Hours after the final notes faded from Santa Clara, CA. I’m pondering what it means to me that the boys from the Grateful Dead won’t be playing together anymore and settling into their own final flight paths.
Questions and ideas begin to come to my mind and some get answered, other were all ready many years ago.
Who will help me decipher the whispers of the highway?
Who will translate the despair to beauty?
It’s the reading of the last page of a book read for the first time and the heart ache that comes with it.
While we can always open the book to previous chapters.
it’s a painful walk back to the bookshelf where nothing else seems to measure up.
And it would be selling ourselves short not to look.
There’s plenty there.
Read, listen, and love.
But how to move without the wheels of fragile thunder?
Who will hold their hand out for the rain to pour?
The anticipation of summer on the golden road.
Holding off the relentless to truly laugh our pasts away.
How to make it just one more day?
How to make it just one more day?
With the future in one hand and a basket of songs in the other.
My questions are infinite but the facts are plain. They walked barefoot in the snow and gave the best they had to give.
How much?
We’ll never know.
A huge thank you to all who have accompanied me on this trip down the highway. My friends and the band. The strangers who stopped just to shake my hand.
farnco illustrations 