Wintry Day

IT WAS WINTER then, and appropriately so. Teach-ins aren't a way of coming in out of the cold maybe.

And it was cold that day, so cold that the air was noisy and burned with excitement. Perhaps it was speaking of the teach-in; perhaps you only thought so, but you were excited and felt movement and a strange kind of vigor, uncharacteristic of most winters.

And the sounds of Phil Ochs were in your head and drove onward in a persistent fugue, calling to mind so many teach-ins, marches, gestures. "I ain't a marchin anymore"--"One more parade"--and you entered the Brattle; it was crowded, pulsing to some mystical rhythm, and the beautiful people were there, out of winter's woodwork for the afternoon's happening.

"If only we can have the revolution finished by June..." a well dressed man in a business suit was saying behind you, as you sat down in the only available space in the aisle.

You had to wonder at it all--a thousand teachins, marches, demonstrations before, when you were young, or younger. A generation had grown up on Vietnam protest. And here, was a carnival atmosphere. "One more parade."

THERE WAS no fear, no earnestness amid the hippies, teeny-boppers, Harvard students, everyone there to be taught-in, a derivative of sit-in, both mushroomed and transformed--into be-ins and a whole host of "ins."

And you were told things and told others, and laughed at the appropriate times, when the speaker had just cut into Johnson particularly well. Maybe you even led the laughter in an area if you were more knowledgeable than most, as you looked at the girls in tight pants and back to the speaker, whose voice was fading in and out as Phil Ochs came back. Or maybe tight pants eclipsed it all.

But there is a war going on, you thought, and everyone around you knew that the war was bad when they remembered it; so you thought, what is a teach-in, a be-in, a mill-in, a laugh-in when people are dying. And you remembered, and got just a little sick at your own smugness and aloofness and cursed yourself for looking at the tight pants when you should have been doing something, but what you wondered and wonder, and the revolutionary refrain from the man in the business suit played upon your mind.

So you went outside in the cold and dirty snow of the soot-soaked city. And you walked and felt uneasy and looked for a public toilet.