LETTERS FROM HOME: IN SEARCH OF CAMELOT AND THE DEATH OF HIP

Feb. 9, 1995

Dear Julie,

The first snow of the winter arrived this week, welcome as a baby at a family reunion. Even my dad, who doesn't wish for much, wanted a snow. Just one to make things right.

Lots of accidents occurred, of course. Spring, summer and fall create an annual amnesia about driving in the snow. Or maybe it's just the adult glee of sledding on four wheels.

I saw two girls carrying toboggans to the park and instantly was a 10-year-old sweeping down the courthouse hills with my brother and cousins. After a snow, those hills became a milky waterfall dropping toward Spanish Street and the Mississippi River in the distance. Speed wasn't a problem. Stopping was. What worked: Aim for a tree and roll off just before crashing.

Every few hours, we'd regroup at my aunt's house on Lorimier Street to drink cocoa while our gloves and socks dried on the heat registers. So the day would go, cold and warmth and bolts of lightning out of the hills.

DC stood outside a long time and watched the snow blowing off our roof. It reminded her of feathers. And Camelot, the way it magically appears and disappears.

Comforted by the glow of the snowfall, I stayed inside reading a cache of old Time magazines a friend gave us. A cover story about the death of hip was irresistible in the way headline writers know their stories will be if they ask: Is God really dead: Or, Are parents necessary?

This one, written on the eve of Woodstock II, proclaimed that it is no longer possible to be hip because the popular culture seizes upon the avant-garde for marketing to the mainstream. Thus we have cappuccino in the malls and Jack Kerouac's image used to sell khakis.

Time concluded that the hippest people around right now are those on the Internet -- but then, how hip can they be if Time magazine knows all about them?

If hip is dead, I don't view the corpse as a reason for mourning.

Oh, I cringe every time I hear a classic rock 'n' roll song used to hawk cars or sneakers. Especially if it once belonged to Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon. Grave robbery.

But once upon a time, what is hip was outlined on napkins by Bohos in dark coffee houses in North Beach and Greenwich Village and pushed through horns by John Coltrane and Miles Davis in the bluish light of the nightclubs that would admit them. Whether a product of artistic sensibilities or skin color or both, alienation from the mainstream created hip.

And if hip is dead, that means alienation is dying as well.

I am aware of the vestiges that remain. Here in Cape Girardeau, most of the black children are concentrated in two aging elementary schools. Twice voters have rejected bond issues that would have improved the schools. Other circumstances exist, but for me the choice comes down to those kids.

And throughout most of the land, homosexuals are at best only tolerated when acceptance is what every human being wants and deserves.

I can't help thinking we're on the right road, though. That somehow, without knowing how, just by making contact with each other instead of hiding our true selves, a shower of sparking neurons spreads light that someday will envelop our shivering outcasts in a blanket of warm white down.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.