hippy days, no where to go no one to sit with

hippy days, no where to go no one to sit with

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


Years ago it was hippy days 1969, 1970. The movement had lost it's vitality, it's elan vital had vanished to where ever it is such things go. The purpose and magic of the hippy movement vanished like a missing elephant disappearing in a stage magic act.

That was the beginning in America of students going to college and never getting anywhere, not graduating, not learning anything useful, switching majors over and over and becoming flooded in borrowed money.

I went to school and worked full time at a hotel as a night auditor, a good job. I knew what I wanted to do and sort of knew where I wanted to go. I worked all night 11 to 7.

Many lost hippies would stop late at night at the Hotel where I worked wanting things. I was there alone. If it was an attractive girl stopping I might become involved or if it was anyone else extremely charming or unusual I might help out out of interest to relieve a long night after the work was done. Anything to interrupt studying at 3am can divert a college student's attention.

More than once someone came in wanting to sit in the lobby to think. They called it meditating then.
Someone with a shoulder pack and a wrinkled green army jacket would stop and sometimes I would let them sit on the floor in the lobby. The hippy would sit alone, such people were always alone, for hours and hours on the tile floor until I told them it was time to leave; regular people and customers would be coming into the Hotel soon.

Sometimes I would give the sitting hippies food from the restaurant which was closed till morning.
Sometimes I would go into the bar, behind the heavy squeaking locked black iron gate and make one of the sitting rocking swaying hippies a fountain coke with cold crushed ice in a tall fancy smoked glass. I could be the perfect host when I wanted to. It was sometimes known for me to let someone who was very poor and in need stay in the lobby till morning. More than once I gave a down and out hippy one of my bosses at the Hotel's older blankets to wrap across their shoulders should it be a cold night when the hippy would walk off in the dark back toward downtown.

As the hippies would walk back toward downtown Akron at 4AM on a dark night back in 1970, just after the Kent State shootings incident I can remember myself watching them through the thick glass of the hotel lobby getting smaller and smaller as they headed on up the road. Where will they go and what will become of them I would think as their wrinkled green army jacket disappeared from sight.