Tag: Gillian

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Wisdom by Gillian

Part 1

“ Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” William Shakespeare

Perhaps you could say that about wisdom, too. Occasionally you run across someone who does indeed appear to have been born wise. They are not old enough to have had sufficient experience to have learned wisdom; it seems innate. Others do have wisdom thrust upon them; frequently, sadly, as the result of some terrible experience from which they manage to emerge with newfound wisdom. Most of us simply stagger through life hoping that we gather a modicum of wisdom as we go.

Wisdom is unpredictable. It comes to us all in varying amounts and at different life stages. You cannot learn to be wise. I don’t believe you can get it from books or from other, wiser, people. You can’t obtain it by quoting the wisdom of others. That might perhaps make you sound wise, but it isn’t your wisdom.

However, if I were to pick one person to quote in the hope of the words being taken for my wisdom, it would be Shakespeare. There, in my opinion, was a truly wise man. One of the reasons his plays go on and on over the centuries is that the wisdom he expressed so succinctly over four hundred years ago still resonates with us today.

The quote I began this page with, for example: so simply stated but so true. Or –

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

How can we argue with that?

“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

The world would be a better place, would it not?

“This above all; to thine own self be true.”

No-one in this room’s going to argue with that, or with –

“Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known.”

Oh I could go on for pages; for hours. But I’ll have mercy and stop. And I’ll close with my favorite quote of all time, actually not from good old Will but penned by someone called Reinhold Niebuhr. To me it is one of the simplest expressions of so many of life’s conundrums.

“God give me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.”
And if we can do that, we are surely, truly, wise.

Part 2

The day I completed that first page, May 28th 2014, Maya Angelou died. On TV, of course, there were endless film clips of her talking or reading her wonderful poems. So how could I not include her many wonderful thoughts, given the topic of wisdom?

“History, despite its wrenching pain,” she says, “cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

And she has her own, somewhat less gentle, version of the Serenity Prayer:

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

“ … People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Oh so true, both the good and the bad.

And I find her wisdom encompasses us, gays and lesbians, often.

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it’s destination full of hope.” And –
“ … the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.”

She speaks to women, of course –

“A wise woman wishes to be no-one’s enemy; A wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.”

She values laughter, particularly at ourselves –

“My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked, a song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.”

And our storytelling group –

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”


(I don’t see how any of us could have many left untold!)

And best of all, she knows exactly what wisdom is. Actually she uses the word “intelligence,” but if you paraphrase and replace “intelligence,” with “wisdom,” I think it is just perfect. So, with apologies, Maya –

“I’m grateful to wise people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really wise. What black old people used to call ‘mother wit’ means wisdom that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.”

I don’t know how better to describe wisdom than that.

© June 2014

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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When I Decided by Gillian

Well, y’know what? If I’m
perfectly honest with myself, (if that is even a possibility for me or for
anyone, but I do my best,) I fear that there are few, if any statements, at
least with reference to my earlier years, that I could make beginning with those
words. At least if I did, they would all end up like this; “When I decided ….
whatever …. I didn’t
really decide at all but just drifted along due to inertia.  Or, was swept away by emotion.  Or, Let someone else decide for me.”
Really! And this came as a surprise to me! I
always thought I made decisions, but looking back I’m not so sure. Much of the time they certainly
did not add up to what I truly consider to be active decision-making; weighing
the odds, listing the choices, analyzing the figures. At best they were passive
decisions, if decisions at all. In my own defense I must say that I never
simply tossed a coin, but maybe even that would have been more pro-active. At
least the coin toss acknowledges that there is in fact a decision to be made. With
me it was often as if I spaced out the necessary decision completely, and, as
if sleepwalking suddenly woke up in a new situation. And to top off this sad
tale of inadequate thinking, it appears to me that sometimes when I did
actually decide something; it was for the wrong reasons. I have been mighty
lucky, then, that most changes I have drifted or been dragged into, have been
very positive.
Take, for example, my decision to go to
college. A good decision made, admittedly subliminally, in order to fix this
queerness I did not even acknowledge having. The men there would be different
from the farm boys at home. I would fall madly in love and live happily forever
after without this unidentified thing eating away at me. A great
decision, my college days were among the happiest in my life, but made for
completely the wrong reason. I hadn’t
been there a week before I fell madly in love with a woman in my class.
After college I fell into deep infatuation
with another woman, who one day casually tossed out the suggestion that we go
to the United States for a year. “OK,” I shrugged, and that was the extent of my
decision-making. Had she suggested an excursion to the South Pole I would have
responded in the same way. Talk about decisions for the wrong reasons! And
letting someone else make them for you.
My “decision” to come to Denver was mighty
casual, as well. I had trailed my ineffectual self around the U.S. in my
inamorata’s
wake, ending up in Houston where she married a very rich and mighty cute Texan,
which put an end to me as her shadow. I might as well start saving the money to
return to England, I thought, gloomily. The new unwanted man in my life had a
friends in Denver and said I should see Colorado before leaving the U.S.
“O.K.”
Another shrug decision. “Why not?”
I cannot even remember really deciding
to go to work for IBM, where I remained for 30 mostly very happy years. I
was working at Shwayder Brothers, later to become Samsonite, when the guy
working next to me said that if I wanted some quick bucks to get myself home, I
should apply at IBM, which at that time was rapidly filling it’s new plant in Boulder with just about anyone
walking in off the street. What an opportunity. It’s difficult in this day and age even to
imagine such a thing, never mind remember the actuality of it. But I don’t recall finding the prospect exciting at all.
“Yeah, O.K.” I responded, “Thanks. Why not”
I never did return to England
permanently, but again I have little recollection of actually making a
conscious decision to stay in Colorado, for all that I recognized I had found
God’s country. It was more a case of
drifting: allowing nothing to happen. In the absence of decisions, the status
quo remains.
My marriage was most definitely a
product of non-decision. (Which is, by the way, nothing like indecision,
which implies at least some attempt to make a decision.) I simply
drifted effortlessly into the vacuum created by my future husband’s needs.
As for coming out, to myself, that
is, there was no decision involved at all. I was picked up by the cowcatcher of
a runaway train and away I went. I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t
get off.
When that train arrived and dumped
me firmly on the ground at it’s
destination, I of course had to leave my marriage. And it was as a result of a
very conscious decision that I left. Not long after that, I came out to
everyone else in my life; another conscious decision. When I asked Betsy if she
would consider actually, really, legally, marrying me last year, that again was
a serious decision.
You see, before I came out at least
to myself, in my early 40’s,
I wasn’t myself. I was an actor plugging
along on the stage of life, playing me. But I was not me. At some
deeply-buried intuitional level, I always knew this. So what did I care what
that person playing me did; where she went or how she lived? Why bother making
decisions about what moves this person, in some ways almost a stranger to me,
makes?
Then I came out and I was me. The
real me. The actor was gone. From then on, of course it mattered what happened
to me. ME. MYSELF. The original. The one and only. You talk about being born
again! Suddenly, in middle age, the real me was born. And I am important to me.
I care for me. I make decisions very carefully for me. I most emphatically do
care what I do and where I go and how I live. Finally and forever, I am me.
“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one
alive who is Youer than You.”
―
Dr. Seuss
© 15 August 2014
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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25
years.
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From God to Santa Claus by Gillian

If you grew up when most of
us here did, in the nineteen-thirties or ‘forties, practically every figure of
influence and power, from God to Santa Claus, was male. Oh sure there was Mom,
and maybe some other female family members; even possibly a teacher, nurse, or
some kind of social worker in the traditionally female nurturing/caring roles.
But the police, firemen, ministers, lawyers, doctors, drivers, sports figures,
business owners, politicians, bankers, musicians and artists, etc etc, were
almost exclusively male, with one or two rare exceptions.
When today’s topic of The
Women in My Life came up, I expected to bore you all some more with ravings
about My Beautiful Betsy – and not that she is not deserving of it – but a
couple of weeks ago the topic Sports brought me to a different approach. Many
women talked about the bond they had developed with their fathers over sports.
Or maybe it was the bond they had developed with sports through their fathers!
And not to denigrate father-daughter relationships, but I was struck by the
lack of mothers or even grandmothers. They simply did not figure. They were not
there. So I am going to talk about the leitmotif which seems to have followed
me – Women (not) in My Life.
I have written before about
my mother, but in case anyone has been woefully remiss and not memorized every
word I’ve ever written, I’ll repeat it briefly as she was the first woman who
was not in my life; not in the way I wanted and needed her to be, at least.
There was some unidentifiable something that came between us. It left a
gap; a space. She wasn’t with me. Children intuit things but cannot
possibly explain them, even to themselves. Much later in my life, a
psychiatrist interpreted this all for me and I think she had got it right. It feels
right to me.
In my teens my aunt told me
my parents had had two children who died before I was born. At ages I think two
and three, they died of meningitis in 1940. My mother, the therapist
postulated, could not bare the prospect of a repeat of such pain, so she didn’t
allow herself to be as close to me as she doubtless would have been otherwise.
That explained so much. I loved my mother and she loved me. I was never in
doubt of that, but nevertheless she was, in some sense, not in my life.
As far back as I can
remember, decades before I came out even to myself, I have always been in love
with some female figure in my life. Only one at a time. Even in my fantasy
world I was seriously, if serially, monogamous. They were wonderful friends but
were never in my life the way I wished they were; needed them to be. Of
course I only recognized this at some deeply buried subliminal level, so I
didn’t even give them the chance to be what I only dreamed of. Those with whom
I am still in contact were, when I told them of my long-ago love, flattered
rather than horrified. I seem to have chosen wisely, these women who were not
in my life!
I don’t think I have ever
met a lesbian who was not at some stage in love with her gym teacher. I am no
exception. But I was a pudgy un-athletic child who did not impress her at all.
I played on the high school
field hockey and tennis teams only because it was a very small school requiring
all hands to the wheel. I enjoyed both, probably mostly due to my infatuation,
lapping up her gentle criticism as I would have praise from my other teachers.
When she married the geography teacher I was broken hearted, but then she never
was really in my life.
Growing up in England, I had
certain female role models absent in the U.S. When I was nine, the king died
and Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne. She’s been there ever since and seems,
as I’m sure it must to Prince Charles, destined to live forever. Previous
queens, Elizabeth the First and Victoria, lived long and reigned well. Women in
power were nothing new. But they had been born to it. That’s the only way you
get there! You don’t think, as a “commoner” in Britain, maybe I
should work towards being queen when I grow up!
Maggie Thatcher, of  course, did spring from common stock. I could
admire the position she had; the power she had taken. But her politics were not
mine. The family I had still remaining in Britain despised her. She was a role
model in some sense, perhaps, but she was not in my life: nor would I want her
to be.
Even the musicians and
artists of the day were overwhelmingly male. Come on, I know you can rattle off
half a dozen world-famous male landscape or portrait painters. How many women
can you name?
Ah, but the times they are
a-changing!
In 1970 only 10% of doctors
in the U.S. were women. Now the number is over 30%, with women making up half
of the students in Medical School. The percentage of women in the legal
profession these days is much the same. After the recent mid-term election,
there will be more women in Congress than ever before. (One of the few good
things to come from that election, sadly) There is no longer any shortage of
women athletes. When I grew up, we would have considered it a joke if anyone
had prophesied that within our lifetimes we would watch women’s teams competing
in soccer, and all the way up to the Olympics. Coaching is rather a different
story. Many women, in teams or in individual sports, employ male rather than
female coaches, something I find hard to understand. Many in individual sports
are coached by their fathers, but only occasionally by mothers. And as for
women coaching men, well……. But there are a few examples even of that, one
very notable. Brit. tennis champion Andy Murray, winner of Wimbledon and an
Olympic gold medal, was originally coached by his mother and is currently
coached by Amelie Mauresmo, an openly lesbian French tennis champion. Some
changes are slow in coming. Women currently hold only 5% of Fortune 500
companies’ CEO positions. But it will come. Hard as the Republicans might try
to push women’s rights back into the Dark Ages, I cannot believe they will
succeed. We have come too far and fought too long to go back now.
I feel the loss of the many
women (not) in my life, but they are in fact still with me, if in some cases only
in memory, and the relationship I have with them now is genuine, real, in a way
it never could be before. One of the women I was madly in love with for years,
remains my closest friend as she has been for almost fifty years. We love each
other like sisters and there are no longer all those confused emotions on my
part to complicate our love. My mother is still with me. She always will be. I
hear her chuckle at some silliness – she had a great sense of humor. And now at
least I have a little understanding of the flaw in our relationship, and the
reason for it, I accept that it was not about me, so I am free of the
many negative, confused, emotions it once visited upon me.
My latest loss of a female
is that of Brunhilda! She, as most of you know, was our VW camper van which we
drove over 100,000 miles around this country. She, Betsy, and I, had a little menage
a trois for 15 years. Sadly the old girl got battered and worn out and way
too expensive to maintain so it was time to say goodbye. But the story ends
happily. She went to live with a man who restores these beasts. So after a
while, with new hips and knees and a heart transplant, she’ll be in better
shape than any of us. And perhaps, as she remains with us only in memory, we
will learn in fact to love her more. Because in real time there were more than
a few occasions when I came close to wishing she was one of those women (not)
join my life. It was something of a stormy relationship, to say the least! Now
we can just gaze fondly at our photographs and see her through those
rose-colored glasses we all tend to favor as the years go by. And all those
women once (not) in my life slide quietly into their correct, comfortable, and
comforting, places, whether in my life or only in my memory.
© 27 November 2014
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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25
years.
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There is a Frog in My Beer by Gillian

Generally, I think I have a good
sense of humor, but it is definitely not of the practical joke variety! Hardly
surprising. If you go by Wikipedia’s definition, practical jokes are everything
I abhor:  ” A mischievous trick or
joke played on someone, typically causing the victim to experience
embarrassment, perplexity, confusion, or discomfort.”
And why would I want to do that??
Need I say that I have never taken
advantage of April Fool’s Day, though I always tried to stay aware of the date
as I proceeded cautiously through the day.
Researching this topic a little on
the Web, I was surprised to find that the terms “hoax” and
“practical joke” seem to be used interchangeably. I have always
tended to think of a practical joke being perpetrated on an individual, for the
amusement of those creating the situation, secretly watching from some
hide-y-hole close by: a sign pinned to someone’s back, or the back of an office
chair, or cars parked within an inch on either side of the victim’s car, so
there is no way he or she can get into it. I have observed this one in the days
before cellphones when of course the car owner was forced to go back into the
building to phone, or simply wait, at which time the jokesters hastily remove
their cars. Why is that funny? I simply do not get it.
And now I think more about it, I
guess a hoax really is very much the same thing. Fake artifacts or photographs,
false media announcements, causing people to be elated or fearful depending on
the content, and later let down or relieved when they realize it was untrue.
Sorry, this is as unamusing to me as that rubber spider in the bed, or fake
vomit in the car; which should, as I see it, cease to be funny about the time
one goes to kindergarden.
And I’m sorry to make it into a
Battle of the Sexes thing, but I really believe, based on personal experience
and documented examples, pranks and hoaxes are much more favored by males than
females. Maybe it’s some kind of power thing. Not so much over women but men
over other men. When I worked in manufacturing, back when we had such a thing
in the good old U.S.A., practical jokes were a permanent part of the culture.
Sometimes women were targeted, but
not often. I think the fact that most women simply tut-tutted and shook their
heads sadly as they washed their hands in trick soap which blackened the skin,
or discovered that the sandwich in their lunchbox suddenly contained plastic
cheese, rather disappointed the onlookers and so took them out of the game.
With the men it became a competitive one-upmanship. Ok you got me good, but
you wait. Mine’ll be better. That kind of practical joking, not involving
the unwilling or unsuspecting, doesn’t bother me. All’s fair between consulting
adults – in this case using the term adult rather loosely.
In fact, bemused.  All this silliness, and I see it more as
unkindness, to say the least, is apparently nothing new. There are documented
examples from the Middle Ages on, and, I’m sure, many many unrecorded pranks
before and since. The latest version would, I suppose, be computer viruses,
which I doubt most of us find very amusing.
I do have, however, my own evince
of past pranks. The house my grandparents lived in had at one time in the 1800s
been a pub. Digging in the garden, my father unearthed an old earthenware
tankard, remarkably undamaged. Inside it, emerging up the side, is a big brown
frog. Apparently, the publican would pick the right stage of inebriation of one
of his customers, and serve his next pint of ale in this mug. The poor guy
probably thought he was suffering from DT’s when the frog started to surface
from his beer.
 
I have to wonder if it was the
wisest stunt to pull on an obviously good customer, but then, some people will
pay quite a price to get a good laugh at someone else’s expense.
     
At one time I managed the
graveyard shift of a plastics production shop. There were about 30 plastic
presses and 35 to 40 miscellaneous employees. More than half the workers were
temporary, “ninety-day wonders” as they were sometimes referred to by
permanent employees, disparagingly but not meaning any harm. This was in the
early ‘seventies and at that time this country had floods of refugees from
Vietnam looking four work. Many of our temporary vacancies were filled by these
quiet, hard-working people who never caused trouble and were, in fact, dream
employees. New to this country, speaking very little English, and heads filled
with who knows what horrific memories, they were, understandably, a bit jumpy.
I had always turned a blind eye to a few little pranks, as long as they was not
too disruptive. It’s hard to stay awake all night doing repetitive, boring,
tasks, and if a few practical jokes gave them a little added adrenaline then so
much the better. But then it spread to pranks pulled on the Vietnamese; nothing
serious or really mean, but these poor people were completely confused by it, a
little scared, and above all, I think, completely bemused. Why were these
things happening to them? Why was someone doing such things? I was forced to
put an immediate halt to  it all, and if,
occasionally I saw it happening again, I once again managed not to see it
unless it involved any of the poor bemused Vietnamese.

©
15 Aug 2014

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25
years.
Posted on

The Shongololo by Betsy and Gillian

We were looking for a trip that would provide both adventure, something different, and a measure of comfort. It was in the year 2000 that our search ended when we read an article in the travel section of the Denver Post. The Shongololo: ten day train tour through South Africa. If this trip turned out to be as the article described it would be perfect. We needed a travel agent representing the South African Company to make the arrangements for us. There was such an agent in Boulder. So to Boulder we went to book our tour on the Shongololo.

The tour started in Cape Town. We decided to spend a few days exploring Cape Town on our own before the tour started. So we booked a room at the Holiday Inn in the heart of the city on Market Square.

We arrived there in mid day and, of course, we were quite exhausted from the arduous trip we had just completed, so we checked into our hotel and went directly to our room to relax and turned on the TV to check on the world news. What we saw was a gorgeous, young, black South African woman delivering the news broadcast by making clicking sounds so unfamiliar to us we laughed. For a moment in our sleep deprived state we thought perhaps we had journeyed not to another continent but to another planet. What we were hearing, we later learned, was Xhosa or the click language. Xhosa is one of the official languages of South Africa spoken by 7.5 million people. Later, on the train one of our guides was to give us a good demonstration of the language.

There our adventure did begin. We were determined to tread that narrow line between being street smart and not letting fear-mongering tie us to our hotel room or at the wildest, organized tours. We had perfect weather – not hard to find in South Africa – and walked for endless miles around the city. We rode the cable car to the top of Table Mountain on of those very rare days when the cloud “tablecloth” did not envelope it and the views from the top were superb. We set off one day to visit a museum dedicated to an old “colored” township which had been demolished during the dark days of apartheid, to make room for white folk who wanted the ocean views the area provided. In the event no further development took place, and the hillside lay barren and empty except for endless windblown garbage. Unable to find the museum, we were told that it had moved, and our informant, an old black man, provided us with two young black men who had been sitting idly on the sidewalk, to be our guides. Ever fearful of being “ugly Americans,” we accepted and set off across this endless wasteland. Betsy and I glanced at each other occasionally with looks that said,

“Are we being stupid? Should we be doing this?”

But one of the young men, who spoke reasonable English, chatted on to us about the current unemployment and other post-apartheid problems, and they seemed O.K.

Perhaps the fact that they were not very big, and we had some notion we could take them if it came to a fight, gave us fools’ courage.

Anyway, it turned out we were not fools. They led us straight to the museum and didn’t even ask for money for their time, although we did give them some before they started on their long trek back into the City. They, and that museum and the friendly people we met there, were one of the great highlights of our trip. Sometimes, when it comes to trust, you’ve just got to go with your gut!

We noticed, while on our own in Cape town, that on the street or in a park or anywhere for that matter, except in our own hotel room, we were constantly approached by South Africans with their hands out asking for–well, we imagined, money was what they wanted. We thought it prudent to NOT hand over cash. And I think we had been advised about this. If we had a little bit, probably we had more would be the message and we certainly wanted to avoid sending that message. We hated the ignoring, so we decided to buy tiny packets of dried fruit which we had noticed in some stores. We kept the packets tucked away in pockets the next time we went out and gave them out as people approached asking for………it turns out they were asking for anything we had to offer and dried fruit was like gold to some. So very grateful they were for a few morsels of fruit. This gratitude so impressed us we wanted to give baskets of fruit rather than tiny packets. But at least we were able to give some sort of response to their supplications.

The streets of Cape Town were full of activity every day. Many people walking about going from here to there, there were always those with their hands out, vendors hawking their wares, crafts, hand made jewelry, clothing, household items, etc. Particularly notable were the groups of young people–usually girls, but not always–performing groups, singing, dancing, sometime simply gyrating to the very lively, upbeat music. The singing was always well practiced, sung in perfect harmony and beautifully. They made choral singing look so easy and they did this while dancing and with no director. We often found ourselves mesmerized by such performances. Of course donations were put into the collection bowl, but talk about working hard for a pittance!

Our escapades on our own in Cape Town were the first indication of what a happy people the South Africans are. This fact impressed us throughout the trip through the country. These people whom one would expect to be full of anger and resentment, many of them struggling to survive from one day to the next, were, at least seemingly, some of the happiest people we had ever seen.

OK OK this is supposed to be about train trip. Yeah, yeah!

After a wonderful time in Cape Town we finally did board the train, and rattled off up the coast of the Indian Ocean.

Have any of you seen, on TV, the travelogue of The Blue Train, another tourist train which winds it’s way across South Africa, as it’s passengers sport dinner jackets and cocktail dresses and sip champagne in their expansive private lounges? Let me disillusion you right now.

The Shongololo ain’t no Blue Train!

Our cabin was tiny, with two very narrow folding bunks huddled on either side of a tiny wash basin, suggesting something out of the shrunken part of Gulliver’s Travels. But it was clean, as was the shower which, far from en suite, was one per each carriage of perhaps a dozen people. Out of 40 or so passengers, there were only two other Americans, who, apparently unprepared, were appalled by the accommodations. However, after the first bout of complaints they gave up, accepted their situation, and ended up being very good sports. The rest of the passengers were a mix of various Europeans, several Aussies, a few from New Zealand and Canada and some miscellaneous, or, as the Brits put it, odds and sods.

The train travels overnight while you sleep. If you’re lucky, that is, as it hurtles round bends accompanied by squealing breaks, only to shudder swiftly to slower speeds while you cling desperately to the strap provided beside your bunk. The previous night, you decide which of several van trips you choose to go on the next day. Maybe a gold mine, wildlife preserve, ostrich farm, museum, shopping, spend the day at the beach or at the winery. Never a dull moment! All the trips were fascinating. You have breakfast, and all the meals were delicious, and then they unload the vans from the flatbeds on which they ride, and off you go on your trip of choice, returning to the train in the evening for dinner and of course exchanges of van stories in the bar.

We loved every minute of it.

The entire trip took place in South Africa and all regions of that country except for one stop in a different country–Swaziland. The Kingdom of Swaziland, a sovereign nation, is an island in the sea of South Africa, completely surrounded by the larger nation with the exception of Mozambique to the East. The Shongololo made one brief stop in Swaziland. When we pulled into the station we were greeted by yet another group of singing, dancing children. These were school children, younger than those we saw in Cape Town, and had been well groomed and trained for this event and they performed with precision. They seemed to be very proud to be able to entertain us and did not expect any reward. Once we filled out the required “arrival forms,” as with all the other stops we were able to depart the train and spend a few hours in the local craft market and a glass recycling shop.

From the vantage point of The Shongololo, which means centipede in Zulu, we were able to get an excellent view of the diverse topography of South Africa. From the coastal towns like Port Elizabeth and Durban through the Drakensberg Mountains to the lush winelands and the Klein Karoo. South Africa is rich in spectacular and diverse scenery. So little time, so many places to see and so many things to do. There is not time or space here to even touch on all the varied adventures and sights offered to us on this trip. But there are two in particular that I must mention.

I do not remember exactly where the ostrich farm was, but we both chose that option on the day it was offered. I may have settled for a day of rest on the train that day had I known I would soon find myself perched upon the back of an ostrich racing around an ostrich corral. At first it was scary but turned out to be good for a lot of laughs–laughs for the spectators. I did not laugh at all until I was allowed to dismount from the bird. They can run like the wind!

Did you know ostrich eggs are strong enough to stand on without breaking. We were given the opportunity to prove it by doing just that before we left the farm.

Since I love swimming in the ocean especially in the surf, when we visited the city of Durbin I had to dig out my” bathing costume,” as they say in south Africa, and spend a day at the beach. The beach, the weather, the Indian Ocean surf–all of it was absolutely blissful. I was paddling around in the water when my bliss was interrupted by a loud, shrill, high-pitched sound very much something I had heard before–oh yes, a life guard’s whistle. When I “woke up” and looked around, I noticed that everyone was running out of the water toward the beach. The whistle kept sounding so it was abundantly clear that there was a reason for leaving the water–the sound of the whistle and the urgency with which people were leaving the water was quite startling, really. Meantime Gill had been sitting in a cafe enjoying a beer, watching the bathers when all this excitement took place. She had no more idea than I did what event had precipitated the hasty exodus so she asked the waiter who calmly explained,”Oh, someone spotted a shark. It happens a lot.” I probably will never swim in the Indian Ocean again. But if I do it will not be blissful ever again. Just scary.

We could go on and on about every single day. They were all great. Good times with wonderful friends we acquired on the trip, especially one Australian couple who came to stay with us in Denver a couple of years later, and we have a standing invitation to visit them. We were certainly the only same-sex couple on the train, but if anyone cared they kept it to themselves.

We were lucky, of course; not all the Shongololo trips went as ours did. The one right before ours was, apparently, something of a disaster. It had poured with rain the entire time, they had been unable to go on several of the scheduled trips due to flooding, and Kruger National Park was closed. The train tracks were slippery and the train derailed at one point. No-one was hurt but it caused serious disruption to the schedule. On top of all this, the British and German passengers were about to start World War Three!

On our trip, the carriages were largely set up by language and we didn’t see a whole lot of the large German contingent, I guess the company had learnt it’s lesson! Not that Brits and Germans inevitably cannot get along, but given that the vast majority of travelers on the Shongololo are our age, and so of World War Two vintage, a little friction is no surprise. We had no problems, although I have to say there was one memorable German lady who could well have precipitated a few quarrels but we were all determined to keep the peace, although the Brits all nicknamed her Hildegard the Horrible Hun.

She was a very big woman with hair dyed something near maroon. She barked tersely at everyone in strident German and strode about everywhere in a way that could only conjure up visions of shining jackboots. The train’s corridors were only one-person wide but she would advance on a group of us heading in the opposite direction, forcing a dozen people to back up so as not to impede her progress. She would also come from her own carriage to ours to use our shower, very much against the unspoken rules, as there was always a long line for the shower at the end of each van trip. But as I say, we were lucky. Everyone just joked about it and didn’t let Horrible Hildegard upset our equanimity. In fact, as we observed the German contingent shaking their heads and tut-tutting over her, she helped us all to bond!

Anyway, Hildegard the Horrible Hun turned out to be the biggest, really the only, negative of the entire trip. Not only was it the best train trip we have ever been on, but it was certainly on of the best trips of any kind of our lives. Sometimes we’re tempted to do it again, but over a lifetime we have at least garnered enough wisdom to know you can never repeat the best things; the best times. We went looking for a little adventure, something different, and we found that and a lot more.

As a postscript, I want to share a very SHORT story with you. We were camping in a fairly remote part of Utah last year, and ran into a young South African woman. We immediately, of course, strted regaling her with our Shongololo experience. She found this to be an extraordinary coincidence, as her childhood nickname had been Shongololo. It’s probably not an earth-shaking coincidence, really, but out in the middle of the Utah desert, it sure seemed that way!

© 8/25/14

About the Authors

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years. Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Anger by Gillian

I know a number of women, and perhaps a few less men, who are nothing more than tightly-wound little balls of anger. They are wrapped so tight that if something loosened just one strand, I feel that they would completely unravel. Most of us are not so extreme, but I think many of us have at least some anger inside us, and we don’t know what to do with it; perhaps don’t even understand what it is about. Perhaps we fear it.

I used to think that men actually handle anger better than women. Now I have come to believe that none of us deal well with it. Men perhaps respond to it in a simpler, less complex way, than many women, but not better. There can be nothing more irritating than that rather too-frequently used ploy of an angry woman, essentially declaring, yes, I am upset, and I’m not going to explain WHY because you should KNOW why. Yes, certainly, irritating. But if the net result of a man’s anger is going on a shooting spree then that can hardly be deemed to be a better outcome. And many of us have read the recent article pointing out that in the last 33 years there have been 71 mass murders in this country and 70 of them had one thing in common; they were committed by men. I’d call that a clear case for improved anger-management.

Aristotle expressed very well our difficulties with anger, and I would say little has changed over more than two millennia.

“Anyone can be angry – that is so easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way – that is not so easy.”

Huh! Easy for him to say!

Earlier in my lifetime, and I suspect many women have this problem, I didn’t even recognize my anger for what it was; and if you are unable to know something for what it is, you most certainly cannot deal effectively with it. I would cry when what I really felt was anger. I would feel depressed or sad when really I was angry. When I did feel anger, I inevitably lost my temper. That really scared me. Well, I guess we all hope that as we struggle with many things over a lifetime we also learn to deal more effectively with ourselves and our emotions.

Through hard work I am strengthening my spiritual self, which in turn helps with my emotional self. I have also found that occasionally spilling my messy guts in Story Time has helped me understand myself more clearly. I have come to accept anger when it chooses to visit itself upon me; not to let it disguise itself as something other, and to understand its cause. I can truly say that I rarely feel anger these days, and when occasionally I do, it tends less to be personal than collective. My favorite spiritual guide, Eckhart Tolle, refers to it as the collective pain body versus the individual one.

I’m not a great Bible quoter though I sincerely believe that if we followed Christ’s teachings the world would be a better place. And, yes, I have frequently been heard to say that although I do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, and don’t call myself a Christian, I am, in the way I conduct my life, a far better one than oh so many who scream their Christianity from the rooftops. But clearly I’m digressing again.

Anyone sensing a wee little bit of ANGER? Yes, I do have collective pain body anger at the evil such faux-Christians perpetrate. Not on me personally, or at least only indirectly, but on so many other innocent souls.

Jesus said, and I paraphrase because there are many differing versions,

“What you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”

And isn’t that what the collective pain body is all about?

I feel great anger at the evil being created in Uganda by American, so-called Christian, homophobes. As a fellow homosexual you do it also unto me. I feel rage at the abduction and clearly dreadful fate of Nigerian girls; and, sadly, so many more before them and doubtless to follow after them. Just being female, I am violated along with them.

I detest the hatred of Obama, which I believe to be in great part racially motivated, but it doesn’t awaken my collective pain body; I am Caucasian. On the other hand, I dread Hillary Clinton running again for President. The vitriol against her will be every bit as hate filled as that against Obama, but I am her age, and white, and female. It will all be directed at ME and all those like me; all the women who over the years have been vilified because they tried to enter male territory.

They suffered from some delusion that they were equal!

Nearing the end of my ramblings, I took a break to watch BBC news which turned out to be all about the 70th anniversary of the D-day landings.

Yup, you guessed it! Up popped that collective pain body, and along with it the anger.

No-one really knows how many died in WW11 but even the most conservative estimate is 50 million. 50 MILLION!

Oh, I do believe that that one was what they call a “just war,” Even the pacifist Quakers accept that if you are attacked you must defend yourself. But when will it ever end?

The newscast showed some very low-key Germans placing wreath’s on German graves at Normandy. One said, to the TV interviewer,

“At least Germany has not been involved in any war for many years now. We did learn something.”

A child of that terrible war, up leapt my collective pain body.

Why hadn’t we, the U.S., my adopted county, nor, to a great extent Britain, my native land, learned this lesson?

OK. OK. I still seem to have plenty of anger.

But at least I see it for what it is, and for the most part understand why it is.

And it no longer carries me away.

I don’t fight it: I feel it and let it go.

No, of course I don’t deal perfectly with anger, but at least I am no longer terrified of it.

© June, 2014

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Right Now by Gillian

Right now, I could die happy. We don’t exactly control, at least consciously, what thoughts and feelings flit into our psyches and this came unbidden into my head as we drove east on California Highway 78, leaving San Marcos where Betsy and I had been married a couple of hours earlier. First the thought flooded me with emotion, but then it seemed a strange reaction when I thought about it. Why DIE happy? Shouldn’t it be, live happily ever after? Nevertheless, that is what I thought and felt at that moment, and much of it is still with me. Maybe age has something to do with it: it affects most things. I’m not a twenty-one year old running off to get married, but a seventy-one year old who has waited 26 years to marry the love of her life.

Right now, as we head at top speed into the Holiday Season, I’m sure I shouldn’t have any thoughts of death in my head. I should have visions of birth and rebirth and focus on how wonderful life is. Which it is; at least mine is, and it’s the only one I am qualified to discuss. And for the wonder of my life I am most sincerely thankful, and more grateful still for my awareness of that wonder. Many many people in this world do not live wonderful lives, for many many reasons. But others do live, are living, wonderful lives and do not know it. How sad is that? All those, many of them already rich, who constantly seek more and yet more money, and all that it will buy. They are stuck with this illusion of some future wonderful life which will magically be available if they get that extra car or if they buy a bigger house or if that multi-million dollar bonus comes through. “When the terrible ifs accumulate,” Winston Churchill once warned, disaster looms.

And speaking of a wonderful life, the movie will be on TV several times in the next couple of weeks, I’m sure. I used to watch it faithfully every Christmas, first with my kids and then without them. Now I am over seventy and have reached the stage that I can lip sync every word, it has rather lost it’s appeal. Familiarity has bred, not contempt, but perhaps a little boredom. But both “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “A Christmas Carol,” in it’s many movie iterations, present the same theme; accepting the reality that you have, right now, without the addition of one single thing, a wonderful life. And perhaps, then, it does make sense to feel that you can now die happy. After all, if you have lived a wonderful life, what more can you possibly want?

I haven’t always known that my life was wonderful. Being GLBT in an overwhelmingly straight world tends to skew somewhat your view of your life and yourself. But many years ago I turned a huge corner on that. It suddenly came to me one day, as unexpectedly as the blazing newsflash, “Now I Can Die Happy.” Not only was I, at that moment, OK with being gay, but much more I was actually grateful for it. And I have been ever since. Why? Perhaps you ask, or perhaps you have no need to. Well, right now is the perfect example. Can you take this Monday story telling group that we so value, and put it into a traditional straight setting? I can’t.

Right now, a friend of ours and her partner are meeting with Hospice. She has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Will she, after a time of adjustment, be able to feel she can die happy? I wish her that kind of peace, but it’s not easy to “go … gently into that good night,” as Dylan Thomas expressed it. We want to kick and fight and scream. It’s fine for me to have that overwhelming sensation of being ready to die happy when I’m not, as far as I know, facing death in the immediate future. Last year I had just enough of a cancer scare to make me realize that, right now, any sentence of death would be very hard to face with equanimity, whatever inspiration might have hit me on that California highway.

I guess it’s one of life’s paradoxes. When our lives are the best they have ever been, we are able to feel that right now we could die happy. Like quitting while you’re at the top of your game. But in truth I want to enjoy my wonderful life a little longer. I think perhaps I could die happy, but preferably not right now!

© December 2013

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Mushrooms by Gillian

I thought of writing about mushrooms the other week when our topic was “Magic” but that led too inevitably to the psychedelic connection, which is far from the kind of magic I personally attach to mushrooms. They bring, for me, a nostalgia for the magic of innocent childhood days.

One of my very favorite things was when my mum and dad and I would go off together into the fields and woodlands to pick mushrooms. My vision of it is my mother with the basket on one arm and me swinging from the free hand between her and my dad. Perhaps this happened for just one instant, once, but you know how it goes. These things from the distant past expand themselves until they occupy vast stretches of time, and in my memory every time we went what we called “mushrooming,” I clasped each of them by the hand and swung my feet off the ground between them. We were not a touchy-feely kind of family and holding both their hands is a thing I cannot remember doing at other times or in other circumstances. It was just part of the magic of mushrooms.

Mostly we went in autumn, early in the morning, though I think occasionally we went at other times of the day and year. I associate mist with these morning jaunts, though again this might, in reality, have been just once. We looked for the mushrooms in open grassy meadows among sleepily grazing cows and sheep, and in glades of old oak trees where they grew happily on old rotting stumps. I have no idea what kind they were, though the ones from the fields were different from those in the trees. We worried little about accidentally picking poisonous ones, but I have no idea whether we were simply lucky or whether my parents had some learned or inherited knowledge about such things. Even I knew that you never picked toadstools, but they were easy to tell apart from mushrooms. Every child knew that fairies only live in toadstools; never in mushrooms! Though mushrooms do form what we always called “fairy rings,” growing in clear circles on the grass. Even when the mushrooms were not there, the rings still were visible as mounds or depressions in the grass, and as the mushrooms tended to grow again in that same ring, it was always a good place to look. These circles were sometimes just a yard or so across, but some were huge, ten to twenty feet in diameter. No-one knew why they grew in these circles so of course who else was to be held responsible but the little people? Stones the size of a pinkie or a fist or occasionally a football were also sometimes arranged in circles, always called “fairy rings” for the same reason. I loved to imagine these little creatures busily pushing and tugging at the rocks to get them arranged correctly, but was never too sure how they got the mushrooms to grow that way. Perhaps, I thought, they planted the wee seeds in a circular trench, the way my dad planted the potatoes in a straight trench.

For me, mushrooms were all about the gathering. I rather lost interest in them when we got the overflowing basket home, though I enjoyed eating them well enough. Had they been readily available in stores via mushroom farms as they are now, I probably would not have liked them, as many children do not, but back then they were rare enough to be attractive.

These days, sadly, in my opinion, picking mushrooms has, like so many things, lost its simplicity and become hugely complex. For one thing, of course, you can no longer wander freely over your neighbors’ fields and woods and help yourself to anything growing there. For another, mushrooms have fallen victim to TMI. We have way Too Much Information about them, as about most things. Did you know that there are an estimated 10,000 different species of mushrooms in North America; that a mushroom specialist is called a mycologist? Do you care?

On Google Earth, I find, you can see mushrooms from space, honest! Well, not the mushrooms themselves, but the tell-tale fairy rings left by some species. These rings are clearly visible satellite images, so you can select likely fields to visit whilst sitting at your computer. Talk about taking all the fun out of things! How can that possibly compare with tucking cold hands into Mom and Dad’s warm ones, watching the frost turn your breath to fog? How can finding something on the internet bring you memories to last a lifetime? And the rings themselves have some completely scientific explanation to do with fungus, and have lost all their magic. Worse than that, they sometimes appear on a pristine lawn and no amount of digging will destroy them so the Web recommends destroying them with chemicals. The poor old fairies are in big trouble in the modern world. And their fairy stone rings, apparently, are causes by the continuous winter freeze/thaw cycle pushing the rocks, not the little people at all, at all.

In Britain, where of course my childhood memories originate, mushrooms have become big business; not only via mushroom farms where they are cultivated en masse but also the picking of wild ones. Far from the “mushrooming” of my youth, it has now gone upscale and is invariably termed mushroom “foraging.” It seems that in order to partake of this, what at least used to be, simple pleasure one first needs to buy some expensive basket via one of many international online boutique such as fungi.com, (yes, there really is such a place!) along with an equally costly knife, the purpose of which escapes me as we always pulled them up and they exited the wet ground with a wonderfully pleasing plop. One then arms oneself with a variety of books and maps and charts so as to identify what one is searching for, and to identify the best place and time to search for it, so as not to waste valuable time and to avoid the hazard of poisoning oneself, even though only about one percent of all mushrooms can be lethal. And after all that, of course, you’ve run out of time and simply hire a “Mushroom Foraging Guide,” to lead you by the hand, instead. (Yes, there really are such people!)

Just reading about it all on WildMushroomsOnline.co.uk wore me out.

And d’you know what upset me most; the worst thing I discovered in my researches way down in the TMI depths? There is actually no scientific basis for differentiating so-called toadstools from mushrooms. They are just variations of the same thing. Oh no! Haven’t those poor fairies suffered enough? How are they to know where to live? I tell you one thing, if I ever suffered from little people envy, I’m cured. The last place I want to live in these challenging times is down at the bottom of the garden with the fairies!

And so the magic goes; the magic fantasies of fairies and the magic moments of mushrooming. It’s partly my age, of course, and partly the age. The world has changed so very much in the time that I have inhabited it, and I would be the last one to claim that it is all for the worse. Those days gone by were not necessarily better, but there’s no denying they were simpler. I have to wonder where the children of this fast-paced electronic era will find the magic, but I try to keep the faith that they will, and fortunately I shall never know.

© December 2013

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Mom by Gillian

Most of us are, of course, via nature
and nurture, to a lesser or greater degree a product of our parents. I can
easily identify many things; good, bad, and ugly, that I got from mine. On the
whole, though, I think what a received from my dad was of a simpler, less
complex nature, than the traits I received from Mom.  My father was essentially an uncomplicated
man. My mother was not an uncomplicated woman, although she put on a good act.
Probably most people who knew her, especially the many children she taught and
their parents, found her to be a warm, patient, conscientious, motherly woman
with a good sense of humor. She was all those things; but a whole lot more that
she never presented to the world, or to me, though eventually I caught at least
an occasional glimpse of what went on below that smooth veneer.
So it’s little surprise that for the first
forty-odd years of my life I found it relatively easy to hide the real, gay,
me, from the world and to a huge extent from myself, and play a very convincing
part. I learned those skills from Mom. Not that my mother was a lesbian, at
least as far as I can ever know, though in fact how can I ever know? I
can’t, but I just
don’t sense it, and
I believe I would. Her issue was her son and daughter who both died before I
was born. She never once talked about it; not to me nor to anyone as far as I
know. She buried her tragedy deep and set about developing a shell, never to be
broken.
At least I eventually broke free of
mine. My mother never did. I learned the truth from my aunt. OK Mum, (which is
what I actually called her, not the more American Mom) you didn’t tell me your
secret and I didn’t tell you mine. Na na na na naaa na!
So I guess that leaves us even in our
dysfunction.
I always felt that there was
something. Something missing. I can’t really express what I felt, or why,
it was simply a child’s intuition. And now, after all these
years, I wonder if a mother’s intuition told Mum that there was
something, something indefinable, missing in me, in who I was, and in my
communication with her.
Somehow, despite our chaotic psyches,
Mum and I were close and I always knew I was loved unconditionally, by both her
and my dad. They both also had a great sense of humor. Mum loved to giggle. I
loved to make her giggle. It was all part of the very complex hidden
relationship in which I knew it was up to me to heal her wounds, though I only
knew of them subliminally, and make her happy. It was up to me to make her
laugh. So in this way she helped me develop my own humor and we laughed a lot
together. My dad’s humor was completely different from
Mum’s, and I am
fortunate enough to have a wonderful mixture of both, but he would look on
fondly in puzzled silence while Mum and I giggled helplessly over something in
which he could find little humor.
Mum was, as were many people but
especially women, I think, back then, very concerned with appearances. I don’t know if any
of you ever watched Keeping Up Appearances on PBS, but the show always
reminds me of my mother, although she was a much nicer person that
Hyacinth Bucket! Mum had a bad case of don’t do it in the
street and scare the horses. I could wear that tattered old sweater I
loved so much in the house, but I couldn’t venture outside in it, and if there
was a knock on the door, I had to bolt upstairs and hide or change clothes
before I came back down. My dad didn’t have to wear his tie in the house
but had to put it on in a rush if anyone came to visit, and he had to wear it
outside even if he was gardening. Someone might see him without it! I,
on the other hand, don’t give a tinker’s curse about
what anyone thinks of the way I dress, or come to that the way I live, or
anything about me. That, I think, is greatly a generational thing, but in my
bones I feel that a lot of it is purely a reaction to Mum’s obsession
with what will people think? On the other hand, of course, it did take
me the first half of my life to come out of that bloody closet, so I cannot
have been as freewheeling as I’d like to believe.
My mother’s other
obsession was with her weight. She did seem to gain weight easily, though she
never ate very much and only drank once a year, on Christmas Eve. It was always
some kind of home-made wine: pretty strong stuff. After a couple of glasses she
was bright red in the face and invariably stated in rather slurred words, how
strange it was that although she only drank once a year, it never had any
effect on her! Oh Mum, ever in denial! She was never obese, just pleasingly
plump in a motherly kind of way.
But my dad and I could never convince
her of that. These days I think it’s much easier to get a good feel for
just how overweight, fat, or obese, you are, and how you look. With endless
photographs of ourselves easily available we can compare ourselves with others
only too often. In the days of only occasional snapshots, my mother constantly
needed assurance.
“Oh dear!”
Mum would
exclaim, eyeing a woman of roughly her age bulging out of her clothes, “I’m not as fat as
that am I?”
Well that was an easy answer in the
negative, whatever the truth. But worse, she would sometimes ask that classic
unanswerable question, “I’m not as fat as I used to be, am I?”
Just try to get that answer right!
I struggle to stay well clear of
denial, because Mum relied so heavily on it. She would cry, not shedding a
quiet tear but sobbing uncontrollably, over things with no direct relation to
her; miners dying down coal pits, a race horse with a broken leg having to be
shot, the death of King George V1. A therapist friend explained to me, many
years later, that this was a classic example of transferred grief, my mother
being way too terrified of facing her own grief, while needing to release it in
some other way.
Poor Mum. She lived in the wrong time
and the wrong place. Her children died in 1940 in a war torn Britain where
people died every day and you just sucked it up and soldiered on. These days
she would have had the benefit of therapy and support groups and various
spiritual teachings to ease her way. Of course you never recover from the death
of one child let alone two, but she would have had a lot of help in dealing
with her heartbreak.
On rare occasions I catch myself
glancing uneasily at an overweight woman and wondering if I am in fact more or
less fat than she is.  I panic. Oh God, I’m becoming my
mother! Eckhart Tolle and I try to keep me grounded in reality and dealing with
my own self, leaving Mum to rest in peace. I am what I am and whether all or
any of it comes from Mum and Dad hardly matters.  I recently accepted that my struggle to keep
the weight off is little to do with heredity and a whole lot more about beer.

© Dec 2013

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Falling among Forbidden Fruit by Gillian

Oh, Adam and Eve have a lot to answer for! Things have gone downhill ever since she gave him that damn apple. Much of humankind seem to consider themselves sufficiently righteous to sit in judgment of others; not to say that applies to all of the people all of the time, but sadly it’s probably true for most of the people most of the time. Equally sadly, it’s not confined to those who proclaim themselves to be Christians, either, so we cannot hold Adam and Eve completely responsible.

We judge others to be different and therefore inferior, but worse than that we fear and hate them. Why, I have never understood. I’m sure I have my parents to thank for that, as they never understood it either. It may also be, at least partly, in our case, that we simply did not encounter these ‘others.’ I grew up in a very homogeneous area, as perhaps many of us of our generation did, and so was really not challenged in acceptance until I left home for college. One would like to believe that a university is not the place where one learns prejudices, so all in all I think I was fairly well sheltered from bigotry until a later stage of maturity by which time I was pretty well protected against acquiring it.

The bigots of this world make ‘them’ the forbidden fruit. In this country, as in many others, it was anyone of a different national origin, ethnicity, language, religion, and especially race. And now, of course, the big battle over same-sex relationships. Multiple prejudices been writ large throughout the history of this ‘melting pot’ of which we are so proud. I observed the horror of it in amazement. I have no more comprehension of it now than I have ever had. I simply cannot get inside the head of prejudiced hate-mongers and so have little hope of gaining any understanding. The very beast inclusivity we can hope for from most people seems to be the old joke,

“Oh yeah I guess they,” whichever particular ‘they’ you may be discussing, “are OK. But you wouldn’t want your sister to marry one!”

So it was with further amazement that I suddenly found myself to have fallen among forbidden fruit.

When I came out, I suddenly realized; I am now one of the Undesirables. I intuited that I should not talk about what I did at the weekend; people might not want to hear it. I had become that person who wouldn’t be coming to dinner; at least not unless I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut and ‘act normal.’ As forbidden fruit I could lie on the orchard floor and rot. Quickly understanding that I was allowing myself to be victimized by the judgment of others, I ceased to modify my reality for their comfort and relaxed.

Then, in 1992, along came Amendment 2. I cried, as I’m sure many of us did, waking in the morning following Election Day and finding myself to be, and really feel to be, someone who could be discriminated against. Legally. It hit me like a ton of bricks that I was one of God knows how many throughout the world and over the ages. I had sympathized with them, but until that moment never actually empathized. And my problems were essentially non-existent compared with those of so many others. I was not immediately threatened with death, imprisonment, or deportation. I would not lose my home nor would I lose my job. Practically, I had no fear that the passage of Amendment 2 would effect my life in any way. Yet I felt insulted and violated. Also, luckily, I was very, very, angry.

That was the final point, I think, in my total ‘outing’ process. I will not let these ignorant bigots make me feel like this. I will not be their victim. I will not let the attitude of others make me feel bad about myself. I will not apologize, even to myself, no, above all not to myself, for who I am. I know I have done nothing wrong and that is all that matters.

And if I have become forbidden fruit to others, it is their problem and not mine.

I will not lie silently, invisibly, under the tree and rot, while the wasps buzz hungrily, angrily, around me.

I will pick myself up and dust myself off, and mix with pride with the rest of the beautiful shiny forbidden fruit, enclosed in that strongly woven basket of understanding, support, and caring that fills me with pure joy at what and who I am, without one single ounce of regret.

April, 2014

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.