Time Frame I.V.

[Bekah]

Okay,  I watched some of those clips   - my own kids (now ages 40 and  
38) have told me they mostly had a good time in their childhoods.   I  
really didn't allow the drugs around them (although I was certainly  
stoned in front of them).    When we did acid we left the kids for  
the day or so with neighbors or family.   One time my daughter (about  
age 8) came into the house and saw her dad dumping a large and  
wonderful,  precious plant.  (He was readying it for a move.)   She  
gasped, horrified, - "What are you doing?"   He looked at her  
straight in the eye and had no recourse but the truth -  "It's  
marijuana,"  he said.  "Oh,"  she replied and left the house  
again.     We traveled a lot.  We talked some politics but we had  
family around so they babysat for the protests and so on.

When my daughter was in kindergarten she told her teacher that she'd  
been to the Weatherman Picnic over the weekend.  The teacher dropped  
the subject thinking Weathermen = SDS - this was the Bay Area - San  
Jose.  At our conference I mentioned that he was a meteorologist.   
She laughed and laughed  as she told me about my daughter's report;   
said she would have invited him to talk to the class had she known.    
(Tells you we didn't look like your average mom and dad, though.)    
And a couple years later when she was in the 3rd grade (1976) I put  
my old fringe jacket (from a very good trip to Mexico) on my daughter  
along with a headband and told her she could be a hippie.   She came  
home early and changed into something else saying she really didn't  
want to be an Indian.   Hurt my feelings.

But by that time the life-style had already kind of petered out and  
then finally ended when my late hubby got a job with NOAA in Norman,  
Oklahoma (Severe Storms Lab) in 1977.  I was still Hannah Homemaker  
but in a better place and sending the kids to middle class schools.    
Up to then we'd been college hippies (not street hippies)  but now it  
was life for reals and although we weren't in the suburbs - we were  
becoming suburbanized.   Kids in piano lessons,  swim team, soccer.   
Tim still smoked some pot and I drank a lot of vino but the posters  
and candles were gone and  instead of an old battered VW van we had a  
brand new one.

I have to admit that deep inside me there's a part which will always  
be Tim's woman,  flower child - but more of an Earth Mother  
considering all the drop-ins we got seeking assistance in draft  
avoidance.    I think today I even look like I was probably a hippie   
"back in the days."   Sometimes I feel like I wear it like a big  
letter "H" on my forehead.  It's very cool among friends - it was  
hard with a boss who was a multiple purple heart Marine vet from  
Vietnam (one year older than I).

Neglected to mention my little political action of writing letters to  
a small town newspaper and getting a reputation.   "There are those  
who say the war is self-perpetuating; that until the government is  
brought down the war will go on.   So far I have resisted those  
ideas,   but as the atrocities are piled one atop the other,  I too  
am becoming radicalized."    (I know I said it better than that.)

Bekah


On Dec 6, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Bekah wrote:

> Omg,  I'm scared to watch although my kids seem to have turned out  
> okay - for being the kids of kinda-sorta mostly hippies.
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Dec 5, 2008, at 8:47 AM, David Morris wrote:
>
>> My parents were neither "cool" nor artists.  It was a very uncool
>> military family.  But at the opposite end of that spectrum of
>> child-rearing in that era, here's a very cool "documentary" on the
>> subject:
>>
>> Born Dropped Out
>> The Hippie Kid Stories
>>
>> Be free! Explore these unedited short videos of children of hippies
>> answering the same 20 questions in self-interviews. This is an
>> experiment in new interfaces for documentary video as part of an NYU
>> Tisch ITP Masters Thesis by Caleb J. Clark, 2008
>>
>> http://itp.nyu.edu/~cjc367/hippiekidstories/index.html
>