I still read the obits every morning, and I always check the first words
"died peacefully in her sleep"--
(how do they know it wasn't terrifying?)
Sometimes it's "at home surrounded by his loved ones"
(a consummation devoutly to be wished, btw ..)
And then yesterday this one... If you can't read it on your cell phone, I expect there's some way you can enlarge it.
anyhow, it starts --" Rochester: (1947-2017) Released to the next adventure ..." That birth date is an alert right there -- he was in his teens through much of the 1960s. It was an exciting time to be a teenager but a pretty hard time to be a parent --trust me, I was there.
Between them our boys drove Abbie Hoffman, marched on Washington with MLK, hitch-hiked to the moonshot and heard Arlo Guthrie at the Newport Festival, registered for the draft and debated fleeing to New Zealand or Canada -- and then they turned middle-aged with good marriages and respectable careers.
I was curious to read what became of Charles, but judging from this obit, he was a living fossil -- true to his era right to the end. Anyhow, what I started out to tell you is that someone thought it worth including in his obituary that he
WENT TO WOODSTOCK WITH A PURCHASED TICKET.
YES! Our Dov went to Woodstock (driving his friends in our station wagon after dawn because his junior license didn't allow driving at night) And YES! he'd PURCHASED A TICKET, only to find that as Woodstock developed, the fences were thrown down and the gates opened.
Na Zdorovie!
im still trying to figure this out. is the fact that he bought a tix to woodstock supposed to make us know that he was an honorable person and not a scavenger? or something?
ReplyDeleteIf I had to guess, I'd say that buying a Woodstock ticket may have indicated dedication and pureness of heart, as opposed to merely crashing through the fence once it went down. But I was 14 years old and living in Tennessee at the time, so this is only a guess.
ReplyDeleteAnd, like Edith, I'm a connoisseur of obituary cliches ("died peacefully" and so on). I've written a few obits for friends and family members, and I always try to avoid these.
Ha! Just for the record, there was no need to crash any gate. INdeed, I had purchased tickets, and my friends had not - the were planning on entering in some other why. After a traffic-filled drive into a field parking lot on Friday afternoon, prior to the start of the music...there was no fence, no one taking tickets. They had not completed putting it together. This was when I realized that something "different" than what I was used to was happening. Not surprizingly, folks had settled on the hillside. I do remember that afternoon a voice coming on and saying, 'HI folks, we are ready for you now. Please go out and come in!'. What were the odds on that happening???!!!
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