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Chapter 41 - Philosophy, Nudist and Religious

Tamara glanced at Mike; he was following her but holding back a bit and looking down.

“Hey,” she whispered to him. “Those are the gals you were looking at when I met you after the games, I’ll bet.”

He nodded.

“Let’s get a shower and jump in,” she told him as her whole group went over to wash off.

When Tamara, Mike, and Peter started down the pool steps at the shallow end of the pool, Marcia and Theresa glanced idly over at them to see who the new arrivals were.

Tamara could feel him tense with nervousness, so she gently urged him, “Mike, loosen up. They won’t bite. Probably.”

He giggled.

Suddenly she had a thought. I feel some curiosity from Theresa; she’s interested in Mike, it seems. I could “push” a teeny bit of interest to her but that would be a big no-no. I don’t want to interfere with anyone’s feelings that way...

Suddenly a powerful flood of warmth and love flooded over Tamara and then she noticed that Peter had staggered a bit.

What’s with Peter? she wondered. Then she recognized Erzulie Mansur’s signature emotion.

I’ll see about Peter later. And whatever is Erzulie Mansur doing?... she couldn’t want me to interfere? she wondered. The feeling grew greater. She does! And with the sensation of a kiss, the feeling departed.

Tamara gathered a tiny bit of a taste of light green filled with flecks of gold and “pushed” it toward Theresa and Marcia as she called to them, “Hey, guys. Theresa. Someone you should meet.”

Tamara had never used that taste before—a tiny amount of a well-being feeling and a possible romantic interest—but she sensed it would work to make Theresa at least a bit forgiving for any of Mike’s likely clumsiness in introducing himself. Tamara had guessed that it was the first impression of the girls in Mike’s high school, about how he approached and spoke to them, that had earned him their rejection.

Tamara sloshed over to Theresa and Marcia, pulling Mike along with her.

“Hi again, you gals. Theresa and Marcia, this is Mike; Mike, the girls are cousins. Theresa, I’m thinking that you and Mike have something in common.”

Tamara had noticed how Theresa had been watching Mike as he came over to them; the way she was looking at him revealed her interest.

“Really? What do we have in common?” Theresa asked.

“Several things... you live in Frederick; your dad’s at the lab there; and you’ll be a high-school junior there too. Same with Mike here.”

Both Theresa and Mike looked at Tamara in wonder.

“How’d you know that?” Theresa asked, her eyes wide.

“You told me some of it yesterday and I figured out the rest,” Tamara answered. “You’re also new to the area. So’s Mike, but he’s been living in Frederick for two years now, right, Mike?”

“Ahh, yeah. We, er, my family, that is, moved to Frederick from, er, Germany two years ago. I, um, can tell you all about the school if you want, Theresa. But, um, I don’t want to ignore Marcia or have her felt left out...”

Theresa beamed at him, “Oh, that’s so thoughtful, Mike. Yes, I do want to hear about the school. And I’d like to have you meet my brother and Marcia’s brother too. We can get to know each other better.”

Mike nodded happily. “Yeah. That’d be dope. Hey, I wanna thank Tamara first. I was a little shy to come over to meet you but she said she’d introduce us.”

He turned to thank Tamara but she swept him into a big hug and kiss.

“You’ll be fine now,” she whispered in his ear. “Just be yourself.”

Then Tamara was surprised when Theresa came over and hugged her too.

“Thank you for introducing us, Tamara,” she whispered. “I feel like I like him already.”

Tamara and Peter left the kids chattering happily together as the two went to see where the rest of their group had gone.

“Peter, just before we went to introduce Mike to the girls, you gasped and stumbled. You okay now?” she asked.

“Oh, sure. But that was crazy, so strange. It was suddenly like I was flooded with an overwhelming sensation of love—it swamped all of my senses.”

Tamara stopped and stared at him.

“Jeez! You could feel that?”

“Um, yeah? I sure did. You felt it too?”

“Oooh... this is awesome. Peter, you felt one of the lwa, one of the spirits I told you about. That was Erzulie Mansur; she’s the spirit of maternal love and the guardian of children. She came to me to advise me about Mike and you actually felt her presence! That must mean that the lwa have somehow accepted you; usually only people who have been trained and are sensitive to how the lwa can make them feel are able to sense them. Wow, we need to talk about this later.”

“Is this good? I mean, if...”

“No, this is excellent. You’ll see. Now let’s go find the others.”

They found the others sitting in the Pavilion. There was a DJ there, playing light dancing music, and the group was listening, talking, and a few were up dancing.

Peter pointed to Susan, who was waving at them.

“Honey, Susan wants us to go there,” he told her.

Barbara, Terence, Susan, and Susan’s boyfriend David were sitting together, and sitting close by were Janice, JoAnne, and Audrey.

When they got to where Susan was sitting, she told them, “David was telling us a little about himself and he’s got some wild Florida stories. He lived there for a bit. I told him that Tamara’s from Miami. Tamara, you want to hear some of them?”

“Sure,” she answered. “But I only moved there when I was ten years old—so, not a native.”

“Okay,” Susan went on, “So David and I go to Penn State and David’s starting grad school for a doctorate in psychology...”

“And I’ve been wanting to pick his brain,” Barbara laughed. “He’s given me same good advice about choosing schools.”

David responded, “For what it’s worth. I had offers from several grad schools but I stayed with Penn State because of Susan. They do have a really good program there, though, so that was my top choice anyway.”

“So what’s the Florida connection, then?” Tamara asked.

“Mostly my parents, not me as much. They’ve told some wild stories about when they lived there. They grew up in St Louis; after they married, they moved to Florida, spent a few years there and then Dad got a job in Chicago, where I was born. I did spend a fair amount of time in Florida myself while growing up; my aunt and uncle live there and I spent a number of summers there, especially as a teen.”

“Where in Florida? I only know the Miami area,” Tamara said. “But if you wanna talk about Florida weirdness, you’ll need to get in line. Lots of things that happen there are seriously crazy, and that’s from personal experience.”

“Good, then you’ll enjoy some of what my folks told me about when they lived there. As I said, my aunt and uncle live there—Plant City, just outside Tampa—and I spent some summers with them and my cousins as a teen. I also had summer jobs there my first two college years. Let me tell you, in Florida it seemed like everything was slightly out of whack. Obviously it’s a southern state, but there are plenty of people from up north there. There’s even more in the winter but I wasn’t there then. But even though there are lots of transplanted northerners, Florida’s got this weird feeling of a northern attempt at efficiency but a southern resistance to anything approaching it.

“My parents lived down there from 2000 to almost 2003 and told me some of their recollections about that time. You know, the biggest news stories in the whole country from those three years all had something to do with Florida? My folks told me about some of them. Number one was, of course, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The next was Florida’s 2000 presidential election ballot recount. Another was the custody case over a Cuban kid whose mother had drowned trying to get her and her kid to the U.S.—the kid was saved from drowning himself—and the kid’s father in Cuba wanted him back, but his grandparents in Miami wanted custody and the U.S. government got involved. And another big news story was about some packages of anthrax spores that were mailed to lawmakers in D.C., and media outlets in New York and ... yes, Florida too—Boca Raton.

“The fight over that election, they told me, was epic. It brought new terms into the vocabulary. The Florida elections used punch cards. The voting booths had a kind of stylus with a pin that was used to poke out a little perforated square in a ballot card. The little piece that got punched out was called a ‘chad.’ Sometimes, the entire chad didn’t get separated from the card, so all kinds of terms were created to describe it: if three corners got detached, it was ‘hanging’; if two, then ‘swinging’; one was called ‘dimpled’; and if it was just bulging out, it was a ‘pregnant’ chad. There were legal fights over how much of a chad was needed to be punched out to be a valid vote. My folks told me that they even heard of cases where entire boxes of ballot cards didn’t get counted and some got counted twice. That was how that Florida election went. And guess what? Again, in 2002, they had similar election problems.

“The September 11 terrorist attack had some Florida roots too. The terrorists learned to fly those planes in Florida—in a flight school in Venice and a couple other places. And that craziness with the anthrax scare in Boca Raton—you’d figure that there’d be targets in Washington and New York, but why in Florida? My folks told me that they frequently wondered about the sanity of a lot of people there—it was the lack of seasons, they thought, that perhaps having no seasons unpins people from a sense of reality. Or possibly it was the rootlessness of the transplanted people who moved down there. Maybe they lost their sense of balance. There’s an Asian term—feng shui—that basically means a balancing with the natural world. I always felt things were out of balance when I was living there. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the place. Someone upset the state’s feng shui.”

“I’ll go with the out-of-balance idea,” Tamara said. “The whole Stripped in Florida kids’ nudity thing that the state started up came totally out of unbalanced minds. How could they think it would increase revenue? Hey, even the wildlife is unbalanced, my dad tells me. There are reports of giant snakes like Burmese pythons and green anacondas, and giant lizards, and lots more species that don’t belong there. People get illegal pets and let them go when they grow to be too big or dangerous. Dad told me that Florida’s the only place in the world where both crocodiles and alligators live in the same habitat. You don’t wanna skinny-dip in a random pond, either; they warn folks that every pond or lake has a ‘gator or two.”

“Eeww,” said a few girls.

“Hey, Dave,” Audrey chimed in. “I’m with you on that Florida-is-weird idea. I’m an SF buff—science fiction—and one of my fave authors is Piers Anthony. He wrote a series of books about a place he called ‘Xanth.’ I remember reading that he said that Florida helped inspire his idea of Xanth. He claimed that Xanth was real—he said it was as real as the images on a tv or monitor screen are real; the dots of light mean nothing until your mind puts them together to make something. He also claimed that Xanth really is Florida, you just have look at it a different way to see that it is. I love his Xanth stories ‘cause they make fun of Florida in a fantasy way. The magic that the characters do is way off the rails and he writes about these weird creatures that live there. The stories have puns everywhere.

“Also, his books have a map that shows that Xanth looks just like Florida, only the places have weird names, like Okefenokee, which he calls ‘Ogre-Fen-Ogre Fen’; Kissimmee River, his name is ‘Kiss-Me River’; he calls Lake Okeechobee, ‘Lake Ogre-Chobee.’ And there’s Tallahassee. His name for that is ‘Tall Hassle.’ Almost all of his place names are puns on the Florida name.”

“Hey,” David said, “that’s cool. That sounds like fun to read. I’ll get the book titles from you later; I’ll check out those stories.”

The music had been getting louder and Barbara still wanted to speak to David about his graduate program, so they picked up their towels and told the others that they were going to a quiet location to chat but the others could come along too if they wanted. Some did, so Barbara led a little group of six, David and Susan, Peter and Tamara, and Terence and herself, to a small gazebo near the hot tub.

Barbara set off with Tamara and Susan to show the way and, at a distance behind them, Terence was walking with David as they were talking about sports, of course. Barbara turned around to say something to Terence; then she just stopped and stood with her hand at her mouth. Tamara looked around to see what Barbara was looking at, but when Susan glanced back at the scene, she just giggled.

Terence and David were slowly strolling along and their penises were gently swinging, side to side, left to right, like elephants’ trunks do when the animals are browsing as the herd walks slowly along. The side-to-side swinging was almost mesmerizing, but it was funny to see too.

Thoughts were rushing through Tamara’s head at the sight, but the most insistent one was about David. How the hell does he pack all that into his pants? She already knew how Terence did; he was a big guy with tree-trunk thighs and the loose pants he wore hid a lot. David, on the other hand, had a sleek but well-muscled body and his penis truly looked like a third leg.

David saw the two girls looking at him and laughed, reaching out to take Susan’s hand. She was still giggling.

“You guys have studiously been avoiding what truly is the ‘elephant in the room,’” she giggled and then her mirth turned into a belly laugh. “I’ve seen you guys trying to look at him without seeming like you’re looking. Look, okay, Terence is really big. So David’s a little bigger. So?”

“Um, I’d say David was in a class all by himself, Susan,” Barbara said. “Is it terribly rude to ask...”

David laughed and said, “No,” but Susan said, “It is, but since you’re naked too, maybe. Sweetie, go tell them.”

David nodded. “Just so you know. When cocks are soft, they’re affected by temperature a lot—and also when guys are physically active. When it’s warm, like now, it gets longer and vice versa when cold. When I’m running, it tightens up. So measured soft, it’s kind of a guess. Somewhere around nine and a half inches. Don’t ask me about hard, ‘cause I’m not sayin’.”

Tamara was sniggering. “Say, I thought nudists weren’t supposed to notice stuff like that. Not that I don’t appreciate how you and Terence look. So nice. But I much prefer Peter. I adore Peter’s peter.”

They all started to laugh, with David laughing the hardest.

“Tamara,” he said, wiping his eyes, “nudists are simply people who celebrate the nude body and take delight in the beauty of everyone who chooses to shed their clothes. When someone is nude, most of the artificial barriers that separate them from others are gone. Like the kind of clothes they wear and their quality too. Those can be economic or ‘class’ signals which can come between people.

“Body image can be a big hangup with people. Positive, negative, and uncertain body image can be the cause of a lot of psychological problems, as I’ve learned in my studies. But I’ve seen the most positive attitudes about body image among nudists—by and large, they are simply not judgmental about how a fellow nudist looks. Terence, you look like you want to say something.”

“Yeah, Ah do,” he said. “Ah had lots of embarrassin’ times in the locker room in high school with guys funnin’ me and my package. The guys used nicknames for me and my cock and thinkin’ up new ones became the thing t’do. And, shit, the cock scared off the gals, too. They didn’t wanna date me when they felt me down there. How did y’all get by in school?”

David paused for a few seconds, considering his words. “Okay, that’s a fair question and I can see that your size still is an issue for you. Remember I used the term, ‘uncertain’ body image? I’m guessing you’re very proud of your body build—you worked your ass off to get it and you work hard to keep it, right?”

Terence nodded.

“I got by in school because I felt proud of my body, including my dick. True, I did work to develop my muscles, but my dick—and my height—they were all me. I didn’t do anything to get them, they were just me. Yeah, kids looked at me in the locker room. When they did, I just told them something like, ‘Get a good look; it might be big, but it works just the same as yours. I’m proud I got it, but you shouldn’t be envious.’

“So Terence, you’re right, I knew some gals who were afraid of big dicks. But I let my positive body image work for me and what happened was that word got out, in a positive way, that I was hung but modest about it. Some gals were curious; we dated, and they got their curiosity stoked. And no girls were hurt in the stoking of said curiosity,” he finished and the others laughed.

“I saw your self-confidence in action when you were walking around the resort,” Barbara said, indicating his package.

“I guess I do. I love how it feels when it’s free to move around—being captive in underpants isn’t very comfortable,” David remarked. “And I’m sure Terence will attest to that.”

Terence nodded.

“Well, I’m proud of it, maybe even a bit vain, because I like it when people look at it. I like to imagine that they find it sexually appealing. I wish the rest of the world would let people go naked when and where they wanted. Truly, I’d rather not hide it away. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool exhibitionist because I like it when people look at me.”

Tamara was “tasting” David’s emotions as he was speaking and she was impressed at his honesty and directness. But his reference to “sexually appealing” disturbed her a little.

“I was under the impression that nudism wasn’t supposed to be sexual,” she said. “How does wanting to be ‘sexually appealing’ fit into that?”

“Oh, good point, and one where I can show off my psych smarts, such as they are,” David answered, grinning. “Even when clothed, you can’t ignore sex and sex appeal; it’s simply that people are sexual beings. Look at advertising. Fashion design with provocative clothes—for both men and women. Movies. Music groups. Wherever one looks in the textile world, you’ll find appeals to sexuality.

“Now to nudism. We like to say that nudity doesn’t equal sex, but if you believe that, I know about a bridge that might be for sale. Again, people are sexual beings. Social nudism is based on people’s acceptance of the sexuality of their nudity. They accept that lots of people like to look, hell, they like to look too, lots of them. But the appeal to those folks is never exhibitionism or voyeurism—the appeal comes from the incredible joy of feeling the sun, breeze, and water on the bare skin and the wonderful peace and relaxation they get from being one with nature. And since we’re social beings, sharing that experience with others makes it all so much better.

“I’m not saying that sex never happens in nudist resorts. It certainly does. But in family resorts like this, there’s an absolute prohibition against public sexual activity. They won’t allow overt exhibitionism like men walking around with erections or people wearing provocative clothing either. But whatever happens in private, stays private, just like it does in the textile world.”

“While y’all were answering Tamara, Ah had a chance to digest what y’all told me about body image,” Terence said. “Y’all hit the nail on the head with that. Ah should’a let those guys know that Ah owned how my body was built but Ah let their teasin’ get to me. Ah guess Ah got defensive.”

“And probably the gals sensed that about you,” David suggested. “Try to think about any interactions you can recall.”

“Um, well, shit! Goddamn, David. Damn. Hey, Ah vote y’all hang up your shrink’s shingle now. No need for any more school.”

“Thanks, buddy, but I’m more inclined to the research side. I’m going for social or experimental psychology. In fact, my senior thesis was in social psychology.” He chuckled. “It was a bit ... um, controversial, let’s just say.”

Barbara perked up at that. “Ooh? Mine’s gonna be on dissociative states. My advisor already approved the topic. We had to turn in a prospectus by mid-May. What was controversial about yours?”

“The whole study was. I did a social study—partly retrospective. That means that some elements in the study had already happened. The study was to answer the question, ‘Does early sexual activity affect how a student performs in college?’”

“Wow,” Barbara exclaimed and others did too. “You mean they let you do that?”

“It took several meetings but I assured them I had worked out a way to anonymize the data. That was a major hangup but not the only one. Another was the data questionnaire. Then I had to explain why my study was different from many others that asked similar questions. And since this study used human subjects, there’s a committee of faculty that had to go over the entire research protocol to ensure it met privacy and safety standards.”

“Well, obviously they did accept it,” Tamara said. “What did you ask participants?”

“So, first I need to say that the key part was keeping me from knowing the actual identity of the subjects, and the subjects from knowing about the purpose of the research. That’s a so-called ‘double-blind’ method and keeps personal biases out of the results. Each subject was assigned a unique code and the only place where that code and the subject’s name were together was in the registrar’s office. Volunteers could download the questionnaire and drop the completed ones at the registrar’s office. When I got them, I sorted them by different factors, like sex, age of first sexual activity, kinds and frequency of contacts, numbers of partners, ages of partners, whether or not coercion was a factor, whether or not the contacts were with longer-term partners, all kinds of factors like those. The questionnaire also included demographic questions like age, race, economic status, family status like siblings and parents or guardians, housing; questions like those. Their grades were given to me by the registrar’s office using just the subjects’ code. I could only get the GPA, the grade-point average, because they said that more detail could reveal identities.”

“And the result?” Barbara pressed. “Curious minds need to know.”

“So obviously nothing was clear-cut. Whenever people are involved, you find stuff ranging all over the realm of possibility. I figured that I would get results that showed only trends or tendencies and that’s just what happened. I didn’t get to use high-school data, just college, and virtually all of the similar prior studies I could find had looked at high school students only. Not much has been done at the college level. So, I found that in general, the group whose GPAs seemed to be the most adversely affected by early sexual activity were those who were economically disadvantaged, had multiple partners, experienced coercion, and whose first experience was before age fifteen. About what you’d expect.”

“Can y’all publish the results?” Terence asked.

“No, there were too many flaws in the design. I knew they were there; it was a simplistic assumption that any low grades could be uniquely tied to sexual activity. Low grades could have been caused by other than academic reasons, for example, worry over finances or a medical problem. There’s a well known saying in science, it’s ‘correlation does not imply causation,’ and it means that if you observe an association between two events, it’s a fallacy to assume that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between them. Also, I only had 153 subjects, which is way too small a sample for statistical validity. The project was more about my learning about the process of designing a project and executing it—not about any significant results I could obtain.”

“Still, that seems like it was interesting to do,” Barbara ventured.

“For sure,” he answered, then laughed. “Some of those responses, jeez, a twelve-year-old having sex regularly? It’s too bad that I had to destroy the materials after the survey was done—that was one of the conditions for approval. Some of the things people wrote... well, keeping that stuff would be unethical anyway.”

“Say, y’all gonna start the next Masters and Johnson sex study?” Terence chuckled.

“Nope. Not me. There already are people and even organizations doing that kind of work,” David retorted.

“Okay, I’ve had enough with discussing schoolwork now,” Barbara said. “We’ll be back in the grind in a couple of weeks. I never heard how the two of you met, only that Susan was dating a guy steady now.”

“Sure,” Susan said. “We met through my ed psych class; David was a TA and my recitation section leader. I’m getting a bachelor’s in education, with math specialty, to teach in high school and that was a required class.”

“Susan caught my eye right away,” David continued. “She was very outspoken in class. I wanted to get to know her better, but as her TA, that was verboten. So for the spring semester, she switched sections and then we could date. But she made my recitation section very lively that fall.”

“Details. We need details,” Barbara demanded.

Susan laughed. “One of the first topics the class discussed was how poor psychological theories could interfere with effective educational practices. Three guesses what the poster child was for that discussion?”

Everyone shouted, “Program, Program, Naked in School Program!”

“It took you guys three guesses?”

She got a number of middle-finger salutes for that.

“So in all the recitation sections, everyone was asked to share their experiences in the Program and how they thought it adversely affected the teaching and their learning,” Susan went on.

David continued. “Only about half of the people in my section had gone through the Program. Strangely, all of the kids who had been in the Program were just from the Philly area or Pittsburgh area—the PA students, that is.” He pronounced the Pennsylvania term “PA” as “pee-ay.” “We had 32 in the section; eleven from PA were in the Program and five from out of state. None of the kids who went to high school in central PA had been in it—those kids told us that there had been a religious uprising against it, led by the Mennonite, Lutheran, Quaker, and evangelical churches. I remember reading somewhere that James Carville—he’s a political commentator—once said that the state of Pennsylvania is really just Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama stuck in between them. Central PA is extremely conservative.”

“Yeah, sure is,” Susan confirmed. “I live in York and the York and Lancaster counties have a huge population of Anabaptists—Amish and Mennonites, mostly. For years, my high school’s nominally been running the Program but nobody has ever participated. It was about ten years ago when they first started the Program there; it ran for just one term, but then in the spring term, every chosen kid refused, claiming it violated their religious rights. So that spring, no one was in the Program. That was also when two of the churches took my school district to court, got a restraining order, and the state court eventually ruled that the religious kids had to be exempted if they claimed that participating violated their beliefs. From that time on, all the kids in all the area schools suddenly got religion.”

“That’s funny,” Tamara said. “Instant converts. What was the reason the courts did that?”

“Religious freedom,” Susan said. “All of the fundamentalists, the Anabaptist sects in particular, are very Bible-observant and personal modesty is a basic tenet of their beliefs. Boys typically wear plain dark-colored slacks and white long-sleeved shirts and girls wear long plain dresses and cover their arms too. Some even cover their hair. But others, mainly the Mennonites, will dress in more stylish clothes but still, their dress is always quite modest. So even the kids who didn’t attend one of those churches were claiming that they were religious too and opted out.

“In my four years there, not one single kid participated. Every Monday, the office would post a list of names of that week’s Program participants on the main bulletin board, but nobody paid that list any attention. Also, the state stopped trying to do anything about forcing Program participation in my county and over in Lancaster County too. I’m not sure about any of the other counties, but if the state didn’t do anything in our two counties, they wouldn’t try it in others. We did hear about occasional threats the feds made about withholding education money, but that never happened. And now, of course, the Program’s all done with.”

David continued, “Back to the class. When the kids who had been in the Program heard about the others not having to do it, shit, with all their pissing and moaning, their frustration about it, we never got to fully discussing the topic, especially since so few kids had anything important to say about their personal experience. Other class sections had just about the same thing happen. But Susan caught my attention when she told the class that even though she had never been in the Program, she was a nudist, and then she began listing all of the reasons why the ideas behind the Program were psychologically flawed. I thought she made some excellent points. Well, we certainly got off the topic of how we met, but that’s how. In a college class.”

“That connection of Program resistance to religion is really interesting,” Tamara said. “In my school, when they tried to start the Program there, there were manifestations of the spirits that many of us Haitians believe in, and because of the chaos that caused, it never got started...”

Then she had to briefly explain about what happened, using the version she had concocted “for public consumption.”

“... so do you know how those churches actually used religious beliefs to keep the kids out of participating?” she finished.

Susan laughed. “Sure I do. Kids in central PA probably know the Bible better than most kids anywhere else. Because the churches got the legal exemption, all the kids, whether they were members of those churches or not, were claiming that their faith required them to follow biblical precepts, so we kids all got the Bible’s modesty verses down pat and I still remember most of them. The biggie is Adam and Eve, of course. The Bible says that when they learned they were naked, they were embarrassed. That teaches that nakedness is wrong. It actually doesn’t, but that was the argument. Another one was in chapter 16 of Ezekiel, where it says that one of the signs of being a righteous person is covering the naked with clothing. In Nahum, Chapter 3, God says that when one exposes their nakedness, it makes them shameful, filthy, contemptible, and a spectacle. I knew a whole slew of additional verses that I could spout off if my beliefs were challenged. But if you look at those verses carefully, they’re either quoted out of context or misinterpreted, or they’re allegory, metaphor, or mistranslations. Still, it worked—because religious beliefs don’t have to be based on logic.

“The churches gave us non-member kids a tremendous amount of ammunition to back our own religious claims, too. One of the most important cases they used in getting the court to agree to require religious exemptions was a big Supreme Court case out of Wisconsin which involved the Amish and that state’s mandate that their kids be required to attend public schools. The court agreed with the Amish that their traditional way of life wasn’t just a matter of personal preference, it was driven by the deeply held religious convictions of the entire community and was an intimate part of their daily life. So, in the Pennsylvania court cases, the courts held that a personal, deeply held religious belief in modesty must be allowed as an exemption from being forced to be in the Program. I’m really grateful for how the churches used the courts to stop the government’s interference with their members’ personal beliefs—and ours too. They got the Program effectively shut down in our area. Oops, sorry for the lecture, but talking about that Program shit just winds me up.”

“Well, I for one enjoyed the lesson,” Tamara said. “I’m learning all about how kids from everywhere in the country were able to stop it. The four of us...” she indicated Peter, Terence, and Barbara, “know someone who was in Alaska and got it stopped at her school. I told you about my school, what happened there. And I read on line about how kids at lots of other schools managed to escape doing it. Your story might be the best one, though, because the resistance was driven by religious faith. I’m all for that. I don’t care which faith you practice; they’re all important.”

It was getting late now, so the group decided to head back to the cabins for the night. When they got there and after their evening washup, Tamara and Peter went into their room.

“Peter, I’ve been thinking about your visit from Erzulie Mansur. In our faith, the lwa only appear to us in the context of a worship service, but a lot of priests and priestesses are trained to be sensitive to the spirits’ presence. I’m not trained, but somehow I’ve become a spiritual focus and the lwa sometimes will approach me. So tell me, when you felt that love flow over you, did it just suddenly appear or did it build up? You remember?”

“Hum. Now that you mention that, let’s see ... it was like a rushing sensation, almost like a big wave approaching and washing over me. Damn—it came from you, Tamara! Yeah, I was watching you looking intently at those girls and suddenly, bang! This wave kinda flowed from you and smacked right into me.”

“Oh, wow; that’s amazing, Peter; I think that was your own empathy that drew Erzulie Mansur from myself to also wrap you in her love. She’s a way distant ancestor of mine, from thousands of years ago, my mother’s family descended from her. That’s a story for another time. The point is, that it looks like the spirits—at least Erzulie—have accepted you as they have me. She doesn’t speak in the usual sense, but she does leave impressions of a message. After she left, did you have any thoughts that weren’t there before?”

“Damn, Tamara. This is crazy; it’s deep shit. Yeah. It was a sudden desire to be a matchmaker, but I have no idea what or how or who that was about.”

Tamara clapped her hands with delight. “Perfect. What happened is that Erzulie’s visit was about Mike and Theresa. I sensed that there was chemistry there; I wanted to help, but I’ll never use unethical methods and my interfering would be unethical. Erzulie came to tell me to do it, to push them together a bit, because there’s an attraction between them. And you felt Erzulie’s message too. That’s awesome. I’m gonna work with you and see just how sensitive you are. My dad’s extremely sensitive—he’s had no training, but he is the son of a priestess, and one of the lwa ‘adopted’ him years ago and guided him ever since. Dad only recently learned about that. So, Peter, it looks like your superpowers may actually be useful. Now come here, I need a kiss and a snuggle.”

The two of them wrapped themselves up in a passionate embrace as they kissed for several minutes, but after the activities of a full day, Tamara drifted off to sleep in Peter’s arms. He was tired too and closed his eyes, thinking about nothing in particular. Except that tomorrow would be a busy day.

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