I used to be a child of hippy parents.
Those of us who haved lived this weird situation know what a hell this can be. You can always tell we sorry few if you’re watchful. We eat junk food with a mixture of bliss and extremely guilt on our faces, as if we know that we’re responsible for killing entire rainforests but at that moment the Cheeto in our face is just that much more important. We have an urge to eat bulgar wheat in strange ways. We knew all about the hemp revolution WAAAAAAY before the Indie crowd picked up on it. It’s subtle but when we meet, we have the haunted knowing look on our faces, similiar to that you see at P.O.W. reunions.
My mother was “fairly” normal single mom. She did the pot thing for years, dallying in “wholistic” approaches. I had a lunch box even though brown bags were cooler, because lunch boxes didn’t kill trees. My sandwiches were always wrapped in wax paper because it was ecologically safer than plastic bags. Not to mention that wax bags never properly closed and the top part of your sandwich is always a little stale and dried out.
Then she started with men who had progressively paler skin and longer beards. Guys who didn’t wear underwear. Who wore ponchos. She started growing her own alfalfa sprouts. The kitchen always smelled a little yeasty. There were copies of “Mother Jones” and “Whole Earth News” lying around the house.
Then she met Paul, who could have been a younger Jerry Garcia. Paul was whole earth. He moved in, we bought an older house in a folky turn-of-the-century neighborhood. That’s when the weirdness started.
They’d hold “house concerts” in our home. That’s where folk musicians play in someone’s home and people pass the hat to pay for the performance. All forms and sorts of hairy-legged women, long-haired men and grubby children attended these. All of them wearing natural fibers.
They started putting in time at the natural foods Co-op. Large glass jars of various flours, grains, and whole wheat pastas began appearing. They created a PANTRY. We were involved in ‘anti-nuclear war’ movements. We knew what hummus was. We ate vegetarian for at least half our meals. During none of our childhood did we have Kool-Aid mustaches.
Only people who know how hard it is to try to spread natural peanut butter (which needs to be refrigerated) on bread can fully understand my pain. A natural peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread is perhaps the driest substance known to man. You can’t even breath when you eat that sandwich. And jelly? What the hell is that? There’s no nutritional value in jelly, so why bother? Just lots of sugar and preservatives and artificial colors. Thus for years, my sister and I could only grunt and mumble because our chops were glued together with Arlo’s Natural Peanut Butter.
And then there was the honey. White sugar was verboten, “over-processed unnatural rot”. We had the biggest container of honey I’ve ever seen. We’d bring it to the Co-op where they had a big honey machine and watch it glurk out into our sticky container. Honey doesn’t spoil. If it gets crystally, you just steam it in a water bath. Thus honey in everything. Not bad really until you think about cereal. Ever tried putting honey on your Rice Krispies instead of sugar? There is no Snap Crackle Pop after you weigh down the boys with that shit. And it does not mix in. Instead, you pull up your spoon and you have a fist-sized dripping ball of cereal and honey and you just gnaw on it. That’s what I’m talking about. And be careful when putting the honey on the cereal in the first place. Because if you do cereal-honey-milk, the honey forms a moisture-proof barrier that will not allow the milk to touch the cereal. If you pour the milk on too fast, it will hit the honey and then spray up onto your shirt. Your best bet is cereal-milk-honey. Trust me on this.
And then the packed lunches progressed into some strange shit. For instance, falafel is bean patties on pita bread with sprouts. Do you realize how hard it is to TRADE lunches when you’re packing that crap? “Hey, what have you got today?” “Um, Wonder bread sandwich with cheese and turkey, Doritos and a Zinger…how about you?” “Um, Baba Ganoujh on flat bread, dried apple slices and a carob brownie.” “No trade” “yeah, I thought not.” One time my mom put carrots in my thermos instead of soup. Our school had a rule that you had to eat everything in your lunch, so the lunch room monitor made me drink the water that she packed the carrots in. When the glorious day came when the folks relented and allowed us to get school hot lunch, we were ecstatic. We were the only kids in school who enjoyed the state hot lunch program. Pizza! They had pizza! Without eggplant or tofu or anything!
It’s hard to explain the changes that you go through. Some things are completely normal, maybe even more normal than the norm. Either my mom or Paul cooked dinner most nights and we ate like a family. We ate a full breakfast most mornings before school, at least until I was in junior high and had a different starting time than my little sister. But we had Buckwheat pancakes and Not!Sausage rather than the norm. But it was honest to goodness maple syrup that we poured over the pancakes. Because that was more natural than Aunt Jemima. However, had you asked my sister or I what we would have liked for breakfast, we would have said something like “Coco Crispies” or “Egg McMuffin” or even “Wonder Bread toast with grape jelly”.
Natural lip gloss. Natural clothing. Natural soap. No microwave (puts evil rays in yer food, zaps the nutrients, etc). No Tupperware or Rubbermaid. We used Coconut Oil rather than sunscreen. We had clove toothpaste, not Crest or Aquafresh with it’s cool 80’s stripes. We went junk picking for antiques. My mom developed a HUGE 300×200 vegetable garden in the back yard. Every fall, we canned and blanched vegetables late into each night.
I’m the only kid I know who came home from summer camp (which we earned by selling chocolate bars to “less enlightened” kids) and found the folks from “Greenpeace” living in our house. While we were away, they sailed into our town to investigate the pollution of the Fox River. They sent divers down and caught a major paper company lying about how much they were polluting the river. The crew of “The Fri” needed a place to stay and shower and the folks offered up our house. When I came home, there were two lesbians sharing my twin bed. Our phone had been tapped by the FBI. There was never any hot water. Hairy people in sensible shoes gathered in our living room discussing ways to make the local paper companies “pay their retribution to Mother Earth”. I went and slept on the Greenpeace sailboat which was docked on the sludgy polluted river instead. It was quieter.
There were some cool things. For instance, we were allowed to watch movies with nudity in them because “it was nothing to be ashamed of” but we weren’t allowed to watch a movie with violence in it. I made a lot of great friends with the children of my folk’s friends. For the first time in my life, I was not considered weird for having a divorced set of parents or having “Mom’s boyfriend” living with us. Their parents all drove Volvos too. They had things like bagels (which were NOT yet cool in the Midwest) and hummus for lunch. They considered us lucky because we had “normal” first names. They had names like “Ewen”(a girl) and “Sunshine” and “Happy”. It was rare for a hippy couple to be married… they all just lived together, so all my friends were starting phrases like “my Mom’s boyfriend” or “my Dad’s girlfriend”.
We’d go to Solstice celebrations and camp with the hippy friends. We’d bath in rivers. We’d go kayaking and gather cattail roots for dinner. We watched bald eagles mate. We saw the hippy friends eat food that was weirder than the stuff that we were eating at home, so we’d realize that putting honey on our cereal wasn’t THAT bad. At least we got to eat Rice Krispies. We weren’t stuck with Kashi and Grape Nuts like our friends Cumin and Stash. Or poor Lark, who’s mom couldn’t decide if she was a lesbian or not and had a boyfriend AND a girlfriend living with them.
Eventually, they broke up. Paul got married two months after my mom moved out. He’d always been after my mom to marry him throughout the seven years they’d been together, so I suppose he married the first girl who said yes. He lives in Florida now. My mom then had a new boyfriend. Then she had my little brother. Now she doesn’t have a boyfriend (at this point).
Now, she’s more or less abandoned the whole “hippy” attitude. My little brother… he eats actual hotdogs, not Not!Dogs. On white bread buns, even, not whole grain sprouted buns. And he can eat regular peanut butter. But she still retains some of the oddities. Stir-fry is still the primary source of food. And she still makes bran muffins and carrot stuff. And she has a minimal garden. No more folk musicians or hairy-legged activists anymore though.
As for my life, I find that I enjoy wheat bread as well as white. I unconciously reach for honey for my cereal. I crave Guerilla cookies some days. I feel guilty when I put on deoderant. I listen to the Indigo Girls because their harmonies remind me of a certain folk duo that passed through our living room.
And every now and then, I come upon a child of a hippy. We’re in our late twenties or early thirties now. When we recognized each other, a look of rememberence comes over us…a hollow look. And we nod slowly to each other in alliance.
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Forgive me for my weird exposition today.. tomorrow I’ll write a real entry.
