Rosalynn Did Good

Knowing a little history, I don’t carry illusions about the 1970s being an idyllic time. Even back then, while I didn’t know the context or the interconnections, I knew about the Vietnam War, Watergate, ICBMs, the Cold War, and the murders of JFK, RFK, and Dr. King. I knew about Bobby Sands and the IRA, Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Patty Hearst and the SLO, Charlie Manson and Helter Skelter. I was aware that “out there” things were scary. Still, around my neighborhood, it was mostly manhunt games, Pinewood Derbies, kickball, bicycle jumps, Big-Buddy Bubble Gum, and an Evil Knievel motorcycle toy that, if you really spun it up, could jump damn near all the way across Orton Ave.

Is it weird that, while I know life back then wasn’t idyllic, while I know there were so many problems in the world, it still seems like it was so . . . good?

That’s weird, right?

When I think about the goodness of being a kid in the 1970s – a kid in a blue-collar/middle-class mixed neighborhood that wasn’t very economically diverse and not racially diverse at all – I think about a few things. I think about my grandmother first. Her name was Peggy Parker, and she just radiated fairness, kindness, and love. Whenever I felt hurt, the first person I thought about was Grandma and how I knew – above all other things, that she loved me without reserve, and if that remained true, everything would be okay in the end.

I also think about my Dad and how if I did something bad, he would be disappointed in me. He wouldn’t be angry, but he’d be so disappointed I'd feel crushed by remorse. If I hurt someone or acted like I was more important than everybody else, I remember how he would look at me – lovingly, but seriously – until I remembered to be a good boy.

Those early memories of goodness also go back to my mom. She always, always, always insisted that the worst thing in the world you could do was lie. Lies hurt her viscerally. They wounded her, and to lie to my mom was most certainly a sin, and so when I was a little boy, I tried hard to be honest and good. Mind you, when I became a teenager in the 1980s, that moral decency gave way to a tyrannically adolescent mind. But that was later on after the world had changed around me.

When I think about the goodness of my childhood, I also remember two priests at St. Thomas Aquinas on Binghamton’s West Side, Father Mike Bassano and Father Excel. Those guys were just good. They were loving and talked – both in sermons and face to face – about doing good works in the world. They spoke of how everyone was responsible for taking care of one another. The Jesus they knew preached a gospel of kindness and grace, not judgment and damnation. Because of them, I even thought about becoming a priest someday because I wanted to be a good man, too. Those dreams also crashed and burned in my teen years due to my dawning understanding of what a properly fitted pair of Levi’s Blue Jeans could do to the posteriors of several increasingly curvy classmates. To become a good man on the other side of those desires took some effort, but I think I finally got there – probably sometime in my 30s and long after the seminary would take me on as a recruit.

From my childhood in the 1970s, I remember campouts, S’mores, and fireflies in jars. I remember late summer storms on the front porch with my mom and family trips with the Kilpatricks and the Murphys up to Beaver Lake. I remember Ghost Town in the Glen, spiedies on the grill, with a special stick of butter to roll your corn in, and laughter around the table as the crickets called in the night. I mostly remember goodness, and I thought about all that simple goodness today for a reason that I will bet resonates with many of you who share the superannuation of our years.

I thought about all of that goodness when I read that Rosalynn Carter passed away today at 96 years of age with Jimmy – her husband and partner of seventy-seven years at her side. She is just "of a piece" with that time in my life and, I suppose, the life many of you remember, too.

It would be a small thing, yet still a precious thing, if I were the only one who felt that flood of nostalgia today. But I’m confident I am not. While the 1970s were certainly not an idyllic age of wine and roses, there most certainly was an innocence to those childhood years, and that innocence and beauty fills my memories with a sense of community, decency, and kindness simply for the sake of being kind. Rosalynn, as a presence of the era, was a part of that beautiful whole, and I mourn her passing with silence, reflection, and love. If my own passing, when it comes, reminds people of such things, then it will have been a life well lived, indeed.

Safe journey home, Rosalynn, and thanks for being so very good at being very good and knowing that's all that ever really mattered.