World Peace through Vegetarianism

I arrived in Woodstock with a backpack, a guitar, and two hundred bucks which I had earned as a cocktail waitress in a hillbilly bar at my last stop. Lisa, my older sister, was finishing up her final year at Binghamton College. It was the first time I had visited her outside of our parent’s home. The apartment was dark and smelled like old wood and fish. She shared the crowded third floor walk-up with Rose, a Polish exchange student, who insisted I try her version of beet borscht the first night I arrived. The table was set with an array of chipped dishes and mismatched flatware. I adore naked borscht with nothing more than a boiled potato and sour cream as garnish and was delighted to sample her old-world recipe. But in its place, Rose’s offering was a hot brown soup spiced with curry and made with raisins and sunflower seeds. I fished around the bowl for the beets—so overcooked that their natural blood red beauty had been bleached out hours before—like a miner panning for gold. To add insult to injury, there was no sour cream in their dairy-free kitchen.

I applied for food stamps the minute I was settled and with my first allotment Lisa and I bought a chicken to roast and a box of crumb-topped Entenmann's donuts. It brought back bittersweet memories of our junk food inebriated childhood and we laughed, like little girls keeping a secret, at the irony of the purchase, thinking that all things come full circle.

“I never eat like this anymore,” she said dunking her donut into a glass of soy milk. “I’m a vegetarian now.” Her voice was filled with conviction.

“Yeah, me too,” I replied grabbing seconds.

After three weeks she grew tired of my borrowing her clothes or her bed when I had the opportunity to share it with one of her friends. When I left town she took over my position at Bud’s Sun Lounge. At first no one even noticed the difference—our appearance was that similar. Like the difference between vanilla and French vanilla. And maybe that’s how I ended up in bed with so many of her friends. Guys that had always wanted to make it with her found it much easier to approach the identical little sister instead. When the folks at Buds finally caught on, it didn’t matter much. Not many girls were vying for my graveyard shift.

“Where are you headed?” she said stuffing a twenty into my pocket the way Dad would. Like buttoning up a child’s coat when the winds were blowing outside.

“I’ll try Woodstock…make some cash, then probably meet up with some friends in Germany for Oktoberfest.” By this I meant a flock of other volunteers that I had lived with in Israel. They traipsed around Europe doing migrant work as an eclectic band of gypsies.

As the Trailways bus rambled its way down the winding route, past farm houses and freshly thawed dirt, I caught a glimpse of the Mill Stream which flows through the town and tumbles past the entrance crossroads. In early spring the muddy water runs wild from night rains and looks like chocolate milk churning over bluestone.

I wondered why I chose this little hamlet in the sleepy hills that sits under the eye of Overlook Mountain and is surrounded by the well-worn Catskills. The idea of Woodstock came to me on the kibbutz. After a year of picking avocados and folding clothes in the communal laundry it seemed to be an honest pick. If the words of the song rang true, Woodstock would be a place to get back to the garden, and just far enough away from my parents. And if things didn’t work out, I would pick up a copy of The Mother Earth News, scour the classifieds in search of a self-sustained commune where I could raise sheep and weave their wool. At this juncture, though, my options were limited. I had family in town and knew there’d be a place to sleep until I moved on in search of hippie Valhalla. But one week stretched to a month and I knew I was hooked on this place where you can roam the streets in your pajamas and feel perfectly at home. I had also met an intriguing man at the laundromat and tonight I was invited for tea.

It was a moonless night and the front windows of the cabin were awash in soft orange light; a slow steady stream of smoke belched out of the rickety chimney pipe filling the cool March air. As opposed to the four square houses that filled the street, this one looked like the house that Jack built. The driveway was cluttered with all kinds of rusty metal beasts and in the darkness I stumbled several times on pieces of firewood. As I neared the small house, dogs inside sensed my arrival and burst through the door like a renegade SWAT team. I was knocked to the ground and accosted by the barking and tail wagging of two huge animals whose color faded into the dark air. An old German Shepard that refused to let down his guard stood crookedly against the narrow door. His bark was thick and raspy and if it weren’t for the door to lean, on his voracious croaking would knock him right over.

“Boho, Lily, Max,” a voice boomed with deep authority. “Come on, guys,” he pleaded. The chorus of howling was a canine competition and each one tried to out do the others like siblings bickering at the dinner table. With no end in sight; he said loudly, “Boho…quit!” The dogs turned to their master and continued pelting me with their huge tails. He offered me a hand, “Hi, how you doing,” his voice was soft and reeked of eastern European charm and garlic. Michael was tall and lanky with blond hair that spilled down his back and the hands of a farmer. “Lily loves girls, but watch out for Max, he’ll bite first and ask questions later!” he added ironically and smiled so that his bearded face lit up like a beacon in the dark and this I took as a celestial sign. “This must be the place,” I thought.

“Something smells good,” I said inquisitively rising to my feet and brushing off wet dirt from my legs.

“Oh, the cookies!” he yelled in a high pitched voice like a half-mad housewife and ran into the cabin waving his long arms. He was so animated, so approachable, so utterly bohemian that I fell into a fairytale trace that would last longer than anyone would have anticipated.

“You’re moving in with him?” I remember my parents questioned when I told them the news.
“So, we’re to assume that you’re dropping out of college?” Their hopes for my professional career were fading fast. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I did know that I was finished with being a theatre major, done with auditions, and constantly worrying about my appearance. I was positive that in acting, as a petite ingénue with dark hair and eyes, I would forever be type-cast as Anne Frank.

I was reading Hindu scripture, practicing yoga, and couldn’t have cared less about the dramatic friends I had left behind in Boston. I obeyed the first set of house rules and threw out my bra and razor. I was a latent flower child that resented being too young for the original movement of the ‘60’s. But there were plenty of traces of that life-style left in Woodstock, a town that’d been on the fringe and not the epicenter of the movement. It was the kind of place tourists flocked to in peasant skirts and tie dyed t-shirts, if but for one day. And it wasn’t until I became a resident that I learned the famous concert of 1969—which made it a household word—had never happened here at all.

Michael hadn’t even asked me to move in with him, I just assumed it and started sharing the one hundred and ten dollar a month rent. In the early morning, while I slept in the cocoon of the loft, he would bring fresh hard rolls from the local bakery, and turn on the gas stove to toast them. The warmth of the oven and the aroma of fresh bread filled the cabin. He’d remove the inner dough so all that was left was a crusty shell on which he would slather sweet butter and honey. The crisp bread would crack into my mouth and crumble as the sticky insides oozed their way down my throat. The butter always clung to his moustache and he’d spend the next hour smacking at his lips like a hyper-vigilant cat. Occasionally, Lily would bring home a bag of jelly doughnuts meant for the coffee shop that had been left by an early morning delivery man. I’d give her one as a reward then we’d scoff down the rest with a pot full of strong coffee. We spent endless afternoons meditating in the yard out back or working in the front garden. I planted a patch of soy beans and perfected a homemade tempeh recipe, which was supposed to look like a science project of white and green mold, and tasted like it, too.

That summer was a haze of purple sunshine and it seemed everyone in town was wearing orange and spouting mysticism. Bagwan Shree Rajneesh was the spiritual man of the hour, and I gently tip-toed around his teachings. He spoke on a high level of intelligence and his writings emanated a powerful presence, like a soft light that healed all wounds. I appreciated how hundreds were introduced to his form of dynamic meditation but I stood as an outsider looking in rather than become engulfed in the orange tide. When he was stated as saying “ …outer beauty represents the inner beauty of the souls as it is the soul which creates the physical body and mind,” I began to have my doubts. I retained my own opinion that science knows as fact that DNA creates the body and brain, not the mysterious “soul.” Outward beauty does not even guarantee a sane mind. And when Bagwan encouraged his followers to “not blindly follow authority,” I took the words literally—closed his books and never re-opened them. I was never one for group efforts and saw myself as a prima ballerina, dancing solo through the depths of spirituality, and not a member of the corpes de ballet.

On any given day you could attend community chanting and observe women lost in the wild abandonment of the sexual energy ecstasy radiating from their guru. And from what I was told, there were several followers that practiced free-love orgies at “closed” parties. I chose, on the other hand, to stay at home and get my first taste of a new set of house rules: celibacy. From that point on it was a slow course downhill.

As the new school year started, I picked up an Italian dictionary from the library thinking that learning a new language would fill the void for higher education, hoping all the while that at any moment I’d reach Enlightenment and be saved from myself.

Michael, a Czech immigrant, was a hopeless dreamer wanting nothing more than to become a saint and/or the greatest guitar player since Jimi Hendrix. Each afternoon he would plug in the Telecaster and send the entire neighborhood into panic. He liked the music loud thinking that it was the only way to appreciate it. Fifteen minutes into ear-splitting riffs the neighbors were on the front lawn begging for mercy. Luckily we didn’t have a telephone or he would have used the ringing as accompaniment. He thought we might form a band and was intent on teaching me bass. He was a good teacher and had great rhythm but even after a year of tutelage I never got past more than a simple blues-run and the bass-line to Daytripper.

He was strict about the house rules and made up new ones to suit him reminding me often that I was always free to leave. But I stayed. There were days that I hated the dirty confines of the cabin and dreamed of a time that I’d own a pair of white pants. As I meditated each morning, instead of visualizing Shiva, I found myself yearning for a room with thick white carpeting and air-conditioning. I was the twirling dervish chasing her own tail. No matter how hard I tried to break free from my middle-class upbringing, it circled me at every turn.

He forbade any meat products from entering the little hovel I now called home. I didn’t own a car, and only traveled as far as my Raleigh three-speed English racer could take me. On Fridays that was to the home of a well-respected psychotherapist whose house I cleaned.

“You’re cleaning houses for a living?” my father yelled. I was standing at a pay phone booth outside the pizza parlor, holding the receiver a foot away from my ear so that anyone passing could hear the ranting and empathize. “You should be having your house cleaned, not the other way around. That’s how I raised you,” he continued with anger and dismay.

“But Dad, I’m happy,” I said continuously over the next four years, though I knew, in my heart, I was lying.

When my cleaning chores were finished I’d welcome myself to a stocked pantry, and indulge on a simply prepared can of Star-Kist. I had to time lunch well enough in advance of my homecoming as not to carry any lingering fish on my breath, otherwise I might not hear the end of a long speech about how Krishna may have incarnated into that same tuna that I had so ravenously devoured. To say Michael wouldn’t hurt a fly was the literal truth. He went out of his way save insects; would keep a pair of tweezers handy to rescue flies from a spider’s web.

And he was very sentimental about fruit seeds; his desk was littered with them, hoping that one day he’d own a piece of land and plant them all. I was forbidden from cleaning his desk, a territorial issue, and the fruit pits would accumulate in moldy little heaps. One time we found ourselves in Manhattan at the Upper East Side apartment of my cousin Bonnie. The swanky duplex with the white leather wrap around divan and copper ceilings was no match for our overalls and Timberland boots. We looked like two peasants at the court of Versailles. Michael made the mistake of eating a peach and when her husband offered to throw the pit in the garbage, Michael lovingly wrapped it in a paper napkin, placed it in his pocket, and told Bert he’d plant it someday. I championed his sensitivity. From that point on, and for many years, Bert referred to him simply as “that pit guy.”

At nineteen years old, my relationship skills were practically non-existent. We argued about everything and nothing at all, like the day I decided to start wearing a bra again; he thought it was unnatural. I thought it felt quite good. Or the day I wanted a curtain to be hung in front of the toilet. There was no door on the bathroom. In fact, the toilet and bathtub were in the kitchen. He said modesty was Ego and I had to shed it.

I would storm out of the cabin and head to the deli in the center of town, the one with the huge loaves of European style bread in the front window. The ticket was always the same: turkey piled high on raisin-pumpernickel with Russian dressing, and a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray tonic on the side. There was a hidden spot behind one of the galleries where a stream ran, and I could sit in silence while I mulled over the thought of living alone. Each stolen bite of that sandwich brought me closer to a sense of myself—reminding me of all the cold-cuts I had consumed as a child. The turkey was honey-smoked and tasted exotic compared to tofu salad. The plump raisins popped in my mouth like little pillows of sugar and I gnawed on the thick crust as an animal with fresh kill. When the last crumb was finished, and I had licked the last drop of creamy dressing from my fingers, I would go back to Michael, knowing full well that it would just be a matter of days before I returned.

Preparing dinner wasn’t a simple as my mother ever made it look. There was no breaking open of freezer bags, no defrosting a pot pie; there was no freezer compartment in the four foot high GE that was packed with containers and bags from the food co-op. A big bag of carrots for juicing was always on the bottom shelf; bags of unusual flours stuffed the middle ones. Dinner every night was a variation on tofu and brown rice with fresh vegetables from our garden. I became quite proficient at cooking with soybean curd and the specialty d’maison was a throw back to barbequed chops. Thickly slice the silken block; soak the sponge like slabs in soy sauce and dredge in Brewer’s yeast before pan frying. The crispy brown skin broke to the tooth and revealed the tender white meat inside; the salty flavor made the juices run in your mouth. One year I entered a local tofu cook-off with a vegetarian version of gefilte fish, aptly named Gefilte-Fu. The tofu and cauliflower balls were pressed into ovals, steamed in mock fish broth (seasoned with kelp) and were plated with boiled carrot garnish and horseradish. It took first prize and brought home one of Mollie Katzden’s bibles to vegetarianism.

“My mother’s coming to visit,” I announced with trepidation. How on Earth was she going to handle seeing her little girl living in such squalor? I cleaned the cabin for two weeks, avoiding his desk and the puja table which was covered with pictures of saints and petrified food offerings coated in a layer of incense ash. When he wasn’t home I washed the unfinished plywood floor with detergent and bleach, and picked up the yard which was an endless sea of litter. There were dozens of chairs in various stages of decay around the yard, but the cardinal rule on that was to leave them for “the disciples,” when and if they ever came.

“I’ve gotten you a room at The Lodge,” I told her when she arrived. “It’s just down the street, and I can walk over in the morning,” I offered.

“You're not staying with me?” she asked astonishedly while batting moths away from her face with a travel map. She had a very low threshold for insects, and an even lower tolerance for grime. Unfortunately I had booked her into “mildew motel”—the only place available. “Your father and I want you to do something with your life,” she pleaded as we ate lunch at Joshua’s Café. I had ordered rare shaslik, removed the tender meat from the skewers, and dipped the lamb chunks into aioli as she spoke. “We want you to be happy, but could you at least consider how this makes us look to our friends. You and your sister both, she’s becoming a “healer” after two bachelor degrees in business, and you’re ….,” she stretched for the words and decided not to candy coat them. “Frankly, we feel you’re floundering. We thought that the year in Israeli would do you good,” she said as she pushed a falafel ball around the plate with her fork.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to disappoint your friends,” I said, self-righteously, unable to express it with kind words. My parents had always stood by me, had been my biggest fans. I found myself despising my mother in that moment, thinking that she was typical and uptight. The girl she thought would be her friend rather than a daughter, the one she had taken to ballet and opera at the Met, the one she had named after her own father, was gone and in her place was a cynic dressed in second-hand clothing. “Let’s go shopping,” I said as if pulling a magic rabbit from a hat. I knew that was Mom’s comfort zone and I’d end up with a new pair of Birkenstocks.

Before going she took me to the market and told me to buy whatever I wanted. I had done all my baking without vanilla extract, considering the lofty price an extravagance I could live without, so I reached for the largest bottle and Mom bought me two. After she had gone, I cursed myself for not having spent the night with her at that dingy lodge. I had opted to leave her alone with the bugs and the mildew in an effort to proclaim my independence.

My mother had thrown out the ball and in an effort to play on her field I purchased a rust bucket Fiat sedan for five hundred bucks. It was the kind of car you didn’t take out in the rain for fear that the bald tires would plant you in a ditch. I bought an armload of dresses at Goodwill, worked on getting a brush through my nappy hair before it turned to dreadlocks and made up a resume on the library’s community typewriter. An advertising agency in a nearby city hired me on the spot! Fantasizing that I’d be sitting in on creative power meetings; my chores were to clip newspaper ads and answer the phone.

Michael watched with indifference as I dressed for work, frantically rolling a lint brush over the patina of dog hair that covered my stockings. I mumbled something about not having a closet and drove off in my wrinkled outfit, learning soon that I’d make do with the trunk to hold my clothes.

While the office girls spent their breaks talking about the last episode of Dallas I’d take off my shoes and meditate in the empty conference room. There was no common ground to bond with these girls that pawed through the pages of Glamour magazine like supermarket shoppers with a coupon circular. Talk about a fish out of water. When I showed up in a short-sleeve shirt someone caught a glimpse of my armpit mop and I was cast out of whatever in road I had made. Spring was in the air and I had a garden to plant. They may have been relieved when I called in sick two days in a row, and then never showed up again.

There was a semi-permanent resident who lived with us but slept in an old VW van in the driveway. And though occasional legal letters came to him addressed quite clearly to a man with a Jewish sounding surname, he felt himself beyond titles and refused to go by one. “Ego,” he would say in a cryptic whisper. “Only the ego has a name.” Like so many residents of Woodstock, who change their birth-given names to single syllable utterances or words like Sky and Free, he preferred to go by “No Name.” I called him Doctor, bestowing the title half out of respect for his age, which was somewhere around late fifties, and half because of my perception of his spiritual advancement. He was small and bald with a curly silver beard like Moses. Some nights he’d dress up with a mid-length cape and stuff his soft pudgy feet, feet that had never seen a day of hard work, into a pair of Indian moccasins and go off to the disco. His constant presence in our tiny 200 square foot cabin was a blessing and a curse. At best he was a mentor who challenged my presumptions, and at worst, a drain on my food stamp allotment. House rule: Don’t ever ask him for money.

He and Michael had a strong connection that seemed to border on perversion. Like an ancient Greek student learning at the feet of Socrates there was something mystical and unnervingly queer about their friendship. Doctor likened himself to Richard Alpert, who through education and doses of LSD, had had a spiritual awakening, and as a phoenix rising from the ashes of his former self, emerged as Ram Das. He saw himself as a Yogi—celibate, and living the life of a monk. He saw me as a latter day Eve with a basket full of juicy apples. I was reduced to eavesdropping on their many conversations and overheard innuendos laced with: “women are the root of all evil.” He was preaching the benefits of celibacy to my less than passionate boyfriend and instructed me to “be the eternal Mother” when my hormones raged and wanted nothing more than a lovers embrace. In my anger and out of spite I’d go hunting for meat or other men, debating with myself about how I could possibly live without the “gospel according to Michael.”

Hope came as the New Year began. I’d escape Woodstock and enroll in the second semester at the Philadelphia School of Fashion. I wanted to wear pantyhose and make-up. I switched my major and would finish a bachelor’s degree in costume design. “We’re more than happy to help,” said my father with such relief that the tuition was paid the day I made the call.

I drove the five hours to school in an old Chevy that was a recent hand-me-down from my sister, sat outside the admissions building for another hour, then turned the car around and headed back upstate. I cried and white-knuckled the steering wheel as I floored it on the thruway. The thought of calling my parents made me nauseous. They were sitting in the back seat asking over and over again: “When are you going to get it together?” All of their friend’s children were on their way to careers and families. In their eyes I was the poster child for under achievement. Could I tell them the truth? I just wasn’t ready to play the game, wasn’t ready to jump back on the express train to average. The insular environment of the cabin had become my captor and yet I was terrified of being exiled. Their words rang in my ears and I drowned them out by popping a reggae tape into the dash board.

When I walked through the door, that evening, Michael and his mentor were eating dinner with their fingers and watching the evening news. Neither of them looked up from their plates when I burst in and joyously announced, “Lucy, I’m home!” Even the dogs were not surprised to see me.

That summer Doctor and I hitchhiked together to a Rainbow Family gathering in the blue hills of West Virginia, leaving Michael behind to tend to the dogs and clean swimming pools. I had accepted him into my life like a stepchild—one that you never warm up to, yet tolerate because they came with the package.

There are codes, seen and unseen, that link all Rainbowites. Nudity plays a big part. A committee of men and women greets every visitor to the enclave in naked splendor with a warm embrace saying: “Welcome home sister (or brother).” Their sincerity and flagrant charm was a glorious reception. After two days of hitching through redneck country, my weariness was instantly relieved. We spent the week sans attire, and relished all that this organic hootenanny had to offer. We dined on curried gruel at the Hare Krishna Kitchen, learned how to make whole wheat japatis from The Sufi Kitchen, and took instruction on meditating with pyramids on top of our heads.

If nudity was the first code of ethics, drumming was a close second and the nightly rave of congas thundered into the morning hours. One’s willingness to do without sleep in lieu of joining the collective trance and dancing in the dirt all night had its own rewards—a subtle "in" with the heartiest of “family members.” Doctor never made it back to camp before four in the morning, long after I had crawled into my sleeping bag under the pines.

One afternoon I saw Doctor get in the sack with a young hippie girl. I was amazed and repulsed at the same time. Every nuance of our living arrangements flashed before my eyes and nothing made sense. After four years of listening to his discourses on celibacy I couldn’t believe that he was, after all, a horny old man.

That week in West Virginia was a slice of life right out of the classic “Woodstock” movie and I should have been ecstatic to have finally reached Valhalla, and yet, as much as I fell in with the scene, I felt desperately alone. These folks had something that I didn’t, conviction. It was evident in the young women that had babies by momentary lovers to others that stringently followed a philosophical or dietary path. And though, I shed my clothes easily enough, I couldn’t shed my innate opinions and desires to live by my own codes.

If the flowers of tomorrow are in the seeds of today, I needed to roll up my sleeves and get to work. As clear as the blue sky that hugged the mountain line, I knew it was time to move on. I packed up my sleeping bag and hitched home to Woodstock alone. I was leaving “the garden” but heading towards my destiny.

“I’m getting my own place,” I announced after paying the security deposit on a one room studio. Michael was plugged in and laying down riffs like he was auditioning for Star Search. He did hear me, though.

Without looking up he said, “You’ll never find this again.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” I replied. Epilogue.

Twenty-five years later, the Moosewood Cookbook with its soy sauce stained pages, crammed with additional index cards with recipes like lentil loaf and mock salmon salad, still sits lovingly on my bookshelf. Michael, after years of rescuing felines from indigents that left town, became known to the locals as “that crazy cat guy” and was ticketed by the ASPCA and later thrown out of the little cabin which had literally fallen down around him. Doctor moved out west and the last I heard was sharing his van with nine white toy poodles.

The T-shirt that I wore till it was threadbare and read “World Peace through Vegetarianism” has long since become a canvas for someone’s art project. My kids most requested meal is meatloaf, and my husband will only consume tofu when it is camouflaged by other vegetables in Asian hot and sour soup. I still shop at the health food store and buy marinated tofu salad, but it’s the one container that can sit in the fridge without the risk of being ransacked as midnight munchies by my carnivorous family.

Lentil Loaf
1 cup green lentils
1 cup barley
4 cup water
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 cup bread crumbs or cracker crumbs
1 clove garlic, minced
1 medium onion, minced
1 rib celery, sliced thinly
2 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon nutmeg

Directions:
1. Add lentils and barley to boiling salted water. Allow to boil for a minute, then reduce heat and simmer with a lid ajar for about 40 minutes or until most of the water is absorbed. Remove from heat.
2. Add bread or cracker crumbs along with remaining ingredients and mix well.
3. Place mixture in a well oiled 9x5x3 inch loaf pan.
4. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 35 minutes.
5. Allow to cool for 15-20 minutes before inverting over a platter to serve.
Serves six to eight.