THEY CAME AND WENT: 1957 TO 1977 SWIFTER THAN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE Part 1: I could not write a book, but I could write an essay or a prose-poem, about seven people with whom I was involved in varying degrees of friendship and intimacy from the late Fifties until the late Seventies: Nancy Campbell, Douglas Martin, Loretta Francis, Elizabeth Rochester, Jameson Bond, Judith Gower, and Christine Armstrong. It was in the early years of this same period, say 1957 to 1965, that the first four of these individuals influenced my social and spiritual, my psychological and intellectual development. Jameson Bond came onto the scene in 1965 and was gone by 1968. Judith Gower became my friend in 1965, my wife in 1967 and, in the early Seventies, we separated and divorced. Christine entered my life in 1974; we were married in 1975 and, in 1977, she gave birth to my only son, my only child. These seven individuals were not a cohesive group; indeed, they each played highly varied, highly idiosyncratic, roles in my development and my life-narrative beginning in 1957, my first year of adolescence, and ending in 1977, the year of the birth of my son, as I say, in my second marriage. The world that I entered in the mid-to-late Fifties, years of my adolescence when I joined the Baha'i Faith, was a world, a spiritual territory, whose lands I would travel-in until my old-age and death whenever that might be. Part 2: It is not my intention to provide mini-biographies of those 7 people who crossed my path and fertilized the many boughs and branches, stems and off-shoots, flowers and leaves that surrounded the track and trail that led me from my teens into the last decade of my young adulthood, my life and my years from the age of 13 to 33. Nor is it my intention to place these significant others, as they say in psychology, in the context of a celebration of myself and my career, from high school to my position as a lecturer at what is now the University of Ballarat, and my community responsibilities as the secretary of the local Baha'i community in that old gold-mining town. In 1999 I retired from a 50 year student-and-employment life, 1949 to 1999, and slowly reinvented myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist, editor and researcher, reader and scholar. Some of what I write here will already be familiar to readers of my autobiographical writings. I am not the skilful anecdotist, with a sharp eye for social conduct and a good sense of timing that are the qualities of a successful novelist. When I am telling readers something I have told them before, though, I try to make the account freshened by embellishments of detail and enhancements of tone, by new feelings about the old material that is my life. At the same time, my frequent rehearsal of personal encounters, of public and private discussions and debates, raises the question of just what it is that I find so compelling and so satisfying about my own career and its achievements, my experience and life-story. There are many things about my life experiences which puzzle me in all sorts of ways. My autobiographical, memoiristic, tendency has been part of my literary life now for at least 30 years. Part 3: Unlike some individuals, I never saw myself as a person of some special stature or talent. Norman Podhoretz, for example, saw himself a marked man since his early teens. He was the brightest boy in one of the impoverished, largely Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, of Brooklyn. He was also acknowledged by teachers, parents and fellow students as the best and the brightest, the one for whom there were great expectations in a neighborhood where expectations of any kind were in short supply.1 Like Podhoretz I was the only son of hard-working, supportive, parents. Like Podhoretz I was for several years, a star-pupil in the local high school. I was not as much of an academic star as Podhoretz, though, neither at high school nor in my teaching career, but I was, unlike Podhoretz, a star-athlete in the world of baseball in the little town where I grew-up. I was a baseball and academic-star as well as a simple and ordinary guy, without needing to compromise myself in any of these roles. Part 4: I could continue this comparison and contrast with Podhoretz who rose to a position of prominence among the New York literary intellectuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the years of my first Baha'i experience in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe. I did not hit any career or literary, any personal or psychological big-time until 1974 when I landed a job as a tutor at what is now the University of Tasmania. It was a 'little-big-time' in the scale of things, in the celebrity-scale so dominant now in our globalized society. I have no desire, as Podhoretz did, to insistently persuade my readers of my importance as a high-powered intellectual. Nor do I want to give the impression that I owe significant credit for whatever success was mine to home truths, truths embodied not in ideas or theories only, but in my own, always challenging social and personal, medical and sociological background. Podhoretz informs us that his ambition for greatness was not remotely a match for that of Norman Mailer, one of the several others in that New York circle of intellectuals in those late 1950s. My ambition was no match for that of Podhoretz. In the scale and index of ambitious people, mine was a moderate ambition and enthusiasm. Part 5: I have been guided in my ambition, and my career aspirations, by a dedication to those values that slowly developed by sensible and insensible degrees in my formative years from those Fifties to the Seventies. They included devotion to family, loyalty to ones own kind, marital fidelity, the validity of ones own experiences, an unembarrassed ambition to make it, and a loyalty, even a certain patriotic spiritual zeal, in defense of the Faith that had given me, not so much the opportunity to fulfil my ambitions, but to possess a centre and a meaning to my life. Like Podhoretz, the problem of vocation was an especially vexing one, until I decided that my ambition, unstated though it was until I decided to become a teacher among the Inuit, was to help further the Baha'i expansion and consolidation program in Canada's Arctic regions. I should thank, in closing, Richard Poirier's analysis1 written the very month I arrived in Tasmania to take an early retirement and a sea-change after half a century as a student and teacher, lecturer and adult educator, among a host of other roles and jobs beginning as far back as my childhood.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Richard Poirier, "A Review of Ex-Friends, a book by Norman Podhoretz, " in the London Review of Books, Vol. 21, No. 17, 2 September 1999. Swifter than the twinkling of an eye, they came, went, & became the object of my reflections for four decades. I would not want to relive all this, even if I knew then what I know now; the path of reincarnation holds not a dot or a comma of attraction as I head into the last decade of my late adulthood, and old- age, 80+.......if I last that long. I look forward, though, to the possibilities of meeting those several souls in the many Lands of Light, and the gentle gales of the Lord beyond this dark world.1 1 'Abdul-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, George Ronald, Oxford, 1970(192, p.116. PS. Norman B. Podhoretz (1930-) is an American neoconservative pundit & writer for Commentary magazine Ron Price 6/5/'14.
