#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

This is an atmosphere memoir type story about San Francisco in the summer of 1967. It has all the drugs and hippie flair you would expect from such a story:

“The air was thick with the smell of marijuana, patchouli oil, jasmine incense and Eucalyptus trees. Black guys were playing congos and flutes; white guys were playing harmonicas and guitars. It was as crowded as Coney Island on the Fourth of July. Hippie Hill was like this every day of the week.”

Although fun for what it is, Mueller clumsily tries to show exactly how cool the scene is while also trying to show her disdain for it, and thus how much cooler she is than the whole thing. She name-drops all the regulars like Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Carmichael. Like the others from this collection, I see the value of her writing, clearly an edgy and important voice for her time, but one that loses its importance this far removed from the scene.

Rating: 6-7-7-5 Total= 25

#78 Flower Children- Maxine Swann

#78 Flower Children- Maxine Swann

Happy Friday! Here is another Prize Story from the O. Henry Awards. Flower Children is written with an easy flow of a pastoral childhood.  If only everyone could grow up like this, happy, free of boundaries, nothing to do but explore and learn.

Of course this utopian view of what existence would be like without a tether is fraught with problems. What starts out as innocence and joy eventually turns to cynicism and angst, at least for the parents.  Children are adaptable as we see here. They love the openness of their hippy home, but then they also learn to love the confines of rules and expectations. 

When you raise a child to be sensitive and aware of their surroundings, guess what? They can see through your façade as well.  I liked this story. Swann has a subtle style and the use of imagery is a nice framework for the underlying emotion. The young apple trees at the start give way to “gnarled apple trees with puckered gray skins” as the children’s lives become more real. In the end, the Utopia has dissipated and is replaced with hope, and that should really be enough.

Notable Passage: “They hold leaves up to the light and peer through them. They close their eyes and press their faces into showers of leaves and wait for that feeling of darkness to come and make their whole bodies stir.”

Rating: 9-9-9-8 Total= 35