First Love With A Fugitive

If you follow this, or any other, blog, you know that Blogger has been down for the better part of the last couple of days.  It's good to be back!


I've been very busy, as the semester is nearing its end.  It's that time of year when pieces of paper are like the brooms in Fantasia.  And I'm like the Sorcerer's Apprentice:  Every time I turn around, those papers multiply.


It's strange:  I've been sleep-deprived, yet people have been telling me I look "really good."  Hmm...Maybe the world really likes tired women!  I know that some men, anyway, are turned on by us!


Speaking of men and the women who turn them on:  When I got home tonight, I turned on the TV and caught part of Dateline.  Tonight's segment dealt with one Dr. Mark Weinberger, who defrauded patients (one of whom died as a result of his cavalier treatment) as well as Medicaid and, after dumping his wife, fled to the Italian Alpine town of Courmayeur.  


What's amazing is that he lived as conspicuously as he did, and was as careless about such things as his dealings with his rental agent, and went for as long as he did without getting caught.  And, while there, he fell in love (if someone like him is capable of love) with a clerk in a local store named Monica who, as it turns out, is transsexual.


He used a fake name and invented a past for himself--or, beyond a certain point, simply wouldn't talk about his past anymore.  Still, the clerk was charmed by her exotic American paramour--at least until she found out that he was on the lam.  In a rather nice twist of fate, she and his ex-wife have become Facebook pals.


What particularly intrigued me about that part of the story, though, was that he was Monica's first lover in her life as a woman.  In that sense, her story parallels mine, and that of some other transwomen I know.  To anyone else, those first loves in our new lives seem almost "too good to be true":  they're richer, more handsome, smarter or in some other way more than we imagined our first loves would be.  And we're all too ready to swallow their bait whole because, for many of us, that first new love validates who we are and what we want to be.  And that love, or whatever you want to call it, gives us a sense of security at a time in which, as happy as we are about finally living the lives we envisioned for ourselves, we are still very, very vulnerable.


So, as much as Dr. Weinberger deserves to be punished for the lives he ruined (or, in one case, ended altogether) with unnecessary or botched surgery, I have a particular ire over the way he, and people like him, manipulate other people through their vulnerabilities:  Something like that happened to me, too.