Bead-curtain days

In the late 60s and early 70s, those of us in New Orleans who were involved in the student civil rights, peace, and women's movements read books, staged demonstrations, went skinny dipping, fell in and out of love, had our first babies, and ate countless bowls of salad and vats of red beans and rice. We declared that the personal was the political, and we sang along with Miriam Makeba, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez; we danced and shook our long hair to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin; and we loved our local musicians: the Neville Brothers, Irma Thomas,  Clifton Chenier. Every year at Jazz Festival we'd all meet in the Odetta tent. We dreamed a better world, and we did everything we could to make it happen. Our houses had certain features in common: posters of Angela Davis and Che Guevara; lava lamps; Indian bedspreads; glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling; and bead curtains. I was out on my One Street today when I noticed that bead curtains, now considered retro, are making a comeback.

Maybe I wouldn't have noticed that bead curtain, but I've been thinking about those days lately. One of my old crowd, someone I haven't seen since 1975, is coming to Portland this weekend, and we're going to meet at the Martin Luther King Day parade and find out who we are now. He comes from Panama, and back then his street cred came from knowing all the great Afro-Caribbean leaders and having read Mao's Little Red Book. He was a soft-spoken, upright, deeply spiritual man, a peace-maker and a leader, and I admired him and looked to him for guidance. I thought of him as being much older than I, but when he called a few days ago to tell me he and his wife are coming to Portland to visit her brother, we established that we're the same age. I'm eager to see him again and to talk about how we've lived our common ideals in these years and what he knows about others of our crowd. Suddenly those years are coming back to me with bead-curtain vividness.

A rough draft of a poem about those bead-curtain days:


Careless love

She flings it like seeds, rakes it like leaves,
heaps it in towers or scatters it like petals
in spring. She dances it, stomps it, believes
there will always be more. No end of it.
She is profligate, she spills it, she's excessive,
she hurls it, lets it twirl off her fingers
like a frisbee, like a football, or she flips it
like a pancake, like a pizza. If it sticks
to the ceiling, she laughs.
She wraps it like an afghan over
hard nipples, around her head,
dips it over one shoulder like a scarf.
She lets it go. Like starfish it regenerates
and she's right: it never ends.