You could say I was a street person back then.
These were the hippie days, late ’60s, San Francisco. Fun times? Love and peace? Sex, drugs and whatever?
Forget it. I was already going bald, veteran of a failed marriage, military service, corporate indentured servitude. Suddenly here I was, foot-long beard, dead broke, living in a VW kombi, scrounging meals from supermarket dumpsters. Bundle of laughs, you bet.
Christmas was coming. Oh boy. The put-on pomp and fake cheer, unbridled consumerism, deck the halls, family, family, family.
Christmas: number one suicide day of the year.
I got some mates together. Planned and plotted. We called it Christmas for Loners and Losers. Rented a hall for peanuts, got the hippie radio station to promote us, drummed up donations of food and winter clothing. Begged a few local bands to play for free. Grateful Dead was one I remember. Janis. Price of admission was a dollar or a joint. Five hundred people showed up. Very few paid cash.
I made several gallons of eggnog. My first time; what I didn’t know, you’re supposed to let it settle for a week. Oops. Like getting kicked in the head by a mule.
Not all the L&Ls in attendance were hippies. Any number of straights. “Okay if I come in?” Sheepishly, like one of us crashing the mayor’s ball. One old dowager shows up in a limo. Chauffeur opens the back door. Thin as a rake, complexion of dirty snow. Furs and pearls. Eyeballs no one in the food queue, sits perfectly erect off by herself, daintily dabbing emaciated lips with a silk handkerchief. Not a word, back into the limo, away.
Fast forward half a century. I am again (yet? as ever?) a loner, though somewhat removed from the loser role. I now celebrate the holiday a bit differently: instead of stuffing my maw with carbs and grog, I fast. Not a morsel past my lips, sometimes for the entire Christmas week. A tiny token nod to the oppressed and hungry of the world.
The very least an old hippie can do.