“Picture yourself in a boat on a river With tangerine trees and marmalade skies Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes Cellophane flowers of yellow and green Towering over your head Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes And she's gone…”(Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Lennon & McCartney)
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes Cellophane flowers of yellow and green Towering over your head Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes And she's gone…”(Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Lennon & McCartney)
It was 1967, I had graduated high school, my last summer of being a school kid, and what I supposed would be my first summer of adulthood or at least freedom-hood. I first had to face the Draft Lottery, wondering if I might NOT at all enjoy the offerings of the next four years of college life, and fight in a war, in which most Americans had been manipulated into thinking would Keep America Great. Some friends of mine ignored the Draft Lottery and enlisted immediately, other friends decided that Canada was safer…I waited until I knew my number, and for three months was on the “might be drafted list, to this day I remember that my Draft Lottery Number was 248, exactly in the middle. Perhaps I was of the Hippie Generation, the child of the Baby Boomer era, but except for my bell-bottom jeans, occasional tie-dyed T-shirts, and army camouflage fatigues, (amazing, we who protested the war would wear this kind of costume as protest/all the while the boys who went to fight had no choice.) I was mainly a middle-class Jewish kid, beginning to watch the world around me crumble, beginning to witness true xenophobia (I didn’t even know that word yet), and beginning to realize that FEAR, if left to its own devices TRIUMPHS over fact, becoming fictions favorite toy, and demands total attention. Of course, I tried smoking marijuana, back in the day we called it “grass,” which I am informed by both my kids and my much younger husband is such a queer word. (Queer as in its original term meaning strange and weird, and not the derogatory meaning most homophobes love to shout and scream when it comes to homosexuals.) Thinking that a little escape from reality would help. But I was and am such a control freak would I never let the joys of being high, remain joyful for too long.
Then there was this song, this magical melody, Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds. When the song came out EVERYONE in the KNOW, swore it was the Beatles poking their fingers at the “MAN” (back in the day, the MAN, was the government), and singing a song about LSD. (Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song, although he got the inspiration from an LSD trip. He attributed the song's fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books.) It seems to me that the past three years have been a long drop down a rabbit hole, a long bout of bad drugs, a totally psychedelic trip, in which good has become bad, right is always wrong, and God is used to now to the deadly Devil. I will soon begin my seventh decade on Earth and have at the ripe old age of almost 70 witnessed the wonders of life but am bewildered at the abolishment of morals and values, truth and honor. I played Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds, and for a moment kind of wish, I had some mystical power to just wish away and erase anything, anyone Trump, and enjoy a true high that life can provide!
