”“Wow..then what happened..”“Then he told me that I was a disgrace to this family. Playing with my pussy like a harlot. Dressing up and acting...like a skanky tramp. Smoking behind his back, and God knows what else. And to top it off, this was Ramamadan. So it a very great sin, to do what I did..he then started accusing me of all kinds of crazy stuff, like sucking off boys, and men, and sucking my teachers for grades, cuz I have never been very smart and recently I had gotten many good. Honestly, I can’t help myself. I saw them and I had to smell them. I lost control. What are you going to do?”She sat there for a minute. Her breathing slowed down as she calmed herself. When she spoke her confidence wasn’t there like before.“Can I ask you something? Something personal since you are taking personal things from me?”“Uh sure Em, anything. Should I go put clothes on though?”“No,” she said too quickly, “It’s about THAT.” Her eyes went to the pillow. “About your penis or whatever.”My. The murk was just the mess I’d made of my life. Maybe I would have eternity to clear it up. For some reason I remembered just when I’d lost Hope.My mid-life crisis hit the day I realized thirty-three was half-way through my life expectancy. Of course, technically, having already survived Viet Nam, I should have had a much longer life expectancy than the sixty-six that was estimated in 1982, but apparently I had seriously over-estimated.At thirty-three, I’d just been promoted to full partner and. There was little doubt he was no longer with us but nobody brought up that subject anymore without expectation of unwanted consequences.Elsa warned me that her mother was subject to some bizarre actions when she was high on the pain-killers she seemed to gobble up like candy when she was in the mood for a change of perceptions. I never actually saw her popping the pills but it seemed like the only explanation for some of her more famous exploits covered in great depth in the tabloids in France.