Good Blonde & Others

San Francisco: City Lights/Grey Fox. VG PB. (1994). Jack Kerouac's Lowell was about 15 miles from ny own initial America, small farm town, Wst Acton, Massachuseetts, Lowell . to the northeast was the city where my fami;y sometimes wemt for annual Easter clothese at the Bon Marche. On my mother's holiday we would go the edge of it on our way up to see my Aunt Bernie who lives in what was then the Weirs in New Hampshire The boston and Maine Railroad was till another link going through our town on its way to Chelmsford and then Lowell,just beyond our town on its way to Chelmsford and then Lowell just them on NashuaManchester and than on up to Canada followin up to Nashua, Manchster and finally up to Canada. It's all eastern inland Massachusetts, old detrelic mill towns, farms long ago abandoned to the suburbs which nonetheless still echo in New England' s hbaits to this day. When I first met Jack in the spring of 1956 in San Francisco, we had each come a long way from that first world yet still kept its company. CREELEY goes on to remember the pboblemsJack had with him in a bar that night. when the bartender tried to punch ihm sveral times. He went on to stay with Jack for a few days. Years later after some blured action in Palo Acton Creeley drove to that house with Ted Berrigan and Alice Nodley, poets and friends than in Bolinas just to show them where the parties has been where Jack had stayedwith Gary Snyder, Phil Wahlen, Allen and Peter all that old company had gathered, Snyder leaving for Japan us with plunges into the surf off Stinson Beach and collecting musstels for instand lunch, Jack sat jotting into his spiral notebook. .