journeying

Sleepiness composes this post here today. Honoring the earlier wake-up call. Honoring what have become a thousand hands and eyes of morning ritual. Still, the thought of sleeping a thousand years has its appeal, this Wednesday.

Back in 1970 or ’71, it may have been ’72, I found myself marching in something of a funky circle in front of the FBI building in downtown Boston – free Angela Davis. I just Googled Angela. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She did some of her schooling at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. My good friend Don lives there and he bought my original “Wareham River” painting. It hangs on a wall in Waltham right now. My younger sister Nancy taught English as a Second Language classes at Waltham High School for more than 20 years.

Angela is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz today. I’ve only ever been to Santa Cruz once in this life, part of a weekend, and I was too drunk and stoned to remember most of it. I went there that weekend with my best friend Bob Zimmerman. Bob passed away in 2010.

Angela’s still here. So is my friend Don, so’s my sister Nancy, and so am I – typing this now. That weekend in Santa Cruz I went with some people to see a rock show, the performers were Bonnie Hayes with the Wild Combo. They have a couple of songs on the “Valley Girl” movie soundtrack, which came out in 1983. I stopped drinking in 1983. I was crashing on my little sister Nancy’s couch at the time. Just two years before meeting Don, who was to be my boss at a young adolescent girl’s treatment house, those girls white and black and emotionally messed up. Angela Davis published her book “Women, Race and Class” in 1983.

I promise to think about Angela Davis and everyone else here when I go marching on my morning walk in San Diego in a little while.