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It was a small, high-traffic, colorfully decorated bath room , in the intimate smokey Club we hung out in and played our guitars at every Friday night,…Friday’s because there was no school the next day….Friday when all the Atlanta folk music people came out to play.

Innocent days, when smoking was still allowed in public and a crowd of teenage music lovers could sit for hours in a bar that had co-ed restrooms, and be served only juices and sodas, and that was enough to get us as high as we needed.

All we really needed was to have the opportunity to stand on that hotly lit stage , tune our “axes”, and sing into the very live microphones. Sometime….most times….someone would be recording us….even then, we dreamed of arenas, or at least a television studio or two demanding our songs.
I was part of the well loved Cleff Dwellers, my high school trio consisting of Chip Dodson, Britt Dean and me in the middle! They guys played guitars, and sometime I did too. And we really loved to blend our three voices on everything Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Gordon Lightfoot. They were our heroes.
I’d learned how to play a cheap guitar from listening to Baez’s early recording of “Dona, Dona, Dona”, an Israeli lullaby.

Those bathroom walls come first to mind, as I contemplate walls and poetry, because those walls were crammed with hundreds of patrons attempts at poetic composition, some serious wails against the Viet Nam War, some light hearted and absolutely filthy…..lots of attempts at various genital portraiture (some of the penises even spouted poems), and so many different colors ,done in so many varied inks and paints, it was an art exhibition all its own.
You could sit for hours and never see the same thing twice….or so it seemed.

But I remembered one late night it felt like the bathroom wall was so alive it seemed to envelope me in colors so vibrant I could hear them! And I was high on CocaCola only….but I was enthralled nonetheless , and left the sacred beatified space of that small lavatory with a sense that my world had shifted.

I was 17, after all, so I was due a shift of some kind, I guess.

I got to our performers table, my world whirling around me, and I quietly understood quite simply, that we all die.

Even 17 year old girls.
I’ll never forget that moment.