Miss L assigned a writing project to our class. The project would be in lieu of a midterm exam and would count as 80% of our semester grade. Nearly every one of the students was ecstatic about there being no big midterm exam. But that glee quickly faded when we learned what our teacher had in mind.

The assignment project was to keep a journal of our experiences as high school students for the entire semester. Immediately the boys - myself included - went into grumble mode, complaining that we could hardly be expected to keep diaries like a girl. Several females in class began to giggle. Sure, why shouldn’t they giggle? This assignment was a piece of cake if you were a girl; most of them probably already kept diaries and took pleasure in recording their daily thoughts and emotions. To us guys, the whole idea was foreign and completely absurd. Absurd or not, we were stuck with this writing assignment and took refuge only in the fact that it was still preferable to an exam.

The day she assigned the writing project to our class, I’m sure Miss Langilier had no way of knowing the lasting impact it would have upon my life or the baleful kinship she was creating. Indeed, the mark Miss L left upon me has proven indelible and everlasting.

While I don’t recall whatever became of that original journal-keeping effort or what grade it earned, long after the semester’s assignment was completed, for some intangible reason, I continued writing on my own. Not a day-by-day diary by any means, but irregular entries that pondered and recorded events . . . the compilation of which began to chronicle the life and times of an entire generation.

And this is what ultimately brought two members of that generation - Suzanne and I - together. But I suppose the best way to begin is at the beginning - back at a time when the social upheaval of the 1960s was in its infancy, its cry barely audible at my small home town in Illinois; back when an entire generation was just beginning to come of age, venturing forth into a world that would soon become virtually unrecognizable; a generation that would move through time, changing history like some vast tidal wave by their sheer numbers; a generation on the move, never intending to settle for the life laid out for them by their predecessors.

There is where my story begins . . .1965.