THAT HURT...

It's true I came home high on the event,
My heart so brimming full I had to speak,
But I had left that place where my poor heart had filled,
And drove away to be with you.
I'd hoped you could come with me but I went alone,
Found pain and joy both at their peak.
I called to have your voice at least take part,
Then left my children to give you your due.
Forgive me: in my joy I was relentless,
Little thought your own soul was so bleak.
I talked on till you loosed that little dart,
Hurt me as I unwitting had hurt you.
My heart again grew full, but now with tears unwept;
My love, let love drive out our fears...
C

LOVE and OTHER DANGERS...

You may remember that although I asked my son twice, he held to his position that the Goat was not to be invited to his wedding. Given that the wedding was being performed by his mother at her house, that all made sense to me, but not, needless to say, to the Goat.

Isis agreed that I could contribute to the wedding as well as attending; I offered to provide the alcohol, an offer which was--wonder of wonders--actually accepted. A similar olive branch was offered my mother, who paid for the cake and the flowers. But otherwise, Isis did it all herself and took no offers of help until the weekend of the wedding, when her best friend and the members of the younger generation arrived, and they all pitched in to pull off the last minute food prep.

I never got a final head-count from the Happy Couple, who were presumably too busy with other things to keep track, so I was left buying wine and beer and hard cider and prosecco for an indeterminate number of people. The best estimate Son B could give me was that forty people were coming, and thirty of them would drink; but Isis had said there might be as many as sixty people coming. What to do?

I finally decided to take the number of guests posited by Son B and treat it as the potential pool of drinkers in a crowd of indeterminate size. So, how many out of forty will drink wine and how many beer? [The hard cider was there for the bride, as was the prosecco, though the quantity of prosecco had been somewhat expanded to allow a general toast.]

I dithered this way and that and finally bought beer for two thirds of forty, and wine for two thirds of forty, in hopes that it would all work out, splitting the wine equally into red and white. I had no idea what sort of food was being served, or I might have done better at divvying up the wine. What I might have thought was that all the meat would be cold, and in fact in turned out to be salmon and chicken. No one in the know would drink red wine at a reception where chicken and fish were the only meat served, and even for those of us not in the know, cold white wine would be more appealing on a summer's day. But then, buying without knowing what was being served, I rather overdid the red and fell a little short with the white wine--but only because I thought I had bought way too much white and held a few bottles back. Well, I almost got it right.

The story of my life...

I also asked both Isis and Son B if it were allright if I might speak at the wedding, though true to form I did it backwards, and asked Isis first. Her response was to point out bitterly how little right I had to speak on the subject of marriage, as though failure were not as demanding a teacher as success. Another wise female friend was of the opinion that I had forfeited not only the right to speak at this wedding, but at any wedding. That seemed a bit much to me. Son B, once I got around to asking him, was more congenial, but I was left with the dilemma that I had to make sure not to mention marriage, and a number of other topics, to keep the lid on Isis' displeasure.

It's hard to write a speech when half your functioning brain is busy censoring the thoughts that are slowly coming together out of the other half. My wise if censorious friend suggested a way out of the dilemma: I should just write down what I want to say, and ask a few trusted people what they thought of it.

Most people are rightly wary of offering advice, but the three good friends I asked were receptive, as they could see I was clearly in over my head; I got some great advice, but it only added to the censorship problem. In the end it was the Goat, bless his heart, who cut the Gordian knot: he simply said that I had the option of writing in metaphor--once the message moved onto a poetic plane, it could easily become vague enough to mention all the things I wanted to touch on without naming names or events that were Beyond the Pale at this wedding, at least. And I did find that as soon as I started trying to craft a poem, which became two sonnets in harness, all the earlier anxieties fell away. The need to maintain rhyme and meter offered ways around a lot of the thornier issues. I was rather proud of it once I was done. It was another acrostic poem, with the names of the happy couple threaded through it, or I would post it here...

Writing it made clear as little else has, just how liberating restraints are to me--in this case, figuratively, though the literal bears some weight as well... but even I could see that the literal was truly not a topic for a wedding.

So when the day rolled around, I was in fact nervous as a cat, but prepared. The Goat had made other plans for the weekend so that he wouldn't have to be sitting at home feeling sorry for himself; he went to a good friend's Midsummer Bare-ass Bear, Beer, and Booze party up on a mountaintop. Once I realized that I was far too nervous to concentrate, I drove over to meet him, and spend the night, which forced him out of the little tent he had brought along and into a motel room. Getting slightly stoned and slightly drunk and slightly @#$%ed took a lot of the tighter winding out of my mechanism, and I drove off after a ridiculously late breakfast, back to what had been home and the Happy Event, part I.

It was a beautiful day, warm but not so hot that standing outside made you want to crawl under a nearby rock, and everyone was in a good mood. Her family and my family were already mingling when I arrived a few minutes early--I had been given strict instructions that no one from my family was to arrived before the appointed hour, and I had passed that info on to my mother, who presumably had passed it on to my local siblings. Nevertheless, all but one of my family were already there mingling away when I arrived, and my mother was nervous about the last missing member of the clan, who arrived exactly one minute past the "not before" hour. I decided not to point out to my mother that he was not late; it was the others who had come early, in spite of specific instructions not to do so. I also decided that there was a little piece of my little black heart that rather liked the fact that the rest of the world was not overly concerned with any lines Isis might decide to draw in the sand.

It was a lovely ceremony, with Son B's siblings and the bride's foreign friends all taking small ceremonial parts. After all the limits imposed on me, it did surprise me a little bit that Isis chose to go on at some length about the importance of home, how this had been B's home, but that his bride's had been far away, and now they would have to find their home in each other. But I guess she felt no need to take any reciprocal heed of my feelings; it did seem that more than one line of her lovely speech had a barb or two in it just for me. I can't say it was intentional, but they lodged anyway.

And, you know what? I didn't really care.

Aside from the fact that Isis made her face a mask and backed off out of reach whenever I got anywhere near her, neither greeting me nor addressing me in any way except when asked a direct question [and then only once], I had a wonderful time. Her sisters were more than welcoming [the one who has the hardest time in life held my hand to her cheek and wouldn't let go, as the tears streamed down her face]. The three children on that side of the family were universally forthcoming; I suppose it helped that I actually still liked their lunatic father, whom their mother had divorced years before.

I made the tactical error, seeing the head-table layout, of assuming the groom's family would be sitting there, and asked Son B if I could sit with him. I turned out to be the only person over thirty at the table, and only one of two who actually spoke English during the meal. All around me the two families were mingled and chatting away as if there were no shadow on the proceedings, and I longed to be at one of the tables where English not only could be, but was, spoken.

Be careful what you wish for. It would have been far wiser to wait until the last minute to sit down, but that would have entailed making sure I was far enough away from Isis for her comfort, and close enough to either of my other two children to feel that I had sat with them.

Finally the prosecco was handed 'round. I made my little speech, and got a very nice response, especially from the happy couple. They really were happy. What I could not mention, of course, was how happy I had been on the same day in my own life, how my love for Isis filled me to the brim; how I was flush with the certainty that all but the very last chapter of my story had just been written. Well, everyone had told me I couldn't mention my own wedding, and I guess I see the wisdom in that.

The newlyweds were smiling so hard they were practically past ear-to-ear, and the happiness seemed to broadcast itself over the whole assembly. For me, the only exception was the grim determination of her who had been my wife, right there at the next table, not to look my way. She was certainly aware that I was aware of her, as the occasional flush beyond the general happy one betrayed.

What the hell! I had a wonderful time, and by the time I left, the last of the guests not spending the night to depart, I had been able to have a talk with just about everyone.

I was so high on the positive aspects of the event that I called the Goat just to let him take part a little bit, to let me have his voice, if not his presence, at the feast. I dearly wanted to stay and hang out with my children, but I wasn't sure that it would have been considered a friendly gesture by the Lady of the House, and my heart was pulling me away toward Goatville. So I made my rounds, saying goodbye, not getting even the grace of a farewell from Isis, then hopped into my car and headed for the other set of hills.

The Goat was seated on my sofa in his living room--it's one of the many pieces of furniture I had no room for in my rooms, and on which he had agreed to take pity. I was so full of my own happiness that I sat down with him and just rattled on and on. I had his head in my lap, and caressed it while I told him all that had happened, how dazed I was at the friendly conversation I had been able to have with Isis' best friend as well as her eldest sister, and on down the line to Son A's very silly toast.

What I had failed to notice in my joy was the downward spiral of the Goat's mood. By the time I got to the end of my story, and let him know that I had been cautioned to be ready for some whiplash once only one of us was working--a situation we will enter in a year, in all likelihood--he must have been feeling pretty low, because his retort was a pretty nasty put-down. And I was completely unprepared.

It was like being kicked in the stomach. I sat there, still caressing his head, as all the joy of the day drained from my heart, and I felt it fill with the Goat's bitterness. I had been so eager to make him partake of the event, I had completely forgotten how much it had hurt him not to be invited, and how uneasily he had pretended he was over it. So, in return for my eagerness to share my joy, which I could see had brought him none, he now let me share his devastation. I couldn't believe that he could be so cruel. But then, I suppose he had thought I had been so first.

I see that now. All I saw at the time was his displeasure and anger. And all I felt at the time was that the joy of the day, which despite all the tension and pain of being a guest where I had long hoped to play the host, had been extinguished. I crept home and went to bed more miserable than I have been for a very long time.

The next morning I wondered, not for the first time, whether I had not made a terrible mistake in aligning myself with the Goat. I had spent the previous day having my nose rubbed in everything I had lost by leaving home, and roughly, too. Now it appeared that the only thing I had in the world to counter that dreadful loss was turning to dust in my hands. I wrote a poem for him [my way, as you may have noticed, of coping with the need to reveal my emotions, especially when they are high] and e-mailed it to him. I tried to recognize his sadness and my thoughtlessness, but also to remind him that I had called him from the wedding to hear his voice, that I had left my children and the long evening around their bonfire to be with him.

And got no reply. Under the circumstances, I didn't really see how I could drive out to his House in the Woods until I was sure he wanted me to be there. And until he could tell me that he wasn't as angry and displeased with me as he had been the night before, I wasn't about to go.

I left phone messages for him, asking him to let me know if he still wanted me to come; and asked myself what conclusions I should draw if he did not. As the hours wore on, I got sadder and sadder and got less and less done, aside from literal and figurative hand-wringing. At the very end of the afternoon, he called after finally getting one of the messages, and couldn't understand my reservations at all. It was as if the night before had never happened, as though I were crazy to have taken it to heart. And surely I knew that I had subjected him to worse, and he had bounced back without the need for reassurance. Or so he said. I got ready to go over, but my heart was still pretty heavy. All the way up the mountain, all I could think about was the way he had managed with one or two short but mightily bitter remarks to completely unseat the joy that reigned in my heart. How could he?

Well, when I finally arrived at the cabin, all was sweetness and light, and I was the one with the problem for being upset. That rather dazed me, but to tell you the truth, the main thing was that my question about how much he cared for me was taken care of as soon as we stopped talking. I rather think that talking is actually a trap for him. He is remarkably capable of expressing all kinds of emotion [and content] in the way he makes love.

And I found myself lying in his arms after he had done so, completely happy, completely at rest. As sure that he had forgiven me for whatever I had done to him as I could be without the two words that unlock my heart ["I'm sorry"] being spoken. And as sure that I had forgiven him. I suppose it is technically possible to lie while lying with someone, but it is a horrible art, if a high one. The Goat's talent is rather different, and it leaves no doubt about what moves him to make his moves. Once again I was overwhelmed by the fact that one [I] could experience something so utterly new, so utterly overwhelming, at the ripe old age of 55, and have it borne out week after week, leaving me just as week in the knees at 57.

It's a mad world, my masters.

Oh, and the funny part:

At the Goat's mountaintop Bare-ass Bear event, I ran into someone from Nowheresville. It was the Alaskan Brown Bear I had taken out to dinner when he came East to look for a house a year or so ago. The one who made me realize how much a certain kind of vulnerable glance coming out of a face covered in fur turned me on--that impossibly powerful particular blend of the masculine and feminine... ah, fur! In any case, we chatted for quite a while, and I admired a new tattoo he had gotten on his first trip back to the Other Coast since he and his partner had pulled up stakes for the Bay State. It was great to reconnect. I came home to a rather embarrassed e-mail from the ABB, who remembered our conversation from long ago, and my tale of my coming out again, and how coming out for leather had been so much harder for me than what I had done in college--it was actually leather rather than gayness I was working so hard to overcome, not to have to accept.

Well, it turns out that my little Alaska Brown Bear has discovered something new about himself, and it made him realize that he really only knew one other person who had at last embraced leather rather late in life--although the ABB and I do part company as to when "late" sets in, as I don't think forty qualifies--and that maybe the two of us might have some things to talk about. I hastened to reply that I was sure we did, but that he should not regard me as having any particular expertise--I just knew what I liked. He said that was just what he needed; he had plenty of black belts around, and what he needed was more of a worm's eye view of the undertaking.

That I can certainly offer. So the next time I drive up to my mother's, I get to make a side-trip to the ABB's front porch, and a view of someone else's confusion, for a change. Just another little adventure waiting to happen.

We just keep on keeping on.
Although the devil does generally take the hindmost...
C

HIGH AS A KITE...

And then some, even without the herbal supplement or wall-banging sex this time. We were staying at my mother's, and our room was right under the bedroom of the upstairs apartment--and there's not a whole lot that goes on in either room that the people in the other don't experience with almost the same immediacy...

The Goat drove in from his house and met us halfway between my work-haunts and my mother's for lunch; there we were, my mother, my daughter, my lover, and me, and we had a lovely time.

A lovely enough time that my mother forgot her purse in the restaurant, and as we swung away to head out of town, my cell phone rang. It was the hostess calling, and she had something for me. It was the best phone message I think I've ever received:

"The gentleman in the red hot-rod has the lady's purse."

And so he did. I swung around and got back to the parking lot before he took off--in fact, I nearly clipped one of his lovingly restored headlights in my eagerness to relieve him of the extra burden... and then we all drove up to my mother's house by our own routes: I wanted to get there, my mother wanted to get there, and the Goat wanted to have the maximum amount of scenery for the distance.

It was a beautiful day...

Later that afternoon, we added Big Brother's rather odd daughter, to the mix and drove into Town to see UP in 3D, in spite of all the critical noise about how the 3D got in the way of the movie [and it did apparently give my niece a headache, but then, we all do, to some degree]. I loved it.

And as I drove in to the "cinema," I thought: here I am in my car with my mother, my daughter, my lover, and my weirdest niece, and we're all off to have a good time together. My niece even consented to stay after the movie and play cards! She comes from a household that disdains games of any sort, and here she was, throwing her lot in with the B-Team. We talked of almost nothing but the movie all evening. And the following morning we were still quoting our favorite bits, among them: "I do not like the cone of shame!"

My question is, what's in the water in Emeryville, CA? Because whatever it is, the rest of the world needs some of it. I realize that part of the appeal of Pixar is that there's only one of it, but don't you wish there were more? At the very least, I wish there were more than one movie a year...

I can't wait to get my paws on a DVD of UP and run it until it's worn away and my eyeballs are dribbling down my front... And the best part? My mother is already talking about going to see Ice Age III with me. I know the movie is going to be a let-down, but it's in 3D, and it has Scratt in it. How not worth ten bucks could it be? Then there's the new Harry Potter movie, and then... well, we all have the first Pixar live-action hybrid movie John Carter of Mars and Monsters, Inc. II to look forward to.

Some days I'm so glad to be alive I can't see straight. That actually has more to do with the Goat than it does with the spate of 3D movies, but you'd never know it from the way I've been running on recently...

I had a long talk with my Favorite Daughter on the drive back to her mother's house [and it seems quite incredible to me that I can call it that without any reserve, these days]. It was all about what marriage was and wasn't. The FD is only 21, and has all the idealism of youth bearing her up; the thing that worried me was that she seemed so invested in how things should be rather than how they tend to turn out, given the flawed nature of human beings. I admire her spirit, but I did have to say that I hoped she found a way to forgive people more and advocate cutting the offenders out of her life a little less.

I wasn't exactly arguing my own case, and she wasn't exactly, either, but it did come up a couple of times. I have to say: if I've learned anything in life, it's that life isn't as neat as you think it should be, and it's better to be prepared to cut people some slack.

As I have often said, some of the scariest words in Western civilization are: "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Anyway, we listened to each other, and tried to avoid each other's sensitive points, and still have an actual reality-based discussion. I loved it. I love her.

I love them all, really. How can you not love people who play cards and go to movies and are willing to go on and on about them for hours at dinner afterward?

Damned if I know.

THE BEST LAID PLANS...

I knew it wouldn't be that simple.

Isis has invited one of her Canadian cousins to come visit on Monday, and since my Favorite Daughter doesn't often get to see her or her family, she wants to stay and enjoy the visit. Never mind that we had arranged weeks ago to drive up on Sunday and stay at my mother's until we needed to be back on Wednesday night. Never mind that her grandmother's nose is now definitely out of joint, and will now take it out of me from Sunday evening through Tuesday morning, when the FD will arrive by bus.

Mind you, she will only talk about the fact the FD won't get to see my loopy eldest Sister from the South, who is In Residence with her über-patient husband at my mother's this weekend. It's always indirect misdirection up there: Heaven forbid that she should admit to being disappointed--it must be my sister who will be... or her husband. I hate to complain, but this habit of my mother's drives me a little crazy.

My grandmother wouldn't dream of playing a tired old trick like that: making a federal case out of my sister's supposed fondness for my children, which I've never noticed, personally--none of my multiple grandmothers would have. But then, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round, doesn't it? Hey, as long as it takes my kind as well, it's OK by me.

You know, I can't really tell them that if I had a choice, I would spend the day with Isis' cousin myself--though I would, gladly. Isis' cousins were one of the best things my marriage brought me. It would be nice if my daughter had put her grandmother first, but she didn't. And that's that.

So now the FD is planning to take a bus to my mother's on Tuesday, and I will drive her home to Isis on Wednesday, when I make my way back to my work hang-out at my grandmother's, where I will have to share the house with a niece [no relation of mine] who is flying in to visit for three weeks. At least I'm only there to queer the punch a couple of days a week, so nobody needs to punch the queer... When I was really worried about my grandmother's health recently, I relished all the company that passes through the house. But now all I see is how the extra people insist on doing things their own way, and force a very self-sufficient person to become their guest in her own house. She would rather eat oatmeal for dinner in peace than have her life turned upside down for veal cordon bleu.

I've gotten rather fond of the fact that my grandmother does the absolute minimum to keep the ball rolling [who wouldn't at 98?]. She teases me constantly about my habit of actually washing the dishes until they are clean. Her standard line once I have polished off and polished up a set of pots and pans is: "Well, that will keep them for another week or two." I've gotten used to it, and I just do what I can to keep the blood-hounds at bay: things could get ugly if the visiting nurse, or the more "helpful" of her other relations, should see things approaching a train wreck in the kitchen...

The Goat doesn't think I get things clean enough, so as I'm getting it from both ends, I figure I must have reached some kind of happy medium...

While the FD and I are at my mother's, we will lure her out to see Pixar's "UP" in 3D. I have to say that it can't be as good as "Coraline" in the 3D department, but it is a Pixar movie, and I'm really going for all the non-3D elements, anyway. Then it's back to the Big Woods and trying to find a movie on Netflix that the Goat is willing to watch for more than ten minutes. It's harder than you think.

I just had to write a progress report on my little job for the College, and the gist of it was that it's all going to take about half again as long as we had estimated at the beginning, and that somebody is going to have to come up with the money to make it happen. Not my department, luckily-- I just work here.

But I do figure I should warn people lying on the tracks about the freight train coming around the bend...

Actually, it's not even so much the money as the fact that it's going to take a lot more time. The whole project is about a deadline, and that's why they hired me: Mr. Deadline. But more time on the project automatically means more time away from the Goat, unless he decides to retire early, and more time being a leech on my grandmother, unless she decides to kick the bucket. Actually, another scare like the one we had last month and the whole family would be after me to spend seven nights a week there... Me, I just generally try to fit into her way of life.

In the meantime, it's back to the Big Woods tomorrow to get a Love Fix before taking off to my mother's.

Now that the Goat is off the hook for the summer, things should get a little easier around the edges. Unless he loses it again next weekend, when everyone else is off at the wedding... Well, here's hoping we've been around that topic often enough to wear it out.

Did I mention that the wedding is next weekend?

That I'm nowhere near ready, that I'm still trying to figure out how much booze to buy, and how to speak at the wedding without making an ass of myself or creating a scene without meaning to...

Hang in there, guys.
You know in your hearts it's all you can do.
C

DOING WELL by DOING GOOD...

By late afternoon, the Goat had finally finished a long day of faculty meetings and frantically squeezing in the last reports, and he immediately took off for the cabin. He called to say he was there and it seemed to the naked ear pretty clear he was in a state of near-total stress. So I let him stew in his own juice for a while--chill out, as it were--before driving out myself to give him a little of what he always gives me:

A listening ear, some slow caresses to the head and shoulders, a polite shove to get upstairs, a gentle nudge to get out and partake of the Hitler's Birthday Herbal Supplement. Then things got nasty, as they usually do, and I think I can say a good time was had by all. He said it was just what he needed, and it made me feel pretty good, too.

Amazing how that works, sometimes. It won't tonight, when the Goat comes up against the very last of his deadlines, and just has to plough through; and it won't tomorrow, when he has to mud-wrestle with the rest of the faculty for the very last time. But by then I will be off to the races, back at my grandmother's house for two long days of work, and then taking my daughter up to see her grandmother, if all goes to according to plan.

It may not; things so seldom do these days. I'm making spaghetti with clam sauce tonight, and wondering why the white wine is all out at the cabin...

But back to last night for the time being:
Here's hoping you too are getting your share of whatever you need.
If not now, then soon.
C

END of the YEAR BLUES...

I don't have the End of the Year Blues, because my year is not coming to an end, but the Goat is in a complete nail-biting frenzy trying to finish up the meetings, grades, reports, advisee letters, and everything else in the ongoing paper war here at the Academy. Everyone looked so happy at graduation, and now the heat is on for the rest of the week... and tempers are fraying ever so slightly.

Last weekend we had a dinner for friends who came to watch a nephew graduate, which grew to accommodate a dozen other people, mostly faculty members. I did my "hide in the kitchen and help make it happen" thing while one of our guests relieved the Goat at the grill station. It was a great party until a couple of the other parties on campus closed down and we acquired the remaining party animals up on the hill...

One woman was quite drunk, and she is a bit of a motor-mouth even when sober. Under the influence of altogether too much juice of some kind or another, she proceeded to lay out in no uncertain terms just what she needed [a man] and why she wasn't getting it [the men at the school were wusses--read: "put off by loud- mouths"--and the school was in the Middle of Nowhere--and, come to think of it, she may have a point there]. I took advantage of the general departure for a cigarette break out on the deck to quietly tuck into the bathroom to brush my teeth, sneak into the bedroom, close the door, strip down, get horizontal, and start sawing wood.

She apparently closed the party down about an hour later when she started making remarks about particular single men in attendance...

She still has another year to go on her contract, and she seems to have set out to piss the whole community off before she leaves... there but for the grace of God go I. It was great to see our friends, and give the nephew a proper send-off. And until it was highjacked, it was a wonderful evening. I ate too much, but that's not exactly news, is it?

Now it's time to clean up and button up all the paperwork, and my plan is to be simultaneously as helpful as I can and as inconspicuous and as absent as I can until it all settles down... at which point I hope to get another good weekend out of what's left of the Goat... my own most precious non-renewable resource.

Hang in there, all.
C

THIS JUST IN...

Someone I met at the cocktail party [see below] sent me this link on the latest wrinkle in the gay marriage debate [click here for the whole thing]:

Neither side of this debate has been true to their professed values. The “rites people” do not really care about the sanctity of marriage and the unconditional love and commitment to family values that such rites express and witness. They are “freaked out” by the love shared by two people of the same gender, so they offer a hysterical, angry view that gay marriages will somehow undermine heterosexual marriages and family values. If the “rites people” really believed society was better off when people committed to stay together, they would celebrate that more people in this country want to be in binding monogamous relationships.

On the other hand, the “rights people” are equally hypocritical. Rather than worry about the label of marriage, which evokes fiery opposition, the “rights people” should concentrate on ensuring that every single legal right straight married couples share is mandated for similarly committed gay couples. But as much as they care about rights, they are really “freaked out” by not having the affirmation of those who oppose them. They believe this affirmation will come with obtaining the legal right to call their relationship “marriage.” Instead of fixating on the rhetorical victory of the “marriage” label, they should focus on emptying the label of its content.

Rabbi Irwin Kula is the author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life.” He is currently the president of The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City.

The BIG 35...

I went back for my 35th college reunion a couple of weeks ago, and it was a very odd experience. Those in the know, and in the cash flow, stayed on through the weekend. I could only afford to stay one night, so I drove out early on the first day of the reunion, spent the night, and drove back late on the second day, so I could be with the Goat at graduation at the Academy. That left me from noon one day to after dinner the next. The first day, I had scheduled a lunch and a dinner with two old friends I hadn’t seen for a long time: a recently widowed rabbi and a philandering architect who lives in town.

I hadn’t planned on attending any of the actual graduation ceremonies, partly because I only do so well with crowds, and partly because I guess I tend to shy away from things on principle. It's some kind of in-born inclination to the negative—I always used to hesitate to go skiing as a kid, for instance, but always had a good time if I did—aside from the frozen extremities, at least. But after lunch with my rabbi friend and his college roommate—who were so glad to see each other you could easily have mistaken them for lovers—they dragged me over to the class day events, which included some very funny student performances and a high-profile speaker. I enjoyed it all, but especially seeing my friend again.

It's been a while.

After that I was expecting to go to dinner with my architect friend, so I had not signed up for the [incredibly expensive] reunion class dinner. I had e-mailed K earlier in the week to reconfirm our appointment, and had never gotten an answer; after the class day antics, I tried calling him, and left messages at his work and home numbers—no one answered in either place. By the time 4pm rolled around, I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to see him at dinner, so I wandered by the reunion office and inquired how much a last-minute ticket to the dinner would cost, and it turned out it cost even more “at the door” than it had on-line.

So much for that idea.

So, I decided I would just treat myself to dinner. Then I remembered that the fledgling gay alumni group had scheduled a couple of events; I had planned on attending the free cocktail party the following day—in fact, it was the reason I had decided to go ahead and spend the money to overnight in town—but I had forgotten that they were having a “warm-up” drinks event that day at one of the pubs downtown. So I put on my walking shoes and wandered down.

One of my rules of thumb back when I spent a lot of time on the road was that you should never eat or drink in a place you can’t see into from the outside. This pub qualified for avoidance on all counts; not only was the door the only thing at street level, but once you did get downstairs, there was almost no light worth mentioning. I finally summoned up the courage to ask where the gay alumni were gathering, and the hostess directed me to a room, more like an alcove, really, off to the side, with the same ennui she might have summoned up if I had asked where the monthly Elks gathering was happening. In fact, if there had been any light in the place, I could have found it myself, but there wasn’t…

Once my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see right away that there were quite a few people from my class there, none of whom I knew well; there were more from the younger years, but then, isn’t that always the case? Once I finally managed to flag down a server and get a beer, I wandered over to where the food was and ran right into someone I had known—we had taken a lot of the same art courses, though we was really a theater person—a stage manager, I think—and I was only doing posters. He did the whole “mingling at the party, welcome the nervous stranger” thing, introduced himself, and I said “Good to see you again, Joe [not his name, mind you]; we actually know each other.”

That brought a complete blank stare, but once I had filled in enough dark details, the pennies began hitting the slots hard and fast. He’s now an oncologist, and he and his partner have a house in the Big Woods, of all places; but aside from a little dusting of gray, he looked exactly the same—and how I wish I could say the same of myself.

Today I am easily twice the man I was then, and I haven’t gotten any taller…

Joe introduced me around, but what was so weird was the fact that we were now so completely casual about being gay, which was certainly not the case on campus in our day—at least, not on ours. Of course, now I could look back and say of those people I had known slightly or at least recognized, “Well, of course. Why didn’t I know?” [as they would have been quite right to say of me]. Over the course of an hour or so, I found the courage to talk to a number of people, and began to feel at home. It was a lovely hour, but then they all took off for the class dinners, and I found myself eating a burger on the sidewalk and wishing I had not been stood up by my friend K. I called the Goat and made little whimpering noises which he found rather silly; in retrospect I do too, but at the time I was definitely being what Betty Macdonald called “a Big Saddo.”

I went back to my lonely dorm room and read a book—thank God I had brought one! I didn’t have my computer or any of the five million things I need to do for work with me, so it was either reading or tearing my hair out. After the dinner was over, I sauntered over to see if anyone was sticking around for the free end of the event, and got to listen to my ex-Air-Force-captain friend “Jay” brief me on the current student issues while the sophomore whose issues he was cataloguing smiled rather tightly. Jay is a bit of an ass, but he was a long-time leader in the alumni association, so it caused rather a stir when he came out… He dealt with it really well, making it a “teaching moment” for the college, and many of the rest of us—at my 25th reunion, I spent much of my time talking to Jay and his lover about my planned going public as bisexual, and they were both pleasantly supportive.

The next day I met Jay for breakfast and he dragged me to graduation, which turned out to be quite a gas—mostly because of the ways students were serious and silly, and the way the adults reacted to both. The people getting honorary degrees were pretty impressive, including one Gay Superstar who will remain nameless. It turned out that Jay’s lover N was completely obsessed with this guy, and had prevailed on Jay to crash the post-graduation cocktail party for the honorees at the president’s house so they could meet him… and they invited me along.

Jay easily took command in the approach to the president’s house. “Stay right behind me and let me do all the talking,” he said. We did an amazing “flying wedge” assault, slipping in through a side entry to the establishment [as they were checking invitations at the front entrance]. Jay charged, and we trotted along behind, trying to look as determined and entitled as he did. From his years raising money for the college, he knew everybody in the Inner Circle we were entering here, and he covered everything [hanging up our coats, grabbing a glass of wine, wading through the crowd to get to the room where the honorees were decompressing] with an amazing volley of greetings and handshakes, keeping everyone who might have stopped us off balance—until we actually got to the Decompression Chamber. There the Cerberus would brook no interference, so we waited for N’s idol to exit the room.

I would have missed it, but N caught him on the threshold [I personally expect he was headed off to take a leak]. N announced his fan-aticism in rapid shorthand, and then asked if his lover Jay could take a picture of them. Jay took two while the poor Gay Superstar smiled rather tensely, and then the GSS sprinted up the stairs, which only confirmed me in my understanding of why he had left his safe haven in the first place… we dawdled out the front door towards lunch.

And there were pre-lunch cocktails! I had paid for lunch, so I took a wine spritzer onboard and after chatting up another four or five people I hadn’t seen in ten or twenty years, breezed into the dining room and found that the only empty seats were with the other members of my class who lived in my Former Hometown, now Isis’ Hometown. That went off pretty well, though I was careless enough, once again, to drop the reason for our split-up, which I am pretty sure Isis is still stonewalling. It gets too complicated to avoid the truth, after a while, and I stopped lying in response to direct questions a long time ago; I don’t volunteer the information, but if someone asks, I’m not going to prevaricate.

After lunch I put in some more time in my dorm room with the life-saving book, and then took off for a Gay Studies discussion and the Main Gay Event, the all-classes, all-gay cocktail party. I wore my new motorcycle boots; I had my jeans over them, so they were a rather subtler announcement than usual, but they were still there to give me a bit of a lift and anyone who was interested… a bit of a lift. The Gay Studies discussion was amazingly self-referential and lame. The students and the faculty who spoke were so tied up in discussion of theory [OK, it's Queer Theory, but does that make it any less irritating?] that I wanted to bolt for cover, and would have. But the room was set up in such a way that I would have had to parade before the panel to make my departure, and that seemed a little ruder than even I was feeling…

Once four or five others had packed up and left, I followed with a profound sense of relief. If there were ever any doubt in my mind that I couldn’t live in academe, it sure got nailed this time. What a lot of hot air! To my delight, one young man did ask if they weren’t all losing sight of the meaning of their own lives in all this convoluted theoretical discussion; I almost kissed him…

Anyway, I finally made my escape and found my self under a tent soaking up gin and lime juice, trying to contact the guys I had met the night before [including an incredibly hot Dutchman whose lover was in my class, I think], and trying to make the extra effort not to let the chance of talking to new people go by me, as I usually do. I did talk to some very nice people I hadn’t known until that moment, including one poor guy whose lover of five years had just been murdered two weeks before. That certainly put the tone of the “cocktail hour” in perspective. But there were what seemed like hundreds of people there; I guess I file the place under “Far Away," but it's close enough to several larger cities to attract a respectable number of alums of all ages, and then there are the Homintern among the faculty and the student body. Nice to see so many of “us” in one place without trying to pick each other up, in any case.

I voiced my amazement at how many guys and gals had shown up, and was then informed that this was just the run-up to the [third? fourth?] big annual dinner of our little wing of the alumni association. Silly me; this was another expensive dinner I had failed to buy a ticket to, so after some very pleasant conversations over the course of an hour or so, I once again watched everyone file off for salmon and asparagus [or whatever the well-heeled are eating at dinners these days] and I wound up back on the sidewalk looking for something that wasn’t a burger…

Once again, after the dinner there was free admission again for the program, but when I showed up the dinner itself was just getting underway, and I realized that if I stuck around for the “program,” much as I would have liked to, I wasn’t going to get home until long after midnight. So I said my goodbyes and took my leave. And drove and drove and drove. The following day I was completely incapable of focusing or getting anything done at all.

It was partly that, at 98, my grandmother has, suddenly taken a downward swing, and you have to assume that there’s little likelihood of an upswing to follow it. Since she has been my main support system for the last six months or so, that kind of took the stuffing out of me. But there was something else… And I tried hard to put my finger on it. I spent more of the morning than I meant to jotting down the names of the people I had met, sending little “nice to meet you” e-mails to the ones I had enjoyed speaking to, and trying to sort out my emotional response to the days’ events. [I couldn’t really contact the Dutchman, as he was only along for the ride, and I had been unable to get his alumnus partner to recognize my existence—oh, well.] And the more I think about it, the more I think it comes down to this:

After I came out to my family and close friends, I skipped town and started a new life as a gay man. [OK, OK, bi, but looking for a guy this time—let’s not squabble about terminology.] Now I had spent time in Nowheresville as a child and as a “youth,” but did not make more than an initial effort to get in touch with the people I had known then who were still in the area. Then I took off for the Big Woods, and was pretty much known as the Goat’s latest squeeze and not much else—though I did mean to contact an old friend of my parents who lived in town, I haven’t. And thereby hangs a tale: I think I was still trying to keep the “gay” and the “straight” sides of me in separate compartments—it does make life easier, as the demands made on both sides of the street don’t really fit me very well. The days at the reunion were the first time, since coming out to my family, that I had to let the two worlds meet in a significant way, and it rattled me.

Everyone was very nice. Anyone who had read my alumni notes knew my story—not to mention the fact that my Christmas letter goes out to my 300 closest friends—it’s not like I was withholding information. Everyone knew. But it’s one thing to tell people, and it’s another thing to be with people who knew you under one set of circumstances and are now seeing you in a whole new light. A few people—there are always a few nitwits in the crowd—had made unpleasant remarks or veiled put-downs, but that’s not my problem. I really think it was the acceptance of the nice people that had set off the emotional alarms: for the first time in quite a while, I was meeting people who had known me for a long time but who now were looking at my sexuality as the first thing they had to deal with rather than the last thing. And that was weird to me. As was the contrast between then and now...

That’s just the way it is.
More later, maybe.

Hang in there, all.

C

MORE of the SAME...

I know that you are all getting tired of this topic, but it continues to astound me how closely the Goat and I seem to be aligned [as the Chinese fortune-cookie ending goes:] "in bed." Saturday nights are usually the points where this is brought home to me in no uncertain terms, and this Saturday was no exception. It was mind-boggling. Who knew one could generate that much heat and not set off the smoke-detector?

I keep wondering where this part of me was for the first 55 years of my life. Well, we all know the answer to that question: under wraps. I knew only too well what was going on out on the piers, in the backrooms, in the trucks in the meat-packing district, and all the other bits of NYC geography that had become the subject of the gay knowledge grapevine that had shoots in every other city in the US, even in the rinky-dink precincts of my so-called Big City--and even of the leather knowledge grapvine, though the Goat claims that anything remarkable or important about leather happened in San Francisco first, and in his corner of the West Coast second.

But, as the Goat also points out, if I'd waded in to the melee then, I would probably be dead by now. I'll take alive over dead any day. But there was no way to know that then; it was just a question of knowing what called out to me loudest. But it's one thing to know what represents temptation to you--and to know how people who show up in it unexpectedly get talked about, as I heard only too often--and it's quite another thing to wake up one day and just give temptation its head, as the saying goes. It may be my imagination, but things seem to just keep on getting better. At this rate, when I do die, I am going to die very, very happy.

We were even able to talk about the future today for the first time in a long time; Son B's upcoming wedding had put a lot of issues out of bounds for a while, but had also crystallized things for the Goat. The non-invitation had made him question how much he belonged to my family [bad] but had led him to actually spend time thinking over the last few weeks about a lot of the issues he has been finessing before then, or putting off until they landed on the front burner all on their own [good].

Such as:

What is going to happen when he retires? how far away would he be willing to move? I have to say that after what will be at that point two years living in several places at once, I really want to find a place we can both fit in within a reasonable travel time from the work that I do have. Short term. And it probably means several years of being ready [or at least willing] to move around a bit--I've got some eight years of work left before I can join him in retirement--if I live that long... He went through a lot of forced relocations out West, and that's one of the reasons that he is so tied to his cabin in the woods now. But today he seemed willing to at least contemplate moving a couple of times to allow us to be together wherever I was working.

That sure sounds like progress to me.

But to return to the opening thought of this post: the really nice thing is that what is sauce for the goose seems to be sauce for the gander--or at least, they both seem to get what they need from the sauce they're cooking up--or in--together. What a gift to get so late in life. Not exactly a free gift, but a great gift nevertheless...

Hang in there, guys.
It beats the alternatives.
C

NO HANDWRINGING... THIS TIME...

I just noticed again this morning--definitely not the first time for me, and probably not even for you, gentle reader--that my blogroll is populated mainly with defunct or long-silent blogs. That is the price you pay for continuing to blog but not really continuing to spend the time to read a lot of other people's posts.

When I started out in Blogworld, I started by reading whole blogs at a sitting; I was even stupid enough to cut and paste the entries so that I could read them like a book. [I was even stupider: I gave the books and URLs to my wife, but I'll pass over that one for the moment.] Now, I check in with my still-posting regulars and whatever other blogs they send me to, but I basically don't read much.

I don't post much, either.

There is clearly a similar dynamic at work across the board. People who are conflicted and in the middle of an intolerable mess, or just plain crazy from not having anyone to talk to, talk on and on and on. People who have sort come out the other side and get their lives in order stop blogging and get on with their lives. Good for them.

[And since I should be in the same boat, the question really is: why am I still blogging? I've asked this question a number of times before... It can't be because I am that dependent on my seven followers and the five or six other humans who occasionally drop in to see what's going on.]

But I can't help wondering what happened to my BlogBrothers once they stopped posting. It's the "vampire in me"; I got used to knowing about their lives, and now I don't. Their gain, my loss.

In some parallel universe, I would be working on my counseling credentials by haunting all the new GMM blogs and offering sage advice. The problem is that I don't have the time. Well, no--the problem is that I really only have one thing to say: no one but you two can figure out where this is going and how to get there. And having once said that, I quit.

But I no longer feel that's the whole story. I still have the scars from all the well-meaning but hateful comments assuring me that there was only one possible ending to my own story. But now I am inclined to believe much of what my vulture-readers told me. Nine times out of ten, they are probably right: eventually, things will reach the point where even the most accommodating woman will decide she's had enough, and if you [we] have any heart at all, you [we] will see that it's time to cut her losses [not yours] and make up your mind one way or the other.

But I insist that either option is feasible. And that one time out of ten, a couple may in fact find a way to cope with what seems like an essentially intolerable situation. In at least one case I know, it works because the wife doesn't want to believe what she really knows in her bones, and as long as it's not said, she can go on living. And her husband loves her a lot--so he wants her to go on living, and wants to go on living with her. I understand all of that; I just don't have the intestinal fortitude to cover up [deny] the truth like that. I suffered enough when my in-laws all refused to acknowledge that my father-in-law was dying--everyone in the family but Isis refused to recognize what was visibly, tangibly, incontrivertibly going on in front of our eyes, and it drove the two of us to the brink of insanity.

I couldn't live with that inside a marriage...

So here I am, giving the vultures their due. I just don't want to be one.

Hang in there, guys.
What else can we do?
C