Edmonds Beacon - Your Hometown News Source

Three things blew my mind before the age of 8. They were dumb things, in retrospect, but let's give the kid a break and the old guy his due. I've been around long enough to see some things.

This was the mid-1960s, an era defined in large part by perspective, like the blind men trying to identify an elephant – it depends upon whether you had the tail or the trunk. From the vantage point of a small child, I was vaguely aware of the social and political changes happening around me, but I paid a lot of attention to the sparkly stuff.

The first was when I went to our neighborhood supermarket w...