Gracias a la Vida (Rebel Girl)

     Sometimes it is a charmed life, Rebel Girl remarked to Red Emma late Thursday night as they hurtled south on the 405 in their rattling tin can of a Corolla. The observation sounded like a bad line out of a mid-century novel but she didn't care. She said it anyway and squeezed his hand. He knew what she meant.

     They had spent the evening at UCLA's Royce Hall, named after Josiah Royce, that California philosopher idealist. Rebel Girl invariably teaches him every semester. She wondered if she could remember Royce's words chiseled in pale rosy stone which spanned the stage. She could: 

Education is using the tools the race has found indispensable.

     Then, Joan Baez came on that stage and for the next two hours sang selections from her nearly fifty year career, opening up with "The Lily of the West" and closing with "Gracias a la Vida," and in between was just about everything else, new and old, or so it seemed. 

     Rebel Girl has noticed that she weeps more easily these days. It started, she believes, when the little guy was born.

     So she sat last night in that grand hall and wept from time to time as the music did its conjuring act, summoning people and the past so it seemed that the great hall wasn't filled with strangers but was instead filled with everyone she'd ever known. Then, as the audience filed up and out, Rebel Girl and Red followed a friend backstage. 

     The friend they followed had worked closely with Baez back in the day and could tell stories about Bob Dylan's appetites.

     Rebel Girl and Red met this friend when they were political organizers and now had known each other, they reckoned, for about 21 years. The friend seemed concerned and a bit confused that she had not, during all those years, introduced them to Baez before. They reassured her that it was okay. They wore blue wristbands which they showed from time to time to the people who cared about them and shuffled through a series of rooms and hallways, pausing, moving, waiting. 

     Then, there was Joan Baez. A barefoot, elegant beauty who looked a bit weary but was gracious all the same. 

     Rebel Girl shook her hand and managed to stammer out a "thank you" and that was about it. It was enough. She watched Baez greet the small group, laugh, share a few stories. It was more than enough.

     

     Then they were in their rattling Corolla, the heat turned up, heading south. And Rebel Girl thought about her charmed life, where she came from and where she is now, as they drove past the exits of nearly all the places she lived as a girl who began to listen to Joan Baez because Baez was a brown girl like her with long dark hair: Los Angeles, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Gardena, Torrance, San Pedro. 

      Gracias a la vida indeed.