Summers of Love

By Glenn W. Smith
Senior Fellow, Rockridge Institute

On a dark Texas highway in November 1967, a fourteen-year-old boy rides beside his father in an old Chevy pickup. The radio's off; there's a mist on the road through which the headlamps cut tunnels of light. The boy and his father are headed south and west, to the border near Eagle Pass. They'll hunt deer the old way: walking, listening, looking, tracking. The boy's father grew up in the nineteen-teens on the Green River in Kentucky, just north of where John Prine tells us paradise lay. This is different country and a different time. Maybe the quiet old man is thinking about that. In his lap the boy holds a sketchbook. In his hand is a paint brush, dipped in orange day-glo. By the dim halo of the bulb in the open glove box, the boy paints the word, "Love."

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