The Kindness of Strangers…and Yes, It Matters

“What’s your name?” the man asked me. We were in the Publix parking lot. I was hugely pregnant, waddling across the cold pavement toward my car, a basket full of groceries.
When I told him my name, he broke out in a huge, gap-toothed grin and reached for his back pocket. He pulled out a worn brown wallet, the creases of which matched the smile lines around his eyes. Rifling through the billfold, he pulled out a crinkled yellow Post-It note and showed it to me.“ This is my e-mail address,” he said. “And this,” he pointed, “is my password.” Written in all capital letters was the name “CLARABELL,” as though it were some poignant, divine intervention (or as though that were my name).

I smiled politely and nodded as though I understood the nature of this revelation.

“I just wanted to know your name to let you know that I’ll be praying for you, Claire. Prayin’ that you deliver a healthy baby.”

I looked at the green nametag on his shirt. He knew mine, after all. His name was Jimmy, and he had just bagged my groceries, asked me about my pregnancy, and walked me to my car. I don’t like accepting help from anyone, but now with a protruding stomach, people insisted upon it, and I’d given up arguing with them. As he walked me to my car, Jimmy told me about all the February birthdays in his family (I was due in February) and the dates of each family members’ birth.

And when he told me he’d be saying prayers for me, I thanked him profusely. If nothing else, that’s the kind of help I can get behind, particularly when I’m treading the uncharted waters of new motherhood.

“Everything will be great,” he promised. And looking at him—the sincerity in his eyes, the age lines of his face and his lop-sided grin—I believed him wholeheartedly.
“I hope so,” I agreed, getting into my car.

“Hope,” he nodding, pushing my empty basket back toward the store. “Ya gotta have hope.”

Nine mornings later, I awoke with faint contractions. Things moved swiftly thereafter. I was ushered into the hospital, then into a gown. I was given needles and catheters and ice chips. And then the baby’s heart rate began to drop. And things moved even more quickly. “We need to get him out now,” my OB informed me as a nurse slapped an oxygen mask on my face.

Tears swam in my eyes as I looked up at my husband, who squeezed my hand and nodded it was going to be okay.
Six minutes later in a roomful of people working at breakneck pace, my baby was pulled from my stomach. He was swollen and pale, and his head was a bit conical, but he was perfect.

Two days after I left the hospital, I went to the grocery store, wincing a bit from my tightening C-section stitches as I strolled the aisles for provisions. As I passed shoppers, I wanted to call out: “Do you know who I am? I’m someone’s mom!”

I had ceased to be just me anymore. The frenetic birth of this baby inexplicably changed who I was.

I looked for Jimmy while I was there, but I didn’t see him. And I didn’t see him again for many months after.

And then one day, there he was. He passed me by, looking straight at me, but there was no light of recognition on his face. Just a placid nod, an impersonal smile as we passed.
I felt a pit form in my stomach. He doesn’t remember me. I’m just one of the hundreds of customers passing him by.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, that Jimmy clearly had no recollection of our moment months back.

Non-memorable, maybe.

Maybe he’d changed. I certainly had.

So when he passed me, I didn’t say anything either. Just smiled back, remembered that one cold February day and the kindness and reassurance given by a man in a grocery store parking lot.

The Five Types of Men…A Woman Needs

Originally published January 22, 2012.

It started as these conversations often do—about half a dozen women (this time a gathering mostly of writers and editors) circled around a table, satiated from an over large dinner they never would have gulped down with such relish in front of their husbands and boyfriends, ever so perfectly relaxed after two glasses of wine each, some starting on the third. And while the topic of men can hardly be avoided at a table of women (men are one of our favorite subjects, you know), there is something especially dangerous about a table full of women writers accompanied by wine.

It began innocently enough. The oldest among us, a talkative brunette from Alabama, mid-50s, was addressing the subject of the life changing effects of serious illness. “When I had cancer, it was the first time in my life my husband really took care of me, really worried about me.” She paused, bit her lip. “He was scared. It was really nice.”

We were not shocked by this. We nodded. We understood exactly the phenomenon of the unappreciated wife, taken for granted like a La-Z-Boy recliner or Monday night football. One among us asked, “How long have you been married?”

“30 years,” the Alabama writer replied.

Some of us gasped.

“It hasn’t been easy,” she went on. “There were many times I thought of leaving him, just wanted to give up.”

“Then how did you stay married 30 years?” I asked, leaning in for her imminent wisdom.

“The way you avoid divorce for 30 years,” she said, “is to stay married. It will eventually get better.”

Yes, I thought to myself, all you have to do is acquire some frightening and potentially fatal disease. Then your husband will suddenly appreciate you.

“You know,” the middle-aged brunette continued a bit wistfully, “I always dreamed of having a man who would listen to my problems and be there for me.”

A couple of us shot her hard and disbelieving looks. Really? She’s over 50, and she still holds onto this pipe dream?

The outdoors editor from Mississippi with her deadpan, never crack a smile humor (if indeed it was humor) said suddenly and firmly, “The guy who will listen to your problems and be there for you—that’s your dad.”

We all nodded vigorously in agreement, and the ever hopeful cancer survivor looked a little bit disappointed, perhaps wondering if her husband’s newfound love and admiration would dissipate like her cancer cells after chemo.

One can’t be too critical of her, however. Even the most experienced, cynical, and worn out wife among us cannot help but admit that occasionally we do dream of the perfect man. Why do housewives read Harlequin romances? Why do the more worldly seek Jane Austen? Because on some level, we still want to believe in those ridiculous fairytale romances of our youth, nevermind that every time my daughter tells me she wants to be Cinderella or Snow White, I cringe.

What we have to realize, however, ladies, is that the perfect man does not exist, at least not in one person. But you have a couple of choices for addressing this problem. You can accept that he does not exist and settle for one of the five or so types of men available, or you can complicate your life extremely (or maybe make it better—who knows?) by finding different men to fulfill your five different needs.

At the risk of over-generalizing (and I’m sure my male friends and colleagues will set me straight on this, as they always do), here’s what’s out there:

1) The Man’s Man

The benefits: He can change the oil in your car, catch dinner with a fishing pole or shoot it, too, if need be (just in case the apocalypse comes), and he can carry all your luggage on vacation (though, be advised, because he is a “man’s man,” he will complain about it loudly). Whatever is broken, he can fix it (except your heart, I’m afraid to report). And while he doesn’t do laundry, he’s a powerhouse at yard work, home repair, vehicle maintenance, and generally pretty good as well at holding his alcohol.

The drawbacks: Monday night football or some other equally annoying habit that leaves you wondering why he prefers pigskin to yours. Rough hands and a complete lack of foreplay awareness. Zero help around the house and substantial contributions to your workload—i.e., he drops double the number of stinky socks on the floor than the other four male types. He can boil water, but that’s about it when it comes to helping in the kitchen. He’ll do dishes if you promise him “you know what” afterwards.

Advice from the experts: Don’t marry a man just because he can fix your car; you can always hire someone to do this.

2) The Sugar Daddy

The benefits: If living in the lap of luxury is your highest priority, this is the man for you. He will give you everything your heart desires—a beautiful house, a luxury car, vacations to exotic and expensive destinations, all the clothes, jewelry, and shoes(!) you could desire. He will make you feel like a queen (albeit a lonely one).

The drawbacks: To finance all this luxury generally requires long hours, lots of traveling, and very little interaction with the life at home. He will be an absentee lover, husband, and father.

Advice from the experts: If you go this route, make sure you have a “rabbit” and/or a pool boy handy.

3) The Helpmate

The benefits: On first glance, this guy seems like a dream come true. He knows how to cook (in fact, he might even be a gourmet chef!), he does his own laundry and yours, too (and he even knows to wash your silk panties on the cold and delicate cycle). He’ll help you clean the house, professing to be a true 21st century kind of guy and a feminist to boot. He’ll change diapers. He’ll go to all the kids’ soccer games (and he won’t get in a fist fight with the opposing team’s head coach like the no. 1 variety might). In fact, he’s a major conflict avoider. He avoids conflict with you; he avoids conflict with your mother; and he avoids conflict with the guy who just pinched your behind in the grocery store checkout line.

The drawbacks: If you want a guy who will clean the house, he’s perfect. If you want a guy who knows how to clean the clock of a rude offender, he’s not it. And while you will love all the help around the house, you can only stand so much apron wearing before you start to feel like you just married your grandmother.

Advice from the experts: You’ll never have a dust bunny under the bed again, but who cares when you’re not doing anything in bed but sleeping?

4) The Big Kid

The benefits: No doubt about it. This is the most fun guy on the block. He has a wild sense of humor, he kayaks, he skis, he loves snowball and pillow fights. And once you have kids, he’ll keep them entertained through the preparation of a five-course dinner, leaving you undisturbed in the kitchen. He loves to please, loves to have fun, knows how to make you laugh when you’re completely sober, and has an uncanny understanding of what makes kids tick, which actually makes him a pretty great father.

The drawbacks: After awhile, you get tired of being the only adult in the house.

Advice from the experts: He’s loads of fun on vacation, but realize that when you have a late meeting, he thinks Cheeseburger in Paradise is a healthy option for dinner with the kids.

5) The Lover

The benefits: This is the rarest breed of man, the one who knows how to talk to women (though the jury is out on whether he comes by this skill naturally or has acquired it as a result of experience, having grown up with six sisters and a domineering mother). He knows exactly what to say to make you feel beautiful, sexy, loved, and admired, and he has equal skill in the physical manifestation of his admiration. He will stop at nothing to make you happy. (Be warned, however, many men put on a good show of being “the lover” in those early days of romance and pursuit; rare is the man who can sustain this personality type after the ring has been locked around your finger.)

The drawbacks: It’s very difficult to distinguish “the lover” from “the player” (which is one of several subcategories of “the jerk”—see below).

Advice from the experts: Proceed with caution. He can rock your world, but because he’s so darn good at it, you will live in a constant state of paranoia, wondering if, deep down, he’s actually “the player.”

Chances are, your S.O. is one of the above. At least I hope he is. Because there is a sixth type—“the jerk.” The jerk comes in many forms, from the guy who expects to be waited on hand and foot as if he is Henry VIII with the wealth and power to attract six wives even after one has been beheaded, to the delusional “I’m a good man, and you damn well better respect me” type that plays computer games all day, ignores the kids, and only likes you because you make his life delightfully comfortable. (Yum, please pass some more of that butter coconut pie before I go take a 12-hour nap.) If you happen to have “the jerk” in your midst, do a favor for womankind and dump him, please.

Your man, if you are lucky, might also be a combination of several of the above. If he contains the characteristics of all five, you may actually have a woman on your hands. Check his pants.

Because ultimately, if it’s a man you desire, you’re going to have to sacrifice something and stop envying your lesbian friends. (In reality, their lives aren’t so great either. Just stop and imagine for a moment what it would be like to live with a copy of yourself.)
Or, if you can figure out some way to do it that is legal, find five men who meet all of your needs. Good luck with that one, by the way. I think you’ll have better luck finding a pair of Manolo Blahniks on sale at the mall.

Men Are Cowards, It’s True…But You Don’t Have To Be

Originally published July 8, 2012.

She was bored.  She loved, had a capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

–William Faulkner, The Town

I have a friend who is about as tough as women come. I say this with both admiration and regret. I admire her for being able to plow through the world without giving up despite all its disappointments, but I also regret that she has never found a safe place to be vulnerable. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. She is married to one of the kindest men I know.

The problem is this: he isn’t brave.

And it is not an uncommon problem. At the risk of some serious e-mail flack in my inbox in the morning, I’m going to say that men, in general, are cowards. I’m not questioning their physical prowess, their ability to withstand the stress of armed combat, the ambition and drive they exercise in climbing everything from corporate ladders to Himalayan mountaintops. But modern men are lacking in courage in some areas that have women hopping mad.

And it’s not just my friend, who complains about the fact that her husband doesn’t stand up for her, will not take her side in heated conflict, but stands there mute, and, in some cases, even allows her to be insulted. She fights back. He remains silent. Is my friend suffering from some kind of fairytale idea of a Prince Charming who is going to ride in on his white horse and defend her honor?

I actually don’t think so. I think the guy is engaging in the classic male conundrum of “conflict avoidance.”

My former spouse used to chastise me not infrequently for being a bit too vocal at times with my often controversial opinions. “You know I’m the one who is going to end up defending you with my fists one day,” he would say.  I knew there was never any danger of that, first of all, because my husband, like most men, would, when push came to shove, do everything to avoid conflict (emotional or physical), and secondly, that the likely opponent would probably do the same…meaning it was highly improbable that any man was going to come up to me and tell me “what for” in an aggressive manner that might lead my husband to clock him.

My ex-husband never clocked anyone on my behalf. And he’s not a small man, by any means.

I remember a couple of years ago another girlfriend of mine noted how a male acquaintance had made a flirtatious remark to her one day in church and then promptly patted her on the rear. I asked her if she had advised her husband of this pass. “Are you kidding?” she replied “You know how scrawny Mark [names have been changed to protect the conflict avoiders] is. He could never take that guy out.” She totally overlooked the reality that even if Mark was a body builder, he would not have done a thing. My friend even asked her husband to give the offending churchgoer a call. He declined, saying it would be “awkward.”

The fact is life is awkward.

And men just don’t like awkwardness.

Rest assured, I’m not advocating the revival of dueling pistols. But once in awhile women like to know their husbands, boyfriends, maybe even their fathers think they are worthy. And it doesn’t require beating anybody up.

It requires something much more frightening to the male psyche—emotional risk.

Most men aren’t willing to take it and will do anything possible to avoid even having to look at it. Women, who live lives rich with emotional risk taking (unless, of course, they have experienced some trauma that has shut them down and made them more like men), cannot help but get angry at the men whose avoidance of reality causes so much depression, anger, and heartbreak.

In her essay, “Why Women Get Mad at Their Husbands,” J.R. Bruns, M.D., talks about this apparent emotional “detachment and selfishness” on the part of men that “leaves women feeling abandoned and frustrated.” Bruns describes the average American marriage, marriages that are often defined as “good” (meaning only that the couples are staying united despite their daily verbal exchange of snipes, ongoing resentment, and tension so thick you could cut it with a knife), as “loveless unions of obligation.”

Part of the problem is that men, in an effort to win the prize of the woman they think they want to have between the sheets with them for the rest of their lives, play an unconscious game where they temporarily release their emotional inhibitions, often speak and demonstrate their deepest feelings, and put on a display of just how much they will give for love that frequently rivals that of a Bird of Paradise. Even the smartest among us have been misled by this mating ritual, believing ourselves to be among the lucky few who have found some rare gem of a man who is unafraid.

What happens after marriage or after a year or so of cohabitation is that men go back to being men. Meanwhile, the brave women they seduced are left scratching their heads, feeling neglected, unloved, and bitter because the guys they so adored have turned into these creatures who make them feel used and taken for granted. The loving looks across the dinner table have ceased on the part of both parties. As Bruns points out, the eye gazing has turned into eye rolling.

Most men are actually okay with this state of things so long as their wives aren’t giving them too much crap about going out every Saturday morning to play golf with the guys or preferring the company of the television to date night. As their wives and girlfriends fall into despair over the loss of emotional intimacy in the relationship, the guys are issuing forth some sigh of relief that the risky stuff is over.

And while I know I tend to try to be upbeat (or at least humorous) when discussing the absurd trials and tribulations we all go through in this life, I have to be honest, ladies, and tell you the odds are stacked against you if your quest in this life is to find an emotionally courageous man. There are plenty of them masquerading as such. But don’t maintain too many fond expectations that the guy you’re in love with right now (if you’re unfortunate enough to even be “in love”) is ever going to pull out all the stops for you one day. He’s likely no Prince Edward, and while he may tell you you’re as worthy as Wallace Simpson, rest assured, he is not going to give up the throne of England for you…or anything else that makes the average male reasonably comfortable.

You’re just not that important to him.

This is not to say you’re not worthy. You know you are.  Your girlfriends call you “fabulous,” and they mean it.  You are.

But fabulous just isn’t a big motivator for guys, I’m loathe to report. Unlike us, if they have a comfortable place to sleep, access to some fine liquor for when they have an “off” day, good food to eat, some hunting or kayaking gear to keep them amused in their free time, and at least the respect of their colleagues and kids (if not you), they’ll consider life good enough if not downright grand.  If they’ve got some true emotional intimacy with a woman who feeds their ego and makes them feel accepted, that’s just icing on the cake that most of them can live without, especially if they have to work too hard to keep it.

It’s a values game. Women value deep emotional connections; men, by and large, do not.

Women crave and dispense emotional intimacy as naturally as breathing, whether because they are biologically predisposed to nurture and love or socialized to be there for the people they adore, I don’t know.  I just know that because women are so good at it and men so clumsy and ultimately uninterested, it makes for a tragic disconnect between lovers. Women come to see the men in their lives as fakes and cowards. Men come to see their women as nagging and bitter.

Respect dies on both sides.

And once respect dies, love is the next casualty.

This morning, my four-year-old daughter crawled into bed with me, as she often does on lazy weekend mornings. After snuggling up to me and peering at me with those large blue eyes, she said, “Mommy, I love you, and I will take care of you for the rest of your life.”

She was decidedly baffled when I broke into tears.  The tears did not come because I believed her or even because I knew that children say these endearing things while we parents know full well our children will grow up, move away, and think not much about us anymore (which is as it should be). The tears came because I, like so many women I know, once believed that a romantic partner would say those words to me and mean them, live by them—consider me worthy of the risk of his heart.

I have not been wise enough yet to give up on this quest for the brave man, though some of my friends laugh at me for believing men can offer anything to my life other than grief. They have been burned so badly by faith that they have forsaken it. One of my girlfriends who watched her own parents live in seething misery with one another for years said she can remember once sitting on the countertop in her mother’s kitchen when she was nine and saying matter-of-factly, “Mom, you need to get a divorce.”

The experience of her parents’ “loveless union of obligation” cemented her feelings for life that men and love were hopeless. She would, no doubt, call herself a realist.

Another of my acquaintances who spent years in a passionate love affair with a man she admits to this day is the only person who has ever lit her fire ultimately gave up the whole thing, exchanging it instead for a stable if passionless long-term relationship with a man who is often gone from home all week. She says she enjoys the alone time and remarks that she and her life partner have “really good sex” maybe four times a year.  “And it’s enough.”

She may be onto something. Maybe we need to be more like men and start to understand the concept of “good enough.” Not only will we be less likely to be emotionally devastated when love forsakes us, but perhaps we will not resent the men in our lives so much either for failing to be brave and failing to love us as we feel we deserve.

There is one problem here, however, and it goes back to the old saga of shifting gender roles. In a world where most men no longer go off to war, earn all the bread for their families, or provide the tangible protection they offered a century ago to wives and daughters, courage has become a lot harder to define.

For some women, courage means having a husband who will tell off his dad who insults his wife. For others, it means having a boyfriend who is confident enough to cry when he is sad. It is no wonder, in some ways, that many men have given up the ghost, settled for “good enough” marriages, and forsaken love. We want them to be tough and sensitive at the same time, devoted and adventurous in the same breath.

The cultural dialogue is a mess of mixed messaging where we at once berate and honor the men who suck it up and stick around, frequently poking fun in popular culture at their dogged dedication to wives who despise and disrespect them yet then trashing the guys who go for broke and walk away from sterile relationships. Women who leave the “decay” of modern marriage, as Los Angeles Times reporter Robin Abcarian (who reported on the Schwarzenegger-Shriver split) calls it, are applauded for bravery. Men who go are often painted as selfish devils even though they were painted as selfish devils in the marriage, too.

It is a marvelous and wicked Catch 22.  Risk everything, and you’re damned. Risk nothing, and you’re damned, too.

Women know the definition of courage for themselves. It has been the same for centuries and across cultures: risk everything for love (whether that’s love of lover, love of children, or love of friend).

For men, the definition was once “risk everything for honor.” Honor used to be a much simpler thing back when cultural hegemony was the norm. Now we live in communities and countries where values, religions, and ethics are more diverse than they have ever been. There is no longer one definition of anything anymore. The result is knowing what is right and brave is often a very individual decision bound to be condemned by someone.

It is easier perhaps to just lay low, watch TV, have a beer, and tune out of all the emotional drama. That is what men do.

It is why we women are so angry.

We have been taught to follow our hearts. When we stop following them, we know we have failed somehow. Men, on the other hand, have never had a cultural injunction to live for love. They know all about living for honor and duty (however their particular culture defines those things). But living for love is not in the male cultural lexicon unless they are poets.

So while I don’t know the answer for finding a satisfying relationship with an emotionally courageous man, short of finding your own personal Pablo Neruda, I do know you should not abuse yourself as not being worthy of love or give up on life, as Eula Varner Snopes did in Faulkner’s The Town. Nor should you, however, try to draw water out of a stone.

I have forgiven the cowardly men of my life because I know the varying societal pressures under which they operate and the psychological dramas from which they come, but forgiving and accepting are two different things. Sometimes accepting means settling for far less than you expected or desired. I’m not ready to do that yet. Because the day I do it is the day I become a coward. And, in the end, if we want to define bravery, let’s keep it simple: bravery is decided and worthy action in the face of fear.

If the man you love is afraid, do not censure him. We are all afraid. Cowardice is when we let fear stop us, whether we are women or we are men. “A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got,” William Faulkner wrote in Light in August. “He’ll cling to the trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change.”

Faulkner is right, of course, but just because our natural tendency is to give into fear, that doesn’t mean we have to.

Passion and Commitment: Why You Need Both

Originally published May 20, 2013.

There are wonderful times when life catches me completely off guard. Like a week ago when I attended my five-year-old’s first piano recital.  It was, initially, reminiscent of the recitals I’d played in as a child, where the first children to play were the youngest and least skilled, and the last were those who could show some mastery over their lessons. Needless to say, I never played last at a recital in any of my seven to eight years of piano lessons.  I liked playing the piano, still do, but I was never passionate about it.

However, last Sunday, I saw passion.  As I sat there in church watching one student succeed another, a few of them showing fine technical skill, I expected no great epiphanies at the keyboard. But then the last student to play, an 11-year-old boy who had been taking lessons only four years, sat down to regale the audience with five minutes or so of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and I sat there dumbfounded. Not only did this boy demonstrate technical skill way beyond his years, but he played with the passion of a man who has found and lost love, watched a beloved die, walked through fire….

Where does feeling like that come from in an 11-year-old boy?

I have no idea.

But I do know that it was not passion alone that made that young man stroke the keys as if he was born to play. The piano teacher’s sister informed me after the recital that the boy’s parents could hardly keep him from the piano, that he played all the time.

That’s not just passion. That’s commitment.

And if you ever want to succeed at something, and I mean really succeed, you have to have both.

How often have I seen a person with passion for an art, skill, or subject fail to reach potential, not for lack of talent but for lack of commitment. And commitment, mind you, is more than hard work.  It comes with cost and sacrifice.

A friend of mine had to give a meditation recently at a wedding, and she was anxious about how to do it because she had been asked not to be too religious. “How can I talk about passion,” she asked, “and not draw an anomaly to the passion of Christ?”

I don’t know what she ultimately came up with, but even though I’m not religious, I know there is much to learn from what we refer to as “Christ’s passion.”  Jesus, whether mortal or God, was willing to take the cost, make the ultimate sacrifice, for what he believed. The result? His life and teachings form one of the world’s most influential religions. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the influence of Jesus’ passion and commitment.

I suspect, knowing my friend, that she perhaps touched on the necessity of passion and commitment to a successful marriage. It is one thing to love another person, even deeply love him.  It is quite another to commit yourself to maintaining that love for life. That not only takes work, like the work of resolving minor disputes before they become big resentments, but the work of sacrifice–willingly and lovingly giving up to get more. And I don’t mean more in a greedy sense. I mean more fulfillment, more meaning, and, ultimately, more passion.

Because that’s the thing about commitment that is passion-inspired. It builds more passion.

I will not pretend to know about passion and commitment within the framework of a marriage.  I know I tried commitment without passion for a very long time, and it didn’t seem to do much other than take up valuable space in the short span of what we know as life.

But I do know about passion in other things. I have had a passion for writing since I was a small child, yet for a brief period while in college and grad school, I let a couple of mentors convince me to pursue a career as professor instead of as a writer. To my good fortune, poverty eventually drove me out of academe, and I began to see, after working as an ex parte brief writer, speech writer, and copywriter, that one could indeed earn a living writing.

For five years, I spent every waking hour I wasn’t at my salaried job working to build my own business as a writer. And once I cut the cord to the world of the regular paycheck and began freelancing full-time, I worked 80-hour weeks for a couple of years to build a client base. There was never a time that any of it felt exhausting. Why?  Because I was passionately committed to living my dream.

The same held true when I finally bought the farm I’d always dreamed of owning and built the house I’d always dreamed of building, working until the wee hours of the morning at times painting cathedral ceilings while lying on my back on a scaffold, hanging wallpaper, and sanding and varnishing cabinets, stair treads, and trim. Passion launched me. Commitment held me.

I have no doubt I will hear one day of that 11-year-old boy at my daughter’s piano recital rocking the world stage as a concert pianist. Because the boy is not just passionate; he is committed. He practices his passion daily.

That’s the key—daily commitment to passion.

As one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda, remarks, you should live “as if you were on fire from within.” Doing anything less is not really living; it is not really committing. If you believe in your passion, whether it is the passion you hold for your work or the passion you hold for your lover, then commit to it, live as if “the moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

Sex and Chocolate: Why Variety and Frequency Really Do Matter

Originally published January 5, 2012.

Here’s what woke me up in the middle of the night a few days ago. Call it a dream, or a maybe a vision. Heck, some men out there might go so far as to think it’s a message from above for all women.

Here’s how the tale unfolded: Dressed in way too much tulle, I was standing at the altar, beaming at my husband-to-be. Though the rest of the details were a bit fuzzy, the wrinkles, sagging, and cellulite which have encroached on my body over the past 13 years were all magically erased. As I stood there radiating with every promise of the perfect life to come, I naively repeated the traditional wedding vows. The strange thing was that this time, my wedding vows were a little different than I remembered from the first go-round. There was a line inserted which went something like this: “And I promise to love, cherish, and eat only Hershey’s original chocolate bars for as long as we both shall live.”

Seemed odd. Promising to devote myself to only one type of chocolate? A bit restrictive perhaps?

It quickly dawned on me that with such vows, the only chocolate I’d be eating for the rest of my married life would be rectangular bars stamped with “Hershey’s.” This strange vow dictated that no Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, or even a Hershey’s Kiss would pass my lips for the rest of my married days if I was to remain faithful to my husband. And it went without saying that I’d have to abstain from my quest for the perfect square of dark chocolate. No other brand or type of chocolate forever and ever, Amen.

That brief foray into an imaginary world was a bit disturbing to me. I like chocolate. I like different kinds of chocolate. I experience a physiological response when I see chocolate. My mouth waters when I smell warm chocolate chip cookies. My eyes lustfully graze over the offerings of chocolate at the check-out, particularly at the better grocery stores which source a diverse selection of quality bars. I even look forward to savoring a square of dark chocolate every morning. No offense to Hershey’s, but the thought that I would be restricted to only a mediocre chocolate bar for the rest of my life seemed like quite a sacrifice.

Maybe I have a problem. Then again, maybe at some level, it’s human nature to feel like that.

And now, I’ll take this opportunity to suggest that perhaps women’s connection to chocolate can provide a glimpse of what it’s like on the other side of the bed. Albeit a weak analogy, I think there’s a little bit in here for all of us women.

Essentially, what your husband said when he stood at that altar was that he was going to eat only Hershey’s Bars for the rest of his life. Perhaps you consider yourself more like a sassy Snickers bar or a sophisticated hand-painted artisan chocolate. Either way, you get the point. Eating only one type of candy for the rest of one’s life would get kind of monotonous. Especially when he really likes chocolate and there’s a lot of chocolate out there. Now whether or not he’d even have the chance to taste all that chocolate out there is another blog post altogether. But back to the chocolate analogy– in some cases, adding to the depressing situation would be a strict frequency limitation: begrudging tastes only once or twice a month.

I’m no expert on men, but I imagine it’s not always easy for them to remain faithful. It’s no secret that just like it’s more common for women to have eating disorders/body image distortion/weight gain, many men struggle with sexual issues at varying levels. Even if he doesn’t act on his desires, lust is there nagging in his mind. Just look at the wealthy and powerful. Those men can write their own ticket in this department. And look at what a mess they make. Men who have remained faithful are akin to a woman who hasn’t gained an extra 15 pounds over her last 10 years of wedded bliss (eating too much chocolate, no doubt). Therefore, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that a woman’s food issues could be akin to a man’s sex drive. From a survival of the species angle, this makes sense. In most species, males procreate, sometimes with multiple females, while females are responsible for care and feeding of the young. Sex for men. Food for women. Maybe we’re just not as evolved as we think we are.

Momentum, monogamy, and creativity are tough to keep up. I’ve failed miserably at all of these at different points in my marriage. There are days that I don’t feel creative. There are nights that I watch the elapsing clock in the wee small hours of the morning, wondering if we’ve got what it takes to keep going. (Of course, starting those mornings with a good piece of dark chocolate does make it all seem a little easier.)

Finally, here’s a tricky one to put out there.

We have to put out a little more. We’re all they’ve got.

You’re his Hershey’s bar. And just like I eat chocolate on a pretty regular basis, he’d probably be glad for a bit more action. An occasional reluctant nod in his direction is not enough.

I know—he doesn’t deserve it. You’re annoyed that he made a snarky comment when you asked him to put his dirty socks in the basket, totally messed up your last anniversary and apologized only after you pitched a fit, worked late all week and then went to poker night, didn’t help put the kids to bed or bring the trash cans in. And then when he did unload the dishwasher that one time, he expected his reward should be you on your knees thanking him. There’s never a lack of legitimate reasons to say no. And there are lots of blogs about men behaving badly and needing denial discipline. Sometimes it’s the only behavior modification tool we have. And it goes without saying that a woman should never put herself in a compromising situation where she’s disrespected, abused, or used. But I’m not talking about dysfunctional, unhealthy relationships or about exhausted women who work full-time with three children under the age of four.

For the rest of us in stable, healthy relationships, I’m merely putting it out there that instead of examining sex as a pawn, a means of manipulation, or a punishment, realize we’re all in this together.

Maybe I’ve taken this whole analogy a bit too far, but it comes down to this: Men love sex. Women love chocolate (or food in general). Both are arguably biological drives. I’m not suggesting that we all need to have sex on a trampoline (that actually came up in the conversation at about 11:30 p.m. one girls’ night with a few too many French Martinis). And as it goes with chocolate, we don’t always need to be having peak culinary experiences. (Though I’d never be one to rule out edible body chocolate if the opportunity arose).

My point is merely that we may all have a bit more in common than we realize. Monotony and denial are our enemies.

Finally, if you made a terrible mistake and made your faithful promises to chocolate dipped sweet and sour gummy worms, Butterfingers, or those waxy white chocolate bunnies you can pick up for a dollar around Easter, my musings are null and void. I’m so sorry. It’ll take more than some high quality chocolate every day to solve your problems.

And to my single sisters—let this be a lesson to choose your candy wisely. Consider an upfront, solid version with few artificial colors or flavors. Look for honest packaging with clear labels so you know what you’re getting. Most importantly, make sure your candy is sourced in a way that aligns with your values and moral code and that it can adapt to a multitude of combinations, while remaining classic and steadfast for a lifetime.

“A Man Is Only As Faithful As His Options”: Why Men Play the Field

“A man is only as faithful as his options.” –Chris Rock

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who has been serial dating or multi-dating or whatever you want to call the exhausting effort of going out with more than one person at a time and trying to keep it all straight in your head began talking to me about how to know “when it’s time.”

Yeah, you know, when it’s time to shed all the chaff and focus on that one person who is floating your boat a good bit more than all the others.

This is not an easy question, and everyone seems to have different answers.

I’ll never forget the boldness of one of my girlfriends, who, after a year of dating her now husband, said, “Look, if you’re not going to ask me to marry you in the next year, I’m not going to continue dating you.” An engagement ring arrived on her finger before the 12 months was up. He wasn’t letting that one get away.

I don’t know many people who are quite as brave as that, however. And forget marriage. My other friend was only talking about monogamous dating–that ether land between dating so many people at once you need a spreadsheet to keep them straight (um, yeah, I’ve done that) and the specter of deep commitment.

Is specter too strong a word? I think not. Not if you’re over 35…and have been married at least once.

I think it’s harder for women than for men. Men still operate under this fear that every woman they go out with wants a wedding ring on her finger and a new baby in the nursery. (This is especially true if you occupy that “under 40” space.) So anytime a woman brings up the idea of exclusive dating, the guy often gets that “oh shit” look, thinking that exclusivity immediately translates into some brutal chain of married existence where he has nothing more to look forward to than a recliner, football, and a beer. Nevermind that’s pretty much what he’s doing anyway when you’re not around….

But honestly, ladies, if you wait for the guy to bring it up, you could wait your whole life in most cases. That’s because men, by and large, like to play the field for as long as they can get away with it…and sometimes longer. As comedian Chris Rock once put it, “A man is only as faithful as his options.”

Don’t presume it’s because you’re not worthy of his full attention. In fact, the more worthy you are, the more likely he will play the field. Because on some level, he worries deeply that he is not worthy of you. Trust me on this, ladies. His brain, probably subconsciously because men don’t like to think consciously about complicated emotional stuff, is saying, “She is so beautiful, so smart, so funny, so charming, I don’t know what she’s doing with me. She doesn’t need me. And there are so many guys out there way better looking than I am. I need to keep one leg on the other side of the fence…just in case.”

Just in case what?

Just in case you ditch him because he’s bald and wears stupid looking ties.

Yes, it’s the back-up plan disease, I’m afraid, and most men suffer from it. The more they adore you, the more frightened they are you will turn tail and run one day. Better to keep someone a little less lovely and intriguing in the background, so he can still get a back massage and a dinner date when you finally decide he’s right about himself.

Which you likely won’t do…but he doesn’t know that.

So what’s a woman to do? I asked a friend of mine this question. She’s a good 10 years older, twice married, hopefully far wiser than I, and even she said, “About men, we’ll never know why they’re so weird.”

I’m not sure I agree. I think I have a modicum of understanding about their weirdness. I should given how many of them have been unknowing lab rats for this blog.

I dated a guy once for about three months. Things were going along fine until I innocently tagged him on Facebook…without any indication, mind you, that he was my “boyfriend.” The next thing I know I get a box in the mail with the high heels I’d left at his house accidentally and a sudden disruption of communication. I’m guessing I was one of the back-up plans, and he was concerned the no. 1 gal was going to get suspicious.

The other reason he’s not committing? He’s worried that looking attached might prevent him from that magic moment he frequently envisions in his head when he buys the voluptuous blond at some bar a drink and has her in his bed two hours later. It doesn’t matter that this magic moment is about as likely to occur as Sarah Palin becoming President.

Some women would be quick to call this the behavior of a “jerk.” And yeah, in a less lucid moment, I’d probably agree. But men aren’t like us. They operate under this notion that keeping everyone in the dark prevents pain. And yeah, it does, initially. But there’s nothing quite like learning that the man you’ve been madly in love with for four years has been fooling around on the side…just in case. Trust me, the kinder approach would have been honesty from the get-go.

Time is a precious and fleeting thing. Don’t waste it thinking that guy you adore with the roving eye (okay roving “Richard,” as we know they all have roving eyes) is going to stop his behavior just because you want him to.

Because  a man really doesn’t put himself in your shoes as readily as you try to put yourself in his (it’s socialization, baby), though I’ll admit, trying to understand why men do the things they do is often, as Confucius might say, kind of like trying to find a black cat in a dark room.

A little self-respect on your part, ladies, might go a long way–i.e. don’t be afraid to stand up and say, “no deal” if the field playing time is over for you but apparently not for him.  If he really likes you as much as his fear that you will dump him belies (hence, why he keeps all comers in the wings), he might actually take what is to him a wild risk and focus on you…but you just might have to ask instead of expect. Expecting things of people rarely accomplishes anything but resentment.  Instead let him know he doesn’t really need that back-up plan or affirmation from the attractive lady at the bar. All he really needs is you.

My New Orleans

If, after my latest trip to New Orleans, someone had told me we were actors in a carefully-concocted movie script, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

There was the cemetery, the grass still woven together with silvery dew. Camera-toting tourists ambled through row upon row, looking. My husband and I were there with a sense of purpose, my skirt dragging through the soggy grass as we traipsed, passing crumbling facades of unkempt graves. People stacked one atop the other. Hundreds of them. Because when you are gone, what better way to rest eternally than sandwiched among bone-laced cement?

But it’s not a place to lament the dead, no. Rather, those left behind. The woman who Scotch-taped a Father’s Day card to her husband’s grave, perhaps; that’s the stuff that makes your heart hurt. But it’s what separates the living from the dead: the capacity to go on living and loving, despite…everything.

The last time I drove through the Lakeview district with my husband, things were apocalyptically different. But that was 2005. We are here now; it is eight years later, and things are humming with activity. The last time my husband saw his grandparents’ house, it was a piece of collateral after the storm to end all storms. The porch screen, tattered then, drooped like loose skin off the house. River mud clouded the warped wood floors in the living room and bled into carpets, and shards of glass were scattered around the furniture.

But things look better, so we park our car to survey the progress. The house looks much the same structurally, but it seems to sag a little less, breathed back into existence by coats of fresh paint, new landscaping and cheerful inhabitants.

So, death, life … then lunch. Isn’t that always the way here?

We’re swiftly revived by a chilled corn broth with fresh crabmeat and even fresher avocado. A pulpy peach bellini. Gin shaken with green chartreuse—just enough to make for a dreamy lunch. Pork belly BLT. Seasoned-to-perfection kobe burger.

Lunch is punctuated by flashes of blue—a bit of spectacle passing outside the restaurant. A fallen cop, his hearse, his comrades processing down the street. A reminder that while life hums within, afterlife isn’t that far away.

We finish our lunch and move on to our hotel.

“Have you been here before?” the woman at the check-in desk asks.

It would take too long to explain.

My husband’s family is from here? I spent most of college back and forth from here? My grandmother lived a few blocks from here? My kids want to read “Goodnight Nola” every night?

“No,” I say, fumbling over my words. “Well, yes, I guess. But it was a very long time ago.”

 “Well, you sure knew where our secret entrance was,” she says. “So welcome to New Orleans.”

If the blisters on my feet from the not-quite-broken-in sandals are any indication, we’ve walked miles so far. But we have more ground to cover.

Bourbon Street is still as gross as ever. People wearing Drunk 1 and Drunk 2 T-shirts and smiling like they’re original. Leathery old women wearing feather boas and drinking hand grenades. Silver-haired men with goatees and football jerseys sloshing beer on the ground as the beads clink around their necks.

The bartender at the local dive bar we pop into is busy topping off drinks with sickly sweet ginger-ale and doling out beer.

On the other side of the silver-haired drunk, a mid-fifties couple is sipping frozen Irish coffees, the house specialty. They’re clearly out-of-towners (So are we, I guess), and are clearly on their second or third drinks at 5 p.m.

“We’re here from up north visiting our daughter,” the woman tells a patron beside her. “She moved here just before Katrina and her husband is in the military.”

And there it is. We’ve clocked less than 30 minutes before the “K” word surfaced.

We move on.  Another local watering hole. We’ve been here before. It’s been awhile.

We take a seat at the bar, order two drinks. We are thirsty and eagerly drink the city in, mixed with a little whiskey. All of a sudden the door bangs open—or at least that’s how I like to recall it—and a six-plus-foot-tall … person half walks, half stumbles in. He’s wearing a straw-yellow wig, slightly askew, an S&M-style cowboy hat with a fleur-de-lis badge on it (what else?), a leather studded bikini and combat boots. Between the bikini pieces, a massive gut hangs, and he tromps straight to the back of the bar, pulls some dollars out of his bra and feeds them into the video poker machine.

We suck down our drinks and move on, eager to cover more ground.

Another street, another bar.

Two old men enter the bar. This is not the start of a joke. Or maybe it is. They are both old, old. As in 80 was years ago. Their pants are hoisted well above their waists. And they’re both wearing Orville Redenbacher-style hats. Except, even old Orville didn’t wear a skimmer hat like that. The result is more Double Mint twins—geriatric style. The 50-something bleach blondes with too-tight clothes, in-your-face jewelry and obnoxiously large Louis Vuitton bags.

The old men tap their feet to the music as they perhaps reminisce of a long bygone era. Or perhaps they’re just tapping their feet because they’re happy to be alive and may just get laid tonight. No matter. One of the women is getting to her very high-heeled feet. She’s walking toward the stage. I grab my husband’s arm. She gets up on stage and commandeers a microphone.

“Oh God,” my husband and I whisper to one another.

But it’s OK. She clearly knows the band. And she belts out Summertime in a surprisingly soulful, throaty timbre.

We breathe a sigh of relief. It’s okay. The living is easy, after all, here in the Big Easy. It’s summertime.

We leave after a bit, gasping for some nonhumid air when we hit the streets. But it is not to be. What meets our eyes, our ears, is the band of brass musicians playing the hell out of dented trombones and trumpets. They’re kids and they’re good. Oh, they’re great actually.

Same street, another bar. We’re ushered in by the tattooed hostess, sucking in the clean, refrigerator-cold air. We grab a table, a drink. And the musical cacophony washes over us. We split a smoky duck confit pizza and buttery yellow bursts of egg yolk coat our mouths. It is beyond delicious.

We are tired and full, and, frankly, we’re out of money. It’s time to call it a night.

So we’re herded back to the streetcar with all the other hot, tired, out-of-money tourists, and we go … clanging and swaying down the avenue until we lurch to our stop and step out again into the humid night under the resplendent oaks.

New Orleans  means something different to everyone. But for me, when I’m there—even if for only a night—it is home. And it’s good to be here again.

Mind Fuck For Girls: Why I Don’t Believe in Fairy Tales…Or Do I?

Originally published March 2, 2012

Coral, gold, and gemstone on Ponte Vecchio

Last Saturday I promised my four-year-old daughter movie and pizza night if she behaved herself all day while I caught up on work in the office.  I don’t know as I would go so far as to call my daughter “girly.”  She hates baby dolls, loves cars, trucks, trains and LEGOs and is especially fond of getting as dirty as possible when outdoors, but she also has a fondness for all things Barbie and princess.  I’m okay with Barbie, and I’m actually okay with princesses, too, as long as we’re just talking about dressing up in a fabulous gown and looking beautiful for the day.

But there is a point at which my tolerance runs a little thin. Heidi persistently asks for Disney princess or Barbie princess movies–you know the ones where the girl finds her “one true love” and lives “happily ever after.”  And much though I’d like to pretend my efforts to make her strong, independent, and choosy are overriding all this falderal, I know they’re not.

I still try though and resisted Heidi’s begging for yet another Barbie princess movie last weekend and chose instead the movie Enchanted. You may have seen it. It’s a little bit of an anti-fairytale with the otherworldly princess rejecting Prince Charming in favor of an imperfect marriage to a New York divorce lawyer. It still has the flavor of happily ever after, but it’s a slightly better twisting of reality.

Heidi loved it, and she even got it when the princess fought the dragon instead of the divorce lawyer. But still, it wasn’t perfect. Because the princess fails, and both she and her lover are saved by a chipmunk. Women are still not allowed to save themselves in fairytales.

A friend of mind calls Disney princess “mind-fuck for girls.” I think that’s an apt description.

Rare is the woman, no matter how intelligent, who does not suffer to some degree from a childhood of fairytale mind-fucking. I always thought it had bypassed me.  Instead of browsing through catalogs at pictures of stunning wedding gowns as a pre-adolescent girl, I was cutting out pictures of my dream house…which I did eventually build, by the way. It seemed to me, even when I was quite young, that I had a much better chance of building the perfect house than of finding the perfect man.

You can control the construction of a house. Love is something else entirely. It runs where it wants to without asking anyone’s permission in advance. And most men are not prepared to be Prince Charming. They didn’t grow up watching princess movies. So there’s an emotional disconnect between boys and girls right from the get-go. My preschooler recognizes it already. She told me in the car one day, “Boys are stupid, Mommy.” I nodded, for there was much truth in this statement. And then she continued, “Daddy is a boy, so Daddy must be stupid.”

I laughed aloud, as I often do when profundity on a grand scale comes out of Heidi’s mouth. One of my girlfriends told me Heidi is far more advanced than we ever were as girls if she already gets the idea that guys don’t get us.

Even though my parents raised me not too put too much credence in fairytales and to make my own way in the world without relying on anyone else to make it for me, they apparently did not protect me enough. Because I still grew up believing that maybe, just maybe, I would fall in love with my best friend and live happily ever after.

A better view than the jewelry: on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence

It didn’t happen. Not for lack of trying. I think, like so many women (especially young ones), I did my best to cram romantic partners into my personal visions of Prince Charming. And the poor men could not help but fail. My former husband had no idea I actually wanted to be proposed to at the lovely overlook where we first watched the sunset on Skyline Drive. I honestly don’t remember exactly anymore how he asked, it was so unmemorable. Others were worse. Like the boyfriend who foolishly told me he’d bought me a diamond just out of the blue with no indication beforehand that marriage was even on the table. I told him he better pay off his college loans and credit card debt before he dared show me the thing. Thank heaven for that caveat. We broke up long before he had his finances in order, and I was saved from what probably would have been a disastrous marriage.

So I don’t have a romantic proposal story about being carried off on a white horse into the sunset to pass onto my daughter. But then my mother didn’t have one to pass onto me either. She got her engagement ring in the mail. (My dad was in the Air Force in Texas at the time.)

And maybe these anti-fairytales are better anyway. For what pain women suffer in believing that a man will sweep them off their feet one day and love and cherish them forever after. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, mind you. But it’s rare. In my 36 years, I’ve encountered only one such couple. They were in their 50s when I met them, working at a museum where I had a part-time job during grad school. They’d been married 30 years. Every day at the end of work, that man would come into the gift shop where his wife worked, scoop her up off her feet, and kiss her. And she would giggle like a young bride. It was amazing to watch. Everyone in that museum shop would turn to look, no matter how many times we had seen it. And we all longed to be so lucky.

Because a lot of it is luck in the end, isn’t it?  Chances are Mr. Right is out there for you.  But chances are he lives on the other side of the country or maybe halfway across the world. He may not even speak the same language as you. How do you find him? That man whose personality is so magnetic that you’ll forgive him a thousand times for failing to put his socks in the hamper or for failing to pick the kids up on time? (Because you know the reason you’re really mad at your husband about his sloppiness and forgetfulness is because you’re mad at him for not being Prince Charming, right?) He’s not your match, and both of you know it, so you spar over the kids’ grades, whose turn it is to do the grocery shopping, why his mother is coming over again, and what to do on the weekend that everyone will enjoy.

Most of us settle for Mr. Half-Right. Or maybe even Mr. One-Quarter-Right because we know that our chances of finding the true Mr. Right are very slim. And someone told us somewhere, likely in a fairytale, that we have to get married, have kids, and pretend to live happily ever after with our “one true love.”

I’d like to think I’m over it. Sometimes I think I am. I’m a realist at least 85 percent of the time. I know men and women often don’t speak the same language, that they have wholly different expectations, that neither gender can be expected to read the other’s mind. I know that 90 percent of the time when a man hurts me, frustrates me, makes me crazy, he really has no idea he’s doing it.

But then something will inspire me to start believing in fairytales again…or at least make me want to believe. It happened most recently last November when Dorothy and I were in Florence, Italy, walking the famous Ponte Vecchio. In case you don’t know, it’s a famous bridge spanning the Fiume Arno that is lined with shops selling gold and silver jewelry. I’ve never been much into jewelry. Once when my former spouse suggested he should update my engagement ring, get me something with a bigger diamond, I told him if he had that much money, I would be far happier with a fantastic vacation or a piece of land. (I never got the diamond, by the way, or a vacation, or a new piece of real estate.) But something about this romantic 1345 bridge in Florence, overlooking the river, with its shops of jewelry and the couples hand-in-hand walking across it gave me a little regretful thrill.

“Wouldn’t it be grand to get proposed to on this bridge?” I suddenly said to Dorothy. “And then go into one of these shops and pick out your ring?”

Dorothy, like me, is something of a cynic about love, but even she had to agree. Yes, that would indeed be fantastic. And so we stood there a moment in between all the glistening shops, looking out over the water and the city, daydreaming about something that was long gone for both of us. And I think we felt a little foolish that we even had such a girlish daydream—two business-owning women who had paid for their own trips to Italy and gone unaccompanied by husbands or lovers.

The “mind-fuck for girls,” as my friend called it, apparently outlasts education, prosperity, experience, even divorce. Which really leads me to wonder what it’s all about, why we can’t let go. Is it something like the “Hope” of Pandora’s Box? Does the idea that the “one true love” is out there somewhere keep us trudging onward in the most hopeless of circumstances, enduring the string of dates with men who are not “the one,” sifting through them all, wondering, and wondering if Prince Charming is ever going to show up? Do we really go through all of this thinking we’re going to be the rare and lucky woman who truly lands Mr. Right??

Maybe.

I know there have been times in my life when I have wanted to shout like Charlotte in Sex and the City, “I’m 35! Where is he?!”

I remember watching a friend of mine walk down the aisle a few years ago. And if anyone had been through the relationship ringer, she was it. I remembered her lamenting during her days as a single, dating woman, “I’m exhausted by it. I am exhausted by dating men, none of whom are right. I just want to give up.” But one day, years later, she walked down the aisle arm-in-arm with the man she believed to be “the one,” and the beaming smile on her face gave me hope for a moment.

Maybe this will be it, I thought. Maybe she really found him, and they’re going to be in love forever. She’ll prove it’s possible. I even told her so.  “Make me believe,” I urged her.

But that’s not how it happened. Her husband is not picking her up into his arms at the end of every workday and planting an “oh, my god, I am so in love with you” kiss on her lips. The question is though: does he need to be?

And I’m afraid the answer might actually be “yes.”

But do I say that because I’ve been mind-fucked, too?

Probably.

But I do know two women who found love in their 60s…finally. And at least one of them is quite madly in love. I think of her sometimes when I start feeling hopeless. I remind myself there is always that five percent or less chance that something magical might indeed cross my path one day.

Crazier things have happened.

It never crossed my mind, for example, when I was the child of hard-working parents just barely getting by at times that I would one day enjoy the luxury of standing on the Ponte Vecchio looking at diamonds and coral pendants and perhaps, more importantly, looking across the centuries-old architecture of the city where Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci once lived.

I bought a ring for myself that day. It was not a diamond. It was not even expensive. I bought it from the jeweler on the bridge with only a few dozen pieces in his window. He told me he was able to sell the same pieces as his neighbors so much cheaper because of his low overhead. I slipped it on my finger, pulled my leather gloves back over my hands, and proceeded on my way to the Galleria degli Ufizzi to look at the original paintings of Botticelli, Raphael, and El Greco, something I also would never have imagined being able to do on a typical writer’s salary.

It did not occur to me until later that I had done my best to live out my fairytale thus far. And perhaps that simple gold filigree band was something of a self-engagement ring for me, not on the scale of the famous right-hand diamond. My fairytale is not quite that big, not yet. And I suspect if it ever gets that big, I’ll be buying more land with mountain vistas or maybe checking out Antarctica, not frittering money away on diamonds. Who knows?  That is the beauty of it, too. The not knowing what’s around the next bend.

In the tale of Pandora’s box, humanity is saved by hope. But hope is not sitting on a windowsill wishing for Prince Charming to come dashing around the corner. Hope is active. It is work. It is believing…and doing…and being…even when the evidence suggests that the game will not end as you would like. It’s still worth a bold attempt. Don’t leave it to princes and chipmunks to save you. That’s great if one comes along and gives you a lift. But try lifting yourself first.

Walmart Supports Illegal Immigration, And So Do I: If You Eat Food, You Should, Too

Illegals at work? No one’s asking…

To be quite honest, I don’t know Walmart’s corporate stance on immigration. Heck, they may not even have one. That’s pretty irrelevant. As with people, I judge companies by their actions, not their words or mission statements.

And Walmart is the single largest purchaser of Driscoll’s Strawberries in the world. Who picks these strawberries? Illegal immigrants for the most part.

This is not to bad-mouth Walmart…or Driscoll’s for that matter. We all need to eat. And a recent trip to “the salad bowl of the world”—Monterey County, California—gave me yet another lesson (most likely not needed) in why politicians are stupid…and why some of their constituents are, too. 

Before I begin this rant on the ignorance of people and politicians (yes, I consider the latter separate entities), let me make a disclaimer: I am a contributing editor with The Progressive Farmer. That’s a big part of the reason why I came to California in the first place to look at food production.  But my work with this highly respected agricultural journal for the past 10 years has been focused on objective reporting. My rant here is completely separate from my contract work with any magazine, though I’m happy to rant for money on this issue if anyone wants to hire me….

I digress, however. Because some things wind me up to the degree that I will actually forego any type of remuneration in order to write about them. The issue of illegal immigration and American agricultural production is one of them.

Do you want to know where your food comes from? And no, I’m not talking about the level of ignorance where people think it magically appears in the grocery store.  That’s a whole other issue.  I’m talking about where it’s grown. Guess what? 80 percent of the produce we find on American supermarket shelves (and yes, that includes Whole Foods, my Birkenstock-wearing friends), is produced in Monterey County, California…where 70 to 80 percent of the agricultural workforce is made up of illegal immigrants.

It doesn’t matter if the produce is from a corporate farmer like Dole or Driscoll or a smaller family farm operation like that of fourth-generation organic producer Chris Bunn, owner of The Farm, who is quick to say, “The government is the biggest obstacle to farming today.”

This isn’t news to anyone in the agriculture industry, but it may be news to a lot of American consumers who believe illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs. Bunn wasn’t referring exclusively to federal and state governments’ stances on immigration (and it may be hard to believe, but if you’re an illegal, you’re a heck of a lot safer in regulation-heavy California than Arizona). 

He was also referring to the too often ridiculous legislation that keeps growers from making the money they need to make to stay in business. (And let me tell you, when the county says you have to plow under 15 acres of your strawberries because a domestic dog or a raccoon walked through your field and may have pooped there, something is seriously wrong with how we approach agriculture in this country.)

Bunn’s biggest concern, like that of his other farmer neighbors, however, isn’t even the absurdity of local and state regulations that make California the absolute worst state in which to do business…or farm.  It’s labor.

Bunn told me 70 percent of the farm laborers in Monterey County are illegals. When I asked another Salinas Valley farmer, Steve Church of Church Brothers Produce, if Bunn’s statement was true, he replied. “No, it’s 80.”

Don’t go assuming these farmers are “bad guys” hiring illegals and stealing jobs from Americans.  Far from it. Every one of them is complaining about labor shortages, and strawberry farmer Ken Lewis says even when he’s placed advertising on the side of the road offering employment with benefits, “I’ve never had a single Caucasian walk into my office and ask for a job.”

So California agriculture has become kind of like the military: don’t ask; don’t tell.

Plenty of producers would like to hire legal immigrants, but most say the government’s H2A program has become so cumbersome and expensive, they can’t afford to use it anymore. Instead, they hire Hispanic workers who come to them with documentation, probably plenty of it fake, and employers fill out I-9s for them.  Under California law (A.B. 263), producers can’t question the validity of workers’ documentation unless it is blatantly obvious it is forged.

At the same time, however, they can be fined up to $1,500 per person in Monterey County if they knowingly hire an illegal.

When Lewis once asked his foreman how many illegals he thought were on the payroll, the foreman replied, “Do you really want to know?” To which Lewis decided to answer, “no.”

And that’s because these farmers know that they’d have no one to plant, harvest, or package their crops were it not for illegals. For a variety of complex reasons related to everything from the back-breaking nature of the labor to unemployment benefits that make sitting at home a heck of a lot more attractive than working in the fields, there is no one else to do this work.

Illegal immigrants are keeping food on all of our tables.

And don’t presume this is some kind of John Steinbeck scenario where well-to-do landowners exploit the foreign masses (though one producer did remark, rather tongue-in-cheek, that “Hispanics are America’s new Negro”). Illegals are making decent money here, most of them receiving pay well above minimum wage. A fast picker can earn up to $22/hour in the fields if he’s working berries, for example. Many types of produce allow pickers to get a “piece rate” in addition to their hourly wage so they have an incentive to work harder.

Lewis says he doesn’t understand why the government wants to keep Hispanic immigrants out. He says most of them are hard workers who want to improve the lives of their families. As an incentive to do so, Lewis will pay for any of his employees to take English classes while they work for him. “Not knowing English is the critical barrier to advancing in employment,” he says. He would like to see a program that allows immigrants to work legally in the U.S. and be eligible to apply for citizenship so long as they can go for a period without any felonies on their records.

It seems a simple enough solution.

Why do politicians make it so hard?

I wish I had the answer.  Plenty of us who enjoy the benefits of American citizenship today do so because our ancestors came here, poor yet hopeful, wanting to improve their own lives and those of succeeding generations. My great- and great-great grandfathers were cotters in Norway—nothing but tenants farming fields they would never own. They came to America with the hope they could, through hard work, become landowners themselves. And they did, and each succeeding generation got along a little better than the one before. Today the descendants of those foreign tenant farmers are dentists and doctors. This is the American dream, is it not?

Apparently, only for those who already have it, many of whom are the same people decrying illegal immigration or fussing that the very people who supply the food on their dinner plates are trying to destroy the very environment they depend on for their livelihood.

If you want to keep eating, you might want to consider a little harder where your food comes from and what’s involved in bringing it to your dinner table.

The Cruise From You Know Where, Part II: You’re Not in Atlantis Anymore

The first night of our journey on the “Fun” Ship we met our tablemates in the Main Dining Room.  I’ll call them Mutt and Jeff.  (Actually, I think one of them really was named “Mutt.” )  Anyway, Mutt and Jeff hailed from western Kentucky and were on this cruise as an anniversary present from their children.  On the surface, they seemed like an ordinary couple in their mid-60s, both feeling, as they admitted, a bit out of place amidst all this “luxury.”

We did our best to be sociable, even after they told us about the “coloreds” in their neck of the woods, and wondered later how seating arrangements on these cruise ships were arranged.  It obviously wasn’t by age and interest.  But Mutt and Jeff were equally concerned about us.  When I mentioned “my husband and daughter,” you could almost hear their sighs of relief.  Thank God, we weren’t a lesbian couple after all!

Of course, Mutt then had to ask about Sarah’s marital arrangements, and Sarah replied she was not married.  “Well, how old are you?” asked Mutt.

To which Sarah honestly replied she was 33.  “Oh, well, I’m sure you’ll find someone one day, dear,” Mutt added with great sympathy.

I think that was the point at which my very happily unwed friend decided she no longer wished to engage Mutt and Jeff in conversation.

It was just as well.  We had our waiter to amuse us with tales of all the muggings and murders that occur in Nassau, Bahamas, our next port of call.  We were sufficiently warned that winning a lot of money at the casino at Atlantis would make us particularly susceptible to being knifed in the back.

No matter.  Sarah had already been to Atlantis on a previous trip, and I was more interested in seeing the local color of Nassau.

We bypassed the cruise ship’s overpriced excursions and planned a day of touring the city on our own, by bus and on foot.  And if you take no other advice from me with regard to touring the Caribbean, take this–bypass the taxis that are lined up right outside the cruise ship terminals.  Aside from being overpriced, they will isolate you from the culture you hopefully want to experience.  Yes, the islands of the Caribbean, in reality, are not the paradises the travel brochures make them out to be.  Aside from the resort areas (like Atlantis), they are, for the most part, hopelessly dirty, weather- beaten, rundown, and rife with poverty.

But if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably not the Atlantis type anyway.  Sarah and I hitched a ride on a local bus with the aim of first visiting Ardastra Gardens and its flock of reputedly trained pink flamingoes.  Riding a bus around Nassau is an experience in itself.  This is not your usual city bus.  Nope, for the small fee of $1, you have the privilege of riding around in an oversized van with fold-up seats that require you to stand up, fold up your seat, and practically sit in another passenger’s lap in order to let others on and off.  The buses are popular with the locals and always full.  It’s an experience that won’t disappoint, especially when a local missing a couple of front teeth asks in lilting Bahamian English, “So you girls want to get drunk?”

There’s not actually a bus stop at Ardastra Gardens, so we got off the bus (Bus 10A is the one you want to take) as close as we could to the place and walked along broken-up sidewalks strewn with garbage to this sad little tropical garden a few blocks from Arawak Cay.  While the books I’ve read make Ardastra sound like a delightful place, it really isn’t.  But then delight is not the attraction here–the flamingoes are.

Garden paths will take you through unkempt tropical undergrowth and alongside the cages and habitats of mournful little monkeys, meerkats, endangered Bahamian parrots, and giant tortoises.  None of the animals look particularly happy to be here, though they are perhaps better off here than outside the gates.  The one exception are the Lory parrots who enjoy daily feedings by zoo visitors.  Be careful if you engage in this activity, however, as the parrots will get into feathered fights on your hand, arm, or head over a succulent piece of fruit.

Sarah and I had read about the flock of marching pink flamingoes and were anxious to see what this was all about.  We gathered with other curious visitors at the appointed hour and were treated to what we have since declared the highlight of our trip.  There’s nothing particularly organized about this group of “marching” flamingoes, but there is something decidedly humorous in watching their trainer attempt to establish order among flocks of feathered fuschia chaos.  You’ll have to watch the video to see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q0LLPUrtX0U