LEAP! Sara Davidson's Blog

Bad Trip - Part 2

2011-12-11T16:01:00.003-07:00

Part two of the best and worst trip to China. To read part one, click here.

After two hours of climbing the "Path to the Heaven" with no end in sight, my knees gave out and I refused to go further. Terry, my sister, went on climbing hoping to find help, and after a few minutes, called to me that she’d reached the top and found my son, Andy, and his girlfriend, Yang Fei. They scampered down to help me to the top, where we saw a wide road with buses ferrying Chinese tourists up and down the mountain. We hadn’t seen a soul on the Path to the Heaven and now we knew why: everyone else took the bus! I learned, later, we had climbed 3,000 feet.

Exhausted, feeling nearly crippled, I swallowed some Advil and sat happily on a bench while the others took a tour of the Avatar sites, which they said were magnificent and surreal.

The next morning my knees were okay, but we had to get up at 5 a.m. to catch the first of two flights to Shijiazhuang, my son’s home. (Henceforth I’ll call it Shiz) We had a six-hour layover between flights. Andy discovered a spa at the airport, where we could have massages and rest. Every day we’d been in China we had foot massages that are like no other foot treatment in the world. We were given a private room with four beds, a flat screen TV, and served tea and snacks when we wished. As we stretched out on the beds in the airport spa, four therapists walked in carrying tubs of warm milk with rose petals floating in them. As we soaked our feet, they massaged our heads, necks and shoulders.

They spent 90 minutes on the feet, kneading, rubbing, pounding and pressing tiny points on the toe and between toes and under and over the bones with such specificity that it was breathtaking. All for about $12. When they finished, my feet had never felt so alive, as if fireworks were going off under the skin. I could feel every fiber of my sock when I slipped it on. We watched a movie and took naps until it was time to check in for our final flight.

That’s when disaster struck. The flight was canceled at the last minute because of fog around Shiz. The airline said they’d put us on a flight the next night or refund our money. The next night was not an option. Andy had allotted us only one full day in Shiz before we had to fly home from Beijing. The main point of my coming to China was to see his home, his company, meet his staff and his dog and have dinner with Yang Fei’s parents. If we couldn’t get to Shiz for that last day, we’d have to leave China without seeing any of it.

Andy and Yang Fei starting working their cell phones, trying to find some other way of getting to Shiz. It was Friday night now, and every seat on every flight to Beijing, from which we could take a train to Shiz, was booked. They tried the railroad but all the trains were sold out. Finally, Andy found the last four seats on a flight to Taiyuan, which was a two-hour drive from Shiz. He called his driver and arranged for him to meet us at the airport.

Relief! We landed in Taiyuan at 8:30 p.m., met the driver and settled in for the last leg of the trip. We were moving right along when suddenly the traffic slowed, then came to a dead stop. As far as we could see, giant trucks and cars were stalled, and they’d shut off their engines -- a very bad sign.
Had there been a massive accident, a landslide, a road collapse? We waited an hour, then another hour. Nothing moved. People walking between the rows of vehicles said the road was closed ahead because of the fog in Shiz. Needing to do something, I got out and walked past what felt like miles of trucks and cars until I saw the barricade. A sign said we were only 30 miles from Shiz! But there was no way off the road, ahead, behind or sideways. We were trapped!

All bets were off. Nothing to do but settle in for a miserable night. There were 5 of us in the car and Yang Fei had contracted a bad cold, coughing and sneezing. I had developed the runs, and had to exit the car periodically to do it in the road, as the Beatles sang. Have you ever spent the night sitting up in a car? We tried to catch some sleep until daylight, when surely they would open the road. But between the coughing, the runs and our cramped positions, no one slept much.

When dawn finally came, the fog was thicker than before. Vendors were walking up the rows, selling tea and noodles.

I began to think we might be stuck here for days! Terry had a brainstorm: “We should call the American embassy.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Andy said.

Maybe they could investigate, I said, or call the local authorities. At least we’d get some information.

Andy folded his arms and shook his head. “Relax. They’ll open the road when the fog lifts.”

“But that might not be for days!” I got out and walked again to the barricade, having to step over puddles of pee and piles of excrement. There was a police car there now with two Chinese officers. With hand gestures, I tried to ask when the road would open. They pointed to the fog, then made a crashing gesture with two fists. One held a mock telephone to his ear, indicating there’d be a call when it was okay to open the road. I held out my watch, urging them to point to the hour it might open. They pointed to ten. Ten! It was only 6:30 a.m.

We waited, playing card games to pass the time. Around nine, Yang Fei jumped out and walked to the barricade. When she returned, jabbering in Chinese, Andy burst out laughing.

“What?” we asked.

“She told the police we had two foreigners in our car who’re sick and shitting all over the road.”

Whether that message worked or the phone call arrived, I’ll never know, but shortly after Yang Fei's exchange, our lane began to move. The police wouldn’t have cared about shitting in the road, but the Chinese are now doing cartwheels to welcome foreigners as tourists and to do business. Tourists getting sick in a 15-hour traffic jam is almost as bad for their image as tourists getting shot by terrorists.

Once we sailed past the barricade, the highway was empty. At 11:30 a.m. we checked into a hotel in Shiz and went straight to bed. We’d started out at 5 a.m. the day before and been in transit for 30 hours.

That evening, Andy gave us a quick tour of his home and office, introduced us to his dog, his maid and several friends. Then Yang Fei treated us to a multi-course banquet in a private dining room with her parents.

first course

Andy coached me in Chinese etiquette: I should make toasts, starting with the oldest person at the table and capping each toast by downing a glass of beer.

With Andy translating, I toasted Yang Fei’s father, mother and Yang Fei herself, but most important, I toasted my son. He’d spent 10 days with three women—his mother, his aunt and his girlfriend--under stressful conditions and only lost his cool twice. He had to translate constantly between Terry, Yang Fei and me, sometimes with two of us speaking to him at once. He wanted to accommodate our different and often conflicting needs, and the grace with which he pulled this off was awe inspiring.

Without my watching, he’d metamorphosed from a green college grad into a mature and terrific young man. He’d arrived by himself in Shiz, knowing no one and not a word of the language, and now he could conduct business in Chinese, manage 12 employees and a household and make his way through tangles of Chinese regulations, taxes and export/import laws.

Being able to see the life he’s created here and feel the love surrounding him was worth the punishing journey. We survived, and isn’t it a far better story than if everything had been blue sky and quaint pagodas?

HOLIDAY GIFT: Click here to send JOAN, the memoir about my 40-year friendship with Joan Didion, to anyone who has an email address. Or treat yourself – only $2.99.

Bad Trip - Good Story

2011-12-07T23:05:00.012-07:00

Part one of a two-part blog

“The worst trips make the best reading,” Paul Theroux, the vaunted travel writer, says, because they’re stories of survival.

When people ask about my recent trip to China, I say, “It was the best of trips and the worst of trips.” Spending time with my son, Andrew, who lives there, was enriching and delightful. But we experienced the biggest travel disaster I’ve known.

Mom and Son

Andrew had gone to China right after graduating from U.C. San Diego. He’d planned to spend a year learning Mandarin, then come home and get a joint business-law degree. Sight unseen, he picked out a language school on the Internet in a city he couldn’t pronounce—Shijiazhuang—that had 9 million people but only a hundred foreigners. He chose that school because it offered four hours of one-on-one instruction every day, which is critical when you’re trying to learn to make sounds like qi and xie.

That was six years ago. He fell in love with China, and with a beautiful and vivacious young Chinese woman, made numerous friends and was welcomed into the city’s business community. He started a Chinese internet company devoted to photography lighting, and found he could lead a very good life—four bedroom apartment, car and driver and a maid who cooks and cleans 7 days a week—for a fraction of what that would cost in America.

I’d visited him soon after he’d arrived, but five years had passed and I wanted to meet his girlfriend, see his new home and office. In October, I flew with my sister, Terry, to Beijing, where we met up with Andrew and Yang Fei, who spoke not a word of English. I’d told Andy to plan a trip to some place in China they hadn’t been yet.

Zhangjiajie

They picked two cities I’d never heard of. One, Zhangjiajie, (don’t even try) has a national forest where the movie Avatar was filmed. Remember those otherworldly enchanted mountains that shoot straight up like fingers, with arches and looping valleys shrouded in gray-green mist? We spent days exploring them, on trails that were cantilevered out from the sheer cliffs.

Terry on cliff path

In one stretch, the trail was made not of stone but of thick glass, so if you looked down you saw—beneath your shoes—nothing! A straight drop to the valley thousands of feet below, and you’re on glass with nothing to hold onto but a rail. That was too much for me, and Andy said we shouldn’t do it because “You have to rent booties for the glass.”

Terry, who’s competed in races, said, “So what? When will we ever be here again? Never! We’ve got to do it.”

Yang Fei on glass path

Yang Fei led the charge. I sat on a bench while the three of them made their way, letting out shrieks, along the glass jutting out over the abyss. Chinese women, I was learning, are gutsy; I watched them arrive in stiletto heels, slip on booties and strut across the glass as if it were a runway.

On our last day, we wanted see the terrain where Avatar had been filmed.

Andy and Yang Fei consulted a map in Chinese and led us onto a trail marked “Path to the Heaven.” We climbed a flight of stone steps which, I thought, would lead to a beautiful viewing site. In China, I was discovering, hiking in the mountains is not walking up dirt trails but climbing cement stairs built into the mountain, going straight up. When we came to the top of the flight, the path jogged to the right and there was another flight -– 5 or 6 stories high. Each time we reached what had appeared to be the top, there was an even more forbidding flight going higher.

After an hour of endless stairs, I wanted to turn and go back down. I’ve had injuries in both knees and climbing steps is the worst stress for knees. If one of my knees went out, I wouldn’t be able to walk for the rest of the trip. But Andy and Yang Fei had disappeared up ahead and Terry said we couldn’t go down or we’d never find them. She coaxed me to take one flight at a time, not looking up or down, but my knees began to throb with pain. After two hours, I sat down and said I couldn’t go any further. I’d seen Chinese men with sedan chairs at the bottom of the mountain. I needed them to come and carry me out of this goddamned place.

To be continued.

NOTE! My short memoir, JOAN, about my 40-year friendship with Joan Didion, is the number one rated Kindle single by readers on Amazon. You can buy it for only $2.99. If you need help downloading it on your computer, click here.

You can also send JOAN as a holiday gift to anyone who has an email address. Click here and on the right, “Give as gift”

Joan Didion Buries the Baby

2011-10-27T07:43:00.006-06:00

I've just published JOAN, a memoir about my 40 years of friendship with Joan Didion, and what I've learned from her about writing and about life.

I did not set out to do this, however, when I interviewed Joan on the fourth of July for Oprah magazine. I'd been assigned to talk with her about Blue Nights, her breathtaking new book about losing her only child and growing older.

She's 76 now, but when I met her she was 36, a rising star whose work was already being called the "finest prose being written in this country today."*

Although she's always looked frail--95 pounds on a tiny frame--I've known her to be tough and in control. She was brought up to live by the Western code of self-reliance, not complaining and never giving up. Her ancestors came to California in covered wagons, and her great great grandmother had to bury a baby that died of fever on the trail, burying him fast because the wagons were moving right on.

"That's the persona I prefer," Joan told me. "I'm strong. I can cross the plains. Bury that baby."

In the past decade, however, Joan has suffered tragedies of Biblical proportion. She lost her husband, John Dunne, then lost their only child, Quintana, and then her own health began to fail. She sometimes walks with a cane and her eyesight is poor. "For the first time ever, I feel frail," Joan said, adding that she no longer "believes absolutely" in her ability to overcome any obstacle.

"So the Western code...?" I said.

"It's not my code anymore because I'm not self reliant. It would be a useless code."

I asked if anything has replaced it.

"Work harder." She laughed. "I think we need to find another code."

What might that be? I asked.

"I don't know." But after reflecting, she said the code would have to include "acceptance. And surrender." She looked taken aback, as I was, by what she'd just heard herself say. "Surrender was never close to my code before! It did not involve surrender. But I don't mean it in a negative way, like giving up. I mean... acceptance."

This seemed an enormous change, and I made that the theme of my piece for Oprah.

Then a strange thing happened. They rejected the piece. The editor said it wasn't interesting, and "there's no point." But there is a point, I said. "Here's a writer who's an icon, who's been articulating a consistent code for forty years and now, in her 70's, all the planks she's been standing on have been kicked out from under her. How is she adapting?"

Besides, I added, any conversation with Joan Didion is interesting, because of the startling and delightful way she expresses herself.

"Maybe our readers wouldn't feel that way," the editor said. "Maybe they wouldn't care."

This made no sense to me, and it was a devastating blow. I'd been a contributing editor of Oprah since it was founded, and now the door was being slammed. Other doors had been slammed, (many) and I wondered if the gods were telling me I wasn't meant to be writing for publication any longer.

Happily, this is one of those instances when bad news turns out to be a blessing. After licking my wounds, I realized that I'd obtained richer and deeper material from my interview with Joan on July 4 than Oprah would have printed. In addition, over the decades, I'd done three other remarkable interviews with Joan, as well as with her husband and even her daughter, when she was seven.

By drawing on all those interviews and my memories, I felt, I had a unique story to tell. I wrote a 50-page memoir of my friendship with Joan and submitted it to Byliner.com. The site was founded by a group of talented and accomplished writers who wanted to create an outlet for compelling nonfiction. They publish "Byliner Originals," which are meant to be read at one sitting--not as long as a book but longer than what a magazine might print. The first piece they published was John Krakauer's "Three Cups of Deceit."

The Byliner staff was thrilled with the article, which they'll distribute on October 27. Simply called, JOAN, it contains material never published before:

- the night Warren Beatty tried to seduce her.

- Joan's recipe for a novel that "takes."

- How to enter the "writing space" each day.

- How losing a child is different from losing a husband.

- Joan's evolution from a Barry Goldwater girl to a supporter of Jerry Brown.

- How she came to Zen Buddhism.

- Her response to the question: Can she ever really bury the baby?

It's also a primer on writing and the writer's life.

And you can READ IT for $2.99, on any electronic device--Kindle, ipad, Nook, your computer or your phone. CLICK HERE to buy JOAN. If you'd rather read it on paper, you can print it out from your computer.

I think you'll find inspiration, humor and pleasure in the story. And you'll be helping Byliner, other authors and me to continue the work we love doing.

I thank you in advance, and if you like JOAN, I'd be even more thrilled if you'd post a review on Amazon. May you enjoy!

* Dan Wakefield, New York Times Book Review

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Naked, With Bats

2011-09-06T17:43:00.016-06:00

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Cat's Cradle: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." I had a peak experience over Labor Day that involved hundreds of thousands of bats, a double rainbow and naturists of all ages. I would not have had this experience if I hadn't accepted a peculiar travel suggestion from my sister, Terry, to go to Valley View Hot Springs in southern Colorado with several friends. I'd long heard of Valley View as a former hippie watering place. Although I love hot springs, I imagined it would have funky bathroom options, messy kitchens and spacey people concocting meals that contain no meat, no gluten, no dairy and possibly no taste.

But... Terry told me there was an extraordinary natural phenomenon to be witnessed there. A large colony of Mexican Free-tailed bats spend the summer months in a collapsed mine near the hot springs. At dusk every night, the bats fly out of what's called the "Glory Hole," creating a flying black river across the San Luis Valley. I decided to go for the bats.

Photos by friend, Cheryl Vonn

Because it was a holiday weekend, Valley View--which has campsites and cabins--was sold out except for a room in a community house, where people use a shared kitchen and shared bathroom across the dirt road. I took it, thinking it would be like camping, with an indoor bed.

Checking in at the Welcome Center, I was told the entire resort is clothing optional. I'd been to places like Esalen in Big Sur, hot springs by the Rio Grande in New Mexico and Strawberry Park near Steamboat, Colorado, where the drill is: you walk to the hot pool area, take off your clothes and slide in, and after emerging, put the clothes back on.

Valley View is different. You see naturists, as they're called now, walking everywhere and doing everything naked: cooking, eating, hiking, checking email, playing board games, making music. You see all age groups from babies to very old people walking with difficulty. Naked. There are no teenagers, or if they're present they wear bathing suits, and the largest demographic is people in their 50s and 60s.

To my surprise, the grounds and buildings, though rustic, are clean and well maintained with rigorous environmental standards. The clientele is amazingly diverse: in addition to New Age types, there are conservative red-state people driving enormous RV's or pulling airstream trailers; college kids volunteering on environmental work projects; and wholesome-looking families with young children. And when clothes are off, everyone talks with everybody else.

But let's get to the bats. That's what we came for, so shortly after checking in, we started the 1.7 mile trek up the mountainside, wearing layers of clothes because we'd been told the weather could turn cold or rainy. The Glory Hole looked like the set of a science fiction movie: jagged black caves, rust-colored rocks with gaping holes, and stone pinnacles pointing at the sky. About 30 people waited, expectant, checking their watches, wondering if this would be the night the bats wouldn't fly out to hunt insects. I was staring at the ground when I heard the sudden flapping. Out came the bats, looking as small as flies at first. The species is only four inches long with a wingspan of twelve inches. As they emerged, backlit by the sun, they took on the rust color of the rocks and it was only when they fanned across the blue sky that we could see the familiar bat shape and color.

It was thrilling: they moved like a tornado cloud, spinning and twisting at 60 miles an hour. Gathering distance, they looked like a lacy ribbon unfurling across the valley. Individual bats would dart away from the cloud, circle and dive back in. They navigate by echolocation, sending out sound waves that, when reaching anything solid, tell the bats where and how big the object is. This creates extreme sensitivity to what's around them. They fly over our heads, not among us, and sometimes you hear a crack when the sound waves of two bats collide and the bats carom away from each other.

Everyone stares, transfixed, and then, unbelievably, two rainbows appear next to the Glory Hole. The bats fly right through the arcs of color.

The out-flight lasts about ten minutes and when it stops, we want more. We wait, hopefully, for a second out-flight, but it doesn't come. So we hike back to camp and receive another aesthetic thrill: the sun setting over the desert mountains. The horizon is vast and unobstructed, with streaks of red, orange and purple. When the sun disappears, the air in every direction turns creamy blue.
In the evening we hit the sauna, one of the nicest I've been in, with beautiful wood benches and a cold pool right in the center of the sauna so that when you get hot, you can dunk in the pool, then hoist yourself back onto the benches in the heat. Later we float on our backs in the Olympic size swimming pool, fed by natural spring water that's warm--92 degrees! The Milky Way has never looked brighter and more clear.

The next day I speak with a grandmother whom I'll call Judy, who's the "camp host," a plus-size woman with an all-over tan. She and her husband have been volunteering as hosts at Valley View for six weeks, living in a mammoth RV equipped with a flat screen TV and state of the art kitchen. They have three kids in their 30's but, Judy says, "They don't know we come here. My oldest son, who's a banker, would be appalled."

Judy grew up in the Midwest, "sheltered and ultra conservative," she says. "It never crossed my mind that a place like this would exist." Her husband discovered it online and visited it by himself while Judy was raising their kids. Many men come without their wives, I learned, and Judy told her husband she'd only come if he bought her an RV. So he did. "I was really shy at first, I wouldn't talk to anyone," she recalls. "Then I started to make friends. We all have something in common: no one cares what anybody else looks like. We're just here to enjoy nature."

Not wearing clothes is a great leveler; any pretense or formality is dropped, and people begin to feel relaxed and free. The most challenging aspect for me was the unisex bathroom, where I'd see men peeing into urinals while I was brushing my teeth.

After slipping in and out of warm waters all day, though, and the transporting experience with the bats, I awoke on the second morning feeling a kind of peace I hadn't felt in some time.

Then came re-entry. We drove home, arriving in time to attend a Labor Day party held by friends. Everyone there was in high spirits, meeting and greeting and eating bountiful food, but the nature of connecting and talking was different from what I'd experienced in previous days. I tried to imagine what the gathering would be like if everyone shed their clothes. But that seemed beyond imagining.

Final words from Kurt Vonnegut: "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."

Who Has the Magic Coin?

2011-07-20T23:21:00.017-06:00

I’ve been meeting with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi to collaborate on a book he’s calling “The December Work.” I see it as lessons from a rabbi in his later years that you can use for all your years.

On July 1, I’m about to leave Reb Zalman’s house and fly to New York for a magazine assignment. “Wait!” he says, “I want to give you something.” He leads me into his prayer room, which I call “the cave.” It’s small and dark, lit by 3 blinking orange lights that are always burning.

He keeps four charity boxes by the chair where he prays. Opening one, he hands me a coin minted in 2000 that’s worth one dollar and bears the image of a Native American woman with a papoose on her back.

“The Talmud says that emissaries of a mitzvah (good deed) are not harmed,” Reb Zalman says.

He tells me to keep the coin with me and exchange it for one of my own dollar bills. “When you get to a place where you’ll see someone who suffers, you’ll be my emissary and give them something.” He adds that he has a “double purpose. The coin I’m giving you has a female picture instead of a president. I want it to help you do excellent work.”

It felt good, carrying the coin with the Indian woman in my purse. It seemed to be giving off a secret magnetic charge. BUT…as I walked through the streets of New York, I didn’t see any homeless people as I always had before.

The purpose of my trip was to interview Joan Didion for Oprah magazine about her new memoir, Blue Nights, to be published in November. The book is provocative and gorgeously written; she’s been a mentor since the ‘70s and it’s always a treat to spend time with her.

The trip had two other highlights – walking the High Line for the first time and seeing the Alexander McQueen show at the Met. What surprised me was that I have friends who live in New York and have not done either.

Kathy Goodman, a buddy since childhood, took me to the High Line at sunset. For 30 years it was an abandoned elevated train track, an eyesore that the city wanted to demolish. Then a neighborhood group formed to turn it into an elevated park, a narrow promenade, and in 2009, the High Line opened and now runs from Gansevoort Street to 30th on the far West side. The design and landscaping are awesome -- elegant and inviting. But what makes the walk spectacular are the views of the Hudson River and the city. Every few steps, different vistas open up and as the sky turns from blue to orange and mauve, you can look right, left, in front or behind and in any direction, the view takes your breath away.

The sunset also burnishes the faces of the people walking by, and every face seems joyful. We did not see a single person hurrying or brooding.

It was, literally, a peak experience, but I did not expect the same from the Alexander McQueen show. I’ve never been interested in high fashion, but many had told me this show was not about clothes but an extraordinary artist using haute couture as his canvas.

They were right. I had planned on staying an hour and couldn’t tear myself away after three. Every runway show McQueen created had a theme and told a story. In “It’s Only a Game,” the models stood on black and white squares like pieces on a chessboard and moved as their pieces allowed.

McQueen committed suicide in 2010, so this show is the best collection we’ll see of his work. It’s worth a trip to New York, if you’re turned on by startling creativity.

But what of Reb Zalman and the mitzvah coin? As my visit was coming to a close, I still had not come across anyone begging or suffering. But I had to give the dollar to someone!

When the doorman where I was staying scurried out in the rain to find me a cab, I gave him an extra dollar. I figured he doesn’t earn much and could use it. I tipped the taxi driver an extra dollar, but I still kept looking for street people. Where had they all gone? I treated a friend to breakfast because he has four children and is feeling the strain of sending them all to college.

I’m back in Colorado now; the coin was supposed to protect me and bring good work, both of which were accomplished. But the magic of Reb Zalmans’ coin was that it expanded my sensitivity and capacity to be generous. Reb Zalman keeps a stash of dollar bills in the ashtray of his car for when he passes people on the street holding signs asking for help.

“Do you always give?” I ask.

“Always, unless the light changes and I can’t stop. Even if the guy is going to buy beer,” he says, “why not still give?”

I must look puzzled, because he lowers his head and looks into my eyes. At age 13, he had to flee the Nazis with his family. They had no passports and carried sterling silverware to exchange for food, until the silver ran out. They were arrested and put in camps, where they had to survive on scraps of bread and water.

“Do you know,” he asks me, “what it feels like to have to go beg?”

I take a keen interest in your comments. Please tell me your thoughts.

My daughter, Rachel, and her husband, Jay, are doing the Mud Run to raise money to cure Multiple Sclerosis. If you'd like to support them in reaching their goal, CLICK HERE.

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Marijuana 2: The Wild West?

2011-06-08T10:37:00.011-06:00

This is PART TWO about living in a state with legal medical marijuana, and why Attorney General Eric Holder is getting involved, concerned that this is de-facto legalization. To read part one, CLICK HERE.

After applying for a license to use medical marijuana, Sam* drives to the closest dispensary to his home in Boulder, Co. It's called Holy Herbs and looks like a crash pad, with shabby display cases containing jars of grass and an old refrigerator filled with pot-laced edibles. A live iguana, the owner’s pet, sits in a corner.

Stepping over the iguana’s tail, Sam finds that at Holy Herbs, there’s no pretense about “medicine;” it’s about getting stoned. The clerk, Rebecca, who has a Ph.D. in physics but was recently laid off from her teaching job, asks Sam what type of pot he likes.

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “I’ve just bought whatever the dealer had.”

Rebecca tells him there are two types: sativa, which is more cerebral and stimulates creativity, and indica, which works more to relax the body. There are also hybrids of the two, with names like Bordello, Skywalker and Train Wreck.

They move to the refrigerator and Sam picks a tiny round raspberry cheesecake made by the “Twirling Hippie,” who’s pictured on the label.

“How much of this should I eat?” Sam asks.

“Depends on how much you smoke,” Rebecca says. “How long will an eighth of an ounce last you? A few days? A week?”

“Oh…six months,” Sam says.

“So you’re a non-smoker,” Rebecca says with a laugh. The cheesecake is marked “one dose” but she tells him to start with half, although it takes her two cakes to feel anything. That night Sam splits the little cake with a friend and neither can move or complete a sentence for the following 12 hours.

The dosage, he learns, is geared to heavy smokers who’ve built up a tolerance. With smoking, one can tell right away how high one is getting but with edibles, the effect takes about an hour to be felt. As a marijuana attorney in Denver said, “Either the dose doesn’t work, or your legs don’t work.”

Most of the strains are now organic but growers have yet to develop a strain that’s low-cal — that doesn’t bring on the munchies. As Sam puts it, the problem is: if you’ve eaten half a brownie and start craving something sweet, the other half of that brownie will pull you like a magnet even though you don’t want to get more stoned. “It’s an attractive nuisance,” he says.

Sam was happy with Holy Herbs. The cheesecakes were $5 and as Rebecca said, “Where else can you have a great time all night for $5?”

A few months later, though, Sam discovered that other dispensaries were giving products free to people who assigned them their growing rights. He checked around and switched to Majestic Mountain Meds, which gave him $50 worth of products as a signing bonus and one free gram of pot each week. All he had to do was fill out the “change of caregiver” form and Majestic Meds notarized and sent it to the state registry. In a short time, Sam had collected enough free pot for a year.

It was the Wild West. No one was monitoring the quality of the marijuana or integrity of the dispensaries. Nobody was making sure the product was all being accounted for and not slipping out the back door and being resold.

Politicians and local communities had been caught unprepared. They scrambled to regulate the booming new industry, with some cities passing laws to limit the number of dispensaries that could operate and preventing them from being built within so many yards of a school. As if! Kids don’t move around town and see the dispensaries? This year, on April 20, also called 420--the national pot smoking day—more than 10,000 young people gathered on the commons at the University of Colorado to smoke, while the police stayed away.

The big question was: how much tax revenues were being generated by medical pot sales? Nobody knew. All sales were subject to tax by state and local governments, but merchants weren’t required to report what they were selling. It could be shoes or marijuana.

The authorities did know how much they were getting in application fees: $90 for every person seeking a license and $7,500 to $18,000 for each dispensary, plus $1500 for a grow license.

In 2010, the state took charge and passed a law setting up a regulatory board for medical marijuana centers. They also passed 70 pages of regulations, starting with the requirement that all pot sold in the state be grown in the state, and all patients must be state residents. All edibles must be produced in the city or town where they’re sold. No such rules apply to any other product sold anywhere.

The new rules go into effect July 1, and will also prohibit dispensaries from giving free products to patients. The state wants the tax revenue and if products are given away, they won’t be taxed.

The regulations are voluminous and minute, stipulating what locks must be installed on dispensary doors and what kind of video security cameras must be operated at what hours. Marijuana will be monitored “from seed to sale.” Every stalk of weed will be assigned an electronic traceable number--a radio-frequency identity tag like those attached to merchandise at stores to track inventory and set off alarms at doors.

The monitoring of pot from planting to processing to final sale to the patient creates a “closed loop,” whereby no marijuana crosses state lines. This may protect Colorado from intervention by the feds, who recently sent notices to the 16 states that have legalized medical marijuana. Governors were warned that they’re putting state employees at risk of federal prosecution for regulating a substance that’s illegal under federal laws.

This makes no sense. Why prohibit regulation of a controversial and ungainly new industry? Because regulation will make the business seem legitimate. Attorney General Eric Holder promised on June 2 to clarify the Justice Department’s position, which seems untenable. How can the feds, as they’ve threatened, prosecute everyone from growers to legislators and regulators, now that 16 states and D.C.—nearly a third of the country—have legalized medical marijuana?

Jeff Gard, a Boulder attorney who’s an expert on marijuana laws, says, “I’m hopeful that we’re at the beginning of the end of prohibition and moving toward responsible use and regulation, in the same way we regulate alcohol and tobacco." Gard adds that in 15 years of criminal defense work,"I've never seen a guy who smoked a joint and beat his wife and kids. But alcohol is involved in almost every criminal case."

What seemed impossible just a few years ago—the decriminalization of marijuana—may indeed happen in our lifetimes.

I'd love to hear your thoughts - PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT

NEW BOOK – I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m writing a book with the working title, “Fridays with Reb Zalman.” A freethinker and unique character who founded the Jewish Renewal Movement, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is a master at connecting the ancient Orthodox with the current cutting edge. Born in Poland and ordained a Chabad rabbi in Brooklyn, his life work has been to “take the blinders off Judaism” and make it nourishing and relevant. In 2009, he asked me to have a series of conversations with him about what he calls “The December Work.” At 86, he wants to describe what it’s like in the December of your years, “when you feel you’re coming to the end of your tour of duty. What is the spiritual work of this time?” That’s where we started and we’ve wandered far afield—into fascinating realms. To be notified when the book is available, CLICK HERE.

* Because of the shifting sands, the names of marijuana dispensers and users have been changed, but make no mistake, they are real people.

Marijuana Train Wreck?

2011-06-06T17:53:00.007-06:00

“Isn’t it fun growing older in Boulder?” my friend, Sam, asked at a recent gathering. “Where else can you eat a cookie laced with marijuana and go to the opera? It’s legal, and it’s free!”

What? Free legal medical marijuana? Until the past week, that’s been true in Colorado. But on July 1, the toughest regulations enacted by any state will go into effect. At the same time, U.S. attorneys are threatening to prosecute the state regulators. Why? Because regulation will legitimize the business of medical marijuana, which is illegal under federal laws. Jeff Gard, a marijuana attorney in Boulder, says, "We have two freight trains heading toward each other on the same track, and it's not clear who's going to win."

I'll explain this further in my next post, and I'll also tell you why I haven't been blogging so often lately. But first, I want to report what it's been like, living in the people's republic of medical marijuana, and why Attorney General Eric Holder is concerned that this is de-facto legalization.

It is.

Five years ago, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. If you have now or have had severe pain in the past three years, you can qualify for a license, walk into a dispensary and pick from an astonishing array of products. You’ll see 31 flavors of marijuana, pre-rolled joints fat as cigarillos, cookies, brownies, cheese cake, truffles, peanut butter cups, granola mix, bread, drinks, ice cream made by Glacier, the best ice cream joint in town, candies to suck or chew and butter and olive oil to cook with. It’s the foodie culture meets the drug culture. Can books and TV shows be far behind? The Barefoot Contessa or Skinny Bitch Cooks with Pot?”

Gourmet Edibles

Medical marijuana has been legal in Colorado since 2000, but you never saw a dispensary anywhere until 2009, when state restrictions were loosened and Attorney General Holder announced that the federal government would not make prosecution of marijuana users a high priority, if they're complying with state law.

Overnight, people who’d been growing and selling pot illegally came in from the cold. It seemed there was a dispensary on every corner in Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs. The pages of local weeklies were covered with ads featuring marijuana leaves, ads which have been keeping those papers alive.

More than 150,000 Coloradans have registered for a license; 69% are male, the average age is 40 and severe pain accounts for 94% of conditions reported. Boulder, a city of about 100,000, has only three large drugstores like Walgreens and Rite Aid but 200 dispensaries of medical marijuana.

"Budista" working at a dispensary

Sam*, a biology professor at the University of Colorado, was the first person I knew who obtained a license, in 2009. He’d had a hip replaced and his medical records filled a box.

The first step was getting a health practitioner to review his records, sign and notarize his application. Private doctors were reluctant to do that but clinics sprang up solely for that purpose.

The state lists 8 conditions which qualify a person for a license, including cancer, seizeures, HIV and severe pain. And who, especially as we get older, hasn’t had severe pain—headaches, knee pain, back pain, pulling a muscle, tennis elbow? I’m told that college students are applying with arthritis.

Sam brought his records to the clinic and as he was filling out forms, a tall, fat man with long gray hear, wearing overalls with “Felix” sewed across the pocket, came rushing through the door, yelling that the state had sent back his documents because they weren’t dated correctly. “I paid you a lot and you screwed up,” Felix shouted.

Rick, the young man at the front desk, tried to reason with him. “You signed it yourself and wrote the date….See?” But Felix kept shouting and pounding his fist. Rick tried another tack. “Okay, we’re going to make it right, don’t worry. We’ll re-do the papers and because of your inconvenience, here’s a coupon for a free gram at the dispensary across the street.” Felix took the coupon, closed his mouth and smiled.

“Sam?” a doctor called, opening the door to the exam room. Sam walked in and shook hands with the doctor—let’s call him Dr. Right. Young and athletic with a blond pony tail, Dr. Right said he’s an ER doctor and does this on the side. As he flipped through Sam’s records, Sam told him that after his hip was replaced, he started having pain in the other hip. “I’ve had acupuncture and physical therapy, and uh… there’s still pain… sometimes.”

“Poor guy,” Dr. Right said. “You’ll probably have to get the other one replaced.”

Sam wondered, is this a charade? Does Dr. Right know Sam doesn’t want “medicine” for pain but to relax and get high? If the doc knew, he wasn’t letting on.

After Dr. Right signed the application, Rick notarized it and informed Sam there was a special program for seniors. The license gives you the right to grow six plants, Rick explained. “That’s worth a lot to a grower. If you don’t want to grow plants yourself and assign your right to a `caregiver,’ the caregiver will pay for this exam--$100—and the state filing fee of $90.”

“What’s the catch?” Sam asked.

“No catch,” Rick said. “You can still buy your medicine anywhere and change caregivers any time.”

“Sign me up,” Sam said, thinking: this is better than the senior discount at the movies.

Rick made a photo copy of the application and handed it to Sam. “The state is running 8 months behind in processing these, so just show this copy and you’re good to buy meds.”

But Sam would soon learn he could get all the medicine he needed for free.

TO BE CONTINUED

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NEW BOOK – I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m writing a book with the working title, “Fridays with Reb Zalman.” A free-thinker and unique character who founded the Jewish Renewal Movement, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is a master at connecting the ancient Orthodox with the current cutting edge. Born in Poland and ordained a Chabad rabbi in Brooklyn, his life work has been to “take the blinders off Judaism” and make it nourishing and relevant. In 2009, he asked me to have a series of conversations with him about what he calls “The December Work.” At 86, he wants to describe what it’s like in the December of one’s years, “when you feel you’re coming to the end of your tour of duty.” What is the spiritual work of this time? That’s where we started and we’ve wandered far afield—into fascinating realms. To be notified when the book is available, CLICK HERE.

* Because of the shifting sands, all names in this piece have been changed but make no mistake, they are real people and real dispensaries.

The Mystery of Dr. Sha

2011-03-20T18:20:00.006-06:00

Last fall, John Chitty, a man I know in Boulder, was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. His PSA score was 266! (Most doctors consider a normal score to be 4 or below) The cancer had metastasized to his bones and lungs with tumors “too numerous to count.” His prognosis, obviously, was dire.

Because John founded and heads the Colorado School of Energy Studies, he launched a full-out campaign to heal himself, doing everything he knew or learned about to make his body inhospitable to cancer. He ate only greens and seeds, had coffee enemas and oxygen treatments and took supplements too numerous to count.

John Chitty

A friend brought him to a talk by Dr. Zhi Gong Sha, who has an MD in western medicine from Xi’an JiaoTong University, was named Qigong Master of the Year in 2002 by the World Congress on Qigong, and is a Grandmaster of Taoist healing. That meeting would dramatically affect the course of John’s illness.

Dr. Sha

John had no symptoms except frequent urination. At the talk, Dr. Sha demonstrated his treatment on John and the next morning, John says, urination was back to normal. Dr. Sha had offered John free tuition at a 10-day workshop, so John dropped everything and left for 10 days of nonstop Taoist practices and more healing from Dr. Sha. Shortly afterward, when John was tested again, his PSA score was…. Want to guess?

John told me: “It’s 1.4.” His oncologist called this “remarkable,” and x-rays of his lungs showed the tumors were all shrinking.

How had this happened? John had been taking hormones that block testosterone and was also doing dozens of natural interventions. (For a list, click here) But he feels Dr. Sha’s healing was a “huge factor” in his improvement.

A few months later, when I was in Hawaii, my sister, Terry, told me Dr. Sha was coming to Honolulu. Terry had recently developed four lumps on her thyroid -- diagnosed as “multi-nodular goiter.” The doctor told her it would not go away through diet or medication and they would watch it for six months, hoping it would not grow larger.

Since Terry needed healing and I was curious to see Dr. Sha, we each paid $100 for his Soul Healing Day at the Ilikai Hotel. I’ve never seen anyone work like Dr. Sha. When he demonstrates on Angelika Carmona, who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer, he makes sharp movements with his arms, stomps his foot and yells so loudly that I jump: “Trans-mission!” He asks everyone in the room to point to Angelika, shake their hands rapidly and chant phrases like, “Divine treasures, heal her!”

Angelika does not wish to receive radiation or chemotherapy. Dr. Sha asks two MD’s who’re attending the workshop, a professor at the University of Hawaii medical school and a retired surgeon, to palpate Angelika’s tumor. They describe it as 4 cm, hard and immovable. For the next four hours, Dr. Sha chants, sings, yells, swings his arms, calls on the divine and urges the group to chant and shake their hands rapidly. He takes off his suit jacket and wipes sweat from his face. Looking around, I feel like I’m at a mass faith healing.

Dr. Sha asserts that the cause of all sickness is karma—the effects of deeds from this life and past ones—and that if he can clear the bad karma, the person will get well because the soul has been healed. He tells us a curse has been placed on Angelika’s breast by someone she harmed in a past life. He sees “dark souls” in Angelika’s body and gives the command for them to leave. “Trans-mission!” Moments later, he says, “Dark souls are gone!” People applaud.

I must acknowledge that I’m an agnostic when it comes to reincarnation, let alone dark souls and curses. I don’t believe, literally, that we go through life again and again in different bodies, although I can entertain the concept as a metaphor. As for karma, something feels intuitively right about “what goes around comes around,” but how that works exactly is, to me, a mystery.

At the Ilikai Hotel, I can’t say if dark souls have been exorcised from Angelika’s body, but the two M.D.’s who examine her report that the tumor has shrunk to 1.5 cm and is soft and pliable. Angelika looks flushed and radiant, smiling with tears in her eyes.

When I describe this later to Donald Abrams, MD, an integrative oncologist who’s chief of oncology at San Francisco General Hospital, he says, “It would be better if they’d done an MRI or other scan before and after Dr. Sha’s treatment to provide objective evidence.” When I tell this to Angelika, she says she had three MRI’s before seeing Dr. Sha but won’t have any more radiation because it’s harmful to the immune system. She’s using Dr. Sha’s healing techniques herself and will have a thermography test on April 19. “I think I can get it out of my system completely by then,” she says.

Dr. Sha tells people at the workshop that after a break, he’ll clear karma, remove curses and heal sicknesses. After he leaves the room, an assistant makes the pitch: $1,000 to clear karma, $500 to remove a curse and $500 to heal an illness. “This is cheap,” the assistant says, explaining that people who have cancer could be charged hundreds of thousands for western medical treatment. He adds, “How can you put a price on clearing karma?” Dr. Sha tells me later that he’s been guided to charge “honor fees” because “people have a spiritual debt they need to honor.” So here’s my question: You can see and feel if a healing produces results, but how can you tell if karma truly has been cleared?

Since I had no illness, I decided to leave then but Terry stayed to have her goiter healed. The next morning, she called and said, “It’s amazing -- the nodules are gone.” She and her husband couldn’t find the largest nodule that they’d had no trouble finding before, although she still felt soreness in her throat. She’s eager to see what her tests will show in six months.

I find Dr. Sha a consummate paradox. He’s extremely generous and he’s constantly selling. He gave my friend John free treatments and tuition, while others paid more than ten thousand for his services. In his books he teaches you to clear your own karma, but if you attend one of his soul healing days, he’ll do it for you and says that works fastest. He speaks about dark souls and curses yet his work is producing results that are palpable. People say he’s healed them of blindness, deafness and tumors, yet others have died. Dr. Sha acknowledges, “Nothing works 100% of the time.”

After spending three days around him, what I can say is that I feel an expansion of love and a resolve to serve more. Returning to the place I’m renting in Kailua, I picked up an old book, “The Golden Bough,” and came across a passage that was uncannily similar to what I witnessed with Dr Sha. It describes a small village in Indonesia where, when sickness ravages the population, they build a boat and everyone fills it with whatever they can offer — rice, tobacco, eggs. They take the boat to the sea, push it off and watch until it disappears from sight. Then the leader cries out: “The sicknesses are now gone, vanished, expelled, and sailed away!” Everyone cheers.

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Better than an Orgasm?

2011-02-14T12:47:00.005-07:00

Gloria Steinem said not long ago, "At this age, remembering something is better than having an orgasm." I get it. You try and try, then you stop trying, you think about the weather, you forget the whole thing and then, out of nowhere, bam! Here it somes. The name or word you couldn't remember.

But how do you know if you’ve just had an age-related memory slip or if Alzheimer’s is knocking at your door?

For me, the alarm went off when I received an email from a woman whose name I did not recognize. “Hey,” she wrote, “I’m coming to Denver Friday for the state Democratic convention.” She asked if we could have dinner and could she possibly stay at my house?

Her name was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t pull up any associations. I went through the people I know who’re active in politics -- nothing. I googled the woman, even saw a picture of her and still couldn’t place her. Either she knew me well enough to invite herself to stay at my home or she had outrageous chutzpah.

I sent her a cautious email. “Hi, I’m in California now so I’ll miss your visit to Denver. Really sorry. I must tell you I’ve been having memory problems lately. I have the sense that we’ve seen each other recently, but can’t bring up details. Could you remind me?”

I didn’t hear back, so I dismissed it as a crank email. The next day, while having lunch, it suddenly came to me. Oh my God! She’s the woman I stayed with for a week in Aspen while I was taking a course, “The Magic of Skiing.” She’s a friend of a friend and had generously offered to put us both up. We ate meals together, I met her family and we exchanged emails afterward. And that was only three months ago!

I rushed to the computer and sent an email telling her what had happened and that of course I remember her and she’s welcome in my house any time. She responded, “You had me worried there.”

The good news was: I did remember, it just took time. The bad news was: this was the most egregious of an accelerating string of memory lapses.

I called a friend, Cathryn Ramin, who wrote the ur-text on memory loss, “Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife.” In her 40’s, Cathryn started forgetting names of friends and common objects and had trouble focusing on her work. She made herself a guinea pig, taking batteries of tests and trying many interventions suggested by doctors and researchers who work on the cutting edge of memory and brain studies.

Cathryn Ramin

After speaking with her, I realized my issue is not just memory but distractibility. Here’s an example: I’ll walk to my office with a check I just received in the mail and on the way, I see a book I need to look at and laundry that needs to be moved from the washer to the dryer and when I arrive at my desk, the check is not in my hands. I retrace my steps and don’t see it anywhere. Sometimes I never find the damn thing again and wonder, was it snatched into a fourth dimension?

Cathryn thought I should get tested for adult ADD. I protested: That can’t be me. I sit at my desk all day and write with total concentration. I’m learning piano and can focus on that for hours. How could I have ADD? And even if I do, I don’t want to take Ritalin or any drug. I’m hyper sensitive to meds and they all have side effects.

“Okay then,” Cathryn said. “There’s a happier solution: You can create scaffolds for yourself that will help you focus and remember.”

The first step, she said, is to create electronic records of everything. “Become a compulsive calendar person. Stop writing your appointments in a paper diary (which I was still doing) and put everything in iCal or some other computer program. Write down every place you go, whom you see, the address and phone. It creates a record, and you can set an alarm to remind you of each appointment. Then you sync the computer calendar with the one on your phone.”

Next, she said, I shouldn’t make lists on scraps of paper in my bedroom, the kitchen and the notebook I always carry in my purse. She told me to keep lists on the computer and sync them with my phone. I had no idea how to do that, but I learned and it did bring relief. Wherever I am, I can add to or check the list on my phone or computer. No more hunting desperately for that scrap of paper that seems to have combusted in thin air. And of course I can’t remember what was on it.

When I received that email from the woman I couldn’t place, I could have searched my email and calendar and her past emails would have popped right up. But I didn’t think to do that.

The second intervention, Cathryn said, was to stop things disappearing from my hands. She told me to put a plastic bin or other special container in each room. “Put everything important – papers, glasses, mail, keys, the earrings you just took off – into the nearest bin until you’re ready to take it to its final destination.

“Every object in your life should have a permanent home, where you always put it,” she said. “If you’re holding something in your hand, put it in the nearest airstrip for departure to its home. Leave it there until you’re ready to take it to its home and when you do, hold it up and watch at it as you walk. Don’t put it down. That’s your mantra: DO NOT PUT IT DOWN!”

This sounds absurd but I was willing to try anything. I put special bowls in my bedroom, bathroom, even my clothes closet and, to my surprise, it worked! I haven’t lost anything from my hands in quite a while.

It’s really about being mindful, 100% of the time. Focus on what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Don’t multi task, don’t even think about other things you need to do and if you catch yourself, bring your attention back to the task at hand.

I’ve found that these days, I cannot talk about complex matters while I’m driving or I’ll end up at the wrong place. I can’t think about a different project while I’m cooking or the food burns.

It’s about bringing mindfulness to all parts of life, which is a good thing to practice. Not easy, no one can do it all the time, but it’s a goal to aim for. And I’m seeing results: fewer memory lapses and less stress and worry about the whole issue.

While I was putting the “scaffolds” in place, though, I remembered visiting a friend in her late 60’s who had put post-its on her TV, DVD player and other devices to remind her how to use them. Is that what’s ahead?

Do you have experience with this or any other suggestions?

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT.

A BOOK TO REMEMBER

Sally Kempton has just published “Meditation for the Love of It,” with a heartfelt introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat Pray Love.” I’ve known Sally since the ‘60s, when we were starting out as journalists in New York. She was the smartest, wittiest woman I knew, an early feminist who surprised many when she became a disciple of Swami Muktananada. She’s been meditating daily and teaching for 40 years, and she brings her full arsenal of talents to this book -- a practical guide on how and why to meditate, for beginners as well as long practitioners. While many start meditating to feel better, Sally says the real goal is to connect with our hearts -- it’s “like a love affair with your innermost self.” To read more click here. http://www.amazon.com/Meditation-Love-Enjoying-Deepest-experience/dp/1604070811/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297712624&sr=8

WHAT BOOKS HAVE YOU LOVED?

My life feels richer when I’m engrossed in a novel, and I’m always looking for terrific ones to read. I like novels and nonfiction that are beautifully written and have wonderfully realized characters that pull you into their world and make it hard to tear yourself away. Examples are “The Invisible Bridge” by Julie Orringer and “Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese. Please let me know if you have any to suggest. Thanks!

The Zen of Swimming

2011-01-11T19:36:00.006-07:00

Just watching the video made me anxious. I was sitting in my warm, dry home but I started to feel panic -- water entering my lungs, struggling, choking.

I was watching a demo of Total Immersion Swimming (TI), given to me by Danny Peleg, my TI instructor, a former Israeli navy seal. The video showed a man swimming freestyle in a graceful, steady rhythm, barely raising his lips out of the water to breathe so you could hardly see when he was taking in air.

“I can’t do that!” I thought.

Danny Peleg - "Yes, you can."

But this story is a testament to the fact that it’s never too late to learn something that scares you, and learning a new skill is the best antidote I know to depression and the blahs.

I grew up by the ocean, had swimming lessons and was constantly in the water, but I was never comfortable doing what was then called the Australian Crawl. Breast stroke, side stroke, backstroke—no problem. But with the crawl, I couldn’t manage the breathing. I’d suck in water, gag, sputter and after one lap I was exhausted.

In my 20s I took up snorkeling—where you have constant access to air—and after that, I’d only swim with a snorkel, even in a pool.

A year ago, I was swimming in the Caribbean with friends and even using a snorkel, I was the slowest in the group and the first to get tired. That’s it, I thought, I need lessons.

I found a woman coach who watched me swim and said I was doing everything wrong. Especially kicking. When I held onto a board and kicked as hard as I could, I didn’t move at all. In fact, I went backwards. The coach said I should use my hips, buttocks and thighs to kick but keep the knees and ankles relaxed while the toes should be pointed. Huh? I tried to point the toes but relax the knees and ankles and still couldn’t get any forward momentum.

In our third lesson, I broke into tears. “I can’t seem to get it and I feel like you’re irritated and frustrated with me,” I said. She apologized, saying she was stressed, teaching too many hours, and I should forget all the instruction and just swim. She looked in my eyes and said, “You LOVE the water.”

“I do,” I said. I love it and fear it, but it’s the love that’s driving me to want to swim better.

We made progress after that. I learned to shift from side to side instead of lying flat and I was finally ready to let go of the snorkel. Then I hit a wall. After months of exercises and trying different strategies, I could not swim one length of the pool without panting and nearly collapsing.

I was resigned to sticking with the snorkel when, by chance, I went to a lecture and sat behind a man wearing a t-shirt that said, “Total Immersion Swimming. We turn struggles into skills.” I’d read about TI, which claims to transform people who have fears and problems in the water into relaxed, confident swimmers.

Two weeks later, I had my first TI lesson with Danny. He was encouraging, patient and clear, breaking each teaching element into small steps that could be easily mastered. He took videos of me swimming which we watched instantly so it was easy to make corrections.

Danny with another student

After one lesson, I swam four lengths of the gym pool without stopping. After three lessons, I was swimming nonstop for 15 minutes and now, after finishing six lessons, I can swim as long as I wish and emerge from the water feeling nourished and exuberant. Look ma, no snorkel!

How does TI work? It was created by Terry Laughlin, who'd discovered that only 2% of Americans can swim a quarter of a mile continuously. TI is based on relaxing and gliding, with minimal leg movement, rather than wind-milling the arms and kicking hard. The focus is not on speed but flow — “fish-like swimming that’s streamlined and easy.” It’s also called “mindful swimming,” a form of meditative movement like yoga. With TI, I was using minimal energy, I didn’t get as winded and was able to take in all the air I needed. Plus, it’s great as we get older because swimming is low impact and tones the entire body.

My only problem is getting into the cold water. So… I swim in a shorty wetsuit. I look dorky but hey, I tell myself, “Get over it.”

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: What do you want to learn or have you learned recently?

CONTACT Danny Peleg or find a coach in another city.

WATCH Total Immersion video.

JANUARY BOOK

Joan Borysenko has a terrific new book, “Fried,” about burnout and how to revive from it. She says burnout is different from depression or being overworked. With burnout, one’s life force seems to have vanished. You feel emotionally exhausted, void of motivation or hope. But it’s a state that can prompt you to create a more authentic life.

What’s unique about the book—and this may be a first--is that Joan wrote it drawing on ideas and stories contributed by her Facebook friends. They even came up with the title. To read more, click here.

Angels Made of Iron

2010-12-15T15:49:00.006-07:00

Here’s a tonic for the misery many of us feel these days when we hear the news from Washington. Rent "Iron Jawed Angels," an HBO film made in 2004. I came late to the party -- I’d never heard of it -- and when I recently saw the Netflix copy on my friend Nance’s table, I thought it was a porno movie, or maybe something weird about a cult like the Hell’s Angels?

To my shock, it was one of the best films I’ve seen in years. Halfway through it, Nance turned to me and said, “Every woman in America should see this.” Every man too, I said.

Hilary Swank and Anjelica Huston star as suffragettes who literally almost died to get the 19th amendment passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Think of it -- that was less than a hundred years ago. When my mother was born, women could not vote.

I’d read about the suffragettes but hadn’t known what they had to go through. When they gathered in front of the White House holding banners, they were beaten by gangs of men and thrown in jail on charges of “disrupting traffic.” One woman arrested was the wife of a U.S. senator who opposed giving women the vote. When he came to see his wife in jail and asked how she could abandon her two daughters, she replied, “Those two girls are the reason I am here.”

In prison, the women went on hunger strikes – a decade before Gandhi did – and were strapped down and brutally force fed with tubes down their throats. (This was before the I.V.) Finally, President Woodrow Wilson was shamed into proposing the amendment, which passed by only one vote!

It was humbling to see that a right we take for granted – a right many don’t bother exercising – was passed by a smaller margin and with even more virulent opposition than Obama’s health care plan. And, when Medicare was enacted, Ronald Reagan denounced it as “socialized medicine” and demanded it be overturned. Every attempt to move forward creates an equally strong backlash.

The film is riveting and charming, brilliantly performed by Swank and a string of award winning actresses from Huston to Lois Smith and Carrie Snodgress. The young suffragettes – gutsy, funny and utterly determined –reminded me of the women with whom I went to Afghanistan last fall. And I knew, had we been alive then, we would have been out there on the streets with the suffragettes. I doubt I would have gone to jail and starved myself. But that’s what it took – a small band of radicals willing to risk their lives to move the giant sleeping middle over the line.

If you had lived during that era, where do you think you’d have stood on women’s suffrage? What unsung movies can you bring to our attention?

Please leave a COMMENT below.

QUERY: AARP magazine wants to write about people who are about to do something they’ve dreamed of for years. Like: a wannabe astronaut who experiences weightless flight; a newbie drummer who plays her first paying gig at 58. THE KEY IS – They want someone just about to do this, not who’s done it already. They said, “We’re looking for a great photo, so it should be something fun and active. Say, riding patrol with the police, being sous chef at a great restaurant; feeding the lions at the zoo.” If you’re about to do something like that, email me: website-feedback@saradavidson.com

Ram Dass Has a Son!

2010-11-01T14:14:00.023-06:00

Ram Dass was working on his new book, Be Love Now, written with his longtime friend, Rameshwar Das, when a letter arrived from a stranger: "I believe you may be the father of my older brother."

What?! Ram Dass dismissed it at first, thinking, “Someone’s trying to hustle me.” A world-renown spiritual leader, Ram Dass was formerly Richard Alpert, the psychology professor at Harvard who was fired with Timothy Leary for experimenting with LSD. He’s bisexual with a preference for men, has never wanted children and teaches that spiritual love is of a higher order than personal love. He famously said, “If you want to see how enlightened you are, go spend a week with your family.” Having a son—if true—would challenge his beliefs about love.

Peter Reichard with Ram Dass

Two weeks after the letter arrived, a friend of Ram Dass offered to check it out. He spoke with the putative son, arranged for DNA tests and the results came back in October of ‘09: Ram Dass is the father of Peter Reichard, a 53-year-old banker in North Carolina who’d never heard of Ram Dass and was raised with no religion.

When I heard the news, I was shocked. What would the son of Ram Dass be like, and how had this come about? I spoke with them both and learned that Peter was conceived in 1956, when there was no birth control pill and DNA had not been discovered. Alpert, then a lanky grad student at Stanford, had a brief affair with Karen Saum, a feisty and beautiful history major who was planning to marry another man, living in New York, whom we’ll call Hans. She and Hans had agreed to have an open relationship until they began their life together.

Right after graduating, Karen joined Hans and soon learned she was pregnant. She told Hans there was a slight chance it was Dick Alpert’s baby, but there was no way to determine that. Hans said it didn’t matter; they’d raise the child as their own.

Richard Alpert in his 20s with niece, Kathy

Fast forward to 2009. Peter’s brother, Lawrence, hears from a mutual friend of his mother, Karen, that she has long harbored a suspicion that Peter may be the son of Ram Dass. When the DNA results came back, Ram Dass was dismayed. He’d avoided creating family ties, believing they might hold him back from attaining spiritual freedom. But friends were congratulating him. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who’s conducted workshops with Ram Dass, cried out, “Mazel tov! It would have been a shame if that wonderful seed wouldn’t have continued.” Ram Dass said, “My DNA continues? That doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

Peter Reichard also had the rug pulled out from under him. He looks like Ram Dass—tall, with the same features and receding hairline. But he speaks with a Carolina drawl, eats pork, enjoys cigars and describes himself as “pretty shallow. Spirituality does not run deep with me.” He had to go on a crash course to learn about Ram Dass. “For months,” he said, “I was drinking from a fire hose.”

Peter, in 30's, with daughter, Emily

In August I visited Ram Dass at his home in Maui and Peter in North Carolina. Although Ram Dass is paralyzed on the right side from a stroke, he practices contentment with what is, including his physical state. Love seems to permeate the air.

I asked him why the spiritual love he cultivates for all beings didn’t kick in when he learned about Peter. “It was the family thing,” he said. He'd loved his mother and cared for his father when he was dying, but he had no concept of what having a son would be like.

Ram Dass and Peter began speaking on the phone each Sunday, visited twice in person and Ram Dass came to love Peter and his wife and daughter. “Peter is such a sweet guy,” he says, and they’ve found they share many traits, including compassion, playfulness and the ability to ease tensions. Ram Dass developed a deeper understanding of the love parents feel for their children, and began to see that personal and soul love are not mutually exclusive but can coexist in nourishing ways.

"Peter and I are meeting as father and son," Ram Dass said, "but underneath that, we're two souls. I'd like us to get beyond the roles; then we'll really have something. I'll give up Ram Dass-ness, he'll give up Peter-ness, and here we go."

I tell him I don't think I've ever given up Sara-ness.

“I know you haven’t,” he said with a playful laugh. “That’s why I’m in the business I’m in.”

“I want to…” I said.

“That’s not good enough.” He made a beckoning gesture with his finger and said, “Come on.”

I know this is hard to convey, but at that moment, something released in me and bliss came rolling in. For the rest of the day, I sat before the windows looking out on the ocean, feeling love for everyone and everything, including the hardest case--myself.

I hope to write a book about Ram Dass and Peter, how their connecting late in life has changed them, and how their story reveals the ways our culture and our families have evolved from the ‘50s to the present.

In the meantime, I recommend you check out Be Love Now, published by Harper One, which describes how love is a state of being available to us all, no matter where or with whom we find ourselves.

This is the 40^th anniversary of the publication of Ram Dass’s game-changing book, Be Here Now, which sold 2 million copies. An ebook is available at Apple's iBookstore with many extras: video of Ram Dass that’s never been released, an audio version of his original Be Here Now lecture, and two guided meditations.

Please leave a COMMENT below.

QUERY: AARP magazine wants to write about people who are about to do something they’ve dreamed of for years. Like: a wannabe astronaut who experiences weightless flight; a 58-year-old newbie drummer who plays her first paying gig; a 70-year-old realtor who gets to realize her dream of being a cheerleader at an NBA game. THE KEY IS – They want someone just about to do this, not who’s done it already. They said, “We’re looking for a great photo, so it should be something fun and active. Say, riding patrol with the police, being sous chef at a great restaurant; feeding the lions at the zoo.” If you’re about to do something like that, email me: website-feedback@saradavidson.com

AND, For theater lovers: my friend, Barbara Isenberg, who covers theater for the L.A. Times, is hosting her 27^th annual London backstage theater tour beginning December 29, and has a few places open. For information, click here.

Fire! Again!

2010-10-31T12:21:00.004-06:00

Just survived the second fire in Boulder in 2 months. This was much more painful for me personally than the last fire. The last one was way bigger and lasted longer, but that time, I only had to prepare to evacuate. This time, the fire fighters went door to door making sure we got out as fast as possible. I ran around for 45 minutes shoveling things into boxes, and trying to catch my cat. It took three firemen to corner her and stuff her into her carrier, scratching and squalling .

My cat watching deer from my office window, before fires

By the time I got to my friend Tina's house, I was soaking wet, panting, and zonked on adrenaline. I couldn't think straight. Luckily, I'd made a list of what to take with me after the last fire and tried to follow it, but: I took my computer but not the electric cord for it, took my printer but none of its cords. Grabbed all the jewelry and threw it in a box, and it's now tangled beyond recognition.

The next morning, I woke up with cuts all over me and a terrible back ache. With adrenaline going, you don't feel pain, and I was shocked to see blood on my legs and shoulder when I got undressed for bed. I lifted things I ordinarily would never try to lift. Bumped and slammed into things and felt nothing. Several friends tried to drive up to help me pack and load, but they couldn't get past the fire barricades, so I was on my own. The closest I got to hysteria was when I couldn't get the cat. I was the last to leave the neighborhood, and the fireman went for the cat so they could get us both out.

Today I'm putting everything back in order. Grateful the house is untouched and I'm okay. A sweetheart of a guy gave me a massage last night, which was the first time in 48 hours that my body let down and let go. For the first 24 hrs, it looked like the house would burn to the ground. My insurance agent had opened a claim. Another reminder - nothing is certain, we have little control over major things. Every moment is all we have. Spread the love.

When Your Baby Gets Married

2010-09-15T18:35:00.015-06:00

My daughter Rachel’s wedding was nothing like the weddings my friends and I had back in the daze. It was a four-day celebration on a farm in Kansas and other sites in Missouri, and it was the most meaningful and ecstatic ceremony I’ve witnessed. What made it powerful for everyone attending was the sense that these two young people are truly soul mates.

I’d been thrilled when they announced their engagement, but four days before the wedding, I woke up with tears running from my eyes. Rachel is 26, a certified music therapist, and her husband, Jay, 29, is an MD doing his residency in pediatrics. They share a passion for healing, for laughter, adventure and each other. Both speak Spanish and want to do service in Latin America. They balance each other in almost every way, so why was I in tears?

I cried at the hair salon, cried at the cleaners. I was a jumble of emotions: time passing, my baby grown, my own life closer to the end than the beginning, my own marriage and how it didn’t work and yet produced two beautiful beings, my son, Andrew, and Rachel. Fortunately, by the time I got on the plane for Kansas City, I was cried out, because what I experienced in the following days was as close as humans come to unmitigated joy.

My son, Andrew, flew in from China where he lives

When I was married in 1968, no one I knew was having a big traditional wedding with a bridal gown and hundreds of guests. We thought it was a waste of money and inappropriate when so many people in our country were going hungry. It was another convention to toss aside.

What startles me – why am I surprised? –is that our children want what we rejected. They want the gown and all the trimmings, a wedding that goes on for days, often at a “destination.”

Rachel and Jay wanted an intimate ceremony on his family’s farm, a serene and fertile landscape that’s been in Jay’s family for generations, and then a larger reception at a hotel in Kansas City that’s a two-hour drive away. This required the planning and precision of a major troop movement. Since Kansas ain’t my home, the bulk of the planning was done by Rachel and her future in-laws.

I was assigned a few tasks related to Jewishness. Jay was not raised in any religious tradition, but Rachel wanted a Jewish ceremony and Jay said he was fine with that. My assignment was to arrange for the building of a chuppa, or bridal canopy, in rural Kansas. After many fruitless queries, I finally showed a picture of a chuppah to the hardware store owner in the one-street town of Seneca, the closest “town” to the farm. “Oh,” he said, “I saw that in Meet the Fockers. I kin do that.” Relief.

Then we searched for a rabbi who was willing to fly to Kansas City and drive four hours to marry a Jew and a non-Jew, just 3 days before Rosh ha Shana, the Jewish New Year.

Rachel emailed and interviewed many before she found a perfect fit: Rabbi Chava Bahle, who brought the spirit and passion of Jewish Renewal to Baileyville, Kansas.

Rachel wanted to spend the night before her wedding alone with her eight bridesmaids in a simple, lovely cabin built by the Rilingers on their land. The next morning, I was invited to join them. I found two hair stylists imported from Kansas City running an assembly line, styling hair for all the bridesmaids plus me and lastly, Rachel. The theme was curls: one maid had corkscrew curls framing her face; others had their hair swept up with braids, curls and twists. The only bridesmaid who had naturally curly hair wanted hers straightened, of course, as did I.

I found Rachel sitting in a tank top and pajama pants, having her makeup and then hair done. She’d originally wanted her long chestnut hair half up and half down, but at the last minute, she asked the stylist to sweep it to one side in a cascade of loose curls. “Bridesmaids!” she called. “Come give me your opinion.” They let out a chorus of aahhhs and Rachel said, “I love my hair! I’m so glad I changed it.” The stylist pinned three yellow flowers, fresh picked, into the curls.

“Can I put my dress on now?” Rachel asked. It took three bridesmaids to help her into the dress and lace up the corset back. Rabbi Chava came in for the signing of the Ketubah, the marriage contract, and asked us all to join hands in a circle with Rachel. “This is sacred—the beginning of the ritual,” she said. We passed love from hand to hand around the circle, then Chava read the Ketubah aloud and asked Rachel, “Are you ready to sign?” Rachel answered, almost in a whisper, “I am soooooo ready.”

Chava left to take the Ketubah to the groom to sign, then the processional began. We stood up when Rachel and her father walked down the grassy aisle, not to Lohengrin but to Andean flute music Rachel had selected.

The two high points of the wedding for me were the declaring of vows and the couple’s first dance. Rachel and Jay had written their vows separately, so when they said the words to each other under the chuppah, they were hearing them for the first time. Locking eyes, they listened as if no other sound existed. Jay adopted a light touch, telling her why he loves her and adding that for him, love is “feeling comfortable and safe with someone but still getting weak knees when they walk into a room and smile at you.” At the end of her vows, Rachel said, “You’re all I want, everything I need, and the best friend and partner I could ever dream of. I love you. Te amo, mi amor.”

After placing rings on each other’s fingers, Chava asked each to turn to their friends and family and recite words from the Song of Songs. Jay said them quietly and warmly. When it was Rachel’s turn, she took his hand in both of hers and pumped it in the air, like a prize fighter’s, exclaiming with animated body language: “THIS is my BELOVED! And THIS is my BEST FRIEND!”

At the wedding dinner, it’s traditional for the bride and groom to be the first couple on the dance floor, but Rachel and Jay hatched a different plan. First Rachel danced with her father, Jay danced with his mother, then the couple danced to a medley of three songs: salsa, Motown, and Stevie Wonder singing, “You Can Feel it All Over!”

It was thrilling. Thrilling! It struck me at that moment that Jay resembles Fred Astaire—tall, slender, moving with a grace that seems effortless, romantic, masterful. Rachel dances with her own verve and charm—spicy and elegant. The beat is contagious, everybody starts clapping and as I clap, a strange thing happens. I feel like I’m dancing right with her. I watch her body twirl and sway and I’m twirling and swaying, the rhythm’s taking over and I almost lift off my chair.

I’ve always wanted to dance, from the time I was three; I took continual lessons in ballet, tap, modern and jazz, read books about ballerinas and pinned photos of Nureyev and Fonteyn on my bedroom walls. Now my daughter was marrying Fred Astaire!

At the end of the dance, Jay dipped Rachel and kissed her. The audience swooned. Then she stood, raised her arms and motioned for everyone to join them, and everyone did. Young and old, Jews and goys, people of different faiths and cultures. After all the sitting and eating and driving back and forth across Kansas, it felt so good to move!

Around midnight, I went to my room and collapsed, while the newlyweds and friends went out clubbing and dancing till 3. We gathered for brunch the next morning, still cruising on joy. As Stevie Wonder sang, You could feel it all over.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: If you were at this wedding, please tell us, What were the high points for you? If you weren’t, what are your favorite wedding memories?

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Great Sex - NOT!

2010-08-15T19:01:00.003-06:00

If you haven’t seen it already, check out “The Kids are All Right,” directed by Lisa Chodolenko. The acting and writing are spectacular: each character is real, flawed and charming. But one element seems all wrong – the sex.

Annette Benning and Julianne Moore play a lesbian couple who’re raising two children, now teens. They contact the man who was their sperm donor, who turns out to be a macho chef and gardener played by Mark Ruffalo.

He charms the kids and hires Julianne to design a garden in back of his house. Sparks fly and they end up in bed. What we see is what we usually see in movies that try to portray hot sex: the man rams the woman, fast and hard. Faster, harder, banging, slamming, over, under, sideways, down.

I always thought this was male fantasy sex. It’s certainly not what any woman I know would yearn for. As the Pointer Sisters sang: “I want a man with a slow hand. I want a lover with an easy touch….”

Sensual, playful, teasing, savoring, rising and falling to peaks and valleys – we don’t see much of that.

What movies do you remember as being arousing? A TV director I once worked with, Bobby Roth, said he believes it’s most erotic when you don’t see graphic images but see people’s faces, hear their voices, and can imagine what’s happening. One of my favorite scenes of that sort was in “The Big Easy,” with Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid. He was coming on to her, she was resisting and said, “I’ve never had much luck with men.” You could see his hands moving, off camera, but couldn’t see what he was doing as he told her, with certainty, “Your luck’s about to change.”

I’ve long wanted to see how women directors would portray lovemaking, but so far it’s been disappointing. The sex scenes in “Kids are all Right” look exactly as male directors have done them. Pounding and ramming. And then I remembered: Lisa Chodolenko is gay. Maybe this is her idea of what hetero sex is like? Maybe she learned it at the movies?

What do you think?

A Bear In My House!

2010-07-10T12:23:00.021-06:00

I grabbed the phone, locked myself in a closet and dialed 911. When Officer Donovan answered and asked for my address, I screamed, “There’s a bear inside my house! And I’m alone!”

It began with forgetfulness. I put some eggs on the stove to boil, went downstairs to my office to answer emails, which led me to look up a website which gave me an idea and I started making notes. I smelled something peculiar, like burning plastic, and wondered if it was the computer overheating. A half hour later, I got up to get some water and remembered, the eggs! I raced up the stairs and found the rooms filled with smoke so thick it was hard to see. The eggs had exploded and the pot was a lump of hard black tar.

Cleaning up the mess, I opened all the doors and windows, hoping that cross drafts would carry away the smoke. I opened the garage and the door that led from the garage to the kitchen.

I walked back downstairs, brushed my teeth, sat in the hot tub (outside in the dark!), then started turning out lights and closing windows and doors.

I was heading upstairs when I heard a shuffling noise. One of the neighbors’ dogs must have wandered into the house. Then I froze. That was no dog! It was a bear, dark brown, with his rump to me as he padded down the hall between the living room and kitchen. He was at least four feet high on all fours.

“Get out of here!” I screamed, raced down the stairs and into my bedroom. What should I do? Call a neighbor? It’s 1 in the morning. Then I thought of 911, grabbed the phone and called it for the first time in my life.

Donovan answered, sent out an alert and said he’d stay on the phone with me until officers arrived. I was hyperventilating. “How long will that take?”

“Not long, they’re rolling now,” he said. My cat! I realized she was outside the closet, but each time I opened it and tried to coax her in, she scampered away.

Petrushka, unaware of the bear

Donovan said, “I have one arrival.” One officer was now outside my house but he couldn’t come in alone, he had to wait for backup. Hurry! I thought.

“Can you hear the bear?” Donovan asked.

“No. Maybe he’s gone,” I said.

“The officers will assume he’s in there. Don’t move from the closet. They’ll come in with guns drawn.”

I was starting to calm down; the cavalry had arrived. I could even laugh when Donovan made a funny statement.

“Second arrival,” he said. “Stay where you are, Sara.”

I heard the officers moving around overhead. Then they were outside my bedroom door. I hung up with Donovan and practically fell into their arms. “The bear’s not here,” they said. They had pistols, long rifles strapped to them and enough ammo to flush out a Taliban nest.

The youngest officer said to me, “I don’t do bears. Criminals, bad guys, no problem. But we don’t expect to find bears in residences.” He shook his head and kept repeating, “I don’t do bears.”

For a second I imagined what might have happened if the bear had dallied. Gun shots, blood, ursine diarrhea and the brown behemoth splayed on my hardwood floor.

We went back upstairs and saw that the bear had knocked over the garbage cans in the kitchen and garage and rummaged through them.

“He didn’t stay long,” the young officer said, “or he would have clawed opened the refrigerator. You probably scared him off.”

By now there were four squad cards with lights flashing outside my house. I couldn’t sleep after they all left. Adrenaline was pounding through me.

As it happens, the next morning was my day to spend with Reb Zalman, a rabbi with whom I’m working on a book, “The December Work.”

We’d been talking about the need to reset one’s course in life at key times. When I told him a bear had entered my house the night before, he gave a playful smile. “The bear is a symbol.”

Of what? I asked. Brute strength? Resurrection or reinvention, because it hibernates?

Reb Zalman said his wife was told by Native American women that if you run into a bear, you should expose your breasts and the bear will flee.

As if I would stand there and try that!

Later in the day I had a call from a ranger with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, who suggested I buy bear pepper spray called “Counter Assault” that was developed for grizzlies in Alaska.

Or I could get a small boat horn, in case the bear returns. The best thing, he said, is to keep your doors and windows closed and don’t have attractants around, like garbage outside or bird feeders.

He said they could set a trap by my house, but if a bear got caught, he would die. “Think about it,” Rick said. Right. People in Colorado don’t like to kill bears.

Should I order the boat horn or the bear spray?

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Go to Bed Makeup?

2010-06-15T11:19:00.008-06:00

Here's another fun part about aging: looking good takes more time and money, and I think we've got to draw the line somewhere.

For example: are eyebrows over or under the line?

I don't know exactly when this happened, but sometime between age 16 and now, my dark, thick, Elizabeth Taylor eyebrows turned to wispy broken lines.

Before

I have friends who've had their eyebrows tattooed, but before resorting to a permanent measure I thought I'd consult an eyebrow specialist.

All roads lead to Valerie of Beverly Hills. In her lavender and cream salon, she does eyebrows for $75 while her associates do them for $40. Valerie is against tattooing because she says styles change and with time, the skin on your face will drop and your eyebrows may end up in the wrong place.

She sits you down in a chair, visible to all, and begins by coloring the brows to hide any gray. Then she waxes all around the eyebrows to create a clear palette.

Valerie is five foot two with eyes of blue and long, wavy blonde hair like Farrah Fawcett's in her heyday. She wears jeans, high heels and a low-cut blouse that shows cleavage. "I have good boobs," she says.

Valerie at work

My sister, who's joining me on the eyebrow adventure, asks, "Are they natural?"

"Course not," she says. "Feel how soft they are."

We do and they are.

"They're saline," she says.

Her tools

Valerie has built a multi-million-dollar business doing eyebrows and makeup for women and men. Her clients range from 16 to 80, but many are boomers growing older along with Valerie.

She has three stencils for eyebrows - the Marilyn, the Brooke and the Pamela. She picks the Marilyn for me, sticks it on my face and brushes powder into the opening of the stencil, going against the grain of the hair. She lifts it off and OMG, what a difference! One of my brows is scraggly, the other is a clearly defined arch of a color that matches my hair. She plucks, brushes and smoothes until she's satisfied.

One done, one not.

As she works, Valerie tells my sister and me who the best plastic surgeons are for each part of the body and that we must use restylane below the nose and botox above it. Beverly Hills is ground zero for extreme beauty measures, from fake boobs and butts to all things injectible.

A woman in her 50s whom we'll call Randie prances into the salon and gives Valerie a kiss. Randie is all done up with a Western motif: a cowgirl hat with black onyx jewels in front, a miniskirt, fishnet stockings and hand-painted cowboy boots. She has a skin-tight t-shirt over such enormous, pneumatically-enhanced boobs that I can't read the words that run down her shirt. She sticks out her chest so I can read: "Sex is my favorite business."

She tells Valerie she wants go-to-bed makeup. "Yes!" Valerie says. "I can make you look natural but rosy and soft."

I don't understand this. I thought you took off your makeup before going to bed?

"You don't want to look all scrubbed and washed out," Valerie says. "When I have sex, I like to wear my jewelry, my push-up bra and lip gloss."

This is way over the line for me. But this is Valerie's favorite business. She does people's makeup herself every day and creates products which she sells online. "I'm constantly doing it, so I can make the products better and better," she says. "Watching your clients get older... along with yourself... you can find the next beauty product." She adds, "We're all going down the toilet together."

When I tell my friend Susan about the go-to-bed makeup, she says, "I'm not having sex these days but last time I did, my makeup was not an issue."

Susan admires my new brows, though. I walk out of Valerie's with a bag full of products and for the next few days, whenever I look at people all I see is eyebrows. Judging from the past, though, I'll get lazy and the products will rot in the drawer.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION. How do you deal with the body changing? Is it natural to want to look as good as you can for as long as you can, as Thomas Moore suggests? Or should we accept the perfection of our imperfections?

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Tweet or Die?

2010-05-16T14:01:00.009-06:00

What’s the scarcest resource of the 21^st century?

Human attention.

That was the opening salvo at the alumni weekend of the Columbia Journalism School this spring. The theme of the weekend was, “The Future of Text.”

I earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia in the 60s. I’d never gone to an alumni weekend, but with newspapers, magazines and books expected to became extinct in our lifetimes, the choice is clear: adapt or die.

Columbia is determined to reinvent journalism. They’ve set up a new dual degree master’s program in journalism and computer engineering. (I’ve never met a journalist who could be an engineer, but I guess a new breed is mutating)

Columbia also created a department of Internet journalism, and they’re running boot camps in social media skills for their students and alumni.

It’s not enough to do great writing, they say. “You have to build, curate and enhance your online brand.” The school’s tech guru, Sree Sreenivasan, says “We still teach reporting, writing and storytelling, but your work has to be seen and your readers have to evangelize for it.”

I sign up for Sree’s two-hour workshop in social media. He says the Big Three are: facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m already on two of them, so I think: I can do this.

Sree, the twitterista

He says the N.Y. Times just appointed its first social media editor, “to listen to social media and evangelize for it in the newsroom.”

Social media, he says, is where “radio was in 1912. TV was in 1950. The Internet was in 1996.”

Facebook has 400 million users. “It’s one of the biggest time sinks in history,” Sree says, and “it will continue to grow astronomically and consume people’s time.”

But here’s the problem. They’re constantly changing how facebook works and they don’t tell you when they make changes!

“Facebook is not helpful, transparent or easy,” Sree says. SO WHY DOES FACEBOOK RULE? Why doesn’t someone build a friendlier mousetrap?

Sree says you need a facebook strategy or you’ll get overwhelmed. I’m already there. You confirm a dozen friends and overnight, you have 100 requests for friends and your wall is so full you can’t read what’s on it.

If you write a book, Sree says, you need a special facebook page for it and video to promote it. “So start taking videos while you interview people and write,” he says. “YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world, and you must have your work on YouTube.

He moves on to LinkedIn, whose primary purpose is networking for jobs. “You should be on it before you need it,” Sree says.

Okay, I’m on LinkedIn and YouTube (not well), but the site I fear and loathe and so far refuse to join is Twitter. He says the maximum post on twitter is 140 characters. “Every newspaper headline is 80 to 90 characters and it’s able to tell you what the story is,” he says. He keeps his own tweets to 120 characters, so they can be re-tweeted in a chain.

Re-tweet? That’s one of a barrage of foreign terms he spits out: Hash Tag, Tweet Deck, bit.ly, Hoot Suite, Mashable. I take notes faster and faster until it feels like I’m going under.

After two hours, I need resuscitation. Sree says, “Don’t feel overwhelmed and don’t feel pressured. Social media is still in its infancy. Just take one step at a time. But do take a step.”

Heeding his advice, I’m going to remodel my blog and will be posting daily on all things about Life after 50. I’m calling it Still Crazy, unless one of you can suggest a better title.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT. How are you adapting to social media? Can you suggest a better title for my blog? If I use it, I’ll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice.

What's a Hippie Grandma?

2010-04-01T11:51:00.010-06:00

I’d like your help here.

Who is a hippie? And will I be a hippie grandma?

My daughter, who’s getting married this year and plans to have children, says I’m a hippie. I don’t get it.

I was at Berkeley in the ‘60s when hippies first appeared, I visited communes and wrote about them for Harper’s Magazine and I was not then nor am I now a hippie.

My daughter disagrees.

I tell her the key definition of hippies was: they dropped out of the mainstream. (Remember “Turn on, tune in, drop out?) They rejected capitalism, materialism and middle class values. They believed land should be free and people should live communally instead of pursuing individual ambition.

But I had ambition running through my veins. I went straight from Berkeley to Columbia to a job on the Boston Globe. When I was asked to write about hippies, I made my way to an “open land” commune where the leader welcomed me into his crude geodesic dome, saying, “It’s nice, for a change, to talk to someone who’s not a hippie.” He was the real thing and knew I wasn’t.

Hippies on open land, 1969

Yet when my article came out in Harper’s, I was interviewed on the radio by Howard Cosell, who said, “My guest, Sara Davidson, is a hippie.” Why did he say that? Because I had long straight hair and wore Indian-looking clothes and beaded jewelry. But long hair and beads did not a hippie make.

Sara in 1960s

When I explain this to my daughter, she’s not convinced. “That’s how your generation saw hippies” she says. “For my generation there’s a different definition.”

What would that be? I ask.

She says you’re a hippie if:
You lived through the 60s or 70s,
You did drugs and still do.
You like “hippie music” – The Beatles, Judy Collins, Bob Marley
You’re a spiritual seeker
You’re for peace, politically progressive
You eat organic food and recycle

I fit that bill.

It seems, though, that some core values have been lost and it’s the tastes and trappings that define hippie now –- like the Howard Cosell take.

But Peter Simon,* the gifted photographer who lived in a commune in Vermont and was proud to be a hippie, says the definition has always been “fluid. I never thought of you as a full-fledged hippie, but about 70% there. But who’s counting? There were various degrees of separation." And various kinds of hippie.

This whole inquiry was triggered when a friend who’s a hippie by anyone’s definition became a grandmother. What, she wondered, kind of grandparent would she be, and what would her grand kids call her? Hippie-ma?

Many of us are having or wishing for grandkids now, and as with everything else in our life cycle, we’re going to do this differently.

Most people I know want to be involved hands-on. I envy the lucky ones who live in the same city as their grand kids and can pick them up from school and have them for sleepovers. I remember living downstairs from my grandparents in a duplex in L.A., and how much it meant to have my Grandpa Louie so close. Whenever I was in the dog house downstairs, I could run upstairs and he would hug me, dry my tears and tell me I was the most beautiful and talented little girl in the world.

For that propinquity, some of us are moving to where our grand kids live, but that’s not always feasible. My son lives in China and when he has kids, how will I know them? It’s a long way to go for a visit.

Some are taking desperate measures. I was shocked to learn that another friend, an elegant woman who’s a renowned speaker and citizen of the world, is shopping for an R.V. so she can visit her 7 grandchildren in 3 different states. She and her husband can drive from place to place, they won’t have to pay for hotels and can bring their dogs. Oy. “You’ll be joining the caravans of itinerant seniors at R.V. campgrounds?” I ask.

My friend smiles. “It beats moving, or constantly taking planes.”

So help us out. What is a hippie today? What kind of grandparent do you want to be and what would you like your grand kids to call you?

JOIN THE CONVERSATION - PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT

*Hippie Pix by Peter Simon: Courtesy of petersimon.com

Dodging Bombs and Tsunamis

2010-02-28T19:31:00.007-07:00

The guesthouse where we stayed in Afghanistan last fall was attacked on Thursday by Taliban, who killed 16 people, including Indian doctors and other foreigners working on humanitarian projects.

The insurgents set off a car bomb, then a suicide bomber detonated himself and the insurgents stormed the Park Residence where I'd stayed with 8 members of a women's peace delegation organized by Code Pink. (Click here for report on that trip) I was on a plane to Hawaii for a writing retreat when this happened, and on hearing the news I went into shock.

There but for fortune...

Faces flashed through my mind: the stooped Afghan lady who cleaned my room, the porter, the desk clerks and the foreigners we met in the dinning room. The guesthouse was modest and shabby by Western standards, but our guide had chosen it because he thought it was "safe," unlike the fancier hotels where journalists and diplomats stay.

I felt, with renewed force, the anguish that Afghans live with every day, and found it difficult to enjoy the 80 degree sunshine and luxuriant waves, sand and tropical flowers. Why had it been their time and not mine? Why would this war never cease, and even if it did, wouldn't others arise in its place? Where is peace, and what can we do to hasten it when few good deeds go unpunished?

The questions roiled in me the following day and I slept fitfully that night. At 5:30 a.m., I heard my cell phone go off. Who the hell could be calling? Someone from the mainland who didn't realize how early it is in Hawaii?

It was my niece, Summer, in Honolulu. "There's a tsunami coming," she said.

What?

She explained there'd been an earthquake in Chile and a tsunami was expected to hit the Hawaiian islands at 11.

What! Half asleep, I couldn't make sense of this. Suicide bombs, tsunamis...

She told me to pack my things and come to my sister's house that was on high ground in the middle of the island. "Come fast," she said. "The warning sirens will go off at six and then there'll be gridlock on the roads."

I saw images of the Tsunami that leveled towns and killed masses in Thailand and India in 2004.

But I hesitated. I was staying on the 18th floor in a condo overlooking the beach, and I'd been told that I'd be safe on that high floor. I had a unique chance to watch this force of nature first hand.

But I was alone and if I stayed, I might not be able to leave for days. Better to make a run for my sister's.

I jumped into gear and sped through the room, shoveling up my things and dumping them pell mell into a suitcase. I also grabbed my portable piano -- we could make music while Rome burned.

I pulled out of the building just as the sirens started wailing and people on the streets began running in all directions. I drove to my sister's in ten minutes flat -- faster than anyone had done before. I joined my niece, her husband, baby, dog and cockatoo in the living room, and heard that four other friends and family members were on their way, prepared to stay for several days. But there was almost no food in the house!

My brother-in-law, Gary, had gone to fill his car with gas, but the station was crammed with cars "trying to enter from all directions," he wrote later in an email to friends. After waiting for an hour to fill the tank, he drove to the nearest supermarket, which was under siege. Cars were parked three deep in the lot, there were no shopping carts and the lines to check out ran from the cashiers' stands clear down the grocery aisles.

The first things to disappear from the store were water, ice, batteries, and, this being Hawaii, spam. Cardboard signs said "only 2 cans per customer." The TV and radio announcers had been telling everyone to have enough food and water on hand for 5-7 days! Power would probably go out, so people should get non-perishable goods. That means spam, bruddah!

Summer said that when she and her husband had roared away from their home near the ocean in a local Hawaiian neighborhood, people were shooting off fireworks! Many locals later set up tents in a park near my sister's home, where there were swings for the kids and a basketball court for the dudes. "Tsunami party!"

Gary finally made it home with a sack of potatoes, canned goods, bread and pasta, since he'd spent much of his time waiting in the pasta aisle. "It's funny what people think they need," he said, unpacking his stash. He himself had bought a jar of special pickles which he'd been searching for for weeks. "The smaller people tended to get smaller things, like mini muffins and crackers," he said. He's a large guy and his prize purchase was a large container of fresh-baked sweet rolls and Danish pastries, which another shopper had ditched just before checking out. Gary opened them in his kitchen and in minutes they were gone.

We settled down in front of the large screen TV to wait for the wall of water -- 12 feet high in some places, the announcer said. It was supposed to hit Hilo harbor first, just after 11, then "wrap itself around all the islands." No coast would be spared.

This is NOT a surfable wave," the announcer kept warning. But we heard later that two crazies had gone out in the ocean by Waikiki.

The TV camera was fixed on Hilo harbor, which was now deserted. The image on the screen never changed. It was like watching an Andy Warhol movie where nothing happens and no one moves. Eleven a.m. came and went, then 11:30. Where in hell was the giant wave?

We saw some strong currents flow into the harbor and out again, in and out, for several cycles. This was "unusual behavior" for the ocean, we were told. But it was no tsunami.

We were relieved, of course -- the tsunami might have destroyed Summer's home and many others -- but slightly disappointed, and emotionally exhausted.

What can we learn from all this? It was certainly better to be prepared for a tidal wave that fizzled than to be struck unawares as the Thai were in 2004, and the Indian doctors were last week. I look forward to your comments.

Yay for Schmucks with Underwoods!

2010-01-28T08:10:00.003-07:00

Buried among the woeful news of recent weeks is a surprising victory. The TV writers who’ve been suing the networks, studios and talent agencies for age discrimination for almost ten years just won a $70 million settlement – the largest age discrimination award in history. It will change the landscape, the way employers treat workers, and possibly what we see on TV.

I had thought this case would drag on for generations, like the lawsuit in Dickens’ novel “Bleak House.” I joined it as a plaintiff in 2000 and figured I would die before it was resolved. (20 of the writers did)

A relatively small number of unemployed writers were going up against multi-national corporations with battalions of lawyers and deep pockets. And screenwriters have always been at the bottom of the totem pole. Jack Warner of Warner Bros referred to his staff writers as “schmucks with Underwoods.” (for those too young to remember, an Underwood was a typewriter)

The challenge at the outset was: few of the writers I knew wanted to join the suit, fearing they’d be blacklisted. Even if they had evidence that they’d been passed over for jobs because of their age, they still were hoping for a break, a comeback. The law prohibits companies from discriminating against anyone bringing legal action against them, but as my lawyer told me, “There’s going to be a list and everyone will know who’s on it.”

People who aren’t familiar with the TV biz would ask me, “Why should writers be discriminated against for their age? They’re not on camera. Doesn’t age bring them wisdom and make them even better?”

Yes, it does, but the biz wants to attract young viewers and believes anyone over 40 is out of touch with youth culture. This may be true, but it’s simple to hire young writers on staff who can supply the references, music and current slang. That alone doesn’t bring success. What generates success is the ability to create compelling characters and tell powerful stories — a craft which seasoned writers have honed. David Chase, for example, was in his 50’s when he created “The Sopranos,” which drew huge numbers of young fans.

The problem I thought we’d have, in proving the case, is that talent and ability are subjective. The networks could assert they weren’t hiring us because our work wasn’t good enough. That would be hard to support, though, against plaintiffs who’d won Emmys like Tracy Keenan Wynn, who wrote “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “The Longest Yard,” and Ann Marcus, who co-created “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

The proof, it turned out, was in the numbers. For members of the Writers Guild, statistics show that income drops off after 40, drops more sharply after 50 and disappears after 60, except for a few mega stars.

I was fortunate in being able to write into my 50s. For 27 years, writing dramas for TV was my principal source of income. Then, at 57, after years when I’d been struggling, my agent fired me because, he said, “I can’t sell you to the networks. You’re a terrific writer, but you’ve been around too long and people think you don’t have `edge.’”

What?! I’d always been a ground-breaker, exploring the edges. I created the series, “HeartBeat,” on ABC, which was the first ensemble of women who didn’t have a boss above them and featured the first lesbian character on a network series. I pushed the limits of what was acceptable in terms of sexuality and language. I concluded that having no “edge” was code for “old.”

I was not alone. My lawyer said all his clients over 50 were having trouble finding work, no matter how talented or successful they’d been. And you could see it reflected on TV: there were few or no shows featuring characters over 50.

So I joined the class action suit, figuring I had nothing to lose. A year later, I got a job writing a pilot and withdrew my name as a plaintiff. But when the job ended and the pilot didn’t make it to the air, I spent a year groveling for jobs I wouldn’t have considered taking before. And I couldn’t get those either!

Not wanting to spend the years ahead scratching and scraping like Willy Loman, I left Hollywood and put my name back on the lawsuit.

And I forgot about it. Every so often I’d get an email on the status of the case, and the news wasn’t good. Then a few years ago, things shifted. AARP joined the suit and the parties began mediation. The networks, studios and agencies have all settled, except for one agency, CAA. They all deny they discriminated against writers based on age, but they settled because, as one attorney stated: “With years of disruptive litigation remaining, it made sense to bring these protracted cases to a close.”

Translation: They didn’t think they’d win.

Will this settlement end ageism in the biz? Of course not. But no one will be able to say openly, as many agents did before, “We’re not taking on any clients over 40.”

The irony is that none of the writers in the suit wanted cash, we wanted work -- to be able to put our ideas and stories out to large audiences. We wanted affirmative action for geezers.

Nevertheless, it’s a landmark legal precedent, and shines a light on practices that have affected the nature and quality of what’s offered on the public airwaves.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: Have you been affected by or party to age discrimination?

For more information on the suit, click here.

Part 6 - Hopeless and Helping

2009-11-30T12:06:00.008-07:00

Part 6 of a series about a peace trip to Afgfhanistan. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here .

On our last day, the final voice we hear is that of a member of Parliament from the south, Roshanak Wardak, who expresses the opposite position from what we’ve been hearing in Kabul. She just moved to a house in Kabul because it’s no longer safe to commute to her village. The concrete slab house looks as if it was erected yesterday, surrounded by rocks, rubble and a security wall with barbed wire.

Jodie, Sara with Roshanak

Roshanak is small and graceful, dressed in turquoise with a black head scarf. “I’m sorry for Americans, they waste their lives here,” she says. In the four years she’s been in Parliament, “everything in the south has deteriorated. America didn’t help us. Our country can’t help us. If you stand in the market and kill ten people, nobody will catch you. There’s no justice, no security.”

She says special forces killed a father and son working in their fields. When she asked the commander why, he said the son had relations with the Taliban. “I have relations with the Taliban,” she says. “We are living with them. When any person is killed, I have to go for the condolence. They ask why Americans did this killing and nobody knows. Now people are against Americans and against our government.”

Roshanak is a gynecologist who set up practice in Wardak in ‘96. When the new Afghan constitution was written in ’04, it required that 25 percent of the seats in Parliament be filled by women. Roshanak’s neighbors urged her to run but she resisted. “I hate politics, it’s a dangerous game, full of fraud,” she says. But her constituents prevailed, “and I won, even though I did not spend one dollar.”

With the video camera rolling, Jodie Evans, who organized our trip, asks Roshanak what she wants to tell President Obama. “Withdraw all troops,” Roshanak says, then proposes a three part solution to the war. “First, the U.S. should negotiate with the Taliban and ask them to participate in government. If you think it’s impossible to talk with Talbian—that’s not true.” Second, she says, “Everyone knows the center of insurgency and training camps is Pakistan. If you don’t give money to Pakistan for one year, the fighting will finish in Afghanistan.” Third, she says, “Instead of sending troops, send engineers, doctors, teachers.”

Her proposals are sensible but are they workable? What good will it do to send doctors and teachers if the roads are too dangerous for them to travel where they’re needed? Roshanak confirms what Jodie believes, though, and Jodie will post this clip online. Roshanak signs Jodie’s petition urging Obama not to send troops and we race to the airport, passing the Indian embassy where, three days later, a suicide bomb will explode, killing 17.

I ask Jodie how she can be sure the President will see the petition. She doesn’t know yet, she says, but ten days later she will find her opportunity.

A friend buys two tickets to a Democratic fund raiser in San Francisco for $32,400, which entitles her to a photo op with the President.She invites Jodie to come, and after Obama puts his arm around Jodie for the picture, she hands him the petition and tells him women in Afghanistan don’t want more troops and they’re upset that women are not at the negotiating table. The President says, “What do you mean, I have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton…” Jodie says, “No, Afghan women want to be at the negotiating table.” Later, Jodie reports that the President responded, “Oh.” He told her he would not be able to fix Afghanistan quickly. She said, “You won’t be able to fix it at all. Only they can.”

On our way to the airport, we have to stop for a huge convoy of U.S. army tanks and trucks to lumber by. Jodie says her views “haven’t changed but have deepened. We’ve created a situation here that’s so intolerable we can’t just leave right now, without real training of the Afghan police and army.”

Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, says she’s come full circle. “At first I thought, oh no, maybe you’re just having a knee-jerk anti-war attitude that doesn’t reflect reality on the ground. But at the end of the trip I feel I do have the right position. We definitely shouldn’t be sending more troops and the ones here should be phased out.”

Rabia Roberts, on the other hand, has reversed her original stance. “I feel we have to admit a terrible truth: the standard anti-war position of `bring the troops home now’ is in itself a violent policy. It will precipitate extreme violence.” She acknowledges that adding more troops will also precipitate violence. “But can we have any development in Afgthanistan without security?” She adds, “I liked it better when I knew what the moral high ground was.”

I’m leaving with no certainty but a humble appreciation of the complexities, of how there is “no solution on a white horse.” It pains me that we’re sending more troops and that the public dialogue is focused only on that number. I don’t believe there can be a military solution, but understand that it will be a long, hard slog to attain stability and peace and that the U.S. must participate in that effort.

This will require work on multiple fronts, including talks with the Taliban, agreements with neighboring countries, redirecting the military to do aid work, securing the roads, cleaning up corruption, ensuring women’s rights and launching an equivalent of the Marshall plan to build up the country, not to mention grace. The unexpected grace that, like the quality of mercy, “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”* A call for troop withdrawal or troop buildup now seems, to most of us, simplistic.

The situation, so labile and confounding, makes me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Despite the tensions in our group, we’re grateful we’ve come and grateful to Jodie for organizing the trip. And we’re grateful to be on the plane heading out.

*Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: Where do you stand on this issue now?

Part 5 - Women's Lib, Afghan Style

2009-11-29T20:33:00.011-07:00

Part 5 of a series about a peace trip to Afgfhanistan. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here .

Afghanistan is no island, entire of itself. There’s a constant bleeding of people, money and ideas through its porous borders with Pakistan, Iran, Russia and nearby India. There can be no solution to its problems without involving neighboring countries, which is the point of a women’s “Trialogue” we attend at the Central Hotel.

About 60 women from Pakistan, India and Afghanistan have gathered for a two-day peace conference. Radha Kumar, a professor from India, opens the meeting by saying, “Our three countries are linked by the threat of violence, women are being targeted but when it comes to the peace process, we are not at the table. You cannot have peace without involving women. So we need to keep asking: Where are the women?”

To my surprise, there’s no security check at the hotel. Nine of us walk right in, pick up programs and earphones for translation and take seats behind the horseshoe table where the delegates sit. Half of them wear head scarves and half do not. During tea breaks, we talk with the women and when we leave, Rabia says, “No one I spoke with wanted the American military to be gone.” Jodie, Medea and Ann say that’s not what they heard. They’d drawn up a petition urging President Obama not to send more soldiers and to work for a political solution that leads to withdrawing all troops. They asked women at the Trialogue to sign it, some refused but a dozen signed.

Rabia says, “I feel like we’ve been at two different conferences.”

The same thing happens when we visit Camp Eggers, an army base in the center of Kabul. I speak with a dozen soldiers from the Indiana national guard, who are perched on a tank, playing Texas Hold ‘Em and drinking cokes. “We’re here to help people and make a difference,” one says. “It’s not about money -- we could make twice as much working for private security, but I’d rather wear the uniform.” When friends back home ask what they can send him, he asks for toys he can deliver to local kids, "who've never seen a toy before."

I ask, “Were you scared to come here?”

He shrugs. “They train us up. You live day to day.”

Rabia and Sara with Indiana national guard

We also meet female soldiers, including an African-American who says she hasn’t encountered any hostility from Afghan men. “They love me. They can’t do enough to help me. I guess they think I’m exotic.” For these women soldiers, it IS about money. They say they enlisted because, as one puts it, “I get free health care for my family, my kids get a free education, I can retire at 38 and get a pension the rest of my life.”

When I repeat this to Medea later, she says, “Sounds like socialism to me.”

Medea and Jodie say the soldiers they talked with want out of Afghanistan fast. “They told us, `We hate them and they hate us.’”

I say I didn’t hear anyone speak like that.

“Must be the way we ask questions,” Medea says.

“Must be.”

And it could be the proverbial story of the blind people feeling an elephant. The person who feels the trunk thinks it’s one thing and the one who feels the ear thinks it’s another.

Women Blossoming

Two women in their 20s, Shakila and Razia, are telling us about participating in their first political protest in April against a law that restricts women’s rights and condones marital rape. Shakila, a nurse with lovely Eurasian features, says, “I never liked politics. I was always busy with work, but when I heard the terms of the law, I had to do something.”

They knew it would be dangerous. Razia says, “When I remember the situation, my body shakes.” The Mullah who’d proposed the law was appearing on TV every night, warning that Islam is in danger from non-believers who’re protesting the law.

About 300 women had gathered in front of the mosque, holding signs that said, “Women of Afghanistan do not want Shia law. We want equal rights.” Suddenly the gates opened and a thousand men rushed out, throwing stones, spitting on the women, pulling off their head scarves and calling them whores. “We thought we were going to be killed,” Shakila says. But police formed a wedge between them and the mob and escorted them to Parliament where they met with legislators who are currently revising the law.

Men rush at the women protesting

We asked if they would demonstrate again, given the danger. Shakila says, “I think some times we are too afraid. But this protest gave me confidence. I saw we could really accomplish something.” Farida nods. “It changed my life.”

Their fervor reminds me of the early days of women’s liberation in the U.S. — of Redstockings in New York and Cell 16 in Boston, whose members were called man-haters and destroyers of marriage. The young Afghan women are hearing some of the same objections their American counterparts heard: women are too emotional, they can’t make decisions and their monthly mood swings make them unfit as leaders. Razia says her husband supports her political action but when he saw her on TV, told her, “I said you could protect your rights, but why do you have to stand in the first line?”

We laugh with her. It’s compelling to see, in the darkness and danger, a grass roots movement blossoming for women’s rights. The prospect of withdrawing and leaving these young women vulnerable to the Taliban is, to put it mildly, disheartening.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Please Leave a Comment: Where are the women?

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Part 4 - Love Shacks for the Taliban

2009-11-29T19:56:00.007-07:00

Part 4 of a series about a peace trip to Afgfhanistan. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here .

We’re invited to lunch by Dan Allison, who runs an NGO, Hope International. Women spread a cloth on the floor and carry in platters of rice, lamb, Afghan flat bread, spinach that’s been cooked to the consistency of mush, raw vegetables and mounds of grapes. We’ve been served the same meal at every lunch and dinner, and have been religious about not eating anything raw and drinking only bottled water. But Dan tells us, “We’ve trained our cooks to wash everything carefully. You can eat it all and won’t have problems.” Wonderful, I think, savoring a raw carrot and some grapes.

A half hour later, I do have a problem and others will come down with digestive troubles later. Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal tells us there’s a higher percentage of fecal matter in the air here than any other place on earth. Kabul has no sewer system, waste runs in ditches along every road and farmers use human excrement as fertilizer.

The next day, I’m too sick to get on the bus but the team returns at noon to our guest house to meet with Norine MacDonald, a Canadian who’s worked in the south for years. Norine is 39, blonde and gutsy. She carries a gun and looks like a model in Kabul, but in the south she dresses like an Afghan boy because women aren’t seen on the street.

Norin in Kabul with Ann Wright, a former army colonel

Norine directs the Mercator Fund, which works with farmers in the south who, she says, “are all in business with the Taliban.” Mercator is encouraging them to grow poppies for medicine. “You can’t get morphine in this country or in Africa. The World Health Organization calls it a global pain crisis,” Norine says. “It’s a simple process to convert raw opium to morphine. The farmers could start with the harvest next spring. It will make them legitimate and solve a world problem.”

Her group wants to intervene with young men before they’re recruited by the Taliban. She says there’s a bulge in the population of males between 15 and 25. “They’re not sexually active because Islam forbids sex before marriage, and they don’t have money for a wedding. They have no sex, no job, and they’re angry.”

Norine in south, dressed as a boy

Imagine, she says, if in the U.S., all the males between 15 and 25 had no sex and no job. “What kind of violence and chaos might erupt?” Her organization wants to give the young men cash to get married, an allowance to build their own place—“a love shack”—and job training. “It’s harder to recruit a married man as a suicide bomber when he has a decent job and a home.”

Jodie nods, saying she found the same was true with gang members she worked with in L.A.

Norine says she’s a fan of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and is happy to see “more troops brought in with his approach.”

There’s a burst of traffic noise outside and I ask Medea Benjamin, a Code Pink founder, if she can hear Norine. “Yes, but I don’t like what I’m hearing,” Medea says.

I move my chair closer. Norine says she likes the idea of taking soldiers out of their vehicles and putting them on the street.

“I’m strongly against that,” Medea says. “I think they should be less visible—stay in their compounds.”

“When soldiers walk around on the streets, people have a different experience of them,” Norine says.

“But they attract Taliban shooting and violence…”

“From my point of view, living here, I’d like to see the military deliver aid,” Norine says. “There are two huge camps of displaced Afghan refugees and they’re starving--10,000 families. No one’s delivered any food aid in years. If the military wants to, I’m all for it.”

“Why not have the humanitarian community do that?” Medea asks.

“They can’t get there because of the security problem,” Norine says. “What do you think people in those camps would feel about the military delivering food aid?”

“Grateful,” Jodie Evans, our trip organizer, says.

Norine adds, “I’d like to see the troops go into Pakistan and rout out the insurgents.” There’s silence at the table. (After the meeting, Ann would say, “Norine lives here and that’s reality. We represent the ideal, and somebody has to hold that.”)

Norine continues, “Here’s another controversial proposal but you’ll like it better: Give all the aid and development money to Afghan women. It will empower them. The men will have to go to them if they want a new well.”

Jodie says, “That’s what we fight for, but we want to do it without troops.”

“You need both,” Norine says.

“If you had to choose between troops and development?” Jodie asks.

“Had to choose? I’d put money on development.”

“Yay!” Jodie says.

Trouble in Pink

This kind of questioning divides our group. Some are upset that the Code Pink leaders are leading people to get the answers they want instead of listening without bias. I spend the evening with two who feel this way, Rabia Roberts and Dr. Laurie Hamilton. The rest of the team are going to dinner at the home of the deputy minister of defense. I’m running a fever, Rabia is staying in to conserve her energy and Laurie has made a different calculation. She and her husband recently adopted two brothers, 11 and 13, who grew up in foster care. Laurie works as a gynecologist in Coos Bay, Oregon, and her husband cares for the boys. “They need me to come home,” Laurie says, “so I’m not taking any chances by going out at night. It’s not worth it.”

Rabia Roberts

Rabia trained with Marin Luther King in the ‘60s and has conducted citizen diplomacy in Iraq and Syria. She’s been uncomfortable with the Code Pink Leaders from the first day. “They had their decision made before coming here and are drumming for evidence to support it. That’s not peace making.”

“It’s aggressive,” Laurie says. “I’m really disappointed. My approach is: you come with questions, not answers. They make everyone wrong who doesn’t agree with them.”

“This is peace movement fundamentalism,” Rabia says.

When told of this comment, Jodie said, “I don’t think I was leading anyone. I wanted to come home and say, “We should put more money in development,” and if nobody agrees with that, I need to know. But every time we asked, what if the money went into development instead of troops, people wanted development.”

TO BE CONTINUED.

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Part 3 - Band-Aids for What's Broke

2009-11-29T14:58:00.009-07:00

Part 3 of a series about a peace trip to Afgfhanistan. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here .

On our second night in Kabul, there’s a dinner given in our honor by Nooria and Asad Farhad, an Afghan couple whom Jodie Evans, a Code Pink founder, had met in L.A. The dinner proves to be a coming out party for our group. Asad is a former deputy in the Karzai government, and the guests are a glittering cast of ministers, journalists, generals, tribal leaders, professors and Mahmoud Karzai, the older brother of the President. By the end of the evening our dance card is full -- with invitations for dinner on every night of our stay.

Nooria, who’s warm and emotive, dresses with dramatic flair and doesn’t wear a head covering. She tells us how she and Asad left Kabul in 1976 for the U.S. so he could study on a Fullbright grant and didn’t return until the Taliban fell. They’ve rented a three-story home in a walled compound that has a large garden and staff, including a cook and driver. But it’s not considered a “good neighborhood.” Directly across the dirt road is a camp of Afghan refugees who fled to Pakistan during Taliban rule and returned with no place to live. They’re squatting in ragged tents on vacant land with no water or electricity. The men make wooden bird cages and the women sew quilts, which Nooria sells through her import business in California.

Before the party begins, she leads us across the dirt to the camp where we’re surrounded by children, many of whom have those startling green eyes that give them an eerie beauty.

Asad says the kids don’t go to school but scavenge in garbage dumps for fuel, earning maybe a dollar a day. He and Nooria are offering to pay the families the amount the children could earn if they’ll send them to school. “We can’t get the families out of the tents now,” Asad says, “but if the kids learn to read and write, we can get them out of the tents in ten years.”

Medea protests that this is “a Band-Aid. They need a national program.”

“It’s one step,” Asad says. “If we leave it to the functionaries, it will not happen.”
Back at their home, musicians begin to play traditional Afghan songs and guests are arriving. Everyone on our team is wearing Afghan clothes we’ve bought on the fly — long colored tunics and scarves -- but the Afghan men are wearing elegant Western suits. They keep checking their cell phones and we keep taking notes, shooting still pictures and videos and making digital voice recordings.

One of the guests, Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, says the party is the equivalent of “hanging out with Jeb Bush during the Bush years.” He’s not surprised that we’re hearing people say they want U.S. troops to stay. He says there are two Afghanistans: Kabul, with 5 million people, and the provinces with 25 million. In Kabul, people enjoy more freedom than they did under the Taliban and want the U.S. here as a buffer. But in the south, where shooting and bombing are destroying homes and killing civilians, they want the troops out. “Under the Taliban, they had order and peace,” Anand says.

A woman reporter cuts in, “It was the peace of the oppressed.”

Asad points out that the Taliban have roots in every village and have set up a de facto government. “They collect taxes and settle disputes on the spot. There’s no other justice. People may not like the verdicts but at least things get resolved.”

A group of men are sitting in a circle with Mahmoud Karzai, dressed all in white with a gray vest and silver hair. He talks about how life has improved since his brother took office, but other men complain bitterly of corruption. Daoud Yaar, economic adviser to the President, says, “We live in a society where you can trust nobody.”

Asad tells them about a proposal he submitted to the government to create local marble works. “If the government builds a factory, it won’t work,” he says. “But if locals build it, they’ll have something to protect.” He says the country has one of the largest marble and granite deposits in the world and it’s exquisite – equal to Italian marble. “But we make no marble products. Our marble is blasted out, which destroys 90% of it, then smuggled to Pakistan where it’s processed and sent back here.” He’s proposing that local workers be trained to extract and process the marble in factories they control.

“What response did you receive?” a friend asks.

“None.”

The men look away.

Medea, Asad and Nooria Farhad, Jodie, Sara

On the bus driving home, I’m exhausted and on overload. Everything is blurring together -- an endless stream of talking heads. Every opinion and argument we hear contains the seeds of a counter argument, and none is provable. Paul, our young stud with gelled hair and black rectangular glasses, lies slumped in his seat. “I’m like a sponge that’s totally full,” he says. Sara Nichols looks glassy eyed. “I came here for clarity but things are getting more confusing by the hour.”

TO BE CONTINUED.

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Part 2 - Real Housewives of Afghanistan

2009-11-25T13:48:00.021-07:00

Part 2 of a series about a peace trip to Afgfhanistan. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here .

In a mud-brick building on the outskirts of Kabul, 25 women are sitting on a faded red carpet, learning to read. They’re barefoot and their palms are dyed orange with henna. We visit the class on our first day in Kabul and find the students, who range from their 20s to their 50s, on fire for learning.

Ninety per cent of Afghan women are illiterate, we’re told by Farida Faqiri, head of Women for Women, an NGO that teaches women to read and trains them for jobs. “Our mission is to give them confidence, let them know they have rights and can play important roles in the community,” Farida says. The first thing her organization does when starting a class in a village is talk with the local mullahs and assure them, “Everything will be done according to Islam. The prophet Mohammed said women should be educated, so please allow them to go to school.”

“And the Mullas agree?” I ask.

“For the most part, yes,” Farida says.

Women for Women has graduated 20,000 women since the Taliban fell. But the program only lasts a year and the women we meet say they need a place to continue studying after the program ends.

Rais, who has green eyes so light that they’re startling, says “We want a better life, a safe life. Please, we want the U.S. to talk with the Taliban and stop the war.” The Afghan women burst into applause.” Jodie Evans, a founder of Code Pink, hands out peace buttons and tells them, “If you keep using your voices, that will come to be.”
The Prophet Mohammed, in addition to saying women should be educated, taught that men and women are equal and that men should not harm their wives because if they do, they may be harming something Allah has blessed. Why then, we ask, are women subjugated across the Islamic world?

A teacher who’s lived and worked in the Middle East would tell me later that the Koran, like the Bible, can be interpreted to support almost any position. If people can’t read – and 70% of Afghan men are illiterate – they don’t know what’s in the Koran. They only know what the mullahs, their parents and grandparents have taught them. And the common teaching, except in urban areas, is that women should not leave home. In rural Afghanistan, where most of the population lives, women will leave home only twice: when they get married and when they die.

The most severe problem they face, according to Farida, is domestic violence. The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) asserts that the majority of Afghan women are beaten regularly – by husbands, fathers and brothers.

I ask Farida why violence is so prevalent. She lists three factors, starting with lack of education. UN studies show that the more educated a man is, the less likely he is to beat his wife. Second is unemployment. “When men have no work and are angry, they often take it out on their wives,” Farida says. Third is tradition and culture.

Her views are echoed the following day when we meet with a UN project director, who says she can’t be named because of the risk. “We have a problem that’s not getting press coverage: the assassination of Afghan women who take public roles, whether it’s a police woman, a teacher -- anything outside the home.” She says they’re being tracked, targeted and killed in drive-by shootings from motorcycles, and “the rising acceptance of this is alarming.”

In almost every case, she says, the women are forewarned. “I got a call last week saying I would be killed unless I resigned my job and denounced the U.S. occupation.” She changed her cell phone and went home in an armored car. She says the belief that women shouldn’t leave their homes “is so tightly knit into the fabric of society that it’s like a blanket—a blanket of fear. And it’s not just the Taliban who’re against women in public. That’s the norm.”

Jodie asks the director the question she asks every person we meet: “Do you want the U.S. to send 40,000 more troops?”

“People here are not clamoring for troop withdrawal,” the director says. “But as an individual, I would say: All troops out now.”

Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, asks, “Won’t the Taliban come back and women will be stuck in the dark again?”

The director shuts her eyes and rubs the bridge of her nose. “This is the struggle I go through,” she says. “There is no solution on a white horse. This is not just about the Taliban. It’s not about troops in or out. Karzai in or out. It’s so multifaceted, we have to be honest about the contradictions.”

She wishes we could travel outside Kabul, which is impossible because the roads are embedded with explosive devices. “If you sit in farm houses with women, you’ll hear: their main concern is security. We can build a hospital for them but women aren’t free to walk to it.”

She tells us about a Pashtun woman in the south who was referred to her by the U.S. Special Forces. The woman fell sick and tried to walk to the hospital but had to be chaperoned by a male relative, so she took her 8-year-old son. She was wearing the Afghan burqa — a light blue garment that covers the woman completely except for a mesh grid over the eyes. “She stumbled and when she put out her arms to break her fall, she accidentally touched a man. Her son ran home and told his father that she’d had `relations with a strange man.’”

The UN director has to stop to compose herself. “Her husband called his neighbors to hold his wife down while he chopped off the tips of all her fingers. Then he told his son to punch her in the eyes. When we found her, she was unable to see.” The director shakes her head. “If your neighbors witness something like that, they’ll think twice about going to a hospital.”

We’re subdued as we ride away from the UN office. We’re hearing numerous stories like this, which makes us probe and question our assumptions. Ann Wright, 63, a former army colonel and State Department officer who has kind blue eyes and speaks with a Southern lilt, says, “I have changed a little bit. Before this trip I was leaning toward: let’s get the hell out! Accept the inevitable! Now I feel we have a responsibility—to be part of a security strategy and help provide education and jobs. That’s a far better way to deal with terrorism.”

Ann Wright

But the Pashtun woman wasn’t maimed by terrorists, she was maimed by her family. Education will alleviate this, but how can we provide classes for people when the roads aren’t safe?

TO BE CONTINUED.

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Confessions of a Dove in Afghanistan

2009-11-11T12:34:00.018-07:00

This is the first in a series about a peace mission to Afghanistan. Sign Up to receive future blogs abot the trip.

There was no stopping us, even though the State Department issued a warning against travel to Afghanistan because of “an ongoing threat to kidnap and assassinate Americans.” We were a group of eight women and one man organized by Code Pink, Women for Peace, and we arrived in Kabul believing the U.S. should withdraw its troops and spend more money on development.

After eight days, our presumptions were turned upside down, splitting us into camps with conflicting opinions. Some still wanted an exit strategy, but one woman who’s spent 40 years in non-violent peace work reversed her lifelong stand, believing the military should stay and more troops might be helpful. “It shocks me to admit this,” she said.

What happened to this group in Kabul—how our ideas changed or resisted change—reflects how and why people in living rooms and offices are struggling with the issue: do we commit or get out?

I’d never been to a war zone before and never participated in a Code Pink action. I signed up for the trip after reading that men were attacking Afghan girls on their way to school by spraying acid in their faces. I called Jodie Evans, a founder of Code Pink, whom I’d know since our kids were in pre-school together. “Is your group doing anything to support Afghan women and girls?” I asked. “I’m organizing a trip,” she said.

Medea Benjamin, Asad and Nooria Farhad, Jodie Evans, Sara

Code Pink was founded in 2001 to protest the invasion of Iraq. It now has 250 chapters and 100,000 members, who’re known for their nerve and in-your-face tactics. At a White House demonstration, women pulled off their shirts revealing peace doves on their bras and words written on their stomachs with black marker: “Read my tits: No War in Iraq.” I was nervous they’d do something flamboyant in Kabul but Jodie assured me they would dress and act “respectfully.”

A month before we were to leave, suicide bombs and a rocket exploded in Kabul, days before the election. I panicked, but Jodie said she didn’t think Kabul would be more dangerous than New York city. For weeks I felt I was on my way to be killed, or worse, paralyzed, blinded or brain injured. Every moment became heightened: watching my daughter play piano, walking through a field of aspens. I would think, this could be the last time I hear my daughter play or see aspens turning gold.

Friends asked why in hell I was going to a place where two New York Times reporters had been kidnapped and hundreds of Americans killed? I didn’t know, but something kept pulling me to commit. At times I would think, I can’t handle this, I won’t go, but then the world went flat and gray as it does when one “refuses the call,” as Joseph Campbell describes it. Finally there was a moment when I simply knew I had to go and felt a keen instinct that no harm would come to our group.

When we all introduced ourselves at the Dubai airport, Jodie, 55, who has natural flaming red hair and wears pink earrings with peace signs, said terror had come over her a few days before, despite the insouciance she’d expressed to me. “I’ve got white knuckles,” she said, “but I had to come. It’s the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and I need to see--what’s the result?”

Our group must have looked like a cougar team: the women were mostly in their 50s and 60s and the guy was 39. The women included a gynecologist, lawyer, photographer, teacher and a former army colonel. The lone male, Paul Kawika Martin, is political director of Peace Action and wanted to come because, he said, “I learn more from experience than anything else.”

We’d been told to arrive wearing plain dark clothes that cover the head, arms and buttocks. But Medea Benjamin, 57, who founded Code Pink with Jodie, showed up in a purple short sleeve blouse and pink t-shirt. “Some people have a problem following directions,” she said.

Medea is like the quick brown fox who jumps over the lazy dog. Small, blonde and wiry with lively brown eyes and an aquiline nose, she’d been to Afghanistan twice since 9/11 and witnessed so much tragedy that she hadn’t wanted to return. “I changed my mind when I saw people were turning against the war and there was an opening to talk about it,” she said.

* * *

In the garden of our guest house, there’s a twenty-foot long bird cage with thousands of chartreuse parakeets chirping so loudly we can barely hear each other speak. Afghans love birds as they love flying kites, but both passions were outlawed by the Taliban. Our guide and translator, Najib, a former war surgery medic, says the guest house is “pretty safe” because it’s not near the embassies or military installations. (A month later, a guest house nearby would be attacked by Taliban and eight people killed, including six UN workers.) Two men with machine guns guard the entrance, the compound is surrounded by metal walls and the rooms are primitive but have internet connection.

Najib tells us the safety rules: don’t split off from the group, don’t walk on the street, even to the corner, without an Afghan escort, and don’t go out after dark.

Our days begin at 8 and end at midnight, riding on a bus from meeting to meeting with a wide range of Afghans. What surprises us is that almost all say they want U.S. troops to stay, for security and to train the Afghan army. Even those who are hostile to U.S. policy say, “Now is not the time to withdraw.” Mirwais Wardak, who runs an NGO for peace building, says, “I can’t go to the provinces to do research. I can’t go to my own village--I’ll be attacked on the road driving there.”

Asad Farhad, a former minister of finance, tells us that if all foreign troops are withdrawn, “This government collapses in 48 hours and we have what we had before: killing, looting, rape.”

Paul is perplexed. “I’d read that only 20 per cent of Afghans want American troops to stay, but that’s not what we’re finding.”

Sara Nichols, an attorney from L.A., wonders if we should re-think the call for a quick exit strategy.

Medea breaks in, “Let’s not be so quick to change our thinking. In the first days you get bombarded with new ideas. At the end we’ll see what we want to integrate in our bedrock beliefs.” I ask what those beliefs are. “The military can’t defeat the Taliban,” she says. “Countries have to work out democracy on their own and women have to find ways to liberate themselves.”

TO BE CONTINUED

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Part 24 - Goodby Billy, Hello Love

2009-09-08T19:17:00.009-06:00

NOTE: I may be going to Afghanistan to report on what it's like on the ground, especially for women. SIGN UP to receive blogs from Kabul.

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: After a great trip with Billy on Cape Cod, I went to a retreat and he went to buy property. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here.

His car's not here. I ring the bell at his massive front door. No answer. I try calling Billy on his cell but it goes straight to voice mail.

What the...? I'd called him from the road, saying I'd be at his place in 30 minutes. We haven't seen each other since we parted in Massachusetts, and I thought he'd be champing at the bit.

I pace for a while and call again. No answer. Should I drive home, wait? How long?

Twenty minutes later, he drives up, saying he took his car to be washed.

As he fixes us drinks, he tells me he found two properties on the Cape that he's bidding on. "I'm going back in a few weeks."

I'd love to see them, I say.

"Well, that's the thing. I don't picture you there."

"What do you mean? I wouldn't want to live there full time, but I could visit."

"I've been having a lot of doubts since our trip. The fact that you went to the retreat on your own, and wouldn't let me come..."

"Guests weren't permitted."

"Whatever the reason, that's what happened," he says. "And I made offers on two places. If I were in love, I'd never think of buying a piece of property without showing it to my woman. I'd be bending over backwards to make sure she was happy with it. He shakes his head. "I'm not doing that with you. So this tells me is: I'm not in love with you, you're not in love with me, and that's where it's at."

I tell him love unfolds in different ways. "We've only been seeing each other exclusively for 4 months. Can't you just enjoy what's going on, and not label it or worry whether it's love?"

He puts out his arms and draws me close; as always, the electricity is mighty. "Are you just hanging out with me for sex?" he asks. I stare at him. Why would he ask this? Maybe he's wondering, is he just sticking around for the sex?

"Would 'Yes' be the wrong answer?" I say.

He laughs, loosening up.

"I don't want to be with someone who doesn't want to be with me," I tell him. "Shall we kiss and say goodby?"

He shakes his head no and pulls me closer.

Two days later, I have to go back to my house to take care of my cat. He begs me not to go. "These have been the two happiest days of my life. That's the truth."

"And you're running away from me?"

"I'm trying to keep you, too."

I know this sounds strange, but after two days of physical intimacy and joy, I'm in an altered state. In spite of Billy's words, I know we've touched love. I've felt us connecting on so many levels, deeper than skin.

He calls me twice as I drive home. "The house is empty without you," he says. "When can you come back?" I get stuck in traffic for an hour, but it doesn't bother me a bit.

One of you wrote a comment recently: "Great sex always feels like love." The corollary for me is that without love, there's no great sex--the sex that bonds two as one and nourishes every cell. I assumed the same was true for Billy.

He calls that evening to say goodnight, then calls in the morning as he's cooking breakfast. No word the rest of the day. No word the next. Or the next.

Stupidly, I had hoped it wouldn't happen this time, but damn if he isn't pulling away again, after the "two happiest days of my life." And this time, it's Waterloo. I can't go on. Not because of him but because of me.

I can't stay detached--it's a great concept, a worthy goal--but I'm not there. As blissful and high as we've been, that's how low I fall. The chest pain is excruciating and I'm struggling to breathe. I fly to New York to do an interview and then go to a reunion of college friends, but I'm just shuffling through the motions. I don't really hear what anyone says. I walk past beautiful vistas and don't see them. I chew what I know is delicious food and don't taste it.

All the while, I'm aware that this reaction is way out of proportion to what's happening. I haven't been diagnosed with a fatal illness. No one I love has died. I'm being left by a guy I've been dating for a short time--a guy who doesn't have the maturity or compassion to even be considered as a long-term partner. But here's where my mind goes: I don't want to live.

Fortunately, I've retained a large enough shred of sanity to grasp that this has to be a major turning point. The problem is not with Billy--he's not "bad" as I've been calling him, he's an imperfect human like the rest of us, doing what he does. His frantic need to run has almost nothing to do with me. And my panic, my chest-crushing pain and wish for oblivion, have almost nothing to do with him.

I've read a piece recently in the New York Times by Laura Munson, about how she responded when her husband demanded a divorce. When he told her, after 20 years, he didn't love her and doubted he ever had, it was like a sucker punch to the gut. But she ducked the punch and said, "I don't buy it." She let him rage, run away, ignore her birthday and miss family events, and she kept saying she knew the marriage wasn't the problem. He was forced, ultimately, to confront his own demons, and after six months, returned to the family with gratitude.

If I'd been able to say that to Billy when he declared he didn't love me--"I don't buy it"--who knows what might have happened? But at that moment, I was incapable of ducking the punch. It landed smack in my most tender and vulnerable place, like the soft spot on a baby's head: the fear that I'm unlovable.

The good news, the fortunate aspect, is that this episode with Billy brought me so low that I knew there was no one out there who could help me. I would have to find my own way out of the ditch, the rut I'd been running in: a man pursues me, I fall for him, he runs and I want to die. Because the pain gets worse with each recurrence, even if I hardly know or care about the guy. It's coming up in extremis, I believe, because something in me has to change, to heal, to be made fresh. And I've resolved to do whatever it takes to accomplish this.

I ended my relationship with Billy a year ago. As the pain has subsided, my goal has changed: from yearning to connect with the right man, to yearning to experience and savor life and love in all their fullness, whether I have a partner or not.

So ends Part One of Sex Love Enlightenment. We're going to take a break as I do more research and field studies. The next part will be the road to Wellville, to healthy love and sexuality, and a commitment--like the one Laura Munroe made when her husband said he didn't love her--a commitment to the end of suffering.

It will be about cultivating many sources of love--besides a romance with one person that's supposed to last forever. Among the sources that are giving me that same sense of aliveness and joy as a romance are: learning to play piano, singing with a rock 'n roll choir, hanging out with friends I adore, and writing, of course, always writing and reporting.

Thanks for coming this far and sharing your ideas. I know we'll make it to the light.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT. Where do you find passion, love and aliveness, other than with a mate? Have you healed yourself of a destructive pattern? How?

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Part 23 - Mick Jagger and Mary Oliver

2009-08-25T14:56:00.009-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: Each time we draw closer, Billy pulls away. But there comes a moment when I know: I'll be fine, whether he leaves or stays. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here.

Ahhhhhh, but that expansive sense of freedom doesn't stay fixed. It's not a state you reach, hoist your flag and dwell there forever. It's something you taste and cultivate and, over time, can inhabit more frequently. Like all experience, it's impermanent.

Billy wants to move to a different part of the country. He's lived in Colorado all his life, so he's eager to try a new region. Maybe New England? As it happens, before meeting Billy, I signed up for a 7-day retreat at a meditation center in Massachusetts. We decide to fly to Boston together and spend a week exploring the coast, from Gloucester to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. Then he'll drop me off at the retreat, do some serious property hunting, and we'll meet at the Boston airport to fly home.

The problem is: We had a fight the night before leaving, and I became so frustrated I yelled, "Shut up!" I was startled by the intensity of my rage. How the hell had my newfound sense of freedom and detachment been knocked out? I apologized immediately, but Billy turned his back to me in bed and refused to speak.

On the flight to Boston, we exchange nothing but small talk. We don't get around to discussing the problem till late that evening. I spend a lot of time apologizing for my part, but his body stays rigid, locked. Like he wants to keep fuming, nursing his righteousness.

In the morning we try to make love, but our hearts, literally, aren't in it. We drive south, listening to music and not talking much, and I think, Why do I want to be with this person?

When we reach the resort where he's booked a room, the views make us gasp: sand dunes, ocean and sky bathed in that lambent gold light that draws painters to the area. Like many people who have money, Billy is frugal and loves to hunt for deals. He found a coupon online for a free room upgrade, so we're given a suite with glass doors opening to the sea, a fireplace, sunken tub and thick terrycloth robes.

At dinner we eat fresh caught lobster infused with sweet butter, corn that's so sugary it's like candy, and heirloom tomatoes dressed with 18-year-old Balsamic and white truffle oil. Even Billy can't stay angry through this. We walk along the ocean afterward and put our arms around each other. Tucked under fluffy white linens in our room, we listen to the rising, cresting--shoof!--of the waves and, at last, all's right with the world.

The next day we drive to the Province Lands, a preserve of sandy forest and freshwater ponds which Mary Oliver has claimed as her terrain, just as Willa Cather claimed the prairie. I've brought a book of Oliver's poems, and we hike to the site of one, Blackwater Pond.

We set out a picnic--lobster rolls and Pinot Grigio--and read it aloud:

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

The words haunt us. "Waking the bones." "What beautiful thing just happened?" After making love that night, Billy says we should give titles to our sessions in bed, because each has a distinct flavor. "This one," he says, "was the Mary Oliver."

A few nights later, we find a movie theater that's playing "Shine a Light," Martin Scorsese's film about the Rolling Stones. In my 20s, I had a case for Mick Jagger, big time. I flew to Denmark to cover a tour the Stones were doing in Europe. I was wearing a long, lavender nightgown as a dress, with my hair ironed straight and falling to my waist, when I found myself face to face with Jagger in the hotel elevator. I trembled, this was my chance, I'd had endless fantasies about him, and here he was in the flesh, but I froze. What came out of my mouth was: "I... uh... really like your music." Eeegods! That was dumb! I wanted to shrink and disappear. But Jagger smiled, said "Thank you," and asked if I wanted to play poker with "the boys." Suddenly I'm sitting on the floor of a hotel room with the goddamn Rolling Stones, who think I'm a groupie, and I'm wondering what they'll do when they find out I'm a reporter.

All this comes rushing back to me as we watch the Stones perform, three decades later, on the big screen. Out on the street, Billy does an uncanny, spot-on imitation of Mick, skipping across the stage, swinging his lank arms and jutting out his chin. Back at the resort, we have a raucous time in bed. Billy calls it "the Mick Jagger."

The week flies to a close and Billy drives me to the retreat center. "I wish you wouldn't go," he says. "You've already been to one, didn't you learn what you needed to? Why do you have to go to another?"

I tell him the learning is ongoing, evolving. "It's the same with people who go to church every week..."

"I never understood that either," he says. "After years, you'd think people would get the message."

I try another tack. "I go because I love to go. Some people love to fish. You wouldn't ask them, why do you keep fishing? Didn't you already catch one?"

"Oh," he says. "I get that now."

We hug goodby, he drives off and I prepare myself to drop into the rhythm of the retreat: meditation, breakfast, a talk by the teacher, lunch, more mediation and walks--all in silence. On day 4, I'm in a rich state of quietness, walking out of the meditation hall, when Billy steps in front of me, putting a finger to his lips and saying, "Shhhh." Startled, I take a pen and paper from my purse and write, "Why are you here?"

He says he was driving by and thought he'd stop.

"I'm happy to see you," I write, "but I want to finish the retreat." He asks if he can join us for the day. "Sorry, they don't permit that." He takes a room in a motel nearby, and the next morning, as I'm walking with the group in silence, he appears again in my path.

"I just want to tell you, I won't be flying home with you," he says. "I found some properties I'm really excited about, and I'm gonna stay longer. I'll see you back in Colorado."

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: Why do you think Billy shows up at the retreat? Is there a poem, a piece of music or a place that awes you? Is there one you associate with an interlude of love?

Part 22 - He's Younger, She's Older — Get Over It!

2009-08-11T21:13:00.006-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: Billy and I go on a four-day bender of sex, drugs & rock 'n roll. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here.

The next time I visit Billy, he gives me a lifeless peck on the cheek.

“Is something wrong?” I ask.

“Your age is troubling me,” he says. He’s eight years younger than I, and this is the first I’ve heard it troubles him. The last two men I’ve been with, including my ex husband, were ten years younger, and their response to the age difference was, “Who gives a damn?”

Billy does. He says he’d rather be with someone who won’t get old before he does. I point out that he knew my age from the first time we met. “Maybe your mind is throwing this up now because it’s one thing we can never fix, talk through or compromise about. I’ll always be older.”

He nods. “It’s a brilliant way to check out, don’t ya think?”

I sigh. I have my own doubts about the viability of this relationship. Billy’s not working and has no focus. He shows no ability to see the other person’s point of view—his perception is always “correct” and mine is wrong. He has few friends. After living in Colorado all his life, he has one male friend with whom he never talks intimately, and two women friends who’re ex lovers.

More important is his skittishness. Because of my own ambivalence, I do best with men who really want to be with me and consistently hang in there. “That won’t be the case with me,” Billy says.

What to do? Months later, I’ll read in Pia Mellody’s book, “Facing Love Addiction,” that the love addict has a fatal attraction to the avoidance addict. But on the day I feel Billy pulling away, I think: Okay, here’s a chance to work on my own stuff. Can I let him have his doubts, say what he needs to say and not react? In meditation, I’m using the practice of “allowing everything to be as it is.” Allow Billy to be troubled. Allow me to be troubled that he’s troubled. Allow it all to be as it is, and when I do that, peace drifts in.

Billy motions me to join him on the sofa and we hug, stretching out. “Do you want me to leave?” I ask.

“I’ve been asking myself that question.”

I shift into a different position and feel his body soften.

“That feels… really good,” he says. “I just relaxed.” He begins to stroke my skin with tenderness. I love the feel of his chest, I love his smell, and in a short time we’re in another land. In this breezy, sun washed country, he can let down his guard, shut off thoughts and let the doubts recede like mist. In this realm he’s playful, inventive, always trying new things, and he wants to make me happy at any cost.

Anne Cushman, a writer I admire, wrote in Enlightenment for Idiots: “In bed with him, my body hummed… His touch hooked up two loose wires inside and I was electrified. The more I had of him, the more I wanted, as if in the very act of satisfying my craving, he was carving a deeper and deeper pit of hunger within me.”

That’s what’s happening with Billy now, except we’re both doing the carving. Day becomes night; he says he’ll leave first thing in the morning but he doesn’t. We sip Prosecco with peach nectar, take a couple hits and keep going, headed for the place Ken Kesey painted on his psychedelic bus: FURTHER. It flits through my mind: Is drinking and smoking and fucking the way to enlightenment? Or to oblivion? But I sweep the question aside like a filly swishing off a fly. Besides, the gurus say the way to nirvana is through samsara—the dark unconsciousness. So dive we must.

As the physical pleasure intensifies, so do feelings of merging, union, love. Billy says, “I’ve never felt so close to anyone.” The problem is: when we reach this closeness, I want to sustain and build on it, raise high the roof beam, carpenters. He wants to run. And the more we let go with each other and love flows, the more violent the backlash. When we’re together, he never wants to leave, but when he does, his mind takes over, carping, judging, finding flaws. His emails and calls fall off, and when we meet again it takes hours, sometimes 24, before he relaxes and we can find our way back to that sun washed isle.

“This is his mating dance,” says Wendy, the Buddhist psychologist. “It’s not about you. Just try—I know it’s a challenge—but try to stay detached.” Okay, I think, I’ll try to let go of my expectations. I can’t control Billy, the future or my feelings, but I can allow it all to be what it is. Surrender—that’s the game. And when I feel myself do that, the clouds part. There’s a knowing in me that whatever happens with Billy, it’s not going to do me in. Whether he leaves or stays, I’ll be okay. Really. And when I feel that … I’m free.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: Is this an opportunity for me to do important work? Is it, as someone said, “another fucking opportunity for growth?” Or is my warning system not working?

Part 21 - Did You Ever Pet a Bee?

2009-08-04T21:12:00.011-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: Billy and I both get HIV tests and pass. But back in his house, there’s a shy awkwardness. To see all posts in chronological order,Click Here.

Billy asks me to come and lie down so he can hold me. He folds my body into his arms on the kingsize bed, with its dark leather frame. “It’s okay to cry,” he says.

Tears come, and I confess that I wanted him to contact me, despite the fact that I told him not to. He says he must have known that because he refused to give up.

We start to make love, slowly, for hours. Sunlight filters through the massive pine trees outside the windows, and he’s playing his favorite kind of music, which is also my favorite: singer-songwriters, from Tom Russell to Sheryl Crow to Leonard Cohen.

The bedroom suite is so big I keep losing my way, opening the wrong doors as I look for the bathroom. There’s a closet so large it has an island in the center, a sauna, a TV nook, and two separate toilet enclosures.

The next day we go for a walk and eat lunch at an outdoor café. A bee lands on Billy’s plate. “Did you ever pet a bee?” he asks.

“God, no. I’m allergic to bee stings.”

He runs a finger, ever so softly, along the bee’s back, barely touching the fur. I brace, expecting the bee to freak, but it just sits there as if hypnotized. After a while it flies up, circles and returns to the plate for more. Watching Billy stroke its back, I want him to touch me that way. When I tell him, he laughs and starts referring to me as “the bee.”

Billy’s not working these days, and I’ve just been told that ABC is canceling the pilot for the series based on “Leap,” which I’ve been working on for a year. It feels as if I’ve been racing on a treadmill and suddenly, the switch has been turned off. I’m at loose ends, so we’re both free to lie in bed the rest of the day and evening.

I drive home and have 2 days to catch my breath before Billy shows up at my place. For the next 4 days, we don’t leave the bedroom except to eat. When Hunter Thompson drove to Las Vegas to write “Fear and Loathing,” he loaded his convertible with bags of grass, speed, acid, a salt shaker of cocaine, beer, loaded guns and a pint of raw ether. Billy and I packed in Prosecco, wine, grass, frozen entrees from Whole foods, energy bars, vibrating toys and loaded iPods. It did not occur to me at the time that this was excessive. I thought, as did Billy: it’s the only way to fly.

Not until a year later did I see what it was: a binge, a four-day bender, our days of wine and roses. As with any addictive substance, the more we indulged, the more we craved. Billy marveled: “I’ve never made love like this.” I’d made love for long expanses with the cowboy artisan I’d been with for 7 years. But when that relationship ended, I believed it was best in show, the sex of a lifetime. I doubted I’d ever come close to those heights again.

Well, what was going on with Billy was… no doubt… absolutely… even better. Can you imagine? It was like an exorcism. I was free from the massive belief I’d been holding onto for 8 years: that the best was in the past.

On the afternoon of day 4, my friend, Wendy, a Buddhist psychologist, calls from Chicago. Both of us have been out of relationship for some time, and when I tell her what’s going on, she’s so happy she’s chirping. I put her on speaker phone. “Billy,” she says, “we haven’t met yet, but I want to welcome you. Welcome to my friend’s life!”

“Thank you,” Billy says, smiling, and there’s a loud pop.

“What’s that?” Wendy asks.

“We just opened a bottle of Prosecco,” he says, “and the cork hit the bed post…”

“You guys!” Wendy says. “It’s not even morning anymore.”

Not only is it not morning, but after four days, we’ve run out of food. I have to write an article now and Billy has to meet his daughter in Lone Tree, so there’s no time for a final meal. Right after driving off, Billy calls while I’m in the shower and leaves a message: “I want you more than I want food.”

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: Is sex a drug, a road to intimacy, a sacred practice? All of the above?

Part 20 - Love in the Time of Viagra

2009-07-28T12:03:00.011-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: After many weeks of no sex with Billy, I decide I’m ready. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here.

What’s it like to go for AIDS tests at a public clinic when you’re over 50? We’re about to see. I know that I’m clean, and Billy believes he is, but I don’t trust that because he’s had unprotected sex with two other women since his divorce. If I’m asking him to get tested, it seems only fair that we both do it together.

As we drive to the County Health Department, Billy asks why the test will take an hour. I say they’ll probably ask questions and try to educate us about safe sex.

“What! I’m not going to answer personal questions,” he says.

Please don’t be rude, I say, nervous, knowing Billy can be a wild card.

“I’ll tell them I’m just there for the test. That’s it.”

We’re the oldest people in the waiting room—by decades. They give us forms, asking for name, address, phone and social security number. That stops me. “I thought the test was anonymous.”

The attendant, Sheree, says, “It’s confidential, but not anonymous—where you just have a number. No one does that kind of testing in this area.”

I glance at Billy. He wanted anonymity for insurance reasons. “Are you OK with this?”

He hesitates. Sheree says, “You can say your name is Donald Duck, or whatever. We don’t ask for ID unless you want a paper copy of the results.”

“We don’t,” Billy says, and we sit down to work on the forms. He puts “Tom” as his name, saying, “It’s a good cowboy name.” I write “Jane.” He puts “Hayden” for his last name. I put “Fonda.” I start to sign the release and he says, “Don’t sign your real name!”

I was doing it by reflex, so I tear up the release and ask for another.

Moments later, a beefy, hirsute man with a thick Slavic accent calls out, “Tom and Jane?” We walk toward him and he holds out his hand. “I am Bojan.” He says he’s from Bosnia. “I know you are couple, but I am government, and rule is: One test at a time. Who goes first?”

“Tom” says he will, and I excuse myself to use the restroom. When I return to the bench outside Bojan’s office, I hear the two of them laughing hysterically behind the closed door. That's a relief, Billy’s not being rude.

Then Bojan sticks his head out. “Tom would like to share his results with you.”

I walk into the room and he shows me a small plastic strip on the table with one line in blue. “Is negative,” Bojan says. I throw my arms around Billy.

“Test is 98 per cent accurate,” Bojan adds.

“What?” Billy says, in mock indignation. “I didn’t come here to get a 98 per cent chance of getting laid! I want 100 per cent.” He gestures toward me. “I was 98 per cent sure I didn’t have AIDS last weekend and she wouldn’t go for that.” Bojan laughs.

“I accept the test results,” I say.

Billy points to a grimy macramé peace sign on a necklace hanging on the wall. “See,” he says, “I knew that peace sign would bring me luck.”

Bojan tells me it was a gift from a client who didn’t have money for the test but he gave it to her anyway. “She take off her necklace and ask me to keep it. I say, I am government, I am not allowed… But she say, if I don’t take it, I will assault her.”

I’m puzzled, then say, “Do you mean… insult her?”

“Yes, insult her.” The peace signs looks creepy and germ-ridden.

Billy leaves the room and Bojan starts down a list of questions, checking off my answers on a clipboard. “Have you had sex in last 3 months?”

“Yes.”

“Sex with man?”

“Yes.”

“Sex with woman?”

“No.”

“Sex in anus?”

“No.”

“Sex through hole?”

I start to laugh. “Sex through hole? Like, glory holes?” When I’d written a book about Rock Hudson, I learned that at gay bath houses, there were holes in the walls of adjoining rooms and men could stick their members through the hole and wait for… glory.

“Yes, glory hole.”

“I can’t believe these questions. Did you ask Bi… I mean, Tom, all this?”

“Yes. He make jokes for answer.”

Bojan pricks my finger and after a minute, we see the same blue line as on Billy’s test result. “You are fine,” he says.

Billy and I leave the office holding hands. This is love in the time of Viagra, I think. We’re certified by the health inspector, good to go.

But when we return to his McMansion in the pines, there’s an awkwardness, and it feels like we’re do-si-doing around each other.

TO BE CONTINUED

Please leave a comment.

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PENIS FINDER CONTEST WINNER
Thank you all for the fantastic comments! It was so tough to choose a winner, I had to enroll five judges to reach a consensus.
AND THE WINNER IS....
Harry Tucker
FOUR-WAY TIE for second: Samantha, Gini Maddocks, Gordon, and Beauregard
Check them all out.
Harry, please send your address. And choose one of my books.

This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

PART 19 - WHAT DO WOMEN WANT, more than anything?

2009-07-23T12:24:00.007-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here.

Well, lo and behold, we’re in an exclusive relationship. “Diving in,” as Billy says.

At the end of our last phone call, I’d told him, “I don’t want to be involved with you unless it’s one on one. Has anything changed?” I said, expecting the answer, “No.”

“Well,” Billy said, “I’m willing to be exclusive while we figure out what’s between us. There’s something that won’t let go of either of us.”

“What about Kitten?” I ask.

“I haven’t seen her again.”

“Why?”

“She picked someone to date exclusively, and it wasn’t me.”

So… He hadn’t chosen me. The other two had dropped out.

Billy says he’ll take his profile off match.com and tell the women he’s been emailing that he’s not available now.

I tell him I feel wary and guarded. He asks if he can come see me. “We won’t have sex for a while.”

“That’s good,” I say. “How long?”

Billy says, “That’s completely up to you.”

This moves me. I tell him about an Arthurian legend I first heard when I was in my 20s. In the story, King Arthur was riding alone in the forest when he was surprised by a strange knight in battle armor. The knight drew his sword to slay the king, but Arthur protested, “I’m not armed, this is against our code of honor.” The knight relented, and made the King promise he would return to the same spot, alone and unarmed, in one year. The King’s life would be spared only if he brought back the answer to this riddle: What do women want, more than anything?

King Arthur rode back to the castle and related what had happened to his nephew, Sir Gawain, the most handsome and chivalrous knight in the kingdom. Sir Gawain said, Don’t worry, I’ll ride in one direction, you’ll ride in the other, and we’ll ask every creature we meet: What do women want?

At the end of the year, Sir Gawain and the King had a book full of answers, but King Arthur knew he did not have the right answer. He was prepared to meet his fate, when he was approached by a hag called Dame Ragnell. She was fat, hairy and covered with warts, had a big nose dripping with snot and gave off a terrible odor. She told the King she alone had the answer and would tell him on one condition: “You give me Sir Gawain as my husband.”

The King refused, he couldn’t commit his nephew to such a fate. But Sir Gawain insisted he would marry the dame, gladly, if it would save the King’s life.

So King Arthur accepted her terms and said, “Now tell me, what do women want more than anything?”

“Sovereignty,” she said.

When the King rode back to meet the knight and told him the answer, his life was spared. But now he had to marry Sir Gawain to Dame Ragnell. After the ceremony, she turned up her hairy snout to be kissed. Sir Gawain could hardly bear to look at her, but shut his eyes and kissed her. And as he did, she was transformed into the most exquisite and sensual woman he’d ever seen. They spent the night making love and as the sun was rising, Dame Ragnell said, “My beauty will not hold, sir, so you must choose. Either have me beautiful by day, when the world can see, or ugly by day and beautiful at night for you alone.”

I pause in the story to ask Billy: What would you choose?

“I don’t know. Both have advantages.”

I ask you, dear readers: what would you choose? To have your partner beautiful for the world or for you alone?

I tell Billy, “Just say what comes to you.”

“Be beautiful when you want to be,” he says.

I’m floored. Sir Gawain had said the same thing, in different words, to Dame Ragnell: “My lady, I leave it up to you.” And when he said that, she became beautiful all the time.

I’ve been telling this story for 30 years, and nobody has ever given that answer. They choose one or the other, but don’t think to leave it up to the woman.

I’m having to do some mental gymnastics now. Billy says he’s willing to commit, and he’s giving me sovereignty.

When he comes to visit and walks in the door, I extend my hand. “Hi, I’m Sara.” We go out to a neutral place—a tea shop with cozy sofas—and spend a long time hashing and rehashing what happened between us. I come to understand that, for him, the relationship began when he first contacted me online in November, so he went through months of rejection and no encouragement. For me, the relationship began when he came to see me after my ski wreck, and promptly started dating two other women as well. He says he was shocked when I switched horses on him, and didn’t trust that I was sincerely interested. He says he didn’t really grasp, until now, how pained I was by his dating other people as we were becoming intimate. He thought I was trying to control him.

In addition to talking, we do a lot of laughing, which has strong healing power. After dinner, he sleeps in the guest room, and the next day he suggests we drive to an obscure theater in Denver to see “Chicago 10.” Billy has a knack for finding interesting, out-of-the-way cultural events, and the film captivates us. It uses animation and archival footage to recreate an iconic moment in time. I knew many of the players in the Chicago trial—Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, and the lawyer, William Kunstler—and it’s enthralling to see them revivified in their prime.

Billy wants to drive to Lone Tree afterward to show me his house, but I suggest we take a break. We need time to regroup, readjust, for me to begin to trust him and he to trust me.

Not much time. Two days later, after confirming our agreement of no sex, I pack a bag to visit him in Lone Tree. His house is a McMansion—7000 square feet—in a development of luxury homes that are not well designed but built on a scale to impress. He’d bought it with his second wife and kept it after the divorce. But it’s an absurd amount of space for one guy—three floors of rooms upon rooms. Billy had treated it as an art piece and furnished each room differently. One guest room has a safari theme, with a giant giraffe sculpture, zebra rug and tented bed as in an African camp. I choose the safari room to sleep in.

What’s enchanting is that the house is set among massive pine trees, with nothing else in sight. The windows run from floor to ceiling and aren’t covered, so at night, I see the dark shapes of trees close up with a full moon shining through branches. It’s like sleeping outdoors, but warm and enfolded in a regal bed.

We spend another two days in nonstop conversation, punctuated by laughter, great meals, music and movies. When I hug him goodby, I tell him… I think I’m ready.

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Please leave a comment. What do you think women want most? And how did you answer the question: would you want your partner to be beautiful for the world, or beautiful for you alone?

PENIS FINDER CONTEST WINNER
Thank you all for the fantastic comments! It was so tough to choose a winner, I had to enroll five judges to reach a consensus.
AND THE WINNER IS....
Harry Tucker
FOUR-WAY TIE for second: Samantha, Gini Maddocks, Gordon, and Beauregard
Check them all out.
Harry, please send your address. And choose one of my books.

This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

PART 18 - IS "NO" THE SEXIEST WORD?

2009-07-13T21:14:00.010-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: I tell Billy not to contact me again. I feel relieved, elated, but then comes the crash. Later I would learn the crashing is a sign of love addiction. To see all posts in chronological order, Click Here.

I was alone, facing a weekend with no plans. I’d been invited to a party but was not up to going, fearing I’d be giving off waves of neediness.

I called a friend, Louise, picked up Thai food and headed for her house where we ate in the garden. She said what I’d experienced with Billy was a condensed version of what she’d gone through for 30 years with the husband she’d just divorced. “He always had to have a woman on the side,” she said, “and I hung in because of the positives – his brilliance, his playfulness and warmth -- and of course our 4 kids. I kept hoping that in time, he’d come into a deeper relationship with me.”

She brings out an unusual Tarot deck created by a local artist, and we each draw a card to reflect where we are. I get… Kali! Goddess of death and destruction, wearing a string of skulls around her neck. Someone called Kali “the poster girl for what happens when a goddess goes off her meds.” In traditional Tarot decks, the picture is a tower being shattered by lightning. I can relate. An illusion is being shattered – the illusion that romance and physical chemistry will bring happiness.

We draw another card to show the future. I get “Healer of Wands,” with the message, “Emotional healing is coming.”

I wake up the next morning feeling better. I wash my hair, give myself a facial. Then I check the computer and my heart starts bumping. There’s an email from Billy with no words in the message box. The subject line says: woulducomewithme2seecrosbystills&nash@redrocks.imissu

Shit, that gets me. “imissu.” He overrode my injunction: “Don’t contact me again.” And of course I’m dying to see Crosby Stills & Nash. I call Sally, my “sponsor,” to keep me from weakening, but she’s not home. I call Gordon, a psychologist friend who’s a wise counsel, and he knows men.

I start telling him the saga of Billy but don’t get far before Gordon stops me. “Sara, I’ve heard enough. This is a dangerous guy.”

But, but… I tell him I haven’t experienced anything this good (or bad) in eight years. Gordon says, “It’s the 'No,' the takeaway that hooks you. The guy shows up and fixes your electricity (the kitchen dimmer) and creates another kind of electricity. You have doubts about the relationship, but when it’s suddenly taken away, you want it. You both have taken it away at different times. Now you’ve said no and he’s back in seduction mode. Where is your freedom, your wisdom in all this?”

Gone.

“You deserve better,” Gordon says. “Not a better guy, but a better place to be, where you can stand in your truth, your wholeness and be with another person standing in his truth and wholeness. And from that place, you embrace.”

Yeah, I’ve heard the words before.

He says that when he met his current wife, they’d both been divorced for the third time and spent a lot of hours questioning their attraction, making sure it wasn’t coming from neediness or neurosis. “I remember telling her: Here we are. We’re in our 50s, we’re in bodies that are transient and we’re both gonna die. We’re like two rain drops falling, and we love as we fall.”

I hang up and send Billy a reply, “No thanks.”

Two weeks later, another missive lands. “I have wanted to respect your order that I not contact you, but if you change your mind about communicating, please let me know. I keep remembering our happy times together, how I felt at the hardware store when I was shopping for your dimmer, then going to buy roses and preparing our dinner. I remember how much laughing we did. Can we just have one conversation?”

I have trouble sleeping that night, trying to feel what my truth is. This is what I come to in the wee hours:

1. I’ve been wanting Billy to keep contacting me.
2. I thrive on the drama. It makes me feel charged and alive. I get excited and nervous watching for email, composing responses and having conversations in my head.
3. I still have hope -- that he’ll see the light, be willing to commit. I want the upside of the roller coaster without the down.
4. This is folly! Delusion!

But when the phone rings and I see his name on caller ID, I pick up. “Why are you calling, Billy?”

“I just want to know, how’s your collar bone?”

Healing.

“How’s the script coming?”

“We’re doing another rewrite. Billy, I’m not up for chatting…”

But he interrupts, asking if I’ve been listening to Oprah’s online class with Eckhart Tolle. That gets me going; I’ve been listening to each one, and I’m in awe that millions of people—mainstream people, Oprah’s people, who’ve never explored any spiritual idea outside the religion they were raised with — are listening to Eckhart talk about being present in the moment, watching one’s thoughts without attaching to them, and letting go of one’s “pain body.”

Billy says a lot of the teachings have been “useful to me,” and in no time we’re throwing words back and forth as in a fast tennis match, laughing all the while. The laughter melts me. I tell Billy I have to go rehearse with a choir I’ve joined. We’re going to sing at the Sunrise Retirement community next week.

“Ooo, can I come?” he asks.

No.

“Why not? I want to hear you perform.”

“Trust me, you don’t,” I say. “Last month we sang at the “Reminiscence Courtyard,” a home for people who have Alzheimer’s and who can’t reminisce about anything. There were 15 people, most of them asleep in their wheelchairs or staring into space. When our leader, Michelle, said, `Hi! We’re the Ecstatic Choir and we’re here to sing for you,’ she got vacant looks. We ran through four songs, making egregious mistakes, singing in the wrong key, but it didn’t matter. When we finished, there was silence, except for one woman who started belting out random notes.”

Billy is laughing. “Maybe if you learned your parts better, you’d get a better gig.”

As if!

“Why can’t I come next week?” he asks. “People with dementia can come, but not me?”

Every time I stop laughing, he says something or I do that sets us off again. Then he turns on the charm. “How many men have begged to hear you sing at the dementia home?”

“How many men have jumped out of my bed to go on a date with someone else?”

“You’re tough,” he says.

No, I’m vulnerable.

“Okay,” he says, “I’ve made contact. It’s up to you to take the next step.”

I’m not going to take any step, Billy. My truth is: I don’t want to be involved unless it’s one on one. Your truth is: you can’t offer that. Has anything changed?

TO BE CONTINUED

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Thank you all for the fantastic comments! It was so tough to choose a winner, I had to enroll five judges to reach a consensus.
AND THE WINNER IS....
Harry Tucker
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Check them all out.
Harry, please send your address. And choose one of my books.

This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

PART 17 - IS LOVE MORE ADDICTIVE THAN HEROIN?

2009-07-05T15:01:00.012-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: I tell Billy not to contact me again. I feel relieved, elated, but then comes the crash. Check "Recent Posts" on right side of page to read past installments or to start with Part One.

When I moved to Venice, CA, in the 70s, the first thing I did was plant a garden: tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and, in a corner by the 7 foot fence, I threw some marijuana seeds. I wasn’t a big smoker but liked a toke now and then. The vegetables did not do well in the sandy beach soil, but the pot grew like Jack’s beanstalk.

I was writing my first book, Loose Change, and late one night, when the neighborhood was silent, I sat at my desk, struggling to make the story come alive. I was startled by a sudden banging and thumping of footsteps around the side of the house. I ran to the front door and yelled, “Who’s there?!”

“Police.” Two policemen with guns drawn were shining a high-powered flashlight at my eyes. They asked if I’d reported a burglary. I hadn’t. They said a call had come from 85 Windward.

“This is 58, you’re in the wrong place,” I said, wanting them to leave quickly. I glanced to the left. The police swung their flashlight to the left and there, in a pool of chalky light, stood the pot plants, five feet tall.

They handcuffed me and drove me to the Women’s House of Detention, where I was strip-searched and locked in a cell with prostitutes. In California at that time, possession of pot was a misdemeanor but cultivation was a felony. At 4 a.m., they let me use a payphone to call my father, who called a bail bondsman and at 6 a.m., utterly shaken, I was released.

I had to go to court but, because it was a first offense, I was given “diversion” – placed in a rehab program instead of being tried. I had to attend group therapy twice a week for 2 months at the Venice Drug Coalition.

There were 9 people in my group and I was the only one not there to kick a serious habit. May, an obese black woman wearing a flowered dress and slippers, spoke in a groggy voice. She was addicted to speed, took 20 Dexedrine a day, had been hospitalized and given shock treatment and still, despite the Dexedrine, she slept all day.

The man next to May had stolen a TV from his grandmother so he could “get down,” then fallen asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and burned down half the house, killing his cousin.

The leader of the group turned to me. “What’s with you, baby? You gotta contribute here, not just listen.”

What could I say? I grew some plants? I’m having writer’s block? I wake up with fear and trembling because I’m stuck on chapter 2?

The leader asked me to bring a chapter and read it aloud next time, but when I did, half the group nodded off.

As weeks passed, though, I became more involved with these people and their stories and they with me. I began to talk about my relationships with men, and nobody went to sleep. In fact, they vied to give me advice.

I told them I’d fallen in love with a man who was married, someone I’d known for many years. I’d promised myself I would never get involved with a married guy, but once we’d slept together, I had trouble stopping. I told the group, “I keep thinking: Being with this person makes me happy. How could something that makes me feel so good… be bad?”

The man who’d burned down his house and killed his cousin stared at me. “That’s what I used to say… about heroin.”

* * *

At the time, I thought it was a funny story and repeated it to friends. “Is that what happens? If I keep sleeping with this guy, I’ll end up strung out in the gutter?” But 30 years later, the analogy seems dead-on.

In the 70s, there was no concept of an addiction to love and sex. If you’d told me I was an addict, I would have laughed, because I was sure I did not have an addictive personality. I never smoked cigarettes or got hooked on alcohol or pills. Chocolate, maybe, but didn’t everyone love chocolate?

The study and treatment of love addiction did not begin until the 80’s, spurred by the publication of “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous” by the Augustine Fellowship staff. Sex and love addiction are different syndromes but related. For men, it’s usually a compulsion to cheat and sleep with lots of women. (Think Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Gov. Sanford) For women, it tends to be an obsession with one man. (Why are we not surprised?) What’s true for both men and women is that we can’t stop ourselves, even when we know our behavior could destroy a marriage or our sanity or the chance to lead a country. And this goes back to the earliest civilizations. Antony lost Rome because he couldn’t keep away from Cleopatra.

The most helpful book I’ve found on the love syndrome is by Howard Halpern, “How to Break Your Addiction to a Person.” Halpern calls the problem “attachment hunger,” and lists three symptoms:

1. The compulsive quality -- you’re driven to merge with a specific person, even when you know it’s not healthy.
2. You feel panic at the thought of losing the person. Keeping or losing the relationship feels like a matter of life and death.
3. When the relationship ends, you have withdrawal symptoms, which include depression and intense physical pain, especially in the chest and stomach. “A person who has just ended an addictive relationship may suffer greater agony,” Halpern writes, than heroin addicts when they go cold turkey.

Another sign is that you only feel fully alive when you're with a partner, and you’re incomplete without one. Your identity, your worth, your very survival depend on keeping that partner.

Halpern and others who’ve worked in the field say the roots of addiction are in infancy: not receiving the love and acceptance you needed. As a result, you never develop the ability to love yourself. You’re constantly seeking to merge with another to feel whole and safe. And because the problem began before you had words, it operates at the most primitive level, unconsciously.

Not getting the love you needed as a baby seems to be the source of most problems, and when I hear that, it's just words. But as I read Halpern’s book and others, I would feel physical pain, my chest constricting, because the descriptions of attachment hunger hit home. Hard.

I’ve had wonderful and nurturing relationships, I’ve been married and raised a family, but since I’ve been single again, I find the hunger and pain are coming up in extremis – stronger than they did when I was younger.

The pain is increasing, I suspect, because the attachment hunger needs to be released. I can’t live with it anymore. The books I read were great at defining the problem, but their prescriptions for ending it didn’t help. I resolved to do what I’d done when I was suffering from heel pain that wouldn’t go away: Everything. Therapy, body work, 12-step meetings, reading, journaling, prayer, meditation retreats. I was determined to do -- or not do -- whatever it took to reach the state where I could savor life to the fullest, whether I have a partner or not.

But before I arrived at this determination, I had to play out my fiery attraction to Billy. I had to hit bottom.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Thank you all for the fantastic comments! It was so tough to choose a winner, I had to enroll five judges to reach a consensus.
AND THE WINNER IS....
Harry Tucker
FOUR-WAY TIE for second: Samantha, Gini Maddocks, Gordon, and Beauregard
Check them all out.
Harry, please send your address. And choose one of my books.

This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

PART 16 - BUDDHA'S IN THE TEMPLE AND WON'T COME OUT

2009-06-23T21:31:00.016-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: I bond with Sally, and she dumps Billy. Check "Recent Posts" on right side of page to read past installments or to start with Part One.

After my dinner with Sally, I buried myself in work, which helped take the focus off Billy. I was writing a pilot for ABC, a drama series based on my book “Leap!” Marta Kauffman, who created the TV hit “Friends,” was collaborating with me, and Goldie Hawn had committed to star in the series. We’d already written a dozen drafts, based on notes we kept receiving from the “suits” – executives at ABC and Warner Bros. Then the Writers Guild had gone on strike and we’d been unable to work for months. Now the strike had been settled and the top gun – the president of ABC -- had given us radical new notes and a five day deadline to complete a total rewrite. We hoped that if we turned in a draft he loved, he would put the series on the air.*

While I was writing, Billy sent some chatty, superficial emails, and I told him I had a deadline and to leave me alone. Marta and I worked day and night, barely sleeping, and turned in the script the last minute before it was due.

An email arrived promptly at the end of the fifth day: “Are you going to talk to me ever again? With tender thoughts, Billy.”

I called Sally and read it to her, like an alcoholic calling her sponsor when she’s tempted to drink. “Tender, my ass,” Sally said. “I hope you won’t respond.”

But I did. I knew that by answering him I was engaging again, but I couldn’t help it. I was like a smoker who knows cigarettes will kill him and can’t stop lighting up.

I emailed Billy repeating that I would not take part in his dating roulette. Then I pulled the pin on what I expected would be a grenade. I informed him that I’d had dinner with Sally, and we’d found discrepancies and deception in his stories.

Billy wrote back that he was happy I was keeping the lines of communication open. But he had his own story of how things had gone, a story in which he was honest, blameless and did nothing wrong. He was sorry Sally and I had been hurt, but not sorry about his behavior. In fact, it was my fault. “I feel you seduced me for the purpose of staking claim to me and making me feel suddenly obligated to you, after rejecting me for months.”

I responded that I had hardly seduced him, he was the one who kept suggesting we go to bed, but “you did not twist my arm,” I said, “even the good one. I threw caution to the wind, and I take responsibility for that. And I confess, I did hope that would lead to a one-on-one relationship.”

He fired back: “I do wish to date one person, with hope that the relationship leads to marriage. I thought Sally might be the person I could do that with. She came to me at a time when you and I had nothing and expected we never would. If you and I had not made love, a relationship with Sally might have been possible. She and I went to one concert, a movie and breakfast. We never had the private time together to gain any realization of whether our attraction was a dream or a reality. You and I did have that time for discovery, but then I found it such a difficult decision that I could not allow you to hurry me into it. The irony is that my attraction, respect and admiration for both of you has resulted in you both hating me. After your meeting with Sally, she asked me not to email her. If you talk to her again, you have my permission to show her this letter.”

I forwarded it to Sally, who was appalled. “He sends me a love note through you? That’s sick.”

As we were talking, another email landed from Billy, telling me he was watching “High Noon” and thinking about me. As if he hadn’t just told me he’d wanted Sally!

I banged out a reply: “Don’t contact me again.” I was glad I had Sally on the phone to back me up. “Send it!” she said.

Relief washed over me. I kept repeating those four words to myself: “Don’t contact me again.” Good riddance to bad rubbish, as we said at Berkeley in the 60s. I wished I could add those words to the Paul Simon song about the 50 ways to leave your lover.

Then, of course, came the crash a few days later. It had been 8 years since I’d been with a man who loved me and whom I loved in return. In 8 years, I’d dated five men and met dozens of others and hadn’t experienced anything close to that deep, nourishing connection. I can go for long periods and be just fine on my own, but after Billy, because I’d taken a bite of the apple -- tasted again what it feels like to have that juicy energy running between you and a partner -- I felt bereft.

I had the old pain in the chest, as if ribs have been broken and it's hard to breathe. (The physical pain, I would learn later, is a sure sign of addiction. The pain comes when the desired object is withdrawn, and the rational mind is helpless to quash the pain or the longing)

I called Sally to talk me down from the tree. “When I sleep with someone and it’s great, I get screwed up. Meditation, psychological insight – nothing helps. Buddha is in the temple and won’t come out.”

“You spent a lot more time with Billy than I did,” Sally said. “You had more invested. I feel like I dodged a bullet.”

TO BE CONTINUED

Please leave a comment.

*The series based on Leap! is not to be. ABC killed it for “budgetary reasons” after asking us for several more rewrites.

PENIS FINDER CONTEST WINNER
Thank you all for the fantastic comments! It was so tough to choose a winner, I had to enroll five judges to reach a consensus.
AND THE WINNER IS....
Harry Tucker
FOUR-WAY TIE for second: Samantha, Gini Maddocks, Gordon, and Beauregard
Check them all out.
Harry, please send your address. And choose one of my books.

This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

PART 15 - DUMP A GUY, GAIN A GIRLFRIEND

2009-06-22T12:27:00.012-06:00

This is a serial about love and awakening. Previously: Billy can’t choose between the three women he’s dating, so I bow out. Then I email one of the women, Sally Burton. Check "Recent Posts" on right side of page to read past installments or to start with Part One.

Sally and I are at my kitchen table, eating buffalo chilli and drinking red wine. We like each other immediately. She’s almost as tall as I, (Billy had said he only dates tall women) and she has natural red hair, a runner’s body and a great sense of humor.

She’d called right after receiving my email and said, “I told you we’d have things in common. I didn’t expect it would be a guy from match!” She tells me she’s not interested in Billy and has been composing a kiss-off email in her mind.

We compare our stories of Billy, filling in the gaps, alternately laughing and wincing. He’d taken Sally to a concert in Denver long before he asked me to say yes or no. “The concert was okay,” she says, “but I thought he was dull.”

“So did I! He was boring on the phone. But when we met in person, the chemistry took over.”

She says she never felt any chemistry, and she did not have a date with Billy on the morning he left my bed at 9 a.m. Whomever he saw, it must have been a washout, because he called me three times after that. He did take Sally to a festival movie that night, then called me at 11:30 and asked to come sleep over, knowing he’d just made a date with her for breakfast the following morning. He was planning to repeat his morning exit-from-the-bed.

Did he tell you he was sleeping with me? I ask.

“Duh…no.” Sally says, “But I had a creepy feeling about him, and I kept him at arms length—literally. I didn’t want him to touch or kiss me.” She says Billy urged her to come visit him in Lone tree, just as he’d urged me and probably urged Kitten Rourke. (Number 3)

“When I walked away from our last breakfast,” Sally says, “I thought, fat chance I’m driving to Lone tree. I think match is full of guys like that – double D’s --deceitful and dysfunctional.” We discuss whether she should send that email she’s been composing or just go silent – not reply to Billy’s calls or emails.

“Part of me wants to let him know he can’t get away with this shit,” Sally says. “You know, he made me wear Kitten’s name tag at the festival? He’d bought one pass for himself and one for his dates, and they all had to wear Kitten’s tag because she’d gone with him the first night.”

I can’t believe she’s a lawyer, with that name, I say. Let’s google her.

Sally takes out the laptop she’d brought along and types in “Kitten Rourke.” (not her real name, which is even more preposterous, trust me) Up pops a website with pictures of her all over it.

“Oh….my…God!” Sally says. “I can’t compete with that! I mean, my body’s in good shape but she looks like a porn star.” (Interesting, isn’t it? A moment before, Sally had said she wasn’t interested in Billy and now she blurts that she can’t compete.)

In the pictures, Kitten is tall and slender with the face of a classic American beauty and long blonde hair that’s spiky on top. The skimpy dress she’s wearing shows boobs like Dolly Parton’s, and a tattoo of a snake runs around her bicep, biting its tail.

We click on her bio, which says she graduated from Harvard, then got a joint degree from Harvard Business School and Law School, started her own venture capital business, retiring in her thirties because she’d made millions. Then she became a free-lance adventurer, going on dangerous missions and writing a series of books about them: “Adventures of the Cat.” She’d sailed in the Americas Cup Race and did long distance ocean swims between the islands in Hawaii.

“This sounds way fishy,” I say. If she’s for real, what’s she doing on match? And why is she dating Billy? She should know lots of brilliant rich guys.”

Sally says that Billy told her Kitten was moving from San Francisco to Boulder and had gone on match so she would have men to date when she arrived. Kitten told Billy that she’d received a thousand replies.

“I don’t doubt that,” I say. “This is every man’s fantasy: a sexy bombshell who’s smart and rich.”

“And available,” Sally says.

I can understand why Billy didn’t want to let go of this fish.

I look up Kitten’s books on the net -- they’re issued by a publisher I’ve never heard of. Probably self published -- the sample chapters are amateurish.

The following day, I call the Harvard registrar, expecting to poke another hole in this balloon. I say I’m writing an article and want to confirm that Kitten Rourke graduated from Harvard College and obtained a joint degree from Harvard Business and Harvard Law School. An hour later, the registrar emails me: “The person in question attended Harvard College and did obtain a JD/MBA.”

Damn. If everything she claimed was true, why was she advertising on match.com? It didn’t compute. But then, neither did my trolling on the site.

That night in my house, though, before we’ve even found out that Kitten did go to Harvard, Sally and I hit the dark chocolate gelato for comfort. We wonder if we should warn Kitten about Billy. We’d like to post a Beware notice on match.com, but they don’t let you post reviews of your dates. They should. We could contact Kitten through her website, but then she might tell Billy….

“I’m going to send that email to him,” Sally says, typing it on her laptop. The final line is: “Please do NOT call or email me -- ever.”

She pushes Send. “There. That feels really good.”

We relish the poetic justice: He plays the two of us off against each other, then we both dump him and become fast friends.

TO BE CONTINUED

Please leave a COMMENT.

PENIS FINDER CONTEST WINNER
Thank you all for the fantastic comments! It was so tough to choose a winner, I had to enroll five judges to reach a consensus. AND THE WINNER IS....
Harry Tucker
FOUR-WAY TIE for second: Samantha, Gini Maddocks, Gordon, and Beauregard
Check them all out.
Harry, please send your address. And choose one of my books.

This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.