THE END OF THE DREAM

THE END OF THE DREAM(Bernie Martin) He'd only been gone for twenty minutes when she called us together. I hadn't seen her smile for ..... well let's just say in a long time... but now she was smiling. She was almost gleeful, as was Paul.
"Today is the start of the rest of out lives," she said.
"Why the face Bernard? Don't you agree? Are you not with me and your brother?"
I walked out. She was right about it being a new start but mine would be radically different from theirs.

The year itself was a metaphor for my changing life. It had begun just as the last one had. An entry in my diary. "Let this be the year." No more than that. Well last year hadn't been the year. True United won the European Cup, I did my "A" Levels and somehow ended up on a degree course at Bolton, but the seismic change I was looking for failed to show itself.

But this year - in many ways I was still an innocent kid. As children, and despite my age, I still sometimes behaved and reacted as a younger child, we feel things more honestly with nothing to blot out feelings. I couldn't get off a bus without having paid unlike my friends. I still lived at home and football was being superseded. I still went but it was more like a habit than a desire. All those fake fans who attached themselves to United no longer annoyed me. In fact, because of George Best, football had become a great place to meet girls. Speaking of which I had a girlfriend but she could never be a replacement for Mrs. Kearns who lived a few streets away and who had been, and still was, my mentor, my shrink, my educator, my everything.

As for my family - dysfunctional would be too kind. I knew it was breaking up. My younger brother and I had been groomed in dad's long absences to hate him, even to despise him. Paul went along with it quite happily. I, on the other hand, still had this childish belief that he was my dad and I shouldn't have these feelings about him. Because of what was happening in my life I felt it important not to keep putting things off. Things I might want to do, but more, things I wanted to say. In the words of Harold Hill. "You pile up enough tomorrows and you'll soon find you've collected a lot of empty yesterdays." The problem was I'd left it too late.

The last thing we had done as a family was watch the moon landing. I'd forced myself to stay up despite being not at all interested. The Russians had put the first man in space. It followed that the Americans would be the first to claim to have landed on the moon. Why force myself you might ask? Because I knew this would be the last time we would spend as a family. But I couldn't enjoy it. There was no talk, no interaction, just the odd gentle snore. I thought to myself - you've wanted us to stay up to watch this together and what do you do? I know dad's presence wasn't important but I had assumed mine and my brother's was. I also thought, as I saw the first steps, why are humans wanting to go to the moon when they can't even sort things out on earth?

Four days after the landing dad had gone. He took with him lots of people I had learned from in my nineteen years. I had listened to their war stories, always wanting more, and when my later teenage years coincided with the hippies and the summer of love it felt like everything I had ever wanted had been given to me. But, as the year progressed, the world I inhabited started to change. True there was Woodstock in August, a mark in cosmic time when the world stopped for three days and the feeling was that you wanted that to be the basis for the rest of your life. But, a few days before, Charles Manson had gone on his killing spree and some weeks later Easy Rider was released and hippies had become fair game.

The singer songwriter era of the protest song was being superseded by heavy bass, lead guitars and thrashing drums. Change was hammering at the door. The dream was quickly fading away. Musically the Summer of Love was giving way to self indulgence and going from politicised, socially active performers to sleeker, hit generating, stadium filling rock stars.

The end of the dream came at Altamont, only a few days after the release of "Let It Bleed." I sort of remade myself in my own version of the impossible bottle. The world I wanted consisted only of those things I could reach out and touch and that didn't include my family.