the summer of love

The 'Summer of Love' began in San Francisco, unleashing widespread awareness of the hippie counterculture. This refrain, from a song from John Phillips, of The Mamas and The Papas, evokes the mood of that time.

If you're going to San Francisco,
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...
If you're going to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.

This Sunday, September 2nd, there will be a free, all-day concert commerating the fortieth anniversary of The Summer of Love. I'll be there, maybe even with some flowers in my hair. I suppose the flowers ought to be real?

I turned fourteen in August, 1967. My baby sister, my only sister, was born that June. I already had four brothers. I had already lost two baby sisters to infant deaths. All I cared about that summer was Margaret. She and I shared a bedroom. All that summer, every single night, when she awoke in the night to eat, I got up, changed her diapers, took her to my mother's bed and went back to sleep. Then, after a short nap, I reawakened, retrieved my baby sister and tucked her back into the crib in our shared room. My mother never even had to get out of bed.

I started high school that fall, probably in late August, probably forty years ago this week. After less than two weeks of high school, I went to my mother and said that it was too hard for me to do get up in the mornings for school and I was going to stop getting up with the baby. My mother was furious. I was very ashamed of my selfishness. To this day, if you mention the Catholic girls' high school that I attended, Queen of Peace, in front of my mother, even with her dementia, she'll say "Oh, well, Queen of Peace, that is the school where the nuns taught your sister how to be selfish."

I was aware of hippies. I had heard of Haight Asbury. In general, I liked the idea of a counterculture, a peace movement in opposition to the Viet Nam War, free love, flowers and tie dye. But for me, the sixties were about caring for my baby brother Dave, born in 1964 and my baby sister, Margaret, born in 1967. I was aware of demonstrations, riots like the Chicago Democratic Convention (I lived in Chicago!) and Kent State. Me, I lived in a cocoon of loving those babies.

In June, 1971, I graduated from high school. A few days later, my parents had a divorce hearing that they did not tell us kids about. While I was at work at my summer job in the public library, mom showed up at the house with a moving van and took almost all the furniture in our home. And she took David and Margaret. She had told the divorce judge, under oath, that she would not remove them from the State of Illinois. Then, that very same day, she took them, disappearing for the next couple years. She took my babies away.

Mom had gone back to college while I was in high school. She liked to say that by helping her go to college (she could not have done it without my childcare), she would help me. I very seriously believed that I was preparing for my own future when I sacrificed extracurricular activities throughout high school (I would have loved to be in a school play, to be on student council, to work on the school paper but I could never stay after school, I had to get to the babies). I loved them like a mother loves her babies.

And then they were gone.

Just to show you what a dope I am, it wasn't until I was in my forties, my late forties, that I realized that mom had made sure she got her education and her divorce before I left home for college. She had carefully planned her escape on my back.

Oh my god, it damned near killed me the way David and Margaret disappeared from my life. I had never had any adults participating in my life, giving me guidance on how to cope with anything so there was no one around to suggest that my grief was normal, that my loss was real. I lost a couple years to that heartache. It was worse to lose my daughter but not by much.

I am going to the Summer of Love 40th Anniversary Concert in Golden Gate Park this Sunday. The hippie movement kinda passed me by in a blur. I am curious to see who turns up. Will it be old hippies? Young people? I looked at the website and it looks like Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist, is going to be there. I was sorry to see that. I just want to hear music and watch people play frisbee.