Chance meeting awakens old memories
April 25, 2008
We don’t like to talk about the old days, we ex-teenaged activists. We don’t discuss how we stood in front of hospitals and clinics with our signs. We don’t recall the bitter cold, the blazing heat, the uncomfortable passersby, their quickened steps. We don’t discuss the adults who ran the movement into anguished defeat. We don’t talk about the bicycle locks, the arrests, the holding tanks, the prison sentences. And we don’t talk about the Other Side, the victorious rent-a-mob who gathered across the street from us in the cold or heat, furious when we tried to outlast them in extreme weather. We had hymn sheets, and they had the chants that burned themselves into our teenage souls.