You Call this Christmas?

December 1968: Schiller College, Germany

It was cold and I was excited to be going back to my family and my sailor boyfriend on the Navy base in Rota, Spain. Warm weather, Christmas cheer, parties. I'd just been back for Thanksgiving, so I knew the drill -- travel orders, passport, space-available military flight from Rhein Main in Frankfurt. Easy peasy.

The dorms closed and I took the train to Frankfurt. The terminal was packed with GIs trying to get home for Christmas. It was wall-to-wall uniforms. Just the way I liked it! Everything was great until I discovered I didn't have my passport. 

It had to be in my dorm room at school. I got on the phone and found that I could get in to look for it, but I didn't have money for train fare. One of the guys hitchhiked back to school with me and we turned my room upside down before getting word through a frantic trans-atlantic call that one of my housemates had accidentally taken it with her --- to Florida. No passport, no trip home to Spain. I would have to go to the American consulate in Frankfurt and try to get a temporary one.

My new friend sprang for a train ride for both of us. I put my plea in at the Consulate but found that everything was shutting down for the holidays. There would be no hope of getting the new passport until they reopened after Christmas. 

Back at the terminal, I fell in with a group of guys, me in my cute little mini smock-dress and my backpack. I had all the attention and admiration I could soak up. They bought me food and drinks, entertained me with stories and jokes, and at night they surrounded me while I slept on the floor --- to fend off the wolves, they assured me.

One by one my companions said good-bye and boarded planes for the States. By the end of Christmas Eve there was almost nobody left except a skeleton crew in the snack bar and in the office. Christmas Day I spent reading my book and had an ersatz Christmas dinner (sort of turkey or chicken?) in the snack bar with the kitchen workers. At least they let me have it for free.

Things powered up again on the 26th and flights began to leave. Space Available is always chancey, and I got bumped twice. The officer who bumped me the second time felt sorry as I stood there crying, and gave me a $20 bill. That was a lot of money in 1968. It didn't get me home that day, but it did mean I could have whatever I wanted in the snack bar.

Finally, on the 27th, newly minted temporary passport in hand, I was on the way to Rota Naval Station on a C140 transport. Seats? Naw, just the netting along the sides with lots of enormous containers down the center. But I got a box lunch to eat on the way. 

My first Christmas away from home felt like a disaster at the time. I missed my family terribly. I had felt all grown up when I went off to college, but there was no place I wanted to be more than around the Christmas tree with my parents and sisters and brother on that December 25th.

By the following Christmas, I had married that sailor boyfriend and we celebrated our first holidays together at his new base. It was many years before I spent another Christmas with my entire family. 2019 marks my 70th Christmas on the planet, but none has stood out like that first lonely Christmas in the airport.

Pushme-Pullyou

                                                          Dr. Dolittle and friends

Remember the Pushme-Pullyou from the Dr. Dolittle movie or books? Aside from being the perfect image for today's congress, it has a different, but related, political meaning for me.

First of all, I loved the Dr. Dolittle books when I was a kid. I checked them all out of the base library, along with the Mary Poppins books, when I was in sixth grade. They were counterpoint to my effort to read every biography in our school library. Typical for me.

So I've carried the Pushme-Pullyou image with me for decades and come back to it often. This morning, I was thinking about the current political situation, a month before the mid-term elections, and in the middle of death-defying efforts to legalize marriage for gay people in North Carolina. It's easy to get wound up, especially when I feel like I have a personal stake in the outcomes. Which I do. But it's equally easy to lose perspective.

When I was 18, I was enrolled in a tiny, American, liberal arts college in Germany ----- Schiller College. It was a unique experience that I didn't have enough appreciation for at the time. I ran away (literally) after one semester. But I arrived at school in the fall of 1968, freshly graduated from David Glasgow Farragut HS (Go Admirals!) on the navy base in Rota, Spain. I had lived in Germany for five years prior to moving to Spain, and my German language skills were far superior to what I had picked up of Spanish in the last two years. I felt like I was going home.

I was also in the company of my best male friend and co-conspirator for all things radical, John. We traveled to Germany by Eurail for three weeks before school started, and got into lots of tangles and interesting situations before finally landing at our castle campus in Bonnigheim. (I don't have a clue how to put an umlaut over that o.) I was feeling adventurous from the moment our train pulled out of Jerez in southern Spain, and being at school didn't dampen that one bit.

So politics. On our tiny campus we had 69 students, all freshmen, all American. Some came from the States and many came from state department or military families overseas. The faculty ---- I don't know how they got there, but they were certainly representative of the times. We smoked weed with the English professor while discussing literature, and we drank beer and danced with others in the on-campus "Milchbar". And one memorable night, we formed an SDS chapter.

We met at a gasthaus in town for a regular political workshop. Everybody drank wine or beer and got really argumentative. It was 1968. The world was coming to an end. Important political figures were being butchered in the streets. Entire neighborhoods in cities were in flames. The war was devouring a generation of young men. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

We met with our political science prof ---- a wise and experienced man of thirty ---- who told us about this subversive, underground, radical group that was opposed to all the things that were wrong with our home country. Some of us had not lived there since we were children. "Breaking news" often broke a week or more after it happened ---- it was hard to keep up with what was happening back home. But the Students for a Democratic Society was in the vanguard, he assured us, and even though we were too young to vote (the voting age was still 21) we were old enough to fight the system.

I don't remember what exactly joining the SDS involved. I don't remember there being any secret handshakes, though there might have been some sort of membership card. I do remember that our meetings involved a great deal of wine and shouting. I'm surprised we didn't get thrown out of the bar.

The SDS in the United States probably did have some impact. For me, it was an introduction to activism, no matter how small and ineffectual. When I left school and married my sailor boyfriend and returned to the States the next year, this early foundation segued into active participation in anti-war demonstrations and street-level protest in the women's movement.

My parents were apolitical. I don't believe they ever voted until they retired and moved back to the US. I cast my first vote for Shirley Chisolm in the 1972 primary. I've missed very few opportunities to vote since then. In fact, I like voting so much I always want to go back to the end of the line and do it again. You know the old saying ---- vote early and often!

I hear a lot about voter apathy now, attributed to various causes, and I wonder if some of it is just plain lack of education. We're swimming in information overload, but still too many people don't know how government is designed to work in this country. The loud doomsday voices on both sides of the political spectrum tend to drown out the plodding local-issue necessities of day to day government. Too many people feel like they don't matter, that they can't make a difference.

My one vote out of millions may not matter if I'm focused on that one tiny action. But if everyone stayed home and didn't vote, because it just doesn't matter, then who would seize the power? Somebody will, and it's not likely to be someone with my best interests at heart.

I feel vaguely guilty because I haven't been out canvassing or phone banking. Over the past 45 years I've done all of that, multiple times. I even managed a local campaign office one year for a governor's race. I've worked the polls. I've gone to Washington to lobby for causes. Now I'm ready to turn that part of it over, not because I'm apathetic, but because I'm tired. And it hurts my heart.

I'll vote. I'll always vote. I'll talk and blog and make phone calls to elected officials and sign petitions. But the pushme-pullyou of politics has taken its toll on me. I can't jump in with both feet anymore without hurting myself. And these days, for me, every single day counts.

Go on, all you youngsters ----- and the oldsters who still have the passion and the energy for it. Save the country. Let your voice be heard.

EVERYBODY VOTE!