Making
Room for Change
“The
thing you have to be prepared for is that other people don't always
dream your dream.”
Linda
Ronstadt
When I see Linda
Ronstadt's name, it takes me back to California in the late 1960's. I
was newly married, barely out of my teens, and in college at
Sacramento State University. My husband was in Air Force flight
school, and we lived at an apartment complex near the base. It was
the first time in my life I had friends who were not Southerners.
Instead, they were from Boston, Milwaukee, Chicago, even Puerto Rico!
They spoke in ways I had never heard before, had their own dialect.
To me, they may as well have been exotic creatures from another
planet. I practice-taught in a small town north of Sacramento, Rio
Linda, and most of my students were Latino. We made a float for the
Camellia Festival and marched in the parade dressed like ancient
Greeks. Ronald Reagan was governor. Downtown, the streets were lined
with orange trees! Orange trees, heavy with fruit! How very strange
that seemed to a mountain girl from North Carolina.
The musical backdrop for
that time was Linda Ronstadt singing:
“You and
I travel to the beat of a different drum.
Oh, can't
you tell by the way I run,
Every time
you make eyes at me. Wo, oh.
You cry
and you moan and say it will work out,
But honey
child I've got my doubts.
You can't
see the forest for the trees...”
(Stone
Poneys—Different Drum)
Boy, was our drumbeat
ever different! Everything was different. I became different. And, I
became different simply because I was exposed to those people, and
that place, at that time. Different ideas, different speech patterns,
different dreams and aspirations. We all left Sacramento after flight
school, dispersed to various bases across the country. All of us
forever changed; broadened by the experience of having been thrown
together with folks who viewed the world from a different
perspective. I wouldn't take anything for the memory of that time.
In making room for
change, we must realize that not everyone shares our ideas of what is
right, what is important. And, realizing this, we do not have to make
them wrong, or warped, or anything else besides different. When we
insist that everyone think as we do, we are simply out of touch with
reality. Everyone comes to this moment with their own history, their
own experience. We don't have to dance to the very same drum to make
beautiful music together.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment