Eye Am A Daughter, but not a Mother

My Mother calls me "Darling."
My Mommy calls me "Rachy."
My nieces call me "Tia."
But no one calls me "Mama."

And that absence of a name makes me cry some times.

This is Jesse's mama, nursing him in the Spring of 1967.
"The Hippie Madonna" is what Oracle's Allen Cohen called her.
Earth Mother Illustration Number 1 is what my diss labels her.

It would be nice to know how she names Herself, these days. The former Mrs. Hilsenrad, mother of Four.

Dona Nobis Pacem

I am home, in New York, and it is good.

I was late, in the morning, missing the plane, which was also good.

... because driving from Newark airport to Park Slope, Brooklyn, would *not* have been fun at 6 pm. But at 2 a.m... which is when I finally made it across the Manhattan Bridge... things were quiet, calm, peaceful...

and that's not a bad way to transition from Berkeley back to the East.

So here I am, back in Queens for the time being, still prowling for research. My "spiral development" process, to rely terribly on a DOD metaphor, continues. And going back into Wolfgang's Vault, to find one more Gene Anthony photo of Mountain Girl and Sunshine, I discover that some of the "serene" art I had been enjoying... so different from many of the Fillmore artists... IS in fact illustrated by a woman artist.

Bonnie MacLean.

As the Fillmore folks explain: "Bonnie MacLean could have made the "Fillmore Five" artist stable the "Fillmore Six" had the idea of women's' liberation been extant in San Francisco in the late 1960s. During the early days of the Fillmore, MacLean was the most "present" member of the staff. She collected tickets, passed out handbills, blew up balloons and counted money for Fillmore productions. Impressed with her lettering skill on the upcoming attractions chalkboards, Bill Graham surprised her with an easel and art supplies for Christmas, 1967, and MacLean's poster artist career was launched. Untrained in graphic arts, MacLean's early style evolved into ornate, Medieval-Gothic designs. Faces in her posters wore trance-like stares, steady and serene, and evoke the detached spirituality of the sixties. Of her work, MacLean has said, "... What's significant is that these posters were created with an intensity that was lived." MacLean lives on the East Coast and continues her career as an artist. Recently, she has reproduced replicas of some of her poster designs on canvas. "

So here's one more tidbit on that, for future reference:

"BG100 is one of Bonnie MacLean's favorite posters. She started the assignment when she was pregnant with her son and wove the peace dove into the composition as her symbolic wish for the new year. This New Year's Eve concert continued the Bill Graham tradition of non-stop, 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. celebration and included breakfast for the diehard fans remaining on the dance floor."

Hipstorian thinks... Hmmm... New Year's Eve... 1967 rolling into 1968... Mommy was in her 4th month of pregnancy with me, crying every night when she came home from teaching first grade in North Philadelphia. Aunt Maryanne was in Korea, to be near her West Point husband, and seven months pregnant with Tommy.

It's a little strange thinking of history and women and hippies and wombs, and then comparing that to my maternal relatives' experiences at the same time.

More than a little, actually.

"This is not a conventional society of people..."

Sometime in the "wheeeeee!" stage of things, we were sitting in the Bayside Diner, on Northern Boulevard, in northeastern Queens, probably eating pancakes. And on that auspicious (read fateful) day I decided to change my surname upon marriage.

Not some major decision destined for the history books, by any means. But since I'm on a writing tear lately, and since my divorced parents would have been married forty years this month, I've been thinking about what my own experiences have been around "traditional" marriage. As well as ruminating about "alternative" and "experimental" forms of it sprouting out of the seeds of the Sixties Flower Children, a la conventions and iconoclasm and normative v. counter social formations. Names being only part of the play of chaos and fluidity of course.

(The current blog title is from Steve Parish's testimony in that CourtTV rock-widows saga of two other Mrs. G's, describing informal marital arrangements and experimental sexual ethics of the California counterculture.)

What was the seduction tactic?

As I recall, some classically codependent sad-sack story about a vetoed opinion on the niceties of a gravestone engraving (the Witty Widower trip), coupled with the family-vibe consideration of a tender teenage kid whose schooling I had suddenly become over invested in emotionally (the Jay Bird Trip), and like a Quantum Leap, whoosh! snap!! kazam!!!, there went three-plus decades of a family alliance.

Unlike the other previous twenty boyfriends-who-might-be-spouses, however, I had neglected in this version of Dr. Mr. Fantasy to practice signing the anticipated neonom. Had I bothered to try that pen-to-paper scrawl even once -- which in execution requires an awful lot of loops -- no doubt my paternal vestige of the Norman invasion of Eire would have stayed intact. But noooooo....

I signed on the line, stepped into heteroringer (but not breeder) line, stepped outside of the ideological Radical Gender Studies limn, leapt without looking, and discarded the feminist "Ms." with a strange scripted femininity.

I'll try not to get Lawerence Summersy-essentialist on my impetuous ass and call it hard-wired genomic genuflection. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. And the L-Double-L assonance sounds far better than it writes. And...

... then I go into my archives, and look at just how damn difficult it was for women in the 1970s to keep their "maiden" names, and the rashness of my emotionalism makes me wonder.

By the way, as I ponder the mythic architectures of conformity, circuitous thanks to Jeanne Parvati, now of Beloved memory, for publishing her before-and-after wedding photos in HYGEIA: a woman's herbal, and triggering my pursuit of countercultural "feminisms" along the cliotheoretical scripts of sexual politics, gender norms, and Earth Mothers.

But this photo is from someone / somewhere else. Gene Anthony mebbe?
.

Pondering The Symposium

MG's first response to hearing the title of my long-lingering dissertation, "Dirty Hippies, Earth Mothers, Love Children" was an enthusiastic laugh: "All three of my daughters were love children."

But, I have to ask: What's that Feather in your Hair mean in Herb Green's photo?

And what does a feminist academic have to say, to talk about, to make meaning of ... when it comes to holding up a Great Woman, Prankster, as an emblem of counter-cultural womanhood?

Given the love story/stories of what Cynthia Robins called "a hippie soap opera" in a 1997 San Francisco Examiner profile of Ms. Adams, some sensitivity might be called for.

"Go Tell it on the Mountain," that angelic gospel choir I sang in at age eight (1976) flips around in poetic play and how mothers' stories intersect with daughters' longings to something cautioning against gossip.

"Why would someone say something like that?" Jerry asked poignantly.

Witnessing the Summer of Love

So its the fortieth anniversary of the so-called SUMMER OF LOVE, and San Francisco is embracing it with gusto.

Actually, the day of the big concert would have been my parents 40th wedding anniversary, so its like... the anniversary of my conception!

And, ya know, with all the sex going on in the Haight... one would think that the 2B1 Media crew who put together a "forum" of a dozen witnesses to the event... could have come up with more than one woman.

Albeit, Lenore Kandel.

One of the daughters got up and addressed the forum, asking where the women were. But before anyone had a chance to answer, the mike kept being passed to new folks, and nothing was addressed.

Typical?

Just take a look at the various nymphs decorating the poster art for the event. Nine of the 26 posters feature the beauty of the female form. But through whose eyes?

In the middle of April...

How different this Spring feels from the last two... life twists and turns, but mostly now feels like a whirlpool tucked in between two large rocks, a submerged tree, and a quicksand bank where I dare not walk.

Inbetween New York and Sonoma County, the pear blossoms here are just starting, while in northern California things are green and glowing, a few more months of verdant pastures before the sun scorches the meadows into golden brown.

My family on this coast pulls me back, wishes me lunar emotional presence. My old happiness on the Pacific coast feels to have evaporated with all the upheaval in moving back and forth.

I am everywhere and nowhere.
I am here and there.
I am...

... uncomfortable.

Incident-us Interruptus

The gossip had been leaking out of Vegas for a few days. The String Cheese Incident were losing their frontman, the Nershinator, "to pursue other musical projects."

Hopefully there will be more than the acoustic harmonies of his current project, Honkytonk Homeslice. But wherever the creative juices take him, we look forward to freaking freely at the Billy Nershi Experience.

Strawberries at Lughnasa

The strawberry, an environmental economist told me once, is the most ridiculous fruit to consume if one is hewing to the "low impact" model of consumption per calorie. Between the water costs of its production, the petroleum-based packaging, and the amount of energy expended transporting these fragile lobes to far-flung places... well, it's something of a sin against Mother Earth.

But when I walked into the Key Food this evening, there was a special of 2 lbs for 2 bucks. They were from Michigan. They were mostly dark red, and small, and sweeeeeet looking. And so I succumbed.

Home, washing them, picking off the stems, I tried to pray. (I guess I prayed, but it always, or often, feels more like such a mental performance more than a heartfelt communion, so I profess the attempt rather than parade too piously.) Thank you Bhudevi for making such gorgeous plants on your beautiful body. Thank you for giving us the bounty to trade for these beautiful berries. I plucked for about, oh, a dozen berries, and then I popped one in my mouth...

And the sense, the sweetness, the pleasure... ah, that experience is a communion with God itself. No doubt. Summer is here...

Free Suzanne Swift

On June 11th, the U.S. Military had Army Specialist and Iraqi War Vet Suzanne Swift, age 22, arrested for refusing to report back to duty. She had been repeatedly sexually harassed by her comrades and by her commanding officers. After community protests at her hometown jail in Eugene, OR, she was transferred to Fort Lewis Washington, where she is confined to base and under extreme emotional distress.

As an American woman, a feminist intellectual, and a civic supporter of the U.S. military despite all of my socialist and anarchist tendencies, I find myself outraged at the situation facing Suzanne and call for her immediate honorable discharge from the service and swift justice to be exacted against the "men" who have disgraced themselves by sexually assaulting one of their comrades.

Please contact your U.S. legislators, your Governor, the President, the Department of Defense, the United Nations, your priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, or other spiritual leaders, and any prominent business leaders in your community who you think care about the protection of basic human rights and women's integrity, and demand justice for Suzanne Swift. There are also links on the following web-page if you would like to send financial support to her mother for legal defense or just to get a cool tee-shirt or messenger bag.

http://www.suzanneswift.org/

Time

I am so confused. According to the cultural Ayamara constructs of space and time, When is then?

Sante on Greenberg on Leary

After last week's debacle review on psychedelic culture, it was a nice surprise to find High Priest Timothy Leary on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

I'm not sure I'm up for carting a 700 page book cross-country with me in August. But Sante's comments on Professor Leary's fondness for quenching his thirst do remind me of the "prologue" to his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks:

"I was conceived on a military reservation, West Point, New York, on the night of January 17, 1920. On the preceding day alcohol had become an illegal drug."

It's certainly worth wondering about the human pursuit of intoxication and the state's interest in regulating intoxication on behalf of the control of labor, land, and other such resources. Recently, law enforcement personnel have started to organize against the misuse of the public interest in the name of a "war on drugs."

Not everything that some people use to party with is about recreation -- so much more is about the unmediated contact with mystic, Earth wisdom. I like Huxley's writings in MOKSHA on the liberation of consciousness. But for an online example, check out Leary's own description of his entheogenic mushroom revelations, in "The Religous Experience: Its Production and Interpretation" from Psychedelic Review 1:3 (1964), pp. 324-246.

Used Book Search Engines and Hipstorical Research

I have always loved the research aspect of my job. Studying for prelims was like genuflecting at the altar of knowledge. The library gave me a carrel, I filled it up with books, and locked myself into it for 9 or 12 hours a day, with breaks for e-mail checks back in the Department lab or a cup of coffee. I could follow footnotes, prowl the dusty aisles for unknown collections of key journal articles conveniently anthologized for the historiographer, and browse lateral materials for a more cliotheorized knowing of the field at hand. In this way I read the slavery studies, labor history, urban history, and History of the West that coursework never gave me an opportunity to pursue.

It is a tantalizing game, such a life of the mind, and there are many libraries I could muse about: The Allentown Public Library, Muhlenberg College's domed cathedral, Williams College's stacked laminate cubby holes, the Bronfman Science Center's quiet reading rooms on the same campus, or my favorite, the soaring UCSF library overlooking Golden Gate Park.

I have lived in NYC for almost five years now, and traumatized by the contrast between Sebastopol in June and the WTC in September 2001, still have not ventured into either the CUNY Graduate Center or the Public Libary at Bryant Square. This is what happens if you listen too deeply to the security warnings about potential subway threats -- inertia, phobia, that "state of fear." Why I take the bus more of the time than not.

So at the moment, I am entranced with the possibilities of keyword searches in the commercial second-hand book market made possible by databases and independent book sellers. My favorite terms -- hippies, counterculture, Haight-Ashbury, and M.G's conceptual label of "psychedelic beatnik" -- all routinely bring up new and inspiring facets on the popular texts which circulated "freak" styles and values from the bohemian outposts of artist quarters and academic circles into the consciousness of mainstream America.

I began with a book I already possessed a photocopy of: Burton H. Wolfe's The Hippies, which I had discovered in the University of Florida library during the Spring Break of 1994 and madly copied into a well-thumbed, awkwardly stapled collation stored in one of the most battered of my files' manila folders. Allan Cohen told me later that the cover photo, which he called "The Hippie Madonna," was controversial in and of itself. But that is a story for the dissertation.

Hedgestock whaaaa?

So last time I was in San Francisco, eating at my favorite taqueria near the Castro, I happened into Aardvark Books next door and picked up a copy of David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How they Got there.

It really seems to me that there is going to have to be more historical work done on the changing patterns of class, caste, status, consumption, and privilege across the 20th century in order to understand how the cultural politics of race relations in both the domestic U.S. "1960s" and the international decolonization efforts (under which category I would include the Vietnam War) have been manipulated toward a world trade that only marginally rationalizes the importance of order over chaos but uses the emotionally provocative languages of stability, security, and safety without full human rights for ALL of life.

My Three Aunts

Whenever people rant in my earshot about Roman Catholicism, I am more apt than not to pipe up: "I have three aunts who are nuns."

Technically they are Great Aunts -- sisters of my father's father -- and two of them are now passed on into Beloved Memory. But growing up with them, being the recipient of their showers of love and affection, and watching them move in and out of cloisters, teaching positions, nursing jobs, and the changing dress-codes for their habits certainly gave me a different perspective on being Religious.

Of the three, I felt closest to Sister Ann Constance, SSJ, former principal of Bethlehem Catholic High School, also known in the family as "Aunt Iz."

(It was a novice at her convent that swept me from my mother's arms at the tender age of six weeks, placing me on the altar for a blessing that Mom always reminded me of whenever the story of Isaac's willingness to sacrifice Jacob came up in a reading or discussion.)

Sister survived breast cancer only to fall prey to a brain disease that left her increasingly immobile and in dementia for almost ten years. At her funeral, my father humbly (or perhaps fearfully?) passed his assignment of reading the Intercessions to me, and I trembled on the altar in front of hundreds of devout Catholics, many of them in religious orders, to dare to invoke "Let us Pray to the Lord."

Devotion to G-D and the Blessed Mother I have. Dogmatic adherence to the precepts of Roman Catholicism or weekly attendance at Mass I do not, probably logging a total of 50 Masses in the last FIVE years (rather than one), ash on my forehead at Lent and friendliness with the campus Newman Association(s) notwithstanding.

Her sister in the Order, Elizabeth Immaculate, passed on less than six months later. She was one of the sweetest, most innocent women I have ever known. Childlike in her way of seeing the world, and beautifully modest about expressing her faith and her opinions. But I also heard she was a tough math teacher. And at her funeral, listening to the work of her teaching career, I realized that my vocation in education was not an anomaly in the family.

Aunt Nancy joined the convent first, at eighteen, directly out of high school. But Aunt Clare held out through her twenties, carried on a vibrant social calendar, and exercised her spending power with a career in nursing. She became a Sister of Mercy. And they were among the first order, from what I recall, to discard the medieval habits for modern costume.

I used to love summers at the Jersey shore. Or more precisely, the two weeks of every year, usually August, that the clan would gather in Sea Isle City. And the nuns would doff their headdresses, and run their fingers through their graying close cropped curls, and laugh at themselves. The older women wore bright tanks with skirts; their brother, my Poppop, always had an underwear shirt covering his chest. It was before most people used sunblock. And we would fly kites, jump the waves, and build castles made of sand and seaweed and clamshells.

Rocktober

Why is it that the first time I have some solo writing time in months every single one of my favorite jambands has to come to the New York City area???

String Cheese Incident played at a community college not too far from Asbury Park on Saturday night. It was a cute, fun, round room. Unfortunately their long-time sound engineer had just quit / been fired over longstanding gripes with the managers, and so the same quaint factors made for an atrociously muddy mix.

Danced up front during second set, and got down a little with a bunch of freaks I love the STRING CHEESE INCIDENT, but was too in my head over the departure of Jon O'Leary to really enjoy.

We zoomed up the Garden State Parkway, thru the Holland Tunnel, and walked in to the Knitting Factory just as New Monsoon started up, sometime after 1 a.m. After the debacle in Lincroft, we were happy to be in a happy-vibed crowd, albeit a small one. And much dancing and festivity took place. Guitarist Jeff Miller was the most relaxed I've seen him over the last several years we've been following them, and so the music was brilliant.

Sunday NM played again at Mexicali Blues in Teaneck, joined by Hot Buttered Rum String Band. One of the storm's players, Bo, who's instruments are acoustic guitar and banjo, lost a close family member and was home visiting. It was the band's first appearance without him, and they were wistful at times, but still very high powered. Aaron Redner, the fiddler from Butter, filled in an alternate part for him on Calypso. And then Erik Yates joined in for a couple a few songs late on banjo.

Butter had opened with a gorgeous set of their usual hot and spunky stuff. Another meltdown!

I arrived a tad late, missing the exit for the George Washington Bridge in a bit of musical mayhem, and having had to turn around in Fordham. I don't know the river crossings or the northern parts of the metro area nearly as well as Brooklyn, so it was a tad of a hairy ride. I always think of my Dad and my Pop-pop when we ride by Yankees Stadium, 'though, and also muse about where my Bronx relatives on the Barrett side lived. So it's definitely a different nostalgia trip for me than for darling hubby.

A good crew of GoudaFriends were in the house, for we all do love the sound at Mexicali Blues, and it was pretty nice sized crowd for a Sunday night! Next up: Yonder Mountain String Band.

La Dolly Mama

We were among the crowd thronged into Lindley Meadow of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Sunday to hear Miss Dolly Parton sing at the “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass” free music festival.

There were, of course, quite a few Dollies in the audience, dressed to impress in the masquerade of diva queens one might expect in such a queer-friendly urbana as Baghdad by Bay. But my favorite was the woman we all came to see perform on the Star Stage, spangled out in turquoise and silver, rouged and dashingly blonde, and wielding at times a matching teal electric guitar.

There was little sign of “the hippie-styled” / vintage show she had put on at Radio City Music Hall six weeks earlier, although the setlist relied similarly on the Sixties-standards recorded on her upcoming release, Those Were The Days (Sugar Hill Records, October 2005).

She sang “Me and Bobbie McGee” with a nod to Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin. She cooed “Crimson and Clover” with a stand-up-like commentary on the pungent aroma of that incense-like herbal intoxicant, known colloquially as “grass,” which seemingly permeated the audience. And among her half a dozen or so other songs, including several peacenik ballads (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and John Lennon’s “Imagine”), she regaled us with a poignant version of “Coat of Many Colors,” dedicated to her Mama, who sewed it for her during a childhood where rich and poor were relative categories reflected against such mirrors as pride, identity, and dignity.

You might remember some of the lyrics about a pieced-together, recycled rag jacket that the enterprising and economic seamstress compared favorably with the bibical story of Joseph’s “technicolor dream coat:”

Dolly Parton, “Coat of Many Colors”
Title song of 1971 RCA Victor album

Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us
And how my momma put the rags to use
There were rags of many colors
Every piece was small
And I didn't have a coat
And it was way down in the fall
Momma sewed the rags together
Sewin' every piece with love
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of

As she sewed, she told a story
From the bible, she had read
About a coat of many colors
Joseph wore and then she said
Perhaps this coat will bring you
Good luck and happiness
And I just couldn't wait to wear it
And momma blessed it with a kiss

Chorus:

My coat of many colors
That my momma made for me
Made only from rags
But I wore it so proudly
Although we had no money
I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

So with patches on my britches
Holes in both my shoes
In my coat of many colors
I hurried off to school
Just to find the others laughing
And making fun of me
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

And oh I couldn't understand it
For I felt I was rich
And I told them of the love
My momma sewed in every stitch
And I told 'em all the story
Momma told me while she sewed
And how my coat of many colors
Was worth more than all their clothes

But they didn't understand it
And I tried to make them see
That one is only poor
Only if they choose to be
Now I know we had no money
But I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me
Made just for me

My mother was also born in 1946, but to far wealthier circumstances. She and her two older sisters (Dolly was one of 12 children in Appalachia) wore matching wool coats with fancy buttons and coordinated berets from New York's finest mercantile. And my grandparents bought similar sets for my sister and I in the early 1970s, before we grew too wild to bother with such decorous styling. The "class" politics of coats and clothes and rags and stitching... All I can say about it right now is let's hear it for the needleworkers... UNITE!

Live from Cali

Nothing like a one-way aeroplane ticket to California!

I'm hanging out in Santa Cruz, recovering from the most amazing wedding EVER in Yosemite. I mean, I loved my weddings -- both to the same man, a year apart, one guru-blessed, one rabbi-legalized. But this affair was quite special.

Hostessed by the Martha Stewart of hippie/deadhead world and the taper extraordinaire of our whole scene, it was a dragonfly extravaganza of love, respect, bliss, happiness, and joy. What a bash! With the best waterfalls Yosemite has had in years. And plenty of crazy hippies mixing it up with Yonder Mountain String Band and Hot Buttered Rum String Band playing music for the aforementioned bride and groom. You can't complain about a gig like that!

Come to think of it, maybe I'll stop complaining. About everything. Why not? With so much love in the world, what's the point in being cranky?

Glad to be outta NYC and hanging in the redwoods - can'tcha tell?

Don't pet the animals: they bite

Note to self: stopping by the tail end of the Motorcycle Club's evening meeting, after they've adjourned to Fillmore's (the Local 3 watering hole) is a set up for chaos. And I have an Outlaw Biker's toothmark on my middle finger to prove it!

Thought the gentleman wanted to kiss my hand, and then he started gnawing on me!! With my husband and our best man standing right next to us!!! Oh the company I keep, and the boundaries I lack. Another lipstick notch for Agnes the Airhead, my new persona for dealing with that "smart girl who doesn't think" side of things.

Apparently the peace offering is a tattoo, according to the men's subsequent negotiations as I raised a rugby-player's balls-out protest about the welt on my knuckle. But we'll be away during "the convention" this weekend at the Roseland Ballroom, so I'll have to wait until June to get inked.

It's funnier than it probably sounds.

Yom HaShoah - Remembrance of the Holocaust

We live in a part of Queens where the observance of Jewish holy days are noticeable, even if you are goyim and/or don't have an eye on the calendar. I hadn't been too deep into the public fray when I posted yesterday morning. And after running errands and noticing some religiously minded men out and about, I came home to check out the many web-sites helpful to intellectually curious people, like me - someone who "married in" to The Tribe, but whose spouse is decidedly assimilationist and unplugged from the shul long ago.

5/5/5 was also the Day of Remembrance this year -- it shifts according to the lunar-based Jewish calendar -- and follows so close between the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Dachau death camp (April 29, 1945) and the surrender of the Germans to Allied Forces and VE Day (May 8, 1945) as to make this historian notice the synchronicity in her mental file. (See also the provocation of a new Deutsche papa to my new bloggishness!)

Dachau, the first of the death camps established, initially for political prisoners, is a place I have visited. It is not far outside Munich, and in 1988, after a semester abroad at the School for Irish Studies in Dublin, a small group of us travelling on the continent sojourned out to pay our respects. It was December, cold and gray, and quite possibly the day after Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie Scotland with 50+ study-abroad juniors like ourselves travelling home for Christmas; a friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Saunders, perished in that bombing.

Modern traumas notwithstanding, the historical weight of visiting one of the Kamps is not to be underestimated. The psychic shock of being in such a place was overwhelming. After just a few minutes of walking the grounds, I began to hear my name echoing. Not quite in my head, but in the sound of pebbles underfoot, and in the wind, and from a far away place. Rachel, mother of the tribe, Jacob's beloved. Rachel of Ramah, crying for her children, unconsolable. Rachel, my daughter. Rachel, my sister. Rachel! Ruchel! Ruchelah!!!

At age 20.5, walking the grounds of Dachau, unkowingly untethered from familiar reality, the membrane between conscious awareness and the collective Unconscious had grown thin.

I sought out sacred ground to quell the spirits. To a temple with an eternal flame, but the gates were closed. To an ecumenical, United Nations-ish memorial, but it was cold and forbidding, not much solace. And then, blessedly, to a Carmelite convent church, on the edge of the grounds, which I stumbled into half-mad with grief and the uncontrolled channelling of psychic pain that was mine and not mine and everyone's at the same "time." You walk through an old guard tower into the monastic grounds, and the transition, for me, was perceptible. As if angels had folded their wings around me and I could breathe again, surrounded by air made purer with prayer and sacrifices of a different order.

As the great soul Elie Wiesel points out in an interview about the controversial religious sites at Auschwitz, in fact Dachau was a KZ for all sorts of dissenters, and many Jewish prisoners were sent further East to their deaths. But I did not grasp that distinction at the time. And still, the unevolved human capacity for genocide remains a terror for us all regardless of caste, creed, ethnicity, or political belief.

What, of all this, might our new German pope, whose faith took its formation in the cauldron of such a war, bring from it to bear on the future of this world?

Why I didn't go see Dylan at the Beacon

It was a rainy night.
We took a taxi to your mother's home
She went to Florida and left you
With your father's gun alone
Upon her small white bed
I fell into a dream
You sat up all the night and watched me
To see, who in the world I might be
-- Joni Mitchell, "Rainy Night House," from Ladies of the Canyon (April 1970)

Up until 3 a.m the night before, being all buttery in Joyzee, my morning plans to trek up to the Amherst-Williams Women's Rugby Footbal Club showdown fizzled. I wrote much of the day, and then fell asleep before Jeff got home from a hard day's work at the airport. He never even checked the bedroom to see if I was home, and set about relaxing with a Hoegaarden's & limon, found himself watching The Last Waltz and realized, hey, why am I watching Bob Dylan on tv when he's live, in town, up at the Beacon Theater?

The Beacon, as diehard NYC music fans know, is one of the last places in town where you can almost always find a way in the door. They often sell standing room only tickets at the door, and since it was a rainy night, my man figured the ticket would be an easy one.

It was at this point, as the music from the room next door began to louden in anticipation of his evening plans, that I roused myself from a nap, stumbling into the hall rubbing the snoozies out of my eyes. Although he was happy to see me, the surprised but gruff tone "What the fuck are you doing home?" made us both laugh.

So, now he had a date. Or so he thought. He pled, he wheedled, he tried out the "you're a sixties historian and he's the Bard of the Era" line on me. But there was no budging. I'd been in Minneapolis too long, and heard too many bad reports of mumbled shows and mediocre music to deal with the scene at the Beacon. I preferred my joyous memories of the Government Mule show there on 12/30/04 to the anticipation of a somewhat stressful jockeying for position night. Solo, Jeff, or I for that matter, can ease our way around and through the crowds at a music show, making friends, finding soulmates, dancing with the spirit. As a pair, however, we are a little slower, a little harder to fit into the crevices between people, and more than preoccupied with how happy the other person is at any given moment. Codependent indeed.

Moreover, all my usual joy-joining suspects were either at Jazzfest, down in Philly at a strangely venued Ratdog at the Electric Factory gig, or on their way to Bryn Mawr for a Hot Buttered Rum meltdown. And the thought of jostling my way into the Dylan crowd was just too much after the beautiful energy of the night before at Mexicali Blues.

So we had a very mature, married-couple conversation, off he went to the Forest Hills train station, and home I stayed to read and write and write and read and organize and journal and enjoy my Joni Mitchell fix.

I will always love Lisa Law's photographs of a young Bob when they were all living down in L.A. But I save my sponteneity for musical energy that vitalizes me, not enervates.

And besides, I still haven't figured out who I might be. It was a good night for that journey.