A Marriage Arranged in Switzerland - #43

With help from Thanksgiving dinner, a missed train, and Krishna

I began writing this memoir on Substack on Thanksgiving Day 2022; the installment you are reading is dated on the Sunday before Thanksgiving 2023. Not a schedule I planned out at the beginning, because I only intended to write about three years, 1992-1994. Then readers convinced me it was unfair to leave them on the cliffhanger of my departure from Wall Street, and the next logical stopping place comes here, the end of 1997, when I settle for a time back into life in Manhattan after three years of what I have variously called a “gap year” or a “pilgrimage without a destination.”

Even more fittingly, members of the family with whom I spent Thanksgiving 1997 have arrived here on Hawaiʻi Island, and will be here through Thanksgiving. As readers who have been with me for all or most of this year of writing will recognize, these kinds of synchronicities have been profoundly significant in my life. In the years about which I have been writing, I began to take them seriously and let them guide major transitions.

I am not sure where this Substack newsletter will go next - I am sure after this week I will not continue linearly with memoir. If you are not already a subscribed reader - and if like what you read - I encourage you to enter your email address below. When you subscribe for free - or pay if you choose - you will get a welcome email with links to the 50-odd previous posts in order. Then you will get new writing in the form of a weekly email. Mahalo for joining me on this journey!

Carman , now my talent management client as well as my friend, was collaborating with a writer on a new musical called Journey to Benares. A synopsis of the story goes like this. The protagonist is a woman in a somewhat toxic relationship with a man who is described only as a narcissistic “producer.” She questions whether their relationship with its demeaning elements is love. Her boyfriend has no time for that conversation. His response is to send her off to his guru in India for answers.

As Shiva, the Hindu deity, sits with his consort Parvati above the stage observing the action, our earnest seeker arrives in India where the guru turns out to be a fraud and all her belongings are stolen. Eventually she finds herself on the banks of the Ganges River, stripped of plans and possessions, alone and unsure of her next steps. Because she has been so sincere in her quest, the gods take pity on her. In the final scene a little boy comes to lead her to a temple, where Shiva and Parvati descend to teach her the true meaning of love.

Several days a week I would sit with Melinda and Carman, listening and offering encouragement and critique as they played with structure and set her words to his music. On the eve of my trip to Switzerland I bought a small statue of a dancing Shiva to reside on Carmanʻs piano and muse them in my absence. And with that I left on one more journey - no longer seeking answers, just traveling for the sake of spending quality time with my friends before I fully settled into my new obligations. Or so I thought.

Statues of Lord Shiva and Parvati in Pune, India.

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Marlies and Prageet had arranged for their long time student Cassandra to pick me up at Zurich airport. She turned out to be a woman about my size, a decade older, with cropped blond hair and vibrant energy to match mine. Her English was excellent, punctuated by frequent laughter, and the days spent in her home in a small village on the lake of Zurich were delightful. The first day she took me to a hot springs spa to splash and steam and sauna off the jet lag. The next day we shopped for vegetables and fondue cheese at the weekly farmers market, afterwards drinking gluhwein at an outdoor cafe with her friends.

Gradually I heard her story. Cassandra had breast cancer. At her initial diagnosis her doctors had given her only a few months to live. Foregoing conventional treatment, she took off on a living and healing journey and was still kicking two years later. One of her early stops had been Maui, and she played Kealiʻi Reichelʻs 1994 album Kawaipunahele as she cooked us dinner and I told her of my adventures with Marlies on Maui earlier that year.

On the morning the nine-day workshop was to begin, Cassandra and I drove into the Bernese Oberland, to a retreat center in the town of Kiental. Marlies and Prageet arrived with Susan, another student whose English was good enough to serve as a translator, and at whose family home in nearby Thun theyʻd been staying. Immediately the real reason for my invitation became clear. We had three or four hours to patch up Marlies and Prageetʻs personal relationship enough that they could hold it together for the next nine days. Hours into facilitating their conversation, that was not proving to be an easy fix.

As the afternoon grew late, only a short time remained before the students would arrive for the opening session. The workshop materials had not even been unpacked from the van, let alone set up in the conference room. I asked for the keys, left Susan to continue the marriage counseling, and drove the van around to the front of the building. A car full of students arrived behind me. As I was pulling out the first large suitcase, heavy with the copper pipes of a full size Stargate structure inside, one of the students rushed over to assist. As he later often told the story in a commentary on my neurotic difficulty in accepting help, I was so focused on the task that I barely acknowledged an attractive man with dark curls and soulful brown eyes making a gentlemanly gesture. So he shrugged his shoulders and went back to grab his own belongings and check in, while I struggled with the rest of the cases alone.

This was my first encounter with The Swiss Guy.

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Marlies and Prageet made it through the Stargate workshop, barely. The students worked hard, and their training was accomplished. Cassandra and I tended to the children and took long hikes to relieve the stress of holding space for what was happening behind the scenes. Some of the attendees spoke good English, and I found time for conversations with them about their lives and what had drawn them to the group meditation experience. In particular, I made friends with a woman from Germany, a medical doctor with a holistic practice, roughly my age, a single mother with a healthy sense of adventure. Monica invited me to change my return flight to depart from Munich so I could meet her daughter and spend some time in a city I remembered fondly from previous visits. I told her I was committed to Thanksgiving dinner with Marlies, Prageet and the girls the day after the workshop ended, but could leave on Friday morning and stay through Sunday night. We checked train schedules, I contacted the airline, and we confirmed the plan.

Thanksgiving 1997. Marlies and Prageet continued in crisis while our host Susan and I cooked a Thanksgiving meal with Swiss touches for the two families - five adults and six children. Friday morning things came to a head. After a heated conversation, Prageet declared I was not a positive influence and forbade me to see the girls in the future - an odd demand, and unclear as to why he thought he had the authority to make it, let alone why it would be helpful to the marital situation. I simply declined his injunction. At this point I was happy to agree to distance myself from him and the Stargate work, but my relationships with the other members of the family were not his business to control. As I prepared to depart on that discordant note, Malu clung to me as if to physically prevent me from leaving for the train station.

My train was minutes from departure when we arrived in Bern. I quickly hugged Marlies and Susan goodbye on the platform. I could not figure out from the ticket where I would change trains. Just ask the conductor, they instructed, waving as I boarded. The conductor punched my ticket, cocked his head at my question, and replied, “no change, no change.” I thought it odd that a single train would take me through Zurich, on towards the border, and then into Germany - but perhaps I had just lucked out. I settled in with my journal and a book, grateful for a five hour ride to process and recover from the intensity of the previous ten days.

Finally the train arrived at St Gallen, the last stop in Switzerland. I looked for the conductor to double check instructions but found no one. I watched as the remaining passengers in my car took their bags and departed. And then I finally heard an announcement. My German was nearly nonexistent, but I understood. The train was headed back to Zurich! I grabbed my suitcase and jumped off moments before the doors closed. There were two railroad employees standing on the platform, and I asked if there was a connecting train to Munich. There was. But it had been a two minute connection time and I had missed it.

OK, I would take the next train. The only problem was, the next train left the next morning. I should please go to the information desk where they could tell me about the hotels across from the train station.

No no no! I was determined to get to Munich that evening. I walked around the St Gallen train station. The rental car agency was already closed. There were no buses until the morning either. I had a phone card so I found a pay phone and called Monica. I explained the situation, insisting there had to be a way to get there and I would still see her later that evening. She laughed at my frustration and naiveté. Unless I planned to hitchhike, she saw no options, but proposed an alternative. On her drive home, sheʻd stopped to visit one of the men from the workshop - in fact, the Swiss Guy who had helped me with the suitcase the first day. Monica explained that he lived in a big farmhouse, somewhere between St Gallen and Zurich. He had two housemates and a spare room that sheʻd been invited to stay in any time. Monica gave me the phone number, insisting I call and explain the situation. She felt sure I could spend the night there and catch the first train in the morning.

I felt less sure. It seemed improbable that this sociable, attractive Swiss Guy in his late 30s would be sitting at home on a Friday night, let alone happy for someone he had barely met and could barely converse with to invite herself to crash at his place. But Monica was quite insistent. I figured I would make the call just to satisfy her, then walk across the street and find a hotel room for the night.

To my surprise, the Swiss Guy answered. He and his roommate were sitting in the kitchen eating raclette and talking about the workshop. His command of English was pretty basic, but with the help of the roommate whose English was quite good, we made a plan. They looked up options on the regional train schedule and instructed me to take a train that would be leaving in a few minutes, traveling back into Switzerland as far as Winterthur. He would pick me up there and get me on the right train to connect with the train to Munich in the morning. They would call Monica and give her the details.

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My monkey mind went a bit wild on the short ride from St Gallen to Winterthur. It had been an upsetting day and I could not make sense of how I had fallen out of the flow. All I wanted was a few days of playtime in one of Europeʻs most fun cities after the intensity of assisting with a workshop in the form of tending to friends and their marriage crisis. Why could I not have that small reward?

Arriving at the Winterthur train station, I searched from one side of the platform to the other, but did not see the Swiss Guy. Had I misunderstood? Had I been stood up? I found a pay phone and called the farmhouse number again. The Roommate answered and said that the Swiss Guy had also called, worried that I had not gotten on the right train. Keep looking. I paced a few more loops.

If Shiva and Parvati were sitting in a corner above the stage, they would have seen a slapstick piece in which two people keep walking into one of the two adjoining rooms between the tracks just as the other one is leaving it. After ten more frustrating minutes, I called the number again. The Roommate sounded relieved. “Just go stand by the Christmas tree and wait,” he instructed. I did. And as if in some predictable romantic comedy a few moments later the Swiss Guy appeared. We fell into each otherʻs arms under the Christmas lights, holding on for a long embrace with a shock of strong, undeniable connection. Whoa. Where did that come from?

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Suddenly shy with one another, we drove back to the farmhouse, where the Roommate was waiting. The three of us toasted with glasses of Freixenet and they offered me a boiled potato topped with aromatic cheese. We laughed together at the story, retelling it again from each perspective. Finally the Swiss Guy offered to give me a tour of the house, grabbing the open bottle from the fridge and carrying our champagne flutes. The roommates were on the ground floor, and the Swiss guy occupied a suite of rooms on the second floor. On the door of his suite was a batik he had picked up on his travels - a life size image of Shiva. As I reached the top of the stairs and stood in front of the image, a shock passed through my body. My mind went momentarily blank. I felt light headed and then began to physically tremble.

Concerned that I was about to faint, the Swiss Guy opened the door and led me to a couch in the sitting room. He brought me a glass of water. I tried to explain that it was not the stress of the dayʻs travels and confusions that had caught up with me. Across the language barrier I managed to convey that there was this musical. A musical about a woman whose journey ends up somewhere other than where she thought she was headed, and when everything falls apart, Shiva appears with his consort Parvati to teach her the meaning of true love. Shiva had just appeared in a farmhouse outside of Zurich and all my senses recognized it as a message.

We talked and talked and then eventually stopped talking. In the morning I called Monica to say I would be spending another 24 hours there. She giggled like a teenager, not at all offended. Then we called Cassandra as a friend and interpreter to meet us for lunch in Rapperswil and help us talk things through. We agreed I would return to Switzerland at Christmas time to meet the Swiss Guyʻs family and figure out our next steps. Meanwhile, I needed to get back to New York for my business commitments, so I would leave for Munich the next day. Which I did - but not before the woman with whom the Swiss Guy was supposed to spend the weekend showed up while we were still drinking coffee at the breakfast table. The part of the story I had not yet heard was that the only reason he was at home Friday night was because heʻd canceled his date, telling her he felt he needed time alone to process the workshop.

The Swiss Guy and I were together for the following seventeen years. I am still not sure whether or not that was meant to happen, but it seemed so at the time. I know the energetic and physical connection and the synchronicities and omens were undeniably strong. I know that there were also issues and red flags that emerged early on and that I chose to ignore - and perhaps that was also foretold in the musical’s story. We often said we had an arranged marriage, although were were not clear who had been the matchmaker. Until I have a better version of the story to tell, one from which I can make meaning, my efforts at memoir will end here.

I am not sure what I am called to write next. Especially since I gave this the title They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. Maybe I will simply drop the last two words. Because for sure They Keep Telling Me I Should Write. I am deeply, profoundly, endlessly grateful for all of you who read and encourage me to keep writing. Feel free to share this. Feel free to let me know what you think of my story, and what you would like to read next! Comments open below!