The summer of 1968 was a pivotal time in my life, perhaps in the lives of thousands of people in this world. It was in the summer of ‘68 that I marched in my first demonstration down Michigan Avenue in the city of Chicago. I would not call myself a veteran marcher, but I have marched with the best of them in Washington, D.C. and Springfield, Illinois, on my college campus, as well my own home town. Still, it was during the ‘68 Democratic Convention that I had my first taste of the power of the masses, the power of an history-altering event, the power of witnessing a wrong in an act of civil disobedience.

I lived downtown for days, camped out with hundreds in the threatening darkness of Lincoln Park, wandering the neon streets lined with intimidating and angry blue-helmeted warriors awaiting the call to bash my head. I walked past them perched upon their trusty steeds, beneath the garish marquees of Rush Street and looked into their eyes, wondering how they could look into mine and want to hurt me. I was eighteen and not yet aware of the anthropology of hate, aggression and inhumanity.

I called my father to let him know I was okay. I could hear the fear in his voice; it shook me for in my heart I acknowledged he’d fought in World War II and knew the dangers of unleashed violence I could not yet imagine. He wanted me to come home. But destiny beckoned me to seek my own truth in the wide, wide world beyond. My father graciously allowed me to back out his front door; how difficult it must have been for him to let his eldest daughter go free.

The Whole World, Too, was watching outside as I stood beneath a cherry tree in Grant Park listening to the inspirational ballads of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, the speeches of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Tom Hayden speaking for the Chicago Seven. And later, in the dead of night, as I ran for my life past the Haymarket statue, a blue-helmeted vassal snorting the exertion of an enraged bull as he raised his baton at my golden crown, I tasted my first terror. I escaped within a hair of his malevolence, my youthful speed and agility, or the angel Gabriel’s intercession, lifting me out of harm’s way. As I hid, breathless and afraid, in a dense stand of lilac bushes looking out on the bloody carnage, it was my whole world inside that was rocked, inexorably changed by the events of that harrowing night. And what happened to the lives of the individuals, the real masses of the riots of 1968, who breathed life into a political agenda?

Barely thirty years later I found myself in the ancient and historic city of Madrid taking a course in English as Second Language amongst a class of Britons, a whole new world of viewpoints to my still young and myopic American mind. The glorious, pulsating heart of Espana, the ancient medieval bastion, twenty four hour, never resting Flamenco city of sensuality and flesh. It was the flesh that was a problem to me, a vegetarian, thrust into the bowels of a peristaltic, carnivorous land. I knew my beliefs would be tested on this trip, but even my most apprehensive imaginations couldn’t conjure up the extent of it.

One of the Brits, a Welshman named Huw, was a vegan, one who eats absolutely no animal products. I eat fish. Intellectually I was aware of the controversy over who gets to wear a vegetarian badge and who doesn’t within the vegetarian community (like the true-woman badge a woman gets once she’s toughed out a "natural" childbirth). But emotionally I wasn’t prepared for the censure, the rejection, the genuine pain in Huw’s eyes upon watching me chew flesh. Huw was like an angel, his skin soft and pink, radiating health and innocence of spirit, a purity that stood out against the gray commoner edifices of the majority. It wasn’t just me. I could feel his horror in my gut each day as his eyes witnessed meat mastication. I wanted to protect him, as adults do the innocence of babes, from the violation he so vehemently rejected.

The pain in his eyes reminded me of my son, Jonathon’s, when he watched me eat fish at home. As each generation evolves beyond the previous one, so had my son transcended my moral consciousness when he rejected eating fish at four years of age on moral grounds. His logic was impeccable, even at such a young age. And so his father and I supported the genesis of his own philosophic journey with pride and satisfaction, our offspring traversing a shorter path to perfection, what more could a parent desire? The communion of mind and spirit of like-minded souls. A communion that is torn with each expression of impugnity I see in his eyes. An expression I try not to use in my life.

We have a neighbor, named Mitch, who drives three vehicles into our quiet suburb, a hulking Harley, an elegant Cadillac convertible, and a rusting Chevy pickup. He is a large man in every sense, a muscle-bound, tattooed Vietnam-vet, one of those draft boys, no doubt, whom I so deeply felt needed my protection in the sixties. Mitch makes his presence known, especially when he revs out on his hog at 5:30 in the morning or returns the following morning at one, a rat-a-tat-tat explosion in our quiet suburban jungle. One day at our annual block party, while chowing down on a thick hunk of rare roast beef, the juices sluicing down his chiseled, defiant chin, he joked about the "squaws" who worked for him in his office. The party gasped and grew hushed. Mitch didn’t notice, so engrossed was he in telling stories about his cute little office squaws. No one corrected him. No one asked if he understood what he was saying. No one. Not even me, the brave soul who could march against fierce cranium-crushing troops. I am not a combative person by choice. Not confrontive or militant about my beliefs. I have discovered I don’t have to say a word to promote vegetarianism. My choice is a red bandana to a raging bull, Old Glory to the Viet Cong, Ocalan to the Turks; its very existence baits them to ambush me, to get right up into my face and attack. I have come to understand it is not up to me to convince others to give up meat; it is my job on this earth to live with integrity and evolve towards a more perfect me, an ideal always beyond my grasp. That’s the real deal with God, whoever she is. My right to life is predicated on the premise of striving to be better wherever I am today. As much as Mitch may have made us all cringe, and as much as I struggled with it during the following weeks, writing him letters, railing against him in my mind, starting towards his door umpteen times, I respect Mitch’s right to travel his own unique path. I do not presume to crusade against him.

Huw treated me much the same in Madrid. The emotion was in his face, tiny ocular muscles recoiling silently against my transgressions. Never any castigating utterances. I would have felt better had he verbally challenged me. But he was too much a gentleman to cause embarrassment. The message I heard was in my own cochlea. Loud and clear. Guilt. The loudest vibration tolerated by the inner ear without rupture. A tortuous din. Each time we dined together the noise became more deafening. It got so that I no longer wanted to accompany Huw to dinner.

One night, after dining and drinking with one of the other Brits, we meandered the narrow, winding streets of the ancient Spanish city, two tipsy revelers amidst thousands on a balmy late-night walk. Rounding a cobblestoned corner with inebriated vertigo, my bleary eyes came face to face with the vacant stare of a lifeless baby pig. It was hanging from a meat hook in the window of a corner grocery store. Next to it hung another baby pig. And another. Five baby pigs, lined white shoulder to white shoulder, almost as close as they might have been together in utero. Hanging lifeless, upside down. Their hooves dangling imploring below for terra firma and mud to roll in, they stared out over the midnight bustle, haunting eyes asking why they were born. The hog industry would say to go to market. The butcher would say to fulfill his customers demands. Mitch would say to fill his stomach and sate his manly hunger. My now-adolescent son would say to live their destiny as pigs. And for once in my life I don’t have the answers.

The sight of the pigs caught me by surprise. I’m not usually squeamish about blood and guts. I’ve become pretty matter-of-fact about the carnivorous world I live in. Not so sensitized as Huw to the violence of this world. In Madrid, I had adjusted to the flesh-hanging customs in every bar, store and restaurant. Nevertheless, the world began to spin that night, star light shooting in concentric circles above. My friend thought it was the effects of too much red sangria; I knew it was the sangre fria, cold blood, of the little pigs who went to market.

I’m old enough to have fresh questions for each of my unearthed answers. I’m old enough to entertain the possibility there are no real answers. Just etudes and rondolets. Only now there is a new urgency to pick up the beat. Finally, one day before leaving Madrid, I said to Huw, "You don’t consider me a vegetarian, do you?" I needed to hear his answer in order to some day make my own. He stared at me dumb. Fidgeting and straining against his British decorum, he could not speak. "It won’t hurt my feelings, Huw, I can see it in your face." Letting out a deeply held sigh, Huw nodded, his pink cherubic cheeks now glowing red. "Well you aren’t, really, are you?" he asked, simply. The elegance of the righteous. The truth of the silent witness. The question was never answered between Huw and me. We went on our merry way, Yank and Brit, enjoying our differences, all but one.

Once I met a Red fish beneath the deep blue Hawaiian surf. He swam up to my goggle-covered face and stared at me, wild beast to wild human, I the encroacher on his wilderness home. I was stunned by his natural elegance, entranced by his colorful grace and thrilled by his curious communion with me. I thought, how could I go home tonight and eat this gorgeous creature? What makes him different than a chicken?

The questions still swim and dart through my consciousness as I lie awake at night in my bedroom. A baby boomer safely tucked in from the night. Is there a right to life? A right to live one’s destiny? Do we humans really have a free will? Don’t I have the right to take time and think through all these questions? Or is there a higher moral authority demanding instant action? The moral riot-battalion.

I can still see those baby pig’s eyes gazing at me imploringly through time. They accompany me on this leg of my journey on this earth. Was it an accident of fate that I met Huw at this time in my life? Or the five little pigs in a Madrid storefront? Yeah, right, and can pigs fly? Those baby pigs flew into my world, all in a row, and sent me crying, free, free, fee all the way home.

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