Back in the summer of 1969, I was 10 years old. That was the summer of Woodstock and although I knew I wouldn’t be able to get there, I asked my mom if I could go. I envisioned standing at the end of my driveway wearing a tie-dyed tee shirt with a big peace sign on it, and getting picked up by a group of strangers making their way to upstate New York for the great festival weekend. These strangers would immediately love me and include me as one of their own because they were hippies. I would spend the weekend with them, sleeping in the back of their beat up, psychedelic painted Volkwagon Van (or it might have been an old yellow school bus with tie-dyed curtains on the windows – my vision wasn’t perfectly clear on that point).
And I wanted to burn my bra, too (even though I wasn’t wearing one yet).
You know, I’ve never told anyone this memory before. Not that it is any great secret, really, it’s just that I had forgotten about it.
Until recently. You see, our grown daughter thinks Brian and I were are hippies. I never knew she thought that of us, but she has made that reference several times recently, so it got me thinking.
As an adult, when I look back at the 60s, I remember the unrest and social upheavel. There were riots, deaths on college campuses and National Guardsmen on the news each night. It was the establishment pitted against the youth. It was the decade that we lost John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
It was also the decade of my youth. I might not have been mature enough to have a clear understanding of all that was going on (after all, I was just a kid), but, I was at an age where those events would impress me and shape who I would become.
I was of the age that I should have been what hippies referred to as a “teeny bopper.” This is the term for people too young to be hippies and who would eventually like music like The Monkees and The Partridge Family. But, I wasn’t there so much. I was more in to Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.
I wore granny glasses and had a pair of Beatle boots. And, I knew of Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary (“turn on, tune in, drop out”), even though I didn’t have a clue about what they were talking about.
My perception of the 60s was colored with the depth of knowledge any two to 12 year old might have had. “Make love, not war” was a beautiful sentiment to me. I didn’t know what making love actually was then, but I knew it was better than war. Guess, I’m still not wrong about that!
Yes, they were a turbulent, violent time, those days, but I believed in the true philosophy of the hippy. At their core, hippies believe in peace as the way to resolve differences among people, ideologies and religion. They believe that the way to peace is through love and tolerance. They believe in accepting others as they are, giving them freedom to express themselves and not judging them based on appearances.
So, years later, my daughter grows up in a household that subscribes to Mother Earth News, and the house has tie-dyed curtains in all the rooms, and her mom wears ‘earth shoes” and walks to work on Earth Day, and marches on Washington in support of women’s rights and makes macrame crafts. She grows up listening to her mom’s music like The Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Arlo Guthrie.
Is that why she thinks I’m a hippy?
(By the way, remember the song Mellow Yellow, by Donovan? It wasn’t about loving saffron, it was about getting high by smoking a banana. I swear, I didn’t know!)
