The Promised Land “Revisited”
It was that strange period, post Cuban Missile Crisis , pre-Beatles, that small crack in the cultural evolution of the human race, 60 years ago. The beginning of the 1960s. The decade when my cohort of the baby boomers generation grew up. A magical time in some ways that in the beginning was somewhat like a mirror reflection of the propaganda that we were being fed on our black and television sets. You know, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, the cowboy and Indian TV shows. Somewhat perfect families, life was divided into goodies and baddies and one that later on morphed into a time of chaotic social change.
In the early years the subliminal influence dovetailed perfectly with the “manufactured” tension between the so called East and West. The communists and the capitalists, we always needed someone to be the enemy. Later in the decade mainstream society became the new baddy.
And they try to tell us now that misinformation and disinformation is something that has just begun, no it’s forever been part of the woof and warp of mankind’s road trip, always been there.
I arrived in East Bentleigh in the springtime of 1963. I was an 11 year old who had just been struck like a hammer by the magic of music.
Maybe this was the first expression of love and passion that I experienced apart from the much more subdued familial love that I just taken for granted.
My childhood was behind me but my teenage years were yet to begin.
And here I was in what seemed to me to be “The Promised Land”, big open spaces, huge houses and wide roads, my own bedroom, hidden adventure playgrounds, a local picture theatre where I could spend my Saturday afternoons, a railway station that was the gateway to anywhere we wanted to go and as I was about to find out loads and loads of boys and girls around the same age as I was.
This new place was larger than life, a self contained world all of its own, a place to forge an identity and bask in the glory, discovery and adventure of life. A place to sew the seeds of hope for what was to come.
Those teenage years don’t last all that long but like a tattoo they are with you for life.
When you are in the thick of it you don’t have any idea that you are creating a foundation to build a life upon, well that’s how I look at it anyway. These distant years and events set the stage for what is to come.
It’s the people you meet, the things that you do together, the shared sense of morality, music, fun, adventure, discovery. The trouble that you create, your secrets, the crazy shit that you never want your parents to find out about you or what you are up to.
As far as I knew my friends weren’t readers, they weren’t appreciators of art although music was an integral part of our shared experience. My friends were free wheelin’ suburban boys who made it up as they went along. We waited for school to finish so we could go to our part time jobs to make some money to buy records and such. At night we’d hang out together outside the local milk bar or at a friends house. We yearned for the weekends when we could explore new adventures, places to go, journeys beyond South, North, Boundary and Warrigal roads. Getting lost in life and each others company.
As I said earlier my passion was music. By the time I was 14 I had joined my first band and spent a lot of my time practising and playing. This experience re-defined my life to a large degree and from then on I had 2 distinct groups of friends but overall the biggest impact came from the core group who I met back in the spring of 1963.
Yesterday four of us got back together to share stories of our lives and look back at our own memories of those years, the people, the girls (those poor girls), the crazy experiences, the rites of passage, the journeys and adventures. We didn’t go into it too deeply, it was a bit like re-assembling a big jigsaw puzzle that had been scattered across a table and left to just sit there gathering dust, waiting to be finished.
What did we have in common? What had happened to us over the past 50 plus years? Did we attain those dreams that we dreamt back in the mid 60s? Did our lives turn out like we had dreamt and expected? Had we been good husbands and fathers?
There was so much to catch up on and no way to do it in the few hours we had together over lots of beer, cider, food and soda water in the back streets of Fitzroy. We were “same same” but different, you know what I mean. The building blocks were still there but what was built upon them was so distinctly different. We had fun, we reminisced, we told stories, recollected events, remembered others who had shared our journey and adventures … both girls and boys.
Was it like “the boulevard of broken dreams”? A little bit. One thing we had in common was that our first marriages were all finished. The girls we had fallen in love with as young men were not in our lives anymore on a romantic level. Some had become friends, some enemies. We didn’t really talk about our kids all that much but did touch on it in a distant sort of way.
My god, what do you talk about after 50 years? Do you take it in turns and give each other an hour or so to tell their life story? Shit no. All you can do is free form it, take it as it comes, listen closely and conjure up memories and images that have been buried deep in your consciousness for half a century.
I said goodbye at about 7 p.m after 6 or so hours of chatter and reminiscing. We promised each other that we would meet again in 6 months or so. Maybe I should start an online group so we can stay in touch but even if I do would we communicate? I don’t know.
Lives are wondrous, unique, complex. All we can do is to share what we have learned along the way with others. Maybe be there for each other if needed, maybe not. We’ll see.
But having said all that I had a ball. I loved every minute of our time together and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Comments
Very good well done Gary a remarkable outlook on life I had a great time to cheers 👍