My Life in Cars

I bought my second and probably last new car in 2002. The only other one before had been a Chevette that cost $5,200 new and I drove that until I made a left turn into the grocery store with my right turn signal on and a woman passing me on the left T-boned me and totaled the car. It was long paid for, but I mourned that car like a dead child, visiting it in the junkyard, staring at it through the fence, and calling out my apologies.

I was not quite as sad when I ran a red light in a dream state and was T-boned by a work van and totaled the next car, a used 1984 Toyota Corolla. It was also paid for, but I had recently sunk thousands of dollars, paid with credit cards, into something called engine gaskets (I have no idea about motors) to keep it alive and the 10-year-old car was near death still. I was without a husband at the time so I had my first and only experience as a clueless woman buying a car and did pretty good, finding a Mercury Tracer for $3,500, which I also bought with a credit card. I drove that for another eight years, even after blowing out the engine and having to put another one in for $3,000. We got two more years out of it before we let it go, without much regret. The red paint job was always fading, but it was the only Just Married car I ever rode in, adorned in streamers on a warm night in July 2001, everyone on the highway honking their best wishes.

Next came the new 2002 Mazda Protégé. I was a few months into a new job that paid an amazing $10,000 a year more than the job I had been fired from and since we had managed okay on my old salary, that extra $10,000 was like mad money. The car was financed for just four years at zero percent interest, so by 2006, I was driving a paid for car and by spring 2015, it was still running, still paid for, and had only 97,000 miles on it since I rode the bus to work and seldom went out of town.

In those twelve and half years, even though my salary went up another $20,000 and my husband’s almost doubled as well, we degenerated into just barely getting by. We bought a house. He bought a cargo van. A roof had to be fixed, a fence repaired, a rotting deck rebuilt. My husband became a walking kidney stone factory and there was mounting medical expenses. I was helping my son out. I accepted that my 2002 car was my last car. I had hopes to retire at least by age 67 when my husband’s van was paid off, and I wasn’t going to drive anymore. I was going to live like a hermit. With Internet, cable TV, and Amazon, who needs to ever leave the house?

That fantasy ended when a 31-year-old manboy in a Chevy Tahoe decided to rear-end my little car while I was stopped at a light. The light had turned green, but the first car in a line of four had not moved because people were still in the crosswalk. Cars one through four were patiently waiting. Car five, the Tahoe, coming up behind me, was looking at the greenlight, not the stopped traffic  and gave me a very solid hit. The Protégé was mortally wounded, even though from the front, you could not tell and it still drove. The back was just gone.

After 13 years, you would think I would have mourned that car more, but I had buried three beloved cats in those years and knew real heartache should be saved for the living, not the inanimate. Although I often attribute feelings to inanimate objects (i.e., are my Christmas ornaments bored and unhappy, sitting in a box in the closet most of the year? Will this blouse be sad if I donate it to Goodwill?), strangely, I felt nothing much this time except the sheer frustration of having to face a car payment again until I am flipping 70 years old! It was all about the bottom line this time, not whether the car was depressed about being towed to a salvage yard. I had four tires on it that weren’t even a year old and my husband and mechanic had conspired to force me to do “scheduled maintenance” on it with a new timing belt and water pump just months before. (My philosophy is if it’s not broke, don’t replace it.) All that cost $1,800, of which $1,400 was still on the credit card.

I have had used cars in the past, a 1967 Pontiac that drove like an aircraft carrier, a Ford Pinto with a gas tank that could turn it into a ball of fire at any moment, the rickety aforementioned Corolla, and the rickety but running Mercury Tracer. A new car was out of the question, and my husband was against anything older than 2010 or with more than 50,000 miles on it because…who knows why. Man brain. I pay the bills and he doesn’t and he has always had a very casual attitude about what we cannot afford. If you can get it, then you can afford it, is his philosophy. Let the woman figure out how to pay for it. This time I would not have the economic luxury of finding a little piece of crap car I could buy with a credit card advance check.

Back in 2002, at first sight, I had not really liked the Protégé because it was white, but I came to love that color. I’m visible at night! No one will hit me. (Apparently that doesn't apply to Chevy Tahoes and broad daylight.) It was my husband's first experience buying a new car and he did not know how to play the game (and still doesn't.) We were rushed by salesmen when we went looking and agreed to too many extras and add-ons, but in the end, I made a good deal. It was a simple car. The radio worked. The CD player worked most of the time. The air conditioner developed an annoying rattle that made the car sound like a bicycle with baseball cards in the spokes. A video of that noise became my second most viewed video on my YouTube account. But it was the little Mazda hatchback from the zoom-zoom commercials and looked quite spiffy. (Mazda only stuck with the design for two years, then changed to a more turtle shell-shaped design.)

I am not happy that we were rushed into buying a car again because my husband would not get out of the chair and leave the showroom no matter how many times I said I was not ready to buy and wanted to keep looking. The price went down $1,500 the minute I stood up, and that made my husband’s butt stay stuck to the seat even harder. I don’t like that they just glanced at my letter of credit from the credit union and financed it with an evil bank that advertises on TV all the time. I don’t like the slate gray color. I don’t like all the knobs and buttons and computer-y things. I don’t like the Bluetooth the salesman and my husband set up so the car takes over my phone whenever I am near it. I don’t like the gearshift or the mysterious way you can easily shift into what-the-heck-is-M and the car suddenly feels like it is driving on boulders. I don’t even like the way the dashboard actually displays “Hello. Zoom-Zoom” when I get in.

And I really don’t like the prospect of car payments. Or the fact that keys for newer cars, even this 2011 Mazda, cost $100 and you have to go to back alley locksmiths who work in secret like abortionists of yore, grinding out keys that the dealership would not approve of because they want you to buy their $450 key insurance and be your sole source. And don’t even try to find a keyless remote that will work on your car for under $300! Are you kidding me? The era of the spare key, the key you give to mechanics or valets, is over. I need insurance for my frigging keys now.

Maybe it will grow on me. I wonder about its past life, its previous lovers. The Carfax says it was a "corporate car" that started life in San Antonio, Texas, and then mysteriously shows up in Arlington, Virginia before coming to rest at a dealership down the highway in Richmond. How did all that happen? And where do we go now?

How to Get Raped and Murdered

A boy I once liked in high school told me how he lost his virginity. It was a cold winter night and he was in a line waiting on a girl he claimed was providing the service in the back seat of a car. He described how long and cold the wait was, how many were in line, and how “messy” it was when he finally got his turn.

At the time I thought this girl must have been a local slut or prostitute, but there was no money involved. Thinking about it now, I wonder if she was just so drunk she didn’t know what was happening.

When I was 12 or 13, somehow I found myself talking to a strange man on the phone. I don’t remember anymore how it started, or how many times he called. Maybe it was just once. I don’t remember anymore what we talked about, but whatever it was, it was so intriguing to me, I agreed to meet him. I had no clue from his voice about his age or his race, but he must have been extremely charming and persuasive on the phone. He must have been very flattering. I must have desperately wanted a Prince Charming to just magically appear, and here he was!

I rode my bike two miles to the fountain at the center of the East Carolina College (now University) campus where we agreed to meet at the appointed time, and I spotted him as soon as I got there. I just knew. Everyone else milling around the fountain was obviously a college student at a predominantly white school. They were going to class, or talking to friends, or reading. But this one man was obviously older than a college student. He was a very dark-skinned black, and oddly overdressed, in a fancy suit with a vest and a fedora hat. He wasn’t just passing through, or talking to anyone, or reading. He was scanning the crowd, looking at everyone. He was looking for me. 

He didn’t see me. Maybe he wasn’t expecting a 13-year-old girl on a bicycle. Or maybe he just hadn’t seen me yet, but I immediately took off back for home. What in the world was I thinking? What did I think I was going to find? What were his plans if I had foolishly walked up to him and said, “it’s me.” Then what? How did this even happen? But it did. I had willingly gone to meet a stranger without knowing why. I can only suppose I was hoping to find some kind of magical connection with another person because things had gone so well on the phone. The calls didn't resume after that. 

Then there was this time at the local teen dance club when I, age 14, and two other girls accepted a ride to the local hang-out, a Hardee’s, from three popular upperclassmen boys. This was back when you ate in the car, so kids just congregated in the parking lot. We piled into the backseat, thinking being seen with these guys would elevate our own popularity. But instead of Hardee’s, the car headed out to the edge of town. 

I am not a party girl. I don’t drink because I have never wanted to be out of control. I am a control freak girl, so I figured out pretty quickly we were not going to Hardee’s. At the last stoplight at the edge of town — before miles of nothing ahead but dark country road and corn fields, I whispered to the other girls, “Get out,” opened the door and ran into the night. (This was years before child locks. Now it's easy to trap someone in your car with the push of a button.) Thankfully, the two other girls followed my lead. We made it to the safety of a small country store and gas station across from the stoplight. The boys circled around, of course, and urged us to get back in the car. Seriously, they’d take us to Hardee’s this time. Really. Just get back in.

I wasn’t having it. I was stone cold sober, so I knew something was wrong. There was no boy in that car I really particularly liked. I wasn’t taking the risk. The other girls declined as well, and the boys drove off in disgust. After a quick debate, we decided Dottie’s mother would be the most understanding, called her on a pay phone (remember those?), and she came and got us.

But how close did I come to being raped or worse? What if I had been drunk? What if I had liked one of those boys and had been more trusting, more willing? 

In time, I was. It wasn’t long before I finally was raped, age 15, but I thought I was on a date; I thought I had a potential boyfriend; I thought this is just how it happens. And after you lose one struggle, how do you say no the next time? So at that too young age, I stayed committed to someone who turned out to be a very very bad boyfriend and passed up on so many opportunities to meet and date nicer boys and have a normal teenage life. I was damaged goods, trying to salvage a bad situation.

And to this day, in the corner of my head, I always hear a warning now, “men are bad,” which is not a great thing to have in your head because sometimes you have to work with them as co-workers and bosses, or friends, or maybe even marry one. But sometimes that warning keeps you safe. It gets you out of the car. 

The recent debate about the University of Virginia story in Rolling Stone and the murders of coeds in Charlottesville, brought all these suppressed memories back at how close I came to similar disasters. I believe all women have these stories hidden in their lives. It is not the unusual; it is the usual.

The Porn Star Cat, the Java Temple Conspiracy and the Great Duck Massacre

The parlor game goes like this: your porn star name is the name of your first pet and the first street you lived on. My porn star name is Puff Woodhaven. There were some animals before Puff, like the cat who scratched my sister when she was little and was banished, and the Java Temple birds that were done in by a hurricane, but I didn’t personally connect with them.

I knew of the cat who scratched my sister only because the clawing cat, whose name I was never told, was always cited as the reason I couldn’t have one. I knew about the birds because I was the one who found them dead. The Java Temple birds, a type of finch, were a gift from my grandmother.

My mother was one of nine children raised on a farm in North Carolina where animals were food, not pets. She went to the big city, Wilmington, to waitress, go to nursing school, and date soldiers stationed at a nearby Army base. She met one who was shipping out to Hawaii and that seemed the best bet to get off the farm. They married on Dec. 3, 1941. He shipped out to Hawaii, all right, but a little problem called Pearl Harbor meant she had to stay behind. She went back to the farm, where she raised my sister alone, and waited. It was four years before he came back and took them to New York. By that time she had changed her mind about him, but it was too late.

She wasn’t happy about living in her Italian mother-in-law’s house on Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. My grandmother was a hairdresser who looked like one of the Gabor sisters and acted like one, too. Java Temple birds would have been her taste, not my mother’s. Nana had her own money and a social life. My mother was a housewife, far away from her family. To her, Nana was an exotic alien. To Nana, Mama was a rube. They both made fun of each other's accents behind their backs, and not in a nice way. I arrived into this unhappy household.

When I was four, we moved to a Cape Cod style house in Elmont, Long Island. The only way my father could afford it was to rent out the two upstairs rooms…to his mother. So even when we had our own home, Nana was still living with us, much to my mother’s disgust.

Hurricane Diane hit Long Island in August of that year as a heavy, blustery rain. Even though my mother must have known a hurricane was coming, she put the Java Temple birds in the garage where either the noise of the storm scared them to death or the change in the air chilled them. It was a convenient way to get rid them, to claim they had been forgotten in the garage, a place they should never have been anyway. Even at age 4, I knew it was suspicious. And since I was the one who found them dead in the cage, it was not a great first memory to have.

We spent our summer vacation every year in North Carolina on my mother’s family farm. I hated it. All my Southern cousins, aunts and uncles teased me because I was a Yankee. One summer I found a kitten that was my solace and comfort for the entire two weeks. I named it Puff and it licked my ear, an orgasmically pleasant sensation. I can’t imagine or remember how I convinced my parents to let me bring Puff back to New York, but the cat made the trip. Once home, it wasn’t allowed in the house. School started, and I came home one day to find Puff gone. My inquiries met with evasions. The cat was sick…mumble, mumble.

I never knew what happened to Puff. I just knew my mother had something to do with it. I believed my dolls were alive and had feelings, so I had even more of an emotional investment in a real live animal, and it was gone without explanation. No one even suggested looking for it.

Meanwhile, Nana, undeterred by the mysterious hurricane death of the Java Temple birds or the disappearance of Puff, continued to torment my mother. She was always talking about a monkey her boss at the beauty parlor had, how she wanted to give us the monkey. She had us all hopped up about that monkey, and my mother had to be the bad guy and say no monkey. She had a new baby that she didn’t even want, and that was enough.

One thing my mother and Nana agreed on was children: the fewer the better. Anything more than one was viewed as low class in my father’s family. My mother had three. My brother was redeemed by being a boy and a blonde, blued-eyed one at that.  I was the unnecessary extra girl.

At Easter we’d get three chicks, one for each of us.  Before it became politically incorrect, Woolworth’s would sell chicks that had been dipped in food coloring, so you’d have live pink chicks, green chicks, and blue chicks mixed in with the yellow ones. Chicks are too fragile to live with children or survive long after being bathed in food coloring. They always died and were removed before I knew about it. Or maybe they were just removed and I was told they died. Not one of them made it to chicken, which was just as well, considering what happened to the ducks.

One year we got three ducklings for Easter. I named them Daisy, Daffy and Donald and seemed more enthralled with them than my sister or brother. The ducklings grew up into fat, white ducks and raced around our yard, honking. I could pick them up, but just barely. I’d run around the yard and they’d run with me. There were photographs taken of me hugging the ducks, a whole booklet of 3x3 black and white snapshots. After my mother died and I went through the family photos, I couldn’t find those. I’m not surprised.

One day I came home from school and the ducks were gone. In my memory, there is a photograph in my mind. I am standing in the kitchen. My father is sitting at the kitchen table and my mother is standing by the stove. They look puzzled. My mind has canceled the rest, the part where I feel something, where I react to what I am hearing.

My mother and her accomplice, an old European woman who lived down the block, killed my ducks, plucked them and gutted them. The woman took one carcass as her reward for helping. My mother cooked one for dinner that night and the third was in the freezer. My father is telling my mother she has to get rid of the duck in the refrigerator because it is upsetting me. My mother is annoyed that I am thwarting her plans. She doesn’t understand why my reaction matters.

My grief didn’t stop Dad from eating the already cooked duck, which he dismissed as too greasy. All the love I invested in Daisy, Daffy and Donald…and their eulogy was “too greasy.”

I don’t know how I got past that day, but if I didn’t know it before, I knew it then that I was being raised by a woman who was insensitive and couldn’t be trusted to protect me or anything I cared about.

I never met a therapist who wasn’t appalled by this story. One time I tried to defend my mother by explaining that as a child on a farm, she had raised piglets that were later slaughtered for food. Their bladders could be blown up like balloons. Their little tails made a tasty treat when cooked over an open flame. Those were the stories of her childhood she shared. Intellectually, though, I still could not understand how even a child raised on a farm could do this, being a devotee of Charlotte’s Web.

“But you weren’t raised on a farm,” one therapist pointed out. “Your mother wasn’t thinking about your feelings.”

No, she wasn’t. She never did. But even so, she knew it was a pivotal moment in my childhood and our relationship, even though it was never talked about until the end. I left home at 18 to go to college and never came back. We always lived at great distances from each other and only saw each other for a day or two at a time, now and then.

By the time she was 50, she was in declining health, both mentally and physically. She left my father and tried living with my sister, who was too religious for her. She tried living with one of her own sisters who promptly put her in a mental hospital in South Carolina where electric shock therapy only made her worse. Then she came to stay with me.

I was a gracious, if indifferent, host. I worked during the day and my son was in school. Our condo was tiny. There wasn’t much for her to do and she was alone all day. She couldn’t remember how to cook or clean anymore and the least little thing rattled her. After a week she called my father and said I didn’t need her so she was coming back to him. I drove her to the airport. It was the last time I saw her. Her health declined rapidly after that and she died the following year.

Out of nowhere, as we were walking down the ramp toward the boarding gate at the airport, she started talking about something that obviously bothered her. It was disjointed and rambling and it took me awhile to figure out she was talking about the ducks! Twenty-five years too late, and now we’re going to talk about the ducks? Finally? It was like she knew this was going to be the last time she saw me, and this was what she had to say, but she didn’t know what to say because she still didn’t get it.

She said it was humiliating to have to beg for old lettuce from the grocer. That was her explanation. That was it. The simplicity of her reasoning caught me by surprise. There was no time to go into it anyway. She was literally boarding the plane and she was too mentally disoriented now for me to get any satisfaction out of attacking her.

I didn’t get a chance to say: Long Island is famous for its duck farms. Surely someone sold duck food. Or we could have taken them to Valley Stream Park and let them loose at the pond. I think I could have been persuaded to let my ducks enjoy the company of other ducks there.

Why was decapitating, gutting, and cooking them the only option? We weren’t so poor that we needed the food. And did she really think I was going to be all right with that? Me? The child who never got over my turtle dying?

We never got to have that conversation. So instead, I spent my midlife crisis years drawing pictures of the ducks for a therapist, who was more interested in discovering repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Isn’t childhood duck abuse enough trauma?

They don’t sell chicks or ducks in Woolworth’s anymore. I don’t think there are any Woolworth’s left. Ducks needing to be rescued are not easy to come by and really difficult to get past landlords, so I didn’t become the crazy duck lady. The need to protect and rescue something would take a different turn.

Excerpt from chapter 2 of Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady, my book on Amazon Kindle

My Shoulder Chip

I was working in production at The News Leader when I was in my twenties, even though I really wanted to be a reporter. That wasn't happening. I had no mentors or connections, and without that, I needed to go to some small town and get experience on a little community newspaper. I just had a hard time accepting that truth when other people in production were being promoted upstairs to the newsroom. One girl was society-connected and went to a classy private women's college. She got the wedding desk job I applied for. The other was an unwashed hippie type who slept around and sold drugs to editors, so she was given a copy desk job, which actually turns out to be a dead end of the worst kind. The third had not even finished a degree in anything, but she was taken upstairs as a reporter. She was black. There were no black reporters. I guess they needed one.

So when I was given an opportunity to write for the employee newsletter, I thought that was my chance to gain some experience and acquire a mentor. The editor of the newsletter was a former News Leader editor who had been forced upstairs to the executive offices just to get him out of the newsroom when he reached retirement age and wouldn't step down to make room for new blood. I have no idea what he did other than the employee newsletter, which he never wrote any articles for. He just supervised it. It came out infrequently.

Over time, I realized, although he let me write the occasional feature story, mostly he wanted me to sit in his office while he told stories or pretended to work. He kept his door open so executives passing by would see me sitting in his office. One time he offered to drive me to my car, which was parked several blocks away from the newspaper office, and then circled the block around the newspaper several times before actually taking me there. It began to feel very creepy, like he wanted someone to see me driving away with him. I felt like an ornament, not a contributing member of his staff. And in the year or more I contributed to his paper, he never did a thing to advance my career in any way. Finally, I told him I could no longer freelance for him. I didn't have the time.

Not long after, I applied for a job as writer/editor for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board newsletter. That job would have changed my life. It was more money, more responsibility, and would have finally put me on the path to working in my chosen field. Without it, I spent another 15 years lanquishing in secretarial and assistant type jobs. I felt the interview had gone very well. When I didn't hear anything, I called and not only was I told I didn't get it, I was told why -- which is very unusual. Usually they just say another candidate was a better fit. One of my references said I had a "chip on my shoulder."

I was shocked, disappointed, chastised, and knew immediately which reference it was. For years, I slumped under the burden of that, and only today, three decades later, have I realized that although he meant that as a damning insult to ensure I didn't benefit from leaving him, it was actually a virture. It meant even at my young age, I felt confident in my ability. I felt I could do more and deserved to do more. I was too good to flirt with an aging old man and massage his ego. I felt I could stand on my own without a society college pedigree or trafficking in sex and drugs. I didn't need Affirmative Action to get a leg up.

But obviously I needed something, and that was the confidence to not let that man's comment rock my confidence like it did. I vowed I would go to his funeral and give him the evil eye in his casket, but it took him another 20 years to die, and by then I didn't care. Nobody did. Despite his illustrious career as an editor-terror through the 1950s and early part of the '60s, he barely got a mention in his own paper when he died.

I lived with that chip for just as long, realizing too late that it was actually the best thing about me.

Why Men Break Your Heart

There’s no glossing over it. Being abandoned by a man is a hard thing, and it’s bad for months. You can get through it, though. Sometimes you look back and see the worst of it was just a bridge that got you to a good place you never imagined you could reach. At least, that’s been my experience. But it’s a gut-wrenching trip over that bridge.

I have been thinking about this again lately because I've been close to three women in the past few years who were all abandoned with little to no advance warning and left reeling. 

This is the thing. You may think everything is fine, but it's not. The reason you don't know is because the other one is waiting, waiting for the new person to come along who will catch them so they can walk out of their old life right into the new one without a single day of feeling lost and alone. The only problem is your crying and hysterics as they go out the door. What's the problem? "We haven't been happy in a long time, and you know it."

I don’t understand this mysterious “happiness” people always think they are missing, like it’s out there someplace, but there it is. Men are really guility of this a lot. They will stay with you, eating your food, letting you pay their bills and clean all around them, until they find the new woman, and then they go. They won't leave their comfort zone until the next one is lined up and ready. 

***

This happens often around age 40. You think you only have one last chance at some elusive happiness and something snaps in your head and heart. You want to try to grab that mythical brass ring one more time. It’s not about the person you’re leaving at all, even though it’s going to be harder on them than anyone else.

***

The one who is left behind may think they desperately want to put the relationship back together, but it’s a cracked cup. Even if you get it back in the cupboard, it will always be a cracked cup. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life thinking if you don’t meet expectations, or keep him happy, he might leave again. Some women are willing to make the sacrifice, but who are you, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy? What are you getting out of this? It's not like you're keeping a cheating husband in order to maintain the title of First Lady of the Land or get maximum sympathy at a future state funeral. 

That's why the right thing to do is not to fight it. Try not to let him ever see you cry. Make it your goal to get back up and put your life back together without him. Yes, the old move-on cliche. You can do it. 

It’s hard to imagine a different life when you’re in the middle of the last one being torn asunder. But gradually, your eyes will perceive new pleasures on the horizon, and you will move steadily toward them. I go for months now without thinking about old heartbreaks. Most of the time, I can’t even remember what they looked like. It may feel really bad now – there’s no getting around that, so just focus on getting through.

***

There’s not much you can do when temptation meets up with general malaise. A man once told me: with men, it’s never the woman. It’s just the timing. There’s always other women making themselves available to your man. Sometimes they hit him at just the right moment, when he’s bored or doesn’t know where his life is going. Sometimes this other woman lets go of your man right away, and you never know anything even happened. And sometimes the other woman wraps a web around your man he can’t get out of, and now he’s stuck in a new drama. Like she’s pregnant. Or threatening suicide. Or has become a Fatal Attraction type that calls him at home or shows up at the door. You need her...and yeah, him, too, now...out of your life. This is their drama, not yours.

***

Yesterday, I was with a group of people and we were talking about our dads. Every person at the table's dad had done the same thing. Some had waited until our moms died. Some had waited until the kids were at least in high school or older, and then they met someone new. And in every single case, the new wife or girlfriend and her family totally absorbed our dads. Our dads became less invested in their own children. His money -- our inheritance -- started going out the window toward the needs of the new wife or girlfriend and her kids. And when all these dads died, all their money disappeared with them. Some people at the table were still really upset and trying to fight the new wife or girlfriend, but I can only shrug. Dads are men. They abandon their spouses, their children, for the new ones. Whatever the reason. For "chemistry." For "happiness." To feel young again. They leave behind a lot of hurt and are mystified that no one understands. It makes perfect sense to them. 

***

I can empathize with the pain. The most recent victim invested five years in her relationship, but there were signs. Neither one would give up their apartments to share one. They kept their safe houses the whole time. They went through a lot of hard times together, but still kept this wall of noncommitment. Then she came down with a routine, but communicable, ailment and they didn't see each other for just one week to avoid his catching it. That was all it took. The new woman, who magically appeared at the right place at just the right time, has Angelina Jolie-like powers -- beauty, intelligence, a direction in life. If I can comfort the abandoned one, all I can say is there's no fighting this kind of enemy, the Super Other Woman. Men are powerless against them. Your only hope is she will tire of him quickly, but then why in the world would you want him back? Better to regroup. Climb out of the rut and shake it off. I like both these people, but they both need more than they had with each other. 

Isn't It Romantic

When I decided to get married for the third time in 2001, according to statistics, it was not a popular option. More and more couples in America were opting just to live together. People advised me not to do it. Our tax refunds would take a beating. There was no real financial benefit to it. That there’s actually a penalty made me very reluctant.

But I had seen this episode of “E.R.” about two lesbians in the emergency room. One had a stroke and her partner said she didn't want extraordinary medical intervention. But her partner didn’t have a legal right to make any decisions for her. The doctors had to contact an estranged brother and get his permission, and he said to try to resuscitate her, so the poor lesbian partner had to watch while they entubated her lover until she died.

Yikes. I had an estranged brother, and I didn't want him making any decisions about me. I also had an adult son who lived in New York and I really hadn't had much contact with in a decade. I had a father living in North Carolina who I hadn't seen in 20 years. The idea that my boyfriend of four years wouldn’t be able to say, “Don’t tube her until she dies…”

Isn’t this romantic? Is this how you plan a wedding?

Why don’t you just give him power of attorney, someone suggested. Because a marriage license was $33 in Hanover County, and a legal document drawn up by a lawyer was more, that's why.

Besides, we had been together five years, and I felt like a silly Cougar woman still introducing him as my boyfriend. Women my age, with heavy Miss Clairol habits, shouldn’t have boyfriends. It sounded addled. It would be even stupider introducing him as my legal guardian.

“It’s time we thought about getting married,” I told him. “What’s the least we can do and still satisfy your family?”

He had never been married, and his family likes the weddings. The last cousin wedding we attended was at a mansion you could rent out for weddings and receptions. There was an oil painting of the bride in a room with bowls of shrimp on ice all around it. All the napkins had the couple’s names on them and the wedding date. Everyone got a miniature plastic wedding cake. When you pulled the tiny bride-and-groom top off, it was a bubble blower. You blow bubbles after the departing couple instead of throwing messy rice, which kills birds or something like that.

There was a free bar, guys in tuxes cooking made-to-order omelets on hot plates, and a deejay playing records. People got loaded and did the Macarena and the Electric Slide around a pool full of floating floral arrangements.

My 80-year-old dad, who sent me $500 when I eloped at age 20, and $500 again when I eloped again at age 22, wasn't going to pony up for a big wedding now. I’d rather have a car anyway, if he wanted to pay for something, which he did not. No one in my family has ever seen me get married, and I’d like to keep it that way. They never approve and they’re always right, so let’s not get started.

My boyfriend said his family would like to see him get married, even if I didn't want anyone to see me get married. We could go to a magistrate at the courthouse, but the immediate family and a grandmother had to be invited. The immediate family also included his father and his new wife.

Damn it. That meant I needed a dress and a ring now because people have to see something. License, magistrate’s fee, dress and a ring. Would that be enough of a show to justify their attending, but not big enough to make my family think I shafted them on the invitations? This was getting complicated, and expensive. I picked a Tuesday night in July at the historic Hanover Courthouse, which also happened to be the fifth anniversary of our first date.

Soon after the decision was made, at a bar where my boyfriend's band was playing, he stood up and said, “We have an announcement…” So now I had to invite the band and their dates. And all his friends.

Looking back, from the perspective of 11 years later, I have a lot of regrets. I regret not actually doing a better job of the wedding and inviting all my estranged family, what few friends I had, and yes, the people at work, even though most of them would not have attended. It's the thought that counts. My wedding video doesn't show anyone at all from my side, and consequently, seems all about the groom. Not that that's a bad thing. It was his first marriage, after all.

I regret the dress I picked. Finding a dress was next to impossible for my size and a late afternoon wedding in the middle of summer when you are really too old to go strapless or have bare arms, and you no longer have a waist. I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I ended up with an off-white sheath with a full-length vest over it and a white Jackie Kennedy-like hat that I decorated with plastic flowers and ribbons. My bangs were too short. You really need to spend more time than I did on the dress and the hair because you will never be photographed so much in your life unless you become a movie star. I didn't hire a photographer, but everyone there brought their camera and sent me pictures.

And then to my horror...I saw the dress again on the mother-of-the-bride in a slideshow of a redneck wedding held at a Waffle House west of Roanoke. The slideshow won some kind of journalism photography award and was in an exhibit. Every woman in the wedding party was obese.

All Politics Explained

I read two interesting articles after the election. One said all the television ads and direct mail pieces made no difference at all. The most effective way to campaign was word-of-mouth, identifying community leaders and creating a herd mentality. For Obama's people, this meant sending community organizers to barbershops and beauty salons to talk up their candidate, leave brochures and posters, and train the shop workers to talk to their customers and encourage them to vote.

The other article was about Karl Rove's SuperPac, and despite its millions of dollars in funding that underwrote attack ads in a dozen campaigns, its success rate was 1 percent.

It appears that all these super PACs are just job creation mechanisms, creating jobs for the organizers of the PACs, that is, and the people who claim they are political strategists, the Josh Lymans and Toby Zieglers of the world. They subtract a great deal of money from the rich and the corporations, pocket some of it, and then inject that money into the media. Television and radio stations collected a bonanza in sales, as well as whoever printed all the oversized postcards I received in the mail.

We try to make politics and the art of winning mysterious and complicated, but I think it's very simple. It's all emotional.

In my lifetime, I can explain how every president got elected by emotion.

Eisenhower beat Stevenson because he was Gen. Eisenhower. We had just come out of a devastating world war, quickly followed by Korea. We were at odds with another superpower, Russia. We felt we needed a general, not the effete, divorced Stevenson. Curiously, the Democrats nominated him again in 1956 to be beaten by the same Gen. Eisenhower under the same world conditions.

Kennedy beat Nixon because he was young and handsome, and Nixon was sweaty and shifty looking, and after eight years of Republican rule, we were all excited for something new and different.

Johnson beat Goldwater because Kennedy was assassinated and we felt bad. Plus Goldwater looked like the 1950s, not that Johnson seemed any more modern. Plus Johnson made us feel like Goldwater might launch a nuclear bomb for no good reason.

Nixon beat Humphrey because Humphrey was a bigger joke than Nixon and supported the Vietnam War, which nobody liked anymore, and the Democrats really had too many guys in the field and split up their base. Vietnam was perceived as the Democrat's war, which was a problem. Robert Kennedy would have beat Nixon, but there was that issue with also being assassinated. Nixon didn't actually get us out of the war fast enough because he needed it to win reelection. McGovern was too liberal and too bald, and the real threat to Nixon, Ted Kennedy, although he was not assassinated, he did leave a woman to drown at Chappaquiddick, so the Democrats were too embarrassed to nominate him.

After having no choice but to vote for Nixon, we then got rid of him another way and ended up with the bland Gerald Ford, who was only vice president because Spiro Agnew was a crook. Jimmy Carter beat Ford because Ford pardoned Nixon, and was also bland, although we all liked Betty a lot.

Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter because of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, which was embarrassing to us and launched Ted Koppel's career as the host of Nightline, which started out as a nightly special report on the Iranian Hostage Crisis. That's how embarrassed we were. Plus, Reagan was tall. Carter was not. At the debates, Carter looked like a midget. We needed a tall Hollywood guy to stand up to crazies like Ayatollahs.

Reagan beat Mondale because Mondale was a joke and had bags under his eyes. Not very Hollywood. The Democrats had nothing taller than Reagan to offer, and Gary Hart couldn't stand much scrutiny due to his sketchy past and womanizing. He was Bill Clinton, but without any political smarts or likeability.

George Bush beat Dukakis because of the goodwill of the Reagan years, and Dukakis' name was Dukakis. He also took a silly picture wearing a helmet and riding in a tank that political cartoonists loved, and he didn't react to a crazy question during the debates about what if his wife was raped. Then there was that thing about pardoning murderer Willie Horton. This was when political action committees actually did seem to work, and the politics of today was created by the evil Lee Atwater, the diabolical spiritual father of Karl Rove. If you haven't seen the documentary, "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," you need to. Atwater was punished by God, but successfully destroyed modern American politics before he was smited.

Bill Clinton beat George Bush because Lee Atwater was too sick to work his evil magic again, and Clinton had that Kennedyish charm. After 12 years of Republican rule, we were ready for the new and different. Plus Clinton had the Democratic version of Lee Atwater in James Carville. With Gore as his running mate, the "Double Bubba" ticket seemed charming.

Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole because Dole was a joke, a worn out politico who always seemed uncomfortable, and everything seemed to be going good under Clinton, so why change? Dole was a WWII veteran and Clinton got a deferment from the Vietnam War, but that didn't mean as much in the 1990s and was a poor strategy.

Bush beat Gore because Gore was not very charming, Bush had Karl Rove working evil magic, and there was that whole sex scandal around Clinton that somehow tarnished Gore. And yet Gore still won the election, but the Republicans pulled shenanigans in Florida.

Cheney beat Kerry because....oh wait a minute. Technically Bush was the president even though Cheney was really the president. Bush beat Kerry because of 9/11 and all the terrorists, and he made an impromptu comment at Ground Zero that made us think he was a fighter, but actually anything encouraging anyone said at that place in time would have seemed encouraging and inspiring. So we got into another war, and somehow, even though Kerry had been in Vietnam and Bush had not, Kerry was swiftboated to appear cowardly. That whole swiftboat thing was a work of evil genius. Plus, Kerry was married to a rich lady with ketchup money, and somehow Democrats need to be a little poorer than that, a little more like you and me.

Obama beat McCain because what were the Republicans thinking with that old guy candidate who looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a trophy wife and a vice presidential candidate who seemed handpicked to be ridiculed by the media and comedians. Plus Obama was young and kind of black, and different, and had that whole hope and change thing going and a cool looking poster, and any Democrat after Bush could have won, really. People who seldom voted, like minorities and young people, voted.

And I think that's what happened again. The minorities and young came back to the polls. Women were somehow convinced they were going to lose their right to have abortions, and that was more important to them at this moment in time than jobs and the economy. (When they're 10 and 20 years older, they will not care about that as much, trust me. They will figure out how not to get pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant. They will want a job more.) The Republicans, instead of nominating someone equally young and handsome and full of false promises of hope and change, picked the most plastic of candidates, another millionaire we can't identify with, who didn't even drink soda, for goodness' sakes, because of religious beliefs. Who can identify with a guy who won't drink a Coke?

And that explains all politics.