My Woodstock

by Stephen Lewandowski –

I’d graduated from college a couple months earlier, then returned home. My college tenure was characterized by the push-pull of intellectual curiosity and aversion to being drafted in roughly equal amounts.

Because I was at home I looked for work in the usual places. I remember pounding the pavements of Ithaca but finally ended up back where there was a regular bed for me, at my parents’ house.  I’d worked for minimum wage at several stores around town since turning fifteen, starting with toting four gallons of paint at a time from the Sherwin Williams basement to the showroom. Later I worked at both men’s clothing stores in town, Shenkman’s and Montesano’s.

Coming home in the summer of 1969, I returned to a part-time job stocking and selling men’s clothing at Montesano’s, where my mother also worked.  That morning I had ironed a pair of khaki slacks and a light blue broadcloth shirt to wear to work.  I wore a tie but, because it was August, no sports coat.  I ironed my own clothes because I liked the fussiness of the work, my mother didn’t, and I hated the creepy feel of “Stay Press®” next to my skin.

So I was, for me, all dressed up for work. It was a preppy outfit that I knew well from college. Maybe I was wearing penny loafers. I couldn’t see anything wrong with dressing like one, even though I wasn’t one, as long as I didn’t act like one.

So it was hot and the air conditioning was on, but I had been at work for hours, and things were slow. I hung around the front door, looking out on the wide sidewalk and two lanes of Main Street traffic each way. The store’s front door was recessed twelve or fifteen feet, with big show windows on either side.  Into this recess drifted three young men about my age, long hairs all. They all wore jeans and carried small backpacks. They’d been hitching and walking and now sought the shade of the entry. They looked tired and a little dirty.

They saw me and motioned me to come out. The heat hit me in the face when I opened the door. “Hey man,” they said.

“Hey,” I said.

They said, “Hey man, whatcha doing? We’re going to Woodstock!  Have you heard?  Something big’s going down. It could change the world.”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t heard. What is it?”

“Music!” they said, “A big festival, all kinds of people playing and millions of people coming. We got off the Thruway it was so mobbed. Come on with us!” They were walking through the city and getting ready to hitch-hike east on 5&20 two hundred more miles.

I looked around the store. Nothing doing here, but I knew the boss wouldn’t let me go just like that. “No,” I said shaking my head, “No, I gotta work.”