I happened to be at an afternoon performance under the tent on July 20, 1969, when the conductor suddenly halted the orchestra in mid-flight, turned to the audience, and shouted in a joyful voice, “I’ve just been informed that the Americans have landed on the moon!” Then he turned to the orchestra and whipped it into the Star-Spangled Banner.
Two cowboys in a Ford Ranchero pickup truck stop and tell me I can ride thirty miles to Missoula in the truck’s back bed. There have been no cars for nearly an hour. I think for a nanosecond. Then I take the ride.
The elderly woman greeted everyone as though she knew them and gave each a bright smile.
My intention had been to attend a writing retreat, but I suddenly had the feeling that I was actually there to attend a labyrinth retreat.
It was the fall of 1970, and we were freshmen in high school, that tender, socially feverish age when your friendships are everything and time stands still around every relationship.
Thomas Stribling won the Pulitzer Prize for a trilogy he wrote about Florence, Alabama. But when I was growing up in the 1960s, no one in Florence spoke of Stribling anymore.
