Brian Shea learns to see himself through his mother’s eyes.
Not long ago, I found myself describing to a younger friend the historical whirlwind of the late 1980s. A decades-old geopolitical order had dissolved with the fall of the Berlin Wall and eventually, the Soviet Union itself. The entire focus of U.S. foreign policy for half a century was gone. Pop songs about “the bomb” now seemed dated and espionage writers replaced KGB agents with drug lords and terrorists to keep their readers thrilled in a new era.
My friend asked me how I knew so many details about the period and all I could think to say was, “because I remember them.”
I was in college as the ‘80s came to a close, studying international affairs, and recall the feeling of uncertainty, even fear, about a future without the universal constants of the Cold War and how it shaped our assumptions about foreigners, the individual’s relationship with the state, and the nuclear Sword of Damocles that hovered over our heads for 50 years.
It didn’t occur to me that my friend would not remember these events herself. When the Soviet Union collapsed, she was an infant of two. And while I could describe the events that changed my world, I still found it difficult to articulate just how jarring they were to those who witnessed them and how they shaped my views of all that followed. Historical change and the unexpected were now arranged along a continuum and we were likely in for more.
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I contemplated my conversation with my friend not long ago as I sorted my mother’s possessions after she passed away. Tucked under some papers was a plastic envelope containing an old, yellowed newspaper. It was the New York Post from May 6, 1969. The day I was born.
I didn’t know my mother had kept it, but it didn’t entirely surprise me. I grew up listening to her recollections of times past and she felt it important that they be remembered and learned from: the atmosphere of dread during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s assassination, and the social tumult of the late 1960s when she had a baby boy and named him “Brian.”
She often reminded me that very little is actually new in human history and the present should be understood only as a middle chapter in a story that began long ago. For her, that often meant avoiding hyperbole or the instinct born of inexperience to mistake the urgent for the important. For her, it was a source of inner serenity during personal and national crises that never left her and it took me many years to understand how she had achieved it.
And, I was not surprised that before she parted, she left me one last lesson, a time capsule stored in a plastic envelope. As I know she would want me to do, I turned off my computer and cellphone, made a cup of Earl Grey tea, and read about the day and the world into which I was born.
On May 6, 1969, New York City had no Internet or cellphones. White lace dresses could be purchased at Franklin Simon’s for $8 and orders could be made by phone or mail. A candidate for City Council President retracted his accusations that student protestors were supported by foreign communists. Two elderly twins inexplicably held hands and jumped to their deaths, choosing to die together over facing whatever monsters haunted them. Two youths firebombed a Brooklyn synagogue. The Pentagon announced the deaths of 48 servicemen killed in Vietnam. President Nixon evaded a student’s question as to whether he planned to grow a beard and health officials monitored an alarming trend of toddlers mistaking their mothers’ birth control pills for candy.
In her own life, my mother had listened to bombers fly over New York City on their way to World War Two Europe, watched President Kennedy get murdered, and received news of some of her friends dying of drug overdoses in the 1960s. Others perished in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Her threshold for designating an event as important was higher than mine, something she taught me to remember when I left home for adulthood.
I learned many approaches to understanding history in school, but her lesson that no man lives in exclusive times guides me more than any other. True north is not being seduced by hysterical predictions of apocalypse should your preferred candidate lose an election or a promotion be given to your colleague over you. There are always others who have suffered more and you will never meet another person who cannot teach you something.
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And, there is always hope. Tucked beneath my New York Post was a LIFE Magazine from June 6, 1969. The cover bore a photo of the moon’s surface, anticipating the first manned mission. My mother had made me watch the moon landing that year, despite the fact that I was barely old enough to be sentient. She knew that at two months old, I would not remember it. But she made her infant son sit on her knee anyway, insisting that he witness all the good that mankind can be at a time when such a sentiment was easily forgotten. Earth stood agape in what we now call “real time,” she often said later, as the Apollo astronauts set foot on another world. And back on the small, blue marble in their sky, people could feel pride and hope during a time in which both were in short supply.
I finished reading the newspaper and took the last sip of my tea, wondering if I would have any worthy lessons to pass on when I am an old man. I hope I am still too young to have inherited my mother’s wisdom, but she at least left me with a map to follow on the pages of the New York Post.
The technological revolution of recent years perhaps leaves the young thinking that their predecessors are incapable of relating to their world. And, they may be right. But my mother would say that however much one complicates an omelette, you can always relate to an egg. And that’s the place for any teacher to start.
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May 6, 1969 was a day that seemed more familiar, more relatable, than I had ever imagined. In the end, that is all my mother wanted me to someday realize and I hope today’s parents consider my mother’s lesson to fortify their children against what lies ahead. It is not a complicated lesson, but transcends many that require multi-volume books to explain.
My mother’s favorite poet, Robert Frost, once said that there are two kinds of teachers: “the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.”
I grew up not far from where Frost wrote those words, listening to my mother’s stories and wondering how they related to the future. I still do.
But if the world changes again and I struggle to divine its meaning, I will not search for answers on Google or CNN. I will turn off my computer and cellphone, make some Earl Grey tea, and revisit May 6, 1969 on the dusty pages of the New York Post. If I’ve learned anything by the age of 44, it’s that you never know what lesson your elders left behind for you to discover not only in the journal of their lives, but in yours as well.
Photo—Wikimedia Commons