Help! Need Drone Missile

My first boyfriend has written an autobiography, bursting with hubris. He tells all about everyone, including real names.  What is more, he has sent it to everyone he knows, many of whom are people I know, too. Needless to say, some of us would like to lynch him. I have spent hours on the phone with his sister whom I adore and whose relationship with a Very Famous Person is being offered up as well because the writer, and I use that word advisedly, seems to believe it bestows fame on him, too. He is all about fame and fortune without ever having earned either. Still, he seems to think he deserves it simply by virtue of his (sorry) existence. Much of the book details all the women he has bedded even though none of them is famous. He could easily have changed their names but despite having no moral or ethical principles at all, he has taken a stand on the integrity of his narrative which dictates that the names be scrupulously accurate.

One of the particularly sordid stories is about a woman he knew in medical school who got pregnant and for whom he procured an illegal abortion. He did not spare any concern for the effects of this situation on her life, only his own. He also declined to change her name because she hasn't asked him to. His sister asked how she could make such a request if she didn't know about it. He had no answer, which did not seem to trouble him.

He even portrays his parents, who were utterly fine and delightful people, in a bad light while being inordinately proud of his illustrious ancestors on both sides of his family. I think those ancestors are all spinning in their graves now.

He has also sent his manuscript to every online publisher he knows, and since he has published political essays in the past there is a chance someone will accept it. I am hopeful that the bad writing and obvious insanity will preclude that possibility, but he has already done considerable harm by disseminating this disgustingly arrogant piece of offal.

I know we're dealing with extreme mental illness but he is cutting a very wide swath, hurting everyone whose life has ever intersected with his own. I don't believe he does this in anger, yet for an intelligent man he is profoundly obtuse. He seems incapable of understanding that he doesn't have the right to violate other people's privacy, but then how could he? He considers everyone either useful or not useful to him and does not recognize that they have independent lives and sensibilities. He has the emotional delicacy of a tick, and ticks are notoriously hard to squash.

I unfriended him on Facebook but it seems so ineffectual compared to the rage I feel.

Whatever happened to the idea that a gentleman does not kiss and tell?

I Want To Hold Your Hand

Today was special. We had a visit from Flip's first girlfriend ever, when he was 14 and she was 13. They hadn't seen each other since they were in their mid-teens, but she found me on Facebook and we began a correspondence. She wanted to thank Flip for showing her in her first relationship that boys could be kind and caring, gentle, respectful and funny. He is still all those things, and more. Lori said that he introduced her to music, which would become a very important part of her life, and to photography as he always had a camera with him and chronicled their young teen life, mostly in pictures of an adorable smiling Lori, who is now a professional photographer.

I warned her that I didn't know how he'd react to her visit as his behavior can be unpredictable, but it couldn't have been better. He was sleeping when she arrived so we went to eat, and when we returned his lunch had been delivered. I woke him up to feed him, and told him who she was. She showed him snapshots he had taken of her at age 13 and remarked that she is much older and larger now, but it didn't matter. He recognized her and smiled. She told him about her life, and that she never forgot him even though they went different ways because they didn't live in the same town and neither was old enough to drive.

She reminisced about strolling in Los Angeles parks and on beaches, hand in hand, singing Beatles songs - it didn't hurt that Flip looked a lot like George Harrison -  and talking on the phone for hours as soon as they got to their own homes. It sounds like the most perfect teen romance. She gave me a stack of photographs, all of them precious. I especially love that he wrote on the back of one:

I have pictures of you plastered all over the darkroom walls, so it's almost impossible for me to forget what you look like - (which is fairly hard to do anyway.)
Truly yours, sincerely, love, forever, cordially, Phil.

It charms me that he sneaked "love" in there, surrounded by several less serious words, because he wanted her to know and also shyly hoped she wouldn't notice. Children are so brave but life doesn't often encourage them to stay that way. I feel honored to have glimpsed an important part of my husband's life long before I knew him. His taste in girls was impeccable as Lori is now a wonderful, kind, sensitive and giving woman who must have been an absolute delight then. There was magic in having his first love and his last together at his bedside, and I think Flip was aware of the symmetry. After she left, I asked him if he remembered her although it seemed obvious that he did. He said, "Oh yeah." I believe her visit helped him to reconnect with who he was then and still is now, despite the fogginess of dementia, and I am grateful to Lori for giving him back a piece of himself. Some days God smiles.

They Can't Take That Away From me

Today I had to take a driver's test - written and vision - to renew my license before my birthday in late June. Of the seven states in which I have been licensed to drive, California has the toughest test so I was nervous. (Vermont's had only three questions, as I recall.) When we moved here 14 years ago Flip, a native Californian, was able to get his license reinstated but I had to take the exam. Since I had been driving since age 16, I didn't bother to read the driver's manual and failed. There are a lot of rules which are specific to California. So I read the entire book which includes such gems as "Do not shoot firearms on a highway or at traffic signs," returned the next day and passed, despite a lack of experience with firearms.

Today's test was required because of an accident I had in 2009. I was especially anxious because Flip is now in a nursing home across San Francisco Bay and I drive to see him every day. Public transportation from here to there is extremely inconvenient, but at some point everyone should stop driving and I hope I will be aware and responsible enough to recognize when that time comes, before anyone gets hurt. Thankfully, I won't have to deal with that particular disaster just yet.

Traffic within the vast DMV building was directed by a large, pleasant Philippine gentleman with dyed orange hair who missed his calling as a circus ringmaster. I began to think things might go well when I was first directed to window 6, my favorite number and birth month, and then to window 24, my birthday. The woman who took my picture was so slow I was sure I had actually broken the camera, but unfortunately it was her printer that jammed. She directed me and the people behind me to another window at the other end of the building and did not show me the picture until it was too late to object. If I am ever stopped for anything, they will be sure I did it and also that I am a particularly muttly extraterrestrial. Cameras do that to me. I was finger printed at each counter. They weren't taking any chances.

 I was glad I had read the handbook again last night. The two people ahead of me failed, and the woman at the checking station didn't bother to tell me I had passed (100%.) Apparently she was unaware that I was holding my breath, fervently wishing I were a rosary bead kind of person. Finally, she handed me the temporary paperwork and said my license would be mailed in 4-6 weeks, about when my present one expires. I would have liked a formal statement and maybe a 21-gun salute since they probably have all those confiscated firearms around, but still, it was a day well spent. And the piece of celebratory chocolate cake was, well, the icing on the cake. Priceless.

When My Name Was Mommy

My son has always had a great capacity for assimilating data and putting it to use quickly. When he was two and my older daughter was three and a half, it dawned on me that I could bathe them together as they were both out of diapers and not yet adolescent. I placed them in a tub of bubbles and lathered them while they played with their bath toys.

Suddenly, J stood up and began to circle E, a look of deep concentration on his face.

“Mommy!" he exclaimed. "E has a different kind of penis.”

E snapped, “Stupid! Don’t you know a vagina when you see one?” She held J's rubber ducky under water until it drowned.

I explained that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, and they went back to splashing each other and racing their plastic boats.

The next day, I was at the grocer's with J perched in the kiddie seat, swinging his legs and grabbing whatever he could off the shelves.

A sweet little old lady shuffled up to us with her walker and cooed, “Ohhh, you are the most beeeyootiful widdle boy!”

He looked her dead in the eye, and then beamed radiantly as he made the connection.

“You have a bagina, don’t you? “ he crowed.

She clutched her breast and gasped, and I thought she would have a heart attack and fall down right in the cereal aisle of Stop & Shop.

When she didn’t die, I pushed my shopping cart away and said, “Honey, it’s vagina with a va, not a ba.”

But J's attention had already moved on to Fruit Loops, which had a very nice picture on the box.






The only thing I ever knew J to fear was haircuts. When he was 2 1/2, his father decreed that “MY SON will not have long hair anymore.” So we took the children to Mr. Gay, a fashionable children’s barber on Madison Avenue in New York.

E went first. She adored the attention, the swivel chair that went up and down, the praise for being such a good girl, her new look, and the red lollipop at the end.

It turned out that J had a Sampson thing going. He accelerated to full hysteria as soon as he was placed in the chair. He could not be reasoned with, he could not be bribed. He was uncontrollable, a small whirlwind, squirming, leaping, thrashing and full-bore pedal to the metal screaming.

E stood by his chair, watching with scientific detachment as she licked her lollipop. The parents of other children put down their magazines and stared in horror. I was ready to pay the barber to stop, but MY SON had to have short hair.

Mr. Gay said, “I can’t do this,” threw off his smock and headed for the door. He was about 90 years old, had given thousands of children haircuts, but he had met defeat in the form of a small but determined blond cherub with exceptional vocal chords.

As the barber disappeared down the street, the other barber (I think he was Mr. Gay’s father) came over and began to cut J’s hair, trying to establish a rhythm between wild leaps and flailing arms. We had to tip him double.

You would think this torture would not be repeated, but a few months later, MY SON had hair hanging in his eyes and over his ears again, so off we went.

E got a lollipop but no haircut, which clearly disappointed her, and J was hoisted, screaming, into The Bad Chair. This time both barbers joined forces to perform the operation, one holding him down while the other attempted to cut his golden fleece on the downswing.

J’s ear got nicked, and I said, “That’s it. Let him go.”

He got two lollipops, and we left.

For the next few years, I cut his hair at night, while he slept, like a stealth bomber with scissors. I would drape a towel over his pillow and turn him like a chicken on a spit, this way and that, until the deed was done, collect all four corners of the hairy towel in one hand while propping J’s head with the other. He never once woke up, and I don’t think he ever noticed the difference because he had no interest in mirrors.

Years later, when he began to notice girls, he suddenly became GQ-worthy and brushed his teeth voluntarily, showered without being reminded, and even took himself for haircuts. I don’t know if they gave him lollipops.






When my younger daughter, C, was 6, she got the part of Lucy in her school play, "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe." Her father took her to a costume shop near an area of Boston known as the Combat Zone, which is the red light district. He must have looked like a pedophile with a mini-skirted little girl in pink Miss Piggy sneakers. She noticed that the "lamppost ladies" were swinging their pocketbooks, so she swung her Snoopy umbrella.

A very old man was walking slowly ahead of C and her father.

A scantily-clad woman in a doorway said, "Wanna fuck?"

The old man said, "What?"

She repeated herself, louder. "Wanna fuck?"

"What?"

She sighed impatiently and said it again, louder than before.

He cupped his ear and said, "I'm sorry, miss, but you'll have to speak up. I can't hear you."

The hooker put her hands around her mouth and yelled, "DO.YOU.WANT.TO.FUCK!"

My daughter said to the woman, "Whatever it is, he doesn't want to. His ears don't work anymore."

An Out-of-Money Experience

In November, I got two red light camera citations exactly one week apart at an intersection I traverse every day to get on the freeway after visiting Flip. I was distraught. Each of them required a "bail" amount of $480, so I hired a lawyer who specializes in such cases at a cost of $300 per citation. She suggested that I handle the second one myself to save money, which I did. Today I learned that we lost the first case for which I had legal representation, and I will have to pay the bail plus an additional $57 for the privilege of attending driving school to avoid points on my license and higher insurance.

I was ticketed for turning right on red without stopping long enough. They had video to prove it. Our argument was that I could not identify the driver of the car which is registered to me as the driver did not look like me, plus she was wearing sun glasses which obscured much of her face. The red light cameras have been ruled illegal in some places including other parts of California, but not here. I must assume at this point that I will have to pay for both of them - if a lawyer couldn't get me off on the first one, I will probably not succeed with the second. It is a horrible waste of money, and enough that it will create a hardship for me. Yet oddly, I am not as upset as I was when it happened because watching Flip's raging dementia advance has made me realize what we all espouse but don't really believe: It's only money. Losing ones health or ones mind is far worse. Still, I know that for a month or so, I will compare the price of everything I would like to buy with the money this round of bad luck is costing me, and I will be sorely resentful.

The exact same infraction costs $50 in New York and Virginia, I've been told by friends who were also ticketed. $480 is obscene for turning a few seconds too soon when no one was even hurt. Every day I see people drive badly and dangerously under the influence of drugs and alcohol, texting or putting on makeup, none of which I do. It seems terribly unfair, but I will try to focus on how lucky I am to be able to get in a car and drive somewhere on my own because at the end of the day, there are far more unfair circumstances.

Appointment in Samarra*

Every day we read about other people's personal tragedies in the news, but rarely do we know those involved. Yesterday, a gunman opened fire at a Christian nursing school in Oakland, California, near the nursing home where my husband Flip now lives. Seven people were murdered execution style and several others wounded, but not much else is known at this time.

What I do know is that one of the victims, Doris Chibuko, was the aunt of a young woman who works at the nursing home as a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant.) Nneka is a particular friend of mine because she is unfailingly kind to Flip, and one of the three aides I have fought hard to get as his caregivers. Her aunt was the mother of three children, 3, 5 and 8, and was a lawyer in her native Nigeria. She was studying nursing at Oikos University and was two months away from graduating. She was only 40 years old. The family came to the United States from Nigeria to have a better life. Whatever brutal conditions they escaped in their country have been visited upon them here. The terrible irony in this is obvious.

Last week, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year old Iraqi-American Muslim woman was beaten to death in her home in San Diego, California. A note next to her body called her a terrorist and said she should go back to her own country. She was found by one of her five children, a teenaged daughter who was quoted as saying, "She's such an innocent woman. Why? Why did you do that?...We're not the terrorist. You are."

The family had been here for many years, and the murdered woman's brothers worked as cultural advisers for the U.S. Army to help train soldiers deployed to the Middle East. The police are investigating her death as a homicide: "A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that. We don't want to focus on only one issue and miss something else." One wonders what else it could possibly be.

In February Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old boy was walking home to dinner, chatting on his cellphone with his girlfriend, armed with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea from the local convenience store. He was shot to death by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain with a history of violence because he was black. The Florida police are still scrambling to justify the cold-blooded murder, and Geraldo Rivera has even helpfully suggested that the hoodie he was wearing in the rain was to blame. The killer might as well have been wearing a hood, a white one, because the only possible motive was racism. This country is collapsing under the weight of so much hatred, no matter how we deny it, and everybody can buy a gun. Who will be the next target? Whose child will be murdered next?

"Shaima Al-Awadi's murder, like Trayvon Martin's, was a senseless murder based upon racial animus," said Dawud Walid, a black Muslim leader from Detroit who is executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "We must come together as a society to have frank discussions about the toxic rhetorical environment which we currently live in that leads to such wanton violence."

I add my tears for all these people, but have no words of wisdom. Sometimes I really fear we are a lost cause. There will always be evil in the world, and all we can do is try to be as good as we can and hope it makes a difference.


*The title is a reference to W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of an old story in which a merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

He Practiced What He Preached

Dr. Peter Goodwin, one of the first proponents of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, ended his own life on March 11th after taking lethal medication, a fast-acting barbituate which provided a peaceful death in less than 30 minutes. He was 82 years old and suffered from a rare and fatal brain disease called corticobasal degeneration which affects balance, muscle control and speech as well as cognition. In January, he was given six months to live.

Under the Oregon law, doctors can prescribe medication to hasten the death of terminally ill patients with a six-month prognosis. The patients must be mentally competent and administer the drug themselves. More than 500 people have used the Oregon law to end their lives. The initiative, the first in the country, has survived a Supreme Court challenge. Washington also has laws allowing physician-assisted suicides.

A year ago, Dr. Goodwin said, "I don't want to die. No way do I want to die. I enjoy life; I enjoy company; I enjoy my friends. I have many, many, many friends." But the horrors of his illness apparently changed his mind and he died surrounded by his wife, four children and their spouses.

He practiced as a family physician in Oregon and Washington for five decades, and was instrumental in getting Oregon's Death With Dignity Act passed in the early 1990s when it was expected to fail at the ballot. He first became interested in the cause 20 years ago when a patient asked for his help. The patient had a fatal spinal tumor and was in severe pain. The patient's wife asked Goodwin if she could administer a prescription, but he reluctantly refused, telling her it was against the law.

He told the story to the Oregon legislature, saying his inability to act when the man was in such pain made him feel like a coward. "We cannot deal compassionately with people if we limit their options," he said.

At what point does a person determine that his quality of life does not justify being alive? It is inconceivable that one should ever be in that position, but it is also unimaginable to live in constant pain, or to be reduced to a set of involuntary impulses with all ones unique personality erased by a horrible disease. Most religions would have us believe that suicide is a sin or at least a most negative action, and that to commit it brings hideous consequences. I would like to think that any God worthy of our worship would be compassionate enough to understand that humans have limits.

In some ways, suicide is the final taboo. While it could be argued that our bodies belong to us alone, the concept of doing violence to ourselves is usually harder to grok than committing it on others. So we rationalize that those who take their own lives are not in their right minds. The Oregon law is an exception in that the doctor who prescribes lethal medication must first determine that his patient is in fact thinking clearly. Of course, this is hard to prove or disprove.

I cannot imagine the sorrow of losing a loved one by his own choice, yet who among us would choose to keep a loved one in great and incurable pain? It is impossible to condemn a person who exercises the right to choose his own death. The question really is, does he or she have that right? I believe so, although my heart breaks at the thought of it. What are your beliefs on this topic? I would really like to know.