Hamlet Park

By Mark Lages

Join Michael Tomlin as he jets through a surreal all-night journey into the heart and soul of the American dream. It all takes place in Hamlet Park, his childhood stomping ground. In his vivid imagination, and under the light of a full moon, he meets up with one unforgettable character after another in a rapid-fire and spellbinding series of encounters. Youll meet an ex-slave who never dies, a millionaire computer-gaming wunderkind in search of true love, a preacher who holds his services in the dark, and many more! This is a must read for anyone whos enjoyed Mark Lagess previous books, and its a great place to start for those who are new to Lagess writing. Hamlet Park is a truly unique experience with many thought-provoking ideas, and, best of all, it has an ending that will surprise you and make you smile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546247449

Mark Lages

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© 2018 Mark Lages. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  06/18/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4745-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4744-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907197

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1:     The Escape

Chapter 2:     Ticket, Please

Chapter 3:     When We Were Square

Chapter 4:     Rah, Rah, Rah!

Chapter 5:     Just Call Me King

Chapter 6:     Happy Birthday!

Chapter 7:     Lucky At Cards

Chapter 8:     Favorite Son

Chapter 9:     Pots Of Gold

Chapter 10:   The Ordinary Joes

Chapter 11:   Flaco

Chapter 12:   Mom And Apple Pie

Chapter 13:   Clifton’s Flowers

Chapter 14:   A Lot Of Blood

Chapter 15:   The Pink Ladies

Chapter 16:   In Humility

Chapter 17:   After The Service

Chapter 18:   The Morning Chorale

Chapter 19:   The Real World

Chapter 20:   The Wurlitzer

CHAPTER 1

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THE ESCAPE

H oly insanity, Batman! I had to get out of there. Yes, I had to leave. One more minute of insipid, champagne-induced wedding-reception small talk, and I think my head would’ve exploded. For real—as in kaboom ! They would’ve been scrubbing bits of my brains and shards of my skull from the restaurant ceiling.

They were all such fakes and phonies. All such sycophants and fools. How could I stand to be any longer in this room full of con artists, obvious schemers, and shameless social climbers? I’d never seen so many braggarts, liars, and pseudoconnoisseurs enjoying each other’s company in all my life. And at sixty-two years of age, it’s fair to say that I’ve seen and heard a lot. I’ve met a lot of different kinds of people, but where did all these lunatics come from?

Heck, I know exactly where they came from. Half came from our guest list, and the other half came from the list prepared by the groom’s family. It was a sad state of affairs to think these were our friends and relatives. They were all so docile and well behaved in the church, sitting still like wooden statues in the wooden pews, minding their own business, but now they had been given free rein to express and elaborate on their stupidity, the opportunity to mingle with one another and work their jaws in earnest. It was a big mistake letting the animals out of their cages. Yak, yak, yak. Yes, a big mistake.

Like I said, I had to leave. I’d been sneaking whiskey-and-waters at the bar, perhaps another big mistake. The bartender got a kick out of watching me down my drinks on the sly. Gulp, gulp—and set me up again. And this time make it a double. Yes, I’m the bride’s father, and where the heck is that next drink?

I was drinking to save myself. I’d just gotten done talking to the groom’s aunt, the groom being a fine young man named Jason Amos. The brand-new and squeaky-clean husband of my daughter, Amy. He was now our Jason, the newest member of our family. Not a pimple or blemish was on the boy’s face, and not a hair on his head was out of place.

Amy took on his last name. She would be Amy Amos, whether I liked it or not. Her new name sounded more like the name of a vaudevillian performer who tap-danced and sang out of key. My daughter, the road-traveling wife and entertainer.

The boy’s aunt (whom I’d been talking to before visiting the bar) was a short, overweight woman named Judy Amos. She had a face like a rotten apple, and she was soaked to the bone with bug-spray perfume. She was the unmarried sister of Jason’s father, Edward. She was holding a champagne glass in one hand and a paper plate with a slice of wedding cake in the other. She was the bull in a china shop, and she was giving me her unsolicited opinion on African Americans in the good old United States of America. They ought to stop all their whining about slavery, she said with a smirk. First of all, none of the ones doing all the complaining were ever slaves. And second, if it weren’t for slavery, they’d still all be living in Africa drinking dirty water and dying of AIDS and malaria.

I suppose that was one way of looking at it, if you had a brain the size of a walnut. Jeez, what kind of idiot was she?

Before my conversation with Judy, I was talking to Bob and Sarah McKenzie. Bob and Sarah—what a pair! I’d met Bob at the tennis club and had played against him often over the past several years. He had a terrific backhand, I’ll admit. Sometimes we’d pair up in doubles matches; the two of us were hard to beat. Bob was one of my tennis friends, and that’s why he was invited to the wedding along with his wife. If I hadn’t invited them, I think their feelings would’ve been hurt.

Are you curious to know what Bob did for a living? He was an oncologist, which meant if you were one of the unfortunates who came down with a dreaded case of cancer, Bob was willing to lend you a helping hand with advice, pills, and dubious treatments, so long as you ensured he would be paid a boatload of money.

Sarah was in the residential real estate racket. She specialized in listing and selling expensive properties owned by rich people. Every several months, we’d get one of her glossy fliers in the mail with a picture that made her look a lot more attractive than she was in real life. God knows how many times she posed for the head shot or how her photographer had to adjust the lighting to soften her features.

Both Bob and Sarah were very good at earning money, and they lived in a sprawling ocean-view house in the affluent beach town of Corona del Mar, an appendage to my town of Newport Beach. They fancied themselves as admirers and purchasers of the finer things in life, and at the wedding reception, they were talking to me about their latest acquisition, an Andy Warhol screen print of Elvis Presley that they planned to hang on their living room wall. Did they even listen to Elvis’s music? I kind of doubted it. Mozart, Bach, and Vivaldi were more likely to be heard in their home.

They made sure I knew how much they’d paid for the Warhol piece. They told me proudly that they were high bidders at an art auction, which I thought kind of made them suckers, but in their minds, it made them—well, what exactly? Winners? The amount of money they shelled out for their possessions—for their cars, artwork, jewelry, vacations, and so on—was one of their favorite topics of conversation. No doubt the price of the Warhol print was far more important to them than the artwork itself, something that I think can be said for most (or all) of Warhol’s art. Do you happen to remember a comedienne named Minnie Pearl, who always had a price tag hanging from her hat? Bob and Sarah reminded me of her, sort of clown-like and unintentionally comical. They may as well have had price tags dangling from everything they owned.

Before I talked to Bob and Sarah, I was talking to my cousin Ivan. I’ve known Ivan my entire life. I think of Ivan fondly as my favorite indomitable failure. I don’t mean to be cynical or demeaning; I just mean to be accurate in my description of him. For as long as I can remember, Ivan has been trying to hit it big with his inventions, ideas, and business ventures. He is the consummate optimist and wannabe entrepreneur. But he’s now fifty-nine years old and has yet to discover the pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. But you do have to admire the man’s spirit. He never, ever gives up. Lately he’s been working on a project that has something to do with kitchen utensils. He won’t reveal the specifics to anyone for fear they may steal his idea and beat him to the punch. You won’t pry any specifics out of Ivan about this kitchen-utensil thing.

What Ivan will tell you over and over are the sayings from famous and admired people he’s memorized, the clever words of wisdom that seem to keep him motivated. He’s a living, breathing encyclopedia of quotes and inspirational adages about failure and success. While I was talking to him, he said, Winston Churchill said success consists of going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. He also told me, George Patton said success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom. Christ, he knew a million of these. Well, maybe not a million, but enough to keep him in the hunt. Enough to keep his candle burning.

I should never have taken the first drink that afternoon. They say in AA, You just don’t take the first drink. And I’ve gone to my fair share of meetings. So I knew better, and I’m not going to make excuses for what I did. But I thought, What the heck? My daughter has just been married and no longer has my last name. She would no longer depend on me or cry on my shoulder or look up to me. That phase of my life was over, and now she belonged to her squeaky-clean husband.

So was I really supposed to celebrate? What was there to celebrate? And with whom? With this roomful of nutcases and lunatics? It all seemed a little too much, so hell yes, I had my whiskey-and-water. And another one. And another one after that. I had to drink on the sly so my wife wouldn’t see me, and that was easy enough since she was busy talking to guests and the parents of the groom, paying little attention to me. She had no idea what I was doing. The whiskey made my heart turn warm, and it made my eyes water. And most importantly, it was now telling me what to do. It told me to leave. It told me to slip out of the party and make a break for it! I was suddenly lucid, determined, and convinced, on my way out the exit doors and marching to my Mercedes.

There’s something you should know about me, and I’m not going to pull any punches. I’m an incorrigible alcoholic. This isn’t to say I’d been drinking recently. Prior to this Barnum & Bailey wedding reception, I hadn’t touched a drop of the stuff for years. I’d been clean and sober ever since the night eleven years before when I was arrested in Tijuana for drunk driving. It was my third drunk driving arrest. I’ve been arrested twice in the United States and once on that night in Tijuana. Getting arrested in Mexico is quite the experience. God, how drunk was I? I certainly had no business being behind the wheel, trying to negotiate several thousand pounds of automobile through the traffic, pedestrians, and confusing streetlights of the busy Avenida Revolucion. I was pulled over by a mustachioed Mexican cop. He was a foot shorter than me and had a gentle disposition. He asked me to step out of my BMW (I drove a BMW back then), and I did what he said. He then leaned into the car and grabbed my half-empty bottle of mescal, saying, Aha! It was funny, but I didn’t have to take a field sobriety test or blow into a Breathalyzer or submit to a bloodletting. They simply had some guy who they called a medic come out and talk to me for a minute or so to determine my state of mind. They towed my car away, impounded it, and hauled me off to a jail cell. A few hours later, I stood before an elderly judge whose reading glasses kept sliding off his nose and who didn’t speak a word of English. I was told to sign some papers and was then taken back to the border at San Ysidro, where the cops made sure I got the heck out of their country. As I staggered back into the United States, I checked my wallet and discovered they’d taken all my cash except for a single ten-dollar bill. I guess that was considerate of them, to leave me a little cash. It took me months to get my car out of their impound lot. At first they said they lost it, and then they found it, and then they lost it again. The confusion had something to do with someone writing down a wrong identification number. I hired an attorney to locate the BMW, deal with all the court paperwork, and pay off the fines. My attorney was a one-man operation I found on the internet, a guy fresh out of law school who worked out of his scratched and dented Toyota Corolla and demanded I pay him several thousand dollars cash up front. We met in a parking lot behind a Burger King. He counted the hundred-dollar bills and then stuffed them in his pocket. I’ll do my best, he said. But remember we’re dealing with Mexico. Strange things often happen.

I become several things when I drink alcohol, and one of the most glaring is irresponsible. I’m very aware of this. I tend to get myself into all kinds of trouble, and, yes, I put the lives of others at risk, especially when I drink and drive. Yet I do it anyway. I’m not asking for you to understand or in any way approve of my recklessness. And you can despise me for this if you wish, but I’m just telling you how it is. When I drink, I often drive. So how many drinks did I pour down my throat before driving off to escape? Honestly, I have no idea, but the drinks at the reception were just the beginning. From there I drove to a nearby liquor store, where I bought a quart of Jim Beam, a pack of Marlboros, and a bag of Lay’s potato chips. I carried the goods to my car, unscrewed the cap from the bottle, and took several good-sized swigs. My eyes watered again, and there was that familiar burning in my chest. A few more hearty swallows, and I started up the engine and turned on the radio. I was off and running.

It’s my opinion that there’s no love affair as intense as that which exists between an addict and his drug of choice. My drug of choice has always been alcohol, ever since I was a kid. I started drinking when I was fourteen. I’ll tell you how it made me feel, nearly every time I drank. To say I’d get giddy or euphoric doesn’t cover the half of it. For me alcohol was the great elucidator. It was like putting on a pair of corrective eyeglasses and being able, finally, to see the world clearly. It was like opening a window for fresh evening air after a stifling summer day, or like a breeze blowing all the clouds from the sky. Let the sun shine! Let the air in! Everything was suddenly brilliant and razor sharp. Emotions were on high alert. Synapses were firing, and my oxygen-rich red blood was pumping like mad.

So where was I going? I’d escaped the wedding reception without being noticed, which was all good and well. But where next? Then it came to me like the word of God himself, like a low and rumbling voice in my car that only I could hear. To the park, the voice said. To Hamlet Park! Of course! Where else would I go? I hadn’t been to the park for years. No doubt the park was still there. The city wouldn’t have sold that valuable piece of real estate, would they? No, no, it was a public park, and parks are sacred. Hamlet Park was not the park’s actual name. Officially it was on the books as Madison Park, but we kids who lived in the area and used the park called it Hamlet. To be or not to be, right? In the park, tucked into its many oak trees, was an amphitheater at which every summer a local troupe of actors would bumble through their amateur performances of William Shakespeare’s plays. The two-month event was called the Madison Shakespeare Festival, and it was popular. Well, it was sort of popular. People who were hip to the event came from all over Orange County to sit on the park’s uncomfortable wood benches and watch Sir Lawrence Olivier wannabes recite the famous Elizabethan lines that, in my opinion, three-quarters of the audience didn’t even understand. But what did it matter? It was Shakespeare, right? It had to be worth watching.

The wooden stage of the amphitheater was a great place for us kids to hang out on Friday and Saturday nights when there were no play performances. It was a perfect place to sit cross-legged, drink cold beer, and talk and laugh. It always smelled of creosote and urine, and the surface of the stage creaked like the floor of a haunted house when you walked on it. How old was the stage? I had no idea. When you’re a teenager drinking beer with your friends, the last thing you’re thinking about is local history. The history of our public park was boring stuff, and we had bigger fish to fry. We pondered deeper questions such as, Who came first, Chubby Checker or Fats Domino? Or why did Roy Orbison sing about a pretty woman he’d never seen? How did he know she was pretty when he was as blind as a bat? Back then, we (meaning my group of friends) were into the golden oldies, the oldies but goodies, the music they played on certain AM radio stations. The disc jockeys would talk over the songs, and the radio stations would give out inane prizes. The music of our own generation was a little boring by comparison. Of course, now they call our music classic rock, and it too is nostalgic.

As I drove my car through the crowded San Diego Freeway toward the park, whiskey running through my veins and arteries, the nostalgia was almost overwhelming. I was thinking about Hamlet Park years ago and what it meant to me. It was more than just a place to drink beer with my friends, more than just a place to pee in the adjacent bushes, and more than just a place to ponder adolescent conundrums about Chubby Checker, Fat Domino, and Roy Orbison. It was a launching pad, a starting gate. It was where we began our race into adulthood. I hadn’t been to the park since I was in high school, and I tried to picture it in my mind. I’ll tell you something interesting about Hamlet Park; it was where I first met my wife, Pamela. We went to the same high school, so I knew who she was, but the park is the first place I actually talked to her, as in forming real words with my mouth. And it was also the first place I kissed her, and the first place I tried to get my hand up her shirt to squeeze her breast. She was fifteen, and I was seventeen. Christ, we were just silly children, weren’t we? It’s hard to believe we’ve known each other for so long. This coming December we’ll be celebrating our forty-first wedding anniversary. It seems like only yesterday that we were so young, having no idea what we were going to do with our lives, drinking Coors with friends, telling stories, and making each other laugh.

The waters run a little deeper now. I’m older and more experienced. I still love Pamela, but I’ll tell you a joke I heard recently that made me laugh. I mean, I really had to laugh. It would’ve gone over my head when I was a teenager, but now I got it. There’s a man and a woman who’ve been married for many years, and one day the woman suddenly drops dead. The husband calls the coroner, and they come out to pick up the woman’s body. They put the body on a gurney, and they wheel her out the door and through the yard. When they reach the front gate of the property, they accidentally bump the woman’s foot into a post. It’s a miracle! The woman sits up and asks the men where they’re taking her. She has come back to life! She goes on to live the next ten years with her husband, until low and behold she suddenly drops dead again. The husband calls the coroner, and they come out to pick up the body. They put the woman on a gurney and wheel her out through the front door. The man is standing in the doorway and watching them take her away for a second time, and when the men reach the front gate he says, Whoa there, boys. Be careful now. Look out for that post!

I would never have told that joke when I was a kid, but now I tell it all the time. Pamela and I have been married over forty years, and I think I’ve earned the right to tell it. It’s like I said, the waters are deeper, and I’ve had a lot more experience. Don’t get me wrong. I do still love Pamela with all my heart, and I’d do anything for her. Well, within reason. And I’ll tell you some things about her, about the teenage girl I met in Hamlet Park, the girl I shared beers with, the girl I kissed and groped in the park under the smoggy moonlight and stars. She was sweet. She was sweet and very good-looking. And she was vulnerable. Was it love at first sight? Heck, if there was such a thing as love at first sight, I would’ve dropped everything and stalked Barbie Benton. Are you a male? Are you my age? Do you remember her? I’ll never forget the first time I saw her face and charming attributes in a friend’s Playboy magazine; now that was love at first sight. No, I can’t say my feelings for Pamela were the same, but I was interested in her. And I was flattered that she was also interested in me. As we began to date, and as I came over to her house to visit, it was clear after several months that she was falling for me, and me for her. It was so simple to my way of thinking. Pamela was love. Never mind anything else you might consider important to describing her. Never mind her Irish red hair, pale green eyes, milky white skin, or her perfect glistening teeth. Never mind any of her aspirations, prejudices, or misconceptions. She was only one thing to me. She was love.

Of course, feelings change as you grow older. Little by little you get to know a person better after you’ve been married for over forty years, after you’ve had some serious time to live together. And people do change. Over the years I’ve seen Pamela grow from a naïve and love-struck fifteen-year-old girl to a full-fledged mature woman of sixty. So how do I describe and explain the transformation that took place? I’m going to do it by telling you about her father, Sean O’Brien. Good old Sean. He had the same red hair and pale green eyes, but other than those features, he looked nothing like his daughter. During the first few months I was courting Pamela, I often came to her house to visit. Sean was always there, seated in his favorite chair, sipping his Bushmills and chewing on a spit-soaked cigar. He kept a watchful eye on my every move, I suppose knowing that someday, God forbid, he might be required to call me his son-in-law. He was unlike any adult I’d ever met in real life, like a cross between Archie Bunker and Godzilla. My own parents were just the opposite. My parents were Democrats, and they certainly weren’t Irish. And neither of my parents chewed on cigars. I never knew exactly what to say to Sean, and when he talked to me, I usually just looked up at the ceiling and laughed nervously. He once said, What the hell is wrong with you? Every time I say something, you laugh. Don’t you ever have anything to say? The truth was, there was a lot I could say, but I just didn’t have the nerve to say it.

Pamela adored her father. She would excuse his gruff behavior by telling me, That’s just Daddy being Daddy, or, He doesn’t really mean anything by that, or, He just likes to blow off a little steam every now and again. I realized right away that I’d never score any points with Pamela by criticizing the cigar-chewing man. Sean meant the world to her, and Pamela’s mother was the same in this regard. He was their man. He left early every morning and worked his tail off all day until Pamela’s mom had dinner on the table. He worked to keep the family safe and sound, living in their comfortable upper-middle-class digs, complete with a three-car garage, a big front lawn, and all the modern appliances and furnishings you could imagine. Pamela’s father owned a Ford dealership in the city of Orange, and needless to say, he made a great deal of money. Sean looked like a rational and mature man, and it was only when he opened his mouth that you thought twice about him. Do you know why so many blacks are dying in the war? he asked me one night. He was referring, of course, to Vietnam. When I said I didn’t know the answer to his question, he told me, Every time someone yells ‘get down,’ they jump up and start dancing, heh, heh. Sean had a habit of laughing at his own jokes.

Vietnam! Just the mention of the war put an awful knot in my stomach the size of a basketball. I didn’t even like hearing the word. I was still in high school but would be eligible for the draft in a year. How old are you? Do you remember that song? It was Country Joe and the Fish, I think. Give me an F, give me a U, and what’s that spell? Join in the fun that was the Vietnam War! Be the first family on your block to have your boy come home in a box. Ah, those were the days, no?

You’re not going to be one of those draft card burners, are you? Sean once asked me. He was dead serious when he posed this question. I think because I had moderately long hair at the time (it covered half my ears, God forbid), he assumed I might be one of them, one of those long-haired cowards who were afraid to pick up a gun and fight for their country. I assured him I wouldn’t burn my draft card, but just between you and me, flying off to die in a war halfway around the world just because a handful of generals and politicians were afraid of a little third world country becoming communist, well, it seemed so grossly unfair. Lucky for me, the United States withdrew from the war right after I turned eighteen, and I was never required to prove my patriotism.

When I turned twenty-one, and when Pamela was nineteen, we decided to get married. Sean made his feelings clear when we announced our engagement. Jesus, we were too damn young to even be talking about something as serious as marriage. According to Sean, what we were experiencing was puppy love, something that would pass given the right amount of time. But when he realized we weren’t going to give up on our wedding plans, he did what any other good father would do. He opened his checkbook and paid out thousands of dollars so we could have an unforgettable wedding ceremony and reception with all the bells and whistles, and, to his credit, he never said another disparaging word about our getting married. Well, except for the crack he made about the engagement ring. Looking back, I guess it was funny. I had very little money back then, and I bought the engagement ring with a few hundred dollars I had sitting in my pathetic savings account. The ring I bought looked like some plastic trinket from the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Does it come with its own magnifying glass? Sean asked. You know, a magnifying glass so people can see the diamond, heh, heh. He was laughing at his own joke again.

I noticed something interesting about Pamela and her father a year or so after we were married. He hadn’t changed one bit, but she was now beginning to stand up to him. I remember one Thanksgiving dinner when Pamela and I were both students at USC, when I was a senior and Pamela was a sophomore. The dinner table conversation landed on the topic of Mexican immigrants. I think it had to do with the things Pamela was learning in her sociology class. Sean’s mouth was full of turkey and mashed potatoes when he asked, Do you know how to get a hundred Mexicans into a ten-by-ten room? It’s easy enough. You just throw in a nickel, heh, heh. And know how to get them out of the room? You throw in a bar of soap! Pamela dropped her fork to her plate and glared at her father. Wow, if looks could kill! It was the first time I’d ever seen her glare with such disapproval. Sean noticed and said, So what’s the problem? What the hell are they teaching you at that school anyway? What am I paying for?

Fast-forward ten years to when Pamela became pregnant with Amy. It was right after I’d been promoted to associate broker at Baker and Smith, the Newport Beach commercial real estate firm where I earned my living. I’d been employed there for the past eight years, and things were good. I mean, they were really good. I was making more money than I ever dreamed of, negotiating sales contracts and leases for the company’s many clients. The money was rolling in, and our income didn’t end with me. Pamela was bringing in a sizable paycheck of her own, working as a buyer for a high-technology company in Irvine. We were doing good for a couple of kids in their early thirties who, just ten years earlier, had no idea where they were headed. Sean didn’t seem to have any problem with me making money, but when he learned how much Pamela was bring home, he said, No broad is worth that much. Her bosses must be crazy. And when he learned Pamela was going to continue working after Amy was born, again he voiced his opinion. "A child should be raised by its mother. A real mother would quit her goddamn job and stay home to take care of it. Pamela explained how we had found a Mexican girl by the name of Martha who was going to stay home while we were at work. Martha would do the housework and look after Amy. Martha had come highly recommended to us by some friends who were moving back east and couldn’t take Martha with them. Well, Sean said, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle." He was obviously not impressed.

Don’t get me wrong. Pamela still adored her father. But she now disagreed with almost every word he uttered. She called him a bigot and a chauvinist. She told him he was making a fool of himself. She said he didn’t know what he was talking about, but he didn’t back off. Dinners with Pamela’s parents were now, more often than not, marred by heated arguments between Pamela and her father. And this went on for quite a few years. I felt embarrassed for both of them. Sometimes I felt like standing up at the dinner table in the tradition of Rodney King saying in a faltering voice, Can’t we all just get along? Do you remember that sound bite? To this day, it still makes me laugh.

The strangest thing happened when Pamela hit her fifties. Her attitude began to change, stealthily at first and then more obviously. She was becoming like her father! I don’t mean to say she became a bigot or a right-wing goose-stepper, but there was a significant change. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. Pamela became more cynical, more impatient, more suspicious, and more intolerant of others. I began to wonder whatever happened to the sweet and vulnerable girl I fell in love with and married years ago. Was she gone forever?

I’ll give you an example. Take the girls who were cleaning our house at the time. We no longer had Martha, since we didn’t need her full-time help. Martha moved on and recommended some of her friends to come clean once a week. They did a satisfactory job given the money we paid them. Well, satisfactory as far as I was concerned. According to Pamela, it was quite a different story. These Mexicans drive me crazy, she said. I pointed out that the girls were from Guatemala, and Pamela said, "I don’t care where they’re from. They’re