My life began in 1972. Who I am came to be just as the Grateful Dead band was touring Europe on their legendary Europe ’72 tour. Funny thing that I was touring Europe myself. The Dead were a rolling ball of complete and utter anarchy. Playing wild solo guitar jams and getting gritty singing old blues tunes they were ripping through a wall between what is and what could be.
Just as consciousness altering for me my travels were part of a prepackaged tour of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Me, I was my own ball of rolling clusterfuck even if I didn’t know it then. My head was so screwed on wrong it is amazing someone didn’t beat my ass to death in the years before I got on board for that transformative airplane flight.
Why do I remember this? It is the smell of April rain. As I walked out of my office today I found the clouds grey and spitting little bits of rain. There is nothing going on out there they would stop a long walk about. It is warm and the grass is greening. Yeah, the smell that comes with rain and green grass screaming an affirmation that life exists and winter is dead that is the smell that pervaded Europe when I was there in 1972.
Austria, Germany and Switzerland can be gloomy in the rain if you are not ready for change. And while I remember a great deal of rain it was no bother. Those showers brought growth.
You may wonder how it was I came to life that 10 day period we traipsed from castle to beer hall to museum after museum. Over that seeming short period came a moment of separation from everything I thought I knew. Torn from the social role I lived at home there came a moment where I had to take account of myself and my own actions. I could have fucked up colossally but I didn’t.
For Christ’s sake I made some friends. I interacted with women. I got drunk. I found a group on that tour bus that was as confused and befuddled as I was. Every single person on that trip was as lost as to role and social order as I was. We had to reinvent who we world for 10 days.
Maybe you had a seminal event that showed you what was possible for you. It could have been a grave situation. Maybe it was somebody mercy fucking you. Maybe it was that trip to boys or girls state. Perhaps a ’la American Pie it was a stint at band camp. For you the smell that trips you back to that moment of transition might be the stale smell of steam heat in a public building or the humid verdant smell of the woods near the lake’s edge. Who knows maybe it is a song or a sound. For me it is April rain.
It was on those days I spent on that trip that I realized I didn’t have to be what my parents wanted, that I was a being separate and distinct from them. It was on those days looking at the Lions Monument in Lucerne that I realized I could be someone different from everyone I knew. Damn that was a good thing. Sometimes I think I should have kept going constantly reinventing myself.
Enough of this I have to take a walk out and savor what the April rain has to offer.
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