University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia, 1990

The gym on the university campus wasn’t packed for the university-sponsored Indigo Girls concert, whose hits ‘Closer to Fine, ‘Galileo’, and ‘Power of Two’ were favorites of several of us who were Graduate Assistants studying under protégés of Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and famous parapsychologists. The Indigo Girls opened with these hits and took a short break.
I had camped on the third bleacher from the floor next to the entrance and exit. A beautiful older woman with cropped dark hair, olive skin, and a model smile stood next to me.
“How are you?”
“Fine,” I said.  “How are you?”
“I’m great.”
I thought she might be one of the deans at the university or a faculty member from another department because she seemed so familiar.
“How do you like their music?”
“I love it,” I told her.
“They are wonderful,” she said.
After our conversation, the Indigo Girls announced over the mic that they wanted to welcome a friend and special guest and asked the crowd to give a warm welcome for Joan Baez. Joan smiled and winked at me. I’m certain my mouth dropped open, and I couldn’t believe I’d just met Joan Baez. It was a dream come true. She headed to the small stage, where she picked up her guitar, thanked everyone, and launched into some of her own hits, including ‘Diamonds and Rust’, followed by duets with the Indigo Girls.
 My friends who had seen me talking with her were jealous and asked what we had talked about, but I shushed them to hear Joan perform.
 I had Joan Baez cassettes in my black VW Scirocco I played all the time including my all-time favorite ‘Diamonds and Rust’, an ingenious ballad said to be based on her relationship with Bob Dylan. It’s a reflective narrative and one of the most beautiful and poetic songs of the twentieth century with clear and stunning imagery and philosophical and realistic truths about relationships.
Through my years of teaching, I often used ‘Diamonds and Rust’ in creative writing and literature classes as an example of realistic, narrative, and poetic lyrics. I didn’t just fall in love with her music. I fell in love with her activism and admired causes she supported and marched for including Civil Rights.
Young students showed their appreciation with sighs and eye rolls and referred to me as an old hippie under their breath to each other, and even though I was only a child in the sixties, nothing made this peace sign loving, Missing In Action bracelet wearing during Vietnam, old hippie happier than when I went to New York to read fiction with other writers at KGB Bar and Literary Club close to Washington Square. There, I stood and imagined a young and beautiful folk singer Joan Baez and a scruffy and nasal voiced Bob Dylan close with leaves falling and their breath mingling in the cold air. My imagination was solidified in reality– a simple moment, rich and full of meaning only to me, and one I would treasure until my last breath.
Stereo Story 895

Niles Reddick writes from his home at Cherokee Lake in the Appalachian Mountains and is author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over forty anthologies and in more than five hundred pubs including The Los Angeles Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Hobart, Boudin, Bending Genres, Citron Review, Midway Journal, and Vestal Review.