Public Domain

Everything has a story. Story is everything because nothing is permanent and all things come from somewhere and are on their way to somewhere else. All stories are also embedded with hypertext. The deeper you look at an event, the more you’re rewarded with links to something else and something else again. I’ve been following this train of thought for the last few days since submitting an entry for my college class of 1966 fifty-fifth reunion yearbook. Just thinking about fifty-five years has been dizzying. Blonde on Blonde, Eldridge Cleaver, my father’s collection of #2 pencil stubs, Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel, marriages, childbirth, the Hard Hat Riot of May 8, 1970.

I was twenty-four and had just gotten married at City Hall in lower Manhattan. In the interim between the ceremony, such that it was, and the riot three weeks later, Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia and Ohio National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State in the protests that followed. One thing led to another and then another, the whole thing gathering momentum in an avalanche of outrage. My new husband and I got on the IRT at Grand Army Plaza. We were bubbly with innocence, heading for Wall Street with a few equally wide-eyed friends. A demonstration had been called at the New York Stock Exchange, blocks from where we’d gone to get married. I remember the exhilaration of being inhaled into the high-energy crowd of 1,000 students and young anti-war activists feverish with righteous indignation at Nixon and his acceleration of the war in southeast Asia. One minute, people were waving at their friends and chanting Peace Now. The next minute, World Trade Center construction workers in hard hats brandishing hammers and iron pipes were bearing down on us chanting USA, All the Way and America, Love It or Leave It. They chased us through the canyons of the financial district, roofers and sheet rockers on a rampage. We were trapped between the banks and brokerage houses in the narrow streets. The police, sympathetic to the counter-protesters, did nothing to protect us. It was terrifying.

In my awareness, the events of 1970 were a precognition of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th of this year. It was as if the intervening fifty years had never taken place. When I watched the insurrection on TV, my breathing became labored as if I were still running up Wall Street. That’s one way of telling that story, but I can approach the unfolding of the Hard Hat Riot from any one of a thousand points of reference. I can begin with the clerk at City Hall asking the people behind us on the getting married line to serve as our witnesses because we’d come alone, without family. I can begin with the subway with its uber-seventies New York slouching drunks and No Spitting signs. I can recall the patrician mayor, John Lindsay, who some say sparked the riot by ordering the flags at City Hall to be flown at half-mast in honor of the Kent State dead. Or I can go directly to the Hard Hats and the Maga hats and make assumptions that may or may not hold up under scrutiny. I am deep in storytelling, fictionalizing. It’s what I do. It’s what we all do, especially when we recall events in our own lives.

My own saga has been wiggly with no obvious overarching plan. But when I thought about my yearbook entry, I realized that everything I’ve been drawn to has been about narrative. I studied modern European history at Brandeis — a relentless unleashing of slaughter in three-quarter time — eventually landing in library school where I stumbled upon the dusty profession of archivist. For a while, I was paid to forego the assumption of privacy and read other people’s mail. I became a connoisseur of letterhead and the scent of lavender commingled with mildew. Later, when I got tired of hanging out in damp basements up to my eyebrows in old paper, I trained to become a chaplain and eventually went to work at hospice. I continued to be magnetized by history, catching people in nursing homes on their way out the door. I asked them to tell me their stories.

Often, they would deny there was a story to tell. Ah, ya know. I picked shade tobacco in Connecticut or yeah, I was in France with my two kid brothers but they didn’t come home. No story there. This despite the fact that the shade tobacco became a cigar that gave off a stink that clung to the shirt of a gruff garment center boss who smoked it in his cubby-hole overlooking a room full of women with swollen ankles. This despite the mud along the Somme that caked on your boots and the crackle of the static on the radio, sometimes armed forces stuff, but sometimes Peggy Lee, his youngest brother Mike’s favorite. He had blue eyes, Mike, and a smile that gave girls something to think about.

Stories are out there waiting to be discovered, a vast lending library of impressions. They can and do go anywhere, walking through walls, speaking in tongues. A story may come to rest its weary bones for a spell in the space between my ears, but it will never be my private property. It’s always in the public domain. If I believe that it belongs to me, a story will reify in my awareness and lie around like an out-of-date almanac. Really, we are all just borrowers.

Postings of seventysomething prior to February 14, 2021, are archived at susiekaufman.blogspot.com