Tami took finding change on the road during her runs to be a sign from the angels that enlightenment’s red carpet unfurled perfectly, merely two steps ahead.  She would tell me, hopping up and down in her Victoria’s Secret Outerwear gauze jumpsuit 15 years too young for her, ‘you are being given this experience to go with making up a creativity workshop!’ She’d continue to clang her bangles excitedly about how I was going to be famous for creativity workshops, like Suzanne Somers with her exercise equipment.

Spiritual mentor, personal cheerleader, dependable friend, I came to adore Tami’s ludicrous veneer. Her clothing is Barbie’s in human size, stitched and rouched in China, and shipped in crunchy, clear plastic bags, to low-brow sensual wear retailers, clothiers to non-Italian slutty cousins by marriage.  Her spiritual side favored the Care Bear aesthetic, and she presented me, as mementos of our truly ecstatic spiritual journeys to higher realms, with apple scented candles and Precious Moments inspirational posters. They enraged me, and I told her so. She said I wouldn’t think so when I loved myself more.  Now I wish I hadn’t conveniently lost them one by one over the seven moves hence.

Tami met C, a hulking, thick-eyelashed, retired Jersey Homicide Chief, on a cross country Amtrak trip some months after I came to live with her on the south end of Louisville. They were both on spiritual quests, both drawn, from New Jersey and Kentucky, to the train. They met in the Midwest, and were shacked up before the Rockies in a sleeping compartment with a louvered bathroom door.  I had a lot of respect for C, plus I was a little scared of him the way it goes with giant cops.  He drove me around South Jersey one night in his pearl opalescent Caddy, pointing with his fat Freemason pinky ring left and right over the dashboard like a metronome, “there was a homicide here, and another one right there, and back under there…”

Right after the train trip, Tami moved to Jersey, and then they retired to Florida where she became whatever an esthetician is.  It wasn’t so bad to be commanded to get a pedicure at a real Florida salon, compliments of the Chief.  I see her jauntily 63 by now, her arching acrylic nails shimmering orange like car paint, with tiny silver flowers in a diagonal line across each one. She has covered her very nice skin with fake-tanning foundation, and painted upon it a face almost as bright as her own. Her T-shirt, tight and V-neck over her second husband’s insistent gifts, reads in swirly cursive, “You are BEAUTIFUL”

When I was living with Tami we were both reading Course in Miracles .  We read at night in our separate bedrooms, me on my futon with my makeshift stack of books altar, and she in her purple hydrangea themed ruffle covers and dusters, swags, settees, high up on her four poster double bed ladies chamber. Reading ACIM at night, she would holler, “oh my GOD” several times a week.  Sometimes followed by an actual bloodcurdling scream.

‘Tami!’ I trotted down the hall pulling the one word sign I was recently given, back through time, past the powder room with the Welcome Home lacy hand towel and the mall scented Yankee Candle burning, ‘Tami, check this out’ I held up the long board with the long word ‘equanimity’