I Bought My Divorce At A Charity Auction

At A Charity Auction, No Less

I recently celebrated 31 years of marriage and 30 years sobriety, so I am happily married and relatively content with life and living. We share a wonderful daughter, age 28, who is pursuing her dreams in Hollywood. However, I was not always happy and content.

My first marriage began in December 1967 at the Tarrytown House in Tarrytown, New York. My first bride, Susan, was a summa cum laude graduate of William Smith College, smart, warm, caring, an aspiring actress, and working for Fawcett Publications in Manhattan. I was just a loud graduate of Hobart College, where I found all of the bars, then my first job had me trying out teaching unsuccessfully in the mid-Hudson Valley.

I became a case worker in New York, decided I needed a “professional” education if I were going to be able to help people. It is a long story, but we found ourselves in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I was a clinical social work student at LSU for two years. Susie worked in advertising and developed a solid career. She also began studies for a PhD, which she eventually did complete. God, what a smart woman, except, of course, for marrying me.

I found a job totally outside my training. Rather than clinical social work, sort of a junior psychiatrist, I worked with a statewide agency developing regional and statewide plans for improved emergency medical services. Heady stuff: public policy, research, surveys, grants, and lots of time traveling around Louisiana. Yet again, I knew the bars all too well.

Susan and I drifted apart, no animosity, no ill will, simply no longer a fit. We let our families know we were separating and anticipating being divorced. Despite the amicable nature of our split, it was a wrenching, God awful experience. What a feeling of shame and abject failure, but it was what it was. We were going our separate ways.

And then I attended a charity fundraiser in Baton Rouge. I came away with two successful bids: first, an oil painting, a nude, done by Don Wight in 1973. Bought it for $50. It is worth in the neighborhood of $1,500 today and sits in the back of my closet. Second, the piece de resistance and the real story: I bid on and won a lawyer’s offer of his services for “a will or an uncontested divorce.” I am perhaps the only person in the country that paid for his divorce this way. Susie and I flipped a coin in his office to see who would be the “bad guy” and I won (or lost), and we went on to completing the divorce with both of us living in different states, Susie in Michigan, and me in New York..

Democrats in American History

As we reflect back on the history of the country, we wonder what the Democrats in today's Congress might have done. For instance, at the Battle of Bunker Hill, you could hear them cry: "When you see the whites of their eyes, turn tail and run like hell." At Lexington and Concord, forget about it. They stayed home and spoke of the need to discuss things with the English.

In New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812, rather than shoot down the Englisg and wim a decisive victory, they said war is just not nice, turned tail, and ran again. Fast forward to the Mexican-American war, oh, no problem, we turned Texas an the rest of the southwest over to Santa Ann and his minions. After all, we cannot impose our Gringo culture and we do not have a destiny that is coast to coast.

Civil war? They stayed home and gave aid and comfort to the enemy of both sides. At Little Round Top, instead of charging down the hill and saving the day, they turned tail and left the battlefield. Spanish-American War and sinking of the Maine. It's our fault for being imperialists. Leave the Spanish world to the Spanish.

Peter J. Flierl, MSW, the co-founder of HealthGain, a wellness company devoted to prevention and alternative medicine, and FBT Worldwide, a private franchise combining the power of the high tech internet and high touch personal coaching. He is a freelance writer and the author of Prayer, Laughter & Broccoli, a survival guide for husbands soon to be translated into Zulu for South African breast cancer patients and their husbands. His next book, Tithe, America will be released by Grindstone Press in 2005.