The Butterfly Effect

Bess & Me, Thirty Nine Years Later. The Band is back together!

Bess Stiffelman & her mother Ellen, Two Wings of the Butterfly

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” — Edward Lorenz, at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In my meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg’s book Faith, she writes about how physicists discovered that atomic particles that were once connected when separated will behave as if they’re still connected regardless of the distance between them. A French physicist tested this theory using lasers to excite calcium atoms. He split a single photon into two daughter photons by passing it through a crystal. The two daughter photons travelled off in opposite directions. They measured that no matter how far apart they traveled, when the spin of one was measured, its partner showed the opposite complimentary spin. The correlation was instantaneous. It happened faster than the speed of light. Theoretically the distance of the whole universe can separate these two particles and when one spins up the other spins down. If one spins right, the other spins left. The inescapable conclusion is that two particles who were once connected will continue to behave in relationship to each other, even when separated by vast stretches of time and limitless space.

Bess Stiffelman and I were born on the Farm, a hippie commune in Tennessee, fifty years ago two months apart. Her family left the commune when we were seven years old, and they moved to Kansas City. My family left the commune a couple years later. My family would drive from Tennessee to California to visit my grandparents and we’d stay with the Stiffelmans. I don’t remember playing with Bess on the Farm, but we were like twin souls when we met again in Kansas City.

I envied Bess’s life which seemed so much more posh than mine. They had a nice house in the suburbs. We lived in an old farmhouse on 200 acres, growing apples, way out in the country.

Me harvesting apples back on the 200 acre apple orchard farm in Hampshire, TN.

The Stiffelmans had a backyard with a swing set and neighbor kids would come by after dinner and we’d all go to their local playground at night. Their house had new carpet and her room had wallpaper. It might as well have been the Taj Mahal to me. My parents would get back to to TN after driving to California and back with a dime in their pocket. We lived on the edge of extreme poverty.

When we were ten and 11 years old Bess and I would stay up talking late into the night, just the two of us in her bedroom. She was always worried her parents were on the precipice of getting divorced (they didn’t! She says her mom was just really patient). Bess was whip smart, outspoken and friendly, and she cherished being my friend. Being friends wasn’t something we had to struggle to do, it was like magnets that attract. You couldn’t pull us apart, Country Mouse and City Mouse.

The summer I was eleven, I stayed back in Colorado Springs with my older sister Jordana. So I wasn’t with the rest of the family when they stayed with the Stiffelmans on their way back to TN. My brother Anthony told me how Bess had made a cake for me, and I wasn’t there. I’d missed it. My mother refused to make me a cake for my birthday for all the years we lived on the Farm. Not celebrating birthdays was a form of extreme hippie austerity where birthdays were considered ego indulgences. There were very little resources, no food, no money. Plus my mother had more children than she had the bandwidth for. I had a Spirit Mapping, an astrology reading from a medical intuitive British physician woman years ago and after hearing of my commune upbringing she rhetorically asked “What do you have to do to get a little love in this family?” Now I know the answer is— leave. Find my chosen family.

I’m sure Bess didn’t understand what that cake meant to me even though I never ate a bite of it. That cake meant she celebrated me. Being loved is being seen, and Bess could see me. That cake meant I mattered and that she believed in me. That cake was pure love covered in icing. I ate every bit of that cake psychically and spiritually.

Carrie D’s sister, me, my sister Jordana, and Marilyn Keating who’d been Principal at the Farm School at Carrie’s wedding in CT, July 2001. Apparently I was bearing my midriff throughout most of my 20’s in NY!

Fast forward to the summer of 2001. I’d been living in NYC for a year and I was going to a Farm friend’s gay wedding in Connecticut. Shout out to Carrie D. and Housa! Carrie’s long lost sister told me she was staying in Brooklyn with someone whose family had lived on the Farm, “But she says no one would remember her,” Carrie’s sister explained.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Bess Stiffelman,” Carrie’s sister said. I fought back tears of joy.

I called Bess. We were twenty-seven at the time. Bess had gone to law school and I’d gone to med school and we’d both moved to NYC unbeknownst to the other.

We talked on the phone for over an hour, me pouring out my heart and my memories to her.

We made a plan to meet up on the Hudson River at an outdoor music event.

“How will we recognize each other?” Bess asked wisely.

I’d recognize her, I assured her. This was way before cell phones, and I felt ridiculously out of place in that crowd of strangers. It wasn’t my crowd.

“Why didn’t we ever try and connect again?” Bess asked me recently.

I explained she was running in a Punk rock crowd back then and I felt intimidated by that. I didn’t have any tattoos. Hell, I don’t even have my ears pierced. I didn’t think I was cool enough to be her friend back then.

Then I went to the big writers conference, AWP, in Kansas City earlier this year. I found Bess’s sister Naomi’s email on LinkedIn and emailed Naomi and asked if their parents were still in Kansas City. Their parents, Neal and Ellen, had recently moved to LA to be near Bess.

When I got to Kansas City, I was like Mole in Wind In the Willows when he could smell his old home off the River bank and he started crying with homesickness. For days my Lyft drivers would drive me from the AirBnB by the art museum through old Kansas City neighborhoods to the Convention Center downtown. My heart was being pulled to find Bess’s girlhood home. I knew if I found, it would look smaller and not as grand as I’d remembered when I was a kid. After three days in Kansas City, I broke down and emailed Bess. There she was. Just as beautiful as always. It was like a dam burst, a flood of memories. Pride swelling at who’s she become. She works to get kids who have long prison sentences commuted. She had been profiled in the NY Times. She’s a Bodhisattva with a heart of gold; badass and brave, just like I remembered.

I got to meet up with her in LA in March at a fancy wine bar in the Arts District. She was gonna visit me in May in Tucson but then our home renovations kept unfolding and life got in the way. My memories of the commune are a deluge. It’s triggering and too much for her, my eidetic memory. She says the Farm was “Paradise Lost.” Her family didn’t speak of the commune for fourteen years after they left. My father says everyone limped away from the Farm with a broken heart. Mixed in with all that love and beauty was boatloads of trauma and darkness.

She told me the story of her father Neal back in the early days of the commune saving a Black man in Columbia, TN, who’d been strung up at a lumbar yard by bunch of racist white klansmen who were gonna beat him to death. Her father Neal untied him and saved his life. This country would have no democracy without the courageous hearts of Black and Jewish Folx. Just like back in June of 1964, when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The three young men, two Jewish kids from NY and one Black student from Mississippi, all in their 20s were working with the Freedom Summer Project to register Black Folx to vote. Voting has always mattered!

Bess has her father’s brave heartedness. She’s still untying those Black kids that are gonna be beaten to death, left to waste away in prison. Her mother Ellen went to medical school and became a neurologist.

Bess hugged me goodbye four times after we met up at a fancy wine bar in LA this past March. “You look just the same as when we were kids,” she said warmly when we parted. It’d been 39 years since we’d seen each other and it felt like it’d only been an instant. The flap of a butterfly’s wings.

Dear Bess, I’ll be spinning when you spin no matter how far apart we travel. Once together, our hearts are forever connected. I love you Bess. Your friend, Ida