Phish at the Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, ME, 10/19/10

The day Hilary's water broke, I was rushing around like a madman, picking up supplies for our hospital stay, lanolin and cabbages and things, and when I got out of the grocery store and started the car, this song came on the radio and the first lyric I heard was something about looking into a newborn's eyes, and when the host came on, he was like "that's the Boneheads from Hallowell, ME, and they're here with me in the studio!" and my whole spiritual life seemed to crystallize in that moment. So when I saw Steve Jones from the Boneheads at Phish, I had to tell him of his role in our birth story. My state senator was there, too, and I thanked him for visiting the elementary school where I work. My high school principal was there; he remembered my name. The granddaughter of a Maine Country & Western legend and former co-proprietor of an ice cream stand in Hallowell at which one could order a ten-strip of LSD was there. The buddy with whom I canoed out to an island in China Lake in order to eat that acid was there. The first person I played a "Fire on the Mountain" jam with was there. And this is really just the tip of the social iceberg represented at the Civic Center that night.

I don't think I had set foot in the Augusta Civic Center since I went to see Guns N' Roses in the spring of 1993, on the day I got my braces off. I went to the circus there once, the only time I went to the circus, and my only really specific memory of this event is of a spherical iron cage in which three motorcyclists established and sustained death-defying interlocking orbits. The room was dark except for the motorcycles' headlights, whose shafts' churning pattern resembled, if I have this right, that of the roving headlights of the UFO in Explorers, which was roughly contemporary. I went to my friend's dad's dojo's karate tournament at the Civic Center and watched that dad chop wood. In fourth grade, Matt B.'s parents took me to a state championship girls' basketball game there, and we brought a giant bag of confetti and gleefully sprinkled it over the spectators below. I recall talking to Matt about the Dr. Who that was on the night before, Peter Davison's "Terminus," as we walked across the snowy lawn between the parking lot and the venue.