Ariel Gore

You asked me once if I was alive during the olden days. I had to laugh. ‘What do you mean, the olden days?’

When I was a kid I’d pictured covered wagons and Model T Fords. You were thinking VW buses.

Later, at the winter assembly, your class sang ‘Free to Be You and Me,’ and you wondered how I knew the words.

Oh, I wish we still had a record player, girl-child, because I don’t have Marlo Thomas on CD. Maybe if I could play it for you, then you’d understand something more than I can tell you about those olden days-before your grandmother’s hair was gray (you know, she waited for you, didn’t stop dyeing it until you were born), before I ever thought I’d be a mother myself (we worried about nuclear war then, not Y2K), before I was dragged in my torn bell-bottom cords to White Flower Day at Macy’s (I would have saved those for you, girl-child, but who knew they’d be selling them at the mall now?), before kaleidoscope memory made your family history so hard to trace.

The stories circle now. They never quite line up. And you look at me cross-eyed as if to say, ‘Who are these freaks whose blood runs through our veins, Mama?’ And what can I tell you?

These are the answers I was given as a kid:

My father was a merry prankster.

My sister was born in a tent during the summer of love.

My mother was sleeping with Henry Miller.

Or was it Ken Kesey?

No, Ken Kesey was a madman.

Ultimately, she seduced the local Catholic priest.

He wasn’t supposed to marry her.

Vows, you know.

The family fortune is hidden behind door number two.

Millions.

No, billions.

My grandfather was a CIA plant.

Ours is not a family of pathological liars as you sometimes suspect, girl-child. But you have to understand something about the nature of memory, history, schizophrenia, and the long-term effects psychedelic drugs can have on the brain before you start taking anybody’s word for anything.

What’s that poem? That line? Childhood is a time when nobody dies? I don’t know whose childhood they were talking about. When I was a kid they dropped like flies. The revolutionaries off their barstools. Mayors. City supervisors. Cult members and cult leaders. Bearded wanderers who called themselves ‘Wolf.’ The potters shot point-blank by their husbands-men who wouldn’t see the insides of jail cells for two decades. Later, I’d stumble upon missives in the newspaper, ‘So-and-so finally brought to justice.’ The poets all climbed over the railing and flung themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge. I remember feeling sorry for one who survived. And relieved for her when I heard that she’d managed to drown herself in barbiturates and whiskey as soon as they had released her from the hospital. When I was a kid there seemed to me nothing quite so tragic as a failed suicide.

There were survivors, of course. There are always survivors. The poets moved into seclusion, up into the woods near Fort Bragg. The potters went back to school. Heald College. They learned computer programming basics and moved into condominiums. Invested quite wisely in the stock market.

The revolutionaries were diagnosed with manic depression. And the painters with paranoid schizophrenia.

At first your grandfather wouldn’t take his medication. He said they were trying to kill him. But eventually he succumbed. Eventually, everyone succumbed.

And the children, we were scrubbed clean and dragged off to White Flower Day. Thrust suddenly and unprepared into innocence. Excessive sanitation. Hushed tones. A belated sober revelation that there are certain things children should not be told.

In that instant, as if by some mysterious curse, everyone stopped dying. Jeans were patched and pegged. Chocolate replaced carob. Margarine turned into butter. All the tastes changed. And all the smells. Pot and eucalyptus became roses and fresh paint. No one described hallucinations at the dinner table anymore. And I wondered: Did they stop seeing demons on their bedroom ceilings at night? Or did they just stop telling?

I was born on the Monterey Peninsula in the summer of 1970. Born to unmarried artists, refugees from Beverly Hills who had left everything but a flair for the dramatic and a nasty habit of name-dropping behind Who had shrugged off the trust funds that weren’t really there and left for the cooler waves that came crashing on northern sea cliffs and foggy shores. That much checks out.

You know, girl-child, there’s something heart-breaking about your grandmother’s poetry from those days. We-your aunt and I and the rest of the kids who used to huddle together on Saturday mornings before the grownups came to, huddle at the neighbor’s house, in front of the forbidden TV, with spoonfuls of peanut butter and slabs of stolen ham-we were supposed to be the first generation of truly free children. Free to trample each other at the Bay School. Free to eat tofu and bean sprouts. Free of the sway of pop culture and advertising and Saturday morning cartoons. Free of finger bowls and social constructions of every kind. Free not to suffer from the eating disorders and gender-identity crises that weren’t supposed to come later, but did. Of course they did.

Still, I was never nostalgic for the hopes in that poetry. I didn’t miss the communal living and talkof nonviolent revolutions. I never did like the anarchist’s free school.

When we moved to Palo Alto and Jimmy Carter morphed into Ronald Reagan and folk song circles became Amnesty International meetings, I didn’t think of the olden days as tie-dyeing parties and Pacific Coast fields of Monarch butterflies. Yes, there had been that, too. But what I missed was the raw truth of it all. I missed the suicides and the open weeping. I missed believing that we would someday come into a family fortune. I missed my father, and all his colorful visions. I missed believing that someone was following us. That’s what made us special, after all. We had the thickest FBI file. Didn’t we? I’d always wonder.

When your grandmother finally settled down with my stepfather and they started shopping at Williams Sonoma, life got more predictable. More peaceful. But I missed the headlines and whispers behind our backs at the food co-op. He’d been a Catholic priest, after all. ‘Torn from the cloth by a temptress named Eve.’ I missed the journalists. I missed believing that our mother was the most scandalous woman on the block. I missed her altered states.

Their wedding song was Cat Stevens’s ‘Morning Has Broken.’ But I missed the night.

I don’t know if I spent my early years in the olden days, girl-child. An editor called this morning and asked me to describe a girlhood in the counterculture. I told her I wasn’t sure I had one to tell.

Because, you know, the funny thing about olden days and modern days, about culture and counterculture, is the way they blend and blur. The way dawn can look just like dusk when you awaken disoriented after a day-long nap or a night-long sleep.

What culture are we living in now? Your grandmother curses my tattoos. Did she change? Or did I?

This morning you asked me to buy you peace-sign earrings at Clothestime, girl-child. Tonight the network newscasters told us straight-faced that the war was over. The smart bombs had done their job and all the casualties were friendly fire.

And sometimes I still wonder: Did everyone really stop dying? Or did everyone else just start lying?