FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: EXPLOSIVE SIXTIES (PART 41)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

1960 - 1970

So the first half of the 20th century came to a close. Eleven presidents had served. Three wars had been fought. A Depression had come and gone. I was forty-seven years old. Surely my life span was more than half over. But, quoting beloved poet, Robert Frost, and thinking of all the things I still wanted to do, I would reassure myself, "I have miles to go before I sleep."

By the end of the 1950s I had enough stories published to make another book. It was somewhat of a sequel to "The Mockingbird Piano" but stood on its own. Thus my second book, Wide Meadows was published by Caxton Printers in 1960. It was chosen as a Christian Herald Farm Journal selection and also as an American Ambassador Book chosen by the English Speaking Union to represent the lives, background, character and ideas of the American people to other countries. Portions of this book were transposed into Braille.

Among the promos was this statement: "Glowingly alive in every page, are the lovable schoolgirls, Lou and Jean. You will meet the neighbors, too, and in the last chapter, you will rejoice with Jean as she finds where God has signed his name!"

Still, I wanted to write a biblical novel, a sort of love letter to God with whom I so often talked and who talked back to me in so many different ways.

But the fuses that had been lit -- one sputtering away toward Southeast Asia, the other toward the Southeast United States -- were about to reach their explosive destinations and these ominous sputterings slowed my progress.

Would we have racial troubles in the local school as in Little Rock? Were we going to have to fight yet another war to hold on to South Vietnam? How long would it take? Stephen was sixteen years old, two years away from draft age.

Years ago, from the safety of the barn, I had watched Dad blow up old stumps in the apple orchard. He would attach a long black fuse to a stick of dynamite which he buried under the dead stump. Then he would light the fuse and find a safe place to await the explosion. The fuse would sputter along under the Early Harvest apple tree, the Maiden Blush, the Russet to finally ignite the stick of dynamite under the old Sheep's Nose stump. Boom! Bits of the stump, grass and dirt would explode into the air and when everything had settled down the landscape had changed.

The explosive devices at the end of the long "fuses" leading to the southern states and half a world away were not like a single stick of dynamite, over with and done. They were multiple, one setting off another and another and another. When things settled back down (some are still ongoing) the cultural, political, psychological, military and moral landscape of America was changed.

Some of the changes were good; we went to the moon and back. Black America rose up, spoke out, fought back and th~e Civil Rights Act came into being.

Some were bad; 58,156 Americans were killed in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Ku Klux Klan uprisings. Murders of southern Blacks and some Whites who went to help. The decline of the nuclear family, the basic building block of society.

From the safety of the green couch across from the TV, I saw John Glenn take off for orbiting the Earth -- Earth, that odd round globe at Loughboro School. Tears of pride ran down my cheeks. Tears of pride for what America could do. I saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon. Land on the moon! I go out now at night, look at the moon and whisper, "We've been there." It is still almost incomprehensible.

I saw and heard Martin Luther King give his "I have a Dream" speech.

The ensuing Vietnam War seemed to have been fought ten feet away from me, in color. To see the Vietnamese man deliberately shot in the head in a vacated street in Vietnam, the bodies of the My Lai massacre lying in a ravine, a Buddhist monk burning himself to death on a Saigon street was more than I wanted to see of the world.

I acquired the ability to send my mind out to walk in old meadows, down ancient woods roads, alongside flowing streams as surcease, but not entirely without a string of guilt attached. Someone had to face the problems of the world, attempt to right the wrongs. Why should I be out in the meadows and woods mentally, or in the hammock physically, escaping from reality? What was my role?

It seemed more than ever as I pondered the question that my role would be to use words, to hold up before readers, if I could get any, a gentler way of life, attempt to make them see, hear and feel, even for just the moment, the little joys of life -- crumbs if you will.

~Sometimes, when I think my words to be clumsily used, trite, or of little consequence compared to the big movers and shakers of literature, I remember the Syrophoenician woman pointing out to Jesus that even crumbs are useful. Then is when I might write such crumbs as "Little Places of Retirement" as follows:

The before-dawn songs of the robins, the sudden cheerful call of an early-returning purple martin are like the siren's songs from the Lorelei, calling me outside. But this is not a wicked siren luring me to destruction, rather to rejuvenation.

Each season has its charm and its co~mforts, but towards the end of that season they grow a bit stale and one wants to burst out like a butterfly from a winter cocoon.

All the books I planned to read this past winter have been read. The crocheted rag wall hanging has been crocheted but not yet hung. All the words I needed to write have been written. I'm ready to descend the five non-icy steps and frolic like a young filly around and around the yard. That is only my mental attitude.

In physical reality I'll walk slowly around like a retired mare put out to pasture. It doesn't take a lot of alacrity to sit in the sunshine on the big stump where the wild cherry tree was, weave in and out amongst the cedars, and follow a mole's tracks, trying to mash down his trail.

The yard is awash with violets. Sometimes, instead of the stump, I sit right down in the middle of them. ~Can't quite manage the lotus position anymore. Don't know that I ever could. And I never needed a mantra to meditate. I just watch the bees flying from dandelion to dandelion and think about how well cared for they are. About the time they tire of the dandelion wine, there will be the Dutch clover, then the autumn olive. Autumn olive, how funny, since it blooms in spring. Its fragrance is inimitable and I suppose the nectar is too. When the little creamy white blossoms unfold, the bushes tremble with happy bee life.

There are many sticks and twigs to pick up, so with little red wagon, I go around tossing them into its bed as frisky as a child pulling a wagon load of Teddy bears. Well, no, that's not quite right either, physically speaking. But with the newly oiled wagon wheels, and on a down hill slope it fulfills my recommended daily requirements of exercise.

Not that exercise is why I do it~. There's a ~gene in Jean that in springtime says, "Clean up that little corner, and when you're through, do that one over there and there and there."

The gene manifested its authority early. Where the log smoke house formed a right angle corner with the picket fence on the farmstead yard, I felt compelled and pleasantly satisfied to clean it out in the spring. Hollyhocks were springing upward at the base of the logs and a rambling rose bush, beginning to leaf out, either held up the pickets or vice versa. Over winter, weeds sprang up in the corner--burdock, chickweeds, feverfew, etc. Dogs loved that corner to chew on bones and leave them there. Windblown leaves and other refuse caught in the corner.

Without any bidding from anyone, I raked, pulled weeds, chopped down the healthy burdock and made myself a little place of retirement. Retirement in the sense that I could go there to be alone, no chores or duties weighing heavily. I could read my little story books or just sit in the warm sunshine watching the working of early spring.

Sometimes I asked Grandma for a new zinnia seeds she would have saved from the past season and sowed them where I had destroyed the burdock. With the sound of frogs in the meadow's low places, cackle of hens rejoicing over yet another produced egg, the odor of the good earth mingling with woodsmoke from the chimney, I did not know I was ingraining a rite that would last to the final decade of the century.

I only knew how good it felt to bring a little neatness into a small corner where I could be alone with my thoughts and activities.

Now, as I pull the wagon around, noting the Johnnyjump-ups I'm running over, the chickweed that needs pulling up, a little bare place where some zinnias might be sown, I think of my old book friend, David Grayson, who said, " ... if once a man has a taste of true and happy retirement, though it be but a short hour, or day, now and then,he has found, or is beginning to find, sure place of refuge, of blessed renewal, toward which in the busiest hours he will find his thoughts wistfully stealing."

My constant but unseen friend, Jesus, knows the most about the benefits of being apart for a while. While I pick up real sticks and debris to toss on the burning pile, He picked up the sticks and dregs of humanity to offer them a new life, an eternal life!

Our daily lives did not change much during these turbulent Sixties. Entries were made daily in my journal:

Aug. 7, 1961: The Russians have done it again. Gherman Titov is orbiting the earth right now. Round and round he goes.

Aug. 28, 1961: A small yellow butterfly lit on my hand today. "Hello, God. Thank you."

Sept. 4, 1961: Two kittens fell into the empty cistern today. Fire chief Lewis came out to rescue them. Not a lot, if any, of the anti-war demonstrations went on in our relatively peaceful riverside city. There were few racial conflicts. Drugs were slow to come.

It was up and off to work for Edward, up and off to school for Stephen and up and off to my writing desk for me. That is, after making beds, washing dishes, planning supper, maybe washing, ironing, sweeping and dusting. But I was at home working at my own speed, handling my own dear things -- the blue and white dishes, the pretty quilts, the sun-dried sheets -- thinking my own thoughts, talking to God and looking for his answer always.

We had breakfast and supper together, usually at the kitchen table for the dining room table had become a study table for Stephen who was out of high school in the spring of 1962 and into Southeast Missouri State University that September.

This dining room table was constantly spread with textbooks, notebooks, papers, pencils, pens, clippings, Sigma Chi mugs, all the accouterments of a college student determined to "get an education."

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.