Meditation Brings Back a Flood of Memories
My fiancee, Howie Baskin and I were on a flight from our home in Tampa, Florida to Los Angeles, California and I was taking advantage of the rare opportunity to indulge in the pleasure of reading a book. This one was called “Corporate Nirvana” by Judith Anderson. We were somewhere over the desert and I was getting tired. The author was detailing her intuitive encounter with a group of business people in which she suggested that they close their eyes and imagine that they were all alone, on a deserted island. There was no work to do. No deadlines. No responsibilities. No demand on their time. There was only the island, the sand crunching between their toes and the birds over head. Their attention was diverted to a beautifully ornate, bejeweled treasure chest in the sand. As they approach they can see that it is unlocked and they know that inside is their gift. This gift will be the answer to the question that is plaguing them now. They will know when they see this gift exactly what it means to them and therein is their answer.
I haven’t meditated in the deep relaxed manner that I had been practicing in over a year. I have been too busy. Things have been going too well for me to value the need for it. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to shut the book and try her visualization. I asked myself, “Why am I always taking on tougher and tougher problems? Why can’t I just say, “enough is enough” and be happy with what I’ve done?” Holding that thought, in my sleepy half conscious state, I began the walk down the beach in the deserted island in my head.
Seagulls overhead, palm trees swaying in the tropic breeze, the warmth of the sun on my face and the sand crunching between my toes. So far, so good. Ah, there is the treasure chest…going over to admire it…it really is beautiful…I wonder what is inside, but I hesitate. Do I want to know? What if I don’t find an answer? What if I do and don’t like it? I stall and ponder the gravity of the moment. In this box that I made up, in a place that I made up, lays the answer to the one problem that has driven me since childhood. Here at 30,000 feet, while I look to all the world that I am asleep, I am about to discover the meaning of life…the meaning of my life anyway.
I begin to slowly lift the lid. There is an aura of purple light escaping from the treasure chest. “Nice special effects” I compliment to my imaginative self. “I wasn’t expecting that.” I am opening the lid so slowly as if I am expecting some dragon to consume me with its fire breathing anger. Come on Carole…open the box…its just a box…go on now open it!
Leaping backward from the box as the top swings open I can only see what looks like a purple, fuzzy blanket in the bottom of the box. Tentatively, I lean forward thinking there must be something under the cloth. It isn’t moving and there doesn’t appear to be any real shape to it. I am disappointed with myself.
“That’s it! That’s the best you could do? You have the opportunity to solve all of your life’s struggles in one vision and all you can think of is a blanket! I must be cold. That must be what is behind this first thought and my REAL revelation must still be in the box.” I try hard to see something else in the chest and after a while I resign myself to just being totally unimaginative.
OK then, let’s have a look at the fuzzy purple blanket and what ever that could possibly mean to me. As I am muttering, “purple blanket” to myself I lift it up out of the dark box and hold it full length. “Well, how about that?” I say to myself as the living material, with a light that gave it the fuzzy appearance, unfolds to the sand. “It’s not a blanket at all. It’s a cloak, shimmering with a life all its own. It is breathtakingly beautiful! It is too precious to wear. No king ever wore a cape as magnificent as this! I wonder briefly if I am worthy to wear this aura of lavender light?
“Of course I am,” I chide. “I made the thing up. I can wear it.” I put it on. Wow! I am cloaked in spirituality. What does that mean to me? It means that I have remembered who I really am.
I am safe. I am at peace. I am at one with God.
Everything I have ever done was leading to this moment. Every challenge that I ever set myself up for has culminated in this moment of awakening. All I have ever been trying to do was to reach this moment of spiritual enlightenment.
My driven self said, “OK. Nice lesson. Now get back to reading and learn something.” My spiritual self said, “I am learning now. I am learning that my drive has come from the need to prove myself worthy, but my spirit has always known that I am and that every lesson in life is about reaching a higher level of Nirvana.”
As if the flood gates had been instantly opened every challenge that had beset me along the way raced through my mind. I was seeing what was common in every situation: Every time a challenge presented itself, it was a much more difficult one than the one before. Every time I succeeded in reaching the goal there were people who I felt were betraying me. In each case, as the stakes were higher, those people were stronger or greater in numbers than the time before. It wasn’t the tasks or the challenges themselves that were my lessons to learn, but rather, how I would deal with the people who would disappoint me so profoundly.
How I would deal with having betrayed myself. Nothing on this earthly plane; wealth, fame or fortune means anything. It is all about reconnecting with God and that is done by reconnecting with ALL of His creation. Yes, Carole, the people too. Perhaps the people especially. It is about remembering who you are and how we are all One.
The author, Judith Anderson suggests the Piper Principle:
What troubles a person most about a situation actually reveals an aspect of themselves (an underlying fear or concern) they don’t yet see; a blind spot.
Underlying fears and concerns of leaders, and the unconscious way in which they protect themselves from them, show up in parable form as organizational barriers or blocks to achieving whatever goals are set.
When aggravation or blocks show up, a person can pay the piper, investigate the blind spot, and resolve the fear and concern or blame others. Unproductive patterns reappear until you pay the piper.
I don’t think I have ever considered a more truthful thought than that.
Some lessons I just go through over and over and over until I get it. Once I get it then the next lesson is harder and will keep repeating over and over until I finally get that one too. Until yesterday I didn’t see this pattern of escalation. I wonder, if I had, would I have had the courage to take on each new challenge, knowing that success ultimately meant a tougher lesson to follow?
Ignorance is bliss, but it is highly ineffective when we know our days are numbered and we have so much to learn in this lifetime. I am increasingly convinced that we live forever and are doomed to repeat lives of frustration and striving until we each experience our own moment of looking into the treasure chest and discover ourselves and our connection to All that Is.
The rest of this is not meant to read like a resume of accomplishments, but rather as an example of how each of us is presented with unique challenges that we meet to the very best of our ability each time. Many times challenges have been presented to me that I was incapable of overcoming. Connecting with people has been the hardest for me. Sometimes we may look back and think we could have done better, but I don’t think so. I think we are all doing the best we can for the skills we have now and that the only way we will ever “do better” is by learning from each lesson.
My family were fundamental Christians and raised me to believe that we are to strive for perfection, but being human, will always fall short. The only good news in that was that God is Love and is capable of loving us even though we are never really good enough or deserving. This belief was the canvas on which I would paint my life.
I was five years old, naked as a jaybird, cleaning my canary’s cage in the front yard with a hose and wondering how a caged bird could sing? Free birds had something to sing about, but why do caged birds sing? Caught up in my own reverie and enjoying the summer sun on my skin and the sand between my toes I was quite taken aback by my mother throwing a blanket over me and dragging me into the house, all the while telling me that “little girls don’t go out side naked.” I wondered, “why not?” I felt so connected to the earth, the sky, the water from the hose, the soft summer breeze in my hair... “What is this obsession people have with hiding who they are? Cloaking who they are?”
I was a big kid; always head and shoulders taller than my peers, with a shock of short white hair and big blue eyes. Butterflies would light on me in the playground and every stray followed me home. I had the same entourage of broken down, unwanted people throughout my life. All of the kids that were disabled or slow or who just didn’t fit in with the “in” crowd flocked around me. I always tried to help them see what was special about them that no one else had to offer. It wasn’t that I was so understanding and wonderful. It was because if I could heal them enough to feel that they belonged they would start to fit in with others and would leave me alone.
I preferred the company of the animals and my spirit guides, the two leopard size, glowing white cats who were with me always, but who I wasn’t supposed to talk about unless I wanted to merely call them my “imaginary” friends. It’s one of those things that a kid just keeps to themselves when they realize that adults are too scared to talk about invisible, panther like creatures who sound like God when they speak in that still small voice, that carries all of the majesty and power of thunder.
Three years later I am eight and my father is the personal pilot to the governor of West Virginia, Arch Moore. We live in a trailer park, in a single wide tin can that is always freezing inside. Our lot looks like the terrain from a hostile planet with its caked, dry and broken clay surface.
Until I was six I was raised by my mother’s mother during the day while my parents worked. At night my parents would pick me up and take me home to sleep and then the next morning I’d wake up back at my grandparent’s home. My grandparents have stayed in Florida and I am still hating this separation from my other parents and the warmth of Florida. Both of my parents work full time and I have become responsible for taking care of my brother who is six years younger. There is a seething anger at my situation that seems impossible to me to resolve, and the only respite from it comes from the animals that I rescue. Taking care of them, takes my mind off what I cannot change.
One day a cat with a couple of bullet holes in her finds her way to my door. I discover that the man across the street had shot the cat because it was near his trash can. This man is big (compared to me), has a history of beating his wife and children (Ada), and is ugly to boot. His face is deeply scarred with pockmarks that indicate a hormonally challenged youth, and maybe one bar brawl too many, and he is now in his late twenties or early thirties. He drinks, he swears and he is just about as vile a human as any I have ever encountered. Until this moment, I have made a point to stay clear of him, even though his daughter and his younger son, have found me to be a safe haven in a life that heretofore was unbearable to them. It is his children who have come to me and told me that their father shot the cat and was threatening to kill any cat he saw come near his trailer.
Trembling, but fully resolved to make myself clear, I march up to this man and tell him that if he decides to take another shot at a cat, or if I hear a shot being fired and even think it is him, then that gun shot will be the last sound he ever hears. He just stands there looking down at me, but as scared as I am, I feel like I am in charge of this moment. I am offering up a challenge, that I have no idea how I will be able to carry out, but I can’t let him know that. After what seems an eternity of staring down this man, through my tear streaming eyes, he turns and goes inside his trailer. He blinked. He turned. He ran from me. I won!
I never heard another shot being fired. The word of that confrontation, spread by his own children, earned me a tremendous following in that poor little back woods trailer park. Now the kids who gathered around me were high school age and I felt like I had the moral support of every kid in the neighborhood. I used to lead them in money making schemes from selling popcorn and Kool-Aid, to mowing lawns, washing trailers, and making pot holders and such to sell door to door. Rock bands were making it big and I tried to assemble one, but I couldn’t sing and we just didn’t have what it took. I felt like learning to make a living was important and learning to manage others was going to be a crucial part of that. It felt necessary although I didn’t know where it was leading.
I felt like I was in some sort of intensive training for something important. I didn’t know what it was about, but as a child you trust your instincts more. At school I was quiet and respectful but felt like the public school system was not meeting my educational needs. There was something important to learn about this thing called life and it wasn’t in memorizing multiplication tables. There were machines that could do that far better than I ever could, so what was the purpose in all of this useless knowledge? Teach me how to succeed. Teach me why the caged bird sings…
I wouldn’t wear shoes. You can’t be connected to the earth and all of the glorious power that is available to you with shoes on. It was fortunate for me that we lived in a West Virginian “holler” where going to school barefoot wasn’t considered too weird. After school I went into the forests. It wasn’t your typical kid-playing-in-the-woods so much as going to learn what it was like to be the woods, to be the brook, to be the animals and the wind. I would climb up as high as I could get in the trees to get a better vantage point on observing everything around me. I wanted to know how everything worked, how it was all connected.
The teachers would send home piles of homework. My attitude was that it was a ploy designed to keep bad kids off the street. If they had to turn in a lot of work the next day they didn’t have time to be in trouble. I wasn’t being bad. I was learning something that I thought was a lot more important and I wasn’t going to do class room “busy” work outside of the classroom. This got me into a considerable amount of trouble with my teachers, but I aced every test and my grades were still As and Bs despite all of the bad marks for refusing to turn in homework.
By the time I was 12 we were back in Florida and I was attending a little private school called Florida College Academy. There were grades 1 thru 9 there, with one class for each grade level that had 12-24 students. My great aunt, Mari, was the principal which as her son, my cousin Scott, and I knew was the worst set up possible for a kid. You were perceived as having special privileges by your peers, and yet the reality was that you were held to a much higher standard because of the fact that relatives see you as a reflection on themselves and they want to be seen as perfect.
It was 1971 and women were burning their bras in the streets a decade before, but our school had held to very antiquated beliefs, that said little girls were to be modest and wear long dresses and never speak out against authority. I actually bought into most of that but a lot of the girls were not from religious homes and even those that were frequently dressed in pants at home. They wanted to be able to wear pants to school so that they could play more freely on the playground. Even though I didn’t even own a pair of pants, everyone turned to me to do something about it. I thought their reasons were sound. Wearing a dress on the playground was certainly less modest than wearing long pants and so I decided to take the suggestion to the principal.
Not only was my Aunt Mari an authority figure within the family and the school, but she was someone I had observed carefully since I was a toddler in the way in which she dealt with my cousin. Scott and I were born the same year and day and look like twins. We have often wondered if we were and just were separated at birth to be raised by two different families because neither one could afford both of us. My cousin has grown up to be a maintenance man in an apartment building. I watched his mother tell him he was stupid and that he would never amount to anything his whole life. By contrast I was always told I could do anything I set my mind to do. Both of us lived up to our parents’ expectations.
I went to my aunt and presented our case and was promptly dismissed as being “un-Christian like”. I went back to my classmates and suggested that the only way to effect a change in the dress code was to lead an organized uprising against the status quo. I busily engaged both sexes in my plan and drew up posters and hung them in the halls, held rallies and basically just wouldn’t shut up until I got what I was asking for. I fully expected to be burned at the stake. Much to my amazement we won. I went out and bought my first pair of pants. (They were plaid and hideous. It was the 70’s after all.) I kept them for twenty years as a reminder of that success.
Two years later, at the age of 14 I was trapped and raped by three men (Steve & Jim? Crabtree and George Minogue). They cut my throat and for years I carried a scar that I hid with scarves. I didn’t tell anyone because I fully believed that I was to blame. If I had not been in a place where I shouldn’t have been this would not have happened to me and thus I felt that not only was it my fault, but that it proved I was not worthy as a human being. I was no longer a virgin and could no longer expect that I would grow up and marry a decent man and live happily ever after. Within a year I had let this event colour every aspect of my self esteem. The deeper emotional scarring of this event however came from the betrayal of my best friend.
Cindy Clark Brown and I had been friends since we were nine or ten years old. I was the innocent; the perfect daughter, cooking and cleaning for my family and joining in working the landscaping business after school. Cindy was about as wild as they came. She was a year older than I and was smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs. She was always in trouble and would often come stay with me until her family could brace themselves to deal with her again. She made fun of me for being a goody two shoes and was jealous of my beauty and sense of grace. People always commented on my air of confidence. The fact was that my grandmother had always made me walk around the house with books on my head and the result was a walk that had an unintentional haughtiness to it.
Cindy and I had been out for a walk earlier and she was flirting with three men from the race track. We went to their house and played cards, while they had both the radio and the T.V. on full blast. They were all stoned and I watched the scene in amazement. I had never been exposed to this sort of activity, and although the only part I participated in was the card playing, I was very curious about this sort of approach to life. Cindy was sitting in their laps, giggling and whispering in their ears. I wondered if they knew how stupid they looked and sounded?
That night, when Cindy and I were supposed to be in bed, she wanted to slip out my bedroom window and go back to their house. I reluctantly agreed and as we cleared the yard, Cindy said she needed to go back to my room to make a call, and that I should go on ahead of her. I did as instructed.
They were waiting for me. What I didn’t know, until many years later when Cindy felt compelled to clear her conscience, was that she had told them I was a virgin and had sold me to them for drugs. The call she made was to let them know I was on the way.
A year later, back in W.Va. I had turned 15. My mother, who had always been my most trusted friend, and I got into the first fight we had ever had. She had accused me of having sex with a nice boy I knew and I had not. I was defending his honour more than my own, because I was so convinced of my own guilt from the rape. As she was storming off to work she said, “When I get home, I don’t want to see your face!”
This was the last family photo before I left home, and yes, I am only 14 in that photo, which explains how I was able to wait tables in bars without being discovered.
I thought she meant that she never wanted to see me again and as fate would have it, I was ready for the next challenge. A young man named Jim Jones, who I barely knew from Florida, was in boot camp near Washington, D.C. He had gone AWOL from the army and was driving back to Florida and asked if he could drop by. I told him I couldn’t live here any more and asked if he would take me with him back to Florida. I packed my cat, my radio and two paper grocery bags of clothes and waited for his arrival. As we drove away I watched my 9 year old brother playing in the yard and wondered if I would ever see him again? Taking care of him had always been my responsibility and as much as I hated being saddled with that, I felt guilty leaving him there.
I had known Jim from the skating rink where kids from my church were all taken to be with others of “our own kind”, but Jim worked there and intrigued me. He was 6 ‘ 4 “ weighed 230 pounds of solid muscle and had long golden hair down to his waist. He was a genius on skates, if not intellectually. Running from the U.S. army should have been my first clue that he was never going to be a brain surgeon. I only knew Jim from the rink and had invited him to one church picnic. Now I was on the run with him.
I worked bars and restaurants and sometimes held three jobs at once because Jim wouldn’t work. Turned out he couldn’t even pass a driver’s license test. He had a bad drug habit and a nasty temper and whenever the two mixed I was caught in the cross fire. I was always on guard to dodge a swing from a punch that would knock the wind out of me. He beat me with a bed rail one time so severely that I couldn’t go back to work for weeks because I was so badly bruised. As he swung the rail and hit the concrete walls of the garage we lived in he had knocked huge gaping holes in the concrete as a constant reminder to me of how much it hurt to be on his bad side. As scary as it was to be with him I believed it was better than the alternative. I had seen the brutality men could use to crush someone as innocent as I had been and at least there was only one of Jim to deal with. Jim was the constant validation of my belief that I was unworthy.
Jim decided he wanted to go home and I was driving us there through San Antonio, Florida. He was drunk and was all over the steering wheel and blocking my vision. With one arm I was trying to push him back into his seat so that I could see, as I ran a stop sign and was hit broadside in the little Toyota we were driving. The Mercury Cougar that hit us was later reported to have been traveling in excess of 60 miles per hour. Drunks seem to never be the victims in auto accidents and Jim was no exception. He walked away without a scratch, once he woke up from the stupor. I went through the windshield and broke my neck. I remember getting up and dragging the front bumper of the Cougar out of the road as I went around first to the passenger side and made sure the little old lady was okay and then around to the driver’s side to check on the little old man. He had hit the steering wheel pretty hard, but was able to speak.
What happened next was like the opening scene from the movie, The Gladiator. When I saw that movie I was awestruck at how it looked exactly as I had seen it all those years ago. I walked out into a field of tall grass. The sun was shining. The wind was blowing softly through my hair, as I reached out with both hands to lightly touch the tops of the waving strands of grass. Everything was silent and then it went white.
I woke up in a hospital, unable to move. I was paralyzed and Jim was telling me that he didn’t want the doctors to know who I was because he was still on the run from the army. I remember two doctors standing over me, x-rays in hand, telling me I would never walk again because my neck was broken in three places. The only hope I would have of even sitting up in a wheel chair was if they fused a steel rod up through my spine. They obviously didn’t know that I was just a child. I had gotten my first marriage proposal at the age of 12 and had always looked a lot older.
I laid there thinking, “This cannot be my life. I can’t be paralyzed. This can’t be happening to me.” I suspect most people go through that denial, but I just wouldn’t give in to the “reality”. I had learned from previous efforts that you can’t give up. No matter how big and bad the odds are stacked against you, you just absolutely cannot give up. Being young and ignorant, I didn’t know what these doctors could legally do to me, but I wasn’t going to take my chances of waking up and finding that some surgery had left me incapable of ever getting past this paralysis. I believed I could heal myself, but not if I had a metal rod installed through my spine.
Jim and his friends from the band (Jim said the band’s name was Credence Clearwater Revival, but I find that hard to believe in retrospect) came and whisked me out in a wheel chair without telling anyone. I spent what seemed an eternity at his parent’s home unable to walk and only able to drag myself across the room, but I dragged myself a lot. I wouldn’t call my family. I didn’t think I was welcome there anymore. Jim’s parents didn’t want to be held responsible for what their son’s actions had caused and didn’t want the army to find their son, so they were happy to hide me and my affliction. My grandfather, Floyd Norris, through a miraculous chain of events, somehow found out where I was and got me to a chiropractor who soon had me walking again.
Because I wasn’t even old enough to be in a bar, I couldn’t work anywhere for very long because I couldn’t show the management my driver’s license for the employment forms. After the paralysis I often collapsed and doing that just once with a tray of flaming cherries jubilee was enough for me to think that I needed to find some other sort of work. I didn’t have a high school diploma and was underage but had heard you could get a worker’s permit. Arch Moore was replaced by Governor Rockefeller who decided to replace all of the state’s planes with helicopters, but none of the state’s pilots, including my father could fly helicopters so my father was without a job.
More as an effort to avenge my father’s dismissal from the aviation team I applied for an opening in the state’s Department of Business and Economic Community Development and got it. I quickly advanced through the ranks and became Governor Rockefeller’s secretary’s secretary. My job was to investigate officials that Jay would be dealing with and put together photos and bios so that he would look good. What didn’t look good, when the word got out in the press, was the fact that a 15 year old high school drop out had risen through the ranks of the W.Va. government to governor’s aide when there were far more “qualified” men and women vying for the position.
1977 was the first time I was in the newspaper as an adult. Being born the fifth living generation had gotten the family into the newspaper in 1961.
The press made a big fuss of the fact that I moonlighted at a Greek restaurant and insinuated that I might be the veiled belly dancer, Little Egypt. My boss told me to dress as frumpy as possible that day and wear glasses so that people wouldn’t think I was hired for my looks.
Had I known that I was on this learning quest to deal with people issues I think I might have stuck it out and played that hand to the end, but at the time, I thought these challenges were about accomplishments and proving worthiness. I had proven that I could step out of a wheel chair, out of the smoke filled bars and into the governor’s office (and not just any governor, but a Rockefeller) and rise to the top. I wasn’t old enough to run for election. That would have to wait.
Riding high on this wave of worthiness I drove Jim to his mother’s home in Tampa and dropped him and his trailer full of belongings off in the front yard. I didn’t have enough money to get back to my job in W.Va. so I looked through the want ads to find waitress work that would get me enough gas to get back to the job that I was told would still be mine upon my return, despite the media craze that had erupted.
What happened next was one of those near misses. It is a juncture in your life that is probably meant to happen, but gets thwarted. I walked into “Our Place” bar on Ben T. Davis beach and was hired on the spot. 20 years later I would discover that my daughter’s fiancée (Daniel Capiro) was being raised by the waitresses in that bar and I would have been raising him had I shown up for work, but I didn’t.
I had come so far and I just wasn’t willing to go back to even a short term job where my ass was constantly being patted and pinched. Instead, I drove across town to a luncheon spot and was, again, hired on the spot, but I had to have frumpy shoes for the job. All my feet could ever stand were sandals if I had to wear shoes at all. I walked across the street to the Zayre’s store and overheard a man saying that he needed to hire a clerk to run the automotive department. That sounded like a new challenge and didn’t require stifling shoes, so I asked for and was given the job. I would work for a couple of weeks, collect my checks and then head back to West Virginia to see where that road would take me. I never went back to West Virginia.
I was living in a Datsun Pickup truck with a camper on the back. My cat, Pearlie Mae, who I had had since I was 8, lived with me so I had to park where it was cool for her during the day, but the days were getting hotter and she was going to die in that truck if I didn’t find somewhere for her to live. My manager’s name was Michael Eugene Murdock and I spent more time dodging his advances than I did stocking shelves. He was leaving his wife and moving into an apartment. I asked if my cat could stay there during the day and I would pick her up at night. He was happy to trade sexual favours for the cat’s room and board. I hated him. At night I would pick up my cat, do what I had to do to cover her “rent” and then she and I would back the truck up against a building somewhere so that no one could surprise us by opening the back hatch.
I would wash my hair in the bathroom of the nearest gas station at night after they had closed for the evening. I tried to maintain my independence for as long as possible, but finally gave in to the pressures of needing a roof over my head as well as the cat’s and moved in with him.
Despite hating Mike, I married him at the age of 17 and gave birth to our daughter at the age of 19. My mother knew that I was living with a man who was not my husband. She had just enough psychology in college to believe that if she suggested I marry the man, I would rebel and leave him, which was the result she was really hoping to get.
I thought it was really what she wanted me to do. I had felt such a loss in the trust that our former friendship had enjoyed and I believed that if I married him, as she suggested I should, then I could be worthy of her love again. I would do this to please her. She had no idea how I felt about him. I stayed with him for eight years, because I was raised to believe that marriage is for life. When I couldn’t take it any more and divorced him, my mother finally revealed that she never liked him and never wanted me to marry him, but had thought that by suggesting it I would run.
Mike was very physically abusive, but clever enough to hurt me in ways that were not visible to the casual observer. It was again, my sick way of validating my belief that I was not worthy. Meanwhile my growing and learning self decided to apply for a job at the Tampa Boat Mart in 1984. The job paid better money than I had made elsewhere and required an interview and an IQ test. I was fascinated by the opportunity to have my intelligence measured and probably applied based on that aspect more than any other.
The owner’s wife did the interview and test and said that I had registered as a genius. Bolstered by this, I told her I would take the job, but wanted 50% more than the job had offered. She balked but I could tell that she wanted me for the position, so I made a deal with her. I would work for the first 6 months at the price in the paper, but at the end of six months she would advance me to the salary that I requested, because I explained that I would be so irreplaceable to her, or else let me go. She agreed.
I asked her to lay out everything that she could possibly think of as my job description. When she did, since I was salaried, I asked if it mattered how long I worked to get it all done. She said if I could do it in four hours that was fine and if it took me ten, that was fine too, but I wasn’t getting overtime. In no time I had automated the process so that I could do it in just a couple hours a day. This freed up my time to work on a business that I believed was going to be my key to financial freedom. I left the Tampa Boat Mart in 1985.
This was me working at the Neptune and S. Dale Mabry Hwy Radiant Oil gas station owned by Joe Capitano in 1982. He had offered me my own station out on Gunn Hwy, but I got the Boat Mart job instead.
At the age of 19 I met and began dating Jack Donald Lewis. Everyone said he had made his money in illegal drugs, but he told me it was from cutting the axels off trailers for re use by the company and selling the boxes. While at the bank one day a loan officer told him she had a $20,000.00 mortgage that was in default that she would sell for $2000.00 if someone would just take it off her hands. Don couldn’t read or write above a first grade level, but he could understand getting something for ten cents on the dollar. He asked her to make a copy of the documents and he brought them to me with the story. Thinking there must be a catch, he asked me to find out what it was. I couldn’t find one. If we bought the mortgage for 2000.00 and the people started paying us on the 20,000.00 balance we would be getting a great return on our money. If they didn’t pay and we foreclosed, we would get 20,000.00 at the foreclosure sale or we might even get the house and be able to sell it for more.
We did it and we made more than 20,000.00. I knew that this was my next big challenge and even then knew that it was just a stepping stone to allowing me to do something far more important than make money, but I didn’t know what that was and didn’t waste much time thinking about it. Instead I was calling every bank and loan office in a 5 county area asked to see their bad loans. They thought I was crazy and I got a lot of resistance at first, but they soon learned that I wouldn’t betray their confidence and I would quickly and easily turn their bad loans back into cash for reinvestment. The Boat Mart gave me the regular paycheck I needed to grow the real estate business so that I never had to take money out of this exponentially growing pot of gold.
I worked crazy hours. I worked every waking hour. I divorced the man I hated and lived in a huge house on Lemon Street with lots of rooms that I rented out so that I didn’t have to touch my investments for living expenses. The business had grown to well over a one million dollar value.
I drove an old Impala that I had paid 100.00 for, bought all my clothes at Goodwill and had taken on some investors who were happy to get 12% return on their cash and let me make the difference for growing my portfolio. It was a man’s world but I knew how to play the game. I started a business called C.Stairs, Investments and told people that I was Mr. Stairs’ secretary. They wanted to deal with a man. I made one up for them. I was so convincing that for years after Don Lewis and I married people called him Mr. Stairs because they just assumed I had married my boss. I had bought into the belief that as a woman I was unworthy of being treated the same as a man.
I am a little hazy on the year, but I was about 27 (1988) when I was driving a drunk, named Bill Benjamin, home from a bar. My car had stalled and he got out to push it out of the road as I steered. It was in the early morning hours and a woman who had fallen asleep at the wheel careened into the back of my 1983 Blood Red Volkswagen Rabbit and pinned the drunk to my bumper, while hitting with enough force to give me a concussion and to bend the door frame where my head hit it.
I woke up in the hospital again, but this time with a Viet Nam vet suffering from post traumatic stress who was screaming bloody murder if I tried to leave the room. I stayed by his side constantly, even though I only knew him as someone I had bought a rug from a few days before. Both of his legs had been crushed and he was in a lot of pain. I felt guilty because it was my car he was pushing out of the road. I had to do something to feel guilty. It wasn’t in my paradigm to go without that cloud of unworthiness hanging over my head. I was so caught up in Bill Benjamin’s drama, that I didn’t realize that I didn’t know who or where I was.
My secretary (Anne McQueen) found me in the hospital. I had been missing for days so she had done the obvious and called everywhere until she located a Jane Doe. Was my name Jane? When she gets me on the phone she asks where my daughter is. I have a daughter? A baby? “Oh my God, where’s the baby?” my mind screams. Sensing my fear she tells me that maybe my daughter had been living with my husband. I have a husband? Then who is this man? All of a sudden I am aware that I don’t know anything about whom or where I am. I just can’t describe that. I have seen some films since then that try to address what amnesia is like, and nothing really conveys what that fear is like.
She takes me home and there are people living there who say that I own the house. I walk into an office full of file cabinets, papers and ringing phones and I do not recognize any of it. I answer the phone and people are asking me questions and giving me information that means absolutely nothing to me. I spend hours reading every file, looking at photos, meeting my daughter, for what seems like the first time, talking to my secretary and one of the women who lives in my house (Mary Young) to try and reconstruct my life.
Over the next weeks and months I get a handle on it and things start coming back to me, but I never know that something is forgotten until I try to fill in a blank spot or until some revelation comes to me as a memory and I sit there wondering, “Was that in this life?” At the time I thought it was a very unfortunate setback, but in retrospect it just seems to be another challenge that I posed to myself to see if I could rise to above it.
This time I was betrayed by my own memory.
I discover that when I touch people I see their lives, or what I imagine to be their lives. I am always confused, still, when I get a rush of feeling, if it is theirs, or if it was mine from long ago, just now surfacing. One of the most dramatic instances of this happened years later when a volunteer (Crazy Gary) introduced me to his room mate. I shook the smiling man’s hand and immediately fell to my knees sobbing. The despair was overwhelming. I was embarrassed by the incident and brushed it off to both of them as just being over worked, but the next day the room mate put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains all over the ceiling. Crazy Gary told me he knew that his room mate was sad, but had no idea of the depth of his despair. I knew.
Don and I married on October 10, 1991 at ten minutes after 10 am. We lost one million dollars in our assets to settling with his wife and one and a half million in assets to settle with his girlfriend, Pam, who was trying to have him brought down on Racketeering charges so that she could keep our 3 million that was in her name. I had always allowed Don to hold our money because I believed he would give me what was owed if I were ever to ask for it. There were a lot of real estate transactions for Pam and her trust in 1991-1996, but they began to taper off and 2004 was the last entry I found for her doing business in Hillsborough County. She had satisfied a mortgage made by our ex secretary Luba Myck. I knew Richard Dery was in Camp Pam, but didn’t know Luba was. 1995 appears to be her last actions in Pasco County, with one suspicious document between her and Jack Martin.
Since Don could barely read or write he didn’t know that she had put the properties in her name, or so he said. What had been 5 million dollars worth of my work was now reduced to half that, but I could rebuild it and did. I had learned how to negotiate the best deals and had learned how to do all of our foreclosures, tenant evictions and get people out of the bankruptcy courts when they ran there for protection.
I learned by going to the court house and reading every file I could lay my hands on, copying the language and forms the attorney’s used and then setting up charts that showed me what the appropriate times between filings were. I spent hours in the law library reading cases and making copies of those that were particularly pertinent to my cases. I sat in on every hearing that the judges would let me sit in on. I befriended several of the judges who would afterwards give me their summary of what had just happened. A lot of the judges did not like that I represented myself pro se and would hold me to a much tougher standard than the attorney’s were being held to, but none could make me give up.
When attorneys were hired to combat me they usually fell into the trap of underestimating my preparedness. In all these years I only ever lost one case, and I won it on appeal. Even the judges who had initially tried to run me off ended up being very supportive and would often compliment my ability over that of my licensed peers, which didn’t make me very popular among members of that profession.
I was a 30 year old multi millionaire real estate tycoon by anyone’s definition, and undefeated in the legal arena. Everything I touched turned to gold, but I still felt unworthy. What was next, a billionaire? Would that make me feel better?
This wasn’t working. Maybe if I could change the world. Maybe then I would be worthy. Maybe then I would say, I’m OK. I belong. I can be at peace.
Consciously I began looking for a way to give back to God all that He had given to me. Unconsciously I was setting myself up to fail and validate that long held belief that I was unworthy... or win and prove once and for all that I was worthy.
All you have to do is wave the wand of intention to bring it into your life. Before I knew what happened we were rescuing cats from fur farms, drug lords, circuses and unprepared pet owners. I was writing books on exotic cat care and my articles were being published in magazines and newsletters all over the country. There were more than 200 animals depending on me for support and the IRS said I couldn’t call it an expense, despite the fact that it was costing me about 300,000.00 a year, so I called it a non profit in 1995.
Two years later, my husband has disappeared off the face of the earth leaving me as the accused of an unknown crime, and all of my assets are seized by the courts upon a petition by the children of his former wife, and my secretary, my only girlfriend for the past 17 years, who I discover has put nearly 600,000.00 worth of my assets in her maiden name and changed my husband’s insurance policy to make her the owner of a one million dollar life insurance policy, just four months before his disappearance. She tells his children that Don and I were having marital trouble and suggests that they appoint her as conservator of his estate.
His estate! I don’t think anyone knew better than Anne that Don spent all of his time in dumpsters and cruising neighborhoods after yard sales to bring home van load after van load of trash. I had been trying to get him to an Alzheimer’s specialist but Don said Anne was telling him that I was trying to have him committed. This can’t be happening. This can’t be my life. Sound familiar?
The courts only allow me to use 125,000.00 of my income each year, for the next 5 years, to support the cats, because the courts are “preserving the estate” in case my husband wanders back into town. In the first years after his disappearance I discover, through the private detective I hire to find him, that my husband, the man I have adored since I was 19 has had a string of girlfriends, mistresses and even prostitutes. Women come out of the wood work claiming that Don told them he would leave everything to them or their illegitimate children by him. I discover that the love we shared was a lie. I was betrayed.
Our expenses are far more than double what the courts will allow me to touch and there is no where for the animals to go. I get to learn a whole new set of skills in running a non profit, but I haven’t chosen just any charity. No. I chose the one type of charity that sees less than 1% of all donated dollars. I had to pick an animal charity. People give more money to art than to animals. In retrospect, this would only be a good test of my worthiness if I could overcome insurmountable odds, right?
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PeTA, brought me a video clip of a lion being beaten senseless with a baseball bat while restrained within the confines of a small transport cage. They explained that this abuse had been video taped undercover and sent as evidence to USDA, but that when the perpetrator had told his USDA inspector that this was considered a standard training method for big cats nothing had been done to stop him. The question was posed to me asking if this was, in fact, a routinely accepted practice. In front of all three major television stations I said that the sad fact is that this sort of brutality is frequently visited upon these innocent animals by people who have USDA’s stamp of approval, but that it was inhumane and USDA was negligent in their unwillingness to enforce the animal welfare act that my tax dollars were paying them to implement.
A few weeks later I was served with a summons. In disbelief I read the case style: The United States of America versus Carole Lewis. Being bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a bed rail all those years ago did not take my breath away like reading these few words. My country. The one I had pledged allegiance to along with Captain Kangaroo each morning of my earliest remembered years. The country I sang songs about, even when I wasn’t in school. The one that bore the flag; the mere sight of which could raise goose flesh on my skin with pride and adoration. My country had not only abandoned me, it was attacking me, and it was doing so because I spoke out against cruelty.
Some pencil pushing bureaucrat was going to show me to keep my opinions about her doing her job to myself and she was in a position to levy the entire nation against me…or so it seemed. Maybe America did have tanks and jet fighters and nuclear weapons, but I had the truth on my side and was not going to take this lying down. Our supporter list had grown to about 3000 people and I sent out a newsletter detailing what the charges against me were and why I felt the USDA had taken this action. More than 2000 people wrote in on my behalf and for a long time I didn’t hear from the USDA.
Then I found out how they work. If they don’t have a legitimate claim then they make an accusation and never follow through on it. This way they can always point to the accusation and say that they cannot comment on pending litigation. They never have to prove their case. I would never be able to clear my name of the ridiculous and unfounded charges unless I took control. So I did. I learned all I could about how to represent myself in a Federal lawsuit and I called for a final hearing. I was stalled several times and when the day my “day in court” arrived, I got a call from the Federal judge who said that the USDA had decided to dismiss their suit against me. Then he asked if I would please let my supporters know to quit sending him mail and calling his office. With such a victory you would have thought I would have felt vindicated, but all I felt was betrayed.
Over the next five years the court appointed co conservator and attorneys ate away at my estate, in the name of preserving it, until there was only a fraction of it left. Then they declare my husband dead, when there is nothing left under the court’s control to take, and tell me to have a nice life. Meanwhile the cats are costing nearly half a million dollars a year to care for and the nation is in a recession following the stock market crash that sends everyone scrambling into real estate as the only safe investment. Having that much money diverted into real estate by people who know nothing of the business drives the price of property through the ceiling. The government steps in to try and pull the economy back up onto its feet by lowering the interest rates and giving loans to anyone who will take them at rates lower than they have been in my lifetime, makes my niche a little difficult. I loan at 18% and buy distressed properties at a fraction of the cost and then resell them. With all of the stock money now in real estate there are no deals and almost no one has to borrow at 18%.
Stress has made me fat and irritable and I drive to the Keys every two years to spend the weekend crying in a hammock on suicide watch until it’s time to get back to business Monday morning. I learn how to raise money by begging; something I wouldn’t do when I was living out of garbage cans as a 15 year old run away, but I have to do it now for the cats. I learn how to manage people and put together a team of volunteers that become world renown for their ability to work together. I run through a string of low life boyfriends that continue to validate my belief that I am not worthy of the love of a good man. I lose 70 pounds so that I can be more effective at getting out the message that exotic cats don’t make good pets.
The last 20 of those pounds were the hardest and after exhausting every diet known to man, I tried hypnotherapy. I was just starting to read about spirituality, healing, past lives and was willing to try anything. I remember that first session like it was yesterday. In the meditation the therapist asks me to walk down the beach and notice a little girl sitting by the shore. He tells me to go up to her. I don’t want to. He urges me on. I don’t want to. I finally give in and of course, she is me, about 5 years old, full of innocence, big blue eyes and white hair. He tells me to hold her and to tell her that I will never betray her again. I will protect her from anything and anyone else who tries to hurt her. I made a pact.
My life changed again. Suddenly I find myself asking, “Is this my life? Can this really be my life? I didn’t think I deserved a life this good.” Enter, Howie Baskin. He’s a brilliant 52 year old bachelor who makes my heart skip a beat. He is the kindest, most loving, genuinely wonderful spirit I have ever encountered on the planet. He personifies integrity. He is way out of my league which, of course, just adds to my desire to have his love. To Bask-In his love. (I just couldn’t have made this up!) But he is more than just the next level higher of a challenge. He is both my reward for reaching this level of understanding and my partner in learning to love mankind. Becoming one with him is my first step in becoming One with all humanity.
I am reminded of a Bible principle that says man’s greatest love for God is expressed in being a living sacrifice. Nothing defines a living sacrifice better than Howie. His friends all tell me that he is the most wonderful, loving person in their life. He lives for others. Watching him, marveling in who he is and how he is, causes me to look inwardly and challenges me daily to be more understanding and more loving. He says his goal in life is to help me love people the way I love animals. I thought I took on big scary goals, but this man knows no fear!
Now things are looking better than they ever have before. I have finally paid the piper in this lesson of betrayal. I had betrayed myself when I accepted the notion that I was not worthy and the even more erroneous notion that I could achieve worthiness if I overcame the obstacles that I invited into my own path. I was going to deal with being betrayed by the people I trusted, and loved the most, until I understood. My fortune cookie tonight even confirmed the presence of God in the statement, “You never hesitate to take on the toughest challenges.” It was as if He said, “I am here with you and this is just my humorous way of letting you know that I am as real as the piece of paper in your hand.”
The real estate business is recovering. The sanctuary managed to break even on operating expenses, if not capital expenses, for the first time ever last year (2003). I have been elected as the Vice President of the Association of Sanctuaries and am serving on its Board of Directors. (From the future: I don’t remember I have the opportunity to influence legislation that will protect wild animals and the physical and moral support of a team of family, volunteers and the man I admire most in the world to help me achieve those goals.
What I notice about each of these hurdles is that I was focused on the subject matter. While I may have been successful in dealing with that aspect, what I failed, almost universally, to do was to learn from the interaction with the people. In most cases I saw the people as the problem and bulldozing them aside was my methodology. It seems abundantly clear that I will continue being presented with challenges that are stressful and painful until I pay the piper on this issue of loving people other than those in my innermost circle.
I wonder how I could go about this learning in a less painful and ineffective manner? Maybe it’s time to put on the fuzzy purple blanket (to give myself the warm fuzzy I have longed for), the cloak of spirituality, and take a look at reality from a different, non judgmental, perspective.
I've been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views. If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story. The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/
I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story. My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.
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Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion.