Growing Up Hippie
(Page 3 of 5)
November-December 2003
by Adriana Barton from Elm Street
In high school, I would turn down dates because boys might interfere with my regimen as a classical musician-in-training. By 16, I earned a music scholarship to a prestigious American university. At 22, I had already performed with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall. But raised to value creativity and originality above all, I was devastated when it dawned on me that I had never played for pleasure or made my own music. So I dropped the cello entirely. This may seem like a waste, but for 17 years the rigid, high-performance world of classical music had provided a refuge of structure and consistency so lacking at home.
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One had only to see my bedroom in high school to get the picture: It was as orderly as that of a Victorian spinster, a beacon of neatness amid the piles of paper strewn about every surface of the dining room, the mess of my Mom’s in-home painting studio, and the crumbs ground into the threadbare antique Chinese carpet my grandmother had left us. My compulsive tidiness was a form of rebellion, a goad to a disorganized mother who had fought hard to escape the oppressive spotlessness and formality of her own privileged childhood. The intergenerational pattern continues.
Every stick of furniture in my parents’ house was secondhand, long before recycling became hip; so were my decidedly unfashionable clothes, mostly from Salvation Army thrift stores. To this day, my mother is more likely to invest in pottery and paintings than something as banal as a new couch. Buying furniture seems so suburban.
I recently bought a mattress, one with coils and a box spring—something no one in my family has ever owned. Before it was delivered, I was plagued with unease. Money wasn’t the issue; as a magazine editor I can afford it. Rather, a vague sense of imprinted guilt crept in, accompanied by images of distended coils rusting in a landfill. What if everyone on the planet had a mattress like this? Where would all the mattresses go when people had finished with them?
I am 32 years old and still not sure how to feed myself. I blame it on Michio Kushi, the Japanese guru who brought the Zen macrobiotic diet to North America. My parents lived in one of Kushi’s Boston houses for a time, attempting to heal my birth father of terminal illness. Following this diet based on the laws of yin and yang, my mother would add a handful of salt to greens with all the water pressed out and call it “salad.” Despite my father's death at age 29, her faith in the macrobiotic way never wavered.
As I grew up, food was imbued with powers of good and evil. Sugar was excessively yin and naturally verboten, but seemingly innocent foods were equally suspect. Potatoes, along with tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, were found to be in the same family as deadly nightshade and therefore viewed as toxic.
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