Like Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, portrayed by Julia Roberts in the movie, I sought a geographical cure for the misery of the breakup of my marriage. As the dumpee rather than the dumpster (guilt-ridden Gilbert), I only got as far as South Florida, a place where many dumped spouses end up. In fact, Palm Beach County is a virtual holding pen for people lets be frank, women who are waiting for spousal support issues to be settled. Since there are very few jobs to be had in this area, between still rising unemployment rates and ubiquitous Ponzi schemes, there is no choice but for many of us to spend mornings and late afternoons reading best-sellers in a chaise longue positioned under an umbrella that needs constant adjustment as the earth circles the sun and the tide goes out and comes back in.
Like Elizabeth Gilbert, I had the experience of the person I knew best in the world suddenly becoming an incomprehensible stranger. I am the type of woman who screams when a curly tail lizard gets too near my foot at an outdoor caf, and bawls at the news that my husband has moved in with a much younger girlfriend after our almost 40 years together. Unlike Elizabeth/Julia, I did not have a James-Franco-handsome young actor/writer, poet-yogi to move in with.
Like Elizabeth Gilbert, I am a writer. In fact I had been a modestly successful travel and spa writer, the envy of, well, everyone. But as my marriage was crumbling behind my back the magazines I wrote for were folding in front of me, some without even paying me for the last article I had written for them. The editors I had built relationships with were being relieved of their duties and became my competition for freelance assignments. Suddenly, in addition to having no life companion, nothing had my name on it.So I left Wisconsin and its Hansel and Gretel forests up north, where everyone but us had cabins, and the very liberal city in which I had lived for 32 years, and headed to the edge of the world. I came to South Florida.I did not need to go to Italy, India, and Bali to be distracted and enticed by pursuits such as carb loading with pasta, learning a new language, praying and chanting, and figuring out how to love myself, thus attracting a monogamous Brazilian (what an anomaly). Delray Beach and Boca Raton are exotic enough for me, having been raised in the Midwest where I never ate a bagel until I was 21. Like Gilbert in Italy, who fell for a language that included mellifluous words like pomodoro (tomato), I love South Florida Jewish culture for giving me words like bobka (which I have taken to using to designate something cute), and Flakowitzs, the name of a restaurant (I like to say the guy was a total Flakowitz). In grocery stores, I am surrounded by French Creole speakers from Haiti and in restaurants by Spanish-speaking patrons from South America. People in my condo courtyard are from Brazil, Paraguay, Paris, England, Michigan, Mexico, Brooklyn, and West Virginia. Like Gilbert, I am being taught a new language via a love of food, by eating with bilingual toddlers in the community area where families grill.
South Florida is also the perfect place for a spiritual awakening. When I first arrived, I had a family member in recovery from drug addiction. Living with the specter of relapse, gave me a reason to exist after my marriage ended. Dubbed the epicenter of the countrys largest and most vibrant recovery community by the New York Times in 2007, it was as easy to find temples in Delray Beach as ashrams in India, although here they catered to followers of 12-step gurus Dr. Bob and Bill W, and devotees of Saint Lois of AlAnon. In addition, I have been exposed to perhaps more yoga studios along Federal Highway 1 than in all of India, having sampled Bikram hot yoga, Vinyassa flow, yoga Nidra, Hatha, Anusara, Thai yogassage, yoga at the beach, yoga on the intracoastal, meditation, chanting, and the opening of my chakras. Its the Love part of Eat, Pray, Love that has me over a barrel of Kosher pickles. First of all, I dont have a bike I can ride past Balis terraced rice paddies with volcanoes on the horizon as I develop confidence in myself, but I have mastered driving on I-95 the most dangerous highway in the country -- north to Palm Beach and south to Miami. My rented condo is set among lush tropical plantings akin to Balis jungle vegetation, however, and I love driving north on A1A and seeing the ornate, even Balinese-style gates to mansions, behind which one can imagine Addison Mizners spider monkeys progeny perched on manicured topiary.
Yet I am not even close to finding the balance that Gilbert was looking for, the four legs wise man Ketut said she must stand on. For me, three of those legs are self-acceptance, surrender, and service; for Gilbert, I think the fourth may have been sex with a hunky Brazilian. The clouds are different here in my new world. I watch them all day and even at night. When I go to the pool to jog in my water shoes, the sky is usually baby blue. Inevitably, the clouds gather steam, building into great thunderheads that are so high they look like they might topple over. In a blink, they have moved on and thinned out to streaks like dissolving jet streams. In the evening they come in stacks of golden honey-topped pink pancakes on giant violet plates. At night, when I step out to wonder what Im doing here, I see a sky filled with silver clouds reflecting the ambient light of South Floridas sleepless divorcees, who are in their air-conditioned condos with all the lights on so that anyone who is lost could find their way home, or maybe so we all can see the way forward. Bio note: Judy Kirkwoods work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler and National Geographic books, as well as in inflight magazines from Deltas Sky to Uniteds Hemispheres.
