I Really Miss That American Glow

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http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-colin1104.artnov04,0,6891677.column?coll=hc_home_xpromo

I find I have a curious nostalgia these days for the America I grew up in.

Maybe that America was just an idea, but you can live in an idea as surely as you can live in a physical space.

I was an American kid living in a suburb in the early 1960s. My parents were rock-ribbed Goldwater Republicans. The United States was the best country on earth.

We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day, and when a space capsule went up, the teachers stopped class and hauled out a big black-and-white TV on a rolling cart, and we all watched and clapped. Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Wally Schirra. Rhymes with hurrah. Our fifth-grade teachers told us the Soviets let their capsules come down on land, instead of water, because they didn't care whether the cosmonauts inside lived or died. Bad Russians.

God, I miss that American glow. I can feel it right now, as surely as I can remember the sun gleaming across a snow fort I built with my friends on Pleasant Street in West Hartford or the wink of fireflies as we played hide-and-seek in a field on Wells Road. America was the best place on earth, from sea to shining sea, and we lived there.

What came next were years of dark moments. Assassinations, riots, the Vietnam War, Watergate. The last of these was especially hard for my Republican Dad. He watched the hearings on television, and Watergate became a big fat python, winding itself around his trust and constricting. He watched with his mouth half open, and from time to time he would say, as if to himself and heaven, "These people are evil."

And after that, he was never a Republican again.