A Life Long Role Model

 I remember many things of 1970. It was the year that Jimi Hendrix died and the Beatles separated. Big events, sad events for the teenager I was back then.

I remember Willy Brandt, then Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, getting down on his knees in Poland, in front of the Warsaw-Ghetto-Uprising Memorial. A touching act of friendship and a demonstration of desire for peace. To many of us, this was the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain.

I remember hearing about Woodstock: love, peace and marijuana. I so regretted not being able to be there. Not that my parents would have allowed me in the first place.

I remember a holiday in London, staying with friends of my parents who let me go see the musical „Hair“ with one of their friends’ daughter who was around my age. One of the actors gave me a flower at the end of the performance, which I kept (and still keep) in my diary of those days.

I remember the movie „Easy Rider“ which made me despise and detest anyone older than 30. Establishment, we called them, first spoken out by the students revolting in 1968. When things started to change. I remember that all of a sudden the „Third Reich“ was a subject at school, something they had never told us about before. The silence was broken. So many things happened back in those days.

And, after over 50 years, I still remember this cold, rainy December evening of 1970 at a bus stop in Hamburg, Germany, where I grew up.

I was 15, at the peak of puberty, nearly always acting oh so cool. So I was standing there, with a bunch of other people, all strangers to each other, gathered under the shelter searching protection from the rain.

All of us were waiting for the bus, which would take a while to show up. I decided to light a cigarette. Back in those days, practically everybody smoked. In fact, you were considered an outcast, an alien, if you didn’t – especially among the young. But most of the other folks, old people from my point of view, far, far beyond 30, definitely the worst of „establishment“, stared, some of them showing open disgust.

Back in those days, it wasn’t appropriate for women, let alone young girls, to smoke in the street. Things were still quite rigid in Germany, especially in regard to women’s rights or how we were supposed to behave in public and private. I couldn’t care less. After 1968, things had already started to change, and we were at the doorstep of the second feminist movement. I was this cool teenager, dressed in black, with very short hair, smoking under the shelter at a bus stop in the rain, not giving a dime about all these old creeps.

Right after lighting my cigarette, a woman approached me, separating from the others in the group. She wore a black winter coat, stockings, black shoes and a red hat. Very elegant, very classy. She rummaged in her purse, found a pack of cigarettes, took one and asked: „Do you have a light for me, please?“, smiling. I lit her cigarette. The folks stared. She took a deep draft, grinned and said loudly, so it couldn’t be ignored by anyone in the crowd: „Thanks! Now let’s give these old geezers even more to stare at.“

This made me laugh and feel comfortable with this lady who seemed to be anything but one of these typical Hanseatic bourgeois – smug, snobbish and mock highbrow, many times with absolutely no substance and depth behind their snotty behavior.

„Yes,“ I replied. „This probably made their day.“ The lady grinned and agreed. She started telling me a bit about her life. As far as I recall, she had been married, divorced, without kids.

She lived a self-determined, financially independent life. All this was very unusual for a woman back in those days. „I am 50 now,“ she told me, „and I don’t give a dime about peoples’ opinion. That’s one of the advantages of aging. Of maturing.“ I stared at her in disbelief. Aging had advantages? Well, if she said so...

A bus came, and most of the bourgeois crowd left, some of them not without giving us another withering look. The lady laughed and let me know what she thought of them – basically the same I did.

She asked me about my life and my plans for the future. Back then, there wasn’t a lot I could tell her. I wasn’t much interested in school and couldn’t envision myself to ever get older than maybe 20. Or 25. Anything past that was beyond my imagination. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I wanted to die young. I just couldn’t figure out how life would be past the teenage years. She seemed to understand, didn’t laugh or made fun of me or gave me some „adult“ advice. I felt very close to her, closer than to any of my elder female relatives. And more comfortable. She didn’t judge. Here was someone who understood, who had empathy.

Her bus arrived, and she said goodbye: „Now you have met a crazy old crone. I wish you luck for your life and am sure you will find your own way.“ With that, she left.

Decades have passed since then. A unique encounter in more than just one way. In those ten minutes of our conversation, she gave me more food for thought than any of my teachers and more than many other adults had been able to give me so far. During all those years, I have kept thinking about her from time to time. Sometimes I think it would have been nice to meet her one more time, maybe in my mid-twenties, ten years after this encounter. But I never saw her again. I finished school some years later, went to live in Madrid, then in Frankfurt and moved on in my life.

She’s still in my heart, and she always will be. Because one thing is for sure: This lady was one of my most important role models in regard to living an independent life and not caring about what others think about it. And I hope that maybe I could and can be an equally good example for one or the other teenager during the past years.