We must go down to the sea.

In what seems like a very long time ago now, I ‘ran away to the sea’.

Clark Little ~ The Inside of a Breaking Wave

It wasn’t something I had always dreamed of. I didn’t grow up in New England nor did we vacation there in my childhood, the lure wasn’t generated by something in my DNA or family history. Running toward the sea and all she held so enticing and healing happened in one of those odd confluences of events that start when people decide to divorce; a place where things are empty and vast and terrifying.

I didn’t find a therapist (even if I had the financial resources my attitude toward this remains ‘physician heal thyself’). I didn’t turn to the reckless consumption of alcohol or men or shopping – all of which seem a potentially dangerous cocktail when feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable. No, I learned to sail and it not only saved my sanity, but taught me skills and refined others I didn’t know I possessed. It expanded my fearlessness, maybe, sailing even saved my life. Running away to the sea came about for me because my ex-husband expressed wanting “someone ordinary” (his words) and for me that meant I somehow needed to prove that being “extraordinary” (at least to myself) would be ‘more than enough’. The path to this was illogical to everyone around me, and a point of contentious arguments with my parents with whom I happened to be living at the time. It was quite literally the biggest of long shots odds-wise on the planet (perhaps the whole galaxy) and I was going for it regardless of what anyone thought, suggested or declaimed as being ‘beyond my grasp’. Here’s the truth, those closest to us, and even those in our immediate sphere of influence, wish to keep us small because it makes them feel better about their lives. Do not listen. Your life is not about accommodating others, it is about filling your journey up so that at the end of it there is nothing left undone. No regrets. Ever.

Me. Sailing on Lake Erie.

Learning to sail gave me enormous, focused calm. It gave me ink black skies devoid of light pollution but filled with shooting stars and the Milky Way as I navigated in darkness on Lake Erie. I pointed up the 33 foot (roughly 10 metres) Catalina I was being taught on – not with a compass, not with the tell tails but in closing my eyes and feeling the wind and adjusting accordingly. I scrubbed boat scum and reefed the main. I took the helm and winched until my arms ached. I was rail weight and hauled sheets. I stood in the bowsprit sighting race markers as we heeled at 15 degrees clinging to shrouds in breathless exhilaration and joy. I tacked and jibed my way through May, June, July and August, at least three times a week and in the process something magical happened – I found an exit strategy to the life everyone around me wanted me to live but that I had either outgrown or was wrongly born into.

The Californian

The 1990/1991 crew and staff of the HMS Bounty, Captain John Rumsey holding the life ring, me, at right of it.

‘Randomly’ I met a captain. John Rumsey was certified to sail everything (and as is evident by this article he still does), all the way up to Super Tankers, and he told me that if I could sail on Lake Erie I could sail on any body of water – anywhere.  After five months of stomach lurching nerves each time the phone rang I became the Operations Manager for the HMS Bounty (not crew, but still having a dotted line reporting to John) then owned by Turner Broadcasting Systems in Atlanta, Georgia. The remarkable thing about having a job like this is the sailing world automatically assumes you are a world class yachtsman and you get invited to helm (or crew) boats like America’s Cup 12 metre yachts the Heart of America and Stars & Stripes, and 130 LOA, 130 gross tonnage replica of an 1847 revenue cutter owned by San Diego Maritime Museum called The Californian.

If you sail, if you love the sea, you understand its pull. And so, two things I must ask of you dear reader – rather I implore you to help.

Every two years something called the Transat650 is raced by a fleet of a mere 80 sailboats. These are 6.5 metres in length and sailed solo, without any technology save for a VHF radio for approximately 30 days crossing the Atlantic leaving Douarnenez, France and finishing in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. I have a Croatian friend (he’s the one closest to you in the picture at right) who aspires to do this in September of 2017. He, unlike I, has sailed his whole life. He is more than sufficiently competent to accomplish this, and as an extreme sportsman is physically fit and mentally acute enough to take on such a challenge. He has an @IndieGoGo campaign and has realised 48% of his funding goal with 22 days remaining is his campaign. I would like to ask you to donate $5 (of course you can give more, even line up a corporate sponsor for him! if you would like). Just because.

Just because you know that you would love to do this as a sailor and life has gotten in the way of doing so, or long ago you recognised your limitations and while still in love with the water and harnessing it a Dark & Stormy is the most tempest you wish to face. You will find Slobodan Velikic’s campaign here. His success is directly tied to my next ‘ask’ (but you will have to wait to find out what I mean by that late this summer). So, thank you for participating in this inspiring man’s timeless quest to test himself, to be in harmony with, and against, the vastness offered by the Atlantic.

My second favour costs you absolutely nothing but a couple moments of your time, and requires the same Internet connection you are already reading this blog post on. Some months ago I wrote a blog entitled “The only oil that goes with a Croatian bikini is olive” and as a result I now serve as the volunteer Chief Strategy Officer for the Clean Adriatic Sea Alliance, CASA. The lovely folks at Avaaz.org have made CASA part of a Survey Monkey campaign to secure a grant for $10,000 USD. All you have to do is vote for us (go here). We plan to dedicate the use of the grant for our lobbying efforts to stop the proposed oil/gas drilling in the Adriatic Sea! Hopefully enough of you will do so and we will be able to expand our efforts to ensure that for future generations of Croatians (Italians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Bosnians and Albanians) and vacationing tourists alike the Adriatic remains free of gas and oil platforms, tankers and pipelines and all of the horrific toxins and environmental hazards which accompany such. Thank you, in advance.

We never know exactly where we will be called to service as a result of something as random as going through a divorce. For myself, and my own journey to Ithaca, it took a couple of years (back in the 1990s) to move through the pain and to actually feel gratitude that my ex wanted someone ordinary. As I sit here today, writing this, I have the presence of mind to know I am exactly where I was always meant to be.

If you enjoy my blog please consider ‘buying me a cup of tea’ in your currency via PayPal to livelikeadog@gmail.com and then, please do share the blog with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book below, thank you! 

No expectations. Realising two, for less than one

The life philosophy that is so perfectly captured in an ancient Scots expression of “what’s meant for you will not pass you by” is how I have always chosen to live. Everything either is, or, it is not. There might be a desire but there is not expectation – expectations carry the potential for disappointment. No one likes disappointment. No, I would rather live in a place of delight when something wonderful happens than be disappointed by people, events or life itself. In such a mindset the glass always is at least 1/2 full, if it isn’t overflowing! Within this is also the deeply rooted principle that there is nothing that I have to have. Absolutely, NOTHING.

http://farmgirlflowers.com/

As a six year old child my beloved, adopted, Aunt Dorothy had a price tag on every single thing in her home (and in the log cabin behind it) – she had an antiques business. I recall being allowed to pick up luminescent carved jade Buddhas only to discover a (shocking amount) tag on the base. Such embeds in a child’s mindset that all possessions are transient and that we are only their temporary guardians – this carries you through life with a certain ease of not holding the bouquet of life too tightly about anything.  Of not trying to control or worrying, of rarely angering and not certainly screaming when I do, of living in each precious moment, of being able to let go of things (and sometimes people, and definitely jobs) rather than have resentment consume me. Doing this ensures that nothing becomes a burden, or impedes my personal journey toward enlightenment. In life there are many things that will ‘no longer serve’ and in releasing, while painful, is (eventually) liberating. That is not meant to read as being heartless but I truly (also) believe in the profound words of Ecclesiastes 3:1 as found in the 1967 song by The Byrds – to everything there is a season.

I love estate sales. I am sure the idea of poking through the possessions of the dead will creep some out, but for me (and quite of few like me) it is a source of unlimited potential of discovered (often inexpensive) material happiness. Last week my girlfriend Kanikaa and I went to two estate sales. Having over the course of the last year sold off ALL of my various chairs I wanted but one thing at the first one – the armchair frame in the French Louis XVI style (to cover – at least the front of it – in this totally wild 1940s vintage Chinese silk brocade that was once a long, full skirt).  Assuming I was lucky enough to get it, I had set a budget of $65 for it.  The chair frame was anomaly – the rest of the house was decidedly Mid-Century Modern. Even arriving by 7:30 AM for a sale that started at 9, Kanikaa and I wound up with temporary numbers 14 and 15. I believe in ‘putting it out there’ if there is something I would like to manifest. Thankfully I will talk to anyone. At 8:30 I approached the vehicle with the two women who had given out the temporary numbers with Kanikaa. It turns out that Arielle and Amanda have a shop, they had arrived at 5 AM to be the first two in the door, and they were only interested in Mid-Century Modern. Also thankfully they were more than happy to put a sold tag on the chair frame ‘for me’. You can imagine my delight, when we were let in in the second group, to discover that it wasn’t simply one chair, but a matching pair! And, AND, each chair was priced at a mere TWENTY-DOLLARS! So, while I might have been delighted with one, to get a pair for less than what I had budgeted for one? WooHoo! would be putting it mildly. But here’s where it gets even better – ultimately the frames became FREE. How you say? Within hours of arriving home I discovered that an étagère that I had listed on eBay would definitely sell – recovering of what I had spent on it in the first place after five years of enjoyment and a modest profit which completely covered the $43.20 expended on the chairs. 😀 These are not fine French antiques, rather they are vintage hardwood frames from a now defunct furniture company in Grand Rapids, Michigan – the original paper labels are on them – I don’t believe they have ever actually been upholstered.

My girlfriend Doris, who also spent many years with a bona fide antiques business, offered her congratulations and expressed “Sometimes I wonder about you and how everything always works out.” (For other examples of these minor victories over material things please see the posts Pursuit and An utterly incongruent story of six lamps.)

Kanikaa asked as we returned home – me flying higher than a kite with happiness – how I would have gotten to the sale if she hadn’t driven, and I said I wouldn’t. But, she said, but you wanted the chair. Yes, I replied, but there is absolutely nothing I have to have, and there will always be another chair. Still, I am thrilled with the gift of the universe saying yes – once again – and everything working out for me – without expectations. The bonus is the ridiculously happy memory shared with my girlfriend.

If you enjoy my blog please consider ‘buying me a cup of tea’ in your currency via PayPal to livelikeadog@gmail.com and do share it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book ‘all that I need, or live life like a dog with its head stuck out the car window’ below, thank you! 

Nostalgic and guilty pleasures found in marshmallow Peeps, honouring Mrs. Dwyer

I am a hypocrite in my food choices for the span of time each spring that it takes me to eat one four pack of Just Born (always the yellow ones) Peeps. I succumb to this guilty pleasure to remember and honour Mrs Dwyer.

Argh, sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, and various food dyes – but I don’t care (though I wish I KNEW IF the sugar was GMO-free). 

Mrs. Dwyer was my 1st grade teacher.

Easter-time 1967, I was 6 years old and had a stabbing pain in my right side and a slight fever. Mrs. Dwyer sent me down to the nurses’ office. I remember hobbling the seemingly endless distance over the terrazzo floors, wincing with every step. Within the hour I was in the Emergency Room and headed for surgery to remove my appendix which they later told me had nearly ruptured. When I woke up Mrs. Dwyer had sent a bouquet of flowers – peppermint striped and white carnations, a couple of red and white paper straws bent to ‘take a sip’ all served up to resemble an ice cream soda. It was the first time (and obviously memorable) I had received flowers! I remember that they smelled like cinnamon, and to this day I can’t see red and white striped carnations without having my heart clench, getting a lump in my throat and thinking of Mrs. Dwyer. I have a chair that I reclaimed and refinished in my early twenties that I finally recognised years later was a tribute to her love – I am about to sell it after living with it since 1983 – but what is in my heart and head ties this to her and who she helped make me.

In retrospect there is no doubt in my mind that I was one of her favourites (after all the woman also came to my wedding and rushed the altar to bestow her blessings and kisses and hugs when I was pronounced a married woman at 23) but then, I was a scared little kid with a huge bloody incision laced with cat gut  who had just been soothed and affirmed as special by someone I thought (still do) extraordinary.

When I came home from the hospital three or four days later Mrs Dwyer magically appeared with an enormous (to me, at the time) Easter basket and amidst the floss grass were speckled eggs, jelly beans, a chocolate bunny and PEEPS!  I am pretty sure she had taken the Peeps out of their cello wrapper because I remember their being just a little crunchy on the outside. The yellow sugar coating and the evaporating moisture of the gooey middle forming a crust. It is still the only way I can eat them – poke a hole in the package wait 24 hours and devour! Each one makes me 6 again and knowing fully and completely that someone (outside of my family) loved me. I was (and still am) the single yellow Peep in the sea of pink, purple and blue Peeps, utterly unique and special because Mrs. Dwyer made me so!

Our childhoods are filled with such sweet pleasures that we rarely recognise for just how special they are at the time (or later) and whilst I don’t live in the past, sometimes these extraordinary moments appear like a rainbow with all the associate blessings and I am so very grateful.

Recently another iconic brand of my childhood has been making quite a bit of social media noise for its “Wholesome” ad campaign launched a month ago (today). Honey Maid Snacks produces the ubiquitous graham cracker used for S’Mores and cheesecake crusts (like my Aunt Wanda Novak made) and made so famous (for a certain generation of us) by Bill Cosby in his routine on Kindergarten (timestamp 2:00). And, like many of the nearly 6 million people who have watched the commercial on YouTube and witnessed the ‘haters’ response to it, I applauded and cheered (and yes, Tweeted) when their response to the ugliness of a (very loud) but narrow minded minority hit the circuit about a week ago – entitled LOVE. But to the two artists whose efforts turned all the comments on the Wholesome ad into art – a special shout out. I noticed that the ugly comments you rolled inward, while the beautiful responses you rolled outward, yeah, I noticed. Love, should always be radiated outward and (though it pains me) let the ugliness destroy itself in its own shadows. We are one, and your art united all of our hearts – thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know it seems like I got off track from Mrs. Dwyer and Peeps – I have not, I assure you. Because while I have been thinking about graham crackers and Peeps, and the joys of childhood and nostalgic longings for what ‘was simpler’ I found a S’Mores recipe – made with Peeps! Coined S’meeps! And I thought OMG that is SO COOL – so I Tweeted that out as well!  Now, a tower of smushed, melty chocolate and Peeps is a far cry from Bill Cosby’s Kindergarten but truly, emotionally anyway, as intrinsically innocent and perfect as my long ago Easter basket.

No Peeps or Bunnies were harmed in the writing of this blog post!

I wish you beauty in everything that touches your life, and hope that today (and every day) you will find a way to bring some memorable sweetness to your own and someone’s life who least expects such. Go forth and Peep!

Sending you love in Heaven Mrs. Dwyer, and an enormous heart filled with gratitude.

 

If you enjoy my blog please share it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my print or ebook from Amazon, please click on the cover art of my book, ebook also available through Barnes & Noble and Lulu, thank you! 

 

Before I read Anais Nin

I must state here, in this first sentence, that despite my love affair with words and with the languid sensuality of using them to describe the mundane and the sublime, the profane and the sacred, that I have never read a single word of Anais Nin – until this evening. And what I have read is simply the preface to her collection of erotica entitled the Delta of Venus (yes, as a woman I at least know what that is).

It strikes me as oddly similar to what all writers must ‘go through’ for the sake of their art – establishing boundaries to separate what we wish to write with what we must write for the sake of keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table.  I have always thought of Ms. Nin as fabulously successful – perception is reality in public relations parlance – but the preface touches on the woes of bill collectors, broken typewriters and doctors’ appointments and the urgency of writing for “a collector” of erotica at a $1 a page (my going rate for ‘commercial work’ is $2 a word plus expenses or a per diem).  She assembles a Who’s Who of wordsmith excellence, protects anonymity and acts as, in Henry Miller’s and her own words “the madam of this snobbish literary house of prostitution” pooling their stories and creating “literary aphrodisiacs” because “All of us needed the money”; and I am shocked and offended.  In my life there is no husband in equally dire financial straits, not children to protect and care for or even a pet or plant – for now there is only me.  Some months, some years, far better than others but on the whole I have “all that I need” (thus, the title of my first book).  My life is full, and amazing things that happen to no one else I know happen to me, my life is the extreme of abundance and deprivation (which never feels such given the plentitude I feel is my lot).

Right now I look at my wildest dreams to drink sunsets bathed in the same golden light of Plato’s landscapes, swim unadorned in emerald and azure waters in the predawn salt waters where Gaia fornicated to create all of the gods and goddesses before turning her back on mankind and wonder “how do I make such happen?”.  But, like Ms. Nin, for me the idea of writing of passion on demand makes the essence of our humanity, the infinite expressions of carnal knowledge given and taken in tenderness, pleasure, hunger unlike Japanese netsuke and more like a blow up doll; in my world there is no room for the debasement of desire, only coming into each other in fullness of being to be more than we might be singularly.

There is the moment when, like the stillness of the air just before a storm the scent of ozone assails and the skies burst forth in a torrent, passion exists like a promise.  It is with such stated that I offer that some lives are steeped in the immediacy of fulfillment and others have fleeting glimpses of what living on the edge of reason could offer – my own life is in the place between.  Our thoughts are p-o-w-e-r-f-u-l beyond reckoning – will he touch me? Where and how? Should I ‘allow’ my thoughts to manifest my desire using the wisdom of Buddha?

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”

I am cognitive of doing that ‘at least once’.  I have never told this story – perhaps at 52 and a few months shy of my birthday I can do so without embarrassment – before I begin actually reading Delta of Venus I want to offer ‘a moment’ a decade ago sitting on the tarmac of Boston Logan aboard an Air France flight bound for a long weekend in Paris.  At the risk of being sensational, the plane was full save for two seats, the middle one next to my own window and one in the bulkhead eleven rows ahead of me with the final boarding call being made.  We’ve all ‘been there’ grateful for the reprieve of space on an overnight transatlantic flight, I had taken my Tylenol PM, had changed into my pajama bottoms, washed my face and brushed my teeth and was prepared to forego the inflight meal for sleep when “he” stepped on board.  Tall, chiseled, broad shouldered, seriously Gallic featured and a soft sigh escaped my lips. The thought, fleeting, was as he took the bulkhead seat, now why it is that no man that looks like that ever sits next to me? (Just like that scene in The Holiday when Kate Winslet is shackled not with the dreamy guy but sandwiched between two blue hairs talking the whole way to Los Angeles whilst she receives a text from the man she is escaping!)  The power of our thoughts to alter the course of our lives plays out in this millisecond of ‘eye candy vs. space to spread out’.  Just as the flight attendants are about to run through the safety card drill his hand goes up to the bell – the two men on either side of him are just as broad shouldered.  Body language tells all and the next moment “he” is sitting next to me.

Sadly not Veuve Cliuot

Over Champagne, and the dinner I didn’t want, Philippe let me practice my school-girl French. He laughed in appropriate places, thoroughly charmed and was a perfect gentleman – almost.  I will not travel without my down pillow, in this instance adorned in a white with pink bow-knots pillow sham. This struck him as funny, but I offered to share, as the lights were dimmed he kissed me – an amazing kiss.  You know those movie scenes where every bit of sexual tension plays out? How the couple involved is breathless and hungry? Our encounter was like that.  His fingers found license unbuttoning my shirt just enough to place his hand on the lace of my bra, then in cupping and fondling my breast and all while we kissed, and yes, he brought me to a (hard fought to maintain silent) dramatic climax at 31,000 feet with my clothes still on surrounded by 400 people.

My point is thus, life is full of such (unimagined) possibilities, and a these experiences can go a long way in carrying us over the seasons of famine in our sexuality. While erotica has its place (I am sure) I have never actively sought it out before Ms. Nin’s book arrived this afternoon, I would much rather live it than read the product of someone else’s imagination.

If you enjoy my blog please consider sending me via PayPal the value of a cup of tea in your currency to livelikeadog@gmail.com. I would delight in your subscribing and sharing it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am  @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book below, thank you! 

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