Tag: Elder Life

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Get Over It, by Terry Dart

Kind of cranky sounding. But crankiness can be par for the course when one has gone past middle age. There have to be some perks to the added aches and pains of ageing.

Well, get over that we are older. Our appearance is no longer like the “unearned beauty” of the young. We move slowly, may drive more cautiously and more slowly.

We may not be hell bound to hurry everything we are doing, to rush hither and thither.

We may use such expressions as thither and thither, cool, or far out. We may want you to shut up during the movie. Or, we may talk during the movie. However that would be rogue behavior, since the rude-aged usually have died off before having had a chance to develop a sturdy, consistent rudeness.

Perhaps we elders have things we should “get over,” But at our ages we can forgive ourselves for putting that off.

This is quite brief; even briefer than usual for me. Too bad we aren’t discussing books we have read or poetry or sports or the importance of Mount Rushmore, or the Fourth of July, or current events, or snails, or sea shells, or favorite fonts.

I suppose I will just get over it.

© 2 July 2018

About the Author

I am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.

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I Still Get a Thrill, by Ray S

As usual my mind drew a blank when the idea of a thrill was confronted.

It occurs to me that the word thrill, like many other descriptive terms, is a matter of relativity. I suppose it depends on how easily one is excited and that of course depends on one’s frame of mind at a given time.

How thrilling was a sunset? How thrilling was last night’s romance? Or how did that hot shower feel this morning? How much of a satisfying semi-thrill was it to find you hadn’t run out of dry cereal or toothpaste and hadn’t forgotten to feed the canary?

I would have preferred to “thrill” this assemblage with some sensational revelation about whatever would prove thrilling to you—this if you were even the least bit interested, much less thrilled.

But in retrospect I do need to acknowledge to you that I am just a wee bit thrilled to be here with all of you today and have you share my pretty un-thrilling trivia.

P.S. just remembered how thrilled I was with the chocolate cup cakes I made and how they tasted. It is another semi-thrill, give or take.

© 25 September 2017

About the Author

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Don’t, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”
The Buddha
This quotation,
ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my
favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The
belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems
to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that
rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat
deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted
looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I
won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.
The above quote may
remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also
goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not.
There is no try.” (The Empire Strikes Back).
Supposedly
Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at
least several millennia prior, so I am going with Buddha as the originator of
this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit
or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For
god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.
At first
blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to
the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have
been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful.
A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t
eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight
bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas?  And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t
come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand
soap was you just used.”
Perhaps I
was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a
nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was
particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”.
I’ll get to
the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer
he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the
publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots.
The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual
abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s.  Kramer as a result was persona non grata in
the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.
Kramer also
has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature
but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS
activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years
later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and
highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man
and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life
advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly
exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.
Quoting Kramer
from the NYT’s article: “I don’t
basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the
line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love
gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I
have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life.
I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system
and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”
I have been
keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very
controversial proclamations and actions since 1978.  He has pricked my conscience on numerous
occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in
the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still
today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.
It is 2017,
almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots,
and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the
struggle continues: “I don’t think that
things are better generally,” he said. “We
have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us.
The fight’s never over.”
© 21 May 2017 
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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My Happiest Day, by Gillian

I
thought I might begin with some really icky remark such as, every day is My
Happiest Day, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it! Equally, I
couldn’t begin to pick out my very happiest days, never mind one single day. I
have been blessed, and the vast majority of my days have been happy, though
with some, inevitably, more so than others.
But,
on giving the topic some serious thought, I decided that I owe the presence of
this multitude of Happy Days to the few bad ones. They were the days which
taught me humility and compassion and, above all, gratitude; the very gratitude
which has given me so many Happy Days.
I
could never describe the day I spent visiting Auschwitz as a Happy Day, but I
will always be grateful for it. The shock and horror of the awful place, with its
indescribably dreadful memories, afforded me huge gratitude for the time and
place in which I live my own life of peace and tranquility; a peace brought
about not by denying the evils of the past, and, alas, the present in too many
other places, but by acknowledging how unbelievably fortunate I have been, and
continue to be, in my own life.
The
days my parents died were most certainly not Happy Days, but their deaths, and
the depths of my loss, brought it home to me, perhaps really for the first
time, how much I loved them and how grateful I am to them for the start they
gave me in this wonderful life. Barely a day goes by when I don’t think of one
or both of them with a love so strong that it still catches me by surprise.
A
few years ago a blood clot found its way into my lung and couldn’t find its way
out again. As I lay in the hospital bed with oxygen tubes in my nose and blood
thinner I.V. in my arm, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself. Poor me! Why me?
Then I recalled that a blood clot in her lung was what had finally killed my
hundred-year-old ex-mother-in-law. I remembered a TV interview with tennis
legend Serena Williams in which she talked of being ‘on her death bed’ with a
clot in her lung. It hit me; I was lucky to be alive! In a nanosecond I went
from being sad and sorry to being oh so very grateful to be alive. A miserable
day was suddenly a Happy Day.
Of
course, the bad days that end up creating the good, don’t have to be huge
dramas. Small incidents can have much the same effects. A good, longtime,
friend of ours died a couple of years ago. Barb was a lifelong Cubs fan, and it
hit me last week how sad it is that she is not around to revel in her team’s
first grab at glory in over a hundred years. But, remembering the many Happy
Days Betsy and I shared with her and her partner over the decades, my gratitude
for them, both on my own behalf and that of Barb, relegated baseball to a mere
speck of dust on the reality of life.
Poor
Stephen, suffering all his current health problems, offered in an e-mail that
he was grateful he was not in pain.
Right
there is the secret of Happy Days; gratitude. Gratitude for everything that is.
I
am so in thrall to gratitude that I am endlessly grateful for it.
And
that’s the last I shall say about gratitude, for which I am sure you will all
be very grateful.
© 17 Nov 2016 
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.
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The Recliner, by Phillip Hoyle

Some years ago when my back started hurting I got a
new swivel chair for my desk at work. Then my wife and I bought a new firm
mattress. These two steps were helpful yet did not solve the problem totally.
Then I bought myself better shoes that gave my arches adequate support. I was
really beginning to feel fine. Then Myrna bought me a recliner, a small one
from La-Z-Boy®. I was not quite sure of the message, but I did find the chair
moderately comfortable. From my point of view the seemed unnecessary, maybe not
a good choice for I had never been able to sit or sleep comfortably in such
chairs. Still, this model seemed okay for me due to the facts it was more firm
than our mattress and it was not one of those monster-size chairs made for
retired football linemen. The recliner sat next to the bed. I got a lamp so I could
read while sitting in it. That was in the days when I was reading five books a
week. Using a pillow, I could read for hours and not hurt my back. My back got
even better—actually stronger—when I added Super Circuit at the gym as well as
my marathon reading in the recliner.
Some people at the church where I worked thought we
would enjoy a new TV. They bought a nice SONY model, a really large one. It was
fine but we didn’t really want nor need a TV to replace the smaller one that
worked just fine. In fact, the new TV required that we buy an entertainment
center large enough to hold it. We found a nice one but realized we had no
place for it in the living room. So it went into our rather large bedroom, and
of course the kids wanted to come and watch the big one. I rarely watched TV.
My space was being eroded. I wondered if I would become a recliner potato, but couldn’t
recline in the new chair to watch the big TV because my new glasses were
bifocal.  
Oh the problems of modern life for the ageing. As you
may suppose I was ageing a long time ago! And the process hasn’t ended. Actually
I’m pleased about that. If I ever start not ageing…. Well I suspect you’ve
already been thinking about such things. Where I live now there two recliners.
I suspect I‘ll be using both of them for even more reclining while my life is
declining, but I do hope that’s a ways off for me.
© 6 Feb 2017 
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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Resist, by Pat Gourley

In one of my recent
meanderings through Facebook, which sadly has become something I do multiple
times a day, I happened on the following little ditty posted and credited to a
web site named sun-gazing.com:
“I’m too old for
this shit
I’m too tired for
this shit
I’m too sober for
this shit
I don’t have time
for this shit”
sun-gazing.com
My initial reaction was
that this was a funny and perhaps poignant statement from someone on the current
state of America and the seemingly endless political nightmare we find
ourselves in. Something though slowly began to bother me, especially the last
line: “I don’t have time for this shit”. 
I decided to check the web site and clicked on their “About Us” page,
where right at the top was the following sentence:  “The Sun Gazing Community was born out of a growing awareness that
suffering is an optional state of being”.
Let me go on record
calling “bullshit” on this unexamined bromide and suggest that perhaps the
authors have gazed at the sun a bit too long or have way to much privilege
coming out of their ass. There is no way I can distort the image of this little
boy’s suffering into an “optional” choice on his part or even perhaps more
perverted “God’s will”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/world/middleeast/syria-omran-photo-children.html?_r=0
The above statement that
suffering is something that is optional to me smacks of smug privilege. In
looking at my own attempts to ‘resist’ the Trump regime I need to carefully “resist”
personally falling into the trap of complacence. I have my Social Security and
Medicare and enjoy many of the benefits that seem to effortlessly fall on many
white males in America even many of us queer ones.
Can I just sit this out
for four years of Trump with the perhaps sad realization that my life may not
change much at all? Is it enough to assuage my conscience, as last Saturday
night’s Louis C.K. SNL skit pointed out, by sitting on the couch and posting
and sharing anti-Trump memes on Facebook or adding Black Lives Matter to my
profile? The obvious answer in this great piece of satire is that it certainly
doesn’t cover one’s sad attempt at ‘resisting’.
One of the things you
sometimes hear these days is “we survived Nixon and Reagan and we will survive
Trump too”. I have a couple observations on that statement. It may not apply to
the 55,000 Americans that died in Vietnam to say nothing of the millions of S.E
Asian lives lost during the Nixon presidency. And it behooves us to remember
how gay men fared during the Reagan years. This is poignantly brought home in
this photo of the small handful of members of the San Francisco Gay men’s
Chorus who survived the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in that City.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154952908052457&set=a.480735837456.252618.518017456&type=3&theater
Even if I personally may
get by the next four years relatively unscathed many will not. My personal call
to resist needs action to go with it or it is just self-indulgent masturbation.
This was brought home to me very directly with a sign I saw at the Women’s
March in San Francisco this last January, it was being carried by a frail and very
elderly women and read: “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit”. A
much different sentiment than “I don’t have time for this shit” don’t you
think.
© 10 Apr 2017 
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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Workout, by Ray S

It was about 7:35 pm when the house lights began to
dim. From somewhere in the almost-filled theatre a voice made the usual request
to silence your electronic equipment and warned that no cameras or recording
devices are permitted.
The house was now dark and the audience settled down
in readiness for what soon was to become a 2 ½ hour long (with no intermission)
revival of the 1975 Tony Award winning musical production “A Chorus Line.”
And what a production with a capital P it was, a
marathon, a superb dancing and singing and stagecraft marathon. As the story proceeded
I could only think what a workout is was for the entire company. Truly I was in
awe of what I watched and heard going on that stage. There is something that
gets under your skin when the score beings to punctuate your every breath, and
you imagine that you might be up there on the stage with that dancing crew.
That imagination is pretty powerful when it comes to erasing 70 or 80 years.
The storyline follows the tryouts each applicant who has
come to the theatre to maybe get a job in an upcoming Broadway musical.
As they are put through their dancing workouts some of
them let you in on who they are, where they came from, and why they want to
dance. Of course, the major reason being they want a job!
But, beyond that the interviews reveal other parts and
secrets of their lives. They are like all of us humans with unrealistic wishes,
happy and sad baggage that comes to the surface at different and strongly
unwanted times. Somewhere, one of the boy dancers steps out to tell a very
moving coming out story which brought tears to my eyes and thunderous applause
from the house. The scene was a show stopper.
So, I and they just keep on doing what we know best
how to do—just keep on dancing.
As the show comes to its climax the audience (that
includes me) is rewarded with a dazzling finale that makes everyone feel
good—but that’s show business folks. You gotta experience it.
© 11 Sep 2017 
About the Author 
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Flowers, by Phillip Hoyle

1915
I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so
slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

Robert Graves
I
was never sure why the romantic tradition never set well with me. I read poetry
in high school and college that usually left me simply wondering what the poet
felt and meant. I didn’t really like romantic sections of books or movies; they
seemed like an interruption to a good plot. I had friends I found interesting,
boys who intrigued me, girls I wanted to date. For school dances I bought
flowers for the girls. For my girlfriend I bought a necklace with a fiery opal.
She was thrilled. But I knew I was following a form I had learned rather than a
feeling that called me into a world of romance. My deepest feelings were for
boys rather than girls, but of course, that attraction didn’t proffer any
romantic images. They just weren’t there; at least I couldn’t find them. In
those days I’m sure that had I read this Robert Graves poem “1915”, I would
have missed the “beautiful comrade-looks” he cited; for in the world in which I
grew up romance, such as was described in poetry, was meant for a special
relationship between a man and a woman.
My
introduction to Walt Whitman was given no homosexual slant. It was interpreted
by a minister/scholar whose enthusiasm for the poet’s work took a theological
slant, one that celebrated all creation. It was the first poetry I could
honestly admit to liking—well besides James Whitcomb Riley’s “Little Orphan
Annie”, Henry W. Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”, and Vachel Lindsay’s “The
Congo”. It took years to open myself to the idea that Whitman was talking about
romance between two men, like comrades at arms or friends lying together in
leaves of grass.
I
married at age 21. I deeply loved my wife and was so pleased to be entering the
life we chose together. But even after living together, I realized the gifts I
offered her were to her something quite different than they were to me. Her
view of our relationship was romanticized. Mine was enthusiastic and generous
and celebrated love, a la C. S.
Lewis’ writing, especially his book Basic Christianity. I found it so
helpful but eventually I came to realize his view was inadequate, the old Don
speaking long before he had the experience of falling in love, a thing that for
him came late in life.
At
age 30 I fell in love with a man. Then I began to know a bit of what romance
was about. But being such a late blooming flower in that field, it took
twenty-five years more for me to fall deeply in love. For that experience I
thank the most beautiful male flower I ever encountered, Rafael Martínez, whom
I deeply loved in every practical and romantic way the two of us could imagine.
He amazed me one night when he said, “You’re so romantic.”
Using his best English, Rafael wrote in a
card: “My sweet love; I can’t express in
full sentences what my soul and heart feel. My whole life has been changed and
you made everything spin around in me. I am overwhelmed.
“When
I express out and loud I love you, you don’t have any idea of how much I mean
it.
“I
am not just glad to have you. I am extensible and sensible over you (and deeply
in love).”
I
thought that card was better than any love lyric I had ever enjoyed or any bouquet
of flowers I had ever seen. And I too loved Rafael.
© 13 Feb 2017 
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
Posted on

Anxious Moments, by Pat Gourley

If you get confused just listen to the
music play
Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
If you plant ice you’re gonna harvest wind
A
few lines from Franklin’s Tower. Grateful Dead (Garcia/Hunter/ Kreutzman)
Let me just
repeat that last line for emphasis: “If
you plant ice you’re going to harvest wind”.  More on that further on.
Writing about “anxious
moments” in June of 2017 now 7 months into Donald Trump’s presidency presents
itself as a herculean task. I mean where to start? For me perhaps it is best to
start with a bit of self-examination of what may be causing my anxiety.
If my privilege allows me
to simply weather out the storm of the next four years with little or no
personal damage, and sadly that seems it might be the case, I must say that it
is very tempting to just put my head down and go about my daily routines.  That would be much less anxiety provoking I
think.
I have Medicare and not
Medicaid.  Paul Ryan and his bunch would
certainly like to get rid of both but Medicare seems a reach to far politically
even for that crowd. Medicaid on the other hand serves a much more vulnerable
and powerless group of Americans. The strong and largely elderly voting block
represented by Medicare recipients is somewhat of a bulwark against Republican
intrusions – Medicaid not so much.
I also get a small Social
Security payment and a pension from the City and County of Denver. Both of
these are fairly solvent entities that I expect to last for my remaining years.
That is perhaps delusion on my part but rather than get “anxious” about it I
prefer to just blithely skip along. I acknowledge this view may really be from looking
out on the world from my relatively privileged window. There is of course any
number of ways the whole really fragile edifice could come crashing down on all
of our heads. So I am choosing to resist
on many fronts anxiety provoking or not. 
Let me relate a very small, and perhaps even a silly way, I am
resisting.
Significant marijuana tax
revenues going to Colorado coffers are adding to the overall financial health of
the State and our City in very major ways, indirectly helping keep my City
pension solvent, a tax tide sort of floats all boats. I am choosing to do my
part by exploring marijuana edibles in earnest purchasing recreational rather
than medicinal and paying the larger tax. 
I could of course legitimately play the HIV card and get a medical
marijuana license but for now I can afford the higher tax on the recreational
herb. Taxes really are the cost of living in a civilized society and it would
only add to that civility I would think if a significant portion of us gets
stoned on occasion.
So what else, other than
getting high, am I trying to do to counter the toxic miasma of the Trump
presidency enveloping us all? Well I am trying not to ‘plant ice’ and by that I
mean I am acknowledging that nobody is wrong 100% of the time (thank you, Ken
Wilber). Well that may not apply to Trump but I am willing to give nearly
everyone else on the planet a pass.
Without getting too deep
in the weeds and stretching the metaphor to death you can simply think of the
phrase “if you plant ice you’re gonna
harvest wind” as another way of saying don’t be an asshole. That behavior often
causes anxiety for others and yourself eventually, adding however small to the
anxiety burden of the planet.
A recent personal example
of my regrettably ‘planting ice’ was when I encountered Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) solicitors out in front of the Trader Joe’s near my house. It was a warm
day and I suppose I was cranky from the heat but I decided to give these young
20-somethings a bit of crap around HRC’s early endorsement of Republican Mark Kirk
over Tammy Duckworth in the Illinois U.S. Senate race last fall.  HRC switched to Duckworth a few weeks before
the election supposedly due to nasty things Kirk had to say in a debate about
Ms. Duckworth and her family but the damage had been done in my mind.
Initially I felt mildly
righteous for sticking up for my longstanding belief that the at times too
conservative HRC was not my Radical Fairie cup of tea. By the time I got home a
couple blocks away I started to feel somewhat anxious about the interaction
though albeit it was pretty tame, no stone throwing or cursing had occurred. I
began to worry, a great hallmark of anxiety, that maybe I had not made myself
queerly obvious and they thought I was some old homophobic jerk. So I put my
groceries away and walked back down the street. After assuring the two I was
not stalking them I explained further my issues with HRC and threw in a few
other things to firmly establish my gay cred. They listened politely, nodding a
lot and I am sure hoping this crazy old queen would soon move on. I ended by
saying that I appreciated and admired their being willing to be openly and
politically queer on a public street. Not something I would have done in my
early twenties.  This proved to be one
more instance in my life where I realized if I were going to plant ice I would
soon be harvesting wind.
© 11 Jun 2017 
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.
Posted on

Self Acceptance, by Ray S

The beauty of our Story Time to me is that it makes me face up to a reality-need weekly. The older one gets, the greater life’s little challenges become.

The Monday challenge is usually confronted the day before or early Monday morning.

This Sunday I wandered around the place in my robe, downing several cups of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal. Seemed like it was decision time to live or die. No not really bad, maybe to just go back to bed and tease my muse for tomorrow’s creative writing.

It was an easy choice—go back to bed. On my way to bed I picked up a book I’d recently been reading. There it laid, speaking to me from its bright yellow and black cover whispering, “Take me to bed with you.” Then my muse and the book’s author started contending for my attention and Story Time’s.

Realizing how much easier it would be to open the book and review the last chapter, I followed the path of least resistance. It was like meeting an old friend at the coffee shop and agreeing about the story and the author’s writing skills.

Muse empathetically nudged me back to tomorrow’s work to be done saying, “Remember Self Acceptance?”

I was reminded of my one time fifty five minute weekly with my Father-Confessor-Buddy, Dr. Ed. Ed’s job was to listen to me babble on for a given time about my self-love/hate relationship, that time period discovering what homosexuality meant and how I fit into that denomination, basic insecurity which used to be known as “inferiority complex” before the new age set in, envy and not measuring up in every way, etc., etc., etc.—

Did Ed accomplish any emotional miracles with his patient? Guardedly I can answer, “Yes.” Somewhat. Or perhaps I grew so weary of all that baggage I dumped it—another word for acceptance.

So now I’ve set my Self Acceptance goals on moving into 28 Barberry Lane with Ms. Anna Madrigal’s other tenants and living happily ever after.

© 12 December 2016

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