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Men Only
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Straight Male / 69
Flirted With Hippie Culture, Reality Hit Me Hard,
Hippie days, make love not war. I dropped out of college and followed the hippie migration to California. I joined a group setting up a commune. Economically a disaster, 100% supported by donations and parental support. Sex was not free, the girls scared of getting pregnant, the guys possessive and domineering. My folks gave me an ultimatum, get your ass back in college, or your allowance is cut off.
A dream scared me. I told one of the commune girls, she was 17, but really 16 and had run away from her home in Ohio. She asked if she could come with me, she would be my wife. We left on a Greyhound bus, back to Arkansas and back to college. Cleaned up, hair cut, bathing every day, baby bump on the way. We were young, but conventional in every way.
Except that she was 16. Pregnant the judge gave me one choice, well two really. Join the Army or marry her. In those days the judge held all the cards, pregnant teens stuck in his craw. Maybe he believed she had run away on her own, but she was pregnant, and 16. He married us, legal.
20 years old with a high school drop out, an infant son. Working 30 hours a week, taking every course I could, I needed to graduate, fast. It sunk in, she needed to be raised, finish her education, learn how to raise children, how to run a home. So much for make love not war, commune living. Hippie life was nowhere near the fun it made believe.
We survived, persevered. Thanks to our son's baby sitter, a woman who taught my young wife how to cook and clean, how to care for a son, she was first and foremost a mother, secondly a wife. And she tutored her until she passed her high school tests. A woman who was in her early twenties in WW2, lost a brother and a cousin. All business, hippies made her mad.
So here we, pushing 70 and my young wife just not yet 65. She went on to have 5 kids, she raised them right. Along the way I had a dream that shook me up, a no nonsense judge that forced responsibility, a woman who taught my wife how to be one. Hippies, what a bunch of losers, each and everyone of them.
A dream scared me. I told one of the commune girls, she was 17, but really 16 and had run away from her home in Ohio. She asked if she could come with me, she would be my wife. We left on a Greyhound bus, back to Arkansas and back to college. Cleaned up, hair cut, bathing every day, baby bump on the way. We were young, but conventional in every way.
Except that she was 16. Pregnant the judge gave me one choice, well two really. Join the Army or marry her. In those days the judge held all the cards, pregnant teens stuck in his craw. Maybe he believed she had run away on her own, but she was pregnant, and 16. He married us, legal.
20 years old with a high school drop out, an infant son. Working 30 hours a week, taking every course I could, I needed to graduate, fast. It sunk in, she needed to be raised, finish her education, learn how to raise children, how to run a home. So much for make love not war, commune living. Hippie life was nowhere near the fun it made believe.
We survived, persevered. Thanks to our son's baby sitter, a woman who taught my young wife how to cook and clean, how to care for a son, she was first and foremost a mother, secondly a wife. And she tutored her until she passed her high school tests. A woman who was in her early twenties in WW2, lost a brother and a cousin. All business, hippies made her mad.
So here we, pushing 70 and my young wife just not yet 65. She went on to have 5 kids, she raised them right. Along the way I had a dream that shook me up, a no nonsense judge that forced responsibility, a woman who taught my wife how to be one. Hippies, what a bunch of losers, each and everyone of them.
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