It has nothing to do with public relations or communications or the online world, but it’s August 9, 2005, a decade to the day since Jerry Garcia left us. The Grateful Dead scene never mattered to me all that much. Not that I minded it. It was certainly entertaining (I remember telling my wife once when she noted how interesting the crowd was to watch that she was part of the crowd now), and there was nothing like the parking lot before and after a show, and you always felt like you were among friends. Everybody was there for the music, and no matter how much time passed, you never felt like you were the oldest person there; the Dead’s appeal spanned age, ethnicity, and all other boundaries. Okay, I did like the scene.

What most drew me to the Dead, though, was simple: It was Garcia’s guitar. It’s hard—no, impossible—to explain what it was about his single-line solos that spoke to me, but it was tangible and I connected with it somewhere deep inside me, a place no other music, poetry, art, or literature has been able to reach. Combined with the rest of the band, forming a whole that was so muich more than its parts, I felt like I could take a weeklong vacation in the space of a four-hour show. I think it was percussionist Mickey Hart who suggested that the Dead were not in the music business, but rather they were in the transportation business. That explanation suits me just fine. So today, while I continue to work on the various projects that consume my time every day, I’ll have Garcia on in the background, transporting me back to those days when I could hear him make that music live, and I suspect I’ll get a little weepy every now and then. As the bumper sticker says, “I miss Jerry.”