The Remarkable, 12/11/24

Change arrives unexpectedly

Photo by Christopher Osten on Unsplash

The Remarkable, Starting to Grow Up, Part One

My unusual path out of childhood

This letter is called the Remarkable for a reason. Despite the darkness a lot of us feel in the world right now, it remains an amazing place, especially if you grew up in a country and time more innocent than now. But in the natural world things are still remarkable in both dramatic and simple ways.

From my current perspective, growth occurs in stages that are not always apparent until much later in life. I’m going to tell a story about one of those changes that has a less than familiar angle. It is about a period in my life when I found myself turning from childhood to adolescence and a growing sense of self-awareness, with more than a little help from a psychedelic.

It was the summer and fall of 1968, when I was thirteen years old, a tumultuous time not unlike now. The war in Vietnam was escalating beyond madness and people were in the streets protesting the senseless unending death and destruction.

That time period has been dissected by historians and I will leave that to them. But it is the broader background of this little story. I live in Rochester, NY, in the western region of the state. We lived in an older suburb that bordered Lake Ontario, an inland sea and our house was a converted summer cottage a stone’s throw from a broad sandy beach.

The area had been a summer lakeside community until the encroaching burbs caught up with it, though that had taken place in the 1930s rather than through the ugly sprawl we think of as suburbs today. My neighborhood, despite its waterfront location, was considered by the rest of the town to be the other side of the tracks, which it actually was as a local railway passed through along the lake.

It was idyllic for a kid and I can realistically say I had a charmed childhood. We had very little money, both my parents worked as soon as my mother felt she could leave us on our own (at an age which would horrify today’s helicopter parents, though we did just fine). I never knew we were what we might call lower middle class because my parents found ways to take us on yearly camping vacations all over the northeast.

It was the classic ‘pack the kids and everything into the station wagon’, including a friend or cousin, and go. But as we grew a little older we regularly had weekend trips, usually camping at one of the nearby state parks in the Finger Lakes, which were and are amazing.

But in a break with tradition that summer, we went to Toronto and stayed the weekend in a hotel, a new experience for us. Even better, my younger brother and our friend and I got our own room. Of course we stayed up all night watching a movie that we probably were not supposed to watch, In Cold Blood, based on Truman Capote’s revolutionary docu-drama about the brutal murder of a farm family in the Midwest. It made an indelible impression, as did the knowledge that we were doing something slightly forbidden.

The next day we spent walking around the city, including Yonge Street which was, at the time, the happening center of a city at the peak of hippie culture and the anti-war movement.

As a constant reader who read voraciously and widely I was hyper aware of the momentous sense of change in the air and was fascinated by the counter culture all around us. I never asked my parents what they thought but now know they were gradually changing with times too.

So there we are, walking down this street with all the variety of a big city around us. The older kids (I am the oldest) naturally lagged behind wanting to look like we were on our own, when something unforeseen happened and I made a snap decision that was to change my life.

A hippie guy, a street character really, walked by us muttering quietly, ‘LSD, LSD’. I paused for a minute and then ran after him, bought a few hits, and ran back, my parents none the wiser.

To this day I have no idea where that impulse came from but I guess I was aware of the psychedelic revolution going on and saw my chance to see what it was all about. I had never taken anything, including smoking weed and drinking.

So there I am, a thirteeen year old with two tiny pills hidden away in a pocket, not certain what I would do with them. In a now hilarious bit of memory I remember hiding them in the hubcap of the family wagon to cross the border, in the unlikely case a family would get stopped.

Ridiculous but true.

Little did I know that this choice to impulsively buy those pills, would be a turning point in my young life and perhaps the place where my childhood, idyllic as it was, morphed into a different awareness of the world.

It is odd that a single choice could, decades later, look momentous in its own way. Here in this newsletter I’m going to look at a few of those turning points in life and try to discern their meaning in the longer context of this life. Those tiny pills, so innocuous, triggered a truly amazing experience I carry with me still. In my next issue I’ll continue this story as well as I can, though I’ve told bits of it here before.

Comments are always open, but being judgemental is not. These stories took place and the why is not up for discussion. It was not a failure of my parents, it was my choice and might have been my first truly independent action. No damage was done and definitely no regrets. What followed was remarkable in a very good way.

I made many choices regarding drugs after that as did most of my contemporaries. There were basically two paths. One led to enhanced awareness and creativity and the other was dark, leading to addiction and in some cases death. Later I watched some high school friends split along those lines with the dark path generally being driven by problems at home, abuse and worse.

That is not the story in my case. I never liked experiences designed to dull me, though I developed my own issues with alcohol, which I have documented in earlier pieces here. That is no longer my primary topic, though I won’t skirt it when it is relevant.

Next week, a transcendent day that changed me forever. I know, very melodramatic, but there is no other way to describe it. See you then.

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