When your memories predate search engines.
Had a dream about Baldwin’s last night, our neighborhood sandwich shoppe, hang-out, place to go. I’mnot sure about the year but it was way before way before.
This event took place shortly before the sixties, before LSD, “Nam, Assassinations, we were probably still in Eisenhowerland or as the old man called him “Eisenhowever”. I was too young to be anybody and found myself hanging out with the local “oldheads” at Baldwin”s. Maybe I was their Mascot/Lookout, someone to teach smoking to.
That night, whatever week of the night it was, Baldy closed early for some reason, who knows/cares and one of the guys said, “my parents are gone, bring your beer to my lawn and taek the little guy, too.
But no fights”
So we sat on the lawn, have a memory of some streetcorner harmony, but maybe I want to have that memory. Long ’bout 9:30 some of Northeast Philly’s finest, all big and brutal, start to put us in that big blue wagon. (I think it was blue then.) Then dumb little me talks his big face up.
“Guys, there’s a first amendment and”- Whomp Whomp Whomp or was it whapo whapo whapo. No matter, Bob’s first time in the back of the Cop Wagon. The oldheads stifled their laughter as best they could.
The old man came to pick me up and went home and whapo whapo whapo.
So I stopped going to Baldwin’s and who knows where the oldheads went. Enlisted or jail, probably.
Meanwhile I got into the sixties and found some real dangerous places. Stuff I could never tell my parents about. Or anyone. It was probably my fault, anyhow.