Leon Hale in 1968: "You lay on your stomach and studied a little early spring flower, and admired the colors in it and the perfume it produced. And you asked yourself questions about it: Why was it there? What made it come up?"
Elizabeth Conley/Staff photographerThis column was originally published in the Houston Post on March 15, 1968. While writing this column, Secretary of State Dean Rusk was undergoing intense grilling by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over whether the Johnson administration lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. The confrontation between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces led Congress to adopt the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which ultimately led to a dramatic increase in U.S. forces in South Vietnam. The showdown between Rusk and the some of the fiercest critics of the Vietnam War in Congress was broadcast on television.
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Do you ever have days when you wish you could reach up and crank back the calendar? And live for a little while, just as a breather, in a time that was better? And problems simpler?
When a man does that, people tend to snort at him and tell him he's a victim of the good-old-days disease.
Sure, but there were some good things about days long past. I don't see it hurts to think about them. It's not a matter of wanting to be younger; it's more a yearning for a life in which problems are not so confounded complex.
You take right now, at this minute -- I consider this a rotten day. It happens to be Tuesday, March 11, that I'm putting this down. Even the weather is bad. Here it is the middle of a spring month and the wind is blowing a nasty wet gale. And when I get up from this typewriter and go around here and there, I see people watching television; watching 17 U.S. senators throwing questions at the secretary of state; questions that may be the most important ones that could be asked about life on this earth, and there aren't any answers. Not really. No human being could answer them.
So you can't tell me there isn't comfort in remembering March days a long time ago when things were better.
I remember some real dandies.
March days when the wind blew, yes. But it had spring in it instead of winter and you already had your straw hat on. And it got blown off your head and there was something good about racing across a pasture after it. There was an uplifting of the spirit in feeling the force of a warm wind, whistling at your ears and pushing at your back.
There was freedom in those old March winds. There were problems, but they weren't yours and you didn't spend any time at them.
The only wonders and complexities, the only questions without answers, they had to do with nature and not human beings. Maybe that was it. You wondered why the wind blew so hard, but you didn't worry about it.
You tried to guess how high a cloud was, but it didn't matter whether you were near to right or not.
You lay on your stomach and studied a little early spring flower, and admired the colors in it and the perfume it produced. And you asked yourself questions about it: Why was it there? What made it come up? How did it color itself in that nice way? Would it ever be seen, in all its life, by any other person but you? And if it wasn't, then think of all the millions of flowers scattered over the earth that might grow and bloom and nobody would ever see them who thought they had any beauty. So why was that?
But you didn't puzzle long, because you could answer all the questions by saying, well, it's just one of the Lord's marvels. And a good thing about believing in God's secrets was that you could just accept them and not have to figure them out. Because you knew that whatever the reasons behind such mysteries were, they were good ones.
But that was a long time ago, when you were a child, and didn't yet dream that human beings could complicate the world so. Still, it's a nice thing to go back just for a little while, and remember when answers to questions came easy.
