Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry: Chapter1, Part2

A little over two years ago, life conspired to send me on a more active search for a meaningful existence. I had always tended toward depression and although I was doing much better, free-lance design and part-time teaching jobs in Chicago where I lived didn’t speak to my hunger for meaning. Then, after taking a full-time job as a graphic designer, a never-ending schedule of expensive redecoration and furniture replacements alerted us to the fact that the company was an orchestrated tax write-off for the umbrella corporation that owned it. They never intended to complete the business school franchise project we were working on. Thus explaining the glacial speed at which the highers-up approved our work.

At the same time, my roommate and I were informed that the three- story apartment building we lived in with marble halls and wainscoted walls was about to be torn down. It, along with the dark brick apartment building next door, were to be replaced by a blocky twenty-story skyscraper. We were living in one of the last Victorian jewels in a prime location near the lake and Lincoln Park. Christine, whom I loved living with, decided it was time anyway to strike out on her own. After much personal agony and guidance from a dead friend in a dream, Europe became my chosen destination.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it. _Yogi Berra

I hadn’t thought of myself as a hippie, but in Europe that’s what people called me. Who else in 1970 would travel for seven months without an itinerary, carrying only a backpack, not even knowing if she were going to return home? Who else but a young American had the wealth and freedom to do that?

Growing up in Chicago, schoolmates in my neighborhood were mostly first- and second-generation Americans—Swedish Lutheran, Irish Catholic, and Russian Jewish. Had our families been living in the Old World, as my parents and grandparents still called it, we never would have met. Here we knew each other beyond the bias of national origins and religious customs. Yet, conflicts had not disappeared in the American melting pot; in contrast to the principles of freedom we were being taught in school they just appeared more meaningless.

While many of our parents had not even finished high school, I was part of the first generation to attend an unprecedented thirteen years of school paid for by the government. In 1966, by the time I earned a master’s degree from the venerable Art Institute of Chicago in art education, a growing feeling of civil dissatisfaction was hovering in the air. Despite democratic ideals I’d studied for and been tested on for so many years, Jim Crow laws were still well-established, blacks kept from voting and, most horrific of all, still being lynched. I also learned that our country used more than its share of natural resources often taken at unfair rates from poorer countries; although the sun and wind were known to be more sustainable forms of energy than petroleum, they were being given no credence; corporations were dictating political decisions including our involvement in a war in Viet Nam. I just wanted America to live up to the democratic principles I had studied for so long; and although for years I seemed to be the only one in my neighborhood to think this way, in college I learned that I wasn’t alone.

Imagine my befuddlement when parents and mentors became incensed when I expressed having a wish to correct the country that had given us so much. Weren’t we all working for progress and didn’t progress mean making changes to benefit the majority of people on the planet—even if it required giving up some of our personal advantages? Many of my friends and acquaintances felt resigned, saying that’s just the way things are—you can’t fight city hall. In graduate school I heard more reactions similar to mine, full of longing to reduce inequities and prevent further destruction to the environment. We shared a conviction that we didn’t have to live this way—unfair to minorities, focused on money and material possessions.

As flower children, we were considered little more than misguided youngsters making a rebellious fashion statement. Experimentation with drugs was a new form of inebriation, not seen by society as a window into the ephemeral world of spirit.

By selling a few pieces of furniture and lots of artwork, I raised $3000, enough to travel reasonably for months. My parents wouldn’t speak with me about the trip to Europe. The reality of WWII was not history to them. None of my friends were willing to go with me, yet when I embarked on the journey, my loneliness and doubts were soothed to some degree by meeting droves of Americans my age who were doing the same thing. I hadn’t expected that. We explored spiritual avenues, too, not intentionally at first—just coming upon meditation and Eastern religions accidentally, then being touched by the serenity of those experiences in ways we didn’t know we yearned for.

I returned home after seven months still wondering if the differences among human beings just couldn’t be reconciled. Couldn’t we at least agree to live peacefully? I thought that’s what a spiritual life was all about. Yet, underneath the logic was another motivator many of us shared—a growing feeling of urgency—that the material excesses of our culture would somehow catch up with us suddenly; that the disharmony of our exploits might even contribute to earth changes. Our lumbering institutions would not be able to respond in a timely way to large-scale catastrophe, whether, economic, social, or environmental. I don’t know how I’d become so concerned about these things when the people I grew up with were not.

So, there I was, back in Chicago again, bursting with the revelations of my wanderings: 1. That travel was scary as hell unless I was accompanied by people who went with me to the next destination; 2. Surprised that anyone had any interest in talking with me when I didn’t have my clever artwork nearby or, as I came to think of them, my props, as a way of relating; and 3. That I loved the spontaneous ‘group’ experiences of cooking, exploring new cultures and landscapes, even defecating together. That happened when we traveled as a group to some pristine location, camping, renting a communal cottage in an unknown Greek beach village like Epano Zakros, or taking hotel rooms in the slums of exotic cities like Istanbul or Tehran.

Stan, whom I’d met in Chicago shortly before leaving for Europe, said he would meet up with me some weeks into the trip. He’d gotten there and home on his own ticket but my $3000 covered most of our expenses for the half year we were together, including the purchase of a well-used VW bus. Despite our having talked about getting married, the instant we got home he opened a record shop with a woman he’d just met and complained to me in front of my friends at my welcoming home party.

***

“You’re not very supportive of me.”

His remark out of the blue was so offensive that my usually tactful friends all had something to say.

“Oh, poor Stan! Boo hoo.”

“What more are you expecting the woman to do—adopt you?”

“Cheez, Stan, she spent that whole trip with you and you have the nerve to be whining, even though you’ve already dumped her for a new caregiver.”

I couldn’t remember anyone ever standing up for me like that, even when the local Catholic kids threw rocks at me.

Good judgment comes from experience,
and experience comes from bad judgment. _Barry LePatner

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