On February 19, 1968 I turned 6.

Our family, Sol, Louise, me and Jimmy,3, lived in a red brick Georgian house at 6643 N. Kilpatrick in Lincolnwood, IL.

My father was 35. He worked in marketing for Miracle White, a detergent company with offices on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago. 

My mom was stay-at-home, 34 years old.

A year earlier, on a trip to South Haven, my parents had talked, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and came to the tearful realization that Jimmy was fundamentally retarded and would not progress. They had finally come to this conclusion, no longer denying the reality. Now, the tragedy was spoken of, out loud: their boy was irrevocably damaged.

Back then there was no institutional structure of supporting a child who looked normal but had a defective brain. 

In 1968, in suburban Chicago, you were somewhat on your own with your own (whisper it) handicapped kid. Tea and sympathy, but not too much sympathy.

Judy A., a lady with a kid around Jimmy’s age, told my mom, “Don’t bring Jimmy here. Your kid is weird.”

There was shame, embarrassment and grief. 

Grandpa Harry told my mother and father to “just get rid of him. Put him in a facility.”

They took Jimmy around to doctors, and to a preeminent woman, Dr. Johanna Tabin, a psychologist who lived in a big house off Sheridan Road and who had studied under Sigmund Freud’s daughter. She told my parents that Jimmy would get better. She theorized that his withdrawing from interaction with people, and his inability to form sentences, his autism, was caused by a lack of parental affection.

Hug him more and he will talk, she advised.

My parents had savings close to $10,000. And exhausted all of it in that year of going to specialists to try and find out how to cure Jimmy.

As our family was undergoing a crisis, the world around us was also in turmoil. 

In Vietnam, there was the disastrous Tet Offensive, a surprise attack by North Vietnam that caused the American public back home to turn against the war. And the decision by LBJ not to seek the presidency again.

On April 4^th, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Widespread rioting in major cities followed, including Chicago.

On June 5^th, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the most likely candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, was killed in Los Angeles.

There was a calamitous Democratic Party convention in Chicago that summer, with protests, riots, police violence, and the breakdown of law and order. 

After the convention demonstrations ended, we took our ‘66 Pontiac Catalina down there to tour. We rode past the boarded-up stores, along the littered streets, days after the mayhem and media rode out of town.

On television, in the movies, in music, the airwaves and the images were shockingly violent. Women in miniskirts, barefooted, in denim, long haired and hallucinating on the streets. Dogs and guns and badges battering out-of-control hippies. 

America, love it or leave it.

Looking homeward to America’s example, protesters from Paris to Prague, were overturning governments. The devil was in control.

Rosemary’s Baby opened on June 12, 1968.

My mother never watched that movie. The story of a defective baby, Satan’s child, was too close to her truth.

I wonder now, how could so much have gone so wrong in only twelve months? 

2020 asks 1968, “Why were you so fucked up?” 

1968 answers sarcastically. “You have Trump and Covid and George Floyd. And you think we were fucked up?”

Alone, here, now, at my computer, only 58, I conjure up events from memory, placing them into words, and paragraphs, fondly looking back in horror at the mess of lives made messier by events beyond one’s control, and some small things within our control. 

Just as today I cannot stop the pandemic. I can only distance, and wash hands, and wear a mask and wait it out. 2020 is almost over.

Sometime, in the summer of 1968, my father went to visit a neighbor, Eve Berger, in her home. Eve lived in a bi-level house where the basement windows also looked out onto the street, a brick overhang hung over the lower level. 

My Dad saw Eve down there, in her laundry room, and he waved to her. He bent down to smile and hit his head on the top of the overhang and had an epileptic seizure. For the rest of his life, he had epilepsy, and took medications, with recurring episodes, often behind the steering wheel. He died, in 2009, of a strange, rare cerebral affliction called Multi System Atrophy.

Growing up I never knew he had epilepsy. It was a secret. When I found out, by accident, at 16, I was told I was too sensitive a child to know the truth. My condition precluded knowledge of his condition.

Sometime, that summer of 1968, I went to play at Eve’s house with my brother Jimmy and her kids, Adam and Lesley. We were roughhousing and I pushed Jimmy off the top of a bunk bed and he fell on the floor.

Louise flew into a rage when she heard about the incident with Jimmy. She attacked me with accusations, “Just tell me! Did he hit his head on the floor! Did he! Did your brother hit his head! Why did you push him!”

Husband with epilepsy, retarded child. 

1968.

She lost it. She said she would kill herself. She took the car keys and got into the Pontiac Catalina, and drove fast, up and down Kilpatrick, 40 or 50 MPH, the windows open, her black hair blowing in the wind, looking at 6-year-old me, on the front lawn, as she threatened to crash the car to punish me for pushing my brother off the bed. Her episode of terror, speeding up the street, attempting suicide, taunting me for misbehaving, was one of the most terrifying of my childhood. 

That same summer, my mother’s older sister, Aunt Millie, who lived in Glencoe, took her four children to the beach to cool off in Lake Michigan. As she was laying on a blanket, a gust of wind blew an umbrella off a lifeguard stand and stabbed her right between her eyes. She was rushed to the hospital and went into a coma.  

For five days her life hung in the balance, Louise cried, “I’m going to lose my sister!” Yet days passed, and Millie awoke from her coma, smiled, and she eventually survived and lives today, at 96.

That summer was hot. There was no air conditioning. The windows were open. The mosquitos were out. The Sealtest chocolate ice cream was melting in the bowl. Samantha Stephens was singing the Iffin’ Song. The soldiers were fighting in the jungle. The women smoked, and used hairspray and were spiffy in yellow, red, green and pink. 

They even dressed cheerfully for Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train.

And brave were those who believed everything true they saw on television, a living color land of witches and genies, cowboys and newscasters.

Bubby, mom’s mom, had no television. She lived in West Rogers Park and listened to WBBM news radio, 780AM. She heard that her supermarket on Devon, The National, had exploded. 32 people were injured, 2 workers were dead. She called to tell mom. 

But it wasn’t the grocery store. It was National Tool and Die, a factory, on Touhy, in east Lincolnwood.

My mother took me and Jimmy, right away, in the car, unbelted, windows down, to see the aftermath of the explosion at the tool and die factory on Touhy, where they were also selling the latest edition of the Chicago Tribune. The building was in ruins, there were ambulances and police cars and fire trucks.

What the hell were we doing there? What mom brings her two young boys to see the aftermath of a deadly industrial accident? 

Sometime, also in 1968, a pilot husband and his wife, she prematurely gray, and their three teen boys, moved next door to us into a tiny English cottage house, two bedrooms, too small. Immediately they constructed a box addition in back out of the old porch to create a den and master bedroom. Why not buy a bigger house? Spend an extra $5,000 or move to Deerfield? 

The woman introduced herself to my mother. As they smoked cigarettes outside, getting acquainted, she told my mom, “I fucking hate my husband.”

And, improbably, that man would become my mother’s best friend, and her lover, and he would become the father of my youngest brother, born in 1971.

But I wouldn’t know the truth of it until 2019, when that brother of mine took a DNA test and told me we had two different fathers.

That was in November 2019.

2020 came right after. 

And as the cliché goes, so here we are.

Again. 

Babies inside history’s womb.