Not All There

A cafe pops up and disappears. Books fly off shelves. Conversations with the dead are more alive than old friendships. A woman with wings teaches flight. A Vietnamese lesbian manicurist/artist teaches the beauty of creativity. A Brazilian hairdresser/poet demonstrates the power of love to heal. All provide strange maps that lead Jewel to leave her affluent neighborhood and a thirty-five-year marriage to begin an unimaginable life. What follows is a kind of odyssey of Jewel's circumstance as she journeys on a path of self-discovery interacting with an variety of people some relatively ordinary and others highly unconventional as the mystery of becoming reveals itself. Later Nadine a seventeen-year-old girl through profound emails with her best friend discovers a thread of magic in her depression hope in her hopelessness activism in the terrible trump era teachers in mind-blowing places and the gift of connection.