Let there be songs...

A few weeks ago, a whole slew of friends rented out the town hall in my tiny, little, one-horse town and set up a projector screen on the stage, surrounded by sheets and tapestries. After a potluck between thirty + adults and about a dozen and a half kids (if not more), we turned the lights down low and started a Grateful Dead show ~ Winterland '79.

Some of the women wore their old cuordery patchwork dresses. Alot of the daughters used this as an opportunity to finally get their fingers on some of their mom's old clothes, too. From what I hear, but never actually saw, there was a jug of juice in the back kitchen, just for adults.

It wasn't until later in the night that people actually started to dance. I had looked forward to this all week, and was craving the opportunity to close my eyes and dance to the sweet refrain of familiar tunes. My memories of those years come in bits and peices and more often that not have something to do with spinning around in circles in some random hallway of some random stadium in some random city. And that was only if I was fortunate enough to score a ticket that night.

In the clutter of my day to day, the structure of packing lunches, racing to the schoolbus, getting to karate class, and meeting clients, it's not that often anymore that I remember the glory of those times. But that night, after I relaxed enough to fully lose myself to the music, Ella came running over and started spinning circles with me and the two of us spun around like little helictoper seedlings until something else caught her eye and she was off and running just as quickly as she'd come.

I had only one friend during those years who had a child and she was four and five years old those summers I went to most of my shows. I used to walk around with her on my shoulders, wanting to pretend she was my own and I would daydream about sharing those experiences one day with my own kid. My friend's daughter is fifteen years old now. Jerry died the summer of 1995 and when my friend's daughter started kindergarden that fall, she came home every week, for many weeks, with a new picture of Jerry, sometimes with angel wings and a halo ~ sometimes he was playing his guitar to Jesus (she had a religious grandma).

Ella has been more curious about those years since that night at the town hall. I think she saw something in all these grown-ups that she might not have seen before, some kind of light that got turned on. It's been fun to lay in bed at night and answer her questions, to talk about how colorful the parking lots used to be and the main strip, called Shakedown Street, where people used to sell food and clothes and goodies of all kinds. She's been sleeping in a big Grateful Dead t-shirt every night and dug up my old patchworked bag from the storage room, convincing me to allow her to wear it to school. We've been playing Grateful Dead in the kitchen while we make dinner and she'll grab my hands and we'll spin around in circles together. There's a light that's getting turned on in sharing this with her. It might not be in a hallway, in a stadium, in a random city, but I don't know if that's the most important thing. There are stories within the songs and stories that go along with those years. Stories worth telling.

The night after our little dance party, I drove by the town hall on my way home from work. All the homes in the village had smoke coming out of the chimneys and warm lights glowing from inside their kitchens. Inside the town hall, the lights were turned up bright and I could see about two dozen white and graying heads sitting at the long card tables. I could just imagine the caller calling out the bingo numbers and I smiled, thinking about the absolute contrast from one night to the next.