The last time I’d been in Sheena Baby’s car there’d been two or three joints in an empty Marlboro pack in the glove box. I flipped it open and the Marlboro pack was still there. I elbowed the wheel and peeked inside the pack and, sure enough, there were still two whole joints in there. I got one out and put the other one back up. Things were getting pretty groovy. It was a Sunday evening and Army Archard was counting down all the top 100 hits of 1967. I lit that joint and bumped down the road drinking my beer and keeping time on the steering wheel, holding the smoke in deep. After a while I was just shaking my head over how good it all was. I listened to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley and The Doors and Cream and Grand Funk Railroad and CCR and Percy Sledge, wawa wawa wa. I got to singing out loud and moving my shoulders around and when that joint got short I took little tokes and got all I could out of it. Army was breaking in once in a while, commenting on how fine it all was and talking about how lucky we’d all been to be alive in that era. I agreed with him 100 percent. I wished I’d gone out to San Francisco and worn flowers in my hair. I wished I’d been hip instead of picking cotton. All of a sudden it didn’t bother me any more that Sheena Baby was leaving me, and I saw that it had been inevitable. We were two different people. We came from different backgrounds, and our interests were not similar. It was a wonder that we’d stayed together as long as we had. Love took a lot of different forms and sometimes what appeared to be love wasn’t really love at all, was just infatuation in disguise. It hurt when that happened, and it messed you up for a while, but sooner or later you got back on your feet and faced the world and saw that love was hard to find and sometimes it took some looking. Love wasn’t going to just walk up and slap you in the face. It wasn’t going to tackle you around the knees out on the sidewalk. Love wasn’t going to leap out of a second story window on top of you.

I rode along there, slightly bumping, the needle wobbling between 7 and 10 mph. The tires went whop whop whop, and the rubber squirmed under the iron rims, and it made the car rock gently. I knew I was going to make it. I knew all this was just a temporary setback.