In one of those kind of modern day life imitates art or vice versa kind of dealios, I was just reading Gail Collins’ take in the New York Times on Woodstock. Toward the end the column compares the connectivity of today to the complete immersion of being stuck in traffic in the middle of mud in the middle of bumfuck upstate New York. The irony for me was the column was recommended to me by one of Gail’s contemporaries, and I mean contemporaries, someone who knew her back in the day, who was trying out Skype video chat over a distance of about 3K miles.

In 1969, in those months before Janis died and then Jimi, my dad had already died. Lawn-mowing induced coronary thrombosis rather than overdose or aspiration of vomit. Pure mainstream American, not the counter culture.

If that was the year that everything changed, with Woodstock the last bout of peace and love before the dominoes of Altamont and Kent State, at five years old, I may have been feeling the new ethos. Of course, in reality I was lost in my own brown-acid-less trip of not understanding death or why everything about my life was now changing. Somewhere between 1968 and 1969, I was sent away for a couple of weeks to live with cousins, moved from Massachusetts to Maryland and back, from a small house to a bigger one and back to an even smaller one near the first. Dazed and confused without the drugs.

At five years old, I can’t say how much I remember or how much I understood or how much I figured out. It’s all glimpses and shadows, like sitting cross-legged on the floor of an elementary school watching the moon landing on a big, black and white television rolled into the hallway on a tall stand, so more of us could see. It’s a vivid memory for me, but with Neil Armstrong strolling about lunar surfaces in July, when school wasn’t in session, and my academic career not as yet started, what with kindergarten cranking up in September, it couldn’t have been the moon landing.

Similarly, logic tells me through the glimpses and shadows of happiness with my mother, that it couldn’t have all been Altamont and Kent State. For her to have gotten married to a man many have told me was fun and funny and gregarious in ways she wasn’t, and then to have had a family of five kids, she must have had some fun in her. Like where did she ever learn to paddle-ball with such vigor and elan?

Yet, my long term memory is of a profound sadness, a life where I think she believed fate had conspired against her ever feeling truly happy. Her “Summer of Love” was probably 1967 too, just like the flower children along Haight Street, because one year later her husband would be gone, leaving an aloneness and perhaps a certain capacity to love would go with him.

It’s funny when I think of Woodstock and peace and love, and let’s try to love one another right now, because I’m pretty sure I have a warped sense of what love means. It’s not a bad sense, just off kilter.

I was talking to a friend the other day, moved to cynicism about what sounded like a pretty grim wedding with two young people embarking on a new adventure with a few cards already dealt not so much against them but maybe too low to make a winning hand. A baby on the way, and a minister dad with some strong words about unity, providing a subtext to the groom that the minister’s daughter was not to be messed with in any sense.

To that friend, I’m pretty sure all relationships, any relationship, any bond of love comes with a huge heaping helping of work. It’s work to keep families together. It’s the kind of work that has brought me to now really embrace the notion of making nothing more taxing than reservations on any of your major holidays. (In truth, I’m so far down on the lazy scale for that work, it’s not even me who makes the reservations. M. likes a good meal and will arrange one.)

Love is not a free banquet on the streets and a daisy in a rifle barrel turning away harsh deeds. Nope, I gather in our conversations that to her love is a bit like my mother’s was for us kids — a 50-mile hike with a 50-pound pack on a sweltering day surrounded by mud and mosquitoes. But, you do it, and you get through and that’s what it is.

I’m no romantic, but I like to think there’s maybe a free iced latte in there or something to lighten the drudgery and load every now and again.

Our major disagreement on love and relationships is over white lies. In my version, the beauty of family and relationships is they have to take your truth warts and all, and the little shit gets worked out. It’s to my family I can point out exactly how I feel and that includes M., and with him sometimes I think he knows too much about me. In my friend’s world, the social contract allows for a little greasing of the story, Lucille Ball telling Desi Arnez the new dress only cost a fraction of what it did and working a secret job on the side to make up the dent in the family budget.

Unfortunately for M., I’m no Lucille Ball, and I’m not making up any stories.

Meanwhile, back in our playing house 1950s California Ranch, M. and I argue (but not in the bad plate-throwing sense, but in the fun dialog way) about whether unconditional love exists. He gives it a possibility for parents to their children but certainly not couples. Because in coupledom, you can always walk away. The life is chosen and can be unchosen if the circumstances allow.

But, for me, and as i argue, walking away from his hypothetical heroin addict, moving out and moving on, doesn’t necessarily mean the love ends. Sure, any Al-Anon session will teach you that you gotta stop getting sucked into the addict’s life, but at the same time the bit of your heart remains behind. Personally, I’m happy I never have or it’s never gotten so bad that I ever completely wrote off some of the folks I have loved the most whose past behavior I have hated passionately the most.

I guess the love I still feel for people who have died also makes me question what unconditional love might be. Obviously, as a not completely insane person, I get that it’s not an active, I guess the word would be vital, love, and it’s a bit one-sided, but it doesn’t stop even as my live moves along and grows. Pat and Tommy and the dad I never really knew will always get a portion of my heart, for lack of a better cliched image to flog, and have a place set at my metaphorical table.

In the end, I’m now living geographically closer to Altamont than Woodstock, but I can spend time standing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, looking at the T-shirts in the window of independent shops that popped up when the baby boomers still thought they could and would change the world by acting locally, and bemoan the big GAP on the corner, even though that was started in the same year but without the nickel and dime business plan. The boomers have, of course, changed the world both for good and for bad.

I may never know love. Or I may never believe in delirious and heady emotions blocking reason and imbuing me with a vision of chocolate-covered, rainbow-colored unicorns and puppies scampering in clover and daisies.

It’s a lock certain guarantee that I don’t aspire to and won’t be sashaying in volumes of white fabric down a satin walkway beribboned and flower bedecked, because I know not only that it doesn’t appeal to me but my self-conciousness at that little parade/ritual would just make it as joyless and awkward as I could neurotically muster. And, without a crystal ball or magic hippie divining rod, who knows, maybe in a minute or a month or a year or a lifetime either M. or I will want to walk away.

I’m not bothered, though. Because at least one thing Woodstock may have taught people, it was not only about being in the now and doing something and taking the chance like Gail Collins wrote about, it’s also about the story you get to tell later. I’m happy with the here and now and the story I might get to tell. (Not to mention, no mud, body odor or open latrines when M.’s copy of Woodstock on vinyl arrives in the mail.)

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