*
These past few weeks have been dizzyingly full of broken things and fixing things. Along with the often pleasing but physically intense work getting my gardens in order. And they are... in order... I promise a peek as the season progresses.
Fixing things, including my iMac. Although what it eventually came down to is a network problem. My computer works in the kitchen (I type this below the cookbook shelves and in front of a ten-gallon aquarium with some very charming goldfish) but no longer in my office. Something about interference from all the other accounts in the surrounding neighborhood... which have, as a matter of fact, if my drop-down list is any indication, grown fourfold or more in the past few months for some reason.
I must call my network provider. I am exhausted even thinking about it. It will take an hour or more of robot talk to finally get to some poor but polite and relatively efficient schmuck in India or Indonesia. They can do nothing at the brick-and-mortar store that the company operates here in town. They just don’t do that.
God. No one remembers in the olden days when things were fixed easily and handily by talking to a real person right off. It was better. Go ahead: look at me with that combination of pity and the vacuousness of complete unfamiliarity. Yeesh.
To my great good fortune, through this spate of broken stuff, I have found an excellent computer guy here in town. He deals in secondhand electronics and repairs, and I have already procured a wonderful amplifier and turntable from him... the old school stuff. I knew there was a reason I never got rid of my sizable stack of vinyl.
He carries used vinyl too. An incredible collection. I found a copy of The Stooges album Fun House. I was ecstatic. It was one of the albums that got away from me over the years, over forty years ago, when I moved around quite a bit. I literally shouted out when I found it in his bins. He said, “You don’t want that one... that’s $150 bucks!”
Wow. Later I thought I might have tried to convince him that it was actually my copy, stolen at some late-night cocaine and pot-infused brownie bacchanal, back when I could still come out of such events and actually go to work the next day. But no. Damn. The value of the stuff we lose along the way, y’know?
Anyway, what I meant to say, before we get down to the real nitty gritty of the following selections from my memoir box, is that I recently reviewed some of the numbers from my Substack account. I don’t usually like to focus on that too much. Numbers don’t equal writing or reading what is worth reading. My small bunch of readers appears to be growing at a slow but consistent rate.
They also reveal that my stuff in Compendium: The Kitchen Sink is being consumed in the way I had hoped. For each offering the numbers of readers grow as time goes by. So, it appears that you all are not feeling compelled to gobble up this stuff immediately after it arrives in your email box or through a notification on the screen. Hooray. Go for it.
And go ahead and subscribe. It costs nothing and will continue to cost nothing for whoever subscribes while it still costs nothing. I have no immediate plans to capitalize this little effort, but who knows. I’m such an anti-capitaliztisyyyysm... anyway, I’m just no good at it.
So, thanks!
Remember: these memoirs, for the most part, were written five to ten years ago, and though I edit them before I post them, I do not change them even though some of my ideas and situations have evolved.
By the way: my desire, before I entered the week of broken and fixed things, was to write about this idea I would like to explore. The history and experience of the rift between what is essentially behavior and what is increasingly being insisted upon as identity. I’ve been thinking a lot about this of late. In this era of continually swelling acronym laden identity compartments, strings of letters and the expectations that they seem to be born with. I’m accepting ideas and thoughts, should any occur to you.
Onward and upward: The sudsy waters of the sink are parting as we speak:
*
*
I Didn’t Like Zinnias
There’s no good way to explain this and I don’t fully understand it myself. I only started to plant zinnias in my garden in the past three or four years. I had developed a long-term prejudice against them, which now doesn’t make any sense to me. They grow well in this climate, they are bright enough to light up the garden, tall enough to cut to light up the inside. They last a long time and after you cut one, they grow another blossom easily and quickly. They can be wildly beautiful.
When I was a child, and perhaps I’ve spoken of this before, my father measured out very small plots in the garden for each of us to take care of. We were given a few packs of seeds to share: carrots, radishes, beans and zinnias. I think we were given bachelor buttons as well. This was thrilling to me as a kid. The carrots took so long to germinate and come up! Not so the zinnias. They were faithful and quick.
Perhaps that is the main reason when I came back to gardening, I refused the lure of such a satisfying plant. It was easy. Or seemed easy. I was going to do better than easy. I was going to grow challenging things, fill my deep backyard Eden with less usual flowers and vegetables. I eschewed bush beans for something of the same reason, until I started canning them and could find no better canned vegetable. During my first few years I did, in fact, grow green and yellow beans, but then I froze them. And the frozen beans sat nearly forgotten in the freezer and got freezer burn and dried out. But canned beans? Sweet. With just a little resistance after they have been warmed up, barely crunchy. Then there are dilly beans. Oh my god. What a treat… both green and yellow tender young beans (they have to be picked at the right time, don’t you know) with dill and garlic, cold and crunchy. Great garnish for a Bloody Mary, if you like that kind of thing.
Now I’ve returned to beans and zinnias. And I grow dried shelling beans. I tried garbanzo with no real success… although it was a short summer and perhaps I shall try them again. But pinto beans love my back yard. The rows grow lush and full of pods. I pull up the whole plants and tie them together to be hung to dry. That part becomes labor intensive. First finding a place where they can dry out and not be rained on. I have put them in our mud room, but they are messy and take up a lot of space. I worked on a more perfect place and found one after I retired: my little greenhouse. Perfect. And from my little garden we have already had two largish batches of refried beans with more to spare.
Great Northern Beans worked well too. My favorite however is a bean called the Yin Yang bean. Gorgeous little black and white beans with markings identical to a yin yang sign. Creamy and delicious.
And as for zinnias? For the past few years, I have included a patch of them in my vegetable garden. I start them early inside under my lights and plant more seeds in the bed after I put in those plants. They last until the first hard frost.
This is not really just a garden catalogue advertisement for flowers and vegetables I have rediscovered as I have grown older. It is more a question. Why did I avoid zinnias and to a lesser degree beans for so many years? While the answer seems easy enough, I think there are deeper issues at play here. But what are they?
I have had the same response to Rogers and Hammerstein. I’ve only recently come to appreciate them when for years any mention of Oklahoma and its ilk would send me into fits of sarcasm and disdain. Why? Many of the musicals actually dealt with issues of race, love and class in ways that, presented in any other way, would alienate a potential audience.
Perhaps it is the mass appeal I resent. But then, I have never, beyond a few of the more well known and good songs, been able to appreciate Sondheim (I know all of my New York affiliated friends and associates will shudder at this… but then, while not hating New York or holding any particular disdain for it, I do not really appreciate it much… or rather, I cannot seem to hold it in as high esteem as it holds itself) and cannot quite get excited about a musical that depicts a mass murdering barber… although I do like the idea of a Seurat coming to life in song. Still. My likes and dislikes and how they develop and are held though years and then revised are interesting to me. I LIKE a movie that takes me on a surreal Escher-like travelogue through the dark recesses of someone’s perverse mind like Lynch’s Eraserhead, but a musical that depicts singing and dancing about making barber customers into meatloaf is simply uninteresting to me. And I LOVE Titus Andronicus. Go figure.
So much of what we… I… do in my life, what I am willing to participate in, and what I protest comes down to these fickle likes and dislikes. And still, at 60 years old, I am unable to put my finger on why certain things have been relegated to the dustbin, that deep storage unit, of what I cannot like and other things… like my taste in popular music… that I really enjoy and listen to over and over.
I am openly ridiculed for some of my musical tastes. Who can resist Karen Carpenter’s voice… really? Well… apparently many people, judging from the virtual eye rolling I get when I post any song of hers on my Facebook page. One always must ask for allowances when one posts such things among the sophisticates and overly educated under employed and under-utilized. Their only allowable sense of self worth in this culture that amply rewards mediocrity and eschews, sometimes violently, any real thinking and debate is what self importance one can hold tightly inside about what one is sure about. And I am sure about Karen Carpenter’s voice. And Joni Mitchell… who I love and who taught me scads about poetry when all the poets I knew were gradually turning into incoherent self absorbed poobahs, isolationist literatus whose trade is in the self-help anodyne via inner states of being as they relate to trout fishing and/or my deceased grandma’s top drawer. But then, what and who am I if not an isolationist?
So, while I worship the ground that surrealists and absurdists walk on, I cannot abide what passes for those kinds of writing and art as it exists now and here. It is as if those who claim to practice it cannot remember that the very central premise of the surrealist manifesto, and the whole reason for the absurdist genre, was to bring out a discussion that was otherwise not allowed or to explicate and travel unimpeded by reason through a dream. It was, they were, not very concerned with inner states of feelings and the various, quite boring and narcissist concerns with the vast inner landscapes of “am I happy and fulfilled and what does my grandmother think as she lies dying” … and mostly they were not much concerned with writing about writing about writing about writers. All these selfies. Sheesh. Can I bear another MFA’d author writing about being a writer about being a stunted collegiate genius?
But then, what is this if not one episode in a long series of episodes of selfies. Ah well, those who insist on consistency will ultimately fail even in their inconsistency.
And they will continue to dislike zinnias. Which I do not, regardless of what about my childhood they represent.
Funny enough, those little gardens of my childhood were probably among the happiest episodes. And so, they, and their zinnias… all bright red and gold and unfolding like a great morning light… deserve their time back out in the sun
*
*
I Got a Call From Dad
I got a call from Dad late the night after he had been discharged from the hospital after recovering from what he thought had been a small stroke. He was anxious and afraid he was having another stroke. We reviewed the symptoms of stroke and what he had just been through, and it seemed clear he was not having another event.
I was pretty sure his fears were related to the kind of anxiety “attack” that many people have after experiencing an emergency hospital admission due to a potentially life-threatening event, but I had come to understand that using the word “anxiety” in any of its forms would automatically result in a kind of a shut down. In my work with hospice, it didn’t take me long to realize that I could not use the word “anxiety” when attempting to assist most male patients my age or older, or male patient supporters and surviving spouses and relatives. An automatic denial would result. I could use the work “restless”, but “anxiety” was out. My father was no different. He didn’t mind friendly talk about how he was feeling but resisted any of what he would call analysis of his mental state.
Since Mom died, Dad had regularly and frequently experienced serious medical problems of his own. A heart attack, a stroke, several trips to the hospital for a very rapid heartbeat. In one emergency room trip his heart beat over 120 times per minute the entire time he was in the emergency room. Until they were able to slow it down, I could see his pulse pounding on his sternum. He was fitted with a defibrillator and later, a pacemaker. In my role as a hospice social worker and counselor one of my jobs included facilitating support and education sessions once or twice a year for groups of people and their primary support person who likewise had defibrillators and for whom his cardiologist had arranged regular, monthly I believe, topical meetings. It was the first time my father had ever seen me engaged professionally.
I was the family member closest in distance, so I was the one who was usually at his side during these frequent emergencies. Of course, there was the time, immediately upon getting off the plane after Susan and my nine-week trip through Europe, when through the haze of jet lag we heard my name being announced over a loudspeaker in the airport. It was my sister trying to reach me to tell me that Dad was in the hospital for a heart attack.
I didn’t mind being the family member support. I’m not so sure Dad was as happy about it as he might have been if it had been one of my sisters. I made an agreement with him that if he needed help with something he should ask, and I think he would prefer that I anticipate his needs. There was the problem too with the fact that he was and remained very conflicted about me in some deep way that had been with him, probably since I was born.
Later in life my sisters would reflect with me that I never wanted to do things with my father and so they always felt that they were his second pick after I refused. Of course, as these things go, no one ever really took my perspective into account or ever asked me. The assumption was that there was something wrong with me that I did not want to be with my father or do the things he wanted to do. My recollection, however, was that whenever we did find ourselves alone together, running some errand or fishing ( I remember a terrifying fishing trip in a small boat when there were big white-capped waves. He was silent and I was scared) or doing some job for which I would be asked to hold the light, his silence was deafening and uncomfortable. He did not talk to me. This apparently was not as much the case, or excused, when he was with my sisters. Of course, at the time, when I was a boy, I could hardly know that. I just knew I was uncomfortable and lonely.
So, it was somewhat odd for me to be the one who was a primary caregiver for my father. He was more talkative with me now. He had seen some of the work I do and was impressed with it and said often that he did not understand how anyone could do what I did. As I said, his heart doctor ran a support and education group for people who had defibrillators and I was called in, in a professional role, to facilitate a discussion process for those who had the mechanism and those who were the primary support of those who had the mechanism. I would divide the group into two groups according to which category each participant fit in, and the people in each group discussed their issues and concerns guided by a list of survey questions that were easily diverted from as they were expected to be as the group became more self-directing. I did some public speaking with this process and Dad was impressed.
Still, he was not comfortable asking for assistance and, I think, didn’t want to be a burden… at the same time he had no problem telling me when he asked a neighbor or someone from his church to do something that I could have done and would have done. There was an element of passive aggressiveness that I chose to ignore and most times, should he end up in the hospital, I was the one who made the trips to the emergency room, or between hospitals when he would suddenly be transferred from a small city hospital to a larger regional one due to the nature of whatever issue he was dealing with at the time. When he got his hip replaced (as well as during most of the rest of his admissions) I was sent to the local drug store to pick up the supplies he needed to manage the incontinence he experienced ever since he had his prostate surgery for cancer. Just one of the errands I was glad to do.
Regardless, Dad was very active to the end. In fact, as I have described before, his habit during the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays was to travel between sisters’ homes to visit. He would drive himself and it was during one of those trips that he had the brain bleed that killed him.
I did not go to my sister's to be with him in those last days. I could not imagine sharing that time with people, especially a brother-in-law, who had been particularly unkind to Susan and me.
I talked to my father on the phone as he lay dying. He was incoherent and sobbing. The minute I told him I didn’t mind if he cried and he could cry as much as he wanted, he stopped crying. It was as if someone had hit a switch. Later, at the funeral, I gave a eulogy that included a part about how my father’s father had been one of the very earliest proponents and members of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Detroit area.
My sisters, their husbands and children, all agreed to meet at a local restaurant the next morning for breakfast. My one brother-in-law was very late, apparently due to passing out the night before from drinking too much. We had avoided that scene but apparently quite a bit a drinking had erupted after the funeral. It didn’t sound like much fun to me. I drink so rarely.
Anyway, as I started, Dad had called me the night after being discharged from the hospital after one of his less serious emergency admissions. It was right after 9/11 when he was taken to the hospital because he thought he was having a stroke or heart attack and had, like millions of us, been glued to the television watching those planes fly into those buildings over and over and over. They couldn’t find anything really wrong, and he was released. He had good insurance, so his hospital stays were always very generous to the point, at times, of being interminable, but once home this time he felt the same feeling creeping up on him again and called me.
We talked for a while. At one point he apologized “for what we did to you when you were a child” I was ready for quite a pouring forth when I asked for more detail about what he meant. He explained that he was sorry he made us all get up and sing during gatherings of friends and family.
My mother and he owned a great number of recordings of musicals of the Rogers and Hammerstein variety. All of them had lyric sheets. They also owned the sing-along albums that Mitch Miller’s orchestra and chorus put out and those had song sheets as well.
We all had our favorites and were asked, expected, to stand in front of the big TV, opposite of the fireplace, and sing along with the recording. We did this as solos and in groups. It was really, for me, the happiest time we had together as a family. And my father was apologizing for it.
“We went too far with that,” he said.
“No, I told him, ...no… those were some of the best times. And all my life sustaining, my joyful, interest in theatre and the arts came out of that. There’s absolutely no reason to apologize.”
He was satisfied and happy with that explanation, but it still strikes me as odd that he had the entire scenario, and me, so wrong.
*
*
I am a Big Man.
I am not sure how that happened. My mother and both my grandmothers were less than 5’2”. My tallest sister is 5’7”. My father was barely 5’9” and his father was even shorter than that.
Apparently, my Grandfather McMahan, my mother’s father, hovered around six foot tall and my great-grandfather, my mother’s grandfather, the one I met, hovered just under 6 foot. That great-grandfather was blocky and solid like me, so perhaps that’s where I got this behemoth proportion. I tower over everyone in family pictures and if you gathered all of us together for at least three generations back, I would be the tallest.
I definitely have the facial features of my father’s people, but all the Halberstadts that I have known about, my father’s mother’s folks, were quite small. I took my father on a cross country train trip when he was in his eighties so he could spend some time with his cousin (like my father he was an only child. He was the closest thing my father had to a sibling) before they both died. That cousin, Cousin Harry, was a tiny man.
I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten accustomed to this height. It took me a while to reach it. I was short and kinda plump going into adolescence after a skinny childhood in which I was usually in the top five or six in height in my classes. By fifth grade everyone grew past me, and I was in the mid-range in height until I was about 15 and a half. I became overweight, and while I had friends, close ones, I was teased rather mercilessly by some of the jock boys who somehow retained their hand-eye coordination and agility when I had completely lost whatever I had of those things. As I have said before, I see young boys, just before or entering adolescence, who have the same physique that I had. Compared to other kids I see in the same age bracket, those boys aren’t nearly as obese as I felt myself to be. But then, obesity wasn’t as plague-like in its reach when I was a kid.
I stretched-out that chub quickly over about six to nine months when I was entering my sophomore year in high school and continued to grow until, by the time I graduated high school, I was a little over six foot tall. I was skinny too. When I was 15, I also finally got a patch of pubic and underarm hair…. the lack of which had caused me much distress as I entered high school as small and un-haired as a baby. (What’s interesting to me is that my son developed on the opposite end of this maturation spectrum and was equally embarrassed by his body hair because it came in so early. That was a revelation to me).
There’s a picture of me in my high school senior year yearbook in which I am playing my bass fiddle. It’s a half body profile shot, and I swear you can barely see me there alongside the bass, I was so thin. My clumsiness had a lot to do with that fast growth spurt. I can remember bumping into hanging lamps with my head in homes where I had been any number of times before. I even broke one. They were awfully good-natured about it.
I grew my last half an inch or so in the first half of my 20s.
I like my height, overall, but I am not sure I ever grew accustomed to it. I see myself in pictures with others and I feel like I’m a giant. And I’m not that tall, actually. Well… I AM that tall, but there are plenty of men taller than me.
There are drawbacks. I don’t believe I’ve ever gone to one of those conferences or trainings related to my job in which the tables and chairs are arranged in a way that provide for the comfort of someone my size.
People, usually smaller women, often complain about men seeming to be ignorant of other people’s personal space because they appear to require a certain amount of sprawling space that always seems to take up space that “belongs” to those around them.
The fact is, at 6’2.5”, my legs rarely fit comfortably under the tables provided or in the small space allotted to each participant at the long tables. I am constantly bumping my knees, sometimes painfully, on cross bars and table edges when I try to fit them under. I have taken to sitting at the end of tables like those so I can turn out at the end and stretch my legs out a bit.
In addition to this (and I have heard complaints about how men often seem to require extra space due to their predilection for sitting with their legs spread apart)... well… I’m a relatively well-hung fella, not gigantic, but proportional to my size, and trying to sit with my legs together for any length of time is simply not a medically recommended practice. I can cross them tightly at the thigh for short periods of time, but eventually that does not work either and I need to make sure my legs and or feet aren’t completely numb before I get up and cross the room to get another nasty Danish or rank cup of conference coffee. I mean, who would be able to pick me up if my numb legs refused to hold me up? How embarrassing would that be? And how distracting from the keynote?
I remember, and this is a rather far-flung tangent, at the conferences I used to frequent when I worked for the hospice organization, I was routinely the only man in the room and became habituated to the girly handouts given during the registration processes, as well as the surprising dirty looks I got from groups of tired looking and generally overweight women who populated the field when I would ask if I could sit at an empty chair near them. Perhaps (and here’s the link to this treatise on my gigantism) it was because they expected I would spread out into their protected space, which they had carefully marked with a purse or a cloak of some kind a full twenty minutes before the proceedings began and before they took their seats.
I don’t actually think about being tall much of the time. Who goes around contemplating their height? Although I do wonder which one of the men in my ancestry I most look like, bodily. I have considered that I may be a new family model all together. None of my nephews are as tall as I am, although my one sister’s boy may come closest.
I think one should always leave behind a description or even a nude full body shot behind (that is, after you are gone, not OF your behind!) so that your inheritors can figure these things out a little better than I have been able to. I am sure my body, my maturation rate, my rather distinctive hard to place features (nationality wise) and my thick hair and easily tanned ‘olive’ skin could find a predecessor or two in the faces and bodies and genitalia of any number of the men who came before me.
Only my face finds a home in the men before me, and in the pictures of my father’s father, my father, and my mother’s father. Other than that, I am not sure to whom I belong. I never had brothers, so comparing and contrasting bodies, either very deliberately or by way of everyday exposure, never was an option. And my father was very modest around the house and so I rarely saw him naked.
So here I am. All 6 foot 2 and a half inches of me, possibly a little less as I have probably shrunk a bit in the past five or six years.
I have become a hairy man, but that only really occurred later in life. As Susan says, when she met me, I had a concave chest and a mere handful of hairs on my chest. Not an ape, my body hair is spread rather indiscriminately all over my chest and stomach all the way down to the “package”.
My legs have been quite hairy since I was 15. Lightly-colored hair, not wiry, and the hair that covers my ass (in my mid-twenties a girlfriend used to call me fuzzy buns) has spread up my lower back. At nearly 61, I even have patches of hair on either side of my back at my waist. My beard has never been particularly heavy, and I can get away with shaving every other day, but I have managed a decent mustache and goatee at various times. A full beard is not possible due to empty patches on my cheeks.
My nose is long and slightly crooked; one nostril seems to be smaller than the other. My eyes are quite small and brown, and my lips are thin. Somehow people have generally inferred or been very direct about my being handsome. I’m not so sure about that, my facial features seem too small for the expanse of flesh where they are arranged that is my face.
But everything works great. I have small teeth that do not show much when I smile. My upper body shows the results of years of swimming but any “V” shape up from my waist is not that pronounced. My jacket size is 54 long. The tailor who adjusted a suit I bought during a trip to New York City was forced to take in the waist quite a bit due to the difference between my chest and midriff. My arms and legs are very long, but my feet and hands are small for a fellow my size.
I am not quite a giant, regardless of what I think I see when I look at pictures of me in groups of my family. And I stand tall with good posture, thanks to swimming and the fact that it feels better. I used to have a gait that was rhythmic and reflected some of the cultural impact of living in diverse cities most of my life before I was 40. I think I’ve lost that swing, that rhythm… but I might make an effort to regain it.
*
*
Friends 2
I’ve thought a lot about friends and friendship lately. My life has been rich with friends of all kinds. In my adult life, I have depended on my friends for stability, belonging, and reinforcement. As I moved from place to place and from activity to activity and workplace-to-workplace, my groups of friends became episodic, and place or activity related. Many of my best and most reliable friendships came about because of my involvement in theatre and writing.
It has been hard, since I moved to this small town over thirty years ago, to form, build, and maintain friendships. I remain unsure of the reasons for this. My politics, my relative openness about my sexual preferences and sense of humor seem to leave people feeling threatened… or at least that’s what I’m told. I don’t believe I ever thought about it in this way prior to moving here. I was never that bereft of a number of friends and activity partners. When I moved here, I recognized I would be leaving some things behind, but I did not expect to have to accept such an absence of friendships.
In many social situations I am not a very outgoing person; in fact, I can be quite shy. Apparently, this can come across as arrogance… some way in which I stand in a room, my natural affect, is seen to be something unapproachable and distant… too observing and superior. At least to those who have their own issues with confidence, of which there are many. I have been told these things about myself by people I trust.
My outspokenness has been a source of some of my isolation in the friendship department as well. Things I believe and speak or write openly about, or with sarcastic humor, have been less well received. That troubles me in some ways. Because, how shall I be able to have a friendship with anyone who is put off by these rather integral, integrated aspects of who I am? How would I change them without being disingenuous because I do not wish to be changed?
I have been left somewhat flummoxed by the social dynamic here. If being myself is what alienates me, then who shall I be and how should I be it? This is an impossible situation. It also comes down to, in the end, my own feelings of being put off and simply not liking many of the people who hold such prejudices. Because that’s what they are.
Even my way of interacting, rather trouble free in the more urban areas where I was raised and lived until I moved here, became an issue. The idea of uninterrupted speech in dialogues or group interactions is rather alien to me. Overlapping conversation, excited and compelling creative dialogue, with a broad dynamic of speed and even volume, seems like normal human interaction. Not so here, where great consternation and offense is taken almost any time anyone feels they have been interrupted, regardless even of how pointless their nattering may be or how long they seem to believe they can hold the floor.
Of course, speechifying is a popular past time here. Every group gathering or event must be preceded and ended by a lengthy speech by whoever has taken the mantle or been appointed by themselves or by fiat to be the most important person present. Often there is a speech in rightly or ridiculously devised intermissions as well. We learn much from these speeches although mostly we learn about a smallish idea of power that comes from lording over a small group of similarly engaged people and not allowing anyone else, regardless of talent or ability, to have their say. I am impatient with such doings and prefer that when I go to the show that the show be unpreceded by speeches. I don’t mind a cartoon or two, however.
Race, too, has been an issue. I have grown quite reticent to attend any gathering of people in this area for fear that I will be confronted by someone or a self-congratulatory group of someones, who believe that having a group of white people together for any occasion whatsoever (in fact, funerals seem to be the favorite occasion for denigrating people of other races, the female gender or non-heterosexuals) give them tacit approval for the most disgusting, pig headed, and Neanderthal speeches (again) about “those people”. Of course, the word nigger is not absent from these diatribes, at least not by those who are tolerated, at least, and often considered to be the salt of the earth independent type.
And then there are those who insist that in their social group such language never occurs, all the while they support political candidacies of those whose main claim to political acumen and fame come from how well they can decry the policies of anything associated positively with African Americans… in between their prayers.
So, yes, friends have been hard to make here. I’m willing to live with that. I am good friends with myself for the most part and enjoy my own company... and Susan and I have such strength and resilience in this arena, I have even thought that perhaps I tend to measure any intimacy I am able to reach with others on a yardstick that is largely defined by how Susan and I are such dynamic and fluid pals… although I miss having friends nearby as opposed to them being gathered on a list in my computer in various sites and social media formats. And while, in the past few years this dynamic has broken down a bit, I am still bemused and have become content with being guarded about the level of friendliness I encounter in the community and what it really means. I have regularly encountered people whose friendliness is mostly a performance and employed as a way to gather information about others. There is status, apparently, for some in how much information they have to share about others. Weird.
I still cannot get over how many times I have been looked at with nervousness and outright sublimated fear when I hazarded a suggestion to go for coffee or a movie with some man with whom I'd had quite intimate, regular, and lively conversation. They would quite literally recoil and go to great lengths to say no politely when I suggested we could do something other than meet at the appointed hour in an activity both of us liked but never arranged to go to together… apparently, suggestions that meant we would be seen together in public drinking coffee or a beer, or at a movie or other public event or venue, were too terrifying.
No, I’m not straight. I make no bones about it and haven’t since the late 1970s although neither do I pronounce it every opportunity I get. That being said, I am also, from what I know from my work in social work and counseling, and the goings-on at the various places where scurrilous and hurried male-to-male things happen, more heterosexual than many men who would drink themselves into a stupor every night if they had to in order to prove that they have never had erotic thoughts about another man’s junk or ass. And getting a man to have sex with me has NEVER been a problem here. Getting someone to go on a hike or out for conversation and coffee remained relatively unobtainable for the vast majority of my 20 years here.