That's Group Living

When my mom was about to turn seventy, she announced to my brother and me that she was going to do a stand-up comedy set at her birthday party. To my knowledge, she’d never done stand-up before in her life. I was nervous. I told her that she’d need to practice a lot, that I was pretty sure comedians didn’t just get on a stage and start riffing— that they ran through their material over and over, until they knew it inside and out. She gave me a knowing smile and said nothing. I wasn’t sure if this meant she’d rehearse or not, but I could tell she was tickled by my concern. It dawned on me that she might not actually care how her act was received; she was turning seventy and would do what she wanted.

For her party, she erected a circus tent on the land trust where she lives in a communal lodge in southwest Wisconsin and invited everyone she knew. My housemates—past and present— flew from Portland, Oregon, to join, and we all cooked together for days. I run a small food business and had packed twenty pounds of our fresh noodles in my luggage so my longtime-roommate Chris and I could make platters of pancit palabok, a saucy Filipino noodle dish, which we served alongside jars of my brother Zak’s homemade chili oil. Chris’s partner, Erin, made an enormous salad arranged to look like a grinning face. Our friend Cynthia and my sweetheart, Corey, pitched in to form nettle empanadas at my mom’s request. Her friend Eric and his son Nico butterflied several lambs and roasted them on spits.

The tent sat in a clearing on a ridgetop, with deciduous woods around the perimeter. When dinnertime came, more than a hundred of us sat down to eat at long folding tables like we were at a church spaghetti fundraiser—or a commune potluck. We clinked glasses excitedly and talked with full mouths; old folks slapped their knees and young kids crawled among the bony, bouncing legs. The night was warm for mid-May, and I was in short sleeves. As darkness began to fall, the thin twilight was replaced by a rising full moon so bright I had to turn my back to it. Of course she scheduled her party for the full moon, I thought. It beamed like a spotlight.

When all the dishes were cleared, my mom took the stage for her set. The tent walls were rolled up, so air flowed past the tables of friends and family. Dozens of people sat on folding chairs, cheeks glowing from wine and beer, looking toward her with grins already plastered to their faces. Zak and I stood just outside the tent, side by side, looking in. I felt such intense vicarious embarrassment I wanted to run into the nearby woods, but Zak compelled me to stay with a firm, unconditional look.

Our mom stood at the microphone, looking breezy in a tight, stretchy turquoise dress, her long salt-and-pepper hair down. In different ways, Zak and I both look like our mom. All three of us have full lips and long oval faces. She’s half-Filipino, and we’re one-quarter, so her hair is black, streaked with white, and ours is brown; her skin is darker, ours paler. Zak has her slim, athletic build. I have her toothy smile, but I’m four inches taller and measurably less frenetic, magnetic, and direct. She has a potency you can sense from across a room.

Swishing in her dress, she appeared comfortable in her skin, undoubtedly nervous but clearly excited. She opened by describing her childhood in the fifties. “It was the era of Father Knows Best,” she sneered. She described teasing her hair, wearing girdles, saluting the flag, offering penance for all her dirty thoughts as she ogled Jesus’s lithe body dripping from the cross. She was leaning forward at the hips, jutting her chin out, and slicing her open hand through the air in her best George Carlin impersonation. All seven of her siblings had come to rural Wisconsin from as far away as Los Angeles, Boston, and Manila. The three who remain devout Catholics squirmed in their seats, more uncomfortable than I was.

“In the sixties, I became a disinheritor,” she announced proudly, a finger pointed at the crowd. A few people cheered like sports fans—“Yeah! Yeah!”—but most remained quiet and alert. She’d tried to throw away the dominant belief systems she’d grown up with, she explained. At the top of her list: Catholicism, patriarchy, and patriotism.

“But did I throw away too much from my parents’ generation?” she asked. “Did I throw the baby out with the bathwater? Was there something from that time that I didn’t appreciate? Something valuable I left behind?”

She held a pregnant pause, looking around at the audience of friends and family, searching their rapt eyes for an answer.

“No!” she screamed. “I didn’t disinherit enough!”

What have I inherited from my parents’ generation? My childhood looked very different from my mom’s. I was raised by someone who’d disavowed Catholicism, patriarchy, and patriotism, in a household with a quality of transience and openness that felt transgressive. Guests were constantly coming and going, sometimes staying for weeks or months at a time. I loved it. Unlike my mom, I don’t want to throw my upbringing away. I want to sort through the remains and build on what feels solid in the face of a world I find troubled and precarious.

Very early in life, I recognized that I take after my parents in many ways. The most obvious is my intense relationship with food. Both my parents love to cook, eat, and drink. When their plates and cups are empty, they daydream about cooking, eating, and drinking. But it took me a long time to realize that both my brother and I are following their lead in another way just as central to our lives: we live communally. In fact, we live together.

Since my early twenties, I’ve lived with Zak, several close friends, and, more recently, Corey, in a large home in Portland. Over more than fifteen years, we’ve become like a commune in collective spirit but without the structure, the utopian dream, or ninety-three Rolls Royces.

In my twenties, this seemed ordinary, not so different from the circumstances of many of my peers. In my thirties, it became more uncommon. But somehow, I still didn’t perceive our living situation as notable until Zak took up a new refrain. (He loves refrains and collects them the way someone else might hoard memorabilia.) From the beginning, Zak has been the occasional grumbler of our group, grouching when someone’s stuff is littering the table or when the tomatoes they’ve abandoned on the counter attract fruit flies. But now—in his own nod to stand-up— I’d hear him announce in the voice of one of his favorite comedians, Neil Hamburger (a dejected lounge-act type), “That’s group living.”

Let’s say I found a beloved ceramic bowl chipped. “That’s group living,” I’d hear Zak’s voice saying, even when I was alone. Group living—yes, that was what we were doing; I just hadn’t named it before. Yet in naming it, it took on a new shape, and not the one I wanted or expected. A handful of stereotypes sprang all too easily to my mind: a horde of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year- olds with no consideration for one another lazing about a filthy, smelly house; a cult of personality rife with sexual abuse; hippies fooling themselves into thinking slop is transcendent; and any freaky mixture of the above. Isn’t group living always a hassle? These stereotypes feel out of touch with reality to me. I mean that in the broadest sense: Most people in the world live in communal settings. To stigmatize group living is to dismiss the pressures of the housing crisis; the need to reimagine women’s unpaid domestic labor; the fact that loneliness and isolation menace all ages; and the racist, classist roots of the nuclear family and single-family home. But I mean it in a very personal way as well. Every day, I look forward to dinner at our house. By cooking for and eating food made by other people, I give and receive each day, which feels as central to my life as inhaling and exhaling. I salvage my sanity by laughing with my housemates, and I depend on their perspectives to help me outgrow my own. That’s group living too, I protested.

Sisterly defiance surged in me. Suddenly, I had something to prove.

My defiance gradually took an unexpected form: I wanted to make a commune cookbook, a now-defunct genre that flourished in the United States in the sixties and seventies. Perhaps the most famous example is The Tassajara Bread Book, which reintroduced whole-wheat baking to home cooks. Many of these cookbooks were self-published by back-to-the-land hippie communes and Zen monasteries. Whenever I visit thrift stores or garage sales, I look for them, but after a month or two, I’ll let them go, because who wants to make “yeast cheese” or adzuki bean pizza?

Why a commune cookbook? In some ways, our house descends from the hippie communes of the past. Could a cookbook provide a way for me to sort through that nearness and then create some distance? To describe my reality with the same attentiveness as the hippies once recorded theirs, and, in the process, to show something different and new? To challenge stereo- types without pretending they don’t come from a real place? To write better recipes—ones without errant adzuki beans—that people will want to cook and share? To reclaim Zak’s refrain?

To my delight, there’s a recipe for group living in Lucy Horton’s wonderful Country Commune Cooking, published in 1972. It comes from one of New England’s longest-lasting New Age communes, a group initially known as The Brotherhood, which was led by a guru who received spiritual transmissions from a retired bus driver named Elwood Babbitt. The recipe is called “Brotherhood Spirit in Flesh Soup”:

Get everyone together and get a good feeling between you. Work out anything and everything that lies unexpressed. Realize that you are Spirit—and that the health and balance of those you feed depend only on your Thoughts—that balance and order of the body depend upon balance and order of the Mind Positive. The ingredients are of secondary importance, and always in a divine relativity. This soup was made by Alan, Martin, Tam, Lynne and others, and Duh Bear.

1. Two big pots half full of boiling water.
2. Add 2 cups of pinto beans and a little later several handfuls of barley.
3. To each then add a lot of sautéed onions. At this writing the soup isn’t done, but we’ll add 12 canning quarts of squash, carrots and tomatoes from last summer’s garden. Also some green beans someone gave us. Later some salt and seasoning, kelp powder, and a few tablespoons of miso to each. Follow your own Awareness most of all.

This soup will feed 130 along with two pots of brown rice and two pots of millet. Pots are about 3 or 4 gallons.

Finally, one last ingredient to be used throughout—Love.

I assume that, like me, you’re now groaning (good grief, canned squash—yuck!). And maybe laughing (“Work out anything and everything that lies unexpressed”—thank you, that sounds easy!). And maybe also feeling perplexed (you’re going to feed 130 people with two cups of pinto beans?!). I’m forever delighted by this disclosure: “At this writing the soup isn’t done.”

I love this recipe for its brazen commitment to itself. I love how every inappropriate use of capitalization makes me cringe: Spirit. Thoughts. Mind Positive! Awareness! Love! This recipe embodies some of the exact stereotypes about group living that I instinctively want to distance myself from: apparent openness masking rigidity, self-righteousness, carelessness in appropriating Asian cultures and ingredients, mind-over-matter rhetoric that manages to sweep all structural inequity under a rag rug, and unappealing food.

And yet—if I’m being honest—I also just love it. It catapults me into the past, into a steamy kitchen with someone named “Duh Bear,” who’s possibly a dog. I’m reminded of the sense of humor that so often accompanies these books, which somehow take themselves very seriously and not seriously at all. I’m reminded of my mom at her birthday party, pointing her finger at her friends and family. She’d posed herself a question: Had she disinherited enough? But she was also asking it of us all, as sincere as she was mocking: Had I? Had we?

Unlike Country Commune Cooking, this book provides no specific recipe for group living. In the end, I didn’t write a commune cookbook, in parody or homage. The title Group Living and Other Recipes is a wink to my brother, as well as a joke on the hippies who wrote recipes for how to live and on myself for being in proximity to them and for feasting under their circus tents.

How we structure our homes isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. There’s no single authoritative recipe. Now is always the right time to reimagine home and family, and group living represents a galaxy of approaches. My intention is to explore it, not write it off or valorize it. I want to complicate the stereotypes even as I write in their shadows. After all, what is human history if not one giant attempt at group living?

Excerpted from Group Living and Other Recipes © 2024 by Lola Milholland. Published with permission of Spiegel & Grau.

Tags

Community, Family, Food, Identity, Home