THE SEEDS OF DISSENT

Miss Becky is center front, the only one wearing a corsage, which shows how momentous this occasion was to my family.

Dearest Friends,

Earlier I described myself as "a little girl who'd hardly been out of Texas", but that word "hardly" is a most critical one.

When I was in first grade I joined a Brownie troop, a couple of which later merged into one rather large Girl Scout troop, under the amazing leadership of Mrs. Charlotte Geary.  Now, most girls lose interest in scouting as soon as they become interested in boys, but that didn't happen to us.  Why?  Because one day, when we were around 11 or 12 years old, Mrs. Geary taught us a bit about scouting in other countries.  When she showed us a picture of the Girl Scout chalet in Switzerland, several of us said things like, "Forget campouts!  We want to go there some day!"  Know what she said to that?  She said, "Why not?"  That thread of hope became the cord that bound the 30 of us together, all the way through high school.

To tell you the truth, we never did make it to the chalet, but in the summer of '69, when I was 15 years old, we did head off for two weeks in Europe.  In Paris we went to a discotheque, and I danced with a French boy whose only English words were "You are beautiful!"  In London we had tea with some English scouts (who served us tongue sandwiches!), and got to shop on Carnaby Street, the center of fashion resulting from the "British Invasion" and the wild popularity of all things "Mod."  The most beautiful city of all was Salzburg, Austria, where we hiked up to the castle that overlooks it all, slid down long wooden slides in a German salt mine, and visited all the places we had caught glimpses of in the movie Sound of Music.

My parents, poor things, thought that if they allowed me to take this trip, it would surely satisfy my yearnings, or wanderlust, or whatever it was that always had me questioning the status quo, and that I would then be content to settle down in Dallas and become a dutiful daughter, like my sisters.  Unfortunately for them, it had the opposite effect.  It gave me even more yearnings, and made me question everything!

If not for that trip, would I have had the nerve to marry John straight out of college, and head off into the great unknown?  And, if I hadn't done that, would my oldest sister have then encouraged her husband to apply for that job at Aramco, and gone off to live in Saudi Arabia for five years?  And, if she hadn't done that, would my middle sister have had the nerve to accept assignments in The Hague and in Hong Kong, and gone off to live there all by herself?

I wonder if my parents ever forgave Mrs. Geary, for uttering those words "Why not?"