I consider myself an expert on very few topics, being more of the sort of person who knows a little about a lot of things. However, among the few subjects I know far too intimately, is the topic of craziness. It's a little hard to admit, but I am a magnet for crazy people, and that has seriously made me question my own craziness.

Widowed for a number of years and remarried, it was a little discerning to be sitting at a stop light, and see your former deceased spouse. It was even more upsetting to see him driving the exact model, year, and color vehicle to one you owned.

At that time, I hadn't heard Gnarls Barkley's Does That Make Me Crazy, otherwise, it would have been the theme song playing in my head that day. I quickly convinced myself, my eyes were deceiving me, it had been over fifteen years since I had last seen him.

Six months later, I lugged excess household furnishings out to a local flea market, trying to clean out the garage. Seated on the booth cement floor, trying to pick up some pieces to a board game that had spilled, I looked up to see a couple approaching. The woman was in the lead, she looked older, but very familiar.

Just as I was thinking about who she might be, a giant aspiration toddled behind her. In his signature Mac work wear pants, long sleeved white shirt, twine lanyard around his neck, rope-for-a-belt -- he struggled to walk, leaning heavily on his cane. Bent, head unable to raise, he watched his shuffling feet, while peeking through bottle thick glasses apparently trying to keep up with her.

There was no mistaking he had had a recent stroke. There was no mistaking he was alive. There was no mistaking that the man, whose death certificate lay in my jewelry box was walking past me.

Because I was still sitting on the floor behind a table, neither of them saw me. I completely abandoned everything, but my purse in a den of thieves, to follow this couple, to make absolutely sure, I was not crazy. Indeed, it was my former husband and his first wife -- the one who had sent me the death certificate!

As I followed them at a safe distance, to be certain this was not reincarnation, or re-embodiment, or some other phenomenon -- it was very hard to come to grips with thinking about the past, I'd tried so very hard to forget. Suddenly, my life was plastered at a cross-roads with undecipherable road signs when it came to what, if anything to do about this new-found knowledge. I'd left crazy and craziness behind, and here it was back fifteen years later, to haunt me all over again.

If you live long enough, you are cognizant of the fact, that real life can sometimes be stranger than fiction. We don't need to discuss my impending birthday, and how old it makes me.

Let's just leave it at that I've lived long enough to have had a life rich in more twists and turns, making any soap opera on television totally unnecessary to watch.

Growing up, I lived in a very sheltered home environment. Becoming an adult chronologically, certainly didn't mean that I was emotionally mature once out on my own. Nor, did it mean that I had the normal expected experiences in social interaction.

Being a slow learner, I made more than my share of bad choices in people, especially in the men that I loved, and was involved with. The story of my ghostly re-embodiment of a former husband is one about those bad choices.

When the phantom came into my life, I was a young single mom who had made some previous bad choices in who I loved (or thought I loved). I'd moved across the country to take a job, that no longer existed when I arrived three weeks after the offer. The person who had hired me had quit, and someone else hired another.

We were living in a duplex without electricity, my car was inoperable, and we were on the verge of eviction. The only job I had, was working for a dealer at a local flea market on the weekends. A job that entailed walking several miles each way with my six year old son and eight year old daughter in tow. My pay was a measly 10% of the daily sales. The three hundred pound woman bar owner who hired me, arrived several times a day to count the cash sales from her air conditioned car and leave me my portion.

Child support seldom came on time, wasn't even enough to pay the rent, and the checks often bounced. Because I had a court order for a certain amount of child support, I couldn't even get food stamps. We were living on granola bars, warm soda, and water. Things were so dire, that I was reduced to picking up cans in hopes of a few dollars to eat on. I feared that I would have to put my children in foster care --a thought I could not bear. There were no family or friends that I could turn to for help, my college education and sheltered background, left me very ill equipped emotionally to know where to turn. I had no real common sense life skills.

This isn't to say I didn't have offers to solve my predicament. There was the English speaking older Iranian gentleman, who offered me $10,000 to marry his non-English speaking nephew, so he could get citizenship. The uncle even went as far as to pull back the nephew's gums to prove that he had good teeth.

Then, there was the toothless man, who wanted to take me to the Jai Alai races. I could even choose another solution -- the former boyfriend living across the state, who would come get us, so we could live in the nudist colony with him. LOL looking back.

Then, came along a man, twenty-two years older than I was. As he talked to me, he bought everything at my booth that day. Despite our differences in age, he was a breath of fresh air. He spoke eight languages fluently, he was well traveled, and he was a connoisseur of literature. This man was a physicist, working in a think-tank of a well-known aerospace industry corporation. He offered us a home, electricity, food, and money -- the only thing I had to do was help him repair a house he was hoping to rent..

At the end of the day, still trying to sway me to allowing him to help us, he helped me close up the booth, and offered to take us to Pizza Hut, before dropping us off. He was obviously smart enough to know we were hungry, and he instantly became my children's hero. The next day, he moved us into one of his rental properties, with the promise, "I'll take away all of your old problems, and give you some new ones." (Well, at least he didn't lie about that).

Before that summer was over, he became my best friend and my lover. There were red flags that I ignored. The rental house (one of many) he was fixing up -- was a condemned house, filled with junk from floor to ceiling in most rooms.

Most of it was electronics, such as computer parts. The rest were building supplies, tons of papers, and books. Obsessive Compulsion Disorders (OCDs) weren't part of everyday vocabulary back then.

In the beginning, he was so kind and gentle, not only to me, but also to my children. He actually laughed when my son nailed five pounds of roofing nails into the door he intended for a back room. They were so tickled to have electricity, food, and television, he walked on water (at first).

My father had always told me that there was, "a fine line between a genius and an idiot." Prior to meeting him, I had read a biography of Thomas Edison. I saw similarities in descriptions of eccentric behavior, genius, and OCD behaviors. I just didn't understand the difference between the word "eccentric" and the word "crazy."

Among what I thought were eccentricities:

• He wouldn't eat on a plate unless it was wet, because a plate that was dried had germs on it.
• He wouldn't sleep with a cloth pillow case, because it had germs on it. Yet, brown paper grocery bags were acceptable pillow cases.
• Before me, he slept on the floor, often using old telephone books for a pillow.
• While he obviously had money, he was extremely frugal over what I thought were very small things.
• He would get very upset if you moved any piles of paper or boxes without consulting him.
• He hid large amounts of cash in just about anything and just about everywhere.
• He always wore a watch and chain somewhere on him
• He wore a twine lanyard with a tape recorder to capture clandestine conversations whenever he disagreed with someone
• He substituted a rope for a belt when shopping to get "a better deal" by looking poor
• When in his business suits, he usually wore a vest that buttoned right-over-left
• He had major "food rules."

Naive, I didn't understand why, nor in the early days did I get an explanations as to why:

• He would almost visibly turn green, when I would serve him pork chops.
• He would always have some excuse to not eat shell fish.
• He got upset when I used milk to tenderize meat (a common Cajun practice with game meat and tough meat)
• He believed meat and milk had to be consumed hours apart
• Chicken and other poultry had to be soaked in salt and water prior to cooking
• The only wine he would drink had to be homemade, but only made by him. He would throw it out if I even touched it.

There were many red flags about this relationship that perhaps other women would have picked up on. Despite our obvious age differences, we got along exceptionally well. While I knew he wasn't the love of my life (my heart still belonged to the father of my children), I convinced myself I loved him.

What I thought I knew about him, was that he would never beat on me; he would never cheat on me; and he didn't drink or sell drugs -- all the earmarks of a good marriage, considering my past relationships.

He portrayed himself as a bachelor, married to his work and travel. Since I was used to hearing him speak on the phone to people from all over the world, often lapsing into other languages -- I didn't question that he often looked uncomfortable, if I seem to pay attention whenever he spoke Yiddish, or what sounded like German. Apparently delusional, I was lost in a sea of red flags of deceit, and didn't even have a clue.

By that fall, he proposed to me. Upon my acceptance, he informed me we would have to move for the school year back to the D.C. area, where he primarily worked out of. For whatever reason, we had to get married in Kentucky, and he wouldn't marry me in Florida or D.C. That should have been another red flag, but I dismissed it, when he made the whole trip one big fun family vacation..

Upon arrival, we went from a condemned Florida wooden "cracker shack" to a three floor mansion with nine bedrooms. If this wasn't enough of a surprise, his home near D.C. came with a resident "grandfather."

This former colleague of his was none other than, Wernher von Braun. Wernher may have been a genius to the world, but the man who would peel a stick of butter for a snack, and march in newspaper hats to opera music -- was as crazy as they come.

Between them, I would come to understand the difference between eccentric and crazy, in a very personal way. You see, I'd married a miser millionaire who had a lot of secrets, not the least of them, was the fact that by birth, rigid belief, and choice -- he was a Hasidim Jew, originally from Lithuania. By marrying me, a gentile, he was committing a very big sin. Within six months, that sin wouldn't matter nearly as much as the fact, that he was also still married to a woman from Amsterdam.

I learned that revelation, when his two young daughters decided to come live with us. In the throes of a bitter custody battle, he and the girls begged me to not leave him. The motives of the children were pure, but what I didn't understand was the motives of the father, was much more complex -- he or she who had custody of the children, had custody of very large trust funds, he'd set up for his children. The ultimate negotiator, he was not about to lose his children or one dime.

Ultimately, with his kidnapping of his son from an institution for delinquents (where the mother had placed the boy), we became a blended family with five children between us. They divorced eventually, and he got custody of all three children. We remarried and led an extremely eccentric, if not crazy life for about ten years.

Somehow in all this craziness, in the end the difference in our age grew greater and greater. The sand upon which we based the foundation of our marriage had eroded greatly in cultural differences and in generational view points. Once his youngest child was about to go off to college, he gave me another "surprise" when he demanded a quick no fault divorce because, "He needed to marry a woman with a PhD. to further his career."

We started the divorce proceedings, but never finalized them. Apparently the woman he "needed" to marry, didn't need him. For the next few years, I learned the extent of his craziness in being the object of his full-tilt stalking, as he tried to persuade me to come back. He frequently tormented my employers in his efforts to contact me. Most calls were about "where did you put" or "you must have thrown away" whatever was lost at the moment, despite our being apart for several years. It was so bad, one employer had to get a restraining order against him.

Then, he disappeared and I thought I left craziness behind on the day I received an anonymous death certificate in the mail from his first wife. At the time, I just thought she wanted me to know he'd died.

In conclusion, today I can only laugh at the past, which gave me as much as it took from me. I don't dwell on the hurts or pain, but am grateful for what I learned from the man who was more my parent than my husband. Without him, there are so many worlds my mind would not have been open to. He introduced me to worlds within research and quantitative analysis, etc. Subjects, I probably would have never explored on my own.

I've forgiven him and myself a long time ago. That said, though I've sworn off "crazy" people (maybe) and deliberately chose to let "ghosts" live in their own little world, and I'll keep the comfort of my much "saner" world.