I was just a mere slip of girl. It was during the 'sixties when the world I knew was coming apart and taking me apart in the process. . . . Those were curious years, which we've romanticized, vilified, yearned after and maligned. For a teenage girl from rural east Texas, who had known only stability and safety overlaid with a protective coating of predictability, they were an exercise in terror that marked me for the rest of my life. . . . The concept of paradigm shifts is like chaos theory.
People talk about paradigm shifts as if they know what they are talking about.
Let me tell you, living through one is like being kicked in the head by a bad mule. You may survive the event, but it leaves you damaged and very wary of mules. . . . I grew up in a town where people knew my grandfather and remembered my mother when she was a girl. Store clerks called Alice and me by name. I wore shoulder-length kid gloves to formal dances escorted by boys in white dinner jackets from families whose parents had gone to school with mine.