CERTAIN THINGS AT NIGHT

When I lived in Berkeley one of the people with whom I hung out smoked menthol cigarettes, drank Bourbon, and collected guns. She was great fun. I wonder what has happened to her.

When she married a lawyer and moved to New York we lost contact.

Because of her, I associate menthols and Bourbon with good times, even though I never partake of either. Fun for the entire family.

For most of my life I've swilled tea and smoked pipes. Which are also fun for the entire family. Children, especially, benefit from being around old codgers who like these things.

We are not pot-smoking hippies into cults or dissolute behaviours, mostly, but upstanding citizens whose only possible weakness might be reading suspect literature. Precisely the sort of person you'd want your kids hanging out with before they turned into juvenile delinquents. The Bourbon quaffing menthol huffer would also have been a good influence.


I don't remember Berkeley very fondly. It has become a priggish self-satisfied place. But there were good moments, and some remarkable people there.

Kind of like San Francisco these days.



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