Granny Glasses

When I was at the top of my teaching career and believed myself to be a super-teacher, fate stepped in and dumped everything over like a wheelbarrow full of rocks. Students stopped reading. They stopped verbalizing and tuned me out.

We called them hippies. Wearing granny glasses and beads, they would sing. They would surf. They made new art. They displayed kindness like I’d never seen before. They would touch and hug, but they sure wouldn’t learn — at least as I’d defined learning.

I never thought the hippies were delinquent or crazy, though some lived on the edge of safety. I mourn those I knew who chose to defy our standards and died young. One of them died of leukemia, provoked by drug use; another disappeared into the mountains (I have his poetry book and drawings). I still wonder about the young girl who left with a popular band member and disappeared. One girl was seduced by a teacher and ran off to give birth in her remote shelter while he continued teaching his math classes. Surprisingly, I never gave a thought to the parents, who must have been frantic.

Instead, this revolution was about me. Picture me in my classroom, baffled and befuddled. Those students in granny glasses and sandals made me laugh; they stepped over the line between authority and student, addressing me as friend. Change came like a hurricane into my tidy life. Foolishness was in the air. I watched those hippies give up pressures for teen prettiness—in fact competition itself was gone. I remember a feeling of helplessness. How could I teach reading and writing without grades?

Those flower children told us to make love not war, and they seemed to have an impact on everything. I watched as strict conventions in dress were abandoned or weakened. Hair styles got more creative — original and colorful. Huge transitions came for us women, and we became able to choose different ways to lead our lives. A new consciousness about injustice entered our thinking — mine, at least — and those with energy and ideals would not be silenced.

In addition to new thinking, wild artistic endeavors and the shedding of underwear, the hippies turned our attention to inner values, to peace and the spirit. They led us to find comfort in meditation and the study of Eastern traditions like Buddhism. The hippies forced our attention to a side of our consciousness we’d neglected. Our fixation on career, money and dieting was rejected in favor of quiet spirituality.

I think the hippies brought that mystical awareness into my traditional reasonable life. I became restless and found my schedules and routines boring. Maybe it was more than their invasion, but the new spiritual renaissance touched me, and I left my teaching to go to graduate school to study religion. No one expected that of me. I wasn’t a clerical type. I’d been divorced, seldom went to church, and was a serious teacher with lesson plans and exams. Yet I drank the elixir and took off for Berkeley.

After three years I came away with a degree in Divinity and no answers to questions that many still ponder — the meaning of existence, whether the human spirit is eternal, or whether we live in a moral universe with an ethical center. My religious studies gave me a chance to inquire and ponder, and those classes were fascinating, but they didn’t bring me solutions to those questions.

I’d pronounce answers here if I had them, but I don’t. In a way, we’re waiting for a messiah, a prophet, “a teller in a time like this,” I read in a poem. We look for a master to solve all mysteries, as Beckett shows us in Waiting for Godot. Those tired men sit in an empty place, waiting for God. I don’t find the human condition a wasteland, as Beckett does. For me, we wait in a complicated place, battered by wars, inspired by beauty, driven by competition, even lost in anxiety, but not a wasteland. If I wrote a play about the search for meaning, I’d set it in a carnival.

Some say it’s the search itself that matters, that we need to listen to a summons from our hearts. The hippies listened and found their way in a transformation of social conventions; my niece turned to shamans who channel the spirits; my friend read books about parapsychology; a colleague accepted answers from the church. That search seems to be the way to keep from giving up on ourselves and the world.

I find hope at home here in a study, surrounded by photographs of my teaching days, when hippies invaded like a cleansing wind.