Peace, dude

“Peace, dude,” said the hippie standing outside the student union, 1969, right after the cops teargassed us and rousted our asses off campus in a hail of epithets: “Get a job,” “Love it or leave it,” “Get a haircut,” “Take a bath, you disgusting commies.”

So my old lady, bitchin chick, tight mini, psychedelic-foulard festooned, granny-glassed shades, said, “We gotta remember today, man.  I'm gonna get us a token, a memento, a timepiece, a whatever-you-call-it.  Hey, what about a tattoo?  Man, that'd be freakin'!”

“Uh, no way, babe,” I said. To glyph my skin, to prick my epidermis, to ink my Id?  Ouch!  “Couldn't we just buy something less painful instead?  How about that new album by the Beatles, called Abbey Road, I think, or a poster of Janis or Jimi?”

So we did buy something, way better than any of my lame ideas.  Off the campus's main drag, a cool vendor in a VW bus painted Day-Glo yellow and pink with blue and green swirls, the color of a 60's lightshow at a happen' be-in, was selling love beads, incense holders, hookah pipes, roach clips . . . and peace symbol necklaces.  My old lady dug into her leather-fringed tote bag with a “Make Love not War” sticker on one side and “Hell No, We Won’t Go” penciled in black marker on the reverse side, scrounged around the bottom of her bag for $15 in rumpled bills and spare change, and bought me a peace symbol necklace, the symbol hanging on a hemp cord, dig it? 

I wore it then. I wear it now, 50 plus years later.  

It's a time capsule of a moment when long hair waved, when love conquered war, when a chick and a dude found peace and harmony in the age of Aquarius.  She and I got hitched in ‘69, made two kids who made four kids.  

One of them will inherit my peace-symbol necklace and wear an era memorializing when their now balding grandpa was a hippie-dippie longhair and their elegant grandma was bitchin'. 

Far out!

Flash Issue 13