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Within minutes of changing the ring tone on my cellphone to Native American bone flute,
the phone rang and it was the only Native American woman I ever knew intimately.
Coincidence? Hardly: this was divine intervention.
It was the first reward for traveling two hundred miles just to show off a piece of real estate.
We knew each other at a time when intimacy and longevity were mutually exclusive.
Oobetah’s last name may have been remembered for a week but it was almost long enough
to be a short story.
We met in the previous millennium when Jimmy Carter was president.
The intimacy lasted for all of one evening.
Her dark sultry voice, however, has been easy to recall whenever I am walking on the beach
under a misty full moon.
I changed the ringtone because I had a Monday morning drive from my Piscataway New Jersey
real estate office to Southampton New York.
For the occasion, I purchased a 5th Generation Technology Motorola H700 Bluetooth Headset.
At least a half-dozen clients were interested in a waterfront property I was showing
all the way out on the eastern end of Long Island.
The seller was a New Jersey Council woman.
Six interested clients but the first phone call–while exiting my home state–was from someone
knowledgeable about prime Long Island real estate pre-dating generational technology.
Bluetooth didn’t even have baby teeth when this white boy met that Indian girl.
“Oobetah! What a delight to hear your voice. How are you?”
“I am not doing good today but I feel slightly better because you addressed me by my birth name.
However, please call me Cindy, as in Cindy Topper.
“Paul, we met on the dance floor of the Terpsichorean TeePee. The year was 1977 and I was with
two of my cousins. You met a trio of Webeno Cherokees whose tribe sold the the disco property
to a Riverhead real estate developer. Unfortunately, that transaction did not prevent my cousins
from spending the night in a drunk tank.
“I have so many cousins that I can’t recall which two crazy ones you met but their names
might as well have been Cliche and Clichina. We were Native Americans
whose spiritual beliefs were diametrically opposite that of ‘naturalized’ Americans
who migrated from Europe.
"Some of us went so far as to call ourselves NON-Americans. But I am a classic example
of a person who, instead of fighting the American way of life, joined it.”
“Oobetah–I mean Cindy–is that why you are not doing good today?”
“Yes. I live in a gated Port Jefferson community and our Jacuzzi needs a new motor.
Yesterday, my granddaughter’s team lost the Suffolk County Soccer League championship
by the disgusting score of 8 to 0. What an embarrassment to my daughter and son-in-law!
They lost a thousand dollar bet. The child was cut-off from iPod privileges for a month.
"My husband’s Mercedes was totaled by a Budweiser truck. He needed my car to get to work.
So I was sitting on the patio with the Blackberry surfing wherever the whim blew when I found
your phone number on whitepages.com.”
“Cindy, what I best remember about that night at the Terpsichorean TeePee
was that you taught me the moondance.”
“The Moondance! I knew there was a good reason why I called you. Uhhh, hold the line. Honey?”
“Are you calling me Honey?”
“No, Paul. Ralph is my honey. He just walked in the door. We’ve been married thirty-seven years.”
“OK, I’ll hold the line.”
I ended up holding the line for twelve minutes, a painless thing to do with a Bluetooth headset.
In Monday morning rush hour traffic, that was barely enough time to make it
through the Lincoln Tunnel.
“I’m back, sorry. I lied. Everything is fine. Life is wonderful.
I knew I had a good reason for calling you.”
“What happened?”
“Ralph and I just did the moondance.”
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Footnote
MOONDANCERS is the copyrighted property of the Lewis Carroll School of Logic but...
it behooves me to connect you to a classic song by Van Morrison.
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