“There were days and there were days and there were days between.”
Robert Hunter wrote “Days Between” near the end of Jerry Garcia’s life, and together they crafted this beautiful, atmospheric meditation I’ve been carrying around in my head for years. They embraced something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: the ride ends. The lights go down. Death follows. Almost nobody remembers.
But it still matters.
Bill Hicks had that bit about life being a ride in an amusement park:
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are… Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, ‘Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?’ It’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.”
Garcia knew this.
Fifty years ago I was working at Gasser’s camera store on the boulevard near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He walked into the back room where I worked, wanting to buy a Super 8mm sound projector. I was twenty-four and starstruck, probably naïve, definitely raw—and I couldn’t hide how much his music meant to me.
We talked for over an hour—just two people, one famous and one not, surrounded by camera equipment while afternoon light came through dirty windows. Music. Film. The things we both loved. He was fit and trim in those days, vibrant, a man in the prime of his life. Nothing like the death-warmed-over images that would come later. This was Jerry Garcia fully alive.
The Elmo projector came to $549. He pulled out this thick wad of cash, all fifties, and peeled off twelve of them—so excited to get his new toy. As I rang up the sale, I realized he'd overpaid me by fifty dollars. I laid out the bills like a hand of cards, counting them for him, proving he'd given me one too many. He laughed, said "OK," and stuffed it back in his pocket. He wasn't trying to tip me. He just didn't give a flying fuck about money.
Before he left, he told me to come film the show the following week. His manager called with the details. I stood on that stage with my camera while the Dead played, inside the thing I’d spent years watching from the outside.
I’ve thought about that afternoon often. Not the concert—though that was something—but the back room. The projector. The way he just didn’t care about the fifty dollars. The kindness of the invitation.
Summer flies and August dies the world grows dark and mean
Comes the shimmer of the moon on black infested trees
The song isn’t bitter. It’s not resigned. It’s something harder to name—a clear-eyed witnessing of how things actually are. That’s not pessimism. That’s just paying attention.
After meeting Jerry, I kept chasing—adventures, moments, small successes that felt like they might add up to something. What Garcia’s song finally helped me understand is that the “between” parts—the parts I kept trying to rush through—those were actually the substance of life itself.
There were days and there were days and there were days between
Polished like a golden bowl the finest ever seen
Hearts of summer held so long in winters keeping
Hummingbird suspended in flight
Garcia died three weeks after his fifty-third birthday. All those years, all those songs, all those faces singing along—and in the end, what remains? Some recordings. Some memories.
Hearts left on shelves collecting dust.
Here’s what I keep thinking about: Garcia filled stadiums. I’m seventy-three and already forgotten. The scale is absurd to even compare.
But time doesn’t care about scale. Give it long enough and Garcia becomes a name in a book becomes a footnote becomes nothing. Same as me. Same as everyone. A hundred years, a thousand—what’s the difference? The universe is patient. The democracy of forgetting spares no one.
Does that diminish what he created? What any of us create?
No. And that’s the point.
How much we’d never know
Hicks said it’s a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. What both he and Garcia understood is that recognizing it’s just a ride doesn’t make it meaningless. It makes it precious.
The lights will go down. Death will follow. Almost nobody will remember.
But we were here. We gave the best we had to give. We made our choices between fear and love, in back rooms and on stages and in all the ordinary moments between.
That’s my friend Jerry in the land of lullabies. I’m still here, writing it down.
