The original version of Summer of Love didn’t include the telephone conversation with my mother. A reviewer thought that it would be interesting to expand the story a bit by introducing some of the ways that the fatalistic acceptance of going to war that summer affected the narrator (me).

I tried several explorations along those lines, but they all felt like they were packing on more pounds than they were worth, bloating what I wanted to be a short, specific read.

Then I wrote in the phone conversation just as it had happened. Since I knew she was worried about my going to Vietnam—worried like every other parent then—I goofed on her a bit by keeping my tone “bravely mature” and building the tension by telling her I got my orders, and then that I was going overseas, and then pausing before breaking the happy news.

More than 50 years later, as I wrote the phone conversation with the memory of it as fresh in my mind as it had been then, I was flooded with the emotion she must have felt in hearing the news. I broke down and cried; almost sobbed, really.

At the time I got my orders, I remember being relieved, of course. But I don’t recall being particularly emotional, except for the excitement that I was going to England at the height of the British Invasion of rock and roll when it seemed like England was the most happening place on the planet.

So I don’t know if my overwhelming emotional response was echoing a parent’s thankfulness that her younger son wasn’t going to war, if it was the floodgate opening on my own emotional memory half a century later, or if it was some combination of things.

One thing is certain, though: an ever-present foreboding hovered over the mid-to-late teen years of every one of us who could be prime meat for the draft then. Our parents felt it, too.

I think I was responding to the emotional memory of that weight lifting from my family.

James Mahoney