By Rachel Cline
In the autumn of 1970, I was thirteen years old. Like seemingly everyone else in America, male and female—I had long, straight hair, parted down the middle. I sometimes wore a cowboy hat, but had trouble finding blue jeans small enough to fit my child-sized frame. I lived in Brooklyn Heights with my brother (then nine and beneath my notice) and our divorced mother. My interests included Star Trek, The Monkees, Mad Magazine, and books that were deemed “too old” for me–that summer I read The Dharma Bums, The Godfather, and The Sensuous Woman by J.
We lived in a City-subsidized building and did not own a car or a color TV, but we were not poor—my brother and I both went to private school in Fort Greene. We also went to summer camp every summer for two whole months so that my mother could have some fun. That summer at camp, when not reading, I had been mildly and chastely in love with my brother’s counselor–a college sophomore with quotes from Tolkien markered all over his Jack Purcells. I remember him telling me that Henry and I must have great parents because my we were both so “cool.” At the time, I thought he meant “interesting and creative,” but in retrospect I suspect he was leaning more toward “bizarrely adept at acting like an adult.” Continue Reading…