Page 12 - Asheville NC Revised2

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Senior high that year began in the ninth grade and felt better to me. Its external chaos almost overcame my interior anarchy. Several riots, multiple bomb scares and huge sales of rebel flags demanded even my paralyzed attention. At the end of the year Dad asked, “Wouldn’t you like to go to private school?”
“I don’t care either way,” was my response. My will was a wet noodle. I was the frozen man, in a maze of ultra self-conscious mirrors, unable to see out. Dad resigned from the school board and I quit my integrated, county-champion basketball team. We went private.
Lest one perceive that all my life was torture, let me hasten to correct. Internally I felt like hell. Externally the opportunities family and community provided shattered any possibility of my becoming a recluse. I lived with the puzzling contradiction of chronic depression surround by boundless well-being.
There was basketball in the fall, tennis, golf and baseball in the summers and hours of tag football all year in our back yard. While going all out in a vigorous sport self-consciousness was pretty well neutralized. Golf was still hell. In addition, there were hundreds of acres of woods behind our house to roam with Ginger, our collie, and moon over the wonder of life’s glorious horrendous mess.
My parents’ bond was as strong as space-age alloy and sound as ancient tradition as far as I could tell. No hints of infidelity, very few arguments and even occasional embarrassing romantic trysts, frisking on Dad’s recliner. I believe they tuned into a complete union of wills that can result from accepting a relationship freely and totally. This maybe created a third, spiritual entity between their two corporeal selves. Helping them to easily conquer financial and social barriers and to generate enough grace to flood, with agape love, their children and a good slice of the community.
Despite the pessimism caused by my neurosis I felt very safe. The possibility of Vietnam snatching me into the TV and covering my head with bloody cotton gauze, or that racial tension might cause harm, never occurred to me. None of the fantastic history of the sixties could penetrate my brain static and parental protection.
Nor could peer pressure breech my mental defense. I went to about three parties and remembered the fetching thighs of girls as they reached high in their micro-miniskirts to slow dance with tall guys, sometimes for the seven lusty minutes of Hey Jude. But nobody asked me to smoke anything or drink a drop or feel this or that.
Was it the shattering experience of puberty that drove me into serial mono- gamy? It surely wasn’t my parents, those magnificent monuments to monogamy. Nor