A Perfect Moment of Amazing Grace

To the left of me is Michael Isaacson, born in 1946. To the right, Marilyn Shenker, born in 1950. Appropriately, I am in the middle--birth year 1947.

We are crammed this Friday morning shoulder-to-shoulder against the cappuccino bar of Starbucks on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, the one in the same building as the huge Barnes & Noble bookstore that provides sweet sanctuary from reality on so many weekends.

Michael lives a few blocks away from the bookstore. He is a tall, gregarious man, a composer by trade, with a sharp wit. Marilyn is a friendly, open woman from Sherman Oaks, twice married but without the world-weariness and unfocused disappointment that show on the faces of many of us who came of age in the violent 1960s, a time so cruel to heroes.

We chat--Michael has two kids, one at Milken High. Marilyn has no children. I’ve got a teenager at Taft. We joke--Marilyn, a psychotherapist, tells us with a chuckle that she runs a women’s support group called “From Woodstock to Menopause.”

We are strangers making conversation, but this is no random gathering of middle-aged coffee drinkers. We stand amid 300 people packed into the chain coffeehouse, listening to the chatter of radio station deejays at a table nearby, and wait patiently for the person we’ve come to see.

“She’s fashionably late,” Michael observes as 8:30 slips toward 8:45. But it’s OK. We all know that this woman is worth the time.

Then there is a flurry nearby, a glimpse of dark hair shot with silver, a flowered skirt. I’m about a foot shorter than Michael, so I stand on tiptoe, beset by a morning’s worth of anticipation and clanging, too-much-coffee nerves.

Suddenly I see straight on that beautiful, angular, familiar face and memory overwhelms me. Everything fades except her, the singer whose music I have listened to for more than 30 years but have never before seen in person.

Illuminated by her presence, 1965 rushes into the light. I am a freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. JFK is two years in his grave, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King have three years to live. The Vietnam War is heating up fast. I’m discovering that nobody really gives a damn whether you go to class or not in college, and this leads to textbook angst, mitigated by all-night bull sessions, the newly acquired habit of smoking cigarettes and a bit too much booze.

But that year really is defined for me by its music. And the diamond in that music is an album called “Farewell Angelina,” the first of her records I ever purchased. I have never heard such a lovely voice sing any kind of popular music. It is rich, like hot chocolate, yet delicate as lace.

The voice of Joan Baez.

But it isn’t just her musicality. It is what she is singing about. As has been said so often, Baez embodied the soul of young people in the ‘60s, people who were dedicated to ending war and fixing the world for everyone, principally by abolishing racism in the United States.

She was the poster girl of the antiwar and civil rights movements, singing anthems of the era such as “We Shall Overcome” as well as traditional folk songs. She also joined forces with the most famous folkie of all, Bob Dylan, boosting his career in a collaboration that flared into a romance they both sang about for years.

I listened to every word Dylan and Baez sang. And I went right along with the program. Although somewhat wary of tear gas, I marched in some demonstrations--a mildly daring thing to do in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago. Only a few years later, at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Daley’s police and antiwar protesters tangled in the streets. Most of the losers, measured by broken heads, were the protesters.

But as has happened to so many others our age, I have lost my certainties since those days, and my belief in perfection has faded to gray.

Yet here she is, her beauty and serenity enduring, with young singer Dar Williams at her side. It doesn’t matter that she is performing at that ‘90s icon Starbucks rather than a smoky Greenwich Village coffeehouse, or that her voice rises in its power between the traffic reports of KSCA-FM (101.9), promoting a concert in Los Angeles that night.

She and Williams sing “Amazing Grace” a cappella, and her voice fills the room with melancholy and hope. The words to the hymn, written by a repentant slaver hundreds of years ago, roll through me like a gentle earthquake, bringing tears.

As I leave, driving west toward Woodland Hills on Ventura Boulevard, the tears won’t stop. But what the hell--other drivers don’t care, as long as I don’t hit them. Next to me on the seat is my “Farewell Angelina” CD, with Baez’ autograph on the cover.

My tears are a celebration, not of the ongoing perfection I believed was attainable when I was young, but of that rare yet obtainable thing--a single perfect moment.

She gave that moment to me and many others at Starbucks that Friday morning.