near as i can remember; HITCHHIKING was written before 1984, but after 1975, sometime after i had returned from the West Coast. but since i lived in at least 3, maybe 4, different places during that period , i can not recall exactly what i was doing. i know i was in the New Haven area, and i had begun to focus on my painting, and toward the end of the 70s i was playing less in public (i had been putting on shows throughout the 1970s), and showing my painting more often, in New York and New Haven. when i wrote HITCHHIKING i was thinking of a time back two or three years, maybe……
……  i was living with friends in a large house in Hamden CT, just up the street from the Jr Highschool. the people in the house varied in age from teen age to 20 something ,to me in my early 30s. i had lived there for a few years, but decided to leave for personal reasons..we all got along very well.
i had a show scheduled in Mystic CT, just up the Connecticut Coast, at a bar where my friend Dean booked the music.
at that time i knew people around the country who i could visit. so i made my plan, and let people know that i might be showing up.
i said my goodbyes and one afternoon we put my harpsichord in the van, and a few of us drove to Mystic, where i did the show.
now, to make a long story short; my friends returned to New haven with the harpsichord, and without me. and i got on the road the next morning (tiple in hand) and headed north.
other than that, the song tells you pretty much what happened after that..though not everything.       written in ansure to a question by a Facebook friend, today.

White snow falling in white air
covers the town in a blanket of silence.
Richard crosses the empty street.
The snow is almost up to his knees.

Little Richard (not the singer),
carries his school books down the street
..... to the old red school.
His friend says, "hay wait up Richard, I'm coming too".

A winding river is a joyous sound.
The light of a life in the eyes of a child is profound.
And noise from the playground is the hat
on the head of the god who makes snow come down

White snow falling in white air
covers the town in a blanket of silence.
Richard crosses the empty street.
The snow is almost up to his knees.

We had a little snow this year.
And Christmas is coming pretty soon.
There building a snow man in the school yard,
and Richard will join the choir soon.

 i have a picture of the Buddha  
in front of my stereo speaker
(the one that doesn't work)
he hasn't moved since i put him there 
10 years ago
and if your wondering what he's thinking about
stop thinking 
and
you might get an idea

when i was living on the $350. a month you got from 
New York Welfare 
because i had hurt my back at a job 

and couldn't work
i had an interview at the "Job Center" 
and was asked a lot of questions 
about what kind of work i had done
and what talents i had, and what kind of work i could do
in the welfare to work program
(or whatever they called it than)
and when the interview was over
i asked
"where are you sending me".
and he said,
"o, your going where everybody else is going!"