William Marvel: Snapshots of America

Memory can be a sore subject in my family, because my wife’s is so bad while mine is better than I would sometimes prefer. Like any self-respecting Irishman, I never forget a favor or a grudge, but I also remember a lot of unpleasant things, such as inadvertent social blunders long forgotten by everyone else. Both good and bad recollections linger as black-and-white snapshots, and many of them went with me on a recent trip, or came back to me along the way.

After I graduated from Kennett High School in 1967, I embarked on three separate hitchhiking trips up and down the East Coast. Twice I traveled alone, and at the end of that summer two friends accompanied me. The solo trips were both devoted to touring Civil War battlefields, which I had hungered to see since the first grade, and I even managed to bend the third trip to that purpose despite resistance within the party. My companions were more interested in the exaggerated delights and imagined romance of the beaches in South Florida.