Finding joy in music!

For Henry, on starting at the University in Missoula next week.

August 14, 2024

My grandson, Henry Roberts, starts the University of Montana next week.  I bet he has strong emotions, but I can’t know until I ask him.  [Meanwhile, phoned, no answer, left him a message].

I don’t know. Therefore, I speak. (Yes, I believe this fits in with wisdom from the Tao Te Ching.)

Dear Henry,

I’m in Billings at home. Tomorrow we drive to Missoula. You and some of your family members will meet us at the airport there. I’m 75. You are 18.

I’m looking across our front room to the dining room table with four boxes. Two of the boxes, including one 24″x24″x21,” contain computer equipment. The others, bedding.  An extra-long quilt is folded, atop the rest.  One box was too large and heavy for P. to lift.  Our plan:  to carry the boxes to Missoula in the back of our camper van.  And reminisce, no doubt, about moving to Missoula.

These boxes trigger several memories of my own journey to Missoula in 1967, of how I felt about leaving home to live in an acne-infested dormitory with filthy socks, stinky shoes, Old Spice aftershave, Irish Spring soap and dandruff. I didn’t savor the aroma then.

Initially, I was eager to move out of my mother’s house in Dillon, just the same as Henry is moving from his mother’s house in Poway, California.  How does he feel about that? 

I wanted a new lifestyle.  I wanted to be an artist.  Maybe I could change the world for the better?  I was young.  My desires were based on an obscure feeling that I had been misinformed by adults whom I could not trust. 

Looking back, I see clearly that I was misinformed.  In my high school years our American history teacher told us a sanitized account of African slavery and omitted that as the inevitable cause of the Civil War.  He didn’t dwell on the differences between the Union and the Confederacy. We were told to memorize dates and battles. History was glossed over. The Union and Confederacy may have signed a formal truce, but the differences and animosity remain even now.

He told us that slavery was generally good for the Black people. He said we lived in the best country on earth, all the while Blacks were being beaten and sprayed with firehoses and bitten by attack dogs in Alabama. Ghettos of racial minorities exist in most large cities, a truth so obvious as to be invisible.

He concentrated on the Communist threat, instead.

He compared the grim realities of the Communist central planning system to the abundance of the American Capitalist system (for white people). 

My own high school years, 1963-1967, were the important American Civil Rights years of Martin Luther King and others, but they were not acknowledged as such at our high school, or at the Methodist Church services my friends and I attended, or in the Dillon Tribune.  This is what I mean by misinformation.  

My mother had a subscription to Time magazine and the Butte-Anaconda Standard newspaper.  The former told about the struggle for civil rights in places like Alabama and Georgia, as did the television news.  The places described seemed far removed from Montana.  The latter had articles about racial equality, usually buried in the back by the obituaries.  I remember trying desperately hard to understand the articles on the front pages about the war in Vietnam, but they were too hard for me.  Even my older brother Tom had to admit they were indecipherable and badly written.

I had a skewed vision of the world, a lack of understanding of my place in it.  But it was time to leave my mother’s house, travel to Missoula, move into a college dormitory.

Of course, my feelings were mixed.  I wanted freedom.  I wanted to learn the truth about the world.  I wanted to hang out with cool friends and enjoy the new music!  I wanted to meet girls!

I wasn’t prepared for my new world within the smelly dormitory.  A world without even one cool friend, just a know-it-all room mate from New Jersey who recently got out of a military school.

My girlfriend in Dillon had broken up with me, gave me the boot, a couple weeks before.  

I was painfully lonely.  Yes, I looked up many of the people I used to know in Missoula.  None of them panned out.  None were “cool” friends.  Most of the people in the dorm seemed confident, self-assured, purposeful.  But they were “others.” I watched them swarm past from one building to another at hourly intervals.  Stop, I thought.

Even frightened by what I thought was an impossibility:  to learn the truth about the world.  My world.  I looked vainly for a glimmer.

As overwhelming as it all seemed at the time, looking back I realize the interminable loneliness really lasted only what?  A week or two.  I began catching glimpses of people I thought I’d like to see more of. These invisible attractions proved important during the ensuing months. Ensuing decades, lifetimes.

Sincerely,

Daniel Struckman