At Thirteen

Below is a photo from almost 40 years ago, showing me at age 13. It was 1969, two years after the 'Summer of Love', and one year before National Guardsmen shot into a crowd of student protesters at Kent State, hitting 13 and killing 4. The Vietnam War was raging, and was being served along with dinner, on television screens across the US.

The photo was taken by my best friend at the time, a boy named Dougal. The two of us had just gotten kicked out of the boarding school we'd been at for 3 years, as I discussed in this earlier post. While the school did graduate us from 8th grade, they didn't want us there during the last couple of weeks of the school year, as we'd been judged to be bad influences on the other children. In the photo below I'm sitting on an old couch that's been tossed out somewhere on the campus of Princeton University.

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