A New Camelot

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the end of Camelot. If you’re at least as old as I am, you know exactly where you were when you heard the news on that fateful day in the history of our country and of the world.

Me? I was in a stroller, says my mother, in Flair Chevrolet in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (The dealership is long gone and thus there's no hyperlink to the site.) I’ve never asked her, but because those were the “graduate school days,” my guess is that we weren't there to kick the tires, slam the doors or road test a 1964 Chevy Impala. Instead, in my mind she was sitting on a tacky, turquoise blue vinyl chair, absently pushing the stroller (with me in it) back and forth and back and forth, waiting for the grease monkeys to finish working on her old clunker that happened to be a Chevy. Had it been a Ford or a Chrysler, I bet we’d have been at one of those dealerships instead. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s my guess.

Anyway… that was the end of Camelot. Right there in Flair Chevrolet. Finished, the end, done.

At least for a while.

But now, a generation and a half later, it seems that maybe, just maybe, we are on the brink of a new Camelot.

Despite the dire financial news we hear and feel anew each day, the two wars on the other side of the globe that go on and on and on, and the graft, corruption and fraud that run rampant in the corporate and public sectors, I believe that we are in for a sea change. Or at least I hope we are.

Like so many others, I anxiously await the inauguration of our new president and a return to a leader of whom we can be proud. More important than our pride, though, are his deliberations and his actions. May he do right by this country and by all of us, and indeed, may our Camelot arrive swiftly and prosper long.