Satirical perspectives from a look back at the '60's on Birthday Island

Birthday island garden

Carol Forsloff---The shredded refuse lies just beyond the trees, the remnants of the raft that floated to these shores from the ship in the middle of the night. It has been so long, as memories remain keen about what seems sometimes just yesterday. Yet it was long ago, when I was young and hopeful and looking forward as other youth those days to the vibrant 1960's. The hope remains I will be found one day, so I am sending this letter on what I think might be my birthday, remembering and wondering how everyone has fared these years long gone for me but mixed with thoughts of love that keep the loneliness at bay.

I have been on this island for a very long time. I had been sailing with friends when I fell into the water, finding the rubber raft descended in the dark and drifting further away until no one had found me as the night sky with no stars brought only silence until a few days passed. The water all around me glitters in the daytime sun, in the middle of I know not where and how just far away. Every year I write a note and seal it tightly in a bottle so one day it will be found. One day the bottle floated back, tightly with its lid but without the note inside. So maybe friends have read it and perhaps I will be found.

It was 1963 when I awakened and found myself here in this place, where no one else has come for many years. Yet I survive, day after day, watching and waiting for a boat, a plane, a sign of someone arriving to take me home again. I will be forever patient, writing another letter, with that hope---no knowledge---I will be found, and soon.

I remember watching television just before the journey that brought me here in that fall of '63. President John F. Kennedy was on Huntley-Brinkley going to give a campaign speech someplace in Texas. He really is handsome. He is very old right now, over ninety years, for I was young and listened to his words. His life would be so rich with such a loving family all around, especially Robert, since those brothers seemed so close, close enough that some might think they could share their women too. And Jackie, John's sweet wife, is always beautiful in her fashionable suits and hats that somehow I can never picture her with a gray-haired husband.

I wonder who won the election in 1968 after Kennedy's second term. I know some people think Robert would make a good President, and I have often wondered if he was elected too. Somehow I rather prefer Senator Humphrey from Minnesota. I've liked him since reading his introduction to a textbook on desegregation and besides once he takes a stand on something, he never changes his mind. Maybe Adlai Stevenson got another chance to be President in spite of his divorce. Rockefeller is another man I have always liked a lot because as my husband, Frank, once said, “You gotta admire a man who's been married to the same woman for 25 years.

At least Nixon got out of politics after he made a fool out of himself in 1962. Wish I knew what was going on.

And poor Frank? I guess after all this time he went and married someone else. Maybe he had a kid or two or even three, I hope. He always liked kids, he said, so raising them and putting them through college would not be difficult. After all the future has been so bright for everyone, with college cheap and all those good jobs folks can get with a good education.

College was such fun. I remember it so well those years ago.  We were passionate about so many things, and all my friends and I were active in civil rights movements as well. Dr. King would now be in his 80's and likely made a difference with his work over all these years. I just hope he never got involved in politics.

I think of my brother now who got a job with the railroad just after I started college, and I wonder how he is. It was such a stroke of luck to start training as a conductor in an industry with such advancement possibilities and job security.

My old friend, Larry, is surely now retired. He got a job writing for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, a newspaper with great potential, likely thriving still today. The country needs good journalists, for certain, since newspapers have always been a reliable source of information that everybody trusts.

Whatever happened to my good friend, Jeanie? I often think of her. She was such fun but a bit of an oddball too. I wonder if she still thinks that the Communists are behind fluoridation.

I'd like to travel when I get back home, but I would not go too far away unless it's something special and I can take my friends along. But I'd like to visit New York City and walk around 42^nd Street one night and take in a movie.

I've learned to harvest food here, where the land is fertile and the rains bring fruit and flowers all around. Back home it's too bad farmers have to burn potatoes and throw grain in the river because they don't have enough storage. Maybe we could sell some to a foreign country like Russia.

How beautiful it must be in California now and how prosperous as well.  Frank told me, the day I left for that fateful boat trip years ago, how clean and clear the beaches are in California, the water all around, so plentiful and flowing, like the very fountain of youth., that we might want to move there. It must be fun to live in a place like California where you can buy a house so cheap and travel with such quiet reflection along uncluttered roads. For sure I would consider moving there to have that simple life if I am ever found.

I worried about Myrna and still do. How I wish I had been there to have consoled her for the mistakes she made when we were all in school. She was such a pretty girl, but how she ruined her whole life, deciding to live with her boyfriend in another town to have her baby, so no one would find out. But we all knew, and that meant Myrna might never find another man if her boyfriend let her go. After all, living with some guy can scar a girl for life.

We sent a man to the moon those many years ago and I'll bet now ships go to Mars. Maybe that's the trip that I can take with friends someday. No President would ever want to end the space program, leaving Russia's Sputnik to prevail.

I have to end this letter now and hope it finds you well, whoever you are and wherever you are when you find the bottle with my note inside. It is my birthday, yet I don't know and really haven't for a long, long time these many years have passed. I am old now, and my hair is gray, but then one day is like another when you have no way to measure time except the sun and stars.

The silence deepens for awhile, and morning comes again. I seem to hear the sounds of footsteps on the sandy shore. I hold this bottle in my hand, for a toast of celebration, as a hopeful heart looks forward to those good, old days again.

Recalling a pilgrimage to Dr. King's Atlanta home and the lessons of the day

[caption id="attachment_22440" align="alignleft" width="296"] Dr. Martin Luther King[/caption]

Carol Forsloff----It was a long day in Atlanta, warm, sunny, and a stopover on the way to Florida from Pittsburgh at a time when the country had moved on from the angry shouts and hurts that emanated from the Civil Rights era, and those wounds felt by so many, to another time, eight years after the death of Martin Luther King in 1968, and a pilgrimage to the memorials.  The memories remain, in reflection, along with life's lessons that stay in the heart as his birthday is tomorrow.

Atlanta was not in my traveling plans, but a missed plane left me stranded in a strange city with no sense of direction, unable to drive and without a car in a place I had never been and only read about.  Those things associated with the city of Atlanta had been the civil rights demonstrations and marches, the acrimony shown on television between blacks and whites and the still older images of the burning of the city during the Civil War.  It was not a positive mindset, held by a woman of the West of liberal leanings; and the first thought was to remain at the airport and simply read a book I had tucked in a travel bag for those occasions of boredom when traveling some distance from Pittsburgh, where I had been living for years.

But a venture out on the curb outside the airport terminal and a look around, emboldened me enough to flag a cab driver who happened to be driving along.  I knew Martin Luther King had lived and was buried in the city, so the plan was to go to the memorial, expecting to be one of a minority of white people interested in visiting the former civil rights leader's grave.

When I told the cabdriver of my plans he replied, "Well, this is my taxi; and I have never been to those places myself.  Why don't I show you the town, if you don't mind my picking up other fares along the way so I don't lose all the income for the day." The agreement was made, as funds were limited anyway by the unexpected time and cost of staying for hours in Atlanta, and a welcome invitation for sure.

We drove through the town through neighborhoods of plain, simple houses, of the kind where I had lived and other middle class friends did as well.  Along the way the cabdriver stopped for a man in a fine suit, who politely offered hello, took a seat, as we shared the ride to the home where Martin Luther King had once lived and the home still a residence for his family in 1976, long after his death in 1967.  The man in the suit offered his card, long lost and forgotten, with a name not recalled anymore, but said, with the card, "I am Sammy Davis Jr's agent, and I too have never been to the home of Dr. King.  I met him many times but have never been to the place where he lived." He seemed surprised I was going there too.

The conversations among us, the cabdriver, originally from the Middle East, a middle-aged African man and me were part of the day's good memories of how strangers meet and in a journey learn and grow with the time.  For each of us visiting King's home and his gravesite came with a different response, but similar too, with respect for the man who had dedicated his life to the freedom of man, black and white.

The house was modest, and not one folks might associate with a man of such incredible reputation, talent and moral strength.  Yet there it was, the downstairs portion dedicated to an office and library collection of civil rights books and memorabilia, while the upstairs, the secretary said, continued to be the family home.  I asked, "Mostly black people come here to visit or people from up North like me?"  "Oh no," said the woman, a smile on her face, "Actually most of the people who visit here and the grave, as well as Ebenezer Baptist Church are white Southerners."  The stereotype of angry white people assaulting black folks with rocks, hoses and epithets dissolved in that comment, to teach me that the news doesn't always present all the facts, but the sensational ones get more attention instead.  We three stood there, listened and wandered a bit through the small area, then left to visit the grave.

Davis' agent was the first to make his way to the gravesite, standing silently and saying aloud, "How I miss you, my brother," as tears began drifting down the cheek of a man who obviously knew Dr. King.  The taxi driver also stood in respect, saying nothing, but his eyes full of wonderment still.  And I feeling privileged just to be there to honor, remember the man I had only seen on television and celebrated just in my heart, knelt for a minute and prayed.

We returned to the cab, somewhat moved at the time, exclaiming, but softly, the feelings that all of us shared.  We three seemed to know we had been somewhere significant and expressed it with joy in our words, as the passenger, who had shared the journey, was left at his hotel, smiling and waving like a friend saying farewell to another on a day that was special to both.

What I learned on that day that has lasted for years is that strangers can share intimate moments of feelings, as had happened that day, especially when surrendering preconceived notions as well.  I wasn't a white woman from Pittsburgh, the cabdriver not a Middle Eastern immigrant and the man who had introduced himself as Sammy Davis Jr's agent was just another person that day, remembering to honor a friend and knowing that friend's greatness as well.  We were three people each on a pilgrimage of sorts to pay respects to the great man martyred for his work and beliefs.