All along the coast

The first time I visited the Gulf Coast, we drove over to Mobile, Alabama, and had some great seafood, including oysters, and stayed in the hotel where I drafted my article. The second visit, we stayed out in Pascagoula, Mississippi. And then, closer, in Gulfport. And, of course, our last night on my first visit we slept in Biloxi itself, inside her tent.

These, then, were the four towns where our southern nights were spent together. I went there to get her out of her daily routine. Her colleagues loved her, but worried about her, and said to me privately, "She's burned out, and really needs to get away and have some fun."

Not a problem. Because we definitely always knew how to have our fun. We also always were back, early the next day, so she could continue her work. I went out into East Biloxi with her. She sought out the most hopeless cases, people who did not have the necessary proof that they were bonafide residents when Katrina hit, the ones Fema, Red Cross, et. al., wouldn't authorize for aid.

These were the people she found and helped. Somehow, almost miraculously, she got them all trailers from Fema -- homes for them to start to rebuild their shattered lives.

An Angel, that is what they called her. And they blessed her over and over, not knowing she is a secular Jewish girl, cynical about religion and about God. But they were right -- she was an Angel.

***

I've always only fallen deeply in love with women who have a passion for political change. My first wife and I covered the Sanitation Worker's marches in Memphis, Tennessee, when we were still college students, and traveled on down through Mississippi to New Orleans, meeting with other activists and journalists along the way. We didn't even realize at the time we would be witnesses to the violent end of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s non-violent civil right movement, but we were.

My second wife and I covered the tragedy of banana workers in Central America who had been rendered sterile by a banned pesticide exported and applied there by American multinational companies. We were witnesses to one aspect of the great global environmental crisis that now, in various ways, threatens life on earth.

My sweet, now long lost, girlfriend and I covered the devastation of Biloxi together. It was really her story I wrote for Salon, though she never saw it that way. I told the place through her eyes, met her clients, unwrapped their stories. She had such a clear view of what had happened and what it all meant that my only real role was to be a scribe.

All three of these lovely women are activists and artists. I will never stop loving any of them, nor the passion they bring to their work in this world. The first two I married, and my children have resulted from those two loves.

The third does not believe in marriage, does not want children, and so rejected my proposal for just last month, though she does still wear my ring.

Others may well love her, and have her close to them, after me, and probably will. But I am the only and the first man to have proposed to her. As she well knows, my proposal remains open, on the table. It is not yet too late for us. True love only comes along every so often in this life.

But it may also be true that our nights together in Mobile, Pascagoula, Gulfport and Biloxi did not ultimately convince her that my love is great enough to follow her there, or anywhere, at any cost. We could be a couple, even so far apart, as we were indeed for three long months last winter. But, she has chosen to leave me this time, with no promises at all to return. In fact the opposite: As she said, confirming my fears, "after all, it's Mississippi," i.e., a place where romantic intrigue, post-Katrina, creates many options for a woman like her, so my only job now, according to her, is to let her go.

My other great loves also vanished, over time. They have moved on. This seems to be life's one immutable lesson -- live, love, and lose -- first love and then life itself. If you can just love enough to let go, do so. Because everything special eventually will be lost, anyway. You will be left only with your memories, your photos, your letters, your stories.

And, at the very end, only our stories. However you are able to tell them. Here, I struggle, holding on to a love story against all odds. Soon, I must let it go. Is this, truly, what she wants?