Larry

Back when I was in High School, I was, naturally, enamored by The Beats.

Now, most of you probably thought we were wanna be hippies, and you would have been right, except you weren't. Black clothes, LSD, and poetry are a bit older than the hippies, and I knew that. 

Truth be told, I had a hard time following Beat Poetry and fiction even with Ritalin. Maya Angelou was my real favorite, and Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams rounded out my American Masters taste in poetry. It's more that I *wanted* to appreciate The Beats. 

Then I got around to reading it, and well, having been born with lady parts, and growing up in the 80s:

Damn, these assholes were sexist. 

And, it wasn't even their fault really, I'm sure for the time they were probably pretty enlightened, but you know, I'm of my time and that stuff is pretty hard to read when you watched Sally Ride bouncing around in space and figuring if Geraldine Ferraro could run for Vice President and Mondale only lost because Regan was just so great that...

Yeah, I somehow thought when I was in first grade if women were astronauts and vice presidential candidates that...

We'd be a little farther along by now. 

But I'm letting my ADD get me off track here. The point was that somehow Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still alive at the age of 100, and he's friends with my aunt. 

And somehow I am the only person I know who finds this miraculous. I MEAN HE'S LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI. 

When Gail and George sent me gifts from City Lights Books I thought it was because it was a landmark near Gail's House and everyone in my family is a voracious reader and I was into poetry. I didn't realize Gail was buddies with the OWNER OF CITY LIGHTS BOOKS FOR CHRIST SAKE!!

When I finally did make it out here, and make it into City Lights Books, it IMMEDIATELY triggered my claustrophobia, which is actually a lovely metaphor for both my experience as a San Franciscan and my visceral reaction to the way The Beats wrote about women, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was having brunch with my uncle, his longtime girlfriend, who I grew up knowing as Gail, but now call "Cap" because we're both grown ups, who I refer to as "my pseudo aunt" because she is for all intents an purposes my Aunt as she has been dating my uncle for 40 years, and my brother, when Gail mentions her friend "Larry" who just finished another book and turned 100. How many centenarian authors named Larry are running around North Beach, anyway?

HOLY SHIT YOU KNOW LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI 

Your buddy was just on NPR! Ok, my buddy was on NPR, too but that's another story, which I will also tell at this brunch...

BUT THATS NOT ALL

So we're sitting there talking about "Larry" I'm stunned that my aunt knows someone who I think of as a historical figure, and my brother is likely unimpressed, and my Uncle is saying something along the lines of "He calls it a book, but it's one paragraph! It's a 140 page long paragraph!" 

I point out to my uncle that The Beats were not generally known for their adherence to grammatical conventions.

That's how short the human life span is, though. That's how fast history moves. I think Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a historical figure, and to my uncle, he's his girlfriend's weird buddy Larry who has no respect for sentence structure. 

That would be a good quip to end on, but unfortunately I have to add the prologue of my going around name dropping that MY AUNT is FRIENDS WITH LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI to everyone I know, and no one knowing who that is. It was very anticlimactic.