Whether you publish any of this or not is your own business. However, I find writing about the past is very healing and integrating. when I look back now from this vantage point it's sort of like being many different people along the way.
However, the person I was about age 10 in some ways is who I am now except I have the armor of experience to guard me now like I did not then.
So, I can now look back and recognize myself as that 10 year old. However, from about 13 to 25 that's a whole different story where puberty and the craziness of life and mores of the 1960s and the 1970s made the world much different than it was in the 1950s in every single way.
But, I still see my roots in being a 1950s child that was tempered by the insanities of the 1960s and 1970s of Viet Nam and women's liberation and human rights for all races that really got going with the Civil Rights act of 1964. It took opulence to get people to give equal rights to everyone. It couldn't have happened without the opulence of that era where the poor were as wealthy as they have ever been (in buying power) then. But that began to end with 1973 and the Arab Oil Embargo and the middle class and poor have been doing worse ever since.
Imagine this: gas was 17 cents a gallon and the minimum wage was around a dollar an hour. So, you could buy over 5 gallons of gas for one hours minimum wage even if you were 16 years old on a Vespa or something like that and working part time after junior high or high school.
By the time I was 9 or 10 whenever people came over my parents wanted me to play the piano for them. This was a lot about what people were like then. By age 10 or 11 I could play popular music and Mom and I would sing along and anyone who wanted would join us, especially at Christmas. by age 12 I was playing piano at church and by 13 or 14 I was playing Baldwin Organ too once I had mastered the pedals and the stops enough to pull this off.
I also played music for my High School Graduation at a church school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My parents drove all the way from Los Angeles where we lived to be there or my graduation from High School in May 1966.
Looking back now I see everything in an entirely different context than we all saw it then. It was just another phase of my now very long life. Sometimes I wonder how many people I knew then even my age have already passed on. In some ways it's a blessing not to know the answer to that question.
It must be hard for people who didn't move around a lot like I did in life when they stay long enough in a small town to watch all their high school friends and friends from growing up die one by one along the way.
But, moving was what my family did a lot while I was growing up.
I think I had already moved 2 or 3 times before I moved to San Diego at age 4 to Vista in 1952.
in Seattle people are very polite sort of like Canada which is right next door and influences people in Washington state a lot because people intermarry there a lot with Canadians. So, Seattle is a very polite place like Canada because of this.
My wife and I were doing a forced alternate merge in Vancouver and she said, "This is amazing! Canadians are so polite they even do alternate merge from 2 lanes into 1 great!"
But, if you are in Southern California it is a fight and takes forever to merge from 2 lanes into 1 because no one wants to give an inch....
Whereas the Canadians are so polite they just do it and don't honk or get upset about it. (or at least this is how it seems).
So, moving to Southern California from Seattle was strange in a lot of ways. But, I liked the freedom of warm weather and warm beaches (even though most homes didn't have air conditioners then). But, some did have swamp coolers but they made the whole house smell sort of like a swamp too. A Swamp cooler is up on the roof and it drains water over I think straw or something like that and then sucks the air through the wet straw to cool the house below. The Swamp coolers would sit on the roofs of houses and blow air down onto the people below cooled by water going through straw on the roof.
Though air conditioning is better it also makes some people sick sometimes. For example, I cannot have air conditioning in my face very long in a car without getting sick. So, if it is above 100 degrees outside I often turn the air conditioning on my feet until they freeze and sometimes open a window a little so the air conditioning doesn't mess up my lungs and make me sick. This way I can stay cool without getting a cold or flu from air conditioning blowing directly into my face.
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