By Louie Ferrera

des-tin-y

1. the seemingly inevitable or necessary succession of events.

It’s entirely possible that one of the most significant days of your life has come and gone without you noticing. It most likely appeared uneventful at the time but somewhere down the road perhaps you’ll be able to pinpoint that day as the beginning of a chain reaction. Like an echo in time, the events of that particular day have reverberated throughout your entire life. There have been a few such days in my own life.

September 5, 1985

I was attending a Grateful Dead concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. I had recently purchased my first 35mm camera and was enrolled in a photography class at the local junior college. I had gotten into the habit of carrying my camera everywhere. In the tradition of famous street photographers like Cartier Bresson, I would snap away at random hoping to capture that elusive “decisive moment”. At Red Rocks that day, I did indeed capture a decisive moment, although at the time I didn’t realize how decisive that moment was until nearly a year later.

Red Rocks that afternoon was a swirl of color and light, tie dyes and flowing hair, smiles and marijuana smoke, patchouli and promise. While surveying the pre-show crowd, a lovely young woman with shoulder length brown hair and an electric smile caught my eye. I snapped off two quick frames and moved on, not giving this fleeting moment another thought until two months later when I ran into Ms Electric Smile again, this time at a Grateful Dead concert in Oakland, CA. Her name was Michelle and she had just relocated to the Bay Area from Denver.  I introduced myself and told Michele that I had these photos and would like to send them along to her. Over the next six months we kept running into each other at Dead shows. We became friends, then lovers. Michelle and I had a sweet eight year relationship that eventually transitioned into a deep and loving friendship that continues to this day.

Michelle also introduced me to some of her friends, an eclectic group of fellow travelers, our common thread being the love of the Grateful Dead. From those initial meetings bloomed many heartfelt friendships that are still going strong. John officiated at  mine and Carol’s wedding and I was best man at Mitch’s wedding. These two guys are like brothers to me. All this as the result of two random photographs.

February 22, 1992

I’m in the hallway at the Oakland Coliseum deep within the vortex of hundreds of other dancers as we swirl and sway, hip hop and sashay to our favorite band, the Grateful Dead. At one point during the show, I noticed this woman dancing with reckless abandon into our orbit. She looked a bit like Joni Mitchell, circa 1969, complete with  flowing blonde hair and bangs. I was immediately drawn to her wild energy, crazy laugh and beaming smile. That was the beginning of my friendship with Dannielle. Over the next decade Dann and I shared more fun, crazy, intense times than I can begin to recount. All of which lead me to:

April 21, 2001

It was a Saturday afternoon. I was at Dannielle’s apartment helping her paint. I had no way of knowing that I was about to meet the love of my life and future mother of our two children.

The previous summer I had just gotten out of a four year relationship and that was just about the time when Dannielle started talking up this friend of hers named Carol whom she had met several years ago waiting in line for Grateful Dead tickets. “Carol’s a hippie, dancer, Deadhead, traveler, you’d love her.” I was definitely intrigued. It took a few months but Dann finally managed to arrange a meeting between me and Carol.

Needless to say, my mind wasn’t really on painting that afternoon at Dannielle’s. Carol was coming over and the three of us would later head to a local bar for drinks and a bluegrass band. Dann lived in a studio apartment above a house in Santa Rosa. The access to her apartment is via a winding metal staircase. Two things will live in my memory forever from that initial meeting with Carol. The first was the clomp, clomp, clomp that her shoes made as she ascended those metal stairs. The second was the way Carol burst through the door and into my life. She wore a scarf around her head that intwined through her long, flowing red hair. Her colorful, patchwork skirt swished around her ankles as she entered. Carol’s sparkling blue eyes and broad, toothy smile lit up the room. It was at that instant when the rest if my life began. 

These events have had a profound effect on me, changed my life for the better and made me a believer in destiny.