24.

Remember the old Twilight Zone episode—“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street?” In the voice-over, the show’s creator, Rod Serling, said:

“This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street, in the last calm and reflective moments . . . before the monsters came.”

My friends and I memorized that when we were kids. We liked to go around growling those sentences, pretending that we were the monsters, scaring ourselves and then laughing.

There weren’t any monsters, were there? And if there were monsters, they weren’t us, were they?

I once lived on one of the world’s Maple Streets. 531-A East Maple Street, to be exact. 531-A East Maple Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas, if you want the whole address. I was in graduate school, writing poems and studying for a degree in creative writing.

It was 1968. Just as we’d planned, Jenny and I got married on December 30, 1967. It was a sweet time. We figured the war would end any day. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of the summer of love. It was an auspicious time. No monsters anywhere, right?

Jenny and I thought seeing John Lennon on the cover of the first issue of Rolling Stone was cute. Remember that? He was dressed as a World War I soldier. He had a part in the movie How I Won the War. It’s all a little period drama. Just a little bit of history. Nothing to do with us, right?

The specifics of the new year slowly come back to me, or at least some of them do.

It’s New Year’s Day, and I have the flu, an aching, gut-wrenching flu. Oh, I remember now. It’s the Hong Kong flu, and then Jenny gets it, and we begin our married life fighting off this attack from Asia, so, OK, there were microscopic monsters and, then, for some reason, the world starts spinning faster. And then it’s hard to keep up with 1968, as if we’re running to jump on a carnival ride. Faster and faster, it goes. Round and round, and up and down. Nineteen sixty-eight. A Tilt-A-Whirl of a year.

It’s the year of the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring, which promises freedom from the Russians until it spins round and becomes the assassination of Martin Luther King on that motel balcony. That baby floating in space at the opening of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey falls like innocence abandoned down to where Bobby Kennedy dies on the kitchen floor of a Los Angeles hotel as the crackle of small-arms fire in Chicago at the Democratic presidential convention punctuates the night while the musical Hair opens and the Age of Aquarius dawns on Broadway, and Congress repeals the requirement for a gold standard, and Elvis, in his leather suit, makes the girls squeal, as if they’re orgasmic, coming right there on network television.

Me, I’m watching much of the year go by in the grainy black-and-white pictures of my little Magnavox thirteen-inch TV.

Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Lyndon Johnson solemnly announces as if trying to drown out those chants.

Yes. Nineteen sixty-eight was quite a year. My generation thought that we would save the world. Isn’t that what the rock-and-roll lyric says? “We can change the world/Rearrange the world.” Mimeograph a list of demands. Take to the streets with some posters, and it’s as good as done.

The little, tiny, hardly noticed part of 1968 that barely gets a mention is the end of graduate school deferments.

Hello, Rick, it’s Nazi time for you, my friend.

Boom, boom, snare.

It’s first two beats on the bass drum and then one on the little snare drum for the army and air force ROTC students every Friday during the school year as they form up and then march in tight formations across the lawn of the university.

Boom, boom, snare.

I am in a classroom on the second floor of a building erected in the decade after the Civil War. The windows of the building must be over ten feet tall. The course is English prosody, and we are studying the Robert Browning poem, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

“Good speed!” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;

“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,

And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

“Mostly anapests,” Professor Jim Whitehead, with great exuberance, declaims.

Out there on the spring lawn the ROTC cadets in their blue and green uniforms arrange themselves into ranks and files and then march across the lawn to the tune of the war’s booming anapests.

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.

Yes, the ancient anapests of war. They form squares and rectangles and then single lines that meet and turn.

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

The young girls with the snapping flags behind them and the rattle of the drum to their left watch their boys group and regroup. The girls in their tight uniform blouses and ascots. Saluting as the boys pass. Their breasts cinched into pointed brassieres that make their chests look like twin traffic cones.

They’re the Angel Flight, but is anyone really thinking of what angels might have to do with the military? Is anyone really thinking of death this spring afternoon?

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three . . .

Boom, boom, snare

Ah, yes, 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight is the year of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive and the First Battle of Saigon.

Does anyone remember those battles anymore?

“A cold, gray fog lifts on the bodies of American soldiers killed at the perimeter of Khe Sanh, Walter,” John Laurence of CBS says on The Nightly News.

Those were the monsters, I suppose, but they were a long way from Maple Street, weren’t they? They couldn’t come here, could they?

I don’t know that my graduate school draft deferment is coming to an end while I amble along Maple Street toward the university, though I’m sad. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot the night before, and that troubles me a little. Like many other people my age I’ve sat around singing “We Shall Overcome.” I’m in favor of integration, but, truth be told, I haven’t done much about civil rights except be sentimental, so I am having an appropriately sentimental moment as I walk along Maple Street toward the university. Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights are a long way off.

Yes, I am walking west from my little apartment, carrying my yellow, college-ruled notebook and a copy of The Form and Theory of Poetry by Paul Fussell.

I think I’m going to be a poet, but the world has other plans.

Ah yes, 1968: that Tilt-A-Whirl of a year is stopping to pick me up.

Oh I almost forgot: the Big Mac was introduced nationwide in 1968. America was at war, and it was getting fatter, too.