Today Rainey Reminisces. She Then Abandons this Whole Talking about Herself in the Third Person Thing.

She might also spend some time musing about the ridiculousness of the spelling of the word "reminisces", depending on how much time she has.

My father, Sean Connery, was born in Oakland, California and grew up in that general area until sometime in his kidhood. (I'm not the family historian. I can't imagine why). When I was in the 7th grade (I think), Sean and Dame Judi tossed us all in the back of the station wagon like cord wood and we road tripped to California to spend Thanksgiving with daddy's cousins.

The reason I'm no good as a family historian (or even as regards my own personal story) is that I have a cognitive problem that absolutely forbids the retention of details. (This is, I suspect, also one reason I can't write decent fiction). Try as I might, I can't remember much about that trip. I know our grandparents were caravaning with us. I know we ate summer sausage, Tillamook cheese, apples and saltines along the way. (I don't know that we did but since that was the standard road trip menu I can only assume it's so).

Where did we sleep that first night? Surely not in a motel. Maybe with my Auntie N's parents, who lived along the route? Or do I just conjur them because we had sometimes been known to stay with them? How did I get along with the second cousins, (Buck will correct me if I'm wrong about the relationship) the children of my dad's cousin? I vaguely remember not much at all liking the younger children and either loathing or being in awe of the girl that was a few (maybe one) year older than me. I can sorta picture dad's cousin and sorta remember something jovial about him. I can't see his wife at all. I don't remember what we ate, have no memory at all of the actual Thanksgiving dinner (but I could tell you what was on the table because Grandma would have been in charge of that. Or rather, even though she was in someone else's home, Grandma would have taken charge of that.

See how it is? I don't actually think this even qualifies as a reminiscence. But here's the thing: I am oh so foggy on most of the trip but I most certainly remember the day that Sean's family decided to take the kinfolk into San Francisco. We poked around Chinatown (where I tasted candied ginger for the first time) and, most indelibly, we drove through Haight Ashbury. This would have been 1969 so The Haight was still a booming center of all things hippie. And of course, we'd never seen hippies. We'd never seen a lot of things we saw that day. The infant mind reels. We were driving slowly down the thronged street and I remember hippies shoving flyers in through the open back window. There was one in particular; I don't remember the content...could have been an ad for some band or maybe an anti-war message, but I do remember that the art was psychedelic and there was a drawing of a bare breasted woman. Cue the adolescent twittering. (Also cue, as I recall, the outraged parental confiscation of same).

The experience was, oddly, a defining one for me. This was still years from the official "radicalizing" of Lorraine, but the seeds of that consciousness were sown that day. There was something in the spirit of the place, the energy of all those youth...flower children and peace lovers and free thinkers...that didn't jibe with the calm narrowness of my real life but it was somehow compelling. I never became a full-fledged hippie...wouldn't have been allowed anyway...but certainly something about the culture started seeping in. I fell in love with the art of Peter Max and with the music of the time. I couldn't listen to rock and roll growing up but to the degree that it was sanitized for my protection (appearances by artists on Ed Sullivan and other variety shows), I accessed it and ate it up.

Of course, I was too young and too naive to know about the dark side of hippiedom...the drugs and the free love (because love, my friends, simply ain't free)...that would all come later. But for a moment I got an uncomfortable but thrilling look at the "counterculture" and I kinda liked it.

Anypatchouli, I have every intention of taking The Child to the Haight when we are in the Bay Area next week. Even though it is more gentrified than bohemian now, I want her to see a place that represents a defining period for American culture and pour moi. And maybe I can score some love beads.

Don't know if there will be a Friday video next week, what with the whole "being on the road and begging Sling to put his shirt on" thing but I've been saving this video for a while in anticipation of Lorraine, Hat and The Child's Big Road Trip of '08. Dig the harmonies, the go go boots and the totally random bathtubs.

Peace.

The Mamas and The Papas "California Dreamin'"