Dressing up with the other girl from Towaco (May 13, 1997)

May 13, 1997

I guess Jimmy’s seeing Ginger again recently stirred up old memories from that time seeming so long ago.

He talked to me as we drove around about that September after Woodstock when he was dating a Danish girl who lived in Towaco.

He was 21 at the time and had not yet met Ginger, who would become the love of his life.

But he recalled in the baseball bleachers in the field behind Ginger’s family home and recalled looking up at it and wondering who lived there and how odd it appeared, sticking out of the grove of trees on top of the mountain.

“I was necking with the girl and just happened to look up,” Jimmy said. “I wondered what kind of people lived in such a strange house.”

“And you would eventually get to live in that house,” I pointed out.

Jimmy shrugged and sighed.

“Who would have every thought it at the time,” he mumbled.

Yet the most memorable thing about that moment wasn’t that house or his future in occupying it, or even the Danish girl he dated.

Jimmy was fascinated with the Danish girl’s older brother and the collection of junk they stored in their own house in Towaco.

“You should have seen it all,” Jimmy said. “It was like they were storing props for some movie studio down there in the dark. I had balls then. I don’t know why everybody else did what I asked them to do, but when I saw all that stuff, I made everybody dress up in raincoats and gas masks and pith helmets. I wore a fedora and a trench coat, and we all climbed into the family’s 1949 Packard and drove to Cedar Grove’s Pilgrim Diner. We just marched in with flashlights, flashing them all over the place, under the tables, into cabinets. The place was packed with people. God knows what they thought was going on. When the manager came over to ask what we were doing, I told him there was been a mine collapse right under the diner and we were checking for poison gas. We even had a Geiger counter and we had someone going around pointing it here and there at people, click, click click. We went on testing the place for a while. We even put up some yellow crime scene tape around the kitchen. Then we left, taking off in that old Packard. People just stared at us through the diner windows as we pulled away.”