Dedication: A Time Ago & Then

A Time Ago and Then is dedicated to all the lost souls, returning veterans of the South East Asian Conflict and runaways I encountered during the waning years of the late sixties and the decompression of the early seventies after the Altamont Speedway fiasco. It speaks of the deterioration of social institutions that occurred at the height of the Viet Nam War as good number of this generation were drafted into the services; took to the streets; experimented with communal life-styles; adventured with drugs; explored sexual and moral ambivalence of those times; and swam through an undercurrent of confusion of the era.

I wrote this book in the year 2010, as I passed by homeless panhandlers on our city’s streets; heard the stories of drug addicts and alcoholics of all ages and the children of the children of my generation; prayed for the men and women in uniform returning from the War in Afghanistan and Iraq; because of all these my heart ached for the need to tell this tale.

I dedicate it to those who attempted, and often failed, to overcome the confusion. Some came out on the other side of it while others sank into its quicksand and were fatally mired in it. We are your grandfathers and grandmothers now and time is slipping away for me to tell the story of this adventure via Max, a flawed character: whose excursions from light to dark and back again can and ought to be judged harshly. He would agree with our judgment and, in the end, he doesn’t seek exoneration or give excuses for his excesses and for escaping the legal consequences of his greatest crime. His story is not an isolated one and it draws from hundreds of similar stories… of struggle and redemption. I needed to tell it and I told it, no holds barred, as honestly as I could.

I also dedicate this book to my daughter, Alanna, her dear mother, Carolyn, and her mother, Lucyna (author of Between Two Evils, who inspired me to keep on writing past the first hundred pages); my partner, Bonnie, whose love and patience at being a writer’s widow is appreciated beyond all explanation. But most of all the prayers of my mother, Eileen, and father, George, and sisters who never gave up on me through all those dark years.

May 23, 2012

George B. Couper II