I doubt if even my great grandkids will get all the way back to my earliest posts, copied onto an archive page here from facebook posts, which was the way I began this practice of daily posts. Ten years ago, most of my posts were anecdotes, and some important ones about pivotal moments in my life. So I’m going to repost a few of them here on their tenth anniversaries.
Love is some powerful shit. I don’t think time heals all wounds, but I think Love might. Love is so cool that some folks even claim it to be synonymous with god.
It was the “Sixties”, tho’ actually 1971, and you who were there know what that means (wink wink). I was the object of some love that I was not requiting, and she had followed me to Carnation, Washington, a tiny, beautiful but exceeding square town east of Seattle on the Snoqualmie River, where a couple of our friends had emigrated. Them and about 200 other hippies – that, in a town with a population of about 400.
Turns out a few poor kids had drowned in the river the previous summer. Some were hippies and some were cowboys. The town had planned, on the night we arrived, to hold a fundraising dance at the local Grange Hall to raise money to build a public pool.
We had just come up Highway 1 in huge home-built housecar, which at times had as many as 25 hitchhikers on board, and we had been gifted about 50 hits of various varieties of psychedelics. Our Carnation friends had prepped a big jug of Kool Aide to which we contributed our stash, and which they planned to share with all their fellow Carnation Hippies at the dance.
Everyone in the town, and I mean absolutely everyone, from the granmas to the major, was there, and the cultural tension at the beginning of the evening was palpable and even a little dangerous. There was an open mic and various folks were getting up and playing in an impromptu battle of the bands, some jamming, some with carefully prepped numbers, some country and some rock.
As we hippies began to peak, we began to dance with more abandon, and the whole Grange Hall began to vibrate with a contact high. As the evening wore on, the stage hosted a round-robin, cross-section of the whole town, all eefing in a free-form rhythmic jam as the dancing became even more tribal.
Eventually everyone, and again I mean everyone, was on their feet jumping and swirling in unison, even me (and I hate to dance). There was a spirit of love in that hall that I had never felt before in my life, and I suddenly looked at this woman who had been pursuing me and thought, ‘why not her?’ finding myself instantly in love with her.
The paint job made folks read its name as “Orange Hall”
Of course ‘why not her’ is about as unromantic as it gets, and it was not at all the sort of requiting she longed for, meaning that, of course, love notwithstanding, it never really worked out. But that love on that night had infected our lives in such a way, that when she gave birth to another man’s baby many years later, I fell completely and utterly in love with him too.
Happy Love, Happy Holly Days
HOLLY DAYS 