For the next few days I will be posting family photos. Tomorrow is my sister's birthday and Sunday is my father's. Mine is Tuesday. A few years ago my father, sister, and I toyed around with the idea of naming the 18th as my mother's celebration day, but we never came up with a good name for it. If we brought all the birthdays together in a row, I could cover them in one trip to Florida, but that might not have been the primary  reason.

My father was a musician and a prolific song writer, as well as being a minister. In the early seventies he started writing songs on the autoharp, mostly setting scripture to music. Soon after that, my sister became an activist, organizing demonstrations against the war. Both my sister and father saw these activities as extensions of their gospel ministries. I was in high school, not doing very well as a student, trying to cope with the knowledge that I had to register for the draft, and unable to come up with a "realistic" plan for a livelihood in America. I wanted to be a cartoonist. I was growing up absurd, as the book said. I want to write about this period from 1969 to 1974,  and how cultural change was affecting us. And so on.