Growing Up Then and Now

Act Three/Scene Two of A Complex Apology:  All Kids Doing Great

SCENE TWO:    With both parents happily remaining at home, the Darymple boys prospered.  The youngest Darymple won the Fourth of July Essay contest as a Sixth Grader and got to read his essay at the Como Park Fourth of July Celebration.  It was all about how great America is, specifically mentioning our freedoms, our creativity, and our compassion.  It included a part about how sometimes it seems hard to see how great America is, and how the good things don’t make TV all that much, but he concluded optimistically saying America’s best days were still ahead, that America serves as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, especially because we can speak our beliefs without being punished, and that we will continue to be a great country so long as we act with compassion.

Joy and The Doc’s children also prospered.  Their oldest was quite the musical talent, even making it on TV as a teenager.  Maybe best of all was that, with Joy’s help, a group of neighborhood high school kids was successful in starting an Americorps program.  They simply wrote-up what they were already doing and said they could expand it.  What they were doing was earning money from “the neighborhood bank” by doing senior chore services, lawn-mowing, etc., and most importantly, running a great after-school and summer recreation program for the younger kids.

Tomorrow:  Scene Three

Act Two/Scene Two of a Complex Apology:  A Police Murder

It was after the summer of 1968 that her first Fred joined the Black Panther movement and Joy met folks in the Weather Underground.  It was an easy and natural extension of the civil rights movement and anti-war movement.  It was not reneging on a commitment to be anti-violent, but rather a reckoning with the reality of 1960s America, of government-sponsored violence, even shooting college kids on campuses across the country, not to forget 50,000 Americans killed in Viet Nam.

And Joy had a good understanding of justice.  It was watching the Chicago 8 trial, where exercising First Amendment Rights to oppose a war was jiu-jitsued into being charged as a criminal for conspiring to riot and commit mayhem, that Joy felt reminded of the stories she’d read in history class about the Haymarket Riot and Chicago in the 1890s, where innocent men were hung for allegedly orchestrating the murder of a police officer when in fact they were simply leaders of the labor movement who had called a labor rally.  It was the opinion of many that the government had started the shooting at Haymarket Square in 1886, and, with her first-hand experience in Grant Park in 1968, it was now also Joy’s firm opinion that government leaders were indeed capable of instigating violence, of taking the law into their own hands, and that justice was not to be counted on in a court of law.  Wrong, and sad, but true.

Joy had learned well in Civics Class about how necessary it was that America fought a revolutionary war to gain freedom and how important the First Amendment is to preserving freedom.  So it wasn’t anything but with the best of intentions that Joy started hanging with Black Panthers and the Weathermen.

Fred Hampton

After the police executed her first Fred in a raid on a Black Panther headquarters, Joy went to Grant Park to protest the police killing, took the microphone, and said “Now you’ll have to deal with me.”  Shortly after that one of her waitress friends moved to LA to be closer to the acting scene and Joy went along, still furious about the death of Fred.  She took on an assumed identity in Los Angeles and then did several things that led to a life-long struggle with her conscience about whether to apologize for her behavior or stick to her guns that what she did was justifiable.

Tomorrow:  Act Three

Act One/Scene Two of A Complex Apology:  Organizing the Neighborhood

SCENE TWO:     Right after moving-in, Joy bought an electric lawn mower and at her first block club party urged the neighbors to borrow it, “Less pollution,” she said.  Within the year, the lawyer on the block who worked for the Environmental Protection League had convinced almost every neighbor that a very nice, albeit not entirely weed-free, lawn could be maintained without using pesticides.  He had made a name for himself by successfully arguing that honeybees have an easement right to fly onto neighboring crop land without being poisoned while performing their necessary cross-pollination duties.  At the time Joy moved-in, he was laying the ground work for another successful law suit holding lawn pesticide companies responsible for the unnatural death of a large number of trees.  He knew a guy who had invented a non-poisonous method for dandelion control.  Everybody on the block got a discount for just trying it.

Their Greenway

While pregnant with their third child, and with two in tow, Joy spent time visiting with the neighbors and convinced us all that our one block stretch of East Como Boulevard could be turned into a pedestrian-only greenway (and later also a community garden) leading to the lake.  Because each side of our one block stretch had an alley behind it, and every neighbor had a garage on the alley, no one had to give up their cars.  The City insisted that emergency vehicles still be able to traverse the vacated street, but soon grass and a walk path replaced the concrete.  The City also agreed to establish permit parking in one section of the parking lot by the lake for occasions when a large number of guests meant not every arrival could fit in the alley.  We all loved it.

Tomorrow:  Act Two