Plocktau: The Portfolio of Caleb John Clark.

Hippie Holidays

"Holiday Hippies"
Santa Fe, NM. November 26th, 2004
Caleb John Clark

A huge coffee table book titled "Hippies" greeted me upon my arrival home to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving. It was from the library, an institution my 64-year old hippie mother believes militantly in supporting, along with several others like public schools, children's rights, worker's rights, peace activists, etc.

As I was reading it later that day, she stopped in front of me and said, "I don't like the book."

"Why?" I said.

"I'm not sure. It just doesn't capture what it was like."

"What is it missing?" I asked as I flipped though the book looking at the iconic photos of nubile braless women dancing with Adonis men, famous poets, rock stars, communes, concerts, psychedelic posters, protests, riots, earth mothers nursing love children, and the great unwashed masses of humanity in between.

Thus began a very interesting discussion on our hippie daze. I was three years old when my mother and father separated in the Bay Area and she dropped out of society like a runaway bride sprinting out of a church.

It was 1969 and she was a nice-Jewish-girl from New York, your typical first generation college over-achiever who had her Bachelors and Masters from Smith and Columbia Colleges by 22 in teaching (her current profession) and was proceeding along a path laid out before her designed to take full advantage of America's bounties, bounties made all the more valuable by her Russian Jewish immigrant grand parents who felt lucky to have made it out of Poland alive in 1905, and her parents who worked hard for her future and never got to go to college.

"So what is not in the book?" I prodded.

"Well pictures of our families, of where we came from for instance. For me it was a reaction to being an achiever," she said as I looked at a full-page shot of hippies lounging around a famous San Francisco house smoking, "I grew up during a heavy time. Parent's burdens effected you you know, what they want for you. But I thought there must be a better way to live then to just to work all the time."

"So you dropped out?"

"I'd always felt different, like a black sheep, so when I found people I felt comfortable with, we supported each other. Everybody I ended up knowing was a black sheep, or became a black sheep."

"Wasn't it an important revolution?" I asked, taking notes and hoping to keep her going as she doesn't like to be interviewed.

"It wasn't a real revolution at first. There was no intellectual base, no manifesto," she said firmly.

"But it effected society to this day," I said, "I mean there's hippie costumes in drug stores for Halloween, tofu in supermarkets, recycling, medical marijuana, and kids today still try and be hippies!"

"In the beginning we didn't label ourselves, we were just living and I didn't know we were doing something special. But later I wrote to my grandfather that this was 'my revolution.' But hardly comparable to his. He almost died for the socialist Zionists trying to overthrow the czar in Russia. Quite a different scale. His life was on the line, that's why he had to leave the country. I wasn't going to be sent to Siberia if I was arrested like my grandmother was."

"What else was it like," I said.

"Well it was the most fun of my whole life. I think a lot of us hadn't had a lot of fun in our lives because we were expected to achieve being the first generation to go to college. But as hippies we got to play! I'm sure that's why I'm still in schools, because I get to play. The other reason is that I like to learn. I had been taught to compete not cooperate. I'd never had a garden or animals, bartered, lived without electricity or running water, or lived under a tree. I never had felt part of something larger then myself and I had a lot to learn coming from the city and suburbia. But I loved it and I learned it well."

"What about all the protesting and changes in American society hippies are part of?"

"It was selfish. It was not a big thing. We were myopic and didn't know what was going on. But I was old for a hippie, being in my early thirties, so maybe I'm not typical," she said pausing and thinking.

"But I do remember that I didn't read a book for whole year. That was huge for me!"

"What did your parents think?" I said.

"My poor parents. They must have been so disappointed. I didn't talk to them much. They were appalled. All that they'd sacrificed for their children, and look what they did. They threw it all away, went to live in the woods, dress in home made clothes, and not work."

"Then we dropped out of the hippie thing in the early 1970s?"

"No we didn't. I just burned out on California and the whole thing and went home (New England) to have a more stable life and raise you. But it was still with those values and in a place I could walk lightly on the planet and not take more then my share. Fortunately I had my teaching credential, and could go back to work. You've had a harder time adjusting to the realities of capitalist, corporate America."

My mother went back to cooking thanksgiving dinner with my stepfather who she'd met on Height Street in hippie days, but they were both with other people. Jack dropped earlier and was first generation immigrants.

"Hey Jack," I yelled to the kitchen where he was cooking, "what did you think of being a hippie?"

"I was never a hippie," he yelled back, "I was a freak!"

I guess that's another story.

THE END