1973 - College commutes and courtship; Nights and frights in Georgia and Jamaica
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The Shack. It had three bedrooms, none of them with a floor, literally: the foundation years before settled, the walls squatting down directly onto dirt. Paul & Linda had their own bedroom with a small $15 tin wood stove. Linda visited weekly. To keep them warm on the bitter nights, although cuddling under the coverlets was their primary means of keeping warm, Paul stoked the tin stove until it roared and glowed red. They each secretly (but mutually confided later) wondered if they could scramble out the window if the roaring stovepipe disintegrated, pouring fire brands and blazing coals onto the earthen floor.
Paul at Linda’s encouragement sought a better place. Introduced to a 35-year-old UVA woman student, he rented an apartment with her, a real apartment, albeit a subsidized housing apartment. Linda visited, but with Paul returned one night to view scrawled sayings across the wall, knife marks and what appeared to be blood all over the living room and the dining room. They expected to see a dead body, but no, Greg, the roommate’s 28-year-old derelict boyfriend just had “a bad trip”.
Right. Time to move again, this time into a trailer off 5th Street, Linda now coming there. Greg visited once when Paul was out, saying he had permission to use Paul’s pickup. Yep. T’was Greg who used Paul’s pickup truck and rolled it, never reporting to the police, so that Paul lost his license prior to their epic trip out west.
Seeking to provide Linda with her own transport to and from Fredericksburg, her sweetie found a $50 VW bug that needed a new engine, and a new floor. The battery under the backseat had leaked and burned out the bottom so that it hung by a cable-thread with the pavement visible underneath as they drove. As he refurbished various parts of the rig, Linda drove it around. But they had no tags at that point, and naïvely thought if they painted on it “Farm Vehicle” all would be well. The state trooper did not think so, pulled her over, and ticketed her. She appeared in court, but as the judge lectured her on the flagrancy of her violations she could only giggle. Nonplussed, but not overly offended, he gave her a light fine.
They gave up on the VW bug.
Next to the low stone walls along the northeast border of the UVA grounds in Charlottesville, several pedestrian thoroughfares converged on a row of small shops that catered to students. They called it “The Corner”. Behind the streetside shops sat a diminutive 2-story house, Victorian style but shabby and butting up to the railroad tracks. Ex-student hippies took it over to start a small vegetarian restaurant.
As hippies were wont to do, they decorated. They painted the outside blue, and inside hung framed pictures of Krishna, an Avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu God of Creation, holding flute and divinely smiling. The picture was only one among other Indian representations and art, part of the theme, sincere and innocent. The food was great, simple, and popular enough that they thrived for years and printed a roughhewn book of their recipes, each lot which quickly sold out. They called it “Krishna’s Kitchen”.
Like many small college-town businesses, after many years the Krishna Kitchen folk folded their tent, moved on to other endeavors, and went out of business. The framed portrait of Krishna, however, Linda rescued, and Krishna’s wisely glowing smile and imagined flute notes followed them to their various homes for years, surviving even Linda’s house fire in 2010.
The Grateful Dead. Outside of a relatively small circle of aficionados and Fan-attics, in the early 1970s the Grateful Dead was not a widely acclaimed rock ‘n’ roll band. They were always live performance artists, perhaps the best improvisational and jam band ever, but the experience in those days was almost certainly wrapped up with psychedelia and marijuana.
When Linda met Paul, she was impressed that he not only knew the band but it seen them three full times!