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A bunch of synchros unfolded Tuesday morning, not all good, but some very strange. The day started when I read an article on the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel about how the police have started using a new tool called ‘SmartWater CSI’ to nab thieves. They left a bait car unlocked with a package visible. When a thief showed up and opened the door, he touched the package and his hand was sprayed with a small amount of the chemical-laced water that leaves a stain visible only under ultra-violet light. The article included photos from a video taken when the thief opened the door.

I didn’t have time to ponder how practical this watery crime-busting tool would be, because I was in a hurry to meet a friend for an off-road bike ride. I went outside and – synchronicity – I found that MY car had been burglarized. I’d forgotten to lock it last night and someone had opened the glove box and the center console, rummaged around, and made off with the garage door opener. I couldn’t help wondering how ‘SmartWater CSI’ would help me find the person who stole the opener. Not at all that I could see.

I left our 111-pound dog Noah to watch the house, and headed out to the trail for an abbreviated ride. Trish and I had a radio show coming up  mid-morning, so one lap through the woods would be all.

I rushed home and arrived half an hour ahead of time. The radio show was scheduled with Martin Willis, host of PodcastUFO and we would talk about our book, Aliens in the Backyard. We’d already had a Mercury retrograde experience with Martin. We’d thought the interview was scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m., but apparently it was a misunderstanding. When Martin didn’t call, we went about our business. I sent him an e-mail, and he apologized for the confusion and set up the interview for the following morning.

So 10 a.m. came around and again no Martin. I checked e-mail and saw a message from him labeled CANCELLATION. Now here is where it gets a bit strange. This was the message he left.

Dear Rob & Trish,

I listened to an interview this morning with you.  I have decided that I do not want to go in the direction that you two go in. I am very sorry to have wasted all your time.  Martin

Of course, we found that puzzling. What direction are we going that he doesn’t like? we wondered. We thought maybe he’s someone who thinks the aliens are here to save us from ourselves, good guys ready to help whenever we recognize they’re here and waiting.  Aliens in the Backyard takes a more cautious approach that suggests  some aliens might be helpful, others neutral, and still others committed to enslaving or eliminating us. A complicated situation, at best.

I wrote Martin back and asked him to explain what he meant. It gets stranger. Here is what he said:

I feel bad, but I am trying to stay away from the alien thing now. I am getting a lot of flack and losing people every time I go there.  Martin

Um, Martin, hello, your podcast is about UFOs. How do you separate aliens from that topic? I wrote back something to that affect and suggested that maybe he should’ve taken note of the title of our book, if not read it. I haven’t heard any more from him.

I noticed that Martin’s website features old stories of UFO sightings from long ago. Sort of a historical tribute to ufology. One about a Maury Island sighting caught my attention, since we’d just written a post about a UFO sighting in Maury county, Tennessee. We also found out that Martin just started his PodcastUFO in May and apparently is still working out the kinks, so to speak. Apparently, he needs to add a sign on his site saying: NO ALIENS ALLOWED.

Ah, Mercury retrograde meets the aliens.

Addendum: Since the interview was cancelled, we got the garage door people out to put in a new code on our opener. Our next door neighbors were also hit and they lost two garage door openers. They called the cops and sent them our way for more Mercury retrograde nonsense…but I won’t go into that.

Mercury turns direct on July 20.

Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror”

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A doppelganger could be that image of the girl in the mirror. It’s usually defined as a ghostly double of a living person. The idea is found in mythology, folklore,  throughout various cultures, and has been used in popular culture in movies, novels,  and TV shows. Many notable individuals have seen them – the 16^th century poet John Donne,  the 18^th century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, another 18th century poet, Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States, Queen Elizabeth I, and the French novelist and short story writer, Guy de Maupassant.

 It’s interesting that Donne, Goethe, and Shelley were all poets. It suggests that their imaginations were well-developed and that perhaps they were deeply attuned to other realms and dimensions. Donne was in Paris when he had his doppelganger experience – but it was of his wife, who appeared holding a baby. At about this same time, she was giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Shelley’s encounter happened in Italy, where his phantom self pointed at the Mediterranean Sea. Not long afterward, Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean. He was just 29.

The encounters  both Donne and Shelley experienced were certainly precognitive – the foretelling of a future event. For both of these men, that future event spelled tragedy. For Goethe, the experience was simply deeply puzzling. It happened while he was riding on the  road to Drusenheim, a city in northeast France.  Riding toward him was his exact double, who wore a gray suit trimmed in gold. Eight years later, Goethe was traveling on the same road, but in the opposite direction. He realized he was wearing the same gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight years earlier. So even Goethe’s encounter  was precognitive. Can a doppelganger, then, be some sort of holographic projection from the future self? Perhaps.

Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, along with physicist David Bohm, was one of the early pioneers of the theory that we live in a holographic universe. Or, as Michael Talbott so aptly expressed it in his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, “…there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it – from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons – are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

 And if that’s the case, if we’re living in a holographic universe, then synchronicity may be one of our most direct experiences with this deeper reality. We can reach this place “beyond time and space” in dreams, during meditation, intense physical activity/competition,  heightened creative periods, during NDEs, and through other kinds of altered states. But synchronicity may be the most easily accessible conscious experience we have of this deeper reality. If so, it behooves us to pay attention.

 In an interview in 1979 in Psychology Today, Pribram  noted that it isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong. “…it isn’t that there aren’t objects  out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”

Doppelgangers – and synchronicities – may also be projections from probable realities. In the early 1960s, author and mystic Jane Roberts (The Seth Material) and her husband, Robert Butts, began experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Jane’s research into ESP. It quickly became apparent to them that the material/information that came from the Ouija entity – Seth- was profound. Not long afterward, they stopped using the Ouija board and Jane began channeling Seth and Rob started transcribing these sessions. At some point between then and when they began writing the first book- The Seth Material – Jane and Rob took a break one night to go dancing.

During that evening, Jane suddenly spotted a dancing couple who looked so similar to herself and Rob that she drew her husband’s attention to the couple.  They were heavier than either Jane or Rob, didn’t look happy, had a kind of grimness about them that disturbed her. She later realized the man and woman were probable versions of herself  and Rob, the version they might have become if they  hadn’t pursued the unknown path that led them to Seth.

What else lies in this deeper reality? I suspect there are gems we haven’t discovered, truths we haven’t uncovered,  and places we haven’t even imagined. Yet.

 This evening, we re-connected with Jeri and Steve, a couple we knew when our kids were young. They lived in our former neighborhood and Megan and their oldest son, Kevin, used to play together. They thought we had moved to Asheville, and didn’t realize that for the last 17 years, Jeri has been in our area a couple of times a week to buy hay and feed for the three horses she and Steve now own.

Their kids, like Megan, are adults now, and they are dealing with aging parents. There are some eerie parallels here. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have figured prominently into their parents’ lives, just as they did in the lives of my parents. Steve’s mother and Jeri’s father passed away recently and whenever these kinds of big transitions happen in our lives, synchronicity is in there somewhere. And that’s how it was for them.

Steve’s mother, Jeri, and her kids always had this thing about the Good Year blimp. They would see it, exclaimed  about how cool it was, talked about riding on it. The blimp was one of those connections in the family. Like an inside joke.

The Good Year blimp is a staple in the South Florida skies. It hums along the coast and sometimes drifts inland over the Everglades. Anyone who has lived here for five seconds, has seen it. You invariably wonder how something this huge is airborne, think of the Hindenburg, and wonder how you can hop on board for a ride.

When Steve’s mother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s,  in an assisted living facility, they all took turns visiting her.  Steve and Jeri left their home one morning with their daughter, Nicki, to drive her to the facility for a visit with her grandmother.  Jeri noticed that the Good Year blimp seemed to be  following them. “It followed us from our neighborhood, to a Chinese restaurant, and then to the facility.”

The blimp was still behind them when they dropped Nicki at the facility, and then Jeri and Steve  headed out to run some errands. The blimp was still following them. At some point in this errand run,  Jeri got a call from the facility that Steve’s mother had just died. Jeri got off the phone. “We need to turn around,” she said. “Your mom has just passed on.”

As Steve made a quick U-turn, so did the blimp. And that was when Jeri clearly saw the message on the other side of the huge dirigible: www.alzheimersassociation.com,  the very disease Steve’s mother had. “And because the blimp was such a big deal for all of us, I knew, I just knew, it was Steve’s mother saying good-bye.”

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Synchros like this one are so powerful they leave an indelible impression. I wonder at the orchestration of all it. Are there invisible gnomes who move  pieces around on some  cosmic chessboard? How’s this kind of stuff happen, anyway?

Jeri says the blimp followed them – but perhaps it was simply following the road they were on.  Even so, why did it make that U-turn at the precise moment they did, just after they’d heard Steve’s mother had passed on, enabling Jeri to see the message on the other side? Alzheimer’s.  It could just as easily have read breast cancer or diabetes or, for that matter, google. But it didn’t read any of those things.

Our loved ones who have passed on use anything they can to communicate with us.

 Years ago, Reader’s Digest published a book called Mysteries of the Unexplained.  It’s one of the best collections of stories and anecdotes about all the stuff that interests me. I page through it from time to time and usually find some small treasure that I haven’t read before.  The story about this dollar bill is one such story.

The dollar bill pictured above was issued in Dallas just two weeks before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in that city, thus its name. Dallas was and is the location of the 11^th of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank districts. The bill has the letter K to the left of Washington’s image,  which is the 11^th letter of the alphabet.

In addition, you’ll see the #11 in each corner of the bill.  The serial number K23456789A begins with a K and ends with an A – Kennedy Assassination.

Eleven also stands for November, the 11^th month of the year, two 11s equal 22, the date he was killed, and the series number is 1963, the year of the assassination.

What are the odds? It’s like the DaVinci Code of dollar bills.

If you’ve read this post, see the UPDATE at the end about our interview with Whitley Strieber for Dreamland.

This shaky photo was taken with a cell phone, in rural Tennessee, at about 4 a.m. on June 23, by one of the abductees we wrote about in Aliens in the Backyard. He sent it to his mother, Connie Cannon, who was one of the four main experiencers featured in the book. He also called her later that morning and told her what had happened. Here is what he said…

“He told me that he sat up in the bed about 3:50 a.m. upon hearing what he described as a ‘squealing’ in his ears. He decided to go outside, (said he felt “pulled” to do that), and was stunned by what was in the sky. He went dashing back into his house and grabbed his cell phone, afraid that if he took the time to get his good camera out of its case, the object would be gone by the time he got back outside. He yelled at his wife to wake up, but she didn’t move.”

As soon as he was outside, the squealing in his ears stopped. He saw a V-shaped series of very bright, large lights in the night sky. He snapped several photos and trailed the object as it moved slowly away. He stopped as he came to a nearby ridge that overlooked an old graveyard. That’s when he saw a “straight red line,” like a laser, coming out of the object, and shining on one of the gravestones.

Connie’s son, John, described the  object as completely silent, just like the surrounding   landscape. “He was terrified, not so much by the craft as that red beam. He said it reminded him of the lasers that snipers use on their rifles when pinpointing a target in their sights.” He took several photos, but the red beam didn’t show up.

“He told me there was absolute silence there….no typical night noises that are heard in the South….no night birds, no tree frogs, no crickets, no katydids, nothing. Just utter silence, and that spooked him even more because the object was moving slowly across overhead and making NO sound.”

The flying lights took about fifteen minutes to move out of his sight. He went back in the house and fell instantly asleep. His wife hadn’t awakened.

“I have a sense he was abducted…..he IS an abductee…..and had just been returned to his bed when the “squealing” was happening inside his head and he was pulled outside to see the craft.

The next day, Connie’s son went to the cemetery to locate the grave the object had targeted. Here’s the grave. Notice the Masonic symbol in the center of the grave. It’s interesting how the lower part of it resemble the V-shape of the light in the photo.

It should be noted that we sent this photo to Whitley Strieber and from there it was examined by a photo expert, who said he thought it looked like what one might see when a time-lapse photo of the moon is taken with a hand-held camera. Connie notes, though, that the cell phone camera is automatic and the exposure time can’t be changed. She also said that when he first went outside,  he thought he was looking at the glowing full moon until the object moved and the V-shaped lights became noticeable. He also said the moon was visible in another part of the sky.

Interestingly, Maury County, Tennessee has recently been the site of other UFO sightings  and also some other unusual incidents. On Dec. 26, 2012, 17 silent orange orbs floated over the county, according to this report. That report evoked another on from May 16 of this year that reportedly involved a military helicopter and a plane chasing an orb in the county.

Here is what was reported by Michele Hood of Spring Hill, TN.

“We just saw the EXACT same thing in Spring Hill, TN – a military helicopter tailing an orange orb followed by a really, really illuminated military cargo plane coming from the west. The helicopter was booking but couldn’t seem to catch up with the orb. Also, there was a stalled engine sound during the chase – like nothing any of the four adults watching had ever seen. We get a lot of weird sky activity out here in rural Maury County – saw a strange orange orb in the western sky around dusk just last night that stayed stationary, flashed bright.”

We also found a case reported by BBC News in 2009 that sounded eerily similar to John’s experience. The article was headlined…UFO ‘fired laser’ over cemetery,’ and included reference to a high-pitched noise ‘like cats wailing.’ The sub-heading said: “A UFO was seen hovering over a Cheshire cemetery before firing laser beams, according to a police log released by the government. The case dates back to 1996 and was released as part of a 3-year project to release UFO files by the Ministry of Defence and the National Archives.

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So, if we take John’s report at face value that he is telling us what he saw, then the question  is: What is the connection between aliens and the dead? Is there a connection? Ufologists tend to back away from this corner of the UFO phenomena just as ghost hunters typically don’t want to hear about any connection between the dead (i.e. ghosts) and aliens. It’s like two sub-cultures that want to preserve their realms and keep things neat and tidy. Ghosts and graveyards on the one hand, aliens and UFOs, on the other.

But let’s expand the possibilities for a moment and see what connections could exist. Maybe the aliens – or some of them – are not from this dimension. Let’s also say the dead are not dead, but exist in another dimension. Hence, the aliens, who have access to them, don’t see them as dead.

But why would UFOs hang around graveyards? Unfortunately, when the idea of aliens and the dead come together, many people tend to think of darkness, evil, Satanic rites, vampires, zombies, etc….Maybe to the aliens, graveyards are something else altogether. Maybe, because of the human after-life traffic, they are portals between dimensions, an access point to reach our world.

ADDENDUM: Trish and I, along with Connie Cannon, will be interviewed this afternoon by Whitley Streiber on his Dreamland radio show about this case. It will be recorded and we’ll let you know when the show will be broadcast.

UPDATE: We had a very interesting and unusual Dreamland show – our third. Connie was fantastic and carefully explained her son’s experience. We discussed the possible meaning of UFOs and their connection with graveyards. Connie also talked about her father’s unusual death, and we got into Masonic links and numerology. The show will be available next weekend, July 12 or 13.

What was really startling was the ‘sideshow’ going on. First, even before we started, there was an unusual and persistent noise in the studio that Whitley said sounded like a truck. He was baffled because the studio is typically very quiet. Then, during the interview, we were disrupted on a couple of occasions by voices. Whitley would stop and erase the interference, baffled by where it was coming from. When it happened again, he left it in and explained what was happening to listeners. The equipment was in perfect condition, he said. Everything was in order. Yet the glitches continued.

At one point, Trish and I and Connie were talking for several minutes when we realized that Whitley was no longer with us. Oddly, he could hear us and apparently continued recording, but we couldn’t hear him. Again, he said, nothing was wrong with the equipment. We got off the line, he called us back, and we continued without any problems to the end.

Mercury retrograde? Spirit/alien interference? Hm, maybe all of the above.

For the second time this year, Mercury has turned retrograde – in the early degrees of Cancer. This means that before it turns direct again on July 20, it will move back into Gemini.

Mercury, the planet of communication and travel, is often a mischievous little devil, a trickster, particularly when it’s retrograde, which it is three times a year. During these retro periods, the most carefully laid plans develop glitches, snafus are common, miscommunication is the norm, travel can be chaotic, things change without warning. Astrologers knows this as do people who follow astrology or who recognize repeating patterns in their own lives. But it’s not science, it’s not as if you’re going to hear this from your local astronomer or meteorologist.

Since Mercury turned retro on June 26, we’ve had a few glitches here. One of our radio shows was re-scheduled. Our lawn mower went on the fritz. We’ve revamped two books. There was a big snafu with a dog-watching plan.

Our neighbors left for a week and we were supposed to watch their dog during the day – bring Fergie over to our house to play with Noah. At night, one of the neighborhood teens would be staying at their place and tending to Fergie, two cats, a snake, and a few other assorted animals.

But the day after they left, their air conditioning broke down (Merc retro) and it was too hot inside the house for the teen, so he went home. Fergie ended up staying with us 24/7 and our neighbors’ cats lived on their porch. Fergie, an eight-month old German pointer, is  a bundle of energy, time intensive. She needs a task, needs to feel useful, and Noah, now four, tires quickly of the tug-a-war games. And our cats don’t want to play with her. And to top it off, the weather hasn’t cooperated for dog park runs. It’s been raining almost nonstop. That means excessive pent-up energy.

So we kept Fergie for two nights and she woke up Rob at 4:30 this morning ready to play, to romp. A bit early, Ferg.

At any rate, the neighbors’ AC is now  fixed, the lawn mower is fixed, our radio show is scheduled for  July 8. So far, this  Merc retro period has been great for revisions, rewrites, rethinking, re-planning. It’s a good time to slow down, kick back, read, relax, and let the world flow to you, and allow yourself to be swept along, swept up, into this crazy experience we call life.

Happy July 1st. It’s hard to believe that 6 months of 2013 are history.

In the spring of 2012, we were inundated with houseflies and  did a post about the possible esoteric meaning.

In the 15 months or so since that post went up, our statistics counter has recorded dozens of queries from individuals who end up at our blog because they Googled “paranormal meaning of flies” or esoteric meaning of flies” or “what do all these flies in my house mean?”

In our original post, we provided a couple of esoteric meaning of houseflies. The Biblical interpretations tend toward looking at flies as satanic. But from an animal totems dictionary, the verdict was much more positive:

The Fly teaches the ability to greatly multiply prosperity, endeavors and ventures at enormous rates. He shows how to be quick to act and respond to achieve results. Fly aids in demonstrating the power of keen eyesight along with expanding awareness in many directions. Although flies are known for carrying diseases in unfavorable surroundings, the lesson of fly is in the value of carrying your emotions, thoughts and feelings in order to act quickly in sometimes unfavorable or uncomfortable conditions. It takes about two weeks from hatching for new eggs to be laid, likewise, two weeks is significant in one’s personal development. Are you ready for quick and abrupt changes? Are you ready to move quickly? Fly will show how to make quick changes for rapid growth.

In retrospect, I’m not so sure the two-week time frame offered by this definition was accurate for us. Looking back, we posted the paranormal houseflies piece on April 23, 2012. Not much happened in the two weeks that followed. But on June 11, 2012, about six weeks later, when we were staying at our agent’s home in the Florida keys, we connected with David Wilson at Crossroad Press. His company has since brought out a number of our back list titles into ebooks. Crossroad also published Aliens in the Backyard: UFO Encounters, Abductions, & Synchronicity, our first original book with them.

Shortly before we left for our week in the keys this June, we were inundated with flies again. These flies were quick, restless, darting about with aerial efficiency, especially when I stood in the middle of the kitchen, fly swatter poised and ready. In the Keys, I remarked to Rob about the absence of flies – and within an hour, found them everywhere in our agent’s house. They flew in through the open kitchen window, congregated on the porch outside the only air-conditioned room in the house, made lazy flights over our table out by the water, and cruised through the deck area where we played ping-pong.

The flies on Sugarloaf were larger than the flies we’d found in our kitchen at home, struck through with a luminous blue, almost like horseflies, but smaller than those stinging mini-beasts. The flies in the keys were languid, relaxed, just as we were; the flies at home were impatient, focused, intense, just as we tend to be when we’re working. Is it possible that flies, as messengers, are reflections where we are in the moment? 

I realize how ridiculous this sounds. I mean, we’re talking about flies, right? But if we look at birds as messengers, if we look at rodents, dolphins, and other mammals as messengers, why not flies?

Our blogging friend Daz  has done a series of posts on animals as messengers, taken from the book Animal Dreaming, and that’s what got me thinking about these pesky flies. In one post, he talks about sea dragons, which sound like mythological beasts but are actually small, delicate sea creatures that resemble dragons. He has a fascinating You Tube video on that post that shows these little creatures.

Shortly after I’d made that remark  to Rob about the absence of flies on Sugarloaf, I ducked into the air-condition room to cool off – and found a dozen flies inside the room, against the glass door, behind the transparent curtains. When I parted the curtain and peered out on the porch, I shuddered and thought, Ok, this is the beginning of a horror novel.

Dozens of these bluish black Sugarloaf flies were having a love fest on the balcony, crawling slowly all over each other on the porch floor, the screens, the wooden beams, the outside of the sliding glass doors, all of them gravitating toward the cold air that undoubtedly seeped out beneath the sliders. We were like those flies, Rob and Me and Megan and her friends, lounging around, enjoying ourselves, and ducking frequently into the air conditioned room for a reprieve from the intense heat.

That evening we ate dinner on the back porch of a place called Mangrove Mama’s. As soon as the food was brought out, these same flies descended in droves. They swarmed, but slowly, taking their time. We waved them away, Nika and Noah snapped at them, the night’s musician, a guy from Nashville, seemed to serenade them, other guests swatted at them and quickly covered their food with napkins.

I kept thinking of Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 remake of the film The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg, and figured I can’t top that in a novel. So the least I could do is connect the dots on the esoteric meaning beyond what we provided in April 2012 and I came up with flies as a reflection of a current state of mind.

Rob thinks it’s all a big stretch and that I’m crazy to be writing about flies. Maybe he’s right. If so, Statcounter tells me I’ve got plenty of company in my delusions! In fact, as I’m writing this, there’s a fly zipping around my office, one of those restless, focused suckers who seems to be shouting, Ha-ha, you silly. Swat me if you can.

 There’s a tectonic shift happening in the U.S. – and it centers on civil rights. First, on June 25, the U.S. supreme court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. This provision of the 1965 landmark civil rights law designates which parts of the country must have changes to their voting laws cleared by the federal government or in federal court. This is huge. It means that states can now redistrict to their hearts’ delight so that minorities – who generally vote democratic – are disenfranchised.

 The ruling was 5-4, with justices Scalia, Alito,  Kennedy, Thomas and Roberts citing how “things have changed dramatically in the south” in the nearly 50 years since the act was enacted. In other words: discrimination? What’s that? We don’t have any discrimination in this country.  Right. That’s why some of the black districts in Florida had to wait 6-7 hours to vote in the 2012 election.

 Yet, the very next day, this same supreme court, these same justices, struck down California’s proposition 8, which banned gay marriage.  This is also huge, in a more positive way. About a third of the states in the U.S. approve of gay marriage – which leaves a huge chunk that don’t.

 This approval, though,  has real, tangible consequences. It means that if you’re a legally gay married couple in a state that recognizes gay marriage, you can file joint tax returns, can collect social security benefits when your spouse dies, that you don’t have to pay taxes on your deceased spouse’s estate. It means you can make end of life decisions for your spouse – in other words, it encompasses all the rights that straight married couples have.

Surprisingly, the military has come out in full support of this strike down to prop 8. If your gay spouse is deployed and killed in action, the military couldn’t even notify you as next to kin about your spouse’s death under the former ruling. Now they can. Now the surviving spouse can collect federal benefits.

There were two gay couples who challenged prop 8 – a female couple and a male couple. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier  have children they are raising together and fought the ban primarily because of their kids. They were married on Friday, June 28, by California Attorney General Kamala Harris after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did away with the 25-day holding period and ordered state officials to stop enforcing Proposition 8.

 The male couple, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, who have been together for 12 years, were married by the mayor of Los Angeles and the marriage was broadcast live on the Rachel Maddow Show. Both of these marriages were moving, monumental.

There are people who  rail against these unions, who will tell you that the bible forbids such unions, that it’s sodomy, that it will unravel the fabric of traditional marriage, that children should not be raised by gay couples. To these people, I say: Love is love. It doesn’t care about the color of your skin, your cultural background, or your sexual orientation.

My first editor, Chris Cox, was gay. He loved his partner Bill, the curator of a Manhattan museum, without restraint, without boundaries. When Bill was diagnosed with AIDS, Chris’s world fell apart.  He cared for Bill on his own as long as he could. But when Bill began to lose his sight, his parents flew him home to Minnesota to care for him. And every weekend, they flew Chris out to Minnesota to spend time with Bill.

Not long after Bill’s diagnosis, Chris was diagnosed with AIDS. He was estranged from his family and his primary caretaking came from  a co-worker, editor  Cheryl Woodruff, and his old friend Susan Sarandon, who paid for a private nurse to tend to Chris. He called me on the day of Bill’s diagnosis and on the day he was diagnosed. He was in tears. AIDS was relatively new then, and I, a straight woman, didn’t really understand much of anything about the disease except that then, in the early 1990s, a diagnosis usually spelled a death sentence.

On the day Chris passed away, my agent, a gay woman who had formed a deep bond with Chris, called to tell me the news. Not long afterward, a day or two, Cheryl called and told me Chris had asked for me to speak at his memorial service. So Rob, Megan and I flew to New York for the service. Megan was barely a year old.

Susan Sarandon gave the opening talk, a moving tribute to her long friendship with Chris. I was next and after Sarandon’s talk, hoped that I would at least be able to utter a single word.

I thought of all this when the supreme court struck down prop 8. How can we, a country that calls itself the most democratic on the planet, have made it illegal in the 50s for black and whites to marry? Or to make it illegal in the 21^st century for gays to marry? We are supposedly a nation where diversity is welcome – and yet, when the diverse appear, we attack them, deny them rights, and it has to go all the way to the supreme court to be sorted out.

And SCOTUS  didn’t go as far as they should have. They should have made it federal law; gay marriage should be recognized throughout all 50 states.  But the ruling is a step in the right direction, and would have made a difference for Chris and Bill because they were residents of New York, one of the handful of states that recognize gay marriage.

I like to think that Chris, this energetic and brilliant man who loved life, to whom I am forever indebted for giving me my first break, is in the afterlife cheering, his fist raised, pumping at the air. Yes.Yes.