Arlo and Jackie on Display at Open Shutter Gallery in Durango

Last year in May, my husband and I stepped into The Open Shutter Gallery in Durango, Colorado, one evening while a young couple showed slides from their recent trip through Turkey. That slide show was energetically and well attended. I’ve been to poetry readings and book signings by famous authors easily attended by fewer than five people. I think you have to love a town that comes out that strongly for a travel slide show. Check out some of Craig Semetko’s striking and memorable photography then on display at Open Shutter (openshuttergallery.com/past/semetko2013/about.html). the photographer whose work was on display at the time.

Last week, in Durango again and at Open Shutter Gallery, we saw photography by Jonathan Blair, much of it formerly published in National Geographic Magazine (http://www.openshuttergallery.com/current/show.html). I loved coming across the photo of Arlo and Jackie Guthrie at their wedding in nineteen-sixty-eight. The caption next to the photo described the situation surrounding Blair’s presence at that event. I read that Arlo and Jackie were still together after forty-four years. That caption worried me because we saw Arlo in concert at The Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing, Minnesota, October, 2012, only a few days after his wife, Jackie, had died.

As a chronic worrier about health, my own and others’, Arlo has always been on my mind for about the same number of years as his marriage. I’m not sure I cared much for the song, Alice’s Restaurant, or that I took Arlo very seriously. But, I took his health seriously, and I must have started consistently following his career.

Somewhere along the years I decided our children should see Arlo in concert, (as well as Doc Watson) since they grew up (even though passively) on a constant diet of those two musicians’ work. Our family saw Arlo in concert at St. John’s University in St. Cloud, Minnesota, somewhere in the early nineties, and on numerous other occasions leading up to the Sheldon Threatre concert a year ago last October, when Arlo said he and Jackie would be together again in the end. So, I’ve been checking on him again (www.arlo.net ). I’m happy to report that Arlo seems to be doing exceptionally well. And this matters because somehow over all these years that I’ve been paying attention, Arlo has brought me a lot of enjoyment. He is one of the people who keeps me feeling connected to this world, the earth at this time when I have been living on it.