All through the parade, there were people with little paint cans and brushes busily painting lines up the avenue. Green lines, purple lines, even white lines. One well-dressed man was painting a thin red line in the middle of the marchers. I thought he was a Communist until he painted past me and I heard him singing, “God save our gracious queen…” as he walked backward working away with the brush. When his paint ran out, he joined a bunch from Local 802 of the Musicians Union who had come along holding up signs and yelling, “Abolish Folk Songs! Save Tin Pan Alley!”
It was the best parade I ever saw. I watched it until the Army paratroops who’d landed in Central Park came down and began herding us to the Special Rehabilitation Centers they’d set up.
And then, damn it, it was all over.
Afterword
I wrote this in the middle sixties when the world seemed filled with youngsters who smoked pot, dropped acid, and were generally willing to swallow anything that looked as if it might have come from a back-alley pharmacy.
Two of them, college students, who came to our home for dinner late in that year were astonished to discover that Greenwich Villagers like the pair of us had never so much as turned on in our entire lives. “Don’t you want your consciousness expanded?” one of them asked my wife.
“No,” Fruma replied. “If anything, I want it contracted.”
And there it is—the trouble I have. The woman I’m married to. I didn’t want to include this story in my final collection. It certainly isn’t science fiction, I feel, not really. But Fruma said, “It’s a lovely story. Unappreciated.” (That’s an exact quote.)
So what could I do? I stuck it in. We’ve been married now for almost forty-four years, and I don’t know any other way to handle my problems with her.
Written 1966 / Published 1967