A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

The Pears of Cupertino
In the summer of 1969, I was a college dropout, visiting a
girlfriend in Minnesota. This was an unwise time to drop out of
college, as a war was on, and dropouts exposed themselves to the
draft, and thus to disembowelment at the hands of people in a
faraway jungle. But I was marching to a different, not very bright
drummer.
The girlfriend had no use for someone matching that
description, but her brother, who was planning a cross-country car
trip out west with friends, invited me along. The idea was to go to
Alaska, but halfway there we took a left turn and headed down
the West Coast. When we got to the Bay Area, I told my pals to
drop me off just south of San Francisco, in a sleepy orchard town
called Cupertino.
Cupertino was a fruit town then. Nestled along the base of
the Los Altos hills, it and neighboring Sunnyvale were a
patchwork of vineyards and orchards, specializing in peaches and
apricots, figs and plums, and apples but not oranges.
You see, I had a relative (sort of) living there. She was my
stepfather's stepmother's sister – not a blood relative certainly, and
not someone I had ever met, or who had ever heard of me. But it
was my style in those days to drop in on people unannounced and
hope to dazzle them with my feckless ways.
I knocked on the door, and Uncle Artie looked me over
carefully before inviting me in. I had a ponytail and wore
bellbottoms and probably beads. Why he let me in is a mystery.
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