Experiencing Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer

 

It had been four rootless years since I had graduated from Baylor University.  I had spent three months traveling through fourteen European countries and another three months driving across the US and back, through twenty-one states.  I had worked at a series of jobs, some menial and some worthwhile.  I had lived in a shack across from the main blowers of a steel mill and in a beautiful palatial mountain home.  But I had finally landed.  I had a career goal.  I had been accepted into graduate school at the University of Colorado, and I was working for an eminent research psychologist, Dr. Raymond B. Cattell.

And then one day in 1974 an important-looking envelope arrived from the U. S. Government.   “Congratulations!” the letter inside began, “Your transfer from VISTA to the Peace Corps has been approved.”  Transfer approved?  My time in VISTA had ended two years before.  Had I asked for a transfer?  I vaguely recalled having received a letter suggesting that I consider the Peace Corps.  My thought at the time had been, why not, what else do I have to do?  But I had expected a quicker turn-around from the ACTION agency that oversaw both volunteer organizations.

They were wasting no time now, however.  The letter indicated that in less than four weeks I was to report for orientation in Chicago, and in two months, I was to be ready to start training in Morocco.  What to do?  I had felt settled after a long period of ups and downs, was enjoying my graduate classes, and finally had a professional direction in mind.  But I had wanted to go to the Peace Corps since I had been in sixth grade and President Kennedy announced its formation.  If I didn’t go now, I probably never would.   Neither my graduate advisor nor Dr. Cattell were happy when I told them of my opportunity and dilemma.  However, my academic advisor agreed to approving a two-year leave of absence, and Dr. Cattell wished me well.

Me at the beginning of my PCV year

I don’t recall much about the two or three days in Chicago except that we had rooms in the lovely old historic Parker House.  My orientation group was large and predominantly male.  We learned that we would be trained as English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) teachers and that we would learn to speak Arabic.  We heard tales of how hard life in Morocco would be and how primitive our living conditions might be.  We women were told about the hardships we might face as females in a Muslim country.  The big questions at the end of this were:  Do you still want to go?  Will you commit to two years in this assignment?

I said yes to both questions, attending more to the opportunity for adventure than the warnings of difficulties ahead.  I went back to Boulder; took my final exams; packed my belongings; gave my kitten, Cass, to my friend Laurie Nelson for safe keeping until my return; and then went home to Texas. 

Mother, always a gracious hostess, threw a good-bye party for me.  About twenty friends from high school and college who were still in Texas came for dinner and time to reminisce in my parents’ backyard in Waco. 

Baylor friends at my parents' house.  Kay Peterson, Jim Selcraig, Steve
Townsend, Rosalie Richards, Cecelia Hawkins, and Ernie Lewis.

My parents helped with packing and travel planning.  We bought a large metal trunk and a big suitcase (I was allowed two pieces of luggage) and set about determining what I would need for my two years abroad.  Sheets, towels, clothing, books, and boots went into the trunk and suitcase.  Dad bought me a multi-band radio that would be able to pull in short-wave stations from Europe, a cassette tape player for my music, and a new camera.  

Peace Corps made travel arrangements and sent my airline tickets.  On the appointed day in June of 1974, Mother took me to the Waco airport for a flight to Dallas, a connecting flight to New York City, and then on to Paris or Amsterdam.  I recall several long, tired hours in whatever European airport it was before the final leg on Royal Air Maroc took me and some of the other volunteers on to Casablanca.  Wrestling with my heavy trunk and overly-large suitcase (there were no wheels on luggage in those days), I went outside the terminal and confronted the reality of Morocco: dusty desert, women covered from head to toe, and men leading donkeys piled high with loads.  I began to cry.  What had I agreed to do?  I was beyond exhausted, but somehow my luggage got loaded on the bus.  Some of my fellow volunteers and I climbed aboard and began the journey to our training site in Meknes.

For two months, seventy-some young Americans lived together at a secondary school in Meknes.  In the women’s dorm we each had a private “room,” a cubicle really with side walls, a window overlooking the courtyard at one end, and a curtain at the other.  Each room had a twin cot with a thin mattress, a sink, and a bidet.  Communal toilets and showers were located at the end of the long room.  

The Meknes School

  

The women's dorm

It was summer.  This was the desert, and there was no air conditioning.  We began our days with Arabic classes starting around six, followed by breakfast, and then more Arabic lessons.  After lunch, we had siesta time.  Sometimes we would venture out to explore Meknes, but most afternoons found me lying and sweating on my bed as the temperatures rose to 115 or 120 outside.  The sun was unrelenting, and there was rarely a breeze.  In the late afternoon we had more Arabic classes, then dinner, and often an evening program of some type before bed.  During those free afternoons, I wrote long, detailed letters home.  My mother saved many of them, and my memories of that year in Morocco have been aided by re-reading my letters.

Susan Wilcox resting on my bed

We found time for fun as well.  There were frequent volleyball games, and some of the men played basketball.  On the fourth of July, our Moroccan teachers put on a party for us. It bore no resemblance to a typical July Fourth, but was filled with music and dancing and laughter.  In August, when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, someone set up a shortwave radio on the roof, and we gathered at two in the morning to listen to (and cheer) his speech on the BBC.

Peace Corps provided us with a “medical advisor,” a nurse named Elsie, whom we all came to despise.  Elsie, who was probably in her sixties and had no sense of humor, appeared at our training site each week to give us shots and pills—vaccines for polio, rabies, typhoid, and I can’t remember what else.  I had a bad case of diarrhea that lasted for weeks.  She gave me a series of drugs.  The first one contained sulfa, to which I developed an allergy, suffering with a horrible, itchy rash.  The next drug contained opium which made me giggly and unfocused.  When I developed a bad sore throat, perhaps strep, she would not let me see a Moroccan doctor but instead ordered me to bed for a week. 

Elsie was concerned enough about my health that she recommended I be sent home.  I refused to go.  I was sure that eventually I would get used to the food and the environment, but  I never did.  Every time I ate food I hadn’t carefully prepared myself, the diarrhea would return.  At the end of my Peace Corps time, I was thinner than I had ever been (or would be again).

I was a terrible Arabic student.  My later self-diagnosis was that I have very poor auditory discrimination, which means I have a hard time distinguishing between similar spoken sounds.  Our Arabic instruction was all oral, with nothing written down.  So, I was always struggling to understand and repeat what the teachers were saying.  And, missing classes due to ill health did not help matters.  At the end of each week, the teachers would gather to re-group us for the coming week, and each week my status got lower and lower.  (This was terrible for my achievement-oriented ego, but a great lesson for my future work with students who had learning disabilities.)  Twice we took the Foreign Service oral language exam, and twice I scored a one, the bottom of the scale.  Again, I was advised to consider going home as there was significant concern about my ability to survive with my minimal Arabic.  And again, I pleaded to be allowed to stay, promising that I would find a tutor and continue working on my language skills. 

Old city walls of Rabat

After six or eight weeks in Meknes, our group was divided into two—half went to Tangiers and half to Rabat for TEFL training and student teaching.  Assignments were made by lottery.  I drew Rabat while all of my close friends drew Tangiers.  Rabat, the capital of Morocco, is a beautiful coastal city.  The old city is surrounded by ancient walls which enclose narrow streets, rows of homes, and beautiful gardens.  The newer portions of the city had modern skyscrapers, wide boulevards, and beautiful government buildings, including a palace for King Hassan the Second and a massive mausoleum honoring his father, King Mohammed the Fifth, who had successfully negotiated independence from the French colonialists.  While I was unhappy at first, I made new friends and ultimately enjoyed my time in Rabat.  I returned whenever possible over the next year.

Four of us were sent to a small town with a population of about seven thousand.  Khemisset was a bus stop on the road halfway between Rabat and Meknes.  The high school, or lycée, where we would teach was a regional boarding school.  We were told that this might be a difficult assignment, as previous Peace Corps volunteers had been removed from Khemisset when someone in the local government decided that they were really working for the CIA.  We should conduct ourselves so as to avoid suspicion.  It was a difficult assignment, but to my knowledge, no one accused us of being spies.  The worst insult hurled my way that year was the frequent hiss of “Nasrani” (literally meaning a Nazarene but a slang term for Christian) muttered as I passed someone on the street.

Me at the Khemisset bus stop

Khemisset buses and horse-drawn taxis

There were two men—Greig Stewart and Jon Goodwill—sent to Khemisset with me and another woman, Christine Adams.  The expectation was that we would have housing partners, but Christine had fallen in love with one of our Arabic teachers (Khalil Mekkaoui) and they decided she should live alone to facilitate his visits, thus leaving me on my own.  The apartment I rented was the bottom half of a home, with the landlord’s family living above me.  My apartment had four interconnected rooms, all beautifully decorated with hand-painted tiles on the walls and floors. 

The bathroom was a squat toilet under the stairway to the upstairs apartment.  The only running water in the apartment was a spigot by the toilet, used for flushing and hand washing.  I asked the landlord to put in a sink and shower for me, but when he refused, I found a plumber and paid to have them installed.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t also afford a hot water heater, so had to make do with cold water. 

My hole-in-the-floor toilet

I almost never used the shower, preferring instead to wash my hair and take cold sponge baths in my small porcelain kitchen sink.  Once a week or so, I would go to Jon and Greig’s for a hot shower in their more modern French-style apartment.  

Tap water was not safe to drink, so each day I would boil several kettles of water and pour them into a large clay pot, adding iodine tablets (provided by nurse Elsie) just to be safe.  I used this treated water for making tea, washing produce and washing my dishes.  It was too awful-tasting to actually drink, but bottled water was much harder to find than it is now, so I drank it when I had to.

My apartment was unfurnished, and finding furniture proved to be very challenging.  I purchased some kitchen things (and a bicycle) in Rabat from a departing volunteer and had other things made to order.  I tried to explain to a wicker man that I wanted a chair and something for my clothes with a hanging rod and shelves.  The things he created for me were functional, but not really what I had in mind. 

According to my letters home, Christine and I ordered banquette cushions and frames from a craftsman in town and found large crates at the souk (market) to use as tables.  Jon, Greig, and I purchased beds at the souk.  All of our furniture purchases were delivered to our homes by the horse-drawn carts that served as taxis in Khemisset.

Greig and Jon sitting on my banquettes

Laundry day: tub and clothesline

My closet and chair

Me boiling water on my propane burners

For cooking, I purchased a two-burner propane stove and a propane tank.  There was no refrigeration, and so I shopped daily for produce and whatever else I wanted to eat.  There was a shop next door to my apartment, but the stock was limited to Palmolive dishwashing soap, Tide laundry soap, Nescafe instant coffee and milk, and warm orange Nehi soda.  The proprietor celebrated when he was eventually able to purchase a small refrigerator and add yogurt and a few other items to his offerings.

I was mostly a vegetarian while living in Khemisset.  Each day, as I returned home from school, I would purchase beautiful fresh produce and freshly baked bread from vendors at the street market.  Occasionally, I would buy a few eggs, but I couldn’t face the meat markets where beef and lamb carcasses, covered with buzzing flies, hung from ceiling hooks.  Nor would I purchase one of the squawking live chickens which would have to be killed and de-feathered at home.   I did eat meat when someone else prepared it for me, but I did not prepare any for myself.

My upstairs neighbors

My landlord’s family was very nice, inviting me up for meals occasionally.  There were three daughters, including one who was my age and taught French at another school in town.  Unfortunately, I spoke no French and none of them spoke any English, so we had to communicate in my pathetic Arabic.  Nothing made me feel more stupid than trying to talk to these women.  Sometimes they would invite others to join us, and I felt like the entertainment as everyone laughed at my poor pronunciation and frequent errors.

A number of Peace Corps Volunteers had maids, but I had sworn that I would not hire one.  It seemed wrong as a Peace Corps volunteer who was supposed to be living frugally.  However, I discovered that what seemed to me to be a meager salary was wealth compared to what most families in Khemisset lived on.  Hiring a maid was a way to provide financial support to one of those families.

In a letter home that September, I wrote that I had spent an entire day doing laundry.  I had purchased a metal washtub which I filled with cold water from my tap and Tide purchased from the store next door.  Repeatedly plunging sheets, towels, blue jeans, and my other clothes in the tub to wash and then rinse them was tedious, back-breaking work.  The next time I was doing laundry, a woman knocked on my door and asked if I needed a maid.  I hired her on the spot to start work immediately.  Fatima came two afternoons a week and worked for Christine another two afternoons.  She cooked dinner for me once or twice a week in addition to cleaning my house and doing my laundry.  We paid her about thirty cents an hour.  Fatima had a disabled husband at home and several children.  One of the girls, about thirteen years old, worked as a weaver in a Khemisset rug factory. 

One souk day, Fatima knocked at my door early, holding her swollen jaw and clearly in great pain.  She explained that she had a terrible toothache and needed to go to the souk dentist to have the tooth pulled out.  She needed money.  So, Christine and I also provided “dental insurance” for our employee.  At the end of my time in Khemisset, I asked Fatima if she would like any of my furniture.  “Yes.  All of it,” she replied.  It turned out that her family had nothing except for straw mats on the floor for sleeping.  So, all in all, I felt that my having a maid was a mutual benefit to me and to a poor family.

Fatima and her daughter on moving-out day

The walls of my apartment were thick and the windows small and high to keep it cool in the summer heat.  It worked beautifully, and I was never too hot inside my home.  However, as the temperatures cooled outside, they cooled even more in my well-insulated house.  Many winter nights found me wearing as many layers of clothing as I could put on, grading papers under the blankets of my bed and wearing gloves.  I finally purchased a kerosene heater, but it was dangerous and only heated the area immediately surrounding it, so I didn’t use it very often.

As for my job, I taught three classes of English.  My students were all boys, about twenty-five per class.  We had no books, but each boy had a spiral notebook and a pen or pencil for taking notes.  All of my teaching was done in English with materials I had created.  Whatever I wrote on the blackboard, the students diligently copied in their notebooks.  I did a lot of acting to get a point across and to teach vocabulary, and the students had to respond orally.  My biggest discipline problem was getting them to raise their hands and wait to be called on rather than all shouting out answers at once. 

One of my classes

My teaching schedule was more like that of a college than a high school assignment.  I went to school for my classes but was not required to be there otherwise.  That worked very well for me, especially since the only bathrooms were community stalls along one end of the lycée compound.  I could teach a class or two, go home for a break and return for my other classes. 

The Meknes Lycee, dorms on the right and
open toilet stalls at the end of the courtyard

My biggest complaint was that I had to teach at least one class six days a week, leaving little time for weekend travel.  The Muslim holy day begins on Friday, so we were out of school on Fridays at noon.  To compensate, there were Saturday morning classes.  Not everyone had to teach a Saturday class, but I did.

The Moroccan education system is highly competitive.  While a free public education is provided by the government through college, only those who survive the academic demands can take advantage of it.  If a student doesn’t pass a grade, he or she may repeat that grade once.  Failing a second time ends the student’s schooling.  At the end of every third grade, students take an exam.  If they pass, they may go on to the next level.  If they fail, they may wait a year and take it again.  Thus, my students were all capable and very anxious to do well, but some, in their final year of high school, were as old as twenty.  French was taught in the elementary grades and English in the secondary grades.  Mastery of both languages was required for high school graduation.  So, my students knew that the stakes were high and therefore took learning English very seriously.

Morocco is a very poor country and everywhere I looked I saw problems:  poverty, unclean water, lack of medical care, and physical disabilities which led to begging.  I thought that providing so many teachers to essentially the country’s elite population was a travesty when there were so many other needs left unaddressed.  I made an appointment to talk to the Peace Corps director about it.  He explained that each country determines what it needs and asks the US to provide those services.  The US can either say yes or no but cannot dictate to the host country what it should be asking for.  He said he understood my frustration and that I was free to quit at any time.  However, he wanted me to know that if I did quit, my position would not be refilled and my students would have no English teacher for the remainder of the school year.  Knowing how critical learning English was to their academic futures, I agreed to stay to the end of the school year.  That was a primary reason for my only completing one of the two Peace Corps years I had agreed to.

I did manage to find a way to address some of the other problems I saw by volunteering at a Save the Children orphanage outside of Khemisset.  The story I was told about its origin was that in the early years of Morocco’s independence, a shipment of surplus motor oil from the US had been sold as cooking oil.  Pregnant women who used it for cooking had babies with terrible birth defects such as missing limbs or other serious deformities.  I don’t know if this story is true, but the children served at this facility all had physical disabilities.  I worked with a group of young girls, doing crafts and teaching them some English. 

Me with some of the Save the Children kids

When my teaching schedule or holidays allowed it, I went to visit Peace Corps friends in other towns—Al Hoceima, Casablanca, Midelt, El Jadida, Essaouira, Marrakesh—or they came to visit me.  During the Christmas holidays, a group of us took the ferry from Tangiers to Spain and spent a few enjoyable days exploring Sevilla and Granada. 

One day in the spring of 1975, I received a telegram from an old boyfriend, John Sellers, saying he was flying into Casablanca and would meet me at Rick’s Café.  At the time Rick’s only existed in the movie “Casablanca”; now there actually is such a place.  I scrambled to make arrangements to go to Casablanca and meet his plane.  It turned out that he planned an extended stay with me, something that would be unthinkable in my small conservative town.  So, we made hurried plans for an impromptu Moroccan wedding in Khemisset.  Fatima cooked a feast, my upstairs neighbor loaned me a dress to wear, and we invited all our local friends.

Wedding day

John and I had met while students at Baylor.  He had been trying to convince me to marry him for years, but I knew he was not the right man for me.  However, by the time we were ready to go back to the states, John had convinced me that he was.  We married for real in Boulder, Colorado in September.  I had been right.  It was a big mistake, and we divorced a few years later.

At the end of my Peace Corps year, I was required to have a physical exam at the US Naval base in Kenitra.  A few days after my exam, I received a telegram telling me to return for additional tests.  The concern was a spot in one of my lungs.  The doctor who saw me said it most likely was a tuberculosis germ, but it looked like my body had dealt with it effectively through calcification.  He recommended that I have it followed up upon my return to the US.  The spot remains there forty-five years later, but, thankfully, I have never tested positive for TB. 

I have many positive memories of my year as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco and occasionally reconnect with some of my fellow volunteers—some of whom can still speak the Arabic I never mastered.  Last year one of my Moroccan students found me on Facebook and wrote that he still remembered me and was grateful for what he had learned in my class.  He told me about the jobs that several of the students in his class were holding—all some type of bureaucratic or mercantile jobs.  I was pleased to have positive feedback after so many years.

PCV Morocco Reunion, 2016

In 2016, I went with a small tour group to Morocco, curious to see what had changed in the forty years since I had lived there.  I found that the big cities were much more modern with vastly improved transportation, but the smaller towns and the countryside seemed the same.  Our tour happened to be driving through Khemisset on a Tuesday, which is still souk day, so we stopped for a walk around the open-air, tented market.

The Khemisset souk, 1974

Produce at the Khemisset souk, 2016

I remembered a few basic Arabic words such as hello, thank you, and the all-important God willing.  I was amazed at how my use of these few words brought smiles to the faces of those I talked with.  “Ah, you speak Arabic,” they would say.  “Only a little,” I would reply.  However limited, this small gesture seemed to convey: I understand something of your culture, your language, your religion, and your lives.  And perhaps that is the biggest benefit of the Peace Corps—an increased understanding of different cultures and a more inclusive world view.   After all, there is only one planet Earth, and we all share responsibility for its care and for one another.

I Think I'm Gonna Love You for a Long, Long Time

 

Music can evoke powerful associations and emotions, and some songs speak to us in powerful ways.  For example, every time I hear The Kingston Trio singing “Scotch and Soda,” I recall David Bass sitting in the living room of my parents’ house, strumming his guitar and singing it to me as I fairly swooned with love for him.  A song, I later came to realize, that he probably sang to other women as well.  So, the Peter, Paul, and Mary song “That’s What You Get for Loving Me,” more accurately sums up my on-again-off-again relationship with him. 

Most powerful of all such evocative songs for me, however, is Linda Ronstadt’s soulful version of  “Long, Long Time.”  When I hear her sing it, tears may spring to my eyes and, for a moment, I am back to 1972 when Jeff Seavey broke my heart.

My first glimpse of Jeff was from across a crowded room at a community reception for us new southern-Colorado VISTA volunteers.  He was strikingly handsome: tall, well-muscled, with long black hair falling in shiny waves to his shoulders and framing a perfectly-proportioned olive-skinned face.  He seemed to have been a phantom, disappearing before I had a chance to meet him.  Later, I wondered with my fellow volunteer and friend, Debbie Green who this Greek-god of a man was and which of us might manage to snare him at some future date.  It turned out to be me, but it would be nearly six months before I actually met him and another three months before we started dating.

I met Jeff at a party hosted by my VISTA friend Tim; the two regularly played basketball together.  I recognized Jeff immediately as the mystery man from that welcome reception.  I learned that Jeff was the son of a local judge, he had attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for a couple of years but had dropped out, and he now was working at the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo.  He was living with his parents while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. 

I don’t recall how we got together after that or how our relationship progressed.  I do remember that he stayed at my house several nights, since I couldn’t stay with him at his parents’ home.  I met them only once when I was invited to dinner.  I remember Judge Seavey as distant and imposing.  It was clear that he did not like me and did not think I was worthy of his son’s attentions.      

When the school year ended and summer rolled around, Jeff decided that he would move from southern Colorado to Lawrence and resume his college career at the University of Kansas in the fall.  As his girlfriend of the moment, he invited me to go along. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.  This beautiful man that I adored wanted ME!  I had completed my year’s VISTA commitment and, with a six-thousand-dollar severance paycheck in my bank account, I said sure.  I’d love to move to Lawrence, Kansas with you. 

But first I had to swing by Texas and spend a little time with my parents.  It was the summer of 1972.  The sexual revolution of the late sixties was well established among the young, but my parents’ generation remained staunchly attached to their traditional family values that included no sex before marriage. 

We had a pleasant few day, until I announced on Saturday morning that I would be leaving as soon as my car was loaded.  My fourteen-year-old sister Peggy, my parents, and I were seated around the old round table in our kitchen eating breakfast.  It was a bright June morning, and the room was filled with dappled sunshine coming through the sliding glass door that looked out on our tree-filled back yard.  

“Why on earth are you leaving so soon?” my mother asked, disappointment in her voice.  “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Lawrence, Kansas,” I told her in the most neutral voice I could manage.  I knew that a battle was coming.

“Lawrence, Kansas!” she exclaimed.  “Why Lawrence?  Who do you know there?”

I stood up, took my dishes to the sink, and said, “I’m going to see Jeff.”

They knew about Jeff.  I always told my mother about the men I “dated,” stopping short of telling her just how involved I was with them.  There were things she didn’t need to know.

“Where are you going to stay?” she demanded to know.

“With him.”

“For how long?  Where will you sleep?”  Her panic was rising.

“I don’t know, Mom,” I replied, “for as long as it works out, I guess.”

Now Dad entered the conversation with his most reliable response, voice loud, deep, and authoritative.  “No. You aren’t going.  You can’t live with a man.”

“Dad,” I sighed, “I’m twenty-two-years-old, and you don’t get to tell me what to do anymore.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me that way,” he sputtered as I left the room.  When Dad got mad, his face turned red, his jaw set, and he seemed to spit out his words.

My things were all packed, and I picked up the first box to carry out to my little gold Datsun, parked in a driveway outside the sliding kitchen door.  Dad had followed me to the bedroom I was sharing temporarily with Peggy.  He now stood in the doorway, arms outstretched, blocking my way.  I ducked under his arm and went out to the car with my box.

Both Dad and Mom followed me, he red-faced and stomping, she a step or two behind, sniffing, as the tears ran down her cheeks. 

My mother pleaded, “Why are you doing this?  Do you want to ruin your life?”

“I’m not ruining my life, Mother,” I sighed.

“If you do this, no man will ever marry you!” she exclaimed.  “No one wants a used woman!”  She was crying now.

“That is no longer true, Mom.  It might have been when you were my age, but it isn’t now.”

“How can you say that?” she demanded.  “Have you lost all your morals?  What about your Christian beliefs?”

“I still have my Christian beliefs about many things, Mom,” I replied as patiently as possible.  “I still care about others and doing good.  I fight for justice and civil rights.  I don’t knowingly hurt other people.”

“Except for your parents,” she cried.  “Don’t you care about hurting us?”

“Oh, Mom, I’m not going to Kansas to hurt you.  I’m going to be with the man I love and see if we can work out a long-term relationship.”  I knew that she could never understand, but I still tried to explain.  “The world is different now.”

As we were having this conversation, I was continuing to carry things from the house, load them in the car, and return for another load.  Both of my parents were following me back and forth, back and forth.

Dad went to my car and closed the door I had left open as he asked, “What are his intentions?  What will our friends say if they find out you’re living in sin?” 

I walked around to the other side of the car, opened that door, and answered him. “None of them will know, Dad, unless you tell them.”

Mom was wringing the tissue she held in her hand and sniffing.  “Why won’t you just marry him?  If he was a decent man, he wouldn’t ruin you.”

“He is a decent man, Mom, and we might marry someday,” I answered her calmly, “but we aren’t ready to make that decision just yet.”

By now, my brother Michael was awake.  He had recently graduated from high school and was enjoying sleeping in on summer mornings.  Michael was tall and gangly with hair to his shoulders.  His feet were bare, and he was dressed in cut-offs and a t-shirt.  He joined Peggy on the patio where the two of them stood, silently watching us go back and forth; spectators to a too-familiar battle between me and our parents.   For now, Michael was safe from Dad’s wrath, but he wouldn’t be for long.  I would learn later that as soon as I drove away, Dad tried to force Michael into the family car and take him to have his hair cut, saying that Michael’s long hair made “everyone” think he was Charles Manson, the despised mass murderer of the time. Dad was as ineffective at changing Michael’s behavior as he was of changing mine.

At last, I managed to get in my car, start the engine and back out of the driveway.  As I headed north on Interstate 35, a sense of relief descended on me.  But the battle wasn’t over yet.  A few days after my arrival in Lawrence, a letter came from my mother addressed to Jeff.  It said, among other things, “If you are a decent man, you will either marry my daughter or send her home.”

“What the fuck!” he exclaimed as he handed the letter to me.  I read it, then wadded it up and threw it into the trash. 

“My mother,” I sighed, and we both laughed. 

Jeff had rented a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an old house in the center of Lawrence.  It was hot and humid that summer.  Our windows were always open and a large fan ran noisily in the bedroom where we spent many a lazy afternoon on the mattress on the floor, talking or making passionate love, sweating profusely, and then enjoying the cooling breeze of the box fan in the window.  

There was no furniture in the living room, but Jeff had set up his reel-to-reel tape player and massive speakers, and we listened to a nearly-endless stream of Grateful Dead music while smoking joints, drinking beer, dancing, and singing along at the top of our lungs.  We hung out in the apartment, ate meals on the picnic table out back under a shade tree, took walks around town, and made half-hearted attempts to find jobs.  I couldn’t have been happier.

And then one day Jeff announced that he had decided to return to Boulder to go to school there. 

“OK,” I said.  “When do we leave?”

“Well,” he hesitated.  “I have to go by myself.”  He had the good grace to look contrite.  “My father says that he will pay my tuition if I come alone.” 

This was the first indication I had had that Jeff had been under any pressure from his parents.  I had thought I was the only one getting parental pressure for my immoral acts.

“I guess we don’t have to live together, but we could still see each other,” I replied weakly.

“No,” he said, “you can’t come at all.”

“What?”  Was this his way of telling me it was over?  He didn’t want me around anymore?

“It’s been fun,” he said, “but it’s over.”

I was devastated.  Not only was I losing Jeff, I had ruined my relationship with my parents, so I couldn’t go home again.  What was I supposed to do now?  I packed up my little Datsun once again, spread out my map of the United States, and thought about where my relatives and college friends were living now. 

Since I was close to Missouri where my grandparents lived, I stopped there first.  I’m sure that I shed a great many tears on that drive, but I put on a happy face for Grandma and Grandpa.  I couldn’t really tell them what had happened and why I was suddenly dropping by for a visit, but they happily accepted my sudden presence whatever the circumstances.  A few days with them allowed me to regroup, regain some perspective, and decide that I could live without Jeff, even though my heart was broken. 

Next, I contacted an old boyfriend, Ernie Lewis, who was living in Nashville, Tennessee.  Sure, he’d be happy to have me come for a visit.  Nashville offered amazing music and intense philosophical and political conversations late into the night with Ernie and his house mates.  The Vietnam War was still raging, and the protests continued.  Richard Nixon was in the White House, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty had not yet raised the people across the south out of poverty.  The Civil Rights Movement had made some inroads, but segregation still reigned.  We had a lot to be angry about but few answers. 

Ernie and I had much in common.  We enjoyed one another’s company and had great conversations, but there was no passion or magic between us.  Before I moved on, we made a pact that if neither of us found true love before age thirty, we would marry each other.  At least it would be a companionable union. 

I drove north and visited my cousin Sue in Baltimore for a couple of days, and then my Aunt Dort and Uncle Toney in Stamford, Connecticut.  I ended in Vermont, where my friend Pruitt Ashworth was living.  He had recently married a fellow divinity student, Valinda, and taken a pastoral internship at a small church in rural Vermont.  Valinda served the church as pianist and music director.  Bethel was a beautiful, scenic place with green rolling hills, lots of trees, red barns, billowy white clouds floating above, and birds singing.  While Pruitt and Valinda were willing to provide me with free lodging, there were no jobs in tiny Bethel, so I moved on to the bigger city of Burlington where I landed a job as a waitress in an upscale restaurant. 

I rented a one-room apartment near the restaurant.  Returning to my room that first night, I was assaulted in the alley.  I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I thrust my knee into the man’s groin and ran.  When I got to my room and looked down from my second-floor window, my would-be assailant was just staggering out of the bushes.  Disaster was averted, but I was shaken. 

The next night, after hearing the story of my assault, a co-worker, Jay, offered his basement to me.  Jay shared the house with three other guys in nearby Winooski.  They would let me stay for free if I would clean their house.  What was a good deal for them turned out to be only minimally acceptable to me, but I was broke, scared, and lonely.  The “room” they gave me consisted of only a camp bed placed between the hot water heater and furnace. 

When I moved in, the very large kitchen was completely covered with dirty dishes.  I think that whenever everything was dirty, someone just bought another cheap set of dishes or pans.  It took a day just to wash them all (by hand; there was no dishwasher in this house).  And the kitchen was in good shape compared with the two bathrooms.  Once the initial heavy cleaning was done, however, we settled into a pleasant life together.  Each of the men had a girlfriend, and they (the men) were all respectful of me.  I was grateful for the bed, and I felt safe.

I began to think that I might stay in Vermont when a letter that had been forwarded several times arrived to shatter my peace.  Jeff wrote that he realized what a mistake he had made in ending his relationship with me.  I was stunned and then cautiously optimistic.  After a day or two, I called him.  Jeff assured me that, if I came to Boulder, he would make a commitment to our relationship.  Foolishly, I believed him. 

I quit my job, thanked my Vermont friends for taking care of me, packed up my Datsun one more time, and made the long drive back across the country.  When I arrived in Boulder, I had been gone from Colorado for four months, had put ten-thousand miles on my car, and had blown through most my VISTA severance pay.  While this was not the end of my journey, it was the end of my travels. 

In Boulder, Jeff and I re-established our passionate relationship.  He went to classes, I looked for work, unsuccessfully, did housework, and cooked.  I had only been back with him for six weeks or so when he picked up the phone one October evening while we were eating dinner.

“Are we still on for tonight?” he asked whoever answered.

“OK.  I’ll meet you in front of the auditorium at 7:15,” he said.  He listened, then responded with, “OK.  See you there.”  He hung up.

I was surprised by this conversation.  “Who was that?” I asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to a lecture with Linda,” he replied as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Can I come?” I asked weakly.

“No,” was all he said.

“You’re going out with another woman?” I was stunned.

“Yes.  I never said that you would be the only one I spent time with.”

I couldn’t believe this was happening.  Again.

“I thought that was why I came back.  So we could be together.”

“Look,” he explained.  He was still eating his dinner, but I had stopped eating mine.  “You can see other guys, if you want.  I don’t care.”

“I don’t want to see other guys.  I love you,” I was trying not to cry but my voice cracked.

He cleared off his plate, went to the bathroom, grabbed his coat, and left.

After a few minutes, I put my coat on and walked to campus, to the lecture hall he had mentioned on the phone.  Linda was beautiful, and they greeted one another as more than classmates.  I sat a few rows behind them through the lecture.  I have no idea what it was about, I only remember the two of them: sitting close, his arm around her shoulders, and their heads together.

He was clearly lost to me.  When I later asked Jeff, through tears, why he had asked me to come back, he only shrugged and said, “I never promised you that you would be the only one.” 

After several tense days and many tearful discussions, I decided that the terms he was offering were unacceptable to me.  I couldn’t live like this, but where could I go?  I had no money, no friends in this town, and no job, but I did have my pride.  And my heart was broken again. 

One night Jeff and I went to a college-student hangout, Tulagi’s on The Hill, to hear a new rock singer, Linda Ronstadt.  As she sang “Long Long Time,” her voice was filled with a deep, deep sorrow.   And listening to her words, I realized that she was perfectly describing my doomed relationship with Jeff.  As the tears streamed down my cheeks, I knew that it was over and I needed to move on. 

Love will abide, take things in stride

Sounds like good advice but there's no one at my side

And time washes clean love's wounds unseen

That's what someone told me but I don't know what it means.

Cause I've done everything I know to try and make you mine

And I think I'm gonna love you for a long long time.

 

Caught in my fears

Blinking back the tears

I can't say you hurt me when you never let me near

And I never drew one response from you

All the while you fell all over girls you never knew

Cause I've done everything I know to try and make you mine

And I think it's gonna hurt me for a long long time.

 

Wait for the day

You'll go away

Knowing that you warned me of the price I'd have to pay

And life's full of flaws

Who knows the cause?

Living in the memory of a love that never was

Cause I've done everything I know to try and change your mind

and I think I'm gonna miss you for a long long time.*

I moved into Boulder’s youth hostel the next day.  It would take a couple of years for me to find my footing.  There was a succession of crummy living spaces.  There were menial jobs and low wages along the way.  There were one-night-stands and some longer-term love affairs, but no one that I loved like I loved Jeff.  (With the possible exception of David Bass, that is.)  I found new friends and rebuilt my life.  And I learned that I could weather all sorts of emotional storms, that I could take care of myself, and that there are more good people than bad in the world.  If I just trusted in my instincts and my inner strengths, I could do almost anything.

Many decades have passed, and I have found a truer, longer-lasting love, but I still have a visceral reaction every time I hear that haunting song.  For just a moment, tears fill my eyes and my heart experiences a pang of brokenness for that lost love.

*Gary B. White.  “Long Long Time.” 1970. Universal Music Publishing Group.