I’m Over All That by Shirley Maclaine Read Free Book Online Page B

clock” against the register and get out.
    The people in Radio Shack don’t know what electronics are.
    Waiters in restaurants have the amazing ability to avoid eye contact the moment you think you’d like the check or some service.
    Young people who are out of work and want jobs won’t work for less pay than the maximum they think they can get. They feel entitled.
    The young people are the leaders of the Rude Pack. I know the rest of us have screwed up the world, but I wouldn’t want to leave it to them anyway.

I Will Never Get Over Africa
    M y time in Africa lives with me always. I will never forget the magic of such a place. More than any other place I’ve been, I wish to return to Africa. I would like to live on a wild game reserve and observe the animals all day. That would make me truly happy.
    When I was there, I lived among the Masai of East Africa and what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania). I initially went to Africa to visit Robert Mitchum, with whom I was having a relationship. He was shooting a movie there. It wasn’t long before I became more interested in what I was seeing and learning than I was in Robert and the movie. I wandered off. Certain highlights stand out for me, things that I will never get over as long as I live.
    The particular tribe of Masai I met had never seen a white person before. They could identify with my freckles, which they believed would someday grow together in order to make me more brown. They were friendly and wanted me to know them. They invited me to help birth a baby, where the mother waited for me inside a hut. There was a fire in the middle of the dirt floor, smoke wafting everywhere as flies darted and landed on the mother giving birth, the newborn, the placenta, and me. Other women surrounded the baby as the mother chewed the umbilical cord away. Then the women handed the baby around the circle as each attending woman followed the custom of spitting in its mouth to welcome it (a girl) to the menyatta (the village). When the child was handed to me, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to contaminate the baby with whatever I might have brought from the Western world. The women seemed to understand. The mother asked my name. I said “Shirley.” She promptly named the child Shurri. I was honored.
    Flash forward fifteen years later. I was doing a book signing in San Francisco. A young woman came up to me, handed me a ring, and said, “Hello again, my name is Shurri. You were there when I was born.”
    How should I relate to this? She handed me a picture to prove that I’d been there. Synchronicity as a fact, not a coincidence, was becoming more of a reality every day. A year later, a man appeared at my doorstep in Encino. He handed me three stones, which he said came from the chieftain of the Masai tribe I spent so much time with. The chief wanted to be remembered to me. The man who brought me the stones was the man whom I ultimately went to Peru to visit. He was the person who said he had had encounters with extraterrestrials in the Andes Mountains. I could see the reality of the web of synchronicity in my life. Out of the Peruvian visit came Out on a Limb , which I think helped birth a New Age spiritual movement.
    I still have the ring from Shurri, and I had the stones from the Masai chieftain mounted in a triangular shape, which I not only treasure but also feel protects me.
    I was besotted by Africa—the animals, the Masai (who believe they are on Earth only to protect our planet’s cattle), the landscapes, the miracles of nature I saw every day.
    A few days after the birth of Shurri, I hired a plane to take me to Tanganyika and join what I thought was to be a photographic safari. The pilot turned up drunk in Nairobi, where we took off. So, on some level I had to help him land the plane on an isolated field in Tanganyika. I stepped out of the plane, not knowing where I was or where I was supposed to go to join the safari. Three Masai morani (warriors) came from the