As I read through the book on the bus ride I was hooked immediately. The book connected deeply with my hippy spirit. I managed to set aside some money over a couple of months so I could buy this book to have my own copy. Getting the money to make that purchase as no easy matter since I was working as waiter in a soda shop and also delivering newspapers by bicycle to try to put myself through school.
I kept the book and kept it dear. Through the tumultuous times of the next year or so with various moves from sleeping in the dorm illegally in a friends room to finding a ramshackle house to rent a room in the book was one of my few possessions I managed to keep track of. I had little anyway other than text books and some bell-bottomed jeans and some paisley shirts.
Towards the end of the summer of 1969, while on my way hitchhiking to Woodstock I made a slight detour due to a rather unpleasant drug experience of accumulated taking of large amounts of LSD. The detour landed me in Marine Corps bootcamp in San Diego. I left a friend stranded in Connecticut who was waiting for myself and two other friends to meet him to attend Woodstock. I was an interesting time in my life, one I can thankfully look back on, and do so with a certain amount of fondness.
Needless to say, as an avid anti war protester and general rebel to authority the experience in bootcamp was not exactly soul nourishing.
I often speak harshly about my mother, and it is true she was no saint. She was however also not entirely evil. At the beginning of bootcamp I was barely holding on to my sanity and I wrote to my mother and asked her if she would write out a copy of The Profit and send it to me as letters. Since no books were allowed and letters were this was a way to get an illegal book into bootcamp so I could read it. She copied the book out faithfully over the course of several letters and the book she used was the very book I had purchased. The cover is identical to the one pictured here.
Most people have by now heard of and even read this book. Perhaps for those of you it might be nice to give it a re-read. For those who’ve not read it yet, I encourage you to get a copy. There are short poem/essays which are conducive to fit into anyone’s hectic schedule and can provide a brief oasis from the noise and distractions of our lives.
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