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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
Are
You in Denial? Probably.
But There’s No Way I Am!
Just about everyone’s in denial these days, if you believe the media. Google the word and you’ll get close to 4.5 million hits. Enter “Bush in denial” and you’ll get 414,000 hits. “Clinton in denial” brings you 230,000. “Vanishing cream for the mind” English writer Jeremiah Creedon calls it. Psychology Today senior editor Daniel Goleman gives it another name: lacuna, a psychological blind spot, a hole in our attention, a gap in our self-awareness. It’s beholding the mote in your brother’s eye, says the Bible, while disregarding the beam in your own. It’s keeping from ourselves secrets we already know. It’s choosing to forget what we can’t bear to remember. It’s making people tell us what we need to hear so we can keep on believing the lies we’ve told ourselves. And keep punishing those who dare make us listen to the truth. A sure sign you’re in denial is to overreact when someone accuses of it.
Familiar words of denial:
“I
was only obeying orders.”
“This strength comes in the form of courage, trust, resilience
and self-esteem,” Willis explains. “And it’s built through
our interactions with others – friends, relatives, a counselor or minister
-- people in whom we can start to confide some of the aspects of our lives
we can no longer can deny desperately need attention.”
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
Who’ll
Choose If You Live or Die
When You Can’t Decide for Yourself?
| “Kill me,” I’ve instructed
my daughter Madeline. In a living will, that is. “ Just let me die,” might be a better way to put it. Maybe I’d better explain. I’ve designated my oldest child as the primary plug-puller in a document that will make life-or-death decisions for me when I’ve lost the ability to do it for myself. Formally called an Advance Directive, a living will can’t request inappropriate or illegal medical treatment. It simply allows your primary physician and your designated “health care representative” to take your wishes into account when you’re too far gone to speak for yourself. In short, you pick the people you trust to make the critical choices you’d make yourself -- instead of leaving them to self-serving strangers. In blunt, clear-cut language, a living will asks you to choose whether or not you want to receive tube-feeding or life-support when you’re near death, terminally unconscious, in the advance stages of a fatal illness or experiencing extraordinary, permanent suffering.
I
read where British nurse Frances Polack went a step further by having “Do
Not Resuscitate” tattooed on her chest.
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
The
Bird Herder: The Redemptive Value
Of Work Done for Its Own Sake
| The ad caught my eye three months after
my Australian shepherd died of cancer at the age of eight: “Sweetheart
Border collie, 4-yr-old Halley, would like attentive and active owner. Free
to great home.” I clipped it out of the paper but struggled with calling
the listed number, torn between wanting to fill the void Buddy’s death
had left in my life and the fear that another dog would only deepen my huge
feeling of loss. I didn’t want another dog, I told myself, I wanted Buddy. And if I couldn’t have him back, I didn’t want another dog to remind me how much I missed him. But a voice in my head kept insisting, “Different dog, different love. You need both in your life again.” Five days later, I finally made the call. The responding voice-mail told me to leave my name, phone number and a brief message. “If you haven’t found that great home for Halley,” I mumbled into the receiver, “I’d like to offer mine.” That evening I heard back from Jeff Hathaway, the man who’d placed the ad. “I’ve talked to two dozen people and have nine more to call,” he told me, “but I got right back to you because you’re one of only two people who said her name. The rest just referred to her as ‘the dog.’” Halley was rescued from an animal shelter as a pup, Jeff revealed when we met in Portland for my interview with man and dog. Three of her four previous owners, he said, had lived in city apartments, one in a house with no yard, the last a single, working mother with three children who’d returned Halley to him after four months. Largely ignored for most of her life, she’d become listless and abjectly submissive, flopping onto her back at first touch, even a stranger’s, her tail wagging dutifully, not in a paroxysm of canine joy but as part of a reflexive ritual to ingratiate herself against further harshness and rejection. “When you get her home,” Jeff cautioned, “she’ll try to sleep all day. Don’t let her. She needs all the attention you can give her. And she needs to be outside, running.” He paused, as if searching for the exact right words, then added sadly, “She’s lost her…dogness.” Halley found it again on the remote Pacific Northwest beach to which I brought her. Here, she’s rediscovered herself, her reason for being and with it all the passion, motivation, reverence for work and compulsion to succeed so characteristic of her magnificent breed. As human beings, I suspect, Border collies would be obsessive-compulsive, workaholic control-freaks, incapable of play and exhausting to be with. As dogs, however, they’re sensitive, intelligent, delightful, passionate partners who provide daily inspiration, motivation and joy. The difference between them and us is everything they do is motivated purely by love. Slowly at first, then inexorably and completely, Halley surrendered to the primal voice inside her. “This is your work,” it whispered. “This is what you do better than any man or breed of dog ever created. It’s what you must do to respect and fulfill yourself.” And she began herding the only creatures available to her at the beach -- the coveys and clusters of sea gulls and sandpipers patrolling the shoreline of her sandy turf. I watch her in fascination: the mincing prance sinking to the distinctive, crouching trot before the explosive, lunging run -- every movement a focused, determined effort. She comes to me for an occasional pat and reassuring “Good girl, Halley,” then she’s off again at full-throttle. If I didn’t stop her, I tell myself, she would die working. Halley never reaches the birds before careening them skyward in widening plumes that quickly resettle in the endless surf. To them, she’s a temporary nuisance. To her, they are the instrument of her salvation.
She’s become sort of a role-model for me – daily
affirmation that work done to the best of our ability brings dignity, grace
and real meaning to our lives. Politicians and employers could learn a lot
from her about the dignity of work done for its own sake. Of its redemptive
value to the human spirit.
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
Are
You Packing for Your Trip of a Lifetime?
| Trust me on this, “So how do you
feel about dying?” is not a good conversational gambit on first dates.
In fact, no social occasion comes to mind where a discussion of our incredibly
shrinking future would be greeted with much enthusiasm. For most of us, enjoying life means disavowing its natural conclusion. “We have a long history of avoiding the subject,” affirms Greg Palmer, author of “Death: The Trip of a Lifetime” and producer of the PBS series by the same name. Death is still a word that sticks in our throats, confirmed a May 2000 survey sponsored by the National Hospice Foundation. More than a quarter of the 1,250 American adults 40 years and older the study interviewed indicated they weren’t likely to discuss a mother’s or father’s impending death with that parent. Fewer than 25 percent, the survey also revealed, have put into writing how they’d like to be cared for when they’re dying. And only 36 percent have talked to someone about their wishes on the subject. Nearly half said they’d rely on family or friends to make end-of-life decisions for them -- but many still hadn’t talked to anyone about their desires. What’s more, while 18 percent of the respondents indicated they weren’t likely to discuss safe sex with their children, 28 percent said they probably wouldn’t bring up the impending death of their parents with their children. But it’s a dialogue we should initiate with ourselves and those closest to us, the sooner the better. Unless a drastic change of attitude is effected, the needs of the dying will continue to go unmet, notes Karen Davie, previous president of the National Hospice Foundation. The problem will increase as the number of U.S. seniors doubles over the next 30 years, predicts Davie. Still, it’s comforting to regard our trip of a lifetime as something we can put off indefinitely, even if our denial gets harder every year we get older and each loved one who passes on. On those rare occasions when we actually ponder death, the tendency is to view the occasion as an indefinite encounter with a formidable but gullible pest. As implacable as the grim geaper appears in Ingmar Bergman's classic film, “The Seventh Seal,” he’s diverted from his morbid mission, if only for a while. The medieval knight for whom he has come challenges the king of terrors to a game of chess. They play. The knight loses and he, his squire and their friends die. But later death is tricked into sparing the lives of a family of roving actors. Why not just ignore that pale rider until the dreaded moment he sidles up? For two reasons, one having to do with dying a good death, the other with living a good life, both inextricably joined. Staring death in the eye keeps us squarely in the present. It makes us question our priorities, prods us into doing things we might otherwise put off. It turns the pessimistic phrase, “Life is short,” into a rallying cry for maximum effort and sustained passion in the time remaining to each of us. It puts our priorities into proper perspective, makes us question life’s signposts we’ve followed blindly and leads us down more spiritual paths As one woman put it after walking away from a high-stress job with good benefits, “I didn’t want a tombstone that reads, ‘She was miserable, but she had a great dental plan.’” Not that I propose sitting around contemplating how it feels not to exist. For one thing, it’s impossible to imagine. Your ego won’t permit it: “The world without me -- unthinkable!” All you’ll do is give yourself a headache. But if accepting the naturalness, the inevitability, even the imminence of death, keeps us from wasting life, this is a good thing, isn’t it? Even if you shouldn't bring it up on first dates.
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
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It’s
No Laughing Matter: People Are Too Serious
| The other day I asked my friend, Alberto
Terego, what he feared most in life. Expecting him to reply “Death”
or “Alzheimer’s” or “Growing old in America,” even
“Republicans,” I was flabbergasted when he said, "Humorless
people.” Noting my surprise, Terego added, “Most of the misery in the world is caused by people with no sense of humor.” “How do you figure that?” I asked him. “Because they wind up taking themselves too seriously, which makes them mean and unhappy,” he replied. “If all the emperors, kings, dictators and presidents throughout history had been able to laugh at themselves, there would have been no wars, for one thing.” Ignoring my obvious incredulity, Terego went on: “If politicians had a sense of humor, there would be no bureaucrats, no red tape, no long lines in government offices.“ "There would be fewer laws, less crime, no world hunger. If corporate heads had a sense of humor, there would be no price-gouging, no rampant greed, no obscene profits. Well, maybe a few angry stockholders, but those with a sense of humor would soon get over it. Humorlessness causes couples to divorce, families to become estranged, friends to part, governments to fail.” “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,” I retorted, the veins in my temple starting to throb. Terego seemed amused. “People who can’t experience joy wind up trying to fill their hollow parts with material things, to convince themselves they’re happy,” he continued. “And the emptier they feel, the harder they work so they can buy more stuff to fill up the emptiness when all they have to do is learn how to laugh again. At themselves, in particular.” I was so upset, I couldn’t come up with an answer. Terego didn’t wait for one. “Let me ask you something,” he went on. “How much unhappiness in your life has been caused by taking yourself too seriously?”
He had me there.
I’ve often thought how much happier I would have been if
I hadn’t tried so hard to impress other people. And that came, I know,
from taking myself too seriously. If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s someone who doesn’t take himself seriously. Or me. |
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
Be
kind to curmudgeons – you may be one yourself
| I like curmudgeons. I admire them. In
fact, I regard myself as one, even though, as Jon Winokur points out,
you’re not a curmudgeon – or a writer, for that matter – until
someone else says you are. I think my youngest son became one before the age of 30, the predictable result of massive force-feedings of the story of man in his pursuit of a Ph.D. in American history. Reading too much, too soon, of our track record on earth would make a cynic out of anyone, I'm afraid. Fortunately, Andy’s perusals have turned him into a champion of the underdog as well, another inevitability of his historical studies, particularly his studies of our conquest of the American West. “Curmudgeons are like sumo wrestlers -- it takes a long time and a lot of abuse to make one,” says Jon Winokur, editor and compiler of The Portable Curmudgeon, a collection of quotes from world-class grouches. I decided I’d joined their ranks when I found myself applauding much of what they said. Dictionaries allude to curmudgeons as old men: cantankerous codgers, irascible coots, churlish geezers. But ours is a state of mind rather than age or gender (Nancy Witford, Fran Lebowitz, Dorothy Parker and Katherine Hepburn are among its hall-of-famers) -- and “a perfectly valid response,” in Winokur’s opinion, “to an increasingly exasperating world.” Most people find curmudgeons irritating because they insist on telling the truth as they see it. After a lifetime of biting their tongues because their jobs and careers, their public personas and domestic tranquility have relied on their forced equanimity, putting a sock in it no longer works for them. They tell the truth because they have to, because it’s become crucially important to them and as natural as it was when they were children. The fact that no one cares to listen is inconsequential. Curmudgeons send letters to editors of magazines and newspapers. A lot of them write columns, too. What curmudgeons don’t realize, however, is that most people can’t handle the truth, not when it comes from others. The truth is something we need to find for ourselves, to figure out in our own hearts, to hear directly from God on long walks at the beach.
What’s more, one person’s truth may not be another’s
and vice versa. |
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
Keeping
the American Dream Basic:
Freedom from Want Is Call for Thanks
| Whenever I start to doubt the American
Dream, I go shopping at Costco. In this mercantile Mecca, it doesn’t take me long to recapture the warm, fuzzy feeling that God’s in his heaven, the Dow is still soaring, all’s right with the world. Brandishing the card of executive privilege that ushers me into the aisles of industrial-size products, I bask again in the warmth of middle-class well-being. Strolling past the state-of-the-art computers, digital cameras and cinema-screen TVs, I pause at the food-sampling tables tended by white-haired grandparents right out of Norman Rockwell kitchens. Watching the children with their upturned faces awaiting the next steamy batch of stuffed jalapenos or cream cheese poppers, I can’t help exclaiming, “Hey, kids, free food! Only in America! It doesn’t get any better than this!” At the bustling checkout counters, the banter of money-to-burn shoppers is similarly reassuring, for what better personification of our stranglehold on the good life than carefree folks buying stuff, big stuff, more stuff, lots of stuff. Yet it isn’t the steady procession of big-ticket items out the door into awaiting chrome-and-steel carriages that assures me the dream is alive and flourishing. It’s the abundance of food -- so much food it can actually be given away. And I depart with spirits uplifted, my faith in America’s unbridled future restored. But the glow fades when I pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV and see the fearful faces, particularly of children. As a first-generation immigrant, 50 years after reaching safe haven in this land of plenty, I identify more with the desperate faces in the media than the cheerful shoppers stocking their larders. It’s the lingering imprint, I fear, of having spent three childhood years in a World War II internment camp. My family was trapped in Manila by the invading Japanese forces following Pearl Harbor. Because of my father’s British citizenship, we were interned with several thousand citizens of other nations at war with Japan until the city’s liberation in mid-1945. To this day, my memories of those times are not of the danger, but of nagging hunger. Americans stand on a shrinking global stage, accused of demanding the lion’s share of everything, the biggest, the best, right now, regardless of the consequences to everyone else. So I work at keeping my American Dream basic. Mine remains the first-generation immigrant’s boilerplate version rather than the glitzier model blithely accepted by succeeding generations as their birthright. I did it when my children were young by admonishing them to take only the food they wanted, no more, no less, because once it reached their plates it would have to be finished. To waste food, they learned, was not permissible. I do it now by expressing my thanks whenever I feel the urge, usually while walking with my dog on the beach, where I most feel grateful. It’s the closest I’ve come to praying instead of reciting words I learned in a bygone catechism class. I do it for having taken for granted most of the good things that happened to me. By not feeling grateful, I realize, I squandered their goodness and promise. “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for this day. Thank you for my food, my home, the people who love me. “Thank you for my life.”
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
Keeping
A New Year's Wish:
May All Good Things Come to You. Finally
| Finally. I love that word. It’s my New Year's present to you. I know you’d rather have a gift certificate from Nordstrom or a new Land Rover, but I can’t afford it. Instead, I offer you something more precious: a simple word, one that’s taken me a lifetime to fathom and which I now treasure. I give it to you freely, with love, on this day of culmination and joy. Finally. Defined by Webster’s as that ultimate point, the eventual moment, arriving at long last, after much hardship and delay. Taken to heart as a guiding perspective, an essential attitude of living, it brims with hope and promise, becomes critical to every achievement, indispensable to all happiness. Finally, as in “Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.” The words are Teddy Roosevelt's, and their wisdom stayed with me for a lifetime before blossoming. Finally, as in “If not now, when?” the geezer’s motto I try to live by, which I offer you as well. If not now, when? To speak up, say what you really mean, stand for what you believe in, do the right thing. To indulge the passions you’ve only dreamed of, achieve what you’ve always yearned for. To get a life -- the one you somehow lost along the way. Finally, as in “Here and now.” Replacing “Someday.” Some call it mindfulness, living the moment with acute awareness: seeing, hearing, touching, feeling, savoring only the moment at hand because it is the only moment we can possess. The one before is gone forever; the next may never come. A woman I know practices mindfulness by pretending everything she does she’s doing for the last time. “When I’m talking to someone,” Helen Ng told me, “I pretend it’s the last time I’ll ever see or hear or speak to that person again. "It’s the last time I’ll be visiting this place or experiencing this particular pleasure. It’s the last chance I’ll have to do what has to be done, to say what needs to be said. "When this time passes, I tell myself, when this person leaves, when this chance is gone,it will never come again.” “Why such morbid thoughts?” I asked her. “It’s my way of not collecting any more regrets,” she replied. “By thinking to myself this opportunity may be my last, I won’t wait until it’s too late.” For what? “For whatever,” she answered. “To say ‘Thank you.’ Or ‘You did a good job.’ Or ‘You were right and I was wrong.’ Or ‘I’m sorry.’ Or ‘I love you.’ Whatever. "How many people allow their precious moments to pass because they think they’ll have others just like them? Too many of those moments don’t ever come again, and those unfulfilled moments are the stuff regrets are made of. "They come from wasting too much of our lives wanting something better, something different, something other than what we have at the moment we have it,” the 46-year-old Portland pharmacist concluded. Listening to Ng, I knew what she said was true. Most things distance themselves with time and space to slide off the edge of our consciousness and disappear forever, but not regrets. "You can shove them aside, disavow them for a lifetime, but they always return, which is why regrets are particularly poignant for the old, those of us who’ve used up most of the chances we’ll ever get and are left to make peace with our failed choices. There are no last chances in regrets. So my New Year's wish is that all good things come to you. Finally.
(This
essay is reprinted from the December 25, 2003 issue of The Oregonian, where
Lionel Fisher's column, PAST MERIDIAN, appears regularly. © Lionel L.
Fisher) |
PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
The
Secret to Being a Great Parent:
Don’t Have Children, Just Grandchildren
| “I’ve been poor and I’ve
been rich,” Sophie Tucker once said. “Rich is better.” My sentiments exactly, only in regard to parenting: I’ve been a father and I’ve been a grandfather. Grandfather is better. I base my opinion, mind you, not on the importance of the two roles, but on their relative degree of difficulty. And their vastly different potential for pleasure. My problem, I’ve come to realize, is that I took fatherhood too seriously. I thought it was my job to make my children the best they could be. I know now this was their responsibility. Mine was to love them, to shield them from harm, keep them from want. And try not to get in their way while they became the heroes they were meant to be. Something each of us has to do for ourselves. If someone else could do it for us, particularly our parents, what an amazing, if boring, world this would be. There’s something else I’ve come to realize: As a grandparent, I’m much better equipped to be a parent than I ever was as a parent. Back then, I viewed the job as an adult. Today, I see it from a much different perspective, from the viewpoint of a child. Shakespeare understood. “An old man,” he said, “is twice a child.” Edith Wharton put it this way: “The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood.” I know this for a fact. People have been reminding me of it lately. What better mentor, though, for a child to have than another child, one past meridian on the journey of life, greatly experienced in the ways of the world, yet still childlike in all things vital to happiness? There’s something else I’ve come to realize, sadly too late. Raising children imposes a stern obligation on parents to examine their own habits, scrutinize their own attitudes, question their own behavior, each day of their lives, for one critical reason: Their children will surely absorb them. Try or not -- like it or not -- we make chips off the old block. We can’t help it. We do it by being ourselves, sometimes with enormous consequences. Our “shadow side,” psychologist Carl Jung called all the negative elements we see in ourselves but steadfastly deny. They are the demons we stuff in the closets of our psyche and rationalize away, thinking we’ve safely hid them -- while we pass them along to our children. And what happens later? In a word, heartache. It’s a universal truth, says U.S. Catholic magazine writer Dolores Curran, that parents have difficulty relating with the children most like themselves because they see in their mirror offspring the things they dislike and repress in themselves. From my perch as a grandparent I now know if I could be a parent once more, I would not try to make my children the best they can be. It’s what kept me from enjoying them. I would relish and love them, marvel daily at their wonder and uniqueness, knowing the rest would take care of itself. That they would see to it themselves. So easily said as a grandparent. So hard to do as a parent. The young adult I was didn’t understand this simple, marvelous truth. The child I’m becoming again does.
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PAST
MERIDIAN
Lionel Fisher
________
The
Six Rules for Serenity that Don’t Cost a Dime
| Last month, Forbes magazine
published its annual list of international billionaires. And I wasn't on
it. Again. Darn! But no big deal. For most of my life, I based my emotional
security on possessions and people -- how much I owned and what others thought
of me. Now my serenity's all in my head. Guess that's why they call it peace
of mind. Whether or not you made Forbes' list this year, here are some tips on how to be serene, even when you're broke. All are based strictly on attitude -- how you choose to feel about what life hands you (especially when it isn't money): The way to get what you want is not to want it. Think back. How many of your sweetest dreams, your greatest desires, ever came true? On the other hand, how much of what you really didn't care about wound up happening anyway? Be grateful either way. Many more tears, you'll find, are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. Besides, wanting something too much turns a gift into a need and takes all the joy out of getting it. Co-dependent tennis is not a good game. In business as in sports and in life, when you serve the ball, someone ought to hit it back to you. If no one tries, the match should be over as far as you're concerned. Put your racket away, go home, find another game tomorrow. Stop returning your own serves, lobs and volleys. Don't play off your own energy, needs and desires. Quit kidding yourself. The 10-percenters will always be with us. A drill instructor gave me this rule for serenity at the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., where they took my soft, undisciplined body and turned it into a finely tuned war machine. "No matter how often and efficiently I put out the word," he snarled at me one blistering, sand-flea-infested afternoon, flaring nostrils and scalding breath centimeters from my quavering features, "10 percent of you motherless cretins won't get with the program. Just pray, boy, you're never one of them!" It's more of a 40 percent to 60 percent rule in today's world, but what my D.I. meant was that no matter how much one threatens, begs, bullies or cajoles any group of people into doing something, there will always be those who don't get with the program. Don't take it personally; it's one of life's imponderables, but factor the 10-percenters into everything you do, for they will always be with us. If it's not worth overdoing, don't bother. As an obsessive-compulsive personality, my lifelong motto has been, "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing." To which I've added the capper, "Or not worth doing at all." This ensures me enough time, energy and emotion to overdo everything on my extremely short list, to be passionate about whatever I choose to be doing. Know when to just walk away. Quit playing the could've/should've/ would've game. Do what you have to, then do what you can, then turn it over to a higher power, as the addiction-recovery folks refer to the simple act of just letting go. As the Beatles sang, "There will be an answer, let it be." Agonizing over your question won't change the answer, only make you miserable. So do it once and let it be. Why is that so hard to understand when we're young? It's not your job to fix anyone. But yourself, of course. Or to figure anyone else out. Give yourself permission not to have to figure out or fix anyone but you. You'll find it tremendously liberating. And you'll be doing the world a favor. I, for one, would be extremely grateful.
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(Read a review of Celebrating
Time Alone by Lionel Fisher)
(Read excerpts from
Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher)
(Past Meridian
- Read current column)
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lionel Fisher writes a self-syndicated lifestyle column for those he describes as “past meridian on the journey of life.” Spiritual in nature and often humorous, though with a realistic edge to them, a favorite theme of his entertaining essays is the need for us to find our happiness and fulfillment, life’s answers, in ourselves instead of steadfastly seeking it in others. He is the author of three self-help books, Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude (Beyond Words Publishing, 2001), On Your Own: A Guide to Working Happily, Productively and Successfully from Home (Prentice Hall, 1995) and The Craft of Corporate Journalism. To research his last book, Celebrating Time Alone, which records the emotional and spiritual triumphs of men and women who have found amazing grace alone, Fisher embarked on a cross-country journey in search of those he calls the new hermits: modern solitaires who have stretched their aloneness to Waldenesque proportions, achieving great emotional clarity in the process. He also spoke with their urban counterparts who, through necessity or choice, prefer to savor their individuality in smaller servings. A resident of Southwest Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula for the past 10 years, Fisher also writes a self-syndicated column on living well enough alone. He invites you to share your thoughts and feelings on your own voyage past meridian, as well as your insights and advice on being alone magnificently. Reach him at beachauthor@lycos.com. |
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