The Distinguished Thing

The Indigo Girls, Summer Stage, Central Park, September 2021

The Indigo Girls, Summer Stage, Central Park, September 2021

Apparently when Henry James was dying a slow, painful  death, he said, toward the very end,  “so here it is, at last, the Distinguished Thing.”

Last night I went to an Indigo Girls concert in Central Park. It was outside, run by the NYC parks department, and proof of vaccination was required.  It was all of the things that the CDC says are relatively safe. And the data suggests that if I do get breakthrough COVID I will just have the equivalent of a bad flu. I do not come into contact with immunocompromised people so I don’t have to worry about making someone really ill through transmission.

And yet. There I was, freaking out at the concert. Standing in a big crowd of mostly unmasking people, singing their hearts, filled me with as much dread as joy.  I tried to focus on the joy. I looked around at the mostly queer crowd, reveling in just being together again. I looked up at the backlit birches, majestic against a moody, Sendak sky.  I hugged my girlfriend, reminding myself of how lucky I was to be here, in this moment, with her.

The past 18 months of the pandemic have forced us to face the Distinguished Thing head on. Death has taken close to 700,000 people in the U.S. That  number is so big, it’s hard to contextualize. I found out this summer that Vermont only has 840,000 residents. If contained to one state, the virus would have wiped out most of the entire population.

Then there is the personal--depending on who you are and how much privilege you live in, you have seen some version of this death. Once, twice, or hundreds of times.

I  live in a privilege bubble. My closest circle of love has been spared, though watching  someone I love grapple with the horrendous side-effects of long-term CO-VID is a different kind of heartbreak.

And yet, in spite of all of the privilege,  I have lived in terror for most  of those 18 months.  In the early days,  it was relentless. Hearing the sirens blaring non-stop, 24 hours a day in Brooklyn,  scared to even go outside and walk around the block for fear of ending up in an overflowing hospital waiting for a ventilator to free up. Then, with more information, the idea that wearing a mask offered some semblance of protection, so that while still fraught with anxiety, a walk was possible. Then a bike ride. Then tentative, masked walks with friends, which drove home how much we humans need the presence of other humans to feed our souls. 

Now, here I am, a fully vaccinated person living in a rarefied bubble.  And yet,  my body still signals fear every time I step a tiny bit out of isolation. Riding the subway in a car with unmasked people feels treacherous. Standing in a small crowded bodega waiting to pay while unmasked people order coffee and a buttered roll feels dangerous.

Last night at the concert,  the Distinguished Thing was part of our collective dance. It injected  the concert with high voltage, human electricity.  The performers and audience were so viscerally connected we might as well have been  holding hands. Death was the darkness falling around us; and it was what made each note so much sweeter.


First Girl Crush

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O.K., Late bloomers, let’s hear it: when was your first girl crush? 

Mine was 7th grade.  Sarah R.  Tall and lanky, with a big a splash of freckles across perfectly angled cheekbones. Dirty blond hair just grazing her collar.  Emerald green eyes. Smile to die for. Every time I saw her, my heart did a back flip.  Which was really confusing. Was this how all best friends felt about each other? Did she feel this way about me?

Best moment ever:  she invited me over the Saturday before my birthday. She opened the door with a huge grin. My heart did a triple axle.  It was a beautiful fall day—normally we’d be headed downtown to wander aimlessly in and out of stores before parking ourselves at Burger King for hours, nursing giant Diet Cokes and sharing an order of large greasy fries. Instead, she made me wait in their family room while she ran up to her bedroom.  Fine by me. I was in love with her whole family— a crew of five athletic, freckle-faced girls with warm, welcoming, seemlingly happily married parents at the helm. In other words, the polar opposite of the sad little state of affairs I went home to every night.

She ran downstairs, holding something behind her back. With a flourish, she pulled out a rectangular piece of wood: "Happy Birthday!"   I admit, I had a moment. Really?  This is your gift?  But then I looked down at what was in my hands. It was a solid maple plaque, carefully stained and sanded by hand. A piece of parchment, burned at the edges, had been lacquered on top.  And on the parchment, in Sarah's loopy script, was a poem about friendship—ending with the one the word I had been longing to hear: love.

I don’t remember the poem.  I don’t remember the rest of the afternoon. I don't remember what else I did to celebrate my birthday that year.  But I will always remember the hug we gave each other after our eyes met.

It took me many years to experience that kind of hug again. But it was well worth the wait.

So, LBLs, how about you?

Badass Middle Age Women, Part One: Grace Paley

Grace Paley

 

 1922-2007

 

 

I’m reading the newly released A Grace Paley Reader, which was just released by FSG. Wow.

You know how you think you know a lot about an author you admire, and then you find out you didn’t really know jack?   Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Little Disturbances of Man hit me hard in my 20s.  I can’t remember a single plot line, but I still carry those books in my heart. Through her characters’ every day lives, she reached out to say, yes—I know how you are feeling. You are not alone.  This is just a part of what it means to be human. You will be scarred, but not broken.

  I knew she was a fierce West Village activist in her day. I pictured a little old grey haired lady handing out flyers on the corner of 6th Avenue and Waverly.

But now that I have read (maybe re-read? Signs of my own grey haired lady-ness creeping in) her essays, I realize how profound and powerful her voice was at the time. She was a brilliant, badass woman who saw the world through a clear, fierce, feminist lens, and forever changed the world for the rest of us.

In Illegal Days, she shares her own experience of getting an illegal abortion. It’s one of the best essays I have ever read about abortion. She puts the fight to control our lives, our bodies, and our sexual choices into historical context and makes an eloquent, irrefutable case for abortion rights.

If you want to read about some of the women whose shoulders we stand on, read Six Days: Some Remembering, The Seneca Stories: Tales from the Women’s Peace Encampment, and Of Poetry and Women in the World.  

 Grace Paley’s work reminds us that while the Women’s March was a great day, the real work happens every day—in poetry, in essays, in jail cells, on courthouse steps, and on corners like 6th Avenue and Waverly Place. 

 

Beware the Cat Food

Thanks to Myfirstgirlfriend. com for publishing my coming out story to my kids:

https://myfirstunacknowledgedgirlfriend.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/a-late-bloomer-comes-out/

The first person I came out to was myself.  It was a surprise, even though it had been a 35-year process, if you start the clock at age 15 when I was wearing men’s military pants and pining for my camp counselors.  The next person I came out to was my best friend.  He didn’t seem surprised.  “Great. Glad you know. Now let’s not tell anyone else until your divorce is final.” Yes, somehow, I’d gotten through 17 years of marriage and two-thirds of a divorce without knowing.  But that’s a whole other story.

After the divorce was final, I started dating women—a terrifying prospect at 40, after almost 20 years of being in a relationship and identifying as straight.  It took me a while to read clues that would have set off alarm bells for LTLs (long-time lesbians). Like, for example, when a woman you are dating organizes her whole life around feeding her cat three hot meals a day.  Then there’s the U-Haul that overstays its welcome. That’s when your girlfriend still co-owns her house with her ex-partner—and the ex lives on the top floor while your girlfriend lives on the bottom. Think Downton Abbey without the starched pinafores.   Granted, it makes shuttling the golden retriever between households a lot easier. But it also starts to feel like you are in a relationship with your girlfriend and a mysterious woman who lives in the attic…. Mrs. Rochester, anyone?

After learning the kind of relationship lessons most dykes had learned decades earlier, I started dating a woman who I met through one of my closest friends.  It began as one of those exciting, charged friendships laced with the possibilities that dance just below the surface. Then one day she drove down to Brooklyn from her New England farmhouse and swooped me off my feet.

This one was the real deal. It also meant that the real coming out moment had finally arrived.  It was time to tell the kids. My daughter was fourteen; my son was eleven. Since they were still reeling from the aftermath of the divorce—an unnatural disaster they would be recovering from the rest of their lives—I had kept my previous ill-fated experiments under wraps. But now, it had become a secret too big to keep—and I wanted to introduce them to my new love.

Talk about terror.  It wasn’t the fact that I was gay, but the questions behind it. When did you know? Is this why you got divorced? Why did you marry Dad? How can you have been married for 17 years and not know? Is our whole family a sham?  I was terrified that they would blame me for the wreckage, and that the bonds we had—the love that defined my world—would be forever broken.

From the moment each of them was born, I loved them with a fierceness that will forever be my anchor on this earth. The joy of small moments, like holding those little hands on the walk to school, was greater than anything else that had come before. And, conversely, the first time they experienced heartbreak, mine broke a thousand times harder.  I’m sure that the fear of damaging that love is what kept my own heart– and self-awareness– cloaked in darkness for many years.

The first conversation was a strange, awkward affair. “I loved your father for years, and then we got divorced, and now I’m dating a woman.” They stared at me and seemed to take it in stride. Years later I found out that I had not avoided setting off those parental landmines that leave lasting scars. Like when my son asked why our marriage had ended, and apparently I had answered, “Sometimes love just runs out.” Wow.  What a great way to comfort an eleven year-old searching for security.

I never quite managed to feel comfortable around my kids with my new partner. She’s now my ex-partner and definitely doesn’t live upstairs. It’s taken a good ten years to feel comfortable around myself with the new me.  But my children and I have forged a new family dynamic—one that is stronger, closer, and more honest than ever before. It turns out that risking the loss of love by sharing the truth can have the opposite effect.

My son, now twenty, came out last summer. I am watching him wrestle with all that entails—no matter how supportive the environment, it is still a road filled with treacherous turns. I hope that he feels both of his parents’ unconditional love, and that maybe my own journey to find and live the truth can make his a little easier.  At the very least, I can warn him about the cat food situation.