John Coltrane John Coltrane the penultimate installment (maybe)

So off we drove enveloped in smoke and the classic Volkswagon puttputt.  I'm not sure which direction we headed, not east since that would have put us in the harbor). Eventually, we were out in the country, which for me was anyplace where trees outnumbered people. I was somewhat experienced in rural survival. My mother had grown up in a small town, Fort Edward, in upstate New York. As a kid we would often spend a few weeks there visiting relatives in the summer. The highlight was going to Lake George to swim. My experience of beaches in THE CITY was the three hour drive in stop and go traffic to Jones Beach where a million people would hike through acres of steaming asphalt parking lots and across miles of burning sand to float in the Atlantic along with what to me at the time looked like deflated balloons (not a reference to the jellyfish). Of course, just when we started having fun, we had to pack up to beat the million person march back to the parking lot and home. The ride home was always pleasant. My bathing suit was full of sand, and I'd be wedged between my two older sisters who were sweating and complaining about the 90% humidity. When the complaining got loud enough, my father would silence it with a sweeping backhand from the driver's seat with his right hand on which he wore his big Fordham College ring that always managed to get one of us on the side of the head and immediately set off a torrent of tears and an undercurrent of smirks and snorts from the two he missed. When we got home, before we could go in the house, we had to stand under a freezing outdoor shower my father had rigged up in the backyard.  But Lake George was different. It had a grass beach, and you could see the bottom, so you didn't have to worry about slicing your foot  on broken beer bottles or slipping on unidentified slimy objects. That was truly "the country."  Jeff and I puttered down a bucolic two-lane road then turned right through a gate onto a dirt lane. Over a hill, through a grove of old trees (at that time all trees were just trees to me. I lacked the vocabulary to differentiate evergreen from deciduous, fir from maple), past a small flock of sheep and down to his cabin. Of course, this being just outside of Boston, it wasn't a cabin but a cottage. I took my suitcase out, the same one my parents had given me for my graduation, probably made of Samsonite and stumbled inside. The first sense that alerted me to a unfamiliar environment was smell. I knew the smell from somewhere in my childhood. It wasn't something from my house. Then, I realized it was a church smell - incense! I wondered what the fuck was Jeff doing with incense. I hadn't figured out what religion he belonged to, but I was pretty sure he wasn't Catholic. Then I started looking around. The walls were covered with an array of West Coast psychedelic music posters - The Byrds, The Jefferson Airplane, some group called the Buffalo Springfield. The cottage was pretty much one big room. In the back was his sleeping space. His bed was on the floor, and on the wall above was a tie-dyed wall hanging. Jeff lit a stick of incense and then another joint. I asked him what the incense was for, and he said to cover the smell of the grass in case the owner came by. I thought in THE CITY if you did that, it would be an invitation for the neighbor to sneak in while you were out and take your stash. Maybe these West Coast guys weren't as hip as I imagined. They did like the Beach Boys.  He put some music on (he also had a component stereo, but his speakers were about two feet taller than mine with supersized woofers).  Most of the sounds I was familiar with, but one was new - the Buffalo Springfield. That one stuck with me. Then he asked me if I liked jazz. I shrugged. He wanted to play an album by a saxophone player named Charles Lloyd. It was recorded at The Monterey Jazz Festival. I will admit to not being very cosmopolitan at that time. I thought Monterey was in France. I mean this cottage we were sitting in had fuckin French doors. The album was Forest Flower. I dug(liked) it right away. I hadn't heard anything like it before, and I definitely hadn't heard a sax played like that.            OK, so this may not be the penultimate installment, but I'm getting close. Maybe oui, maybe non.