He walked back to the door, turned, and fixed his eyes on mine. When he spoke, it was very softly. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but something has. I know that before this year I just wasn’t home enough. I can’t change the past. But I can see that something has you headed in the wrong direction. I’m not going to sit back and watch it happen.”
“You mean you’re going to get involved? Don’t do me any favors.”
He looked at me, but I don’t know if he even heard me. He didn’t respond to what I said.
“Your mother and the girls will leave for the coast on Monday, just like we planned,” he continued. “I don’t want to ruin everybody’s summer. You and I won’t be going. I think we can do the work I was going to pay those contractors to do around here. At least, we’ll see. Because you and I are going to stay here this summer and do it.”
Lucas Trew was born too late, a 17 year old boy with a ‘60’s sensibility trapped in a ‘90’s South Texas lifestyle. He longs for the days of protest marches, real rock ‘n roll, and, why not, free love. His lifestyle is about to change, but not quite as he might have wished. His father, an ex-marine Vietnam veteran, has just sold his business and bought the family a ramshackle mansion in the country. The plan is for mom and dad, Lucas, and his three half-sisters to spend the summer at the Texas coast while the mansion is renovated.
But then Lucas gets caught smoking pot at school on the last day of his junior year. School officials threaten to press charges and withhold credit for the entire year. However, their anger pales in the light of his father’s. Dean Trew realizes how far he has let his relationship with his son drift and determines to make amends, albeit in boot camp style. When mom and the sisters leave for the Coast, father and son stay behind to do the renovations themselves. Military mindset confronts hippie consciousness.
For Lucas, a summer with “dad” equates with a season in hell. Especially after Dean reveals the rules–summer long restriction; visiting hours; mandatory physical fitness; and endless hours scraping, sanding and painting a house Lucas comes to hate as much as its owner. But even hell has its oases–visits from Danny, his pot-smoking amigo, and Eun, his Asian American on and off again girlfriend; occasional trips to the Coast; group drug therapy sessions that go beyond weirdness; and one wild night of freedom. Not to mention a shark attack.…
The Sixties Kid is a father-son drama about recovering relationships, finding out who you are, and learning to live with it.
Author’s Note:
This is the book closest to my own heart because it was inspired by my relationship with my father. He was a stern disciplinarian, determined to see all six of his offspring grow into productive and respectable citizens. I was my family’s black sheep. My father’s work (he was a mining equipment salesman) required him to leave on Monday morning and return home on Friday evening. My mother’s most oft-spoken phrase to me was the thinly-veiled threat, “Wait until your father gets home.”
I probably broke his heart when I was arrested for possession of marijuana at the age of 19. We barely spoke for the next seven years. I became a Christian when I was 26, and though my father was not a Christian, I believe it was the power and grace of God that led to our reconciliation (a long story for another time). We remained close until he passed away on August 11, 1997.
Lucas Trew has to learn to see through his own layers of self-preoccupation before he can perceive the kind of man his father truly is–as did I.
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