-by MOTHER

It had to have been the summer of '64, because the summer of '63 Kennedy was still alive and America was still young. Summers were long and luxuriously slow for 15-year-old blue collar girls in Chicago, too poor to go to camp, to young to work.

My gang took extra classes in summer school just to get up and out each morning. After class the bunch of us would hop a bus to adventure. The whole city was our playground. What would it be today: the Loop, or the beach, or Riverview, or just wander the shops on Devon Avenue? We knew the guards at the Art Institute by name; Marshall Field's waiting room was our watering hole. And there was always the classic summer delight of hanging at someone's house for the afternoon.

We actually did spend hours draped on the front stoop, talking and dreaming, listening to our transistor radios – WLS Silver Dollar Survey, Dick Biondi – waiting for the next Beatle song to come around, shooting the bull until we heard the bells of the ice cream truck. Who would be first tonight, Good Humor or Tastee Freeze?

We hung a lot at my house, because my mom would always throw on another plate for dinner and my dad was a good sport about driving my guests home. My dad loved driving my friends home. He loved the noise and the foolishness and the sheer exuberance of our youth. We always seemed to detour from Devon Avenue to Skokie for Dairy Queen, or down to Buckingham Fountain to see the lights and run through the blow-back from the fountain on hot, windy nights. He let us play our rock and roll station full blast and tapped out the time on the steering wheel with the edge of his wedding ring. And he kept jars of bubbles in his glove compartment for us to wave out the open window as the air blew apart our ratted and sprayed beehive hairdos.

My father may have loved seeing me with my friends, but he was being especially nice to me that summer. At the end of August he was taking me away from them, from my bus rides to the Art Institute, Buckingham Fountain, the canyon-like streets where I grew up, and moving me 20 miles north to a leafy green cul-de-sac and a big ranch house with no front stoop, no ice cream man and, until I learned the ways of white collar suburbia, nobody to hang out with for pointless hours.

The night of August 4 was like any other idyllic night that summer, an ice cream and bubbles orgy, driving around listening to Motown and Beach Boys, and babbling plans for the future, in my innocence not realizing that all my friends had a future together that did not include me. A news break interrupted the flow of the music.

"President Johnson, speaking from Washington," said the disk jockey. In a voice full of gravity the President cited a Pentagon report that US vessels had been attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats earlier in the day in the Gulf of Tonkin. He was announcing a momentous escalation in the situation over there, retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam.

How many years later did we learn that the supposed torpedoes were the result of a sonar man's over active imagination? That the Pentagon was just looking for an excuse to escalate, that we were tumbling head first down a flight of stairs while I held a bubble wand in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other?

We dropped off my friend and drove home, as the President continued talking. Dad found a parking place in front of our apartment building; we sat side by side and continued listening in silence. Gulf of Tonkin, North Vietnam. When he finished I looked at my father. "Daddy? Does this mean we are going to have a war?"

"No," assured my veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who had seen war, who knew war close up, who couldn't ever imagine war again. "No war, couldn't be."

Two weeks later we loaded everything we owned on a moving van and moved away from the inner city world I lived in all my life. A lot of things changed that summer.