Food Revolution

Line, Marty and Paul’s mother was not very interested in cooking. She was a superb baker. She always started with the best ingredients and taught her kids to bake exquisite pies, cookies and delicious breads full of interesting grains (some they ground themselves). But for meals she provided the meat, potatoes and vegetable diet common to the post-war era. After a few years in which she researched Adele Davis’ ideas, she went back to using the prepared ingredients and frozen foods which were so available at the time. This was especially true after the older kids went to college and she began full-time teaching. The younger Mikkelsons recall that almost every recipe she used called for a packet of Lipton’s dried onion soup!

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, big gardens played a part in the Mikkelsons’ lives. In Montauk, a fictional town in northeast Iowa, a half-acre garden was attached to the parsonage. Though planting in the spring was exciting, everything from the usual vegetables to sunflowers (to feed the big cardinals and bluejays in the winter), corn and peanuts, the kids’ enthusiasm for weeding and hoeing was tepid. The bounty from the garden was never wasted, however. Many of the vegetables were partially cooked and frozen for eating in the winter. Dad planted apple trees at each parsonage, but the Haroldson parsonage had no garden. Only a rhubarb patch.

Line’s cooking develops from living around so many people who came up from the South to work in Chicago. She learns how to cook okra, collards and fried chicken, to fry up hoecakes and make delicious cornbread. Money is short, and Line becomes expert at getting the most for her money at the new food co-ops run by activist groups. From ex-Texans, she learns how to soak and cook beans, refry them and wrap them with onions and tomatoes in tortillas.

Marty learns the romance of cooking from a year-long stay in Oxford with a family whose European values dictate great food every day. When she moves to Berkeley, the exposure to fresh and raw vegetables educates her palate even further. She doesn’t like salad, but she finds that no California meal is complete without it.

When Line joins Marty in San Francisco, they become even more excited about food. Any Saturday that someone with a car turns up, they go out to the farmers' market on Alemany Boulevard in the southern part of the city, and buy the fresh produce of the season. They were not necessarily vegetarians, but the cookbooks of the time celebrated the peasant meals that world travel was introducing to people with a desire to live lightly and well on our fragile earth.

Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery by Alan Hooker, which appeared in 1970, contained recipes influenced by Indian and peasant cuisines all over the world. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, showing how to get complete proteins needed for health using particular vegetarian and sometimes dairy combinations. Laurel’s Kitchen, by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey first came out in 1976, again providing much information about vegetarian nutrition. The Moosewood Cookbook, completely hand-written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen, came out in 1977, reveling in the “health food” cooking of the restaurant collective she was part of in New York. Versions of all of these books are still in print and tattered copies can be found in my sisters’ and my kitchens even today!

It is hard to convey how exciting this revolution was, as today farmers’ markets abound and everyone at one point or another gets excited about real food. To the Mikkelson kids, however, who grew up on canned and frozen foods, packaged meats and Betty Crocker baking mixes, the idea that you could start from scratch and everything would taste better, and perhaps make you healthier, was heady indeed.

Hannah Arendt, Boris Pasternak and Us

The film Hannah Arendt dramatizes the controversy which raged around Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Though she lost friends and alienated family members, who misunderstood her reporting as lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, she continued to insist that individuals should be seen as persons, rather than members of “a people,” a tribe. Eichmann, the organizer of transportation for millions of people taken to concentration camps during World War II, was found in Argentina and taken back to Israel for trial for war crimes. He was hung in 1962.

Because Eichmann insisted he was simply obeying his superiors, Arendt did not see that he could be convicted in a court of law, though she wrote that he must hang because he had “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth” with others. Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe those who are simply thoughtless, who refuse to connect their actions with the consequences, who refuse to be persons.

I am currently reading the new translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This book helped set me on my path when I first read it in 1966, but some of it, especially the philosophical discussions, were fuzzy in the earlier translation. In this one they are extremely clear! The first time I read it, I gravitated to the powerful story of a man who remained a person in the face of the monumental pressure of the ideological revolution in Russia. In the first translation, the story was wrapped in thick romance about love and art. [The movie, of course compounded this!] In this translation the romance is pared away, revealing a story which is set not only in history, but is about all of us.

Here in the West, too, we’ve been buried in ideology. If you think you are free, have a look at the BBC production "The Century of the Self", a four part series on how corporations have used Sigmund Freud’s and his nephew Edward Bernays’ theories to subliminally affect your life. In order to be free, to be a person, one must look deeply into one’s reasons for doing things. Most of us, in order to work, to have friends, to contribute to society, make some compromises with our innermost beliefs. But, being a person involves drawing boundaries and acting on them. Our global economy and information system relentlessly inform us of the effects of our actions. Do we pay attention?

Doctor Zhivago is filled with moral quandaries and ideas, a long rumination on life and art. Tolstoy’s social doctrine of the Kingdom of God on earth was part of the huge ferment of revolutionary thinking at the end of the 19^th Century. Pasternak’s Tolstoyan character Misha Gordon, a childhood friend of Zhivago, believes that personhood began with Christ. For him, the Gospel began as a “naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? … In that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.”

It doesn’t matter where our personhood, our responsibility comes from. It is a gift which we must not refuse. Eichmann and Pasternak are good examples of the poles which may be lived out with relationship to one’s culture and society. “Life,” Zhivago tells the partisan leader who has imprisoned him, “has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle; it eternally alters and transforms itself; it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”

It was this trust in life which initially thrilled me about Pasternak’s book. Harrowing experiences awaited its characters, as they await us. That trust did not desert Pasternak, even as much that he loved was taken from him. It was a good thing for me to learn as I was setting off into the future.

The Zorba Method

In telling the stories of Line, Marty and Paul, I believe I’ve been quite brave, showing their sibling rivalry, their misery at being unusual as teenagers, their youthful passions and misconceptions. It seems now that as we go into their lives as adults, I must continue to be brave. Braver.

As the 1960’s became the 1970’s, the peaceful revolution went underground. People began to explore their inner selves, believing that if they raised their own consciousness, the world as a whole would benefit. A fair bit of self-indulgence went along with this!  Line, Marty and Paul are no exception. I am going to have to describe the part in their lives played by sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We were certain that “the body was the unconscious” [Wilhelm Reich], that the body expressed one’s innermost self. Everything one did, how one dressed, how one moved, what one said, was revealing. We were certain we could start with a blank page, express exactly what we wanted to be, that the potentials for being human had scarcely been scratched, that we could move further toward investigating their limits. Desire was, for each of us, an earnest of truth.

From the movie Zorba, the Greek

We developed what I used to call the “Zorba method,” named for Nikos Kazentzakis’ character, Zorba the Greek. The philosophy was: act freely, fear nothing, live in the moment. Trust your desires to show you yourself. Know that you will come to end of them. Don’t avoid or go around trouble. Go through it! In those early days in San Francisco, it could be considerable.

Like the young English teacher in Kazentzakis’ book, I arrived in San Francisco full of book learning, shy, disciplined. As the eldest in a large family, I was not indulged. I was sure that the only way to become who I wanted was to do what I was told and work very hard. And only as I served others would they love me. I needed to let go, get into trouble, trust myself and learn to dance.

I did that. Delight, beauty and awe seemed to be around every corner. The intensity and variety of the music took us there, as did unexplainable, diverse friendships, and as many experiences as we could pack into a weekend and still get to work on Monday morning! Exploring a town Herb Caen extolled every day in the newspaper as Bagdad by the Bay (at the time meaning a place of unimaginable splendor!), we reached a shining coastline in three directions. We had enough money to eat interesting things, buy second-hand clothes and indulge ourselves in many and various arts. The flip of a thumb took you far from the city into natural wilderness preserved for all of us by diligent men and women.

The young people I know today could not read Zorba the Greek without commenting on his attitude toward women. But political correctness is a poor substitute for passion, I believe.  And one learns from neither literature nor life if his or her tea cup is so full there is no room for more.

In exploring our desires, I doubt that we were worse than many others. Certainly the culture as a whole has slid into a prurient interest in each other’s darkness, which everyone assumes is there. Self-indulgence does have its consequences and I don’t want to shy away from describing them. Line, Marty and Paul now tremble in that early and dangerous time of openness between the ages of 20 and 30. I want to emphasize the bright sides of my characters, the astonishing beauty of each upstanding person, flowering in so many and various ways. Brightness and shadow make up the whole, helping them grow into real people.

Poor People's Campaign

As a young, barely-politicized person, I ran across a notice inviting people to come to Washington, D.C., with a group studying non-violence. Leaving from Ann Arbor, the plan was to stay in churches and college dorms for a week, participating in marches and meetings in Resurrection City, built along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I signed up with the group of eight or so people.

The campaign had been Martin Luther King’s idea, but he was killed in April, 1968, and the campaign started in May. It was left to Ralph Abernathy to head up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I recall how tired Abernathy appeared to me, sitting across from him in a poorly attended meeting. By contrast, Jesse Jackson was everywhere! He was only 27 and had been leading an SCLC operation in Chicago. His upstart, attention-getting ploys caused a rift with Abernathy later. But Jackson’s attempt to downplay race in the struggle against poverty and the grass-roots organizations he created were certainly affected by his experiences at the Poor People’s Campaign.

In addition to poor black people, Dr. King had reached out to Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poor white Appalachians, all of whom came to Resurrection city. Multi-cultural experiences and classes for all were held in the “Soul Center” tent in the middle of the city. I’ve since learned that the Highlander Folk Center and the Smithsonian Institution assisted.

Every night, under the Lincoln Memorial, with acres of people around the reflecting pool singing along and dancing, groups played pop music. It seemed to mostly be a Motown Sound. Marshall Tate, who became a friend that week, drew me instead to the tent nearby where the old blues and bluegrass people were playing and Pete Seeger moderated the evenings. Seeger had been blacklisted from being on television in the early years of the 1960’s when I was watching, so I’d never seen him though we were all singing his songs. I don’t remember exactly who we saw, but probably John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, lots of banjo pickers.

An odd thing about the present, is that you don’t know the significance of what you are doing until later. It is only now, forty-five years later, that some of the pieces click into place. For instance, marching in a long, winding column throughout the capitol alongside a nondescript middle-aged white man, I heard the whispers, “That’s Dave Dellinger.” I knew he was a peace activist, but it is only now that I am aware of his power and significance. He was 53 at the time and had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. All through the 1950’s and 60’s he participated in freedom marches in the South and hunger strikes in jail, eventually coming to apply the principles of nonviolence to the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was indicted later in 1968, along with the rest of the Chicago Eight.

June 18, 1968, Washington, D.C.

Marshall and I stayed on in Washington when the others left, marching, exploring and going to the Smithsonian. I recall the warm rains which left mud everywhere and getting arrested (actually taken to a police station!) because I was jaywalking, barefoot and looked like a hippie. Delicious bread was baked in coffee cans day after day by an older couple in blue denim. On June 6, hitchhiking back to Ann Arbor, we got into a car and heard that Robert Kennedy was dead. Marshall says that when speaking to groups as part of his work for the Pacific County Democrats, he always mentions this. “It was a life-defining moment for me,” he says.

The Poor People’s Campaign is generally seen as a failure because it did not produce anti-poverty legislation, it didn’t get much press coverage and the campaign died out in the middle of June. Residents were divided about whether they wanted to share in America’s “culture of abundance” or revolt against it. One of the mule trains, however, did travel to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. And the campaign’s legacy lives on in the indelible experiences of those who were there.

None of my characters attends the Poor People’s Campaign. Marty is in California in 1968, Line is pregnant and working, and Paul is in Minnesota. But my own involvement informs the writing and everything that happens in With One Hand Waving Free.

"What's Happening, Man?"

In the process of finishing the book With One Hand Waving Free, the task I set for myself this year, I can report that I just finished Chapter 14 and thus am half way through the book. The part I’m working on, set in 1968, is intense for Line because she finds herself accidentally pregnant and is not at all sure her politically-active boyfriend Stephen wants to become an involved parent. Marty meets Erik, a student of architecture at the University of California, who will mystify her for years. And Paul moves further north, into a larger Minnesota college to finish his B.A.

Line, Marty and Paul do not know that it is “1968”. Their own awakening lives absorb them. Paul does not know that when he plays the guitar and sings “Take my hand, Precious Lord,” that it will be sung at Martin Luther King’s funeral in April. Line does not know when she sees Tom Hayden, his sad, charismatic face all broken out from living on peanut butter and coffee, sitting on a stairway in a hall where Democratic convention tactics are being discussed, that he is the poster child for the year. Marty does not know that watching Janis Joplin perform with a boozy passion, accompanied by her band Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Carousel ballroom above an auto showroom in San Francisco, is a historic event.

June 24, 1968 Washington, D.C.

1968 “rocked the world” according to those looking back. As a student in a Master’s program, I spent most of the year on the active University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. I marched in Washington, D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, traveling with a group studying non-violent action. In August I took a job in Chicago just as the Democratic convention was getting underway. The urgency behind me was more directed toward earning a living than working toward social justice, but I did what I could. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, having moved far from my origins, I was too sick to work and landed back in the bosom of my family. I was grateful they took me in and took care of me until my next foray into the great world.

The world is very large. In 1968 it was knit together by television, which provided nightly news almost raw, lifting events into a visibility upon which people could place their own value. At the time we did not know that the tide was turning, that there would never be another 1968. It was just what was happening. A question which we began to ask each other frequently! “What’s happening, man?” Because something surely was.

Balcony Seat

When I first began to live in cities in the late 1960’s, the heady feeling of intellectual freedom I found there was very much associated with coffee shops. Coffee was delicious, especially dosed with lots of cream and sugar, and the accompanying toasted bagel or pastry was inexpensive, my love of sweet buttery wheat a tie to home. Most of all, I was purchasing a seat at the endless street carnival of the city while connecting it to the extravagant life I lived in my head and put down in the notebook in front of me.

Caffe Mediterraneum, Berkeley, CA

I usually had a favorite cafe, associated with the places and times I worked, though they often changed. If it disappeared it was like losing a friend. For writing, one of the best was on Sutter Street in San Francisco, on the second floor above an art supply store. The tables were not so close together that you couldn’t overhear others if you wanted to, but far enough apart that you could hear yourself think. Best of all, you could sit at a window and look down into Sutter Street, watching people. The light at a particular time of day, the shape of the room, the demeanor of the server, all made up the atmosphere which acquired an almost religious significance. The mystique had to do with the brioche they served, the people I had seen from the windows walking up the street, the friends I met there.

Not least, were the words I read and sometimes wrote in these hallowed spaces. Writing was an evocation of the senses. As in drawing, the more detail you noticed, the more evocative the piece became. I was addicted to writing, to putting on paper words connecting mind and world. Not so much as a letter written to the world, but to my growing self. It turned out I wasn’t alone!

By the time Natalie Goldberg made writing in restaurants almost a cliché, I was done. Not with journaling, of course, but with sitting in public places to do it. These days, while bookstores close, Moleskine, whose revived notebooks are world-famous, is opening its own stores! In their words, they represent, “around the world, a symbol of contemporary nomadism.” It turns out your notebook can tie your whole, roaming life together!

For Marty, the middle sister who has always loved books and whose horizons widen to California in about 1967, coffee shops are thrilling. She lives with a Jewish family, the members of which enlighten her about politics. She is homesick, but family life eases the difficulty of crossing yet another cultural divide.

Having found a life I love and no longer so much in need of intellectual refuge, I nevertheless still enjoy the balcony seat at a wonderful coffee shop on occasion. No laptop sits in front of me, separating me from the world. The cup of coffee, the buttery croissant, my pen rather connect me to it, my hands moving between them with delight.

Hitchhiking

In the late 1960’s I did a lot of hitchhiking with friends. We did get into trouble sometimes, but nothing we couldn’t get out of. And the stories of the astonishing variety of people who picked us up and took care of us would make a novel in itself. I note that it is still common in Europe.

In the spring of 1967 we didn’t have backpacks. My friend Jean Olson and I, just 21, left Oxford, England in April for a few open-ended weeks, planning to visit friends stationed in the Army in Germany, and hoping to get as far south as Greece. We each carried a train case, with a change of clothes, a student hostel membership, and the Let’s Go: Europe guidebook. What I can’t remember is whether we actually wore nylon stockings! Skirts, flats, for sure, but nylons? Maybe.

Although, With One Hand Waving Free is something of a Bildungsroman, it doesn’t have a lot of space for a three-week trip on the continent of Europe. Marty hitchhikes with a friend down to Greece and the openness she gains from it definitely goes in the book. With little experience of the world, what unfolds in front of her is full of terror and delight. But here is one story from my trip with Jean which won’t make it into the book:

After a few days on Corfu and in Athens, we got rides with truckers on the long haul up through what was then Yugoslavia. One of them deposited us at the Hotel International in Zagreb (now Croatia), where we rested. We had been up all night in the cab of a truck, regaled with a big slab of chocolate and Turkish coffee for breakfast!

The next day we made it to Ljubljana (now in Slovenia), but as we stood that afternoon on a busy street, thumbing, we were approached by two girls, one of whom spoke excellent English. “You’re not going to get a ride there,” she said. “It’s Sunday! Come with us to a coffee house and stay with us tonight. Tomorrow we’ll show you where we usually hitchhike from.” They liked to go up into the mountains to the north to ski.

The two blonde girls took us to a large room open to the air where, at round tables, with many small glasses in front of each of them, people sat talking. Musicians played in a corner, accordion and fiddles, and often people got up to dance. Rounds of liqueurs began to be set in front of us, astonishing me. I had never had these small brandies and spirits, flavored with all kinds of fruits and herbal infusions. “Try this one, try this one,” we were asked. Exotic Americans as we were at the time, many wanted to talk to us. Places at the table kept shifting and the light settled into evening in the festive, open cafe.

When it grew dark, we were taken to dinner at the younger girl’s apartment. She spoke less English and it was a little hard to understand who lived there, but certainly her father and siblings. Fed meat (though our pale girlfriend didn’t eat any) and given beds with embroidered linen coverlets in the guest room, we felt we were getting the royal treatment in this odd, socialist country.

The next day, the girls indeed found a better place for us to hitchhike. Their only request was that we send them sunglasses. We did try, but we never heard whether the sunglasses arrived at their destination. All through the Bosnian War, I wondered about these girls whose faces I haven’t forgotten. Where were they and what happened to them when Yugoslavia split up into so many countries?

I no longer have any documentation for this trip, but many of the faces, the smells, the places, our fears and our delights are as vivid as anything that happened recently.