Free Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins Page B

broken glass, an impromptu teenage reach for fresh thrills in small-town postwar America.
    In any case, for days thereafter, all of Warsaw was abuzz with talk of the Halloween caper. Everywhere, we were regarded with curiosity and/or disgust. Commonwealth Attorney Jones was hell-bent on “prosecutin’ ever lass one” of us to the fullest extent of the law. Rumors of impending reform school were widely circulated.
    Several of our parents got together and hired a lawyer, and I was among those who were deposed in his office. Eventually, restitution was paid, individual letters of apology written, Miss Claude forgave us, and within a month the evil pumpkins of Halloween had been safely baked into Thanksgiving pies, although there were a few of us who would never quite sponge ol’ Jack’s tainted smudge from our ledgers.
    Now, an octogenarian writer looking back on his life, I find my list of regrets a short one: shorter, no doubt than it has any right to be. Near the top of that list, however, ahead even of a couple of ill-advised marriages, is the part I played in the breaking of Miss Claude’s windows. If there is an afterlife, a dimension resembling Judeo-Christian fantasies of heaven, I take some solace in the conviction that the good Miss Claude is busy there, occupied with helping God update His office skills in case He should finally get around to correcting all those obvious mistakes in the Bible.
     
    Apparently, my seasonal interest in the Feast of the Dead mythology was squelched neither by maturity nor middle age (the two being by no means synonymous), because I was a tick past forty on the Halloween when three friends and I ingested a sizable (though less than heroic) dose of so-called magic mushrooms ( Psilocybe semilanceata ) and set out to make credible contact with the spirit realm.
    The most favorable spot for such an encounter (location, location) seemed to be a graveyard, one well away from traffic and city lights. Thus, Pleasant Ridge Cemetery seemed ideal. Several miles from La Conner as the vulture flies, reached only by a two-lane country road, it was unlit, unguarded, reasonably isolated, and regularly enveloped in Pacific Northwest mist. Any bag of bones tempted to rise from the grave could scarcely ask for better conditions.
    By the time we reached Pleasant Ridge, the fungous psilocybin had begun to kick in. The caul of civilized conditioning was falling away from our eyes, and our central nervous systems were vibrating at a frequency that seemed to be perfectly synchronized with both the rhythms of wild nature and the music of the spheres. It was the necromantical numina of the netherworld we were courting, however, and they proved to be reluctant guests.
    Time is decidedly relative when one is in the thrall of the mushroom elves, but I’m guessing we sat among the tombstones for no more than thirty or forty minutes before concluding that such close proximity was likely inhibitive to the wakeful dead; whereupon we moved across the narrow road and repositioned ourselves inside a thickish grove of alder and second-growth fir. There we not only had a clear view of the cemetery without being intrusive, but were concealed should a car happen by, and moreover, were in a relationship of sorts with the (not-exactly-primeval) forest.
    A bank of clouds foreclosed on the moon. Dark pillows smothered the stars. A thin silvery rain began to fall. Still, we sat. We watched. And we giggled. And giggled and giggled. We were cold, wet, scratched by twigs, uncomfortably seated, and in a lonely, spooky place miles from the costume party our peers were enjoying at the tavern in town. So what was so damn funny?
    Well . . . everything. Everything! Raindrops running off Roseanna’s nose were funny. Victor’s fit of sneezing was funny. Aurora’s unsuccessful attempt to form a coherent sentence was funny. The moss was funny, the ferns were hilarious, every third tree was a stand-up comedian. From the perspective