman in her early thirties, her hair impeccably tied with a purple ribbon, was seen through Diane’s mind’s eye to cry out in horrific pain as rattling explosions broke the still afternoon air. Then with regular clarity Diane would visualize that other woman crumple and then completely disappear in a dazzling burst of radiance. She would look at me with this most appalling expression then the episode would be gone quicker, then it’s onset. With calm returning, she would tell me that she couldn’t identify what specifically had happened other than the fact something unspeakable occurred. I would respond with a mocking tone that it was her imagination playing tricks within her. That being her father was a gifted storyteller with such an exceptional ability to take her on one of his Magical Mystery Tours into the past, she had inherited his heightened sense of drama. I tried to get her to believe it but with no success. Now in the present context, I am certain those stories not only took her to some dreadful piece of the past but also gave her a jolt of purpose to keep moving forward.

Like some Twilight Zone rerun maybe she did stumble upon that other dimension relegated to purveyors of high strangeness. Yet for many years my way of thinking forced me to believe that the only place she ever really landed was into that wondrous land whose boundaries were not that of time and space but of an overactive psyche. Being as I’ve always been a devout agnostic on such things, evidence presented to me on this day gave me reason to reevaluate how this world should be perceived. That in some extraordinary way maybe she did travel beyond this sphere to that other place where the living, are excluded from partaking of its most profound secrets.

Erich Metzger wrote those words of reflection three days before her interment in Greenstone Cemetery in upstate New York. Because of the graveyard’s celebrated connection to Washington Irving, the townspeople renamed it, Sleepy Hollow. As it was believed Irving got his ideas for his classic tale while sitting under the same Weeping Willow where they had spent so much time together. Its branches drinking from the creek that flowed by.

The young man comforted by the fact that she’d be going to her eternal rest in a place derived from one of his favorite authors. It was also coincidental that they’d met exactly to the month, sixteen years earlier and four days after the president’s assassination. And not exactly what you would describe as the traditional boy meets girl moment at her grandparents’ home in Cleveland. But it did bring a much, needed life affirming counterpoint to the tragedy that had gripped the nation

TWO

"Here rests her head upon the lap of earth.

A youth to fame and fortune unknown.

Large was her bounty and soul sincere.

She gave to misery all she had, a tear,

She gained from heaven (‘twas all she wished) a friend."

ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY, CHURCHYARD Thomas Gray, 1751 (Paraphrased)

Greenstone Cemetery

Walden, New York

November 12, 1979

FOR WHATEVER REASON, as Erich walked through the cemetery, he couldn’t get those Civil War stories Diane’s father would tell with tedious regularity out of his head. The genial middle-aged man would repeat the same ones until they were memorized. Those she recalled mainly dealt with things that had relevance to her life. An orthodox psychology that states how one attaches to ideas that have pertinence.

Maybe it is peculiar to say that a young girl who was in love with life and with a vision of her goals would have even the slightest interest in the stories he’d retell of Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, Sherman’s march, of the abolitionist John Brown and of all those other heroes that 19th century war churned out. After all they were a centennial past from the contemporary era she wanted to become a part of. And yet they held within her a most meaningful significance to the unresolved issues of bondage from that war now creeping into her time.

It was one stunning passage her father recited that drifted about him as he waited for the services to begin. It came upon the young man rapidly and receded as quickly. The breezes that had been blowing warm then with more vigor on that late Autumn afternoon fueled his remembrance of a Rhode Island infantryman by the name of Sullivan Ballou. He surmised that it had to be one of his favorites as Mr. Howard told it so many times that even Erich could restate it verbatim.

The soldier wrote to his wife Sarah in July of 1861. He told her that, he would be moving in a few days, to a battle outside of Washington. The horrific conflict would later be referred to as First Manassas. Relating in flowery Victorian prose the reasons he thought it necessary to be in this war.

It may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will but thine, O god be done. If I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I now lean on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us…

Erich recalled how he spoke of missing their son Edgar when he was gone and of the future family life, he wanted so badly to be a part of but was sure would be snatched from him on the battlefield.

Sarah, oh Sarah never forget how much I love you, and as my last breath escapes me, I will whisper your name. Forgive my faults and the many pains I have caused you…I must watch you from spirit-land and hover near you…But Sarah if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you, in the garish days and gloomiest hours, always. And if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath or if the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead, think only I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again. July 19th, 1861 your loving husband, Sullivan Ballou.

Private Ballou was killed two days later. His prophetic letter sadly fulfilled.

Being as Erich had studied so many pieces of prose like that in school he couldn’t help but be touched by such literary expertise from such an average fellow. Its affectionately fragrant style reminded him of so many professional Romantic era writers like Wordsworth or Lord Byron. For whatever reason his remembrance of the letter brought with it a chill and a sense of paranoia as he felt something, or someone was watching him from the area where the murky doglegged creek outlined the cemetery. Could it have been one of those apparitions he and her thought they’d encounter on one of their earlier moonlit hikes.

He quickly shook himself out of this irrational mindset, discounting it as his imagination put into the stratosphere. Refusing to fall prey to what she, oftentimes believed to be true. He then recalled a similar queer sensation when he would stay up to watch terror flicks on a Cleveland station hosted by a beatnik looking fellow by the name of Ghoulardi. Putting it to rest as a silly youthful remembrance.

Maybe it was coincidence but as he dwelled on that most heart wrenching part of the passage where the breeze touched Sullivan’s wife’s cheek, he noticed the unusually mild wind tousle his hair as it swept down to balloon open his loosely fitted shirt. Again, as he conjured up those heartbreaking lines, he felt a second then third breeze waft by him and with it some goose bumps began to develop on his arms. This time it blew warmer then steadier against his lower face and neck as if it were caressing him. He shook his head with determined skepticism in not wanting to believe that the dead could, really come back to life, and flit unseen around the living as that soldier believed.

"There was no way it was Diane," he forced his mind to convince the rest of him. As it had happened twice, he was sure it was only happenstance and that he could repeat that passage a thousand times and the phenomena would never take place. Writing it off as the unseasonably warm Fall weather battling the soon to be Winter. He wouldn’t allow himself to wander that path superstitious nineteenth century rubes travel down. Coming back to visit the living isn’t going to happen, he persuaded himself. It was an absurdly nonsensical idea that wasn’t possible in this modern world driven by rational thinking.

The hour preceding his appointment with this most dreadful of ceremonies went by interminably slow. As he walked among the current year’s crop of brightly colored leaves strewn across the cobble stone walk, he forced himself to remove his thinking from the outlandish to a song he loved from so many years earlier. With that, he hummed the sensuous lyrics then sang it aloud. Kicking the gold and reddish leaves off to one side, one only had to hear its memorable refrains to recall the title.

"All the leaves are brown,

and the sky is gray.

I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day.

California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day."

California Dreamin’ by The Mamas & Papas

It had for years stood as one of those iconic tunes done by that folk, rock group couples would dig out of their playlist to possibly choose as that special one to be, their song. For Diane and Erich, that and many, others would go by the board without a clear decision as to which one would give definition to their relationship. Eventually they would find it, not one but two! Yet on that almost, winter’s day the soothing melody gave him some solace.

Wending sixty yards to the precipice of a sun-drenched hill, there came upon him yet another disconnected thought from years past. Trekking the steep incline to her freshly dug gravesite was no problem as he was still in good shape years after playing high school football.

Reaching the summit, he wistfully recalled his Victory High with its vines of yellow and blue trumpet shaped flowers skulking its way up the brownish-red brick façade. It had seemed like eons ago when he was the wide receiver for their football team as his beloved memories of time there were positive and untarnished. His school was once named, ULYSSES S. GRANT, for the man from Erich’s Ohio who had saved the Union. However, after World War II, the school board decided to rename it, VICTORY, in honor of all U.S. war veterans that had come home as well as the ones who never would. He now looked across the freshly mowed ground of not a football field but of a newly developed part of the cemetery. Maybe he was sacrilegious but as he fondly remembered those years at Victory it took him back to a game, he’d played in.

"Great catch, but that stupid ass mistake that could have gotten our Bulldogs to the playoffs. I am never going to live it down if I live, forever am I? If I’d only done what the coaches told me I would have been a hero. I had to do something idiotic in front of my girlfriend of a day and a half." He dwelled on it for a second and then tried to hit delete.

If I could just go back and replay that game, that play, our lives, maybe everything would’ve turned out differently, I just know it would. Then with a moment of contemplation… he cast his eyes downward to consider the fact that there would be no going back, not that game, not her, nothing. Only a sense of moving forward towards some indefinable destination.

His highly charged imagination had always been the perfect antidote to his troubles. He would again try to ride that vehicle of daydreams far from what was ailing him. He’d always had anxiety in social situations, but this was different. All he knew was that something so dreadful was about to take place that no mind games would bring him the respite he desperately needed. The weight upon his shoulders made Atlas’s burden seem miniscule compared to what he would experience when they wheeled that bronze casket to within a few feet of him. Wiping the beading moisture from his brow he could feel his angst-ridden heart pounding wildly. Tugging on the front of his shirt to get some air moving he wondered why it was so oppressively hot for November. The gale force winds blowing through the pines were like a blast furnace about to set the place ablaze.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, as the locals nicknamed it, was no different from any other burial spot with row after row of headstones set in finely tuned harmony to the immaculately groomed landscape. Many graves were carved with carefully denoted passages of fancy script or plain printed prose engraved below the names that might give passersby a hint of who the individual was. A poetic refrain, a picture or memento laid nearby would give another clue as to that person’s mysteries concealed beneath the grassy sod.

Yet Erich knew so much more about Diane than any brief epitaph could ever reveal. Keenly aware of the events that had brought him to this untimely spot, yet he couldn’t bring himself to think about it. Thoughts raced in a futile effort to make sense of the despondency that was shrouding his sensibilities. He could still see her unfathomable black eyes once again shining back through the tears that were pooling and running down his cheek. Unable to free himself from the fact that there was that special appeal she exuded that was impossible to describe. A sparkling allure that when matched to her socially conscious personae made her different from any living being he’d ever known. Of course, one couldn’t overlook that all-consuming objective in her life that only he knew in extreme detail. For her, that ideal was in abundance and lured all she’d come in contact. That may have explained part of what drove her as he could never grasp the idea that the person he’d known for not that long was a puzzle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in a conundrum.

What he did know was that she and her folks were thoroughly New England Yankee. Hailing from the small town of Walden that was as far eastern New York as one could get without being swallowed up by that metropolis that regularly sent its inhabitants to her village for summer respite.

Her alabaster complexion and distinctively fine features were somewhat reminiscent of a haughty dark eyed southern belle depicted in one of those rambunctious tales of Civil war romance and chivalry. Yet only he knew the secrets that carried her far from that image. Diane was no Scarlet O’Hara type portrayed in, Gone with The Wind, as he knew her secret desires better than anyone, with possibly the exception of her father. Mr. Howard being an unwitting catalyst in who she had become.

Not traditionally religious yet with an English major and Philosophy minor on his resume, he commenced to dwell on those time, honored questions of human existence that both sacred and secular have battled with for eons. Trying desperately to understand his circumstance, he pondered.

"Maybe it’s the trials of daily existence, or goals accomplished that keeps the human soul from flickering out and to never be forgotten."

Interesting but too windy for him to use as her epitaph. For what he sought was a special something that was truly her. A definition of her being and times to be seen forever by others who might read her stone. He readily understood that philosophical verse on tombstones hadn’t been in vogue for decades yet there was some merit in remembering her that way. After all she did have that odd fixation towards that other time.

Occupied by reading more inscriptions, he came upon an older section, he jumped back startled as if that person laying below his feet was speaking to him:

I ONCE STOOD STRONG AND TALL LIKE YOU, BUT SOMEDAY YE TOO SHALL LIE DOWN HERE LIKE ME,

Oscar Samuels, New York Volunteers,

21st regiment; 1841-1863.

He felt embarrassed that he would be alarmed by something written by one of those superstitious past century types. He decided to recline against a headstone of one of Diane’s soon to be neighbors. The direction he faced looked towards a wrought iron fence rusted by storms for generations. He recalled the evening he and her climbed over it, scraping, and bloodying their shins, in an effort, to spend the entire night there.

The idea was hatched one summer afternoon as a whim but by evening the plan got more serious. Daring the other as to which one, after hearing a small garter snake would become so overwhelmed with terror that they’d go screaming out of the graveyard in mind numbing horror. Each was sure the other would hurdle the fence like a track star absolutely, positive that some headless entity was after them.

The game was set for 10:30 p.m. when they would climb the gate and sit by the Willow tree. The object was to last the entire night in that most legendary of cemeteries where townsfolk believed Washington Irving actually, witnessed his headless horseman. Maybe they too would catch a glimpse of that Hessian soldier moving about the trees. Nothing happened but as right as rain the sound of a curious chipmunk scurrying up a tree scared them to their wit’s end. In unison they fled the scene, tripping and sliding down muddy patches while fiercely hanging onto each other’s hand. As hard as they ran, they couldn’t get out of Greenstone fast enough.

The strange night would be the first of many occasions that would test their youthful bravado. It was all fun back then with no consequences but that would soon change. As his memory of that episode drifted away like those ghosts they never did find, he regained present consciousness. Disappointment was etched on his face as would someone coming out of a beautiful dream. Like soldiers in boot camp that was the first but not the last time they would steel their courage for trials that were soon to await them. A spring training to what they’d someday encounter.

Stress had been no stranger to Erich, for he’d known it all his life. Aptitude and achievement tests were his biggest fear for they sought to determine his career track like something from a Capitalist Manifesto. The creative part buried deep within him yearned to be free as Rock and Roll had always encouraged his love of the poetic nature of language. He recalled verses written by some guru of individuality.

"Let me be, let me be…

To think what I want to…

I am what I am,

and that’s all I ever can be."

Let Me Be, P.F. Sloan

How far afield his thoughts had drifted as it had been drummed into him that college was the only path to financial well-being. Higher education rained down gently but steadily like some Chinese water torture. For Diane, who lived in a small mountain community, she too felt similar pressures.

Having been born in 1948 and raised in Birchwood, a suburb of Cleveland, he was surrounded by the reminder that there was a massive number of kids his age who were beginning to absorb the proposition that material accumulation was good. For anyone to remark that the United States was a nation without opportunity could be branded as heretical. Rosy the Riveter had given way to the man in the gray flannel suit where upward mobility held as much moral sway as Catholic catechism or old testament studies. The doctrine was as unavoidable as eating, throwing a curve ball or those dreaded voluntary mandatory after school dance lessons promoted by Mr. McCarthy, the cherubic principal of Erich’s Rockefeller elementary.

Erich’s Birchwood was a place where people genuinely got along, with a sense that everyone fit in. Life’s endless spontaneity was a way of living for the descendants of those who fought to keep the world free. All were welcomed equally into the fold but with the proviso that you were Caucasian. Yet centrifugal forces during Eisenhower’s administration hinted at racial reform.

The nation’s view of how it perceived itself in the world also came into sharper focus. It was perceived that manifest destiny was the right of the United States to remake the planet in its own image. Many in foreign lands, like Vietnam, rejecting that version of their future. As this was the backdrop in which both teens were raised.

The drama was now upon him as the death of a 31year old woman was something he was understandably having difficulty with. Knowing all too well, her death couldn’t be categorized, much less thoroughly understood. For now, the central person in his life was gone with disbelief taking her place. There would be a time for which he could dwell on all that had transpired. Placed in a disheveled closet with the rest of his unfinished dreams to be rummaged through later. The only thing that troubled him to the pit of what was left of his being was the sight of that casket hanging on mesh straps to be lowered to the land of forever.

The ceremony was short and so he waited patiently to have some time at her resting place. The reading of those most exquisite lines from the 23rd psalm, King James version, was predictable.

"He makes me to lie down in green pastures,

he leads me beside the still waters,"

Erich couldn’t help but think of how his mother so often referred to Old and New Testament passages as some of the most extraordinarily beautiful prose and poetry ever written. Maybe that is where he got his love of literature. Yet his agnostic views that were once perfectly rational were not helping.

The brisk winds that had nearly swept him off his feet suddenly changed direction. Now as they came out of the south the clouds began to give way to more sun as the small contingent luxuriated in a false optimism that only springtime can bring. A brief anomaly for he knew that winter would soon be upon him with searing cold his enemy.

As the moments dragged, he remembered other summers past when challenges were to be had for the asking. He knew of the journeys she’d taken far from the beaten path and which had broken the boundaries of respectability. Often telling him about risks that were far from the comfort zone. For the road less traveled, as Robert Frost had written were much more to her liking. Traveling risky uncharted paths that Erich would come to discover years later. His recollections of her lofty desires now snatched away by that earthen rectangle that yawned before him.

He pondered those journeys of discovery they believed would never end as the 23rd Psalm, read by minister Griswold held no such happy endings. For the only destination it took him to was now forever buried beneath, green pastures … and to reside, beside the still waters, that was Greenstone Creek. His words gave him insufficient solace for this was a bitter and unexpected finale to a life which had held so much promise. His only legacy was to reflect on that amazing Technicolor age that passed them by with such fleeting strides.

The minister looked at Erich and uttered words of salvation. Where does my help come from?

Erich who had been listening indifferently was more absorbed in pondering his own mental salvation. Determined to set forth on that most perplexing of journeys to find some of the answers on his own.

They’d both been imbued with the unruliness of the 1960’s. Diane’s father, a small, town Republican, had in a quite inadvertent way, brought out a rebellious side of her through those stories he’d tell. By speaking of the abolitionism of her great, great grandfather Oliver Otis Howard it had generated within her a defiant streak she needed to vent. When her father would discuss the unresolved concerns left from those times, Erich couldn’t help but be amazed how those issues had traversed a century to land quite appropriately in her lap.

Mark Twain said it perfectly. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly but returns again in a rhyme that takes on a slightly different version of the original.

The era of civil rights, Vietnam and the rock and roll soundtrack that fueled their generation was a time so significant that one hardly realized it while it was happening. Yet it was if it had all happened before but in a slightly different version. The age of Negro protest that had grown out of the failure of a catastrophic Reconstruction was beginning to awaken in the 1950s. The nation’s white youth also rebelling against their form of slavery as they felt shackled to a war, they wanted no involvement in. Modern events were playing themselves out as if to remind a nation that its long sleeping social ills needed once again to be addressed. And so, the spark was set to tear the nation in two as it had done five generations earlier. Not on a single front as was black bondage but with the modern theaters of civil rights and Vietnam thrown in to add more fuel to already explosive times.

A Negro woman not wanting to sit at the back of the bus was how things began. Then on February 1, 1960 several neatly dressed Negro students from North Carolina A &T would touch off the second spark at a segregated Greensboro Woolworth. Years later armies of northern white and black college students would join the fray as they journeyed south to expand the nation’s suffrage to excluded minorities. Walter Cronkite said it powerfully as he commented how those expressions of civil activism, Vietnam protests along with the long hot summer unrest in the nation’s inner cities would drive America closer to the abyss of insurrection than anything since April of 1861. It was as if Fort Sumter had been fired on for a second time but this time it wouldn’t be the walls of that Charleston fortress that buckled but of America’s domestic and foreign policies. Erich, dissecting their past as would an archeologist seeking to breathe life into the age of the pharaohs.

Suddenly a deep voice shook the still air. Sir, uh SIR! you’ll have to move your car, the crew has to begin tarring this road.

Stunned back to reality he looked up to see the pleasant smile of a six-foot four heavy set man with ruddy complexion and dressed in gray striped coveralls. His peppery white beard set in contrast to his wind burned face.

Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you like that. The man’s baritone voice now lowered. So many come up here to visit loved ones and all, so we try our best to keep our machinery from making too much racket. Kind of like I is the head honcho who keeps it peaceful in a library, he grinned broadly.

His name was Pascal, as ascertained by the blue patch on his uniform. The supervisor then headed down the hill towards his truck. He gazed at Erich, his apologetic expression said enough.

Sorry, I’ll get my car out of here, can’t keep a hardworking man from his job.

He felt an apology was in order as he felt he was delaying the cemetery workers from getting home to their loved ones. The words, loved one, choked in his throat. For he wouldn’t be returning to his special one that evening or ever. Yet as he observed the giant of a man, he couldn’t help but think there was something familiar.

He looks similar, to professor Atkinson from the English department. Except for his poor language skills, he could be his twin.

The professor would say. "A literary career was no way to wealth, it’s a calling, like being a preacher or priest. A few dollars above taking a vow of poverty. Then again you don’t have to become celibate."

Spotting a quiet area a few hundred yards from where the crews were, he headed down a path towards the residence of that Weeping Willow he and her knew as their romantic hideaway. Its graceful limbs with green oblong leaves overarched the broad creek in a purposeful attempt to touch the life, giving water. As he sat between two arterial roots, he immediately began to reclaim a sense of himself. The main trunk that supported his weight slanted lazily at a perfect angle as would a comfortable arm chair. As long, as he had three days off for bereavement, he might as well spend some of it here with this venerable piece of natural furniture that stood sentry to the wide flowing stream.

Now more than ever he desperately needed this get away from the tedious duties of his job. Later, when it would be his time to resume his place among the land of sentient beings, he knew this type of journalistic endeavor was perfect to escape into the details of other people’s lives. A literary narcotic to bypass his cheerless existence.

The pastoral scene that stood before him was therapeutic, feeling a sense of buoyancy he knew was integral to his personality. He was determined to rebound from misfortune as there was a better than even chance, he would again find happiness. For now, all he wanted was to make sense of the insanely horrific thing that happened and to take in the cemetery’s natural beauty. The murmur of the brook was a calming backdrop to the ceremony now concluded. He watched the last vehicles follow the empty Cadillac hearse travel down the graveled road. Comparing it to a scene from a movie where the family members stand weeping and wailing on a rain swept hill near that of a departed. Umbrellas cocked at an angle to shield themselves from the driving rain. The differences were stark in that the only dampness this unseasonably warm November afternoon would produce was the trickle that runs down the back as the confluence of emotion and stress merge.

Blinding himself to this, he had an eerie sensation that something quite remarkable was about to occur. And that for the rest of his life he would never be able to explain what was about to come upon him. The idea was so overwhelming and unexpected that it would challenge all he understood about consciousness.

He then reflected on a most unusual concept. "Was it possible to go back and relive all of their time spent together? Not like in a dream but, go back and live once again every, single detail and footfall of it? To experience it all through every one of his five senses. The thought was impossibly crazy, but it ate into him.

He knew he had had an overactive psyche but what he wanted to conjure into reality was utterly preposterous. Yet he wondered if he could pull it off and in so doing they could be together again. His longing was the propellant to take him back to those past years, he so wanted to return to. To experience their relationship again when it was fresh and new. Maybe if he hoped, wished, prayed and yearned hard enough, it would come to be. Was it possible to experience, not in one’s mind’s eye but physically set foot again in those cities, towns