Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Girlfriends


By midday, Boulder was sweltering canned heat with no relief other than to check into Vic's Coffeehouse for an iced mocha, sipped slowly at a table directly beneath the swamp cooler fan while trying to keep the eyelids open as the brain shuts in a meltdown. I gulp iced sodas and an ocean of water and still, I'm exhausted just watching the heat waves blur the air above sidewalks and car hoods. It's after a full day of visiting long-time friends in town in 100 degree temps that the imagery of cold sake and excellent fish in air conditioned surrounds propels me to a more logical priority before heading up the dusty, winding curves through Fourmile Canyon where I'm staying with dear girlfriends of my Boulder past life.

"Wow, that's a lot of sushi!" exclaimed the rotund man taking up his space and spilling into mine at the bar in Sushi Tora in downtown Boulder.

"They're only half rolls," I defended as the artistic platter of a dozen pieces was handed over the counter with a smile and a bow. Savoring the memory of my favorite Boulder sushi restaurant in the old West Pearl neighborhood called for revisiting the best loved menu choices.... all of them. Flying fish egg, and half rolls of dragon, soft shell crab and the Orgasm, the latter always producing guffaws from clowns like the one sitting next to me.

"What? Only half an orgasm? You should really work on that!" he grinned a dimpled practiced smirk that might have been cute when he was far younger but looked grotesquely warped as he elbowed his 2 buddies, who were equally smarmy.

"Yeah... right… but I'm only faking it anyway," I politely snarled, turning in solitary culinary bliss to admire the delicately arranged rolls zigzagged in sauces and sitting atop heaps of Japanese veggie-garnish. Slowly luxuriating in the complex flavors, I maneuvered another piece into my mouth.

"Wow, you can really put it away! And you're small... I mean... you're not fat or anything but you can really eat that stuff," the uninvited neighbor bleats as his belly shakes in laughter with his own perceived cleverness.

"Oh look.... your check! " I smile, "Isn't the service here wonderful?" I shoot a thankful glance to the waitress, who knowingly smiles back, and think... that's what I get for going to dinner without my girlfriends.

The girls were back at the canyon cabin, dubbed Fort Girlie for the weekend, where the air was only slightly cooler but the mountain stream was refreshing as it tumbled past the front door. Girlfriends who would never insinuate that you were eating or drinking too much. In fact, they'd gladly sacrifice the calories and offer to dine with you just to keep your intake to half. In our world 25 years ago, we would jog around North Boulder Park and then reward ourselves with
ice cream.

"The calories cancel out if you both eat the same hot fudge sundae," my friend, Lynda, would proclaim. It's like clapping your hands if you believe in Tinkerbell and if you believe – like magic – it will be. It must have worked because we were always able to fit into size 2 jeans.

The ladies of the canyon had reassembled and were chatting about past and future boyfriends, cats, travels, tarot readings, planetary transits and the latest strategy for instant weight loss and lottery-sized financial gains set to the music of girlish howls and fine wine. Years of mutual admiration and camaraderie. Decades of fashion trends, club hopping and changes culminating in a weekend reunion of breakfast in pjs and dinners on the porch with long conversations deep into the night. Real girlfriends who would never chastise for frivolous spending, or dumping a date, or moving cross country for your soul, or buying a pair of jeans a size too small for incentive. No... these were seasoned women who, after 25 years together sometimes on opposite ends of the universe, had been through every imaginable disaster, joy, loss, rebirth and hairstyle – and emerged victorious, wizened and stronger. Through time, they had come to understand and encourage the dynamics and value of their individual quirks and flavor.

"You know, my Ruby the VW is not going to make it over to the front range," I had tried to explain to my friends when the gathering was announced.

"We'll understand if you can't make it, but you should try to come," Lynda and Robin both said. I had been looking for a companion car for Ruby – like getting a puppy for an older dog – to get me to the further reaches, the edge and beyond – the VW reality is that in her antiquity, she's really a western slope car. Ruby is a lot like the rest of my girlfriends, classic and still going strong, but selective. Serendipitously, another girlfriend in Crested Butte happened to be selling her Subaru and although it didn't have the personality of a 72 VW bug, it would do the trick.

"Wait... you bought a car just to come see me?" Lynda sounded amused
but not too surprised.
"Well, that's what girlfriends are for..." I reasoned.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Memory Jog


This is your brain on macaroni with a side of fried memory.

If the genetic memory within cells can summon up traits in reproduction, why can't I recall the name of the person I just met 5 minutes ago? I'd like to blame it on the bleach headiness, but the sad truth is I think I had the same memory issues when I wasn't blonde... but I can't remember. Is the brain like a hard drive and can I upgrade to zettabytes? How do I get it to auto-save? Does it automatically empty the trash bin of memories not used for decades to make room for more?

It's embarrassing to have to continually ask someone's name introduced to you less than a minute before. I've tried the name game trick and relating the face or a feature with the name and even making silly rhymes. Tracy... racy, Macy's, parade, jade, fade, spade, dig, pig, fig... what was your name again? Sorry... my mind wanders. And my disc needs to be defragmented.

Coming back to Crested Butte after a 20-year journey through life elsewhere, I was reunited with people who remembered more about my past than I did. Although, I'm not sure their perspective of the events was viewed from the same angle as mine if I could remember it.

“Don't you remember Franko the Magician?” one particularly sharp friend impishly smirked when I looked blankly at the ground, trying to conjure up an image of anyone named Franko with a wand.

“You certainly came to work the next day thinking he was magic...” Later that evening, disturbed that I couldn't bring to mind someone uniquely romantic enough to be dressed in renaissance threads and traveling in a gypsy wagon, I suddenly remembered that I was trying to make my band learn Magic Man (by Heart) around the same time Franko's bohemian bus rolled out of town. But I still couldn't evoke specifics about meeting the magician, who was also a hypnotist...

As if to mock me, my mind will pull a visually detailed memory out of no where, completely unrelated to the moment, just a flash of a fragment – the marble stoop we sat on as young kids, a dusty corner from my teenage bedroom or the way the light fell into the window of a home 10 years ago. What triggers that visual when I can't remember where I left my keys, glasses, hat or drink?

Do genetic memories make us predisposed to certain preferences? There's a certain amount of cellular duplication passed on from parents to child – can parents' experiences be genetically shared on some level? This could explain why all teenagers are annoying to their parents... an endless cycle of retribution. It would then stand to reason that I am re-experiencing my grandmothers' flair for clothing, music and dance as a past life experience. It’s not my fault, it’s my ancestors’.

Riding along in the clanking tin cans of a local train to my family's ancestral home in southern Italy, I was stunned to discover the region was mountainous. No one had ever mentioned we hailed from magnificently tall green peaks that surrounded our house still occupied by the descendants of those who arrived in the 1500s. On a smaller, more ancient scale it was reminiscent of my own chosen mountain town home... but without the skiing, costumes or bars. I wondered if my love of vertical landscape could have originated from collective genetic memory of place.

They say if you can remember the 60s you weren't really there. What is it that makes a VW summon thoughts buried in a haze of purple nights and sunshine days? It's the gasoline and the horsehair seat stuffing. They always smell like part gas and part funky, musky wild animal and the combo jogs those memories loose from the back folds of grey matter. Someone tested the theory that the olfactory, the sense of smell, could bring forth strong memory, so college kids were given chocolate wrappers when studying and then again during the exam. The results were astounding for the group sniffing the wrappers. Maybe I just need more chocolate... enough to wake the deep-sixed.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Road to Freedom


Photo by Dusty Demerson

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing ain't worth nothin' but it's free...” – Me & Bobby McGee by Fred Foster and Kris Kristofferson

Free Bird. Free Ride. Free Falling. I'm Free! Free your mind. Free your soul. Free love. Free spirited. Free Huey. Free the people. Free beer (where?!) Break free. Fancy free. Duty free. Free agent. Free up. It's an adjective. It's an adverb. It's a verb. It’s a way of life. It's free. But apparently, for some reason, there is no free lunch.

I ran away when I was 16. Not because I hated my family, to the contrary, I really loved them, but the call of the road was beckoning freedom and every day was a new experience, tantalizingly unfurling like a good mystery. When curiosity peaked for what was unseen beyond the next curve, I could no longer be confined to schedules and rules. Life was uncontrollably pulling me into the moment along with hundreds of thousands more of the generation who chose to tune in and drop out.

Monterrey, the Atlanta Pop Festival, Woodstock... they were about freedom. Freedom to groove to music, altered by the times, a collective of souls temporarily thrown together under one sky for a similar unified purpose in love and perceived understanding. Sharing. Dancing. Laughing. Freedom from the prescribed daily drudgery of the life “The Establishment” made. The way it should be in a perfect world... however, in reality, without the machination for economy or food, it wouldn't have lasted more than 3 days anyway.

While we proposed that truth could set us free and love sustain us indefinitely, we were all continuously hungry with severe munchies. The barter system worked for some things depending on what you wanted and what you were willing to give for it. Communal living sprung from the well of harmonious thought when we imagined we could be one big happy entity. It was about the WE and not the individual. And in that, theoretically, there was the freedom to be yourself within the cosmic sort of family. But if everyone’s truly free, then who's going to do all those communal chores required to exist, especially in the induced haziness? Few communes figured it out – most didn't and people went their different ways.

All that togetherness is probably what spurred the ME generation of the individualistic late 70s. The turn around from the group mentality of the flower children. New and improved... even more freedom. Free to be you and me, separately. Needing one's own space. Just because I sleep with you doesn't mean I'm gonna dance with you, as Tony claims in Saturday Night Fever.

Freedom takes shape differently for each individual. A mountain bike ride or sitting at a bar all day. A solitary walk deep into wilderness. A good book that can transport into another world. Traveling with no particular destination. Good health. Financial stability. For some, there is freedom in defined parameters because it appears safe. Religion. Meditation. Groomers.

I love my freedom. Corny as it may seem to some, the little red 72 VW I've given the name Ruby to is the manifestation of independence on wheels. She smells of simpler days, times of adventure and youthful idealism – and she gets 30 mpg. Recently, personal liberty was granted by the 30-year veteran guru of VW repair who in one simple statement, “She's good to go,” sent me free wheelin' down the road. I had waited all winter to redeem Ruby from her western slope winter spa since that's how long the Bug Guru in Delta had said it would take him to get 'er done. Which freed me from having to locate and shovel the tiny car out from the heapage of snow this past winter.

Mid May rolled around and Ruby was still in “I'm working on her” mode as we slid into June. I started to panic, feeling trapped, unable to roam past the walking boundaries of town. Anxiety took over and I packed a bag, ready to thumb it over to Delta if necessary to liberate Ruby, ready or not, when the call came serendipitously the same day Kebler Pass opened up the entire Western Slope from my front door.

The road doesn’t call me, it screams and sings in 5 part harmonies. For me, the sound of freedom ringing is a chirping VW engine as it putters along a high mountain pass, aspens fluttering in the breeze giving glimpses of distant higher peaks. Sunshine, blue skies. Everyone smiles when they encounter a classic VW ... they recall their own glory days of freedom, or the stories told to them by parents – fingers with muscle memory from decades ago flash peace signs. But meeting another classic VW on the road is like finding an old friend, honking and waving with recognition, knowing you share a history of like-mindedness being freedom bound. Why else would you be driving an ancient chariot? For all of you on the road, may your journey be free and easy and your Freak Flag forever fly.