Hut on the Bay

My name is Anna Mia Tesoro. Mia is fine. To begin, decades have passed since the 60s when hot dry Santa Ana winds whipped California's chaparrals into torches. Those scorched times come clear now: murder, lust, money, obsession, a bevy of riddles. And remembering disturbs me still. Had I applied but one lesson of the ancient myths, it would have then made sense. It's so simple. Obsession lives beyond reason. That's how I see it now. I think on passing moments, for instance, when Sam cried "Colleen" in the throes of ecstasy. You'd wonder who she was. I did. Curiosity is glorious, not a crime, forward thinking when boys are described. Semantics, duplicity? Gods or mortals, we're not so different. Pandora, you opened your gift, as I would have, a gift from those conniving gods. But their grins subsided when their plan backfired... on you and everyone thereafter, didn't it? What evils came from that box are on them. And what jokes are played on us, still today. One thing is simple in hindsight, obsession lives beyond reason. That's how I see it now. And yet, here we live millennia later in our turn to dodge those evils and to capture the wonder of the pursuit of happy lives, when times shed life-letting waters in promising directions. Sam and Nick, and me, encountered great forces at play - the Viet Nam War born of old-man fear, baptized in blood and greed sanctified in the name of big business. Opportunity, if you held on to it, carved it; and I remember women most of all, obsessed women, magical sisters; and magnificent men: lusty evil and playful as dogs. And loss and hope. There was that. We were ordinary people in an extraordinary time when we grappled with the introuvable. Did we learn how to live connected to every human being under the might of the wise old moon? Did we find answers to thwart greed, see good, understand love, war, death? Did we try? Or, as the ancients foretold, were we only the next generation of apathetic? You decide. We all die with a smile or not, but death didn't end the trial or reveal the reason for the magic of joy or a plan to the pain. Not then. Not now. Is it as simple as the god's ennui and idle quest for amusement? Here it is, my story for you to weigh. It is our journey, our places, our moments, and above all, this is what we did...