My friend Saturn reared two daughters and now has grandchildren. But long ago she lived in San Francisco as a teen, and in various other places all over California, such as Santa Cruz. It was there she met Cosmic Lady.
Right away she saw they had a lot in common. They were both confirmed cosmic hippies. They shared long conversations about space aliens and their help and intervention in our world in these times of crisis. They shared a joint when one would come around the circle. Neither cared much about gender definitions and acted and dressed as they pleased. In many ways they noticed they shared a deep soul connection.
And, they both had beards. Yes, scraggly little goatees like some wimmin have, but most assiduously remove, one way or another. But both Saturn and Cosmic Lady always wore their beards proudly.
For Saturn, it was a way of showing solidarity with oppressed people. Male hippies could grow their hair long and thus be ushered into the ranks of discriminated-against people, but young hippy wimmin were more likely to find themselves the object of interest by men in power, for the better or worse. So wearing the beard was Saturn’s way of showing she too stood with oppressed people. In all of her years as an ovulator, she never, not once, trimmed it or cut it off. Once in a while someone would walk up to her out of the blue, and thank her for wearing that freak flag.
And also the beard was a statement that appearance was not important. (Years later, she asked her grown daughters what it was like to have gone through their teen years with both a father and a mother who had never-cut long hair and beards. “Oh you raised us to be proud to be weird,” they replied. “And we collected friends who were also proud to be weird.”)
Saturn did notice some differences, though. Cosmic Lady was twice her age. That was unusual for such a kindred soul and friend. And though Saturn lived on a rainbow hippy bus, she was relatively more grounded in the material world than Cosmic Lady, a wandering astrologer, mystic, and seer who seemed to have no home address, and carried only a small satchel filled with her writings and prophecies, that she shared with pretty much anyone who would listen. And she smoked cigarettes; so it was not a huge surprise when twenty years later, Saturn got word her friend had left the planet due to lung cancer. She had never seemed all that attached to being here anyway, except to warn everyone by sharing her special knowledge of things to come.
Also, Saturn regarded her friend as a sort older version of herself. But she was vaguely aware that Cosmic Lady was attracted to her in a different way. She realized only later, that Cosmic Lady was either lesbian or bisexual. That was never obvious to Saturn at the time.
And there was one other difference, one that Saturn only noticed, for the first time, much later, forty years later, in fact, when she found an old glossy color photo that Cosmic Lady had sent to her. At the time, Saturn had noticed the very cool outfit Cosmic Lady wore in the photo. She was dressed in head to toe rainbow tie dye, standing next to some rainbow art.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Saturn had a realization. Never had they talked about the subject. It was not avoided, they could talk about anything. It had just never come up. Seems odd now, in this identity obsessed culture of today; but this was forty years ago, late seventies, early eighties. She knew nearly nothing about where Cosmic Lady came from. Her accent, or lack thereof, implied she was from California. That subject also never came up, as they were living in the here/now, and the future.
But it all added up. The dark brown skin. The big salt and pepper Afro, that of course, just grew like that, with no help from beauty parlors. They were, naturally, hippies.
Cosmic Lady...was black! Saturn, a blond haired person of Scandinavian descent, had literally never noticed this, no, not ever.
She had at the time, black and brown friends, with whom she talked at length about rights, discrimination, and oppression, sexism, racism, and so on. They identified as black or brown, so Saturn saw that. She grew up in an activist family. Her mother, in fact, was a political science professor who taught, among other things, courses called “women and politics” and “black politics.”
But contrary to what you may have heard, it is true, she realized. You actually can be colorblind, not see color, and not ever categorize people by so called race.
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