Jardine Libaire’s new story, "Genesis," begins with a generation of kids
born on Long Island in 1950 follows them through wars and drugs and
home-leaving and ends in an apartment in Greenwich Village
in August of 1972. The children of 1972 are 35 years old this year. Libaire’s
fiction could be the story of your parents, your genesis. It begins:
New Year's Day, Dawn, 1950
The Block is quiet. Sunrise seeps through the development, spills
on the identical homes in this town on the South Shore of Long Island, a town
which is identical to the towns on either side. The milk is in the milkbox,
mothers. The cars are in their ports, dads. Smoke hangs in the air from
fireworks long spent tonight, the dust of great promises & fantasies of
light. The bang & clang of pots & pans is dead.
Update: According to Libaire, the piece is "about a
town like levittown in the 50s, and the baby boomers born then, and how they
grew up & regenerated--into our generation. it's an ode also to whitman
& kerouac, in a sense, & american life in general."
