The 70's

Outside the window, the bare branches of wintering trees and the ground strewn with crispy dried brown leaves. 38 degrees and rain that looks like it will continue most of the day. All of which puts a literal damper on my hopes to wander the town and surrounding woods in my old college haunts. But as the Swedes say, “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes” and in fact, I have a raincoat, a wintry warm hat and an umbrella, so it’s all still possible. 

 

Continuing my pilgrimage to visit old friends in new or old sites, I’m in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at my friend Liz’s “town house” a few blocks from “downtown” and another few from the Antioch College campus. Liz and I shared our college years here in the early 70’s, that glorious time when exciting change was in the air and we were young with our lives ahead of us, when all was possibility and dreams and conviction that we were going to heal a broken world with our refusal to walk down the main street of corporate greed, racism, misogyny and environmental destruction. We had hope that mind-expanding drugs and then, yoga and meditation would enlarge the consciousness of ourselves and others, that organic food and living on the land would create a collective Thoreauvian utopia, the free schools would nourish a new generation of children unbound from the narrow conventions of honor rolls and football teams and right answers on mindless tests and instead nurture each child’s undiminished sense of wonder and curiosity in a joyful and connected community. All of this to the soundtracks of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Incredible String Band,  the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and countless more young Woodstockian visionary artists. 

 

 In-between classes I took with titles liked The Future is Now/ The Phenomenology of Musical Perception/ Man and Nature/ Bird-Watching/ Canoeing/ Yeats, Frost and Cummings and so on— Liz and I and our friends sat in rooms listening to music and talking out our dreams, wandered the woods of the Glen Helen Nature Reserve, went folk dancing on Friday night followed by the Midnight Movie, danced on the front stoop on Saturday nights, cooked dinners in the house where ten of us lived a few semesters, sang around the piano, got on a bus to DC to protest the Vietnam War. 

 

The Avant Garde jazz artist Cecil Taylor was in residence for one-year, both teaching and giving concerts. A Zen Master named Nippo joined the faculty for one semester. I went on my first backpacking trip in that Man and Nature class. A guest teacher named Avon Gillespie taught a one-semester class on Orff Schulwerk. By the time I graduated, Antioch’s work/ study program found me teaching at progressive schools in rural Maine, urban Hartford, New York City and the mountains of North Carolina. I also got credit for hitchhiking to California and camping around the state and wine-tasting in France and Italy while singing Renaissance Sacred Music with the Antioch Chorus. Orff, Zen, Jazz and teaching in a progressive school in California for 45 years while continuing to travel in Europe and six other continents defined my life that would follow and it all began at Antioch.

 

So here I was again, enjoying a yellow squash soup and kale salad with Liz at the Sunrise Café on Xenia Avenue, the one-block long “downtown” of the small town of Yellow Springs. The Little Art movie theater still open a few doors down and some of the old icons—Ye Old Trail Tavern, Ha Ha Pizza, Tom’s Supermarket, The Senior Center— still here amidst the inevitable new shops and restaurants. Some buildings gone or deserted on the Antioch Campus, the buzz of the student body that once had a thousand or so vibrant young people gathered together now a bit of a ghost town with less than a hundred. But the woods of Glen Helen continue through their seasonal cycle undisturbed, the iron-laced waters of the yellow springs are still trickling and Liz and I are the human counterparts of change, notably weathered by time and experience but still an unchanged essence living on in both of us. 

 

Which is all the more remarkable because on the outside, our lives could not have been more different. Her buying an old stone house at an auction for $10,000 soon after graduating and 50 years later, still living alone out in a field with a couple of horses and no neighbors within sight. During all this time, she rarely has traveled beyond a 3- mile radius, never held a 9 to 5 job, never married or held a long-term relationship. She has spent her days caring for her horses and her house and her land and a group of friends, flirting with various art forms from sketching, drawing, painting, video, woodworking, guitar, tap-dancing, singing in a choir and more. 

 

By contrast, I moved to a city, have been married to the same person for 46 years (and another 5 living together), had two kids and have two grandkids, worked a job for 45 years, traveled to some 60 countries and still going. I’ve stuck to the disciplined practices of zazen, jazz and classical piano, daily writing and the art of teaching. On the surface, two radically contrasting lives.

 

Yet here we are with our soup and salad, enjoying each other’s company again as we always have. Two pilgrims who walked together in the 70’s now sitting together in our 70’s. Over 50 years between those 70's and these 70's, but here we still are. Conversation predictably began with the health report, both of us having experienced related issues with vertigo-like dizziness. Then a short excursion into the political catastrophe, our utter bafflement as we wondered “What the hell happened??!!” Quickly climbed out of that rabbit hole, shared the news of mutual friends and acquaintances and then just let the conversation flow, which it did as easily as it always has. 

 

The poet David Whyte writes of friendship as “the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”  A good summary of my relationship with Liz and so many of the people I’ve gotten back in touch with these last two months— Don Arbor, a fellow 8^th grade student back in 1964, Mike Spirito, who I went to high school with in 1968-69, Tommy Kearney, who I taught for one year in 1975, Jeff Thomas, who I met in India for three months in 1979, James Fox, my old neighbor from 1980, Ginger, Paprika and Maya, 3 sisters I taught in the late 70’s early 80’s at The SF School, Kathleen Poole, my Level I Orff teacher back in 1983 and yet more. All folks (and more) who shared a brief span of this remarkable journey and all of whom I felt instantly re-connected to in these recent visits. There’s some dynamic at work here and alongside my current reading of David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person, I think it’s a simple reminder that amidst my constant focus on “accomplishment,” it’s the grand privilege of walking alongside such beautiful human beings that is the true measure of a life well-lived. 

 

The rain continues to fall outside the window and the outside air is cold, but my heart is warmed by it all.