on growing older, tigers, monsters and that thing called love

Dear son,

Today is your 30th birthday. Happy day! I’m celebrating with you.

Rather, celebrating without you.

Better yet, I’m celebrating you.

My mind flashes to the day you turned three. Your mother and I had been egging you on, promoting the belief that to turn three is a grand accomplishment, telling you how big you were going to be. To cement the date in your head we used the tune “Mary had a little lamb” and taught you these lyrics:

My birthday is February seventh,

February seventh, February seventh;

My birthday is February seventh,

And I’ll be three years old.

  You were a precocious child anyway, and armed with this information, you had a long-form response for anyone who asked how old you were.

You woke up the morning of your third birthday and raced to the sitting room, stood before the mirrored door of Grandma Brown’s antique wardrobe. And began to cry.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I don’t look any bigger,” you said.

You dear child.

+ + +

Do you feel bigger today for having rounded the corner into your thirties?

I remember wrassling with you in the bedroom. We’d play “Tiger” with me as the striped beast on hands and knees and you the feckless hunter who would launch himself from atop the bed onto the unsuspecting feline’s back.

At 30, do you have the world by its tail?

I remember many post-divorce games of Monster at the playground beside the White River. I took the title role whilst you and your younger brothers sought refuge atop the slide, jungle gym, climbing structure. I gave chase. Somehow you were always able to elude me.

Do you still see me as a monster? Do you still live in a world where gay fathers are hell-bent on their sons' destruction and must be avoided at all costs?

Been a long time since you turned ten, since you told me, “Dad, I don’t want to see or talk to you for a while.” Curious, the twists life takes. Curious, how long it takes us sometimes to learn the simplest lessons. Yet there are many opportunities to grow.

We don’t always attain the heights we set for ourselves—or others set for us.

Why not take the world by tail? Launch yourself forth in exuberance, expectation, delight. And see what happens.

Keep your eyes peeled for danger, sure. And do your best to learn where true danger lies. All is not what it seems.

You get to make a fair amount of choices in this world. Make them as wisely as you can. There’s an awful lot beyond your control. Accept this with all the grace you can muster.

+ + +

These last 20 years have been a lesson for me in love, loss, what it is to love into loss. Love into the void. The red cords that tether heart to heart in spite of time, distance, emptiness. The power of memory, intention.

I've learned love lasts a lifetime. That we are surrounded by love—even from people we don’t know, choose not to know or remember. 

Here’s to you, son. In celebration of a milestone. In anticipation of whatever lies ahead. In life, in death, in love,

                 Dad

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART WAS

Garage sale the other day. My husband buys a lime green T-shirt emblazoned with black letters. Looks like a rock band shirt, fits him like a muscle-T. “I like the name on it,” he says. He wears it the next day with tight jeans and cowboy boots. Up and down the aisles of the antique mall people can see us coming. Can tell I’m with a member of The Outsiders.

The Outsiders. I get that. I’ve felt like one all my life. Never quite fit in. No place I really belonged. Have long felt an affinity for others who share outsider status. Like the little girl with dark curly hair in my kindergarten class. Every day she scratched herself with her fingernails, left long white streaks down her arms. My classmates gave her a wide berth. I befriended her, shared chalk, crayons, toys. Even so, I shuddered when she walked me home from school one day. I didn’t want to be that good of friends.

I started kindergarten in Gary, Indiana, the day the city’s public schools were integrated in 1964. Policemen patrolled the halls, alert to the possibility of trouble. Looking at my class photograph years later, I learned my teacher Miss Tate was African American. Made me no never you mind. I’d already seen my share of change by age five, not the least of which was our family’s move from northern Minnesota. 

Which was meant to be temporary. We’d stay only until the iron mines were hiring again. Which should be any day now. If you believed the hype. Which you did if you’d been living on hope and not much else. I was my parents’ third child. Arrived soon after my dad helped cart out the last of the rich iron ore from the world’s largest open pit mine in Hibbing. Jobs ran out same time the high-grade ore did. Thousands laid off.

How to support a wife and growing family? My father did seasonal work at a chick hatchery, gathered pine cones and balsam boughs for holiday wreaths. Cut timber with his father. Completed a six-month training course in auto body repair shortly before his fourth child was born. Moved his family across the state, chasing jobs and rumored jobs. Kept waiting for the mines to reopen. Everybody said it would happen. Soon. Efforts afoot in the state legislature. Special tax breaks for companies to mine low-grade ore. Required a special amendment to the constitution. Such things take time. Meanwhile, kid number five arrived.

U.S. Steel offered work in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. “We’re going,” my dad said, and we went. I was only five, but I knew Indiana wasn’t our home. Home is where the heart lives, not where the body goes to sleep at night. Home is where your dead lay buried. I had yet to learn a new place can become home as you bury parts of yourself there. 

The next summer I turned six. Started first grade in Gary that fall. Changed schools in October when we moved to the country, little white house leaning into a grove of pine trees. Our new temporary quarters. Then December 24. A late night phone call: Mrs. Marlow, there’s been an accident at work. Your husband’s in the hospital. It’s his foot. He won’t be home for Christmas.

The mines did start hiring again, and the wave of reverse migration rolled right on past us. No job driving big truck for a man with only one foot. No, you’re stuck in Indiana. 

And so I grew up in exile. Every summer, every long-awaited summer, we’d go home. Go back to Grandpa and Grandma’s house, to the little white church in Cohasset, to our friends and extended family—aunts, uncles, countless cousins. Where we were insiders once again. Padding pine needled trails, listening to loon’s crazy laughter, swatting at mosquitoes. Catching bullheads, picking berries, chasing dreams. In the woods, the north woods, the place we’d once belonged, where we had been happy, where Dad—and all of us—had been whole.

This essay appeared in the October issue of The Community Letter.

WE'RE NOT THERE ANYMORE

My husband Dave very recently retired after 24 years as chaplain with hospice. He looks forward to having time for creative pursuits. Yet even as he says hello to his creative self, he says goodbye to position and daily routine, patient contact and serving as part of a hospice team. He is defined by the space he no longer occupies.

Dave's last day at work was Friday. He left at 3:00, headed for a 3:15 doctor's appointment regarding his heart. "This is not how I envisioned starting my retirement," he said. He's been feeling tightness and sharp jabbing pains in his chest—angina pectoris.

And so we are at the hospital. He's here for tests. I'm here for him. I feel a pang when I look at this man I adore, when I place a hand on his defined pecs, know I love him, fear losing him. I want to hear that all is well, that this pain is perhaps the result of stress and major life transition.

Today Dave will undertake a treadmill stress test with radioactive dye coursing through his system. Just now he is in line for a blood draw when the man behind him engages him in conversation. This fellow had a heart transplant three years ago. Doctors had given him 10 months to live without the transplant, 10 years with it. He opted to pursue treatment.

"I used to weigh 430 pounds," he tells Dave. "I hated shopping for clothes. I felt like I was buying a couch cover when I bought a pair of pants." Before his heart transplant he lost 60 pounds and had bariatric surgery. He's now down to 180 pounds and says he is doing very well, feels great.

Dave says hearing this man's story helps him put his own troubles in perspective. "I realize I'm worried about my condition and there are people who face far greater challenges than I do."

What I hear is how we are defined in part by the space we no longer occupy. This man once weighed 250 pounds more than he does now, and he readily shares this information with a stranger. Part of who he is now is what he does not have. He no longer has the heart he was born with. He no longer has 250 pounds that were once a part of him. These losses allow him to live and to live more fully, but that doesn't mean that he's forgotten about them or no longer thinks about them. In an intangible, invisible way they are a part of who he is.

Dave and I later stand at the radiology counter. An elderly woman comes out of the waiting room, looks about, looks bewildered. The receptionist turns her attention from us to the woman.

"They wheeled your husband down to Area 2. You were on the phone so I didn't interrupt you. Go down this hallway to the desk in Area 2 and they'll tell you where he is."

The woman nods and steps away, then turns back. "When you've been married to a man for 60 years, you miss him when he's not around."

Dave says he hears this as a need to talk, invitation to dialogue, plea for help. I hear a comment about loss, about self-definition, about defining oneself by what or who is not there—or here.

I gauge such encounters through the screen or filter of my own experience. Who am I? I am who I am not; I am the space I no longer occupy. I am the father whose children are lost to him, whose children choose to have nothing to do with him. I am the father whose eldest son at age 10 said, "Dad, I don't want to see or talk to you again." I am the father whose twin sons when they turned 14, obtained a restraining order to put a stop to our visitation together. At issue: my being gay. My being an openly affirming gay man. My being a gay man with the temerity to believe I'm not going to hell for being who I am.

I define myself in part by the space I do not occupy, by the children who are lost to me. By the heart space that is empty, the echo I hear when I call my sons' names. Is this me, the un-father, not-father, used-to-be father? Yes, part of who I am is who I am not. But I sometimes wonder if I spend too much time looking at the empty half of the glass. Still, to be human is to experience loss.

The stress test over, we go to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled. The woman in line behind us says she's been up since 3:00 this morning. Her husband is in the hospital with an unknown heart condition. She received a middle-of-the-night call from the nursing staff suggesting she come sit with him. None of their three children could join her. She's having to go it alone.

"I don't know what I will do if something happens to him," she says. "We're barely making it on two incomes now."

Who will she be when her husband dies? How will she handle a new definition of self when it smacks her in the face? How does any of us handle loss? We adapt, we cope. We grieve. We move on, we get stuck. We do the best we can, the best we know how. We rely on each other. We tell our stories. To anyone who will listen. This is part of being human, too.

Later this month, come Pride Day, I'll be thinking of this as I celebrate us as a people of courage and spirit, as I listen to the stories told of who we are, where we've come from, how we define ourselves. We are who we are—and also who we are not.

This essay appeared in the June issue of The Community Letter.

THE MOURNING AFTER

Dawn arrives, crisp and cool. Crickets chirp, insects chorus from the trees. A gentle breeze waggles green maple leaves, spiked with what I imagine are the red-brown eggs of some creature whose larvae will hatch and dine before their great green dinner plates turn mustard-color and slip away. Bright sunshine dapples the ground. I savor the early morning chill, knowing afternoon will bring sweltering heat and humidity. I step barefoot across dewy grass, dig in my toes and say, “Ah, Mother!” I do not know whether I am addressing the planet or the woman who yesterday was laid to rest in its earthy embrace. 

The caress of the breeze. The cool of the day. The soles of my feet wet and chill. Simple pleasures not afforded the dead. 

I hear the phone ring. Earlier this morning I called my first lover—he of some 27 years ago—and left a message informing him of my mother’s death. He calls from France to offer condolences, to share some verbal snapshots of my mother. We both agree she was a wonderful person, funny and engaging, warm, interesting. “Most of all I remember her eyes,” he says. “They were so bright. They glistened with life. They were vibrant. I remember her eyes most of all.”

Hmph. This, the same woman on whom I turned my back three months ago as she lay dying. I walked away when even on her deathbed she refused to accept me as I am, to see me as worthy enough to provide care for her. You’re gay, therefore you’re not good enough, not accepted here, not acceptable. This the message both she and my siblings communicated.

I’m outta here, I said, and left. 

I have tried in the 12 years since my coming out to be the good son, to care, to love, to show my family that I am the same person I ever was. I’ve tried to please them, educate them, scare them a little into opening up their worldview, into looking past religious prejudice to see me as a person. I’ve tried to show them love, patience, tolerance, acceptance, hope, life. A new way of being in the world. How happy I am. How angry I am. How much I have to offer.

I might as well have tried to baptize a cat.

I did not attend my mother’s funeral. I choose to direct my energies toward life, not toward people for whom I will never measure up. Better, more honoring of the bright-eyed woman I hold in my heart, to nurture awareness of life and its simple pleasures—now, while I still can.

Yesterday, as my siblings gathered about her casket in a cavernous church building some 12 hours away, I stood alone under an arch of blue sky in our back flower garden. I laughed, cried, sang and spoke remembrances of the woman who gave me birth. This morning I dove my toes into dewy grass and said again, thank you for life.

This essay appeared in The Letter, Spetember 2008.