That night found us at a run-down old house where one of the girls lived, camped out on the floor sipping wine, passing around skinny hand-rolled joints and listening to Buffalo Springfield and Leonard Cohen on the stereo.

"Someday when we are old and nasty looking," Joni spoke prophetically, "and we think back upon our long spent youth, it will be the memory of nights like this that will make us smile."

God she was beautiful.

"You will never be nasty looking," I told her.

She smiled, stood up and pulled me to my feet by the hand. Leading me like a pet on a leash to the backyard, we collapsed upon the grass and made love under a sky filled with stars in a way that was both passionate and tender. I only hoped my inexperience did not betray me.

Afterwards, still wrapped in each other's arms and lying in the grass as we gazed up into the heavens, Joni told me she loved me. I was truly flattered, but didn't that happen a little fast? I mean, we had just met. "I'm still licking wounds from the last time I allowed myself to fall in love," I told her. "I'm not in any hurry to get involved again." My steady and I just broke up a few weeks ago, the hole in my heart not quite healed yet. But this was more than I cared to reveal.

She giggled, as if I had misunderstood. "That's cool," she said. "But I can still love you. Even if I were never to see you again - just know that on this particular night, at this particular spot in the universe . . .  I loved you."

[postscript 2001: We would know each other but briefly before reaching that metaphoric fork in the road where our paths splintered off in different directions. But Joni was more prophetic on that first night together than either of us could have known. Whenever I think back to the spirit of the sixties, it is that night with a girl named Joni that I recall. The smells, the music, the youthful passion - all so vivid in my mind's eye, as if it happened only yesterday. And Joni was absolutely correct - the memory does, indeed, make me smile.]