I’m on a bit of a rampage, which I go on every few years. Usually they are so painful but so far this one has proceeded peaceably. I am working on decoupling aggression from anger. It’s very hard. And for the record, being called a badass is not a compliment.

In other news my mother has decided to learn to cook using The Moosewood Cookbook. She is a masochist. I’m happy she’s making food for herself and thinking about cooking and eating but wow—Moosewood. It’s like learning to drive on a 1982 Ford Pinto standard shift station wagon (powder blue), with my rageful father sitting next to me as I yanked the gear shift up and out of the car and had to drive all the way home, through town (we second shifted it right on through the 4-way stop sign and the railroad crossing), chugging up the hill in second gear, my father gripping the clutch in his hands, grinding his teeth, sweating.

To me, that is what learning to cook at age 82 while living alone using The Moosewood Cookbook is like. Probably less stressful but no less devoid of fun. My ears pricked up when she mentioned buying bulgar wheat at the health food store and I asked her what cookbook she was using exactly. That sent me back to childhood and my lifelong belief that many hippies just had no tastebuds in their head in the 1970s and 1980s.

My town had the worst health food store ever

It smelled like dirt. The proprietor stood around in a converted packing shed that was very dark and filled with aluminum garbage bins all filled with seeds and beans and wheat and grains and dried fruit. Dust filled the air, swirled in the sunlight streaming through onto the bearded proprietor in his very short shorts.

There was also the lie about carob

The two items that were supposed to be of interest to children—besides running our dirty hands in the dried beans and feeling them slide through our fingers—were kefir, that Russian fermented dairy drink that was actually sweet and sort of interesting, and carob, which was total bullshit. Carob was “just like chocolate, but healthy.” That’s what all the hippies told us and they let us have a ton of carob-flavored desserts.

Terrible! Not good! Gross waxy-tasting brown sludge!

Usually hippie parents were invisible to me. Unlike the parents of my Christian friends, the hippie parents were not interested in me or my forbidden Judaism. The Christian parents asked me questions when I was at their house, and always tried to bring me to church after Saturday night sleepovers (my parents were pissed at this and began asking the other parents if church was required and then I had fewer sleepovers). Hippie parents had a totally neutral vibe, except for the repeated falsehood of positing carob as being as tasty as chocolate, and I resented it.