Page 486 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
There were also memorable moments that involved only Danny, especially in his last two years of high school.
Because Danny had three and one-half years on Peter and had reached the age of sixteen, he was able to visit me on his own if he chose to. New York City obviously held its attractions for teens from the sub- urbs, and I was flattered that Danny felt that he could visit me with his friends, particularly Emmet Witchel and Steve Glazer. For some reason he trusted me not to embarrass him with his peers. They would congre- gate at 24E from time to time; I loved his company and theirs, and that led, I believe, to a different type of bonding. Maybe it was my experi- ence as a camp counselor, but somewhere along the way I had learned to speak to kids in their own terms, usually when they hit ten or eleven. From that time on, when their desires and abilities to learn and grow coalesced, I think that I found a way to talk to them without being the remote parental figure, without feeling the obligation to perform some- body else’s idea of the role of the “adult,” without being merely the supervisor.
Of course, that attitude had its challenges when more “mature” issues arose as they got older and were learning to fly on their own. Sometime early in their teens, Danny and Emmet and Steve had become devotees of the Grateful Dead and, as I learned later, had traveled as far as Colorado to see the group perform. The followers of Jerry Garcia’s band formed a subset of teen (and adult) culture, and the true followers earned the moniker “Deadheads.” I didn’t know much about the group; my closest relationship to popular rock had evolved only to the point at which I really liked U2’s Joshua Tree disc, which I had bought to keep pace with the kids. But if the Dead’s music was so important to Danny and his friends, I felt that I should learn more about them.
Thus it was that, when the Dead played Brendan Byrne Arena and Danny had tickets that he made available to me, I seized the opportu- nity, took a date, and found, when I reached the concert, that I had entered a world unto itself. Most of the kids—and the crowd was almost entirely what I viewed as kids—were wearing what I learned were “tie- dyed” tee shirts that, having gone through a tie-dye process, were
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