My Friend Jane

Transparency for me, has always lain the foundation for hope.  Without truth, there is no good progress, and no lessons emerge from any of our life experience. 

Jane lives in Corfu.  She courageously departed from our little corner of Chapel Hill NC for that strange new part of the world almost forty years ago.  I recently had the pleasure of reuniting with her for the first time when she trekked to the US for a family wedding.  Albeit only a couple of memory-drenched hours, beholding Jane's countenance after all these decades brought immediate awareness that what initially drew us into close friendship still lives on...regardless of years and miles.  

As we shared events current and historical, I found it remarkable that those memories I have held all these years were not aligned with Jane's.  No matter...except one, and that is how we initially met, which Jane has been recounting through the years with imagined clarity.  One of us was hitch hiking on Glenwood Ave. and one of us pulled over to pick up the other one, and from there a grand friendship flourished.  

I was delighted to find Jane on Facebook a couple of years ago.  Once reconnected, she and I poured gap-closing now-and-then details, effortlessly as if it were the month after we had lost connection fourty years ago.  At the time, it was sufficient to have her as a Facebook friend, banter exchanges fortifying our renewed connection.  It wasn't until she came to visit this Spring that I really understood what great friends we were and continue to be.

What draws people to each other?  Circumstances, yes...but what creates the desire to share more than passing dialogue with another person?  The simple answer would be found in similarity of dispositions and interests.  Certainly Jane and I were free spirits, living as intellectual hippies (to be carefully distinguished from the grunge hippies of yore,) whose attire, jargon and hair suited the lifestyle quite well.  What we found in each other was the spirit of adventure, believing at that time that a brave new world was beckoning us to show up and be counted among the superlatives.  We lived the part, and we believed wholeheartedly that as we sailed through an adventure devoid of threat or harm we would find only bigger and better pursuits...growing ourselves and eventually finding us having arrived at our cosmic destinies.

Upon detailed introspection we determined that it was I who picked Jane from the roadside, instantly agreeing to transport her all the miles to her intended destination: ECU.  I had planned on returning to my parents' home and was en route after dropping my mother off at the airport when I saw Jane there, on the side of the road, thumb pointed heavenward on the end of a tie-dyed sleeve.  Long, massive thick black hair in lovely curls that cascaded down past her shoulders almost obscured the rest of her.  I was doubly impressed to behold a young woman (roughly my age) hitch-hiking alone.  Absent were thoughts to hinder my relief effort, as I only saw a new friend, making her way toward my stopped vehicle.

It was probably right after she told me she was planning to wind up in Greenville (and I had agreed to drive the distance) that she offered me something hallucinogenic.  LSD.  Having completed my first year at art school, the drug proliferated among the best of the best.  I am not saying that I was a chronic drug user, but I had experienced a few hallucinatory occasions.  I liked the drug's effects of color and life-giving force to all things, animate and inanimate.  It produced in the user a completely new  consideration of all established concepts. And we were working to defeat "the establishment."  And here my new friend was offering some to me.  Without hesitance I swallowed the tiny piece of paper which bore a small brown dot, depressed the accelerator of my parents' teal blue Impala, cranked up the AC and headed for highway 64 out of /Raleigh.

Conversation and scenery both in and out of the car are now absent from memory until the point where I turn toward Jane to tell her that I don't think I can drive any further.  I am having trouble at that point even driving.  Although I know I must make it home, I recall a friend who lives in the vicinity whom I could visit a while until the peak experience is gone.  Jane graciously accepts the limits of my service, sharing goodbyes as she exits my car. 

My solo journey minus my new friend as passenger was wrought with confusion: There were many houses along those country roads that looked exactly like my friend's, and the one I eventually determined to actually be hers (enough to park and visit the house) rendered disaster.  After only a couple of steps from my parked car I was met by what seemed to be a herd of unhappy wild dogs whom I'd awakened from under a junked car beside the house.  My friend did not have dogs, and would not own such vicious mangy-looking mongrels, so I flew back to the safety of the driver's seat, now knowing that a long trip to Raleigh was my immediate mandate.

God protected this young girl as she winded her way through country roads, finally finding herself on a four-lane highway.  (Four lanes were the super highways of the day.) But finding a highway offered little peace, as it was unclear where this highway led, and in which direction one would proceed if one were wanting to go to Raleigh. 

I was thoroughly relieved to find a gas station right on the highway. I parked and entered for directions to my destination.  Still greatly under the influence, I had difficulty understanding the directions coming from the cashier and a few folks in line who were (in retrospect) all telling me to get back onto the highway with a left turn, and I would find myself in downtown Raleigh in 40 minutes.  Seeing my frustration, one kind man told me that he and his family were actually going to Raleigh and that I could just follow them. 

This should have presented the end of my worries, however from the point where I resumed my journey behind a station wagon transporting the all American family and their dog, I had to constantly remind myself that I was to keep that thing in front of me always in my sight.  That thing being their car, and their car being my sole hope of ever finding my way home again.

Good follower, LSD-me, unaware of time and space.  After what seemed to be a lengthy trek, panic overtook me when the other half of my convoy suddenly pulled over to the side of the road.  I followed suit, now seeing the father walking in the direction of my car.  Thanking God for electric locks, I pressed the master button hard and realizing that he had something he wanted to say to me, I imagined an LSD nightmare with  a serial killer having misguided me.  I barely cracked my window to hear him say, "We're in Raleigh now, in fact we've been in Raleigh for quite a while and this is our house."

Jane safely arrived, enjoyed and returned from her visit to ECU, and once she was back at UNC, we became inseparable.  (At some lucid point we'd exchanged contact information.)  She has asked me to write down some of my memories of those days and times, and so I offer this, the first of many.


I'll always wonder how I might have differently viewed life, had I not been generationally-influenced in this fashion.