The Haight-Ashburies
This week I hooked up with my old friend from 7th
grade whom I will name here as Jesse Winchester.
We hadn’t seen each other in decades. (Please don't the math; yes, I’m
probably older than you).
Back in our running days, we cut school incessantly, sometimes for a
week at a time. We were what they called "incorrigible." We would change our school clothes
for hippie garb that we brought along in brown paper bags and change at the SF bus
terminal. I had an olive green embroidered Mexican dress with bell sleeves and
wore beads and leather sandals.
It was spring, and I can still smell a sickly sweet odor of
ornamental cherry blossoms like incense. It brings me right back to that place and
time, even now.
We were somewhere in the Haight, and we scored some acid on
the street --you could do that in those early days. We were starting to feel it as we slowly made our way up toward
the park, and somewhere between Shrader and Stanyan, a man came up to us and said, “You girls better get out of
here. Martin Luther King’s been shot and
there’s gonna be a riot.”
It was hard to believe that on peace and love street
anything so violent could happen so suddenly, but unbelievably a few minutes later a whole
group of black kids came furiously running out of the park on the south side of
the Haight. They were smashing all the windows and
going crazy.
We got on the bus to go back home and sat in the back. Jesse was crying. I saw all the old faces on the bus turn around to
look at us. “Jesse, you have to maintain,”
I told her. “Jesse, maintain...”
So there we were 45 years later on the same stretch of
street. It was night, and we just parked there and looked
around. Looked it up on our smart little phones. Yes, it was April 4, 1968.
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