Fifty years, half a century, sounds so long ago it couldn’t possibly have any direct connection to me. And then I came across some old slides of mine in the attic and with the click of a projector, I was transported back to the summer of 1970 on Block Island.
The island made such an indelible mark upon me as a child I sometimes feel like it was imprinted in my brain. As I look back, I picture myself in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” a poem that is a paean to his youth and the powerful and lasting impact a place had on him in his childhood when… “Time let me play and be, Golden in the mercy of his means”.
For me, the late 50s, 60s and early 1970s are the quintessence of my island experience. I truly was “green and carefree.” My responsibilities were chores at home and, later, summer jobs, but neither intruded on my feeling that all the island was wild and free, and so was I.
Of course, I was not raising a family or commuting back and forth to the mainland every week like my father. I also wasn’t trying to make