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.

ST. JOHN IS A CREEP

He's a bit creepy, Ian Bannen, in his role in the 1970 TV movie “Jane Eyre.” He plays St. John Rivers, a solemn young clergyman pledged to be a missionary to India. He's cute enough, mixing little boy sincerity with raven-haired adult resolve. But he's got this religious thing going on. That, and an inflated ego or a bent view of God’s demands. Probably both. I recognize too much of my former self in him to think otherwise. Bannen plays the role I once lived: Good Boy/Good Church Boy/Little Mr. Please-Everyone-Else-Especially-God. 

Creepy.

I had to be good and better than good to make up for a deep-rooted inner sense that I was sick, would never measure up, was deep-down worthless. I didn't have a word for the type of person I was, didn't want to know the word. Knew it was bad. Knew I was bad. Knew I was dirty and shameful and rotten to the core. I didn't want to look too closely into the pit at the center of my psyche. But I knew always it was there. I tried to fill in the hole with religion.

I see all this in the St. John character on the mini-silver screen. My husband Dave and I look at each other across the popcorn bowl. "Repressed gay man," he says. I agree. 

St. John (Brits pronounce it SIN-jun) lives with his two younger sisters who encourage his developing interest in their house guest Jane Eyre. When he at last gets alone with Jane, St. John leads her to the village church where he preaches each Sunday. 

"I want to serve in a large way," he tells Jane. "I have to serve my Savior. I have to serve my Savior." He sounds earnest, serious, sober, intense. "Do you understand? I shall do it with all my power and with all my strength."

He's trying too hard. I can relate. He wants to find a hard-headed woman to accompany him on life's journey. He’s set his sights on Jane, not because he's in love with her, but because she's strong and determined. She has character resources he needs.

"Don't you see?,” St. John says. “God sent you here for a purpose, to join with me in this great work…. Marry me. Together our strength will more than double what we each have. And we’ll give it all to God.”

Damn.

This is me proposing marriage to the woman who became my wife. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, I wanted her to save me from myself, be my ticket into heaven, my rock and my salvation. Later in our marriage I wrote her this note: “In some way I don’t understand, you have saved me—from myself—and I love you for it.”

I was way off base expecting someone else to save me. Never a good idea. I put my wife on a pedestal, myself in the dirt. I had to serve her—she was my savior. I resented her for this, and it was my own doing. I disempowered myself and sabotaged our relationship. 

In the movie, Jane Eyre has the sense to turn her back on St. John and his proposal. But he catches her, spins her ‘round, pulls her to himself. 

"Say yes, Jane, say yes. I need you as I've never needed anyone. Help me. Help me. Help me. Give me your strength as well, for I neeeeeeeed it.”

He has never been more creepy. I shudder to hear my past self in him. Funny how an evening’s entertainment can reach out and bite.

Yet I console myself with this: I was desperate, yes. I was flailing, yes. I was stupid, misguided and all the rest. But I was reaching for life as best I knew how. Perhaps this ultimately was my salvation.

This essay appeared in the January 20123 issue of The Community Letter

BLOW, GABRIEL, BLOW!

And this month the world comes crashing to an end. Or maybe not. But our nation is prone to doomsday fervor and our society does have a morbid fascination with fiery endings. How else to explain the traction the fictitious planet Nibiru has gained in some quarters? From what I read, this mystery planet supposedly will materialize (perhaps bolt out from behind the sun) and smash into the earth on December 21, a date that figures on the ancient Mayan calendar as the end of a long cycle of calendar time. Perhaps the end of time itself. Bye bye, birdie.

Such claims pique my interest much more than they poke my anxieties. I find people endlessly fascinating, and inexhaustible the number of things we get worked up about. (Please note, the things I get worked up about are no laughing matter: rigged voting machines, rabid raccoons, nylon socks.) Perhaps I can feel at peace facing the apocalypse for having already lived through my fair share of predicted doomsdays, and finding myself none the worse for wear.

Before I came out as a gay man, I regularly attended a local United Methodist Church whose pastor was quite convinced the end of the world was at hand. This I found unnerving. He had a fiery preaching style, worked himself into a sweat most Sunday mornings railing against abortion and homo-SEX-uality. 

He was certain the Judgment Day would arrive within the next year or two, before 1993, and he preached it. Listening to his sincere and heartfelt warnings week after week, repeated rapid-fire at about the same decibel level as a low-lying helicopter, I began to wonder if maybe he wasn't onto something. He sounded so sure of himself. At the time, sincerity and self-confidence carried a lot of pull with me. 

During the lengthy Sunday services my wife and I were using Cheerios, board books and little toy cars to keep our three young sons quiet. I began to wonder if I'd get to see them graduate high school before the end of all things.

That I should have been projecting so far into the future now seems poignant. High school graduation? As it turns out, I never saw them enter first grade.

The calendar turned once, twice, and our pastor scratched his head wondering aloud how he could have been mistaken. “I was so sure,” he said.

From outside the church came dire warnings about January 1, 2000. Remember those? According to some predictions, the Y2K computer glitch would have airplanes dropping like flies from the sky. Some folks dug in, built bunkers, stockpiled food and guns. Not me. I drove into town on the day before the chaos was to be unleashed, withdrew $20 and bought a four-pack of toilet paper. 

You see, by that time, the world had already ended for me. And I had learned the secret that in every ending there is a beginning. In 1995, in the middle of my life, I’d come out to myself and others as a gay man. This marked the end the world as I’d known it. End of my marriage. End of being counted father to my children. End of my job. End of friendships, family relationships, church membership. End of massive amounts of personal energy being funneled into repression, suppression and denial.

In this ending was a beginning. New life, a world of possibilities, different eyes through which to see. 

We lgbt people who have come out, who in so doing have rocked our worlds to their very core, who have lived to tell the tale, we have this message, this mystery, to offer the rest of society—or did some angel beat us to the punch?—“Fear not, neither be afraid. For I bring you glad tidings of great joy that shall be to all people.” Life is born in darkness. From the end of all things, the beginning of wonder.

This essay appeared in the December issue of The Community Letter. Photo courtesy WikkiCommons

MAY WE SEE THROUGH THE HOLES IN OUR HEARTS

Whump. Thump. Clonk.
 

This time of year the tall black walnut trees around our place drop large round projectiles at random. They hit hard enough I want to wear a helmet when stepping outside. As I don’t own one, I sometimes I hold my hand over my head as I cross the yard. The thing about walnuts is I can’t see them coming.
 

This is so true of much in my life. For 34 years I didn’t see foresee my coming out as a gay man. Neither did my parents, family, church family, children nor wife.
 

Maybe we see only what we want to see. Nothing in my world or worldview had prepared me for the concept that one could be both gay and Christian. As a child, I’d sworn allegiance to the Christian flag (“and to the Savior, for whose kingdom it stands”) every Sunday in junior church. Like their co-conspirators the Communists, homosexuals were fearful, dark shadowy figures whose presence in the world boded no good for the cause of Christ or country. I could no sooner see myself as one than the other.

But maybe I’ve trained myself not to see. My husband Dave gets bothered that I seldom use the headlights’ high beams when driving at night. He turns to me from the passenger’s seat and asks, 

“Don’t you want to see what’s up ahead?”
 

Guess not.
 

I keep out of the office gossip loop at my workplace. I figure if something’s coming down the pike, I’ll hear about it in due time. No sense getting worked up about rumors that may never pan out.

Maybe I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t: the month my twin sons turned 14 they were of legal age to obtain a restraining order to stop our weekly visitation time; they did so. We’d spent time together regularly for 10 years. They told the judge they were uncomfortable with what they’d seen of my homosexual lifestyle.

How best to see anyway? When I was a boy I thought eyeglasses were cool. Not everybody wore them. They set people apart in a socially acceptable way. I thought if I wore glasses I’d fit in. If people noted I was different from them, they’d think it was the glasses. Doesn’t make sense to me now, but children make their own accounting of the world.

I was 13 the autumn day my dad drove me home, my first-ever pair of glasses on my face. The corn stubble in the fields we passed amazed me, the way each stalk stood out in sharp relief from its neighbor. With enhanced vision, what did I see? Ruin and decay.

Good training, perhaps, for what was to come. When I came out as a gay man in mid-life, I lost wife, children, family support, church connection, friends, court cases, career, and more. I learned that loss sometimes sharpens one’s ability to see. Unable to rely on others for support, I learned to look within, follow my own internal vision for the future. I wish this were always, everywhere true.

A writer-teacher friend advocates writing haiku as an exercise in focus and editing. Start with five syllables about some natural object, she says. Use the seven syllables in the second line to describe its essence. Dig deep. In the third and final line, use five syllables. Open up to some broader, more universal observation.

Finding a subject for my latest haiku was easy. I picked up one of last year’s bombshells and held it in my hand. Imagine if you will a cracked walnut shell. Half-globe. The one side, a dry, black, rounded ridged shell. On the other, a flat heart shape punctuated with two elongated dark holes—chambers once filled with nutmeat, since consumed by insects. From this side, the walnut looks for all the world like a miniature owl. I hope what I say of it is true for all of us who sustain loss, experience emptiness:

Cracked walnut, wee owl;
Your insides were eaten out,
granting you vision.

This essay appeared in the September 2012 issue of The Community Letter

HOW DOES ANYTHING HAPPEN?

Typical. Iʼm off contemplating the world 's navel while my wife "Janis" is back home being productive. I sigh, then breathe deep, stretch out on the bank of a small stream, gaze up at the pink and blue sky, the setting sun. Nearby, a robin twitters. A jay screeches. I roll over to look for a four-leaf clover. If I find one, Iʼll give it to Janis, proof I was doing something useful. I was thinking of her.

The path home leads through a woods, over two fences and across three fields. We live at the end of a long lane, down a dirt road, a ways out from town. Our rented farmhouse is small, old and white. Our landlady and her now-ailing husband raised a passel of daughters here. They used the closed-in front porch for extra sitting space; my wife has it filled with ferns, spider plants and cacti. With no babies to nurture, Janis mothers houseplants. Houseplants and herbs. 

This spring, where I cleared the remains of a tumbled-down hog barn, she fashioned an herb garden. Under her care, the plants have taken off like rockets. Gardening is Janisʼ way of working through her deep disappointment over our inability to conceive a child.

More than anything, she wants to be a mother. And Iʼm ready to be a dad. We often imagine ourselves as parents, even as grandparents. What we donʼt imagine is me walking out on her, leaving her as a single parent to care for our young children. What we donʼt imagine is the particular set of circumstances that will lead to this.

The struggle to conceive consumes us. Doctorʼs visits, specialists, tests, procedures, charts, surgeries. More tests, more money. Are we trying to buy hope?

Why canʼt we have children? It seems so unfair. Weʼd make ideal parents. We often fantasize about how it might happen—through conception, adoption or (in our wilder moments) kidnapping. Weʼre doing all we can and can afford, but these barren years have convinced us the outcome is in Godʼs hands. Our prayers assail the gates of heaven. 

As of yet, I have not begun to ask the questions that will unravel our marriage, shake loose my faith in religion. Janis and I are still on speaking terms and if our children will have nothing to do with me, that is now because they are not yet born. So much has not yet happened: my coming out, leaving the house, being turned over to Satan and out of the church, lawyers, the restraining order, meeting Dave.

Unable to see the future, I instead look for a four-leaf clover, find none. However, the mosquitoes have found me. I rise to go, straddle fence, cross fields, wend woods.

Rounding the last bend I see Janis in the twilight exactly as I want to remember her now. Aglow in her herb garden, dirt under her fingernails, concentration upon her face. All about her, gray-green. Basil and oregano gone wild. Chives and marjoram run rampant. Towering wormwood and all the thyme one could want. A tall handsome woman with chiseled features, sandy brown hair, face flushed with exertion and summer heat. Working out her own salvation, healing herself. Finding her way through.

We turn together toward an empty house. We believe love will keep us together come what may; infertility, if it doesnʼt kill us, will make us stronger; prayer changes things. 

As the sky darkens, stars wink into view. We open windows, hoping for a cross-breeze. No luck. We lay down together but apart. Itʼs too hot and too sticky to touch each other. We fall asleep, unaware a judge will one day seal the distance between us; if after that we ever we touch again, it will be only in memory. Weʼll wonder how it happened, how anything ever happens as it does. And weʼll keep on going—and growing—as best we know.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the July issue of The Community Letter.