Not to make anyone jealous, but there is another blog on my heart. It's called North Bronx, Class of '70. Its grand ambition: reconnect with my generational cohort--starting with the people I shared public school with--and find out what really happened to us between the assassinations of 1968 and the primaries of 2008.
- Who did you cast your first presidential vote for: Nixon or Humphrey or McGovern?
- What were you doing during Disco, and when did you begin to disavow it?
- When, if ever, did you first register Republican?
- Why did you get married, the second time?
- What kind of radical were you in college?
- When did you start wearing your race/ethnic identity on your sleeve, and when did you remove it?
- Why you did or (more likely) didn't vote for Dukakis?
- Your first interracial relationship? Your last?
Stuff like that. And more. If you're interested, I'll be glad to extend this subject to this blog, for those not so blessed to have grown up North Bronx, but still came of age in high school cherishing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Stand.
I recently posted this essay, My View From The Bridge. I hope this tease gets you to read it:
Except, of course, I was lying.
I’ve been looking back, in some fashion, ever since I started writing in 1979. I wasn’t 10 years out of Evander when I wrote about the conflict between races and classes that seemed to follow me wherever I went. It followed me, of course, because it was in me, probably from 10th grade, or maybe even since P.S. 76. I didn’t have words for it, even in ’68-’69, not long after the assassinations of King and Kennedy, and the teachers strike that put everyone on notice: King’s dream (Rodney and Martin Luther) of us all getting along wasn’t coming true any time soon.
The illusion that we were all related by growing up listening to WABC-AM disk jockey Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, even though our neighborhoods were mostly segregated, now showed cracks that should have been too big to ignore...
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