I don’t mean to shock anybody. Wait. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t much care.

In the early 1970s, when I was editor of the Cuesta College newspaper, The Cuestonian–-a job I’d inherited from my big brother, Bruce (AGUHS ’66; me, AGHS ’70), among the many favorite human beings on that staff, and there are many, was a reporter named Mike Partain, who had a bushy bushy blonde hairdo, and his girlfriend, Cathy, who went to work every day on a 500 cc Honda.

Mike and Cathy loved me, for reasons that still elude me. What is uneludable is the fact that I loved them, too.

When The Cuestonian was put to bed, to be printed by the Blankeburgs, who were kind to us, we were exhausted. It was a good paper, from a little podunk community college housed in World War II barracks, and it won statewide awards for photography and writing and layout. So I would celebrate with Mike and Cathy, because we knew that newspaper we’d sent to the printer was good and we all knew that we’d worked hard to make it good.

So we would barbecue and drink wine—red, usually—which is exactly the same pattern I followed took many years later with the dearest friend of my life, Joe Loomis, who taught me many things including generosity, kindness, and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. There is no one on Planet Earth that I loved, and still love, quite so much as Joe. But we, too stayed up so late. There is no one who I feel the need to apologize to quite so much as Joe’s wife back then, Carol, when they lived on Mr. Boysen’s place (where I learned that garbanzo beans, the supply-and-demand agent that Mr. Avila used to make sense of macroeconomics to me at Cuesta, were like caviar to mule deer. Joe Loomis was an economics major in college. That fact amazed me. Fareed Zakaria was among the authors on his bookshelf in a little house in the Huasna Valley when he died suddenly of a heart attack. His intellect, and his appetite for learning—among the books he left behind were those written by Fareed Zakaria—were as as moving and joyful as a Vermonter’s first visit to a California In N Out Burger.

Mr. Boysen’s farm, where Joe and Carol lived, was beyond the “T” intersection of Foothill and Los Osos Valley Road, and I used to come over to visit. I’d like to think that it was all the time, but it was, maybe, only twice. A finned and oxidizing maroon Mercedes Benz graced the front yard. Someday, Joe was going to make it drivable again. I don’t know that he did, since there was wild mustard emerging from the engine block, but before we went inside, Joe and I regarded the Mercedes for a few moments. We admired its promise.

Four hours later, and I think of this with shame, we’d wake Carol and baby Gram up with our laughing. I owe Carol, a beautiful woman/human being/friend who makes beautiful art—I had an immense crush on her— forty years’ worth of apologies. We were incorrigible, Joe and I, though not nearly as much as Joe’s father John Loomis and his uncle, Gordon Bennett. But I kept Joe Loomis’s photo atop my teacher desk at Arroyo Grande High School thirty years after Mr. Boysen’s place.

Sometimes, in Room 306 at AGHS, I’d look down aet Joe’s face—that’s the face I saw, just below, and my heart would soften. His image made me a better teacher.

Years before that, at Mike and Cathy’s house, after many hours of ribs and red wine and pot and deep philosophical conversation (I liked to imagine that we were the heirs to Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell at Pacific Biological on Cannery Row in the 1930s), it was just about time for me to go home when I asked Mike to play two songs on his lovely Warehouse Sound turntable, with his lovely Pioneer amp and his tombstone-sized Harmen Karden speakers. So here they are.

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