Journey back with me to the 1980’s, and hear once again the music of escape.
There was a time when I was young when I did not know where I would be when the next new dawn came. Yes, I once took the midnight train (except it was a bus) and I arrived in a teaching career in deep South Texas. I crossed borders into another culture, another way of life, another journey made of words and pictures that hasn’t reached the final station yet.
At the outset, we all take a risk. Born and raised in South Detroit (although it was really North Central Iowa) I passed through established procedures, rules, and regulations to do things that desperately needed doing for people who could only help themselves in very limited ways.
Some spoke mostly Spanish. Some lived in broken homes. One boy lived for a while under the bridge of the Nueces River, but attended school every day because he was hungry to learn, and because free school lunch was the majority of the food he got to eat. He got on a midnight train, and I never saw him or heard from him again. His sister, though, lived with a tia who treated her like a daughter, and grew up to be a school teacher. I let her teach the lesson for me during one class period, as part of an educational experiment, and it put her on her own midnight train.
It was a train going on the same track I followed. Not because of me and what I did for her. But because she came to realize it was the right journey to take for her. It was the perfect anywhere for her.
But there is danger inherent in getting on a midnight train going anywhere. You don’t know who is waiting for you down the line, or what your circumstances will be at the next station along the way. There may be strangers waiting up and down the boulevard, their shadows searching in the night. I befriended other teachers, mentored some, learned from many, even married one. I had a run in or two with people who sell drugs to kids. I had all four of my car tires slashed one night. I had a car window broken out. I had a boy once tell me he would kill me with a knife. I later had that boy tell me he had a good job and a girlfriend and he was grateful that I talked him out of it and never turned him in to the police.
And we end up paying anything to roll the dice just one more time… At one time or another we have all been there, aboard that midnight train to anywhere. There is a moment in everyone’s life when… well, some will win, and some will lose. Some were born to sing the blues. I have been there. I have done that. And it occurs to me, that song plays on in my head still. I am still on that journey. And I won’t stop believing. Because it goes on and on and on and on…
Catch a Falling Star 
Reflections from 1964
In 1964 I was 7 years old until November. I became a baseball fan that year. I had listened to baseball games on the radio with Great Grandpa Raymond before that year, but that had always been Twins’ games in the American League. But that was the year I discovered the St. Louis Cardinals. I followed them in the newspaper, the Mason City Globe Gazette. They had lost the greatest hitter in their history to that point, Stan Musial having retired when the 1963 season ended. But he was replaced in left field by Lou Brock, the hit-making base-stealing boy wonder of 1964. They went from near the bottom of the National League to edging out the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds by one game each (they were tied for second) at the very end of the season.
The World Series pitted the Cardinals against the mighty New York Yankees. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were the stars of that team and had won five World Series in a row a decade before. It was a fantastic battle that the Cardinals finally won 7 to 5 in the seventh and final game in St. Louis. Bob Gibson was a deciding factor and won Series MVP. I would become a life-long Cardinals fan.
And I lost my Grandpa Beyer. He went to work one day, driving a road grader and his heart simply stopped working. It was the first time I lost a major somebody in my life.
In 1962 I had spotted the bright pinprick in the sky that was John Glenn orbiting the earth in the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. My mother and father helped me spot it from our back yard in Rowan, Iowa.
In 1964, therefore, I began to take a serious interest in outer space as the Mercury program transformed into the Gemini program that was testing procedures in space for eventual Apollo moon missions.
I was in the Second Grade in 1964. Miss Madison was my teacher. She was as old as my Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich. She got mad at me at least three times that I can remember. I mean, I know that there were more than that, but there were three times I made her so mad with a joke that she memorably made me feel the wrath that teachers reserve for classroom clowns.
The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan in February. My Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich told me that the Beatles must’ve been confused about whether they were boys or girls to have haircuts like that. And those were the bowl-cuts they had before the wild-hair days of the later Sixties. All the boys in my class had either a butch cut or a flat-top. Hair styles for boys back then meant not really having any hair.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was president. He had been since the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
In July LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, abolishing segregation.
In August, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (since revealed to be a proven false-flag operation) leads to the Vietnam War.
The “Daisy” campaign ad for LBJ, showing a little girl picking flowers and then being blown up by an atom bomb, convinces my dad that Barry Goldwater is a dangerous radical, and he votes for LBJ even though he is not a conservative or a Republican.
LBJ is elected President of the United States in 1964.
Later that November, I turned eight years old.
1964 was a notable year for me. Even if it wasn’t for Barry Goldwater.
In the picture that starts this post, I am 8. Nancy is 6, holding on to little brother David at 2. Mary is 4. We are all in our Sunday best on Easter Sunday morning.
Why am I writing about 1964 today?
My mother is in hospice at 87 years old. She is dying of heart failure. And today, I and my two younger children got to talk to her by phone. The light and hope we have today is colored by the hope and light we had in the past. Such is the nature of having a family over time.
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