The Free Spirit

Peace Has Come; 1975 (Part One)

"Now I've been crying lately thinkin' about the world as it is. Why must we go on hating? Why can't we live in bliss?"

I'd say the year 1975 was one of the most eventful years for my family. It bore shocking news, a traumatic injury, a death in the family and even a brief reunion of the two brothers, but not during good circumstances. It also saw the end of the Vietnam War, officially, but the end result of the war wasn't exactly very good, either. Through it all, however, domestic life in my family continued, although Don was briefly back in the studio in the summer and fall. He loved to relax and enjoy life, but I knew that he couldn't keep away from the studio forever.

The year started out with sending the kids back to school after the New Year, of which none of them were too thrilled about. "Can't school just be over yet?" Maggie whined early in the morning on the day that the kids returned to school.

"It won't be over for a long time for you, kiddo," Don told his daughter, and she groaned loudly.

"Why can't I be Marley? She doesn't have to go to school!" Maggie complained.

"She doesn't have to go to school yet, because she's still a little too young, but come September, she's gonna start school, too, sweetheart," Don told her. One glance in his direction and I realised that the shirt he was wearing was a little tighter around his midsection than it used to be, and his profile seemed a little fuller than it had. It was clear to me that Don was starting to put on weight, which was good, considering he'd always been as thin as a rail.

"What?" asked little Marley, her fork stopping in midair with a piece of egg on the end of it.

"You heard me, honey. You're goin' to school soon, too," Don told his youngest daughter, and Maggie laughed.

"Ha! You don't get to escape it either!" she said, and Marley stuck her tongue out at her sister.

"I don't understand why you hate school so much, Maggie. Don't you like to learn?" Stacey asked her younger sister.

"Nope. Learning is stupid," Maggie replied.

"I don't think learning is what you have a problem with, Mags. I think it's the whole being told what to do thing that makes you hate school," Elton chimed in.

"Now that is hitting the nail on the head," I said.

"Yup. Bossy people annoy me," Maggie said.

"You're a little bossy, aren't you?" Stacey asked her.

"And you annoy me, so what does that make you?" Maggie replied.

"Hey, be nice to each other, girls. You're sisters," Don told his daughters.

"Do we have to be?" Maggie asked her father.

"You have to be sisters as much as I have to be both of your brother," Elton said to them, and Stacey scoffed.

"Most normal brothers wouldn't replace their sister's goldfish with carrots," she said to him.

"I would have replaced your uncle's fish with carrots," Don chimed in.

"Don, don't encourage them," I told him. "Enough with the arguing, you kids, and start getting ready for school or you'll be late." Minus school for not only my kids but myself in my pursuit of a doctorate, the early months of 1975 were rather unremarkable. Don's thirty-eighth birthday came and went, as did Maggie's tenth birthday, and we were in mid-March. Spring was around the corner, but being in Nashville again meant that we still had some rather chilly days. It was dawn, and I stood outside wrapped up in Don's robe and held a warm, but untouched mug of tea in my hand, the other holding the robe closed. I'd had another nightmare of my days in Belzec, another reminder that the past seemed forever ago, but continued to shape who we are as individuals. The war had turned me into a protestor, a hater of war and violence and a lover of peace, love and serenity. My experience in the war taught me my own mortality, that death didn't care if you were ninety years old or a child - if it needed to take you, then it would. It forced me to rush my youth. I had three children before I was thirty, I shoved my teenage years into medical textbooks and buried them away. Women my age had stories of how they went to dances and the cinema, but I never did any of those things until I married Don. I spent my Friday and Saturday nights in my room working by an oil lamp, reading, studying, taking notes, practically copying the entire book into piles of notebooks. I lived an entire life by the time I was thirty - I had been a midwife for over ten years, I had become a recording artist, married, had three children, became a protestor, basically lived an entire life. All in thirty years.