Whatever happened, I wonder, to Tom Paxton? And whatever happened to that skinhead kid who punched me in the face? 

I was 19 or 20, as was he. I'd been trying to pry a months old Paxton concert poster from an out-of-business shop window when he ambled over from the cafe across the street and commanded me to stop. On the authority, he claimed, when pressed, of the real estate agency for this store. Where he clerked. I bet, I said. Whereupon he warned me that if I did not desist he would have to punch me in the face.

Well, this was the tail-end of the sixties, and since Tom Paxton was the kind of pacifist beatnik folk-poet I wished by all that was hip to some day be, I simply sighed. Not wisely and benignly, as Tom might have sighed, but in the most superior hairy college boy fashion I could manage. Oh, it was a call-out of a sigh. My tweak to his loutish skinhead townie nose. And I added, Well, if you're going to punch me in the face, let me get this pocketknife out of your way. 

After which, with more bluster than conviction, he punched me. And we considered matters. Had it hurt? Did it sting? Perhaps a little. But I too had come from nothing, if not his kind of nothing, and I too had picked my side. I'm not going to punch you back, I chided. To be the bigger man. To irk him. Hit me, he pleaded. Hit me. 

A police car approached. Let’s let them handle this, I said, and made to hail it. Don’t you bleeding dare! he growled. It swung on by.

Fine, he said then. You may take the poster. But your knife is damaging the glass. I'll be watching from the cafe. You unsheathe it again, and I'll be back. 

I took the deal; I returned to Tom Paxton, unsheathing instead my ragged hippie fingernails, and I clawed away. And soon, turning, I found a very pretty, very irritated girl had come to help me. Her boyfriend had not impressed her. But it seemed I had! Together, companionably, we freed the poster. I thanked her. We nearly hugged. As he watched, his nose squished to the cafe glass.  

Thank you, too, Tom Paxton, because although in every way back then I was as clueless as absolutely anyone, blundering again and again into life's blind alleys and backways to fail to learn them, I felt the spirit of you watching over my win that day; even nudging me, in a certain light, towards a behavior that might have passed, if one squinted, for a grown-up's.