Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Three Beautiful Things 10/26/15: Back to NE DC, Oasis in College Park, Accidental Dead Air

1.  We had a couple of bags of things to donate to Goodwill and I decided I'd drive about twenty minutes down the Baltimore/Washington Parkway to New York Avenue NE and then South Dakota Ave. NE and take to stuff to the Goodwill there. Driving to this part of DC also meant I could go back to the slightly bewildering intersection of New York Ave, Montana Ave., and West Virginia Ave. and get the way it works straight in my head. I practiced it today -- which means getting to Atlas Brew Works will be a lot easier!

2. Well.  It was akin to going to the old Oasis store on Willamette -- with wider aisles and the added bonus of free coffee -- when I visited Mom's Organic Grocery on Rhode Island Ave. in College Park today. The bulk grains and nuts section, the shelves and shelves of remedies and natural supplements and Tom's toothpaste, the Springfield Creamery products -- yes, Nancy's yogurt --, the Emerald Valley salsa, and the Knudsen juices, among other things, filled me with nostalgia, nostalgia I enjoyed.  All it needed was music by the Grateful Dead playing, but the combination of reggae, the Indigo Girls, and Neko Case worked just fine.

3. I wanted to see if possibly that movie from over thirty years ago, The Grey Fox, was posted on YouTube, but it wasn't.  Somehow, my search for The Grey Fox and then listening to the music the Chieftans supplied for the soundtrack opened up about 140,000 videos of the Grateful Dead.  I watched Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia's appearance on the David Letterman Show back in 1982 and loved their acoustic performance of "Deep Ellum Blues". I also watched Garcia and Ken Kesey on Tom Snyder's show. Tom Snyder always killed me off. Later, I stumbled upon a "Dark Star" from Fillmore East (02-14-70, I think) that sent me off into the far reaches of the cosmos and put me in just the right frame of mind to enjoy a peaceful night's sleep.

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