For me, it wasn't really about physical survival during these years. It was more about psychological and spiritual survival at least for me. The illnesses I had dealt with like Whooping cough at age 2 and Concussion caused night time seizures were far behind me ending (the seizures at night) which were like being murdered each time until I was about 15 years old. At this point I asked God to come into my body with me and he did and my appearance changed after this and girls started falling in love with me which changed my life a lot. Before this I was a very quiet person but the women in my life started to bring me out of this quietness. At the "I AM" School in Santa Fe in 1965 and 1966 where I graduated in may of 1966 my senior speech at this religious school was "The Power of the Silence" which was something I really believed in then. Because I saw just how powerful I was not talking very much at that time at age 17.
I sort of gave up on Church girls I intended to marry from age 21 to 25 and instead dated more worldly college girls instead. So, I had many girlfriends between 21 and 25. Before 21 I had only dated about 5 girls mostly from my church and you were supposed to marry then from within your church so girls especially were all looking for husbands inside the church which wasn't always easy and still isn't for girls of various religions around the world.
So, if I was going out with someone from 1 month to 6 months or longer I tried to stay alive for them out of loyalty to them because mostly I didn't want to be alive for myself at all. I think this is a common state for young men and why so many single young men die in War and in Car accidents and overdoses because of how crazy is is to be from about 18 to 25 for a young man.
But, finally I found someone I wanted to be with long term but my parents realized it couldn't really work long term and I had an inkling they might be right but then my girlfriend was pregnant. When she decided to drown herself at Moonlight Beach in a full white Dress while I watched her do this I was wondering whether my son would even be born or not. She didn't like Birth control pills so she stopped taking them and got pregnant which seemed strange to me too. However, I was psychologically prepared to be a father and it was one of my main goals in life to be a Dad then too. So, having my son worked out well for me.
However, my wife was very vegetarian and into being maybe a Fruitarian which I always thought was nuts because I met her friend in Hawaii who lost her period by only eating coconuts and fruit there and was skinny as a rail so I knew doing this likely wasn't good for a human body to get that skinny.
So, the strange thing that happened at moonlight beach was that she said our son came to her and told her he was going to be a fruitarian and somehow this is why she walked out of the ocean in a white wedding gown that she was preparing to drown herself in and had our son according to her.
However, many people who were "Flower children" in the 1960s and 1970s were sort of like this too. Also, she was born in 1951 which is the "Optimum Hippy" person of that era. I was born in 1948 so much more grounded than many Flower Children. I liked to hang out with a lot of them but I was always more serious and less dreamy and idealistic than they were because I had already faced death so many times in my life that I knew life was a very serious business and staying alive was no easy matter for any of us.
The best compliment on this level was my wife's older sisters then husband. She was an is a neurosurgeon trained at Berkeley where my wife also graduated High School there likely around 1969. I graduated in 1966 in May in Santa Fe New Mexico from private school myself then too. But, going to a private school psychologically got me ready for college because before then I was too into just staying alive and working on cars with friends and surfing a lot and working making money any way I could after school or weekends always after about age 10 or 12 years old.
Oh. The compliment was: "Fred. I like you still are using the name Fred instead of "IAM" or Golden or Violet Sunchine or some other Flower child name. It's good you are still grounded in being just Fred!"
So, though I often hung out with Flower children because many of our spiritual beliefs were similar I wasn't really ever a hippy but just friends sometimes with people like this because I was born 3 years too early to really be a hippy. I was too grounded in the suffering of the 1950s and 1960s to ever really be a hippy myself. However, for my first wife I did wear a beard and shoulder length hair when we got married in Long Beach when I was 26 a month before our son was born in Southern California then.
We used an 1880s law for common law marriage where you don't need to take a blood test to get married which was otherwise required then. We had gotten a Blood test but then SRF Encinitas where we wanted to get married wouldn't let us marry because we weren't actually members of their church there even though my new wife's sister was trying to become an SRF Nun there then. She passed away in her 40s from Diabetes after having many children.
But, as you can see here if you were born after the 1950s or 1960s these were very very different times than now.
So, one of the main ways I survived to age 25 and 26 was getting married and having a son and needing to stay alive to raise my son right.
By God's Grace
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