February 7th

Please send your ADVICE to two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF if she asked, “HOW CAN I SUSTAIN THIS PEACEFUL FEELING?” Any advice you can give to Zoe would be helpful, but this is what Sophia said.

Late one morning, Sophia lay in her bed in New Hampshire, yearning to call Zoe, who wouldn’t be home until the next night from her business trip to L.A. Sophia stayed up most of the night before obsessing on her cheating, soon-to-be-ex Marty. She needed to talk to Zoe, but the “man of the house” since Marty left, lay on top of Sophia, preventing her arm from reaching for the cell phone. This “man” was her enormous Maine Coon cat, Tolstoy. Sophia loved Tolstoy, but lately, he’d become possessive of her. Whenever she was in bed, he jumped on her chest, then spent hours cleaning Nutella chocolate spread and Chex Mix off Sophia’s cheeks and chin. This meant that poor Sophia was often pinned down for hours or until Tolstoy ran out of “food.” With all her might, Sophia pushed and poked until Tolstoy gave her a dirty look, jumped to the floor, and wondered why Sophia was being such a bitch.

Meanwhile, Zoe stood in panties and bra, studying her face in the bathroom mirror of her hotel room in L.A. She was preparing for her last day of contract negotiations with various film producers. What she saw reflected in the mirror was a certain calm she hadn’t seen in her eyes for a long time.  Since Zoe arrived in L. A., she was so overwhelmed with work, that she barely had time to think. And two days into the trip, her lap top crashed and was taking forever to be repaired. Normally, the absence her lap top, with its trusty Webcam for convenient “dating,” would cause Zoe extreme distress, but following a few hours of withdrawal anxiety, she began to feel a certain liberation from her obsessive need for virtual communication with men.

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February 3   

Please send your ADVICE to two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF if she said, “HOW CAN I SLEEP AT NIGHT WITH THE GHOSTS AND THE ANGER AND PAIN?” Any advice you can give to Sophia would be helpful, but this is what Zoe said.

Zoe and Sophia stood side-by-side in panties and push-up bras, sharing the bathroom mirror at Zoe’s house. They finished slathering their bodies in moisturizer, and were now expertly working the enchantment on their eyes and lips. Sparky, Zoe’s incontinent yellow Lab lay at their feet, gazing up at them with doleful eyes. He might not be able to walk straight or control his bowels, BUT he wasn’t stupid. He knew the meaning of the packed luggage beside the front door. It meant Zoe was taking another trip. Zoe had to be at the airport in Boston by 4:00 a.m., so she decided it was best to drive from New Hampshire that night and stay in a hotel. Sophia, who was suffering from acute separation anxiety, offered to drive Zoe to Boston and see her off on her business trip to California.

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January 31

Please send your ADVICE to two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF if she said, “WHAT AM I SEARCHING FOR, AND WHERE WILL I FIND IT?” Any advice you can give to Zoe would be helpful, but this is what Sophia said.

Zoe lay in her cold bed, teetering on wakefulness. Her hand felt for the long, lean gorgeous man lying next to her. Wait a minute. What was that smell? Who was licking her hand? Her eyes snapped open, and she realized she was in her own bed in New Hampshire, with her beloved, incontinent Sparky on the floor next to her. His stroke-impaired body had purged turds in the night, and Zoe knew she would have to race her sweet Lab to the door before he left a yellow stream throughout the house. As she stirred, she realized her laptop was still on her stomach, where she’d left it the night before, after a Webcam “date” with Jackson from Florida.  He was the long, lean gorgeous man whose limbs were not occupying her bed. Gingerly, she began to remove the laptop, just as an incoming email blinged its arrival. Sparky still snored, so she risked opening the message. It was from a colleague saying Zoe was booked on a business trip to L.A. in a few days. Zoe smiled, wrote back the word “Yippee,” then flung herself out of the bed and made a mad dash to the door, with Sparking running sideways behind her.

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January 27
Please send your ADVICE to two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help them. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF if she wailed, “HOW CAN I GO HOME WITH ALL THAT PAIN WAITING FOR ME? Any advice you can give to Sophia would be helpful, but this is what Zoe said.

Early on the morning of Zoe and Sophia’s last full day in Florida, Zoe found Sophia sprawled in a heap on the deck outside the guest bedroom, sobbing, of course. Zoe expected this would happen when Sophia realized the transitory nature of her escape from the searing pain of her broken marriage to Marty. Sophia stopped crying out the litany of harms, a morning ritual, when she saw Zoe’s shadow.
“Get up, Sophie. The sun’s out and we need to put the polish on our tans.”
“Jackson’s been such a good host. Oh, Zo, I’m dreading going back to New Hampshire.”
“Don’t waste precious time on that shit. We don’t leave until tomorrow. Today is today.”

“Okay. How are you doing?” Sophia asked as she struggled to her feet. Before Zoe could answer, Sophia reached out for a badly needed hug, but Zoe didn’t see her, and at that instant she bolted back indoors when she heard Jackson call her name. Consequently, Sophia wrapped her arms around air, leaned into the same then fell flat on her face. “Trust” was not a game to be played with Zoe if she was answering the call of the “nature.”

An hour later Sophia heard Zoe open Jackson’s bedroom door and heard the bathroom door bang. Fully expecting to find Zoe immersed in one of her too-many-to-count ‘afterglows,’ Sophia barged into the bathroom, boundaries being a concept they ignored with each other’s space. To her surprise, she heard Zoe weeping in the shower. Instead of letting Zoe cry alone, Sophia jerked back the curtain. Frightened, Zoe screamed and slipped on the soapy tub floor. On her way down, Zoe grabbed the shower curtain, and took both the curtain and fixtures down with her.
“Fuck sake, Sophie. Why did you scare me like that?”
“I’m concerned about you,” she said to the back of Zoe’s head, since Zoe’s face rested on the bath mat, while her legs and torso still occupied the tub. Since the curtain had lost its purpose, water spurted everywhere, not that either woman noticed.

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January 23

Thank you for the WONDERFUL ADVICE you’ve offered the two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help them. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF as she said, “HEY, SOPHIE, ARE WE “WORKERS” WHO TAKE THE BUS OR THE OTHER TYPE OF PEOPLE?” Any advice you can give to Zoe would be helpful, but this is what Sophia said.

As Zoe floated just beneath the surface of awake, she sensed things were not quite right. Where was the smell of Sparky’s nightly accidents, involuntarily purged from his rear end? Sparky was Zoe’s stoke-victim yellow Lab. Yes, he was incontinent and walked sideways, but he was the sweetest dog known to woman. Where was the cold, heavy air, sitting like a pall over her head? Where was the cough of the struggling furnace in her 1790s N. H. home? Wait a minute–who was that long, lean, gorgeous man lying next to her? Zoe’s smile awoke her. Not bothering to cover her naked body, she slipped quietly from the bed, aching to smell ocean air. She tiptoed past Sophia’s room, not wanting to wake her friend. In the soft darkness of pre-dawn, Zoe threw open the french doors leading to the deck, closed her eyes and stepped outside as the warm Florida breeze bathed her face.

Sophia was not asleep. No, she was sitting in good Buddhist meditation posture, legs crossed, hands on thighs, right outside the french doors. The serenity of the moment splintered once Zoe walked over Sophia, lost her balance and plunged, face first, on the deck. Sophia was knocked on her back when Zoe’s knees raked across her face. But Sophia, the bastion of focus, remained legs akimbo, hands still on thighs, breathing in and breathing out.
“Fuck sake, Sophie. Why there? Why right in front of the door? Not two feet to the left or right, but dead center in my path?
“Sorry, Zo,” said Sophia, swimming out of the open space of her spiritual journey, into the mired waters of Zoe’s scorn. “At least Sparky wasn’t here to pee on me. Hey, you wanna go to the Botanical Gardens today?”
“No. I want to lie by the ocean and get a tan.”
“You wanna go to the Collier County Museum?”
“No.”
“You wanna go to the Naples Information Center?”
“Fuck sake, Sophie. I want to lie on the beach all day roasting like a chicken on a spit. Anyway, go brush your teeth. Your breath is drowning out the sea air.”
“Well, you should consider doing something about your hair, Zo. Your bed head might be mistaken for a rat’s nest.”

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January 20th

Please send your ADVICE to two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help them. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF if she asked, “WHY HAVEN’T I LOST MY MIND ONCE SINCE WE LEFT NEW HAMPSHIRE?” Any advice you can give to Zoe would be helpful, but this is what Sophia said.

At 5:50 a.m. Sophia stood in the shower, her body lathered in soap and her hair full of Caviar Conditioner-the crème of hair products for “blond” women over forty.  The shower where she stood was in a hotel near the Manchester Airport. In exactly forty minutes, she and Zoe were due in the lobby to catch the shuttle to their terminal. Sophia’s mind was filled with the sublime lightness of being, knowing that in a few hours, she and Zoe would be lying in the sun that hovered over Naples, Florida. Zoe showered first and stood outside the bathroom rubbing her body with lotion and preparing to blow dry her hair. She looked at the pathetic hotel hairdryer, rejected it, and plugged in her own mammoth contraption. And that decision was how she plunged Sophia into darkness, leaving her flailing about with soap and “Caviar” in her eyes.
“Zoe,” Sophia cried, “Lights, Zoe.”
“Blew the fuse,” yelled Zoe through the door. “Can’t see a thing out here.”
“Fuck sake, call the front desk.”

Sophia was not especially coordinated in broad daylight, but she was lucky not to kill herself, blindly searching for a towel, which she couldn’t find because Zoe had used all four of them and then slung them across a chair, far from the darkened shower room. Shivering and dripping, Sophia felt her way out of the dangerous zone of porcelain surfaces. Thinking she could safely walk, by remembering where the beds were in relation to the furniture, she launched on her journey to find a towel. What she didn’t know was that Zoe had left open luggage in Sophia’s pathway, causing Sophia to trip, skid across the carpet, and hit her head on the table leg, just before Zoe opened the door to the maintenance man. Within seconds, Maintenance Man dazzled the room with light and discovered Sophia, naked and wet, lying on the floor, nursing carpet burns and a bumped head, and balling like a baby.
“Fuck sake, Zoe, get me a towel.”
Zoe turned to smile at the maintenance man then took her sweet time sashaying across the room, stepping over Sophia, and finally flinging a wet towel to her friend. The man neither moved a muscle nor uttered a word. Only when Sophia glared and hissed at him, did he snap out of his catatonic state and hastily back out of the room.

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January 17th

Thank you for the WONDERFUL ADVICE you’ve offered the two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to help them. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF as she cried, WHY CAN’T I BE STRONG LIKE A TREE INSTEAD OF FRAIL LIKE A LEAF FLUNG ABOUT IN A FURIOUS WIND ? Any advice you can give to Zoe would be helpful, but this is what Sophia said.

Zoe sat at her kitchen table thinking about her first face-to-face meeting with Jackson from Florida in two days. She envisioned them as characters in a film, reunited after a long separation, running in slow motion then falling into each other’s arms and whirling round in a blissful blur. Smiling at the visual, her thoughts next turned to Walter–the guy who likes travel.  He  called and asked if she wanted to “date” for an hour or so. But Zoe wanted to stay “fresh” for Jackson, and anyway she was still weighing whether Walter was arrogant or just confident. Until she figured that out, she thought it best to avoid him. Almost against her will, Zoe’s thoughts suddenly floated, the way thoughts do, into an unchartered, unprotected area somewhere deep inside. In this place she began thinking about Ron. Although she hadn’t seen him in years, she did contact him after her split with George, and they spoke on the phone a few times. But Ron was tricky because he was the one man on earth for whom Zoe brandished the sword that always turned inward, that sense of loss for something she never quite had. Ron was the object of her unrequited love.

To shake the echoes of that buried hurt, one that still swam to the surface, Zoe took a shower, thinking she might wash the echoes away. When the hot splinters of water failed to dilute her feelings, she sat down and Googled his name as she had many times in the preceding months. Ron’s bio popped right up. He was now a divorcee and a high-ranking executive in the Chicago branch of the same corporation he worked for in Boston, when Zoe knew him, before she married George. His bio was apparent because he authored two well-received books on how to motivate employees hydraulically bound to corporate feudalism. The thrust of Ron’s advice (to get the sheep to stampede off a cliff and like it) was interactive communication, positive reinforcement, honesty, integrity and a host of other strategies he no doubt found in some Carl Rogers’ book on psychology. Ironically, these were qualities Ron steadfastly refused to apply to his relationship with Zoe. As the old pit gnawed at Zoe’s stomach, while new tears sprung from her eyes, Sophia burst through the door in a dither, startling Sparky from his slumber. He lay in a dog bed dotted with hard turds his body involuntarily purged during his nap.

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January 13

Thank you for the WONDERFUL ADVICE you’ve offered the two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to give it. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF as she cried, I RAN INTO MY EX’S GIRLFRIEND AT THE GYM, AND I COULDN’T REFRAIN FROM STARING IN HER EYES AS I POINTED AT HER GROSS THIGHS? Any advice you can give to Sophia would be helpful, but this is what Zoe said.

Sophia stood looking at the piles of summer clothes on the floor of her bedroom. With Zoe’s help, Sophia managed to clean up the plates she broke a few days before, on the afternoon when her despair reached such a pitch that she danced around her living room in a grass Hula skirt, singing to the heavens in her pathetic attempt to expunge cheating Marty from her heart. But the clothes she danced on, amidst the broken pottery, merely shifted from the living room to the bedroom, and she still hadn’t begun packing for their trip to Florida.  Sophia knew that when things became overwhelming, it was difficult for her to START somewhere. So, once again, she stepped around the clothes piles and headed downstairs to begin cooking dinner for Zoe who would be joining her shortly.

As she stoked the fire in her chilly 1770s N. H. home on Lake Winnipesaukee, her phone jingled.
“Hi, Zo.”
“Hey, Sophie. I’m on my way. I have to bring Sparky though. George won’t look after him tonight.” George was Zoe’s soon-to-be-ex who lived in the cottage on the same property as Zoe’s large 1790s home, five miles down the road from Sophia.
“No, prob,” said Sophia, but she wasn’t thrilled. The last time Sparky (Zoe’s incontinent, stroke-victim yellow Lab) came to the house, he limped around until he found the cat food and consumed it. After that, he shoved his nose into the crap in the cat box, and just as he was about to enjoy “dessert,” Sophia shrieked at him, alarming the poor thing, and he peed involuntarily all over Sophia’s mudroom. Good times.

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January 11th 2010

Thank you for the WONDERFUL ADVICE you’ve offered the two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to be so generous. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF as she cried, “I CAN’T SEEM TO PLEASE ANYONE–WHAT DO I DO?”Any advice you can give to Zoe would be helpful, but this is what Sophia said.

Just before dawn broke on a Sunday morning in early January, Zoe awoke to the second day of solid snowfall. The last thing she remembered before going to sleep was lying in bed with her laptop on her stomach watching “Nurse Betty.” Sophia was lying next to her engaged in a text war with her soon-to-be-ex Marty. But when Zoe looked to her left, all she saw was her laptop lying where Sophia had been. Sparky, Zoe’s incontinent stoke-victim yellow Lab, was asleep on his pad on the floor, surrounded by sizable turds his bottom had purged involuntarily during the night. Just as every other morning, Zoe knew the moment she stirred, she would have to race Sparky to the back door and get him outside before his bladder let loose in a steady stream all over the floor. Silently she counted “one, two, three…GO.” Zoe grabbed Sparky’s collar and made a mad dash through the kitchen, then pulled open the door and shoved him gently through it.

What Zoe didn’t know was that Sophia was sitting outside the door doing a Buddhist meditation. The train wreck which followed occurred when Sparky tried to go up and over Sophia to relieve himself. He knocked Sophia out of her proper meditation posture, and she lay sideways with her legs still akimbo and her face smashed into the yellowed snow. Because it was not yet light, Zoe didn’t see Sophia, so she tripped over her and landed face down in the white powder, barely missing poor Sparky. Zoe pulled herself into a crouching position and squeezed Sparky’s mid-section, helping the dog express the last of his urine. Throughout, Sophia remained, like a wooden Buddha, lying cross-legged on her side.

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January 8th, 2010

Please keep your WONDERFUL ADVICE flowing for two single women, whose lives are suddenly crashing in chaos! Zoe and Sophia, BFFs for thirty years, find themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of re-creation and redefinition after decades of being faithful wives to George and Marty. They need advice from anyone willing to offer it. For instance, what advice would you give your BFF IF HER HUSBAND INSISTED UPON SHARING THE MARITAL HOME WITH HER ON THE DAYS HE WASN’T ALLOWED TO SLEEP AT HIS GIRLFRIEND’S HOUSE? Any advice you can give to Sophia would be helpful, but this is the advice Zoe gave her.

As January slithered into her midst, Sophia stood upstairs in her Exeter, NH house, looking down at her faithful Coleman blow-up bed. She didn’t know how to fully deflate it, but she was sure Zoe could help her when she arrived. To economize, Sophia realized she had to give up the house. She originally rented the empty place after she fled her large 1770s home on Lake Winnipesaukee in early September. At the time, she couldn’t bear being in the space filled with the wrenching associations of her husband Marty’s evolving affair with Fugly, as Sophia called her. At least every day now, she could be just five miles down the road from Zoe’s similar house on the lake. Moreover, she wouldn’t have to worry about Sparky so much. Sparky was Zoe’s stroke-victim dog, which meant he was incapable of climbing stairs and profoundly incontinent. Without warning, he peed and shat everywhere. Sophia’s lake house had no outdoor steps to challenge Sparky.

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