Friday rolled around and I was edgy to say the least. Al tried a 'good morning' and damned near did get a wrench hurled at him. I apologized later and I felt bad immediately but I was just on edge. Joanie didn't get the chance to call every night but I had talked to her a few times through the week. Her class schedule was real light on Fridays and she had said that she was done by one but she had an appointment to go to before coming into the city. I guess I was worried because she had a sort of worried tone when she said it so I naturally went to thinking there was a doctor's appointment and she was sick or something or she wasn't being all honest with me and there was no appointment but just someone she wanted to spend time with more than me. I tell you the mind can take some pretty out there journeys if you don't rein it in once in a while.

Quitting time rolled around and I still hadn't even thought about knocking off for the day. Al finally came over and put a hand on my shoulder which was a brave move for how I'd been acting that day.

"You know you ain't getting paid overtime, right?" he asked.

I got up and started to see to the closing duties when I heard a familiar engine pull up out front. Al saw me perk a bit.

"Go on," he said, "Won't kill me to do some work around here for a change."

I walked out and there was the 'Vette but I didn't see Joanie right away. Then I spotted a shape in the driver's seat. I went around and saw her turn her head away from me. I can't tell you what went through my mind at that one action and I mean that I can't because it was such a jumble that to this day I can't sort it all out.

I opened the door and squatted down. She finally turned toward me and I wasn't prepared for what I saw. I nearly laughed out of relief because I understood immediately. I had nothing to fear. There was no horrible illness and no other guy. There was only a pair of glasses. Now we thought those frames were horrible at the time but they are so far back in style that my granddaughter snagged those glasses and had her own lenses put in them. There weren't a lot of choices of styles and almost all of them were those horn-rimmed kind of cat glasses. Hers were as good as you could get I supposed and I actually thought they looked kind of cute on her but she was so upset about them and I could tell. I was glad I'd been able to keep from laughing. I wouldn't have been laughing at the glasses or her, just at my own insecurity and maybe my relief.

"Is that all you was worried about?" I asked and saw her relax a little.

"You don't hate them?" she asked. "I'm so ugly."

"You're not ugly," I said, "I can still see your face. I just wish it wasn't so sad."

She finally gave me a smile and got out of the car. Al spotted her and smiled.

"Look at that," he said and I cringed though I don't know why, Al usually knew what to say to the ladies. "She's only at school a week and already she looks smarter."

Joanie smiled at him and I think she was grateful.

"How are you this evening, Miss Joanie?" Al asked her.

"Better by the minute," she replied and then she did something that surprised Al as much as it did me. She ran up to Al, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. She said something in his ear that I'm sure was along the lines of a thank you. He blushed and planted a quick kiss on the top of her head. I think the old man almost got a little misty.

I put my arm around her waist as she pulled away from Al.

"Well, I'll leave you two young folks to your evening," Al said before heading off for his house.

"Do we have plans tonight?" Joanie asked looking up at me kind of uncertain.

"Well," I said sort of like I was thinking about it but I wasn't really because I didn't have to. "Kid and Lou said something about getting together tomorrow night and maybe playing some euchre or something but I don't think there's anything going on tonight. We could maybe see what Buck and Carol are up to but she's been awful tired lately, I guess."

She looked sort of relieved and I knew she still wasn't at all confident about those glasses and being seen in them. I thought it was sort of silly myself because to me she didn't look no different and I could still see those beautiful brown eyes through them and when she was willing to show it, she still had that same gorgeous smile.

"She probably needs her rest," Joanie said, "I wouldn't want to bother her. Maybe we could have a quiet night with just the two of us?"

That is just what we did. I have to say I rather enjoyed having Joanie all to myself and hearing about her week. She had signed on as a volunteer to work at getting out some mailings for John Kennedy's campaign for president. And Kennedy was the only male that she gushed about. Of course I don't know many women who didn't have at least a little crush on the man. He was young and, I guess, attractive. I wasn't jealous at all of that. It's like your girl having a poster of Elvis or James Dean on the wall, or if I had a poster of Marilyn or something. It's just nothing to concern yourself with too much. Apparently none of the boys in her classes caught her eye at all. She just went on talking about what she was learning and how she and Sherry would sit up late sometimes and talk and all the things she learned about Sherry. Sherry was from Midland and had a bunch of sisters and brothers. I can't recall anymore exactly how many but it was a big family she was from. She didn't have some of the experiences that Joanie had-not as much travelling and no cabin in the U.P.-but she had stories galore about her siblings. And she spoke pretty highly of some of the things in Midland. There are some gardens there that are real pretty. I hadn't known about them but I got to see them on a few occasions and they are real pretty. With Dow Chemical being right there, Sherry had been encouraged to go into science and she really liked it and was good at it. I think she was majoring in chemistry and minoring in biology or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, it was a load off of Joanie's mind. She never had the head as much for math and science so knowing that she could go to her roommate for help was a comfort.

I did a lot of nodding and just listening to her go on and on. It was like a different world that she was describing and certainly not like school as I had ever known it. I was a little jealous, not of the boys that she might meet but of the experience that she was having and even the things she got to learn. Just because I didn't do well in school don't mean I'm not a curious person or that I don't like learning. I always loved going to museums because Joanie would tell me things about whatever we were looking at and it was always really interesting. I loved that if Joanie read a book, she would always tell me about it and then it was almost like I was reading the book. I could read and I didn't mind it at all. Sometimes Joanie would loan me books and one day she even drug me down to the library and helped me sign up for a card. All the years that I was actually in school and I don't think I took a book out of any library at school past grammar school when we actually had library days. But once I had that card in my hand, I was down to the library at least twice a week checking out books and reading everything I could on different things that seemed interesting. I know that anything I know beyond fixing cars is due to one extent or another to Joanie showing me that there was this whole world out there. Or maybe it was that she showed me I had as much a right to it as anyone else did.

I know that night I just felt good to feel secure with her again. I know one week isn't a long time but she obviously didn't have eyes for anyone else but me and JFK and he was already married. Maybe this would be fine.

It always astounded me how it never tripped up Joanie when I didn't know stuff and she'd have to explain things to me. Somehow she never made me feel stupid for not knowing. I know at first when we started dating I felt insecure and like I was dumb but after a while I figured out that she didn't care in the slightest. She actually would tell me that I was smart and just didn't know it. I used to ask her how stupid a guy had to be to not even know if he was smart or not. That was good for an eye roll but I wasn't all kidding when I said it. I knew she was the smart one out of the two of us but it felt good sometimes that she didn't think I was totally dumb.

"You're quiet tonight," she observed while we were sitting on the roof listening to the radio. "Or you haven't been able to get a word in edgewise around my babbling."

"I like your babbling," I said honestly, "I like hearing you so happy and excited."

She cuddled up to me and said, "Still, something must have happened around here this week."

"Not a hell of a lot," I said and it was pretty much the truth. "The only real news is what I've already told you. Lou's pregnant and Kid's joining the Army. That was quite enough excitement for us for the whole week."

"When is he going in?" she asked.

"He went to the recruiting office Wednesday," I said, "There's some paperwork that's got to go through, I guess but within a few weeks he should be leaving for training."

It was hard to think of how uncertain things were for him at that point. He was so important to me and to our whole circle; just thinking that he wouldn't be there was hard and then thinking that he could get sent off to a war zone and well, I didn't even want to entertain that thought at all. I knew I maybe didn't have as much a right to fear as Lou did but no one ever wants to think about losing someone they love.

"Is Lou still upset?" Joanie asked.

"I don't know if Lou will ever not be upset by this," I answered, "But she's doing better. She don't like the idea of him going away and maybe even having to move with him at some point but it would be better than the alternative."

I didn't have to say it because the alternative was clear. The only place where a soldier was stationed where the family didn't follow was when he was deployed in a war. We were only just involved in the whole Vietnam thing at that time and U.S. involvement was still small but you never knew about such things. As it turned out, our fears of what that involvement could turn into were pretty well-founded.

I guess I look back so fondly on nights like that and like when we was driving to her cabin a few weeks earlier and everything from that year because I know we still had our innocence. Things was simpler then and I do mean that. It has nothing to do with stuff old geezers like me grump about either. It wasn't simpler because there were no cell phones or tiny little music players or the twitter or myface or whatever they call those network sites. True, we didn't have Google and wiki and all those things that give the littlest bit of information at our fingertips but that's not why we still had our innocence then. It's more that so much of what you can find in those wiki pages and search engine thingies just hadn't happened. It wouldn't be there if the computer stuff existed.

I look at how much changed in just a couple years. We saw our president assassinated; we watched a full blown war every night on TV while we ate dinner. We saw protests and Woodstock and all of this happened in less than a decade. I shake my head sometimes at how fast things move now and I think that's sometimes why everything seems so much worse than anything that ever happened before. The wars are worse and the crime and everything and it's not that it is worse, it's that we're so overwhelmed by how fast everything comes at us, there's just no time to let anything sink in or think about it much.

But that night was still innocent. Girls still wore saddle shoes and little penny loafers and tied their pony tails back in little ribbons and a guy like me was still a rebel for the simple act of having hair a little longer and wearing jeans instead of chinos. You don't know how often I'd like to go back to a time where being a hood meant you were wearing jeans and maybe had a pack of cigs rolled into the sleeve of your t-shirt. Now to be tough you have to have your pants hanging to your knees and a semi-automatic weapon stuffed in your pocket and arms full of tattoos.

All I really know is that innocence was bliss back then. Joanie was starry-eyed for the man who would soon be president even if neither one of us was allowed to vote for him and was talking a blue streak about changes coming for Negroes and women and everyone else too. All we could see was the good that could come and it never occurred to either of us, or many others I guess, that before the good could come, there'd be so much bad that some of us would start to wonder if any of it was worth it.

So, yeah...PBS here in the US has been running these wonderful documentaries about the folk music scene in the 60's and how it influenced the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Got me a little introspective. I was totally raised on folk music though to meet my parents and hear their politics you might not believe that they would have reared me on such left leaning political stuff. I have always been a little left winger though I prefer the term "displaced flower child". My kids and their friends all just call me a hippy and no doubt I would have been but I'm not quite that old. Anyway, it really struck me the research I have done on 1960 for this piece and seeing these documentaries and how different people were dressing and talking in just two or three short years. And the music...that one of the top hits in 1960 was something that wouldn't even have been played on an oldies station when I was growing up (BEyond the Sea by Bobby Darin) and the next year one of the top songs was "If I had a Hammer" which became an anthem of sorts for every movement striving for equality and Dylan's iconic "Blowin' in the Wind" wasn't too far behind. Astounding to me how fast things changed and continue to change. I already some days feel like some out of touch old fogie when my teens start talking about their gadgets and stuff and I'm not even 40 yet.

So references, Midland is my hometown so I had to give it a shout out. Dow Gardens (so named because the land was a grant from the Dow foundation and the design of the gardens was done by Alden Dow) it really is a beautiful place and where I whiled away many a lazy summer afternoon. Um...the legal voting age in 1960 was 21 in case anyone is wondering why Joanie and Jimmy can't vote for JFK. Later it was changed largely on the basis of one statistic...the average age of a soldier fighting in Vietnam was 19 and the voting age was 21. Many believed, and I think rightly so, that if a man was old enough to fight and die then he ought to be old enough to vote for or against the one giving the orders. Well, you know they weren't about to raise the draft age...especially since one of the ways to sometimes avoid having to serve if your number came up was to be married and have kids. 21 gives a lot more time for guys to get some families and not have to go. So they lowered the voting age to 18 where it still is to this day. But there is no age you have to be in order to volunteer and in those days there was a lot more envelope licking and door knocking and pamphlet handing out going on. There was no twitter or anything else to get the word out and there were no 24 hr news networks and candidates relied on campaign funds from a little box we check on our income taxes that gives them like a dollar or two for each taxpayer. So volunteers were everything because there were no multi-billion dollar campaign funds. You ask me and that's a better plan because maybe we go back to government officials and public servants who actually work for the people and not for big business. Just sayin'...

I don't think there's much else too out there to figure out. I know not all of you dear ones are American but I think Kennedy was a big enough figure that his fate was not a shocker and most have seen pictures and know he was our youngest president ever and a good looking guy to boot. Wow...there is still such a long way to go with this...guess I'd better stay hydrated or I'll cramp before the end and have to limp it across the finish line.-J