Before I grew into a wanna-be-hippie teen who clashed with his conservative values, I remember my father and me as “pals”. We have similar tastes and temperament and everyone said I looked the most like him of his four children. He doted on me and over the years we shared a secret or two: teenage transgressions with boys and drinking on my side, the same, with middle-aged women on his.

By high school, my friends and I would pile in some boy’s van on the weekends for concerts at the Spectrum or the more intimate Tower Theatre in Philadelphia where I grew up, regularly waiting in line for hours to get front row seats and lose part of our hearing. These were the days of Bic lighters glowing in a weed-infused haze, asking for Just. One. More. Please!

Having a Sunday walk in the park or woods surrounding my house seemed more appropriate to celebrate this special day. No dress or patent leather shoes required.

I fell in love with Mexico on my first trip in 1989. I was on my honeymoon and travelled around by bus for a month with my new husband. Merida, in the Yucatan was our first stop and when we arrived, it was a blissful sensorial shock to my system. The language fell melodious into my ears. The smells flowed through and out my pores. The vivid color threatened to burst my retinas. All of the “foreignness” intrigued me and I absorbed it like my sweat-soaked tank top in the jungle of Quintana Roo.

The Tibetans have a similar way of dealing with anything we might view as uncomfortable, such as death or fear, or other unsettling emotions: make friends with them, invite them in, accept them as they are.

Having been topless on public beaches and even spending a vacation once at a clothing optional venue in Tulum, Mexico, I used to feel pretty comfortable being naked in public. The pleasure of having your body kissed by sun and surf without the confines of even a string bikini trumped whatever trepidation I might have had about being ogled.