In my last email about my return trip to Glasgow, Montana, I stated the following:
"I found the best way to frame my feelings about my return to Glasgow was most recently enunciated my that suddenly profound actor Matthew McConaughey and what has become a rather talked (and ridiculed) commercial. You can find the commercial at In response to this last comment, one of my college mates mentioned Sankofa as being the term most applicable to what I was describing. While I may be a student of African history, I had never heard of Sankofa so I looked it up at
"I found the best way to frame my feelings about my return to Glasgow was most recently enunciated my that suddenly profound actor Matthew McConaughey and what has become a rather talked (and ridiculed) commercial. You can find the commercial at In response to this last comment, one of my college mates mentioned Sankofa as being the term most applicable to what I was describing. While I may be a student of African history, I had never heard of Sankofa so I looked it up at
What struck me most about this concept was the associated proverb
"It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."
In the context of my return to Glasgow, that is largely what happened to me. Yes, there were fond remembrances of learning to play baseball for the first time at the Air Base baseball field and the summer when I caught 18 frogs at a nearby water filled ditch and put them all in an empty milk carton. There was also memories of enjoying school so much that I woke up early one morning and walked a mile to school in the bitter cold only to find out that I was an hour early. There was so much associated with Glasgow Air Force Base that I certainly enjoyed revisiting. Fondest memories were of the on-base Youth Center where I first learned how to play chess, the game of Risk, bumper pool and shuffleboard games and where, for the first time in 1964, I heard music from a band from England that was dominating all the record player time. It was a group called the Beatles and by the time I left Glasgow in the summer of 1964, I knew all the words to "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Yes, indeed those were transformative times for me... but in "going back" I had to reflect on whether those times were really good times. And sadly, the answer was "No".
You see, we arrived in Glasgow at the end of the summer of 1962 just in time to begin school. Soon afterwards, the base went on a military alert and became a very busy place with a steady stream of planes (the B-52s) flying in and out. In school, -- my nice new, integrated school -- a sudden emphasis was placed on learning how to duck and cover, not for protection from an earthquake as my California raised children have learned, but rather from the very real possibility of a nuclear attack. You see unbeknownst to me at the time, there was a crisis going on involving an island nation in the Caribbean which brought this country seemingly very close to nuclear war. Even with all the spectre of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Ebola, there is nothing quite as terrifying as the very real prospect of a full fledged nuclear war.
I was only eight when we arrived in Glasgow and was only nine in 1963. In those days, playing out in the field catching frogs was far more satisfying than being at home watching the news. Heck, you could not get me to watch the news when I was nine years old and there was sunlight. So I missed seeing what happened in Birmingham with the dogs mauling some black folks that looked like me and I missed hearing Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. But I do remember fully hearing the principal speak over the intercom one November day to inform the class that the President - that nice looking Kennedy man -- had been assassinated in Dallas. I remember watching my first televised news show that day and, in retrospect, my age of innocence seemed to forever disappear.
In my return to Glasgow and seeing the now weed invested baseball field where I once developed a taste for the game, it did not escape my attention that at the same time that I was learning how to catch a baseball and play first base (and learning so pitifully how hard it can be to hit a ball when you are afraid of it), in other fields elsewhere in this land people were literally laying down their lives in order to provide me with the rights and opportunities that I now enjoy.
So yes, returning to Glasgow brought back some fond memories of youth but it also brought into play some historical perspectives which made me realize that the Good Ol' Days are really the days of today -- the moments of the right now -- and that even these days will one day pale in comparison to the Good Ol' Days of tomorrow.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Peace.
