A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

Let me jump forward to a great misunderstanding. Through
the 1970s the commune waxed and waned, and eventually
"failed" in the sense of being a going concern. People eventually
quit the hill. But the spirit of the place lingered on, nongeographically.
We stayed in touch, or continued to live close to
one another, in one locale or another.
I got on with my life, becoming a journalist and essayist. In
1980 I was news editor of a small daily newspaper out on the
plains, so when I was invited to the first Jacobs Hill reunion that
summer, I decided to attend in order to mop up the zeitgeist, and
maybe cop a story. In my newly sophisticated mind, the point of
the reunion was that communalism was doomed to failure all
along – that idealism and sharing were not competitive attributes,
that living together was as tentative a proposition as who was
willing to do the dirty dishes; so endeavors like ours were
fundamentally vain.
I attended the reunion, which was like the end of our youth
for most of us, just reaching our thirties and casting about for the
next chapter in our lives. I wrote an essay about it, in that spirit. It
was one of the best things I had written up to that time. I
enthusiastically sent it off to The Atlantic, which –
enthusiastically – sent it right back to me.
In my effort to be timely and hip and craft a post-hip
perspective, my essay was needlessly cruel. Everyone at the
commune was a washout, I implied in my piece. Long hair had
been long cut. The women had gotten older and were starting to
need makeup, and the men had just gotten cranky. For the purpose
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