Tag: Gillian

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Running Away, by Gillian

I thought about this in the sense of escaping, but we’re going to write about escape in a very few weeks so I’ll skip that idea.

So now what? I guess I’ll just have to re-cover some old ground and pepper it with quotations to make it seem more interesting!

Writing or talking of my mad dash from the closet, I have often likened it to hurtling along on a runaway train over which I had little, if any, control. It was almost as if I had never actually made that conscious decision to come out, although of course I had, at some level. But it didn’t feel like that. It simply felt as if some wild-west movie train with a big old cow-catcher on the front had scooped me up and run away with me. (As Kimberly McCreight says, in Reconstructing Amelia, ‘Sometimes its hard to tell how fast the current’s moving until you’re headed over a waterfall.”’) I had no objection, but I was just along for the ride until we got wherever we were going. Doug Cooper, in Outside In, asks, ‘Am I running away or moving forward?’ It’s difficult to feel firmly that you are moving forward when you have very little vision of where you are going. Yet in a way, I did know. I knew I was going to be openly gay. What I did not know was what exactly that meant. But that was not truly having no destination; rather it was having no experience or knowledge of that destination. As Glenda Millard says, in A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, ‘Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.’

As a child I never remember harboring thoughts of running away, or wanting to. On the other hand I was often accused of letting my imagination run away with me. Thinking back on that now, it sounds very like a somewhat passive form of running away; which, in turn, sounds typical of me – back to the cowcatcher and that runaway train. I seem to have a pattern of allowing things to happen to me rather than proactively forcing the pace.

And, as I continue thoughts along that vein, that seems still to be true. Now it is time constantly running away with me. I am not running away from or towards anything. Life is close to perfect right where I am. But alas time is not content to let me be. Time rushes headlong at me from the moment I put a foot on the floor in the morning. It grabs me up and rushes me through the day. I am by nature an early riser; nevertheless before I have even planned my day it is lunchtime and before I actually start anything it’s suppertime which means it’s almost bedtime. Life is one constant rush to keep up with itself.

Why does it do that when we are running out of time, anyway? Surely time should slow down in order to preserve as much as possible of what is left; but no, off it speeds in a rush towards the point where it, or at least our portion of it, will, inevitably, run out.

And on that cheery note I shall give up on this topic. But I want one erudite end quote; something that will anchor my ramblings with style. I don’t even have to turn to The Web, I already have the perfect words stored midst the jumble of quotations in my head.

“How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”

Dr. Suess

© March 2018

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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Rolling Thunder, by Gillian

My mother was peeling potatoes. I was standing beside her shelling peas. It was not a dark and stormy night, but it was a relatively dark and very stormy morning. As we prepared Sunday lunch the thunder crashed above us, echoing up and down the valley where we lived as it always did. My dad came into the kitchen, saying, as he always did when it thundered,

“By ‘eck, ‘ear that thunder rrrroll.”

(I chose this topic because I wanted to be able to say that! It wasn’t until I returned home after a year’s absence that I realized how strong a Welsh accent my father had. Of course, in my own defense, he was a man of so few words that perhaps it was not so surprising that I had never noticed his accent. By ‘eck, ‘ear that thunder rrrroll was about as verbose as he ever got!)

Mum and Dad and I all loved thunder storms. But this time my mother got a bit carried away in her enthusiasm and, potato peeler still in hand, opened the outside door to get a better look. Well, my mother never was the most practical of people! Simply opening the door invited the lightning bolt right in. It hit the knife blade, burned across the floor from Mum’s feet to the chimney corner, up the wall and it was gone. It happened so fast we might have thought we imagined it except for the black scorched trail it left behind. My mother felt nothing and, though speechless with surprise, was unhurt.

That little incident might, I suppose, have dampened my enthusiasm for thunder storms but it did not. Roaming around this country in our camper van for twenty years, Betsy and I have sat in many a campground, cozy inside our van, reveling in the thunder crashes and the lightning flashes, the rain streaming down the windows as the van rocked in the howling wind. We watched smugly as the poor unfortunate tent campers struggled, out in the pouring rain, to prevent their wildly flapping tents from taking flight and chased rolling camp-chairs through the trees. The most memorable that I recall was on a hilltop in Missouri from which there was a spectacular 360 degrees view. In any direction we looked, countless streaks of lightning ripped across the angry black sky, the lightning flashes lighting up the night all around us. It really was breathtaking.

I still love thunder storms, and still greet then eagerly, but must confess that in recent years they have tended to come, around here anyway, with accompanying hail storms which a do not welcome. They can be so damaging to so many things, not the least of which is one’s bank account.

Whenever I hear a good clap of serious thunder, I immediately hear my dad’s voice rejoicing.

“By ‘eck, ‘ear that thunder rrrroll!”

But sadly my love of the expression rolling thunder was dampened during the Vietnam War, when Operation Rolling Thunder consisted of a sustained aerial bombardment of North Vietnam lasting from 1965 to 1968. During that period it is estimated that we killed approximately 72,000 North Vietnamese civilians. Of course, I really had to dig to find those numbers. We rarely hear of actual human beings dying. We hear that during Operation Rolling Thunder we dropped 864,000 tons of bombs on the North, inflicting physical damage valued at $370 million. Nice clean unemotional impersonal statistics, proudly proclaimed under the inoffensive name Rolling Thunder.

Of course none of this began or ended with Vietnam. I am no military historian – nor do I want to be – but I think this practice of naming military operations began in World War Two for purposes of secrecy. And of course it involved many countries, not just the U.S. The Allies had operations under such harmless names as Primrose and Croquet, Stonewall and Teardrop. The Nazis had Wonderland, Rainbow, Reindeer and Buffalo. At least I can understand the need for secrecy, but today there is nothing secret about these operational names. Rather we shout them out for the world to hear, these harmless-sounding names. Desert Storm suggested nothing worse than a little blowing sand. Valiant Guardian, in Iraq, had something of the kindly uncle about it. Operation Crescent Wind in Afghanistan, an effort to bomb hell out of The Taliban, is suggestive of nothing more violent than a gentle parasail above the cliffs. If we called these Operations what they really are, they would boast names like Operation Spreading Terror or Operation Killing Anything That Moves. But we sanitize everything. We don’t murder innocent civilians. Instead we have collateral damage. Miriam-Webster defines collateral as: secondary, subordinate, indirect. I’ll bet it doesn’t seem any of those things to those who become collateral damage.

Good Lord, how on earth did I get so far off track? I suggested, and then chose, the anodyne topic of Rolling Thunder in order to have a gentle trip down Memory Lane. But somewhere I took a wrong turn and ended up in The Land of Ranting and Raving.

Enough!

The End

© November 2017

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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Reading, by Gillian

I was probably lonely as a child. I had good friends at school but when school was out I had no nearby children to play with, and I had no siblings. But I don’t recall ever feeling lonely as I was always accompanied by friends from books. (I originally wrote ‘from fiction’ but as The Bible was one of the few books available to me, I imagine some might take exception to including The Bible as fiction.)

I say few books were available not because of any failure on the part of my family to love books, but because paper was scarce in post-war Britain and so few books were published. There was a library in the local town but that was a long and infrequent bus ride away.

So my personal book collection contained four Winnie the Pooh books, published long before the war and once belonging to my mother, an old and very tattered family Bible, and a book called Mystery at Witchend by Malcolm Saville, a prolific author of children’s books in Britain in the 1940’s and ’50’s.

So I roamed the countryside accompanied sometimes by the roly poly Pooh and a bouncing Tigger, sometimes by all or some of the five children from Witchend who formed The Lone Pine Club and together had many harmless adventures and solved gentle crimes with never a hint of violence. Indeed the only violence I ever read about was in The Bible. But the Jesus who occasionally accompanied me was the gentle fatherly figure depicted in The Children’s Pictorial Bible which we read in Sunday School. Because of one of the pictures in this book, my friend Jesus always had a lamb draped around his neck like a fat wooly scarf. Looking back I rather suspect that my child mind had confused the picture of Jesus with one of the shepherds greeting His birth, but never mind. As Jesus and I frequently walked through fields dotted with grazing sheep my vision was appropriate enough.

Fast forward a few decades. I am in my early forties and finally coming out to myself, and very shortly after, to others. So. I was homosexual. A lesbian. What did that mean? Obviously I knew the meaning of the words, the definition, but what did it mean? To me, to my life. Where did I go from here? I felt very alone. Who could I talk to about all this? My friends might be very supportive, but what could they tell me? No-one I knew would have any answers.

So of course I turned to books and headed for the library. This was before the advent of internet so I searched through the catalog card files, in their long narrow boxes, for the pertinent categories. Although I was ‘out’ to anyone who mattered, I must confess to peeking furtively over my shoulder as I searched the LESBIAN section, the word seeming about a foot high and glaringly obvious to all who passed by.

There was amazingly little available regarding lesbians at that time, fiction or non-fiction.

What little there was, was awful. I rushed home with the few books on the library shelf, avidly read them, and wondered why I had bothered. Beyond depressing, they were just plain frightening. If this was where I was headed, I was in serious trouble. The Well of Loneliness, by Radcliffe Hall, was my introduction to lesbian fiction; one of the most depressing books I have ever read. The title alone, if you know that is the road you are now taking, is enough to to make you rush back in the closet and throw away the key. This book has become something of ‘classic’ in the lesbian world, in the sense that most of us have read it, though not a ‘classic’ in a positive sense as any mention of it is greeted by groans. I don’t recall now the titles of the other few books, but in all of them the lesbian character seemed destined for a life of abject misery, or suicide, or else they are saved by a return to heterosexuality. My reaction to this introduction to lesbian fiction was, essentially, what the hell have I done??

So, lacking new characters to jump from the pages and accompany me, I thought longingly of my childhood buddies. Somehow I didn’t think they would be much help. Pooh Bear would just sink his chubby head further into his honey pot, Tigger and Kanga are too busy bouncing and hopping to listen. Eeyore would say, as always,

‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’

But it does. It matters very much.

Those kids from the heterogeneous, clean-scrubbed families of Witchend, would look ascanse at each other and say,

‘Oh dear oh dear but this is awfully difficult,’

and probably run home to mother.

I, who do not identify as a Christian, actually did have a little chat with Jesus. And He actually helped. Asking myself the question what would Jesus do, I answered myself, with every confidence, that he would love me and accept me whoever and whatever I am.

Pretty soon, I discovered Beebo’s bookstore in Louisville and discovered that there really were positive portrayals of fictional lesbians. Claimed as the first of these is Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, in which neither of the two women has a nervous breakdown, dies tragically, faces a lonely and desolate future, commits suicide, or returns to being with a male. But by then I no longer had need for fictitious playmates. Women at Beebo’s had introduced me to the life-saving – or at least lesbian-saving – Boulder group TLC, The Lesbian Connection, which in turn introduced me to many wonderful women; real women, who in turn led me to my Beautiful Betsy.

With a real woman like that, who needs fiction?

© November 2017

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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Losing Touch, by Gillian

I will, before long, I expect; I’m rapidly losing other senses. My hearing is not too bad, but I don’t seem to smell the wet grass or the salty ocean with the strength I did as a child. Fresh strawberries and tomatoes right off the vine sure don’t taste as good as they once did, and my eyesight is battling the effects of glaucoma, so I have little reason to expect my sense of touch not to deteriorate. My mother had terribly inadequate blood circulation, leading to frequent complaints of not being able to feel her hands and feet, or feel with them. She would put me to work peeling potatoes, slicing bread, shelling peas or folding the linens, because, she said, she could not feel what her fingers might be up to. After she cut herself twice and then dropped our best kitchen knife on the stone kitchen floor where it broke, she was only allowed anywhere near a knife on really hot days – rare events in my pre-global-climate-change England. I don’t seem to have inherited that problem, but my Beautiful Betsy has exactly the same thing so before long I shall probably be called upon to perform all our household chores involving sharp utensils.

My dad lost touch. Sadly, it was not a problem with his fingers and toes but with his mind; his very being. Through dementia he lost touch with everyone and everything, including himself.

I first noticed some confusion on a visit home when he was in his early seventies – a little younger than I am now. I mentioned my concern to Mum but she shrugged it off with, well, Dear, I’m sure our minds aren’t quite as sharp as they once were. But she exhibited none of it, I noticed, and in fact she never did and was sharp as a tack till the day she died. I, of course, was living in Colorado and only saw them once a year or so, though out of necessity my visits became more frequent and of greater duration as they aged. The next time I returned, after this particular trip, I was aghast at my father’s mental deterioration. It was harrowing; heartbreaking.

He floated in and out, drifting from lesser to greater confusion and back again, all the time knowing he was losing touch. At one stage he held his wrist towards me, tapping at his watch – a much-valued possession. He gazed at it, then looked at me with tears and a look of such anguish in his eyes that I almost burst into tears myself, but of course I knew I must not.

‘I can’t remember,’ he faltered.

‘What is this? How do I make it work? What does it do?’

‘Oh .. um … nothing much …’

I ran my fingers gently over it. I had to put some cheer in my voice.

‘It sure is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? I tried, desperately.

‘It is,’ he agreed. And smiled.

Not many visits later I returned to see him safely settled into a memory care facility. By then it was easier on all of us. He no longer drifted in and out of differing cognitions. He had no idea who I was or who Mum was or who he was. He no longer struggled with what his watch was for.

He seemed remarkably at peace, so Mum and I were able to find peace for ourselves.

Right now, I am losing touch myself, though not, thank you God, in the way my dad did; at least not yet. Rather, I make a conscious effort to lose touch. I can only inhabit this current socio-political reality for a limited amount of time. I simply have to escape. If Agent Orange can inhabit a reality that is all of his own making, then surely, I can escape to my own alternate reality on occasion? I have a collection of home-made VCR tapes, mostly of ancient Brit sitcoms. Some of these shows are really pretty bad, but in my alternate reality the worse they are the better I enjoy them. So, most evenings I head for the basement TV, descending to my alternate reality as I say to Betsy. Though to be honest even bad Brit sitcoms reach a higher standard than this current American reality show in which we find ourselves, so in fact I am rising up to my alternate reality.

Margaret Atwood says –

‘You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.’

Sorry, Margaret, I’m a fan of yours but I tried it and I didn’t like it. I reserve the right to lose touch.

© February 2018

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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Escape, by Gillian

The thing is, you can’t. Not completely. You can perhaps escape your current location and situation, your lack of money, to some extent your social status; even your family. But you can never escape who you are. You can perhaps escape some of your character traits, your paranoias and phobias. But you can never escape the basic YOU. You cannot escape being male or female, straight or gay. You cannot escape the color of your skin, or your ethnicity.

I have read that the average male thinks about sex every seven seconds. Whether or not that is true, I wonder if there have ever been studies of how many times a day I think of being a woman, or of being a lesbian. How often does Carlos register that he is Latino, in all circumstances.

Sadly, these frequent acknowledgements of who we are are most often, at least in my case, brought about by negatives; not directed at me, but at a woman, or women, a lesbian or members of the LGBT community. My tribe. You attack members of my tribe, you attack me. Or as Jesus said it, (depending on which translation you choose), ‘whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”

It took me a long time to get over the Orlando nightclub mass shooting; if indeed I have. 49 people died and another 58 were wounded for no other reason than that they were members of, or friends of, the LGBT community. It was ME that man was shooting at; ME that he hated enough to kill.

I saw a news video of blood-lusting ISIS men tossing a man from the rooftop simply because he was gay. I fell with him. It was MY body bursting as it hit the ground like a watermelon fallen from a truck.

The #metoo [Twitter] movement has brought much recent attention to the emotional and physical pain suffered by an appalling number of women in this country. But world-wide the treatment of, and attitude towards, women is frequently so much worse. I feel the pain of every woman forced to marry a man against her wishes, or forced to hide her shameful body in clothes she hates. Crimes against women, rape in particular, are rarely prosecuted or even illegal in so much of the world. In Hungary I met a young woman whose grandmother had been raped many times in World War Two, first by the Germans going East and the by the Russians battling West. Rape has always been a weapon of war; indeed of brutal men everywhere, in all circumstances. I feel for, in every possible sense of the words, those tragic Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boca Haram and forced to live as nothing less than sex slaves to big, angry, violent men.

In February of this year, Rodrigo Duterte, the mass-murdering president of The Philippines, issued a new order. He reportedly told his soldiers to specifically target women rebel fighters, and not to bother killing them but to shoot them in the vagina because then they will be useless as women anyway.* You could write a book, a whole series of books, about that statement. Except that I am way too angry, and it hurts too much even to address those terrible words. What you do to them, you do to me.

Just last month I read about the neo-Nazis in Australia. (Maybe I would sleep better if I went back to my old favorite Winnie the Pooh books!) They sing a delightful ditty, those modern-day Nazis, the refrain of which is, we will get the seventh million yet. Those words sickened me. But I am not Jewish. Yet I know how very much black lives matter, as I hide here in my white skin. And I am forced then to realize that my tribe is not women; not gays and lesbians. I am stuck with feeling the pain of the whole damn world: the entire bloody human race, all the freakin’ people everywhere. And, given the pattern of man’s inhumanity to man, I don’t see the pain going away any time soon.

But I know, somewhere very deep down, that I welcome the pain; the anguish I feel for every hurting member of my huge tribe. It assures me that I am capable, indeed all too capable, of feeling empathy. And for

that I am indeed grateful. Without it I would be some kind of sociopath; pain free perhaps, but we all know that it’s the old story of the yin and the yang, the ups and the downs, and no joy without pain. We see that lack of empathy every day in the Orange Ogre’s behavior. We hear it in his words. And being like him is somewhere I never want to go; someone I never want to be.

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/philippines-rodrigo-duterte-orders-soldiers-to-shoot-female-rebels-in-the-vagina

© April 2018

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 Drain, by Gillian

Searching Google, as I so often do, for inspiration on this topic, I was surprised to see one of the first things to come up was a pop music group of some unknown (to me, at least) variety called The Drain. This has happened amazingly often with our topics. There are apparently, for example, groups called Magic, Guilty Pleasures, Culture Shock and I Did It My Way, all topics on which we have written. There is also one called Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. We have only written on the first part of that, so maybe we should tackle Hand Grenades one of these days.

Tricky things, drains. In the northern hemisphere liquid rotates clockwise as it disappears down a drain; in the southern hemisphere it circles in a counterclockwise motion. We all know that this is simply a function of the rotation of the earth, and yet everyone seems to be fascinated by this one fact of life. Anyone, going for the first time to the other hemisphere, just can’t wait to gaze raptly into the bathroom sink to see the water draining in that unaccustomed direction. Yes, it suckered me too, though at the moment of truth, all I could come up with was ‘huh!’

So; tricky things, drains. Like many things, we only recognize the true value of them when they cease to do their job. They are designed to consume material, but on occasion they refuse , or even regurgitate, instead. We’ve all seen times in Denver when the storm drains, blocked by fallen autumn leaves or overwhelmed by the occasional gully-washer downpour, simply refuse to digest the requisite amount of water and leave it to flood intersections and underpasses, and many people say much more than, ‘huh!’

There is little more nauseating then the indescribably disgusting gray goo which has to be extricated from the bend in the pipe when the sink drain refuses to absorb anything further.

Did that stuff really come from me? Huh! The horrors from which our drains habitually save us!

At the time that I left the U.K. in the early ’60’s, the whole country was suffering from what was termed a ‘brain drain’ – so many with higher education left for other countries as Britain offered so few opportunities. One arm of that drain, however, has always run the other way. In the Britain of my youth it seemed as if almost every doctor was from India, and on once again checking with Google, I find that the situation has not much changed. Those from India still provide the largest number of non-British-born doctors and health professionals in Britain, and, in fact, the National Health Service is currently actively recruiting doctors from India. The current fear, however, is that since the Brexit vote with it’s associated real or imagined rise in xenophobia, doctors from India and indeed any other country will be unwilling to commit themselves to a move to the U.K. With a mere 37% of all doctors in Britain currently being British-born white, this does not bode well. Tricky things, drains.

Since the recent U.S. election, many of the same concerns are being voiced here, where more than 25% of all doctors are foreign-born, again, incidentally, with an incredible 10% of all our doctors being from India. There are roughly a million foreign students in our universities, many of whom will remain to contribute greatly to the country. But with the new atmosphere of just about every kind of ism and phobia imaginable, will students from other countries still want to come? Will they feel safe? I can only suppose probably not. This would almost certainly be true of many other potential immigrants except for those sad souls driven by an even greater fear of life in their place of origin. Trump talks of limiting immigration and deporting many of those already here, but if he reverses the flow of that drain, blocking the incoming and increasing the outgoing, our country will be sadly poorer for it. Tricky things, drains.

Now our future leader talks of ‘draining’ the swamp of the Washington establishment – something many of us would not find discouraging. Cleaning up the quagmire of dark money and general corruption and lies, to replace it with clean fresh honest air, who would argue? Sadly, any vision we might have had of an outward-flowing drain was swiftly dispelled. No, the drain flows in.

And with it it brings a new level of homophobia, racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism the likes of which most of us never saw coming in our worst nightmares. But we can stop the flow. We can reverse it. With constant vigilance, not to mention a lot of hard work, we can do it. Just don’t forget, Donald – tricky things, drains.

© November 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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Sorting It Out, by Gillian

Whatever ‘it’ is, I feel as if I have been sorting ‘it’ out for ever; from the all-encompassing entirety of my life, to it’s tiniest details, ‘it’ never-endingly needs to be sorted out.

I guess it started, as so many things inevitably do for us all, with my mother. I have no idea how old I was when I began, only very subliminally at this stage, to try to sort out my mother in my own head, or probably more correctly, in my own psyche. But I was very young; too young to come anywhere close to expressing anything in words, even to myself. This particular sorting-out was going on at a much more primitive, instinctive, gut level. In my teen years, when an aunt told me that my parents had had two other children who had died before I was born, I felt a huge step closer to sorting out my mother’s complexities of hidden emotion. But there I stuck, until much later I finally began to come somewhere close to understanding not only my mother, but the effect her own traumas had had upon me.

And attempting in turn to sort out my own heart and soul was, of course, another life-long challenge. I say life-long, but now I don’t actually think that’s right. I lost the first forty-plus years. During those decades I spent plenty of time sorting out many many things; anything rather than sort out myself and the real me I was born to be. But eventually I got there, and only then could I set about sorting out me – a task which still takes up a considerable part of my time and dwindling energy.

But I must admit there is something oh so satisfying about sorting ‘it’ out. In fact, I frequently feel a great desire to get my hands on something and sort it out. This is in fact just a passing fancy, or fantasy, you understand. I’m retired. I plan to stay retired. If someone offered me millions of dollars to sort out anything from the airline industry to Amtrak to our government to any and all homeowners associations, I would refuse. But I do like to complain instead.

My most recent ‘it’ I dream of sorting out is the mid-range hotel industry. I’m not talking about the low end old roadside motel. You get what you pay for and should not expect more. And I’m ignoring the high end because I cannot afford them and so cannot judge. I am talking about the average Best Western, La Quinta, Ramada, Holiday Inn, Microtel etc. usually somewhere in the $80 to $150 per night range. These are my most recent bugaboo because Betsy and I had stayed in very few hotels over the last twenty years as we always camped. Now we no longer have our camper we have been ‘enjoying’ – and I use the word very loosely – hotels. To start with, almost every one of them has something which doesn’t work, most frustratingly the coffee maker. One we stayed in on our recent Arizona trip, only had hot water; no cold. Most unusual. No matter how you manipulated the knobs you could not get cold, or even cool, water. In more than one hotel, the rooms seem to have been designed for, or at least by, people eight feet tall. In one there was an electrical outlet above the door, just under the ceiling where not even most basketball pro’s could reach it. In another, the microwave was similarly placed, requiring any normal person to stand on a chair to use it. Lawsuits waiting to happen! What are they thinking when they design these places?

In one hotel we had no TV remote – strange but not all bad. There’s something about those things that makes my skin crawl. I am compelled, it seems, to think of all the other hands which touched those buttons after being in God only knows what unthinkable place the moment before.

And I am clearly not the only one with that reaction. In some rooms they insist on proclaiming that their remote is clean. One sign read, ‘this instrument is completely sanitary’, which for some odd reason bothered me more than suspecting it was filthy. Oh well, just one more good reason not to turn on the TV.

Maybe the answer to all this is simply to patronize that old mom and pop 1960’s motel down on the old road, where there is no coffee-maker, no fridge to hum and cough all night, no microwave to malfunction, probably an ancient fat TV sans remote, and sometimes only cold water. She who expects little will not be disappointed. But really, Betsy and I are now becoming so expectant of complications that we move into our hotel room like itinerant tinkers with bags and boxes of miscellaneous equipment: spare light bulbs, a step-stool, extension cords because wherever we want to plug anything in there will beyond any doubt be no convenient outlet, a plug-in kettle in case of the anticipated malfunctioning coffee-maker, and movies on DVD that we can watch on our computers without forming any relationship with that ‘sanitary’ remote.

And last but certainly not least, we provide our own breakfast, which of course has to be something which can be eaten cold if necessary, in anticipation of the out-of-order microwave.

I must admit we have occasionally had an excellent hotel breakfast but too often they offer nothing even remotely edible. Fruit-loops, a day-old sticky bun, weak coffee and some glow-in-the-dark orange drink masquerading as juice just isn’t breakfast. We have also learned to be very wary of the much-touted ‘hot breakfast’. Well OK, toasted Wonder Bread is hot!

So I dream of how I would sort it all out if I were in charge. And it’s only a dream. But in all sincerity, I wish someone would. We have so many tourists these days, visiting from all over the world. Every time the light doesn’t work and the coffee maker spits scalding water on my hand and I’m invited to a delicious breakfast of a plastic packet of instant oatmeal which I can’t eat even if I want to because the ‘hot’ water is only tepid, I cringe with embarrassment for our country.

‘Do you suppose things work better in other countries?’ Betsy asks.

No, perhaps not. But how I wish those tourists and business people could leave here so impressed that here, they do.

But I’m not going to sort it out.

© May 2017

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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Time and Preparation, by Gillian

This grungy old green tote bag I schlep all my junk in every Monday came as a gift from The Denver Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security when, about ten years ago, I took a class rather grandiosely titled CITIZEN EMERGENCY RESPONSE TRAINING. It was actually pretty basic, but it did inspire me to a certain basic level of preparedness. No, Betsy and I are not about to go and live in a cave in the wilderness where we have hauled enough supplies for a year, accompanied by enough guns and ammo to fight off the hungry hordes who failed to prepare. But I do believe, especially in these uncertain times, a little planning is worthwhile.

And no, I don’t lose sleep worrying over alien invasions (from this planet or any other) or, where we live, floods. Earthquakes and tornadoes are always possible but not huge threats right here. My main concern is our infamous Grid. I fear The Grid could easily fail us. Natural disasters or computer hackers could equally easily bring it down. And no, I don’t necessarily mean the real Doomsday scenario in which one big sector comes down which in turn overloads the next until the entire country, or the whole continent, is without power. It probably could happen, but it is beyond the scale of any preparations I plan to make for survival.

Remember the panic over The Millennium? Computers were going to crash so nothing would work: no power, no gas, no groceries? That’s very much my vision of life without The Grid. Very little will work. How easily we forget, when we have all those things, our degree of dependence upon The Grid. We’ve all sat through power outages of a couple of hours; maybe even a couple of days. It really is miserable. We cannot get out of the habit of anything and everything being available at the flick of a switch or the turn of a knob, or more likely the tap of a key. And it’s all gone.

My worst-case survival preparation is a month without power. It’s not too hard to envision damage to The Grid severe enough that it takes a month to bring it back up. We have enough bottled water and canned food to stretch, very meagerly, for three or four weeks. We have sleeping bags in the basement, which retains a pretty even temperature so we shouldn’t burn up in a summer emergency or freeze in mid-winter. We have wind-up flashlights and a lantern – irritating because of the continuous cranking required but good enough until we can replace the inevitably dead batteries in the good lights. And we do have a good supply of batteries. We have endless books for entertainment in the daylight hours, along with playing cards and board games. We have a camp stove with a couple of fuel bottles, so we could heat up food or water, if only occasionally. We have cash – very well hidden so don’t even think about it! – because even if any supplies are to be had we clearly will not be able to use credit cards. What we do not have is those guns and ammo the TV survivalists always display, so if we get to the stage of starving marauders breaking and entering I fear we’re doomed. Other than that, I’d say we’ve got a pretty good chance.

When I took that class, it was quite apparent that most of us were Seniors. Who among the young people have time even to think about surviving for a month without power, never mind taking time actually to prepare for such a thing. Good preparation in fact usually saves time in the long run, but most young people find it hard to concentrate on that long run. When we’re young we wing it; fly by the seat of our pants. It takes time to prepare and in youth time is scarce – or at least that’s how it seems.

As I age I find preparation increasingly important, you might say vital. Fortunately, in retirement I have time for it. I schedule my cups of tea very carefully so that, with a little luck, I will not have to scuttle to the bathroom in the middle of Act One. Before our month-long road trip last year we each had a ‘staging area’ to collect everything we needed to take with us. This has to be a large area of floor where things can be spread out, so we can check and recheck what we have already placed there. Things cannot be put in the car or into the suitcase because we can’t remember what we’ve packed and spend days or weeks packing and unpacking and repacking.

I never go the grocery store without a carefully prepared list – even if it only has one item on it. If I go without that piece of paper I shall return home with seventeen things I bought in case we’re out but I can’t remember. The thing I won’t have is the one thing I went for in the first place.

Old age is a full-time job!

Problem is, preparation doesn’t always work. Just last Monday I carefully gathered up all library items which needed to be returned on my way to The Center, remembered to put my library card with them to check out new books, placed everything in a tote bag which I put right in front of the door into the garage so I couldn’t possibly forget it. Come time to leave I picked up the bag and went into the garage. There I remembered my other bag, this old green one I talked about earlier, was still sitting on the table with my story in it. I put down the library bag, went back into the kitchen for the Storytime bag, into the car and I was off! Only as I drove past the library did I remember the bag left sitting on the garage floor.

I fear that our careful emergency prep will fail if ever put to the test. We’ve hidden the cash so carefully that neither of us will remember where it is and no amount of searching will turn it up.

Our arthritic fingers will be too weak to open any of the cans with the old manual opener, ditto any screw-tops. We might be able to manage the water, but it’s stored in carcinogenic plastic bottles so by then will probably kill us.

The fact is that time is running out and no amount of preparation can stop it. I don’t find that depressing; I find it deeply relaxing. It relieves an awful lot of pressure. So I’ll try to get the list right before I go to the store, and I’ll try to return my library books on time. But if I don’t, the world will not tilt on it’s axis or turn to blue cheese. I have finally found how to live in the now.

© January 2018

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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Springtime, by Gillian

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours. 
– Mark Twain

And I thank you for that, Mr. Twain. Thanks for telling it like it is – that Springtime is a sneaky, unpredictable little critter full of unpleasant surprises. T. S. Eliot wrote of April being the cruelest month, but most poets wax lyrical over the ‘rebirth’ that is the Spring, but they tell only half the story. More reliable is the old adage that if March comes in like a lamb it goes out like a lion, or vice versa. The old folks, tied much more closely to the seasons than many of us today, knew just how unreliable Springtime can be. In the England of my childhood those April showers so romantically trilled about in song had a bad habit of coming in one long shower beginning shortly after the New Year and ending temporarily for a few days in late July.

Arriving in sunny Colorado in 1965, I was welcomed by a seemingly endless Fall of clear days under a deep blue sky. Then, suddenly, one day winter arrived and the weather remained pretty cold and snowy for a couple of months, then suddenly one day the temperatures shot well above seventy and stayed there. The birds sang, early daffodils and tulips poked out their heads, buds appeared on the trees. Spring, I believed, had arrived. Wrong! A huge cold front moved in, temperatures plummeted, blossoms froze, flowers struggled to breath under three feet of snow. Of course, I now know that that is standard Springtime procedure around here, but that first year of my Colorado life it sure did take me by surprise. That ‘Springtime in the Rockies’ that we sang about in grade-school was even more given to shock and trauma than that Springtime in England so beloved of poets.

Contained in the lyrics of the Simon and Garfunkel song, A Hazy Shade of Winter, is a reference to ‘the springtime of my life’. I somehow missed mine; at least the first time around. Not surprising; I was stuck in that hazy shade of winter. Not that I was unhappy in the first four decades of my life, before I came out to myself. I just wasn’t there, which hardly lends itself to happiness or unhappiness. There was someone playing my part, but I didn’t care whether she was happy or not. She was not me and so signified nothing. And so I continued in that hazy shade until suddenly, about midsummer to continue the seasonal metaphor, I burst out into the sunshine – and entered my Springtime. I guess because I flunked the first one by my complete absence, I was forced to do it over. And I did not flunk this one. I blossomed. I bloomed. I unfurled my petals and felt the sun enfold me in it’s warm caress. I felt no fear. I was free to discover my own true beauty and to display it to the world. Maybe there would be some cold rain, some damaging winds, maybe I would struggle to survive under a snow drift, but I would survive to thrive in the summertime of the new me.

And so I must apologize to all those poets and songwriters. They have it right. There really is a magic in the Springtime air. Ellis Peters writes that ‘every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.’ She describes, perfectly, my life since I came out; one of perpetual, breathtaking, astonishment at my joy in life.

Continuing in A Hazy Shade of Winter –

…. Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It’s the springtime of my life
Seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry ……

And it occurs to me that one of the many blessings of aging is the ability to look back and see so clearly the seasons of our lives, and that time does, indeed, weave a tapestry; a tapestry design which we cannot see as we live it. Only when we look back does the picture become clear. We are finally able to see, and to revel in, our own life’s tapestry.

© April 2018

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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Dark, by Gillian

I grew up in the dark. Quite literally. And yes, here we go again, back to the England of World War Two. (Pause for communal groan.) Born in 1942, I was three when the war ended and, along with it, the blackout regulations. So for the first three years of my life I truly had no experience, nor even concept, of artificial lights shining through the darkness outside. Every window of every single building, no matter it’s use, had to be completely covered in thick, black, material. If the tiniest chink of light showed through, one of the blackout wardens who roamed the dark streets would very shortly be banging on the door. For many people it was almost impossible to go through this entire process every evening as darkness began to descend, so they simply didn’t bother. Their windows remained covered, 24/7 as we’d say these days, for the duration of the war. I certainly don’t remember any of our upstairs windows ever being uncovered, though we had one window in the living-room which my dad relieved of it’s burden every morning before he left for work.

Equally needing to save their energy for all the other things demanded of them, shopkeepers often failed to remove much of the blackout covers when they opened their shops in the morning. They frequently had very little to sell anyway, so what did it matter? My very early memories of shopping with my mother provide vague glimpses of standing in line for what seemed to me to be the entire day, frequently – of course – in the rain. Finally gaining access beyond the dark doorway, we were encompassed in a cold gray gloom not much different from that outside. At least it was out of the rain, but as everyone in the crowded room was dripping water down onto the little toddler me, my environment seemed to have changed remarkably little. I would peer about me as my mother did, though I’m sure I had no idea what I was looking for.

“No bread today?” Mum gazed longingly at the rows of empty shelves behind the counter.

The exhausted-looking woman at the till shook her head.

“Just sold the last one Luv, sorry. Out of flour now so God knows when I’ll have more.

And so the dark days days went by.

Because of Dad’s war work we lived fairly close to London at that time, but London was as dark, or probably from necessity even darker, than our nearby town. There was very little civilian traffic at the time, but all vehicles – military or not – was made to have all lights covered or painted black. This made what traffic there was, and the streets and roads themselves, extremely hazardous. In fact, at first more people were dying from traffic accidents than were being killed by the enemy. In the first month of The War alone, there had been 1130 road deaths attributed to the blackout.* The whole of Britain, at that time, was a very, very, dark place.

The War over, we were free to move as needed. My father felt obligated to move us in with his aging parents to help care for them, and so we landed in a remote sheep-farming part of the west of England. All national improvements had been delayed for years by The War, the preceding years of preparation for it, and the recovery from it. Our new home, like all those for many miles around it, had no running water and no gas or electricity. Artificial light came in the form of candles and ancient oil lamps. We had flashlights but batteries were strictly rationed and hard to come by so mostly they were useless. We might as well have remained in the blackout. Inside, the house was cold and dark and silent. Outside after dark there were no lights from neighboring windows to help guide your footsteps, and certainly no street lights. Well, there were no streets, just a quiet winding country road. I fell quite often while scurrying to the little shed at the far end of the garden in the middle of the night, especially if I had waited a little too long and was really having to hurry.

This darkness never bothered me. I loved living there. I don’t remember exactly but I think I was in high-school by the time we got indoor plumbing and electricity. My dad never once as far as I know, deigned to use the new indoor toilet. Neither of them liked the electric lights, which Mum described as “much too harsh and glaring”. She, an avid reader, was quickly seduced, however, by the length of time her tired eyes could pour over a book under this new glaring light versus peering shortsightedly at the pages in the dim gray/yellow light of the oil lamp. I certainly found it much easier to do my homework!

When I went off to Sheffield to college, I couldn’t sleep at first. The curtains of my little dorm room were thin and beige, doing little to keep out the light: light from street lights, light from houses and businesses, light from passing cars and trucks and buses. Of course the hustle and bustle and bright lights of a city still recovering from The War were nothing compared to that of cities today, but I found it overwhelming.

Of course I got used to it; learned to love it. Yet occasionally, still, I long for the silent darkness of my childhood. But I know that’s nothing but nostalgia, which can fool us all. If I were to return to that darkness, I would also be returning to the other, metaphorical, darkness. The darkness of ignorance. The darkness of not even knowing there were homosexuals in this world, and far, far, from the acceptance that I was one of them. No thanks, I’ll stay here in that “harsh and glaring” light and be grateful for it.

*https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/01/blackout-britain-wartime

© November 2017

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.