The Joy of Uber Driving

by Yamini Redewill

  Next? Along came Dr. Bones. He was an orthopedic surgeon from Arcata, California. We talked for hours on the phone for two weeks before we met. He had gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, which I’ve always had a thing for. His pictures were not that exciting, but our minds and our spirit were so in sync I fell for him right away. He would riff on a subject with such humor and originality that I was mesmerized. This, I thought, is what I have been looking for all my life. I’ve always been attracted to off-the-wall brilliant humor, and he had it! We decided to meet in Berkeley where his daughter lived, and he would pay for my hotel room. When we met eye-to-eye at the airport lobby, he was leaning against a column and looked like a GQ ad, much more handsome in person than his photos revealed. I was immediately caught off guard, and all my walls went up to hide my sudden lack of self-esteem. If he had smiled, it might have been different. But it seems I did not meet his expectations, as he greeted me with a somewhat cool demeanor while he politely handed me a bouquet of yellow roses and a Zen book of poems.

  The whole weekend with him was torture as I tried to make him laugh or smile or respond like he cared for me just a little, only to be met with blank indifference. The more I groveled, the more he withdrew. It was obvious I was not in my power. Somehow, I had abdicated my personal power with the belief that I was not enough. It didn’t help that the glaring fluorescent light in the hotel bathroom cruelly revealed all the wrinkles I was used to blocking out in the soft light of my own bathroom mirror. On the last day, I was left in my hotel room without a call from him all morning. I was like a wild, caged animal, not knowing what to do with myself, not having a car or his daughter’s number (we didn’t have cell phones then). Finally, about noon, he showed up and said this wasn’t working for him. I burst into tears, blaming myself for not even trying to seduce him the night before. When my plane landed in LA and I got to my car in the parking lot, I sat there with the windows up and wailed like Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give for almost an hour. Not since I was thrown out of Bhagwan’s ranch had I felt this much pain from rejection. Unfortunately, my movie did not have a happy ending like Diane’s. I think this was the final blow that ended any desire to actively search for a mate through the Internet.

  My daughter, on the other hand, has had startling success, as she married the second guy she dated from Match.com. After celebrating six years together, it continues to be the perfect marriage. I was honored with an acknowledgment as her birth mom at the wedding reception and was also the official photographer.

  I have been going through a lot of resistance to writing my last Internet dating experience. I didn’t want to remember it or talk about it until last night when I read a quote from the channeled book I Am the Word by Paul Selig that spoke directly to me: “You are living the lives you have chosen and will continue to choose. And the creations you have created were all born in need. You needed them or you wouldn’t have created them. We would like you each to see before you, in your mind’s eye, your perfected self. We are before you leading the way, and we are behind you saying: ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry. Go meet yourself. Go meet the beautiful self that you are and have always been.’ You are merging now with your own vibration, the holiest self that you may know. Feel yourself in worth as you are engaged in marriage with your own Divine Self.”

  PING! I pulled up to two women hugging on the sidewalk in front of the house, one with bags, indicating she was going to an airport. She was crying while the other tried to comfort her. The moment she got into the car and closed the door, she let out a full-blown heartbroken wail. She was a very attractive blond, but her makeup had become so smeared, she resembled a sad raccoon. She kept apologizing for crying, and I told her, “Please don’t feel you have to apologize. Go ahead and just let it all hang out.” She did and went through a handful of tissues. I asked her if she’d like to talk about it, and she immediately, between sobs, went into the whole story. It was about being rejected by a man that she had high hopes for while visiting here from Key West, Florida. She met him on an online dating service and spent about three weeks with him here in Northern California. They were so “into each other” they wasted no time renting a house to live in together. But she made the fatal mistake of “innocently” accepting a casual date for a drink with his best friend in hopes that he would join them both later. He went ballistic, misinterpreting her intentions, and no amount of rational explanations on her part could persuade him otherwise. Previously she had ignored all the red flags when he’d told her he had to have everything his way or not at all. The upshot: he kicked her out of the house in the meanest way possible and told her to never come back.

  This so reminded me of me years ago. I tried to convince her that it was a good thing she found out now what he was like and that none of it was her fault. I told her she was a beautiful woman who deserved a lot better. She, of course, thought just like I did once, that it was all her fault and that she did something horribly wrong. By now I knew that with her state of mind, nothing I could say would make any difference. She was as determined as I once was to be the victim. When I told her that she was letting go of a toxic relationship so that she could make room for something better. She just gave me a blank stare. I changed the subject and asked her who her favorite movie star was, and she brightened and said, “Sofia Loren” and then thanked me for distracting her from her grief for a moment. (Sofia Loren? Really?)

  This woman’s pain and her complete submission into self-blame and victimhood reminded me so much of myself and all the years I suffered with this affliction. When I was thirteen years old, did I not proclaim that my greatest life goal was to love myself? As I near the end of this book, it is my fervent desire to reach this goal before the last page is scribed. This may be the ultimate purpose of writing my memoir.

  IMAGINE

  A Retirement Community of Loving Friends

  For the first seven years of doing family beach portraits and children’s vintage portraits from the end of 1997 to the beginning of 2004, my creative yearning was basically fulfilled.

  But as usual, after seven years of doing one thing, restlessness set in, and my mind scoured the landscape for a new all-encompassing project. In 2004 I turned sixty-five, which is officially retirement age. Naturally, thoughts turned to the kind of life I would want or dream to have in retirement. I ultimately returned to the idea of communal living, of sorts, in a community of like minds and spirits, but with a twist: I wanted it to be a place where we owned or rented our own little houses but were connected to a main house where we could gather together for meals and movies or lectures if we wanted. I expanded the idea to include several in-house businesses operated by the members, such as an organic garden, a retreat center and spa, a wedding location, a publication house, an art studio and public art gallery, and a boutique selling our own flower essences, arts and crafts, and hand-made jewelry. Far from being a retirement community, it would be a fully functional hub of creative activity and moneymaking businesses. I then added the idea of a health facility and assisted living for our aging members.

  I began extensive computer research on existing co-housing communities, on building methods and materials, on design concepts, on environmental practices, and on building codes and land use laws in California, in other states, and in Mexico and Costa Rica. My favorite design concept was the Haiku house, which is a redwood structure with a clay tile roof topped with a skylight and a wraparound veranda. It’s built on poles, allowing it to fit any terrain without needing a foundation. There were many designs and sizes to choose from. They would arrive in pieces by truck and require a construction crew to put together. Another favorite design was the underground “eggshell” houses that could escape the notice of aerial surveyors, if you couldn’t find a location that would allow more than one structure per acre. I drew in a number of people who were interested, including Handy, who spent hours doing Internet research as well.

  Several of us took trips to Mexico together to look over available proper
ty, but they were a little too remote, and the ride to them was unbearably unattractive because of the miles of garbage that lay rotting on the hillsides. We also took trips to Northern California and the Santa Cruz mountains in particular, because of the comparatively cheap land values there. We visited properties that already had structures and ones that didn’t. I fell in love with a beautiful two-story home in Morgan Hill, which had a large pond and a big lawn area perfect for a retreat center and for weddings. The property extended into the forest behind and in front along the long drive to the house. I could see that dozens of cottages could be built along the creek behind the house.

  I created a business plan that included this property and also a property in Southern California. My brother owned one hundred acres between Temecula and Warner Springs, and I was able to get him interested in letting us use his land if we would build a house for him and his wife and son away from the community up on the hill above. He was not interested in being a part of the community, as he is a very private person and has never been involved in any of the spiritual practices or teachings that I have embraced. A major drawback was the weather, which could reach up to 118 degrees in the summer. I designed a community of twenty-four houses on his property, ranging from Haiku pole houses to underground shell houses, which would be naturally cool in the summer and warm in winter. He had a natural spring and a pond area that was currently dry. Most of the one hundred acres were vertical, with about ten usable flatland acres.

  One time, I traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, and met with a sannyasin real estate agent who showed me a few possibilities. I had never seen such a beautiful landscape of vine-covered trees and beautiful forests. But the humidity, and the strong stench of mold in every place I stayed, was a big deterrent.

  PING! Two middle-aged Mexican American women climbed in and were highly animated by the Hillary sticker I had on my bumper. One spoke robustly for the two of them and told me that she was doing everything she could to see that Hillary won. She and all her friends were very scared of Trump and had already begun to reap the consequences of the hate paranoia he had generated, as they experienced being demeaned by complete strangers every day. She said she’d like to tell them that she’d lived under a dictator, that they didn’t know how good they had it in the US now, and what the consequences would be if they elected Trump. She spoke of the elections going on in Latin America and a deal she had made with her friends south of the border: if the liberal candidate won there, she would celebrate by eating their tacos, and if Hillary won here, she would invite them all for hamburgers.

  I’m still caught up in the political drama playing out on TV, and we are now only twenty-six days from the election. I’ve had many open discussions with my various Uber passengers, who all seem to be in agreement that Trump is despicable and has to go. This was even before the first debate, and then there was the Access Hollywood tape (i.e., sexual assault expose) and the second debate, which only compounded his unfitness for the office of president, causing prominent Republicans to leave in droves. Meanwhile, Russia and Wikileaks are furiously trying to balance the scales with their Clinton email exposés. Trump’s hateful, demagogic rhetoric to his base is sickening, and now he’s setting it up that if he loses, it’s because the system is rigged. More than a million more guns have been sold since he began his campaign, and they talk incessantly about a revolution if he doesn’t win. There have been many open threats by his supporters. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

  I spent two years fully engaged in the creation of my Moonwater community, but to no avail. It was a wonderful dream, and still is, but with little prospect for actual manifestation. Like my Humanimal, it lay crumbled on a dusty road to nowhere.

  THE GREATEST LOVE OF ALL

  My Soul’s Purpose Revealed

  Meanwhile, my life as a photographer was creatively less and less fulfilling as I continued to do family portraits, professional head-shots, and vintage children’s portraits. I joined more network groups to bolster my client base and became proficient at marketing my work through the personal contacts I made. But my “why” was missing. Who was I being other than a working photographer? Then one day an idea was presented to me that would be the answer to feeling more fulfilled. Someone told me I could work with teens at risk in lockup as a volunteer. It required a one-day training session, in which I would become a certified VIP (Volunteer in Probation).

  I applied for the course, and after getting my certification, I chose to go to a lockup school in Santa Ana, where I could spend time with them in a schoolroom as an art teacher. My prior work as a social worker in LA and also as a district leader in the Buddhist organization prepared me to associate with them authentically and effectively. I visited the school for two hours, twice a week, and went home feeling energized, knowing I was making a difference in their lives. The one thing I noticed missing at the school was an element of love and respect for these kids. It seemed that so many on staff were in a punitive state of mind and very much on the same level of consciousness as the inmates themselves. So I did my best to show my appreciation for them as human beings and as potentially productive members of society. I would come up with a different art project every time and helped them to see life with new eyes.

  One day, I had the idea to bring my camera, studio lighting equipment, a backdrop, and a rack of glamorous clothes and accessories for the girls to wear for a photo shoot. This was so much fun watching them “ooooh” and “aaaah” and support each other’s experience of looking beautiful. After that, the girls received a free five-by-seven print of themselves.

  There were several kids I became interested in: one in particular was a seventeen-year-old girl whose family lived in Laguna Niguel and who was in for heroin addiction. She was a repeat offender. Once she got out, she invariably hooked up with old friends who would drag her back into her addictive behavior, and she would end up either in juvenile hall or in the lockup school again. Several times she tearfully confided in me and expressed her despondency at being locked up.

  I had her come to my studio, the first time she was out, and I dressed her in a red silk gown and did a classic portrait shoot, which helped me with my portfolio. She was naturally beautiful, with big brown Anne Hathaway eyes. It also helped her to see a side of herself she hadn’t seen before. Another time I took her out on the streets of Laguna and did a series of black-and-white journalistic portraits, such as walking up a flight of stairs in a short, tight skirt and high heels, looking over her shoulder, carrying a boutique shopping bag; making a phone call in an iconic red British phone booth; and sitting on a park bench, smoking a cigarette and looking contemplative.

  We became very close. She invited me to her house to meet her family. Once I took her to the emergency room at the local hospital to be checked for VD, which she suspected she had, and another time we went to the state fair in OC with a male friend of hers for a carefree, fun time. I lost touch with her after two years when I suspended my work at the school, but found out later that she was drug-free and had gotten a job with a law firm. This made me very happy.

  PING! I was on the freeway heading toward Marin from Oakland when I got a call from the UC campus in Berkeley. Eloise, a woman of around fifty with long grayish-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, entered my car with an overnight bag. I asked her if she was a student there, and she countered, “Oh, no, my daughter, Stacy, is. I was just helping her get settled into her new apartment.” She showed me a picture of her on her iPhone.

  I exclaimed, “She’s beautiful. What is she majoring in?”

  “Medicine, and to tell you the truth, this worries me.”

  “Why? Is she stressed out?”

  “A little, but that’s not the reason. Before coming to Berkeley, she was on Adderall for her ADHD condition. It’s like crystal meth, you know. Her father is the one who thought it was a good idea to take Adderall so she could focus on her studies. He’s always pushing her to excel at everything. She listens to
him because he’s paying the bills.

  “She told me she finally got off it, but occasionally has been using marijuana and other recreational drugs. She insists she’s not addicted and can stop anytime she decides to. But meeting her new roommates, who have tattoos, pierced lips, and purple hair, I worry that she’s not in the best company to manage her ‘non’-addictions. She has a cousin who is only seventeen and is in a rehab center for heroin.”

  I asked, “Why does her studying medicine worry you?”

  She said, “Because she’ll have easy access to all of that stuff when she’s a doctor.”

  I surmised, “Well, that’s a long way off, and by then she may have grown out of the need or desire for it.”

  “That’s true. I guess I’m really more worried about the drug culture now at Berkeley and wondering if I can have a positive enough influence on her from four hundred miles away, for her to make the right choices. It’s just so scary, and I feel so helpless to do anything about it. I’m always walking a fine line with her, trying not to put her off with any lectures or even suggestions.”

  I exclaimed, “It must be hard being a mom, especially one with a brilliant and independently willful child. My kudos to you. I can’t imagine what it would be like to care so much for someone and not be able to stop them from making bad choices. Addiction is so insidious. It’s always, ‘Just one more time won’t hurt.’”

  Quietly she murmured, “I know.” I looked through my rearview mirror and saw her head bowed and a tear running slowly down one cheek. Quickly, she brushed it aside and smiled, asking, “Do you have any kids?” I told her my story and felt as though I had just made a friend I could reveal everything to. She listened with genuine interest, although she had every reason to be absorbed in her own thoughts and not hear a word I said. When I finally dropped her off at the airport, I got out of the car and gave her a big hug and my card, asking her to please feel free to call anytime. I then turned off my Uber app and headed home in silence and said a prayer for this brave woman and her beautiful daughter.