Just Kids

I am reading Patti Smith's book, Just Kids, and I'm amazed at how much I like it. Somehow, I thought of her as this stone cold rocker girl, when, in fact, she seems like a wounded sparrow. Her love affair and long friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is such a tender passage. Two wounded sparrows sheltering together! I don't think either of them would've achieved what they did without the other. True soul mates, she was the bread winner working full time at Scribner's, while he moved furniture & did odd jobs while pursuing his art. They started out in Brooklyn & made their way into the city with incredible determination. They were very often hungry or cold or both, but, somehow, they just kept whittling away at the lives they wanted to live. The late 60s really must've been our version of Bloomsbury, though, because the great world really seems to've changed then. Art, music, everything just got freer. It's so peculiar to think that without Vietnam, there probably would've been no Woodstock. She takes us from micro to macro in a seamless way. Meandering along the streets of New York in a seemingly haphazard way, it all comes together. As someone said, "the long way round is sometimes the shortest way home."