The Other One

I needed some time to integrate, as I often do. The holidays can be that way, familiar faces, familiar emotions, pattern recognition hits a different way this time.

I also am processing a major loss and reflections on this happen in the quiet hours of my evenings.

Bridget told me. Of course she did. She told me when Phil left too. We were together when Jerry left. She always seemed to tell me about my band, I should say “our band” because they are “Our Band” even “The Boys”. They were here for us, all of us who needed them. There was always a way forward, when their music reshaped your focus, unmistakably.

On this particular day, after school, I called her on the phone. Not a cell phone, those weren’t around yet. A phone with a cord. Yeah. I called and said, did you hear them yet? She said, “I did”!

She had purchased two cassette tapes from Columbia House, (she had a subscription), she bought Skeletons from the Closet and American Beauty. The song, “Ripple” on America Beauty was the one. For some reason, I recall this as being the first song from The Grateful Dead I ever heard.

Before she came over and dropped off the tapes, I asked her if I would like the music, (I always wanted her and everyone else to read my mind). She said in not so many words, “I don’t know, dude”, but I’ll bring it over and drop it off and you can listen tonight.

So she did, and I did.

I will never forget pressing play on the recording and hearing that tape turn on. I laid down in my bed and closed my eyes. I really will never forget this moment in my life. I started listening to the melody of the song, and instantly I was home. Not home like some version of going home after a long trip out of the house and putting on your sweats to feel comfy, no this was ‘Home’ in the sense of I knew this place. I had been there before. I thought I knew the words, they formed out of my lips as I heard them, every one of them as they were being sung. I was certain I hadn’t heard this music before. My parents were as far from hippies as someone born in the 1950’s could be. They never played the Dead, even on the radio. If there was a song I might have overheard in the late 1980’s it would’ve been Truckin’ or “Casey Jones”, this was neither of them, but those songs weren’t familiar to me, it was the other ones: Ripple, Brokedown Palace, Attics. etc.

I will never forget that day. The day it all begun and my life changed. I knew that this was something I had been yearning for. A message sent directly to me. I was to listen to the cry, and respond. I was to go on the road to seek the Bird Song. And that’s exactly what I did.