Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, January 16, 1995                   TAG: 9501260019
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A SHELL CRACKS

Apart from our overt ecumenism (which we kids, of course, scarcely noticed), we were not a radical bunch.

We took hikes and had picnics. We made field trips and had lessons. Mostly we flirted. We giggled. We played.

But we also tried, because we were told we should, to do some good in the world. I remember three service projects (although there likely were more): We painted a room in Buchanan's community center, we picked up trash along Plantation Road, and we cleared off a hillside in town so a sidewalk could be built.

Pretty safe projects. No war protests, no sit-ins, no bus trips to D.C. with Freedom Marchers for us.

Under the tutelage of a couple of our more iconoclastic leaders (it was the '60s, after all, and a few such ministers made their way even unto Fincastle), we did discuss the heroic civil disobedience during World War II and the wild uncertainties of ``situational ethics.''

But all in all, as I said, we were not a radical group.

That, at least, is my recollection. I remember mostly our safeness, our firm belief in each other and our heritage, our solid, shell-like peace of mind. We most assuredly were not the teen-agers then pictured on the covers of Time and Newsweek.

In the spring of my senior high-school year, I attended a church-sponsored retreat. Maybe others from the youth group attended, too; I really don't remember. For I was in a miserable state that spring and, in my misery, I'd stopped noticing much in the world around me. All my problems seemed enormous, insurmountable, hopelessly personal. Pretty much your standard 18-year-old fare.

At this retreat, a woman named Barbara befriended me, counseled me, jerked me back up into the peculiarities of life. She was a college professor, well-versed in the miseries of the 18-year-old, and wise.

As luck would have it, Barbara taught at Hollins, the college I entered that fall. Whenever I saw her on campus, I beamed with admiration. Deep in the throes of hero-worship, I longed to be like her: steady, assured, and right.

National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in the spring of my freshman year, 1970. It seemed to me that at that instant, the whole world turned on a dime. Hollins students lobbied for, and won, a moratorium on exams. Many chose to wear black armbands in remembrance. A group of students and professors daily protested the war by sitting in at the only federal installation on campus: our tiny, grimy post office. The air around me crackled.

How can I capture for you my shattering confusion? One dear friend was deeply loyal to her boyfriend in Vietnam. A boy I knew, too, and liked. Another dear friend wore a black armband and boycotted her exams.

And there, in the midst of the post-office protest, sat my hero Barbara. Solemn, seething, well-versed in the miseries of the 40-year-old. Protesting the very status quo I'd thought we ought to trust.

For the first time, real cracks opened in my nice, safe shell: the one my youth group had helped grow around me.

Over the next few years, of course, that shell pretty much broke apart. I'd have had to be deaf, dumb and blind through the late '60s and early '70s to hold it completely intact. So these days, I poke out all over it, spilling out through its many fissures.

But do you know what? It hasn't disappeared. And there are times when I know that its remnants are what hold me together.

I didn't join the Freedom Marches of 1963. I couldn't have; my safe, little shell wouldn't let me. But if there are marches in 1995 - or any year henceforward - I'm pretty sure I'll be there. I've got this hardy shell, you see, and it's a source of courage.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.