I wouldn’t exactly herald them as “The Good Ole Days,” but
there is a golden quality to them, in retrospect, all the same. They are rich
and gritty, dazzling and dark. That hazy era between naïve, lovingly protected
childhood and the misunderstood certainty of the first marriage. Those years were
sprinkled with tentative leaps out into worldliness and heartache (just as
predicted), then huddling back under the shield of the great Man in the Sky—so
safe and quiet here, so dull and formless. Still, a good place to lick wounds
(self-inflicted lashings-out, a poor attempt at healing a broken heart by
trying to stuff another into the festering gouges left by First Love’s abrupt
absence). But then, still injured, badly scarred, to step cleanly from within
that shelter out into the brazen world of delicious cocktails and daring
sexuality—of bouncing over rutted backroads in a rusted out vintage Camaro, or
relentlessly pressing out into the mountains in search of the peace and love so
thinly promised by the hippies I wanted to be, or inhaling deeply of life, of
lust, of incense and the smoke it was meant to disguise.
