A Different Kind of Vow:
Rewriting My Happily Ever After
At thirty-two, Laurie outgrows her sleepy beach town and moves to the epicenter of the anything-goes eighties: Los Angeles. There, she befriends a teenage wizard and a Russian defector. She enrolls in a Hogwarts-style psychic college. She gets a job at a hilltop Hindu convent, where she considers taking her monastic vows. She dates an Indian guru and shares heart-to-heart conversations with a Catholic priest.
But it is only when her home nearly burns to the ground that Laurie finds what she is looking for: her true calling. Reading passages from a cache of three hundred old diaries that were spared by the flames, Laurie locates clues planted in her past and gradually comes to a realization: She must let go of the conventional, “white-picket fence” marital vow she has sought for decades and instead must fashion an entirely different kind of vow for herself.
With this knowledge in hand, Laurie sets about fulfilling her sacred contract. In turn, she experiences for the first time an intense rightness—a sense that this is how her life is meant to be.
Praise
“Reading Laurie Collister’s book is like eating an ice cream cone. Each sentence is like one yummy lick after another.”
–Paula Bernstein, author of the Hannah Kline mystery series
“Laurie Collister’s book is human, kind, empathic, and honest. And she is funny as hell.”
–Rick Draughon, Emmy and WGA award-winning writer, Days of Our Lives
Excerpts
Excerpt from Chapter #3, “Leisure Suit Larry”: Laurie carries on a short telephonic relationship with an obscene phone caller.
A few weeks after our breakfast, I got a cryptic call at 2:30 a.m. Half asleep, I answered the phone. Someone breathed heavily into the receiver, without saying anything.
“Reed, is that you?”
He laughed and hung up. This was before caller ID, so I couldn’t track who’d called. But based on the Leisure Suit Larry incident, I suspected Reed might play such a prank.
The next night, I got a second mysterious call.
“Hi,” the caller said timidly.
Right away I knew it wasn’t Reed.
“Oh, my God, you’re an obscene phone caller, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “How did you get my number?”
“Just dialing randomly.”
“But what do you hope to accomplish?”
He didn’t answer.
Over subsequent late-night calls, I learned that his name was Matt and that he had jet-black hair to his waist. Despite being a high school dropout, he was intelligent and self-reflective.
“I’m nutty, Laurie. And impulsive. And dependent.”
Those words sounded like therapy-speak. Hopefully, he was still seeing a professional.
For the next three months, he called two or three times a week. I’d begun to look forward to our exchanges.
He shared his experiences with women. “Sometimes, when the chemistry is right, good things start to happen in both our lives— jobs, projects, windfalls of some sort. It’s like we’re feeding each other in ways we could never do on our own. That’s how you know a relationship works. It makes you more than who you were.”
I admitted that had rarely, if ever, happened to me.
“You feed me emotionally, Laurie,” he said quietly. “And vice versa.”
What an odd thing for one’s mystery caller to say. But he was right. Matt fed me emotionally. Since he’d started calling, my skin had gotten clearer. I didn’t reach for my Xanax as much. And I felt energized the day after talking to him.
Eventually, though, Matt stopped calling or, in today’s vernacular, he ghosted me. Just as well, I consoled myself. What future did I have with an obscene phone caller? He was simply a mythical creature who’d flown in my window one night to deliver a lesson or two.
Excerpt from Chapter #15, “Love Candle”: While Laurie’s friends resort to magic, she takes a different route to attract a mate
I retreated to my third-floor apartment to regroup. Love for me, I discovered, wasn’t a battlefield so much as a relentless slog. When I lamented to Denise about the sorry state of my romantic affairs, she responded in a surprisingly conventional way: “Finding love is a numbers game.”
“By numbers, what do you mean exactly?”
“Two hundred, 500, 1,000 dates. Whatever it takes.”
“I don’t know if I have it in me to date 500 more Brandons, Dr. Devas, or Purple Persons.”
I turned to other women friends for guidance. Having exhausted all typical means of “putting themselves out there,” several had resorted to magic.
Stacey had written “October 1991” on slips of paper and taped them all over her apartment. “That’s the month and year of my wedding,” she explained.
And when I visited Elaine, she pointed to a corner of her living room. “Kneel,” she ordered. A ten-inch red candle burned on a side table. It was her “cosmic love wish candle, blessed by real monks.”
She asked me to pray that love would come into her life. An adjunct religion professor who ricocheted among four community colleges to make ends meet, Elaine craved stability.
I knelt before the flame. “Please, God, bring Elaine a professor,” I began in a loud whisper. “Tenure track. Sorry, God, adjunct won’t do.” I got back up, thinking I’d done my duty.
“Get back on your knees,” Elaine commanded.
I knelt again. “One more thing, God, I almost forgot, the man must love dogs, especially Blue. That’s Elaine’s 65-pound Samoyed.”
Amazingly, Elaine’s love candle worked. While researching at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, she met a history professor on sabbatical from Indiana State. He was both tenured and a dog lover, as I had requested.
I decided to skip the love candle and re-enter therapy. Not with Barbara, but with Joyce, an MSW near me in Palms. Perhaps she could give me some insight on how to manifest a man.
In our first session, she gave me a long penetrating look, estimating whether I could take what she was about to say. “This is outside my area of expertise,” she began, “but have you ever thought about making your hair more poofy?”
“You think it’s too…”
“Yes, too flat, especially on the sides.”
I ran my fingers through my chin-length bob to give it more body.
“Let’s be honest, Laurie. Men are very visual creatures.”
Still cringing at my diagnosis, I walked home from my appointment. I remembered the first question my mother asked the doctor when she delivered me: “Does she have curly or straight hair?” When the doctor said it was definitely straight, Mom let out a sigh of relief. I had not inherited the wild curly hair she hated so much. Now, it was painfully evident. I needed my mother’s hair, not my father’s fine, pin-straight locks.
At the corner, I passed a CVS. Hell, let’s solve this problem right now. I invested $39 in twelve super jumbo hot rollers with bonus clips. The package promised “voluminous curls” and “high-powered shine.” Maybe the solution to my problems was simpler than I realized. Maybe it all boiled down to something as simple as poof.
Eventually, though, I discovered poof contributed little to my search for a man.
Quickly engaged and wishing to spread her wealth, Elaine bought me my very own love candle for Christmas. I slid the tall red pillar, wrapped in gold tissue paper, deep beneath my bed, like a grenade that had to be kept still lest it detonate.
Finally, as December 31 approached and it came time for New Year’s resolutions, I carefully unwrapped the gift and set it on my altar, next to my collection of seashells and the elephant god Ganesh. I lit the candle and smelled its intense jasmine and sandalwood scent. I tried to pray with the identical intent that I had marshaled in front of Elaine’s cosmic love candle, but I could not muster the same level of focus. My goal was not as clear-cut as a tenure-track professor who loved my dog. I wanted something, to be sure. What it was, though, I did not know.
On New Year’s Eve, I lit three votive candles on my nightstand and climbed into my tall brass bed. I found my diary buried under the down comforter and propped it on my lap. Time was growing short. The new year was minutes away. I needed to come up with an alternative to Elaine’s love candle, some other way to manifest what I wanted. I wrote:
Why rely on God? Or happenstance? Or a stupid therapist? Why not write your ideal romance? Make it happen, girl. I know you can! You can fill it with intrigue and uncertainty, all the while knowing the story ends with your happily ever after.
Excerpt from Chapter #23, “Psychic College”: Laurie attends an introductory class at psychic college.
The psychic institute bore no resemblance to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts school — the dark, scary castle on the banks of Black Lake. Instead, it consisted of two fluorescently lit classrooms, rented off hours from a secondary school in Santa Monica’s commercial district. But the minute I walked in, the rooms felt magical — exceptionally calm, centered, and ebullient.
“You’ve just entered psychic kindergarten,” the teacher announced to the seven students seated in a semicircle in the classroom. As she collected empty chairs and stacked them in the corner, she explained, “We wouldn’t want any vagrant spirits joining us tonight.” I tried to suspend my skepticism.
The teacher, a woman named Carmella in her forties with a thick mane of brown curls, continued, “We live in a vortex of energy and experience energy exchanges all day long. Some people ‘throw’ energy at everyone around them. Needy people often vampirize others’ energy supplies. This school teaches techniques for moving energy to achieve what you want.”
I flinched as the classroom door sprung open. People paraded in, wearing fuzzy bedroom slippers. “This is the Healing II class from next door,” Carmella announced. “They’re here to practice their techniques on you.”
A freckle-faced man in his early twenties, sporting chartreuse fur footwear, introduced himself to me. “I’m Bradley. I’m going to be your healer tonight.” He pulled my chair to a corner of the room. “First, I’ll feel your aura. It’s the energy field roughly three feet around your body. It reflects everything that’s going on in your life.”
He began to circle me, waving his hands as if conducting an orchestra. I clung to my purse for protection. He gently lifted it from my lap and placed it on the floor. “We don’t heal purses,” he said. “That’s in the advanced class.”
I chuckled while Bradley burst into gales of giggles. As he circled me, he loudly yawned and belched. Sensing my concern, he leaned in and whispered, “You have a nice aura — light, fluffy, and smooth.” I suspected this comment was a common pleasantry in the psychic realm.
“Now I’m going to release energy that’s not yours so you can reclaim your own.”
Bradley circled his hands two feet from my body, as if waxing a car. After ten minutes he said goodbye. Grudgingly, I admitted to myself that my loud, seemingly rude healer had affected me. I felt lighter, calmer, even see-through.
Then, just as quickly as they’d entered, the Healing II students departed.
“So how do you feel?” Carmella asked.
“Free! Excited!” my classmates and I exclaimed.
“But why did they constantly burp and yawn and laugh?” I asked.
“Those are techniques for releasing energy,” Carmella explained. “Amusement, especially, is like psychic Drano. It allows you to get rid of heavy, stuck energy, like invalidation, uncertainty, and judgment. Basically, healing is about finding stuck energy, letting it go, then reclaiming your own.”
“And the bedroom slippers?” a classmate wanted to know.
“Oh, it was ‘Fuzzy Slipper Night.’ That’s yet another way to keep the energy in the room light and moving. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to be healers, too, not just of yourself and others, but of all aspects of your life.
Wow, I could sure use that knowledge, especially when it came to healing the pain of my aloneness. But Carmella’s promise seemed too good to be true.