You may not know it, but I walk among you. I conceal my origins in wool suits and makeup. My blow-dried hair and patent leather shoes hide any sort of barefoot background, my heritage as a child of hippies.
When I started this project, Dad said to me, “But Leida, Mum and I weren’t really hippies,” and I suppose they weren’t—not in the free-loving, drug-smoking, hard-core cave-dwelling kind of way. They were, and still are, more of the low-key, steady-as-she-goes hippies. But in Newfoundland a little hippy goes a long way . . .and the picture of a poncho-swaddled me under a peace-sign-topped Christmas tree speaks for itself.
Mum and Dad met in a bar at McGill in March of 1968. She was coming from a protest, he beginning a weekend of partying. Three weeks later they moved in together. They did eventually get married, something for which my prissy self has always been extremely grateful. As I understand it, Mum and Dad were standing at a crosswalk in 1969 when Mum proposed the idea. She once told me it was so both of them would be invited to family parties.
They had one of the first civil weddings in Quebec, timing it in December for tax reasons. Mum wore a green velour minidress, and Dad donned a sport coat he still wears. They took the subway to the ceremony and opted for a honeymoon at the movies. A reception was held in January where the “cool” aunts smoked up upstairs. (Knowing them as Lithuanian-accented 80- and 90-year olds, I have a hard time picturing this.)
With their tax refund, Mum and Dad came to Newfoundland for the summer of 1970. Dad needed a place to study, and a ship’s captain had told him the island was “God’s country.” They returned in the fall of 1972, ten months after I had been born. They thought they’d go back to land, which was cheap, so they bought a house and three acres in Woody Point on the province’s west coast. They supported themselves on Dad’s occasional contracts, family allowance cheques, three large gardens, and samples from a cousin’s clothing company. Dad had lobster traps one year and cut his own wood while Mum started weaving and attended her first craft fair. Work wasn’t steady, however, and my parents started to want things like swimming lessons for my younger sister and me. At the end of 1976 we moved to St. John’s.
Since we arrived in the city in December, it was impossible to build a compost heap. So greatly did it pain my mother to throw out good compost that that winter she filled empty milk cartons with banana peels and apples cores, stapled them shut, and stacked them in the freezer until spring.
In elementary school I started to notice that my family didn’t fit into our neighbourhood. I was attending a Catholic school and since we were half-Jewish, half-United, all agnostic, I was kept out of religious events. Then there was the grey barley soup and the egg salad sandwiches Dad would pack in lunches when Mum was away. No blue cans of traditional Newfoundland Vienna sausages for me.
My name was different. I was dressed differently—no frou-frou lace outfits or dress shoes for me. My parents looked different—Mum with her big curly hair and wool sweaters, and Dad with his shoulder-length hair and beard. On top of all this was a layer of “come-from-away.” I was not a born and bred Newfoundlander: I didn’t have the accent, or ever go “around the bay,” or eat Sunday dinner that included carrot and turnip mashed together, and I had an Oma, an Opa, and a Grandma, but no Nan or Pop.
All I desperately wanted was to be normal. I wanted sliced white bread! I wanted fuzzy wallpaper upstairs, and carpet on the basement walls! I wanted my mother to wear makeup and join the PTA. I wanted American cars, trips to Florida, and family friends with short hair. I wanted church!
I wanted a cabin, not a sailboat, and I didn’t want family friends who fed you gritty soy burgers, or wore their hair in ponytails. Mum and Dad were part of what was called in St. John’s the “rubber boot crowd,” or at least they were on the periphery. These were artsy/hippy “townies” who wore rubber boots for convenience, not because of their occupation. Mum still tells of how at age twelve I wouldn’t walk beside her on Water Street because she was wearing boots on a sunny day. I’m ashamed of myself now, but at the time I was tired of being teased.
Then there were the whales and the weaving. Our first winter in St. John’s we drove for hours to see whales trapped in the ice in Springdale, then illicitly cooked chili on hot plates at the hotel. Dad did some research on whales, and one summer we joined him camping under tarps and studying a tethered whale. Mum wove whales into her tapestries. One spring she gave whale ear bones she’d found to family in Montreal—I wonder what they thought? But the whale that was the real bane of my existence, however, was the mortifying green whale skull that sat on the porch. The other day Mum told me someone had borrowed it. “You mean you’re going to get it back?” I asked.
While I was in elementary school Mum began weaving quite seriously and attending craft fairs two or three times a year. She was really good at what she did and won awards. At the time it was a little unusual that my mum worked, even if her studio with her large and noisy loom was in the basement. I’ll always remember the pre-fair stress in the house and the production—the smell of dyeing wool and finding mohair strands in the butter. It was exciting to help my mum set up her booth and fun to hang out with other kids I only saw at craft fairs, but, once again, there was a discomfort I always felt when the “society” mothers and daughters came through. There was something too exposed and sort of poor about sitting in my mum’s booth as the world walked by. Of course, I know now people’s compliments were genuine, that they really did admire my mother’s talent.
The one arena of hippie culture I didn’t rebel against was politics. By and large, my parents were voters and grumblers, not activists, although I do remember Mum taking my sister and me to a peace march in the early 80s. Family friends were more the button- wearing, protesting types, but by grade three I knew Nestle was bad, and that there was somewhere in Africa where minority whites controlled things and majority blacks had no power. Oddly, I became more politically involved than my parents—as a columnist, a campaign volunteer, and with aspirations of my own. In grade six I dressed up for career day as Canada’s first female prime minister.
Life improved in junior high when I began a French immersion program. The program attracted kids whose parents cared about education, and who, in many cases, were as hippy, or nerdy, or just plain “come from away” as me. I didn’t become popular, but suddenly I wasn’t the only one with a name that wasn’t Murphy or Campbell. Shopping at the health food store was actually de rigueur, and there was nothing wrong with reading books. Lots of kids in my class weren’t affiliated with any faith or had one they and their families didn’t practice, although being half-Jewish was still kind of unusual. It was a godsend to find these peers, and, according to my dad, I became a happier child. Of course, there were still moments that felt particularly embarrassingly hippy—like the 1969 Volkswagen van we got from my grandparents. At one point the hand brake had gone and in hilly St. John’s that could be a problem. Mum took to carrying a large rock with her that she would wedge under a front tire when she parked, and then pop out again when it was time to go.
Today I appreciate the fact that Mum and Dad gave my sister and me the freedom to make our own decisions. We were free to travel by ourselves from a young age and to choose our own career paths. For a time I was well on track to becoming the parents I wanted to have: I wore frou-frou clothes, became a Girl Guide leader, sang in a church choir, and made myself meals that included grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft slices and white bread. I planned to be part of the establishment—to carry a briefcase, sit at boardroom tables, and wear a matching suit, but these days that is having less and less appeal.
Like Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton in “Family Ties” I have found the bred in the bone values have come home to roost. I no longer hide the fact that I can and do make granola from a family recipe, and I occasionally vote NDP. And compost, man, I do love the stuff! I love to look at it, take pleasure in creating it, and don’t mind spreading it. I’ve even tried vermiculture. Yup, it, too, pains me to toss out an apple core.
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