It is, I suppose, a sign of age

when one suddenly, "for no apparent reason"* thinks of dead people from one's past. People who were alive in one's past, of course, but are dead now. Not people like Deacon Samuel Chapin or Everett Hosmer Barney, who were dead all along, as far as our lives are concerned. I've just been listening to The Dutchman as sung by Steve Goodman; the really good version not one of the many "live" renditions with pick-up bands of various qualities and instrumentations and crappy sound and Goodman tired or bored. The version from the "No Big Surprise" anthology is close to as good as a song gets, even better than Goodman's first (as far as I know) recording on "Somebody Else's Troubles" way back yonder in '73. But I digress - this is not meant to be about Steve Goodman or The Dutchman but about Mike Stevens, a pal of mine for a while back in the 70s and into the 80s.

After the Air Force, I lingered and lollygagged a while - I refer to it as my hippie phase - and spent a lot of time playing guitar and singing and drinking and smoking. I had recently been liberated not only from the military but from a marriage as well (not my idea, but we're not always in control of everything, are we?), and the early 70s were a bad time to be looking for work (remember CETA?) so I was cashing in my VA education benefits and cranking out some business administration credits at the local Community College. Had to be Bus Adm since I already had a liberal arts bachelor's degree. So anywhere there I was wandering into the cafeteria one afternoon, pondering a reason not to go to accounting class (debits by the window, credits by the door, that's all I know) so I sat me down with coffee and there was this lad with a kerchief around his neck, looking byronically around the place, and I thinks to myself "Now THERE is a lad with a story."

And that was the last I saw of him for a while

*"For No Apparent Reason" was also, as luck would have it, the name of a band once, of which neither I nor Mike Stevens was a member.