Fifty Years On...

Fifty years on.

A half-century ago, I was a six-year-old boy who lived in a large apartment in Bogota with my mom and two live-in maids (Lily and Olimpia). I was about to start first grade at Colegio El Nogal, a private Catholic school run by Nidia de Hakim, an acquaintance of my grandparents and mother. I don't remember much about the school now; fifty years on, I only have vague fragments of memories; the campus was a remodeled mansion with many rooms and long dark hallways...the pencil sharpener was in a closet outside one of the rows of classrooms, and we had two meals on school grounds during the school day: onces (which was a mid-morning snack), and lunch (around one in the afternoon). I also remember that we wore uniforms to school; blue-black-and-white plaid shorts, knee-high blue socks, blue-white wingtip shoes, white dress shirts, and blue sweaters with the school's monogram (EN)) in white letters on the upper left of the chest area. School days began at 9 AM and ended at 4 PM. A school van (we called it la buseta) picked us up in the morning and dropped us off at home in the afternoon.

Fifty years on, I don't remember if I had close friends in school. I probably had a few, but I don't recollect hanging out with anyone besides cousins and family acquaintances outside of school. I don't recall being either well-loved or hated by my Colombian classmates; then again, I've lived in the United States pretty much continuously since 1972, so whatever memories I have of those days are pretty much buried deep in my subconscious.

Fifty years on, I had yet to become reacquainted with my older half-sister Vicky. In March of 1969, she was finishing her senior year at a Catholic boarding school in Parkersburg, West Virginia. I knew I had a sibling because Mom made sure I was aware of her, although she was careful to accentuate the positive aspects of Vicky's personality and didn't delve into the hows and whys of her having to go to school so far removed from the rest of the family. All I knew about Vicky is that she was almost 13 years older, that her dad was my mom's first husband and had died when my sister was nine or so, and that she'd be living with us starting that summer of 1969. I had no clue that half a century later we would be estranged from each other and living hundreds of miles apart after our mom's death.

Fifty years on, I have dim memories of being excited about the Apollo manned space program. I remember watching news reports of the Apollo 8 lunar orbital flight (man's first visit to the Moon), but almost all my true Spanish-language memories of seeing the American space missions from a city 1506 miles from my home town of Miami have been long overwritten by years and years of watching American documentaries and dramatizations about the NASA missions. Even so, I do remember being aware around this time in 1969 that los astronautas gringos were on a mission (Apollo 9) testing some of the equipment for the planned Apollo 11 mission, scheduled for later that summer.

Fifty years on, I remember that my maternal grandparents and both of my mom's siblings, as well as all of my cousins on her side of the family, were still alive.

Half a century ago, also, I was not yet a Star Trek fan; it was not introduced to Colombia till it ended its NBC run in the early summer of  '69. No one took me to the movies to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars was not even a gleam in George Lucas's eye.

In 1969, though, I was already a World War II buff. I learned to read at an early age (family lore said I was already reading newspapers when my dad was still alive in '65, but I take that with a grain of salt), and I remember reading the Spanish version of The Longest Day in the Colombian edition of Reader's Digest at age six.

I also knew, in 1969, that the U.S. was at war in Vietnam, but I was totally clueless about how or why.  I only knew that many of my cousins, who were in their 20s and 30s then, were angry about the American involvement in Southeast Asia. I, being six at the time, didn't have the smarts or maturity to discuss the topic with any of them, so I remained clueless about the war till I was older and living once again in South Florida.

Fifty years on, I sometimes wish I had been a bit older then, or that I had more of a photographic record of life in 1969.