For about ten years, from my teens into my twenties, I spent the night of December 21st at a cabin in the woods with John and Doc Colella, a son and a father, and two of the best friends I'll ever know. They’re both dead now, but I still think of them nearly every day, though as we pass through the solstice each year, they utterly fill my heart, my memory, my soul, and my interior sky.

Maybe John knew what we were doing the first years we went up, but I sure as hell didn’t. I just liked being invited. John was so brusque and cool, while his dad, Doc, was entirely different than anyone I’d ever met. To my mind, and in my experiences back then, compared to him, most people were like cookie-cutter patterns. Or perhaps, better, it was that he’d started with one shape, but it didn’t suit him, so he punched holes through walls and scraped chunks out of the level parts of himself until he was a wholly unique form.

Knowing a little history, I don’t carry illusions about the 1970s being an idyllic time. Even back then, while I didn’t know the context or the interconnections, I knew about the Vietnam War, Watergate, ICBMs, the Cold War, and the murders of JFK, RFK, and Dr. King. I knew about Bobby Sands and the IRA, Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Patty Hearst and the SLO, Charlie Manson and Helter Skelter. I was aware that “out there” things were scary. Still, around my neighborhood, it was mostly manhunt games, Pinewood Derbies, kickball, bicycle jumps, Big-Buddy Bubble Gum, and an Evil Knievel motorcycle toy that, if you really spun it up, could jump damn near all the way across Orton Ave.

Is it weird that, while I know life back then wasn’t idyllic, while I know there were so many problems in the world, it still seems like it was so . . . good?

That’s weird, right?

When I think about the goodness of being a kid in the 1970s – a kid in a blue-collar/middle-class mixed neighborhood that wasn’t very economically diverse and not racially diverse at all – I think about a few things. I think about my grandmother first. Her name was Peggy Parker, and she just radiated fairness, kindness, and love. Whenever I felt hurt, the first person I thought about was Grandma and how I knew – above all other things, that she loved me without reserve, and if that remained true, everything would be okay in the end.