The Joy of Uber Driving

by Yamini Redewill

  I decided not to abort (as I had done before in a back alley and almost bled to death). I wanted to learn my lesson and never get pregnant again. I wanted to be like the brave character Leslie Caron played in The L-Shaped Room. So I rented a squalid apartment in Venice, California, with creaky, slanted floors and rats running around at night. Somehow, the magic of the big screen wore off in reality, so I went to my mother, who came up with a welcome idea. By now, I had been able to graduate from UCLA, so she shipped me off to her best friend, Kitty, in the Bay Area. This wonderful woman nourished me with love and inclusiveness in her family of two kids my age while my tummy grew and I waited for the inevitable. I prayed daily on what to do.

  So here I was being a passenger in my life again with my parents more or less in charge of my destiny. Perhaps a new beginning would wipe the slate clean as I turned to God for clarity and strength. Having a baby in my stomach was a deeply religious experience. It was somewhat akin to feeling like the Virgin Mary, even though I obviously wasn’t a virgin. I walked around with a newly polished halo, or more accurately, a glowing auric field around my whole body, blissfully unaware of the impending personal tragedy ahead.

  PING! Receiving a call from an upscale neighborhood in San Rafael, I was greeted by Betsy, the same lovely elderly woman I remembered picking up a couple of months ago. This doesn’t happen very often. But this one was special. When I last saw her, she was suffering from late-stage lymphatic cancer, which she openly talked about then. She had the most positive attitude and was determined to fight it with alternative methods. Now, she told me it had disappeared completely with a special diet eliminating all sugar, processed foods, and other cancer-friendly foods, and by incorporating meditation and yoga into her lifestyle. She had steadfastly refused chemotherapy and radiation and won her battle. Her doctors were amazed.

  She also told me a story of nearly drowning many years ago as a scuba diver. She said they went one night diving off a ship anchored a mile offshore. They each held flashlights while holding the hand of one other person. She let go for a moment to turn on her flashlight, and it slipped out of her hand and fell to the bottom. She lost her scuba mate and was deep under pitch-black water alone. She started praying fervently as she felt her oxygen depleting and frantically waved her arms around. Suddenly she hit the chain of the ship’s anchor and was able to pull herself up to the top just in time. She firmly believes she’s here for a reason, and I believed I was just graced by an angel. We exchanged cards.

  I have always had an interest in metaphysics and spirituality. I was brought up in the Episcopal Church, where I took communion and sang in the choir from the time I was nine. Just before I joined the choir, my next-door neighbor, Susan, a girl my age, was given a whole new wardrobe of beautiful dresses, which she excitedly showed me. I went home green with envy and lay rigid on my bed, praying as hard as I could for God to give me at least three new dresses. I went to my closet and concentrated very hard on visualizing them hanging alongside my other dresses. Then I returned to the bed, praying with my eyes tightly closed and my teeth clenched. I just had to have those dresses! This went on for about two hours from bed to closet and closet to bed, then my mother knocked on the door and said someone wanted to see me.

  I opened the door to face Susan, carrying three of her beautiful new dresses on hangers, which she handed to me. Hallelujah! My prayers had been answered! That Sunday I wore one of the dresses to Sunday school and acted as though I was a very special girl graced with a miracle from God, which I would share to everyone’s complete and utter amazement. To my complete and utter amazement, no one was impressed—least of all, the Sunday school teacher. In those days, materialism and spiritual manifestations were not talked about in the same breath with religion. It was totally outside of the church’s purview and almost blasphemous to put them together in one sentence.

  This very special girl was properly put in her place, but at least she had three new dresses and an experience of manifesting through faith and visualization, which was a gift to cherish for the future (a much more open and inclusive future).

  Coming back to the precious being growing in my stomach: my father wanted me to keep the baby, so he offered to give me one hundred dollars a month to care for her (an absurd proposition). When I demurred, he had another brilliant idea: to adopt her himself so I could come and visit her as her sister. It was obvious he didn’t have any frame of reference for how to manage this situation. So I finally decided to give her up for adoption by the welfare department, and I spent my last month in a home for unwed mothers.

  Felicia (the name I gave her meaning “happy”) was born September 8, 1964. She had the most beautiful long eyelashes and green eyes. I breastfed her for nine days before letting her go to her new parents. My social worker thought I was mature enough, but it was a huge mistake to allow such bonding to happen. What followed was ten years of depression so deep and painful that I became a social worker myself. It helped me focus solely on others so I could get away from wallowing in my own sorrow. I rattled around in a Honda hatchback acting like Sally Field in The Flying Nun from one housing project to another, dispensing the wisdom of a still clueless adult and learning more from my welfare clients than they did from me.

  Perhaps, being a spiritual person, I should have experienced that kind of depression after any one of my three abortions, but I didn’t. I’m not advocating abortion; this is just my own personal experience. I am suggesting that going full term and giving your child up for adoption is a good option if you think you are strong enough to withstand the emotional pain you may experience. My daughter turned out to be a remarkable woman who has had a wonderful life, being raised by a family who adored and cherished her. She is a wonderful contribution to the world with her amazing singing and acting talent and dedication to combating breast cancer.

  In my belief system, there are no accidents, and having an abortion is not an evil act as far as I’m concerned, because it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that the soul does not enter the fetus until well after six months and maybe, in some cases, after he/she is born. Maybe the soul waits until it is sure that it is wanted and is safe. (I know I would.) This belief comes from my absolute conviction that we are reincarnated hundreds and maybe even thousands of times and map out our destinies beforehand on the other side in order to experience situations that will advance our soul’s evolution. This would explain why some are born with extreme hardships, such as being born crippled or blind. With this scenario, what would be the point of choosing to be aborted before experiencing your soul’s life lesson? Living in California, we are exposed to an array of metaphysical practices, and past-life regressions are a common practice for spiritual seekers.

  Past-life regressions are a form of wakeful hypnotism, and one session had me in the eighteenth century as a young male apprentice to the artist Raphael. I saw the streets of Florence vividly. I had never been there, and later that same week, I saw the very same images in a National Geographic magazine. My then mother had me believe that my father was a sea captain who was lost at sea. Somehow word got back to me that my father was actually the local priest. Excited but scared, I paid him a visit to get some sort of confirmation. When I confronted him, he became enraged and bludgeoned me with a fire iron and pushed me into the fire in the fireplace. He called the police and had me hauled off to jail as an intruder. I died in jail from my third-degree burns and remember calling out to my mother, and as I died, I forgave her for deceiving me. It felt like she was someone close to me in this lifetime, perhaps my current mother.

  PING! A short, round-faced, full-figured woman in a long multilayered dress and with a full head of curly white hair, named Misty, stood beside a blue Honda with taillights blinking on the side of the road off the 101. When I pulled up, she smiled brightly and laughingly told me that her beloved Honda pooped out on her. I responded that the taillights still worked pretty well. She giggled and said, “Yes, that’s true.” She then opened her trunk and
pulled out some cloth bags full of embroidered silk fabric and transferred them to my trunk, along with a box of statues, essential oils, a vase and flowers, candleholders, and candles. After turning off the lights and locking her door, she gathered her many layers of clothing around her as she climbed into my back seat. I asked if anyone was coming to pick up her car, and she replied that she would take care of it later, as it was much more important that she be on time for the workshop she was conducting.

  Fascinated, I watched as she pulled a notebook from her shoulder bag and began leafing through it. She stopped and looked up at me and asked if I knew anything about past lives. I responded, “Yes, I’ve had a few.”

  She cocked her head, looking askance at me, and giggled again. Her bright blue eyes danced with amusement as she quoted from her notebook: “‘Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.’ Do you believe that?” she asked.

  I smiled and said, half-chidingly, “So that’s why you seemed so familiar to me!”

  She squinted her eyes as though a big secret was about to be revealed. “Precisely! Somewhere in time we agreed to meet this way and to touch each other’s lives for a brief moment. Isn’t it wonderful?” I looked at her through my rearview mirror and saw a woman-child glowing with excitement as she spoke those words.

  I asked, “Is this what your workshop is all about?”

  She said, “No, but it’s a part of what we explore and talk about. We do rituals to clear up any past misgivings and blocks to our happiness, sometimes reaching beyond this present life experience. Life’s a mystery, and there is more going on than meets the eye. Only a few will try to see.”

  She then handed me a brochure with her picture on it and invited me to come to one of her lectures or “healings.” “You’ll love it, I’m sure!” I told her I would be honored and would look at my schedule to decide the best time to come. She added, “This may be more than just a brief encounter. I can’t wait to see what happens next!” She had a satisfied look on her face, as though she knew something I didn’t. We arrived at her specified location as she hurriedly gathered her things. I helped carry the box of accouterments inside the hall where about fifty or sixty people were mingling. They looked up when we came through the door, and several ran to her side to hug her and help carry her bags. She introduced me as her “very special Uber driver,” and they all nodded knowingly. As I left, I couldn’t help but feel I had been uplifted to another level of awareness and self-love.

  SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

  A Lesson in Miracles

  In 1969, five years after Felicia’s birth, a friend told me that if I chanted “Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo” and took two aspirins, I could cure any headache. Not seeing the irony in this, I became interested and attended a meeting. Right away, I signed up and became a Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist. This particular sect advocated celibacy and free everything (but love) just for chanting the mantra and doing the Lotus Sutra recitation twice a day.

  For thirteen years I atoned for all my sins, chanting two to three hours a day, leading meetings, enlisting other “unhappy” souls, and helping them get their lives back as well. I abstained from dating for almost eleven of those thirteen years. Total celibacy and devotion from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m. every day was rewarded by “You can have anything you want if you just chant ‘Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo.’” They forgot to tell me that love was not in the equation. I should have seen the red flag when I excitedly showed a senior leader an unexpected love letter from my fifteen-year obsession (Basil) requesting I spend a week with him in Puerto Vallarta because “we deserve some time together.” But she, in no uncertain terms, told me to reject the offer and focus only on my practice.

  Thus the final curtain came down on Basil St. John, the man of my dreams. He did show up briefly thirty years later, completely destroyed by booze, the fire gone from his bloodshot eyes and his stomach distended from an inflamed liver. Although he was happy to see me, he was perpetually angry with everyone and everything, barking orders at bartenders and waitresses. He confessed that he was scared because he was constantly fighting vertigo, thinking he would black out at any moment He said he never remarried. (OMG, was I to blame for this?) He died a few years later. I cried when I reread his sweet letter, which had been forgotten and in storage for thirty-five years. It was the only significant love letter I ever received from anyone.

  One of the major tenets of this branch of Buddhism was regarding “karma,” or cause and effect. According to its tenets, most everything in one’s life that occurs repeatedly and cannot be explained through psychology or any other means is caused by karma. I was instilled with the belief that chanting would help to change my karma from a cheap B-movie to a blockbuster hit. I thought surely I could change my karma with men, which is why I stuck with it for thirteen years and vigorously chanted for hours every day, losing my singing voice in the process.

  Later in my life I had a clear vision of who I was in a recent past life, which could explain my karma with men. I saw myself as an unknown artist in Paris paling around with Degas, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec while I used beautiful women for my paintings. I would callously use and seduce them, dismissing them as soon as I got what I wanted, causing many broken hearts.

  Although I was never able to see any noticeable results from chanting that changed my love karma, throughout my thirteen years of Buddhist practice, I had several unexplained miracles and a myriad of “benefits” that kept hope alive.

  While the religion itself explains the miracles as proof of the power of chanting, remembering my childhood experience of manifesting, I have come to the conclusion that all thoughts are powerful, and if you spend enough time and energy with one thought, you can easily put into action its manifestation. It’s called the “Law of Attraction,” or the power of intention. Why didn’t it work for my man karma? I now believe that my intention for love has always been blocked by my fear of commitment and ultimately rejection and abandonment after giving myself away completely to my first love. This fear was born from observing my mother and father’s relationship and later cemented in my subconscious mind by Basil and Nameless and countless others. Chanting never brought this awareness to light. I always assumed it was just really bad karma. However, the belief that this chant is a positive and powerful vibration is cause enough for great things to happen that aren’t necessarily on your wish list. It keeps you ever hopeful that eventually your wishes will be fulfilled.

  For instance, driving home from a meeting in Hollywood late one night, I didn’t notice that I was being followed. When I stopped and parked my car, my car door on the driver’s side suddenly flew open, and a young black man held a knife to my neck and demanded I give him all my money. Strangely, I felt no fear. I looked him squarely in the eyes in a moment of realized compassion and said, “You don’t have to do this. All you need to do is chant NAM MYO HO RENGE KYO [I said it with the full force of a lion’s roar, which is how I normally chant] and you can have anything you want.” The poor guy thought I was doing some kind of voodoo on him, backed away with his eyes bulging out of his head, ran in a full sprint back to his car, and laid some rubber as he sped away.

  Once, I had a flat tire on Hollywood Boulevard in front of a tire store. I bought a new tire and enlisted a young man walking by on the sidewalk to install it for me. Turns out I got the wrong rim attached to the tire, which had four lug nut holes while my wheel had five. I didn’t understand or care, so I chanted as hard and sincerely as I could even though this young cynic laughed and said it was virtually impossible. And then bam! It went on. He couldn’t believe it and, with that, was enrolled and came with us to the meeting.

  Once while speeding down the Harbor Freeway at eighty miles per hour, trying to make a meeting on time, I was stopped by a cop. I frantically told him where I was going and why it was so important. Silly me. Could I be so naive to think he cared? Turns out he did. He sighed and said, “Oh, I understand. My wife belongs to the same Buddhism,�
� and he let me go without a ticket.

  PING! Standing on the corner of Van Ness and Lombard was an older couple that looked uncannily like someone I used to know. Indeed, turns out it was my Buddhist district chief from forty years ago, Stan, and his wife, Norma, who had gotten married in the wedding dress I designed and made for her in 1972. During their secret courtship, I remember how smitten he was with her, calling on her to speak first whenever she raised her hand at meetings. Their obvious attraction to each other was adorable to watch since it really was one of the few love stories going on in the Buddhist organization at the time. They now have two married daughters and several grandchildren. They had just flown in from Carson City, Nevada, and were taking in the San Francisco sights for the weekend. Looking at them through my rearview mirror, I marveled at how they still seemed smitten with each other, holding hands while he laughed delightedly at her insightfully funny comments.

  Looking out the window at all the pedestrians, Stan asked, “Why is everyone so young and skinny here? Is it their diet?”

  She said, “Oh yes, I heard this is really a retirement town for old geezers like us, but they all eat greens five times a day so they look twenty or thirty years younger. That’s why we’re here—so we can get some of them greens!”

  With that he drew her close to him and kissed her sweetly and said, “Honey, you don’t need them greens. You still look good to me!”