She was somewhere in her 60’s and I can still remember her face - these beautiful laugh lines and sparkling eyes - and how everything about her just seemed to radiate. Maybe it’s wrong, but sometimes you can fall in love with someone just looking at them.
And it was such a perfect time and place to be alive just then: a warm, sunny afternoon outside a little market, surrounded by redwoods in the mountains above Santa Cruz. It was such a beautiful day that commenting on it wasn’t even small talk, and I’m pretty sure that’s how our conversation started.
She asked me about myself and I said I was about to graduate college, hoping to become a journalist or a writer of some sort. She said her son was a writer and that he’d recently sold an episode for the new “Twilight Zone” series remake. When I asked how he managed to do it she said he was lucky: he knew the producer because his band did the music for the show.
I’m not sure how I knew this - maybe it was common knowledge at the time - but I said “The Grateful Dead does the music for the Twilight Zone…” and she said “Yes. That’s his band.” And smiled.
So that’s my story about how I met Robert Hunter’s mom. I like telling it because she really did shine with such a remarkably beautiful light, but mostly because I love how she introduced her son, one of the greatest lyricists of all time, as a guy who wrote an episode of the new Twilight Zone.
Here are some of the signs I put up yesterday and today.