Endosymbiosis
When cooking dinner, my Mom would listen to a renegade nutritionist on the radio. As a child, I would be helping her at the stove some of the time, because our parents didn’t separate household chores by gender, with some apportioned to sons, some to daughters. Instead, my sisters and my brother were expected to take their turns at everything, whether cleaning a room or cutting the lawn, stacking logs for the fireplace, or helping to shingle the garage.
As a result, I was later slow to understand the joke about a man whose wife went on a trip and he ate out of cans because he didn’t even know how to boil an egg. Like my sister, I learned how to make supper for the family, to bake pies, to pickle herring.
In the kitchen what I learned from the radio was not only data about nutrition but also skepticism about mainline assumptions in any field. I don’t know whether Mom intended this lesson, but it served me well with regard to religion, foreign policy, legal studies, states of consciousness, and many other areas.
Belatedly, I realized that Mom was a bit of a rebel, in part because her own artistic and educational ambitions were thwarted. As a highs school girl in Milwaukee, she wanted to travel to Germany to attend an arts school called the Bauhaus, where instructors included the architect Walter Gropius, the designer Laslo Moholy-Nagy, and the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. But higher education was for her brothers, not for girls.
During their courtship she made Dad promise that their children would be treated equally, and that, if at all possible, all of them would be supported through college. (We all were.)
An ardent feminist, Mom was nonetheless traditional in some ways, including being active in the Lutheran church in which she was raised, and in the youth group in which she met my Dad. When dropping me off at work the summer before college, she looked painfully serious and said, “I am so unhappy you’re going to Harvard because it probably means you’ll go to hell!” Other parents had congratulated me on the success of my application.. And I had quietly grown dubious about my childhood faith before ever graduating from high school.
However, Mom taught many valuable lessons. After raising four kids, she went to the New York School of Interior Design and started a business. After my father’s retirement and their move to the West Coast, she went into real estate. Then, without having gone beyond high school in her youth, she became an adjunct professor in California.
But even more than her professional success, what I most appreciated were lessons from my youth, including little things like her practice of feeding squirrels and sparrows in the winter when food was scarce. She saved bread scraps and threw them out when she thought no human was looking, threw it on the snow under lines on which clothes were drying. My favorite picture of me as a child is an image in which a little boy is standing on a frozen pond and throwing stale bread to very hungry suburban ducks.