Deck the Halls!

Dearest, most precious and essential six subscribers:

There’s been some unauthorized, rebellious, spinsterial activity here. I’m referring, of course, to the two old posts that mysteriously reposted themselves within the last week. This was apparently prompted by the launch of my two new blogs (VickeryEckhoff.com and Fat Cats on Forbes.com).

As of this writing, my first Forbes.com post was viewed 19,502 times and was shared on Facebook 4,527 times. Perhaps the spinsters felt slighted and decided to take matters into their own bloggy hands. In any event, please don’t walk away while we’re growing. All three blogs will have regular, new material, so please stay tuned and follow. I promised the spinsters you would, and you know how they get when disappointed.

xox

In the end, it wasn’t moving out of our home of more than 30 years that got me. It wasn’t packing up and selling off the last of our family belongings or even sweeping the house when it was empty, locking the doors and driving away. It was two photographs that arrived in my e-mail box from someone I barely knew, after returning to my studio apartment in New York City.

Like many townspeople in Bolton Landing, NY, she had came to the two-day tag sale we’d staged the weekend before closing. It was an opportunity, for some, to pick up cheap armchairs and rugs and wicker porch furniture. For others, it was a time to see the inside of the house for the first time, one of the great ones built on Millionaire’s Row on Lake George. And for several who’d actually worked on the property, it was a time to come back, sit on the porch, and reflect on what Nirvana Farm had meant to them.

“I’m sure it is with mixed feelings that you close up shop at the farm and move on,” my new friend wrote eloquently in her e-mail. “What a beautiful, peaceful spot it is.”

I knew it and yet I didn’t, or at least I hadn’t allowed myself to feel it, not in the four years since my dad had died, then my aunt, then my sister Mary, and, a month ago, my sister Karen’s husband, David. It seemed that I’d only known how beautiful Nirvana Farm was when my mother had been living there, before her passing, in November, 1988, with my dad and my sisters and me gathered at her bedside.

Since then, we’d rented the house out in the summertime for income, painting the inside and the outside every year, cleaning, planting petunias and impatiens and getting it ready so that other people could enjoy it. But it wasn’t until my dad died in 2006 that it became clear we would have to sell. None of my sisters or I lived large. Only one of us had a house. The rest of us lived in small apartments. And while it was nice to have a country spread as grand as Nirvana Farm, it was also supremely odd to spend the week in a 550-square-foot apartment in New York City and weekends on four acres in the country with a red-roofed boathouse, private beach, seven bedroom home with attached greenhouse, massive carriage house, rose garden, arbor, apple orchard and six other outbuildings.

Nirvana Farm lived up to its name: views of islands, lake and mountains, sprawling lawns, beds of flowers and lovely mature trees that blazed in autumn and cooled in summer. I remember the first time I saw it back in high school, when my parents purchased it, even though we had another house  that my great grandfather had built in 1904. What did we need a second home on Lake George for when we already had one, I wondered? But both my parents loved the lake and our other home wasn’t winterized. It had no electricity and had only lake access. So they bought Nirvana Farm. Pastoral in summer, fall, winter and spring, heaven, except under the pressure to clear out 30 plus years of accumulated objects and memories in the midst of so many family deaths and losses.

We’d loved Nirvana Farm in various measures and toiled over it, endlessly. The former owner, Helen Simpson, had a staff: maid, butler, chauffeur and numerous gardeners. A pawnbroker’s daughter, she lived in the house alone, and never married, devoting herself, instead, to its gardens. There were footpaths bordered by lilies, a grape arbor, a raspberry patch. The house even had a potting room, a vaulted, wood paneled room leading to the greenhouse with a long sink along one wall in which the Nirvana Farm plantings had gotten a start.

This was the room in which my mother had passed away, not the Master bedroom. Why? She wanted to be closer to the porch, where she could sit outside and look at the lake and the mountains beyond. We never really did much to the room afterward: we moved in a ping pong table, a grand piano and several love seats. The cabinets that had once held terracotta pots filled up with boxes of photos, mismatched sets of limoges, boxes of vintage Lionel trains and some of the other eclectic items my parents collected throughout their lives.

Nirvana Farm was filled with surprises. I remember being delighted upon walking through it for the first time to discover an electric stair and a buzzer system that rang in the butler’s pantry. Need more wine at dinner? Ring the buzzer under the dining table. Thirsty at night? There were others in the bedrooms for calling the help.

Once Miss Simpson passed away and Nirvana Farm came into our hands, though, there was no more delineation between master and servant. We retained a groundskeeper and housecleaner but took over other duties ourselves. My dad and sister Mary handled most of the work for years (they both lived close by) but with his death and then hers, the rest of the family pretty much went from being owner to hired hands overnight. We worked on weekends and holidays, getting our hands dirty, our bones tired from constantly moving heavy tables, cabinets and boats from one part of the property to another. One of the tasks I loved was mowing the lawns on a riding mower. I loved the smell of the grass, others loved gardening, but it did take hours of time. Genteel as it may have looked, Nirvana Farm did not take care of itself.

One project had us searching for a buyer for dozens of hulking pieces of antique machinery my father had installed in his workshop out in the carriage house. There were lathes, a grinding machine, a massive drill press and countless engines from boats we owned. The engines we would sell to various collectors or give to his friends, but the machinery? It was bolted into the floor and ceiling and weighed thousands of pounds, ran on a series of belts, and made the entire carriage house vibrate when turned on.

A family friend helped us donate these to Peter Jackson, the director, who was building a museum in New Zealand. In return, we were offered some Lord of the Rings memorabilia which we have yet to collect (note to Jackson: please ship Viggo directly to my apartment on University Place). Another boondoggle had me searching for a home for the grand player piano with boxes of piano rolls left me by my mom, the one that sat in the potting room after her death.

I’d had dreams of holding concerts for friends during which I would play Rachmaninoff and tell witty stories. When I was in college, our next door neighbor, the Chairman of the Music Department at Union College, had invited members of the Philadelphia orchestra to perform the Brandenburg Concertos in the Carriage House. How spoiled we were! But my tiny quarters near Washington Square barely had room for the small amount of furniture I already had, much less a grand piano and an audience. What would I do? Get rid of my bed? Why couldn’t my parents have left a bank vault filled with securities that were easily liquid, instead of so much stuff weighing thousands of pounds that none of us had room for and no one would buy? Such was our plight.

But back to my e-mail. ”It’s hard to grieve when you’re planning a funeral,” my sister said, when I related the story of the two photos I’d received after the tag sale and how they’d tripped some kind of sadness alarm that I thought had been magically disabled. “Everyone kept asking me if I was sad to sell the house,” I told her over the phone. “You know what I told them? I wasn’t. I think I was just too tired. You know, this place aged me. I look at photos of myself three, four years ago, and I look like a different person. I want that back.”

There was a brief moment of silence, and then I added, ”At least we won’t be working so hard any more. Or yelling at each other,”

“Plus we have Tongue Mountain,” she said.

Ah yes. I’d gleefully explained to inquirers that we were lucky enough to have another place North of Bolton.

“You know the first house on the Narrows? The one with the island and gazebo?”

“You own that?”

“It’s smaller and we’re going to fix it up,” I told them. “So we will still have Lake George. And we will still be residents of Bolton.”

Sometimes, I’d lighten the story by telling them about the rattlesnakes out on the mountain; how two had gotten into the house and how Nina and Mary, as teenagers, had chopped one up with a series of hatchets on the windowbox in our living room, then mixed themselves up a pitcher of gin and tonics. I did not relate how I’d had my first love affair out there at age 18 and how, after leaving Nirvana Farm, I hoped to flee to the cool, quiet mountainside, there to skinny dip, read books and, with my sisters, return to being the girls we once had been.

Still, when I stared at the photos on my computer screen, at the photos of the property taken by a stranger, I felt cheated. There, in her images, was something I’d missed about Nirvana Farm. It was peaceful. It was beautiful. Everyone, it seemed, who had come to the property in the thirty five years we’d owned it, or had visited for the tag sale could see it. But I, somehow, in my quest to pack, to move, to unburden myself and my sisters by being perfectly organized, had entirely missed it. And suddenly I knew. I had walked away too quickly.

I had, with my three sisters, come together for one last weekend, two of us from New York City, one from Connecticut, another from Columbia County. We had an auctioneer take out most of the better furnishings, we had packed up some for ourselves, we had sold and given away the rest and then driven down the long driveway without a backward glance. In between, when we had time to relax, to sit down together for dinner, we reflected: about things that had happened there, about poetry we loved. Karen recited some of the early verses of the Inchcape Rock and then, Nina and she and I attempted The Highwayman.

“The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon stormy seas,” I started, forgetting the first verse. “The road was a ribbon of moonlight, looping the purple moor—”

“and the highwayman came riding—” we repeated together, “Riding—riding—The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”

We continued with the next stanza, about the French cap cocked on the highwayman’s forehead, then got lost.

“He’d a coat of claret velvet—,” Karen said after a moment as we sipped our coffee. “Imagine a coat like that.”

“His breeches were of fine doe-skin,” I added. “They fitted with never a wrinkle; his boots were up to his thigh!’

There was a pause as we all considered it and then I told them that Sally still had the book of poetry, the one our mother had read to us from when we were little, and we all fell silent again. I, for one was relieved that it hadn’t been lost or given away. Some things should never be let go.

We’d had a long time to think about saying goodbye to the house—more than four years. Our weekend together before closing had been an epiphany orf sorts. Here we were, welcoming strangers into our home to pick through stuff we’d examined, piece by piece, deciding if it merited keeping and if not, what we’d sell it for. The signed Stickley cabinet in the dining room would stay in the family. The table saw, the TV, the various armchairs, the couches, the rugs, and even my mother’s knitting chest could go. It was  small, but in tiny apartments like the ones we all lived in, there was no room. To all our satisfaction, it was bought by a local guy I knew from the deli for his mother.

“She’ll love it,” he said, cradling it in his arms. And so we let it go happily, feeling that a transplant had taken place. One mother’s chest, another mother’s knitting. Life was flowing onwards.

So the day went. We sold rakes, shovels and garden planters. One guy showed up looking for a posthole digger. Instead, I referred him to our freebies pile.

“Do you have a pickup truck?” I asked.

He did.

“Do you belong to the NRA?”

He looked perplexed, until I handed him a small plastic rifle that you could use to light your barbecue grill. Ironically, it had a small warning on the side. “This is not a toy,” it read.

“You can tape it in your back window,” Nina said, helpfully.

“From my cold dead hands,” I guffawed, doing my best Charlton Heston imitation.

He took the toy rifle that was not a toy and also bought some washing machine hoses. I think we made $4.00 on the deal.

Some buyers were sentimental. “Would you sign these books?” one asked, holding several I’d donated from my personal collection. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written them. It only mattered to her that they had sat on the bookshelf at Nirvana Farm.

Another practical buyer bought a shower caddy, for $3.

“And you have the guaranteed satisfaction of knowing that all the residents of Nirvana Farm have taken showers with it,” I told him.

I felt happy and checked myself for signs of sadness and its other forms: regret, remorse, depression. But there weren’t any. I felt as sunny as the day was bright.

Oars and paddles, tables and chairs, boxes and lamps. These were our top sellers of the day. We sold a weird canister from the basement that no one could identify for $10. We also gave a lot of things away in the afternoon: half a dozen Shur-Stop glass globes filled with carbon tetrachloride that were installed in the house decades ago for fire protection; some board games and, to a shy eleven-year-old girl, a pretty wicker seat with green velveteen cushion and matching wicker footstool.

Her name was Helen and she arrived with her dad, a local sculptor I’d seen about town, always wearing a speedo bathing suit and Teva sandals and with Helen in tow. She was slight, with long dark hair and a quiet but friendly manner. Today he was wearing shorts but was shirtless, covered with tattoos, his belly hanging out. She wore a pink sweater and carried a small blue purse. Where was her mom? Did she have one, somewhere?

“I built Helen her own little house, right behind mine,” he said, looking over a set of chairs with rush seats. My sister Nina and I exchanged happy glances. We all knew the thrill of a girl having her own, private place.

“Would you like something for your house?” we asked her. Nina pointed out the wicker chair and footstool, and both father and daughter looked at us, before Helen beckoned to her dad and whispered something we could not hear.

Nina rang up another sale as he and Helen quietly conversed. When I next looked at them, Helen was standing off by herself, by the porch railing.

“Helen would like to accept your offer,” her dad said softly.

It was mid afternoon. We had sold a lot, but there still remained a number of things left and we knew we had to mark them down or give those away, too.

“Everything is half off, now,” Nina announced, at which point Helen’s dad disappeared into the living room with some other buyers. In a moment, he had the door open and was calling her to see something inside.

“We’d like to buy the couch,” he said, emerging moments later. It was the big one I’d napped on so many times in front of the television. “Can Helen stay here while I go get my truck?”

I said sure, mentioned that she’d be fine, and he said he trusted us. Along with everything else that was happening that day, that made me feel really good.

Helen. I pondered her name. You didn’t hear it much any more. To me, it was a grownup name for such a small child.  “We can take my dog for a walk—or you can, until your dad returns, Helen,” I offered, as soon as her dad had left. She liked that idea.

The blooms on the apple trees were on the cusp of bursting, the sky was blue as we headed down the slate footpath leading from the porch with my dog, Daffodil, on her leash. We crossed the driveway, through the apple orchard with its brown, twisted trunks and several branches that had fallen down in a recent wind, to the carriage house.

“Daffodil’s been inside all day,” I mentioned. “So she’s pulling a little. Can you handle the leash?”

I showed Helen how to hold it in one hand, controlling the tension with the other, the way I’d shown my neighbor’s daughter back in the city.

“It’s really big,” Helen said, peering in through the sliding barn doors into the vast, empty space that had once been filled with boats, chairs and tables. This was my favorite building on the property and I’d had it on authority that the new owners would not tear it down. The house, I’d heard, though, might not be so lucky. These were people with a lot of money. They had, in fact, bought the Sagamore Hotel that you could see from our dock on Green Island.

“They used to keep six horses in here,” I said, pointing out the still remaining  harness cabinet that stretched along part of the wall. “Imagine that!”

Next, Helen and I walked toward the road, crossing the grass where a big patch of daffodils—my favorite flower—and narcissus grew.

“Don’t let Daffodil pull you,” I told Helen, as we walked past a cherry tree with tight, magenta blossoms not yet unfolded. There was a small hillock and I clambered up it. The grass was full of violets and forget-me-nots and I told myself to take a photo of it. I’d taken so many photographs of the Nirvana Farm grounds, but never the violets. And somehow, I knew I’d miss them. Take a picture of these, I told myself. Take a picture.

“Here,” I said, pointing. Helen dragged Daffodil over to where I stood and we both looked down. There, hiding among the grass and clover were small headstones marking the graves of seven different dogs. Bobby. Barney. Gipsy. Fairlee. Penny Popover. Freckles. Windy. Judy.

“Were they yours?”

“No. See the dates on them?” I pointed them out with my foot. “This one died in 1943. This one in 1957. They all belonged to the previous owner. And these two were apparently buried together.” We looked at the last headstone in which two dogs, though born in different years, had died, eerily, at the same time.

Helen stood quietly. Daffodil sat down.

“Now you can take her for a walk, if you like,” I said. “Just don’t leave the property. Or you can come back to the house and wait for your dad on the porch.”

“I was going to ask you a question—” she began, then stopped. “I probably shouldn’t.”

I looked at her. What would she ask? Would I date her dad?

“Shoot,” I said uneasily. “Whaddya wanna know?”

“If I pick a tulip—can I keep it?”

“Sure, as many as you like” I said, looking around to see if there were any in sight. But there weren’t. They seemed to have all but vanished.

She and Daffodil wandered off to look for tulips and I walked back to the house. Dig up some bulbs to transplant at the Bolton cemetary, I thought to myself as I looked at the apple blossoms blooming in the afternoon sun. Dig up some bulbs! No use leaving them for the new buyers. They would never miss them. Besides, they would be lovely adorning the graves of family members, like my mom, my uncle and grand parents at the cemetary on the other side of town.

Nina had come up with that idea, a day before, when she and Karen and I had inexplicably stopped off at the graveyard on our way back from our lawyer’s office in Lake George Village. We almost never went to see the graves, though I thought about them most every time we drove past the entrance. It was simple, set in a hill, overlooking Lake George, with little in the way of plantings. Our family had a plot, there, though there were only four headstones in it. The oldest was for my mother’s younger brother, Bennett, shot down in World War II in May, 1945, right before the war ended. His body had never been recovered, and I reminded myself what a terrible loss this had been for my grandparents and my mom. I imagined them, receiving the news, two uniformed men arriving at their door in Garden City. Two men telling them that their only son had died in the service of his country. Only 22 years old.

Someone had placed a veteran’s flag next to Bennett’s grave and Karen, Nina and I stood around, reading a Robert Louis Stevenson poem my grandmother had inscribed on his tombstone. If I remember correctly, it went something like this:

Under the wide and starry sky,
dig the grave and let me lie,
and I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me,
here he lies where he long’d to be
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
and the hunter home from the hill.

My grandfather’s headstone stood opposite from Bennett’s, and the one my mom and grandmother shared next to that. Aggie had actually never wanted one and my mom didn’t show much of an interest in things of that nature, either, but when she died, we decided to erect one for the two of them—together. What could be a better way to keep some of Nirvana Farm alive in our hearts, but to plant some of its flowers there, where they’d bloom for eternity, for mom and Aggie, Grampy and Uncle Bennett? I might add that there was no headstone for my dad or Mary, but that was no big deal. It had taken us 7 years after my mom died to erect a stone in her and Aggie’s memory. None of us was in a hurry. Dad and Mary could wait.

Back at the house, I quickly forgot about the bulbs I wanted to save for the cemetary. There were people in the driveway who’d stopped by for one last look around the property. They had stories to share. One had mowed the grass on the property as a boy. He had to have been in his mid-sixties. Another’s aunt had been a housekeeper for us, perhaps 15 years ago.

“I’m Vivian’s niece,” she said, proudly. We’d had so many housekeepers, over the years and I could keep most of them straight, but not all their relatives. Still, we hugged. Vivian had been with us for many years.

So had our groundskeeper, Chuck, who stood in the driveway, helping a middle-aged couple put some drawers into the back of their SUV. He started as a kid, helping his dad, Albert, with the grounds until Albert had retired, what? 18 years ago? The two of them had been heroes,  cutting up fallen trees, mowing the grass, snow plowing, fixing the plumbing, getting the boat started, keeping the tank filled, and turning on the heat when the weather got cold and they knew we would soon be arriving for the weekend.

How do you thank someone for that but to offer them a beer?

“Later,” Chuck said politely, watching a lone figure approach from across the apple orchard. We all turned to see a mobility scooter zipping toward the house, an American flag fluttering from an antenna behind the seat.

By that point, two of my sisters had come out of the house to observe.

“It’s Albert!” we all must have said, collectively. Sure enough, it was. He was hunched over, wearing a plaid shirt, driving straight up to the house at about 10 miles an hour. Aside from a recent sighting at Stewarts, we hadn’t seen him much over the years, but he still said what he always did when asked how he was.

“Well,” he said with a small smile, “I’m still here.”

He got off the scooter slowly, we each hugged him and then watched as he walked with Chuck into the house for one last look at the place they’d both tended for most of their lives. Sally and Karen returned to the house to pack up the last of our linens and dishes and I wandered onto the porch where I found a terraacotta wine cooler and filled it with water for Helen’s flowers.

By the time her dad returned, she had a big bouquet picked, including tulips, daffodils, narcissus and forget-me-nots. It was a big armful of flowers for a small girl, but she looked happy and that made me think. I’d be giving this place up in just a matter of days. She would take her chair, and the couch and the flowers home with her and what would I take home? Good memories? Or bad?

I thought about things I should be doing. Photograph the house. Shoot it empty. You’ll regret it if you don’t, a voice within whispered. I wrestled with the idea. Did I have to be sentimental? For the past three years that the house had been on the market and the two times it had nearly sold, I’d photographed it from every angle and in every season. I had photos of the maple trees in full flame, the ginko in silver, the birch with its ghostly white bark.

I’d photographed the greenhouse in its various states of decay, the carriage house, the chicken house, the ice house, the wood shed. I’d shot individual leaves lying on the ground in fall, chairs on the porch in spring, boats in the boathouse in summer. And here the house was, almost completely empty, and I was thinking I needed to capture that. And I did a mental check. Am I sad? Do I need to capture everything or will I hold it in my heart? And I decided I could do that. I had enough photos. And then, I looked down at the lawn and noticed the violets again and how pretty they were.

The next day was supposed to rain, but it didn’t. Upstairs, Karen and Sally continued packing, and Nina and I consolidated all the leftover sale items in the potting room. I even made a new sign and placed it down at the end of the driveway as an incentive to bargain hunters. “75% off!” it read.

Not too many people showed up, though. There were a few who filtered into the potting room, asking about dressers and such, but I had to tell them the auctioneer had taken all the nicest stuff and they left looking disappointed. We were now getting down to the wire. Whatever we didn’t mark down we’d have to store and we didn’t want to do that. So we just started giving stuff away, practically for nothing. We sold hooked rugs for $5 and a teak table for $10 that used to sit on the porch and gave away as many books as we could.

This is how I got introduced to Lisa. She’d been poking around the freebies pile and I told her, if she wanted, to take as many books as she liked. We got to talking and I found out that she lived in town and that she liked dogs. And before I knew it, I offered to introduce her to Daffodil and to give her a tour of the house.

“Won’t you miss this place?” she asked earnestly, as I led her up the backstairs, showed her the bedrooms and the small sleeping porches and then, when we were downstairs again, the butler’s pantry.

“What will they do with the property?” she asked, and I told her I didn’t know.

“I think they will keep the boathouse,” I told her. We walked down there, stood on the dock for a bit, and looked over toward Green Island and the water, now stirred into small white caps. Next I took her over to the carriage house. “This will stay, too, but I’m afraid the house will come down.”

“That’s terrible.” She said. “You won’t be sad?”

I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with me as I led her across the grass, past the patch of daffodils, back to the dog cemetary. Once again, I repeated my story about Tongue Mountain, how it had been neglected because we’d spent all our time fixing up Nirvana Farm and how we were going to put in electricity out there and even a hot water heater.

By that point, we’d reached the top of the small hill that I’d dragged Helen up the day before.

“Now here’s something you don’t see every day,” I told her.

We both looked down in silence. I had to admit, the cemetary grabbed me in a way it hadn’t previously. There was something so poignant about it. Here I was, too busy to put in a gravestone for my dad and sister and Helen Simpson had headstones for every dog she’d ever had. I felt, actually, a little guilty.

We went back to the house, Lisa gathered up her books, and I gave her my card before she left. It had been an extraordinary day: new faces and old, curiosity seekers and those who’d come back to remember. And all of them because a house in town was about to be sold. And people had come to bid it goodbye.

I’m getting a little tired as I write this. I’ll just sum up and say that Sally and Karen left that night and Nina and I stayed to meet the mover in the morning. Everything went according to plan: it was again supposed to rain, and it didn’t, so after all the boxes were gone, after the Stickley cabinet had been spirited away and the linens and the dishes that would head out to Tongue Mountain, I let Daffodil out for a run, took out my camera, and strolled the property.

What did I shoot? The daffodils. The violets in the grass. The cherrytree blossoms, which had unfolded slightly overnight but were still gathered into small, pink fists.

I looked at the house, but resisted taking any photos of it empty.

Nina and I then packed up her car for the ride home—two cats in the back seat, Daffodil and I in the front. She locked the door. I took a deep breath and we drove away, past the apple orchard, the carriage house, down the driveway past the daffodils and the cherry tree and the small hillock with the headstones. We neared the end of the driveway and Nina said, “I think we should go to Stewarts for milk shakes,” and I felt happy about that and forgot to look back when we turned onto the street.

It felt strange. We’d done it. We’d moved and in four more days, we’d close. And I’d never have to worry about Nirvana Farm again, never argue with my sisters over the bills, over who was working hard and who wasn’t. I thought about it on the way down in the car and I told Nina I wasn’t sad and she told me she was.

Later that night, after I’d arrived home, after I’d entered my small studio apartment in the Village and given Daffodil a fresh bowl of water, I sat down to check my e-mail before going to bed. I’d been away four days, and there were more than 130 e-mails in my inbox.

One of the last, though, was from Lisa.

“As I was leaving your property to pick up my car, I took photos of some of the old dog cemetary stones in the front yard,” she wrote. “The graves show the loyalty and caring that must have taken place between the dogs and their owners.”

I quickly went to the link and what I saw made my eyes well up.

“Loved friend,” she’d titled the photo of the gravestone. Next to it was another: “Nirvana’s violets.” I was stunned. She’d captured exactly what I loved.

I felt so foolish—even bitter, like when you break up with someone and all anyone else can say is what a great guy they were. This was Nirvana Farm. Sure, the insurance payments had been too high, the taxes exorbitant, the work my sisters and I had put into the property exhausting. But to try not to miss it was stupid. Who was I kidding?

I spent the next day playing Spider Solitaire, wondering how I could go back and make up for my miscalculation. Would there be time before the closing to walk the grounds, free from work and worry, and take in its charms? Would I have time to dig up those bulbs I’d forgotten, to go once more to the dog cemetary, to walk the silent rooms?

Two days later, I had my chance. It was the night before our closing, and Sally picked me up at the train station in Hudson for the drive up to Bolton Landing. We arrived late in the afternoon, still early enough to take photos and walk the property. My neighbor, Marshall, had already dug up some bulbs for me and left them in a bucket; he’d leant me a trowel, too. But by the time I was ready to go to the cemetary, it was too dark to even find the graves, much less plant anything.

Instead, Sally and I went to dinner in a local diner. We talked about the house and what it meant to us and I told her I’d brought a card with me.

“What for?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I figured we’d write it out and hide it in the attic, a kind of message in a bottle about why we love Nirvana Farm,” I said. “Years from now, if they haven’t torn the house down, they may find it. The new buyers. That’s what I was thinking.”

“Hmm,” she said. “We could do one of those exquisite corpse exercises.”

She explained that this was where one person writes a line, and then another person writes another line. Before you know it, you’ve got a story. This was somewhat different from what I was thinking, and certainly more creative. So I gave Sally a pen, and she wrote the date, and then she wrote something like this: “We, the magic elves of Nirvana Farm do cast this spell…” And then I continued “made out of silver fish hooks and Sea and Ski and a pinch of Accent…”

Well, I’ve tried to recollect what the rest of it said, but naturally, being inspired by magic elves, neither Sally nor I can remember it. I do recall, though, that we wrote “Open if you dare” and drew a skull and crossbones and some bats on the envelope. And we sealed it.

The house was dark as we walked up to it after dinner. We turned on a few lights, then went up to the second floor, pulled a cord releasing the attic stairs from overhead, turned on the light and, one after another, climbed the steep stairway.

The attic was empty, of course. We’d cleaned it out when we’d sold the house the year before, the time we actually completely moved out of the house, put everything in storage, only to show up at the closing and find out the deal was off. As I peered into the dark corners of the attic, I had the odd feeling that I wasn’t sure if this wouldn’t happen to us again. We couldn’t be that unlucky, twice, could we? Would the elfish spell we’d put down on paper help us? I wasn’t sure.

Downstairs, we turned off the attic light and I had an idea.

“Let’s sing karaoke in every room,” I said. “And each song needs to be about leaving.”

So that’s what we did. We sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and that song from the Sound of Music, “So Long, Farewell” and some others I can’t remember. We danced wild dances and pounded on the walls and whooped and hollered in every room. “Goodbye door. Goodbye window. Goodbye bathtub,” we sang, kissing the walls, the window sills, whatever we could.

And then, we went out and sat on the porch, and did something I’ll never forget: we howled at the moon.

That night, I slept at our Real Estate agent’s house, but Sally slept on a futon in the carriage house.

“I went back on the porch after I dropped you off,” she told me the next morning. “I could hear loons calling.”

And just like that, I let go. I’d miss Nirvana Farm, but I had Tongue Mountain, I had flowers to plant on my mother’s grave and the memory of that night, howling at the moon. Most of all, I had my three sisters: Karen, Nina and Sally. And we, at last, could stop worrying. We could go back to being girls again.

The closing took place later that morning at 10:30 am, leaving just enough time for planting flowers in the family plot before heading to the attorney’s office. As luck would have it, I managed to step in a big pile of dog shit somewhere between the parking lot and the waiting room. How funny is that? Elves, is this your doing? Your way of lightening what was sad, of making merry in the midst of long farewells?

I’ll leave it there. It’s late and time for sleep.

Photographs by Lisa LaMothe and yours truly.

Special thanks to Chuck Robinson, Marshall Ford and Hugh Wilson and so many others.

What I Learned on the Red Carpet from Javier Bardem

I’d just passed a significant birthday when a 24-year-old colleague suggested the unthinkable: “What you need is a nice, 60-ish retired math professor,” she declared, sipping a latte. “You’re a tall blonde WASP. You should be dating Americans, not those Latin lovers you go for.”

My kittenish pride was wounded. Swarthy men were my specialty: How could I forget the dashing Chilean I’d lived with for six years after grad school; the Spanish producer with eyes the color of robin’s eggs; the Uruguayan guitarist I met backstage at Carnegie Hall; the bohemian Colombian designer at a recent writing job; and my greatest love of all, an Italian motorcyclist and photographer I’d tearfully given up after seven years, just two weeks shy of turning 40? He baked me cakes and wrote love poems. But I wanted marriage; he didn’t.

Getting him out of my system was difficult: two Milanese, a Roman and one Sicilian later, I still hadn’t found anyone as warm, adventurous or good in the kitchen, so I decided to give Italy a rest. Shortly thereafter, I met an Argentine videographer in Wholesale Liquidators who asked me, within months, to be his fourth wife. I declined.

Over the next five years, I made a conscious effort to expand my borders. There was a former Kurdish shepherd who owned a multi-million dollar townhouse off Washington Square; an Indian management consultant born in London; a blue-eyed Slovakian video editor; a Russian producer and mountain climber; and the biggest charmer of all: a Frenchman and former trapeze artist who worked for the circus.

Nearly all were younger than me — one by 17 years, but none were marriage material and I wouldn’t settle for less. This amused friends, family and strangers. Even one of my five-year old Sunday School students was incredulous. “Why aren’t you married!” she whispered one day during The Lord’s Prayer. “Don’t you know any guys?”

I patted her head and laughed; but I couldn’t do that with my 24-year-old colleague. What did someone just two years out of college know about love? Why she had practically accused me of being a cougar. I couldn’t take that lying down.

At home that evening, standing in front of my bathroom mirror, I asked myself what appealed to me in a man. Was a homegrown, graying math geek better for me than a man whose name ended in a vowel? Was it time to act my age? And what, exactly, would that mean?

My mirror yielded no alarming answers: no grey hairs, cellulite, sags or wrinkles to suggest that I was over the hill.

I turned off the light and moved to my dining table. Eyes shut, I reflected on what love meant and the men who’d shaped my outlook: the spoiled Ivy League frat boys I’d fended off in college; the hopeful foreign exchange students I’d met at NYU business school; the men whose accents and stories of birthplaces, families and memories left behind awakened something deep in my vagabond soul.

I asked for any thought that might limit my appreciation of love’s great diversity to be revealed and cast out. I listened for an answer. Before I’d even opened my eyes, one appeared, bright as a maple in full flame: My attraction to handsome foreigners — and vice versa — was nothing that called for atonement. They were no less worthy than retired school teachers simply for being beautiful.

I laughed out loud. It was so simple. Could it be true? I found out the next day, when an old friend called me with an invitation.

“We’re screening No Country for Old Men tonight at the Film Society,” she said excitedly. “And guess who’ll be there? Javier Bardem!”

Aye caramba! Javier Bardem!  Had she been reading my thoughts? I tried telling her about the flaming maple tree but she cut me off.

“My dear!” she exclaimed. “You don’t need to justify yourself. Javier is so you! Quien es mas macho?”

Six hours later, I was standing alone beside a small stretch of red carpet outside the Walter Reade Theater. Except for a half-dozen photographers and Juilliard students getting out of class, there were few people idling about.

It was a warm evening for November, and I’d taken off my coat. After a few minutes, I moved away from the velvet rope to a less obtrusive spot against a wall. The giddiness I’d felt all afternoon had finally abated and I was relieved. I wasn’t a cougar; I wasn’t a teenager, either.

My friend arrived within minutes, frowning, from across the plaza. “What on earth are you doing over there?” she scolded. “You must stand here, where Javier can see you.”

She led me to a spot right at the end of the red carpet and gave me a once over. “He’s dating Penelope Cruz, you know. So take your hair out of the ponytail and stand up straight. As pretty as you look tonight, you’re never going to catch his eye like that.”

I let down my hair but standing so close made me uncomfortable.

We settled on a spot about ten feet away. “I’m not stalker,” I said defensively. “Besides, he’s a somebody and I’m a—”

“—somebody else,” she cut in.

Moments later, Javier arrived with the Coen brothers to a meteor shower of flash bulbs that seemed too bright for such a smoldering presence.

“Penelope is one lucky senorita,” I whispered, taking in his face, dark suit and easy smile as he made his way down a gantlet of paparazzi. Well, I didn’t just say the words “lucky seniorita.” I think I may have also called her a puta, but it was all in jest.

“He’s like her fourth boyfriend this year!” my friend added. “Now smile, Vick. He’s coming our way.”

Indeed he was. He’d just finished speaking to the last reporter when he turned unexpectedly and faced me. Our eyes fastened on one another. Neither of us moved. We both just stood there, staring for several seconds. Him, a 38-year-old A-list actor and somebody — and me, a 40-plus writer and somebody else! Neither of us blinked or even smiled. We just stood there transfixed, as my heart ripped loose from its moorings.

It wasn’t until a Coen brother took him by the arm that the spell was broken. His eyes softened, he turned and entered the theater.

My pal waited until the door shut before grabbing my arm. “Oh my God, Vick! What was that about?”

I didn’t know: It felt like a dream.

“He was totally checking you out, Vick. I told you he was your kind of guy.”

We entered the Walter Reade through a side entrance and found seats toward the front of the auditorium. The movie was great, but even during the final credits, what stuck in my mind wasn’t the violence, or Javier’s demonic performance or even his oddball Prince Valiant haircut. It was the way he’d looked at me outside the theater and the longing that welled up in my heart.  Perhaps a rumpled academic wasn’t my destiny after all.

Out in the lobby, my friend said, “I’m not much into these after parties, but you should really stick around and talk to Javier.”

“Javier? Are you crazy? What do we have in common?”

I racked my memory. I’d had a Prince Valiant haircut when I was 13. I’d been to Madrid a decade ago with Mr. Italian motorcycle dude and eaten at a McDonald’s. And Javier and I were both heavy metal fans. But it didn’t seem like enough.

“How’th your Ethpagnol?” my friend lisped. We laughed at her attempt at a Spanish accent. “You mutht have learned thomething from all thothe Latin boyfriendth,” she added.

“No me quiero ir,” I said, in my sexiest, breathiest voice. “Dame un beso. Dame un besito. Dame un besote. Me gusta hacer l’amor con tigo.”

She looked at me blankly.

“I don’t want to leave here,” I whispered. “Give me a kiss. Give me a small kiss. Give me a big kiss. I like making love to you.”

“Great!” she said, taking me by the arm again. “Let’s find your hombre and have at him.”

Plotting our way across the packed room, we located Javier and Josh Brolin near the bar, circled for a half a minute, then retreated several steps away.

“I hope he didn’t see us,” I said nervously.

My friend kept watch over my shoulder.  “Shhh,” she whispered. “He’s right behind you.”

I felt someone’s back brushing against mine. It was a substantial, back, I might add. “Javier?” I mouthed to her.

She nodded. Suddenly, her eyes widened. “OK,” she breathed. “Now!”

He was sipping a glass of wine as I turned around. I extended my hand and he graciously offered his. It was warm and strong. That’s what I remember.

“I loved you in Mar adentro,” I said, looking into his eyes, “but I’ve never heard you speak English in a movie until tonight.” He listened quietly.

“Your voice in the film was obviously tailored to your character,” I went on. “But it’s clearly not your regular voice. I’d love hearing your accent, if you don’t mind.”

His words spilled forth without hesitation, in deep and entrancing Spanish, an elixir for my longing heart. I tried to stay focused, but my attention wandered off almost immediately, from his lips to his hair and back to his eyes. I’d only just caught myself when he stopped speaking. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling foolish, “but I don’t understand a word of Spanish.”

He switched to English and we chatted a bit more. He was amiable, and I suddenly snapped back to attention. I was a somebody speaking to a somebody else, but he was the star of the show and beyond seeing whether or not I could engage him in conversation, I didn’t have much else to say. I couldn’t tell him no me quiero ir. I looked behind him to see a line of women, waiting to shake his hand or look into his eyes as I did, thanked him and excused myself. My friend followed me as I walked away.

“He smiled when he saw it was you, Vick. What did he say?”

“I don’t know. Motht of it wath in Ethpagnol.”

“Ethpagnol! Maybe he wath athking for your phone number.”

I’ll never know. Nor will I know the meaning of that long look we shared across the velvet rope. But this much is clear: when something touches you in ways you can’t explain, there is a good chance you shouldn’t tamper with it. I’ll thank the heavens for that revelation — and Javier’s role in it, standing there quietly, with a gleam in his eye.

I apologize for what I am about to say, specifically about my Sunday School teacher, Miss Cummings, and also my dad’s older sister, Lenore. What did they do? Frighten me half to death, that’s what. My mother tried convincing me that they were God’s perfect children, that I needed to love them, see them as God did, but it was hard. Sure they were sweet, but they were single women in a married world. That’s how it was with old maids. There was always a defect there, some flaw that made them unpopular with the opposite sex and scary to children.

Like most girls born in the fifties, my sisters and I were raised to be wives: We had the right moral instruction, good education, proper training in etiquette and ballroom dancing and stylish clothes from New York City department stores. Even the toys I got for Christmas provided perfect training for future wedded bliss: an E-Z Bake oven, a little Hostess Buffet and miniature percolator that made real coffee.

We dreamed of brides, flowers and cake, my sisters and I.  After Sunday School, after we’d changed out of our Sunday best, we held practice weddings in our basement—with dolls. My mother played Handel’s Wedding March on the record player, Carol wore a black choir robe and read from one of the many Bibles in our house (we each had one, in addition to our own matching copy of Science and Health). Rita, next oldest, had us round up all our dolls. She and Molly walked them up a makeshift aisle in pairs. Sandy threw rice. I carried daffodils picked from the edge of the lawn. And then, with God as their witness, five trolls, three Barbies, Tressy, Patty Play Pal and Chatty Cathy all got married to Mickey Mouse.

There would be no Mickey for Miss Cummings and Aunt Lenore, alas. Miss Cummings was the only single teacher in the Sunday School and she was definitely the right age to be a wife. Pretty, too, but she had this deformity, a severe burn from her wrist to her pinkie, that made the skin look like it had melted, then frozen in place. And though most of the time, she kept it hidden under her cardigan sweater, that was not the case when she opened her hymnal to sing. I would have rather watched our next door neighbors from the Ozark Mountains butcher chickens in the front yard; I would have rather watched them, gut the chickens and boil them before plucking their feathers, than have to sing Feed My Sheep next to Miss Cummings and see that monstrous hand of hers. Concentrating on the Beatitudes and 10 Commandments after that was really hard, I tell you. The sad thing was, she had such large eyes, Miss Cummings. Large, brown eyes with lovely, long, dark lashes. But they seemed lonely, at least to me.

Lenore’s predicament was different. To begin with, she wasn’t a church goer. We invited her to come with us many times, but she never did. What else? She was six feet tall; she towered. Do you know she told me her height ruined her life? Can you believe it? She never talked about herself much. She was private, but she did tell me that.

Was it her height—or that she was prim? What kind of person goes camping wearing a pair of white sharkskin pants, pressed daily with an iron warmed on the campfire, you may wonder? What kind of person bakes lemon meringue pies in a baking box out under the pines, as Lenore had done as a young woman?If these were the signs of a life careening toward ruin, why didn’t she change course? Perhaps it was because everything else seemed to be in her favor:  good posture, clear skin, delicate features and small hands and feet. She was well-dressed: wool Villager houndstooth slacks, flat Pappagallo shoes, a gold pin with coral strawberries on it that was a gift from her boss. She drove a Mustang and owned a neat ranch house in Palisades Park, New Jersey. She was a secretary.

On the downside, she’d never had a boyfriend—probably never even been kissed, as far as my sisters and I could tell. We did suspect that she liked her boss: if you complimented her on the strawberry pin, she would smile slightly and mention his name, but had anything gone on there? He was married, so it would have been a sin. That much I learned from Miss Cummings. And Lenore was too proper, besides. I’d hugged her several times, and she never seemed to enjoy it. She definitely wouldn’t enjoy kissing, that’s for sure.

What did she enjoy? Well, a few nice things and a lot of weird things. She liked skiing, for example. But she also liked writing thank you notes, making jell-o molds and doing dishes—and she seemed to thrive on serving other people. See, she’d made this deal with my dad and their other brother. They got to go off to college and then to war and raise families; Lenore stayed at home with their parents, taking care of them both until they passed. Her earthly reward? When she was older, they’d take care of her. So that’s how she ended up a spinster, other than being too tall and fussy. Anyway, Lenore spent every Christmas and holiday with us, and she was forever doing things like clearing the table when everyone was still eating and volunteering to take the smallest piece of cake for dessert. I thought this was great, but my dad always said no, Vicki is the smallest, she gets the smallest piece of cake. And the girls will do the dishes.

We all resented that. I mean, if Lenore was happy clearing the table and letting the rest of us sit around and enjoy dessert, I thought we should let her. But my mother said that would be taking advantage.

Taking advantage? Is that bad?

And so, my dad ordered her to sit at the table when she did not want to, and we served her the biggest piece of cake, which she did not eat. We gave her gifts of cologne and writing paper when it was her birthday—because what else does a spinster need, but to write thank you notes and be sweet smelling? She was included in every family milestone, every graduation and birthday and anniversary. We had crazy, over-the-top Christmases, with piles of presents from Bergdorf Goodman and Saks and Bloomingdales and great Easters, with plenty of chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts. And there, on the sidelines, wearing her sufferer’s expression of woe and her favorite strawberry pin, would be Lenore, a witness to our collective joy, but not a participant in it. What can you do? At least Miss Cummings had God for companionship. Lenore just had us.

So, to sum up, here’s what I’d learned by age 12: spinsters were lonely and often unhappy. Whether because they were too tall or had scars, either physical or psychological, they were not popular with boys and they were often martyrs, which meant they were good at making you feel guilty and sometimes, scared. In contrast, I was popular in the sixth grade, I had been the lead in the school play and had been asked to go steady multiple times by a variety of boys and had made out with Jamie Becker whereas my Aunt was 52 and had never been kissed and probably never would.

Lord knows, you don’t want to end up like that.

Everybody loved me growing up. That’s how it was. We may have been five girls and five girls was too many; we may have been poor compared to the millionaires next door, but where love was concerned, we had an embarrassment of wealth.

My sisters loved me, and so did my teachers and Sunday School teachers. My grandparents did, too, and my dad—he loved us, all five of us, to pieces. That’s what he used to say all the time, in different ways, of course. Sometimes, he said it while imposing rules (no TV on school nights). Sometimes he said it by taking us on some very creative adventures (for breakfast, to Jones Beach, at sunrise, for example. He kept a frying pan in the trunk of the car. We’d find an isolated sand dune; he’d build a fire and make eggs and bacon. After we finished, he scoured the pan with sand and threw it back in the trunk).

My dad declared his love frequently and urgently. Toward the end of his life, he said “I love you desperately” so often I had to ask him to stop. “I know you love me without your needing to say it,” I told him one morning on the sun porch, looking down over the lawn toward our boathouse. He nodded dolefully, but did not comply. Later that afternoon, as he drove me to the train station in Hudson, NY, for my trip back to New York City, he said it again.

He was charming and handsome and clever but not a respecter of other people’s boundaries; he got away with things. His enormous displays of affection and crushing hugs were just one aspect. Friends were always commenting on them: “My God, you’re so lucky. Your dad loves you so much!” This was embarrassing.

“How would you like your dad crooning songs from Camelot?” I’d ask them.

How to handle a woman?

There’s a way, said the wise old man. The way known to ev’ry woman since the whole rigmarole began.

Do I flatter her? I begged him answer. Do I brood or cajole or plead? Do I play the gay romancer?

Said he smiling, “No, indeed.”

How to handle a woman?

Mark me well, I will tell you, sir: The way to handle a woman, is to love her…simply love her…merely love her…love her…love her.

“He does that?” they’d ask.

Let it be said that my mom loved us too, but it was more ethereal, effortless—the kind of love needing few words. Hers was a counterweight to my dad’s more earthly expressions—the best of all possible worlds, you might say. The thing is, having the best of both possible worlds doesn’t put you on easy street. What you get in childhood has a way of slipping from your grasp the older you get. In the absences, the long stretches where no one fills your mailbox with Valentines Day cards or your heart with desire, you wonder. What is Love, exactly?

I’ve asked myself that many times. Here’s what I’ve come up with today, Valentine’s Day, 2010: Love from whatever source is not something casually distilled or easily stored. Both are fleeting—the human kind certainly is and the divine kind, though steady, can seem an abstraction. Even studying it as a subject, or writing about it as the spinster is trying to do, doesn’t equate to living it, which is the point, is it not?

Now let’s get back to my story:

My mother was the one who taught me, from the tiniest age, that as much as she and my dad loved me, that God loved me most of all. It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that my first memory ever is of lying in a crib in the nursery at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Huntington, New York, staring up at a mobile that hung over the bassinet, just beyond my grasp, as things in life so often do.

I may have told you this story already, and for that I apologize. The thing is, that early feeling of security was repeated throughout my childhood and most notably at bedtime, when my dad would make up stories (Jack James, World War II hero!) and then my mom would come in and tell me that I was God’s perfect child, just as I learned in church.

You may think I liked Sunday School. You would be wrong. How could I know that the person I am today would emerge directly from those tedious early lessons learned, sitting at the small round tables in my Mary Janes and smocked dress and trying to make sense out of Bible stories and corresponding passages from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy?

I liked the idea of God being my father-mother, sure. I liked hearing that he loved me so much that I could never be sick, or sad or scared. I also liked the church, which was small and white and pretty, with azaleas, hyacinths and forsythia that made everything seem like Easter. I loved seeing my dad standing, tall and slim in a tie and jacket, wearing white gloves and a carnation in his lapel, at the door of the foyer, welcoming in the congregation on Sunday mornings. I also loved that my mom was a Sunday School teacher and that my sisters were sitting at the surrounding tables, learning that God is seven synonyms (Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle, Life, Truth, Love) and not some angry old guy with a white beard sitting on a distant cloud, waiting to punish us when we are bad.

What didn’t I like? Sitting still. Memorization. Did not committing adultery come before or after not stealing in the 10 Commandments? And what did not taking the Lord thy God’s name in vain mean? That it was bad for Daddy to say “Oh God!” or “Jesus!” so often?

Then there were the lessons we were supposed to study every week on different subjects like Ancient and Modern Necromancy, alias Mesmerism and Hypnotism, Denounced and Is the World, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force? and my all-time least favorite: Everlasting Punishment. Lest I mislead you, these subjects were no more difficult to understand than those with shorter, merrier titles: Love; Soul; Spirit; God, the Only Cause and Creator. But I digress.

We had no crossword puzzles about Jesus to entertain us in Sunday School, no Easter and Christmas pageants like my friends who went to other churches. We did not have a choir like the Episcopalians or stained glass like the Methodists and nice baptisms and christenings and weddings like—I don’t know. The Presbyterians? We did not have preachers like the Baptists, either. What we had was a simple room downstairs from the auditorium, with the words God is Love painted on the wall, right behind where the Sunday School superintendent stood whenever we were saying the Lord’s Prayer or singing hymns or reciting the Scientific Statement of Being.

For those of you not in the know, the Scientific Statement of Being says that there is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter. That all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation and that God is all there is. It goes on to say that Spirit is immortal Truth and matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal and matter is the unreal and temporal. Finally, it says that Spirit is God and that man is his image and likeness. Therefore, man is not material. He is Spiritual.

Got that?

The Scientific Statement of Being happened to be the last thing we repeated before Sunday School was let out, and therefore I had it committed to memory, though I confess to always saying it while standing on one foot. Who knows why. Mortal error? Animal Magnetism? Simple boredom?

I realized early enough that what I was learning in church was totally unlike what my little friends were learning in their houses of worship. Worse was hearing from my Sunday School teacher that the early Romans threw Christian Scientists to the lions—just like Daniel in the lion’s den. I’m quite sure that’s what she said. Why single us out? That’s what I wondered. What had we done to deserve such persecution? Was it the no doctors thing? The fact that we had readers upstairs instead of priests? I asked my mom why we couldn’t be Lutheran like my friend Callie, because they got to draw pictures in Sunday School, or Jewish like my best friend Leslie, because they didn’t go to church at all on Sunday but rather, got to stay home and make pancakes.

One thing I did know was that I didn’t want to be like my friend Annie; her father drank and yelled all the time and her mother beat the kids with a strap. I also wouldn’t want to wear a uniform to West Side elementary school as Annie did, or get taken out of class at regular intervals to go to “relig” (aka religious instruction) at St. Patrick’s church, which was down the street from our church and much, much bigger. If that church made you study The Bible when you were actually supposed to be in school learning about fun stuff—like the pilgrims and the first colonists and whatnot—I wanted nothing to do with it.

In any event, there were many reasons I did not like Sunday School. There was one good thing about it, though, and that was that my parents rewarded us with a stop at the candy store in Cold Spring Harbor on our way home. Afterwards, we stopped in at Louie’s clam bar, a little roadside shack with a rutted dirt parking lot where my dad ate cherrystones right out of the shell and my sisters and mom and I ate hamburgers and fries and watched swans squabbling off the pier. I always wondered how he could eat those vile things, but I figured, well, he’s a dad. He eats raw clams and sings songs from Camelot that no one wants to hear and serves as an usher upstairs at church. That’s what dads do.

There is a point to all of this, and here it is: all this love talk and demonstrations about love—love with a small l and Love with a big L at home and in church really made an impression on me. Between my mother’s reassurances and my dad’s hugs and God being love and everything else, and despite my resistance to studying The Bible and Science and Health, I got the impression that this love business was really, really significant.

This was particularly true when I wasn’t feeling well. At such times, my mother reassured me that God never made sickness since he was Love and Love was all good. She would then read me some story about Jesus saving Jairus’ daughter or God saving the three men in the fiery furnace and we would sing, Feed My Sheep. My dad’s middle name was Sheppard, and I almost always felt that this song was about him even when I knew that it was really about God. You think I sound a bit confused? Well I knew this: When my mother told me that God wouldn’t ever let me be sick, I always believed her. And with that, I fell asleep. I always awoke, well.

Of course, there was a downside. Since I was never sick, I never got to miss school. My friends were always coming down with something and staying home and this seemed very unfair. They got the mumps and were allowed to stay home and sleep. They got to have their tonsils out and stay home and eat ice cream until they recovered. Why couldn’t I be more like that? What did you need tonsils for, anyway?

Finally, though, I got my wish: all my sisters and I came down with the measles and we got to stay home. Mom hovered over us more than usual, praying aloud with my Dad in the room, telling us we were all God’s perfect children and walking from one room to the other, reading to us from The Bible and from Science and Health. As I improved, she even let me play next to the ironing board while she pressed my dad’s shirts and watched The Sons of Hercules on TV. That was really fun.

Did we go to a doctor? No. The doctor, as far as I was concerned, was a sadist who plunged a hypodermic needle in my arm on my second visit ever and then smiled when I was crying. He was also the man who told me to close my eyes when I was very small and just when I anticipated he was going to give me a lollipop, put a band-aid over my mouth. Yes, my mother took us to a pediatrician for shots, but only to oblige state laws. So we suffered through getting jabbed with needles at the doctor and got measles anyway. That never made any sense to me, but that’s what she did.

My mother’s prayers were very effective, by the way, and when she needed extra help, she called a Christian Science practitioner, which is someone who heals through the application of Christian Science prayer and principles. What kind of principles? The same ones Jesus used, my friend! Anyway, within four days, I was back in kindergarten and my sisters back in school, too. I really missed watching those muscular, oily Gladiators driving chariots and beating up bad guys in leather skirts and breast plates while my mom did the ironing, but I also had a big crush on a classmate. So going back to school was, it turned out, not so bad.

It’s true: I was born a romantic, a kindergarten Don Juan. I loved boys the way my dad obviously loved girls—one of those traits that get passed from parent to child like a talent for playing the trumpet or wavy, red hair. I even tried to enlist Mom in helping me write a love note to Jody. I had not yet learned to write; of course she declined. This was devastating: I loved Jody and wanted to marry him, just the way my dad had wanted to marry my namesake when they were both seven.

That crush passed and others followed. Besides a school mate I wanted to marry in the fifth grade, there were infatuations with Ringo Star, Davy Jones and David McCallum from The Man from Uncle. Then there was Jamie Becker, with whom I went steady in the sixth grade. We actually made out in the woods one day after school. Can you believe it? I was this tall, skinny kid with blond hair and he was another tall skinny kid with blond hair and we made out while my friend timed us with a stop watch.

Where is this going? Who the hell knows? I set out to explore love with this blog and it occurred to me that my predilections later in life (Latin men, for one) had deep roots back among the tiger lilies and wild lady slippers of my childhood. All this because I was loved and because I was the youngest of five girls in a household with no boys and because my Dad wanted us to know that no one loved or needed us as much as he did, which my Mom always contradicted by affirming that God loved and needed us even more. And that was that. Not a bad beginning for a spinster, I think.

I was born under a curse, the kind you find in fairytales. It goes like this: First my parents had a girl. Then, two years later, they had another girl. The next baby — was a girl. After her came another baby — a girl. And then my mother, Adelaide, Wellesley girl, did something very unusual for her, not being Catholic: she threw away her diaphragm. Two years later, I came along, on a hot August day, a Friday, at 4 pm.

This was the day that my dad had an epiphany. “Honey,” he said, taking me out of my mother’s arms right there in the Glen Cove hospital, “This one’s mine.”

He named me Vickery. Vickery Ames. It was a strange name, to be sure. “Like Hickory Dickory?” people like to tease. ”Yeah,” I always answer, “something like that.”

My mother had chosen my sisters’ names: nice, unfancy, two-syllable names you couldn’t mispronounce or mimic like nursery rhymes, but no such luck for me. I was named for my dad’s first love, Vickery Gratton, which is never a good thing to do. Fortunately, she was a minister’s daughter, and he was only seven. At least she wasn’t a showgirl. People find this fascinating.

“Did your mother mind?” they are fond of asking. “Probably,” I say, but I forgot to ask and she died when I was a child. Well, I was 31, but I felt like a child. Still do.

Maybe your parents were trying for a boy? This is another favorite comment. Like having five girls is somehow unreasonable. As it turns out, though, I asked my dad once and he denied it. “Really honey, we just loved children,” he reassured me. “Plus, you were a mistake. Your mother suggested trying the rhythm method, but she didn’t know what that was. And so, we had you.”

My parents brought me home to my family’s varnished, modern house on the Old Tiffany estate with its rutted dirt driveway bordered by dogwoods and a canopy of tall oaks and elms shading the yard, just a mile or so from Sagamore Hill in the town of Oyster Bay Cove. And there, I grew.

Being raised on Long Island’s gold coast does much to skew a child’s sense of class and mine was developed at an early age. We may have had a brand new modern home on two and a half acres near the beach, we may have had a lovely summer cottage in the Adirondacks named “Tongue Eyrie,” but our neighbors lived in mansions, on estates, with fancy names like “Topfield” and “Meriwether.” We may have had several boats both at our lake house and a 36-foot sloop sitting down in the harbor, we may have belonged to the local beach club and the Harvard Club and gone to a great public school, but our neighbors had yachts, and pools and kids in private school and in my mind, that meant one thing: we were poor.

While I was a descendent of one US president and one pirate, our neighbors directly across the road were descendents of John D. Rockefeller and therefore very rich indeed. They lived on 30 grand acres, and we never saw them, except for coming and going down their long driveway and of course, they never waved. Indeed, the only family member who gave me the time of day was one solitary pet donkey, named Butterscotch, and that was because she was lonely. Day after day, she stood forlorn, by the fence near our house, swatting flies and eating grass. So I was friends with Butterscotch, but as for the rest of the family, they remained holed up inside one of those typically imposing Georgian style mansions that I never did see up close, except through the cracks in a high, stockade fence, and it was covered in poison ivy, so I really didn’t get too close.

Occasionally, our fancy neighbors would throw large soirees to which my parents were never invited. No one in the neighborhood was. Instead, they sent their gardener door to door bearing potted plants with consolation notes attached (“We’re having a little party tonight. Hope we won’t make too much noise.”) My mother didn’t appreciate this. Her response was to return it promptly with her own little note (“Thanks for the plant, but we’re having our own party.”)  This pretty much took care of things until the day that Butterscotch got loose, crossed the road into our woods, and dropped dead of a heart attack. I always felt it was because she preferred us; somehow, we were kinder. In any event, within hours, they’d dispatched a bulldozer to our house, dug a hole, and buried her. Another potted plant and thank you note arrived, which amused my mother no end. “We have a Rockefeller buried on the property,” she was fond of saying afterward. This appeared to break the ice with our neighbors and they did, in fact, invite my parents to one of their fancy parties after that. But only one.

My mother was a snob, but a very minor one. This wasn’t hard in our neighborhood; she was a paint and varnish heiress, after all, living on a two-donkey street. Besides Butterscotch, there was Neely Dunn, whose owner rode him to the beach in a western saddle, his feet nearly dragging on the ground. Next to him lived a one-armed Greek. On the other side and directly behind our house was a man who hated children and picked off unlucky squirrels with a shotgun. My sisters named him “Mr. Mean.”

Next door, was a hillbilly family—not fake ones, either, but real hillbillies, from the Ozark Mountains, who ate something called Slumgullion, butchered their own chickens and whose mother never wore shoes. Further down the street was an even wilder family—of six boys. You think five girls is a curse! They had a sign at the end of their driveway that said “Indian Acres,” and this pretty much described the state of things there. The boys wore their hair in Mohawks and chased us about the woods, throwing rocks and chopping down our trees with hatchets.

As luck would have it, though, there was a really nice German family at the other end of the street that invited us over on Sundays. My dad’s father’s family was German, and our neighbors were very civilized. The dad always wore an ascot, smoked a pipe and drove a Bentley. At Christmas time, his wife invited us over for pfeffernusse and lebchuchen, which I loved. It was only years later that my sister told me that our distinguished neighbor was in the Luftwaffe and that the photo of him on the side table in their hallway was of him shaking hands with Herman Goering. I was really little, then, so of course I remember little of this. The point is, I did not grow up in the normal circumstances, and this may explain why I am the way I am. Or not. When you grow up the youngest of five girls in a two-donkey neighborhood, and are descended from one US president and one pirate, of course anything is possible.

Dear Fellow Spinster:

Here’s a little tale, not about how George and Laura Bush invited me to take an outdoor shower  (more on that later) but a real story, the one I’ve been building into a memoir for the last three years: about how a tall blond WASP, Latino-lover and one-time girlfriend to a mountain-climbing, motorcycle-riding Italian photographer became an ex-girlfriend,  a solitary Sunday School teacher and librarian in a Christian Science Reading Room, of all places. From Latino-loving biker chick to head librarian. How does that happen?

I have come up with seven possible explanations for this strange trajectory into spinsterhood: varnish, the US Navy, the Sons of Hercules,  Cosmopolitan, horses, being raised in a religion most people find weirdly suspect,  and John Gotti. Buckle up—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Part I

I was born entitled, the descendent of one US president (Ulysses S. Grant) and one pirate (Sir Richard England). My mother provided the blue blood, my father the buccaneer genes. She was a Wellesley girl, he graduated from Duke, Duke law and Harvard business school. What brought them together? Varnish. Paint and varnish, to be exact. My mother’s grandfather made it, sold it and built a nice little fortune off it through a small company he founded in Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Paint and Varnish Company, at 50 Jay Street, in what is now DUMBO.

It’s gone now, bought out in the seventies by a large chemical company, but while  it was in my family, the Brooklyn Paint and Varnish Company provided for many perks, among them an Adirondack camp, which my great grandfather built at the turn of the last century. He built it on a mountainside, in the middle of a lake, complete with Adirondack-style cottage with stone pillars and wide front porch, tiny island with gazebo, private bay for swimming and plenty of show girls. While his wife stayed home in Brooklyn, my great grandfather had a fine old time, entertaining young ladies in the fresh air, by the silvered waters of Lake George. One man, many women. What did he do there? What do you think?

My parents met in a swimming race in those  same waters, years later,  when they were 13. My dad was a camper on a nearby island and my mother beat him. “Your mother was a great swimmer,” he always said, somewhat wistfully. He was a man unused to losing, espeially to women.

My parents did not become an item then; they were just kids. It took another 12 years for them to grow up and come together and the Navy had much to do with it, or rather, the war did. World War II, that is. My father had enlisted, as young men did back then, when he was in his first year of law school at Duke. Both my mother’s younger brother Ben and my dad’s older brother Arnold did too. It was what you did, particularly college-educated young men. Things were different than they are today. Privileged young men didn’t have to defend their country—they wanted to. Being college graduates, they also had an advantage: instead of ending up as enlisted men, they immediately became officers.

That’s how my dad became a commander on the islands of Guam and Saipan throughout the war, where he had the time of his life, according to stories he has shared with me over and over. Having been to bomb and fuse school in Jacksonville, FL, as part of his training, he was put in charge of a bomb dump. Later, he was in charge of collecting and dispensing carbines from officers and sailors as they came and left the island.  This put him in the enviable position of being responsible for a lot of firearms. What did he do? He traded them for things a young naval officer needed: like lumber, a fridge and beer. What did he do with those things? What does any guy in the middle of a war do? Build a beach shack for entertaining nurses in. Do you detect a pattern here?

He not only entertained nurses in his beach shack, he dated many of them. I have all his photo albums from back then and they are full of photos of him standing next to the things he loved best in life: one, airplanes  and two, ladies, most of whom were photographed wearing bathing suits and sitting on his lap,  palm trees and bright Pacific skies in the background.

I needn’t mention it, but my dad was popular with the ladies and good looking: kind of like if Steve McQueen and Charlton Heston had a baby. He was charming, too, affable, and the beach shack didn’t hurt—nor the boat. Yes, he had a boat—doesn’t every guy from Palisades Park New Jersey serving in the middle of a war? He got the hull at the dump and fixed it up. He also got an engine from the dump, painted it and traded it for a brand new engine. So while other navy guys were doing push-ups for recreation, my dad was hanging out in his beach shack and taking the ladies waterskiing. As far as he was concerned, there is nothing like a dame!

When he was transferred from Guam to Saipan, he went out and made what he called a midnight requisition. He stole a trailer, in other words, loaded his boat onto it and took it down to the water. There, he met a guy loading telephone poles onto a carrier that was going to his next port of call. He gave the guy a carbine and in return, the guy loaded his boat onto the carrier. And presto! Upon arriving on Saipan, he found his boat waiting and a new crop of nurses. He had to leave the beach shack behind, alas.

So why didn’t he marry any of the those dames?  Varnish. As things would have it, my mother, an English major, wrote him —and many other men—letters throughout the war. That was what women back home did: write to all the boys overseas. Anyway, that was her winning ticket. “Your mother wrote the best letters,” my dad has told me more than once. For proof, I have copies of them, all typewritten, in storage. Yes, he kept hers, she kept his. A paper trail, in other words, was established. She beat out the Navy nurses for his love with the stroke of a pen.

My father served his country and returned home, marrying my mother in 1947. My uncle, the heir apparent to running the Brooklyn Paint and Varnish Company and my mother’s younger brother, however, did not. A co-pilot of  a Navy Liberator, he was shot down in a  bombing raid over Marcus Island, on May 9, 1945, just before the end of the war. His plane and body were never found.

I remind myself once in a while when I see the headlines about Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that I am not entirely removed from such losses. I have read and reread the letter that was given to my grandparents when two men showed up at the door of their home at 45 Kilburn Road in Garden City, NY, with the grim news. I can picture how it must have overtaken them, this news, their only son, gone. What did they get? A purple heart. A war hero for  a son. For many years, it and Uncle Ben’s photo hung in the library of that very same Adirondack cottage that my sisters and I now own, a reminder of our family’s sacrifice. I may be descended from a pirate, but I have him as a war hero to burnish the family’s respectability, and for that, I am grateful.

My grandmother, the original Christian Scientist in the family, welcomed my dad as a son-in-law with open arms. My grandfather did not. I do know that at the end of the war, he had traveled the country, visiting the families of the other young men in my uncle’s plane. Their squadron had been called the Reluctant Dragons and there were 16 men who were lost in the raid. But apparently, he was turned away. Perhaps the families blamed my uncle, and by extension, my grandfather. Perhaps it was just grief at losing their children. Grief is funny. It will do that to you.

So my grandfather returned home, heartbbroken, my parents married, and settled into what married couples do. My dad became the proverbial son-on-law working for the Brooklyn Paint and Varnish Company, having finished both his law degree and MBA, courtesy of the GI Bill.  What else did he do? He and my mother bought two acres on the Tiffany Estate in Oyster Bay, where they built a house that was distinctive for both the neighborhood and the times. Unlike other homes, it was of modern design. Strangely, it wasn’t painted on the outside: it was varnished. And that’s where I came into the world.

photo: Galina Arlov

Dear Fellow Spinster:

What does “the premier provider of adult clown services” have to do with the Stupak amendment in the health care bill—and why should you care?

Before I answer that, a caveat. Ouchy the Clown and I aren’t “friends.” I don’t use his services or contribute to how he makes a living. How does he do that? Besides being a DJ and doing “straight razor shaving,” he offers this rather unusual service to clients. Are you ready?

“I am a trained, certified meeting facilitator. Oh, and I am a clown. Did ya miss that part? I specialize in:

• Brainstorming sessions
• Conflict resolution
• Organizational development”

Ouchy, whose tagline is “Happy to Beat You,” is well aware of the irony. “ Sure, it’s weird to have a clown facilitator,” his web site admits, “but you’ve seen stranger things, I’m sure.”

I first met Ouchy in cyberspace. You could call me an innocent bystander. I, a senior copywriter in a downtown Web development firm, was minding my business, writing some copy for Goldman Sachs’ intranet when I noticed a group of Web designers gathered around the Mac of the Colombian art director I mentioned earlier. You know: the one in the John Edwards dream story.  But back to the workplace.

So here are all these young designers staring at a computer. Not wanting to miss out on the excitement, I went in for a look. You guessed it. Ouchy. Cut to a couple of years later. The firm had folded. I was freelancing, which gave me time to museum hop during the day. And that’s how I ended up, on a bright fall afternoon, on line at the Guggenheim with a Russian designer friend, waiting to get into the Matthew Barney show.

Those of you familiar with Barney’s Cremaster Cycle will recall it as being highly “clown centric.” In any event, Ouchy was attending in his usual modest leather regalia. So I waved at him excitedly and, like a proper gentleman, he walked over.

“Ouchy!” I exclaimed. I mentioned having seen his site and he kindly obliged my request for a photo. “Happy to beat you,” I said afterward, before he walked into the crowd. And that’s how I ended up posing with the premier provider of adult clown services. Now I must ask you to look closely at him and at me in the photo. I know it’s kind of tiny, but if you look closely, you’ll see that he looks terrified. That Ouchy has a funny sense of humor.

So now you’re wondering how does this relate to healthcare and I’m going to tell you. It goes like this. dMind, the Web development firm that brought Ouchy and I together, was a first for me in many respects. It was the first job I had working in Web development. It was also a bit of a hellhole, compared to my previous jobs working for American Express and the Forbes brothers, what with their landmark building on Fifth Avenue and collection of Faberge Eggs and yacht and all. Located upstairs from a Taco Bell and across the street from the Fulton Fish Market back when it still sold fish, this Web development firm had the memorable distinction of smelling terrible all the time. What did it smell like? Not just the bathroom at Jones Beach, but the bathroom at Jones Beach and refried beans. The point is, it was a rather unrefined place—and the Modern Christian Spinster kind of enjoyed it. It was a nice break from propriety, in other words.

While this was a first, it was also a last for me, because I never held another fulltime job or had health insurance again. For those of you not in the know, Christian Scientists are known for a bunch of things, most of them incorrect. One is that we’re the organization behind those free stress tests given in the subway stations. The other is that Tom Cruise is a member.

A bigger misconception is that Christian Scientists are martyrs who don’t go to doctors and therefore like to suffer. A related misconception is that we deny medical care to critically ill infants and children, dooming them to suffer.

Why would anyone pray, people ask? How could that possibly make you feel better? People ask this a lot. Some people are actually quite abrasive about it. I had a boyfriend in college who teasingly used to call me a cult member, but he also used to refer to his penis as “my two inches of Jewish steel,” so I didn’t exactly get offended.

Anyway, if you’re wondering about the effectiveness of prayer in healthcare, then read my story about being healed of measles, epilepsy, a sprained ankle, a broken bone, a frozen shoulder, migraine headaches and grief through prayer alone and you’ll see. Oh wait a second. I haven’t written those yet.  Well no matter. What can prayer heal? Anything—which is why when I was asked what kind of insurance plan I wanted at the Web development company, I picked the cheapest plan, the one that didn’t offer full blown coverage, but offered reimbursement for the services of a Christian Science Practitioner. This is someone who heals through prayer. And unlike most medical services, it is inexpensive. $20 a day, if that.

So I paid my insurance premiums every month and then, when I had some bills from the practitioner, I submitted them to the insurance company. It was a while before I realized, however, that I hadn’t gotten any reimbursements. So I called the company and was told that yes, Christian Science treatment was covered. My claims just hadn’t been processed yet.

A year or more went by, and not a single claim was processed. And then the Web development company vaporized in the dotcom bubble and I got laid off. That’s when I found out that the insurance company never had covered Christian Science treatment; I had paid all those premiums for nothing—and the only way to get my money back was to go to small claims court. I did, and won.

Despite all the dire prognostications of well meaning friends, I’ve survived quite well without insurance, thank you. I continue using practitioners and having healings through prayer and I intend to keep doing so even as the health care bill  comes up for discussion and a vote in the senate. Which leads me to this:

If anyone should be skeptical of national health insurance, or not want to pay taxes to cover medical services they will never use, or fund activities that violate their religious beliefs, it’s me.  That would include, by the way, refusing to pay taxes that fund any wars or bail out Wall Street or cover Viagra—especially when most insurance companies deny coverage for contraceptives to women. But I can’t do that. I’m not allowed to be a cafeteria taxpayer and I believe that being a good citizen means caring about other people’s well being, which is the point of nationalized health care and the reason I support healthcare reforms and the public option and am against the Stupak amendment.

Its supporters, however, do not share my sentimental feelings for my fellow Americans. What they care about is paying for their stuff and their stuff only. That means, of course, disenfranchising women in need of abortions. Not just the ones who can’t afford them, but any women, really. Have you read the comments recently by prolifers anxious to defend Stupak in the news media? Sure, some  claim simply that they do not want to fund anything they find morally abhorrent. Fair enough. But many others reveled in going further. Here are a few of the labels they used to describe women facing problem or unwanted pregnancies straight from  NYTimes.com: “frivolous,” “irresponsible,” “lazy,” to name a few. The word “slut” was implied in every one of them. These are Christians? What happened to “Let he who is without sin among you cast a stone”? There is something just so Taliban in their fervor. Let’s call them by what they are, shall we. I suggest “stoners.”

That’s why I am against Stupak. The Modern Christian Spinster simply does not give free passes to men on the responsibility front as so many prolifiers, and the Catholic Bishops do. They are calling women—basically all women who might ever have a problem pregnancy, and that is all of us (well, perhaps not the Modern Christian Spinster at this more proper stage of life) — both morally inferior and immature. It’s a serious charge and people need to take note. Women, and men. Particularly men. If you’ve ever had sex, particularly unprotected sex, you need to be standing up for women and not abandoning them, as if they’re in this all alone.

I’m infuriated by our representatives who passed this amendment that diminishes women’s reproductive rights and autonomy while leaving men’s perennially undisturbed.

Which brings me right back to Ouchy. He would be a splendid candidate for facilitating the upcoming debate over health care in the senate. Conflict resolution? Organizational development? Why stand outside the doors of democracy bearing an automatic weapon as happened at the town hall meetings when all you need is a little hot wax and boundary pushing to make our lawmakers humble? A little more submission on their part, in my opinion, would serve us all well. Forget the Bishops this time, folks. Send in the clown!

Thank you for writing. No, I’ve never heard of a male spinster, though why not? There are many unmarried men of gentle family like you past the common age for marrying and unlikely to marry. There may be even more of them than the female variety. Perhaps the dictionary definition should be revised to include pioneers like you. Congratulations, dude, on breaking the lace ceiling, and welcome to the club!

I’m sure you’ve tried Match. I did. I think I was viewed something like eight thousand times. Oh, I was popular with young guys and old guys, alright,  but particularly atheists. I think there’s a correlation between atheists and looking for love online. It’s amazing how many there are, many expressing such personal virtues as “loves to laugh” and “extremely open-minded” at the same time that their “religious views” articulate a particular hostility toward people of faith. Hello! I did go out with a couple and sure enough, all they wanted to do is argue about Jesus! Let me say, do not challenge me on the Jesus front, dude. You will lose! Anyway, the last one tried and I decimated him and then, at the end of the meal, he apologized for attacking my religious views and invited me out again. That happened twice, actually: two different atheists. Weird. I said, “the conversation has been stimulating,  but I’d rather save the arguing until later on—after we’re married,” which only made them look perplexed. Like they didn’t get the joke.

Anyway, I did hear from a very attractive French guy who’d just moved to New York. Lord, he was handsome, and wearing a suit! And then I saw the word “atheist” down at the bottom of his profile, and my heart sank. A little mischief always cheers me up, so I e-mailed him straight away and said, “I have proof that God exists!” and I never heard from him again. Afterward, I added the “no atheists” stipulation to my profile and then I didn’t hear from anyone except much older guys seeking much younger women, which I find creepy. There was even a married Congregationalist Minister who directed me to the church website and one of his sermons, “When Things Are Not As They Seem.” Indeed. He grilled me on being a Christian Scientist, as if there was something wrong with that. I said, “dude, you’re a married minister on a dating site. Which of our sins is greater?”

There were other interesting, presumably God fearing characters after him, who dropped into my e-mailbox like apples falling from a tree, but none was exactly right. RopeEmCowboy. OohBabyBaby. Hunque. QuestHero. Then there was the guy employed in a Tournament and Dinner Theater as King Arthur whose screen name I can’t remember. I do love a man on a horse. I had my own horse when I was 14—Dick. He was my first love! But no one appealed to me the way Dick did. None suited my sense of adventure or refined sensibility. Oh, the lousey speeling and grammer! The winks!! The vacation snapshots in tank tops or worse, shirtless!!!

I was prudent — The Modern Christian Spinster always is in matters of love and finance. As a precautionary measure, I signed up for only three months, only to discover a week ago that Match memberships don’t expire — they automatically renew. But they don’t tell you this and they don’t bill you until a month later, so you don’t discover you owe them another $75.09 until a month has passed, at which point they will make it very difficult for you to get a credit. What merchant offers credits for used merchandise you want to return a month later besides J. Crew? Certainly not Match.

Being a stickler for financial propriety, I was enraged. I am not patient with this kind of scam! Late fees? Plate sharing charges? I’ve been banned for life from the Carnegie Deli for refusing to pay $4.00 for the privilege of splitting a Reuben the size of my head. You don’t tell the Modern Christian Spinster how to eat a sandwich, buddy!

That Match is sneaky! Do you know they train their customer service reps to lie? They do. Explain you didn’t want another three months of membership and you want a credit and they will staunchly tell you that their system doesn’t allow it. Two of them did this, which is why I demanded to speak to a supervisor. After once again repeating my request, he too referenced Match’s  rogue system. You know, the one that human beings program but over which they apparently have no control.

“Your company is no different from other companies that give credits,” I said. “If  Con Ed does and Verizon and Time Warner do then yours can too. Capisce?”

“I’ll send your complaint to the resolution department,” he said immediately. And he did. I got my credit the next day.

A company that has a resolution department and keeps it hidden from customers? Do me a favor, will you Luvs2Cuddle? Share this little secret with your pals. And never ever  sign up for Match again. Because the Modern Christian Spinster is going to share with you all you need to know about having love and finding love. Yes, you Mr. Modern Spinster dude. And it won’t cost you $75.09 Just promise me one thing. Keep your shirt on!

Dear Fellow Spinster:

It’s hard knowing where to start a story as long as mine: my first memory of lying in a crib in the childcare room at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Huntington, Long Island, wrapped in a blanket and staring up at a mobile that hung like a branch just beyond the reach of my tiny fingers? My need to forgive my dad, who charmed nearly everyone with his mad genius and good looks, and who I lost nearly three years ago? My dream last week of a certain philandering Senator otherwise dubbed “the little Breck girl” back when he tossed his hat into the presidential ring and the name “Rielle Hunter” still meant nothing to the public?

Hmmmm. They are all related, these stories: my upbringing as a church girl, the senator’s infuriating penchant for affairs, my dad’s infuriating talent for charming ladies far and wide and the way he cheated on my mother right up to the day she died of breast cancer and I sat at her bedside at our home on Lake George, holding her hand until her eyes closed forever.

Let’s have fun, shall we? John Edwards for five hundred, please.

This is the story.

I spied him two weeks ago on University Place in front of the dry cleaners, where he sat, alone, on a park bench.

“John Edwards. What are you doing here!” I exclaimed upon spotting, first the top of his head, then, beneath it, his famous face, which was tilted downward, as if he was trying to hide behind all that famous hair, which had grown longish, by the way. A bit Bohemian, the way I like it.

Let me say that I had liked him as a candidate long ago, less for his good looks than his appealing virtue of being a handsome man who appeared to be a one-woman man, a devoted family guy and public servant to boot. Now there’s something you don’t see everyday. And then the National Enquirer burst my bubble.

The sight of him sitting there in the morning sunshine right outside the dry cleaner unleashed in my thought a meteor shower of tabloid images. Elizabeth. Rielle. The baby. I immediately recalled the  story of how she met him, improbably in midtown, and got him at hello. Well, it wasn’t hello. I think she said, “Hello,” and then said, “You’re hot.” And the next thing you know, she’s moving to South Carolina with the baby and Elizabeth is all over the Huffington Post saying she’s going to toss the bum out.

I looked at John there, on that bright October day, and had a Rielle moment of sorts. I say “of sorts” because he looked vulnerable and, I felt, needed  a friend. Otherwise, why would he be sitting like that? I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide behind a newspaper. He just looked, well, dejected.

I am no Rielle. My thought was merely to be a good Samaritan. Being a bit of a prude and disapproving of how he’d treated Elizabeth (and also being a firm believer in the seventh commandment and the Golden Rule), I wasn’t hitting on him. I was wearing sweats, having just walked the dog, besides. I was just being a helpful neighbor. Offering a helping hand, because that’s just the kind of person I am.

“Aren’t you afraid of being spotted?” I asked as he looked up at me. It was an inviting look, the look of a man with nothing to hide. Still I wondered what he was doing there, where people who disliked him for being a bum could look down at the top of his head as I did and take in his famous face as I did and perhaps make disparaging comments, as I do every time I see a picture of him in the Enquirer at D’Agostino’s, or see Rielle with that baby on Entertainment Tonight, and think about him promising her a rooftop wedding and a serenade by Dave Matthews after Elizabeth passes on. I mean really!

He smiled and I sat down. “You could sit in Washington Square Park,” I said, describing the lovely park renovation, the fountain that spurts water that I cavorted in with that nice guy from Church on the last hot days of August, and how the whole thing now lines up with the arch and Fifth Avenue. “You would have some privacy, there,” I said. But he wasn’t interested.

I was perplexed by his blankness. I mean, it conveyed a complete lack of awareness and propriety. “You’re persona non grata around here, John,” I wanted to tell him. “People don’t like you any more. At least have the common sense to remove yourself from being seen and judged.”

But I didn’t.

“Union Square is also a bit more private and it’s closer,” I offered, thinking that he could disappear more readily there, too. Perhaps he could sit in the dog run? I mean, it’s a bit smellier than the one in Washington Square. Not many people go there. Daffodil doesn’t even like it. He would, at the very least, not be seen—or judged by the likes of people like me.

He didn’t say no. He just didn’t say yes. It didn’t interest him and I was somewhat concerned. Here was John Edwards, looking a bit out of sorts. Had he lost it, mentally? Where was the big smile? The crisp suit? Gone. He was, to all appearances, an ordinary handsome guy — and a bit of a depressed one, if you ask me.

He looked so harmless I offered to get him a glass of water and a place to cool off. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. I thought, this is a bit weird, but I’m offering him a cup of water in Christ’s name. Where’s the harm in that? I was mindful that he was married and also that the last time I’d allowed someone that attractive upstairs to use the loo that there had been some amount of making out and grappling. But this guy? I wasn’t worried. He didn’t look up to it.

As happens in dreams, my apartment was no longer a studio when I opened the door to let Mr. Edwards inside, but had undergone a Cinderella transformation. Gone was the tiny kitchen and short hallway in which that last guy—a handsome Columbian art director from work who also happened to have a girlfriend—had entrapped me in his arms. In its place was a vast sunlit space with expansive marble floors and expensive modern furniture, the kind of space in which you don’t consider anything untoward happening because, well, I wasn’t going to let it and also because it looked so much like the lounge of the W Hotel.

I led John into my large dream kitchen with the granite counter tops and marveled at my new Sub-Zero fridge and how I could fill a glass with ice cubes and purified water right from the door, unlike the 18 year old GE model I owned when awake that froze everything in it even when turned off. John was quiet. He leaned against the counter and when I handed him the glass, drank thirstily, poor dear.

We walked into the living room, which was now overlooking Central Park. I turned on some music and we sat down. And then—I can’t say how this happened—he had taken off his shirt and we were dancing, me in my sweatpants, him bare-chested. Let me say that things didn’t go farther than that, physically. I enjoyed the feeling of being held like that by someone who shouldn’t have been doing it the way we do in our dreams and some people do when awake: without recrimination.

The next thing I knew, I’d taken him to an outdoor wedding where the banquet tables looked out on what is perhaps a uniquely Southern form of wedding entertainment: a tractor pull. Perhaps we were in his home state? I guess it must have been. The landscape was not that of upstate New York. There were barns, sure, but I’m pretty sure the crop I was looking out on in the distance was tabacky. Not that I know.

I woke up in the morning, after my night of dancing with a bare-chested John Edwards and watching the tractor pull feeling as I always do after one of these no-strings attached nocturnal dalliances: a lucky woman. The feeling of satisfaction lasted all day—and the next. I may be a Christian spinster, but I am a uniquely modern one: I had him at hello. And now he is gone — back to being just a face in the tabloids and perhaps soon dancing on a rooftop with Rielle to some Dave Matthews song. Frankly, I hope Elizabeth keeps her word. You just can’t trust guys with hair that perfect. And Dave Mattews? He should have the good sense to be busy that day. Heck, let Rielle and John settle for a tractor pull. Between you and me, though, even that’s too good for them.