long, it was enough to bring the Beantown police to the door of the house, asking about the strange, vagrant car parked on the street. That visit from the police is cemented in my memory as my family’s initiation into our brand new identity as the town freaks. Did ‘normal’ people have the police coming to their door because their car looked so dilapidated? Somehow, I didn’t think so.
The vortex of the small-town Midwest sucked us in and held us captive for thirteen long years. There in the vortex, all the things about us that hadn’t seemed that strange before took on a whole new meaning. We were a complete anomaly to the residents of this tiny town. The people of Beantown must have been vaguely aware that the hippie culture existed, but it rarely, if ever, infiltrated their stable community. Other than my parents’ band mates, we stood alone on an island of hippie weirdness, or at least so it seemed to me at that young age when every difference is magnified. We were almost the only vegetarians in town. My parents were folk musicians, a virtually unheard of and severely misunderstood profession. My mom still made most of our clothes, and a wood stove was still our only source of heat. My mom wore colorful ethnic fabrics and knee-high leather boots instead of polyester pantsuits and flats. My dad bought all his clothes at the local Salvation Army, including the series of corduroy and leather vests that he remained strangely attached to even into the mid-eighties, much to my dismay. My parents weren’t Christians-they were pagans, and our ‘bible’ was a combination of the l-Ching, Tarot cards and the channelings of Seth. We drove a succession of rusty cars that always looked as if they couldn’t make it another mile, including one of our more embarrassing vehicles, a 1965 red Plymouth Valiant. The Valiant would swing into the school parking lot to pick me up after school, looking grossly out of place next to the Ford Escorts and minivans. When viewed through the lens of mainstream culture, our hippie ways were incomprehensible. Obscure lifestyles, or any sort of difference, can seem threatening in a small town-and we were misjudged accordingly. People saw my parents and immediately assumed (incorrectly) that they did drugs. I was taunted in eighth grade, asked if my parents had seen all of the Cheech and Chong movies. There was a vaguely dangerous mystique surrounding our difference.
Being different inside our home was easier to bear than the more public differences-no one could see my dad meditating or my mom playing the dulcimer. Food continued to be the most public declaration of my family’s strangeness. In my school they segregated the cold lunch kids from the hot lunch kids-and no, my mom did not allow me to eat any of the preservative-laden, non-organic foods full of processed meats and refined sugar served in my school cafeteria. I was, of course, a cold lunch kid. Which meant that I had to sit at a table in the lunch room that for some reason was perpendicular to all the rows of hot lunch tables. We, the few cold lunch kids, spent the whole hour providing an amusing visual distraction for the hot lunch kids. Our bagged lunches were of great interest to the hot lunchers-something to look at while they slurped down hot dogs and mac-n-cheese and chocolate cake and jello and hamburgers and chop suey. And my lunch was the most interesting of all. The kids had seen Velveeta and white bread and Cheetos and Capri Sun juice boxes before, but they hadn’t been exposed to homemade wheat bread and blue corn chips and tofu and natural licorice. And so it happened again and again- the dreaded natural food incident. The pdinting finger, the gaping mouth and the inevitable comment: ‘What
My repeated public embarrassments due to the contents of my lunch bag bred a deep resentment inside me about my family’s food choices. I begged my dad to buy hot dogs. Secretly plotting which sugar cereals I could get my hands on and dreaming of Os-, car Meyer bologna sandwiches on white bread with that nice bright yellow mustard, I revolted. My tolerance for their food choices hit its limit with tempeh. My mom grew tempeh in their bedroom. It smelled bad and looked worse. Their bedroom floor was covered with pans of white molding cakes, which my mom would bring downstairs, slice into neat squares, fry and serve for dinner. I would not eat tempeh.
My friends went to college and became vegetarians. I went to college and became a meat eater. After nineteen years of being force-fed tofu and beans and rice, vegetarianism did not hold an enigmatic appeal for me. Early in my freshman year a large group of my newly turned vegetarian friends discovered, to their immense joy, a restaurant that served tofu dogs. This was like the Second Coming for them. They came to my room in an excited bunch, inviting me to join them to ‘go out for tofu dogs.’ I declined. The natural foods craze held no sense of independence or contained rebellion for me. I felt more insurgent satisfaction from eating a hamburger or a slice of chocolate cake. So even now, as an adult who enjoys eating healthy foods and is surrounded by a community that sanctions rather than punishes this choice, I am still guilty of occasional secret trips to the drive-through lane of fast-food restaurants. I lust after processed sugar, red meat, full-fat dairy. It is the legacy of growing up vegetarian and sugar free, the curse of the hippie kid turned adult.
By the time I was a teenager, I had already lived as a nonconformist and, in some ways, that left me no direction to go but toward conformity. My parents had already fought many battles for me. I was so free to become who I wanted to be that I just wanted to be like everyone else. In high school, my friends rebelled against authority by stealing their parents’ cigarettes, skipping class and getting stoned at lunch. I curled my bangs and became a cheerleader and class president. My classmates did Tarot cards and listened to Pink Floyd. I did my homework religiously and organized the school prom. Thankfully, my parents were patient enough to let this wild stage run its course, as I pranced through my teen years in disguise-my bangs curled high and immobilized with hair spray, my lips glimmering with shell-pink lipstick, my jeans rolled tight to my leg, my Keds whiter than white. They may have secretly lamented my embrace of the trappings of mainstream teenage life-but they never said a word.
My rebellious phase is long past; normalcy is no longer an icon. I left the towering bangs by the wayside. More important, however, is that everything that once felt shameful now seems interesting; I actually enjoy the looks of incredulity from people who did not grow up as I did when I tell my childhood story. I’m no longer embarrassed to describe the setting of my birth-or to admit that my parents weren’t married until I was seven. I beg my mom to sew me clothes, having long forgotten the trauma of the pink jeans. I humbly ask her how best to cook tofu, and don’t mind that people know my dad still meditates on a nightly basis. Our family mantra, ‘You create your own reality,’ our version of the Lord’s Prayer, has found its way into my daily life. I try to balance my parents’ hippie values with my own brand of nineties realism and a healthy dose of ex-hippie-kid skepticism. I’ve stopped view-ipg the world through a lens that magnifies difference and makes it undesirable. And I’ve finally forgiven my parents for all the rusty cars and tofu sandwiches, for the homemade Care Bears and home haircuts. They knew what they were doing.
Chelsea Cain
The look is key-worn blue corduroys, a black cotton Indian style shirt with ornate white piping over a black tank top, brown leather boots, long hair braided, each braid held in place with a Pocahontas-style leather lace-up tie. Sans makeup. Sans jewelry (save for beads or anything made with tiny peace signs). It’s more Michelle Phillips California Hippie than Marianne Faithfull Bohemian Hippie or Grace Slick Haight-Ashbury Hippie. (There are subtle but very important differences.) I want to blend in but I don’t want to be the first one arrested if the cops come.
There are ten thousand of us and we are in the open field, arms linked, chanting. We are swaying to the unrelenting heartbeat of a hundred bongo drums. It is distressingly hot and as people begin to strip so that they can dance naked in the circle, I find myself worrying about things like sunscreen and personal hygiene and body image. The air is thick with marijuana smoke and incense and body odor and I can’t feel my toes because about an hour ago when a bearded man in bicycle shorts offered me tea I forgot to ask ‘Is this special tea?’ and I drank a cup before I realized that it was laced. So we are chanting ‘Om,’ all ten thousand of us, in the heat, packed like blinking, bewildered cows into the central meadow, and all at once everything stops and someone points to the sky. There is a hawk circling up above, to the right of the two news helicopters. ‘A hawk!’ someone cries. ‘It’s a
