AN ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE : A SPIRITUAL MESSAGE
by Paul Schroeder
paranormal,alien abduction, hauntings, ghosts, demons, aliens, supernatural
by Paul Schroeder
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by Paul Schroeder
Since sex is less than five or ten percent of a marriage, those who marry just for sex, find
imposing reasons later on in the relationship, to not confine sex, within the parameters
of their marriage, but remain as faithful, as their options and opportunities.
Women wander sexually, as well, as statistics reveal, that every other wife strays to
another’s arms, for love making.
I thought that women had it better than men and that if I were a woman, without
any love, that I’d be down at the docks, with no underwear, waiting for the fleet to come in, my skirt pulled over my head.
But, today, much older and jaded, I’m a cheap date, for myself, and even after sexy-self-
love, I don’t even take myself out to dinner or to a movie..
More and more women today, say aloud, that they “don’t need any man, anymore, even
for sex, but that they DO need men , sometimes, but then, ONLY, to lift and move, heavy things around…
Sex, is forever something that parents are loathe to discuss with their children; when I
was a child of seven, they mentioned the fearful danger of sex, saying, “not to play
around with sex, because it was,”playing with fire.”
At seven years old, I recall thinking:
But one who marries, just for sex, is buying a 747 jet, just for the little bag of peanuts.
Surely, there’s other ways to get peanuts, if that’s all that you really want.
Men are more juvenile in primitive sexual drives and emotional makeup, and women
are indeed, far better human beings, providential, sensitive, charitable, strong and beautiful.
This DNA primate difference can be demonstrated.
Equality, in mutual passion, is easier to demonstrate:
When a cop on the beat encounters a young couple making love in the tall grass, in a
park, he does NOT tap their shoes with his nightstick to angrily demand:
Progress will eventually turn HIStory, into HERstory.
Women remain naive and not the least bit aware of men’s glandular functioning
concepts towards all women.
At a party or wedding,
deep within men’s psyches.
For women, few rarely grasp that their public dancing, is clearly nothing but public,
overt, symbolic sex.
Most cultures associate ” beauty”, with a simple more precise symmetry, of the face,
where perfection is a mirror image of both sides of the face.
We equate physical beauty with inner goodness, which has allowed nice-featured and
handsome psychopaths like Ted Bundy and Jefferey Dalmer to serial (successful) murder
so many duped women and duped so many gay men .
Men are suckers for a pretty (merely perfectly symmetrical) face and will sacrifice
marriage, family and children for a dalliance with one..
Each solitary, individual feature on your face always stays its birth shade and original color.
Methinks, that If men wore makeup, most would be disconcertingly prettier than many women.
You can always wear shorts despite how awful your legs do look.
Your last name, regardless of marital -legal battles, stays put.
People do not ever stare at your breasts and your nipples when you’re happily chatting with them.
Calorie intake and belly size are never a crucial consideration.
You always have the consummate and total freedom of choice about the growing of a mustache.
You don’t have to remove all of your clothes just to pee.
You can wake up just as attractive as you were when you went to bed, rather than have
your beauty somehow deteriorate, during the night.
Woman, as the pretty sex, is a relatively new idea:
Throughout the animal world, whether it flies or swims, the male is STILL the colorful
sex, the female, the drab one.
But since the eighteenth century, sexual and cultural reversals have oddly persisted in
human affairs, and women instead have become the pretty sex.
But “pretty” means, slim and skinny, as fashion dictates.
Straight men, do not adorn themselves towards being highly polished- exceptions exist
for politicians, actors, sports-stars, head gangsters, and police detectives, for within these
men, narcissism, a sinful sense of entitlement, and monumental ego all loom.
‘Beauty’ television commercials and ‘beauty’ magazine ads feature graphics of highly
curried women, extolling Western society’s virtues of vacuous, narcissistic women, who
gaze back at us, made over into a man’s surreal vision of what ‘beauty’ should look like..
In Maine, at a lobster restaurant, I went to the register to pay and behind the counter,
opening the register, was a tall, strikingly handsome, buxom woman, in a formal
ballgown who sported a large handlebar mustache.
Men perpetrate this hoax until they themselves believe it.
In truth, a woman is as sexy in bed as that woman was interesting, before bed, and interesting, after bed.
(“No man ever reached up a woman’s skirt, looking for her library card”)
Joan Rivers
But, for many non-self-respecting men, it’s all just about a woman’s exterior patina, and veneer towards sex.
Yes, men are more shallow than one would imagine, more vain than women and more
duplicitous in satisfying their overwhelming hormonal drives.
Women thus feel that loss of beauty means loss of love, and then rush off to plastic
surgeons, for tits and ass augmentation, nose jobs and liposuction, mascara and eyeliner
alert, to avoid NOT being a love object..
REAL beauty emanates ONLY from within, something not taught in our culture, where
women spend very much time on their outsides and little or no time spent, on their ‘insides’…
Women at an early age learn what dizzying effects their bodies have on men, and men’s
sex drive, and use THAT against them ; women culturally have been taught guile and
deceit from a tender age, to ‘trap a man’, by using their physical, sexual allure:
They shave armpits,
shave legs and mustaches,
dye their hair,
use eye-liner,
face makeup,
(“Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald
head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy”)
foundation-makeup,
earrings,
tints of rouge blush,
sport uplift brassieres,
apply perfumes,
go for Botox or plastic surgery to erase facial wrinkles,
install Hershey-kiss silicone fake breasts,
wear high heels,
designer fingernails,
contact lenses,
then, they meet a man,
and they want, …
“HONESTY!!”
Can such preoccupation with sexual camouflage avoid extra-marital diversion , and
allow longevity and truthfulness towards a meaningful marriage?
Many couples who have lasted together forever, don’t have to work hard, to get along in marriage’.
When George Burns and Gracie Allen were asked how they remained so in love after sixty years, he said:
I remember once being stopped and asked at Disneyland by a graying and aged couple,
to “photograph them”, for it was none other than their “fiftieth anniversary”.
I wondered what wisdom and marital advice they might share, for too many, marriages end sadly in divorce.
These too many short-term marriages, for too many men, seemed to me, just like a tornado:
in the beginning, there’s a lot of sucking and blowing , and later on … you lose the house.
Whatever happened to the romantic woman and to the romantic man who said that they
could not live without each other?
He went East, and she went West… and they both lived.
My wife went over to speak with his wife to comment on how sweet they looked
together, but when
I returned the camera as he made his way over to me, I asked him the $500,000 lulu question:
“What’s the secret to being married, so successfully, for so long?”
He looked confidential and wise and peeked to see if his wife was engaged in
conversation before he spoke:
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Just before my grandmother on my mother’s side died at the age of 95, I whispered a kiss in her ear and thanked her for her wisdom.
One odd piece of advice, that she had taught me when I was a child, I had carried close to my inner ear, all of my life.
It had been an Independence Day warning, borne of a distant Russian wisdom, one that
she had whispered to me four decades ago, when I was nine or ten years old,
impressionable and the apple of her eye.
The imprecation that I got from her, the warning whispered in my small rapt ear when I
was nine or ten years old had been an odd warning that had ruled and had guided my life, and through raw angst, had come to define a larger part, of what I called my soul.
Now, she at ninety-five was far from that woman who in giving advice could be ironic and poetical.
She had used lipstick as a rouge to color her cheeks and then decided that her whole face was of a pallor that also needed color, rubbed lipstick all over her face.
She was quite a shock when I got onto the seventh floor of the retirement home and
turned the corner and saw her sitting in a wheelchair, as though apparently waiting for me.
She earnestly asked with a childlike innocence if I could bring her some new makeup
and some big diamond jewelry for her to wear to dress herself up, when I visited her next?
Cautiously, I had asked her, skeptically dubious ;”What type of diamond jewelry?” She had said;
“Expensive, fancy jewelry.”
She labored under the delusion that she was in a hotel in Miami, one that slouched in basic standards;
“The meals at this hotel are terrible, but what is a person to do?”
She did not ever surmise herself to be in a nursing home near the beach in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
A person’s senior mind can lend a type of psychic anesthesia that acts in many ways to
protect it from uncompromising and painful truths. .
Now I was an odd adult.
I wanted her to know that I loved her, how her whisper had returned years later as my gratitude.
I had loved to cherish ideas; a rare few philosophers had touched my early soul .
Dr. Seuss had barely competed with grandma.
But, he wrote :
“Be who you are and say what you think, because those who matter don’t
mind, and those who mind, don’t matter!”
My other odd philosopher was sitting here in her wheelchair, armed and propped with a
pillow/ alarm that would audibly alert nurses in the retirement home if she pitched
forward and left her chair’s upright fixed position.
She was different the next time I saw her, the way she used to be ;
” Hello, Paul; sharp as a matzoh and twice as crummy!”
“How come you don’t call your grandma more often? Humph!!”
“Humph;You going to wait until I’m in the cemetery and THEN you’ll visit me?”
“I’m sorry, that you’ll be sorry, but THEN it’ll be too late!”
This was the same verbatim greeting that I had gotten from her over the years over the
telephone . I presumed that I was calloused to it all.
It always deeply riddled me with guilt but I never let her know, but instead I saw it
rather as a good sign that she was still feeling feisty.
When she successfully aimed ring-toss-Velcro-guilt in my direction, I rationalized, she
must be feeling much better.
I quickly tried to change the subject to refocus her mind.
” Grandma, I remember that boardwalk, we can see
here in Brighton Beach from a time when you were fifty years old and I was about nine
years old, on the Fourth of July fireworks and I still remember the good advice that you
gave me, back then.”
“What advice did I give you?”
I told her.
It had stayed with me for many years as a token of her wisdom.
“You brought me to you on a bench on that boardwalk, in Coney Island, on a hot 4th of
July afternoon, when the whole family was there suddenly hugging and kissing each other,
“Don’t get too close to people; you’ll catch their dreams,” You told me.
“What?”, she said, so I told her again;
“Don’t get too close to people; you’ll catch their dreams.”
“OH!”, she said,”I am VERY sorry, if I ever told you that!.”
“I AM very sorry.”
I reminded her, however, what an impact she’d had on me then.
“That whisper, as a recommended life philosophy, was both poetry and true and that,
your advice, really stayed deeply with me.”
Taken to heart, it had allowed me to remain aloof and separate from everyone, as a type
of self protection, to preserve my OWN dream.
She looked at me as though I were some stranger in a dream.
I said it, again;
“Don’t get too close to people, you’ll catch their dreams.”
She was thoughtful and then looked worried.
“I never told you THAT.” …
“You shouldn’t get too close, because…”
“Germs”, she said.
” I said that you’ll catch their GERMS.”
“I told you and your sister MANY times;
“Don’t get too close to people, ’cause you’ll catch their GERMS.” she said, again.
That wrong belief had overshadowed every relationship in my life with an ambivalence
and a craving to just be left alone.
If one was alone, one was safe from the awful things that loving people could do to you, I
had always reasoned.
But, I had been running away from my own shadow.
One marriage and a dozen influenza later, I had realized her truth, too late.
The expression,”serial killer”, denotes the word, ‘serial’, which means, successful killer .
Ted Bundy said that he often wore his arm in a sling to perfectly trap random
compassionate women, who traveled to his car door to assist him with his theatrical
‘struggle’ with packages.
These outgoing, caring women were brutally clubbed into his trunk for later torture.
Serial murderers who instead of passion, kill in ‘cold blood’, and do not know their
victims, beforehand, for they kill randomly, purposefully moving from town to town, city
to city, without any remote tinge of latent regret or accumulative feelings of guilt.
Unlike a murder of marital or organized crime Mafia passion, there is no plan for a pre-
dug grave or a methodical bother to dismember the corpse.
They make no attempt to hide the bodies of their victims.
They stop on a deserted road and open the hood of their car to flag down a helpful
motorist to kill them with a gun.
Back into the victim’s stolen car, in the next town,
they lure a child into a car by asking them to help find a lost puppy or by offering them a
kitten from a box of kittens, which disarms any child, and then stab the child to death.
Later that night, they stop at a truck stop to pick up a prostitute to then strangle her
afterwards leaving her body on the side of the road.
They remember to be most careful to use a different method of murder, each time to
confuse police efforts from various jurisdictions, from establishing an M. O. pattern
that links random killings into a single silhouette, the fingerprint of a singular serial murderer.
Interstate highways lend a unique anonymous isolation to the mentality that serial
killers love and use:
Truck-stops are high risk areas, as are truckers, themselves, and especially long off-
ramps are over represented with highway murder deaths, a study of murder statistics show.
A big, friendly, helpful smile, or a helpful assist from a total stranger, is the last thing one
will ever see and one will never see it coming, the guise of
serial killer psychopaths .
These serial killer psychopaths travel from state to state blithely killing random people,
leaving corpses on roadsides the way that we leave cigarette butts, without a single afterthought ,
psychopaths who from childhood, have had their consciences, all of their lives, sit in the
corner, like a well trained German Shepard .
Serial killers enter
back into this harsh world without a written ‘blueprint’, without spirit helpers and
without protecting angels and
do again return to become serial murderers, and
It is good advice that one should avoid them, sidestep them, and never attempt to tackle them head on.
But one CAN recognize and survive an encounter with such a serial killer predator, by
taking careful notes from serial murderers who have explained their ‘trade-craft’
” Trust your intuition:
Do not ignore your instincts or intuition.
You have likely recognized something indefinite that spells out danger, and your mind
has not caught up with your recognition – you do not yet perceive how to dissect it
logically.
This is intuition.
If something does not feel right, then it is not right.
Never ignore such inklings; do not be embarrassed to change your mind in front of a
stranger or have fear of being rude.
It’s better to be rude than dead.
Under no circumstances get into the Car:
Once victims get into the car, few return alive and are later found dead at a secondary
crime scene.
Whether you’re helping some stranger carry a package to the car, being offered a ride, or
having someone else near your car, they can all end with you being murdered.
The presence of a baby seat or children’s toys in the vehicle – or even children
themselves- are tools that a serial killer uses to mentally disarm victims.
The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, once returned to a body dump site to have sex
with the corpse of one of his victims while his son slept in the vehicle.
– Serial Killer Warning Signs of Entrapment-:
A Pretended injury/weakness:
The murderer makes a huge effort to let you know that he is physically weaker than you.
He may stumble and drop packages
“Please help me carry this to my car. Ever since my spine injury, I can hardly move.”
He may wear a cast or walk with a cane in the Ted Bundy method, to trap his victim.
Too much information:
The murderer will give you too much unnecessary, detailed information:
“My sister has a sweater just like that. She was living in California but she moved home
last year. Her boyfriend gave it to her for Christmas, but afterward they broke up …”
When such a serial murderer is telling a lie, though it sounds credible to you, he often
has little confidence in his talking-trap method and will tend to add too much detail,
more than necessary to support it.
This ruse of details makes a serial murderer seem less a stranger and appear more
familiar than he really is.
The un requested promise:
“Just one drink and then I will take you home, I swear!”, when you never asked him to
promise you anything.
Sudden unsolicited promises can be a sign of an underlying sinister agenda.
Friendly authority:
The stranger projects some kind of non threatening authority:
“I’m the security guard/ the park ranger/ a police officer.”
“You didn’t see the signs; this is closed. I’ll escort/drive you out of here.”
‘You shouldn’t be alone here; we are on the lookout for a serial killer in this
neighborhood. Get in and I’ll drive you out of here.”
No law enforcement official would tell you that there was a serial killer, for
they avoid giving outside knowledge TO ANYONE of an ongoing case for media
avoidance purposes.
Some serial killers come tricked out with police identification and police-like vehicles.
Insist that he call a uniformed backup if you did nothing wrong but are being “arrested.”
Challenging your personality:
The killer labels you, in a critical way, hoping that you will attempt to prove them wrong,
“You’re too weak to help me lift this box into the back of my van.”
“You’re not frightened of me, are you?”
Teaming:
Often a killer will manipulate you to “team up” with him.
You and he instantly become a “we” – “I hate drinking alone, I know a great place we can
go to up the road.”
“I’m going there too, we can get there in my car.”
This attempt to bond with you is a way to quickly establish a familiarity.
Imposed obligation:
A serial killer will impose his help on you, hoping that you will feel obligated to help him back.
“Let me help you carry that to your car” will lead to “Can you give me a lift to the corner?”
You leave your home to find your tire flat.
“Let me change that flat tire for you” will be followed by “May I come inside to wash my
hands?”
But he WAS the one who punctured the tire in the first place.
Having already accepted his help, he hopes that you feel bad enough to refuse a request like that.
Once inside, you’re a murder victim.
An appeal to a feeling of being vulnerable:
“Help me find my lost puppy before it gets away too far.”
“I need to drop off this medicine to an elderly person upstairs, but I can’t legally park
here; just come and sit in my car while I run in for five minutes?”
“My little girl is missing, will you help find her?”
– Not taking,” no”, for an answer-A classic murderer’s tool.
No matter how many times you say, “That’s okay, I don’t need your help,” the stranger insists on helping you.
If you give some weak excuse or sound unsure, he will persist.
Do not be afraid to be loudly blunt and rude: “I said, NO! Go away! I do not want your
help!.”
Many are loquacious and charming, but it’s only a ‘tool’ to conceal a demonic intent:
“I’m the most cold-blooded sonofabitch you’ll ever meet,” said Ted Bundy.
“I just liked to kill, I wanted to kill.”
The signature symptom of the psychopath is his inability to see others as worthy of
compassion.
Victims thus become dehumanized, “flattened into worthless objects in the murderer’s mind”.
John Gacy, who never showed an ounce of remorse, called his victims “worthless little
queers and punks,” while the “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe declared that he was
“cleaning up the streets” of ‘ human trash’
All of these killings were managed with an initial charming smile, a smile carefully
contrived, before a lethal knife or hammer fell.
Would YOU have easily fallen, do you suppose, for one of these “tricks of the trade”?
Would you have been naturally leery enough to survive such tactics or would you be
clearly very prone to an evil stranger’s charm and closeness, to become yet another murder victim?
And many rare victims who survived later said, “But, he was so sweet!”
Sweetness, is not the same as being sweet.
Sweetness can be used as a deadly manipulative tool.
A charming smile can mask the most evil intentions.
Once one is alerted to these uniform techniques employed by many
incarcerated successful, serial murderers, one can teach one’s spouse, one’s children,
one’s colleagues and one’s easily duped friends, to be much less trusting, to raise their
fence higher, around themselves, to prevent them from becoming the next victims of
a murderer.
One must teach one’s loved ones to be immediately suspect, of any close-hand
encounter with a stranger, who pretends a stance of authoritarianism, need, or one
warmly disarmingly charming, widely used tactics that serial killers rely on.
An approaching car, one that passes close by you, while you are out walking late, in an
abandoned hour, or in an empty place like a deserted parking lot, could easily spell such an unplanned
death.
One must be taught, instead, to be poised to bolt, to be alarmed by any car’s or person’s
close proximity to one, in a lonely place and moment, and to lose one’s sense of blind
trust, of one’s presumed safety with a total stranger.
The suspicious always appears “ordinary”, until suddenly, it isn’t.
Can anything be done to change and redeem such serial killers’ dark minds and souls?
Capital punishment for such murderers is spiritually counter-intuitive, because after
physical death, they linger on this plane and join together with dark others, to
accomplish yet more evil than they ever could have done, when they were alive.
Only God can and will “shift” them, in His own time,
but until such time,
don’t talk to strangers..
by
Must one be crazy to dance,
publicly ?
I thought long and hard about that statement, approached it from different angles of thought and pondered it.
Orthodox Hasidim Jews, believe that wild dance, ensemble, is a way to approach sublime Divine attainment, most tribal and ancient.
Is it the case that
those who were deaf, could not hear the music and thus thought the dancers insane?
What makes a person gyrate sexually in front of strangers? I finally accept that dancing is publicly symbolic sex, with the exception of Lambada, which IS sex, most graphic in public.
Lap dances and belly dances enthrall men as consummate sex fantasies unfurled, and these reside deep within our psyches.
Men who routinely go to “topless” bars to watch naked women dance, harbor a wild and degrading fantasy, an addictive stimulant, that seems just as unwholesome as public sexual gyrations to music.
But sex, in public?!
Why do you think that men are so very willing to buy ladies drinks?!
“On-stage dance takes from sexuality practices “off-stage” and imaginatively stylizes them and possibly reinforces or challenges these practices that include expressions of sexual identity and attraction, flirtatiousness, friendliness, exhibitionism, eroticism, and love-making.”
(Hanna, Journal of Sex Research / March-June, 2010 )
Would one who is a Buddhist and contemplative, dance or would he resist the impulse as unabashed sexy exhibitionism?
After all, what is,”sanity”, if “no sane man dances”?
Drinking alcohol during a “cocktail hour”, before public dancing at such affairs may assist the temporary insanity inherent to very public sexual gyrations called dance.
Sexual unabashed exhibitionism?
I can often resist the impulse to publicly gyrate, or to circle dance or line dance amidst a large group of people by recalling Twain’s sentence.
But, if dance is truly symbolic sex, the horizontal mambo, then group dancing brings to mind another quote:
“Sex between two people can be a wonderful thing, among ten people, it’s just fabulous!”
(Woody Allen)
To me, having unabashed multiple polygamous sexual partners is demonstrated by line dancing.
Dancing in public, however symbolically obscene in its blatant sexual gyrations, is not likely to expose one to HIV or STDs.
For one like me who will not dance, I wonder about the biological absurdity of dance and of sex, for many species have dance-specific mating rituals wherein if the dance is wrong, the mating doesn’t happen..
There has to be a more dignified way of expressing your deep love and affection for another human being, because despite our spirituality,
the human body is a odd marvel, in that it has its waste disposal plant, immediately next to its amusement park.
But these days, older and more jaded,
I’m a cheap date, for myself, and even after sexy-self-love, I don’t even take myself out to dinner or to a movie..
“Want to dance?”
Since public dance is blatantly sexual and thus, embarrassing, in public,
I and Twain, shall instead, sit this one out.
IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES, CAMOUFLAGE PREVAILS
“Sex is not the answer.
Just before my grandmother on my mother’s side died at the age of 95, I whispered a kiss in her ear and thanked her for her wisdom.
One odd piece of advice, that she had taught me when I was a child, I had carried close to my inner ear, all of my life.
It had been an Independence Day warning, borne of a distant Russian wisdom, one that she had whispered to me four decades ago, when I was nine or ten years old, impressionable and the apple of her eye.
The imprecation that I got from her, the warning whispered in my small rapt ear when I was nine or ten years old had been an odd warning that ruled and guided my life, and through angst, had come to define a larger part of what I called my soul.
Now, She at ninety-five was far from that woman who in giving advice could be ironic and poetical.
She had used lipstick as a rouge to color her cheeks and then decided that her whole face was of a pallor that also needed color, rubbed lipstick all over her face.
She was quite a shock when I got onto the seventh floor of the retirement home and turned the corner and saw her sitting in a wheelchair, as though apparently waiting for me.
She earnestly asked with a childlike innocence if I could bring her some new makeup and some big diamond jewelry for her to wear to dress herself up, when I visited her next?
Cautiously, I had asked her, skeptically dubious ;”What type of diamond jewelry?” She had said;
“Expensive, fancy jewelry.”
She labored under the delusion that she was in a hotel in Miami, one that slouched in basic standards;
“The meals at this hotel are terrible, but what is a person to do?”
She did not ever surmise herself to be in a nursing home near the beach in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
A person’s senior mind can lend a type of psychic anesthesia that acts in many ways to protect it from uncompromising and painful truths. .
Now I was an odd adult.
I wanted her to know that I loved her, how her whisper had returned years later as my gratitude.
I had loved to cherish ideas; a rare few philosophers had touched my early soul .
Dr. Seuss competed with grandma.
He once wrote ;”Be who you are and say what you think, because those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind, don’t matter!”
My other odd philosopher was sitting here in her wheelchair, armed and propped with a pillow/ alarm that would audibly alert nurses in the retirement home if she pitched forward and left her chair’s upright fixed position.
She was different the next time I saw her, the way she used to be ;
” Hello, Paul; sharp as a matzoh and twice as crummy!”
“How come you don’t call your grandma more often? Humph!!”
“Humph;You going to wait until I’m in the cemetery and THEN you’ll visit me?”
“I’m sorry, that you’ll be sorry, but THEN it’ll be too late!”
This was the same verbatim greeting that I had gotten from her over the years over the telephone . I presumed that I was calloused to it all.
It always deeply riddled me with guilt but I never let her know, but instead I saw it rather as a good sign that she was still feeling feisty.
When she successfully aimed ring-toss-Velcro-guilt in my direction, I rationalized, she must be feeling much better.
I quickly tried to change the subject; ” Grandma I remember that boardwalk we can see here in Brighton Beach from a time when you were fifty years old and I was about nine years old; I still remember the good advice that you gave me back then.”
“What advice did I give you?”
I told her.
It had stayed with me for many years as a token of her wisdom.
“You brought me to you on a bench on that boardwalk, in Coney Island, on a hot 4th of July afternoon, when the whole family was there suddenly hugging and kissing each other, happy for once, to be all together and happy seeing the fireworks, and then you whispered it in my ear:
“Don’t get too close to people; you’ll catch their dreams,” You told me.
“What?”, she said, so I told her again;
“Don’t get too close to people; you’ll catch their dreams.”
“Oy!”, she said,”I am VERY sorry, if I ever told you that.”
“I am very sorry.”
I reminded her what an impact she’d had on me then.
“That whisper, as a recommended life philosophy, was both poetry and true and that, your advice, really stayed deeply with me.”
She was thoughtful and then looked worried.
“I never told you that.” …
“You shouldn’t get too close, because…”
“Germs”, she said.
“Oy, I said that you’ll catch their GERMS.”
“I told you and your sister MANY times;
“Don’t get too close to people, ’cause you’ll catch their GERMS.” she said, again.
“That advice, I ALWAYS told you.”
“And YOU’RE supposed to be the smart one?!”
“Oy,” she groaned in pain.
” Take me over to the dining room; it’s still too early for the lunch, but I want to get there anyway, early.”
That wrong belief had overshadowed every relationship in my life with an ambivalence and a craving to just be left alone.
If one was alone, one was safe from what people could do to you, I had always reasoned.
But, I had been running from my own shadow..
Two marriages and a dozen influenzae later, I had realized her truth too late.