Thursday, June 29, 2006Uncle John's Band I received an email this morning from an old friend from freshman year at UC Santa Cruz. My delight could not have been more complete. And the connection started me on a long road of associations and memories. 1974 was a magical year for me. It was my year of leaving home and coming home. Coming home to myself for the first time in my life, while at the same time jetisoning all aspects of comfort and familiarity. I flew into San Jose airport and took a shuttle onto campus, truly on my own for the first time in my life. Alone at least literally. In truth, this was the first time I think I felt ever truly connected. When I had come up to visit the campus earlier that spring, I'd started crying when I saw it, smelled the redwoods, turned to see the heartbreaking expanse of Pacific Ocean stretching out below me. It was home, even though I'd never been there before. And it's still home, even though I've been back only a handful of times in the past ten/fifteen years. I had a roommate for a few nights and then she moved to triple up with a cooler set of girls, leaving me a "single double" which was perfect and luxurious for an only child about to work through all her issues all at once. That first quarter I started to take care of business by discovering sex, drugs and alcohol all within the first couple of months. I also discovered mononucleosis, flirted with suicide, was felled by strep throat, mastered the magic of calculus and was boggled by the impenetrability of pure philosophy. I met my friends Brian and Nancy, whom I still hold as dear as treasured jewels, even though we rarely talk and our meetings are agonizing years apart. My friend Tom who wrote today is another one of that circle. He'd disappeared from view about 25 years ago and I was sure he had been swallowed by the depths of time forever. One moment in second quarter, when I was down in another room -- a single room this time -- I was introduced to The Grateful Dead. It was, of course, a requirement in that time and space to be a Dead Head and I was woefully behind in that aspect of my education. So Brian sat me down with his copy of Workingman's Dead and put on the first track, Uncle John's Band. Thanks to I-Tunes and more technology than we ever imagined, I can now sit here and write a blog while listening to the same music. At the time it was thought to be soooo wild. The Grateful Dead -- such a name! I was secretly thrilled just by saying the words. They were SO edgy and SO contemporary. To a girl who had just recently come from a home in which the strains of Simon & Garfunkle had to be snatched from the AM radio in the Chevy, to listen to music by a band with such an iconoclastic name was rebellion itself. And the music... well, it was great. Simple and pure, with lyrics that I would end up spending years (and innumerable rolling papers) trying to decipher. After hearing from Tom I pulled out my old original vinyl album, bought almost immediately after that first introduction from a used record store down at the Pacific Garden Mall. Its corner was chewed by a dog I'd purchased in one misguided moment and ended up giving to the family of a girlfriend, one of my first huge failures in responsibility. If it was an album that booked open, I'm sure some residue of ancient seeds or stems would've been caught in the crease. I pulled out the album, much to my ten year old son Jack's fascination. "You can actually play that thing?" he said in wonder. I put the stylus down and heard that old crackling of analog and years, and suddenly the song started. As simple and pure and lilting as always. And I had two thoughts. 1) MAN, these guys could REALLY not sing very well. It was all about the lyrics and the music. And not at all about their voices which, well, I'm sorry to say, kind of suck. And 2) what simpler times those were. I hate to say this, too, because it sounds like I'm such an old lady. But to think of this music as iconoclastic? After hearing what the next thirty years produced, this seems so... melodic. Simple. Clean. Nice. It's almost Muzak it's so nice and sweet. My god... in our quest to shock, how far we have come. Jack sat and listened to it dutifully, kindly not commenting on the fact that I was able to remember and sing (with the same quality as the original band) every single word of the lyrics. I was grinning broadly and felt my heart lift in a way I haven't felt in ages and ages. I was in love... with my past, with my long long life, with this music, all the roads I have travelled. Suddenly I was SO glad to be turning 50. I am SO glad to have such deep roots and long memories and complex stories with so many people. There are people in the world who remember my Chevy, who introduced me to music that is so sweet and antiquated these days, who remember me in the first days of my long career of befuddled adventure. There are people whom I love, and who love me, simply because we've travelled through so much life together and separately. And that's a fine reason to love and be loved. We've gone through it. We've seen the world through eyes that are still more or less synchronous. I love it. I can't help it. It's such a gift to have been down so many wandering paths. A wonderful woman I met on the train the other day said that she sees each birthday as a time capsule... like a pill that unfolds in its predestined order, blossoming open each year with an appropriate new dosage of learning and wonder and magic. I used to drive along the winding roads of Mt. Tamalpais listening to this music. It was the center of the universe to me back then. And this morning I got to hand a small slice of that moment to my son. Like a time capsule, he won't get to maybe receive its full strength for awhile. But I hope that someday he meets people who get in deep under his skin, and listens to music that fills his soul, and has scary and dangerous adventures that will shape him and his life forever. Hopefully not as dangerous as mine, but ones that fill him up to bursting as he looks back on them from the hills of time. Like the Monterey Bay stretching out before me from that campus so long ago, I look back over these years and feel my heart swelling with gratitude. Such moments. Such moments. Such moments. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:31 PM  
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