Sandy Mershon is a friend Elizabeth and I love. And she just had the audacity to post THIS song on Facebook.

So hearing this song again led me to several more meditations, none of them invited. Mind you, the Seventies was when I was wearing embroidered cowboy pearl-button shirts, listening to the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. And then something like this would come on the radio:

And I was reduced to Silly Putty. Or maybe a Slinky going down a long, long staircase.

This one might come on the radio, too. I loved the singing, so smoooooth, and maybe I loved the costumes just as much—you will notice that winged shoulders were in vogue.

It didn’t take very long for Funk to kind of meld with Disco, which, among my people back then, was about as popular as Pneumonic Plague. I’d graduated to Fleetwood Mac. But, every once in awhile, I’d kind hop up and down in my car seat when this came on the radio.

This song is sublime.

And then there was that whole “Toot toot! Beep beep!” thang.

We’re talkin’ mid- to late-1970s here. But my whole thang began when I was nineteen, a student at Bakersfield College, and so deeply depressed–I’d just moved from Arroyo Grande, okay? I was on my way home from school and four kids needed a ride. Three girls, one boy. All Black. For whatever reason—I’d prefer to credit the Lord God Himself—I pulled over my little yellow Mustang and beckoned them to hop in.

The girls were packed, uncomfortably, in the back. The guy sat next to me, looked through my eight-track tapes, uttered a little yelp, and put this song in. It was performed at Woodstock in 1969.

We all danced, all five of us, as much as the confines of a 1965 Mustang would permit, all the way home, until I dropped them off.

I won’t say that I have loved Black people ever since that day, because that would be a generality just as pernicious as any hateful racist generality can be. But I will say this: That ride home made me love being an American.

Many years later, for John’s birthday, we went to a Niners game during a woeful season. We had seats in the end zone at Candlestick, facing the sun, and so resembled lobsters by the fourth quarter. But when Our Guys kicked a field goal with no time remaining and won–one of their two victories that year–I jumped up and yelled. So did the Black woman next to me. We turned to each other without hesitation and hugged. And then we jumped up and down, still hugging.

That ride. That hug. Those are the kind of moments the Good Lord intended for me, from the moment He knit me in my mother’s womb.