Time folded back upon itself recently and the fabric yielded and tore slightly beneath an unseen pressure. I had received a friend request on Facebook. I didn’t recognize the name so I did my usual private eye routine and began by looking at the profile picture. Thank god it wasn’t a kitten or cartoon avatar. I studied a photo of a bewhiskered grandfatherly man seated comfortably at a microphone with a guitar. He had a bemused expression on his face with his glasses pushed up his nose. He was strangely familiar … then like an image emerging from the photographers developing tray I saw it was Jay, my old college roommate from Arkansas some 40 odd years ago. I could recall the earnest, gangly blonde haired farm kid with big hands and thick glasses. He shared his acoustic guitar and we sang “El Paso” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” We were strangers in a strange land together.
College was a big change for me. I had been raised very sheltered. I had been unceremoniously kicked out of my home the year before and I spent my high school senior year living in a diminutive cabin behind the Baptist minister’s house. I had the use of my brother Sam’s 52 GMC pickup truck while he was off at war, although I didn’t have a driver’s license. I existed in a fog. I was the janitor for the courthouse and jail and the public library. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would drive the streets of town with one hand on the gear shift and elbow out the window. I’d pass the single red light blinking downtown or park and listen to the frogs croaking at the town pond. At college the next year, I found the concentrated society of dorm life overwhelming. Music and activity were going on around the clock. There was zero privacy. I worked in the cafeteria with the black kids and snuck out trays of food on the weekends. I was an emotional rubber band snapping between insecurity and excitement about the new experiences.
Recalling those days, I wondered who else had I forgotten? Within days I had reconnected with Winston, the sensitive kid, who had still been in high school, but hung out with us. He wrote great songs and taught us how to play Simon and Garfunkel hits. There was John of the turtlenecks and cool demeanor and social insights whose parents hosted us for weekends. Craig spoke like a Tennessee Williams character, gesturing with his pipe and making pithy wry observations. He came to our aid when a badly placed parking lot light outside our dorm room destroyed all hope of twilight sleep. He fetched a sweet little 20 gauge shotgun and nailed it from my fourth floor window. Then there was demure Sheila who was clear-eyed and always the sharpest knife in the drawer. Together we would gather in the student union listening to “Crimson and Clover” as we tried to make sense of a year that included the assassinations of Senator Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the My Lai massacre of 347 Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers, and Apollo 8 circling the big golden moon. Hair was opening on Broadway, the median household income was $7,743 and a stamp was a nickel. We didn’t smoke pot and hardly drank beer but we were the campus radicals. As I chatted on Facebook with these folks and they casually dropped names and recalled events, I was appalled at how much I had forgotten.
In 1968 our institute of higher learning had mandatory ROTC. I had already registered with my draft board as a conscientious objector; willing to serve but not bear arms. I had to find new reserves of determination and self-reliance as I negotiated with the angry officers. I became the first ROTC cadet to march and execute maneuvers without a rifle. The commander considered it further mutinous behavior when I brought a black student as my date to the ROTC ball.
Someone concerned about the atmosphere of violence on campus and the fact that black students were only given menial jobs in housekeeping and the cafeteria had invited SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to send a representative to our college. One day an exotic young couple arrived. They began passing out a pamphlet entitled The Use of the Word [expletive] as an Intensifier. In short order they were arrested and lodged in the local jail awaiting trial. We conversed with them through the second floor barred windows at the rear of the jail. We tossed them single cigarettes which they snatched from the air like swallows on the wing.
The rip in time widened. I got a phone call from a person who lived with Sue and I in the early ’80s while he struggled with alcohol. He helped me build a deck. He rolled his car in the meadow by my mailbox and woke me in the darkness, drunken and frightened, his words slurring, while the red and blue lights of the police cruiser lit the overturned car in the tall ryegrass. I walked him down the driveway to face his consequences. That was 30 years ago. He had just found my number on a slip of paper and he wanted me to know he’d gotten his life together, married and had a successful business.
Days later, from a different wrinkle in time’s fabric, Warren, the hermit of Blue Lick, W.Va., banjo player par excellent and brewer of fine beers appeared on Facebook. It used to take a half day’s hike out the muddy ridge to see his tall cabin covered in hop vines and his gentle smiling face. Today he’s active playing with The Candya** Mountain Boys. From just over the ridge on Trace Creek, old neighbors Bob and Stephanie weighed in with reports of their work and family. Then, Connie, another hippy homesteader from those days sent a friend request.
Just the next day, space crackled and spit and through the portal came the voice of Jack on the phone, “Is this the same Tony and Sue who lived in Rapid City in the ’70s?”
While I labored on the blood-stained floors of Black Hills Meat Packing and Sue raised four little kids, we were immersed in the community of a charismatic church. Jack and Kate were the only hippies we knew. We would picnic with them and admire their gardens and sometimes I’d sit in with their sprawling string band for performances. We lost touch when we moved away four decades ago. As they were passing through Flagstaff they saw my name listed for a performance in the paper and called me on a chance. We were able to catch up over breakfast the next day. Gardening and music are still mainstays of their lives.
Clinical psychologists, craftsmen, retired high school teachers, off-Broadway actors, data operators, grandparents, farmers and directors of drama, all getting off the bus stop—circling back just now to remind me of the influence I had in their lives and the role they played shaping mine. Is this a new intuitive logarithm Facebook has developed? Or is it just the season of my life?
Tony Norris is a working musician, storyteller and folklorist with a writing habit. He’s called Flagstaff home for 30-plus years. He will be performing with Springfed, Bill Burke and special guest Elena Gonzalez on Sun, May 3 at the Coconino Center for the Arts as part of Stories To Life Abraham Lincoln:150 Years Gone By. The show starts at 6 p.m. and is free. For more, visit his website at www.tonynorris.com.
