A few blocks before the spot on his map that showed Haight Street meeting Golden Gate Park, a crowd had gathered on a corner. In its center, a beautiful woman stood beside a large cast-iron pot. Her dress was long and white and snaked with red embroidery. A blue scarf hung around her shoulders. The crowd whistled and laughed as she spun a tin mug around the long neck of a metal ladle above her head. My father watched the mug spin, impressed, and was momentarily blinded when sunlight hit the metal with a bright flash.
This was my favorite moment of this story, the moment my father met my mother.
When my father opened his eyes, she was looking right at him. “Hey you,” she said. The hum of metal on metal slowed and then stopped as she lowered the ladle to point it at him.
Hey you,I would say in my head along with my father, my mother.
He stepped to the front of the crowd. The leather sandals on the woman’s feet were flecked with dried mud. Her toenails were painted citrus orange. She emptied a ladleful of what appeared to be stew into a tin mug. When she handed the mug to him, she cupped her fingers around his.
“This,”she said, “is the best Free Stew you will ever eat.” Her smile was warm. The mug she’d given him was not. My father, hungry and in no mind to disappoint this woman anyway, drained the mug of its contents and was surprised to find that the stew was delicious even cold. He tasted potatoes and bellpeppers and buttery greens, and there was not a single sweet beet in the mix. It was only once he’d handed the mug back to her that it occurred to him to wonder if there were drugs in the stew.
“Well?” she asked.
“You’re right. I will never in my life have better Free Stew than that.”
She smiled, as he’d hoped she would. Her eyes, my father saw now, gathering the courage to look, were a surprising green-brown color that seemed to glow against her suntanned skin. They moved from his face to the bag on his shoulder.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Nebraska. Just got here.”
A line had formed behind him, but she seemed in no hurry to move on. “Nebraska.” She chewed her lip. “Then you need to see the ocean.”
This was the moment, my father told me, that he fell in love with my mother.
“Louie!” she called, not taking her eyes off my father.
A man emerged from a knot of people who were handing out slices of dark bread from baskets. “Marigooold,” he said, drawling the name into song. His lips were hidden behind his beard.
Marigold.A fitting name, my father thought. There was something bright and bold and a bit wild about her, like a flower that held the colors of the sun.
“I’m cutting out to see the ocean,” she said. “Can you dish the stew?”
The man named Louie ran his hand down the length of Marigold’s tangled blond hair and my father felt his heart drop. But then Louie dipped the ladle deep in the pot and smiled an easy smile at him. “Sure thing,” he said. He filled a mug with stew and handed it to the next person in line.
When Marigold held out her hand to my father, he took it. A current of energy flowed from her. He sent a message of thanks to the man with his grandfather’s eyes for drawing the map that had led him to her.
As they rode a streetcar toward the ocean, she told my father that nine months earlier she had left a girl named Mary Simon back in New York City. Now she went by Marigold.
So my mother had been just like my father, chasing adventure, brave enough to change her whole life.
Her people called themselves the Freedom Collective. “Emphasis on the free,” she said. She had not yet let go of my father’s hand, and she squeezed it now and again in percussive backdrop to her words. When he told her his name, she repeated it and squeezed his hand three times:Ja-cob Shawe.
At this point in the story, my father would reach for my hand and squeeze it three times.Mer-row Shawe.
“We have a big piece of magic earth up north of the city,” my mother told him. “The plants burst out of this dirt all big and green and beautiful. We work in shifts up there on the farm. Then we take turns coming down here to the city to give away what we’ve grown.” She squeezed his hand. “I should have given you some of our Free Bread. It’s even better than the Free Stew.”
“The best Free Bread in the world, I bet.”
Marigold laughed. An elderly woman sitting in front of them turned to stare, and Marigold offered her a radiant smile.
“Free is our special ingredient. It’s not a secret, but you’ll have trouble finding it anywhere else.” She looked through the streetcar windows at the rows of low, pale homes that lined the long avenue. “There aren’t really any sights to point out to you on this route. This is just where ordinary people live ordinary lives. It’s so calm, isn’t it? It’s beautiful just to be on this car driving through all these ordinary lives.”
After a thoughtful beat, her smile grew sly. “But the ocean will blow your socks off. And if the ocean blows your socks off, our land up north is going to leave you wearing nothing at all.” She laughed. “Which is the way most of the Collective likes it.”
She said this as though there were no question in her mind that my father would see the land, that he was one of them now. The idea didn’t bother him a bit.
“Freedom Farm has a bunkhouse if that’s your thing, but most of the time we just sleep under the stars. When the clouds clear, the stars look so close they could just about blind you. And it’s quiet up there, but not quiet at all, you know? Because the land is breathing and moving all the time. You’re alone and never alone. There’s so much space, but every time you stretch your hand you touch something alive.”
