They took the sofas out of the upstairs of the Barnes & Noble at the mall. I suppose that’s the way it goes, since they took out the restaurant to put the Barnes & Noble in. The restaurant was the fanciest place I knew about in Asheville for the first couple of years that I lived here. That says something about me, but it also says something about Asheville.
The rise of the downtown is well documented, and there’s plenty to celebrate about it of course. But nights like these remind me of arriving in town 21 years ago with an oversized fridge in a U-haul trailer that made my 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham overheat on the reg. The fecund woods of deep summer might have grown across all of that machinery while I was off doing trust-falls with my freshman peer group.
I listened to the Grateful Dead without irony in those days, and it’s still easy to listen to them in September. If you can only hear one song on the way back to the house from the mall, with the windows down and the moist air pouring in like tepid Cheerwine, that song might as well be Darkstar into Space and back into Darkstar. It’s not nostalgia for those days or that restaurant or the sofas that make the ride so sweet. It’s the gratitude that all those rides have brought me home.
…through the transitive nightfall of diamonds….
Was that the Dark Star from the spring ’90 Uniondale show? You know, the one with Branford. Oh, and the Bird Song from earlier in the set, a sweet one.
I know, I know, James: I’m being stereotypical. A person can’t help it sometimes, don’t you think?
Well, perhaps it was. And stereotypical behavior in the defense of great music is no vice. I’m paraphrasing Goldwater at his ’64 show in ‘Frisco.