Amazing Grace is not where you look for it.

I start back at the U of M on Monday.  It is 50 years since I dropped out in August of the Summer of Love to hitchhike to San Francisco.  I didn't wear flowers in my hair. I didn't return for my Junior year and didn't graduate with my class in June of 1969. Instead I worked night shift as a janitor in the Physics building at the U, and sat outside on the gabled stone window sill watching as my class went through the graduation ceremony on the green expanse of Mall.  I smoked a cigarette and discussed the irrational basis of all culture with a physicist from Delhi, India, who took a morning break from his equations to philosophize with me.

That morning he told me of the first time he left home, at the age of 15, to go to a boarding school.  He had to wait in dark, at a deserted rural crossroads, for a bus that would take him away from the warmth of his family and into the bleak heart of  his urban, westernized future.  In the twilight dawn, he looked up into a nearby tree and saw the luminous ghosts of all his ancestors, watching him to make sure he got on the bus and didn't run away.

And he was a mathematical physicist.  One of the most demanding disciplines in rigor of thought

The black-gowned Midwestern children looped past the dias as their names were called. I thought about the people I had met on the road over the past two years. I had hitchhiked through Monterrey on my quest of the Big Sur Experience, and encountered the last human actor hired by Disney to portray Lincoln, before the animatronics replaced him.  Imagine being so far ahead of the trends that you lose your cosplay presidency to an android in 1967!  1967 was Peak Hippie for our society.  By 1968 we had crested the wave of optimism and trust among the mobilized underclass, and we were crashing down on a beach littered with broken icons and assassinated leaders.

If you couldn't trust the Hell's fucking Angels to keep peace, love and understanding at a Rolling Stones concert, who could you trust?

We sensed but could not measure the great loss to our generation when  Idealism had given way to divergence and conflict.  Anger replaced the conviviality of smoking dope with strangers while waiting for the new age to fully bloom.  My feelings were a mix of sentimental regret and logical dismay.

I regretted not being gowned in black and ready to tackle family and career, but I regretted more that our society had precluded that fast track for anyone of conscience who could not ignore the massive injustice and brutal sanctions we imposed on Native Americans, Blacks, Vietnamese, South American democratic regimes...etc.

I was dismayed by the tangle of contradictions that saw naive kids fall under the influence of extremists as they sought to replace the authority of Moloch America with something more friendly, compassionate and fair.  The extremists had learned to disguise their wolf-like appetites for destruction with the woolly double-talk of  egotistical gurus, cowardly  revolutionaries, inarticulate poets--the flotsam and jetsam of 19th century ideas washed up on the rocky shores.

One of the big differences between being a 19 year old Sophomore and a 69 year old Junior in CLA is that I have been diagnosed with an incurable disease.  When I was 19 we joked that life was the incurable disease.  Today I joke that Leukemia is ... well, no joke actually.