Beauty Through Pain

I keep trying to figure out how we arrived here, and what country and planet we are now living in/on. When did this all begin? I grew up in the 60’s in the midst of massive social change with integration and women’s liberation and the Vietnam War protests and Martin Luther King and JFK and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.  It was the Age of Aquarius, of peace and love and expanded consciousness. At the same time it was the end of the New Deal Republicans.   I remember Barry Goldwater, whom my parents described as a political outlier with his extremely conservative and libertarian agenda and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of

1964  . . .  

I love this poem that takes me back to the 60’s.

For the Slip’N Slide

by George Bilgere

For the WHAM-O Manufacturing Company

which in 1961 invented the Slip’N Slide.

For Brenda Harris’s shady back yard

with its long fairway of soft grass where she

and her sister whose name is now lost

set up the Slip’N Slide and attached it to the hose

under the burning summer sky of East LA.

How Brenda and her sister and I ran

in our swimsuits, took a flying leap, and skidded,

screaming bloody murder on our tummies.

How we did this ten thousand times, howling

our Tarzan cries and never tiring of it. For Brenda,

who invented the Double Decker, whereby

the two of us would run, Brenda just behind me,

and I would belly flop onto my stomach

and she would land on my back and we streaked

across the yard out of control and smashed

into her mother’s hydrangeas. For her mother,

who didn’t get mad.  Who at lunch time put out

a pitcher of iced lemonade or Kool-Aid

and a bunch of Velveeta and Wonder Bread sandwiches

on the table under its green umbrella and we kids

sat there eating like royalty. How nothing

was better than those Wonder Bread sandwiches.

For the Safeway supermarket down the road,

which employed Brenda’s father in the produce department,

where he earned the salary that paid for the Slip’N Slide.

How he would fill a couple of shopping bags

with day-old lettuce and carrots and oranges

and onions and radishes and potatoes

destined for the dumpster behind the Safeway

and leave them on the front porch of our house

where my mother would find them when she got home

from her job as a guard at Fontana Women’s Prison,

the only work she could find after my father died

of booze and left her with the three kids

and a falling apart little stucco house. How

accepting the day-old produce hurt her

even more than working at the women’s prison

and collecting food stamps because in her former life

as socialite wife of a well-to-do drunk

she had employed people like Brenda’s father,

who entered from the back door when they came to work.

For the women incarcerated in Fontana Women’s Prison,

whose crimes, whatever they were, gave my mother a job.

How she never thanked him. For that summer

under the cobalt LA sky, where a place

called Watts had yet to ignite, and our Tarzan cries

echoed in the yard and the cold lemonade

made our heads ache and the days went on

forever, the Slip’N Slide like an endless river

which arrived one day at a fork which none of us

could see coming, and Brenda and her sister,

her mother and her father drifted off

into a place called African America,

and my mother and sisters and I drifted off

into something called gated communities,

the Slip’N Slide, the Wonder Bread sandwiches,

the bags of groceries long forgotten.

For Brenda, and the Double Decker that summer

a lifetime ago, and how the two of us now

keep on journeying deeper and deeper

into a country growing stranger,

less recognizable, more lonely every day.