Peace Corps post card from Crayolamom on Flickr.

Major Revisions 1-18-10 and 8-15-10

When the chips are down, it’s time to call in our friends. They can be real but also our icons, the women who inspire us. For me these women are Angelina Jolie and Alicia Keys, sensual women who strive for success, but not at the expense of their values.

A few days ago, I received a detailed and upsetting letter (email) from my good friend Paul, who is working in his second Peace Corps assignment. This time he’s in South Africa. 

The long history of our relationship summarizes the life contradictions expressed throughout my Anne of Carversville journal.

Split Personality 

I’ve always moved in two worlds; my friend Paul has devoted his life to a single journey, with a constant focus and commitment to his core values and life’s work.

Young Love

We met when I was 21 and he was 17.  Outside of family members, he knows me longer, although not better, than anyone else in my life. That dubious honor goes to my dear friend Robert.

Paul’s mother Sandy, a buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, invited me to a party one hot summer night, decades ago. As the evening lingered later and later, this wise mother insisted that I spend the night at her apartment.

The result was a long love affair with her son, one that wove in and out of my marriage, (but not during) and our subsequent romantic relationships. Our life choices have kept us apart, far more than together in life.

It was Paul who gave me Hesse’s book Siddartha on my 21st birthday. Reading it, I was clear that we would never be a couple; I was a phase, a temporal infatuation and nothing more in Paul’s life. 

via Flickr’s BehindTheScenes2006Golden Delicious Eve 

My dear friend has unintentionally stung me more than once in life, but never more than when he suggested that being with me was the equivalent of moving to “Apple Valley”, a derailment of his life purpose … an establishment cop out.