The Dream Catcher

This was an assignment for eleventh grade English. We were supposed to create several people's stories from a certain era as if we had lived it ourselves. Excercises like this are always a really great way for me to let my writing take a life of it's own.

 

            The 1960’s. That tumultuous decade has left a scar on many people from many walks of life. We understand that something deep and profound fell apart, or together, in our country, and no one is quite sure what one thing caused it more than any other. Black oppression? Definitely a big role. Nuclear threats? Bingo. Cuban Missile Crisis? Yep, that too. Baby boomers? Hah, I’m sure we had our little parts in the play. No, I think it was definitely way more than anyone could have ever figured would happen. All the bad things in the world rose up at once, and exploded with such fury that people now a days are still blown away by it. Talk about a long lasting effect.  I mean, you can wash away the blood and paint of a riot gone bad, but you can’t clean up the bloody facts of what happened. You can cover it up, but we all know it happened.

            I remember that I used to carry a blue dream catcher with me, pretty much wherever I went. I bought it in a little tourist trap in Arizona when I was pretty little, and I figured the road ahead was going to be like one big bad nightmare. Something personal to help me through. I guess the truth of it was that we all got caught up on a dream that morphed and twisted into our lives during the sixties. Dream catcher is definitely the right term for what my friends and I went through back then. I wonder what would have happened if the six of us hadn’t met at that party. But it’s too late to do anything about that now.

            Speaking of the six of us, I should probably record in here – this little diary of mine- what happened to everyone else. I mean, obviously I know where I am, huh. Stuck in a 9 to 5 (more like a 7 to 6) trying to make enough money to keep up a good lifestyle, wishing that I had more of a retirement plan. What a great hippy I turned out to be. Slave of the Establishment.

            Anyway, back to where my flower power friends ended up. Well let’s start off with Dandelion. Honestly, that’s still the only name I know her by. I traveled with them for almost ten years, and I only know her as that. Well it turns out that Dandelion ended up in a mental institute somewhere in Maine or something. Its really quite sad, but I guess after all these years she’s still trying to booze her way through life, at the same time yelling at the top of her lungs about dirty gorillas, and how Malcolm X should come knocking on her door. If he wasn’t already dead, that is. “Crazy racist ‘til the end.” That was one of her lines. I remember she got pretty faded one time, I mean seriously tuned out. She grabbed up that dream catcher of mine, kind of twirled it around a bit, and started muttering something that sounded like “Those crazy injuns are always playing mind tricks.” She was a character if nothing else.

            And then there’s Daisy. She was always pretty short, but she had a big enough attitude to make her a mental giant. I swear that saying about redheads is true. You know, the one that talks about how those with fiery hair are of fiery disposition. Something like that. Anyway, she’s pretty much still doing the same thing that she’s always done. Get up, dance or pray, smoke some weed, read or meditate, eat a lot, and consider the new Man. Born and raised a hippy. Question everything. That’s her style. I’ve always wondered if she still did those ridiculous naked dances in the middle of winter. I swear one year one of her parts is going to fall off. I bet it will.

            Oh, and since its December and all, I got a Christmas card from Nancy. Hard to believe that after all the stuff she went through that she turned out to be one of the “normal survivors of the sixties.” What does that even mean? It was a phrase she said once. I guess it just means that she grew up, got over it, and moved on. Although, if I had lost my husband to ‘Nam, I don’t know if I’d ever get over it. Seriously.  In her card she basically said that life’s normal, she pretends to be happy, her grandkids are spoiled, and her husband is fat. Yep, life’s normal. Hah, there’s a kicker for you.

            Probably the saddest ‘life after the sixties’ story that I have is how Lisa ended up. I think it was back in 1972 that we got the news. Man that was a weird day. I mean we’d always seen Lisa as a chick that didn’t really have anywhere to go in life. We’d always figured that like twenty years down the road she’d still be sleeping on one of our couches, begging for some coffee and some No Doze, hoping to be the next Janis Joplin. Well, she got one thing right there. They went out the same way. I remember that everyone had just come over to the little flat that I had back then. Nothing fancy, but definitely better than the communes we tried building. Anyway, everyone had come over, and we were starting to bet how long it would take for Lisa to make it. We loved her, we really did. We just also knew that her sense of time wasn’t much good. Pretty soon, two of Uncle Sam’s best showed up. Which was a surprise. Let me tell you, we got sober in about two seconds. Serious business. They told us that Lisa had been found in the back of an alley. Heroin needle still stuck in the vein. I remember how the vibe in the room went from “S**t, are we gonna get locked up right now?” to straight amazement. We hadn’t really known she had even done heroin. Everything else was fine with her, but she usually said that heroin wasn’t for her. She said she didn’t even like needles. I guess things had gotten to be too much for her. Poor kid. She was a year or two younger than me, I think. Daisy was the first to break the silence. She said “Well, that’s what kids get for messing with anything unnatural.” The humor didn’t help.

            Okay, definitely over the sob story. She was a great person, but she messed up in life. Just like a lot of people did. And I’m not exactly a saint either. But you get sad, then you get over it. Just like everything else.

            So Mister Freddy Freckles is the last story to tell. Well, after he got arrested, and went to Vietnam and everything, he came home as an unwelcome veteran. I’m still against that war, but I mean I felt sorry for the kids that got sent over there and then came home to a country that hated them. I mean, a few volunteered, but the rest were Drafted. Not exactly their fault. And you know that most of those Drafted tried to find a way out. I heard that some of the kids would eat wads of peanut butter right before their physical so that it looked like ulcers. Or they swallowed cotton balls, burned their draft tickets, made joints out of them, all kinds of stuff. Anyway, I’m diverging again. Always happens. So Freddy got back from ‘Nam, and kind of fell out of the loop for awhile. He went back to trying to live a good square life, but I guess he got some pretty crazy kicks across seas. After awhile, he was back to hanging with us and having fun like the old days. This is old days as in like two years earlier. And then after awhile, he decided to get back in school and make something of his life. I think he’s a high school teacher or something now. I think he’s the football coach, or you know, along those lines. I hope he’s happy. He really was a good kid.

            That pretty much wraps up everything there is to tell. Or at least, everything that I’m getting into in this diary entry. And I must say, it is a long one. Sheesh. The kids weren’t kidding. I should’ve been a writer. The only question left is if anyone would buy the rantings of a sixty-five year old ex-hippy. I seriously doubt it. Oh, and guess what. I still have that blue dream catcher after all these years.