In Memory of Susie McMillen (1953-2010)

                It’s hard to remember back to a time when I did not know Susie.  I met her at U.C. Santa Cruz through my friend Dan Colner, who went to Merrill and with whom I shared a love of pot smoking and my new found passion for the Grateful Dead.  He was friends with a guy named Jeff Krumm, and Jeff’s girlfriend was this young lady named Susie.  Perhaps the first time I met Susie was we all went to Winterland in March of ’72 for a benefit for the Alcatraz Indians which may have been the last time I saw Pig Pen, and I got lost from them (I got lost a lot at shows in those days) and was reluctant to leave the hall to go home because I thought how can we be sure the show is really over and because I was pretty sure the world outside the concert hall was just an illusion and couldn’t be depended on. 

                Or perhaps I didn’t meet Susie until the summer of ’72 when my friend Rick Van Stolk and I moved from campus to a little fixer-upper on Oxford Way a block from the beach that his father had purchased, when she came up the walkway to the front door because she’d heard from Jeff who’d heard from Daniel that a room might be available for rent.  I remember she seemed mighty young and she had the most astounding blue eyes that captured the ocean that rattled our door when the waves crashed and I loved to hear her laugh.  And so she became part of the first household I’d ever lived in, for at least a year, maybe more, and those were magic times, our house was full of smoke and music and friends and every day felt like an enormous adventure.

                And the shows were the biggest adventures of all: from getting the precious tickets to figuring out which old car had the best chance of getting us there, to waiting in line, to the miracles that happened when the music began to play and the challenges of sitting calmly in the crowded halls during those interminable set breaks and then the music finally starting up again at last with more miracles and then the long drives back which of course were a bit of an adventure themselves.  I remember sunrises at the beach where we would try and figure out what we had all experienced, because we knew something big was happening here, something significant, something that was transforming us and transforming the world around us. 

                It was interesting we never hooked up.  It wasn’t because I wasn’t interested, but Susie was with Jeff, and then she hooked up with Daniel, and I was in a perfectly dreadful relationship with Janet until we finally broke up and then I met Ellen, and by that time Susie and I almost knew each other too well, we were brothers and sisters.  Then I moved up to Tahoe and Susie moved to Capitola but we kept coming together for the shows. 

                The next decades were a blur of good times, all wrapped around our passion for our friends and for the music.  Hundreds of Dead shows, Jerry shows, reggae shows.  In line in Santa Cruz for New Years tickets there was a lottery and we danced down the street when we all won.  Countless road trips – we were in a car together in Long Beach before a show when we heard John Lennon was dead.  And another time in Long Beach when the second set began and we all stacked our folding chairs into a mountain that we danced joyously around.  That dreadful time in Denver when the crowd swept her across a swath of broken glass in her perpetually bare feet.  Lots of nights in sleeping bags on couches, too buzzed to sleep much, lots of days wondering how on earth we’d find the energy to go to another show and we always did and we always, always had huge amounts of fun.  She even saw me and my crazy little tour group off on the plane to Egypt and was as dumbfounded as I when the band got in line to follow us through the gates.  Susie was the best concert buddy you could imagine.   I can’t ever remember her cross or crabby, no matter how long the road trip, how small the car or how many days we’d gone without a decent night’s sleep. 

                Ellen and I moved back down to Carmel in ’79 and got married and I introduced Susie to a carpenter friend of Ellen’s named Seth and before long she had moved into his step van, and they parked it in front of our house there on 15^th Avenue, again just a block from the beach.  Seth was a restless soul and I was beginning to realize that Susie in her own way was as well.  Though they had something powerful between them for awhile there was stuff they could not work out.  Susie had grown into a strong and independent spirit and Seth had suffered a hard childhood and had some deep issues and so I guess it was not a good fit.  But it was a good enough to produce a miracle, a miracle that Susie named Kaya. 

                I remember how shocked I was when Susie told me she was going to have a baby.  None of us were even thinking about kids back then, Seth was long since out of the picture, I didn’t see how she could possibly manage it and I told her as much.  She was such an utterly free spirit I couldn’t imagine her being tied down by the responsibilities of being a mother.  But as we talked I could see that she had thought about this a lot, and thought about this deeply.  She once said to me something about being a parent meant you couldn’t consider killing yourself because someone else was dependent on you, but aside from that she didn’t think much else would be different.  And that took me aback, because I couldn’t imagine my bright-eyed dancing, laughing friend with whom I shared so much joyous time would have such dark thoughts, but I guess there was some stuff she didn’t share.

What she did share with me, though, was that she really, really wanted a daughter.  And we all know how well that worked out.  She may have had some issues with men and so the universe gave her three fine ones to work out her stuff with.

So began the decades of Susie as a mother.  My God, what a mother she was.  I would come by often to see her when she lived at Wumby, and perhaps seeing her with Kaya opened me up some to the idea that having kids would not be the end of life as I knew it.  I even recall her smuggling Kaya into shows under a shawl as coolly as I’d smuggle pints of tequila in my boots.  She kept on dancing.  She kept on paying lavish attention to her friends.  She kept food on her table and clothes on her kids.  (Though not always clothes on herself.  She did go through a bit of a clothing optional phase which would take some of my friends aback if I brought them by her place without warning, though it bothered Susie not a whit.)  And the wealth she found in her simple lifestyle, the lavish freedom that let her move her family to Baja for weeks and weeks every year – how I wish I’d been wise enough to give my family that sort of extravagant gift.  And what extraordinary young men she raised – strong and smart young men who care about the things that are truly important. 

As years went by we saw each other a bit less, of course.  We were in Grass Valley, she and the boys were out in the trailer in the vineyard.  Thank God for Strawberry and High Sierra, for the glorious family reunions they became!  She told me for years what a mistake I was making in missing those pilgrimages and I finally came to my senses and sure enough my first year at Strawberry was like going home.  Days and days of music with lots of time to get caught up with people who mean a lot of you.  That’s when I truly began to appreciate the extraordinary family that had grown up around us, as I watched in amazement as our wonderful family kept growing and growing, and I realized how much greater the music sounds when you are surrounded by people you love.

                I cannot imagine how different my community of family and friends would look if Susie had not come into my life.  The amazing community of friends I am blessed with, which grew up around the music and the sacraments we shared and which has become such a precious and sustaining and enduring and supportive part of my life, would not exist if not for Susie.    She was a magnet, she let you know how important you were to her and you knew how important she was to you and somehow, effortlessly, all her friends and family became my friends and family. There has been no one in my life who grew my family the way Susie did.  Every celebration we have, every time we find ourselves together in rejoicing, in giving thanks and praise, is a gift from Susie.  And the joy that fills the space when we find ourselves together shines even through the sadness of finding ourselves without her – the joy, the light Susie brought into our lives fills all the living rooms and concert halls and music meadows we find ourselves once again together in.  And even though in this life there is so much that we do not know, I do know that Susie is here now, in our hearts and in our smiles and in the light that fills the spaces between us.  And always will be.  That is one thing that I truly know.

                So there are two things I can name that Susie gave me, two things that helped shape who I am and how the world appears to me.  The first thing is family.  Susie’s family had no walls.  It was her and the boys and every each one of us.  And we knew that, and by instantly and effortlessly and finding ourselves related to her we found ourselves likewise related to one another.  And we always will be.

                And the second thing Susie gave me is celebration.  Susie helped me realize how important the music truly was, that it was not something that we did, it was something we were, something we are.  Without Susie I would not have come to make it such a centerpiece in my life.  She was such a perfect fellow traveler on road trip after road trip, so open to the miracles each and every new song might bring, and so open to hearing each and every song as if it were brand new, as if it were the very first time.   She was so full of light, and so open to joy.

                There is so much in this life that we do not know and so little that we do.  And times like this make us realize that the real knowledge, the deepest knowledge we possess is in our hearts not in our heads.  And in our hearts we feel the love that fills the spaces between us.  And in our hearts we are still dancing, together, with Susie, in that ring around the sun. 

In Memory of John Olmsted (1938-2011)

 J. Perlman Photography 2010

             I first met John Olmsted at U.C. Davis, where I was enrolled in the Planning Certification Program and he came to speak at one of the seminars, and I was struck by this odd tall passionate man who seemed to channel John Muir and who closed his eyes as he talked of his vision.  Before he talked very long I could see his vision too, of his chain of jewels, of conserved precious lands stretching across California.  Before he’d finished his short presentation which involved an overhead projector and a bunch of photos and a lot of stories I was totally enrolled – how could I not be?  His vision was so clear, so tangible, so graspable, that it seemed the least I could do – in fact it felt an honor to be asked to help bringing it forth.

            How do I describe his utter unstoppability, his unreasonable indomitability?  No, I take it back, his indomitability was not unreasonable, it was beyond any notions of reasonable and unreasonable, he simply knew what was so, and what would be.  It was not a personal vision that drove him, and drove him to drive the rest of us, it was a vision much bigger than him, it was a vision, I came to understand, borne in a meeting of giants between lifetimes, a meeting where he sat at the table with his peers, the spirits of John Muir and Frederick Law Olmstead and discussed what was to be and how it would be made so.  I believed he returned to that table every time he closed his eyes and prepared to speak, and I understood what gift it was to be shown his vision of what was to be, and what an honor it was for all of us to be given the opportunity to share in the bringing forth of that vision into this world.

            And how to describe the gentle quality of his persistence?  He could, and he would, ask such unreasonable things of you.  And the natural response would be to push back, to say “don’t you understand, I’m busy, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the money” but then you’d see how profoundly less he was asking of you than he was asking of himself and how could you possibly say no? 

            Though he would be so sweet when you did say no. No matter what the crisis was, if you could not do that which was needed so badly this time, hey, it was no problem, he knew someone else who would take care of it and he knew you’d be there for him next time, and if not next time, then the time after that. 

            And there were those glorious disconcerting mad periods when he would be consumed by the movie he was making and he would call me up, from his home or perhaps his hospital room or the room at the Outside Inn and leave these enormous long messages telling me what he could see and how everything was coming together into this tremendous climax and how we were all each one of us at the very center of it and I could not help but see it too. And I cannot help but see it again now – how it is all coming together, right now, and how we are all, each one of us, at the very center of it.  I brought him boxes of my old Grateful Dead concert tapes to put into his shoebox-sized cassette player which was held together with duct tape and he filled dozens of them with his amazing brilliant streams of consciousness laid over the music, and his excited voice, describing all that he could see segueing seamlessly back and forth with Jerry’s guitar, was so perfect I could not erase those messages from my phone.  His vision was so complete and so simple it was funny and in his messages he would roar with laughter and he declared he had become a standup comedian, especially since because of his prostate problems he couldn’t sit down very well anyway.  The omniverse, the Obamaverse.  Time standing still, time going backwards.  The movie he was born to make revealing itself fully, with each camera angle determined and the narrative completely written and all we needed to do was assemble a camera crew and we could make it in a weekend and it would be the greatest movie of all time.  The first cosmic download in history.  All of it coming together, right there, right then, in him.   He would call the movie “Pain in the Butt” in honor of both himself and his condition.

            I remember descending with him into the tightly packed tiny rooms where he kept his collections, shelves and shelves of old books and old typewriters and Victrolas and rocks and taxidermied animals and maps and, my God, it was like the movie “Being John Malkovich” and I was descending down those narrow stairs into John Olmsted’s brain, and at first it looked like utter chaos but then I began to listen to John speak about this piece and that piece, each with its own story and the story of one piece leading seamlessly to the story of the next and the next and by the time we went back upstairs that crowded little basement had been transformed into a shrine where the perfect order and beauty of the universe had once again been, by John, revealed.

The last time we spoke he lay in his bed without the strength to raise his head, but he could still rattle off parcel numbers from memory as we spoke of some of his properties along the Yuba River, there in the middle of his necklace of land-jewels across California, and we talked of what was needed to pay the property taxes –for John, there were always property taxes to be paid – and rebuild the old house which had recently burned to the ground and taken many of John’s antiques with it.  And for John the loss of the house was only the briefest of blows – he had the house plans and he knew contractors and he would rebuild the house as it had originally been, it would be better than the patched-up remodeled shell that had burned.  And as we talked and shared ideas and thoughts of what should become of the properties John would close his eyes and say “Yes!  That makes me tingle, I can feel it, yes, I know that will happen!”  And I could see that John’s spirit-peers, John Muir and Frederick Law Olmstead, and, probably Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, were all there sitting at the table with him and when he felt the tingling it was his spirit trembling because he was in the presence of Truth, of what will be, and John knew what a sacred thing it was, what a blessing and honor and obligation it was to be gifted with that vision of Truth.  It was that vision which drove him, relentlessly, and which sustained him, and enriched him, and demanded his entire life, and gave him his entire life.

Thank you for sharing the gift of that vision with me, John.  I will carry it with me as I walk your trails and, together, we will walk your vision into this world.