‘For Emily 

Where Ever I May Find Her’ 

Pressed in organdy

Clothed in crinoline of smoky 

     burgundy

Softer than the rain

I wandered empty streets

Down past the shop displays

I heard cathedral bells

Tripping down the alley ways

As I walked on

And when you ran to me

Your cheeks flushed with the      night

We walked on frosted fields

Of juniper and lamplight

I held your hand

And when I awoke and felt     

you warm and near

I kissed your honey hair with 

my grateful tears

Oh, I love you, girl

Oh, I love you

    There was great romance in the decade of the 1960s. It was a terrible decade. The Cold War was in full fury. Then political assassinations were in full force as political surrogate war. There was the Kennedy Assasination, the Malcolm X assination, the Martin Luther King Jr. Assasination, the Bobby Kennedy assasination, there was the Vietnam War, there was the rise of mind-control cults that stemmed from Korean War experiences of the previous decade that produced seminal works like the Manchurian Candidate (1962). That work by Richard Condon featured the role of Pavlovian conditioning. It proved unpersuasive for brainwashing, however, as such methods require the constant reinforcement that only cults can provide.

But there was no holding back that decade still. There was MLK’s March on Washington and his famous I Have a Dream speech in August 1963, a speech also attended by eight brave members of the pioneering Civil Rights organization The gay and lesbian Mattachine Society that included Frank Kameny and Lilli Vincenz.

The decade marked an enormous step forward for that movement and the June 1969 Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village that launched that modern movement. 

Above all, however, the decade was marked by the epoch changing music of Simon and Garfunkel. At 81 Simon will be in concert in Northern Virginia at Wolf Trap next month.

In the summer of 1968, in my second summer as a graduate theology seminarian at the Garrett Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, I was on a cross-country tour with a best friend at the time. I will never forget waking up on the side of the road on a morning in August 1968 with that beautiful haunting song being sung so sweetly by Art Garfunkel playing on the radio. I’ve often remarked over the years since that for anyone who has ever been in love in life, truly in love, this has to be their favorite song of all time.