Damn Hippies

I was a surly 14 year old. I would have rather stayed home, but she insisted I go with her. I don’t even remember where we were going. I think it was to meet Dad at work for lunch and to do something scintillating like grocery shop, or worse, shop for clothes for Dad.

It was summer, and I would rather have stayed home. I would have liked to sit out on the deck in the sun, listening to Rush, and trying to get tan. I’d just bought a copy on cassette of “Hold Your Fire” which I was *thisclose* to wearing out. But no, that was not to be the plan.

I scowled as I sat in the passenger seat. I slipped off my sandals and put my feet up on the dash in just the way that annoyed her. She raised her eyebrows, and I think she was counting to 10. I defiantly stared back.

Mom’s second language was English. She often said things incorrectly. Like I said yesterday, she thought that “junk” had a plural. We drank milk chocolate sometimes, instead of chocolate milk. She measured things with a measure tape. I think at one point she’d even used towel paper to wipe up a spill on the counter.

But her arch nemesis was the hippies. Mom didn’t really know who the hippies were, though. To her, hippies and hoodlums were synonymous despite my efforts to explain who hippies were. She pointed out the window at the trash can that was left at the curb. The garbage trucks came through that morning.

“Hey, bring that garbage can back to the house before some hippie steals it,” she ordered. I burst out laughing. (Years later I relayed the story to Todd and he said “Yeah, because hippies are always looking for things to put their recyclables in.”)

She asked me what I was laughing at, but I was too far gone to explain. I got out of the car and dragged the bin back to the house, and then got back into the car.

A few years later Mom came home with a blue bin that said “Western Massachusetts recycles.” We didn’t live in Western Massachusetts. But she beamed as she set it in the garage, “Look at this great bin I found on the side of the road.”

I flashed her the peace sign and went back into the house.