May 8, 1970 - Kent State did not END on May 4th

I pulled this cup out of my china cabinet this week to make tea. It was one of Mom's pieces which I rescued after she died when my siblings felt that everything of my parents should be sold because "there is nothing of value there." I held onto this and the teapot that was the wedding gift from her maid of honor. 

I felt entitled to it because I had bought it for her at a gift shop in Westerville, Ohio where I went to college. It was my present  for Mother's Day 1970: Lilies of the Valley, for the month of May, when I, her first born was born and when we celebrate Mother's Day, which she loved as much as any holiday because she loved being a mother. 


It was in my suitcase that Friday when I got on the bus to Wooster where she would pick me up and take me home for the weekend of May 8, 1970. 

Riding the Bus: May 8, 1970

 

I had just left class where my professor had shouted,

“If they’d been truckers, the government wouldn’t have touched them.”

Boarding the bus home, I heard a man say, “We need to kill a whole lot more

college kids.” Half an hour later, outside Gambier, three Kenyon guys

got on, laughing as always, moved to the back, sat down facing

the glaring stares, and quieted.

I sat there in the middle, on edge, heading home, a two hour ride,

and Kent State, thirty minutes beyond that.