Here’s what we knew:

Howdy Doody was kind of funny but Froggy on top of the Buster Brown clock was tossing seeds of emotional anarchy into the already hardening arteries of six year old minds.

Froggy was magic; Howdy Doody was all strung up. That meant something; we just didn’t know what, though- not quite yet. Here’s what else we didn’t know:

Telstar, Sputnik, John Glenn, space

Woolworth’s, Birmingham, Malcolm X, race

Assassination

Castro, Khrushchev, MauMau, spies

James Bond, Vietnam, Pentagon, lies

Heroin

Satisfaction, Say it Loud, Woodstock, mud

Chicago riots, Watts, Kent State, blood

Agnew

Mr. Hooper, Meathead, Jim Belushi, death

Junk Bonds, food stamps, drug labs, meth

Guyana

“Plunk your magic Twanger, Froggy,” Andy Devine would tell the apparition suddenly standing on the clock. Froggy gave some of us weird dreams while Howdy Doody made us aware of strings being pulled. Most of us, it turns out, ended up on Froggy’s team. We learned that time passing did not automatically cause anything to make more sense. We learned that there are some things even more mysterious at 61 than they were at 6. We learned that it makes more sense (oftentimes) to stop thinking, to stop trying to figure anything out, and to

accept enjoy embrace whatever it is

because..we’re apparitions standing on a clock, too.

David Weber, November 2010