Senior Dating (or Why I Date Fresh Men)

Once upon a time there was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead.

For a fairly cute girl, she liked to read, and read she did. Every damn fairy tale ever known to womankind and published in the full set of the Book of Knowledge. The Book of Knowledge. What a misnomer that was. For the uneducated, the Book of Knowledge was an encyclopedic set that covered history to science and everything in between--including fairy tales.

I don’t think it is as much so today as when I was a girl, this believing in fairy tales, that either a handsome prince or a white knight would dash in to a young woman’s life and the twosome would live happily ever after with nary a woe. In fact, I don’t guess there is much of a market for fairy tales with today’s young girls. Fairy tales mislead girls to believe that there is one special someone out there who will love and protect them all of their days. Well, there is. He’s called your daddy. Trust me, that is the only man, and I mean the ONLY man who will ever love and respect a girl as she deserves to be. To hell with the rest of them.

Forgive me for generalizing here, but men, as it were, is a misnomer, too. When have you known a man to ever grow up? They don’t really, only if they sire a girl child, and only in respect to said child. I hate to be the burster of bubbles here, but men never grow up in respect to womankind. They always see themselves as they were at the peak of their sexual prowess, a virile young man, no matter how many nose and ear hairs you can count and no matter how little hair is on their pates.

Once, an older lady friend of mine emailed me a cartoon. It showed a fat, balding man looking into a mirror admiring the image of a studly body builder. In the next frame, it showed a good-looking woman, looking into a mirror with disdain at the image of an old hag. It kind of reminds me of that old Robert Burns poem, “O wad some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us.” Wouldn’t that be something? For either a man or a woman to see how others see them? Therein lies a fairy tale in itself.

As a woman who has been around the block a time or two or three or more, I can tell you this much, I’ve seen everything from a sweet gherkin to a beef stick to a pile of Jet-Puffed Marshmallows (my apologies to Kraft). You women out there know what I’m talking about even if the men don’t. Yes, I admit, I’ve been accused of being a cradle robber for having married and dated younger men, or in today’s parlance, being a “cougar.” And for good reason. Call it what you will, but younger men do have their benefits when you consider that the old farts never grow up and only gain in nose and ear cartilage and hair. Besides, what’s the point of dating someone your own age, especially if you are a reasonably attractive woman who desires the same in a man?

There is also a misconception that once a woman reaches menopause, she is no longer interested in the male of the species. It is true for some, but not all. For example, a famous female author friend of mine, who is approaching sixty-five and shall remain unnamed, told me not long ago: “I’ve sucked my last dick.” I love her frankness (no pun intended), but for me, I don’t think I’m quite there yet.

I fully understand that by posting this blog, I may be cutting off future dating opportunities with men my age and older, such as they are, but the damn fairy tale is over.

Now it’s all about slaying dragons.

Darryl Strawberry's Half-Brother

Some of my Facebook friends may have noticed a post my oldest son made to my page today. It simply said: "Darryl Strawberry's half brother." It was his Christmas gift to me to put a smile on my face.

Yes, of course, there is a story behind that simple post.

It happened one night in the fall of 1990 or '91, as I recall. I was sitting on my bed in my condo in Northern Virginia wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt, writing a letter to my boyfriend du jour, when I heard a man's voice in my living room. I thought it was the television at first. It was around 9 p.m. and time to get my two young sons to bed. So I got up, went into the living room to see my boys chatting with a tall black man with very small ears. Needless to say, I was shocked. Evidently, he had knocked at my door and my sons had opened it and invited him inside. They were chatting away as my mind was racing about how to get this man out of my house before there was an ugly scene that would scar my sons for life.

When the man saw me, he introduced himself and said he was selling magazines to earn money to attend community college in California. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd heard that story before. I quickly purchased a year's subscription to the Village Voice in an attempt to shoo him out the door and give my sons another lecture on not letting strange people inside one's home. I wrote him out a check for said amount and told him I needed to get my sons, then about ages seven and five, or thereabouts, to bed. The man was ever so grateful and began to flatter me, telling me how good I looked in that T-shirt, etc. That is when I knew the trouble was about to begin.

"I'm Daryl Strawberry's half-brother, you know," he announced.

Of course, that piqued my sons' interest being sports fans and got them very excited to have a somewhat celebrity standing in their living room. I don't recall the conversation that ensued too well, all I know is I was frantic to get this man out of my house before my boys were forced to watch the rape of their mother.

"I'd like to take you to see Jungle Fever, if you don't mind," he said.

I told him I didn't think that would be appropriate and finally led him to the door and let my aura, if you will, push him out the door. Then I clamped the deadbolt shut and warned my boys of the dangers of letting strangers into one's home, especially late at night.

The next evening, I got a phone call. Yes, you guessed it. It was from Darryl Strawberry's alleged half-brother. He had gotten my phone number off my check and was pressing me to go see Jungle Fever, a movie about a white woman dating a black man or something to that effect. I have not seen the movie to this day, so I couldn't tell you what it is about really. I informed the young man that what he was doing was unethical and could jeopardize his position with the publications company for which he worked. That was enough to end our conversation and I didn't receive any more calls from him after that.

Ever since then, that evening has become somewhat of an inside joke between my sons and me and Jeff always knows it is good to illicit a laugh from this lonesome heart.

Marshall Chapman Discusses Willie Nelson

Something good happened at the Southern Festival of Books on October 9, 2010. I got to meet someone whose work I’ve long admired, Marshall Chapman. She, to me, is the epitome of a true Southern belle. Stylish in her own right, she never makes a fashion faux pas in denim and pearls. I don’t want to come off as a gushing fan, but, oh well, what can I say? I am a fan.

During her 3 p.m. session at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville, I had the pleasure of being her water girl. She was about three-quarters of the way through her presentation for her new book, They Came to Nashville (Vanderbilt University Press), and her voice was beginning to give a little. “Didn’t anybody think to give us any water up here?” she asked rhetorically. I did a quick bag check, and saw I had an extra bottle so I ran up to the stage and handed it to Jill McCorkle, who had introduced Marshall and was moderating the session. She gave it to Marshall.

Later, when my friend Sue and I were getting our books signed, Marshall asked to whom she should sign my book, which Sue had kindly bought me as a gift. I held up my badge, since I, too, had spoken at an earlier session, and to my surprise she said, “Eileen Sisk. I know that name! You wrote the book on Buck Owens!” I answered in the affirmative and pointed out that the same photographer, Anthony Scarlati, had taken our photographs for our respective book jackets.

To tell you I was thrilled that Marshall Chapman knew who I was would be a gross understatement. I told her I was the one who had taken her the water and she said, “Ah, you know how it is then.” Oh yeah, I know. Nothing like having your mouth get dry or your voice waver and crack when you are supposed to be at your best.

After Sue and I thanked her for her work and signing our books, I wanted to see what Marshall had inscribed in my book. I took it out and this is what it said:

For Eileen –

Thanks for the water!

– Love on!

Marshall Chapman

Here’s a snippet of Marshall in action at her session:

Cinnabooks

When I was a little girl growing up in Las Vegas, my enterprising mother used to get up at 4 a.m. and cook a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, toast, and Sanka for my electrician father. She also would bake a gigantic batch of cinnamon rolls, which she would pack up in a box lined with wax paper, and put in the trunk of her old green Studebaker.

Then she would pile us kids in the backseat and drive downtown to JC Penney, her favorite store. Before we went inside, she would stick a few fresh rolls wrapped in napkins her pocketbook. Then, as soon as the store opened at 9 a.m., we would trail after her like baby ducklings, whereupon we’d go from the first floor to the second floor hitting each department in the store, the divine odor of her warm cinnamon rolls wafting everywhere we went. Inevitably, someone would approach us and say, “What is that wonderful smell?!”

That was all the encouragement my mother needed. She would open her pocketbook and show off her lovely rolls to inquisitive shoppers. “I have a whole trunk full of these outside in my car if you’d like to buy some,” she’d say.

Then she would go outside where the car was parked and sell the entire batch of rolls in about 15 minutes or less, then her purse would be filled with shopping money instead of buns.

The other day I loaded a box of copies of my new book, BUCK OWENS: The Biography, into the back of my car. Now when I am out and someone strikes up a conversation with me, the talk always seems to turn to my book and someone inevitably says, “I need to buy a copy.” That is my opener to say: “I just happen to have some out in my car if you’d like a signed first edition.”

The first time the words came out of my mouth, I realized I am my mother’s daughter.

I Got Groped at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop

Something strange happened to me today at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on Lower Broadway in Nashville.

I had stopped by to drop off posters at both Nashville locations plugging the book-signing for BUCK OWENS: The Biography that I am doing at the Music Valley Drive location at 9 p.m. Saturday, August 7.

Even though it was hotter than holy hell out, I dressed better than I normally would have in the heat because I wanted to make a good first impression. I had on a pair of white slacks, a Bohemian-style diaphanous green blouse, and black sandals that showed off my OPI Holy Pink Pagoda pedicure.

I handed the poster to Larry Mayhew, who was working the counter there. He looked at it and said, “Oh, I just got this book and started reading it! It’s really good! Are you the author?”

I told him I was and noticed that right above his left shoulder was Buck Owens’s Act Naturally boxed CD set by Rhino Records. There Buck was, big as life, looking down on me and at the poster, with a look of either disappointment or disdain.

Larry extended his hand and shook mine. He said, “I am so happy to meet you! I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you to talk to you about something.”

I asked if he had known Buck, and he said no and proceeded to tell me about his idea. While we were talking, I felt a hand grab my right butt cheek and give it a quick pat. I turned and looked over my right shoulder. No one was there. I looked over my left shoulder. No one was there either.

“Did you see anybody behind me?” I asked Larry.

“No,” he said.

“You’re going to think I’m really strange, but I could’ve sworn somebody grabbed my ass just now and patted it.”

Then Larry told me that another woman who had been in the shop recently also had felt someone grab her butt cheek. “Well, you know this place is haunted,” he said.

Then I recalled hearing something about the shop being one of the stops on the haunted Nashville tours they do here every year around Halloween.

“I wonder if it was Buck?” I said, pointing up to boxed CD set. “That certainly would have been something he would do.”

Larry went on to say there have been many strange happenings in the store.

When I got home, I did an Internet search and discovered that the downtown ET Record Shop was once a hospital during the Civil War and that the basement of the building was used as a morgue. Sometimes, if people are discussing an older artist, the CD player comes on at will playing a song by that singer even though there is no disc by the artist in the machine. At other times, there are hot and cold spots in the building. Here's a photo of the shop at 3 a.m. that my friend Larry Garvin, who worked there until recently, sent me. He said he used to store his intruments in the shop but never experienced any paranormal activity there.

It reminded me of a night in 1991 at Zed in Alexandria, Virginia, when a former linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers approached me and said, “I know you don’t know me or anything, but I’m gonna tell you something most guys wouldn’t say to somebody they didn’t know: You have a nice butt.”

Remembering that, I joked, “Well, whoever it was must’ve liked what they saw.”

My Son, the Screenwriter

Meet my oldest son, Jeff Tetreault, aka Jeffy T, who left Tennessee three years ago with nothing but a suitcase and a heart full of dreams. He just made his first screenplay sale in Hollywood to Morgan Creek and is represented by Energy Entertainment and William Morris Endeavor.

My son always has held tight to his dream and is a risk-taker, something that didn't sit well with the officials and some of his professors at his alma mater, Western Kentucky University, where he graduated in 2006 with a double major in English and Sociology. That school did him no favors and tried its best to tell him he was a no-talent failure. I would not recommend it to anyone who dares to color outside the lines.

A couple of years ago, he won first place honors in the Tennessee Screenwriting Competition and a year earlier won honorable mention in the Slamdance Screenwriting Competition. He's been reading and writing ever since he was about two or three.

Anyway, I'm a proud mom for sure and thrilled he did this all by himself. It's kind of like watching him take those first faltering steps at nine months and that first two-wheel bicycle ride at age three.

Rock on, my son, and WKU, eat this:

http://www.deadline.com/2010/06/wme-closing-on-spec-script-sale-trifecta/#more-49159

The Hypocritic Oath

Yesterday, something happened to a friend that regerminated a seed planted in my brain some time ago. In journalism, we are taught to trust no one. Not even our own mother. The point being, check and doublecheck everything because credibility is crucial when reporting the news.

The same holds true in health care. Trust no one. If a doctor tells you something about your health, you'd better damn well check and doublecheck it yourself because it is YOUR life.

When people become doctors, they take the Hippocratic Oath, promising to uphold high standards of medical care, to be compassionate, and so on. I am here to tell you that is simply not the case in health care today. Many physicians are more concerned about making money and covering their asses than they are about helping people. I won't say every doctor is like that, but the ones who are true healers, who genuinely care about the well-being of their patients, are hard to find.

They are out there, you just have to keep looking. More often than not they will be out of network and you will have to pay out of your own pocket or a higher pecentage co-pay to see such a doctor because of the stigma attached to treating, i.e. attacking, Lyme disease and its associated diseases the way it/they need to be.

Doctors are easily bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, insurers, companies that hire them as workers comp physicians, and more. What you have are a class of high-dollar prostitutes who are more concerned about paying off exorbitant school loans or buying a new Mercedes-Benz.

My point is this: If a doctor diagnoses you with one disease and it alarms you, get a second opinion. Don't take one doctor's word for it. Get more tests. Don't just let one X-ray or blood test be the deciding factor. Go to a specialist who knows the disease you have been diagnosed with and see if, in fact, you really have that malady.

By going to the ILADS specialist in California, I discovered that I had had Lyme disease, and quite possibly Bartonella, for ten years. Yes, ten years. See, I got bit by a deer tick in Virginia about six months before I moved to Tennessee. I developed symptoms shortly after moving here and was told by countless doctors countless theories about what was wrong with me. The severe scalp rash I had acquired was brushed off as "folliculitis." The pain in my hands and my forearms and elbows was brushed off as "carpal tunnel syndrome." A workers comp doctor had the audacity to say, "You're a middle-aged woman, get used to it." Other doctors told me I didn't have CT syndrome. Still others said nothing was wrong with me. Still others said I had fibromyalgia. Others suggested I had Lupus. My erythema migrans rash--the classic bull's eye or target rash, was called "poison ivy," and so on.

The fact is, I knew something was wrong years ago. Each day I dragged into work, it was a struggle, but I carried on, because, after all, everything was fine. Nothing was wrong with me. It was all in my head. The negative tests proved it.

Thank God I got bit by six ticks last year and finally got the EM rash from a dog tick. Actually, it was a disseminated EM rash, which meant every organ and tissue of my body had already been infected.

Here you can see a photo of my right leg taken in 2009 with the multiple EM rashes, which were mirror image on the left leg. I also had mirror image EM rashes on either sides of my breasts. A spotted rash on my chest.

A bright red linear rash on my ankle, which turned out to be Bartonella, aka cat scratch fever. I didn't take a photo of it when it was bright read, but you can see the scar it left behind.

After my first 21-day course of doxycycline was completed, the EM rashes returned. Some were even oval.

I even got blisterlike rashes.

At least one internist at St. Thomas Hospital finally called it was it was, Lyme disease, only to back-pedal after an infectious diseases doctor from Vanderbilt told me point-blank, "You can't get Lyme in Middle Tennessee." Another dermatologist at St. Thomas Hospital told me, "We don't even have the tick that carries Lyme disease in Middle Tennessee." So, the internist started calling the rash "erythema multiforme," which is nothing more than an allergic skin reaction.

This year, 2010, I've been bitten by at least five deer ticks. Oh, but I forgot. That alleged dermatologist says we don't have deer ticks in Tennessee!

Thank God for my journalistic training. I trusted none of these poor excuses for doctors. I was forced to go out of network to a Lyme specialist and listed the 57 symptoms I was exhibiting. Thank God, this man knew what to do with me. Thank God he knew that if coinfections were not treated first, the disease would come back. Thank God my sister found that man for me.

My story is not so different from other people who have had Lyme disease and have been misdiagnosed as having MS, rheumatoid arthritis, ALS, Crohn's disease, Parkinson's disease, and more. If left untreated, Lyme will go on to mimic these diseases and more. In fact, I've mentioned this before, one Harvard researcher found that in seven out of ten brains in the Harvard brain bank of deceased Alzheimer's patients that the Lyme bacteria, borrelia burgdorferi, was in those brains. Think of how many Alzheimer's patients actually may have had Lyme disease, which can be treated and eradicated with early and aggressive treatment. But if Lyme is left to its own designs, the consequences can be devastating.

If you are diagnosed with any serious disease, not just Lyme, I urge you all to educate yourselves. Knowledge is power. Don't just take one doctor's word. Seek out a knowledgeable specialist. Research the disease. Get the proper diagnostic tests if there are any available. Don't just take someone's word for it.

Your life depends on it.
 
(Originally posted February 13, 2009, on MySpace).