Thursday, June 13, 2024

More going down memory lane, 1968-69.

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.

In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.

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Daily Diary, Day 1381:

We did get sun yesterday, but once again it is cloudy this morning with only an hour or two of sun predicted later in the day. Today I have my usual Thursday noon zoom meeting and a possibility of a meeting after that, as well as a scheduled meeting this morning at 10, so I am trying to get this post done early amidst my usual morning cleaning, walk, and now morning soaking of stye. Such a glamourous life! 

Actually, I shouldn’t complain but be grateful I have the financial security so that I can effectively slack off from my usual level of activity in terms of writing and marketing and not be panicked by the inevitable steady drop in income this has caused. Instead, I am continuing to enjoy my recreational reading.

I am also spending a little time after dinner each day re-reading the letters I wrote my parents (which I had simply skimmed earlier in this process.) It is amazing what I don’t remember! For example, while I do remember that I pretty quickly began to be interested in the anti-war movement, I didn’t remember actually speaking up at one of the mass meetings in my sophomore year (1968-69). But according to a letter to my parents, I did so, standing up at the end of a long meeting to argue for more nuanced and less divisive tactics than the one being promoted by the more radical student leaders. In the letter I sounded quite surprised but proud of my willingness to speak out for greater moderation in a meeting where I estimated that there were about 300 students attending. I simply don’t remember having done this, or that at the next meeting, the leaders had come up with four different kinds of protests so that students could choose what they felt comfortable doing. I do vaguely remember what wrote about in a subsequent letter, that I did participate in the next protest, as part of probably the least confrontational tactic—picketing outside of the building where there was a marine recruiter, but I had forgotten that one of my best friends, Peg, who was in a wheel chair and had decided to “sit-in” in protest, was one of the 40 students who were threatened with suspension.

I found two things of particular interest to me from this set of letters. The first was my assumption that my parents would be supportive of my activities (something I know was not true for many of my student friends who lived in terror that their parents would learn of their activities.) In fact, one of the letters referenced a letter my mother sent to the college president in support of students’ right to protest peacefully on campus.

The second thing I found interesting in the letters how little the events of the outside world actually intruded in my daily life. I do reference my disappointment in the re-election of Nixon in 1968, and going to a vigil after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as asking about news of rioting in my home town of Pittsburgh. However, these references were minor compared to the amount of detail in these weekly letters about how many hours I was studying, my papers, and exams, and descriptions of the various young men I was dating. From these letters it is pretty clear how little the outside world tended to intrude on my life within the protected bubble of a small liberal arts college set in the middle of farms land in Ohio.

And this was clearly one of the reasons behind my desire to try and break out of that bubble by spending the summer after my sophomore year (1969) in Washington DC, taking summer school classes at Howard University. And, what a summer that was!

But my impressions from that summer are for a future post. Meanwhile, some more geraniums, wbich seem particularly rampant this summer.

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