December 1966 -- 17 years old

p. 12:

"Imaginary Brother As Witness"
Pencil on newsprint
(1966; water damage in early 1980s)





1966






Looking northeast this morning after the icy fog lifted on Rosa Parks Day:






















"If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.'"
(Martin Luther King, Jr., 1955)

Introduction / Double self-portrait

INTRODUCTION

In December of 1966, I met R on the beach at Half Moon Bay, California. We had both just turned 17 years old, and we discovered that we had been born within 24 hours of each other. We both liked Bob Dylan's music. R loaned me his copy of the lyrics from the album "Blonde on Blonde," which had been released in the spring of 1966 ...

In January of 1970, he left for Vietnam, convinced that he could not obtain conscientious objector status and not wanting to go to prison or to Canada. We made a commitment to write a letter to each other every day and kept that commitment. He arrived home on December 8, 1970, in the early hours of the morning, but in some ways he never returned from Vietnam. We lived together for five turbulent and bewildering months and then separated, remaining friends. He asked to see me before he died in a VA hospital in April of 2008. It was 38 years after he had returned from Vietnam, 42 years after we first had walked together at Half Moon Bay. All of the following art work and poetry is, in one way or another, the result of R's presence and absence in my life.

(from page 10)





1966










1965










1965





Oboe next to laptop this morning: