TABLE TALK

Do you think less people would become HIV positive if it weren't such a secretive illness? Discuss in Table Talk.

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ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY CYNTHIA ROMANOV | In the months immediately after I filed for divorce from my husband of 27 years, I was possessed of the strange conviction that I was going to have an affair with Peter Coyote. We'd never met, but there was enough of a tangential connection to prevent dismissing this notion as completely deranged: Peter Coyote is the friend of a man I'll call Patrick, who was briefly friends with my closest friend, whom I'll call Alexandra.

I vaguely remembered seeing Coyote in "ET" and "Jagged Edge": tall and dark, terrific voice. Then one night, searching the Internet for information about Allen Ginsburg, I stumbled upon some pre-publication chapters posted from Coyote's (as I learned he was called) loopy, psychedelic-soaked memoir of his days as a capital-H Hippie, a high-profile member of the legendary Diggers and performer in the original San Francisco Mime Troupe. These chapters did not break any new ground in the gray-haired ponytail memoir genre. But they were, for me, incredibly evocative of the era, and delving into them was akin to experiencing an acid flashback.

I read them straight through, amazed at the power of the memories they commanded. Revisiting the era's heady dangers and pleasures -- the giddy sense of infinite possibility, the seeming surety of social and political revolution, the electric charge of ingested psychotropic substances -- I also revisited my own youth, remembering where I had come from, what conscious and unconscious compromises I had made as I grew up and bore children, what I had gained and lost. And recalling the artless lasciviousness of the times also brought into high relief my own muted sexuality, shaped by a long marriage to a man whose enthusiastic midlife plunge into the gay community surprised no one.

The timing was exactly right. Coyote's unbuttoned romp through the fields of our common youth made me remember who I was before I was the wrung-out wife of a man whose midlife crises left a bankrupt family in its wake, and in doing so made me aware of who I might be after I was a wife no longer. Emerging from the trip stunned and a little disoriented, I bonded, gratefully, to my guide. I felt I knew him. Then I realized, hey, I could know him.

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