Sincerely Sire Newsletter-March 2002

The Call of the Wild - - - Woman

My wife, Rosemarie, started going to these women-only meetings about two years ago—twice a month from seven to nine in the evening. What kind of meetings are they? I don’t know and I don’t care because it means a few hours by myself when I can eat sandwiches and watch TV.

But that was before I noticed her in bed one evening reading a massive hardback book by candlelight. “What’s that?” I asked through the flickering candlelight. “What’s up with the candle. Why don’t you have the real lights on?

“It’s the group’s book,” she replied solemnly, without looking up.

“Hum,” I said. “And does the group have a name?”

“Yes,” she said. “The Hermetic Eros at ET Circle, but we also refer to ourselves as The Sacred Story Tellers.” Just then, as I read the book jacket, Women Who Run With the Wolves, a sudden rush of cold air swept through the room and extinguished the candle at her bedside leaving me standing alone in the pitch-black with my wacky wife. Terrified, I bolted from the room and turned the TV on to Wheel of Fortune.

A few weeks later she told me that ten members of the group were coming in from all over the country to meet out at Joshua Tree in the desert. She would be gone for three days and she couldn’t tell me exactly what they would be doing, except that she needed a drum, and that they would be sharing creative ideas, putting on “plays” and discussing this one chapter in The Wolf Book about a woman who got her hands cut off.

Strange stuff I thought, but not unexpected at this time in our empty-nester lives. Making the transition from being fulltime parents to hardly being parents at all is challenging. You find yourself looking for stuff to fill in the gaps. I, myself, have found that ham and cheese works quite nicely. But, Roe—she has been probing for something with a little more meat to it. So, for the last two years, ever since our girls moved out, Roe has been searching for a creative outlet to take the place of being a nurturing fulltime mother. She’s been searching for her “instinctual self”—at least I think that’s what she said. Or was it her stinking self? I’m not really sure. Maybe it was her stinking instinctual self. Yeah, I think that was it.

And so, after three days of hangin’ with the pack, and doing whatever it is that they do, and then getting lost for two hours in the driving rain on her way back home (not very wolf-like) Roe arrived at the house exhausted but undaunted as she set her hands down on the kitchen table—no, not the ones attached to her arms, some other hands that had been chopped off at the wrists.

“Ack!” I said, jumping back from the table. “What are those?” 

“We all made plaster molds of our hands. Aren’t they great?”

“Yeah,” I said, “They look just like they’re coming up out of the grave. They’re fantastic! Let’s use them for hood ornaments.”

I’ve been married to wolf-woman for 27 years now and sometimes I think I don’t know her at all. But I suppose that’s what keeps it interesting—that and the ham and cheese.

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