Nothing runs like a dear

Stag-Man by Patrik Törnroos, used by permission

Astride the green ogre, Dave appears less than his usual confident self. Omigosh, he is human. Suddenly, I can't wait to get him in bed.

My husband stands out in any crowd. He has all the style and class I never got. My earliest image of him: swimmer's build, tight jeans, cowboy boots, purple jacket, Crocodile Dundee hat. At last year’s Pride parade, divas on floats and sexy men in skanky underwear waved and called out to him, “Love your hat.” He was wearing a straw cowboy hat, hand-shaped to look extra-cool, decorated with black and white polka-dotted feathers from our guineas, and set off with a dangly piece of shiny blue jewelry.

People warm to Dave easily. And no wonder. He’s friendly and good-natured. He was born with a droopy eyelid—it makes him look like he's thoughtfully considering everything you say. He probably is. He's a great listener. He exudes confidence, competence, wisdom and compassion. Dave served as hospice chaplain for 25 years. These traits served him and his patients well. He's the sort you’d trust with dark secrets. With your life.

Say you and he find yourselves in dire straits—you’ve climbed a fire tower to get away from a 60-foot alligator. From here you can see the huge forest fire headed your way from the east and a tornado coming in from the west. Now you notice termites have weakened the tower structure. It sways from side to side. The staircase below crumbles to dust. Deep breath. Dave assesses the situation, calmly explains your options, makes a decision for himself and supports you in crafting your own plan of action. Offers to lend you an extra jet pack and parachute. Betcha.

Do you get the idea I think Dave can do anything? You're right. But here, outside the John Deere farm implement dealership, I’m seeing his vulnerable side.

We've push-mowed our two-acre lawn for 15 years. A twisted ankle last year made us rethink that plan. Back in February we bought an old John Deere 318 garden tractor. It ran fine for two weeks this spring, then not at all. We purchased a utility trailer, manhandled the behemoth onto it, and drug it into that bastion of butch, our local John Deere dealership.

The mower’s been repaired and we’re back now to pick it up. A few minutes ago a manly man in a green farm cap drove it up onto the wagon, grunted, then sauntered back to his man-cave.

Fine, except when he parked it, he rammed the mower into our trailer’s flimsy front rail. The thin wooden board looks ready to snap. Dave puts the tractor in neutral and tries to roll it backwards, but to no avail. The mower won’t budge. We push, pull, push some more. No dice. Dave climbs up on it and starts the thing. Still no luck.

“The brake pedal is stuck in the down position,” he says. “I can’t get it to let up.” (Later we’ll learn the way up is down. To release the brake pedal you have to press it all the way down.)

I suggest Dave go back into the shop and tell ’em we're new at owning a Deere, ask how to unlock the brakes. I myself don’t volunteer; I don't want to look stupid. But I’m sure he can pull it off without looking the fool. He grew up on a farm. Those men in there are his peers.

Dave gives me a pointed look. “We'll wait until we get home and read the manual,” he says.                       

 Suddenly, I see him in a new light and my heart melts. He’s vincible. He’s not as omnipotent as I think. Someday I’ll lose him. All I ever touch is fragile. My hold is tentative, even on those I love most. Time, and with it life itself, darts away, runs like a deer.

As the Lady From Joisey Said . . .

The Rape of Ganymede by Rubens

    “We think we know everything. We don’t know shit.” The name of the play escapes me, as does the plot, but this line sticks with me, as does the image of the world-weary drag queen who delivers it.
    Growing up, I thought I was in the know. My brand of church taught that we had the inside track on salvation, knew exactly what God wanted. It was up to us to point out to others how wrong they were.
    My eyes opened when I came out gay in mid-life. I went from a desk job at a religious organization to biscuit maker at an interstate truck stop cafe on the early morning shift. One of my co-workers was a large imposing woman with a thick New Jersey accent. I loved her sense of humor and take on the world. I often told her so. “Aw, ain’t you sweet,” she’d say. “You want to know what I think? I think you’re full of shit.”
    I didn’t want to believe her. These twenty years later I begin to think she was spot on.
    Last month I wrote a short piece about the brevity of life, how everything changes and how quickly. How to manage in such a world, I wondered aloud, and concluded: “Live as fully alive and fully aware as possible. Choose love. And gratitude. Laugh often.”
    This on a Wednesday. 
    Thursday morning, my employer called me into his office to tell me he’s decided to change my job description. I’m to identify prospective customers and sell them on our services. “I know this has been a revolving-door position,” he said, noting the average tenure of marketing personnel at our company is three months—people get fired when sales quotas are not met. “I’ve decided this is what I want you to do.”
    Had my anxiety been rocket propellant, there’d be a big hole in his ceiling. I am no salesman. As a kid, I tried peddling magazine subscriptions, and in college, vitamins. I proved an abject failure on both counts. After college, armed with a communications degree and no job prospects, I went into telephone marketing. That career topped out at a week. My next position, also in sales, lasted four times as long: I sold popcorn and caramel apples out of a wagon at the Covered Bridge Festival in Parke County, Indiana. I haven’t looked back. Until now. My boss orders me to walk the plank. 
    What I wrote about living awake and aware, embracing what is? Ehhhnhh.
    When change stares me in the face, I notice I sing a different tune. I go all queasy—and with good reason.
    It has to do with the story I heard Saturday at graduation open house for a friend who just earned her Ph.D. in psychology. As we ate out on the deck, we heard the neighbors’ chickens. Erin told us they’re being picked off one by one. Coyote? Hawk? Conversation turned to a YouTube video she’s seen: a family sets their baby bunny free to live in the great outdoors. Hop, hop, hop. As Dad videotapes its first steps toward freedom, a hawk swoops down and carries off the little rabbit squealing.
    “Run, run, be free!” said Erin, gesturing wildly. “Then wham-o!” A bunch of us laughed.
    “That’s not funny,” said her mother-in-law, who finished chemotherapy two weeks ago.
    “I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time,” Erin said. “But isn’t that life? It’s what happens.”
    Indeed, life pulls no punches. A bald-headed woman. Bunny nuggets. Me a salesman. Everything changes in an instant and it’s not funny. It’s tragic—except that it’s also somehow comical.
    We traipse through life thinking we know the score.
    “We don’t know shit,” says the drag queen, kneeling at her friend’s grave. She carries her purse over one arm, in the other, a toilet seat lid.

Brief matters.

1. “A walnut killed him,” a relative says at the family reunion this summer, speaking of my great uncle. “He had a lot of food allergies,” says a second cousin. Apparently, Uncle Louie was deathly allergic to walnuts and didn’t know it. I stare at a sepia photograph of a young married man with big ears and bigger plans.

Live like you mean it, Louie. Hear me? Love like you’re gonna die at 31. ’Cause guess what—

    2. Blend the peel of an orange, a patch of velvet cloth and a gold doubloon with a Georgia peach and you’ll approximate the color of day lily my husband Dave has growing out back. Gorgeous blooms. But don’t blink. As their name implies, each blossom lasts but an afternoon.

    3. The pain is intense, and it isn’t as if I haven’t been warned. Dave pointed to the hornets' nest being built above our barn’s double doors, said he planned to kill its inhabitants. I made a case for living and letting live. They'll interfere with our painting the barn this summer, he said, and will probably sting us when we go in and out. Not if we don’t bother them, I said. I’m reminded how physical pain rivets my attention, even as I mutter, “this, too, shall pass.”

    4. After our long cold winter, the attack of the mayflies didn't happen at my workplace this year. There are usually one or two days the entrance to the building is heaped with mayflies that have expired beneath its bright security light. These creatures spend most of their life as nymphs in the nearby Missinewa River. Come spring, they transform en masse, unfold new wings, fly, mate and die—all within a few hours.    

    5. Love me, love my cock. My hens, too. Our barnyard chickens are more pets than livestock. I was stricken last fall when a dog maimed my favorite hen. Three weeks ago she went broody, determined to hatch a clutch of eggs. My heart swelled to think of this scrappy survivor bringing life into the world. Yesterday she responded in soothing tones to the peep-peeps of her lone new arrival. Today her nest is empty. No sign of her chick anywhere; only a broken eggshell to prove she is a mother.

    6. My oldest son is seven years old when I come out to myself and others. I lose my court gambit for joint custody, then see my visitation hours cut and cut again until finally a judge issues an order barring me from seeing my children altogether.  

    7. Pride Day in Indianapolis offers a flash of rainbow warmth and dazzle. Then it's over. Back to life as usual. Yet for one brief Camelot moment, a shared sense of acceptance and freedom.

    8. Life itself might well be an orgasm, fast as it shoots by. I’m at the age now where years collapse into months, months into hours. My elders assure me the pace only quickens from here on out.

    9. In the wake of a recent federal judge’s ruling same-sex couples here in Indiana are allowed to marry. No having to travel out of state or out of country (as Dave and I did when we wed in Canada in 2005). For three days I revel in the notion my state finally has to accord Dave and me this measure of dignity, humanity and equality. Then the 7th Circuit Court stays the order. Now, a colleague bustles over to tell me what she heard on the radio: same-sex couples who wed here are to return their marriage licenses and collect a refund of fees paid.

    10. All things change. All things change. My crib notes for living in such a world: (a) Live as fully alive and fully aware as possible. (b) Choose love. And gratitude. (c) Laugh often. (d) Avoid nuts.

DIE LATER. DANCE FIRST—ONE LAST TIME.

"Dance of the Mayflies"
Artwork by Indiana artist Rod Crossman
(used by permission)

“The grass is green fire,” I say aloud. Iʼm lying in clover and bluestem, looking into the darkening sky. “I am fire, too.ˮ

My husband Dave glances my way, makes no move to find a garden hose or fire extinguisher. In 16 years, heʼs heard me offer plenty of out-of-context remarks. Itʼs how I ask for his attention. He knows Iʼll explain soon enough. We are resting, having spaded our part of a community garden at my workplace near the Mississinewa River.

I point upwards.

The sun sinks low in a Neapolitan ice cream sky among layers of blue raspberry, peach and vanilla. Itʼs a gorgeous backdrop for the aeronautics show overhead. “Mayflies,” I say. “Can you see them? Look. Itʼs as if the grass is on fire and theyʼre the ashes whirling upwards. The hot air lifts them up; they drift back down, only to get caught in another updraft.”

I watch, mesmerized. Each delicate mothlike creature measures an inch, maybe two inches long from its pointy outstretched front legs to the tips of its twin tails. They rise a yard, two yards in the air, then float downwards only to lift again, sometimes whirling up and off to one side. There are a hundred or more. Rising, falling. Rising, falling. The intricate dance of the doomed.

Mayflies famously live only a few hours after they take to the skies. They mate. The female lays her eggs in water—a pond, lake, or river. The adults die. The eggs hatch. Wingless nymphs emerge. They live underwater, feed on algae and dead plant material. Many fall prey to fish, dragonfly larvae and other predators. Survivors burrow in the mud, hide under rocks or aquatic plants. Over the course of the next several months they regularly molt, shedding the old skin theyʼve outgrown. Pads develop on their backs. These are their future wings.

Creatures of a day, Aristotle called them, ephémeron. There are over 2000 species of Ephemeridae. Those along the Mississinewa River hatch in early May. As if on cue, they rise en masse to the surface of the water, wait for their skins to crack open. They crawl forth, spread newfound wings and fly to dry land where they molt one last time. They now have no mouths, no way to feed themselves. No need. All that is necessary is within. They are called to the dance. An aerial ballet. A dance of fire.

And dance they do. Big-eyed long-legged males, smaller-eyed shorter-limbed females, rising, falling, rising. Lace-like wings, long thin bodies. “Lifelong dancers of a day,” the poet Richard Wilbur calls them.

Dave and I watch for mating behavior, donʼt see any coupling for some while. (Reading up on them later, I learn males take to the air first, await the femalesʼ arrival. Must have been a lot of mayfly testosterone up there.) Eventually we spot some insects coupling as they float by. Males use their longer front legs to reach back over their heads, hold onto to their female partners. Or male partners, perhaps. Several ménage à trois waft by. Ménage à quatre, as well. And ménage à sept, huit, maybe even neuf. This latter makes a rapid descent, weighed down by the number of passengers.

Rise, fall; lift, drift. I could lay here for hours watching. Except that Dave has the keys to the truck and itʼs a long walk home. I rise to go.

Come morning, when I return to work, I find a heap of dead mayflies beneath the security light. Mostly males, I assume. No need to return to the river to lay eggs. They died drawn to the shining. 

Are these but creatures of a day? Dare I discount the lifetime they spent as inhabitants of a different world? I sympathize with them, I who came out in midlife, waited until late to crack open my shell, find my wings.

For all of us life is short; the end is sure. Everything in its time. When our call comes, may we dance as if thereʼs no tomorrow.