This morning, before the day began to shimmer with summer heat, I walked my dog towards our neighbor Jake’s place. He lives on a 6-acre property, replete with a shingled farmhouse, garden, and creek. As we rounded the corner from our street. Vato’s tail and head perked; he began prancing like a fired-up racehorse. His objective? To greet Jake, who, beard damp with sweat, shoveled chipped bark from a dump-truck-sized pile on the side of the road into a large wheelbarrow.

As we drew closer, Jake paused, wiped his hands on his cargo pants, peered at us through his round, wire-rimmed glasses, and said, “Hello, little one,” (to my 50-pound doodle).

They had their usual love-fest - Jake scratching Vato’s head and rubbing his jowls.

He eventually acknowledged my presence, asking, “Would you like a tour of the garden?”

I wanted very much to see the gloriously abundant garden that I’d viewed with awe from the street for the 14 years I’d lived in this neighborhood. But despite this longing, I hesitated before answering. It was heating up outside, and I felt the pressure of trying to get a long walk in before it was too hot for the dog. But, recognizing the offer as a gift, and inspired by my recent rereading of Shonda Rhimes’ aptly named book, Year of Yes, I said yes.

I followed my neighbor through the tall wooden driveway gateposts and down the gravel road that led to the farmhouse, with the garden on our right. We entered the rows and beds of plants. The palette of sunshine-yellow squash flowers, deep purple eggplant, and lively green basil delighted my eyes as the scent of herbs and spicy fresh bark underfoot cleared my nose.

Jake leaned down, picked two cucumbers, and handed them to me. Since I had no backpack or bag for carrying the cukes, I almost refused. Fighting my automatic tendency to reject all offers and gifts, I accepted.

“Thank you!” I said as I followed him back out onto the street.

We parted ways - me to continue my walk and him to ferry more loads of bark to dress the garden paths. At the corner, I took off my sweatshirt, stuffed the cucumbers in the arms, and tied it around my waist, the cucumbers pressing into my sides like a square belt.

As I stood there on the corner, a neighbor, Don, waved as he passed me in his big white pickup. Behind me, I could hear the truck tires rough up the gravel as he parked in front of Jake’s fence.

Don shouted at Jake, “Just stopped by to watch you work.”

They both laughed. I turned back to look as Don slid a shovel from his truck bed. He started scooping bark and heaving it into the wheelbarrow side by side with Jake, the rhythmic scraping of the blades on the dirt counterpoint to their banter.

Crossing the street into denser housing, I chose the shady side. Yards bloomed in the morning light. The quiet and cool from the night before lingered.

A Little Free Library beckoned from under an apple tree in a front yard. I slowed, admiring the library’s rough wood exterior and paned windows, which offered me a peek at the book spines inside.

I thought, I’ll just look, but only take a book if it’s something I’ve been wanting to read. For animal lovers, this is like going to the Humane Society “just to look around.” Inevitably, you go home with a 3-legged dog.

I unlatched the tiny door and peered inside. E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View caught my eye. I picked it up. Set it down. My Dad’s wife did her thesis on the author, and, curious about what drew her to his writing, I’d always wanted to read his work.

But who had the time? Certainly not me. I shook my head side to side.

Then an unfamiliar book title caught my eye: The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez. I pulled it from the case and studied the front: the title in white print over an illustration of the back of someone’s head, a shiny black braid, a plumb-line on a pink blouse. I flipped it over to the back cover to read the description. Then sighed and moved my hand to set it back on the shelf.

I hesitated, questioning my decision to put the books back. Vato, tired of my indecision, lay down on the still-cool sidewalk.

I wanted both books. What was this compulsion to deny that? I paused, breathed deeply, and again said yes, taking them both. I shut the library window quickly before I could change my mind.

A few blocks later at an intersection, I pushed the pedestrian signal button and crossed the boulevard, books in one hand, dog leash in the other, and the cucumbers secured in the sleeves of my sweatshirt. In this area of town, historic trees shelter the turreted and gabled houses that preside over ample lawns. It’s always ten degrees cooler than any other area of the city. The well-watered lawns were too much for Vato to resist. He padded onto one, sniffed the damp grass, and turned in a circle to lie down with a sigh. This was his favorite kind of walking – not walking.

So, while he groaned with pleasure, I spent 5 minutes enjoying the sight of robins wrestling earthworms from the ground.

As I feared, the morning began to warm quickly. So, I encouraged Vato to his feet by luring him with a dog treat. We ambled under the maples and the oaks back toward home.

On our way back, in front of a church, a blue-black crow feather stood out against the bright grass. I collect crow and raven feathers. I took a step toward it, then turned back, leaving it. Then another pause and deep breath. Out loud, I said, “Okay,” (which is pretty close to “yes,” although Year of Okay would not make such a great book title). Then I tiptoed through the damp grass, my toes getting soaked through my canvas shoes, picked up the feather, smoothed out its tangles, and put it in the waistband of my sweats.

When I got home, I arranged my found objects on an end table: 2 cucumbers, 2 books, and a feather, all of which I had initially rejected. But why?

I suspect part of it is an old habit: a fear of being needy. If I don’t accept gifts or need anything, then I owe nothing to anybody. I am a product of the 60s and 70s. I grew up thinking having needs was a character flaw. I understood stoicism as the antidote. So, I learned to turn down offers of food or drink at hosts’ homes, put off using a bathroom, and to say “no, thank you” to any offer.

If I absolutely needed help, I prefaced requests with “Would it be possible?” Not wanting to burden anyone, I ended the request with “If you can’t do it, that’s fine. I have other resources.”

In her powerful essay, ‘The Myth of Too-Muchness, Gina Luker describes this shrinking of women’s authentic selves in order to make other people comfortable. She writes:

“Because the patriarchy did not simply steal opportunities from me. It stole my essence. It stole my personality, my joy, my intuition, and my voice. It convinced me that the careful, quiet, edited version of myself was maturity. It made me believe that being palatable was proof that I had finally gotten myself under control.”

I know I’m not alone in rejecting what delights me. Women are socialized to say yes to taking care of others, to put their own desires and needs last. In the 1970s, when I was a teen, women rose to demand equal rights, an end to domestic violence, and equal pay. Those who wished women would continue to be subservient, primarily men, trotted out the labels “strident” and “needy” as a ploy to shame into silence the call for emancipation.

And so here I am, having resisted my habit of denying my own delight, carrying a bounty of found objects. And in that, I am, in a sense, defying the patriarchy.

It was 1970. I was 9 and dressed in my usual jeans and t-shirt, with my tangled shoulder-length hair tucked behind my ears. I stood with Grandma in her garden amongst the ripe tomatoes. The earthy scent underfoot met the pungent aroma of tomato leaves. I held a saltshaker in my left hand, ready to pick and eat the reddest, ripest specimens.

“Do you go to church?” Grandma asked me as she did every time I saw her. When I said no, her lips tightened and her eyebrows tensed. In the past few years, our parents had moved our family of six from this small town in Northern California, where most of our relatives, including Grandma, lived, to a series of locations. Mom and Dad were following their career and social justice aspirations, creating their version of a values-driven life.

It didn’t allay Grandma’s fears about my whereabouts and religious education that my parents had relocated to Chicago in the summer of ’68, just after the unrest that had (literally) inflamed the city. Now, my family was back in California and settled in a less fraught location, a nearby university town. But despite the physical safety of our current home, Grandma still worried about my soul. I didn’t want to upset her, so, staring at the row of corn at the far edge of the garden, I lied.

Hoping to make her aqua-blue eyes sparkle, I said, “I read the bible a lot.” Which was sort of true. A teaching assistant at our non-religious private school had given me a white, faux-leather, palm-sized bible and exhorted me to study it daily. I opened it most days, usually getting as far as the begats, the first chapters at the beginning of the book, a litany of who begat who, that went on for dozens of pages, which stopped me short every time. At nine, I didn’t understand the stilted and archaic language and preferred to read about adventurous girls and young women like those in Harriet the Spy or Little Women.

But already well-schooled in people-pleasing by the character Jane, Mommy’s little helper, of Dick and Jane, the ubiquitous elementary school reading primer of the 1960s, I lied. I think she may have known that I was trying to appease her. But my fabrication seemed to smooth Grandma’s worry, and she plucked a tomato and bit into it, squirting a seed onto the front of her plaid house dress. Back in her good graces, I too twisted a tomato from the vine and bit into it; its warm juices washed clean from my tongue the tiny transgression of untruthfulness.

My dad, the oldest of Grandma’s six children, was, I believe, the only one of them who did not attend church. I think the pressure in the provincial/rural town was too great for his siblings to even consider not going. But my family didn’t live there anymore. We had moved on.

I think Grandma had given up on saving Dad, but she still hoped that my three siblings and I were salvageable. I believe her concern was based on worry about my moral compass, which she must have believed would not point to True North without the magnetic pull of Christianity and a vengeful God keeping me on the path to righteousness and out of hell. I think she viewed morals dictated by the church as the only way.

What she couldn’t see was the moral code already instilled in my dad, not from churchiness but from growing up on a farm, in poverty, and dependent on neighbors and nearby relatives.

Things that were frowned upon in my immediate family included lying, selfishness, stealing, inauthenticity (which encompassed anything in popular culture, including television, makeup, and bras), religiosity, the idea of God as a wrathful entity, violence, racism, war, wealth, and unkindness.

My parents also modeled the values of interdependence, the sharing of tangible and intangible resources, truth-telling, critical thinking, pacifism, and cooperation. Note that none of those included fear of God, thank goodness.

Prior to my parents leaving the church, I remember my father debating original sin with our Lutheran pastor at a cocktail party. They sat by the fire in armchairs, a drink in one hand. I played on the braided rug between them, building a car from Tinkertoys. I don’t remember the exact words, only that Dad loathed the idea that children could be labeled sinners from the moment they took their first breath.

Now, as an adult, I imagine that the patriarchal authors of the Bible and those who continue to espouse the idea of original sin likely saw it that way because babies come out of vaginas. Contact with the womb and passage through a woman would be enough to incriminate the newborns.

I don’t remember much more from that conversation between the pastor and my Dad, but it shows that he, and my mom too, had faith in the inherent goodness of children. As proof of that, they never told us we were bad kids; instead, if we hit a friend or stole a cookie, they engaged us in conversation about what just occurred and guided us to think about the merits, or lack thereof, of our behavior.

When I was young, my parents were fervent in their altruism; they had a passion for environmentalism, feminism, and righting social inequities. They didn’t need an invisible spirit to scare them into being decent human beings. They had internal compasses.

So, yes, our family had its own culture and morality, distinct from that of our church-going relatives. It was not rudderless or sinful. But it was also not perfect.

Our parents made many mistakes, as parents do (me included), and sometimes brought us into less-than-ideal situations, like the social justice-oriented, but cultish organization, where we stayed in the summer of ’68.

But to Grandma, we were lost. The road to righteousness was a toll road that demanded allegiance to the authority of a wrathful God.

Despite this, as I grew into adulthood and started dating and partnering with women, Grandma always inquired about their well-being. I know that she thought same-sex love sinful, but she never tried to make me feel less deserving of love than my heterosexual cousins.

Despite her fervent beliefs in the mandates of her religion and her ensuing fears for my and my siblings’ souls, she loved us fiercely. And so, that day in the garden, she let the answer that I read the bible daily suffice, clasped my hand, and we continued to wade together through the warm, whiskered leaves of the tomato patch, awash in the glory of the sun and the pleasure of holding and eating the heavy, ripe tomatoes.

Whose Utopia?

I grew up in the 1970s counterculture, a teenager in an adult-centric world. The starry-eyed rapture people exhibit when they learn about my nontraditional upbringing underscores for me how much the myth of the idyllic sixties and seventies counterculture has been promulgated by people my parents’ age, those who were young adults during that era. My experience during that time tells a different story.

Those who are envious of my upbringing must be imagining me dancing all day with flowers in my hair, going to rock concerts on Sundays instead of church, and retiring at night to a hammock strung between pine trees under a shimmering cloak of stars.

Yes, these impressions have roots in reality, but they are a microdot of the experience of growing up in this subculture. As a demographic, those of us who came of age in this movement are not a monolith. Our experiences differ, yet I’ve noticed commonalities amongst my friends with similar upbringings.

Many of us did not have a television in the house; we went to potlucks bearing questionable food offerings; did some form of dancing, whether it be Sufi, folk, free dancing to a rock band, or our parents’ friends’ guitars and conga drums; and smoked pot at an early age.

The one guaranteed shared experience with my peers is the blurring of boundaries between adult territory and childhood. The most harmful of these was the adults in our world extending the “Free Love” movement to include teen girls.

Often, this inclusion was sanctioned and encouraged. Many men and older boys felt it was their right to prey upon my friends and me, misinterpreting our “seductive” behavior as consent. At 12-17 years old, we were still children playing at being adults. We mimicked the women around us, not with an intent to have sex with adult men, but in the spirit of trying on adulthood, much like younger children play dress-up with a pile of discarded ballgowns.

Later on, at 21, after I’d escaped the small town of my childhood, I worked in a summer camp. One of the 17-year-old counselors-in-training, part of a group of high school girls volunteering at the camp, wanted to brush my hair and rub my shoulders. You could say she was flirting with me. Instinctively, despite or perhaps because of the predation I experienced as a teen, I felt the power imbalance and the wrongness of allowing a transgression of boundaries. Although I was 21, just 4 years older than her, I was a lead counselor, a paid staff member, and an adult college student living independently.

Many men from my childhood would have chosen to interpret the high-schooler’s offer as a green light for sexual behavior, then blame the girl. “She seduced me!” they’d protest. But I will say, as a person who was once a teenage girl, in the situation at camp, I knew that she was testing a role, and it was my responsibility as the adult to set boundaries. Simply put, we must model behavior, not take advantage of innocence. How hard is that?

The other facet of the seventies was the questioning of antiquated rules of comportment. Exploring freedom and straining against the constraints of their parents’ generation, my parents and their friends threw their hamburgers and shakes against the wall, scratched the needle across the Elvis record, ditched church, and exchanged their letter jackets for lentils, rock and roll, and batiked tunics.

I benefited in many ways from this freedom. I was encouraged to follow my passions, and I had many. My parents provided my siblings and me with the education and tools to think critically and to explore our creativity. I had a drum set, journals for writing, access to a sewing machine, an herb garden, use of the kitchen, permission to use the scrap wood and tools in the garage, and a library card. This was the perfect home for my big dreams, curiosity, and endless whims. It worked well when, in my preadolescence (ages 9-13), my parents provided my siblings and me with a structure: mealtimes, chores, school, and family trips. I thrived. Creativity grows in delineated space, not in a house with no walls.

When the framework of our home tilted and began falling apart, so did I. Teens need as much support as toddlers; it just looks different. They still benefit from limited choices and emotional support. They will protest it, but their struggle is like a butterfly beating its drying wings. Parents must provide an atmosphere in which those wings can unfold before the attempt at going aloft. Too much freedom becomes a free fall.

And free fall I did. I lost many friends to their “old men,” their boyfriends who were 30, 40, or older. My girlfriends, once shacked up, no longer had time to hang out; they had meals to cook and houses to clean. Some of them became pregnant and were burdened with infants. Just to be clear, we’re talking 14- to 18-year-old girls.

A number of my friends’ parents allowed their adult (need I say “male?”) friends to “mentor” their daughters into sex. They rationalized it by saying, “I’d rather have an experienced person show her how.” Today, we call this child abuse, and rightly so. The parents’ abdication of responsibility, the narcissistic assumption that what they wanted for themselves, their children must want too, destroyed many girls’ adolescence.

What adults at that time called “openness” about sexuality was, in fact, a transgression against childhood and a form of emotional voyeurism.

I don’t fault anyone from that generation for romanticizing that era; in their minds, they were building a utopian society, a worthy goal.

But a utopia for whom? Many children raised in the counterculture (hapless passengers on their parents’ journey) were forgotten in the back of the car. The adults merrily careened on winding roads, seeking their own wide-open futures, as we, their offspring, sans seatbelts, skidded on the Naugahyde and flew haplessly through space.