To appreciate the next episode, it helps to recall who Lyndie always was: An outrageous woman (if not yet “older”).
She and Cal left the New York tenement with their toddler daughter and returned to California. Cal got jobs in construction, but there was never regular employment, let alone a career.
After 4 years there, Lyndie was caring for a 5-year-old, a toddler and an infant — facing all the challenges of raising a young family and, perhaps unsurprisingly, sometimes serious depression.
In 1976, visiting a former foster son who had moved to Dubois, Wyoming, Cal and Lyndie were entranced by the Old West charm of the town and the stunning mountain landscape, and decided to move there. As Lyndie puts it, there was nothing to hold them in California.
They sold one house, bought another, and arrived in the middle of a blizzard. Shortly afterward, Cal came down with the first symptoms of a gradually disabling illness that took many years to be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. In 1983, they had a fourth child, a son.
While Lyndie was caring for her increasingly weak husband and her last young child (the others having grown and left home), and meanwhile studying for ordination as an Episcopal deacon, she had an unexpected invitation from her father, Jack Wallace. “It’s time for you to go to Europe and visit Assisi,” she recalls him saying. Amidst her own life of willing poverty and unconditional love, he offered Lyndie a trip to the home of St. Francis.
Cal was still able to walk and to care for their son, so Lyndie took off for Italy with her father and her Aunt Ruth. That first trip to Europe, in 1989, proved more of an adventure than they had imagined.
You can either watch the video below, or read the transcript by clicking here.
Left alone and penniless in a mountain town in Italy, many women her age would have felt frightened or furious, or both. But Lyndie was not at all like most women her age. Watch her tell how she responded to the situation, or read the transcript.
Several times in recalling this, Lyndie has used the word “mortified” to describe her father’s response at having left her destitute, in the care of some nuns. To thank the sisters at the convent, he donated funds to renovate their medieval chapel.
Four years later, after her ordination, her father paid for Lyndie to repeat the visit to Assisi on her own. This was the second of seven trips to Europe, including the first Danube cruise two years ago.
Twice she took her youngest son to Europe, once while Cal was ill and went into respite care and again after Cal died in 2002. They celebrated her son’s 21st birthday in Rome with a picnic “among the ruins of the Caesars’ palaces….we sat on the grass feasting on bread, cheese, and wine while pigeons swarmed us.”
Later, when she was alone, she took several trips to Greece, France, and Switzerland. How could she afford all this, I asked, while living a life of willing poverty?
“I worked four part time jobs,” Lyndie replied. “I cleaned houses, I bussed tables, I swept floors, I worked as a special ed in the elementary and the high school. I just did whatever I could and … squirreled away the money, bit by bit. I went on the cheap, you know. I couldn’t afford to eat in sit-down restaurants so I ate street food.”
Mostly she traveled by “shank’s mare,” she added, “knocking on doors, looking for a place to sleep, with a backpack.”
These days, sitting quietly or waiting to fall asleep in her apartment in Laramie, she sometimes amuses herself by trying to remember the details. A flood of memories follows.
“One morning not long ago, I spent two hours trying to recall just exactly how (in what conveyance) I crossed the Gulf of Corinth to the Peloponnese. In what year? I finally remembered it was a bus! Then recalled standing on the slope above Old Corinth (from St. Paul’s time) and wishing my much more religious blind friend could see it … It was the year of the terrible wildfires that consumed much of the Peloponnese. Burnt olive trees, so terribly sad-looking!”
Recently, reading about the religious reformer John Wesley, she came across something they had in common: They are both immune to seasickness. “Sailed all over the Aegean in all kinds of wild weather, waves bouncing clear above my cabin windows–never had a bad moment,” she wrote. “Fellow passengers were not so fortunate!”
It was small ship, registered in Cyprus. The head waiter was a Greek Cypriot named Dimitri, with whom she “almost fell in love,” who told her stories of the Turks dive-bombing the fields where he and his brothers had played.
Later, she went to France with a friend. They rented an apartment in Paris, where the friend served up strawberries and cream on Lyndie’s 68th birthday. She walked along the Normandy beaches where her Aunt Ruth’s husband had served during (and survived) the D-day invasion, and collected sand to send to her two of her sons, both of whom by then were disabled veterans.
“A favorite memory [from France] is walking alone up the long, lonely road that leads to the medieval monastery of Chartreuse, where the monks make the famous liqueur and rarely speak,” she wrote in a recent email. “It was utterly silent, even standing outside, at the foot of the walls. No woman ever enters there. But the lifestyle, like that of the Poor Clares [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Clares ] (whose monastery I walked by daily in Assisi) has an oddly beguiling appeal. Maybe it’s why I spend as much time in contented silence (without phone, radio or TV on). It’s a way to re-charge after engaging with the world outside.”
Now Lyndie has begun to prepare for what must be her final trip to Europe, thanks to the generosity of Viking River Cruises and dozens of generous donors. In due course, right here, you will be able to read about those memories, too.
Lyndie will fly off to Budapest in a few weeks! Chapter 8 will be published on March 6.
Want to start this whole story at the beginning? Click here!
In a 2024 crowd-funding campaign on the Angelink platform (supplemented with direct contributions), friends and total strangers raised nearly $3000 to help Lyndie (re)live her ruined dream of a trip to Eastern Europe. We are still working to restore her savings. To learn more, please click here.
Lyndie's Journey 