One thing?

Daily writing prompt

What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?

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One thing? How about a shopping list? Doctrine for the young fool seemed to be do it all, no matter how stupid it was. There was that trip to Texas in ’65. Oy vey. Or singing Wild About My Loving in the church coffeehouse in Oklahoma. I was lucky to get out of that one with just a baptism in the nearby creek. Then there was that time staying with my friend whose dog had just had puppies; my cat, The Grey Menace, decided that the pups were toys. We not only left in a snowstorm, but that was the end of the friendship with Tim. Those are only the ones that spring to mind.

I used to live in a Folkie “Pad” on Boston’s Beacon Hill. We called it the Folkie Palace, and there was very little that we wouldn’t, couldn’t, or didn’t do that was offbeat, weird, and to our mind “really Cool!” Take the Thanksgiving Piñata: a giant piñata full of candy and fireworks to give a real bang start to the Thanksgiving holiday on Grove Street. The primary ignition method of a fuse did not work, so some bright light, and I’m not naming names here, decided that the conglomerate of candy, paper, glue, and fireworks should be lit with some charcoal lighter and a match. The cries of Run Away, Run Away, were fervent and loud.

While on the topic of the Folkie Palace, there were the regular potluck supers. Now I know that for most people there are reasonable limits to what gets put into a potluck. Not at our place. It was a lot of luck, and whatever was found in the market was put in the pot. The chef was our in-house mystic, the Monk; he was an escapee from some monastic order and fancied himself in the loaves and fishes role. He’d spend an entire late Friday afternoon at the Haymarket scouring the stalls and trash bins for salvageable produce that he’d turn into a feast for the multitudes. By the door was sometimes a basket or pot for a free-will donation for the meal. This appeared frequently when we were trying to get the rent money together at the end of the month. The other Folkies who appeared for these meals weren’t exactly well off for money, so some odd things appeared: a nickel bag of pot, a socket wrench, some foreign currency, or a bag of sprouted onions.

Yes, there are many, many things I might suggest to my younger self, but he’d probably just shoot me the middle finger and continue doing them. Still, all in all, I didn’t turn out too bad.

What’s that? Are you snickering and laughing? You’re just jealous!