Once upon an ancient time, circa 1967, my old pal Michael O’Hara Garcia and I embarked upon a historical journey to the north country, hacking our way through the stubborn wilds of New Jersey all the way to resplendent Greenwich Village, heart of the burgeoning East Coast hippie avalanche. We had important business here, seeking wholesale purveyors of posters and buttons and funky light machines for the opening of Gainesville’s first “underground shop,” the now-fabled Subterranean Circus. Garcia, a fiscal conservative at heart, eyed me nervously as I emptied my pockets to pay for these dubious products, more than once pondering, “ I don’t know, Killeen---are you sure you want to spend your whole $1200 on this stuff?”
The store opened to great success in September of that year. By then, Michael Garcia was in the United States Army in Vietnam, trying to keep his head above rice paddy water. Garcia was a savvy customer with a lot of street sense, always able to sniff out danger just before it knocked on the door, a quality which stood him in good stead in the hairy provinces of Vietnam. He made it through the madness, if not without a couple of scary moments. One night I got a telephone call advising me to be at Jacksonville Airport a couple days hence at the outrageous hour of seven o’clock in the morning. Michael was finally coming home. “I’m taking one flight after another,” he said, “…the Phillipines, Hawaii, San Francisco and home. I want to get as far away from Nam as possible and as fast as I can.”
Once back in Gainesville, Garcia was struck with the success of the Circus operation and decided to open a similar place in Washington, D.C., where he’d spent several years as an aide to Florida senator George Smathers. He found an affordable basement space on Wisconsin Avenue in funky Georgetown and we spent a hectic weekend stocking the store with items which had proved successful in Gainesville. Garcia called his shop Elysian Fields, named for the final resting place of soldiers and other heroes of Greek mythology. Michael’s place prospered and he soon moved down the block to a larger building on M Street, just a hop and a jump from Wisconsin. Elysian Fields quickly became a mainstay of the lively Washington hippie scene.
A few years later, Garcia’s boyhood friend Steven Stills came a-calling, looking for someone he trusted to help pilot his rapidly expanding musical career. Michael sold Elysian Fields to Bill Killeen for a modest price and took his leave for a more difficult battleground—the hellfire of the music business. It was my initial introduction to the District of Columbia, the first time I spent more than a couple of consecutive days there. The shop continued to do well but within a very short time the Circus had accumulated three other sister stores, one in faroff Denton, Texas, and Bill was spending all his time in airports. Elysian Fields was eventually sold to its loyal corps of employees and life in Washington was over. The trip back this weekend for the wedding of a niece, Kathleen Ellison, was only the second time I’ve been back since the seventies. One glorious thing about the capital, however. Much of it will always remain the same.
Walking The Walk
Our hotel was the Palomar, a Kimpton property in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, an older section of Washington, popular and thriving today with a host of embassies, a vast variety of eateries and retail shops; it’s a fine spot for walkers, joggers, young mothers pushing prams, people on scooters, gastronomers fond of eating outside in 60-degree weather. There is a Metro (subway) stop at Dupont Circle and if the Metro is a touch less available than the subways of New York City and Boston it still beats the dirgelike D.C. bus system which insists on stopping at every corner, concerned that humans might not have been born with legs.
Siobhan and I decided to hike from the hotel to the Lincoln Memorial, via the campus of George Washington University, then on to the White House to visit The Donald and deliver tanning supplies. It’s a spectacular walk, a mere 1.7 miles directly, a little more wandering around The National Mall and adjacent monuments, including the bittersweet Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall containing the names of most of those lost in the war, 58,220 souls at last count. When a visitor looks at the wall, his or her reflection can be seen simultaneously with the engraved names, which is meant to symbolically bring the past and present together.
The Lincoln Memorial, located on the western end of The Mall, is a colossus. Both the building for the sculpture and the statue, itself, are properly enormous. The architect was Henry Bacon, the designer of the statue was Daniel Chester French. It was carved by the Piccirilli brothers and dedicated in 1922, almost 100 years ago. The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple. Martin Luther King chose the spot to deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Visiting the memorial, which is never closed, is a singular experience enjoyed by 6 million people annually. I went there once in the 1970s at 3 a.m. and there were a half dozen others present. I told the security guard I was surprised to see anyone else there. He turned to me, smiled, and said, “Sir, I have been here for twenty-two years and there has never been a time when there was nobody here.”
The President Is Missing
The walk to the White House from the Lincoln Memorial is about 25 minutes if you don’t stop to take pictures. When we got there, Siobhan was horrified and disappointed that there were no protestors wielding angry signs. She thought she might borrow one to participate in whatever it was they were objecting to, which covers a lot of ground. The best she could do was to have a meaningful discussion with a permanent tent resident, a Mr. Maccabello, who was advocating for world peace, against nuclear weapons and human rights violations. He was also very pissed off about elephant carnage, and so is Siobhan, so we gave him a pat on the back and a small financial inducement to continue his crusades. Mr. Maccabello told his new friends that George H.W. Bush had come to speak with him when he was president, as had Bill Clinton, so he is getting his message across better than the rest of us. We didn’t ask him if he hung around in the dead of winter, but that tent looked pretty flimsy and exceedingly vulnerable to the January blues.
Here Comes The Bride
We have known Kathleen Ellison since she was a speck of a thing, transported to Florida for annual visits by her parents, Stuart and Mary, accompanied by an older sister, Ashleigh. Kathleen was a spunky little girl, not afraid to make the world aware of her preferences, assuming that everyone would eventually bend to her will. When she ate at the kids table, she would regularly swipe food off the plate of her beleaguered sister, who, being a kind and gentle girl, just shrugged and smiled. To the great consternation of their parents, Uncle Bill taught the girls several songs they could sing on the eight-hour trip from Chattanooga to Fairfield and they never forgot the words.
The girls were decent swimmers but otherwise unathletic, though Ashleigh took a shot at volleyball for a short time. Uncle Bill, ever the optimist, suggested Ashleigh and Kathleen spend a week at University of Florida coach Mary Wise’s volleyball camp one summer, Mary being capable of the occasional miraculous transformation of athletes from average to super. When Siobhan went to pick the girls up at the end of camp, she raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Coach Wise. “Tell Bill not to hold his breath,” said Mary with her usual impeccable honesty.
Kathleen being vulnerable to occasional bouts of irritability in which weaponizing a car was not out of the question, nobody wanted to teach her to drive, so the job fell to Uncle Bill. We drove the backroads of Marion County for awhile with no issues so I told her to take the next ramp on to Interstate 75. “Am I ready?” asked Kathleen, in a rare moment of self-doubt. “Sure,” I told her. “It’s easy. Just stay in the right lane and don’t get too close to anybody. If somebody blows the horn at you for going too slow, you just drive and I’LL give them the finger.”
Kathleen was a Florida Gator football fan, which is a tough row to hoe in Tennessee. She went to several games with her father in Knoxville and Gainesville and we all thought she might end up matriculating at UF. When the time came, alas, she chose North Carolina, despite its inferior gridiron prospects. There she met her husband-to-be, Yaniv Barzilai, and there was never any doubt about it. Despite long separations while she attended medical school and Yaniv scuffled through the brambles of Azerbaijan and Afghanistan as a State department employee, the love train never ran off the tracks. Ten years after meeting, they would finally be married at Brookside Gardens in Silver Springs, Maryland at 5 p.m. on October 20th. Since Kathleen decided to wed on the only bye week in the Florida Gator football schedule, the least we could do was attend the ceremonies. If only we could find the damn place.
Has Anyone Here Seen Brookside Gardens?
The least the wedding party could have dispensed to its guests were detailed maps, miners’ helmets, sickles and TNT, the better to blast our ways through the concrete underbrush to the Lost City of Brookside Gardens. If the Cavendish Gang had the good sense to hang out here, the posse never would have found them. We drove in with a carload of Mary Ellison’s relatives and their GPS girl was worn to a frazzle trying to find the place. She gave us late directions, she gave us faulty directions, she confused S street with South Street and finally she threw up her hands in despair. “I don’t know where the damn place is!” she screamed, almost weeping. “You’ll have to find it for yourselves!” Then she took a pill and went to vespers. We made it, although a mere twenty minutes before the lighted ball slid down the poll. Getting to weddings on time seems to be an issue with Bill.
The bride, pretending to be demure, was beautiful, the groom handsome, the parents proud, the minister cocky. The ceremony was unplugged so there are no sexy avante-garde IPhone photos to show you and we’ll have to stick with the traditional stuff. The action was outside on a cool, sunny day, which was fine until the sun took umbrage and left. This bothered the considerable number of young dancers not a whit as they frolicked o’er the lea. It affected the oldsters a tad more as they leaned over the marshmallow roasting pit in search of salvation. The happy couple is off to Portugal to drink cheap wine and gobble pastel de natas. For them, life is just a bowl of cherries. The rest of us eventually figured out how to get back to Washington. It’s tough when Siri takes the night off.
That’s all, folks….
