Indelible

We've been looking back at 1976 this week, in particular at the massive oil spill in the Thousand Islands that shaped life along the river in ways that can still be seen and felt. I may just be at a reflective age, but events have conspired to bring the past to mind again and again recently. My wife and I were interviewed by students from an oral history course about student life and politics in the 1970s. Old friends and communards have gotten back in touch. And half of what I hear on the news rhymes with issues and horrors thirty and more years gone. A new musical genre called "freak folk" harks back to the psychedelic, and is featured in a New York Times online video. The other day a friend remarked that someone had said to them "Dale seems to be aging well." As a compliment, it falls short of "His abs would stop a bullet," but I'll take it. The me of 1976 still lives on in the me of 2006, the way the mammal brain lies wrapped within the primate brain, the way the bathtub ring of the Slick of '76 lives on in the high-water marks of the Thousand Islands. Some stuff just doesn't wash off.