LETTERS FROM HOME: JERRY, MICKEY AND PASSAGES INTO OTHER REALMS

Aug. 17, 1995

Dear Deion,

DC and I were thinking about you when the news came about Jerry Garcia. We watched the faces of the people on TV who gathered at the makeshift wakes, and noticed the remarkable lack of grief and dolorous pronouncements. They had the look of people who believe that life is a long strange trip, a series of passages of which death is only one.

I also saw confusion among people who'd incorporated the Grateful Dead into their lives the way someone else might religion. No, that's not quite it. It's more like the Grateful Dead are part of millions of people's family. Everybody knows them by their first names. And concerts are recalled with the affection of a reunion shared by people who need no words.

I work with a woman whose son is a Deadhead. She was feeling for him the day Jerry Garcia died. And she told me a story about her son losing his wallet at a Dead concert. It contained a hundred dollar bill and two twenties. Days after the concert, the wallet and the hundred arrived in the mail with a note that said something like: "I figured finding your wallet was meant to be because I needed money to get home. I used the twenties. Will send them to you as soon as I can."

I could tell she was glad and a little amazed that her son hung out with such people.

Deadheads believe in everyday miracles. And you probably believed the Dead would go on and on, just like their soul-reviving concerts themselves. But how will they go on without the smiling bearded Buddha on the end? It won't be the same.

When I was a kid, I played baseball every day all day, from the first spring thaw until autumn. And I thought Mickey Mantle was the best thing in the world to be. I couldn't imagine not playing baseball, or baseball without Mickey Mantle.

But baseball was just a passage into other realms. And baseball has survived without Mickey somehow, though he was among the last of those who played simply out of love for the game.

It was the same listening to Jerry Garcia play, the love he felt for the unique sounds he created, forms and splatters of aural paint on a canvas of air.

That love infected everyone at a Dead concert, reconnected them with the joy of drums in the night, of dancing with 10,000 people who don't care how geeky anyone looks, of dipping your soul in the same pool where Peace and Love were rediscovered in the '60s.

The thing is, the crowd always seemed an essential part of the performance. Like when the bag lady takes the aliens to a play in Lily Tomlin's "The Search of Intelligent Life in the Universe" and the aliens get goose bumps just watching.

Yeah, pretty good play, the bag lady says.

No, the aliens say, good audience.

Each generation creates its own heroes, forgiving their faults and magnifying their deeds and legends. They're heroes because they mean something to our lives through an alchemy that others who are merely famous only pretend to.

And every generation is left wondering where their heroes -- Charles Lindbergh, FDR, Joe DiMaggio, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Mickey Mantle, John Lennon, Jerry Garcia and on and on -- have gone. And what will become of us now.

When the question, my twirling silver-toed dancer, as always is: What will we become now?

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.