An Old Friend

An old friend came to visit today. Such joy. An old friend who knew me when we both were young. She scaled the stairs a bit slow this time, not the old Olympic contender swimmer as before. Her joints a bit achy. She arrived, but not out of breath. We embraced.

You look so much better than the last time! I confessed.

Thank you, she said.

We sat on my couch. She was once in love with me. I thought many of our contemporaries didn’t make into the third destiny. We called out the names of friends who passed away. It made us feel very special suddenly, like survivors guilt, how come we are still standing? After all we are still in the sixties, pushing seventy. Not so old if you think about it. Sixty-eight must be the new fifty-eight. Who knows? Doesn’t matter. We are here. Big smiles.

We must have more missions to accomplish, I remarked.

Yeah, I am not done either, she said.

We both had two sons, about the same age, it was great. We had play day, plus we had a date. The boys swimming in the pool at UCLA, and we flirting with each other on the terry cloths beach towels, doling out change to wet little boys to get something to drink, eat from the machine. Then back to our flirting.

Time flew so fast, she said.

Her two boys have spawned a clan of more Scottish grandsons for her, all shades of blond, blue-eyed happy little kids. She showed the picture to me.

I have already seen this, she sent it to me email a couple of years ago. She’d forgotten. I admired them all over again. They deserved it. Very handsome group indeed.

I had not much to show in return. One single grandson. Just one. He lives in Mississippi, dresses very gentlemanish, even though he is only nine years old. He looks like a mini-businessman. But he reads on the tenth grade level, I offered. He is a Gemini. We put away the pictures and pulled out the ideas. Susan was always radical, but only ten years later after radical was already done. But then she took off from there.

With all this big family to show, she is against the institution of family. She says the family was invented to restrain women from shopping around for good quality sperm. Family is a patriarchal invention, and should be reorganized. Men created it to make sure their sperm stays in the breeding pool, and the women must breed them for their immortality. She said, the family is not natural for men. Men will always want to break out from it, and do. Women too she admits. And she wants women who support their families to get higher pay then childless men. She thinks that’s only right. It would soon solve the equal pay for equal work dilemma. Men still get more money on account of them supporting families, which is no longer true. Single mothers support their families, they should get paid more now.

We disagree about the knowledge of the sperm.

Susan says, humanity didn’t know it was the sperm that created the fertility that brought the babies, and after they have discovered the importance of sperm, they have created the nuclear family.

Not so. I stated.

There is no way to avoid the knowledge about sperm when you live in rural areas, you see horses have sex, and you see dogs have sex, and you see pregnancy of the same females that had sex, and then later the birth of the little ones. There is no way to think that all that humping is for nothing. There was knowledge of sperm all right. The matriarchies simply said, do I honor the toothpick because I use it to clean my teeth? Sperm was seen as something like a tool that created the missing link for the egg to travel down and imbed itself in the uterine walls. Everything important was then up to the woman and her body. Her wisdom, and her care. The men had a very fleeting business to do with fertility.

My dog loves to butt in when the energy is high. Zyna expressed a few Puli ideas about the matter. She talks in an unpleasant barkish-way. She tries to sound like women, but ends up disrupting us.

Hush Zyna. Put a sock in it!

She does, she picks up a toy and muffles the sound she makes. It’s the only trick I have taught her.

We go on.

For lunch I took her to Scotts, an old restaurant on the waterfront.
Susan liked the view, slow moving boats back and forth. The sun broke through and we warmed up.

You order whatever you like Z, she said. I got bucks.

Hmm. I was just looking at a lobster dish for 58 dollars, but my emigrant self couldn’t allow it. It’s to much for a meal. I could shop on that for a week.

Order it! Susan encouraged me.

No I would be thinking about the price all along, I just can’t. I ended up ordering something for 28 dollars and was happy with that.

Susan was ravenous. Fresh sourdough bread with fresh butter. We ate with gusto.

Today we eat for the old self! I declared.

But neither of us even thought of drinking alcohol. We drank cranberry juice. Yumm. For desert I had key lime pie, and she had apple cobbler.

Did you know I had a triple bypass?

When?

A few years ago. I am fine now.

She told me she was building a meditation center. A hypnotherapy practice. She was still working on her cohabitation commune, which was flowering, and had a lot of ink lately too.

How can you be one of the first members of the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One, and you never did any work for women’s spirituality.

I don’t know. I have other great works. She replied. And that was true.

Interesting that we both had recently fallen in love again. She promised to come to my wedding with Bobbie, and I wanted to see a picture of her girlfriend, who was still straight, and Susan didn’t have that killer swimmers body anymore. Didn’t bode well for her. But who cares. Just having a great loving feeling is rejuvenating.

She remembered the first witch’s Sabbath very differently from me.

She claims I made her recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards and how therapeutic that was for her mind. I know I didn’t because I cannot recite anything backwards in English, and that’s a fact. But in her mind and in her telling of the legend it has happened. She always brags about her input into the early stages of the Women’s Spirituality, but she was only part of it because I was her girlfriend for a brief time.

Then she became a lawyer and worked very successfully for the ACLU. Argued well many gay cases, and won. Then she was on her own and made a lot of money. I lost track of her about two decades ago.

The phone rings and its her son. He just bought a house in San Carlos. I performed his marriage ceremony 13 years ago. He remembers it very happily. I chat with him, his voice is deep now, he is doctor, no more the little boy saying every half an hour … Mom, can I have 75 cents please?

What more do we have to do? Will it reveal itself? I never know. Susan is free floating. It has gotten us this far.

Pretty amazing, I say.

With the key lime pie taste in my mouth still, I think about the rest of my day. A festival coming up, a new book is being built. I don’t want to loose track of Susan anymore. Old friend climbed into her car after careful direction to the freeway, and sped away.