Letters from a Plainclothes Hippie (Draft 11/25/23)

“Take anything you want,” my mother said, pointing to the lower drawer of a file cabinet where she had stowed the files she saved when she sold the house and moved into her mobile home. I didn’t expect to find much of interest. As a historian, my father saved every scrap of paper that fell into his hands, but history just wasn’t my thing. Sure enough, there were leaflets from obscure museums in Luxembourg and France and slide sets from ruined castles we had visited together during his sabbatical. Then one of the manila folders caught my eye. My name was written in pencil on the tab in my father’s handwriting.

I have the folder in front of me now. It has darkened with age, and parts of it are creased and worn to the point of coming apart. It contains twenty-some typed pages fastened with a paper clip and a thick pile of handwritten letters dated only by day and month. Some of them are aerograms, a single sheet with the stamp printed on the front, no longer made by the U.S. Post Office for more than twenty years. Some are closely written on lightweight paper, in red and blue edged envelopes with assorted colorful stamps.

The first of the typed pages is an exact transcription of the words on my diploma, dated “this Seventh day of February in the year of Our Lord One thousand nine hundred and Seventy.” On that day I graduated from Pomona College in California. Of course I know the normal thing is to graduate from college in May or June to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance” (DOO doo-doo doo DOO doo), but I just don’t seem to do things the normal way much of the time.

It was winter. There was a war going on that had a huge impact on the lives of all the young men of my generation. And I had a feeling some people were expecting me to get a job—either that or give in and go to graduate school. So I left California behind, wearing sandals and a mini-skirt, with a B.A. (in French, mind you) and a need to get away. It seemed obvious I was unemployable. I also had a few doubts about my ability to succeed, or even to survive. Not to mention about my self-worth and about the path unfolding before me. Graduate school seemed inevitable, followed by becoming a teacher, and then back to school every autumn for the rest of my life. This happened to be the same path my father had followed some 30 years before.

I always give the war as one of my reasons for leaving the country, unlikely as it sounds. Surely I didn’t honestly believe that living in France was a statement that would impress anyone, that they would even notice my symbolic nose-thumbing? Oddly enough, almost all the young Americans I met during my wanderings understood and sympathized with my gesture. They too felt the romantic kinship with the Lost Generation, the call of Paris, Culture Center of the Universe, and the need to put as much distance as possible between oneself and Home, in order to work through the mandatory young adult exercise called finding yourself.

That was the other reason I came up with, after it was over and I had to explain it to people. I needed to get away from my family, I said, to become independent. And my family is not easy to get away from. During the three years I lived in France, my parents spent a sabbatical year in Luxembourg (closer than we had been when I was in college), my brother and his wife were in Paris for a year (taking the slow route home from Taiwan), and my other brother was in Germany the whole time (working as a civilian engineer on an American military base).

Why France? I wanted to find out what I’d missed by spending my sophomore year of college in French-speaking Switzerland picking up the distinctive accent and other linguistic peculiarities at the Université de Lausanne. Somewhere I had gotten the idea that Americans were not very welcome in France, so I picked glamorous-sounding Switzerland for my European adventure. Looking back now, it’s hard to believe, but Swiss women did not at that time have the right to vote. In May 1968, when students were building barricades in Paris and France was paralyzed by a general strike, I pointed dramatically at the Lac Léman and said to my new Swiss friends, “Over there on the other side there’s a revolution going on!” They refused to get excited. “That’s just the way the French are,” they said.

I wanted to see for myself what they meant. I had applied for a position as English assistant in a French lycée to begin in September, and I thought I should get a head start on assimilating the culture. I thought I might meet someone.

First I flew to Chicago, where it was seventeen degrees. There I boarded an Air Icelandic flight to Luxembourg. My ticket was one-way, although for another fifteen dollars I could have had a round trip. When I arrived in Luxembourg and showed my passport to the immigration officer, I was asked to prove I carried sufficient money for my stay (because I had no return ticket.) “Ce n’est pas beaucoup,” he said, shaking his head at my three hundred dollars in traveler’s checks. I said I was on my way to France, pointing to the bus waiting to load us up, and he generously let me pass, relieved to see that I was about to become France’s problem.

I was wearing a fetching dress and fashionable boots. I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting next to me, and when we got to Paris, he and I and the guy behind shared a taxi to a hotel, where we took separate rooms. At breakfast I chose between them, and I ended up going to Spain with the one named Michael.

I sent a post card with a picture of Notre-Dame to my parents:

Dear folks, The plane didn’t stop in Iceland; it was closed by the worst blizzard of the winter. Consequently we had no breakfast. In fact Luxembourg was temporarily closed, so we waited an hour at Brussels. The bus to Paris took eight hours because of the weather—we arrived at 3 AM. I’m staying for the moment near Rue des Ecoles; a couple of nice boys from the bus are taking care of me. It isn’t too cold. Love, Jane

Naturally I didn’t tell them I was traveling with a near stranger, that I had sort of fallen in love with him, that my inquiries had turned up a possible job as a (shudder) secretary for an American company in Paris, but that I preferred the idea of roaming the chilly beach in northern Spain with this guy I knew nothing about. I didn’t want them to worry about me!

That relationship didn’t last long. I ended up at the Berlitz School in Barcelona teaching English for a couple of months, then going back to France. In the fall I got the assistantship in a girls’ lycée in Paris, and the following year I started teaching English at the Institut Franco-Américain in Rennes, the capital of Brittany.

Notice that the three years I stayed in France I was rarely without a job, almost always a teaching job. It must have been destiny at work. Eventually I realized that if I was going to be a teacher anyway, I might as well go home to do it.

I had been entangled in a new romantic relationship approximately every two or three months for the entire first year. There was Claude, the youth hostel manager, who was basically gay, but willing to give me a try. I wrote my parents about Claude, “He is short, not much taller than I, and well-built for his height. He has a round face, his hair is not dark but black, a tangible Chinese black. He has black eyebrows, a small mouth, a small aquiline nose, and enormous round green eyes with thick black lashes.”

There was Daniel, a tall blond American who worked as an assistant to Claude and had fallen hopelessly in love with a Swiss girl who was passing through. Daniel’s friend Richard, just out of the army, stopped by for a few weeks on his way to Israel. I also went out with a guy named Jean and another named Jacques. And Philippe. There was even a close call with a female friend that I wasn’t quite ready for.

I don’t believe that any of them were affected by these liaisons nearly as much as I was. For me, every day in a foreign country had an unreal quality, like a fairy tale come alive. For them, hooking up with an American girl was one of the things you did when you were young and hadn’t yet met the one you take home to meet your parents.

And then there was Guy. My last year and a half in France, Guy and I lived together. Just my age, he was born in Algeria of a French father and a Spanish mother. It’s because of Guy that my French is what they call “near-native.” We even talked about getting married. I met his parents and his aunts and uncles. In fact, when I went to graduate school after all, I met the guy who later married Guy’s sister. But after it became clear it wasn’t working out and I went back to Oregon in 1973, I never saw Guy again.

It wasn’t until after my father died in 1983 that I learned he had collected all my letters from France, retyped them and submitted them to the New Yorker under the title “Letters of a Plainclothes Hippy, 1970.” It goes without saying I never resembled a hippie in any way, shape, or form, and only my father could have imagined anyone would be the slightest bit interested in reading those long-ago letters home. The form letter rejecting the manuscript is a mere twenty-one words long.

My father had an academic cap and gown his family had given him when he received his Ph.D. in History, before I was born. Ultimately, he passed them on to me, and I donned them for every graduation ceremony I marched in. Year after year I took my place in the line of faculty forming in the hall, walked in to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” sat down, applauded and walked out again, atoning to a certain extent for having skipped my own Commencement. Wearing my father’s regalia, I was doubly conscious of having stepped up and assumed my rightful place as a link in a long chain and of having left my plain clothes far behind.