Starting a peculiar reign in Spain!

I CAME here back in September 1969 with my wife, son Joby and a crisp $5 bill

IT seems to be the trend lately to publish a book. I’ve been asked for mine quite often and now can warn you that it is a task well in progress. 

The text (as you’ve been reading) is completed. But, my preliminary stories were concerning an anthropologic metamorphosis as I grew into living here. That’s a difficult story to tell and gets more complicated if you want photos.

People shots I have in abundance but as you well know I haven’t yet begun to write about those characters that made Mojacar so exciting and vibrant. When, in fact, it shouldn’t have been anything other than a backwater hideout from Franco or a place to collect seagull crap. 

I came here back in September of 1969. I carried with me great treasures, my wife, son Joby and to my delight I had remaining in my wallet one crisp $5 bill. It was enough, it had to be. I was on the lam. 

America was tearing its heart out over Vietnam, national Gallop polls indicated that more than 65 per cent of the country didn’t want the war, yet both political parties did. Resolute thoughts of the actual worth of a representative democracy already so stratified yet that required such fundamental changes that I knew weren’t going to come easily, if not ever.

Naturally major life-changing decisions needed to be made, both drastic and almost unthinkable.

Much of the pain of my transition was alleviated by the fact that my mate was of Czech ancestry and like my parents hers were also first generation Americans. A ‘leaving’ pattern had already been laid down previously with firm personal resolve. 

The calamitous stateside circumstances and their predestined outcome were already anticipated by my brother Paul and the rest of Europe. In reclusion, I was surrounded by comforting friends. 

I had envisioned that if all went right we would be in self exile for six months to a year. If not, I had already anticipated buying myself one of those large sombreros I presumed Spanish people owned and wore, purchase a donkey and begin a new life form of existence.  

Those sophomoric thoughts were obviously the naivety of youth and inexperience confronting the real world. In the international papers everyday were rumors of peace, entire phrases of compromise and settlement. But, they never came to pass. Not for a long time or until the Vietcong showed their pure resolution of what the outcome was destined to become. 

It seems that all the youth in America already knew that, as did all the university professors. But, something as big and powerful as the government, our flag, land of our father’s – didn’t.

The American Industrial complex continued to reap the benefits from explosives that slowly converted dense jungle into a parking lot. 

For the money spent concerning that war all of South Vietnam could have been asphalted one metre deep making it a perfect landing site for alien aircraft rather than using the distant Nasca lines in Peru.