I was fourteen, lounging on my mother’s bed as she put away the ironing, when the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came over the clock radio on her nightstand. No words were exchanged, just as none had been over JFK, nor would there be in just two more months when Bobby would be shot as well. Trauma had visited our family only a decade earlier, and we no longer admitted it entry. Not the Kennedys, not King, not Vietnam, not the Manson murders, not Kent State. We didn’t talk about these things. We kept our emotions in jars, like fetuses in their arrested development.

My rubber seal cracked with Bobby Kennedy: I had gone to bed with my baby blue transistor tucked under my pillow. I prayed as hard as I ever could remember, and as the news sunk in, tears leaked into my ears and I wondered what was this adult world I was growing up to join?

I’ve never been an activist descending on Washington, but I have cared, deeply. I am older, sadder, and sometimes cynical. I don’t like this about myself. 

Tonight I wanted to experience the opposite of that. I wanted Hope. I wanted to see Dr. King’s message in a glowing beacon, pulsing into the world. 

I walked ten minutes in the bitter cold, clear air, from my house to the Howland Cultural Center on Main Street. An hour-long free concert was planned with hometown musicians and school kids. Donations for the local food pantry were accepted. Here was Dr. King’s legacy. Here was Hope, aged 9 thru 91.

Pete Seeger and the Rivertown Kids 

 my neighbors in Beacon, NY