We met Fran a couple of years ago when we petted her blue heeler, Sheila. Seeing that we liked dogs and were good with her dog, Fran asked if we would babysit Sheila on Tuesday nights when she (Fran, not Sheila) went bowling. We said yes with no thought that she would pay us, but when she picked Sheila up the first night and handed me a $20 bill, I took it because I’m just that way. (You might want to jot down the fact that it would be a mistake to offer me money as a gesture based upon the assumption that I’ll refuse it, e.g. “Thanks for the doughnut; here’s a thousand dollars.”) Fran has since retired from her job, so we don’t see her or Sheila much anymore except by accident, but when she wrote several weeks ago to ask if we would keep Sheila for three days, we said yes. She offered us $150, but, as with keeping Sheila on bowling nights, we would have done it for nothing.
So, here I sit with Fran’s cow dog nudging me for a cuddle and her (Fran’s, not Sheila’s) Honda Element in the driveway. I’ve had sex with people who didn’t trust me that much. I don’t know how I could have ever been so stupid, but I assumed that if a woman made love to me, it meant that she trusted me, but when a couple moves in together, it’s not the sharing of sex or the professions of eternal devotion that represent the ultimate in confidence, but the putting of the other person’s name on your bank account, especially if there’s anything in it.
When Peggy and I were married, I doubt that we had $3,000 between us, so sharing a bank account didn’t seem like a big deal, but now that we have enough money to keep us “comfortable” for the rest of our lives, I can’t imagine putting another woman’s name on my accounts. This brings to mind the fact that I’m growing older and there might come a day when I will need someone other than Peggy to handle my financial affairs. I think that what I might do would be to ask my friend, Lee, to take charge. He’s the father of my grand-daughter, but I have no blood relationship with him or his wife, Robin, which means that I haven’t known them for years and years (about 6-8 years). I have observed them, and they’ve consistently impressed me as being people of integrity. One of the things they did that got my attention happened last year when we were shopping for baby clothes a short time after Sidney started walking well enough that she was no longer prone to doing face plants. Lee warned me not to put her down, but I wanted her to have a good time—especially since she was with her remarkably adorable Grandpa—so I did.
She immediately began to shop like her father, mother, and grandmother, only at a hundred times the speed as she ran through the store pulling clothes off the racks and carrying them with her (whenever she got too many to carry, I returned the excess). It was just her and me since everyone else was involved with the real shopping, and we had a grand time. When Lee and Robin were ready to go, Robin asked Lee if they should pay for the clothes that Sidney had been carrying around the store, and Lee said that, no, they hadn’t been soiled, so there was no reason to buy them. That Robin broached the subject and Lee took it seriously made quite an impression on me. Never once have I seen them show less than total integrity, and this makes them more like Peggy than like I because while it is in my heart to show unblemished integrity where my friends are concerned, how I treat others is dependent upon how they treat me.
You might wonder if I don’t have any blood kin whom I would trust with my money. I don’t have much in the way of family. There’s a half brother whom I don’t know, a half sister who is a good bit older than I, and a full sister whom I wouldn’t trust with pocket change. Peggy has many relatives, but they’re all on the other side of the country, and they’re either getting old, or I don’t trust them, or I don’t know them well enough to trust them. Even so, the sad fact of life is that we all have to trust someone. I say sad because if I could be eternally competent to do everything for myself, I would greatly prefer it, but sickness, accident, and aging, have taught me that, sooner or later, we all have to make ourselves vulnerable to other people.
Four posts back, you’ll find one entitled Passion Recalled Isn’t Passion. In it, I touched upon some of the sexual affairs I had starting about a decade after Peggy and I were married. Peggy later corrected me on a few points. One is that she never had affairs in the sense of screwing people without my knowledge and consent. This is true, and I didn’t mean to present things otherwise; its just that there are no good words to distinguish the various types of sexual relationships that one might have with other people while married. She also corrected me about not catching any STDs, because she and I both got chlamydia. She then told me something that I didn’t know. She said the chlamydia was what caused her to have endometriosis, and was therefore the root cause of her hysterectomy.
Peggy also told me where she thinks she got the chlamydia, and I’ll share that with you because the incident is typical of what our lives were like at the time. By now, we were maybe thirteen years into our marriage and had gone from me having affairs to us having an open relationship. Peggy only agreed to this, because I clearly wasn’t going to stop having sex with other women.
In the mid-eighties, I spent much of two years visiting communes. I’d take off in my Datsun truck and drive to wherever one was that I wanted to visit, lining up two to four per trip. These trips took me to Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Hampshire. I would be gone for up to two months, and it wasn’t unusual for me to have sex with people I met along the way. I visited two communes in Tennessee. One was the 1,200 member guru-inspired outfit called The Farm (http://www.thefarmcommunity.com/) that was, and still is, I suppose, renowned for its midwifery program. The other was also rural, but only contained about ten or fifteen people who lived in their own houses, either as couples or singly. I stayed with a couple named Lynn and Bob, and the first night I was there, I couldn’t sleep for them having sex. Bob never made a squeak, but Lynn was a screamer, so there wasn’t anything for it but for me to lie awake and listen.
When I got up the next day, Bob was gone to work, and as she made my breakfast, Lynn asked how I slept. I figured she must have known, so I said I lay awake horny listening to her scream. She asked if I would like to make love to her the next night, and I said I would so long as it was just her and me. She said that, no, Bob had to be included, so I said okay, I would do it if I wasn’t expected to have sex with him. Lynn said that he was a heterosexual, so I needn’t worry. So the next night we all climbed into bed, and talked a bit, and then I started making out with Lynn. When I was through, Bob took my place, and then we talked a bit more and went to sleep. In hardly any time at all, I was ready to do it again, and so began another round of lovemaking with me going first and then Bob. This went on all night, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I never felt awkward in such situations because if there was any awkwardness to be felt, it happened when I was trying to decide whether a woman would say yes if I asked her to have sex with me (sometimes, the woman made things easy by beating me to the punch). Once the question of whether to have sex was out of the way, I felt completely comfortable, and the women I had sex with did too, because those who make love to a lot of people are never shy, at least about lovemaking.
A few months later, Peggy and I visited Lynn and Bob. Peggy and Bob spent the night together, and Lynn and I spent the night together. I think we did this for two nights. Once, during the daytime, I leaned over to give Lynn an affectionate hug, but she stiffened and looked displeased, so I didn’t try that again. Later, Bob and I were talking, and he said that their open marriage was Lynn’s idea. This put him and Peggy in the same boat, so if they had each known how the other felt, they might have lay in bed and read instead of having sex.
Not long after we got home, Peggy learned that she had chlamydia. I never gave any thought to where it came from because it seemed so minor. Only now, do realize that Peggy blamed it on Lynn and Bob. She also told me something else that I didn’t know. Her doctor said he was required to report her to the health department, but that he wasn’t going to do it out of respect for her privacy, Brookhaven, Mississippi, being too small a town for a person to have any confidence in keeping something like that a secret, especially when that person is a nurse.
I look back on those days with longing, my only regret being that I didn’t make love to a hundred times more women, but when Peggy looks back, all she sees is a lot of pointless sex. For me, sex was the point. It’s not that I didn’t want emotional intimacy because I very much did, but that there was usually too much going against it, things like geographical distance, jealous husbands, a lack of interest on the woman’s part, and an absence of emotional compatibility.
After we moved to Oregon, I had four relationships that were emotionally intimate and that lasted for a period of years. It was the women who ended three of the four, and I was very sad and angry for a long time after two of them ended. What I observed about having serious relationships while married is that most women fall into two categories. Those in one category wanted to have a relationship with me precisely because I was married, and they imagined that this would prevent us from becoming emotionally entangled. Those in the second category, whatever their initial motivation, eventually tried to win me away from Peggy and ended their relationship with me when they failed. In the first instance I felt used, and in the second, I felt abandoned. Clearly, being married doesn’t protect one from heartache, which is why Peggy says she’s done with open relationships, and this reminds me of something else she corrected me about. I wrote that if our friend Walt gets a divorce, I thought that Peggy would probably go back to having a sexual relationship with him, but she says she’s against it because it’s not worth the aggravation.
One of the women I had a long-term relationship with was Vicki, and it was she and Peggy and I who formed the group marriage. We talked of adding a second man, but we only lived together a few months short of two years, and by the time we separated, it was a case of good riddance. The last woman I had a long-term relationship with was Jackie, and that was in the late ‘90s. She was divorced at the time, and she ended her relationship with me when she decided to start looking for a husband. Since I regarded her as a a good friend whom I had sex with rather than someone I was in love with, I was okay with this, and so Peggy, Jackie, Jackie’s husband Kurt, and I are still friends all these many years later. Kurt was initially reluctant to meet me, but when he did, he realized that I had no feelings of jealousy and no remaining interest in having sex with Jackie, so we got along well. I think that with both lovers and friends, it’s often the intense relationships that burn-out fast and end miserably, which means that it’s better not to aim too high.
The painting is by Costantino Cedini, and I chose it because it captures how good sex used to feel. I'm sorry those days are gone, but I wouldn't want them back either because for every moment of ecstasy, there were a lot more of sadness.
“If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others… There are so many people who speak badly about religions or other religions, who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others. They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr. Gasparri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit.” —Pope Francis
Can you imagine an eight-year-old ghetto kid standing in court beside an 80-year-old Vicar of Christ because both imagine that a “Yo mamma…” insult necessitates a violent response? Such is the shallowness of ghetto, Catholic—and Islamic—morality, yet they all agree that, as an atheist, I cannot be a moral person.
Religious people from one religion tend to hate those from other religions, yet they share an interest in censoring anyone who shows disrespect for any religion. That those who regard religion as a force for evil feel don’t feel such respect, or that religious people don't reciprocate the respect that they demand, is considered irrelevant because, as religious people see it, religious values come from God, and secular values from Satan. In his remarks, the pope did say that violence in the name of God is an aberration, but given his words about there being “a limit” to what one can say before an assault becomes necessary, along with his personal threat to assault anyone who curses his mother—much less his religion—it appears to be an aberration that he shares.
“One of Charlie Hebdo’s founding members blamed the slain editor for being murdered, calling him a “blockhead” and saying, “I really hold it against you.” —The Telegraph
If this “founding member” is consistent, I can but assume that he blames rape on women who wear short skirts, burglary on people who buy new stereos, and pedophilia on toddlers who kiss priests because, god knows, if the victims aren’t to blame, who is, their assailants bearing no responsibility?
The common ground to both of these news items is that people had damn well better back-off when it comes to criticizing religion because if they don’t, they can expect to come to a violent end, and it will be their own fault. Where does this leave me? I often criticize religion in ways that would get me fined, killed, or imprisoned in the 44% of the world’s countries that have laws against the defamation of religion. So, what do you think? If I should come to such an end, would you say that it was a travesty of justice by a people that despise free speech, or would you say I have no one to blame but myself?
When I hear about the latest Islamic atrocity, I often recall the centuries during which Christianity was no better, and I wonder if the world might not see a return to those times. When I heard the pope's latest stupid remark, I reflected that he and Islam are a lot closer than he and I when it comes to the ease with which they rationalize violence as a reasonable recompense for opinion.
*If you want to send your own message to the pope, here's the link: http://vatican.com/contact#
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