-by MOTHER

Me and my friends, the decidedly unliberated young women of the late 60s, we didn't major in journalism, or sociology, or French or stuff like that.  Well, we took the classes and eventual got degrees in those things, but the real major for our little circle, was mathematicians. Some girls go after the football team, or the basketball team or the black turtlenecked poets, but not us.  We were attracted to the math nerds.  We were math student groupies. It was easy to see why; they weren't hot frat macho, they were sweet-tempered and grateful for our interest.  They were considerably older than us undergraduates, they had cars, they preferred exotic ethnic restaurants down in the city to the bars on the edge of campus, and they were endlessly interested in the world around them. They had their offices in an old frame house; three or four desks in the living room, three in the dining room, two on the sun porch, couple more in the defunct kitchen.  Blackboards everywhere covered in equations, guys in plaid shirts, thick glasses, scruffy beards, chalky hand prints on their rumps. The old house was a great place to visit; you'd climb the wide wooden steps to the front porch, pull open the heavy oak door and breathe in the smell of chalk dust, old book and pipe tobacco. There'd always be a lively discussion going on somewhere in the house.  Sometimes about arcane mathematical theories, but more likely about the radical politics of the late 60s, the music scene, Pogo comics, movies, books and always, always, the latest and best scams for avoiding the draft. These guys were in the 5th, 6th, 7th year of higher education, PhD candidates all, sweating out their student deferments, wondering when their hometown draft boards were going to say enough is enough and reclassify them 1A. Someone had brought in an old TV; it sat out on the sun porch.  On lazy nights we'd sit around and watch its snowy screen, wondering why someone couldn't shell out the cash from their $256.56 monthly living allowance to replace the coat hanger with a real antenna. Here we watched old movies, and the dragged-out death of Star Trek, and the horrors of the '68 Democratic convention, not believing our eyes that such things were happening not 15 miles away in Chicago. It was on one of those nights, December 1, 1969, that the math students and their gal groupies sat around and watched the Selective Service hold its first lottery drawing since 1942. No more would it be up to arbitrary and inconsistent draft boards to do the picking; now it was an all-or-nothing arbitrary birthday system.  Your birthday was your number, and when your number was up, you went.  Three hundred and sixty six blue capsules sitting in a large glass container, waiting to define the fate of every young man born between 1944 and 1950. Representative Alexander Pirnie of New York pulled the first date, September 14.  The birthday of the first to be called up.  And one by one the dates were pulled.  April 24, number 2; December 30, number 3... down to the lucky May 5, number 364, February 26, number 365; and June 8, number 366.  My sweetheart pulled 196; little did he realize they would call up to 195 before they stopped. As the numbers droned on cries of fear turned to sighs of relief as boys learned their fates. Some of them realized they could study forever; others now knew they could drop the pretense of study and get on with their lives; others saw their fate sealed in khaki.  Two guys were quietly filling out applications to Canadian universities. Others who had fled to defense jobs were phoning they were on their way back. One guy just sat in the corner eating, always eating; he had to keep his weight up to maintain his 4F. When he got his high lottery number he became a fitness freak. It was a scary night of rejoicing and mourning.   Somehow, they all managed to escape the war, by pushing 4F, or Canada, or luck of the draw, conscientious objector status, or sympathetic shrinks who wrote up psych reports full of big words that scared backwater draft boards.  They were the lucky ones, the educated ones, who could play the system to their own advantage.  But a lot of boys outside the sheltered circle of the draft counseling game saw their luck run out that night, as the blue capsules were pulled one by one from of the glass jar. And us girls?  We all married the math students we groupied.  Today we're celebrating our 30th, and 31st and even 33rd wedding anniversaries.  We look at the balding, potbellied men, hunching over their computers, and remember the frightened longhaired boys at their chalk boards with only their slide rules and student deferments between them and fate, and thank heaven our children have a professional army fighting in Afghanistan, and worry about the future.