Songs for terrible times in Daydreaming on the Porch

The year 1969 was one of those pivotal years in my life. I graduated from high school for one thing. The first half of the year was the best time I had ever had in because I was on the staff of the yearbook. I was in my element. Editing, layout, photography, writing. It was great. Little did I know that a few years later I would be working at my first newspaper job.

In those days the arrival of the yearbook from the printer (no video versions) was a highlight of the year. As soon as we had unpacked the boxes and started distributing them, our classmates were everywhere getting people to sign them. That was a big deal back then. I wonder if they even do that today.

Graduation arrived at last. Freedom from four years of high school and a summer shad of bliss on vacation at the beach. I even quit my lawn mowing jobs.

Then in early September of that year everything starting going downhill big time. Not a week into college that September at a small private school far from my home, I realized that I had made the absolutely worst choice I could have possibly made. The next three months were a hellish nightmare of endurance until I could transfer back to a university in my hometown. I was totally out of place, an honor student in danger flunking out, a lost kid.

The country was still in shock a year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. There were violent protests against the war in Vietnam and then as now, we had a thuggish, criminal Republican as president. But surviving depression and the fiasco of my first term at college we’re all that was on my mind that Fall of 1969.

There were two songs from that year that stand out. One was playing nonstop on the radio and in the college dining hall: Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” It was a great song forever tarnished by associations with that awful college experience.

Another song was released in November of 1969 and it was a powerful song, musically and lyrically. For some strange reason I have been listening to it over and over lately on YouTube. It’s “Reflections of My Life” by Dean Ford and The Marmalade. I decidedI needed to write about it.

It’s a song very much of its time and also for ours. Back in 1969 to many soldiers wading through rice paddies in Vietnam looking in all directions for an enemy they couldn’t see and didn’t know anything about, and for the millions of people against this nasty and vicious war of destruction, the world did indeed seem like a very bad place. For a soldier fighting a war he couldn’t comprehend, (nor could anybody else), he could only dream of returning home, away from that madhouse of a war that was poisoning and destroying an entire nation to satisfy he global delusions and pretentious of a country and it’s leaders gone astray. I thought I was insulated from that insanity until a just-returned, mentally disturbed veteran of that war became by chance and ill-fortune my dorm roommate in the Spring of 1970. He made my life miserable, tormenting me until I got away from his twisted influence.

At times that year of 1969 and well into 1970, I thought I was dying, psychologically, and emotionally. But I fought back, and I made it through that school year, but with lasting scars. When you’re 19 years old, you’re not ready to die.

Now the entire world is in the grips of a deadly pandemic and could kill millions and damage countless others for a lifetime with long-lasting after-effects. It is a calamitous new disease for which no one had any previous immunity and which has ravaged populations of the most vulnerable.

Today, also, to compound the damage and destruction to our people and our country from a killer disease, we have a massive toxic waste dump consisting of a Republican president and Senate that threatens to poison our “democracy,” civil rights, and what is left of our sense of unity as a country. And, a president who for many months denied there was any real problem at all.

As the song by The Marmalade laments, “the world is a bad place, a terrible place to live, but I don’t want to die.”

In November we have a chance to begin the cleanup of this toxic waste dump in Washington. We have a chance to begin anew and restore sanity to the body politic. We need a sea change, a paradigm shift before its too late.

As I began to see the end of that terrible Fall-Winter of 1969-70, I listened with gratitude and relief to another song that was emblematic of the era, “Bridge Over Triubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel. This song soothed my soul every time I listen led to it. It gave me hope that I would have friends, leave behind a terrible year, and that the world would be a better place.

A “bridge over troubled water,” is what we need. That bridge will lead to a vaccine for Covid-19 and a new beginning for the country in January of 2021.

“Reflections of My Life,” performed by Dean Young in 2014:

The changing of sunlight to moonlight
Reflections of my life
Oh, how they fill my eyes
The greetings of people in trouble
Reflections of my life
Oh, how they fill my eyes
Oh, my sorrows
Sad tomorrows
Take me back to my own home
Oh, my crying (Oh, my crying)
Feel I’m dying, dying
Take me back to my own home
I’m changing, arranging
I’m changing
I’m changing everything
Everything around me
The world is
A bad place
A bad place
A terrible place to live
Oh, but I don’t want to die
Oh, my sorrows
Sad tomorrows
Take me back to my own home
Oh, my crying (Oh, my crying)
Feel I’m dying, dying
Take me back to my own home
Oh, my sorrows
Sad tomorrows
Take me back to my home.