Talking of knowing yourself...

I'm sitting here, full of joy, having sung along at the top of my lungs to the whole of Carole King's Tapestry while assembling my vegetarian lasagne for tomorrow's lunch. (I'm not a veggie, but we're lunching with veggies.)

I'm an old hippy, aren't I?

So much of what passes for life now upsets and confuses me. I just hate casual cruelty of the type meted out between kids, as entertainment on television, and reaching its nadir in drug-riddled hinterlands and middle-class suburbs alike as out-and-out war between generations living in the same miserable house, children abused by vicious, mindless parents or parents abused by slack-jawed teenagers. I hate that it has almost become the norm. I was only a little girl when Tapestry was made, my teens were in the late 70s when things were already much tougher, and my youth in the 80s when I was the only person I knew who had a long straight curtain of hair, and I still do now. Spiritually I'm a flower child.

In the nice, middle-class school where I teach, I was admonishing a class yesterday for calling out unpleasantnesses to one another, and I said "I don't like unpleasantness." One of the very nice, very gentle boys instantly retorted "Everyone's unpleasant, Miss." Now I know that's open to all sorts of philosophical interpretations, but as a knee-jerk reaction I find it troublesome. While I like an intellectual set-to as much as the next person, in the end I yearn for harmony. As I get older I find my skin getting thinner and thinner, to the point where I flinch at any injustice meted out to anyone anywhere. It's not quite as bad as it was when I was a new mother, but not far off. Everyone's child is my child. Everyone's environmental disaster is mine.

But in my own home, in my cocoon, I can play Simon and Garfunkel followed by Carole King and sing and dance, trying to ignore Daughter's disapproval, and kid myself that the world is full of love and knowledge and self-awareness and I can experience really the deepest joy.

As an aside, the same boy who piped up about everyone being unpleasant asked me as I was going around correcting French direct object pronouns last week "Do you like Leonard Cohen, Miss?" When I confirmed that I did, he said "Thought so." Do you think he thinks I'm an old hippy too?

I'm old, I'm a hippy and I'm proud.