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.

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.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND BREATH

His college roommate finds him, I assume. Finds him dead in their shared dormitory room. Same dorm I lived in when I attended school there. He died at 21. Young and full of promise--"going places," a friend blogs. Loved and respected by those who knew him as genuine, loving, caring, funny, authentic and polite. Active in Christian ministry groups, played trumpet in a jazz ensemble. And now dead.

Local news media report, "College student found dead in his dorm room at age 21." Authorities are quoted: suicide has been ruled out; his death was accidental. A memorial service will be held. The college is evangelical Christian in nature; the school's spokesperson (a former colleague of mine) requests prayers for the family. He notes a scholarship will be set up in memory of the deceased.

A week later a friend of mine emails to ask if I've heard the latest developments. No, I missed the whole story. I tune in, learn the coroner has released the cause of death. Newspapers, radio and television stations noise it about. 

And so I come to grieve the death of a young man I never met. Brad, I'll call him. Almost I could call him Rab; I see much of myself in him. Brad was a third-year student at my alma mater, a small Christian college with a large reputation among the conservative evangelical Christian crowd. Same school I was working for when I came out to myself and others as gay man. Same school that turned me out in short order; no room for a gay man on their administrative staff. They had the college's reputation to consider.

Brad came from a loving and supportive family environment, as did I. We both called Minnesota home. Like me, he majored in communications at college, demonstrated an artistic bent, participated in campus ministry groups. Like me, he harbored a sexual secret. It proved his undoing.

The coroner reported Brad died of auto-erotic asphyxia (AEA), a dangerous sexual practice that involves reducing the oxygen supply to the brain while masturbating to achieve a heightened orgasm. In this instance, something went awry and a 21-year-old college student ended up dead.

In 2009, the unexplained death of actor David Carrodine in a Thai hotel room focused media attention on AEA. Circumstantial evidence fueled speculation that the 72-year-old actor had died in the course of AEA activity. Often done in secret and shrouded in shame, the practice is particularly dangerous because no one is around to help if something goes wrong. 

I wish our society set up fewer barriers to communication when it comes to sex. We label so much territory as off-limits, taboo. Whom is one to talk to, where to find support? 

While in college I wrestled with what I believed to be a sinful attraction to other men. In this I felt very alone. I carried same-sex desire with me, in me, as a dark secret. My senior year I braved the college counseling center, divulged my struggle to the center director. He referred me to his wife, also a counselor. 

"You have plenty of other issues to deal with," he told me. "I suggest you work through some of those with my wife. Then if this thing still bothers you, come back and see me." What I heard: your sexual desires are too sick, too far out to be addressed.

Did Brad ever seek a listening ear? What if he had turned to me? To you? 

As a gay man living in rural Indiana, I am ever on the lookout for safe persons. I listen closely to words, note actions, expressions and attitudes. I look for people who are non-judgmental, accepting and kind. Who keep confidences, show respect, offer mutual support. I watch for people who are honest, trustworthy, confident, secure. In my own actions and advocacy, I signal to others my willingness to listen. 

We need each other. There is a role for professional counselors, sure. Yet we can serve as lifelines to each other, offer support, acceptance and care. Will we?

GOD'S COCK

Some days lessons lie around every corner. Browsing a used book store recently, I happened upon a book of Eastern European fairy tales. It includes a story called "God's Cock." This title delights me. As both a chicken enthusiast and as a gay man, I find the idea of God's cock, um, divine.

According to the Serbian fable recounted in the book, God sees the earth is barren and sends a cock to make it livable. Right away, this divinely empowered rooster rolls a powerful egg out of a cave. The egg cracks. Out of it flow seven rivers to water the earth and make of it a paradise. The landscape grows lush, green. Animals arrive, and people.

God's cock watches over the human beings. He spreads his wings over the earth. He crows at regular intervals. He wakens the people at sunrise, signals mealtimes, work times, when to rest, when to sleep.

For me, a cock's crow represents one of the joys of country living. But not everyone feels this way. The people in this story grow tired of listening to God's cock. They want to make their own decisions about how to order their days. They pray God to remove the offending creature. God answers their prayers and banishes the Great Rooster in the Sky from paradise.

Before he leaves, the cock flies down and crows this warning, "Beware the ocean!" 

Alarmed, the people send a watchman to the top of a nearby mountain to keep an eye out for the ocean they've been warned against. There is no ocean to be seen, but the watchman dutifully trudges up the mountain every day.

Without God's cock to wake them up and keep them on track, the people eventually grow lazy, bitter, mean and greedy. In the end—their end—they bring about the destruction of their own paradise.

They break wide open the divine chicken egg. They don't want to lug water from here to there. They figure if they break the egg, water will flow evenly all over the land, no need to carry it from the rivers. 

At first this seems to work. But the water keeps coming and coming until it forms an ocean in which they all drown. Their own greed destroys them. The danger is within. The sole survivor is the watchman on the mountain. 

I shudder as I finish the story. My own nation courts ecological disaster, races through natural resources like there is no tomorrow. Maybe there won't be. Every day I do my part to chip away at the egg. What am I thinking?

This is one way I read the story.

On another level, the story says to me, "God sent you a cock for a reason. Listen to what it has to say. Pay attention." 

For many years I lived as if I didn't have a cock, as if what I had between my legs had nothing to say to me. Sure, it grew hard at the thought of men, but I discounted and ignored the implications of this message. I knew what church, mother and wife demanded of me. Why should I listen to what some cock has to say? I chose to suppress, deny, go numb/dumb. The enemy is within. 

And don't think the matter has been settled entirely in my favor. I continue to wrestle with a strong streak of repression.

Hearing this, a friend tells me he faces the opposite challenge. "My problem is I think with my little head instead of my big one," he says. "I recently had a breakthrough. I've committed myself to slow down, breathe and think with my big head before taking any action."

We are all different. Maybe this is why one of the two admonitions scribed on the temple of Apollo was, "Know thyself." Maybe this is why the other was, "In all things, moderation."

Maybe this is why we are gifted with bodies—and cocks—and good books in the first place. Do we know? Can we listen? Will we understand?

THAT MAY BE A MIRACLE YOU'RE (NOT) SEEING

I see miracles every day. Every day. I am in touch with the miraculous, hold it in my hands. Oh, I go looking for miracles--you bet I do. Stumble after them in the dark sometimes. Other nights, I shine a flashlight in the nests, reach in and take the eggs I find there. Eggs, the everyday miracles that populate my world. Eggs, amazing containers of possibility and life—breakfast, too.


Maybe I have a low threshold for wonder. Maybe not.


Each evening I gather the dozen or so eggs our hens have laid that day. Our mixed-breed chickens lay eggs in an assortment of colors, sizes and shapes. Some eggs are, well, egg-shaped. But others are pointy, roundish, squat or as near rectangular as an egg can get. Some have thin thin shells, others are almost hammer-hard. Colors range from white to beige, ecru to ochre. I've learned to associate certain eggs with particular hens. Mrs. Lapinski lays long white missiles, thin and pointy at both ends. Now in her dotage, CeeCee lays wrinkled, light brown beauties with what look like vertical stretch marks. One unidentified hen drops gargantuan bombshells. You'd think she'd be easy to spot—find the stiff-legged hen walking about with a look of perpetual stupefaction. Apparently she's in stealth mode.


It takes but a moment for a hen to stand, squeeze her pelvic muscles and allow an egg to gently drop onto a bed of straw. She usually climbs into the nest well in advance of this final production, however. Settles in, sits quietly, bides her time. The process began 18 to 36 hours earlier when her body released an egg cell into her oviduct where it could be fertilized by the rooster. Layers of white formed around the nascent yolk, then a membrane, last of all, the shell. The miracle of life in so humble a casing.
After laying the egg, the hen cackles to announce her success to the world around. The higher her status, the more likely the rooster and other hens will echo and amplify her cry. Me, if I'm within earshot, I'll echo anyone's cackle.


Despite what a rooster might tell you, a hen will lay eggs whether or not he's in the picture. In his absence, her eggs will be infertile. Great for breakfast, but no little chick will ever hatch from them. Most store-bought eggs fall into this category. Commercially-raised hens may go their whole short lives without ever seeing a rooster. Our hens should be so lucky. They lay fertilized eggs; our rooster sees to that. He never tires of sexual activity, goes at it almost every chance he gets. Let him mount a hen, bend his cloacae to hers, spray his misty sperm, and the egg she lays will contain the potential for life.


Take that fertilized egg from the nest, refrigerate it, and nothing more exciting than omelets will happen. Keep it consistently warm in an incubator or under a broody hen—one whose hormones have kicked in, convinced her she wants to be a mother—and in 21 days a chick will hatch from it. It never ceases to amaze me.


You've seen the inside of an egg. There's no chick in there. Only a big blister of yellow pus floating on a clear sea of slimy snot. How such glop and goo can be transformed into a living creature, a wobble-legged chick, wet, blinking, bedraggled, now dry, fuzzy and fluffy, ready to run, scratch and come to mother's call--how such a thing can be boggles my mind. This is the stuff of miracle.


It happens every year about this time out in our coop. Out of nothing, something. From snot and pus, peeping cheeping life. Happens out of sight, deep inside. Transformation and change.


Reminds me of the coming out process. 


Reminds me more may be going on inside at any one time—inside me, you, or anyone else—than anyone could ever guess. Even now, today, a miracle may be hatching.

DEAR BULLY

Here's a question for you: what is it that ultimately defines us, says who and what we are? Is it how we look? Act? What we say? Think? What we believe in? Value? 

And who does the defining anyway? We ourselves? Are we whoever and whatever we say we are? (I can't altogether think so. When I was a child, I declared I was a kitten and when I grew up I was going to be a cat. This pronouncement no more made me feline than my fervent belief I was heterosexual male made for a happy marriage to a woman.)

What then, do others get to define us? They try, certainly. Every social group sets rules and expectations for its members' behavior—and consequences for failure to measure up. Yet to be human is to be a walking set of contradictions and mystery. We each have a hard enough time getting a handle on who we are as individuals. How can we pretend to define who and what another person is? But others do hold the power to define us, don't they—in the end, we become whatever memories they carry of us after we're dead and gone. 

So I ask you, Kurt, what or who is it that determines what we are? I was 14 when you started in on me. "Jeezo," you labeled me. "Fag," "pud," "queer." I didn't know what those words meant. I didn't want to know. I knew you didn't intend them kindly. Whatever they meant, they didn't jive with my Sunday School award for perfect attendance. Didn't jive with how I wanted to define myself: good church boy, obedient Christian, godly teen.

I prayed for you, of course. Prayed you'd go directly to hell. Prayed your arm would snap next time you pressed me against the wall, next time you thrust your hand under my chin, pushed my head back so I could see only the ceiling, had to look heavenward from whence came no help.

Every school day you tormented me. I can still feel the jibes of your tagalong henchmen, hear the snickers of my classmates. I often felt helpless, hapless, humiliated at your hands.

I wonder which affected my sense of self more, your actions or my inaction? To what extent did I participate in my own abuse by allowing you to treat me as you did? Was I so helpless as I imagined? Under your tutelage, I came to see myself as a spineless loser, stupid sap, human push-around. What recourse did I have? Over and again I appealed to God without effect. I tried to tell my parents what was going on. How to explain, "Mom, Dad, your oldest son is the laughingstock of the school, the scum at the bottom of the barrel"?

I let myself be defined by your words and actions. 

What about you? I suspect you were defined in part by how you looked. You were the one dark face in a sea of lily-white. How was that for you? I never asked.

Were you unleashing on me pent-up anger you couldn't blast at your friends? You had friends, right? You lettered in golf—didn't that put you in the rich kids' club? Maybe not. Maybe doors were closed to you; maybe in a thousand prickly ways you were told you didn't belong. Was that it? Or were you lashing out at something in me you didn't like in yourself?

I'll never know. You peddling your bicycle, a couple years after graduation. A sudden roar. You never stood a chance against that Mack truck.

All that's left of you now are memories. Those, and the way I still shudder to think of you, the sour taste that rises in my mouth when I do. Some legacy, eh? I'm left to define you, Kurt, to shape you—not in the way you shaped me, but still. 

I wish I felt more kind.

This essay appeared in the February, 2012 issue of The Community Letter

NAMES I HAVE KNOWN

Donald, the name my mother wants to give me when I am born. No, my father says, they'll call him Donald Duck.

Douglas, the name they settle on. Douglas Jay. Where they get the Douglas, I don't know.

Jay, perhaps after the son of close family friends. Shortly before I am born, three-year-old Jay and his parents pull out of their driveway near the Shady Rest Motel. Two teenage boys are using Highway 2 as a drag strip. Jay and his parents never knew what hit them.

Douglas Jay Marlow! The name I hear when I am in trouble with my mother.

Number One Son. I love it when my dad calls me this.

Dougie, my name at home until I start kindergarten. What my grandmother calls me into my teenage years.

The Ugly Dougling, a name I give myself in third grade trying to redeem the deep sense I carry of being flawed, different, awkward, wrong. I want to hope against hope I might someday look into a pond and see reflected in its depths a beautiful swan rather than a place to drown myself.

Jeezo, the school bully's derisive label for me. And Eeeeeee. I don't have a clue what it means except that it's always accompanied his hand under my chin, thrusting my head up and back, baring my neck.

Queer, as in the game we play in gym class, Smear the Queer? But my classmates don't say it in a playful rambunctious tone.

Fag. Faggot. Terms I look up in the dictionary, tell myself it's not so bad to be called a bundle of sticks.

Pud, a name I know to be jeering, won't know until years later it carries derogatory sexual connotations.

Disco, not because I am a dancer. Because I have the audacity to confront my Christian college floormates about violating school rules by practicing dance steps in their dorm room. The name sticks like glue for four years.

Jay, what I call myself when I withdraw from college, go to live in Alaska.

Dewi, Welsh for David. The name I give myself after studying abroad in Wales. The name I am using when I fall in love with a man. The name I am using when I run horrified from that relationship into marriage with a woman.

Doug, the name I switch back to in order to please my wife who has always disliked Dewi.

Greg, what strangers most often call me when they are certain they know me from somewhere.

Melizza, my online persona in a role playing game, who meets and falls head over heels for a man. She/me/we don't know what to make of the very real accompanying feelings.

Bryn, another Welsh name I am enamored of. The one I give my online lover when we share our "real" names.

Dirty homosexual. Child-molester. Monster. Judas. Betrayer. Liar. Cock-sucking fudge-packer. Lowlife shit. Scum of the earth. Dog turd.Some of the nicer names I hear when I come out as a gay man.

Selfish, selfish, selfish. That's all you are, Selfish. I hear this so many times it's not funny. Never was.

Deceived of Satan, my brother's title for me. It helps him make sense of what is happening to our perfect family.

Reprobate. Damned. Consigned to hell. Delivered to Satan. Your name struck from our roll. Shunned by this fellowship of believers. So my church weighs in on how to address me.

Plaintiff, the court's cold legal term for me in reams of documents in divorce proceedings, child custody hearings, a case brought before the state court of appeals.

Bryn, the name I am using when my sense of self coalesces. The name on my revised birth certificate. On my social security card.

In Tolkein's Lord of the Rings saga Treebeard harumphs at the hobbits' names, so soon said and done. "In my culture, our names tell our story," he says. I add 10 middle names to mine. Verbal touchstones. I include references to my children, father and grandfathers.

Rab, a name that has lived in me since childhood. Since I read Esther Forbes' novel Johnny Tremain. Rab, the older, dashing good friend who looks out for his young friend.

Rab, the new name I am now trying on, trying out, ever so slowly living into.

Beloved, the root meaning of the name David, of the name Dewi. Beloved. Be loved. My experience of living with a man whom I treasure, who affirms, supports and treasures me. Be-loved. At root, the name I have for all life, all beings, all creation, all in flux, all changing, all in their own way, time and place, loved.

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