Carrots and Artichokes

I have a lot of artichoke stuff. It’s because of a carrot.

Not the carrot of the famous carrot story -  an unrelated carrot.

My mom had a friend I’ll call Anne, because that’s not her name.

Anne’s husband dumped her for another woman. She was the first person I ever knew to use the c-word. (Not carrot.) I didn’t hear it from her; I heard it from my mom when she told me they referred to the other woman as c-word face.

Later, my mother would use that word in a game of hangman while we sat endlessly in family court, waiting for the judge to decide how much money my dad was never gonna pay.

But I’m trying to get to carrots, and from there to artichokes.

Around 1971, my mom and some other women from the Unitarian Church decided to form a women’s group. Feminism was hipster trendy in the early 70s, like kindness now.

But then they decided to include their husbands, and have an Encounter Group, also very stylish. They got together nearly every Friday night for years. It was my favorite night of the week, as long as it wasn’t at our house. Then, we had to stay in our rooms until it was over - usually about two hours. But most of the time, it meant soda and chips and tv, first the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, later Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

Anne and her husband were in this group so it was kind of a thing when they split up. Eventually all but two couples out of the original six or eight had divorced.

For several years, though, they talked regularly about their marriages and their friendships with each other, their ambitions and obstacles, not so much their kids.  They studied all the hot behavioral psychology of the era, reading books like I’m OK, You’re OK and Games People Play. They did a transcendental meditation workshop and a Rolfing session and eventually most of them did the EST training, which was the peak of the movement toward talking and thinking about yourself endlessly.

So one Friday night, before CFace, Anne announced she was tired of the word “relationship”. That she felt it was overused and tired; she was starting to cringe when anyone used it. She acknowledged that they could hardly stop talking about such things, as it was why they were there, but that they should substitute a new word, just to make it more interesting and the use of the word a little more thoughtful. She suggested “carrot”.

It didn’t really catch on. I think a successful word substitution has to have the same number of syllables. Syllables are why parodies work.

A few years later, my mother was trying to land on a word we could both stand to use for women who date other women. She said ‘lesbian’; i said i thought it seemed clinical, and confining. I suggested “dyke” and “queer”. I think this was about 1982 so those were soundly rejected.

Then she remembered Anne and the Carrot. “I’ve got it! Artichoke!”

For her it only needed to be another vegetable to fit neatly in this system that she found hilarious and useful.

She didn’t really appreciate my insight that an artichoke is kinda dry and spiny like a pinecone or a pineapple on the outside, but that it has a highly edible heart, especially if it’s dipped in melted garlic butter.

So now I have a lot of artichoke art and tchotchkes. I’ve debulked some; it was her default gift idea for awhile.

More recently I think Anne, rather than taking the Carrot proposal one step too far, did not take it far enough. By agreeing that it was still necessary to have a word for Relationship, she weakened her position. We have turned our relationships into a Thing. Like in your marriage you don’t just have you and your partner, you have your Relationship. Like it’s this whole other mouth you gotta feed.

It’s not, though. It’s not a thing. It’s an idea and it changes all the time and you and your partner would never draw it the same way. Even if you both agreed it was a carrot, your carrot and their carrot would not come out looking the same. And you probably won’t agree on how it should be served.

Some ideas, like democracy or credibility, are cool; they help people live. But “relationship” is an idea that forces people to state policy when none applies, define artificial milestones, to demand concessions to the idea of it. Each tenet of the definitions of it comes with a list of requirements one must meet to fulfill the implied promises. Like the mob, demanding payment to protect you from themselves.

People who look up and like each other’s ways and faces, and take care of themselves, don’t end up needing to tend to any third party.

That said, a whole steamed artichoke is the bomb for a date night, but not with this guy, who unsurprisingly hasn’t found the best part of it yet.