Lifestyle

We began to use the word “lifestyle” in the early 1970’s mostly as a discussion about choice. I had made a few big choices by then, but was just starting to be able to make money enough for daily choices. What to eat, what to wear, where to live and how to get around. These choices all counted, we thought. In was a matter of citizenship in the world. The civil and political efforts of the past decade had led us to ask ourselves how to vote with our dollars and live responsibly.

Living simply was high on the list. We did not want to live in highly ornate, single-function rooms. We were quite mobile and minimalist, happily moving into apartments with a mattress on the floor and a few dishes, but we had definite quality standards. We thought older things had been crafted better than new ones. We loved natural materials, cotton, wool and linen, and avoided cheap polyester fibers. And we loved folk arts, things crafted by people from around the world which flowed into the Bay Area.

There was a strong sense of egalitarian camaraderie about these values in San Francisco. We had little money, but we were never hungry or homeless, as Patti Smith describes in Just Kids, about living in New York at this time. We always had jobs, places to live and money to spend on food. When our friends ran out of food stamps, they came over for dinner! People traded grass for stuff. Some of it wasn’t very important. Easy come, easy go. Experience ruled.

In scavenging bits and pieces, we gave preference to older things and anything made with wood. At the time you could find sturdy wooden boxes on Grant Street in Chinatown in which china had been packed. We brought them home, stained them and used them as shelves. We absolutely had the redwood burl slab which became a table when set on a stump. It was kind of rickety, so it mostly stood in the corner, covered with plants. David acquired a red Navajo rug which we used for everything. I bought a small knotted pile rug from the Caucasus at the flea market that had been used as a camel bag. I still have it.

When I first went to work in San Francisco in 1970, women were not allowed to wear pants of any kind. (That changed within the year!) The dresses we could afford in stores were awful, so we bought good cotton and sewed our own. Peasant dresses, often. We could buy cotton tee-shirts and jeans, and they became even more valuable as they aged and grew ragged. The handmade jean patches I made were loved. We all felt that we could make better things than we could afford. Friends became accomplished weavers, potters and embroiderers.

The wealth of ethnic restaurants in San Francisco enabled us to eat out a little, but we were also experimenting with all the kinds of cooking we had never done at home. Beef stroganoff, quiche lorraine, shepherd’s pie, eggplant parmigiana and salmon casserole were some of our specialties. I remember how delighted I was to buy abalone in the store (!) and learn to cook it. I baked breads until my Sunset bread recipe book fell apart, and all kinds of cookies and pies. When we could get our hands on a car, we went out to the produce markets on Alemany St. Of course we did entirely without table grapes or iceberg lettuce, part of a boycott on behalf of the United Farm Workers.

We did not want to spend time and money commuting. Since we hardly ever had more than one car, we moved into apartments close to my job. When I took a shift at a newspaper from 3 until 11 p.m., we moved to South San Francisco near the paper and I bought a 10-speed bike to get back and forth late at night. When I got a job in a building near Fisherman’s Wharf, we moved to North Beach. I could then walk to work.

And yes, there were drugs and music. Everyone was exploring, testing. Parties were epic, rock concerts pervasive, often free in the park. David was terribly interested in, even a purveyor, of drugs. Acid, cocaine, grass and hash of many different provenances (all of which he knew), even heroin. I did my last heraldic acid trip on the island of Hawaii in 1977. It was great. It was wonderful. It was enough.