Well, now, what a wavey thread this turned out to be.
I was brought up in the far North - I used to tell my kids without much exaggeration that "when I was your age, I could walk out the back door and go 500 miles in any direction without the threat of another human being." Family moved to Vancouver in the mid '60s, I dropped out of life about '66 and went to work as a camp cowboy on a couple of very large ranches here in BC - no humans there either, just cowboys, cattle, horses, and dogs. When I happened to come back into Vancouver in the summer of 1969, I was wearing a hat, boots and jeans, driving my pickup truck with the gun rack (ropes only in Canada). I drove down Fourth Avenue - for any of you who weren't able to be around Vancouver then, it was Canada's Haight-Ashbury. And I was knocked for a loop.
There were people all over the place wearing long cloaks, wizard hats, hair everywhere, colour all about, and the smell of burning herbs filled the air. And there was music on the streets, and beautiful girls, and hey, you know what? It beat the hell out of cow camp. So I stayed a little while. And when I made my way back to the range a couple of years later, I had hair to my shoulders, a 12-string guitar and a little something extra in my tobacco pouch.
Now I'm sort of a grown man, live mostly in Vancouver, work takes me travelling to bigger cities in the US and Europe a lot, but I write this from our country place in Ashcroft - not a sound here but the river, the occasional magpie, and crickets still in the September evenings. So I've got good footing in all those worlds. And I don't see much conflict between any of them. Bing - I've spent a fair amount of time in Montana, sister lives in Livingston, I'll try to get to see you sometime. I'm sure you know that Ian Tyson song about Charlie Russell "God put the stars over Judith Basin, God put the magic in young Charlie's hand"? Same stars here in Ashcroft, about three times as many people as Stanford, but still reasonably quiet.
My kids are grown - their schools were good (more than half the kids who enter Grade 1 in Vancouver have English as a second language - mostly they do just fine), their friends were good, they ran into the weed as well but survived so far. Seems to me that our generation did a lot of dumb things, a lot of good things, and left a hell of a lot of things still undone. Here's to all our children - may they pick it up where we left off, and may the world be a better place for them.