Lou’s News #9 — Memoir outtake: Kerouac and my Mother’s Cloche Hat
(Readers, these posts are functional duplicates of a limited circulation newsletter I send out sporadically. After a few months I publish the content as blog posts. To avoid hassles, we don’t open this website to comments. The newsletter signup form is on the homepage of this website.)
Newsletter #9, April 2023
Hello everyone. Many knew my mother Patricia, Aspen hippie of the 60s-70s, denizen of Crested Butte, Colorado for many years, more recently of California. After a prolonged struggle with dementia, she passed away peacefully, in her sleep the morning of March 27, 2023. She was 92. I grieve at the finality of her passing, but at the same time I’m joyful she’s released from suffering. As it is with most of us, my mother had a huge influence on my life, and as I write my memoirs those influences come to light in surprising ways. For example, I’d been a fan of Jack Kerouac since high school, but I’d never gotten the connection. Then I remembered a story my mother had told me. Here it is, molded into a bit of narrative nonfiction. (Note: Those of you who receive my newsletter, you might notice a few small revisions for accuracy and narrative flow.)
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Hipsters, Painters and Cloche Hats
Stored in the cardboard box with my mother’s honeymoon journal, there is a photograph: 19-year-old Patricia, waking in the morning. She’s bedded on the Olds’ rear seat. It’s parked on stubby grass, clearly not a designated campground. Rocks are chocked under a rear wheel in case the parking brake fails. A rifle leans against the rear bumper — to ward off outlaws? A plaid blanket wraps up to her chest. She’s sloe-eyed, waving at my father’s camera, maybe saying, “This is a grand adventure, but I could use more sleep.”
As it often is for children, it’s hard for me to reconcile Patricia’s honeymoon innocence with the mother I would later know. Even so, over the years she always had something of this happy, girlish quality, no matter how difficult or crazy her life became — no matter her age. And she craved adventure, indoors or out, road trips, mind trips, creative explorations.
During the courtship, Charles Craig invited Patricia Pillsbury to a reading by Beat generation icon Jack Kerouac, in Manhattan. Patricia knew nothing of Kerouac — she figured they were attending a play or perhaps a musical performance.
Patricia, 1948, hipster influenced?
At the time, Patricia was working in New York City at the storied Lord and Taylor department store on Fifth Avenue. For the occasion she chose a belted, periwinkle blue dress she purchased from L&T on her employee discount. She permed her golden blond hair. White gloves and a white cloche hat rounded out the ensemble. “I couldn’t believe what your father got me into,” she told me years later. “I stood out like a sore thumb in that room full of beret-sporting hepcats. But I was amazed someone wrote so beautifully.”
In the years since my mother told me her Kerouac story, I’ve pictured her in that dimly-lit basement bistro, sitting primly on the hard seat of a battered wooden chair. Cigarette smoke gathers at the ceiling like offshore storm clouds. Wine bottles clink against glass rims. She can’t help but notice the bar smell, a mix of unwashed city-skin and whatever drifted in from the nearby toilets. Her clothing glows as if backlit, surrounded by a mob of hipsters resembling dark-dressed priests gathered at the Vatican.
And my father, inspired by the early counterculture, chain smoking his cigarettes, not quite hip, a thin dark-blue V-neck sweater over collared shirt. He worries Patricia doesn’t get the “daddy-o” scene. Yet she does, and under the couple’s traditional surface begins a tangled thread of creative adventure. In my mother, this manifests as her 1960s-70s stint as a hippie matriarch, but more to the point, she lived life as an accomplished artist.
While the ups-and-downs of the years sometimes truncated Patricia’s output, she worked in ceramics, silk screen, journaled incessantly, and later came into her own as an oil painter. She was a reader as well, fond of edgy writers such as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and an impressive collection of coffee-table art books always strewn about our family homes.
As I turn the pages of my Kerouac, I lift my eyes to Patricia’s brilliant paintings, the vivid flowers, the soft Colorado landscapes. Today, Kerouac’s pages are set in the mountains. Patricia’s hills and flowers revive the memories. I smile at her work, then gaze out the window.
