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Destiny
by Suzanne Gold
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Even
when I was very young, I imagined my soulmate. He was tall and blond, and
had the hands of an artist. I felt that I was continually searching for
him, which was a secret embarrassment. I thought it was a sign of weakness.
In my last year of college, I met a man who had the hands I pictured. He
was tall, brunette, and wanted to be a doctor, not an artist. But he wanted
to marry me. Desperate to escape my parents' rigid protection, I accepted.
Ten minutes before the ceremony, I realized I'd made a mistake but didn't
have the courage to call the wedding off with everyone assembled and waiting
for me downstairs. It took me almost a year to end it. I was thrilled to
be free and on my own, but still yearning for my soulmate, the man with
the artist's hands.
Five years later and three thousand miles away, I met Dan, who fit the
profile. We'd known each other for half a year and had become quite intimate,
when one evening we were playing music together and he suddenly stopped
singing.
"Wait a second," he said. "Suzanne Gold... I remember you. You stole my
roommate. Rob. In Boston, three years ago." I had no idea what he was talking
about. Three years before, I hadn't yet been to Boston. But the story he
told made it apparent that our connection began much earlier, in Philadelphia,
where I'd grown up.
It started when I was working as a psychologist in a drug treatment center.
One morning, a tall, dark and handsome newcomer joined the morning Community
Meeting. We made significant eye contact. That afternoon, he interviewed
for an opening in the psychology department and asked me to have dinner
with him. This was the infamous Rob.
He was offered and accepted a position in the group therapy department.
Since he'd come down from Boston to interview, he had no permanent place
to live. It was a time of free spirits and impulsive behavior, and it seemed
natural to me to invite him to share my apartment. After a quick trip back
to Boston to tie up loose ends, he moved in with me and started work. He
never mentioned moving out of an apartment he shared with another man or
what that roommate's name was.
At first Rob and I thought we were lovers. But soon he felt stifled, and
I felt neglected and resentful, so we agreed instead to be friends. He
turned out to be an important bridge for me. I was drawn to transpersonal
psychology, and Rob's training with the Arica Institute, a school of meditation,
yoga and other esoteric techniques I'd already been interested in, was
part of what had attracted me to him in the first place.
Rob introduced me to the Philadelphia Arica house. I found I liked their
programs very much, and soon left for a forty day retreat in Vermont. By
day thirty, I knew I wouldn't be returning to my old life.
I moved to Boston to live and work in the Arica community, the same one
in which Dan had lived a few years before. His name came up now and then
in conversation with people he'd known, and I felt an odd urgency to meet
this stranger. But he'd gone to California by then and mostly, I forgot
about him.
As much as I loved teaching with Arica, after a year of Boston's parking
conundrum and freezing winters I craved a change of scene. Then a friend
said he was moving to California and asked if I'd like to come along. The
possibility shone in my mind like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I was in transition, the perfect time to experiment. I jumped at the chance.
I told another friend I was going, and he wanted to come too. He told one
more, and soon we were a caravan of six, wending our way west. At the end
of the continent, we turned left to cruise along the Pacific coast. When
we reached Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate, my body zinged
with anticipation. Every breathless vista, each voluptuous hill seemed
to be telling me that this was where I belonged.
On arriving in San Francisco, we each called everyone we knew in the Bay
Area and arranged to meet along the waterfront at Justin Herman Plaza.
A score of people gathered. I found myself seated directly across the table
from a man whose gaze mesmerized me. Tall. Blond. With the hands of an
artist. He turned out to be the mysterious Dan: artist, graphic designer
and Renaissance man, whose name had touched me in Boston.
After lunch, Dan invited us all to his hillside house in Sausalito. With
its sweeping view of San Francisco Bay, it looked like Oz to me. I was
awe-struck at my good luck at being here, now, with Dan as attracted to
me as I was to him. During the course of the afternoon, with the city,
the water and the hills spread out before us, we embraced love at first
sight. We became inseparable. Within months we were living together.
After all that time, when Dan suddenly realized our previous link, he told
me how angry he was at Rob (and me!) for leaving him in the lurch. I burst
out laughing, which made him laugh too, and washed away his resentment.
The extraordinary coincidence seemed a portent of our destiny to be together.
We were married two years later, and are still blissfully together after
two decades.
Our sense of kismet intensified recently. We were designing a cover for
my autobiographical novel, Daddy's Girls. We'd found an image to represent
my sister, mother and myself, but were struggling for one to capture the
essence of my father, so we set the project aside to percolate.
Instead, Dan showed me some photos and paintings he planned to use in a
talk at an art gallery about his life and philosophy of art.
"This is practically the first painting I ever did," he said. "I was sixteen."
It was a moody portrait of a man with a splotch of red in the heart area
that suggested emotional wounds. "It seemed to paint itself through me.
I've often wondered who
he was."
"It's 'Daddy!'" I cried. "It's just how I pictured him looking on the cover."
But we realized the painting was even more than that, an amazing bond between
us that went back beyond California, beyond Boston, to the day a budding
artist unknowingly painted a portrait of the father-in-law he would never
meet, a man who died years before the artist met the woman he would marry
fourteen years later, who would use that image on the cover of her first
novel, published twenty years after that.
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