Making an Unconventional Life

Heather McDougal
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

When I was a kid, we didn’t have a colander.

What we had was this weird conical thing with holes in it that my mom found at a thrift store. I think it was for making jam. So whenever we made spaghetti, it came out into the bowl in this conical lump, and we had to mash it down a little (or flick it, if it was ravioli, so it didn’t get squished).

When I moved out of the house, my mom gave me a spatula, two wooden spoons, and one of the bazillion Griswold cast-iron frying pans my parents had bought in a junk store in Iowa. I made most of my meals in that pan, until I bought my own paper-thin aluminum pot from a cheapie store on Powell Street for boiling water and making soup in . But the first high-quality piece of new cookware I ever bought was a colander, from the cookery aisle in Cala Foods, my local grocery store at the time.

My parents were, for most of my youth, bohemians. My mother‘s father was a con man; she grew up during the Depression, and tells stories of fabulously extravagant dolls at Christmas which were repossessed two months later by men who came to her house and tore the dolls out of the hands of her weeping older sister. She was trained to look in the “secret place” for the keys and address to their next house if she ever came home and found her family had moved out.

My mother’s maternal family were Socialist Danes. She lived out of wedlock with a man in a tent in an orange orchard at the end of the 40s. She married a man she’d had a baby with in the 50s, only because his mother insisted on it. She commuted to work in a canoe for awhile. She never could conform to the norms.

My father was raised by a single mother in post-Depression Detroit. He did things like buy a Model A Ford in Seattle while stationed in Alaska in the Coast Guard, and shipped it North on a Coast Guard ship so that he could drive it around Juno, probably a 20-mile drive from end to end. He was famous for his cartoons, his ability to make anything with his hands.

They were both crazy people in their own ways, both from families where no one had gone to college, both longing for something bigger and better and more beautiful. They came from people who got by, who still lived as if they were in the Depression; but my parents, both of them, were like watermelon seeds — they slipped sideways under pressure, refusing to be smashed by events, refusing to fit in the space allotted them. They would rather ride the rails than live in a dumpy rental somewhere being respectable. My mother did all sorts of jobs in her youth, from working in a mental hospital to being a burlesque dancer in a cabaret in Hollywood in the 40s. She was never very respectable. They didn’t come from money — this wasn’t wealthy eccentricity. It was the belief that there must be something else to be had out there, if you could only find it, if you could only look. And they were lucky to be living in a time and place when bohemianism was possible, when rent for a whole apartment could be paid by one person working part-time.

They did find that bigger, more beautiful life. They rented an old abandoned ranch on the California coast, talked the landlords into fixing it up, then started a pottery school and lived that life for twenty years: backbreaking work interspersed with parties, European visitors, great conversations about art, midnight kiln runs, and the wide, wide country sky. All created with no money, while living in a house with no colander and, occasionally, nothing to eat.

But times change, and the eighties came and suddenly the world wasn’t about crafts anymore, and they got a loan with all the stuff from junk stores that were now “antiques” as collateral (yes, for some reason the bank let them do that!) and turned their attention to building a place that became a restaurant, became a real business. And they did it well. It had a certain unidentifiable something, a kind of bohemian wildness to it that made it special. My parents were terrible businesspeople, but they knew how to create atmosphere. And in all this, despite making lots of mistakes, they slowly became middle class.

They built themselves a house, and for the first time owned their own place. It’s a beautiful house, wildly bohemian, of course, painted in crazy parrot colors and full of pots and other stuff they found in junk stores and craft shows along the way. Their stove is the same 1915 stove I grew up with. There are paintings done by one of my mother’s Scandinavian Socialist family members. They still have all the Griswold pans, though now my mom uses nonstick pans. But they have two colanders, a coffee maker, a convection oven. One of those Italian toasters. Some nice knives. Matching cutlery.

I live down the hill from them now, in a house we built ourselves with the life savings of my husband’s late mother. Our furniture is a combination of inherited junk-cum-antique, ikea, and garage-sale; we have way too many books. My stove is a 1970s one with peeling paint, but it’s a Wolf, and I fixed it myself. Even when we were struggling, we bought books now and then. It’s a hodge-podge; a decorator would clutch their head, and a respectable person would simply shake their head.

But I also have two colanders, a cherry pitter, a blender, a (used) food-dryer, and a new cheese grater (I finally got rid of the 1920s one, it was too dull). I have lots of drawers with cooking utensils in them. I have nonstick pans (as well as the original Griswold) and two copper-bottomed soup pans.

It seems that I, too, have hit the middle class. Or at least, I feel that way. Sometimes, when we’re on vacation with our manky old teardrop trailer, I see all the shiny huge RVs people drive and I wonder where they get the money to buy something like that?? But when I get home, and the checks haven’t bounced, and the vet visit makes things a little tighter but doesn’t break the bank, I feel like I’ve passed some invisible line into a world where the wolves aren’t waiting at the door.

We’ve all been so lucky, I think about that every day. In another life, my mother would have been roped into prostitution, would have become a junkie, would have been lost. In another life, my father would have gone right on working in the Ford plant in Detroit, and would perhaps have been laid off when everyone else was being laid off at the end of the last century. He might even now be living in a neighborhood with boarded up houses, might be wondering what to do now. Because these are the things that happen to people nowadays; this is how it’s set up now. You work, and you work, and you have to keep working because it takes four working people to pay the rent for an apartment now, with not much left over. The days of my generation, where you could find a cheap room in a household of college students in San Francisco? Those days are past. And once rent is eating up your income, there’s no place to go. There are not enough hours in the day to make the money at a low wage to pay for the kind of rent people are asking now. Young people nowadays are hosed, and they know it.

I want to acknowledge here that my parents are white, and I’m white. My husband is white; my children are white. Despite coming from very little money, we still come from privilege. I don’t know what this story would have been like if we were people of color — probably, the owners of the ranch wouldn’t have rented to us. They’re nice people, but who knows? Probably, the bank wouldn’t have allowed us to get a loan based on what they might term our “junk.” Probably, my husband’s mother wouldn’t have died with enough money to build a small house.

But I do think about how, by turning things on their sides, by looking through the cracks, by refusing to be pigeonholed, we can sometimes make a space to do things differently. I do think about the unlikelihood of my childhood, and I try to remember it, try to create a life like that as much as I can for my own family — at least, all the good parts. The thrift-store furniture with holes in it; the old iphone I inherited from someone else; the mismatched plates, the 17-year-old mattress, the manky third-hand trailer; these are all the things I’m happy to live with, if it means I make a little room for myself to pop, watermelon-seed-like, out from under the weight of convention and necessity.

But my kitchen utensils? I do not bend there. In the kitchen, I am as conventional as they come.

Well, mostly.

)

Heather McDougal

Written by

Writer, educator, costumer, Maker.

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