Smokin' Bowl

There are some things in life that just come along, times that you never forget...In the summer of 1971, the Grateful Dead performed at the Yale Bowl to a capacity crowd...you can still listen to the concert on InternetArchive.org, infamous because the curtain closed on rock concerts at the Bowl after that night...storming the fences to get in were hundreds of Dead fans who were thwarted by tear gas and the cops, but that didn't cause the band to skip even half a beat as far as I could tell...I am pretty sure this was the first performance to feature Sugaree but all of it was amazing...I was wearing a Buck knife on my belt that night...I always wore one in Maine, why not New Haven? As we went in, one of the cops grabbed it off my belt and refused to give it back, apparently because I just looked too dangerous and a guy who could not be trusted, you know, like all the other Deadheads...after arguing to no avail, I slipped the sheath off my belt and handed it to the guy saying they needed to stay together...not at all inclined to give it back, even after the concert...going to be thrown in the harbor, he told me...
...I have it today, it took six months of waiting after an intermediary in New Haven talked the cops into returning it to me and it arrived in my mailbox in a pretty nondescript looking package...the way I look at it that cop probably had to go diving in the harbor and sort through a lot of bottom shit before finally, with about 20 seconds of air left, find it and break for the surface...

Tales from the crypt

So I'm sitting at one of the town's more respectable bars last week, bookended by two couples I did not know (or so I thought) with a hunger and a thirst that I've usually taken care of by 8:30 any evening of the week...on my left a social worker and a teacher from Massachusetts, on my right a somewhat inebriated couple all hugged up as we say and talking pretty loudly...I'm just about halfway through my appetizer and Oban, after finishing giving the couple to the left my almost most knowledgeable tips about where to hike and climb on the island, when I freeze-frame after hearing guy to the right say to the woman on my right that although he is in Maine, he has yet to run into his old girlfriend from years past...to my everlasting credit I didn't let on that his old girlfriend was, or is, my ex-wife...WOW!, here's something that's right up there on my Richter Scale, a scale I had to take to the shop for repairs after hearing this guy speak...the guy was a real name-dropper: he mentioned my ex-wive and David Rockefeller only about five minutes apart...I guess now comes the question to my legion of readers: do I say anything to this guy if I see him somewhere, do I warn my ex that this guy did eventually return from England, or do I simply put this down as a write-off on my social tax return? The phones are open, I'm taking calls and in a subsequent blog, I will provide survey results...this could be fun!