At the end of our street was a commune in a log mansion–Jed Holson’s house–and girls in frayed orange cable-knit sweaters and no pants would chase each other across its enormous furnitureless rooms. It was the suburbs, it was the seventies, life was bizarre and glorious, and we didn’t even know it. Jed’s father, Elijah Holson, had been a founding director of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. In 1918, he built himself an eighteen-room house of locally hand-hewn oak on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. He dug a moat around the house and put down a drawbridge. A grand house, a famous house, a house for the ages. The son was even more eccentric. In the spirit of his own time, past seventy himself, Jed Holson went hippie. His wife fled to California, and Jed opened his father’s mythical log palace to all female comers. Long-haired men were welcome, too. The lawn was crowded with VW buses and tents. People did their laundry in the moat. Jed’s doctor lawyer banker neighbors didn’t know what to make of all the parties. It didn’t matter. They weren’t invited. By the time I was old enough to enjoy the show, Jed–his crazy beard, his experiment in alternative living, his passel of nymphs–was forgotten. The log house went dark. Free love, old hat. As a kid, I used to climb up and pace the front porch, ghosting back and forth in front of the big windows, waiting for the flesh and the laughter. Jed must have been asleep somewhere in the gloom, his chin sunk in a tangle of yellow beard.

HIGHLAND PARK, ILLINOIS, 1981