Letter of Recommendation: ‘Honesty Is Still in Style’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-honesty-is-still-in-style.html

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I can’t remember when I first noticed the sign. It must have been sometime in my mid-20s, after I moved to Logan Square in Chicago, sinking my life’s savings into a fixer-upper Victorian — a consolation prize after a major breakup. I would pass it when I cut through Humboldt Park, driving to and from the bars where I’d hope to meet a rebound, or speeding to work on rainy days. It didn’t loom large on those drives, exactly, but it was big enough to politely clear its throat and announce its presence, at once a warning, a reminder and an adage: “Honesty is Still in Style.”

The sign was hand-painted, nailed to the side of a currency-exchange building on the edge of the park. Its letters were hokey: bright red, outlined in black, their kerning nonsensical. The words clung self-consciously to a couple of whitewashed plywood boards, each claiming its own line so that the dot of one line’s i stuck to the bottom of another line’s n. The top lines read as if the painter was tight on space, forced to cram letters together to make it all fit. But toward the bottom, everything relaxed. The last word, Style, kind of floated, confidently taking up more space than it needed. Even its y hung low, breaking the sign’s border.

The more often I passed the sign, the more I thought about it. For better or worse, “Honesty is still in style” became my motto. In those years, I was hellbent on finding a partner to share that ramshackle Victorian with me, to fill its rooms with the life I thought I’d bought with my nest egg (plus a pair of pre-Great Recession mortgages). I’d meet someone; I’d be honest with them about what I thought I wanted; it would end. When, eventually, I met my future husband on a blind date a couple of blocks from the sign, honesty had cemented itself as a guiding principle in my life. By then I was turning 30, the age at which OB-GYNs begin to measure their responses to single female patients who express a desire to possibly want kids someday. So on our third date, I was honest: I told him I wasn’t interested in dating anyone who didn’t want to ultimately marry and potentially have a baby. He concurred, we high-fived and have been together ever since.

For whatever reason — the conviction of its message, its lovably rudimentary design — that sign wove its way into my personal life, and the lives of everyone I’ve encountered who remembers it, too. It’s not nostalgia. It’s because the sign addressed a basic principle we seldom talk about: this idea that humans are expected to communicate truthfully with one another — and that said connection is not only desirable, it’s also stylish, a trend of an emotional ideal. It’s the word Still, I think, that lends the phrase its power — the idea that no matter how life evolves, certain standards remain paramount. In hindsight, every relationship I’ve pursued, every opportunity I’ve seized in the years since I first saw it, has been heavy with honesty, sometimes to a fault. Over a decade ago, real honesty laid the groundwork with my husband, and I believe that same brutal frankness is what ultimately saved our marriage when it waned. In conversations with my daughter, I emphasize the value of being honest about how you feel, even though she’s too young to really get it. As I’m settling into life as a 40-year-old, I’ve been making a point to be more honest with myself about everything, from how many hours I work to how much sugar I consume, which has led to a heightened self-awareness typically reserved for regulars at Esalen.

Eventually we moved out of the Victorian, and I didn’t see the sign as much. So last summer on a jog through the park, I tried to make it my destination, but when I arrived at that familiar corner, the sign was gone. It had come down with very little fanfare, and I was inexplicably heartbroken. I started digging around in hopes of learning its whereabouts, and found an Australian artist who, after a Chicago sabbatical, produced a zine named for the sign. I talked to a local sign painter who paid homage with a synonymous silk banner, hand-lettered in a masonic-regalia style. Instagram led me to a local writer-illustrator who had started a replica at some point. I stopped by a neighboring taco shop and, as if investigating a missing person, flashed a grainy Google Images photo to the owner, who offered a quiet reply from across the counter: “Yes, of course I remember it,” he smiled. “It means everything.” Finally, a few days later, I found Maria — the woman who originally curated the sign.

For 15 years, Maria and Jay Feldman owned the currency-exchange building to which the sign was tacked, overlooking a small gravel parking lot. An optimistic Maria had it installed to thwart off bad energy. And it worked — until it didn’t. In 2015, a fraudulent check forced the Feldmans to declare bankruptcy, causing them to lose everything: two homes, five businesses, their cars, their credit. Jay, meanwhile, had fallen victim to opiates. He had an affair. Divorce was discussed. When it came time to decide whether the couple would stay together or split, the sign became scripture. “What had started off as an existential question for the crooks,” Maria told me, “had weaved itself into our personal lives.” They’re still married.