Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (20 page)

One day late in that summer of 1991 when I was exceptionally low, Frieda said to me, “You have so much personal power, Ronni, and you don’t even know it. You have no idea.” Really??? Personal power?? Me???

She was right; I had no idea. I felt worthless and drained, anything but powerful. I was completely defeated and numb, and slipping deeper and deeper into a black hole of emotionless existence. Frieda hand-carried my sad sorry self to LifeStream, a four-day personal growth program in which she and her family were involved. She made my reservation and paid for it, informed me that I was going, made sure I got there, and stayed with me for the four days of the program. Since I was unable to decide what to do on any given day, and certainly had no emotional strength to resist, when Frieda came to pick me up, I went. I needed to be there, and Frieda was the one who knew it.

I experienced a number of things at LifeStream that, even in my impaired state, seemed odd. I must have dismissed them, though, because I can’t remember at all what they were. However, there was one activity that stays with me to this day, and for which I am forever grateful.

The participants were told to build our personal safe spaces. We were instructed to sit on the floor, get comfortable, and then close our eyes. We were then told to envision tools in our hands. The assignment was to construct in our mind’s eye whatever we wished, but specifically to create a place where we could go if we were in emotional distress. Already in distress, and being a good dyke who knew tools, I thought about my safe space possibilities. Without hesitation I began to build a cheekee hut. What??? A cheekee hut? How did I come up with that one? Nevertheless, I worked diligently to build my cheekee hut on a small unpopulated palm-tree-covered piece of land that jutted out peninsula-style into the Intracoastal Waterway up near Fernandina Beach, almost at the Florida-Georgia border.

I hammered four big imaginary pilings into the ground, one at each corner of a square cement floor. (I must have poured the floor first, or maybe it was already there. I couldn’t remember.) Then I wove and attached a thatched roof of palm fronds, leaving all four sides of the cheekee completely open. Then, to my surprise, I found myself walking over to the water’s edge where I built a beautiful wooden dock. It was a short dock made of the finest teak, smooth to the touch, warmed by the sun. The dock, as it turned out, and not the cheekee hut, was my safe place. The cheekee hut was there so I’d have someplace to put my stuff when I went to my dock. I felt myself lie down on that warm wooden dock, water lightly lapping against the pilings, the sun embracing my body. A feeling washed over me, caressed me, reassured me that whatever was wrong in my life was going to be okay.

I was about to begin a doctoral program at the university in a few weeks. It occurred to me as I lay on my imaginary dock in that big room with all those people that day, that worthless people don’t get accepted into doctoral programs, therefore I might not really be as worthless as I believed. Like an injured phoenix on the mend, I slowly began to rise out of my ashes of despair with Frieda as my guide.

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Several days after that weekend, my therapist suggested I would benefit from a five-day in-house program at a mental hospital. I felt so ashamed at the startling realization that I was truly nuts though I’d had plenty of hints along the way. Embarrassed, I called my mother and asked for the money to pay for the hospitalization since my insurance didn’t cover it. My mother—God bless her—put a check in the mail to me that day, no questions asked.

I went to the university to speak with the professor who had been assigned as my mentor, Dr. Pritchy Smith. I told Pritchy about my precarious emotional state and that I would miss the first week of classes because I had to go to a hospital. In the kindest voice and with such understanding, Pritchy asked me to look at things in a different way. He said to consider every single day a victory, that each class and each completed assignment was a goal accomplished, to be celebrated. He suggested I wait a couple of weeks before going away. “Stay here, Ronni, and just try this for a few weeks. Go for the little achievable goals,” he advised. I did, and day by day, one little goal at a time, I began to come back to the land of the living. Between Pritchy, Frieda, and my mother, and their loving support, I canceled my reservation at the hospital and destroyed the check.

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To this day, twenty years later, in times of stress or sadness or anger, I take myself to my little dock on the river and feel the warmth of the sunshine as I lie down. My heart fills with memory and respect for my own difficult journey, and with deep and abiding friendship for Frieda, my gratefulness to Pritchy, and, of course, with my love and respect for my mother.

As for Lea, it took many years but today we’re friends. When same sex couples could legally marry in California for a brief period in 2008, I had the honor of being the witness for Lea and her longtime partner at their wedding. That jeep? Gone for decades…no creature comforts!

24. The Southern Belle

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1993

U.S. President
: William J. Clinton

Best film
: Schindler’s List, The Piano, The Fugitive, Philadelphia

Best actors
: Tom Hanks, Holly Hunter

Best TV shows
: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; Bevis & Butthead; Late Night with Conan O’Brien; Rikki Lake; Frasier; NYPD Blue; The Nanny

Best songs
: Can’t Help Falling In Love, I Will Always Love You, Don’t Walk Away, Ordinary World, Love Is

Civics
: Federal agents besiege Texas Branch Davidian religious cult; Rodney King beating; Ruth Bader Ginsburg appointed to U.S. Supreme Court

Popular Culture
: Michael Jackson accused of child molestation; first humans cloned; The Shipping News by Annie Proulx published; President Clinton signs Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy

Deaths
: Don Ameche, Arthur Ashe, Frank Zappa, Dizzy Gillespie, Audrey Hepburn, Cesar Chavez

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Paula was a Southern woman with a drawl thick as molasses. She was born and raised in Georgia, and actually had a mammy when she was a child. She had three brothers, an unusual mother who demanded to be called Lady Winston though there was absolutely no evidence of royalty in the family. Her father was some sort of secret operative who slaughtered wild African animals and hung their heads in his house. I suspect he also beat up little children but Paula never talked about that, saying only that she had no recollection of life before the age of eleven. 

Paula and I had been together in Jacksonville for a year before I was offered a job at the University of Michigan. We’d met years earlier on a speakers’ panel because we were two of the very few lesbians in Northeast Florida who had children. Paula had custody and I did not, so we often shared the stage at speaking engagements. Paula was a very supportive friend whenever my relationships fell apart, which was often and inevitable. In fact, she once gave me a copy of the book Surviving the Loss of Love. Good ideas in that book, but it didn’t stop the cycle for me.

I had many short-term relationships with women. It was a predictable process. I would meet someone, initiate an intense sexual relationship with her, then lose interest. That sounds so cold and probably exactly the way it was perceived by others, but it was how I protected myself. I was desperately afraid of real intimacy. Not in a sexual way but in the deep, heartfelt meaningful way in which two people truly connect. I functioned under the guise of the old adage I set for myself when I was young: If you know my truth, you’ll leave me. If I’m sexual, I don’t have to talk, don’t have to share anything about myself. Once the sexual excitement calmed down and conversation set in, I reverted to the silence that guided my life. It happened over and over and over, regardless of other dynamics in the mix. Paula watched me do this for years with a certain amount of interest and curiosity.

Paula and I got together as my volatile rebound relationship with Linda fell apart. Linda was a handsome woman a few years younger than I, with long silver hair that flowed and glistened down her back. Linda and I had separated seven times in eighteen months. The relationship had zero chance of survival.              

I remember the December we visited Linda’s parents in Colorado. It was freezing cold, her folks were drunk, and Linda was as miserable as I’d ever seen her. On our last night there, she came to bed after yet another fight with her parents. I tried to sleep through the mayhem but she woke me up and growled with clenched teeth, “I wish I could hurt you!” She then rolled over and immediately fell asleep while I laid there with eyes wide open, petrified, for the remainder of the night, vigilant of the body next to me. As soon as we returned to Jacksonville, I left her. Paula was waiting in the wings.

Paula held her feelings as close to her chest as I, so we pretended to be in love. We weren’t, but we were both so afraid to be alone. There were many wonderful things about Paula but there were several unusual things as well. Paula had rules about protocol, many of which were baffling—like we couldn’t say the word toilet because she considered it offensive, or that she would absolutely not be seen without her makeup, strange for a lesbian back then. But Paula had two outstanding traits: she never forgot a name, and she knew how to be a gracious hostess.

The name thing amazed me because I always had difficulty remembering names. My band director in college, Richard W. Bowles, could remember names of people he’d not seen in 20 years! Remarkable! When Paula and I attended social functions, she would whisper people’s names in my ear so that I didn’t appear socially inept.

Her hostess skills were legendary. When my doctoral cohort colleagues and I took our two-day comprehensive exams, Paula gathered partners and spouses and organized lunches and snacks for us each day, and then a champagne reception at the end of our exams. The piece de resistance, though, was the full-on buffet, complete with floral arrangements, that Paula prepared for my committee the day I defended my doctoral dissertation. They still talk about it at the university!

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They also still talk about the issue I had with my dissertation and commencement. Most institutions print the title of doctoral students’ dissertations in the commencement programs. There were two of us graduating with doctoral degrees in education that December of 1996. I was informed by the University that my title—Unheard Voices: The Effects of Silence on Lesbian and Gay Educators in Northeast Florida—would not be published in the commencement program. The reason, they said, was their fear that I would be booed by the audience, ruining the sanctity and pomp of the event. My response was simple: either print the title or I’ll sue due to discrimination. It was their choice. The title was printed, no one booed, and the commencement ceremony was lovely for all of the graduates and their families. It was especially sweet for me because when I was a brand new first-year student at the University of Florida in 1965, an academic counselor told me I wasn’t college material, that I should quit now and not waste my parents’ money. Thanks for your vote of confidence, buddy. I’m a doctor now! Ha!

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Paula had four children, and prided herself on being a great mom. The two younger ones, James and Jonathan, lived with her, and then with us. Her oldest son, who we rarely saw, was away at college, and then there was Martha, two years younger than the oldest, who rose from the dead. Literally.

“Ah neva cry, “ declared Paula in her thickest—and sexiest, I might add—Southern accent. Still getting to know one another early in our relationship and before we lived together, we were having a discussion about the demonstration—or, rather, lack of demonstration—of feelings. I suspected Paula had tremendous issues from childhood that prevented her from recognizing or dealing with her feelings. I could easily relate. Not 24 hours later she called me at my apartment, sobbing without control.

“A ter-ruh-ble thing has happened.” She was crying so hard. “Please come over raht away.” I got to her house quickly.

“What on earth...???” I asked to the air. Paula was home alone and nearly hysterical.

“Th-th-the phone,” she tried to talk between sobs. “S-s-some young wo-wo-woman. She said, she said...” Paula blew her nose. “She said she’s my daw-ta. How can that beeee??? —sob—I have no daw-tas, just that one who died at birth. Who is this mean—sob—woman? So, so—sob—so cruel. She’s—sob—she’s gonna call back. Please talk—sob—ta her, Ronnnnni.” She couldn’t stop crying and didn’t try. The heaviness of the world was riding down her face on her streaked mascara.

The story, as it turned out, was that Paula’s first and second children were fathered by Paula’s drug-addict boyfriend in the early 1970s. During that time there were several active black-market Florida-to-New York baby rings. When Paula went to the hospital in Jacksonville to have her second baby, she was knocked out on drugs for several days. When she awoke, she was told that her baby had died. This apparently was a typical method for procuring babies to sell in other states. Paula believed that her baby was dead, as she was told. She felt tremendous pain at not having the chance to see her baby, to say goodbye, before she was buried. Later in life, Paula became a nurse and made a point of always showing baby bodies to the birth mother if the child died.

The baby girl died, Paula believed, and the drug-addict boyfriend disappeared. Later, Paula married an upstanding man and had a third child, then divorced him and entered into a relationship with a woman just prior to the birth of her fourth child. Fast forward 24 years and the phone call. Turns out that the second child, Martha, was quite alive. She had been sold, by either the boyfriend or a nurse or both, to an agency in New York and adopted by a loving family. She always knew she was adopted and, at age 23, had her adoption papers unsealed. She found her birth certificate and managed to locate Paula. Paula was so shocked about having a child rise from the dead that she wanted no contact with her. I met Martha when she came to Florida. There was no doubt in my mind that she was Paula’s child. She looked and sounded more like Paula than any of the other three children. However, no matter what we did, Paula refused to have contact with the young woman. In her own way, Paula was a wonderful mother and loved her children fiercely but she never spoke of Martha again, at least not while I was with her.