Growing up in Canada at the height of the Vietnam War I had the chance to be part of a world that will probably never occur again, at least not in this or the next century. I’m not talking about the anti-war rallies in Toronto organized by the Quakers or the radical student groups, nor the protests in front of the American consulate nor even the intensity of the arguments in school with those who believed America was right to bomb Vietnam. I’m talking about being part of something that most people watched on television or only read about in the news: a commune.
I’d met a couple of draft-dodgers while working for Sam Stokes when I was recovering from my accident and once I also bumped into them in the IGA. A small American flag graced the back of one T-shirt and a peace sign the other. Everybody in the store stared at them and didn’t say a word until they left. Mrs. Greunock, the pharmacist, shook her head while her husband laughed and said that it was all right for people not to want to fight in a war half way around the world.
Roncali wanted nothing to do with hippies and communes. “Afraid of war,” he said. “Besides, mothers let their kids watch ‘em pee and fathers walk around naked and let me tell you, a naked man’s an ugly thing.”
“Hippies don’t like the world as it is,” I said. “They want a better world. You got a problem with that?”
“Sure do. I like the world as it is and I’m not afraid of war. Wouldn’t want to change that and you can call me a conservative until Bobby Orr grows old and dies.”
I think Roncali’s attitude reinforced my determination to visit the commune and when we came upon it one day while chasing a Buckeye butterfly behind Nederson’s orchard, we stood and stared in awe, as if we’d suddenly come upon an exotic world, a backwoods Xanadu. Not that there was anything mystical about what we were staring at: There, at the bottom of Hammock Valley, was an old barn with a grain silo and next to it a yellow VW bus with a large red peace sign painted on its side. Long-haired men and women and even a few kids came and went. This was the commune.
Roncali, not one to be intimidated or to reveal awe, said we’d be crazy to venture any closer. As soon as you enter a commune, he told me, they tie you to a chair, put needles inside you and teach you about communism. “They’re what you call proto-anarchists.”
“Proto my dick, Roncali.” Roncali had been sleeping with the dictionary in a valiant effort to improve his chances of also sleeping with Cheryl Sommers, a girl who wore long flowing skirts and used even longer flowing words. Alone, I tramped down Hammock Hill.
The entrance was nothing more than two brightly painted barrels at each side of a dirt path and someone had written WELL on one barrel and COME on the other. A small half-naked child raced in my direction, chased by a long-haired woman who grabbed the child, lifted it high into the air and glanced at me.
Suddenly a man wearing bell-bottom jeans, with long hair, a headband and a T-Shirt with the words AAW Boston Mobe was standing in front of me.
He seemed to be scrutinizing me, then he suddenly leaned over and hugged me. He smelled of the outdoors and of tobacco or something. I pulled away, thinking of Roncali’s words. “Nice of you to show up,” he said and let go. He spoke clearly, in a real every day voice. “Name’s Jay.” I liked the accent, open, loose, American. Some long-haired men struggled with a thick tractor axle. “Hey, don’t drop it!” He shook his head. “This here’s the Farm,” he told me, “the den of sin, the harem of loose women, the center of psychedelic ecstasy. Right?” He laughed. At a picnic table next to a small pond, two women and some children were peeling carrots and potatoes. Behind them, a man sat cross-legged with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, hands in the air. “That’s Jonas,” Jay said, following my gaze. “He’s Canadian. Nothing to do with the draft. Joined us last year. Believes in the Baghwama Jiree.”
Indian sounding names didn’t attract me. I’d seen similar types on Yonge Street, head shaved, hands up in the air, chanting mantras, and I always stayed away from them.
“What’s that mean?” I pointed to the words on his T-shirt.
“MOBE? Mobilization. The rest means Artists Against the War.”
“I’m against the war,” I offered.
“Smart kid.”
“I have a friend who isn’t.”
“Wonder what your friend would say if they sent him to Vietnam, with orders to kill.” He pronounced ‘nam’ like ‘lamb.’ In Canada it was more like ‘mom.’ “Cluster bombs, grenades, bombs that spot you from where you last took a piss. Legs flying at your face. Holes in your stomach like the open door of a washing machine.” As he led me to the barn I memorized his words to repeat them to Roncali.
“Where you from? Strange accent.”
I told him I was born in California but, I added, slightly embarrassed, I grew up in Greece and that we now lived around here.
“Far out,” he said and that was that. Not for Jay the endless questioning about one’s past. He tapped the barn’s wood exterior with his knuckles. “Worked on this baby for upwards of a year. It’s our community hotel with thirteen bedrooms. Toilets are of the outdoor variety, if you get my gist.” He pointed to a wooden outhouse at one end, surrounded by bushes.
“Who can join the commune?”
“Anyone,” he said. “Even you.”
A shiver ran down my back.
“Do you share all your belongings?” The wind fluttered the leaves of a large maple.
“Don’t believe everything you hear about us, Alex. Just hang loose and soak it all up.” The pond shimmered in the sun. A woman in cut-off jeans and a halter top washed clothes on one of those washboards I’d only seen in Little House on the Prairie.
We went through a screen door that banged when he let it go and I found myself inside an enormous kitchen. Rafters soared above; ladles, large spoons, mugs, pots, pans, and other kitchen implements hung from a wooden rectangle that itself hung from the rafters with chains and hooks. Three long-haired women sat around a large oak table that could easily sit twenty.
He spoke to the women. They smiled. One had a wide face with cartloads of freckles; another one was thickset, wore shorts and revealed hairy legs and unshaven armpits. The third had long brown hair and such a smooth face that I wanted to reach out and touch the skin. She wore a sleeveless T-shirt and loose baggy pants that ballooned around her thighs.
She stood up, grabbed my shoulders and kissed me hard on each cheek. I squirmed. “I’m Sintra.”
“I’ll leave you in their hands, Alex,” he said. “Have some lunch. It’s on us.” He banged the screen door when he left.
The woman who’d kissed me, Sintra, told me to sit down. The chairs didn’t match — tall short, skinny and squat, old and new. She ladled out some soup – broccoli – carved a chunk of bread and plied it with thick butter. A girl came in. She couldn’t have been much older than me. She wore jeans that were frayed at the cuffs, Jesus sandals, a red headband that flowed down her back like a pony tail and a loose blouse that reached her knees.
I wasn’t hungry but I ate the soup without taking my eyes off her. The girl was peeling a carrot.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Alex,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“Melissa.” She had a soft voice and an even softer American accent. Her nose – an item I’d never given much thought to – was perfect. “We all have a philosophy here on the farm. Want to hear mine?”
I nodded.
“There’ll be nobody like you ever again. So make the most of every molecule you’ve got.” She moved away and continued cleaning carrots with a sharp knife. “What’s your philosophy?” The shavings fell neatly into a paper bag at her feet. I could already feel the crunch of carrot in my mouth.
“Mine? I believe in helping others. Like the poor. The sick.”
“Yeah? That’s pretty good. And money?” She offered me a carrot which I chomped into with unnecessary vehemence.
“Money?”
“Do you believe in money?”
The way she scrunched up her face I knew pretty well what she thought of money.
“How can anyone believe in that?”
She sighed. “I thought only people on the farm thought like me. I don’t go to school any more you know. Teachers visit us each morning from Saint Thomas. There’s five of us kids. I learn everything there is to know.”
“Wow! No school?”
“Yeah,” she said, already bored by the subject. She popped a carrot into her mouth and handed me another one. I hated carrots. I took two. She told me about Harold who was presently in a clinic in Aurora, recovering from some unspecified illness. “He once stood in the middle of the field with the vacuum cleaner and shouted at the stars,” she told me. “Woke us all up. He wanted to suck them down and pin them on his wall.”
Jay was her “commune” father but Sintra was her real mother. Jay knew lots of stuff. “Like he told us that the world has just created something called a Unimate. A robot. It’s a welding robot and it looks like a praying mantis. He says it’s the world’s perfect worker. It never tires, never sweats, never complains, and never misses work. And never talks.”
“That’s no good.”
“That’s the stuff the world is making.”
“The world made you,” I blurted out suddenly. She stared at me with her green eyes. She seemed truly surprised.
We sat on these tall wooden stools on the porch while the men went about chopping up some wood. Someone was fussing with the VW. He waved at us. I waved back.
Melissa asked me about school, about other girls her age. She only had one friend and she didn’t see her much cause she lived in The World.
“Do you do drugs?” I asked her.
“Drugs? Me? No way. Not everybody does drugs. The police visit us once a week and check in on everything. Besides, Jay says that we didn’t escape American jail to end up in a Canadian one. Next year he says we’re going to return to normal life. Get full-time jobs. Is your school okay? I’ve been away two years now, ever since we left Massachusetts.”
I stayed for lunch. I was introduced to them all – Sintra, Big John, Merriac, Nathan, Wanda and the others. We ate chicken, chunks of home-made bread, and had strawberries and whipped cream for desert. Harold said some strange prayer against the war in Vietnam.
Melissa gave me a long kiss on the mouth in front of the others, then tucked a small daffodil behind my ear.
“You ever want to come and really soak up the Farm,” Jay told me at the entrance, “you’re welcome. See if this is for you.”
*
I went again the following Saturday, the same day that Harold was released from the clinic. Jay drove him down from Aurora in the old VW bus and when he arrived everybody was waiting for him. They kissed him, hugged him, mussed up his hair. One of the men, Merriac, who had a beard that covered most of his face and thick hairy arms, gave him a strong hug and Harold squealed like a child. Jay brought him over to me.
“This here’s Alex. Hates the war.”
“That’s the magic ingredient, my man,” he said and shook my hand. His long hair was fine like a girl’s and he looked both old and young at the same time, like those drawings that switch from ugly to beautiful, depending on your perspective. His arms were thin and wiry, lines carved his cheeks and yellow and purple bruises colored the inside of his arms. “You’ll like it here. I’ll make sure of that.” His blue eyes were bright and darted around. “Did I tell you all I baptized the nurse? Two parts saline solution and two parts alcohol.” He laughed.
Sintra led us on a “celebration walk.” This meant we held hands in front of the pond and then followed Teecup the Turtle for about fifty minutes. Teecup walked a total of three hundred yards, around a tree, under a bush, munched grass and looked back at us more than once, turning its ancient head with bored curiosity. This was how we honored Harold’s return.
*
Each weekend I visited the commune and helped with the chores, cleaning up the kitchen which seemed always full of dishes, woodwork, tractor maintenance and in August we got to the corn husking. With Melissa we made a rack for corn on the cob. It was nothing more than a series of spikes that ran along an upright piece of timber and nailed one end of the corn into the spikes. When the rack was full of corn cobs it looked like some huge bumpy yellow cucumber. Some of the men made a concrete walk from the barn to the chicken coop so that when it rained our shoes wouldn’t get weighed down with mud. We also made a device for extracting honey from beeswax, a box with a glass over it and a dripping pan inside. Fill the box with honeycombs, tilt it towards the sun and watch the honey pour through the dripping pan. We made scoops from tin cans, cloth-covered boxes from grocery boxes.
We caught frogs and let them go, listened to Harold read Walt Whitman and Alan Ginzberg. We baptized two stray sheep in the pond: the little one we called Draft Card and the larger one Affidavit. Affidavit nearly drowned. When we tried to catch a porcupine Melissa cut her finger. We spoke to the sky, the trees, the sun, and to each other. During the all-denominational informal prayer sessions, Melissa and I held hands.
It took me two days to come down from LSD. To keep my eyes from wandering and my mind from hallucinating I read the Anarchist’s Cookbook from page to page, including the fine print. Melissa stroked my head and kissed my neck and we did just about everything else there was to do. Melissa had hard breasts, a slim waist and she liked to wrap her legs around me so that when I was on top of her I could barely move. Sintra told us that love-making was part of life on the commune, like collecting eggs and shitting. No, there weren’t multiple partners. Melissa was all mine and I was all hers. After Francine being with Melissa seemed natural, easy, and above all guilt-free.
I grew my hair long, wore head bands and painted peace signs on the hip pockets of my jeans. With Melissa I went to marches against the war in Toronto. We piled into this old VW and bombed down Yonge Street while singing.
Jay was the undisputed leader of the Farm. He practiced martial arts in front of the forest each morning. The muscles of his back jumped like tiny fish when he moved. His movements were so smooth and slow that a deer once stood about five feet away from him, munching on something. Only when he jumped into the air, legs and arms out at forty-five degree angles and shouted some Korean angst-ridding word did the deer race away like live buckshot was vying for a place on its hide.
But if Jay was the mind, Harold was the heart. When Sintra cried he held her in his arms. When Merriac complained that his back hurt, Harold would massage his hairy shoulders through the night. He performed a “love ceremony” for me and Melissa. This meant we stood in the pond one frosty November morning and shivered as the water touched our crotches. We wore these skimpy home-made robes over our naked bodies while he touched our heads and sang something weird and said stuff like “Let their be union and harmony among these two poor souls. Let them forever be joined.” He draped our shoulders with an American flag where instead of the fifty stars were fifty Maple leaves.
One day he’d wear shiny red pants from a circus clown he’d met in Toronto, another day a long purple sari and sometimes even nightgowns. For all his gallivanting, he tried to be useful. For a while he was convinced that pets could be put to productive use. He attached four small soapy sponges to a squirrel’s feet and tried to make it walk on the pile of dirty dishes that collected in the sink each day. The squirrel tried to race away and kept slipping because it’s claws couldn’t dig into anything and it scampered into the bush, never to be seen again. But my favorite was when we tried to make a small tread mill for dogs to walk on and draw water.
“A good-sized dog,” Harold read from some farm manual, “can easily earn his living in an arrangement of this kind.” It was lucky there were no dogs on the farm that expressed an explicit desire to earn their living in such a fashion.
Once though, Harold overdid it. I found him lying unconscious under a tree outside the farm. There was something obscene about the way his T-Shirt rode up his chest, the way his bones showed, even the languid way his hand hovered above the rim of his jeans. I shouted his name. I shook him. Yellow froth came from his mouth. “Harold, are you all right?” My voice seemed muffled by the trees behind us, sucked up by the thick forest. With the tail of my shirt I wiped his sweating face. I pressed two fingers against his neck. The flesh yielded almost too easily, although what did I know about the yield levels of human flesh? I searched for his pulse, daintily at first, afraid to touch a person so intimately – I was barely intimate with my own hum and drum of life, my own heartbeat – and then pushed harder and harder, expecting to sense a movement, some sort of steady rhythm. Nothing. I pressed my fingers somewhere else against his neck and suddenly there it was, a sliver of a beat, like small wings fluttering.
“Wigwam,” I heard him say, “jimjam.” I ran back and got Jay.
When Jay appeared he sat down, put Harold’s head on his lap and started to rub his neck. He told me to massage his bare feet. I rubbed hard, like I was starting a fire through friction alone. Bits of dried skin and dark dirt fell to the earth in tiny black pellets.
Jay worked on Harold’s shoulders and arms, kneading the muscles with his own strong hands. “Harold’s got a knack for sucking up the bad. This time it was bad LSD. Bad sticks to him like glue. But because he takes it all himself, there’s none left for us. He’s our talisman, our good luck charm. He’s the one that got us over the border, faked out the customs people; he’s the one that knows when it’s time to move to another farm, knows whether a farmer’s a good or a bad person, just one look and he knows, it’s something he does. Without him we’d be long gone. He’s like our father and our mother, Alex, and that’s not commune talk I’m giving you.”
Harold opened his eyes and squinted.
“Jay?” Harold tried to sit up. “Jay, I’m fucked up real bad.”
“Did you have dreams?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you dream of?”
Harold closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Do I have to?”
“You know it does you good.”
“I was barefoot. You were cutting my hair while I was sitting on a chair, and each separate strand was a different color. The floor glowed with hundreds of bright colors.” His eyes focused on me. “Who are you?”
We helped him to his feet. He staggered to a maple tree, leaned against it and threw up. It sounded like a toilet bowl gargling. After that I stopped with the LSD and the acid and the speed and the meth and just about everything except grass.
*
Roncali continued to refuse to enter the Farm and said I was stupid to be working for free when I could earn three bucks twenty in construction, but finally agreed to join me and Melissa in the afternoons when we would leave the commune and walk into the forests and take notes of the countryside. He too was inspired by Melissa and the both of us called upon all our hard-earned chasing skills to search for rare visitors by which to impress Melissa, to find pale creatures with red blotches hovering in the air, crenellated eyespots on wings, and all nature of Greater and Lesser Fritillaries.
I told Roncali and Melissa that I dreamed of attaching my name to some undiscovered species, if not a butterfly, than at least an unknown type of beetle. Though I knew nothing of Nabokov, I did know that scientists earned fame in this manner. We invented some new species.
Coleoptera Melissus was a beetle that looked like a tank, with yellow stripes and a white mandible whose hind legs, when ground up and sprinkled over hamburger, were known to reduce cholesterol and generally decrease the risk of a heart attack.
Lepidopterus Alexus was a humongous butterfly with orange and blue wings that could carry messages from South America to Kansas and Nevada; it ate small insects but was known to hover about the heads of angelic looking girls like Melissa.
Agrion Maculatum de Roncaliensis was a completely new species of black-winged damsel fly that used to live with the bison in the American west and was thought extinct, until Henry Roncali, after great personal sacrifice, discovered the last known nest in a bush along the Colorado river.
Melissocomai lampyridae was a female firefly with the unique ability to light up a whole room and had been attached to chandeliers and small dimly lit bathrooms during the pioneering days of the West.
Magnificent Roncalius or Saurus Magentis was not an insect but instead a large and useless lizard with rainbow coloring across. It’s strong tongue served like a pogo stick and it bounced at great heights and traveled great distances. It detested females of the human species, and made a honking noise whenever it saw any.
To show off, Roncali and I once caught a large Swallowtail. Roncali gripped its thorax and squeezed hard to produce temporary paralysis. When the butterfly grew still we offered it, palms up, to Melissa.
She shook her head. “Undo what you did,” she whispered. “Take the spell off and let it fly away.”
“It’s too late,” I said. Roncali looked at his catch, embarrassed. He laid the butterfly on a flower and we walked away. Like me, he too was in love with Melissa.
After that we stopped collecting butterflies.
This was the world Melissa and Roncali and I created for each other. We would wander in and out of the woods, sometimes sitting beneath a tree for hours, listening to the sound of some small wood animal rustling along the forest floor; or maybe a squirrel clawing its way up a tree; we would test our abilities to smell, a quality, I believed, that was a must for all wannabe entomologists. I collected leaves from different trees and with my eyes closed, tried to guess their names from their feel. I got Melissa to draw leaves and needles and color them and then drop the simulated leaves into a wastepaper basket. Roncali would pick one out at random and then Melissa and I would guess the species. We grew good enough to distinguish the needles of a balsam fir from those of a grand fir.
In here, in these backwoods of that part of Canada known as King City Ontario, the three of us would walk through unexplored tufts of green, stare at the thick black dirt full of living creatures, buzzing, droning things — giant bumblebees and tiny flies, crawling jumping bouncing beetles. All these seemed miraculously joined to the long-haired, toiling, drug-taking hippies. It was a wonder that these disparate elements coexisted so harmoniously not only in the commune but in my very own soul.
*
The last week of August was also my last week before school. Jay decided that we needed a vacation. He drew up the week’s schedule and we followed it religiously:
- August 20-24: snake dance, karate, self-defense training, learn to float in the pond.
- Saturday, morning of August 26: workshops on drug problems, underground communication, live free guerrilla theater.
- August 26. Afternoon: Drive to Lake Ontario in the VW bus – meet other like-minded people to sing, BBQ, swim, make love. Sleep in sleeping bags.
- Sunday, August 27, dawn: On the shores of Lake Ontario perform poetry and take part in other religious ceremonies.
- August 27, afternoon: Nomination of Affidavit the sheep for incoming commune president.
- August 28: March on the US Embassy where we will levitate the building and exorcise it of evil spirits.
- Monday night, August 28: Drive back to the Farm. Make corn on the cob and in general engage in a healthy, all-round rumble.
With August gone and the celebrations over, I had to return to school. In class each day I thought of Melissa and how she studied on her own. I tried to come afternoons but the walk was long and I barely had time for my homework. But Saturdays I’d show bright and early and Melissa and I would walk around, hand-in-hand. I would tell her what I was learning and she would tell me what she was reading. We traded books. We read Ayn Rand’s We and Thomas More’s Utopia and every other book on communal societies we could find. That September was one of the coldest on record. Jay forbade chopping down any trees. “Trees are our friends.”
But communes are not meant to be. The police descended on the farm during the week. They didn’t find any drugs but Harold landed in jail because he punched an officer and told them they were “organs totalitarian of the state.” Farmer Eccles, an otherwise peace-loving man, showed up the very same week to tell Jay that rent would henceforth be doubled.
In front of the barn Jay told us that we could put up a fight in the courts and probably hang another year, but that the good folks of Ontario were no longer as tolerant. The winds were a-changin’ he said. Besides, the way things were going, they could barely last another week, let alone a whole winter. The communal pot contained five hundred dollars and thirty eight cents. With fourteen people to feed and Eccles to pay, no matter how many strawberries they sold and how many part-time jobs they picked up, no matter how many supermarkets Big-John bagged for, it just wasn’t going to do it. Kids got sick, he said, men wanted their beer; women had to take hot showers. Last winter they’d nearly frozen to death and which was why they were down to half their original number. It was time, Jay said, for the Big Move. “It’s time, I’m afraid,” Jay said, looking at us, “for the World.”
“Be realistic!” Big-John shouted, “Demand the impossible!”
“Fuck the pigs!” Melissa said and lifted a lean fist to the air. But the rest of us were quiet.
I don’t know why or how a man changes his mind, but he does. Just like that. Jay wanted the commune over and done with. The women hugged themselves. The men hugged themselves. Sintra, Melissa’s mother, looked particularly sad, stiff and silent, a dry puppet leaning against the wall. She told us she’d have to do acid every day now, after this downer. Harold tried to make everybody happy but we could all see how sad he was.
I was surprised that nobody really disagreed. Maybe they all knew they were living in a dream and that dreams cost money. I didn’t know.
After Jay’s speech we built a fire next to the pond and the women brought out the hot-dogs. Big John pushed Harold into the pond and soon Merriac and Nathan joined in. We raced out to break them up and soon all of us were in this huge mudfight, right on the edge of the pond. Melissa took her T-shirt off and everybody stared at her hard nipples. We sat around an enormous bonfire until the sun came up.
Soon everybody had real jobs. Big-John hired himself out to the construction companies that were building roads right through the forest. Sintra found a job in the Newmarket hospital as a cleaning lady. Harold drove groceries until someone complained about his clothes – one day he’d wear a second-hand Tuxedo, another he’d wear his clown outfit. I think it was also his permanently dilated pupils, the sweet smell of hashish that surrounded him and his extreme gentleness that scared the good people of King City. He found some sort of job in Toronto with the Quakers and helped them publish their literature. Melissa wrote articles for this journal called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
The ones working in Toronto had to sleep in shelters down-town and like me would show up only on weekends. The commune was falling apart.
Then the President of the United States amnestied all draft dodgers. The whole lot of them moved back to the States.
I kept the little box we’d made for melting honey. I sent my rarest butterfly to Melissa by mail – a Buckeye, in a small frame. Cruel maybe, but beautiful. I wrote to her everyday. She wrote back. This lasted for about six months. Then it was down to one letter a year. Then I lost contact with her.
*
All that and everything else occurred a long time ago. Now I’m pushing forty. Me and Roncali still don’t “believe” in money, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Probably because neither one of us makes enough to believe in it. We’re not vegetarians, we don’t wear our hair long and we don’t do drugs, but once in a while we might, if they come our way, like at a party at someone’s house. When long hair came back into style we were both surprised but didn’t lengthen ours.
I took a degree in science from the University of Toronto and I’m now the King City Secondary biology teacher. I live in an old farmhouse on the other side of town. Sometimes I take students to the old farm – what’s left of it – and we look around for animal life: insects like beetles, dragon flies, spider flies, armadillo-like insects that roll up when you touch them and anything else that crawls. I teach them the names of butterflies. We collect flowers and leaves from trees.
It’s not the same thing of course.
The roof has caved in and two of its sides have been torn down for firewood. On the remaining sides the paint has faded to a greyish red. One student once found a ladle in the dirt and held it up gleefully like it was an archaeological artifact.
One year the students painted peace signs. The sixties were all the rage again. Another year the students painted a MAKE LOVE NOT WAR slogan. Some kid with talent did a decent portrait of Martin Luther King. That was in the mid-eighties when the students had re-discovered Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and King Crimson and gotten it into their heads that the “sixties” wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Usually, after our catch-and-tell insect spree I sit them next to the pond and we munch on sandwiches and take in the sun. That’s when I tell them about the things I believe. I tell them about sharing, about love, about nature, about friendship. Once I even told the class about an angel named Melissa.
I tell them about how we all followed a turtle around the place for approximately five hours. They laugh. I tell them about how to separate honey from the wax. About how there was a time when the outside world didn’t exist.
This year a student asked me if I missed the commune. I don’t miss the commune, I told him. It’s gone and over. But I miss the time and space that allowed a commune to exist, do you understand. I miss the world that made the commune, the world that made Melissa and Roncali and me and people like Jay and Harold.
I’m almost always sad when I come back from the outing. My wife, Francine (we met years later and decided to marry) is good to me. She understands – so she says. She’s not too jealous. There are moments that catch me completely unprepared, moments when I miss Melissa so much I have to hide from my wife, I have to leave the house or pretend there’s dust in my eyes.
If I can, I rush to a telephone and call Roncali. He’s easy to find because he’s a high-paid telephone technician for Bell Canada, wears those belts, climbs the poles, drives a van. We don’t say a thing, mind you, we might talk ice hockey scores and weather predictions, Canadian talk, but underneath when I call him up – even it it’s in the middle of the night – well he knows what I’m saying even if I’m not actually saying it.
Sometimes, and this sounds strange, I miss myself – that little inconsequential guy who rubbed someone’s bare feet without a second thought and who decided to be part of a commune — on weekends at least — just because it seemed the greatest thing. I certainly can’t imagine living like that today, just like I can’t imagine myself getting into fights about the Vietnam war or joining a protest. Maybe it’s my age, maybe I’m just coming up with excuses to hang back and lay low, but today’s protests seem overly-organized, as if they’ve been appropriated by professionals. There’s a word I haven’t used in a long time: appropriate, as in to take, to own, to possess.
The graduating class of 1985 bought me a present: two little sheep made of stone. They painted the words Draft Card and Affidavit on their sides. I use them as paperweights and sometimes put them in my palm. Dam but these two foolish stones make me sad.
Only a few days ago I got a letter from Melissa. I didn’t open it for hours, just held it up and stared at it. Finally I tore it open. She’s a nurse in Boston. She’s been married and divorced and married and divorced and has two kids. One of them’s named Alex. After me, she wrote. Sometimes, she says, when she sees kids wearing headbands, pretending to be hippies, or when she sees a protest march in front of City Hall or when they play those shows about the sixties on television she says she feels a deep throbbing pain in her chest and can’t help but cry.
Jay, Harold and Sintra, she wrote, live in Pyramid Lake, Nevada. Harold’s stopped the drugs years ago but he’s still skinny, like Mick Jagger. He works part-time in a gas-station somewhere in Reno and people come to watch him because he’s always wearing something different, like a hat with a dead cobra around the top or a vest made of a grey material that he claims is made from an elephant’s foreskin. He must be pushing sixty. Sintra is a short-order cook in a night-club. Jay works as a camp leader for weekend trekkers.
Maybe one day Roncali and I and Francine will swing by and pick up Melissa and her kids in Boston, then drive down to Nevada. Maybe we’ll do a reunion thing. Get everybody to pow-wow on Pyramid Lake. Chase a turtle. Roast marshmallows.
I’ll unfurl the slightly tattered flag with maple leaves instead of stars, the one I’ve saved all these years in an old chest. I’ll throw it over our shoulders and we’ll huddle in front of a fire.
Harold can take our picture while I hug Melissa and Roncali. After the picture is done I know one thing. I won’t let them go. And then I’ll just keep hugging and hugging and hugging. That’s what I’ll do.