Ode To A Hippie, Butt Cheek Pocket

"...I got a freaky old lady
Named Cocaine Katy
Who embroiders all my jeans..."
~ Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show

I don't know why I do things sometimes. Nearly forty years ago I threw out an old pair of jeans but before I did I cut off the right butt cheek pocket and I have carted that damned thing around with me ever since. I don't tell you this to infer that when your jeans are dead it's only proper that you should remove its pocket and hold a memorial service where you bow your head and say somber stuff like "It was a good pair of jeans" and sing a hymn or two. I do so as a testament to the fact that I was once as close to being a hippie as you can get without actually being one.

You see, hand embroidery of a butterfly done by a woman on the butt of your jeans is a very hippie-like thing to have happen to you and means you might be very close to actual hippiedom. And back then everyone wanted to be a hippie. 'Cause it was cool. And you got to put two fingers in the air and say "Peace, man" and grow your hair long and get discriminated against because you had long hair and you could sing "Alice's Restaurant" in four part harmony on a city bus without getting busted and scribble peace signs on your jean jacket and stuff like that. And if you were in the right place at the right time there was a period where you got free love. Before that evidently you had to pay for it and after that it became kinda dangerous.

You had your city hippies and you had your country hippies. The city kind went to coffee houses had pictures of Che Guevara on their walls, wore bell bottoms, sandals and tie dye shirts with love beads and patchouli oil, maybe worked at record stores where they were cooler than their customers and said "far out" a lot. And the country hippies maybe were originally from the city but left and went to the country in their VW vans where they joined communes, played Dylan songs around wood stoves, did farming, talked to animals, wrote poetry about deep and meaningful things like the evils of society, made tea out of strange plants and maps for the county where they left off their location so others couldn't find them. But that's another story.

I don't mean to make fun of the hippie culture. Well, okay, I do. But in fact; it introduced a lot of good things to a lot of good people. People who still get a pang when they hear Scott McKenzie's "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair..." or the Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band..." If you look past the heavily hyped psychedelic, drug-taking, foul-languaged surface that the media would have you see, you'll find the basic precepts of love, peace and brotherhood. The questioning of traditional middle-class values and the embracing of aspects of eastern philosophies prompted a different way of looking at life. One that said it was okay to be the you that you were meant to be and it was okay to be poor and not have a two car garage and it was also okay to love who you love and one that, I'm sure, would be tickled day-glo pink to have a little fun poked at it.

Fate had it that I was too young for Woodstock and too far away from the whole Haight-Ashbury thing so I missed being a real hippie. But this pocket and the fact that a nice woman did it for me says that maybe there was a little hippie thing in that moment. The good kind.