By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song
And a celebration.
Mary sits on a bench in a small pocket park on Tinker Street, strumming a scratched and worn Guild guitar, singing her original songs for an audience of three. She is as weathered as her old guitar, dark from the sun, wearing a black dress and a floppy hat. A motorcycle cruises past, its sound system blaring “Sweet Home Alabama,” momentarily drowning out the street musician plying her trade. Mary keeps singing, undeterred. She’s a warrior.
A couple approaches — a man and woman holding hands, both with long white pony tails. They stop and listen for a minute, then the man drops a bill into Mary’s guitar case and the woman pantomimes a photo-taking gesture, silently asking if it’s okay. Mary nods yes and keeps strumming. A phone-picture is duly snapped, and the couple wanders on down the sidewalk, past the Herbal Dispensary, Candlestock Gifts, Strawberry Fields, the Tiny Woodstock Shop, and countless other quaint-ish stores along the town’s central thoroughfare.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes,
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.
So, yeah, I did go to Woodstock. Not the festival in 1969; the town, in 2025. It was last week, actually, after my wife and I had made a run to the Home Depot in Kingston, New York. We have a little house in the country up in the Hudson Valley now, where Tatine has a job as an attorney, working with unaccompanied immigrant minors, a Trump-endangered species of young humans. I’ll be spending a lot more time there eventually, though I’ll still be in Memphis a lot, and still writing for the Flyer and Memphis Magazine.
Anyway, as we pull out of the Home Depot lot, I’m looking at the map on my phone and notice something.
“Hey, did you know we’re only eight miles from Woodstock?” I say. “Why don’t we just run over there and take a look at it?”
And so we take the short and winding road upward, over a couple of crystalline mountain streams and through the woods and into the town whose name became shorthand for an entire generation.
My first reaction, as we cruise along the village’s main drag looking for parking, is that the place has avoided by the merest of white whisker hairs becoming Myrtle Beach for old hippies. There are shops of all kinds catering to granola-tourists — you can buy flowing dresses, T-shirts, beads, candles, guitars, and herbs of all kinds, including cannabis. You can get a massage, a facial, some incense, a pair of earthy shoes or sandals. There are lots of cool-looking small restaurants and outdoor venues of every variety imaginable.
And there are a ton of people walking around, many of them old. Which isn’t surprising. After all, if by some chance you were one of the 500,000 people who went to Yasgur’s Farm for the Woodstock festival in 1969, you’re at least in your 70s now. Judging from the crowd on this Saturday afternoon, visiting Woodstock is still an appealing pilgrimage for many folks, young and old.
Me, I decide to take a break and enjoy the street music while my wife hits some more shops. I watch as two women approach the singer. One drops a bill in her case, and the other says something to her that I can’t hear. There’s a brief silence, then, a tad wearily, Mary begins the Joni Mitchell song she probably gets asked to play a dozen times a day — the one with this chorus:
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
Okay, yes, right, we’re golden. Woodstock. I get it. But hey, we’re not a billion years old, even though our grandchildren may think so. I stand and wave goodbye to Mary, who smiles slyly, and I wander off, thinking, I’ve got to get myself back to my garden.
