IF I LOVE YOU, WILL YOU BITE ME?

The first twisp of spring flew about our kitchen one day last month. "Twisps," I call them, because my husband Dave hates wasps. By using their Native American name I hope to remind him of the Lakota phrase etched above our front door. Translated, it reads, "all my relations" or "all are related" or "we're all in this together." By subterfuge, then, I appeal to his big heart, remind him to treat even those he fears and despises with respect. Fine. He won't thwack twisps with the flyswatter if I capture them, carry them outside for release.

This twisp I encircled with a clear drinking glass, slid a recipe card over the mouth of the vessel, inverted it and carried said twisp outdoors into the sun. I held the glass upright, removed the card, waited to see him fly off. He was much too involved in grooming himself to take flight. I watched as he stroked his bald head several times with his two front legs. He reminded me of a cat cleaning itself with its paws. First his head, then each antenna. These seemed to have subtle joints in them. They bent in sections to the touch of his legs. He was very intent. Focused on one antenna, then the other, then back to the head again. Next he gave himself a backrub, petted his thorax, that little button of a body piece threaded directly behind his head. With his back legs he rubbed his abdomen—that stretched-out football of a heine—again and again. Employed his wings, too, to rub it, stroke it, soothe it. I almost fell asleep myself, it looked so relaxing. 

I marveled at what a thin joint attaches such a big behind to his body--as if his waist were a size 3 and his buttocks a good 64 inches 'round. I drew the glass close to my face, wondered what it would be to slip a paring knife down inside and sever the twisp's butt from his body at that narrow isthmus. I watched him clean each wing in turn, then stroke each of his needle-thin hind legs. The only body parts I did not see him clean were his center legs. I presume he needed them to balance upon.

Ready at last, he buzzed up out of the glass, alighted on the roof and proceeded to clean his abdomen some more. So big a portion of his body appropriately demanded a large percentage of his attention. Then he was up, over the rooftop and out of sight.

He reminded me of the stereotypical gay man grooming himself. Except that he didn't change his clothes several times before leaving, he devoted as much attention to his appearance as does my friend Kellin before he steps out of the house each Saturday night to head for a smoke-filled, dimly lit bar where he proceeds to remove as many items of clothing as possible. 

All my relations.

Though he said nary a word, Brother Twisp spoke volumes to me. He reminded me that I share much in common with all beings, no matter what their size, shape or intention. Even with those who would do me harm, those whom I fear, despise. They, too, cleanse. 

We are all in this together. And together we wing our way towards a common fate. The poet Emily Dickinson writes: Death is the common right/ of toads and men/ of earl and midge the privilege.

Aware that death is in my future I find the present richer, fuller as I recognize parts of myself in all I meet. Maybe we do carry within us a spark of One light. With my Buddhist friends, I could bow to those I meet and say namaste—the light in me greets the light in you. Easiest to say this to my friends, but there are people aplenty in my world who carry the sting of prejudice, discrimination, bigotry. How to treat them with respect yet avoid their venom? Perhaps Sister Twisp (for she may well have been female) points the way. She suggests I try seeing myself in the smallest creatures I meet, practice saying, "All my relations." And mean it.

This essay first appeared in The Letter, June 2008

I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROCK GARDEN

I plan to put in a rock garden this spring. Nothing big, only three short rows. In one row I’ll plant smooth river rocks spaced about an inch apart. In another, ordinary gravel. In the third, some of the curiously shaped and colored stones I inherited from my father and grandmother. 

I’ll tamp the soil lightly over these pebbles, water them well, wait to see them sprout, watch them grow, gather a bounty of rocks this fall. 

Wasted effort? Misguided hope? Sheer stupidity? Perhaps. Yet so much like my life! After coming out as a gay man 14 years ago, I tried hard to educate my wife, parents, siblings and others about homosexuality. I tried to help them see, accept and love me for who I am, as I am. I might as well have been coaxing rocks to grow. 

I hoped the woman I loved most in the world, the one to whom I was married, could understand. Hoo boy.

Perhaps my siblings, the people who grew up with me, would be able to get it. No way.

I realized it would take time, but I believed that before they died surely my parents would come around. They proved me wrong. 

A year ago this month, my mother was admitted to hospital, diagnosed with a terminal illness. She was to return home, would need 24-hour care. My husband and I volunteered to take the first week-long shift. But even on her deathbed, she was concerned about keeping up appearances, adhering to church dogma. In the end, religious scruples outweighed love for her child. We were not welcome to provide care for her in her home overnight. Receiving this on top of other you-are-not-good-enough messages, I left. I hardened my heart, refused to make contact, check on her condition, attend her funeral.

 This past month, at an uncle’s funeral, I saw one of my siblings. The one who testified against me in court during my divorce hearing. Who in this and many other ways has thrown stones my way. With whom over the years I’ve tried to reopen communication, offered to meet, discuss differences. No more. I gave up waiting for those rocks to sprout. 

Not that stones can’t be a catalyst for change. My husband and I were married in Windsor, Ontario by a minister who was among the first in the city to wed same-sex couples. When outraged detractors hurled stones through the windows of her church building she redoubled her outspoken advocacy for the right of all people to marry.

Not that stones can’t offer thrills, excitement. My cousin Neil captains an ocean-going boat in Alaska, takes fishermen out in search of bottom-feeding halibut. One client fought for 20 minutes to bring up what he’d hooked from the ocean floor. No one on board knew he’d snagged a rock until it broke the water’s surface. 

Not that stones can’t serve as vehicles for healing. In my first experience of a Lakota-inspired sweat lodge ceremony, I held the door flap open as red-hot rocks were carried into the midst of the darkened circle. The lodge keeper explained that those stones, older than imagining, could serve as recipients of all the sorrows I asked them to bear. 

When I plant my rock garden this spring, perhaps I’ll plant the rock that is my heart towards my sibling, my mother. The rock that is my gallstone towards my former wife. The rocks of my kidney stones towards the church, legal system, higher education, organized anything.  The stones my society flings at me, the messages that demean, diminish. The millstone I carry around my neck of not being acceptable, my internalized homophobia, self-hatred, despair.

Maybe I can release these stones into the earth’s accepting embrace. Maybe I don’t need to carry this load of stones around, after all. Watered, nurtured, weeded, maybe the results of my planting will be something beautiful.

This essay appeared in The Letter, May 2008.

DEATH AND TAXES

Income taxes come due mid-April. I know this. Yet every year I act as if the deadline has been changed to the thirtieth of July, say, or September third, or the fifth of Never. I only fool myself, I know, but I can be pretty gullible, especially when I work at it. Problem is, my fool’s paradise is a fragile thing and one of my co-workers seems bent on shattering it to pieces. Not only does he file his taxes early, he advertises this fact. Again and again.

“Nope, didn’t watch the game last night. Got my taxes done instead.” A few minutes later, “See you got a haircut. Looks like they shaved you as close as the IRS did me this year. Found that out last night when I did my taxes.” Then, “My cousin called me last night and I told him about getting my taxes in by the end of January. . . .”

Sheesh. The groundhog hasn’t yet poked its nose out of its burrow. No way I’m going to take my head out of the sand. Or so I reason. I want to believe that my life flows easier, richer, fuller when I ignore all things taxing. That my days grow more footloose and fancy free. Never mind that little black cloud on the horizon, the one that grows darker and more threatening as April approaches. Never mind that I scramble at the last minute to put my financial house in order, find the papers I need, receipts, bills, check stubs. Never mind that last year when the IRS reviewed my return they found I’d overlooked some of the finer points of the law. They refunded me an extra 800 dollars. 

There’s a lesson here if only I would listen. My way of doing business exacts a high price, both in mental stress and material loss. Ignorance falls several hundred dollars short of bliss. The cost of living in a fool’s paradise keeps going up. 

So does the cost of dying there.

Death and taxes, they say, are the only two sureties. And I do a capital job of ignoring both. But as I lollygag my way through life, pretend I am immortal, I wind up paying a high price when death comes knocking on my door. Ignore the fact that I am going to die, and I lose out on experiences of life I don’t even know are mine. What’s the good of hiding my head in the sand when I have one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel? Staying aware of death’s approach may allow me to more fully experience the moments I have, 

Easy to say, hard to do. Monarchs of the Middle Ages had a servant whose task it was each day to remind their royal highnesses they would die someday. I can’t afford to hire someone for the job. Guess I’ll have to do it myself.

Life offers me little reminders, opportunities to practice dying. To say goodbye. To feel pain. To let go. 

A college professor friend teaches a class on death and dying. He passes out four slips of paper to his students, asks them to write on each something they value highly. Could be people, popularity, relationships, eyesight, physical or mental health, house, home, motorcycle, good grades, whatever. He then talks about the aging process, about having to let go of things that have been meaningful. He directs his students to select one piece of paper, pass it to him. “You’re left with only three now,” he says. “Imagine what your life is like.” They discuss these losses. He has them turn in yet another slip of paper. Students find it difficult to choose. They talk some more. Then he walks the aisles, himself takes one slip of paper from each student. Some grow angry. “That’s how it is,” he tells them. “You don’t have a choice in what you will have to give up.” Fact is, in the end, they will have to surrender everything. Life itself.

Hard words, these. Hard truths. Not pleasant to think about.

But they can motivate me to stay open, aware. To be thankful for what I have now. To know it will not last, that circumstances will change. To practice holding all things lightly, practice letting go. When I feel pain, to try opening to it rather than clenching tight around it. To see if I can get through it, to find out what, if anything, awaits on the other side.

My husband, bless his heart, all year long saves receipts, files papers, tracks tax deductible expenditures. As if he knows this preparation will pay off somehow in the end. As if he has some privileged information about a day of reckoning to come. Can it be?

This essay first appeared in The Letter, April 2008.

GODZILLA IN MY BASEMENT

The oak stood 85 feet tall, older than anyone in town, had been growing alongside the house for time out of mind. It had to be removed. Would we want the wood? Sure.

So it was that my husband and I spent several days last fall cutting, rolling, stacking huge logs. We later returned with a log splitter. With a long trailer last month.

Marvelous things, log splitters. Roll the log under, stand it up, hold it fast, drop the lever, watch the maul chomp down, hear the wood crack, see it split, make sure a chunk breaks loose, bump the lever up, watch the maul lift, stop its rise. Turn the log, repeat. Split and split until the pieces will fit into the wood stove. Steady work. 

What amazes me is the number of solid-looking logs that house insects. We uncover sluggish colonies of black ants with a few winged queenly-looking members, smaller groups of big carpenter ants. A colony of winged ants. Black beetles. Brown ones. Wee white worms that bore wire-thin tunnels. White corkscrew worms—I imagine they twist and turn their way through the world. Then—and “hyre be monsters”—a den of gargantuan black beetles. 

However, most dramatic are also the first found: huge white grubs with orange-yellow faces and greasy grey butts. Godzilla-like cousins of the dainty cutworms I find in garden soil. These are coiled under the bark, encased in powdery mulch-like sawdust. I save the first one we find, determined to winter it in our basement, see what develops come spring. 

At first they are a novelty. By late in the day I’ve seen so many of these terrors they lose their power to amaze. When one falls out beside the splitter I don’t bother to move it. A few minutes later white gut grits spackle the ground. 

I came out to myself as a gay man 13 years ago this month. At the time I was snuggled in a sawdust of my own making, married to a woman, every day father to three young children, working for a conservative religious-based organization. Coming out, I lost marriage, children, job. My world was mauled open. I imagined my guts spattered the walls. Indeed, prolonged custody hearings put on public display certain greasy grubs hidden in my character.

I continue to learn that I am riddled with hidden recesses in which lurk unknown energies—some twisted, some beetle-black, some bearing queen energy, some in the process of becoming. Becoming what, that’s the question. With the poet Czeslaw Milosz, I wonder, 

Will it be a bright butterfly soaring over the earth,

Or a moth, dirty tribe of night?

Won’t be long now before the behemoth slumbering in our basement arises. Time, that natural ally of change and transformation, will play its part. So, too, the warming rays of the sun. Given the bottomless basement of the human heart, what might unfurl its wings this year in me? In you?

This essay first appeared in The Letter, March 2008

FINAL SEEN

“This was the world’s edge. So long as he was here, Noburu was in contact with the naked universe. No matter how far you ran, escape beyond this point was impossible.”

-- Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

I stand under our back porch, look up to the rafters, and suddenly I am on the edge of the world. A dying grasshopper takes me there. A spider several sizes his junior cradles his head in her arms, appears to kiss his brow. I’m not fooled. She is sucking the life from her paralyzed prey. 

The grasshopper stares at the world around. Does he see? If so, what? And for how much longer? How did a creature of pasture and field meet his fate so high above the earth? How did he of such long legs, strong thighs and powerful kicks fall prey to so spindly a captor? 

The spider eyes me with what looks like suspicion, then pulls her prize upwards towards her web in the corner. I admire her strength, cunning, determination. I wonder what I would say should she invite me to dine with her.

Judging by his size and appearance, her meal is leeward of middle age. He was a graduate student, I imagine. Hopper U. Theatre major. Liked the limelight. Copped a thrill from being up on stage, having all eyes on him. Assumed that others saw himself the way he did. Never considered that some eyes fastened on his body for reasons other than his art or physique. That there were those who saw him as dinner waiting to happen. A protein-rich meal to be taken in, chewed up, shat out. 

Too late for him the lesson he teaches me: not justice, but fate is blind. The universe beneficent? Tell that to this aspiring actor, bound and hanging upside down, one leg pulled away from his body at what seems an obscenely painful angle.

Arachne’s daughter doesn’t care that her catch has a family, a home, a history. A favorite song. A little sister. A future that once stretched ahead of him further than he could jump. Comrades who even now expect him to join them any minute.

Here in miniature is spun the destiny of us all. The fates who spin, weave and snip the threads of history do so without regard for any one individual. “We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and necessities,” says Foucault. “But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events without a landmark or a point of reference.”

Ask the immigrant. Ask the exile. Ask the reject of society. Ask the bereft mother howling in the war-torn heartland. Ask my friend Jim, diagnosed with cancer the day after he turned 40. 

I eye the grasshopper. Life is tragic. I watch the spider wrestle with her super-sized meal. Absurdly comical. I stare into unseeing eyes. A tragicomedy in all too few acts. 

How to live in such a world? How to embrace “what is” when it is happening to me? I hope the grasshopper had moments of bliss, from time to time soared on wings of joy. Tasted dew. Made love. Felt the sun warm on his back. 

To savor the moment. To feel into pain. To somehow choose hope over despair in defiance of all the facts. To say yes. 

Able to offer the dying actor nothing more than this, I keep my eyes on him during his final scene.

This essay appeared in The Letter, February 2008

IT ISN'T ONLY MEN I FIND PERPLEXING

Riddle: A box without hinges, key or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid. What am I?

Reply: You are a metaphor for life.  You sometimes arrive at my house spattered and dirty.

When our hens climb into the nests with muddy feet or feathers they soil the day's offerings. Hence I wash eggs before using them. I'm doing this now. I handle each egg carefully, examine it closely for the least little spot of dirt.

I like eggs, and not just the way they taste. Our hens lay in sepia tones that range from caramel to tan to beige to, well, eggshell. Some eggs arrive freckled, some splotchy, some bumpy, most smooth. And the shapes! Here's one with a ridge that spirals round its center; another about as rectangular as eggs come. I once read about an ad agency's struggle to find a dozen perfect eggs for use in a television commercial. They bought carton after carton of eggs. In the end they used styrofoam eggs.

If I could, I would keep every egg that catches my eye. That way I could hold and appreciate each egg anytime I wish. But there are limits to what a person can do. So I wash these eggs, set them in the dish drainer, then pick them up one by one. I turn each in my hands, admire its color, shape, individual style. Then I strike it against the edge of a stainless steel bowl. Crack.

How can I marvel at an egg one moment, break it open the next? Perhaps this is what it is to play God. To love life, cradle it in one's palm, then serve as agent of its destruction. Or transformation. 

I cannot save eggs--or anything, anyone--from their fate. All things hurry towards dissolution, change. They don't need my help. Things are what they are. And we are eggs, all of us--with something so magnificent, so golden as life encased in a fragile shell. 

I run my fingers along the beige egg with the spiral ridge, imagine a dancer twirling an orange scarf about her. "Beautiful," I say. "Amazing." Crack.  

"Come here, little speckled freckled Brownie. Thank you for giving yourself." Crack. 

"And you, Square Egg in a Round Body. You hold gold within. Thank you." Crack. 

Yesterday I was outside when I witnessed something new in the night sky. First I heard the croaking and purring, the calling one to another. Then a huge flock of cranes--a hundred or more--passed overhead in several vees. I've seen Canada geese before, yes. And ducks go by, yes. But these were cranes. They were magnificent. I wanted to hold onto the moment. All I could do was watch, notice, appreciate. Say thank you. Say good bye. 

How to stay open, aware, attuned to life? How to say to all that comes my way, "I notice you. Thank you." How to let go? It's a tough riddle to crack. 'Guess I'll keep practicing on eggs.

This essay appeared in The Letter, January 2008

LEMONS AND LIGHTS

This time of year you don't see the cracks in the mortar. They're still there. They jag their way from above the cast iron fireplace insert to under the pine board mantel. Whoever laid the bricks didn't count on the extra weight to make the floor sag, the mortar crack. It did. Actions have consequences. Not that you'll notice, however. Not this time of year.

Step into our living room and your eye is drawn to the holiday decorations atop the mantel. Two green wreaths on either side, an angel in the middle. Shiny red balls, little white lights, bright yellow lemons, pine garland, reindeer, glistening glass. Beautiful—and fraught with meaning. Have a look. 

Two evergreen wreaths adorn the wall, apt symbols of two men whose lives have circled 'round though joy and heartbreak to a sense of wholeness and love. My husband Dave and I marked our eleventh anniversary as a couple this year. Coming out and living as gay men in rural America is a sweet-sour enterprise; lemons nestle with frosted red berries and ribbons amongst the pine bough wreaths. 

Loss and gain, fullness and emptiness. The tension between these poles recurs as a theme in our lives, and is reflected in the antique cut glass bowl propped on edge at the center of the display. Behind it, small white lights cord a pine garland that runs the length of the mantel. Extra lights gathered behind the bowl illuminate it, cause it to shine. Were the bowl full the effect would be lost. Out of the emptiness shines the light. 

Peer long enough into the bowl and you may see faces of the dead peering back: my father, Dave's mother, his firstborn son, friends and relatives. And the living: our former wives, my teenaged sons, Dave’s two siblings and one of mine—brothers by blood who severed ties with their gay kin—and a host of people we once called friends. The refracted light serves notice that even in their absence these persons are present to us; bearers of light all. 

To the right of the bowl stand three hurricane globes graduated in size. A ruby-red heart-red glass ball appears to float in the center of each. Look closely and you'll see the ornaments are suspended from nylon fishing line. It is not always easy to see the threads that tie us one to another. These glass globes represent Dave's three adult children and their spouses. 

On the left, three red balls represent my estranged sons. Twin reindeer each carry a rose-red ornament in honor of my twin sons; a crystal vase cradles the third red globe. Making of loss, beauty. Perhaps an answer to poet Stanley Kunitz, "how shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?"

 

Against the wall between the wreaths lean seven long cinnamon sticks. Squint your eyes and you might be looking at the oaken slats on the side of a crib. A crib that has been the focus of Dave's attention for hours on end this year. That has come into being through his effort. That represents the first realization of his desire to build fine furniture. 

A crib that will cradle our first grandson, born halfway around the world this past July. He should arrive home to his parents next month. He was named Angel Gabriel at birth, re-christened Noah Andrew Gabriel long-distance from Ohio. We've been cooing over photographs of him. What a bundle of hope and promise swaths any infant! As a reminder of this, above the mantel, above the cut glass bowl, above the red balls, the lemons, the wreaths hovers a carved wooden angel with wings widespread.  

There. Did you notice the crack in the masonry? Probably not. But it's there nonetheless. We live in a world that feels flawed, in which there is pain, loss, cracking up. But at the same time there is hope, there is color, there is light. Isn't this the message implicit in Hanukkah, Christmas and Winter Solstice celebrations? In the time of great darkness comes the light.

In this new year may we all be sustained by such hope. And light.

And love.

This essay appeared in The Letter, December 2007