So now you know all about the rare roses of Berkeley… or you do if you read the earlier posts in this series. I promised you a story, and here it is:
Many years ago… back in a strange time called by some; ‘the day’… I and a friend of mine, maybe the best friend I ever had, and who is now no longer with us, had an idea.
There was a Grateful Dead concert playing the next day at one of the colleges in the Bay Area. We had tickets. You may or may not know that roses are associated with the Grateful Dead. In the… uh… mental state that we happened to be in… (hey, don’t judge me, it was ‘back in the day’)… we suddenly realized that this was a cosmic confluence of events.
We were going to see a band that is associated with roses, and we lived just a few miles from a place that was full of rare roses found only in a few places in the entire world. You can probably see where this is going.
Yeah, we grabbed some pruning clippers and a bunch of big trash bags… gloves would have been a good idea too… and we drove to the Berkeley Rose Garden, hopped the fence, and clipped hundreds… maybe thousands… of roses.
Okay, simmer down. We only took two or three from each bush, and roses only last a few days anyway, and rose bushes are not hurt when you do this, in fact, it is good for them.
The next day, we stood outside the concert venue… in an even more enhanced state of mind… and gave one rose to every girl of any age who walked by. If you don’t know anything about a Grateful Dead concert, you should Google it… or YouTube it… or whatever it is you do these days. People wear bright colors… you know… tie dye… I’m sure you have seen it around…
And the hippy girls in their long, flowing skirts, twirling around to the music, each holding a single, long-stemmed rose of colors seldom seen, it really was a magical day. I hope you can forgive our youthful exuberance.
But it isn’t easy to tell stories about ‘back in the day’ on a family-friendly blog.
Pouring My Art Out 