1. Static

1.

I was six when Nixon resigned. We were pulled off the road by Canandaigua Lake in our avocado-green car. My parents fussed with the radio, twisting the chrome dial and stabbing at the preset buttons that looked like Chiclets gum—shiny, candy-colored, imprecise. The station came and went in waves of static, Walter Cronkite’s voice flickering in and out like a ghost in the machine. I didn’t know what resignation meant. But I knew something had happened. The car was quiet in a way cars aren’t with two adults and two kids inside—me, and my four-year-old brother in the backseat. It wasn’t silence—it was attention.

Later, my father would joke that I was his draft deferment. Born December ’67, just in time to keep him out of the war. “You saved me,” he’d say, not always kindly, not always unkindly. He didn’t graduate, but he took classes for years—history, music theory, geology, sociology—never enough to add up to a degree, just enough to stay out of the war. He wouldn’t have called himself a pacifist. Said he didn’t care. Said he was okay with violence, just not that violence. Against the war, but not for peace, exactly. It made no sense, but it made him.

Now, half a century later, I watch history loop back on itself like a snake choking on its own tail. Fascism isn’t creeping—it’s strutting. We’re in another moment, another pulled-over car, trying to tune in through the static to something true. We are in it, again. Living history. Again. And I think of my father’s half-declared apathy, my mother’s silence in that car, the way I knew something mattered before I understood what it was. That same feeling is back now. Bigger. Clearer.

This is a beginning.

Lind for chapter 2 is below.