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Fault, by Betsy

I first encountered the word fault meaning a gap or rift in the earth’s crust–not in school or even at home under the tutelage of my parents–but when I was around the age of 50 years partnered with my current spouse and traveling in a geologist’s paradise, the state of Utah. I always thought I had had at least an average education and I did graduate from college. Yet I knew next to nothing about geology. Now whose fault is that?

I have no memory of geology being offered as a subject in high school and not even in college. Granted I attended a liberal arts college for women, and I guess geology was not considered to be of any interest to a 1950’s female student. It’s not that science courses were not offered. Biology101 was a required subject for freshmen. Plenty of courses were offered in chemistry, physics, and other sciences. But no geology or Earth science.

Part of the fault lies in the fact that it was not until the 1940‘s and 50‘s that geologists began to develop a new way of looking at the planet and how it works. Much that we now know about the history of our Earth has been very recently discovered. One of the few positive outcomes of the Second World War was that new technology used for searching for submarines could be developed and further used to study the ocean floor.

As a result scientists could now better understand the dynamics of the earth’s crust. Although the theory of continental drift had been around for decades, now there was an explanation for the movement of the Earth’s land masses which millions of years ago had been one large land mass called Pangea.

This theory of plate tectonics was in the development stage when I was in school. Makes me feel really old. The theory was still in its infancy and not completely developed and certainly not well established among geologists. No wonder it was not well known or understood among educators in 1950.

It seems that today the study of geology has become quite common. Most of my knowledge of the subject that I have now I have learned from my spouse in the last 20 years. Unlike myself, she studied geology in high school and college–and 10 years after I did. I have also gleaned a lot of knowledge from educational television programs about such topics as How the Earth was born, the early history of our planet, volcanoes, and global climate changes, and mass extinctions brought about by catastrophic geologic events. I find geology a fascinating subject, and I love learning new things. Geology does seem to be an excellent topic for educational TV, as the events which have made our earth what it is today are truly dramatic and lend themselves very well to television drama. No wonder. It is the fault of the earth’s faults that causes dramatic events such as tsunamis, earth quakes, volcanic eruptions–big, dramatic happenings.

Enough about the geologic fault. Another kind of fault with which I am quite familiar is the one that happens in tennis when the serve does not clear the net and drop inside the service box. In my ability and age level of tennis, the fault should be a rare happening. What a double fault amounts to is a gift for your opponents. It is a rare happening except when I am playing mixed doubles. In ladies’ senior doubles tennis, in my opinion, the serve is simply the first shot of the game and a way to put the ball in play. The point is rarely won on the serve.
I used to play some mixed doubles. I gave it up when I stopped playing on weekends and when I decided I did not want to routinely lose the game because of my partner serving double faults every time. Why is it that men serve faults so often and women hardly ever? I think it’s because men try to serve aces and women don’t. It’s very hard to serve an ace and it does not happen very often in my age group and ability level. An ace requires a great deal of spin and pace on the ball and perfect placement.

Neither I nor my team mates or our opponents are usually able to pull off such a serve. Better (and more fun) to place it well and play out the point. If I serve a fault, it’s no one’s fault but my own. And everyone knows it.

© 20 April 2015

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

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Breaking into the Gay Culture, by Will Stanton

Breaking into the gay culture. I have no idea what that means. I suppose one first would have to define “gay culture.” I’m not sure what that is, either.

Does that mean living in San Francisco and being 99% nude in a parade? Does it mean hanging out in gay bars and trying to pick up tricks, perhaps even resignedly going home with a nameless body at 2:00 A.M.? Does it mean late-night roaming of Cheesman Park, or hanging out around men’s restrooms? Does it mean wearing rainbow colors, or lots of gay bling announcing to the world that my orientation may be different from yours? Is this that “gay culture,” especially as defined by uninformed or homophobic people?

On the other hand, could it mean that wealthy, cultured, and well educated gentleman who is bored by the bar scene and, instead, sits in the balcony of the Met Opera with a group of black-tie friends and then throws exclusive after-opera parties at his magnificent home? Or, does it refer to someone like billionaire, arms-industrialist Alfred Krupp enjoying the view of a dozen naked, young boys splashing in his swimming pool, flaunting the draconian anti-gay laws of early-20th-century Germany?

Or finally, can it mean a bizarrely inverted and destructive so-called “un-gay culture” populated by outwardly-straight army generals, fundamentalist preachers, homophobic Republican senators, or “pray-to-cure therapists,” anyone who fears or denies his own orientation that he does not understand or is willing to accept?

One obviously visible part of gay culture that I certainly respect is those persons who work for gay civil rights and to educate the otherwise ignorant public. Such work may expose them to ridicule or worse. Or at least, that dedication may dominate their lives and take up most of their time, possibly denying them the opportunity to pursue other, more personally rewarding directions.

For those gays, however, who may have realized their orientation but who have not found much of a of a life beyond it, I would hope that “gay culture” is not defined by unproductive pursuits for frequent sex partners, short-term relationships, beer-busts, and constant gay social events. Human lives should mean much more than that.

It seems to me that the natural, healthful approach for viewing one’s orientation is that it is simply one element of a person’s personality and thinking, that it does not have to dominate one’s mind. Consequently, choosing friends, joining clubs, selecting careers, interests, and hobbies does not have to be determined primarily upon whether they are considered to be gay or straight activities. After all, any psychologist or biologist worth his salt now knows that sexual orientation is not binary, not black or white; it is fluid, running the spectrum of thinking, feelings, and behavior. I could be mistaken, but perhaps some individuals think of Story Time more as a gay writers’ group. I chose to join because I prefer to view it simply as a means of telling our worthwhile, human stories. The human experience often contains universal elements not limited by gay or straight.

Denver, © 21 July 2012

About the Author

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.

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Nowhere, by Ricky

Like many men of my age group, I had my mid-life crisis a few years ago. At this point in time, I perceive that nothing has changed since then. I still have feelings that my youthful goals and dreams are nowhere in sight for the future or accomplished in the past. With the loss of my best friend of 27 years and 9 months, most of the joy of life went with her. I now have no ambition, nowhere to go, no one to go there with, and no money to spend when I don’t arrive there.

I have been blessed with a modest amount of financial and medical security, but the Republican Party leadership is poised and planning to take even that mea-ger amount away by making major changes to existing law and pro-grams. Republican Paul Ryan has published his proposed budget for 2015. Bruce Lesley reported inThe Huffington Post [1 Dec 2014],”In the name of protecting children, the poor, and the states, the Ryan budget does the opposite.”

Like the Beatles’ Nowhere Man, the Republican Party’s proposed federal budget for 2015 is a “nowhere plan.” The republican leadership inhabit their “fortress of solitude,” listening to no one except budget extremists, and where they make all their plans for nowhere budgets for the benefit of nobody except the wealthy.

Nowhere does that nowhere plan contain the Affordable Care Act or the expansion of Medicare or uncapped Food Stamps or Public Radio or the endowment for the arts or Amtrak or even basic research grants or funding for educa-tion. Republican leaders are, “No way, No how, Nowhere Men”.

They know not where they will lead us to.
They are as blind as they can be.
They see what they want to see.
Nowhere Men can you see the poor at all?

Somewhere, somehow, sometime, the Nowhere Men will find the way to fund their favorite project – weapons for war to either use or sell. After all, a good old fashioned war is great for business because war makes the rich richer.

Nowhere Men never learned the lessons of history: wars cost money, the outcome is never certain, and innocent nobodies will end up, no-where. “Nowhere Men wars” will take us all nowhere, somehow, in no time.

In exchange for a unique American culture of democracy and the American Dream, by defunding education, Public Radio, and the endowment for the arts, the Nowhere Men would have us embrace a culture of rule by the few wealthy Nowhere Men – an oligarchy based upon military strength and a subservient poor.

Nowhere Men would be well advised to remember that Democrats, Libertarians, Independents, other groups, and individuals also own guns and were trained to use them during combat in Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, and on the streets of major American cities.

© 1 December 2014

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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Madame Rosa, by Ray S

“Madame Rosa,” her real name is simply Rosa. But I’ve given her the grander and dramatic name because she reminds me in some imaginary way of the gypsy woman with the crystal ball on a table, who is about to tell you of your past and future. No, she is not a mystic or a seer. In fact, she has had a very productive career in the fields of counseling, self-esteem, personal and family matters, as well as group presentations.

I write all of this so you might know just a little of her background. Rosa has the strength of personality and will of a woman who knows who she is and always has been. She is a helpful, generous, loving individual that minces no words about her philosophy as it may apply to a client’s problems or concerns.

The irony of Rosa’s story is that it has been some eighteen months to two years that she has had to accept that she is mortal like the rest of us having survived two strokes and a heart attack. After much thought and determination, true to her sense of will power, she announced to family and friends that she had had enough of doctors, hospitals, and pills and is setting about to die, as almost at her command—she was, as usual, in control.

Now, instead she seems to have met her fate realizing that she was not the only one in control. Madam Rosa and the crystal ball are no more—replaced by a despondent shadow of the persona that she once was. It is just a waiting game now.

Recently I took her a Christmas gift and we had a good visit. She managed to open the box and take the many-colored scarf and wrap it around her shoulders. Her smile reminded me of other good times we had met at her kitchen table for what I called “tea and sympathy.” She always had the right answer.

One time, when we went to lunch, she asked me to run by a number of stores. It was that frantic time of the year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Her niece had unpacked and set up the crèche in a niche in the living room. It was complete, even the guiding star above the manger. Somehow, though, the fluffy white clouds were missing in the unpacking and this would never do. Onward and upward we hit at least three different stores until we found a supply of Angel Hair. What surprised me was that I thought angel hair, a spun fiberglass, had been outlawed and was a thing of Christmas Past like tinsel ice sickles. Remember how the perfectionists insisted each strand must be hung perfectly straight and one must never get caught tossing a handful up to the top of the tree.

That was one of many memories of the driven persistence Rosa had when her mind was so determined. Lost in my reminiscence of happier days, I could only hope and wish for a good measure of that drive she once had to return since she has found one can’t choose to die at will. Doubtless the time will come as it will for all of us and when it does, here is one of a host of friends that will recall Madame Rosa with the Angel Hair.

© 25 January 2016

About the Author

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Coming Out Spiritually, by Phillip Hoyle

I started revealing my gay self in a religious context subtly when I suggested in a church course on sexuality that we might want to think of bi-sexuality as the conceptual norm for our inquiry. That would make good use of Dr. Kinsey’s scale arising from his 1950s research into American male sexuality and would give us as a group a more flexible way to read the books we were going to consider. I had structured the group on a seminar model providing a small library of books from which each participant could select to use as a source in our discussions. To me it seemed like I was opening the closet door just a crack. It made sense in the church where I worked, a broad church in that it gathered conservatives, moderates, and liberals together for worship, study, and service, a congregation that historically hired moderates and liberals for their ministerial staff. We talked together for those weeks trying to understand ourselves, our kids, our society. We kept the peace as we did so. My wife participated in the study.

A few years later I wrote for our church’s publisher an adult study piece that included varying spiritual perspectives. I made sure there was a gay presence in that manuscript as well as many other points of view and experience. In another congregation I wrote a discussion guide for an adult group studying the book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? by Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (HarperCollins, 1994). While there I also edited a study paper on homosexuality prepared by a group in our regional church. Throughout my years of ministry I thankfully accepted homosexual musicians into our choir lofts and worked with several gay and lesbian organists. Thirty years into my career, when finally I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Disciples Musicians, my wife feared our marriage might be over. Whatever I believed I was doing, she seemed sure I was coming out.

Eventually our marriage did come apart, and soon after that sad experience and while in good standing in our denomination I left active ministry having dedicated many creative years to the work of our local churches. I was going to live an openly gay life and chose to do so as a lay person rather than clergy. I assumed I’d find a nice liberal congregation somewhere near my home on Capitol Hill in Denver and started attending services—church shopping as it were—something I’d observed many lay persons do. While searching for an apartment, I had walked the neighborhood and noted what churches were there. I decided to look away from the denomination rather than within it.

One Sunday I walked down to the First Baptist Church with its beautiful brick Georgian building featuring sturdy brown granite pillars on the façade and a very tall spire on top. I liked their location right across from the State Capitol building and near my home. There I found a worn out building in which gathered a nice group of worn out people who seemed to be tolerating their rather average rock band that asked them to sing songs they barely knew. I watched and listened to everything and decided not to return mainly because they were in an interim period between Senior Ministers. I’d suffered too many interim ministers during my career and couldn’t see how suffering theirs would promote my spirituality.

I went to St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral with its soaring rock towers and magnificent stained glass windows, a virtual symbol of a life of prayer. There I was rather thrilled with the organ and choir music but seriously put off by the sin and redemption language of the liturgy, ideas I had long ago set aside. Furthermore, in my move to Denver, I had got rid of most of my fancier clothes and realized I really did not want to fit into a dress-up social group. I knew it was not what I was looking for, besides I just didn’t have the kind of ritual liturgical need to which Episcopalians and many gay men respond in such churches.

The next Sunday I decided to visit the mostly-gay Metropolitan Community Church. I knew the history of that movement and realized that while it might be too conservative for me, it offered an open social environment. I was pleased with the organ music, entertained by the presence of a couple of drag queens in the choir, responsive to the tone and style of the sermon, and even received communion at the altar. I loved the enthusiastic singing of the congregation (couldn’t say the same for the choir even though I tried hard not to be a musical snob) and I especially liked being surrounded by gays, lesbians, transgendered persons and, I assumed, a bunch of bi-sexual folk. Knowing I was way over-loaded with needs and experiences related to my many recent changes, I decided to attend that nice group for a few weeks wondering if it might be for years. Week after week I smiled, laughed, felt sad, shed tears, and eventually found a kind of spiritual equilibrium that was helpful as I began living more deeply into my life as a gay man, a massage student, a friend of new gay and straight acquaintances, an artist, and a writer. When within a few months I quit crying in church and then began to be irked by the language of the little bit of liturgy they used there, I realized I had more things to deal with in my spiritual coming out. Long had I been displeased by the language of most churches and with doctrinal constructs that pervaded the worship, even that of the Disciples of Christ with whom I had worked. I hated the exclusionary aspects of words that were used, innocently and thoughtlessly too often. I realized my relationship with the church had now become more receiver than giver, and I didn’t like what I was receiving. Still the sermons sparkled, but the song texts, anthem lyrics, and weekly-repeated words of the communion service were becoming onerous to me. I had failed to become an official member of the congregation—it seemed somehow too soon—and realized I needed to look further into the church community to see what I could find.

I began attending the First Unitarian Church and found one of their preachers really communicated to me as she spoke from a liberal, open, Christian point of view and seemed herself to be working on the same kinds of spiritual and theological themes and experiences as was I. The rest of what was happening around me in that congregation I found neutral and uninspiring. Even in that most liberal atmosphere I stumbled over language, like when the choir sang an anthem of Anglican origin (one of my musical favorites) that ended with a very Trinitarian blessing, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.” Etc. The words had been rewritten but they were still Trinitarian in their form and actually in their meaning. I knew choir directors and singers were rarely theologians, but to hear barely de-Trinitized words in a Unitarian service? It seemed too corny to me. Since I couldn’t attend weekly due to a part-time job, I missed quite a few weeks in a row. When I returned on an Easter Sunday (of course, it was not really Easter at a Unitarian church) I found that their sparkling preacher had left and a nice but bland interim minister was now in place for several months. I didn’t relate to anything said in that service and chose not to return. Certainly I was not going to be spiritually nurtured there.

Now I know that others cannot make one spiritual. The ultimate responsibility for spirituality is located in the experience and imagination of the individual—you see ultimately I’m very Western, very American. I saw clearly that my own sense of spirituality, quality, and meaning was going to have a tough time being met within any church group. Of course, I was not un-used to that having been who and whatever I always have been. I thought about this a lot and within a year or so realized that my new spiritual congregation was made up of a group of friends with whom I drank coffee and occasionally went out and of my group of massage clients whose aches and pains—and often confessions—I dealt with as I rubbed into their skin oils, lotions, and love. The focus of my spirituality changed due to my participation in my new major community made up mostly of gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual people.

© Denver, 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Master of the Rant, by Pat Gourley

Dear fellow Queer
writers:
http://www.papermag.com/2015/10/larry_kramer_sour_times.php
Comments from Larry
Kramer on discrimination from the straight world he adamantly believes exists
towards gay writers.
© 23 Oct 2015
About
the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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I Hate My Hair, by Nicholas

          The famous
essayist Nora Ephron once wrote a piece in which she denounced her neck. She
said simply that she did not like her neck. It was scrawny and too long and had
to be hidden with scarves and turtleneck sweaters. That’s how I feel about
hair. I don’t like my hair and I never have. It’s fine, soft, and thin and
getting thinner. It never was a color I liked—and gray did not improve over the
former brown. It never grew out into any shape or style that was appealing. It
grew long but not curly. It grew longer still but never full. It just sort of hung
there.
          The standard
for beautiful hair, for me, is Danielle Grant, the woman who does the weather
on Channel 9. I watch the weather just to watch her hair. Her rich brown tresses
hang long over her shoulders in a lustrous waterfall of hair. Her hair shines
with a deep luster. I don’t care if it rains or snows or turns sunny, her hair
is a beauty to behold.
          Hair has many
functions, none of them really all that important. It can be a thing of natural
beauty, a fashion statement, a political statement, a symbol and, of course, it
was even a musical. In the 1960s, we let our hair grow long and shaggy to show
our disdain for an oppressive establishment and our attachment to a new culture
of freedom that did not include barbershops. We let our “freak flag” fly, as
one song put it.
          In the 1970s,
we returned to those few barbershops that survived the ‘60s, and got it cut
short—gay short—because we didn’t want to be seen as some kind of hippie longhair
redneck. Hair styles came full circle, I guess. What was once a protest of the
establishment, became the establishment. Long hair meant you were a right wing
crazy conservative. Short hair was the rebellion.
          Of course, we
didn’t just go to barbershops. We went to stylists and had our hair styled. And
paid a lot more for that styling. When I was first coming out I even had my
hair permed once. I wanted curls and decided to torture my hair into curls even
if I had to wear a toxic waste dump on my head. It didn’t work. I got curls,
alright, but I looked like I had a nice dust mop on top of my head. I looked
like Woody Allen on a bad day. I realized that my hair just was not made for
fashion.
          Now I just get
it mowed now and then, about once a month. It’s like the lawn. Doesn’t really
do anything or contribute anything but looks better if it’s kept under control.
The problem is that there is too much of it where I don’t need it, like ears
and nose, and not enough where I do want it. I go to the cheapest barber I know
and for $10 get whatever excess is there clipped to a reasonable shortness. I
like my hair best when I don’t have to think about it.
          It would be
nice to keep up with fashion, but I’ve given up. I would love to die it blue or
purple, colors I really like in other people’s hair. But on me, it would just
look silly. Beyond the basic requirement of workable hair, I don’t have that
fashion persona to pull it off. You know how some people can walk down a street
like they’re walking across a stage. I’m just trying to get a bus home before
somebody stops and says, “God, what did you do to your hair?”
© 15 Jan
2015 
About the Author 
Nicholas grew up in Cleveland,
then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from
work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga,
writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.
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Time, by Lewis

Is there any cliché about
time that has yet gone unwritten or unspoken? 
I don’t feel comfortable making generalizations about the subject of
time.  I can only speak my own truths
about time, if I can figure out what they are.
People spend a lot of
money trying to mitigate the effects of time on their bodies.  They are usually rich, perhaps even as rich
as their plastic surgeons.  I don’t know
what a facelift costs.  I’m sure that it
depends upon a number of factors—the number of wrinkles per square inch of skin,
the number of square inches of skin per linear inch of one’s face, the elapsed
time since the previous facelift, the degree of satisfaction from the previous
facelift, the amount of time spent in the sun showing off one’s facelift, and
the percentage of body fat.
Also, I’m sure that, once
one has had a facelift, there is tremendous pressure to make some adjustments
to the birth date that appears on various personal documents.  It must be extremely embarrassing to be pulled
over for a traffic violation only to have the officer look at you, then your
driver’s license, and ask you step out of the car, put your hands on the roof,
and receive a pat down on suspicion of having a stolen ID.
What must a facelift do
to one’s relationship with a twin who cannot afford to follow suit?  Would they then introduce him or her as a
parent or much older sibling?  And what
of the spouse who now must endure the clucks and chuckles from those who assume
that he or she has “robbed the cradle”?  Upon death—still, I’m afraid an
inevitability—would it not feel unnatural to gaze upon the 90-year-old corpse
with skin stretched drum-tight across its chops and exclaim, “Oh, how natural
he/she looks?”  And, of course, the worst
message such shenanigans sends is that all the rest of us, the ones who choose
to age naturally, are growing uglier by the day. 
But I’m not buying
it.  I think of aging skin as a beauty
mark.  Nobody who’s into classic cars
would think of putting 2013 parts on a 1957 Chevrolet.  Sure, we might hammer out the dents,
straighten out the frame, fix the rust, replace the worn-out springs, and spray
a new coat of paint on her, but we would never try to make her look like this
year’s model.  I’m a 1946 model of a
white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant gay male who prefers to nuzzle the bumpers of
others like me and who doesn’t give a fig for brand-new sporty SUV’s with
programmable liftgates, reverse-view cameras, and touch screens.  I’ve been around the block with beloved
partners of both sexes, fathered two children, had a 30-year career that
provided a comfortable life, and I want to look the part.  I don’t want to pose for “before” and “after”
pictures where the “before” photo looks like an old picture of me after being
sucker punched in the mouth.  George
Bernard Shaw is quoted as saying, “Youth is wasted on the young.”  Yeah, and today youthfulness is wasted on the
old.
But the bitter old men of
Congress have found a way to exact their revenge.  They have saddled our youth with endless wars
that ravage their bodies in horrible ways but mollify themselves by providing
medical care that allows them to survive to live a full life in a condition
that no octogenarian would envy.  We load
the young up with student loan debt that makes the home loan of my generation
seem like chump change.  We trap them in
$9 an hour jobs with no hope of advancement so that they are actually making
less money at 35 than they were at 25. 
And, worst of all, we are handing off to them a world who atmosphere has
been poisoned to the point that their children almost surely will face a
lifetime of struggle for ever-dwindling resources.  We have made sure that, for them, growing old
is the most coveted luxury of all.
For those of us who have
lived free of ecological and demographic constraints on how we live our
lives—how many children we have; how big a house we build or live in; how many
vacation trips we take to how distant a destination; how we get to work, to
church, or the store; how we feel entitled to anything we can afford—it is time
to reimagine our lives in a new way. 
What truly makes us happy?  Where
does happiness happen?  What kind of
happiness do we want for those who come after? 
What is true?  How much time is
left before it’s too late?  We are threatened
not by growing old but by growing apart from what we know in our hearts is true
and that time is not on the side of the young and we are responsible.
© 19 May 2013 
About
the Author 
  
I came to the beautiful state
of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I
married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas
by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working
as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman
for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured
that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I
wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just
happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both
fortuitous and smooth.
Soon after, I retired and we
moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years
together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One
possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group
was there to light the way.
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Scars, by Gillian

We all have them. Don’t
try to tell me you don’t. Nobody gets to our age without them.
The first one I remember
acquiring came along when I was seven or eight. Mum and Dad and I were
wandering through the woods picking blackberries when a sharp, jagged, end of a
broken-off small branch scraped a gash in my thigh. These days I’m sure it
would be off to the ER for stitches, with perhaps a butterfly bandage to keep
it together on the way, but back then we were expected to suck it up and
soldier on; the result being a scar wider than necessary and very long-lasting.
I still have it.
Roughly forty years later
I needed a butterfly bandage again when I fell on sharp rock edges while
backpacking in the Shoshone Wilderness Area, miles from anywhere. But this time
I was carefully tended to by my beautiful Betsy, who had the foresight to carry
butterfly bandages in her pack.
Back again in the old
days, in college, I slipped at the top of some icy steps and fell, with my knee
doubled under me, onto the metal blade of a boot scraper. Now that one did
require stitches. But that was all it got. These days we’d be given all kinds
of physical therapy; exercises to help it heal as efficiently as possible, but
in 1959 I was on my own. It hurt like Hell to bend it, so a couple of days
later, on a bus, I stretched my leg out beneath the seat in front of me. The
bus got in an accident, the seat above my leg came down on it and hyperextended
my knee. That hurt like Hell. A week later, with my knee the size of a
football, I went off for a long-planned week’s hiking trip with a classmate.
Well, I was madly in unacknowledged love with the woman! What’s a girl to do?
Not surprisingly, I have had a lot of trouble with that knee over the years but
I’ve worked hard at keeping it in working condition, mainly through water
aerobics. It remains functional, and actually gives me less pain than it did
twenty years ago, though I’m not off on any more backpacking or even hiking
trips.
A few years back I broke
my ankle – just a simple break. It healed perfectly, leaving no scars. Then, as
some of you might recall, I broke my wrist a couple of years ago. That was a
compound fracture, requiring surgery, nuts and bolts, and a long scar which has
now basically disappeared. My ankle and wrist both healed quickly, fully
functioning in record time. That, of course, in addition to skillful surgeons,
is because I diligently did every therapeutic exercise I was given, painful
though they often were. I would like to think that I have become a little less dumb
in dealing with injuries, over the years, but much of that is because
healthcare professionals know so much more these days. Our job is just to
follow their excellent advice.
Which, it seems to me, is
much the same for our inner, psychological, scars as for our outer, physical,
injuries.
As a child, and even as a
student, I had no more idea how to deal with my inner than my outer pains.
Neither, come to that, did my parents. All of us colluded in some strange way
to pretend I had no injuries, inside or out. Just get on with life, denying the
pain. I’ve written often enough about my childhood angst so I’m not going to
repeat it, but I rode roughshod over it just as I did my mashed knee, making
both worse while denying there was a problem. Over the years, I have paid
heavily enough for that. But, as I gained knowledge and sought expert advise to
try to make my knee more functional and less painful, so I did with my inner
dysfunctions. Endless physical therapy, endless psychotherapy. Both mostly of
the self-help variety, but they worked. The trouble is, it’s so much harder to
go back; to try to fix those old inner and outer scars years later. Now, I try
to deal with both immediately. Keep exercising that wrist, don’t let that scar
tissue form or I’ll be sorry. Take those emotions out and look at them right
now. Work them over. I don’t want that psychological scar tissue building up,
either.
I don’t expect to stop
receiving wounds, and so the scars that mark them, either physical or
emotional. But as I age, perhaps becoming increasingly vulnerable to physical
scarring, I hope to balance it with a healthy decrease in psychological
scarring. Due largely to my attempts to follow the spiritual path, and in no
small part to this group where I find healing by writing out and sharing my
problems, my wounds are less deep, less painful, and heal more readily. Little
scar tissue has the chance to form. Even those big bad deep wounds don’t get
reopened as once they did. Those are the ones that are there because I’m a woman.
Because I am gay. I am happy about both, but being female or being GLB or T
leaves you constantly open to painful slashes of hate-filled sabers. Oh they
are not usually directed at me, personally, but I feel the stab of the knife of
every woman murdered because she wants an education, or refuses to hide away
her body, and of every gay man murdered in Uganda or left to die in Wyoming.
It’s certainly not that I find any of those horrors less painful, nor, alas,
less frequent. I simply, for the most part, recognize the pain sooner, deal
with it better, avoid reopening those old wounds.
Yet I am happy to have
scars. How can you live any kind of eventful, meaningful, life, and not have
them? We are battle-scarred warriors who, having fought the good fight, did not
come out unscathed. As Kahlil Gibran puts it,
“Out of
suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are
seared with scars.”
© 30 June 2015 
About the Author 

I
was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to
the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the
Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised
four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting
myself as a lesbian. I have been with
my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.
Posted on

Close, but No Cigar, by Gail Klock

Driving home from Pueblo, after my fifty-year reunion for
South High School I was feeling a little melancholy. I was pondering the source
of these feelings; was it the fact that 50 years had passed so quickly and only
a fraction of those years remain to be enjoyed, was it the fact I had lost
touch with so many people who had once been an enjoyable part of my K-12
experience, or was it the hotel room I had stayed in because my parents were no
longer alive? Certainly these were all a part of the melancholy, but not the
primary source. Throughout the events, hovering in the background was a growing
awareness of the different opportunities which the boys and girls had
experienced. All of these attributable differences were driven by gender, that
of the privilege of being male.
The area which was foremost in my mind was the provision of
athletics for the boys- football, basketball, wrestling, baseball, track, golf,
tennis, and cross country, and no sports for the girls… at the time it was
against state law for girls to compete against one another at the high school
level, a fact I became aware of when the principal called me into his office on
a Monday morning and threatened to expel me if I ever played in another
basketball game against girls from another school. The game he was referencing
was a pick-up game against girls from the local Catholic high school in which
there were not even any officials.
I first started thinking about the male/female high school
opportunities when the introduction of former teachers was made. Out of the
eleven who were in attendance four of them were coaches, definitely a disproportional
number to the 59 teachers whom had been on the faculty.  I hypothesize this disproportionate number was
due to the fact coaches work more closely with athletes than teachers do
students, thus forming a stronger and longer lasting bond. This was quite
evident as Tom Mauro, my former classmate, carried out the introductions. His
continuing respect and connection with his former coaches was quite evident and
the introductory comments regarding the other teachers did not reflect this
same elevated note of respect. Before any one jumps to any erroneous
conclusions I must quickly interject that Tom was not a “dumb jock” whom of
course would have been closer to his coaches- Tom graduated from Colorado
School of Mines and was very successful in his career. In addition, he is a
very accomplished pianist.
As I continued to process my observations and feelings as the
reunion continued it occurred to me as I watched my former classmates interact
that sports had provided more than just the opportunity for fitness. The boys
had deep bonds with one another that crossed the boundaries of cliques;
placement in college prep classes, business classes, or technical and trade
classes. The girls didn’t have this avenue which provided for the intersecting
of lives with other girls. Popularity, or the lack there of, was the main
determiner of how friendships were established. I realized as I talked to my
classmates that our high school years would have been different for the girls
if there had been sports for us in which to compete. We had a very athletic
group of girls- girls from all the different education tracks and cliques. A
couple of girls “stories” supported my feelings about the missed opportunity of
competing in sports. Linda a friend from elementary school was an incredible
runner. She could beat all of us, boys and girls alike in both running and long
jumping. I never knew until I talked to her at the reunion that she would have
loved to have been an athlete. As I shared my memories of her abilities and the
grace and skill with which she ran tears came to her eyes and she remarked that
I had just made her day. I never would have guessed this desire of hers, she
was a very bright and pretty girl whom had been part of the popular crowd.  I also didn’t know she had always hidden a
vision problem she had inherited which was so bad she was given a scholarship
her final year of college from the National Federation of the Blind. She could
only play ball sports which used a large ball like the one used in kickball,
but man oh man she would have been a star on a track team had there been one
and her self-described greatest embarrassment through all her young years would
have been eased. Arlene, our head cheerleader stated in response to “What would
you have done differently in high school?’ 
I would have participated on sports teams instead of cheerleading and
would have sought out friends from a variety of groups.
In addition, two of my close friends, whom were both great
athletes, did not come to the reunion. The first Rosalyn told the organizing
committee she hadn’t enjoyed high school so why would she come to a reunion.
Most of my classmates were stunned by this statement as Rosalyn had been a
member of student counsel, dated one of the football players, and gone on to
graduate from Colorado School of Mines- one of seven girls in attendance there
at the time. I had known Rosie throughout school and played with her many times
in pickup basketball and football games with other girls (the boys used to come
watch us play football as they couldn’t believe we would play tackle without
any pads or helmets, which we did because we loved the activity and we had no equipment
available to us). My other friend Vickie, whom I was able to have lunch with,
told me she didn’t want to go because she had always struggled with school and
had not been popular. She added there had only been about six kids she had
trusted in high school. I know in the depths of my heart both of these friends
would have felt more connected with their high school experiences and enjoyed
it more if they had had the opportunity to compete in sports.
When I thanked my former classmate Mike for supporting me as
an athlete while in high school, a unique position for my male classmates, he
replied, “Heck you could have kicked any of our butts, I really admired your
ability.” It was nice to hear this compliment.  I along with many of my female friends would
have benefited greatly had we heard fans cheering for us as we had cheered for
our male counterparts.
Beyond the camaraderie, fitness, and support from classmates
and parents some of the boys were able to attend college on athletic
scholarships. Of course during the time I was in college no similar
scholarships were available for girls, but I am thankful I did get to experience
the other benefits which sports can offer. However, I still need to have a
conversation with the folks up at Colorado State University who still don’t recognize
the contribution women athletes made to the college from the time women were
allowed to compete against other colleges until the inception of Title IX –
approximately a 15-year period of time. Had it not been for Title IX which in
part said, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be
excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination
under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance”,
women athletes, (not the intended primary recipients of this federal mandate)
would still be treated unfairly by institutions of higher learning and high
schools. One only look at the current lawsuit brought by a University of Denver
female law school professor to see the evidence of continued discrimination
based on gender.  We are getting closer
to closing the gender gap- but at this point it is still status quo- close, but
no cigar.
© 28 Sep 2015 
About the Author 
 I grew up in Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents.
Upon completion of high school I attended Colorado State University majoring in
Physical Education. My first teaching job was at a high school in Madison,
Wisconsin. After three years of teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend
graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. After obtaining my MSPE I coached
basketball, volleyball, and softball at the college level starting with Wake
Forest University and moving on to Springfield College, Brown University, and
Colorado School of Mines.
While coaching at Mines my long term partner and I had two
daughters through artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home
required by coaching I resigned from this position and got my elementary education
certification. I taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County
Schools for ten years. As a retiree I enjoy helping take care of my
granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the
storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT
organizations.
As a retiree I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter,
playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling
group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.