Hippy Sunday

Yesterday, Auntie Suzie was in "the two-state area," as I call our neck of the woods, along with Beau Greg, and we got together for a kind of  late-lunch/early-supper.  For better or worse, the recommendation came from a friend of ours who's kind-of a flower child and who, for whatever reason, loves the city of Lowell (Massachusetts).  So we ate at a place called "Life Alive," a very sensibly named little eatery, in a row of former mills/warehouses/factories. I don't know what  to call it - it's like a coffee house that happens to specialize in food, rather than coffee.  But the food isn't what most people would recognize; the entrees have names that tend to include "goddess" or "swami," and they're generally miso-based (or similar) brothy rice or noodle dishes with all kinds of vegetables and nuts and sauces and, no doubt, a smattering of organic honey.
I'm not complaining; the food was good, if unfamiliar, and the ambiance was worth the visit in itself.  My only whining point was that we were in Lowell and we weren't eating anything ethnic.

Lowell has lots of Greeks and Latinos and Vietnamese and Cambodians, so there's incredible food practically on every block. As we drove down those narrow Lowell streets to the center of the city, we passed any number of restaurants with the word "Athens" or "Pho" in the name or - most agonizing - "Kampuchea"; yes, the Cambodian restaurants are so Cambodian that they're not even Cambodian; they're Kampuchean.  Cambodian food is really the best cuisine imaginable, with the exception of Kampuchean food, which means super-dooper-authentic-Cambodian.  And we were ordering dishes with names like "The Supple Green Guru."  But again, the hippy stuff was also good.

But the ambiance: definitely worth the price of admission.  Hippy murals in all colors on the walls, organic shakes served in what looked like canning jars, old wooden tables and stools, kids behind the counter who very-much looked the part, but best of all was the bathroom.  Or rather, the "Bath." The place had "Bath" on the door, and when you went in, it looked more like a greenhouse than an outhouse, and the bathtub, still intact, was filled to capacity with potted plants.  Madeleine observed, "This is a crazy restaurant with a crazy bafroom!"  I wish I could do the place such pithy justice on my own.

So since we were the first ones there - Ian, Madeleine and I, waiting for Amy and Daniel and Auntie and Beau - we looked around the place (no one really cares what you do in a place like that), and I commented about how very hippy it was.  Ian didn't know what "hippy" meant.  This gave me a bit of a reality-check on how much has changed between my youth in the 70's and his own, in this brave new millennium.  It also gave me a better sense of how sheltered he is, and the difference between growing up in Boston and growing up in New Hampshire.  Vermont is the beloved homeland of the Hippy Nation, but New Hampshire is nearly its antithesis. So I tried to explain hippiedom to Ian.

Of course, he got my version of it.  I said that the idea behind the hippy movement was to try to enjoy life and focus less on making lots of money and more on spending time with people and relaxing, with an emphasis on sincerity and a preference for hand-crafted things over consumerism.  I said that the hippies had many good ideas, but the movement also had some bad tendencies.  I didn't want to touch on the details of hippy decadence; I don't know how much he knows about these things, and I'm afraid to open Pandora's Box, so I just said that sometimes they focused too much on enjoying themselves in ways that weren't good, and sometimes came at the expense of family life.  I concluded the synopsis by saying that I have some sympathy for the hippies but Mommy has much more, and in fact, Mommy is something of a hippy in her own right.

At that point, the proverbial Child at the Emperor's Fashion Show asked a painful question, as children do so well:

"Then why is she so stressed?"

For what it's worth, The Stressed One arrived soon afterwards, was beyond ecstatic for the entire meal, cheerfully wolfing down her rice-in-beet-and-almond-and-other-stuff entree, from the ceramic bowl, with a trusty pair of chopsticks.

(March 9, 2014)