Free Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith

disappeared, and her conversation turned to logical and incisive questioning of their belief systems. Typical of one of her stop-the-conversation-cold questions would be, “So, if I understand you correctly, what you are saying is that the reason someone gets cancer is because they did something terrible in their past life such as raping their daughter or killing their next-door neighbor? Therefore the cancer in this lifetime did not occur because of the current medical explanation of mutant cells rapidly multiplying but instead is due to a karmic payment for past sins? Am I on the right track here?” She quickly entered the no-win zone of these metaphysical, meandering conversations. In no time at all, she realized that she was better off playing the silent cook rather than the happy hostess.
    The ever-widening gulf between my parents was especially apparent in the bedroom. Secondhand books on Buddhism, levitation, hypnosis, Rosicrucianism, magnetic healing, UFOs, and reincarnation continued to pile up on the table next to Pop’s side of the bed, while Mom stuck to her lurid novels and biographies of screen stars and Rat Pack comedians. The separate piles of reading material beside the bed were indicative not just of different interests but of two lives that were diverging.
    But now time had passed, and their differences had hardened. As if in one final attempt to acknowledge and accommodate their growing estrangement, Pop created a special mattress that catered to their individual tastes: firm and ascetic on his side, and soft and cushy on hers. There was something very Hollywood about this his-and-hers mattress invention. In a nod to Eastern sleeping habits, the bed, a gold-leafed extravaganza, was just a foot off the floor, whereas standard American beds seemed to be getting higher and higher until you needed a ladder to climb into them. The gold metal headboard of swirls and curlicues designed by my father anticipated the free-form psychedelic aesthetic that was about to sweep the country.
    During this period of change, my parents continued to work together at the design studio. While much of the day-to-day work remained business as usual, Pop’s decorating sensibility took a turn toward the mystical as well. Maybe it was his daily meditations or the early tremors of the mid-sixties shaking all around us, but suddenly he found the staples of traditional decorating—such as fabric and wallpaper—terribly old-fashioned and conventional. Without ever dropping a tab of acid, he was inexplicably drawn to things bright and shiny, especially iridescent jewel-toned colors.
    One day Mom was wearing some vividly colored Mardi Gras pop beads (so unlike her) that her sister had given to her. They caught my father’s eye. Suddenly he had a decorating epiphany that these beads could become a new way to make modern draperies. Perhaps this inspiration was brought on by one of his many previous incarnations, specifically the one where he was a Persian talisman maker, as revealed to him many years later in a message from one of his spirit guides. Thanks to the magic of reincarnation, a new decorating trend—beaded curtains—was born that would sweep the country and keep me in bell-bottoms for years to come. From this moment forth, fabric was banished from his decorating vocabulary, to be replaced by plastic and glass beads from around the world. The beaded draperies, created with his brilliant sense of color, design, and texture, combined the best of hippie regalia and cheap made-in-Japan bamboo curtains with a majestic sense of antiquity. Pop was high-low decades before this would become a cultural idiom.
    His timing could not have been more serendipitous, or prescient. Haight-Ashbury, Maharishi Mahesh, Timothy Leary were all about to unleash their love seeds of a new consciousness on the world. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was about to become the mantra for a new generation wanting to explore