This ’63 Dodge Dart is the same model and color as my first car. Click to enlarge.
’63 powder-blue Dodge Dart
slant-six engine, push-button transmission
that my father gave me in 1970.
Volvo 122s Wagon I bought with a hundred dollars cash
and twenty-five dollars in food stamps.
I have told no one this story—not until this moment.
It was 1973. I was 22 years old, hitchhiking around the Mediterranean Sea, with no itinerary and no time constraints. It was my hope that, by surrendering all expectations, I might acquire some insight into what to do in life.
In Nice, France, three English musicians invited me to stay with them for a bit. With a place to stash my guitar and other stuff, I was free to walk the city streets, something I treasured more than visiting museums and historic battle sites.
On a slightly run-down street, I walked by a girl not older than seventeen but whose smile had the air of an old soul. Continue reading
[This piece is so-titled because the story wasn’t over when I thought it was, but instead followed me like a stray dog determined to tag along.]
It was the Seventies. I was at Brandeis University, just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. So yes, I took LSD. I was alone in the university’s Rose Art Museum that was like a drop of pond water: tiny and unassuming until you slid it under a microscope and then suddenly there was life of every ilk. In the Rose-Art-Museum Drop-of-Pond-Water, I was rubbing elbows with scores of the greatest artists of the past century.
Face-to-face with an abstract impressionist canvas, I said “I know you. You will now become pure light.” Continue reading