. . . and tender new leaves begin to unfurl . . .

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Rural Delaware County, Ohio

In the 1960's, our family lived in Delaware County, central Ohio on a beautiful, 70-acre rural farm estate dating back to the 1820's.

Our family was considered upper-middle class professional, with our parents being of the teacher-preacher bent, and who worked in nearby cities.

    

We kids - - which included myself, my brother Chris, and sisters Nora, Kari, and Sara, plus our friends -- had all of our beautiful farm, plus unlimited access to our neighbors' farms and country roads, literally hundreds of acres to freely explore to our hearts' content on foot, bike, and horseback.

As the oldest girl in the family, it was often my job to take care of our family's youngest sister, Sara, which turned out to be an immensely important learning experience and for which I am profoundly grateful. When we kids went off on our expeditions, Sara often had a hard time keeping up, and, not being able to go any further, would sit down and cry in frustration and dismay. Our older brother and friends - - much stronger than me or my other two younger sisters - - never deigned to assist. So it fell to me, the biggest and strongest of the sisters, to carry her so she could go along. Being personally such an adventure lover, I couldn't bear for her not to also get to share in the fun.

Our Schools

Growing up in this rural county of Ohio in the 1960's, we attended our local-neighborhood's small, country schools, which fed into our Olentangy High School, which -- at that time -- had 500 students in grades 9-12.

In school, I got good grades and awards, and was a ravenous reader. From an early age I loved to write, with my stories and poems always hovering around the theme of freedom.

In my younger teen years, among my favorite books was Daphne du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek, about a 17th Century British women of the nobility who grew sick of her over-indulgent life in London. Taking her young children with her, she escapes from her oaf husband for the summer and journeys to her family's country estate on the wild cliffs of Cornwall. There she stumbles upon a band of French pirates using her creek as a hide-out between sea raids on rich merchant ships. She and the pirate captain, of course, fall in love. She accompanies him on one of his raids and tastes the freedom of his outlaw life, a life whose purpose is to mock and exploit her own life of aristocratic, established privilege and comfort. Nora and Kari and I read this book and longed for freedom of our own. [BTW, the BBC's 1999 Masterpiece Theatre production of this story is an abomination; don't even bother watching a second of it. They unnecessarily corrupted du Maurier's simple, lovely theme of freedom to be instead one of English Protestants seeking to overthrow the Catholic throne - - the filmmakers possibly attempting to ride on the coattails of the 1998 commercial success of the movie Elizabeth.]

Lisa, age 14-15:  1966-1967
      

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Lisa, Nora, Kari: 
3 of the 4 Lindberg sisters in their early Springtimes
- - teenagers in the 1960's, going to Olentangy High School - - 

Ever since I was 5 years old, I have loved baton twirling, and did it all the time -- and, in fact, to this very day I love doing it (see My Life-Long Love of Baton Twirling).  In my sophomore and junior years in high school -- 1967-1969, ages 15-17 -- I was one of the majorettes in the Olentangy High School Marching Band, and enjoyed hanging out with kids I got to know from doing music together -- band and chorus.

Olentangy High School Marching Band -- Fall 1967

From an Early Age: Applying My Inner Feeling for Freedom to Ideas on Learning

In high school I kept on getting good grades and awards, but about the middle of my sophomore year, shortly after turning 16, there began to emerge in my conscious awareness something I had been feeling deep in my bones for many years : something was quite "off" about the learning opportunities offered to me and my young peers. I kept thinking, "Something is off.  There is a better way to do this.  Something is missing, something significant is being overlooked."

From that time on, I have continually envisioned approaches to learning which are in accord with how human beings actually learn, with what human potential actually is. The awareness of these educational shortcomings was one of the revelations to myself that I was a heat-seeker - - and definitely not a comfort-seeker. Not "heat" in the sense of thrills and action, but rather in the sense of looking for underlying (often unexpressed, subconscious) conceptual assumptions people hold about life with which they form their paradigms and worldviews. The process of turning over rocks to find the inner workings of things, and then closely examining these assumptions and evaluating their validity, can indeed - - as I have amply discovered - - elicit heat.

Around this same time, I had my own personal political awakening. It was the world-wide infamous year of 1968. I spent that summer in much solitary reflection, the kind only a 16-yr-old can do. That August I watched the Democratic National Convention on TV. I saw the young anti-war activists be beaten by American police for expressing their view that using fighting to settle disputes was not very rational, adult behavior. Young people are often ahead of the rest of the world in such matters. This persecution was happening in America, a nation founded on beliefs in freedom of thought and behavior. (Note : this was the era in American life characterized by the slogan "America : Love it or leave it" - - a significantly different viewpoint than now, a few decades later, with the recent revelations by military higher-ups of their Vietnam-era lies.) I was shocked and incensed at the cops' treatment of those young college students. I wanted to throw out everything and start all over. Revolution now.

That summer I became a radik, and I have never gone back. (My family says I was never NOT one.)

To complexify matters for my young self, earlier that summer, I had just been bitten by the Family History Bug. In July our family had an extended-family re-union at our beloved Romundstad Farm in Strum, Wisconsin, with scads of cousins, lovely Wisconsin weather, lakes, etc. We had it on the beautiful farm my great-grandparents Anders & Karen Romundstad had built at the end of the 1800's, and where our Grandma Mildred and her sister Grandma Nora were born. At that reunion found myself wanting to delve into the history of our family's emigration from Norway.

So now, upon becoming a political and cultural radik, I found myself agonizing over how to do reconciliation : how could I both want to throw everything out and also be interested in family history??  Was there a way to reconcile history and future?  I could find no resolution to these contradictions. So I just continued along with both interests :

• I asked my grandmother to tell me everything she knew about our family's early days.
• I continued to weave in my mind what I considered better ways to live on this planet

My Last Two Years of High School, 1968-1970: pure emotional Suffering -- with some bright spots of good influences

Starting in Summer 1968, I was "done" with high school, which made my last two years there -- 1968-1970 -- major suffering. until I could graduate and be out of there. 

However, during this time I found a handful of profoundly good influences.


Architecture

One influence was Genie and Irwin Fellows, country neighbors of our family, who I got to know in the summer 1968 -- that summer of my "awakening." Genie and Irwin were parents of Joy, my brother Chris' girlfriend, who also became my good friend.  I first visited Joy at her family's house that summer of 1968, and was dumbstruck. Her mother was an architect, both parents were advocates of user-designed-and-built structures, and they had designed and built their house themselves. I walked around and around in it, trying to take it all in, and decided I never could find an end to partaking in its lovely places to read, cook, eat, sew, grow plants, work on building projects, meander around, hang out, take in the views, etc. Their house reflected its creators' view that one can create ones own environment to suite one own personal needs and desires. Their place -- along with the amazing Japanese Tea House in Westerville my 7th grade class had visited on a field trip - - significantly influenced the awakening of my life-long interest in environmental design, and which led later to my decision to study architecture in college.

Gypsies

Another good influence was learning about Gypsies.

Sometime around 16 or 17, one day in our local public library's card catalog I looked up the category "Gypsies," and discovered Jan Yoors' just-published (1967) book, The Gypsies. It was the true-life story of a young, white, European boy's entrancement with the life of the bands of Gypsies who regularly came through his town, which. eventually led to at age 10 his fulfilling the proverbial desire of many young people to run off and join a band of Gypsies. For 10 years -- the decade 1929-1939 -- he regularly lived half of every year with his adopted Rom Gypsy family, and the other half year, he would return to his birth family in their Antwerp home.  The home of his (very tolerant and understanding) birth family was always full of the sounds of languages of many countries - - his parents' visiting artist and scholar friends; and its lovely, high-ceilinged studio on the third floor where for hours he watched his father paint. Every year when he felt the restless urge to re-join his Romany family, he would disappear without a word, and eventually find his way to them, once again enduring with them their cold, wet, hungry privation, and also their luxurious indulgence in overabundance, living outdoors always, sleeping out under the stars.

Selections from his book :

"This book is written as a protest against oblivion, as a cry of love for this race of strangers who have lived among us for centuries and remained apart. The Gypsies [who call themselves the Rom], seemingly immune to progress, live in an everlasting Now, in a perpetual, heroic present, as if they recognized only the slow pulse of eternity and were content to live in the margin of history. They are in constant motion, like the waving of branches of the flowing of water. Their social organization is forever fluid, yet has an internal vitality. The inner cohesion and solidarity of the Gypsy community lies in the strong family ties which are their basic and only constant unit. The larger groups of family units, the horde, they call the kumpania. It remains highly mobile, constantly scattering and regrouping as old relationships and alliances shift, as new patterns of interest develop. They keep in touch with each other through a web of secret contacts.

"Unlike the Jews, they share neither a Messianic visionary cult nor the consciousness of a great historical past. Oral traditions survive only through strong genealogical awareness. ... There are no mythical or legendary heroes, no stories about their origin, no need for any justification of their worldwide nomadism. (p. 5)

"[The] kumpania [is] kept fluid, scattering and regrouping, like the flowing of water, adapting itself to all circumstances, endlessly remodeling itself but forever remaining true to its essence, the eternal Rom." (p. 256)

Upon publication, Yoors' book The Gypsies become a classic in the field of ethnography, continuing to be used as a text or reference book in college classes in sociology and anthropology. It remains a favorite of mine, which I continually re-read. Yoors' insights into the concept of eternal fluidity.around an eternal essential core - - and which is which - - are ones I can see applying to many aspects of life.


Planning a Trip to Hitch-Hike Around Europe

At the end of my junior year of high school, on Memorial Day weekend, I made plans with my friend, Joy Fellows, who, at the time, had just finished her first year at the University of Kansas. She and I decided that one year from then -- as soon as I was finished with my senior year of high school and she with her sophomore year of college in the Spring of 1970 -- we were going to wing our way to Europe and hitch around for the summer. I couldn't wait. That's all I could think about.  During my last year of living with my birth family -- June 1969-May 1970 -- knowing I would be going on this trip made me able to keep going.

Summer 1969 -- between my junior and senior years of high school -- I built a good pot of money (saving nickles... saving dimes) from my two jobs.  My less-favorite was at Green Meadows Country Inn, where, with a few of my girlfriends, I was on the housekeeping and laundry staff. After work, I went out with my next boyfriend, Joy's brother, Ray who had was just graduating from Ohio State University (OSU)  with a degree in economic geography. We hung out together on the OSU campus, around downtown Columbus, and at his apartment, staying out way too late, including on nights I had to be at work at 7:30 the next morning. With these grueling hours of work and play, I really burned the candle at both ends, eventually really wiping out my body:  shortly after school started that Fall, I came down with mono and I had to stay in bed for a month to recover, getting to miss a lot of school.

Sandy & Ted Scheick; Donna Krile Boylan; Dave Morgan

My favorite job during that time -- summer 1969 and my senior year of school, 1969-70 -- was with the another set of people who had great influence on me: Ted and Sandy Scheick.  They were country neighbors of ours -- both math professors at Ohio State -- had a little girl, and I worked for them.  On weekends and on their Summer vacation from teaching, they pursued their interest in arts and crafts, and had need of an assistant: me. 

They welcomed me into their home and into their lives, where I worked with them as an apprentice artist-craftsperson. They gave me a glimpse of a world quite other than what I was accustomed in my world of standard teen-aged world of high school. They didn't watch TV, and deliveries of newspapers lay in scatterings in their driveway; they had too many other interesting activities to pursue than reading the paper.  My job was to help them with such things as adventuring into the woods to pick berries for making into wine, doing leather-furniture making, costume design and creation, candle making (both poured and dipped), organic gardening, food putting-up from their garden; and organic gourmet cooking where we made everything from scratch: bread, cakes, cookies, fruit cakes, and main dishes from exotic locales. While doing these things, we talked about art, philosophy, books, the condition of the nation and world, what I wanted to do with my life, guys, my upcoming backpacking trip to Europe, etc.  We also played music together. They acknowledged and affirmed a part of myself for which I was starvingly hungry. For the experience of this privilege, I accepted wages. I remain friends with this family more than three decades later.

Another person who helped me enormously during this rough period of my life was Donna Krile Boylan, my high school senior-class English teacher. The position of senior-class English teacher at any high school is always a challenge, and in my senior year, we were getting a new one. In fact a brand new one : a greenhorn fresh out of college and only 4 years older than us, having gone to summer school each year to do 4 years in 3. "Hmm," everyone thought, "how is this going to play out?" The first day of school, she came into class -- all 5 ft 2" of her - - and announced resolutely without batting an eyelash, "OK : this is what we are going to do this year, and this is what I expect of you, etc., etc." There wasn't an inappropriate peep out of anyone that day in any of her classes - - even from the big, brash 6'4" guys - - nor over the course of that entire year. When she was sick, we hated having substitutes, and couldn't wait until she came back and they left, taking their judgmental moralism with them. As a part of my general chafing, I would write Donna long thought-essays, and she would thoughtfully comment back to me on them. She and I have kept in touch to this day.

Also:  Dave Morgan, Student-Teacher in Spanish at Olentangy High School, his senior year at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio.


When I finished high school, I was looking for a lifeline -- into myself.  I wanted to find my way out by finding my way in.

Lisa Anne Lindberg - 50 Rock Gypsies