The Ten Spot: Charles Rouse

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“Two Years at Occidental College in the Late Sixties.” This is a two year slice of my memoirs. I joined the Air Force after high school and attended the University of Hawaii in an Air Force program at night. After a year at Citrus College in Los Angeles County, I attended Occidental College as a junior year transfer. Occidental is the college that Barack Obama attended for two years in the Eighties. My time at Occidental was very troubling for me and was contemporaneous with a serious breakdown in American society, a time of war, assassinations, civil disorder, the hippie movement, drugs, rock and roll, and attendant phenomena, negative and positive and all disturbing to the national psyche. This is my story of that time. 

Yes, there are a couple of things. One, this book, “Two Years,” is autobiographical. As far as I have the ability to do so, to recall and relate, this is a true story. There was, believe me in this, no reason to embellish and I did not embellish. As far as I am capable, this is the story. I tried to provide a national time line along with my college time, but I didn’t provide my own time line of the news, I quote news stories of the day. Even for those of us who lived through those times, they were almost unbelievable. We all remembered the Kennedy assassination. In the Spring of 1968, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both murdered several weeks apart. After the King murder, the cities exploded with violence and fire. There was a machine gun nest on the steps of the capitol building in Washington DC to protect the capitol while the downtown area was burning. There were at one point half a million American troops in Vietnam, many or most of them draftees. 

Do you believe in a deity? 

In other words, do I believe in God? Yes. I’m a Christian. I’m Episcopalian and have for many years been involved in the life of my Church. I always say that I came to Christianity from the East, that is I had a teenage interest in Buddhism and Zen, especially Beat Zen, from the beatnik writers. I studied that and Taoism and Hinduism and ended up with the religion of my childhood, Christianity, albeit a studied and well read Christianity, the Episcopal Church. I was an agnostic for the years of my youth, I could never talk myself into atheism, and, influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, and the influence of people close to me, I found a spiritual home with the Episcopal Church. 

Well, actually, my book is a slice of my memoirs. “Single most powerful challenge,” is a fancy way of asking “What’s the hardest part of writing a novel, or a memoir?” The hardest part of writing a memoir is facing up to one’s life. I suspect that isn’t easy for anyone who has the intent to being honest about it. It was very difficult for me. Sometimes I would write for an hour or a bit more, and be exhausted, wrung out from reliving some of those events. The hardest part about writing is looking at a human life that you had no choice but to live. 

Books are containers. They can contain gold and they can contain oceans of vaporous boredom. It kind of depends on the book. The plays of Shakespeare have always been in books, from the beginning. The old wisdom of the human race is contained in a book, a series of books, really, that we call the Bible. Great poetry is in book form, physics textbooks, truly grand novels, useful nonfiction, biographies of interesting lives, owner’s manuals, and everything else. It depends on the book. 

Now there’s a loaded question if I ever heard one. The answer is, of course, and more than once. I think it started in the fourth grade. I still look back on her with fondness and hope she is doing well. My youth, my early and mid twenties was full of romances and affairs and broken hearts and turmoil and thunder. I eventually settled down with a woman my own age who had at least as much sense as I did and likely more sense than I did. We have been married for forty one years and have two adult children and an adopted son. Some of the aforementioned turmoil and thunder are recorded in my book, “Two Years…”

I’ve lived a long time and I don’t think I would like to be limited to one. My wife when we were married. She was a beautiful bride. Dawn over the Air Force base in Hawaii. Hawaiian sunsets are multicolored, but Hawaiian dawns are gold. Certain surfing spots in Hawaii. Certain art works in Europe. Scenes from nature, mountains, the sky. A beautiful sailboat in full sail and with a good wind. Pretty women. 

Will you take a shot if the chance of failure and success is 50-50? 

Oh yes. Always have. I’ve tried with sketchier odds than that. 

This is a bit deceptive. The implication is that you could say something that would have a positive influence on the six year old you. I’m not sure that’s a practical proposition. Maybe it is. I would tend to be more practical. The little boy is probably not going to be able to absorb any adult wisdom and I’m not sure that he should. I think I would tell him to wash his hands when his parents asked and use soap and warm water. I might tell him to make sure to go to the bathroom before he goes out to play so that he can stay out there for a while and won’t have to worry about wet pants. 

I’ve talked about this with my wife. We both decided that we didn’t have a bucket list, a so called bucket list, a list of those things that you want to do before you “kick the bucket,” in other words, before you die. Whenever possible, we have always done what we strongly wanted to do, within reason of course. We travelled. If there is something we want to do, we do it, and if we can’t we don’t worry about it too much. Eventually the world ends for each individual. If I have regrets, they aren’t that I didn’t really live, because I really did live. I still do.