Grateful Dead license plates

When I was married and living in WI, and my kids were little, in the late 1980s & early '90s, we had Grateful Dead-inspired license plates for the cars. In WI it's pretty easy to get personalized plates, so we would come up with combinations of letters and numbers that meant something to Deadheads. My kids' Dad had one that said GOGD for "good old Grateful Dead", a phrase he used on tapes he traded. I wanted OTHER 1, a Dead song, and I've seen GDTFB, another song abbreviation, for Going Down the Road Feeling Bad. We had AM DEW, for Morning Dew, a song covered by the Dead (written by Bonnie Dobson, the Dead got it via Fred Neil, a folkie who got hooked up with the SF scene; Jefferson Airplanes's Other Side of This Life is Fred Neil, It's a Beautiful Day covered one of his songs, too, and lots more he probably never got enough credit for).

When we moved to Illinois in 1991, some friends wanted to get the AM DEW plate. I wrote a letter to the WI DOT explaining that I was no longer using the plate, since I had moved my car to Illinois, and the friend could have it. They still have it on one of their cars, and they got another one that says DIRE - on the endangered resources plate, that has a wolf, so Dire Wolf, another GD song.

I went for a kind of alternate walk this morning, through more neighborhood streets, instead of bike paths and lake front, and went past the friends' house, where the AM DEW car was parked out front. I was thinking about our kids growing up and graduating from high school, and how that's a life change. I keep thinking that I will become sort of invisible now that I won't have kids in the Madison schools, and that I will have to work to pay attention to what's going on in the schools.

I was still sort of idly wondering where the Dire Wolf car was when I walked past the High School and the daughter had just pulled into a parking spot, with loud rap coming out the windows.

I did a bunch of cooking tonight; I made General Tso's chicken and tested a recipe for blackbery ice cream, but it was all really messy, and I don't wanna talk about it now (and I still have some cleaning up to do).