June, 1968

In early June of 1968, Factory hangabout and misandrist Valerie Solanas demonstrated her resolve against patriarchal oppression by attempting to assassinate that bastion of masculinity and all round tough guy Andy Warhol. Firing a decidedly select three bullets - any more would have been certainly ungracious and any less ungrateful - Solanas felled Warhol but he managed to survive. This would have been bigger news that month if not for the fact that just over a day later a more successful assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan, shot and killed Robert F. Kennedy. At three months of age I live in a tumultuous world of violence and bloodshed and a world that finds me becoming an increasingly fatter baby. Having essentially two mothers in those first fews weeks it seems I am receiving twice the food. It is at this point that my mother feels it necessary to take back fully the reins of motherhood. She thanked my grandmother for all her help and sent her back to her husband who had for the past several weeks, only seen his wife on occasional visits to our home.

The warm, early summer air meant time spent outside, at least time spent in the back yard. My mother would hang laundry while listening to the radio. She would then unfold an aluminum tube lawn chair and sit in the sun and read with me, secured in a baby carrier, at her side. The tiny, vivid pink wild roses that grew at the far end of the garden mixing with the salty ocean air and fresh laundry detergent would be orchestrated bouquet of my first summer. And June would be a tableau of my mother, a yet unknown other sibling or two, and the radio playing from the kitchen window. Perhaps it was here that we both heard for the first time that James Earl Ray was arrested trying to leave London with a fake Canadian passport and subsequently charged with the murder of Martin Luther King. That cannot be confirmed but what is known is that I am not seen without a hat as, I am told, my hair was growing into a coarse nest of spikes that could not be controlled. I am, at three months of age, a fat baby in a bonnet perched in the grass, highlighted by the itinerant shadows cast by laundry lazily moving back and forth in the warm ocean air.

It is the end of June and my mother’s brood of five are around all day as school is out for the summer. Pope Paul VI condemns birth control and most North Americans choose to ignore him. My mother, even though she is not Catholic, thinks that some things are best ignored.

From June, 1968:
Revolution, The Beatles