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Nete at University of Wisconsin, Madison
Nete at Edgewood College

Silver Anniversary with a Martin Guitar - The Untold Miracle
It was a bone-cold November day back in '73. Well, more than a little frost on the ol' Willamette Valley pumpkin, anyway. But when I first walked through the sheet of hanging love beads into Denny's Guitar Shop on West Burnside, I was a man burning inside out with a mission.That was my last stop on a serious reconnaissance of Portland's most alternative guitar shops. And so far, luck had not been kind to me.

I took a long drag on the incense of the place, and made a hasty but thorough tour of the acoustics hanging up on the wall. Not much worth haggling over here, I could see. I finally glanced over at whom I suspected was Denny himself, frozen behind the counter like a rabbit caught in a pair of headlights. I decided that he could have been any wino off the street caught rifling the cash register by a prospective customer. Whoever he was, I told myself, he had to be one of the world's oldest and most unrepentant hippies of his time.

But it wasn't until the second or third glance that it dawned on me that he lterally hadn't moved a muscle since I had arrived. Not even an eyelash. It set my pulse up a couple of dozen beats to think that he might have burned a bit too much sandalwood in the back room, and it was going to be me that discovered his cold, rigid, corpse still upright behind the cash register.

"Yo, Denny". I tried to break the ice. I waited patiently, even hopefully, but it took a few moments before I saw his squinty eyes through all that tangle of hair blink a couple of times. Then a hand moved unsteadily up from nowhere and tugged at a few strands of beard. I relaxed a bit. I must have jolted him out of that mode which was later coined as, Advanced Power Management.

I tried again, more definitively. "Denny, got any used Martins?". This time an eyebrow twitched, and his sticky lips began to move and search for air. "Ya got any money, kid?" Now that was disappointing, I thought to myself. Equivalent to a knife in the back for a 60's-kind-of guy like me. I expected more from a true alternative hippie guitar shop guru than a frontal attack on my financial resources. My bellbottoms were new, my beard was cropped, my long hair was squeaky clean. And here was some old, burned out, Burnside capitalist, dressed up like Timothy Leary giving me the third degree. I tried to stay cool, but I could feel the raw edge in my voice when I replied curtly, "$350, 400 maybe".

He still hadn't shifted position, but suddenly his tone and pitch lurched into overdrive. "Maybe ain't good anuf, kid," he snapped, "I got waitin' lists here as long as ma arm". Instinctively, I edged over toward him, trying to get a better look at his arm. Where in God's name had the spirituality of it all gone, Iasked myself? I mean, you couldn't get anymore sublime than hippies and Martins.

Still not quite sure yet whether to spit or split, I reached out almost against my own will and snatched a pen from in front of me, and scribbled my name and phone number on the back of a Salvation Army shelter flyer lying on the counter. Without another word I whirled and stalked toward the door. As I fought myself back through the love beads, and reached out for the door handle, Denny twisted the knife again, "Don't call me, I'll call you." I turned quickly, baring my teeth this time, searching frantically for the perfect comeback. "Great", I growled, "just don't make any sudden movements, you might hurt yourself."

When the phone rang a month later, I was comfortably unemployed in front of my hand-me-down Black and White, and in the middle of a pivotal pre-Christmas episode of As The World Turns. The phone was a tortuously long stretch from the couch, and if I hadn't sent in my World Wide Sweepstakes Coupon a couple of weeks earlier, I would have just let it ring. But I was suddenly dragged back into the real world by the sound of Denny's sarcasm on the other end of the line. It didn't take much for me to imagine him standing right where I left him. "This is ya lucky day, kid. Some flat broke flat picker just traded in his 67 Martin D-35 for an electric Japanese trip through hell. Y'ar number 7 on the list, and nobody else's home. You got one hour to get ya butt down here with 400 bucks, or Denny moves on to number 8, ya hip?"

In 1973 most issues for me requiring immediate action fell into just two categories: the threat of death and the promise of sex. As far as I can tell now in retrospect, a decision on this issue, with all of its emotional and spiritual baggage, represented for me a stunning breakthrough in personal growth. With neither dark paranoia looming nor pulsing hormones as an immediate mitigating influence, I made my first totally spiritual decision. In less than 10 seconds I had located the exact 400 buck emergency stash I had carefully hidden behind my steamy waterbed. Within 30 seconds I had cranked up the normally stubborn V-Dub in freezing weather, and had begun the impossible assault on the crosstown maze from deep SE to  NW Portland over the Columbia River via the Burnside Bridge.

It was crystal clear from the outset. This could only be accomplished by means of rocketing through back alleys, blowing through stoplights, scattering startled pedestrians and motorists along the way. But luckily, I was not alone. When it seemed hopeless, (and it often did) I imagined the smell of Brazilian Rosewood in the wet South American jungle, I pictured pristine mother-of-pearl embedded in a smooth, black ebony finger board, I heard the divine voices of an angel sextet vibrating in perfect harmony, I saw the gleam of a finely lacquered, spruce top  reflecting eternal sunshine. I closed my eyes and raced toward the light.

I arrived at Denny's with three minutes to spare, walked boldly through the love beads and claimed my prize. I don't remember what Denny said to me at the time, nor what I said when I slapped the money down in front of him. He simply ceased to exist  at that euphoric moment, and I never saw him again. But I did learn an important lesson that day:  I learned that true spiritual communion often comes by way of the unexpected, and sometimes even the disgustingly ugly. And I do know now, in looking back over these past 25 years, that for one hour of one day, I was in "the Zone".

As I drove off, the planets were in perfect alignment, Ying and Yang were dancing the rumba, there was a bright new star shining over Bethlehem, and I --- well, I had just buried a thirty foot jumper at the buzzer without even looking.