Lifestyle

We began to use the word “lifestyle” in the early 1970’s mostly as a discussion about choice. I had made a few big choices by then, but was just starting to be able to make money enough for daily choices. What to eat, what to wear, where to live and how to get around. These choices all counted, we thought. In was a matter of citizenship in the world. The civil and political efforts of the past decade had led us to ask ourselves how to vote with our dollars and live responsibly.

Living simply was high on the list. We did not want to live in highly ornate, single-function rooms. We were quite mobile and minimalist, happily moving into apartments with a mattress on the floor and a few dishes, but we had definite quality standards. We thought older things had been crafted better than new ones. We loved natural materials, cotton, wool and linen, and avoided cheap polyester fibers. And we loved folk arts, things crafted by people from around the world which flowed into the Bay Area.

There was a strong sense of egalitarian camaraderie about these values in San Francisco. We had little money, but we were never hungry or homeless, as Patti Smith describes in Just Kids, about living in New York at this time. We always had jobs, places to live and money to spend on food. When our friends ran out of food stamps, they came over for dinner! People traded grass for stuff. Some of it wasn’t very important. Easy come, easy go. Experience ruled.

In scavenging bits and pieces, we gave preference to older things and anything made with wood. At the time you could find sturdy wooden boxes on Grant Street in Chinatown in which china had been packed. We brought them home, stained them and used them as shelves. We absolutely had the redwood burl slab which became a table when set on a stump. It was kind of rickety, so it mostly stood in the corner, covered with plants. David acquired a red Navajo rug which we used for everything. I bought a small knotted pile rug from the Caucasus at the flea market that had been used as a camel bag. I still have it.

When I first went to work in San Francisco in 1970, women were not allowed to wear pants of any kind. (That changed within the year!) The dresses we could afford in stores were awful, so we bought good cotton and sewed our own. Peasant dresses, often. We could buy cotton tee-shirts and jeans, and they became even more valuable as they aged and grew ragged. The handmade jean patches I made were loved. We all felt that we could make better things than we could afford. Friends became accomplished weavers, potters and embroiderers.

The wealth of ethnic restaurants in San Francisco enabled us to eat out a little, but we were also experimenting with all the kinds of cooking we had never done at home. Beef stroganoff, quiche lorraine, shepherd’s pie, eggplant parmigiana and salmon casserole were some of our specialties. I remember how delighted I was to buy abalone in the store (!) and learn to cook it. I baked breads until my Sunset bread recipe book fell apart, and all kinds of cookies and pies. When we could get our hands on a car, we went out to the produce markets on Alemany St. Of course we did entirely without table grapes or iceberg lettuce, part of a boycott on behalf of the United Farm Workers.

We did not want to spend time and money commuting. Since we hardly ever had more than one car, we moved into apartments close to my job. When I took a shift at a newspaper from 3 until 11 p.m., we moved to South San Francisco near the paper and I bought a 10-speed bike to get back and forth late at night. When I got a job in a building near Fisherman’s Wharf, we moved to North Beach. I could then walk to work.

And yes, there were drugs and music. Everyone was exploring, testing. Parties were epic, rock concerts pervasive, often free in the park. David was terribly interested in, even a purveyor, of drugs. Acid, cocaine, grass and hash of many different provenances (all of which he knew), even heroin. I did my last heraldic acid trip on the island of Hawaii in 1977. It was great. It was wonderful. It was enough.

Volkswagen Bus

Nothing is more emblematic of the 1970’s than the Volkswagen bus! I know. We had several Volkswagens, including the proverbial bus. At the time, those of us who came to San Francisco from other places were rolling stones. Everyone was searching, on the move to find information no one else had, out of sight music, the wilder side, land you could own, or maybe, friends and community. The Volkswagen bus made a turtle out of you, your house on your back. You could fill it with your stuff, sleep in it, pick up hitchhikers, even tune it yourself. It was the ultimate backpack for a fluid world.

David and I had thick pieces of foam cut to fit the back of the bus, so we could lay out our sleeping bags in it and be at home anywhere. Taking a hibachi to cook on, we drove up and down the California coast on the weekends, thinking ourselves kings of the road.

No Volkswagen was complete without a set of metric tools and a greasy copy of John Muir’s “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.” Drawings carefully demonstrated exactly how to tune the Volkswagen and many other tasks. Not being the mechanical type, I never learned much about the engine, but David (having made friends with a great mechanic named Ernie) did learn to tune ours. He would listen to the purring of the motor, sensitive to all its sounds.

One Christmas we drove the bus down to Baja, hoping for sun and warmth. It was foggy and chill on the Baja beaches, however. And I had to take a plane home to get back to work in time, leaving David to nurse the bus home. The engine on the bus was air-cooled, and a piece of the aluminum foil he had used to try to draw air into the engine got sucked into the pipe. On the way home David drove slowly and stopped often to keep the poor thing from overheating. At least that was the story.

I never had driven much, as I mostly lived in San Francisco and took buses. But when David had a bad car accident and ended up in Crystal Springs Rehabilitation Center in San Mateo, I got my California driver’s license and learned to drive the bus. I liked being up high with not much car in front of you. When David was able, I drove down, picked him up and took him places, reminding him there was life outside.

We had many cars and apartments in the 1970’s. Coming from other parts of the country, we didn’t know how to settle down. There was some philosophy behind our transience, of course. We were trying to see what the basics were, what we did and didn’t need, to live lightly upon the earth. We didn’t collect furniture or anything else. We “borrowed” landscapes and libraries, sat in coffee shops and explored every inch of our city and our world, though we did keep friendships and held down regular jobs. We had acquired the habit of searching and there was always a reason to move.

I didn’t really know I was a rolling stone until I married a native Californian. I’ve now lived in the same place for fifteen years. It puts a different perspective on things to be sure!