Read Online Looking Back by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online Page A

men’s magazine advice columns read, one sentence at a time, from quick, nervous perusal in the drugstore. By seventh grade, the make-out parties had begun, and my ribaldry wasn’t funny any more because it ridiculed a world more and more kids were entering, while I remained outside.

M ORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE , I enjoy an experience that lets me like, really like, people. That’s not so simple for me, quick to find fault and suspicious, when I don’t find it, of over-goodness. It’s not that I don’t feel affection for a good many people, but blanket love, the kind Miss America contestants always swear to (“I love tennis and horseback riding and people …”) has never come readily to me. That’s what I liked about Pete Seeger—he brought out my most tolerant side. By all sorts of short-cut devices (a specially joyful banjo-picking style, blue lights, and certain combinations of notes —there must be a formula—that never fail to make me want to cry with love), somehow he always made me feel generous-spirited. It never worked on records, and two hours after hearing him, the desire to run away and join the Peace Corps or send my money to India would have worn off. But in the concert hall it worked. For once I didn’t care about standing out—I reveled in assimilation. Boundaries (me and them) disappeared. It was us, the audience—we were a single body. Pete Seeger didn’t sing or play all that well. Often he just strummed his guitar. Fancy picking wouldn’t have seemed right for his gritty dust-bowl singing, his drab shirts and baggy pants that looked as if he’d spent the day farming. His Adam’s apple was more memorable than his nose or his mouth—it throbbed, and seemed to be the heart of him. Resonant, mellow notes wouldn’t have been right for that thin neck, stretched forward and turned toward the ceiling in a way that always made me think of a crowing rooster. His songs were not exactly distinguished either—rarely beautiful or sweet-sounding, anyway. They were simple lines you could sing along with and whistle later to yourself on the way home. Pete Seeger talked a lot during concerts. That was part of what you paid to get, the long, low-key introductions that explained what he was going to sing, or who wrote it. Not funny, Las Vegas-type jokes, these were more like bedtime stories, ramblings, and you were never quite sure when they were finished because they didn’t have what you could call punch lines, or even endings.
    But because nothing was so exquisitely beautiful you didn’t dare touch it, it was fine to cough or sneeze during songs, if you needed to, or hum along, or clap in time, or sing as loud and off-key as you wanted. Pete Seeger taught us harmony parts and led sopranos, altos, tenors and bass all at once, switching melody lines from rooster-falsetto—with the neck stretched like a licorice whip—to low, low bass notes, losing the tune sometimes. He would cue us with each line just before we sang it, walking around the stage or putting his foot on a chair and stamping hard, turning red in the face and looking really happy, making us feel that we were a special audience, able still, after all these performances, to stir him on the final chorus of “Michael—Row the Boat Ashore.” Then there was “Guantanamera,” whose preface-story we all knew so well that he had only to say the first words for us to break into applause.
    We sang “We Shall Overcome” and dedicated it to the civil rights workers who died in Mississippi, and once (I heard him often) he asked us all to take each other’s hands so we formed a single chain. We sang “This Land Is Your Land,” and I felt more patriotic than “America the Beautiful” at basketball games ever made me feel. We applauded ourselves at the end, and stood up, wishing there was something more we could do than give a standing ovation. Right then, with “… this land is made for you and me” still fresh and swirling, not yet