Master at converting others to his way of thinking that he was he had at last come

Master at converting others to his way of thinking that he was, he had at last come up with a bill of goods that not even my mother would accept. Can’t you see why it is I don’t want any part of that? Why it is I want to rescue you from that sort of poisonous self-denial, even if it means turning this household upside down?”Despite such elaborate rhetorical fireworks, my father had a rough time keeping the great plan on track for very long. Don’t do as you like or be as you like, be as we tell you to be Or else. For me to say that would be to give in to what the world out there – the world of Mr Nixon and Mr Agnew and the creepy, hypocritical bastards who run this country – wants me to say Screw growth, screw possibility. I had hoped you would be happy that I’d found someone who can fill that need in my life.” “I am happy,” my mother would reply. “I can understand if you’ve decided you need to have someone smarter in your life.

I’m the first to admit how dumb I am, but why do you need me too in that case?”"I’m not saying you’re dumb!” my father would return. “I’m saying, I’m showing you that just because a person comes across something good in life – a treasure he realises he doesn’t want to do without – it doesn’t mean he has to turn around and say goodbye to everything else in his life that’s good as well Betty and I get along, we understand one another. We are about to embark on a unique and potentially very important adventure – one that will change all of us in radical and hopefully very beneficial ways.” My father’s “great plan”, as he outlined it to my astonished mother, involved leaving behind the suffocating blanket of prohibitions and inhibitions that characterised life in twentieth-century America, and entering into a way of being in which absolute freedom of mind, body and spirit was the first and greatest goal. By and large, we are a nation which prefers to remain fully clothed at all times. It was not until as recently as 1966 that members of the British Olympic Male Swimming Team were allowed to remove their jackets in order to swim: the trunks-only ruling was not introduced until 1973.Similarly, right up to 1974 all new-born male babies in the Greater London area were required to don shirts and smart casual trousers or slacks within 15 minutes of birth, or face prosecution and possible imprisonment under the Indecent Exposure Act.On a more personal level it was not until the Spring of 69 that I took my first bath without vest and underpants. “It’s not just a sex thing,” I would hear my father explain mysteriously to my mother. After a week or so of outraged absence, my mother returned to our house ready to set about the “new adventure” of living in the enlightened and jealousy-free manner my father was so anxious to sell her.From early on, Betty was billed as a sort of intellectual assistant – someone to help my father wrestle with the gargantuan ideas that it was his job to bring to the attention of the unknowing outside world.

In their 20 years of marriage, my mother had little experience of rebelling against my father, and he must have known it would be a matter of time until she came around. Just as I know from her that throughout the dinner the strange new woman looked at once pleased and embarrassed to be there, and that my father’s statement shocked her almost as much as my mother.Though his fame as a writer on New Age topics still lay in the future, my father was already well established in the eyes of my mother and I as a figure of prophetic and all but unimpeachable authority. I know that my father said something very much like this because my mother told me about it years later. From here on out, I’ve decided to start acting like someone who is alive, not dead, and part of doing that means loving both you and Betty equally, without jealousy and without reservation.”I was too young to take in what was going on in anything but the most vague and impressionistic way. None of us knows how to do that anymore, because we’ve been trained to think and act like corpses – dead bodies moving about in a world of shit.