My first encounter with the man who would become my best friend.

Patrick and I had been living in Puerto Rico. The year was 1967-1968. It was a sort of accident that we were there at all, if we chose to believe in accidents. We were married, penniless, hippies, Had had an extended honeymoon of months of wandering around the USA doing fun hippie things. Everyone got married in those days. You couldn't sleep together or get a hotel room together or rent a house if you weren't married. An then there was the Vietnam War...another reason people got married in those days.

I had decided that I wanted to go back to school to study political stuff. I chose the University of Wisconsin because it was one of the hotbeds of political activity and there was someone there I wanted to study under. I can no longer remember who it was. We were bumming around Connecticut where Patrick had gone to college and where my folks lived. I wasn't hearing from Wisconsin. I had no question that I would be accepted so we had made our plans accordingly. (Who was that young woman?)

Sometime in the summer, I finally got nervous and called the school. No, I wasn't accepted because they had never gotten a complete application. A bit of research showed that I sent all my forms in under my married name, but all my transcripts had been sent under my maiden name. Oops. I wasn't used to being married, obviously.

They offered that I could come in  January. I couldn't see moving to fucking Wisconsin in January. You had to be crazy to do something like that.

We were having dinner at my parents house when one of the guests, a lovely Puerto Rican woman who worked with Mom in social work in Hartford, a city bursting at that time with Puerto Rican immigrants, upon hearing we had no plan for fall, suggested that we go to Puerto Rico and teach school for the year. It sounded heavenly to us. We were there within a few weeks.

We both got jobs in a private school. I taught English and French and Patrick taught English and Puerrto Rican History. The school was a trip and a half. Our social life was mostly drinking and beaching.  It really came under the heading of 'partying.' Lots of dancing and pig roasts, the usual  kind of thing.

One day Patric got a book in the mail from our friend Bobbin. I think it was a wedding present she had gotten from Jennifer Greene who lived across the hall from her at Sarah Lawrence College. The book was about water.

"Theodor Schwenk (1910, Schwäbisch Gmünd - 1986) was an anthroposophist, an engineer and a pioneering water researcher. He founded the Institute for Flow. Science. Link: http://www.stroemungsinstitut.de/prospect.htm His book Sensitive Chaos has been cited by Ralph Abraham, the California mathematician and Chaos theorist, as an influence on his thinking. Schwenk talks about the need for "water consciousness", maintaining that the movement of water, by its very essence, signifies change. Cosmic consciousness is symbolized by water, where all particles merge into a single, transcendental entity. Man, according to Schwenk, will come closer to the secret of life by studying the cyclicality of movement opened from above. Schwenk further notes myths and tales pertaining to the treasure hidden under water, introducing the quandary-assumption that the treasure is, in fact, the water itself! "

This book changed our lives.

Mas manana.