Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair

There’s a young man that I know just turned twenty-one
Comes from down in southern Colorado.
Just out of the service and he’s lookin' for his fun.
Some Day Soon, goin’ with him, Some Day Soon.

Ian Tyson

I lied the other day. I do have roses blooming,
just not on the four bushes in the back garden.
All four pictures today are roses that are blooming in my yard.
All four pictures were taken on May 20th, 2007

There’s an old song that I love, Judy sang it first for me.
It talks about a star-crossed pair of lovers.
He is rough and rowdy, she’s her father’s cup of tea.
Some day soon, I will sing it, some day soon.

I can’t remember the first time I heard Judy Collins’ cover of Someday Soon*, but I fell in love with the song immediately. I started singing it, without changing the genders in the song. Never sung it in public yet, however. That may change. Down at Borders Books in Eureka on Saturday, I wandered past the CD section and a boxed set of four Ian and Sylvia CDs jumped off the rack and into my shopping basket. The set was expensive, almost fifty dollars, but it was a compilation of all seven records the Canadian duo made with Vanguard which made it seem more affordable, somehow. And even at $50, that’s only twelve-fifty per disk, a bargain in today’s market. I knew precious little about Ian and Sylvia. I knew they were Canadian. I knew they were responsible for the song Four Strong Winds. That’s about it. I may have noticed in my Judy Collins’ Songbook that Ian had written Some Day Soon, but if so, I’d filed that in the back of my head where it was now covered with cobwebs. Looking over the list of songs on the back of the CD box, there were enough songs that I know and like that I felt comfortable in shelling out the money.

Sunday morning, I pulled off the shrink wrap and put disk one in the CD player. Turned the volume up and came into my study to check e-mail and maybe get some work done. What that means is that I wasn’t really listening to the album, just using it for background noise. Disk one played through without me paying much attention. There are twenty-six songs on the first disk, and I missed most of them, including C.C. Rider, Un Canadien Errant, When First Unto This Country, Jesus Met the Woman at the Well, and Spanish is a Loving Tongue, not to mention Four Strong Winds. I’ll have to put that disk back in the machine.

Later in the day I put disk two on, and this time I listened. I had to. The first cut on the disk is one of my favorite songs from high school days, You Were On My Mind. All I have to do is close my eyes and the group We Five are singing in my head. I had no idea that Sylvia had written the song, nor that the words were changed before We Five recorded it so as to get it past the censors. Other songs on disk two are Little Beggerman, Nancy Whiskey, Early Morning Rain, Darcy Farrow and For Lovin’ Me. Gordon Lightfoot credits Ian and Sylvia as putting him on the map as they were the first major performers to record his songs. Early Morning Rain always gets me crying. It’s one of the songs my group, The Internationals, prepared for our concert tour of northern California prisons. (Haven’t I told you about that???) Just like Johnny Cash, I have sung at Folsom Prison. But the number seven cut on disk two stopped me in my tracks. A gorgeous baritone voice was singing “blow him back to me, he’s likely drivin’ in from California.” Ian Tyson was singing Some Day Soon, and he wasn’t changing the genders. I skipped back to play the cut a second time. Then a third. Then I paused the machine and got the 12-string out. For the most part it’s the same song that Judy Collins sang, only a few words were changed for Judy’s cover. But the original words strike me as so much stronger. The main change comes in the second line of the second verse. Judy (and pretty much all the other female singers who have covered this song) sings “My father says that he will leave me cryin’.” Ian’s original words are “They [my parents] say ‘He’s not your kind. He’ll leave you cryin’.’” “He’s not your kind” really hits home, at least to me. Very much what a lot of us were hearing in the nineteen sixties. Does anyone remember Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” And indeed, the sixties were when a lot of us came to terms with being –or not being—society’s child.

My parents cannot stand him ‘cause he works the rodeo
They say “He’s not your kind. He’ll leave you cryin’.
If he asks I’ll follow him down the toughest row to hoe.
Some Day Soon, goin’ with him, Some Day Soon.

San Francisco is celebrating, I suppose is the word, the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love. We’ve been reading about fights, disruptions, all kinds of things happening that don’t seem very “loving” in this re-enactment of the hippy invasion of Baghdad by the Bay, as Herb Caen, the SF Chronicle columnist, referred to the city. I wish I’d been there for the “reunion.” I wish I’d been there for the original, instead of living fifteen minutes away across the Bay in El Cerrito. I never considered myself a hippy. In fact, I was a pretty conservative kid until the California National Guard and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office shot tear gas at me in an attempt to keep me from going to class. Nothing like having the guardians of peace destroy your health to radicalize a person.

The Chronicle has been giving us quips from various spokesmen who had something or other to do with the original Summer of Love. Can’t say I recall seeing anything from Scott McKenzie, but Lawrence Ferlinghetti appears a lot. Of course, he’s San Francisco’s poet laureate—or at least he should be. I’ll have to find a copy of A Coney Island of the Mind. The poetry will undoubtedly mean a lot more to me now than it did when I first came across it some forty years ago. Just now, in doing a Google search, I found and reread the poem “Christ Climbed Down.” Pretty powerful stuff. Although, come to think of it, if forty years later I still remember the title of the collection and even the title of one of the poems in the collection, it must have been pretty powerful stuff when I first read it.

I suppose that everyone one has triggers that take them back to their youth. But you have to admit, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and graduating from high school as Scott McKenzie is telling us to “put flowers in your hair,” all the while our government is dropping napalm in Viet Nam to get rid of any plant life, including flowers, I’ve got some pretty potent triggers. Especially now when we seem to be making the same mistakes, and even greater ones, in the Middle East. I can’t read about Iraq without thinking back on Viet Nam. And I know I’m not the only one. I just finished Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation, and he certainly connects the two. Right down to noting that in 1967 the US was ecstatic that so many Vietnamese had turned out to vote. Hmm, where have we heard that lately?

When he visits me my pa ain’t got one good word to say
Got a hunch he was as wild back in the early days.

So blow you old blue northern, blow him back to me
He’s likely drivin’ in from California
He loves his damned old rodeo as much as he loves me.
Some Day Soon, goin’ with him, Some Day Soon.

If you don’t know Ian and Sylvia, I urge you to check them out. This is the way “folk music” should have been sung—and was by a very few. Listening to three of the four disks yesterday, I spent a good bit of time replaying certain songs, crying over others. I also bought a CD of Melanie Safka’s music—her two first albums now on one CD. Something was really looking to take me back to my youth. Melanie I knew—I have several of her LPs on vinyl. Ian and Sylvia were a wonderful discovery. And while Ian and Sylvia are no longer a couple, they are both still making music separately. Ian is now living in the Calgary area and singing about cowboys. Makes ya wonder. His tour dates for 2007 include a concert in Livingston, Montana, and the Monterey Cowboy Festival. It even turns out he was in the Bay Area singing at the same time I was there for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus concert. Had I only known that the night before the concert I attended, Ian was singing at my old favorite, Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. But then, we don’t dare let life be made up of what ifs.

But one thing I do know, Some Day Soon is going into my public repertoire!

Some Day Soon, goin' with him, Some Day Soon!

*For the record, no pun intended, Ian Tyson wrote Some Day Soon. The Judy Collins Songbook refers to the song as Someday Soon. I love Judy’s version, but Ian’s original is so much better, in my opinion. And I don’t mean to imply that Ian might have a thing for cowboys, other than for their music. To the best of my knowledge, he’s a straight arrow with a beautiful voice and a great way with words and music.

When I come home to you, San Francisco

My love waits there in San Francisco,
above the blue and windy sea,
When I come home to you, San Francisco,
your golden sun will shine for me.

Words by Douglas Cross, Music by George Cory

The first picture I've taken in San Francisco since 1997
Taken from the Land's End Overlook
1/29/07

In December, 1974, I carried my possessions down three flights of stairs, loaded them in my pickup and a rented U-Haul trailer, and left the San Francisco Bay Area where I had lived since 1962. After spending Christmas and New Years Day with my parents in Smith River, California, I headed north and east to start my new life by moving into my parents’ three-room log cabin in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. In August, 1975, I headed back to the Bay Area for a brief visit and was amazed at how strong the energy field was. Mind you, I had been living in a log cabin, a mile and a half from my nearest neighbor for eight months. I had been out cross-country skiing every day from January through April, and at 25, I was probably the healthiest and in the best shape that I’ve ever been. Driving south on US 93, then west on I-80, I first started feeling “vibrations” at Reno. By Auburn, California I could feel a definite “pulse” in the air, and when I pulled off the freeway and parked at my girl friend’s home in Oakland, I took my own pulse—110. I was amazed. I grew up and learned to drive on these roads. What happens to people who have never experienced this kind of traffic? Do they have heart attacks on the Interstate?

After that experience, I made it a point to visit the Bay Area every other year, whether I needed to or not. This was relatively easy as long as my high school and college friends remained in Berkeley or nearby. Then, after I came out of the closet in 1978, I watched as more and more of my gay Montana friends moved to San Francisco (as well as Seattle, Portland, Denver—anywhere more hospitable than home). I’d make a trip to San Francisco to visit Montana friends, pick up more Princess Points as an out gay man, and maybe see old high school and college friends. I’d make these trips in connection with visits to my parents on the North Coast, killing two birds with one stone, as it were. In 1997, I met a guy on-line in an AOL chat room, and in no time we were chatting every day. I made eight trips to San Francisco that year, spending time with John, even going so far as to plan a flight to Ixtapa that was routed through SFO, just so I’d have an extra weekend with the SFBF (San Francisco Boy Friend). In November of that year, El Cerrito (California) High School’s Class of 1967 had its 30 year reunion, and I attended with John as my date. I didn’t hear from John at Christmas. He didn’t acknowledge the birthday present I sent him, and frankly, I’ve only heard from him once since then. I dunno. I enjoyed the reunion. But I never returned to San Francisco.

Not until this past Monday, that is. Guerneville was picturesque, with gay men on every corner, and the Highlands Resort was charming and romantic, but those were not the attributes I had left Smith River to find. Since the weather had been beautiful and the clear blue skies were supposed to continue for a few more days, I decided I could drive home on California’s Highway 1 on Tuesday, freeing up Monday to visit San Francisco. Had Tuesday’s weather forecast been anything other than clear and sunny, I would have spent Monday on the coast visiting Fort Ross, Jenner-by-the-Sea, and maybe even Bodega, the location of Tippi Hedren’s home in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds.

The path to Mile Rock Beach, complete with Stairs
San Francisco, California
Taken 1/29/07

Having made my decision to head south instead of west, I got up Monday morning, soaked for a while in the hot tub, had breakfast at the main lodge, then drove down to Coffee Bazaar for a latte and croissant, not to mention the free WiFi service. When I completed my on line work, I hid the computer in the back of the car and drove east on California 116 through Forestville and Sebastopol, catching up with US 101 at Cotati. South through Petaluma, known for its chicken farms and arm wrestling competitions, into Marin County and the towns of Novato, San Rafael, Mill Valley and Sausalito, and there I am, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Had you asked me, I would have told you that San Francisco was my favorite city, followed by Paris, London, Vancouver, Edinburgh, and Portland in no particular order. It was the standard answer I gave when asked. The fact is, however, that San Francisco is not my favorite city. It is, rather, the one city in the world where I feel at home. Everywhere else I travel I am a tourist, visiting for a few days and moving on. This is true even in Portland where I’ve spent more time in recent years than any other place outside Montana or Smith River, and the one city I would consider relocating to. But I’m not a tourist in San Francisco. I’m back home.

I took the 19^th Avenue exit from 101 and drove south to Geary, then west to park near the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Where I expected to find a street running along the cliffs above Land’s End, I found instead a large parking area complete with benches, fences, and those devices that pass for public binoculars—put in your quarter and see the sites. I parked the Volvo, put the D80 on its tripod, and quickly shot a few scenic views. There used to be nude beaches at Land’s End and at nearby Baker Beach, and frankly, I just wanted to get naked and lie in the sun listening to the waves hit the shore. Walking down the trail toward the Legion of Honor, I kept noticing another trail lower down on the cliff. Now I remembered that trail, and knew that I had to be on it to find the paths leading down to the water. It was all familiar, and yet quite different. When I did find a way down to the lower path, I was amazed to find signs pointing out all the nearby attractions, and even a staircase leading down to what is now called Mile Rock Beach.

Once on the beach—which was assuredly NOT Land’s End—I found a few people, all fully-dressed, and lots of rocks. Someone had put a lot of time and effort into making rock cairns all along the beach. I walked west until I ran into a cliff that would have required swimming around, then stopped, took some pictures, and headed back to a more accessible part of the beach. Here I removed my shirt, ate an apple, and read for a while. I had the beach entirely to myself at this point. Later, climbing back to the car, I found the signs indicating just how much work the City was putting into beautifying this new tourist attraction. I doubt that nude beaches are considered part of the improvements.

Stone Cairn
Mile Rock Beach, San Francisco
Taken 1/29/07

Before I left the area, I stowed the camera gear in the back with the computer, so there will be no pictures here of the Great Highway, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, the Castro, or North Beach and Chinatown, even though I passed through all of those areas. I didn’t even get out of the car in Golden Gate Park, although I knew I’d have to come back and spend at least a week wandering the park with my camera. Even with a week, I’d only scratch the surface of all the images in that wondrous place. I did walk several blocks through the Haight, and found the piece of jewelry I wanted. I also walked past the Lycée Français where I got to hear a mother actually say “Oo là là” as she watched her child playing basketball. I even had a Crèpe Madeleine for lunch. (Turkey, cheddar and mushrooms, in case you were wondering.)

In the Castro, I renewed my membership in the Human Rights Campaign http://www.hrc.org/ and had a wonderful chat with the fellow minding the store. We chatted about mothers, ex-lovers, carrying a lot of baggage around with us, and just how faithful was Dreamgirls to the Supremes/MoTown story? I could easily have spent the whole day talking with this delightful man. In another shop I bought the replacement for my old and faded rainbow flag, picked up yet another sticker to put on the Volvo, this time the blue, black and white leather stripe so that the Volvo will match the Saab, and got my second rainbow ring. Years ago I had purchased one of these rings and wore it with pride for quite some time before I lost weight—including finger fat, and the ring fell off somewhere without me noticing. Harbor Jewelers in Brookings/Harbor, Oregon, has a similar ring advertised on a billboard just a couple of miles from my house in Smith River. They’re charging $1400 for the ring, as the rainbow stones are all sapphires. I passed on it then, but in San Francisco I bought the version with the glass stones for $50. Now that I’m back in Smith River, I sure hope I can find it. That is to say I hope it fell off my finger in the car or while unpacking, and not on the beach at Fort Bragg or along the Eel River. Maybe I’m just not supposed to wear rainbow rings. Boy am I glad I didn’t buy the $1400 one.

I spent an enjoyable few hours in a men’s club on Market Street, then headed back toward the Russian River with the idea of having a delicious and exotic dinner in Chinatown or North Beach. Unfortunately, even though I had had no problem finding parking in the Haight, in the Castro, or in the area near the club on Market Street, the only space I found in North Beach was a yellow zone—30 minute parking only. Knowing that I’d take much longer than half an hour to enjoy dinner, I reluctantly gave up and returned to US 101 northbound. Dinner would be baby-back ribs at Chilis in San Rafael.

The Surf at Mile Rock Beach
San Francisco
Taken 1/29/07

I didn’t realize just how much I love San Francisco. I can’t say I left my heart there, or that my love waits there, but the city by the bay will always be a part of me. This post has been the hardest for me to write to date, as I keep blinking back tears. I’ll be back, San Francisco, and much sooner than ten years from now.