At all times prior to 2008, the memory of my mother is always related to food in some way, and whether she was teaching me how to cook, how to shop, or how to change the world, it was always related to food. In her mind, food was the root of all evil and good.
“Everyone appreciates a good lasagne,” Jean would say, an assembly line of baking pans, noodles, cheese, and sauce in front of her. When I saw this, I knew someone we knew had lost their job.
My formative food years, 1966-1975, were framed by shopping with my mom at the Berkeley Co-op food stores. The Co-op is the foundation for my eating and shopping habits today. The Co-op is likely responsible for me reading labels, voting “yes” on food disclosure propositions, and trying my best to stay away from anything produced in factories. It is also responsible for my trust issues around bread, chocolate, peanut butter, and any puffed cereal-like food.
The Berkeley Co-op is hard to explain to any adult who did not grow up in the Bay Area in the 60’s and 70’s. It was a cooperative grocery store whose practices today are fairly in sync with stores like Whole Foods, but back then were revolutionary. Think Whole Foods meets Berkeley City Counsel meets Symbionese Liberation Army.
Everyone who was anyone in the progressive movement was a Co-op member. When you joined, you were given a number. Ours was 7021, which I would come to learn later was quite prestigious among the hippie crowd because it signified we were among the earliest members. Although the Co-ops closed in the 1980’s, most of us still remember our Co-op number. Like a prison tat.
The Co-op used fewer lights to save energy, which made the place look dingy, or closed all the time. They didn’t play that comfy elevator music that made you feel like you were in one of those happy television sitcom families. The people who shopped there didn’t iron their clothes or wear make-up or dye their hair. They smelled like the woods but not in the good way.
Jean was a Co-op board member. Because the store was run with input and direction from its members and the Board, it did things that fairly ensured any child of a member would not be trading lunch items. There would be no Fritos or Snowballs, or Chips Ahoy, or Wonder Bread in our lunches (there would be carob crunch cookies). There were ziplock baggies to protect our sandwiches (ours were wrapped with biodegradable waxed paper that opened up during the day so our sandwiches became stale or fell apart, or both). All end-aisle displays were healthy choice items, and despite push-back from companies like Kellogg’s, sugared cereals were put at adult level, not a child’s eye-level.
These were all things that mde the Co-ops awful for a kid who thought life should be more like Leave it to Beaver and less like Laugh-In, but what truly was a living hell at the Co-op was the Kiddie Korral. I would get the DTs just watching my mother load the car with those homemade, scratchy, saggy, reusable burlap grocery bags emblazoned on the side with Save a tree, recycle me.
“Please please please, mom. Don’t make me go!” I would beg her.
“It’s only for an hour or so,” my mother would say, pushing toward the screaming mass of unkempt caucasian Berkeley kids (black people were not shopping there).
“Please, mom. I’ll bag the groceries if I don’t have to go in there.”
“Deal.”
To avoid the Kiddie Korral, I would do anything. Even help my mother shop and listen to her mindless drivel about preservatives, saving the earth, and making collard grens the proper way.
The Kiddie Korral was designed to give parents a place to drop their kids so they could shop in peace. It was an ugly converted meeting room filled with shitty broken gender-neutral toys, those wooden puzzles that bore even babies, some ratty nasty books, and an indoor sandbox I was sure the boys peed in. If you were hungry, they had bruised fruit, likely pulled from the shopping floor because it couldn’t be sold. There was one attendant to watch everyone. She was either an old lady who sat reading in the corner not noticing that Lord of the Flies was being reenacted right in front of her, or a youngish teen who tried to be the interactive “with it” sitter, but smelled too much like the woods for anyone to want to be near her. There was no Kleenex anywhere to be found.
One day, instead of heading to the dingy old Co-op, my mom brought me to the Safeway nearby, with its bright lights and the people who bagged your groceries for you in clean, new brown paper bags. I was so excited. She handed me an oversized sweatshirt and told me to put it on.
Instead of going inside with me, she stopped at the entrance to the store, and knelt down to my level. Her voice was low.
“OK, I need you to go inside and do something for me,” she said to me.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked.
“I’m going to stand out here and wait for you,” she said. “Now listen carefully, because this is very important.” Jean reached inside her purse and brought out a box cutter. She held it out to me.
“Here, put this in your hand and cover it with the sleeves of the sweatshirt. I want you to take this knife and go the baking section – aisle 6. I want you to drag the knife blade across all the bags of white sugar and all the bags of Nestle chocolate chips – you know, the yellow bags?” Actually I didn’t know, because my mother always bought carob, and the Co-op didn’t carry Nestle products.
“You want me to cut the bags? On purpose?”
“Yes, honey, that’s what I want you to do. You are small and at just the right height that if you just walk past the sugar and the chocolate chips and hold the knife out, you can cut them as you go by without anyone noticing. That’s why you have the sweatshirt on.”
“But why?
”
“Because I said so.”
“But that’s not right,” I said.
“OK, fine. You want to know?” I could tell she was exasperated with me. “The people who make those chips in the yellow bag are very very bad people. They kill babies in Africa and we need to stop them by ruining their chocolate so they can’t sell it here and kill more babies. Can you be my soldier?”
“Do they make sugar, too?”
“No, that’s a loss leader. That punishes the store for selling the chocolate.”
“A what?”
“Just go cut the bags, and don’t let anyone see you. Then come back out.”
Years later, I wondered what my mother would have done – what I would have done – had I gotten caught. I didn’t. After slashing the chocolate chips (which was not nearly as fun as the sugar, which made a whooshing sound when I rand the knife through the bag), I came back outside and handed her the knife. Then we went back to the Co-op to pick up our groceries. These were the political years.
That same year, a friend and fellow Co-op board member named Nancy Pelosi encouraged my mother to run for President of the Berkeley Co-ops. My mom got her paperwork in on time and we stayed up all night making buttons for her, but when the voter brochure/ballot came out, she wasn’t on it. It was a misprint, they said, but there was nothing they could do about it. Jean would have to run a write-in campaign and pay for her own advertising. As a result, my mom had to do the one thing she hated most: ask my dad for a favor.
(My parents tried really hard to be cordial to one another, and my mother – though she got full custody of me – never ever interfered with my relationship with my dad, allowing me to see him and stay with him as often and for as long as I wanted. They, however, really sucked at being cordial to one another. And they often used me to fuel their hatred.
“You fucking asshole!” my mom would scream over the phone. “Do you know how long you have kept your daughter waiting?” She’s been sitting at the door since noon waiting for you, and it’s 3pm.” That was all true. Dad wasn’t very prompt. Then he’d start up the soft voice version.
“Do you realize that your controlling nature has sucked out every bit of self-confidence your daughter has in her? She thinks she’s fat, ugly and stupid. Would it kill you to give her a compliment?” Also true. Mom was not really forthcoming with the praise.
A weekly occurrence, I could hear her screaming at him on the phone behind closed doors, mostly about money, but when she emerged from the bedroom and asked what was wrong, she always said, “Oh nothing. Grownup stuff.”
In between the fights about money (he never paid child support), and the arguments about me, however, Jean acknowledged his talent as an artist. When she learned that she needed to launch a write-in campaign, she bit her tongue and asked him.
“Can you create some campaign flyers for me? I have to run a write-in campaign, because they forgot to print my information on the Co-op brochure.” My mom had me in tow when she asked.
Dad was an artist, and engineer, and a certified genius. He agreed to help out. From brochures to hand painted posters, he created an entire campaign in a weekend. They were the most beautiful signs and brochures in the campaign. People too notice.
I was fitted with a sandwich board that said “THEY FORGOT MY MOM!” which I reluctantly wore while I paced back and forth in front of the Telegraph Avenue Co-op. As with my dinner party training, my comments were scripted, and we practiced my lines at home before she sent me out to the front lines. She won.
At one of the board meeting’s that followed, Jean met her second husband, who was the President of the Marin Co-op. They were married in the courtyard of the grocery store, while shoppers passed by. My mother wore a powder blue silk gabardine dress. I thought she looked like Jackie Kennedy. My brother-to-be tripped over the cinder block planter while carrying the wedding cake and it landed face-up in the dirt. Kids came by and scooped out pieces of it with their hands. The wedding was in a meeting room. As a special treat, they opened up the Kiddie Korral for the kids.
We moved to a tiny house in Point Reyes Station -- about 40 miles away from Berkeley, that was owned by my new step-father, Jerry. It was a depression era salt box piece of shit. There I shared a room with my new sister, 9 years my senior. Money was tighter than it had been when it was just the two of us, because my mom and step-dad were saving for a bigger house, but we didn’t feel poor. Point Reyes – at least back then -- wasn’t home to lots of wealthy people, so by comparison, we were fairly average, or maybe even a little better off, since there were two working people in the house. Other people had far less than we did. Those that did have money, like the dairy farmers, didn’t flaunt it. The worst thing about the house was it had an electric stove.
We did things for fun that people who don’t have a lot of money do. I didn’t know that these were cheap activities at the time, but I later learned the world looked very different to many of my friends in college.
It was the early 70’s. We played monopoly and quadruple solitaire and “I doubt it,” (which we called “Bullshit”) for hours on the living room floor. The cards we had were so old that we began to be able to cheat based upon the creases in some of them.
During the summer months, my mom sent us out with giant plastic mayonnaise jars to go blackberry picking in the summer. She taught us how to make blackberry jam, blackberry cobbler, blackberry pie, and blackberry ice cream. There were some incidents of cow tipping, too.
There was no movie theater or much of a downtown back then. During the summer, the old vacant Palace Food Market (which was directly across the street from the new Palace Food Market) would show movies like “Paint Your Wagon,” or “Singing in the Rain.” When we didn’t have enough money from our allowances to go, my mom would pop massive amounts of popcorn on the stove, and we would bring it down in giant brown grocery bags, to barter for entry.
What we ate changed dramatically. My step-father insisted on mashed potatoes with every meal, so my mom changed her menus. We didn’t have beans and rice with cornbread, which was my second favorite thing to eat. Worse, she stopped making my favorite dish – soupy chicken – altogether. Here is how you make soupy chicken, circa 1967 (which, by the way is pronounced like this: SOOOOOOO-py chicken):
Take a sheet cake pan and oil it with Crisco or other cooking oil. Sprinkle 1-1/2 cups of rice on the bottom of the pan. Open a can of cream of mushroom soup and blend in enough water to it to make 3 cups of liquid. If you are fancy, add some tarragon. Pour the liquid over the rice. Pat dry a raw, cut up whole chicken (or if you don’t have enough money for that, a bunch of chicken thighs), and coat them with salt, pepper, and paprika (if you are fancy, toast the paprika in a pan first). Lay the chicken atop the rice and liquid. Cover with foil and bake at 350 for about 45-60 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the thickest part of the chicken produces clear liquid.
She taught me how to make broiled lamb chops, and broiled chicken, and broiled steak. To broil anything, you season your meat with salt and pepper a day in advance, then wrap it up and put it in the fridge. Then, you take a broiling pan, set whatever meat you like on the top, and cook it for 3-5 minutes a side. Serve with mashed potatoes. Here is how you make really good mashed potatoes:
Figure 1.5 medium sized potatoes per person. Peel the potatoes and cover them with water. Add a pinch of salt. Boil them until tender (tender does not mean falling apart; it means a knife goes easily into them. If they are falling apart, then they are waterlogged and it will take a crapload of butter and cream to make them taste good).
Drain the water from the potatoes and briefly mash them to break them up. Add warm chicken broth to the pot so that it covers 1/3 of the potatoes. Begin mashing with a potato masher until there are no large lumps. If you like butter, add it now. Correct the seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve them exactly this way for the next 12 years. It will be the only thing they don’t complain (much) about in therapy..
Because Jerry’s kids were not adventurous eaters, we seasoned everything with salt-and-pepper. This would later change, but for the time being we were relegated to some form of meat-chops, mashed potatoes, and salad made with iceberg lettuce and Good Seasons Italian dressing.
I missed the fancy parties we used to have when it was just the two of us. I never got to take anyone’s coat. We never had parties of any kind, now. My mom said it was too far for her friends to drive for an evening. My new brother Scott said it was because my mom’s friends thought her new husband was an asshole.
One night my step-father was driving home from a bar and hit a kid, crippling him for life. Worse, the kid was a friend of the family. There was no discussion about it – I heard about it at school. When I asked my mom whether it was true, she said, very matter-of-factly, “Your step-father hit one of Jim’s boys. It was very dark. He’s very broken up about it.”
A few weeks later, a man came to our door with our dog in his arms. The dog was dead.
“I got your dog Tina in the back of my truck,” he said to my step-father, who answered the door. “Had to shoot her. She got out and was scarin’ my cows. Want me to dump her or you take care of her?” Scott told me it was retaliation for crippling the kid.
Sometime after the dog incident, my parents called a family meeting and told us we were moving to Corte Madera. My mom said it was because the 75 mile round trip commute was getting to be too much for her and we needed to be closer to San Francisco, and that was that. Scott told me it was because we were being run out of town.
It seemed to me as a child my family was either stirring up trouble, getting into trouble or pretending that the trouble never happened. No matter what, and through various arrests, drug raids, deaths, car accidents, abortions, molestations, and even my brother Scott’s suicide, my mother brushed herself off, picked up the pieces, deep-sixed the discussion, and that was that. I never saw her cry. Not once.
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