1976 - Year 7 notes in My Diary of the '70s

1976 Revisited

“Life is a cafeteria line of experience. Attaching any significance to one event over another is simply a human fiction. Any cat knows this. Humans will rationalize any idiotic act; this is the underbelly of our great cognitive tool.”

She wrote this sentence in her diary at age twenty-six. She re-read it, quite pleased with herself. After all, it was true. So far.


Years later she would laugh at this analysis. Only a naïve young woman could have written such an adolescent defense. For each decision has a different effect on one's future. 1976 bared some of the consequences which had been hidden in 1973’s decisions.


After all, that sign that this guy “Kendall” had posted led to her women's band, The New Harmony Sisterhood, which led to women as lovers, which led to her first glimpses of self care. One new layer led to another. Was it just a means to the final end? What end? Self-knowledge? And when she got there, that end became another means. At twenty six, she thought there was an end, a place where she could rest and know who she was. There was, in a way, but that end was a process, not a resting spot. She knew who she was now, but “who she was” was always going to grow. It was just fine tuning instead of gross tuning, like with the harpsichord.

Each choice gets decided by emotion, reason, or a combination of the two. It's almost irrelevant which one predominates, for we always get something we didn't count on, both pleasant and awful. The best choices, "best" meaning creating a more healthy, integrated, happy future usually combine both rational and irrational reasons, but in the end, a complete rational choice can end in disaster (D#2) and a completely irrational choice can be lots of fun (my VW bug).


She wasn’t sure which paradigm to adopt. On any given day, her life might look like a great success or an utter failure. There could be three realities:

You get what you settle for.
You get what you deserve.
You get what you get.







THEMES

1976 + Writers in my family, Edna, Dad, me, Brian. The star gene and trouble too. Wanting to make something fine, write better than the Bible, destined. Dad quote.

1976 = wrong: cafeteria line of life, making a living at music (shock of housing prices now), This is IT!, doormat, oblivious (P.), friends and lovers mixed up somewhat.

LOVE: Why dumped? C. & B,? Negative, sarcasm at first, but nothing under it. Stabs in the dark at relaxation techniques, sex as anticipation mostly.
Characters: R, A, C, B, Ch.

JOB: HCHP, not BC. Steady pay, weight strategy, union. Split, agony.
Characters: T, K, L

MUSIC: book, record. Didn’t think we were good. Now I do. Misunderstood our small pond. Characters. NHSB, Maurice, et al.

Spiritual search: wanted desperately not to care. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ les to lose (see Rumi).

Right: Two Strand River. From age 10. Political struggles, monk/punk, practicing, kindness, women and men both exciting for different reasons. Secrecy, queerness, outsider view. Fat girls & drag queens. Feminist hated drag queens but I didn’t. Year before, grey rabbit. We always rationalize our libido.

HOW RELATED TO EDNA’s: Topics, she defaulted to children when she accepted her marriage and her lot. Damage to grown sons, objectify them as children and good little Christians and then out like a light. (To the Lighthouse).

FAMILY LOYALTY: Finally I see why I was upset about dad’s body donation. I figured out why I’m different from Dave and Ma. I feel an animal connection, spiritual, history, invisible, illogical, that because he’s mine, he’s special and important. Was brought up to be “fact” based and logical, and I never cheered for our side on the team unless I thought we “deserved it.” Had to earn respect, we all said in the 1970s of our parents. But there’s a different awareness, my cat is beautiful because she’s my cat. Not statistics, polls, outside based. Real, not from intellect. That’s why I was upset by his giving his body “to science”; I got this sense and others didn’t. Not breast fed, all was intellectual love from ma. Not nurturer. Why not? Nana was.



Secrecy and Bruises: How did I get there? Loved drama. Little self protection. Fed up with crunchy feminism.

Music people, picked because I was shy in college, harpsichord NOT, grad school, Rounder.

Day Job: Union at work.

Housing: Adelaide Road, still there, porch, piano. Describe. Search for relaxation, no mention of Priscilla, except when she was mad. Invited to leave. Bro loved naked photos.


My Car. Window of mobility, fluke, $500, clueless. Bike next 25 yrs.

Jan: , Dec., Ch. Crushes. Little did I know, P coming, investment co. (next chapter)

"Singers! Tired of sexist, racist music on the radio? Join us at the Redbook Store, Cambridge, Mass."

This little sign launched a saga of music, women, and politics that would change her forever. She entered 1973 a virgin, a lapsed Phi Beta Kappa music history graduate, an out-of-focus young woman who spent her days battling thoughts of the boxes of sugared cereal in the pantry.

It didn't help that in the apartment with the Davids, the cereal was right next to the phone and the ancient salvaged armchair, the most comfortable one in the apartment. This was the apartment of the Summer of Watergate. Also a baseball game, which She knew from the fact that the television set was never off and the Davids and Bud walked around shirtless and hairy, smoking ciggies and cigars and drinking endless beers, talking baseball and revolution.

She had Tai Kwon Do on Monday nights, Women's Issue Group of Science for the People on Tuesdays, Food coop meetings on Sundays, and since she was getting unemployment, she spent her days at the public library looking up old folk songs and what they said about women. She had just signed up for a graduate degree at a radical school called Cambridge Goddard. Its "campus" was a brick building near Porter Square, one room for files, one room for childcare, another room for Community Meeting, where the womyn yelled at the Marxists and She cowered in the middle. As usual.

S.H., a former Abbie wife, taught a course called "Let the Children in on the Revolution." She lectured that she was an "oddist," yes, spelled that way and that we were all oddists or could be. M.L., of Rounder Records, co-taught the feminist music "ovular" and taught about Dolly Parton as a sub rosa feminist, entirely aware of her image and how to use it to her advantage. M.L. wore a black cape and her witchy green eyes never betrayed any shyness. Our heroine idolized and hated her, and when B. asked our heroine to move in to Rounder house, she didn't know which one on whom to have her main crush, M. or B. To be or to have? Girls or boys? Question authority, even gender authority. But where did that leave you? Especially when you woke in the morning to a note from B.: "Make yourself at home." the night before he had said, "Having sex should be like shaking hands" and got up early to write anarchist articles for Black Rose.

The Kendall who had put up the sign was a girl. The group at the Redbook met in the basement, hence the eventual moniker of The Red Basement Singers. She spent the autumn learning words in the unemployment line. "The Cutty Wren" was an old English worker's ballad that spoke of boiling up the landlord for dinner. They sang revolutionary Greek, South American, and North Vietnamese songs for anyone who would listen. "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" wowed them at anti-war rallies. The group had the usual fights about elitism and hierarchy (should someone who couldn't carry a tune be allowed to take a solo? Of course! This was people's music!) and where to perform.