A Tale of Love and Raisin Bread
Scarcity, Abundance, and What My Parents’ Marriage Taught Me About My Own
The week before my parents married, they ran out of food.
My father didn’t tell me this story until I was married, a middle-aged parent myself. We were driving together to pick up a car from a mechanic. My parents’ anniversary was coming up, and we were talking about their plans. And then Dad asked if he’d ever told me about the raisin bread.
I thought I already knew all the stories of their lean early days, living out of a shopfront and a windowless van in the Bay Area in the early 1970s. Their favorite meal was steamed cabbage, prepared on a hot plate, smothered with tomato sauce. They clothed themselves in thrift-store castoffs and garments my mother sewed and wove herself. They ran a business teaching woodworking to people who wanted to make their own musical instruments.
Free-spirited living can be difficult in a pay-as-you-live world. The classes were not free, the materials were not free, the rent was not free. But my parents were young and optimistic and didn’t always collect fees from people who wanted to craft instruments and fill the world with music. They were broke. So was everyone else. There was a pointedness to it: you couldn’t support capitalism without capital.
