Sometimes that’s a good thing.

**

Tyler Tervooren, another Portlander like Chris Guillebeau who advocates risk-taking and living an unconventional lifestyle, said something (which I can’t find to quote now) to the general effect that being courageous in the everyday choices we make accustoms us to taking risks and being bold in more significant areas of our lives.

It was for this reason that, presented with the option of either taking a permanent, secure job in a toy company’s Internet department for a $30K salary (in a basement with mostly women) or becoming a full-time fundraiser for the anti-corporate underdog in our Democratic primary (in a a diverse and bustling campaign office), which by all accounts would be temporary and hourly, I chose the latter.

The former was a sure thing, but would definitely be stressful and suck precious hours of my life away (underground) for no real purpose. The campaign job was risky, but held promise as well as meaning. It would enable me to advocate for and help elect a real “people’s candidate,” while also possibly providing new connections and leading me in any number of new directions — if I wasn’t automatically out of a job after the primary.

In the midst of this decision, I had my first truly bitter fight with Jeannie. To make a long story short, she believed she was acting in my best interest, while I was shocked at her sudden “bossiness” with me and apparent lack of trust in my gut feelings.

What I derived from this episode, however, was a greater understanding of how Sam must have felt when I “bossed” him and showed little faith in his judgment. I didn’t like it, either.

Choosing the campaign involved a leap of faith. It was an act of trust in the future as well as belief in the candidate, and belief that fortune does in fact favor the brave — belief that my life will only change if I start making choices based not on what is already known and safe, but on what draws me forward and closer to a greater expression of who I am and what I value. It was the same kind of leap I took last year at this time.

As you know, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

**

For the past month I have also been working with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in Sonoma, California. We have weekly hour-long sessions that are meant to correspond to each section of the book. So far I don’t seem to have Called In The One, but I have definitely become more “magnetic” (to borrow from Katherine Thomas) when it comes to the opposite sex. More on that presently.

Beth’s input, along with some of Frank Schaeffer’s well-chosen words in his latest book (Patience With God), helped me deal more effectively with the latest Come-To-Jesus letter from my mom.

Dripping with the catchphrase-laden sentimentality peculiar to born-again Christian women, her missive gushed about how her life with her Heavenly Father/Lover (shudder) was so much more fulfilling than mine. (That incestuous blurring thing BACW do with their version of God I’ve always found unsettling.) It also took for granted, as usual, that her literalist cult had the corner on the “Christian” label and on what God wants.

God has always had a wonderful plan for your life, and has always wanted to reveal it to you. He has given you delightful gifts — tenderness, kindness, mercy — plus all the “smarts” with which He has endowed you. And the life He offers is one which is filled with His loving presence!

Do you still feel that the Christian life is one of rules and regulations legislated by a tyrant God? Not so! It is a life of a loving relationship with the God who designed us and Whose will is only for our good! You may feel your life is full of excitement and adventure, but I assure you “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” A life lived with God is a life of deep satisfaction because it is lived according to the blueprint of the Designer! And instead of being confining, it is a release into freedom, life as it was intended to be!

To top it all off, she sent me a Facebook message later that same week complaining about the words I’d used on someone else’s thread. “I didn’t bring you up to use such crude language,” she scolded.

First a child’s blush, and then a flash of rage, made blood ring in my ears. How dare she? The letter was already presumptuous to the max, but this was beyond the pale.

I took a time-out to cool down rather than going with my first impulse and using language that would have made her sorry she’d said anything at all.

**

Instead, I explored with Beth the critical relationship issues that surface in my dealings with my ever-proselytizing mother. Namely — the inability to stand up for myself; the distasteful bind of being either projected upon in the most saccharine manner (as sugar and spice and everything nice) or dismissed as invalid (stubborn and sinful); invisibility. All of which inspire a sort of primal and inarticulate rage.

To this day, after all, I often allow men with strong personalities to dominate and silence me. I have attracted admirers who idealize me so much I don’t even recognize who the hell they think they’re enamored with. I have chased many highly visible (attention-grabbing and handsome) men to whom I have been essentially invisible.

These relationships are mirrors of what I picked up from my earliest connections. Jeannie and I even discussed how the dynamic of our conflict resembled the dynamic of me vs. my mother and her well-meaning but overbearing Come-To-Jesus letters — just days before the latest one arrived.

So, theoretically, I should be able to apply the remedy where it all began.

Beth had me imagine the part of me that feels this rage as a small child. What does the child want? she asked. How would you take care of this child, as the responsible and mature adult? What would you say to her? What would you say to your mom?

This simple visual aid was remarkably helpful. I found myself feeling angry and protective of the marginalized, silenced, “unacceptable” little girl who was supposed to “be good” at all times and not upset anyone. In my mind’s eye, I picked her up and told her she was just as important as everybody else. I told her I recognized and valued everything she was, whether or not my mother or anyone else judged it to be “good.” I told her to express whatever the fuck she wanted. And I told her I wasn’t going to let my mother talk to her like that anymore.

**

The next day I wrote my response.

The fact that I have no idea which comment you’re talking about only serves to demonstrate that I am finally letting my hair down around here. I’m sure whatever it was could have been a lot worse in your book — I’ve been using language you’d probably call crude since I was a teenager. At forty-two I’m just getting over things like walking on eggshells and self-censoring to the point of nonexistence. I don’t want every part of me that isn’t inoffensive to someone to be invisible…

I can only marvel at the hubris when any human being thinks that they can read the mind of God and outright tell me I am NOT following His wonderful Plan for my life in my own damn time and way. (Oops, guess I cussed again. Somehow, I think God is bothered more by the behavior of the Enron Corporations of the world than by my saying “damn.”) Look, I know it’s just your way of trying to communicate love and concern, but doing it that way is neither welcome nor necessary. Why not just trust that God knows what He’s doing with me? It seems like a lot of hurt, tension, and resentment could be avoided here.

Defensive, my mother backed off somewhat, thanking me for being honest, but she still couldn’t resist throwing out the classic fundamentalist argument:

I don’t pretend to ‘read the mind of God’ other than reading what He says pretty clearly in His Word. I know you feel that Jesus’ words about being The Way, The Truth and The Life sound pretty exclusive — I didn’t say it; He did! I have chosen to believe Him as I would if a doctor told me ‘This is the ONLY medicine which can cure your disease!’ It is not a matter of opinion; either it is the truth or it is not. (Pascal) was willing to trust it as the truth — what was there to lose?

This “because he said so” tautology used to work on the child. C.S. Lewis made something like this argument too, saying that Jesus had to either be the Messiah or akin to the madman who claims he’s a poached egg. (What Lewis et. al. fail to consider, even within their dubious closed arguments, is that we can never know how much the canonized New Testament writings reflect what Jesus, if he really existed, actually said, written as they were after decades of oral tradition within a revisionist religious movement. To say nothing of those heretic Gnostics who didn’t even make the cut!) I replied:

There’s a couple of places we diverge that are irreconcilable, I guess. I don’t believe that I need to be cured, or that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, although I do believe that someone in the first few centuries wrote that a guy named Jesus said the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” thing…

You may or may not remember this, but I took a preceptorial (elective seminar) and wrote a paper on the Pensées at (college). (Pascal) was a fascinating character, but I agree with Franky Schaeffer’s assessment of his famous wager: “Pascal’s wager, wherein one bets in favor of God rather than risking damnation, is one of the stupidest ideas ever articulated. If there is a God, He knows you were just a good betting man splitting the odds – insincere but scared.” There are better reasons than fear to believe in some kind of Divine. On that perhaps we agree.

After that she pretty much shut up about the whole business, and since has stuck to subjects like how the campaign is doing, what’s happening with people we know, and the news.

It felt like some kind of watershed moment.

**

Just as Jeannie taught me what it was like to be on the receiving end of the “bossing” I gave Sam, my mother’s letter taught me something else about myself. Something uncomfortable to look at.

I realized that my mother was trying, time and time again, to persuade me with impassioned and sometimes manipulative pleas to take on her emotional experience when it was definitely not mine.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: no wonder my carefully-crafted, effusive love letters to nearly a dozen indifferent or ambivalent men over the past twenty years never won them over. I could no more “convert” these guys to my subjective and unshared emotional experience than my mother could convert me to hers. They were probably even less into me than I’m into Jesus…and I wouldn’t or couldn’t accept that.

I flushed, thinking how cloying and annoying my attempts must have seemed. Perhaps as annoying as a subway evangelist handing out tracts.

I guess it’s a hard habit to break.

**

But about that “magnetism”…

I should mention that Ted has been working a few hours a week for the campaign, and that Padraic came over after he found out I was working there. (Ted has since quit the call center, and may be going more full-time until he passes his pharmacy exam.) I must admit, I never fully got over my crush on Ted, that nondescript but intelligent liberal Texan of my own generation. When I met him, he reminded me of a forty-plus version of Sam — hence the attraction. But I gave up on Ted months ago. I really don’t want to suffer over any more men who’ll play with me when I’m the only game around, but run around after other, younger women when I’m not. He still kids around with me, and seems genuinely glad to see me when I’m there…clearly he has a friendly affection for me. So I take our relationship for what it is, no more and no less.

Padraic I take with a grain of salt. I figured him out after a while: if I take a step toward him, he takes a step backward. This dance is time-tested and guaranteed. When he complained that his young ex-girlfriend was “too into” him and wanted to get serious (which is why they broke up) I realized I was being presented with yet another opportunity to play chase-the-carrot. Wisely, I declined. Padraic really does remind me of my brother John. I could have broken my own heart again and run after John one more time…but I wouldn’t have caught him this time, either.

No, I’ve had it with the terminal ambivalence and mixed messages. I deserve better than that.

**

One thing worthy of note, however, is how one of the Big Fish at my new position reacted to me. It caught me completely off guard. This is a national campaign, so it’s populated by local political luminaries who are Big Fish in our small pond.

During my first few days there, I came into contact with one of them repeatedly. A handsome, charismatic figure who knows how to work a room, Matt shook my hand with an oddly dazed look and seemed at a loss for words. I just smiled and nodded. I didn’t burble or effervesce the way most women do in his presence. Mind you, this is a guy at whom multiple eyelids flutter whenever he enters the field office, who gets to rub elbows with impeccably groomed Abercrombie & Fitch princesses at events.

Yet every time he’s had contact with this low-rent, un-svelte, T-shirted fortysomething in chipped librarian frames and holey sneakers, he looks like nothing so much as a dumbfounded adolescent boy alone with the prom queen. I’m tickled to death by this. I know I didn’t put the energy out there, but I feel it in the space between us.

I haven’t told anyone but Beth about this. And now you. No one around here, at least no one who knows local politics, would believe me if I told them. Beth, of course, says it’s a sign that I’m becoming more “magnetic.”

Even Ted, the other day, surprised me: I was standing outside with him and one of the other fundraisers, an ex-Marine in his fifties who had come down to work at our office location “just to see you,” he told me with bald flirtatiousness. Suddenly I felt Ted’s hand resting on my shoulder as he talked to the Marine. It felt weirdly territorial. Then Ted made a humorous remark, and shook the other man’s hand in a conciliatory fashion. The body language honestly seemed like something dogs might do if they were bipeds. Again, I was tickled, especially as it was Ted. At least he didn’t pee on me.

**

There’s really something to this whole let-them-come-to-me business. The best example of all happened when I went down to the call center to pick up my last check.

I would never have expected it to be so effortless, to get what I had been hoping for for weeks. I had by this point pretty much resigned myself to never making significant contact with either of the beautiful newbies mentioned in my last post, as I was (at long last) leaving The Job.

Stopping by various cubicles to bid my farewells, I didn’t see the half-Asian Adonis anywhere. The raven-haired Sir Lancelot, however, was sitting just a few seats down from my friend Jane. Standing there beside her, telling her about the campaign, I noticed he and I were still just missing each other’s glances. Before long, he stood up from his seat and logged out for a break.

As he came toward us, both Jane and the supervisor coming down the row read his subversive T-shirt slogan aloud. Lancelot laughed, stopped, and explained it to us, introducing himself with a firm handshake. His name was Tanner. Actually, Tanner was his surname; Jim was “everybody’s name,” so he went by his last. Close up he was even handsomer, his dark-lashed brown eyes larger and warmer. He had a sexy voice and an easy affability, and I wondered why on earth we hadn’t managed to introduce ourselves earlier.

After a minute of chatting he left us to go outside. I followed suit not long thereafter, not expecting to see him unless I deliberately went up the alley. The designated smoking area was on the other side of the building. I was contemplating whether or not to go that way, and how I might contrive to speak to him again, when the elevator doors opened.

To my surprise, Tanner was sitting right outside the front door. He held it open as I wheeled my bike out. I stopped to chat with him for a few minutes more (and to tell him that this was my last visit to the call center). I found out a bit more about him: he was twenty-seven, currently in his last year of school at the Art Institute, and had been a new recruit in the military — dispatched to the Pentagon — during 9/11. After witnessing censorship and the suppression of information at the site in the immediate aftermath of the attack, his politics did a U-turn and he became something of a 9/11 “truther.”

I tried not to stare as he spoke but couldn’t help myself. Sweet Jesus, what a delectable young radical was he. I wished I could eat him with my eyes. (And so friendly! Who knew!) When at last he turned to go back inside, he wished me luck with the campaign and said he was glad to have met me.

“I’m glad to finally know your name,” I said, starting to wheel my bike away as he pulled the door open. “Now you’re not just the tall handsome one with the tattoos.”

He paused, grinned, and laughed: a pleased laugh, a very sexy laugh. “Thank you!” he purred, with that sultry voice of his. “See you around…”

Oh, I wish, honey.

Nevertheless I couldn’t believe how easy that was.

Maybe he’ll turn up at a rally somewhere.

I’ll share a favorite scene from Chapter One, set during the Becker family’s first summer vacation dinner at the pensione (inexpensive rooming house) in Paraggi, Italy. Mom is in the middle of saying a typical (i.e. very long) grace.

**

In my heart I said, “Please, oh please, don’t let Lucrezia come to our table to ask if we want wine with dinner while Mom is praying!”

Lucrezia was the owner’s daughter. When she cleaned the rooms with her mother they both wore blue housecoats over their day clothes. At night she was the pensione’s waitress. She wore a white apron over her black pleated skirt. Her starched apron strings hung down to the hemline behind. Lucrezia wore her silver crucifix outside of her white blouse when she served us our dinner. It made her look very Roman Catholic.

Lucrezia was standing at our table. “Vino? Rosso–? Bianco–?” she said.

“Please, Lord!” I prayed.

Mom kept right on praying.

“Vino?”

Couldn’t she see we were praying? Would Mom interrupt the prayer and look up?

“We thank Thee for this food and we pray for those who live and work in this pensione that they might come to know Thee as their personal Savior…”

“Vino?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked up sorrowfully, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light, then smiled ruefully at Lucrezia. Poor girl, she didn’t know the Lord. In fact, here we were praying, and she didn’t even wait until we were done. Probably she didn’t even notice. I guess she thought we were staring at our food while Mom talked to herself with her eyes shut. We had pity for Lucrezia and all the unsaved Italians. Roman Catholics thought they knew the Lord, but they worshipped Mary, not Jesus; they did not trust Him as their personal Savior but tried to merit salvation by works. I knew they were lost, but, just the same, I wished we didn’t have to pray in front of them.

“Vino?” Lucrezia was starting to really wonder what was going on. She tried English. “Wine? Red…White…Yes?” She smiled. Mom smiled too. Mom’s smile was full of compassion.

“No, Lucrezia, no, we won’t be having any alcohol to drink.”

“No wine.”

“No, thank you, we’re Christians, just some water please.”

“Acqua minerale?”

“No, just natural water…acqua naturale.”

It was Lucrezia’s turn to look sorrowful and to smile wistfully. Mom took her smile to be an expression of longing to know the Truth. I knew Lucrezia just felt sorry for people who drank tepid tap water at dinner when a hundred and fifty lira would buy a bottle of Chianti or Orvieto.

When Lucrezia walked away, we bowed our heads to finish our interrupted prayer. “And, Lord, we pray for dear little Lucrezia. We pray that You will give one of us an opportunity to share Your love with her and an opportunity to witness to her. In Jesus’ precious name we pray. Amen.”

I love how Calvin’s mother says “we’re Christians,” in characteristic evangelical insider way, like they and only they own the word — as if “you unsaved pagan Catholics obviously don’t know anything about it.” Schaeffer nails it.

**

I may never accept Jesus as my personal Savior, but I’ve found a Salvador.

Well, Salvador is his name, anyway…a sweet, round, 37-year-old Mexicano divorced father of two who works for a Spanish language network and broadcasts our baseball games on the radio en Español. We met via a free online dating site. I’m not at all sure he’s The One — I’m kind of disinclined to think so — but he possesses just the sort of crazy creative and risk-taking mindset that’s generally been missing among my circle of close friends and associates. Only Meg Ferris, that globetrotting writing coach who showed up at my yard sale last year, hatches anything like the sort of “harebrained” schemes Salvador comes up with — and makes work. This is a man who got himself an interview with George Lucas’s creative team in Los Angeles simply by setting up an attention-grabbing Web site.

He claims to have no expectations about us, and I believe he’s sincere. “Perhaps I am here to help you now,” he said at our lunch meeting, “and then, someday, you will have an answer I need.” Salvador was raised Catholic but has become enamored of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He teaches martial arts to kids in his spare time. (I can almost imagine him punctuating his sage observations with “young grasshopper.”)

I’m glad, at any rate, to have found a new friend with his breed of unrepentant cojones. Wasn’t I just saying I had no idea how to break out of the box?

**

A separate foray into the online dating world, this time for a Match.com free trial, has yielded equally interesting results. A gentleman my age, whose photo and profile I had skipped right over while perusing my daily matches, sent me a message. It was so warm, witty, and complimentary, I felt compelled to respond. But first I clicked on his profile to get a better look.

What I read there got me a little scared.

Not creepy scared, but scared in a way that Jason’s and Salvador’s and some of the other guys’ profiles hadn’t, because they essentially gave me a list of interests and what-I’m-looking-fors that more or less fit me or didn’t. (Online dating thus far has been like looking through a catalog and picking out the style and color that suits me best. The list approach, again.)

William’s profile struck a different chord. And not because of his vocabulary or his writing skills, which were excellent. Not because he was a law student focusing on international human rights law. Not because he was nice-looking in a supporting-actor kind of way, or because he’d rather watch a foreign film than climb a fourteener. What came through his carefully chosen words was a good-humored generosity, authenticity, and lack of ego. Here was an educated man who didn’t take himself so deadly seriously, who admitted to not having all the answers or all the confidence in the world, and who felt a strong sense of responsibility toward (and interconnectedness with) other human beings. His sense of humor was not unlike my own. (My best friend of twenty-three years, listening to me read his “In My Own Words” section, exclaimed, “But that’s you!”) I wish I could paraphrase a sentence or two for you here, but he took down his profile when his paid month expired.

After several rounds of increasingly personal email exchanges, William and I chatted amiably on the phone for over an hour. We have yet to meet. He’s leaving for Nigeria on a school-related mission next week and will be gone for three weeks.

I’m almost too freaked out to meet him, to tell you the truth.

Like me, he has deeply conservative parents, who hail from the same state as my mom. And Sam. His trip has become somewhat controversial: the faculty advisor who backed him for this Nigeria project just got fired. (Apparently the University doesn’t want its law students inserting themselves into the affairs of third world countries.) I’m inspired and humbled by his humanitarian passion and commitment, which goes way beyond the often ineffectual rallying and canvassing that wonky political progressives like Eli and I do on weekends, however well-intentioned. Talk about walking the talk.

I think: could he be…? Do I deserve…? I don’t dare finish the sentence.

Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m ready for prime time.

**

On the same day that I read William’s first, flirty message, a yoga friend posts a call on Facebook for interested parties who might like to get coached for free in the “Calling In The One” process. Rebecca has just finished Katherine Woodward Thomas’s relationship-coach training, and some of her friends in the program need “practicum” guinea pigs with whom to complete their certification.

Within 24 hours of responding to Rebecca, I am talking with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in California. Just like that. And for free.

You tell me that’s not one hell of a coincidence, amigos.

After our introductory phone session, however, I find myself awash in ambivalence.

**

At work, a tall, slim young trainee with jet-black hair and tattoo “sleeves” is looking at me. I noticed him his very first day: he resembles a young “Camelot”-era Robert Goulet, at his peak of tastiness, when they were saying he might be the next Elvis, before the cheeseball ’70s moustache and the Greatest Hits 8-tracks. I meet his gaze; he holds it for a provocative moment with his deep-set brown eyes, then looks away. I flush. We exchange furtive glances throughout the shift. One of us seems always to be sneaking a peek at the other through the cheerful, hefty matron sitting between us.

Suddenly the call center seems full of delectable young men again. A lean but muscular half-Asian with creme-caramel skin and huge hazel eyes whose name is really Sam (honestly!) makes me forget to breathe when he goes out of his way to introduce himself in the parking lot. He’s no taller than I am, but he has the torso of Apollo and the face of a Filipino matinee idol. Mama Maria.

I suppose there have been a few lovelies around in the past few months, but these latest afternoon delights are actually giving an eye to this tired old broad. Why, I have no idea. I think I look kind of fat and mousy at the moment. Go figure.

But it all comes surging back, all the forgotten intoxication and hunger. In between calls, somewhere in my graphic imagination, I’m nuzzling the tender brown nape of Apollo’s neck and running my fingers all over his taut, smooth, inconspicuously magnificent body. I’m pulling Young Robert down the stairwell to G3, the parking level where no one ever goes on foot, and pushing him up against the wall, thrusting my tongue between his lips, pressing into him. I get lightheaded with lust; my knees weaken. Not enough blood is getting to my brain or my feet, and…hello, may I please speak with Jane Smith?

**

I talk things out with Jeannie, my closest girlfriend in town. I’m beating myself up and working myself into a state of despair for being “superficial” and apparently losing my newly acquired, less visually-oriented perspective. I don’t have any impulse whatsoever to drag sweet, eager, decidedly stout Salvador, reeking of cologne (I hate cologne), down a stairwell, as swell as he is and as much as he seems to dig me.

I tell Jeannie that I don’t expect the guys who inspire lust in me to be the same ones who are good for me. Probably quite the opposite. But now I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to give up the hunger.

Jeannie, a counselor by trade, gently suggests that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. If I’m not turned on by someone, I shouldn’t force myself just on principle. Sam #1 didn’t elicit from me the same Greek-god comparisons as Sam #2, but we still had an intense, undeniable, potently pheremonal chemistry that made me want to eat him alive. With a spoon. Every day, if possible.

Who says you can’t love the right guy AND feel “the hunger?” she muses.

I start to feel a little more hopeful.

I think it’s great that you’re so sexual, adds Jeannie. I love that about you. Maybe what you need right now is to have a fling. Maybe you want to have a little sumpin’-sumpin’ with one of these youngsters before you get serious and look for something real. Have you talked to Beth about these feelings?

Of course I haven’t. Not yet. It may have been our decision to work together, after all, and the renewed prospect of successfully “Calling In The One,” that triggered this little midlife crisis.

**.

I struggle to complete my “homework” — not for Beth, but for Salvador. His questions for me are: what, exactly, do I want to write? And where do I want to be?

Finally I email him an answer. I don’t know! Frank Schaeffer makes me want to write a novel. But I’m not even sure I can do it; I’ve never managed to write a sustained work of fiction. (Of course, at the time, neither had Schaeffer.) I know I can do something like a personal travelogue competently and love it, and I can meet deadlines when I’m doing expository-type writing, so there’s that…but do I want to live abroad, or just travel? Where on earth do I belong?

“Don’t worry, just be patient, even a tree can’t speed up to grow,” he writes back. “Step by step. You need to relax, be quiet so you can start listening.”

Probably excellent advice all around.

**

My assignment from Beth has me stymied as well. I’m supposed to set an “anchoring” intention for love, in my own words. And answer the question: who would I need to be, to call in the love I desire?

All that comes to mind now, for the latter question, is: Someone else!

Jeannie, who dearly loves me and always sees the absolute best in me (you’re brilliant, you’re beautiful, you’re hilarious, et cetera), genuinely believes that these mouth-watering boys are a viable, if temporary, option, but you and I know that I’m only a legend in my own mind. When it comes to initiating anything with anyone who inspires that kind of unbridled lust, I’ve historically managed to project all of the allure of a skunk at a picnic. Out of dozens of fantasy partners, I’ve managed to snag only two or three (Lord only knows how) and pull them over into the reality of my bedroom.

The clincher of course is that the fantasies — to be brutally honest now — have nearly always proven to be better than the reality. Not to diss anybody, but just because something looks like a Porsche doesn’t mean it drives like one. When your nose is pushed up against the glass like the Little Match Girl, however, whatever’s going on inside is an imagined paradise. In the mating dance I’ve generally been a wallflower with two left feet, so I’m prone to thinking I’m going to miss something somewhere (the greener-grass syndrome) no matter what.

But the fevered imaginations of those who, like me, live too much in their heads can really short-circuit actual experience. (Case in point: the strange phenomenon of fans wanting to literally check out of life on Earth and go live in James Cameron’s Avatar universe.) Not everything is what it appears to be. Jeannie, a fellow vegetarian who makes a lot more money than I do, likes to take us out to the kind of candlelit restaurants that have white tablecloths and $20 entrees, where we’re routinely disappointed by the risotto al funghi. Conversely, we’ll sometimes wind up at a tiny storefront with plastic flowers on the table in a dingy strip mall on one of the ugliest thoroughfares in town, and slurp the best coconut curry soup anyone has ever concocted for a mere $4.95.

If there have been any pleasant surprises along the road of amore, it’s how the physical intimacy with Sam just kept improving. I went from not being sure I wanted to get him naked to wanting to keep him that way all the time.

So maybe what I need to do first and foremost is to let go of the stubborn and thoroughly unfounded belief that I understand anything at all about how this mating business works, and embrace my own unknowing.

Maybe “who I need to be” is just someone with a beginner’s mind.

I’m starting to get nervous about my finances again — I keep telling myself “I’ll work more hours this week,” but when I do manage to drag myself to that circle of hell we refer to as a call center I can hardly wait for a four-hour shift to be over. Jobs that sound at least tolerable and that I’m somewhat qualified to do have been scarce, and the ones to which I’m applying aren’t calling me. I had hoped I’d have something better by now, so that I could re-hire Lisa Brown to help me with my nonexistent writing career. As it is, right now I’m operating at a deficit every month.

What I’ve been most diligent about has been following Katherine Thomas’s book to the very end, and exploring various relationship prospects. You may be surprised to learn that “David” is no longer in the running.

**

What happened was this: I had been so delighted that David was so radically different from my dad and the patronizing men I’ve usually attracted that I failed to notice the huge pursuit imbalance that had been forming. The truth was I was contacting him repeatedly in order to nail down a date. I had initially been the one to reach out to him, and then I had had to prod him several times to make that first date. After that, it took a month (and more than one try on my part) before he suggested a group outing with his friends. A group outing.

So I was beginning to suspect that maybe David just wasn’t all that interested in me. He has a lot of very cute female friends, after all, who are a lot younger than I am and could pass for Suicide Girls, and I had to wonder if he’d keep them waiting for weeks.

Nevertheless, when we finally made it to the bar, and were having a great time with his friends, he cozied up against me in the booth and kept putting a hand on my back. Flushed with alcohol, I had a stong desire (for the first time) to kiss him. I hadn’t felt any such impulse toward him before because his demeanor was so eccentric, but I liked his touch and was starting to find his mannerisms cute. Two of his close friends, a couple, gave us rides home. As we weren’t alone I simply hugged David goodbye. If we had been alone, I doubt I would have been so restrained. I’m glad now that I was.

The next day (Friday) I called him to tell him what a great time I’d had. He suggested we get together again — maybe that weekend? He’d check his schedule and get back to me. I said: Are you sure? I knew he would be busy that week, helping organize a musical event at a local bar. But he said he’d call.

Except that he didn’t. Five days passed. No call, no messages, no nothing. Needless to say, by the following Wednesday I was feeling pretty disappointed, and realizing that I was on the same old merry-go-round I’d been on a million times with mixed-message men from León to Rick. Only this time I wasn’t going to focus on just one “message” (our seeming rapport at the bar) to the exclusion of all others (his repeatedly not calling). I deserved better than that, dammit. Not wanting to phone David yet again, I sent him a message, which I tried to make humorous and non-hostile in tone, but which in effect said: Hey, I’m getting the picture here from your actions that you’re just not that into me. And I don’t want to keep pursuing you if you’re not going to call when you say you will. I wouldn’t want to do that if you were a Nobel prizewinner or George Clooney. So if I’m correct about this, I think it would be best if I skip your upcoming event. I hope we can stay friends either way.

Notice that I left my surmisings open for him to contradict. I really thought he would contradict them. I thought I would at least hear something from him, if nothing more than sheepish agreement. But I heard nothing at all. Not the next day. Not the next week. Not since.

So so much for David.

**

Walking home through air heavy with the perfume of blooming lilacs and apple blossoms, I was reminded of how hung up on Rick I was last May, and how hopefully (and doggedly) I clung to every little bit of inconsistent attention he showed me. Given what happened after that with Sam, it seemed a bit like scavenging for potato chip crumbs from a discarded bag while the catered-banquet truck was coming down the block.

Now it occurred to me that for all I knew, something a million times better was coming down the block. Because I’d already tasted something a million times better than stale potato chip crumbs. And it changed me. Sam couldn’t stay, but he stayed just long enough to shift the entire ground beneath my feet.

I was able to laugh off my disappointment when I framed things thus: David had, after all, been dangerously close to getting the kind of action all boys like. A lot. If things had gone well, I could have been exhausting him the way I had managed to exhaust a 21-year-old. Your loss, kiddo!

**

I have since been asked out by two supervisors (who are now not supposed to date me, per company rules laid down after last summer’s scandal involving a director), one married man, and a slightly unhinged coworker who looks like Teddy Roosevelt and who may or may not be a pathological liar. Not exactly ideal pickin’s…but Ms. Thomas did say there would most likely be a number of “near misses” coming my way, that I might actually find myself challenged to make better choices for myself.

The only such choice that has been at all difficult has been the choice to lay it on the line with David. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, to decide I didn’t want to keep chasing yet another ambivalent guy. Typically I just try to convince myself that what little response I’m getting means a lot more than it does. To paraphrase Lisa Brown, the less love you’ve received in a relationship, the harder it is to let go. Which may explain why it took three years for me to let go of Sonny, and more like three months for me to start to let go of Sam. The mixed-message givers incite us to want to prove our worth to them, even as their behavior reinforces our doubts about it.

**

One night while reading Salon.com, I noticed one of their featured personals ads to the right of an article. I found myself wondering: would the Salon readership be a better pool to explore than the Yahoo one I had waded into a decade ago? My previous foray into online dating had proved inconclusive, but my hippie friend Diana was constantly singing its praises. I went ahead and did a quick search (which is all you can do without membership) of my age range and location.

The first person to come up in the list, a man my age, had a black-and-white photo that was a bit dark, but I swear made him look like Sam Rockwell in one of his mustache-and-soul-patch incarnations. As you might imagine, I stopped. Cold.

I tried to click on the man’s profile, but the site sent me to the signup page. I wound up building a rudimentary profile of my own just so that I could view his. (My introductory blurb was, I thought, funny and literate, if frank, and eschewed the standard shopping-list approach.) After I finished it, I was able to view the man’s full profile, and found his interests and answers to be intriguing and strikingly compatible with my own. To contact him, however, I was required to spend money, and I couldn’t afford to join the site, even for one month. Oh well, I shrugged. So much for that idea.

The next morning I had an email from the site: “Someone wants to see you.” Member X had requested my photo. Member X was the guy I had joined to investigate.

I literally shouted with laughter.

That same day I posted a photo, and filled out the rest of my profile. Then I went to look at the available payment options for sending messages. The cheapest option, hidden away from the membership options in the Help menu, was to buy 2000 credits (enough to send 10 messages) for $10. I decided to do it, and promptly sent the guy a message. “Hey man,” I wrote (literally quoting a Rockwell character), “sweet ‘stache.”

He answered the next morning. “I thought you’d never notice!” he said. “So when am I taking you out for a drink? My treat!” He had changed his profile photo to one in color. When I saw it, I literally broke a sweat. In this one, he more closely resembled Edward Norton…only better.

I found myself head-over-heels in lust with a photograph.

Controlling myself, I insisted on exchanging more information before agreeing to meet, but my fantasies were already running wild. Could Jason be It? Jason was such a hot-guy name — befitting that photo — and he was sounding so cool. He was a sommelier who had worked for an organic-foods market for years and recently transferred here from Austin. He lived in my best friend’s eclectic neighborhood. He was politically liberal and generally non-religious, but took an interest in Buddhism. And he looked like that. I kept pinching myself, and going back to look longingly at his photo. I imagined meeting this attractive contemporary and having the sparks fly as we both realized we’d met The One. Which was something that had really happened for many of Thomas’s clients. Finally I couldn’t stand the wait any longer, and wrote: Okay, let’s meet!

His response was immediate: How about tomorrow night? Name the time and place. I did…and then proceeded to not sleep a wink from excitement. Clearly this man and I were supposed to find each other!

**

I glanced nervously around the bar. It was a place Rick had shown me, a lounge in an old Victorian owned by a Polish family that was long on atmosphere and had a wonderful upstairs patio. I didn’t see anyone who vaguely resembled those photos.

And then I spotted a man who vaguely resembled those photos.

Vaguely. Except that he looked quite a bit older and chunkier, with graying hair, a baggy flannel shirt and a round, avuncular face. He lit up when I introduced myself (in contrast, I tend to photograph poorly). I tried to stifle the disappointment of an addict denied a promised fix.* Understand, it’s not that Jason was unattractive — he actually had beautiful, warm eyes — it’s just that he wasn’t particularly hot, and I had been expecting Edward Norton. He looked his age, kind of like that favorite history teacher you had in high school who had teenagers of his own. I felt a momentary flash of resentment, as if I’d been a victim of false advertising. Those photos were apparently not recent.

I ordered a pineapple martini on his tab, and proceeded to get good and inebriated as we sat on the patio. I enjoyed talking to Jason; we have a lot in common. We talked politics and conscious consumerism and music and travel; he loves Italy, too, and has explored Ireland. He encouraged me, as my artist friend had, to “just go” to Europe and work there illegally if I had to. He loves to read, and I considered how much fun it might be to show him around the semi-famous bookstore where I used to work. He really did have nice eyes.

I thought of how I wasn’t infatuated with Sam until the third month of knowing him, and how madly in love I fell with him…how ravenously eager I became to have sex with him at every available opportunity. I thought of how I had had trouble getting past David’s oddness on the first date, but wanted to make out with him by the second. I knew I was experiencing a major letdown because I had giddily believed I had found that lust-at-first-sight fantasy man who could feed my chronic craving for eye candy. I had built Jason way up in my imagination. Granted, he hadn’t helped me any by posting an out-of-date photo. That was frankly unfair, and seemed somehow dishonest. But if I had met him another way, in his present form, I probably would have warmed up to him pretty quickly, and thought, “Gee, what nice eyes he has.” Maybe eventually I would have found myself wanting to ask him out, as with Ted.

**

Speaking of Ted, I mentioned in my comments thread a couple of posts ago that he had made it clear to a mutual work friend that he prefers younger women. So I had given up on him. One day, however, in the staff kitchen, I witnessed a particularly humiliating incident which Ted’s unfortunate preferences afforded him.

Two of our younger callers, a skinny skaterboy and a slender, platinum-blonde princess who would look completely at home on any given MTV show or spring break video (all eyeliner and spaghetti straps and miniskirts up to here) were conferring quietly in the lounge area. Ted was sitting near them on the other couch. I was eating my lunch at the kitchen table. MTV girl was telling skaterboy about some club or other where she had seen this “old guy” dancing and “totally making a fool of himself.”

Ted, undaunted by her obvious contempt for her elders, asked, “What club was that?”

Apparently he must have tried to chat her up before, because her withering reply to him implied as much. For Ted’s sake I won’t repeat it, but I’ve never heard another woman over the age of eighteen be so directly and unapologetically cruel. In movies, perhaps, or on featherweight TV dramas aimed at teenagers, but not in real life. Poor Ted, stammering and backpedaling, crimsoned from neck to ears. I felt myself blush in sympathy. When he spoke to me shortly thereafter, he had the look in his eye of a bleeding calf. I wanted to say, Look, honey, you can bother me anytime, but I didn’t want to embarrass him further in front of MTV bitch-goddess and her lackey.

Later that week Ted started to say something to me about how long it had been since he’d seen a show at a music venue I like, and I was about to say something, but we were interrupted. I was a little sorry about that, but I’m not at all convinced Ted wants a grown woman, or things to be easy.

**

I came home from my date with Jason (I left things at “Call me”) and upon hitting the pillow was comatose for the next nine hours. Toward the morning, I dreamt that I had locked myself out of a borrowed car, a light brown station wagon like the one my family had owned in the 1980s, and was trying to push it, but accidentally pushed it into a river. As it sank, so did my spirits. How could I have fucked up so badly, on two counts? Everything was ruined.

Suddenly Jason appeared, offering to buy me a meal and console me. Utterly defeated, but comforted by his kindness, I asked him to drive me home instead. He drove me to my parents’ house — the house I grew up in, not my home. Sitting in his car in my parents’ driveway while he chatted outside with my mother, I was overwhelmed with despair, and felt like breaking down and begging him to take me out after all, to take me the hell away from there. Then I woke up.

Maybe my unconscious was trying to warn me about seizing on anyone out of a sense of desperation or defeat. Maybe I’m afraid that saying yes to Jason means that the Prodigal child is at the end of her rope. I don’t know. What a loaded one, Dr. Freud.

**

On waking, I felt a wave of disappointment crest and crash over me, and wondered melancholically if I would ever be able to love another man the way I had loved Sam. This thought made me cry. Eventually I got up, fed myself, bathed and dressed and even put on a little makeup, determining to go to my favorite coffeehouse to write on my laptop and see if anyone interesting showed up. Irrationally, perhaps, I still half believe my Rockwell is out there somewhere, waiting to be found, ready to make up for the fact that I could never have my beautiful older brother. (“Mommy,” I asked my mother at a precocious three years old, “When I grow up, can I marry Johnny?”)

I scanned the whole place from my vantage point at a front table, my back to the open garage-door facade. No one in particular caught my eye. On some days the prospects are as thick as thieves — I’m tripping over men I‘d like to tackle — but not today. After a while I went to get more hot water for my tea. As I stood in line, absently gazing out the open garage door at the patio, I saw our old buddy Eli strolling by on the sidewalk. He glanced inside. I waved my arm. He stopped.

I chortled to myself. Well, there’s some candy for you, baby!

Eli came in to have a cup of coffee with me, since he had some time to kill. His “lady friend,” as he called her, was at the nearby medical clinic having some tests done on her eye. He explained to me that she was already blind in one eye (save for peripheral vision) and that she might be losing her vision in the good one. She had asked him to come with her today. That he had accompanied a brand new “lady friend” in such difficult personal circumstances struck me as unusually caring, and I suddenly remembered him telling me about how he did his best to look after his semi-disabled mother.

But let me just point out a major irony here for a moment. This is Eli we’re talking about here. Beautiful Eli. The young man who completely commanded my attention the very first time I laid eyes on him. Even with his shaggy unwashed hair in a bandanna and nerd-specs on and skin breaking out, he causes me to stare in a trance of near-intoxication. I have to remind myself to keep my head, to peel my eyes away from his intense gaze. You all know I’m well aware that there’s more to relationship compatibility than finding the other person visually compelling, and I had previously ruled him out as anything other than a friend, but Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that he’s an Equal Opportunity Boyfriend, this probably indicates that he’s a far finer person than I previously imagined, and I hope his “lady friend” doesn’t lose what’s left of her sight. But I could not get over the fact that Eli was seeing a woman who might lose her ability to see him.

I for one was damn glad I could see him. We talked for a good hour, catching up — I shared my latest job disappointments, he filled me in on his political organizing — and I kept up the appearance of detachment. But the junkie inside me was soaking up my drug like a thirsty sponge. After he departed to go get his girl, I sat there for some time, substantially cheered up but starting to second-guess myself.

Eli is ten years younger than me. I know he wants to put down roots here, while I want to go abroad. He’s an atheist and a loner and he doesn’t like people. He would probably detest half my friends. And yet…and yet…he’s extremely caring. He does like me. And he may not look like “Johnny,” but he does resemble that kid I had a crush on in my youth group for forever.

To supersitious types like me who can’t quite believe such encounters are only a coincidence, I can only say: what a time for Eli to reappear. Had I not gone for a refill when I did, we would have missed each other. He doesn’t even live within five miles of that coffeehouse. It’s not exactly his usual haunt.

Of course, he’s not currently available: beautiful Eli is dating a visually impaired woman. And I’m trying to talk myself into dating your old history teacher. Who may or may not call again. I opened Thomas’s book at random the other day to read: we must do our best to live 100 percent committed to whatever intentions we set, without being attached to the results we are getting.

Who really knows what’s around the corner?

I guess I’ll continue to wait on that catering truck, anyhow; you can keep your potato chip crumbs.

_______________________________________________

*20/20 cited a scientific study that actually showed that the same area of the brain becomes active viewing beautiful people as becomes active when alcoholics are shown pictures of alcohol or compulsive gamblers are shown pictures of cash.

(I do want to observe, based on my unfolding friendship with the increasingly complex and sometimes volatile character known as “Rick,” that sometimes our passing attractions to people turn out to be unlikely opportunities to develop underdeveloped aspects of ourselves, and to exchange strengths. I don’t think it’s sentimental to say that nearly everyone — even the ex-felons and the chemically challenged — has something to teach us, if we’re open to listen and learn and not make everything about us.)

At any rate, upon my faithful German reader’s encouragement, I thought I would perform an exercise in self-reminder. That is, I thought I would remind myself of what I recently acknowledged as my Big Dream by sharing with you fine readers some, if not all, of my Italy diaries. Because I feel a little as if I’ve lost my way…

As I mentioned, I felt then as if I had finally found my place in the world, living these experiences and writing about them. I hope they don’t disappoint…some of my friends at home, Sonny included, were hooked, as if on a TV series. They do start off on the factual side, as I get acclimated, and become more introspective over time.

Most of the names have been changed, as is my custom on this blog.

**

PART ONE: CULTURE SHOCK

So: I’ve realized that I’m no Elizabeth Gilbert.

The delightful and funny woman who wrote “The Last American Man” and “Eat Pray Love” has a genius for travel. She can land anywhere without a plan or a knowledge of the language, and by the weekend she’’ll be staying in someone’s house being toasted by a table full of locals. She makes it sound so easy.

Maybe it is…for her.

Sometimes you’re just a beginner. And I haven’t felt like such a rank beginner in quite some time.

1. Mi Dispiace, Non Parlo L’Inglese

The flights were uneventful, although I wasn’t able to get much sleep on either leg, not even the eight-hour transatlantic flight. (Both flights somehow managed to show “Big Momma’s House.” One viewing may be more than it deserves.) When I reached the tiny airport in Milan I exchanged my dollars for Euros, incurring more than $15 in service charges. Outright theft (!), but I suppose you could consider it the fee one pays for being a greenhorn. The bus was easy enough to locate — I spoke a few words in Italian to the driver and felt so very proud of myself — and the ride to Novara gave me a chance to check out the landscape. I was struck by how much the quality of the light is like the American West’s — bright and direct, shining down out of an expansive blue sky. But it’s much greener here. On the highway, you think you could be anywhere (it resembled the American Northeast) but the inhabited areas are full of palms and other more exotic Mediterranean flora, even this far north.

We drove through a few small towns, after which some American resort towns seem to model themselves, with familiar red tile roofs and beige facades — some of them crumbling picturesquely. Everywhere I saw old women riding bicycles. The motor traffic seemed to regard the many bicyclists as legitimate vehicles, even on these narrow streets. In Novara, traffic slowed to a halt near the stazione, but it seemed to have been the natural order of things. No one so much as honked a horn.

Inside the station I managed to buy a train ticket to Pettenasco (in Italiano), but once outside I had no idea which track I needed. The direction I had been told was Domodossola, but there was no ‘Domodossola’ on the signs. This is when I first found out that, generally speaking, no one in the smaller towns speaks English. The people at Centro confirmed this later. (Thank God I know how to ask where the restrooms are in Italian, it was the first thing I taught myself! I could go off on an ugly American’s tangent here about my experiences with Italian public restrooms, and how the station’s was barely a Port-o, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.)

My anxiety mounting, I approached a fiftyish gentleman who had come to look at the schedule of destinations and track numbers. In the United States, fifysomething gentlemen are nearly always favorably disposed toward me, even when no one else is, and I hoped that the rule might apply internationally. Mi scusi, I said, Me scusi, non capisco. Sono Americana. Dov’e…? and I pointed at my ticket. He peered at my ticket and at the schedule and seemed to be as flummoxed as I was. He told me (as best as I could understand) to follow him, taking my suitcase, and I trotted after him up the underground walkway steps to a uniformed man by one of the tracks. They conversed rapidly in Italian and the uniformed man consulted a map, pointing out (quite serendipitously) the train behind us that was about to leave. Mille grazie! I cried to them both, and ran with my bags to the train. My Samaritan followed, sitting across the aisle with another middle-aged man in a baseball cap and sunglasses. He only rode three stops, but I heard him tell the other man that I was an Americana.

At the next major train station the train stopped, and everyone, including the conductors, began to deboard. I looked in confusion at the man in the baseball cap. Che stazione? I asked, and he said “Borgomanero.” I must have looked crestfallen. He reached out for my ticket. “Pettenasco,” he murmured, and then said something that sounded like Ven conmigo, which means “come with me” in Spanish, along with a string of words I didn’t understand. I followed him out of the station, and around what appeared to be a major construction project. Maybe that’s why the train stopped there? At any rate I was becoming nervous. Perhaps I should find a phone and call Centro. Where was this guy taking me? “But the train was supposed to go all the way there,” I said, and he turned around. Mi dispiace, signora, non capisco…non parlo l’inglese. Sorry, ma’am, I don’t understand, I don’t speak English. For all I knew, he was leading me to his den of iniquity, or into some international slavery ring…

But instead he led me to a bus that said “Trenitalia” across the front of its window, whereupon he spoke more rapid Italian with the driver, apparently asking if he went to Pettenasco. The driver nodded. Si, si, Pettenasco, he said, motioning to me to board. I didn’t have to pay — apparently this was some sort of extension of the train service. We both got on the bus, and I sat up front behind my second graying savior, who proceeded to engage in a long, animated conversation with the driver and a sweet-looking puckered old woman who was sitting behind the driver.

The bus wound its way up into the mountains, on impossibly narrow streets, through Orta (which shares its name with the lake) and into Pettenasco. Signore Baseball-cap helped me with my luggage and I told him and the driver Mille grazie, siete molti gentili. Thanks a million, you guys are very kind.

There was a phone kiosk just across the street, and I went over to it only to find that it took neither coins nor my credit card. Well, I’d made it that far…maybe I could use someone else’s phone? I pulled my luggage up the street and noticed a sign on a building that said something about an ufficio and turismo so I went behind the building as directed and found a small office full of pamphlets — but no people. I had just gone behind the desk there to inspect an old, non-working telephone when a woman with a name tag hurried in looking purposeful. I came toward her gratefully, full of explanations, but she shook her head and raised a hand to halt me.

Non parlo l’inglese, she said.

It seems they don’t speak English in the tourism office here either. I managed to communicate my needs with telefono and Centro d’Ompio. She led me into a small, much more modern back office where I was able to call Centro, and they were able to send Günter (who is from Germany) down with a car.

2. Centro d’Ompio, Bisetti, e la ‘Meltdown’

Günter is a full-time employee at Centro, a cheerful but serious taskmaster whose chosen mode of leisure dress could be described as heavy-metal-musician-meets-bondage-master. He likes to go shirtless, and is so hirsute as to qualify as furry. Günter oversees the center’s groundskeeping, and manages the working guests’ residence, Bisetti, a half mile down the mountain from Centro.

Günter drove me at breakneck speed up a slender road full of hairpin turns, honking his horn to alert pedestrians or other cars. There was hardly room for one car to pass, so I’m not sure what happens when there are two going in opposite directions. We arrived in the gravel parking lot at Centro and went up to the office on the second floor of the main building, where I was introduced to Paola, the pleasant young Italian woman who helps run the office. Paola took me downstairs, whereupon I met several of the other working guests immediately — Christian, from Norway, Stefan, from Switzerland, Hanna, from Finland, and Alessandro, from Canada. I also met Cosmo and Mila, full-time kitchen workers who are native Italians. Stefan was leaving in a day, but the rest will be my companions for the majority of my stay here.

Christian is bearded, lanky, and ponytailed, and smokes expensive cigarettes. He works in a clothing shop back home in a small Norwegian town, and speaks English fairly well. He makes me a little nervous, however, with his lingering, sultry looks…such unabashed boldness strikes me as a marked cultural difference, something tres European, along the lines of nude beaches and legalized weed. I meet his gaze and smile…but not for too long.

Hanna is a sweet, shy young slip of a thing still in university, with scholarly glasses and delicately pale skin. Her English is decent, if limited, but it’s all we have to work with as I don’t know a word of Finnish. She looks at me with an almost awestruck expression, which I doubt I deserve, and speaks to me with the utmost fondness. What did I do, sweetheart?? Please tell me so that I can repeat it everywhere I go.

Alessandro is (in my humble opinion) the resident beauty, dark and stunning, the child of Italian parents who reside in Canada. The poor fellow has dual citizenship in Canada and Italy — can you imagine a worse fate?! — and ultimately wants to move here. He would rather be a waiter in Italy than an accountant (as is his training) in Canada. Six months ago I would have surely and rapidly alienated him with a clumsy and singleminded pursuit, but at this point I’m content with just talking and looking. To be honest, we don’t have a whole lot in common, but he’s good-hearted and sincere, with an almost childlike quality. Our conversations actually remind me of the sort I have with my nine-year-old nephew.

Cosmo recalls to mind some character actor from the 1970s I just can’t place. He has frizzy graying hair and sly dark eyes that suggest to me that if I understood what he was saying half the time, I’d find him hysterically funny. Mila is slim, fortysomething, no-nonsense, but good-natured.

Centro d’Ompio stands on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Orta, with the little island of San Giulio, on which sits a medieval monastery, visible from the pool terrace. The lake itself is surrounded by steep green mountains. It’s a dramatic view. At the moment I’m unable to download pictures from my bargain-basement digital camera onto my computer and I’m not sure why. Otherwise, I would show you. Centro has several peacocks — one of them completely white – wandering the grounds and emitting haunting, catlike cries. They have no fear of people, and weave amid the outside tables at mealtimes. Seeing them after so many hours of not sleeping was a completely surreal experience.

What’s odd to me is how much less infatuated I am with it all than I expected to be, how unreal the scenery feels, almost like a photographed backdrop. I can’t explain why this is. I half anticipated feeling Frances Mayes’ instant sense of belonging.

But belonging is the opposite of what I felt my first evening…

After lunch, Günter drove me and my luggage down the hill to Bisetti, the guest worker house. He showed me my room, which was private (at least I didn’t have to share), located up two flights of outside stairs and then up a sort of ladder. (All of the rooms, toilets and kitchen included, let only onto the outside, like motel rooms.)

The sky had by this point clouded over and it had grown quite cold. I noticed that there was only one thin quilt in the chilly and unheated little room, and I wondered whether, with my tendency to get cold under the best of circumstances, I might in fact freeze to death.

The closet-sized toilets, shared by all, were on the ground level, and both contained a small cold-water sink. Then Günter showed me the showers. Two coed, communal showers, off of a room with a hot water trough-style sink for washing up and brushing teeth. One of the stalls wasn’t even in use, due to a leaky pipe that had flooded the adjacent laundry room. I looked at it all in a sort of despair. Was I a completely square American prude that the thought of showering within sight of the Norwegian, or for that matter anywhere where absolutely anyone could come and have a lookyloo, completely creeped me out? Was this how they did it in Europe?!! And what of the infernal swamp in the next room? Would laundering my dirty clothes be out of the question? I thought, I’m sure all my little anarchist friends with their communal housing and free love and unflushed toilets could cope with all of this just fine, but I’m an old broad who craves a few basic creature comforts, like a little bathing privacy and a warm bed. I said something to Günter about whether there was a protocol for the showers. He looked at me as if I were a completely square American prude, and said that there was not.

Of course all I wanted to do at that point was take a hot shower and go to sleep.

I opted to try for a nap. Layering up, I curled into a little ball under the white (yes, white) scrap of quilt and shivered. Eventually, after some yogic breathing and a Buddhist exercise in surrendering to “absolute cold,” I dozed off. I woke just in time to hike up the hill to dinner. At least the hike warmed me up. I ate with some of the Italian kitchen staff and Bettina, one of the people who worked in the office. I told Bettina about being cold, and she told me she could give me another blanket. I asked her about the showers, and her response was, more or less: you’ll deal with it.

She left the table, and I tried to have a halting conversation with the others, but both sides lacked crucial vocabulary and I wound up feeling even more like a stranger in a strange land. Mila did understand somewhat about the showers, and she said that maybe I could come up to Centro and use theirs. Her tiny bit of sympathy made me feel dangerously close to tears.

But she left the table, too, and I left Centro for Bisetti, feeling more profoundly lonely than I have in years. Sometimes being surrounded by a hundred people is lonelier than being alone, when language and culture prevent some sorely needed understanding.

But I was also trying to suck up and buck up and not appear needy, square, or uncool. I wasn’t going to be the whiny, high-maintenance American. No, no one was gonna see me sweat. I wouldn’t give them any more chances to judge me. I was afraid Günter and Bettina already had.

These efforts, however, were about to go straight to hell.

Bisetti is home to a number of small stray cats, about which I had been repeatedly cautioned. Don’t let them in any of the rooms, they’ll shit everywhere! They seemed to be regarded like pests, including the small, rather dirty 19-year-old deaf and blind cat that spends most of its day on the kitchen steps. One of the residents had kicked the poor thing out of the way before. This cat was on the steps when I arrived back. I bent to pet it, and it began to purr like a tiny motor.

Suddenly I saw myself in this helpless, despised, affection-starved little creature, and I sat down on the step beside it and started to weep quietly, stroking its bowed head. A small black cat (drawn, no doubt, by the purring) came running and jumped up in my lap. This second cat couldn’t get enough love either, and that’s when I really lost it, wetting its silky back with hot tears.

Just then Bettina came through the gate, and stopped.

She came over to me and sat down beside me and pulled me into a fierce embrace. It was no use hiding it anymore; I sobbed. She clucked sympathetically and said — You’re tired, and overwhelmed, and it’s your first day, and I know it’s all a bit much. We’ll get you a blanket, and if you like you can take a shower up the road at Leibich, our house. (The full-time year-round employees live in another, more traditional house a few doors down.) I can even give you a hot water bottle, if you wish.

And that’s exactly what she did. She gave me a wool blanket and a hot water bottle and showed me the perfectly lovely accommodations (complete with bathtub) at Leibich. We went into Bisetti’s rustic kitchen to heat water, and there I met Raffe, short for Raffaella, Centro’s cleaning woman. She is of indeterminate age, my height, pleasantly round, with large, kind green eyes and dark burgundy-tinted hair. I love the name Raffaella — it’s the name of the angel, played by Natassja Kinski, who watches over Karl (the angel who falls to earth) in Wim Wenders’ “Faraway, So Close,” one of my favorite films.

And yea verily, Raffe immediately sensed the state of my soul and began to minister unto me, that very evening, and from thence. Her English is not great (still much better than my Italian) but we manage to communicate in other ways. She felt the shower situation was undesirable too, and encouraged me to lock the door (as she does) when I went in. She heated the water for my water bottle and stroked my hair and kissed me and called me “Bella,” something she has done ever since. She always greets me with an Italian-style kiss on both cheeks, and it gives me a greater sense of belonging than just about any other thing or person here.

That night I locked the door and took a hot shower, right there in Bisetti. Afterwards I sat in the kitchen and drank tea with Cosmo, Mila, and the soon-departing Swiss. And later, I crawled under a warm blanket with a hot water bottle, lovingly prepared by my angel Raffaella.

My take on him is, of course, highly subjective, and might evoke strenuous objections from those conversant with his philosophy; but then again, Kierkegaard was in favor of nothing so much as subjectivity when it came to questions of truth, so I imagine he’d give me a pass.

…

In his best-known work, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard speaks of the necessity of passion as a vehicle to arriving at faith — passion regarding desires of the heart which, in the examples he uses, at least, are directed at something other than God, and are quite “spiritually incorrect” by the standards of most orthodoxies. I suppose having passionately desired something other than some abstract omniscient father figure since I was old enough to chase my cousin Nate around the coffee table, I was naturally more inclined to listen to this crazy Dane.

The book attempts to take on one of the problems many sane, rational, ethical people have with the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac: How could a guy agree to sacrifice the cherished son he had waited so long for God to give him, even if God, for some arbitrary and unknown reason, required it? (It is widely believed by biographers and scholars that Kierkegaard’s laborious philosophical endeavor here was, among other things, an elaborate allegory for his broken engagement with the love of his life, Regine Olsen. This angle only further endears him to me…)

I was riveted when I got through all of his preliminary obfuscations about Abraham (that were largely — or so it seemed to me — deliberately roundabout teasers hinting at where he planned on taking the reader without including too many particulars) to the part where he first brings up the knight. This hypothetical knight, you see, is pining for a certain fair maiden, a princess, in the tradition of the knight-errant of medieval romances. But this is no run-of-the-mill fairy tale. It’s a little too dark and intense and ungratifying for that (unless of course you’re talking about Hans Christian Andersen).

No, the action here is all internal, and would make for a very boring Disney movie.

The knight gives himself over utterly to his longing for his beloved; he feels love palpitate in every fiber of his being, as if he had drunk a mysterious potion that could very easily turn out to be deadly. This single-minded desire, says Kierkegaard, becomes “the substance of his life.” To all those who would advise the gentleman to get out more, maybe take up a hobby or find some nice rich brewer’s widow to marry…well, he’d say “let them go on croaking in the swamp.” This is the man’s passion, for the sake of which he is about to embark upon a profound and difficult interior journey — a journey that may or may not lead to faith.

Because when he sends out his dearly held wishes “like doves,” they return to him as messengers of sorrow — there is no way on earth he can be with the princess. What his heart desires is truly impossible.

According to Kierkegaard, he then undertakes a preliminary “movement” — that is, he enters into a sort of despair the author calls infinite resignation. In the midst of abominable, nearly intolerable pain, he recognizes the eternal and formless nature of a love that will never find expression in the temporal world. “Spiritually speaking, everything is possible,” says Kierkegaard, “but in the finite world there is much that is not possible.” The princess may be utterly lost to him, but at the same time she becomes a permanent and immovable presence within her devoted knight’s soul.

Once he has surrendered all claim to his dearly beloved, and is “reconciled in pain,” the knight is ready, if he dares, to make the most difficult move of all, the movement of faith. Kierkegaard pretty much sums it up with the statement “I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, by virtue, that is, of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.”

In twelve-step lingo I guess that’s what you might call “giving it over to your Higher Power.” The knight’s surrender is total, yet he believes in the face of inarguable impossiblity that the Almighty will commit an act tantamount to reversing the laws of gravity, because He can.

Thus we can possibly understand how Abraham (Kierkegaard) could prepare to sacrifice (give up) his beloved Isaac (Regine), having gone through this same agonizing renunciation and come to embrace the absurdity that somehow, through the miraculous workings of Divine omnipotence, his loved one would be returned to him (in Abraham’s case, perhaps even from the dead; in Kierkegaard’s, from marriage to another).

…

This will sound like heresy to traditional intellectuals (to them I say: get over yourselves) but in many ways I see this whole setup as paralleling what innumerable New Age quantum-consciousness authors (Deepak Chopra et. al.) are currently saying about intention and nonattachment. There is that same delicate dance between complete disinvestment in an outcome and the absolute conviction that what one desires will come to pass (through something like Divine Providence). Both conceive reaching toward something and letting it go as one single paradoxical gesture.

It’s fascinating to me that I would find in such unlikely places echoes of Kierkegaard, but then, maybe, just maybe, there’s something to it.

…

As I said in the beginning, what I like most about Kierkegaard is his unorthodox appeal to our human desires. It’s not typical of religious thinkers to engage our tangible, terrestrial passions when talking about faith. At best, it’s considered bad form; at worst, it’s considered idolatry, or Samsara-inducing attachment, or whatever. It’s against the law, as the song goes, as long as I’m borrowing lyrics from Paul Simon. But what are those of us to do, who have only experienced something like religious ecstasy gazing deeply into the eyes of another human being? Who touch upon something vast, numinous, and eternal not in church (or even in silent meditation), but in the inestimable presence of (a) certain individual(s)?

Kierkegaard, at least, gets that. Check out what he wrote to Regine (from his Journals):

Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it’s good to be here.

I may still have trouble with faith, but to that I can say Amen.

“Here” was Boulder, an affluent town full of New-Age Caucasians.

I knew exactly what she meant.

Lately, I’ve been scared. Honestly scared. We’re in a recession, food and gas prices are climbing, and I’m underemployed, over budget, and under deadline to find a new place (probably a tiny studio) to call home. I am currently surrounded, in my work and personal life, by well-meaning but mostly middle- to upper-middle-class white people who reassure me daily that everything is going to be fine, that what needs to happen will happen, that the universe will take care of me, and so on. My roommate, who with her mother co-owns the condo where I’ve rented a room for a year, is certain of this.

Such faith does not come easily to me, having lost my very dramatic fundamentalist faith very dramatically in my youth. One moment I was secure in the (warm, if somewhat oppressive) bosom of home, family, church, and God; the next, I was thrust into a boundless black hole, floating like the proverbial inconsequential speck in an indifferent universe, unspeakably alone, my existence and actions apparently as meaningless as those of Camus’ unsympathetic Stranger. No wonder, I thought, I had never felt the presence of Jesus, purportedly walking alongside me all the way; no wonder my fervent prayers, often delivered on my knees while hitting my chest with my fist, had never been answered. It was all an elaborate racket, a comforting lie to keep people complacent and obedient. Squaring my jaw and my shoulders, I told myself that everything was now up to me.

I was not at all sure I was up to the task.

And I must say, it’s been a struggle most of the way since — living on the perimeter at a subsistence level, and learning to make do without. The profound sense of abandonment I felt when I lost my Christian community and beliefs is still very much alive in me. Eventually I did come to believe that a spiritual dimension exists, that there is inexplicable depth and mystery to our conscious and unconscious lives, that everything is interconnected. At certain extraordinary moments I’ve felt I’ve touched upon something numinous and eternal. Rumi and Rilke are two of my favorite poets. But there’s still that doubt at my core.

Part of me (a big part, that is perhaps just a big kid) really, really wants to believe the Intenders and the Manifestors and everyone who embraces what the scientific materialists would call magical thinking. I’ve seen The Secret. I’ve read some of the more involved of the “new physics” books like Lynne McTaggart’s The Field. Her latest work on meditators affecting remote plants is actually exciting to me. I’ve so rarely made anything I really wanted to happen happen, and never for long. I’ve wished upon a hundred stars. I’ve forwarded the chain e-mails. And now all around me, in the holistic community where I work, there are voices reassuring me that the universe is looking out for me.

Of course, these are all Caucasians, most of whom can afford to shell out for the high cost of yoga.

And I go back to our Woman on the Street, puncturing the bubble of our possible cultural complacency. Do our beliefs reflect our undisturbed privilege? The casualties of Myanmar and Beichuan — hell, the (mostly nonwhite) victims of the New Orleans flood in our own country — how, pray tell, did everything work out for them? (I have to say I’m offended by some of the more materialistic aspects of the Secret craze. You want a fully loaded Hummer, and over here this Haitian can’t even get a spoonful of rice. What’s wrong with this picture?) Vox Feminista’s anonymous commentator, with a laugh, refuses to play along. Maybe she, from her differing vantage point, has seen too much that conflicts with the majority story, the way James Baldwin had when he spoke in The Fire Next Time of the “innocence” of white Americans. Or the way unrepentant firebrands like Jeremiah Wright have, who then say things that offend the sensibilities of the mythologically correct — those who, to borrow from Baldwin, insist on believing that our unimpeachable republic’s founders were all “freedom-loving heroes.”

…

Of course, then there’s Oprah. Oprah, the alternately admired and maligned evangelist of reality-creation. I refuse to say anything bad about Oprah. She had no such privilege; she was born black, and female, into poverty, and endured horrific physical and sexual abuse as a young child. That she would turn out to be one of the world’s wealthiest women was unlikely to say the least. She gives away millions, and spurs a TV nation to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If she wants to tout the power of intention, more power to her. Bully for Oprah, I say.

She most have done something right along the way.

…

The other day a good friend of mine with survival struggles of her own introduced me to her remarkable friend Pablo. Pablo is from Spain, has traveled the world on a shoestring, and carries a different set of life experiences and assumptions than many of the middle-class white Americans in my social circle. For this reason (as well as for his infectiously enthusiastic and affectionate nature), I listened attentively to this diminutive middle-aged gentleman when he decided to expound upon the topic of success.

“I arrived here on a Thursday. By Friday I was working. You know how you get the job? You go where you want to work, and you say, ‘How long until I can work here?’ And when they say, ‘We don’t have anything,’ then you say, ‘Okay, then I will wait, I will come and sit here until it’s time for me to work.’ And then you go, and you sit, and you wait. And you ask them, ‘Is it time yet?’ No? Then you go and you sit some more…”

My friend tells me that Pablo is fond of offering the choice, “Is the answer yes, or yes?” He said to me, “Everywhere I go, people help me, because they know I have love in my heart.” For Pablo, things do indeed seem to “work out,” and he sure ain’t your typical Boulder-ite living anything close to a typical life. Talking to him was like a whack upside the head. He doesn’t do things the usual, conventional way; he disregards the rules we unthinkingly live by, like how to go about getting a job, and makes up his own. He assumes that strangers will want to be helpful. (“Everyone is amazing,” he says, “it’s just up to you to find out.”) I love this. Especially since he seems to make it work.

I don’t know about Rhonda Byrne, but I’d sure love to be more like Pablo.

How long until I can work here? Until I can live here? Until I can be your girl? Mind if I crash on your sofa — in Tokyo?

I don’t have money, but I have love in my heart.

Is the answer yes, or yes?