A Song for Youth & Age (Part 1)

Fifty-six years ago, having left the convent just three months short of my thirty-first birthday, one of the songs I first heard was “Turn, Turn, Turn.” (Its title was also “For Everything There Is a Season.”) 

           For this song, the beloved folk singer Pete Seeger had composed music to accompany the first eight verses of Chapter 3 of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The only lyrics he’d added were the refrain (turn, turn, turn) and the last verse on peace being possible even then . . . even now. 

During the escalation of the Vietnam War, I mostly listened to folk music. Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” became anti-war songs. Those two anthems radicalized me politically.

 Two other insightful songs, “Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel and “All I Know” by Garfunkel, spoke to the recesses of my heart that I’d bolted and locked. The songs seemed to be the soundtrack for my life—emotionally, spiritually, politically. They charted my journey from where I’d been, to where I was then, to where I might be headed. 

At the time, three companions—three psychotic hallucinations whom I could both see and hear—accompanied me everywhere. Daily, the four of us imprisoned one another: one cheered me on, one cautioned me, one excoriated me. And I? I said nothing. I played a role that hid me from what I expected would be the loathing of others.

The two anti-war songs, plus the example of two friends whom I’d met in Dayton, Ohio, led me to protest the Vietnam War, which led to shotguns being aimed at me and guard dogs sicked on me. It also led to my meeting men who’d come back from the war, their hopes, dreams, and minds bruised and battered irrevocably by the war and by the reception they’d received on campus. 

In August 1971, after completing my studies for a graduate degree, I returned to Dayton only to learn—from a kind storeowner from whom I’d sought employment—that the FBI had a file on me and was encouraging those to whom I applied for work to disregard me. According to the bureau, I’d become both traitorous and unemployable. Fortunately, I was able to get a job in a factory beyond the city boundaries and later to teach at a drop-out center for Black students. 

In the late 1960s, while teaching at an inner-city school in Dayton, I’d taught students the history of slavery; taken them into the downtown area where many of them had never been; and written numerous letters to federal, state, and city government leaders about Civil Rights, racism, and segregation. I’d also written to department store owners who had no black mannequins in their window displays. I have no idea if that info was also in the file. And, if so, what it implied to the FBI.

I was not a true social activist for I was never arrested or jailed. I was in some season of my life that did not include imprisonment but did include gathering with others to right wrongs. 

The songs of the 1960s and early 1970s accompanied me from Minnesota to Ohio to New Hampshire to Missouri and back to Minnesota. They inspired me, helped me discover and name my loneliness and fears, and brought me ever closer to revealing to someone the three hallucinations who hounded me. 

As my life changed in those turbulent times that ultimately, for me, became years of settling down, finding a career, and discovering my passion for writing, Seeger’s song especially continued to speak to me: “For everything there is a season.” I found new meanings in it as my experiences evolved. 

That’s what his song did then when I was young in thought and hope. In my next posting, I hope to share with you what happened on my recent birthday that connects Seeger’s song with my aging. 

Peace.