Two weeks before Christmas, my parents read a pamphlet on the industrialization of food and told us from then on we would eat macrobiotic. The next day, my father showed us the menu for Christmas dinner: kale, Chinese lettuce, Shiitake mushrooms, seaweed crackers and a tofu roast. I was eight years old, my brother was nine, and my sisters were 10 and 11. All we wanted was a Charleston Chew and a bag of Twizzlers. But these were now off-limits. My parents read somewhere that food coloring in breakfast cereals promoted hyper-activity in children; my mother served oatmeal and salty bran flakes with flaxseed. If we begged for sweetener, she gave us sliced bananas. My parents joined the natural food co-op and signed up for colon cleansings. We were no longer allowed soda pop, potato chips, fast food, or chewing gum. My mother told us that corn syrup caused cancer. “It’s in everything!” she said, reading from a can of spaghetti sauce. Soon after that, she stopped shaving her legs. She stopped wearing undergarments, bras, or anything acrylic. Our Christmas stockings had to be knit from sheep’s wool from Switzerland. My mother was convinced that tinsel was radioactive. My father bought hemp baseball caps and organic cotton dental floss for stocking stuffers. We decorated the tree with organic popcorn and orange peels. My father burned incense and read selections from Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse.

In the obscure backrooms of my memory, there is a gauzy portrait of me drumming pots and pans on the kitchen floor. I am a bumbling infant, top-heavy, lower-lipped, thumb-suckling, encountering gravity for the first time, buffered by an afghan laid out on the linoleum, banging the consequential music of kitchen utensils: a chopstick on the glass lid, a plastic spoon on a rice steamer, the tap dancing of a whisk on a box of spaghetti. This is my first performance. I am eleven months old. I am a drum major. I am a ragtime rhythm section. I am a wild animal knocking rocks on the hard shell of mother earth, the prehistoric paradiddle. I am nerves and muscle gaining strength.