the rest of that summer and my last two years at the university, I lived off campus in apartments I rented with friends. Monroe Street for those few weeks in the summer was fine, but when the three of us returned to school, it wasn’t going to work. Fortunately I was able to move in with Judy Rand, another friend from home in need of a roommate. She had been one of Mary Beth’s closest friends since fourth grade. It was Judy who taught my sister to smoke and swear—my mother’s preferred take, again, on who’d done the teaching—so I knew her well.
Then, senior year, it was Casey, Judy, and me sharing an apartment just down the street from where Mary Beth lived with yet another friend of hers from home. She’d hated the first college she’d gone to and had dropped out after the first semester. After deciding that working for a living with just a high school diploma wouldn’t do, she came to UVM to begin her nurse’s training as I entered my last year there.
Fragments of memories from each of those apartments linger in my mind, but no place could ever compare with Monroe Street, where my transformation from button-down almost-sorority girl to genuine, barefoot, ripped-dungaree-wearing college hippie was seemingly completed.
CHAPTER FOUR
V-I-E-T-N-A-M, Marriage, and Mexico
The courses I cobbled together at school served mostly as a backdrop for events that would have lasting impact on my life. Increasingly I focused on the social turmoil in the country. And for me that was expressed by protests about the war in Vietnam. My college years weren’t only a time of my metamorphosis from prim and proper freshman to college hippie. I also changed from a fairly uncritical product of our culture and history books to embryonic activist.
Vietnam became emblematic for a complex storm made up of the civil rights movement, feminism, and full-scale U.S. military intervention and the increasingly volatile reaction to it. Many of us experienced those years as a time apart, a time filled with expectations of great change. When the war ended, things didn’t return to the status quo ante, but neither did the social upheaval usher in the transformation of America that so many in the streets hoped for.
When I’d left for school, I was living comfortably in the fog of our mythologized history. Within a couple years, I was a college hippie grappling with a shattered view of American benevolence in the world. How people come to grips with changing understandings of American myth and reality is in fact something I think about all the time. I understand the reluctance to confront all sides of a story. Particularly when it means tackling long-held and unchallenged beliefs without much experience to base one’s questions on.
At first, I didn’t understand that all countries create their own myths. Even in our personal histories we tend to emphasize the good, minimize or erase the bad, and reshape events for our own benefit. Nations do the same. Undying, epic stories about a country and what it stands for are part of what binds people together in a national identity. The stronger and better the stories, the more the people want to identify with them and defend them, even against evidence to the contrary.
More than once I’ve been amazed by how angry people can get when confronted with the darker side of their national history. I’ve listened as people take refuge in the belief that the parts of the stories they never heard before, or which were grossly underplayed in history books, are simply lies. Certainly parts of a country’s patriotic stories are based on historical reality. But what happens when people begin to explore other aspects of that history? For me, the Vietnam War was a shock of epic proportions that helped shatter my unquestioned beliefs about America. The war brought to mind a teacher I’d been fortunate enough to have in high school. His name was Chip Porter.
It was his first year teaching. Mr. Porter was standing in for a social studies teacher on sabbatical, and he took us all by storm. He was young and hip, cool in his white, dashiki-type shirts. He was the only male teacher in high school who didn’t wear a suit. Nor did he teach from notes he’d been using for years.
I wasn’t sure what social studies meant. It was just one of the courses you took. I looked it up recently and found that the National Council for the Social Studies defines it this way: “The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.” I doubt it was defined that way forty-five years ago. Interdependent? I don’t think so; then the world was simply the communists and us.
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