By Rose Kundanis
My memories of 1969 are especially vivid. I was 22 years old, graduated from college and I had just moved to my first apartment on Seminary Avenue in Lincoln Park, Chicago. I dated seminarians, those who studied theology, and considered going to seminary myself, but the closest I came was living on Seminary Avenue where I first began to figure out who I am. I had my first fulltime teaching job at the school where my mother had gone to elementary school and was now a branch of a larger high school.
My co-worker Sherry at the Manley Branch of Marshall High School picked me up in her car one morning, but we did not get far. A car hit the driver’s side of our vehicle and moved us over the fire hydrant on the corner of Seminary and Dickens.
When the car stopped, I realized Sherry was injured when the only sound I heard from her was a groan. I was in shock with a shot of adrenaline. I ran home and climbed up to the second floor. When I burst into the apartment yelling to call an ambulance, my roommate Mary looked horrified as I was covered in blood. I did not know until then that I also had been injured.
I did not realize my own injury until, at the hospital, I looked down and found my boot slashed. Under that slash was a hematoma blowing up just below my right knee.
Sherry was recovering and I called my parents on returning to the apartment.
My mother Bessie arrived, but she would not cross the threshold of my apartment.
I knew why.
The day I left to move into the apartment, and not before, I told my father Bud I was leaving. I knew he would make a scene so I waited until I was ready to leave. My World War II veteran father Bud had a fit.
“Go to hell, Rose!” he yelled, from his perch on the couch in our living room in front of my mother and siblings. Thus, he disowned me, refusing to acknowledge me as his daughter.
So when Bessie refused to enter the apartment, I knew she had chosen her loyalty to Bud, who had forbidden her from entering.
It was the 1960s and I was trying to be who I thought I was.
After a reconciliation and much later, I visited Bud and Bessie in Elmwood Park when I was attending a high school reunion. I told them not to wait up. I would be late. But, when I drove up to their condo, Bud was out on the sidewalk with a coat over his pajamas. I was shocked. I wondered how long he had been waiting out there, and, since the car was heated, I told him to get in. The problem was that I had to parallel park and I had reverted to my teenage self and could hardly park with my father sitting next to me. I learned that, for me, being back under his roof meant also being my teenage self again.
Rose Kundanis is a retired college journalism professor who is working on a memoir titled “Looking for
Who We Are in America.” Her published writing includes a book on Millennial children, families and the
mass media and a submission to “Visions of War,” on popular culture during World War II.