Never Say No to the Pie Lady
For starters, she has lemon meringue, as well as pecan, coconut, chocolate, apple and cheese pie. Big slices, jumbo slices, none of those mamby pamby baby slices, the ones you normally ask for – those pretend slices of pie. No, she’s got big ass slices and she’s carrying them around in a little basket on her hip, the way you’d carry a watermelon or a child. It’s 10:30 in the morning and you’re sitting under a palapa – an open air, palm frond covered structure on a beach in Yelapa, Mexico, leading a writing workshop for nine women. The Pie Lady, a lovely brown skinned girl in her mid 20’s comes right up to the table you’re all writing at and she says, “Pie, I am the pie lady.” That’s when you know there really are some seriously bad hombres in Mexico and The Pie Lady is clearly one of them. You know this because as she lifts the woven lid off the basket of pies, you see the stiff, fluffy white of the lemon meringue and you’re helpless. It’s 10:30 in the morning and you’ve got a suitcase full of workout clothes that you meant to pull out five days ago, but it just hasn’t happened. The beach, which you imagined yourself running on each morning is actually a tiny fishing cove with boats lazily bobbing in the water, and there’s a lot of manana in the air. Each morning you stare out at the beach from your 5th story room which looks out over the Bay of Banderas, and you think, “today I’ll run,” but you don’t. Instead,...
But Was it Life Changing?
“Was it life changing?” my daughter, Zoe asked me this morning as I groggily sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. I’d gotten home from nearly three weeks in South Africa the night before, had managed a few hours of sleep, and was now on my third cup of coffee and it wasn’t even 7am. “Was it life changing?” “Yes and no,” I said. “Yes, of course, and no, not really.” And it’s not because I’m jaded by my recent travel to Bali last November, Nepal this past April, and the last many weeks in South Africa where I traveled with my 21-year-old daughter Ruby, and my 79-year-old mother Suzy. It was incredible to tool around in a jeep on a large private animal reserve in South Africa and to stumble into a herd of elephants taking down trees for breakfast. It silenced me to get as close as we did to the pride of lady lions whose faces were covered with blood – “lipstick,” our guide called it – after they’d just taken down an impala – a kill we’d seen them circling for, heard them attacking deep in the bush, and watched them emerge from afterwards. It was ridiculously amazing to watch a mama rhino and her baby lumbering along a shady dirt road, taking their time as our vehicle kept a safe distance behind. The closest I’d ever gotten to these animals – cheetahs, giraffes, rhinos, leopards – was in magazines or on T.V., and it was both oddly wonderful and disconcerting to be so close to them. One day we drove right up to a...
This is How it Starts
So while it took me 24 hours to physically get home from Bali – to fly from Denpasar International Airport to Hong Kong, and then on to San Francisco – it only took me about 10 minutes in the car the next day to become some wild eyed impatient bitch who was half an inch from leaning on her horn because some dude in front of her wouldn’t turn right at the red even though he COULD HAVE.
“Oh my god,” I thought, slowly pulling my hand back from the wheel, “so this is how it starts.”
The Wide View
Just because I’m 8000 miles from home doesn’t mean I don’t get triggered now and then. Not by Bali, with its fresh bowls of purple dragon fruit, its incense and little paper altars every two feet, a place so peaceful I haven’t seen one cop or heard one harsh word. A world where most people I pass on the street look up and smile, and who are so kind-hearted that today on my run when I almost got flattened by a young man on a scooter, he put his hands together in prayer and smiled when I mouthed, “I’m sorry.”