Waiting for Hank Aaron: Reflecting on 1968 Fifty Years Later

I waited, listening to AM radio, for Hank Aaron to hit a home run. We were a baseball family–Minnesota Twins’ fans–and “Hammering” Hank was tantalizingly close to being the first Atlanta Brave to hit 500 homers. In July 1968 that made us all Braves’ fans, holding our breath. While we waited that summer, my best friend and I pinned blankets and bedsheets over line strung low in her backyard, creating a suburban Bedouin tent. The shade was perfect for reading old National Geographic magazines, to study its maps. I resolved to be an explorer. We whispered about boys. I was ten, had my place in the world and could predict the future. I had not yet begun to pay attention to the boys Walter Cronkite tallied every evening on CBS news over the whomp of helicopter blades. I did not grasp that Hank Aaron could make your heart fly around the bases and a few days later, the bullet from a soldier’s gun could pierce your cousin’s chest and fly eight thousand miles from Vietnam to St. Paul to break that same heart.

Fifty years later, I sit in an airport lounge thinking back on a year as tumultuous and important as 1968. Civil rights remain beset by clueless bigotry. Bullets blasted through sixty three schoolchildren this year and broke hearts from coast to coast. Astronomers discovered one hundred sixty two new planets, spinning my imagination through an expanded universe. NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars and for the first time, we listened to the low, moaning wind of the red planet. In the intervening years since that summer under our backyard tent, my old friend raised a family of boys in rural Minnesota. I lived in thirty one places and in my own way, explored the world laid out in those old National Geographics, from climbing the ancient, shallow stone steps of Teotihuacán to creating a cairn of unearthed bones on Cambodia’s Killing Fields. I flew Vietnam Airlines over the Mekong delta with my cousin on my mind and touched down in a captivating landscape. A generation has passed on: my baseball-loving grandfather listened to his last game over radio waves in the kitchen, my cousin Bruce’s mom is an elderly widow, surrounded by her grandchildren, and my friend’s dad cracked a joke before passing away last month. Hearts have broken and mended and broken again. I still study maps.

Life reset in 1968 because a young man pulled a trigger in a jungle, making a telephone ring in our kitchen. The ground beneath my feet went to quicksand, vanishing every trace of certainty. Shifting and tectonic, history tore off in body-sized chunks. Cronkite toured Vietnam. I listened each night for his tally and searched maps for clues I would not understand for years. American soldiers played baseball in Danang while they waited for war. Hank Aaron rounded for home. Explorers aboard Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve, read Genesis on our televisions and healed hearts with a blue and white earthrise.