tin soldiers and nixon coming

My first political memory is all wrong.

It's Kent State, but not the massacre that happened 37 years ago today. No way could it be that. I was 6-and-a-half months old on May 4, 1970. I don't remember the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. I don't remember angry students burning the ROTC building or Gov. James Rhodes calling in the National Guard. But I remember Kent.

I remember driving out to Kent, mid-70's, about 45 minutes from my house through Ravenna, past the Ravenna Arsenal, where Ohio turns from flat to beautiful low rolling hills. We were going to visit my cousin and ice-skate, me on double blades in the rink. The wounds at Kent hadn't fully scabbed over, students were still hurt and pissed-off, and doubly so because all the talk that spring was about a new recreation center slated for construction on Blanket Hill above the commons - right over top of the ground where those kids were killed. As we drove through campus in the light blue, wood-panel Country Squire wagon everyone talked how it was dis-respectful to break that ground so soon. Other people were thinking it was time to move on. And, the sooner the better.

I got that four kids had been shot to death. I got that. But I didn't get the context so my mind filled in the blanks. I can still show the the picture it drew. Four students sitting on a blanket - Blanket Hill - having a picnic, bottle of wine. It's dark and out of nowhere a sniper comes by and picks them off. That's it. Funny. I can't figure out why I'd come up with that scene. I mean, I grew up eating dinner to the nightly news. I must have known Vietnam and protests and body counts and I don't remember any of that. I remember my first trip to Kent and my own vision of four kids killed drinking wine on a picnic blanket.

Kent State is HUGE in my memory. Near the top of every childhood fear. It goes Wicked Witch of the West and then Kent. The place still spooks me. Wicked was all the therapy I needed to finally find compassion for Elphaba and let go of that witch. Somewhere inside I knew that was just a story, too. Pretend. But Kent, Kent State was for real.

Kent State was right next door. It was the sixth grade teacher who, in 1980, 10 years after the shootings, told us she was so thankful for having cut class that day. If she had been where she should have, she'd have been crossing the commons at noon. She'd have been crossing the fire.

Kent State was the bullet hole through a sculpture outside of Taylor Hall, the journalism building. It was a trip to campus 1988 to see The Alarm sing Spirit of '76 in a lecture hall. I went with my first "real" boyfriend, Mark. We walked the commons and he showed me that bullet hole and I came home with a black t-shirt with the outline of a flower sticking out from the barrel of a gun and the words "Flowers are better than bullets" Allison Krause, May 3, 1970, printed on the front. On the back it said "We will not forget."

Across a row of dorm windows "National Guard 4, Kent State 0." We we're both students at branch campus that spring. Both living at home. At 18 I would have followed Mark just about anywhere. Anywhere but Kent. In fall 1988 he went there and I went to Columbus.

Kent State is the Memorial dedication and annual candlelight vigil I covered for my student paper in 1990, 20-years after the shootings. Walking just behind one of the victims' family.

Kent State is the re-occurring backdrop for my dreams and nightmares, popping back up in the strangest of places. Still. It's me in a dream in college running trough the memorial, lost and looking for my mom. Dark. It's a dream I had a few days into my first pregnancy, Amelia. In that dream Scott and I are going to visit someone in the hospital. We're driving through Kent's campus. Across a row of dorm windows, in pink block letters: "It's a GIRL."

I know the context now. I know the images. I know that the tragedy is not just the kids who should be grandparents now, it's also the guardsmen - kids themselves. Earlier this week, finally, proof. It was not an accident. It was not one frightened, itchy trigger finger that sparked 67 shots in 13 seconds hitting 13 students, four of them fatally. It was a command.

This week the evidence. A reel-to-reel tape recorded out a dorm window caught the command "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"

We will not forget.