Life Began Calling

Not sure why, but this Peter, Paul, and Mary recording, a great Dylan piece, reminds me of a minor moral dilemma I encountered in the Spring of 1969. I was a Sophomore in college and a baseball player. Prior to the annual baseball Spring trip, when we went farther south to play a week of games, the athletic director put pressure on the baseball coach to leave me behind if I did not get my hair cut. I was the "clean-up" hitter on the team, so it may have been a dilemma for the coach too.

Seemed the world outside of baseball was beginning to take priority for me. The summer before (tumultuous 1968) while playing baseball in the Cape Cod League, I seemed to spend as much time hanging around the Eugene McCarthy for President Headquarters in Chatham, Massachusetts (the town in which I played for the summer) as the baseball park. (My girlfriend worked in a candy store next door).

I didn't get my haircut. The coach took me with the team on the trip anyway. He didn't start me in the first game. That was sure fine by me. Real life was beginning to call.