The day in July 1990 came for the moving van. I followed it down the road to the lake house. It didn’t contain many items from my old house in Columbia. There was a table and chairs from the basement kitchen which I would use in the dining room and TV trays for bedside tables with bed lamps purchased at Walmart. I bought a couple of chairs on rollers to use at the counter below the kitchen windows. The clothes closets had built-in pull-out drawers for the personal belongings I carried in my suitcases, and there was ample hanging space for the clothes that were on the moving van. I left the rest of the furniture in the house for Gwen. The van also contained filing cabinets and bookcases from my Fay St. office.
The three-story lake house was built into a
rather steep hillside in a V-shape like the prow of a ship. The front of the top level had offices on
either side of the V with windows overlooking the lake. In the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was
built-in storage including file drawers topped by a work surface with holes for
cabling. On either side of the back wall
there was a fireplace and adjacent beautiful wood cabinets with closed doors on
the bottom and shelving for bookcases on the top. I didn’t need room for clients as I would be
visiting their offices. They would not be
coming to mine. There was one persistent
student at the lake, a school principal in Camdenton, who bullied his way into
seeing me at my house for help with his dissertation. One visit and I was done with him.
Below is a picture of the lake house taken
from a boat.
After I moved, I was miserable. There were still workers inside and out
finishing the construction. The driveway
from the street down the hill to the double garage under my third-floor bedroom
was still dirt. The entrance for the
house I used the most was from the garage into the kitchen which only had a
plywood floor because the floor covering was not yet laid.
Gwen would occasionally come by the house
on her days at the Lake, but her visits were short. I would try to talk her into changing her
mind. I told her “You cannot create
pleasure out of pain” meaning she would not be able to have a wonderful new
relationship after causing me so much pain.
I spent many evenings sitting at the dining room table with a deck of
cards playing solitaire, staring out at the lake and the night. In the past, I dealt with not having a
relationship by immediately trying to start another one. I was almost 50 and living in a location where
I felt there was no opportunity to meet another single lesbian. It seemed like I might as well be on the
moon. I decided I better learn how to
deal with it. Recalling my self-help
days in Kansas, I went back to the books.
I studied a book on personalities and took
the Myers-Briggs test. It seemed to
accurately evaluate that I was a problem solver with numbers, not people. No surprise, I was also an introvert, at
least when not drinking. I mainly
focused on the Rational Emotive Therapy book since it seemed to offer a logical
method by which I could learn to understand myself and take corrective
action. Chapter by chapter, I studied
the method and did the suggested exercises. One exercise asked me to write down the
negative thoughts I was having about my life, like “I will never meet someone
new.” It then asked me to write an
alternative statement, like “when the time is right someone will come along.” I began to feel better, like I was taking
control of my life and making progress.
I celebrated my 50th birthday in
October while on a visit at my mother’s.
I occasionally visited Sue and Sheri and decided to get to know Craig
better, my gaydar telling me he was gay.
He was a techie, like me, and I usually got along well with men like
him. I asked him to meet me for lunch at
a Lake Ozark restaurant where he tried to impress me in a number of ways. He
proceeded to tell me about all of the women he had sex with and having met
Marie Osmond at the Lake and Julie Andrews in Switzerland. I thought he was being anxious around someone
he had been told was gay. The contractor
had made comments to him and the construction workers had joked that the two
women moving there wanted all the construction to be tongue in groove. I just listened, and thought he and I would
soon get past his nervousness, and we did. I thought I understood him, but he didn’t trust
me enough yet to tell me about his sexuality.
I prepared for my upcoming Olivia trip that
was sailing out of Ft. Lauderdale to the Eastern Caribbean and back, Olivia’s
first 7-day cruise in October 1990.
Their earlier cruise was only for three days, sailing to Nassau and
back. I purchased snorkeling gear with a
prescription lens for the mask. I packed
my suitcase with shorts for day, slacks for evenings and one nice outfit for
formal night. I didn’t know anyone else
to substitute for Gwen, and she certainly wasn’t interested in going with me on
the cruise we had scheduled together.
I had never been on a cruise ship
before. During a family visit to
California when I was young, we took a day-trip on a big ship to Catalina Island,
and I had good memories about that. I
flew to Ft. Lauderdale and took a cab to the cruise ship terminal. My cabin was small, but felt much too big
with two beds, one of which would remain empty.
Late in the afternoon while leaving port, there was a big party on deck
where all the singers were introduced.
Since I was not with a partner, I was asked to join the “solos,” and our
group ate dinner together. I didn’t
really relate to any of the other solo women.
After dinner each night there was the evening concert at sea with a featured
Olivia entertainer.
The picture below was taken on formal night
and shows me, front row second from left, along with the other solos and wait
staff.
Halloween night, instead of the concert at
sea, there was a costume party. The
women really got into this. Two of the
most memorable couples were the ones dressed like Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett
Butler from Gone with the Wind and the Teletubby twins. Watching them, I recalled seeing a number of very
large suitcases being brought on board which must have held their costumes.
Being on the shore excursions reminded me
that the Caribbean islands had remained colonies of European countries much
longer than the United States. While
visiting them, it seemed that a large part of the population still lived on the
very lowest rungs of the economic scale.
I did enjoy the visit to Honeymoon Beach on St John where I learned how
to snorkel. I was amazed as I watched the
way the ship maneuvered to enter the narrow entrance into the port of San Juan,
Puerto Rico. Searle had a manufacturing
facility in San Juan. Failing to make
prior arrangements, I entertained the naïve idea of being able to call and arrange
a tour, so I didn’t sign up for the solo’s shore tour. I did get help from a ship’s clerk to call
the factory. Neither the clerk nor I spoke
Spanish, and the people at the factory did not speak English. The tour didn’t happen, and I never stepped
foot off the ship in San Juan.
Aboard ship, there were speakers or other
events in the mornings. One was Karen
Thompson speaking about her book Why Can't Sharon Kowalski Come Home? Sharon was brain-damaged in an automobile
accident, and a court battle ensued between her parents and her lesbian lover
over guardianship. It was the first time
I became aware of the long-term implications of a lesbian relationship, and the
need for other protections since we could not legally marry our same-sex partners. The other notable speakers were Del Martin
and Phyllis Lyon, authors of their book Lesbian/Woman, in which they
discuss the meaning of being a lesbian. Martin
and Lyon c0-founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco in 1955,
which became the first social and political organization for lesbians in the
United States. I was exposed to so much relevant
information that wasn’t easily available to me back home, and I was incredibly
grateful to Olivia for providing this opportunity for consciousness raising.
As much as I enjoyed the knowledge I gained
from these meetings, I was upset by the attitudes expressed by some of the San
Francisco lesbians. They just did not have
any understanding of the fact that some people did not feel safe being open
about their sexuality. Their argument
was that until all lesbians made their sexuality known, people would never
learn to accept us. Trying to explain
the difference between attitudes in Missouri and California went nowhere. There were no employment-discrimination laws
that included sexuality in Missouri. As
a matter-of-fact, there are still no such laws at the Federal level or in Missouri. Plus, too many Missourians disowned a family
member if they disclosed their homosexuality.
I wouldn’t feel safe being public about my sexuality until after I
retired. I never even openly
acknowledged the fact to my parents even though they probably knew. It turned out my sister’s second husband had
a gay son, so after my sister was in a relationship with his father, I could be
open with her. The combination of
changes in societal attitudes and being less reliant on clients for economic survival
I believed would allow me to finally reach that comfort level.
After the cruise, I returned home to a
backlog of work. When Monsanto employees
left for jobs with other companies, they still wanted the services I
provided. As an example, Aaron went to
work for a contract lab in south St. Louis, he arranged for me to visit, and I
soon had a contract with his new company.
Most of their work was done according to the United States Pharmacopeia
(USP) standards. They describe exactly
how the procedures are to be conducted and the statistical analysis is to be
performed, as well as the results necessary for a successful outcome. Even though this work did not involve
consulting with scientists to design the procedures, I enjoyed learning about
all the different specifications used by USP.
I was also contacted by a Bayer Crop Science facility south of
Shawnee-Mission, Kansas that tested new Bayer products according to EPA rules,
similar to the work done at ABC labs.
Again, I was offered a contract.
Another referral led to a contract with Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceutical
in Nutley, New Jersey to consult on their plate bioassays.
In the past, I looked down on using Excel
to perform statistical calculations.
However, since most of the scientists used Excel to record their
results, I decided it would be very useful to learn how to use that language in
the most accurate way possible. My work with
Excel benefitted companies by developing tools for the scientists that decreased
their time doing calculations and, therefore, increased their time in the
laboratory. I learned how to write macros
used by the spreadsheets. Searle was
beginning to install SAS on PCs, and their IT department worked with me to
learn the commands and procedures to invoke SAS using an Excel macro. This meant I had much more work to do with
Searle employees while utilizing the new capabilities I could provide.
I was also learning about the expectations
of corporate culture regarding human interactions. I now started my phone calls and emails with
a warm greeting rather than just the immediate message, and ended them with
wishes for a good day. I asked about my
clients’ families, particularly their children.
Family pictures on their desks helped to start the conversation. I modified my behavior and felt like a warmer
human being.
My office at the lake was being fully
utilized. I was
very organized. I had a manila folder
for each client’s projects. The filing
cabinets were full of these folders and they were lined up all along the top of
the 20-foot-long cabinet tops. There
were very few distractions at the lake.
Being there was very good for a business that bills by the hour, but
what about my personal life? I still had
none. All work and no play were making
Jeanne a dull woman.
In fall 1990, I received a telephone call
from Diane Booth, the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood of
Mid-Missouri. She said she noticed that
I was a long-time contributor and wondered if we could meet and have lunch in
Columbia to discuss how else I might be able to support her organization. I had met Diane briefly at the open house for
the birthing center on Fay St. Of
course, I no longer had a home in Columbia, and usually did not even go through
Columbia on my way to St. Louis, rather taking Highway 54 from the lake up to
I-70. However, I did have plans to visit
some friends on a Sunday, staying at their house before going to St. Louis the
next morning. I agreed to meet her for a
Sunday lunch at Boone Tavern.
It was a pleasant meeting. At the end of the meal, I offered to pay for
the lunch. Then something happened that
I didn’t quite understand. I was a
conservative 10% tip payer. I took out
my calculator to determine the dollar amount, and Diane started laughing. She said she found it humorous that someone with
graduate degrees in math needed a calculator to figure out a 10% tip. Although I could solve differential equations,
she didn’t know how bad I was at elementary arithmetic. I could have felt insulted, but she gave me
such a kind smile, I didn’t think she intended her comment to be taken as a put
down. Instead, I think she was
comfortable enough with me to believe that she could joke with me.
I didn’t think much more about it until I
got back home from my St. Louis visit and found a message from her on my
answering machine. Her voice was in a
sappy, deep tone, that seemed to me like she was trying to sound sexy. It didn’t work on me. For a change, I wasn’t looking for a new
partner, but instead wanted a new buddy.
I talked to my friends, Vicky and Marta, who knew Diane because of their
common backgrounds in social work. They
advised me to not read too much into the phone call. They asked both Diane and I to lunch at their
house as a way for us to get to know each other better.
I had to postpone their invitation, as I
had begun regular visits to my mother in Wichita, making the five-hour drive on
Highway 54 across western Missouri and eastern Kansas. After I was back home and could make it to
Columbia, Vicky and Marta served Diane and I a nice fall lunch of soup and
bread. Then we all went to a nearby park
for a walk, during which I found I had another problem with Diane. As she and I walked side-by-side, I filled quiet
times in our conversation with talk about my life, but Diane didn’t ask any follow-up
questions and volunteered little about herself.
She appeared to be friendly, but it seemed she wasn’t interested in
knowing me better, and only told me about herself when asked direct
questions. I decided she was a New
Jersey snob and didn’t understand Midwestern friendliness.
I didn’t hear from Diane for quite a while. I visited my mother for the Christmas holidays
in Wichita. During my January visit with
her, we joined viewers around the world watching the beginning of a war for the
first time ever on live television. We
saw cruise missiles hitting targets in Baghdad, Iraq, during the first hours of
the Persian Gulf War in response to the Iraqi invasion and annexation of
Kuwait. The active war did not last long
but the after effects lingered as President George H Bush chose to allow Saddam
to remain in power and did not push on to capture Baghdad and overthrow his
government.
I finally did receive another call from
Diane. She said she was in New Jersey
over the holidays visiting her sister’s family, and then she had to return to
New Jersey as her father got sick and died.
She asked me to visit her for a meal at her house, and I told her I
could stop by on my way home from St. Louis on a Tuesday evening. That’s when things started to change for the
better. I decided to be direct and told her
my reaction to our previous conversation.
She tried to excuse herself saying that she was brought up to not ask
people questions about themselves. She said
that she was taught that if someone wanted to tell you something, that they
would do so without being asked, that it was not polite to ask personal
questions. I informed her that it was
not that simple and that asking questions indicated an interest in the person.
At any rate, she then knew what I expected. She expressed more interest in me and my
family. Without prompting, she started
telling me about herself, her sister’s family, and her extended family of many
cousins, aunts and uncles. I heard the
story about the unexpected death of her mother during the time Diane was
commuting to Rutgers. Diane dropped out
of college to take care of her younger sister who was still living at
home. Her father was going to move
another woman and her two children into their small two-bedroom house where
Diane and her sister slept in one bedroom.
Diane asked her mother’s brother, her uncle, to co-sign for a used car
and to allow her and her sister to move into a room at his family’s house. She was very close to her sister.
She was
the first member of her family to leave New Jersey. She had been in a long-term relationship with
a woman who had grown up in the state and whose mother lived in Missouri. Diane and her partner moved to Jefferson City
in 1977, the same year I had moved to Columbia with Gwen. Two years later, Diane moved to Columbia by
herself to become the Executive Director of the Job Center. In 1986, she was offered the job at Planned
Parenthood. Diane also told me about the
visit she and her sister made to the Hyde Park Culinary Institute, and that she
was entertaining the possibility of opening an Italian restaurant in
Columbia. Indeed, the meal she served
us, along with a glass of wine, was an Italian feast. I started to relax around
Diane and re-evaluate her. It helped
that she no longer seemed to be expressing romantic intentions.
I felt like I should return the invitation
to dinner, and asked Diane to visit my house.
I told her there was a condition.
Since she was such a good cook, I would like her to prepare the evening
meal. She arrived on a Saturday
afternoon, bearing a potted plant as a house-warming gift. I gave her a tour of the house. She was amazed that I had not even unpacked
my suitcases from the Olivia cruise, and that there were still unopened boxes from
my move. Rather than finding it untidy,
she seemed to understand how depressed I had been.
I was beginning to think of Diane as the
buddy and friend that I was looking for and could talk safely with about
anything. Little did I know what she was
thinking. That afternoon we decided to make
the 45-minute drive through the lake area and tour Ha Ha Tonka State Park. As she drove, we talked about our previous
relationships. I told her that at this
time I wasn’t looking for a new partner, but that my body was giving me sexual
signals, asking her if that happened to her.
I didn’t intend my talk to suggest I wanted an affair with her. I was just curious about whether she had the
same experience as I did after breakups.
I told her it wasn’t usually the case, but recently my breasts felt like
ripe grapefruits that needed squeezing. She
didn’t have much comment.
Diane was overweight whereas I had
thinned down some going through the breakup with Gwen and the move. I wasn’t sure she could keep up with me at Ha
Ha Tonka. We walked through the castle
remains and then scrambled through some steep slopes on the grounds. Diane followed right along. I was impressed that she was able to keep up. I wondered if she was just trying to impress
me.
Below is an aerial picture of Ha Ha Tonka.
After we got back to the house, we
went downstairs to the wine cellar that was full of the German wine bottles I had
brought from Columbia. We picked one out
and returned to the kitchen so Diane could find what she needed for
dinner. She really disliked the kitchen,
saying whoever designed it wasn’t a cook.
That was true. It was all the
architect, Victor Stimac, with no input from either me or Gwen, as if either of
us was a great cook. We found a box of Uncle
Ben’s white rice, some chicken breasts
and a vegetable in the freezer. Diane
got a good idea of what I was eating at the lake and commented about the 17 TV
dinners, spam, Velveeta cheese, and Vienna sausage. That seemed to be my diet. She
did her best with what I had, and it was passable. After all, I did want to challenge her
cooking acumen.
After dinner, we relaxed on the front
deck overlooking the lake to drink the rest of the wine even though Diane
didn’t care much for its sweet German taste.
I suggested we might want to end the day by using the hot tub in the
lower level. By then it was dark. I told Diane that when friends visited, we
always stripped before entering the hot tub.
I gave her a large bath towel and hoped that being naked wouldn’t
embarrass her because of her weight. She
complied with no comment. I put some women’s
music by Olivia artists on the CD player, and we entered the tub on opposite
sides.
I thought we were both just relaxing,
enjoying the end of a nice day with the warm water bubbling around us. Suddenly Diane was next to me with her arm
around me giving me a very tender kiss.
Just as quickly as she appeared, she disappeared back to the other side
of the tub. I was stunned. This was not what I expected or even thought
I wanted to happen. However, it was a
very nice kiss, soft yet full of passion!
We stayed in the hot tub a while longer, then got out, put on our
clothes, and went up to bed in our respective, separate bedrooms. In honor of the kiss, this date, March 9,
1991, became what we considered to be the beginning of our relationship.
I fixed apple pancakes the next
morning, and then we took a long clockwise, circular walk from my house along Sweetwater
Dr to Horseshoe Bend Pkwy, then over and back down the other side of Sweetwater
Dr to my house. It was on this walk that
I heard the passionately told story of why Diane left the Catholic church and
was an atheist. It wasn’t the story one
might expect from a homosexual, but rather had to do with an incident when she
was a child. She was instructed to
accompany her cousin, Peter, to Sunday school.
Neither of them had been there before and, when they approached
hand-in-hand, they were told boys and girls were not allowed to be in the same
class. Peter did not want to be
separated from Diane. As he howled and
Diane protested, they were forcibly torn apart.
That did it for Diane. She took
Peter and left. Any religion or God that
didn’t care about the feelings of children was not for her, and nothing
happened since to change her opinion. I
was discovering that this was a woman who held many opinions and philosophies
of life that were in firm accord with mine.
In the picture below, my house is next to the
one on the point.
Diane left for Columbia and invited me
to stop by Tuesday for dinner on my way back to the lake. I never made it to the lake Tuesday. We ate dinner, and she asked me to spend the
night. I thought I knew what that
implied, as I had thought of little else the past two days. I usually slept in the raw, but not wanting
to be mistaken about my suspicions, I put on a sleep shirt before I left the
bathroom and headed to the bedroom. Diane
didn’t allow the sleep shirt to stay on me for long. She was a very eager lover, and I responded
in turn. After a long night of
love-making, we both slept better than we had since the kiss in the hot tub.
When Gwen called me later that week I
told her about Diane’s visit, not going into details but saying to her “I was
thunderstruck! She and I will be dating, and I think you and I should stop
seeing each other. You need to stop by
and pick up a few items.” When she came
to the house, I gave her the antique ring that we had purchased at McAdams’ in
Columbia as a symbol of our previous relationship. I offered some other jewelry I thought might
have some value. I told her I would pay
her $5,000 when she signed the release document that would take her name off
the deed for the lake house. She seemed
dejected by the conversation, but I kept it short and business-like. She realized that I was moving on and our
relationship was at THE END.
After that, I was in Columbia on most
Tuesday nights and Diane was at the lake most Friday and Saturday nights. As we spent more time with each other, we had
an opportunity to learn how much we had in common. Our mothers and fathers both had two
daughters, the difference being that Diane was the oldest and I was the
youngest. Both our sisters lived in New
Jersey, mine having four children and Diane’s having three children. Early in their availability, both of us
acquired computers, and we both liked using financial software to track our
income and expenses. We were
conservative spenders, only buying items we could pay off the same month. The rule was no credit card debt. We both read
a lot, had subscriptions to Discover magazine and liked to travel.
We were also getting to know each
other better physically. I discovered a
new way of having a clitoral orgasm. I
found I could position myself on top of Diane so that our private parts met and
with a little movement I could create a most intense erotic sensation. As before, it didn’t happen every time, but
it also didn’t take so long to get there when it did and didn’t have the same
painful buildup. We were having a lot of fun.
In June, my sister’s oldest daughter,
Denise, was getting married in the Princeton University Chapel, and I was asked
to escort her grandmother (my mother, Almeda).
Almeda boarded the plane in Wichita, and I boarded the same plane in St.
Louis during a layover. After the
wedding, I brought her to the lake for a visit.
She stayed in the middle floor bedroom so she wouldn’t have to walk up any
stairs. I had told Almeda about my new
friend Diane, and she met her at the lake.
Being a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and abortion rights, my
mother really liked Diane being my friend.
I then drove my mother back to Wichita.
Picture of me and my mother standing
in front of a planter at the Lake house.
Diane and I soon had an opportunity to
test our compatibility during travel.
Diane had a Planned Parenthood meeting of administrators and board
members in San Antonio. We flew there
and rented a car to drive to the meeting hotel.
After checking in, we toured the botanical garden, running into some
Columbia board members. This was the
beginning of me getting to meet the strong women who worked for and supported
Planned Parenthood.
During the day when Diane was in the
meeting, she arranged for Steve, a previous employee, to pick me up, and he and
I visited the San Antonio Art Museum. Later Diane joined us for a tour of the town
and a wonderful Mexican dinner. I
learned that her friend, Steve, was a Canarian, a descendent of Spanish
immigrants who moved from the Canary Islands to Texas hundreds of years ago. Diane and I stayed over one day after the
meeting concluded to visit the downtown area with its beautiful river walk. As Diane and I returned home, we both
concluded that we did indeed travel well together and seemed to enjoy the same
sights and the amount of time to spend at each.
We were very comfortable with each other’s travel rhythm. It amazed both of us.
Picture below taken at the San Antonio
botanical garden.
We wanted to check out each other’s
families, so we drove to New Jersey to meet them. Mine was a relative piece of cake. My sister, Earlene, and her husband, Vince,
were living in their combined households in Princeton. Diane had a great time cooking with Vince and
we all enjoyed sharing bottles of wine.
Earlene and I still had heated debates about our childhood experience and
parental relationships. With the six years
between us, we essentially grew up in different families, so it was no wonder
we didn’t see our childhoods the same way.
If our discussions got too loud or abusive, Diane and Vince would
intervene or just send us both to bed.
The next morning, all was forgiven.
The experience of being around Diane’s
family was different than being with mine. We visited her sister’s house and I met all
three children. Diane routinely referred
to her sister as Suzy, but when I used that name, she corrected me and told me
to call her Susan. I don’t think she
took to me right away, and I didn’t know why. I met most of Diane’s extended family during a
party at cousin Joyce’s house which was overflowing with adults, children and a
big German Shepherd which roaming freely around. The young children swam in a
big above-the-ground pool, while Diane directed them in a choreographed dance. Everybody talked loudly and in New Jersey accents,
which I struggled to understand. When
Diane was back inside after swimming, she sometimes had to translate my Midwest
accent to her relatives. They were all
very friendly and told stories about Diane which I enjoyed. It was clear she was much closer to her
extended family than I had ever been to mine. But then growing up, they had all lived within
close proximity and gotten together regularly.
Over the next few weeks, I had a
chance to see if Diane and I could work together on projects. I ordered a multi-story metal birdhouse for
purple martins. They migrate from South
America to Missouri each spring to eat the bountiful flying insects, mate and
raise their young. I thought mounting a
birdhouse near the lake would give them a clear path to their home. Of course, the bird house came disassembled,
meaning instructions had to be interpreted and followed. The assembly went well, so I was again
encouraged that we could work together.
Before taking the next step into a
long-term relationship, I wanted to make sure the legal aspects were agreed
upon. I had listened well to the story
about Sharon Kowalski. Since I helped my
mother with her trust, I believed that would be the best vehicle we could use to
protect our legal rights. I envisioned
us each having our own trust since we had separate homes and assets and would
want separate wills. However, the
structure would be such that when one of us died, our
trust could still be used to support the other, if needed. After we both died, our individual assets
would still be dispersed as we specified.
That meant that Diane would have to consider my welfare ahead of her
sister’s as long as I was still alive, but she could still designate her sister
in her will. Diane had to give this
idea a lengthy consideration.
Before she decided, we scheduled
another trip, a longer one with lots of driving. In late August, we flew into Seattle’s SeaTac
airport and rented a car. The next day
we visited the Pike Street Market and enjoyed some rich, creamy clam chowder
for lunch before boarding a ferry for Vashon Island where we were spending a
couple of nights in a lesbian B&B.
The next day we drove around the island, stopping often to get out for
the views. Diane was thoroughly enjoying
her favorite hobby of taking pictures.
She especially liked taking photos of old lighthouses. Then we took a ferry to the Olympic
Peninsula, drove to Port Angeles and took another ferry to Victoria on
Vancouver Island, Canada. We were just
in time for the wooden boat show in the harbor during Labor Day weekend. We visited the Royal BC Museum, were ready to
leave at the same amount of time, walked among the totems in the garden and
then had high tea at the Empress Hotel.
The next day we drove to the Butchart (we pronounced as Butch Art) Gardens that
were transformed from a limestone quarry into an amazing array of green hues
and colorful gardens through the vision of Jennie Butchart. In the afternoon we drove to Swartz Bay to
board yet another ferry for the Tsawwassen terminal south of Vancouver. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we spent the
almost two-hour trip outside on the upper deck viewing all the islands we
passed by.
Picture below shows the Butchart Gardens.
After disembarking, we drove 45 minutes
into downtown Vancouver and our hotel.
The son of one of Diane’s exes had a postdoctoral fellowship at the
University of British Columbia. The next morning, he met us at their
Anthropology Museum and showed us the many drawers which could be opened to
reveal a trove of small artifacts. We stopped to have a late lunch on Granville
Island, where I introduced Diane to the joy of eating mussels. The next day we explored more of Vancouver,
visiting Stanley Park with its totem poles and the Vancouver Aquarium.
Our next destination was Jasper National
Park, north of Banff National Park. Along the way we stopped at many of Canada’s provincial
and national parks for hikes, spending the night in the old railroad town of
Revelstoke. There was a big glacier very
near the Icefields Parkway between Lake Louise and Jasper. I called a tourist office in Jasper, and they
found us a room in the bottom level of a house that Diane and I could rent for
three nights.
There were so many places to hike in
Jasper. It is likely that the first
white woman to see Maligne Lake was Mary Schäffer,
a botanist, explorer, writer and photographer, who was guided there in 1908 by
First Nations’ people. While on a
Maligne Lake boat cruise, Diane and I visited Spirit Island and saw a handsome
moose on the lake shore.
Picture below is of Spirit Island.
The goal early the next morning was to find
a brown bear. We spotted one up a hill
on the driver’s side feasting on berries, so Diane got out to stand on the road
and take pictures. I’ve never seen Diane
move so fast to jump in the car as when the bear ran down the hill, across the
road in front of where she was standing taking pictures. Before that she had dreams of being a
National Geographic photographer. Sure!
Upon leaving Jasper, we stopped briefly at
Lake Louise then headed south towards the North Cascades of Washington, taking
Highway 20 all across the state. I used
the AAA travel guide to describe each town we traveled through. I learned how easy it was to tease Diane
when, thinking about my early disclosure to her about my breasts, I said: “This
town is the grapefruit capital of Washington.” She just said, “That’s amazing.” Then I could laugh and tell her it was a
joke. She just laughed at herself. For many years I found she was easy to joke
and tease with, but she eventually caught onto my teasing ways.
Along the road west, there were many hydroelectric
power dams which the Native Americans hated because of their effect on the
salmon runs. We spent the night at the well-named
Idle-a-While motel in Twisp, WA before proceeding to Whidbey Island, visiting
the Fort Casey Historical State Park to see the lighthouse and historic gun
battery. The last ferry ride of our trip
took us to the mainland and the airport so we could fly home the next day. Another successful trip!
There was soon an opportunity to work
together on a common project, creating a photo album of our trip. We assembled all the pictures Diane took along
with the trip memorabilia I collected. I
also had my AAA books with their descriptions of the places we stayed and
visited. We cut out and assembled a
chronological display of our travel on the album pages to our
satisfaction.
I
was still evaluating our relationship.
When asked, Diane said she wouldn’t mind taking the same Myers-Briggs personality
test I had earlier completed. The test
indicated that she was also a problem solver, although with people, not numbers
as I was. It made sense she could be a
boss with many employees and run a not-for-profit. The book predicted a compatible relationship
between us, and it was feeling like that to me.
However, one event did give me pause. We were working together in the lake kitchen
where she was cooking and I was helping.
I was accustomed to requests for help being delivered with a
please. “Would you bring me this,
please? Or would you get this out of the refrigerator, please?” However, what she was saying was “Bring me
this!” or “Get this out of the refrigerator!”
I was being ordered around. I
stopped to think, “I can ask for her to change the way she asks for something,
or I can recognize this is her style, and she means no disrespect.” Her tone of voice wasn’t antagonistic. She came from a New Jersey culture, was a big
sister and a boss. In all other ways,
she showed a caring, loving nature. I
decided that if I ignored this now, I would need to be able to live with that
decision for the duration of our relationship.
And that is what I decided to do.
There was no way I was going to change the essence of Diane Booth.
Our third opportunity for travel occurred
when Diane asked me to go with her to the national Planned Parenthood
conference in Washington, DC. She was in
business meetings most of the day, and I could work on my computer in the hotel
room. I joined her for the dinners and
evenings of entertainment. At the
night-time events, I learned firsthand that Planned Parenthood people could really
relax and party when away from the office.
Picture below of me on the Washington,
D.C. trip.
With another successful travel experience
along with our other discoveries about each other, Diane decided to agree to
meet my requirement that our trusts be structured so that they could be used to
support the other if needed reassured her that after we both died, the document
freed her to leave her assets to her sister.
We made an appointment with Arlene Zarembka who was then a prominent
lesbian lawyer in St. Louis.
The preparation of my trust caused me to
give greater consideration of how to write my will. I needed to specify what would happen to the
assets in my trust, if any, when both Diane and I were dead. My relatives, my sister and her descendants,
seemed to be financially comfortable already, so I considered what charities
best fit my values and beliefs. I could
see political maneuvers and legal attacks being made on institutions I
supported and felt that only legal challenges through the courts and
educational efforts could meet these threats.
I settled on the areas of environmental protection, women’s rights, and separation
of church and state. I then chose the
charities with the best record of education, filing and winning lawsuits and responsible
use of donations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, National
Wildlife Federation, National Women’s Law Center, Americans United for Separation of Church
and State and the Center for Inquiry.
Diane and I finalized the documents
and our trusts were officially dated December 16, 1991. How were we, two very independent women with
demanding careers, going to handle our living arrangement? We decided on a slow start, keeping both
houses before exploring other alternatives.
Meanwhile, we could still be with each other a lot and travel more. Stay tuned.
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