Tag: Gillian

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A Letter to My (Much) Younger Self by Gilllian

For Christ’s sake, Gillian, you’re ten bloody years old and …

No, I mustn’t swear. This is a letter to be read in the early 1950’s. And leave Christ out of it as well. You surely recall that at the age of nine you decided organized religion was a load of — , well, you rejected it.

Gillian, you really need to get your shit together.

Oops, that’s no better. Gillian, yes, YOU, the seventy-year old one, need to get YOUR act together. OK, act together, that’s better.

Gillian, you’re ten now, and it’s time you got your act together.

No, that really doesn’t work either. The ten-year-old Gillian IS acting; playing a part. And at some level she knows it. She needs no encouragement in acting. And it all sounds a bit distant and cool, doesn’t it? It shouldn’t. I feel great affection for, and of course empathy with, this desperately confused younger self. So here we go, AGAIN. Well, I didn’t expect this to be easy.

My dearest Gillian, (yes, MUCH better!)

Now you are ten, I think it’s time we had a little chat.

No, no! Too condescending.

My dearest Gillian,

Yes, you are only ten, but you have some pretty difficult stuff to deal with. I know you know what I mean, although you are trying oh so hard to hide it, even, or especially, from yourself. You think, in those rare times when you face up to thinking about it at all, that you are absolutely the only person in this entire world who is attracted to those of the same, rather than the opposite, sex. You think that somehow, in some way quite unclear to you at this time, these feelings will, magically, go away. They will not. I cannot guarantee you much, but that I can promise. No matter how hard you continue to refuse to accept them, they are going to strengthen until the day comes when you can no longer deny them to yourself, and so no longer wish to deny them to everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advising you to ‘come out of the closet,’ (a phrase she is not yet even familiar with, needs explanation) that is, shout out on the school bus that you love girls not boys. Don’t kiss your best friend, though I know how much you have wanted to for quite some time. And don’t tell Mum and Dad. Dad, I suspect, would walk away without a word, and, if you tried to pursue it, might say something like, ‘I don’t ever want to hear that again,’ and walk faster, and further, away. Mum would, more predictably, say, “Oh Gillian! You’re being entirely too silly!” And that would be the unsatisfactory end to it.

The time and place would not be good. Caution is advised, my dear. (Good. Nice and warm, and what her mother often calls her.) In your current year, 1952, the Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing is being forced to take ‘cures’ for his homosexuality. (Don’t think the word ‘gay,’ though friendlier, would mean a thing. Come to think of it, neither would Turing nor Enigma, both being silenced for years to come under the Official Secrets Act. Never mind, she can get the idea.) Sir John Nott-Bower, commissioner of Scotland Yard is beginning to weed out homosexuals from the British Government, at the same time as McCarthy is conducting a homosexual witch hunt in the US. No, not a good time and place. (Though I suspect, in 1952, there was no good place.)

You will find this hard to believe, but my wonderful same-sex partner, of twenty-six years, and I are about to be legally married in the U.S., where same-sex marriage is now, nearing the end of 2013, legal in fourteen states.*

It is also legal in parts of Mexico, and legal throughout another sixteen countries.** The 21st century is an amazing place!

What I implore you to do, is, simply, look at yourself. Accept yourself. You are beautiful just the way you are, and one day you will know it. But if you deny it, hide it, try to make it go away, that will not work. You will hurt others.

Unintentionally, but the hurt is there all the same. And yourself. But there will be losses as well as gains. There will be sadness as well as joy. But make your life-choices consciously, for positive reasons, not negative ones, and never in denial of who you are, and who you must be. You are who you are. You have no choice. I know that now.

I wish, my dear Gillian, that I had known you, myself, a whole lot better in 1952. But here I am, sixty years later, still working at it, and very slowly I believe I’m getting there.

*
California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Maryland, Washington, and Washington D.C.

**
Argentina (2010) Denmark (2012) The Netherlands (2000) South Africa (2006) Belgium (2003) England / Wales (2013) New Zealand (2013) Spain (2005) Brazil (2013) France (2013) Norway (2009) Sweden (2009) Canada (2005) Iceland (2010) Portugal (2010) Uruguay (2013)

October 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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Revelation by Gillian

I do believe that our socially conservative friends, well actually I don’t have any but you get the drift, must be having a bad time lately. There have been a couple of revelations which doubtless crowded right into their worst nightmares.

Jonny Weir

First, we have the Winter Olympics. Much of what was shown on TV was ice skating. Fine and dandy, but,

“Why oh why,” moans my imaginary friend, and I’m sorry, but, yes, he does have a Southern accent, “Did they have to ruin every moment of it by having that dreadful Jonny Weird as a commentator?” 

Yes, I have returned to my childhood ways, or perhaps gone into my second-childhood ways, and created for myself an imaginary friend with whom I can discuss these things, as I lack a real-life socially conservative buddy.

“His name is Weir,” I correct.

Jonny Weir and Friend

“Whatever, he sure as Hell is weird. Dresses like a goddam woman, for Christ’s sake. Lace blouses and all covered in jewels. Jesus! If they must have him do that job they don’t have to show him do they? His hair all primped and curled and piled on top of his head. Shit! It’s indecent. I sure as Hell hope his broadcasts don’t go outside of this country. He’s an embarrassment to this once proud nation of ours. What in Hell would the rest of the world make of us? Is this what we fought for?”

Oh, that’s using we a little loosely, I think. He’s too young to have been in ‘Nam; I know because I created him. By the same token, I know he has never defended his country in any war, much as he encourages everyone else to do so. Were he a Vietnam vet., I would have too much sympathy for him, so I took that crutch away.

“Perhaps not a great shocker to much of the world,” I shrug. “Most of Europe for a start would probably not think a whole lot about it.”

“Yurp. Who cares about Yurp? Bunch of socialist lay-about faggots themselves. This was once a God-fearin’ respectable country. I just don’t get why that goddam NBC allows that guy to dress like that, makin’ a laughing stock of hi’self, preening in front of millions of people. Why ain’t he made to dress right like everybody else? All th’other commentators wear suits and ties and look like men. I mean, for the love of God, if NBC won’t do it then they should be be made to. I never did believe that I would live to see days like this. This was once a law-abiding country. Now anybody can do any goddam thing. We need laws and we gotta to enforce them.”

This, I think, but don’t say, from a guy with a bedroom full of repeating rifles and sub-machine guns or whatever the mass destruction weapons of choice are these days. A guy who thinks the ‘gubmit’ should stay out of his life.

“And then,” he’s on a roll now, and yes, sorry again, but my conservative buddy is definitely a man, “they got all that women’s hockey hoopla. Ice hockey yusta be a man’s game for God’s sake. Now they got women. And we’re supposed to be proud of ‘em with their medals. Be the day when I let my daughter do somethin’ like that.” As I have provided for my imaginary friend with a relatively independent, politically middle-of-the-road, daughter, I smile to myself at his illusion of a power over her which he has long ago lost, if indeed he ever had it. Which, of course, is fuel to his general anger and resentment.

“Shit, they all covered up so you can’t even tell what they are. They ain’t women and that Weird guy ain’t a man. Jeeeesus!”

“Soccer,” I offer, unable to resist the temptation, “Used to be just for men. Now women and girls everywhere play it.”

He snorts in disgust. “Another bunch of lesbians! Don’t fool me if they talk about husbands and babies. They nothin’ but lesbians!”

“Some of them,” I shrug again, “but all those husbands and boyfriends supporting many of these women are, what? Hired actors?”

“Maybe they jus’ fools who think they married real women who fake it for them. Thinka that?”

What I think is we’ve exhausted this topic. Usually I listen rather than talk with my imaginary bud, after all his very purpose is to help me get inside the heads of people who think like him, as best I can; to try to comprehend their thought processes, what drives them.

So sometimes I just cannot resist egging him on, for that very purpose. “There was that college football player last week too ….. Michael Sam …” 

He spits.

“What in all Hell’s wrong with that guy? Apart from being a queer, I mean. Football’s one place left where no sissy-boys allowed. What on God’s green earth he trying to prove? He coulda been drafted pretty high and had a good career ahead and he just shoots hisself in the foot. No NFL team going after him now. Wouldn’t you think being a ni…. bein’ black makes him different enough without he gotta be more different. Not that being black is any problem in the football world. But being gay sure as Hell is. Why didn’ he just keep his mouth shut? Why do they always have to be in my face with that crap? I don’t wanna know. Being gay is nothin’ to do with how he plays football!”

And that, I think to myself, is indeed a revelation. But did he get the irony of what he just said? Sadly, I doubt it.

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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Long Ago and Far Away by Gillian

Long ago and far away, I lived in paradise. It was quiet and peaceful, a land of green farm-studded hills comprised of green sheep-studded fields. No-one locked their doors. There were few cars. A tiny tinny church bell rang one monotonous note every Sunday morning. No peels from bell ringers here, just one old farmer pulling on an old frayed rope, and we all answered it’s call; not from religious zeal but because we wanted to chat with our neighbors, who lived many stones’ throw away.

What a wonderful life!

What claptrap!

Nostalgia, it has been said, is the longing for a place and time you couldn’t wait to get away from. I do have wonderful memories, real or imagined, of that past life, but I do not want to return to it. It did not encompass the GLBT world I am now able to inhabit. I was condemned to act a part on reality’s stage rather than live my real life. I couldn’t be who I really was. I couldn’t even know who I really was.

In High School English class, two of the works we studied were Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam. These days we all know about old Oscar and the troubles he got himself into, but all that study of his wonderful writing never once led us to any discussion of his personal life. My elderly Welsh teacher would not have had a clue how to deal with any of that; nor would she have wanted to. Oscar himself had been well out of the closet, but we had booted him back in and slammed the door.

Tennyson is not as well known today as Wilde. His writing has never been interpreted on stage or screen, though In Memoriam has given us that familiar sentiment that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

As with Wilde, we spent endless school hours analyzing and dissecting the writing; the four line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetrameter. But never the man. Nothing was up for discussion on the fact that Tennyson spent seventeen years of his life writing this poem of love for, and in grief over the death of, another man. In doing that, he certainly came well out of his closet, but again society had shoved him back in.

I sometimes fear that all these English Lit. studies gave me was the ability to trot out endless quotations to fit just about any given situation, and wonder why memorizing everything was such a large part of our education. But in fact these lessons gave me much more; the very special gift of a love of literature.

Tennyson still brings tears to my eyes, and when I return to In Memoriam I find he speaks to me so clearly after all these years, and perhaps even more clearly to the lost soul I was then, in that closeted world where I studied his words.

So runs my dream, but what am I?

An infant crying in the night

An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry.

How better to describe me, in that cold dark closet, long ago and far away?

The past is another country, and, in the way of other countries, a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

© September 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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Humor by Gillian

My parents both had a wonderful sense of humor, though each quite different from the other.

My mother loved words, so much of her humor involved quotations, jokes, and stories. She filled up dozens of little notebooks with such things and, apparently as a reminder to herself, lest she should slacken, an embroidered wall hanging pronounced that the day is wasted in which one has not laughed. Painfully correct grammar for such a relaxed sentiment.

As an elementary school teacher in an old two-room school she reveled in stories told by or about the children she taught, laughing the more with every telling. She would start giggling like a little kid herself. “Oh, you will never believe what little Jimmy Owen said this morning……..” and she was off.

My father’s humor, on the other hand, was, like him, much more quiet. Most frequently it necessitated no word at all, but rather an almost imperceptible eyebrow twitch, or my favorite, the one naughty wink, in my direction. Somehow I always understood what the joke was, what my dad’s gesture was indicating. I think we shared some very special intuitive connection there. Unlike my mum’s happy giggling, which lit up a room, my dad and I sat in silence without even our lips twitching to acknowledge our inner laughter. Oh such delicious secrets we shared in our secret mirth.

Rather unfortunately, I suppose, when my father did use a few words to facilitate some humor, it was usually at my mother’s expense though it was just silliness, never mean. And in a whole lifetime she never stopped setting herself up. “….you will never believe what little Jimmy Owen said this morning….” Dad solemnly winks at me and rises from the chair, heading to the door. “Edward! I was telling a funny story…” “Well, maybe we don’t want to hear something we’ll never believe…” And they’re off.

“Oh, Edward, honestly! You know it’s just an expression!” He sits obediently back down and hears her story, which is wonderfully amusing in it’s own right. We’ve had our little bit of fun.

As I grew older, I sometimes initiated the silent joke with my dad, although it had to be via a wink as I never learned to do the eyebrow-twitch thing in spite of endless hours of teenage practice before the mirror. I also, from quite a young age, spent considerable time and effort making my mother laugh. She loved to laugh and I loved to laugh with her, but one of my main youthful entertainments was making her giggle at inappropriate times and places.

It was the equivalent connection with my mother that the wink was with my father. She pretended to try to make me behave but really she loved it. I made her giggle in church, at school, during concerts and speeches. I especially liked to get her going somewhere like on the bus, where there was no bathroom. Her bladder-control was nothing to brag about and laughter could bring about some challenging results. “Ooooh Gillian, STOPPIT!” She’d whisper, shuffling in the seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

A teenage girl of the Fifties I had heard rumors that when a woman said no she really meant yes, and I have to say that in my mother’s case, with humor, it was true. The more she fought to control her helpless daughter-induced giggles during the graveside service, the more she loved it.

My parents had lost two children to meningitis before I was born, and I truly believe some intuition told me that it was my job to cheer them along. In any case, it served to bring humor to all three of us, and that’s a gift from the gods if ever there was.

My father developed dementia in his eighties, and had no idea who I was. He no longer winked at me, and my wink to him brought no response. My mother, amazingly, still had the embroidered laugh injunction beside her bed in the Nursing Home, though a broken hip had reduced the humor, along with most positive emotional and physical abilities, to a minimum.

If you ask me what is the greatest thing I inherited from my parents, I would say my sense of humor. If you ask me what I miss most I would say their sense of humor. And my father’s wonderful, wicked, wink.

© 2 February 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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How Did I Get Here? by Gillian

How did I get here, to Denver?

The Queen Elisabeth ocean liner and the Greyhound bus.
Why? Because I was madly if secretly in love with a woman who was madly if secretly in love with a young Englishman finishing his Ph. D. at Ann Arbor in Michigan.

I would have followed her anywhere.

We left the port of Southampton on the South coast of England on a pouring wet day, surprise surprise, in October 1964. There were wild storms gathering in the North Atlantic but we were intrepid adventurers caring nothing for weather forecasts. Now at that time the Queen Elizabeth was the largest most luxurious ship afloat and the U.S.A not exactly uncharted territory so we were not quite jumping off into the wilderness, but we were in the spirit of the thing for sure.
This was indeed a magnificent ship and I was truly saddened when, in 1972, it sank ignominiously under mysterious circumstances in Hong Kong Harbor.

But I digress.

The crossing took six days and we had one relatively calm day at each end. The other four days made for one wild ride.
In 1955 “Lizzie,” as she was always affectionately known to the Brits, had been fitted with stabilizers. These cut down the amount of roll by over 50% but, because they head the ship directly into the waves, they increase the vertical displacement. The result, in the bow at least, is the feeling of constantly rising and falling hundreds of feet in an express elevator.

The bow was, of course, where the Third Claass bars and restaurants and ballrooms were located. We were referred to as Steerage passengers, however, because our cabins resided in the stern, within the endless roar of the huge propellers. (Though by that time, the official term had been changed to the more appealing Tourist Class)

1964 Cunard brochure picture

It never occurred to me to resent the luxury and relatively smooth ride of First Class. They could not possibly be having this much fun!

This endless elevator ride got to most passengers sooner or later but a handful of us, the intrepid adventurers, slid happily off our barstools, clambered bravely back on, and watched mesmerized as the huge windows pointed to the sky then sank seemingly forever beneath the water.

Each wave crest was accompanied by rather terrifying shudders and groans from the tortured body of the ship as it rested, horizontal for one moment, before crashing down into the trough.

The several sets of stairs were among our many activities. Going up or down them as they morphed from almost horizontal to vertical was certainly challenging, especially after an hour or two in the bar. Those with deck access were also pouring with water, adding to the overall fun.

I never got sick but my head felt as if it would explode after the first twenty-four hours in that express elevator. Each time we reached the wave’s crest it seemed as if the top of my head was lifted from the rest of my skull, then as we crashed it was pushed down behind my eyes and nose, my neck straining to hold it up.

In the narrow bunk at night invisible springs pushed up in the middle of my back, then a huge weight pressed down on my stomach. It was not conducive to sleep but the previous hours in the pitching bar took care of that.

After two days, the Captain decided we were ready for some variations in entertainment. Apparently, though none of us would have sworn to it, the storm had somewhat abated. We had lost time and, with a schedule to keep, would travel the rest of our way without the stabilizers, enabling us to regain some of that lost time.

I didn’t mention to anyone that my head was grateful for that turn of events, but little did I understand what lay in store.
The elevator rides certainly became less lengthy and a little less speedy, but were now accompanied by drastic sideways rolls seemingly every bit as pronounced as the vertical movements had been.

Serious sea-sickness prevailed.

Meals, for those intrepid explorers still with appetites, were nothing short of a circus. Wooden slats perhaps three inches high had been raised along the table edges to prevent dishes crashing to the pitching, rolling floor.
The Americans among us did reasonably well, grasping their plates in the left hand, their forks in the right, and shoveling in the food with all possible speed.

The Brits were a sad, hungry, helpless lot. We found it genetically impossible to eat without a fork in the let hand and a knife in the right. That left no hand available to retain the plate, which slid forward and back, left and right, at alarming speeds and gave little opportunity to capture your prospective meal. If you were really lucky some gallant American, having wolfed down his repast with comparative ease, would hold your plate for you. Otherwise you simply chased it around the table, knife and fork poised at the ready, as it careened like a pinball around the table.
With the stabilizers retracted and the storm abated, oh ha ha, activities resumed full pace. Can you even imagine playing ping-pong or pool under these conditions? Steerage, sadly, had no swimming pool but I had wonderful visions of swimmers being beached ignominiously on one pool side while the water sloshed back to the other.

The ballroom opened up and the live band played determinedly if rather staggeringly through all the favorite dance tunes. Now this was the age of touchy feely dancing when you actually had a partner whom you touched and, yes, there were proscribed dance steps.

The waltz and the foxtrot, remember them?
Slow, slow, quick quick, slow.

In that ballroom it was more like slow, slow, quick quick quick quick quick as the floor lurched, then wham wham wham against the starboard wall.

Followed by another sequence of slow, slow, quick quick quick quick quick and wham wham wham against the portside wall.

For the intrepid explorers, a laugh a minute!

No, we didn’t end up on Ellis Island but in a cold tin roof shed on Pier 41 with officials giving a perfunctory glance at suitcases and passports. Long before the age of terrorism.
Various jobs in various cities followed, until someone said, as I lamented the hot marshes of Houston, why not go to Denver?

So I did, and found God’s country.

I worked as a waitress at the White Spot café on Colfax, I sold clothes at the brand new May D&F store downtown, I slaved at the PizzaPlenty near DU.

I saved money for my return trip to a gray, still war-torn England.

“IBM’s hiring,” someone said, deftly twirling a pizza crust.
“Up in Boulder. Paying a fortune.”

And a fortune it was. $82 a week I started out at, four times what I had ever made since arriving in this land of opportunity.

I had found a home with beautiful scenery, near perfect climate, and I had a great job.

I never left.

The 1969 postcard I sent my parents upon my arrival in the USA

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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The Long Wrong Road by Gillian

My mother thought it was the wrong road, anyway, this railroad rushing us off in the wrong direction. And I knew, in the way only a child can know these things, that it was all my father’s fault.

I was about four and we were leaving our comfortable home in a quiet village in the genteel gently rolling south of England for the untamed and unsophisticated rugged sheep farming hill country of the Welsh border, where my dad grew up. His parents were no longer capable of living alone, he was an only child with no one else to share the responsibility so he was doing the only thing he could do, as they categorically refused to move south to live with us. We had to go to live with them.

So Dad quit his job, something that became quite a hobby with him over the years, and we moved to another world.

My mother was not happy.

I was perfectly happy. Too young to have formed attachments to any place, I was simply reveling in this new train ride experience.

Travel having been severely restricted during World War Two, which had recently ended, I had never met any of my grandparents. I don’t think I quite grasped the concept. I certainly had no storybook image in my head of the classic rosy-cheeked plump and cuddly grandmother beaming over her flowered apron and offering fresh-baked cookies. Just as well. I would have been sorely disappointed. My grandmother was as eaten up with resentment towards my grandfather for years, as my mother was towards my dad on that train ride.

My mother’s ground to a halt not long after we arrived at the end of our wrong road, she adjusted as people do, but my grandmother kept her anger well fed and it flourished.

My grandfather was what we would call these days a recovering alcoholic. In those days he was just one of several local drunks. The fact that he no longer touched the booze seemed to be ignored and he was still thought of as a drunk by neighbors and family alike. Certainly my grandmother never gave him any credit, nor even acknowledgement, for having quit.

He had drunk his way out of a good job, lost the lovely old house that they had owned when my dad was a little boy, and had to settle for moving to the cold dark damp dreary dwelling I now found myself living in.

My grandfather rarely spoke, or moved for that matter. He sat in his armchair beside the fireplace, which rarely had a fire in it, hour after hour, doing nothing. For all the attention he paid us, we all might as well not have been there. At least he was harmless, unlike my grandmother. Far from showing even a spark of gratitude for my parents’ sacrifice, she acted as if she hated us all. She never spoke a civil word to anyone, but droned on with an endless litany of complaints. She walked with the aid of a cane, and any time I was foolish enough to get anywhere near her she took a vicious swipe at me with the thing. I learned very fast to stay a good cane-length away!

You might possibly think that she and my mother, both resenting having been forced down that long wrong road by their husbands, might have bonded a little but this was most certainly not to be. That house was not a place of bonding.

Looking back after I had come to know my maternal grandparents I can certainly appreciate how hard all this was on my mother. Her parents were very different. Her mother actually did approach the storybook image, and my Irish maternal grandpa was one of the delights of my later youth. He was a stonemason, creating gravestones from the local marble. I loved to sit and watch him, and occasionally I was even allowed to help. He sang while he worked, or regaled my fascinated ears with endless fantastical tales in which I doubt there was an ounce of truth.

They lived in a gorgeous rambling old house, built in 1742. It was light and warm with welcome, and different in every way from that of my other grandparents, the one in which I was to grow up. But I was just a kid, and I was oblivious to all the negatives of our new life. With the exception of that flailing walking stick, I loved it all. We had dogs and cats and chickens and pigs and a goat. Surrounded by farms, I was free to wander wherever I chose as long as I carefully closed all farm gates. I made friends with staring-eyed sheep and slobbering cows and hairy-hoofed horses. What did I care if the house was dark and cold, had no running water, no electricity, no indoor toilet? Having to shiver my way to the far end of the yard, stumbling in the waving flashlight beam, to the rickety old outhouse, was all fuel to the fire of my new life adventure.

My grandfather died not long after our arrival and my mother commented that she rather expected my grandmother to dance on his grave. I couldn’t imagine this at all and quite looked forward to it but in the event she did not even go to his funeral.

My grandmother, I never called her grandma either out loud or in my head, died about two years later. I could well imagine my mother dancing on her grave, and she did attend the funeral but simply looked suitably somber.

Now we were free to return to the civilized south. I lived in terror of this announcement for some time, life was much more fun on the wild Welsh border as far as I was concerned, but eventually I realized I need not worry. By that time, my mother had returned to teaching in the nearby elementary school where she taught before marrying my dad. My dad had a good job not too far away, we made improvements to the house, and we stayed. But somehow it felt as if my grandmother’s misery had invaded the very walls. She would not go away.

Years later, home for Xmas from college, I was helping my parents clear out the old cellar and what should surface but that gnarled old walking cane. I held it up and we all started to laugh. My dad took it from me and calmly sawed it into four short pieces, which he handed solemnly to me. Without a word, we went back upstairs into the living room where these days a hearty fire roared, and I equally solemnly placed the lengths of wood on the fire. Silently we watched until they were completely consumed. My grandmother was gone.

© October 2011 

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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Culture Shock by Gillian

After what seemed a fairly short, swift journey, I had arrived at a strange place. I could feel the mist of Culture Shock swirling as I became aware of everything around me. Many things were familiar, yet apparently seen from an unaccustomed angle. I spoke the language, but not as well as I would have liked, or felt I should. I was somewhat taken aback by this feeling of strangeness; unfamiliarity. I had never been there before but had read up extensively on the place, yet obviously had not got the vision quite right. I had maps, which I had expected to be at least adequate, but now they seemed to bear little resemblance to the lay of the land.

Old Age is a strange place; don’t fool yourself, as you approach, that you know all about it. You don’t. Culture Shock awaits.

I had expected to reach old age at a steady pace, closing in on it year by year, but in fact it wasn’t like that at all. My psychological flight arrived in this strange land and suddenly here I am. Old.

I know that these days seventy is just the youth of old age, but it is old age nevertheless, albeit the early stages. And out of the blue it hit me one day not so long ago. I am old.

I arrived in this place partly via the aches and pains of arthritis, the unaccustomed urge for afternoon naps, and the disappearance of nouns from my vocabulary. I haven’t quite accepted that I actually am this person. Who is this Oldie masquerading as me? She walks a mile and starts chuntering on about how her knee will hurt tomorrow. She falls asleep in front of the TV, in spite of that newly discovered joy, afternoon naps. She can never find her car keys no matter how absolutely sure she is of where she left them, and she blanks out on her neighbor’s name.

It’s all part of that business of familiar things not feeling exactly as they should.

Then of course there’s the visual. Some days I look in the mirror and see my father; sometimes my mother. I see a recent photo and am shocked by the wrinkled neck and baggy eyes, and again I see my mother or father, rather than me. I seem to be disappearing into some ancestral version of myself.

And it’s not just how I feel and what I see, but what I hear. I almost speak the lingo, I possess a reasonable vocabulary, but much of it doesn’t resonate with me, rather like speaking the basics of a foreign language but missing the nuances, the subtleties. It’s all about 24/7 and sexting and texting, RAMs and blogs and twitters and tweets. Nouns have morphed into verbs. It’s about the “F” word, and many other words rarely heard in my youth, scattered liberally and without purpose throughout even the most erudite of conversations.

It’s also about what I use, as well as what I feel, see, and hear.. We who suffer this Culture Shock have dealt with endless technological innovations throughout our lives. We have struggled from no phones to wind-up phones to heavy bakelite with rotary dials to push-button to cordless to cell phones. And now we have smart phones. In my opinion they should be called outsmart phones because they outsmart a lot of old folks. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re the smart ones. We know enough to know we don’t need them.

Any time I have to unplug the various attachments from my TV – cable box, DVD player, roku box – I have to photograph how it’s all hooked up, first, to protect myself from hours of frustration later; which I do, of course, with my digital camera. Yes, some unfamiliar familiar things, I must confess, are wonderful. I still have my mother’s 1930s folding camera, but you don’t have to go back much more than twenty years to remember the slow, cumbersome, expensive processes accompanying the old film cameras

Indeed, Culture Shock is not necessarily a bad thing. It challenges us, focuses our brains, and stimulates adrenaline.

But Old Age is a worrisome place. We worry not only about our own futures, but also those of our offspring, our country, and indeed the world. With the threat of climate change hanging over us, we worry about the very survival of the human race. I think all “wrinklies”, throughout human history, have had the same worries for the future. Growing up, I heard my grandparents and parents, and many others of their generations, say things like, “Even though I lived through two World Wars I’m so glad I lived when I did. I dread to think what the future holds…”

I suppose they worried over the propensity of atom and hydrogen bombs and the Cold War; the rapidly increasing numbers of unmarried mothers and divorces, the exponential increases in crimes of all kinds but especially violent crimes, and the unheralded rush of people to the ever-expanding sinful cities. But we survived everything they worried about, and more. We dealt with it, so why don’t we have faith in our grandchildren that they will handle a changing challenging world just as we did, and all will be well? This future-fear just seems to go with the territory. I bet there were oldies sitting round campfires shaking their heads over the invention of the wheel, and surely Adam and Eve knew that the Garden was going to need environmental protection from the ravening hordes of the younger generations.

We can’t see the future and so we fear no good will come of it. We prefer, more and more the longer we live in Old Age, the past. And probably we remember it through ever more rosily tinted glasses. The journey to Old Age seems shorter, more condensed, as I age. My sense of time past is a little skewed. Not long ago I chanced to refer, to some young thing, to the fact that we all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot. The look I got caused me to pause for calculation. Of course, not only was this teenager not yet born on that dark November day in 1963: neither were his parents.

But there is one wonderful, wonderful, thing about life in Old Age. I am finally, completely, at peace with who I am, relaxed comfortably in my skin, and I believe many other oldies are too. And I am not just talking about GLBT people; I think it’s true for many of any persuasion. After what for some has been almost an entire lifetime’s struggle, we can relax. We know who we are, we are who we are, and we are all done apologizing for it, even, or perhaps especially, to ourselves. It’s something of a paradox, as I have just said that I sometimes can scarcely recognize this oldie me. But I am more than simply the sum of all I feel, see, hear, and do.

Deep inside my spirit is untouched by Culture Shock. I am at peace.

© 23 November 2012

 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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Eerie by Gillian

Cats.

It’s all about cats.

I love cats, but, face it, they are not completely of this earth. They inhabit a slightly different plane, or at least they see this one very differently. Anyone who has spent much time in the company of a cat knows this. They sit completely still and stare fixedly at something in the corner that none of us can see. They wake from one of a dozen daily dozes to rush off into another room for no reason that we can comprehend.

Growing up as I did in a farming community, everyone had cats. Mostly they were of the marginally domesticated kind who lived in the barns and sheds and fed primarily on the other critters living there. Before the days of spaying, they reproduced prodigiously and the kittens were traditionally drowned as soon as they were discovered.

My mother discovered Delilah with her latest brood, burrowed into a pile of leaves under a hedge, and my poor father was summoned to do the dastardly deed. A gentle, kind-hearted man, he hated this job, which always fell to him. He waited until Delilah had temporarily vacated her position, scooped up the kittens and did the dirty deed. A couple of days later we discovered Delilah, again, half asleep and purring lazily behind a hay bale, curled lovingly around a single kitten.

Had she known what was about to happen? Had she figured one was better than none? And how did she know that not one of us could even begin to think of depriving her of her hidden child? The Mona Lisa look she gave us, an extraordinary yet eminently decipherable mixture of triumph and challenge and love, seemed to answer all our questions.

    
My Mother with Delilah

When I was married we had a huge war-torn, old, yellow cat called FatCat. One day he jumped up onto my lap, nothing unusual, then pushed under the book I was trying to read, lying flat on my chest. He purred loudly, also nothing unusual. He pushed himself further up towards my face, with front paws on either side of my neck, and stared into my eyes.

I couldn’t say why this was so unnerving. There was simply something about the intensity of those eyes peering searchingly into mine as if trying to see something there, or perhaps actually seeing something there. Or yet again, it was more as if he was trying to tell me something. I threw him roughly off me, at which he and my husband both gave me a surprised look. 
“He was staring into my soul.” No of course I didn’t say that. “He was digging his claws in my neck,” was all I actually said, feigning nonchalance.
FatCat gave me a disappointed look like a parent might cast upon a child who has let him down, and stalked off. A few hours later I received a phone call that my mother had died, peacefully in her bed as the saying goes but in my mother’s case it was true, in England. When I adjusted for the time difference, my mom had died right around the time that old FatCat was peering into my eyes.
OK OK it’s all coincidence and a product of that kind of overactive imagination that kicks in around the death of a loved one.

I knew that.

I know that.

But there’s a tiny spark in me that still somehow manages to wonder.

FatCat
© 5 March 2012

 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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A Visiting Doctor by Gillian

Yes, I’m going back to the days when rather than you visiting the doctor, he, or very occasionally, she, came to visit you. Doctors of those days tend to suffer from a certain type-casting. In the old Western movies they are usually gruff, monosyllabic, and the town doctor frequently doubles as the town drunk. In British period pieces, the village doctor tends to be gruff, monosyllabic, usually Scottish, and enjoying a dram, or two, or three, of an evening beside the smoky fire.
My grandmother had fallen into something between a deep sleep and a coma, so my dad walked to the nearest pub where he borrowed the phone to call Dr. MacElroy. Now those of you who have paid attention have met my paternal grandmother before, and will remember that there was no love lost between my grandmother and my mother and me, or even my father, her own son. She showed none of us any affection. All I ever learned from her, as the dog and cat learned even faster than I did, was to stay a walking cane’s length away or I would get a whack from that cane apparently just on principle; I didn’t actually have to do anything to deserve it.

Enter the gruff, monosyllabic and very Scottish Dr. MacElroy, breezing up in his brand-new Austin-Healey Sprite, a zippy little sports car from which my father had great difficulty diverting his hungry gaze. The good doctor shuffled his way up the dark staircase to Grandma’s bedroom, and shortly shuffled his way back down again.

“Aye, she’s deeead.”

All three of us started in surprise and involuntarily glanced up at the ceiling through which sounds somewhere between labored breathing and snores issued.

Doctor MacElroy harrumphed into his scraggly moustache.
“ No’ now!” He glared at us irritably. “But she’ll no’ make it tae the kirk o’ Sunday.”

Seeing that I, in the few years I had so far inhabited this world, had never known my grandmother to go to church on Sunday or any other day, I didn’t find this assertion earth-shaking.

The next day he appeared again, skidding to a halt in a spray of gravel, his brisk driving the very antithesis of his slow, shuffling gait, not to mention his slow, shuffling personality. Again he huffed and puffed his way upstairs and down, only to declare,

“Aye, it’s o’er.”

Not one of us was fooled into looking up towards the stentorian snoring this time, and he departed in another shower of gravel.

The next day when he arrived, all was silent above the living room.

“Aye,” he muttered on descending the stairs, and helped himself to a seat at the dining table in order to complete the death certificate. Over three days and three visits he had spoken a grand total of twenty words. I guess stereotypes are born and thrive simply because so many people really fit them, and Dr. MacElroy certainly fit the bill. I can never know whether he sipped a few shots of single malt by the fire on a winter’s evening, but as perfect as he was in every other way, how could he not?

Denver, 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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Cooking by Gillian

I have blamed my lack of enthusiasm for cooking on being a lesbian, and my mother, in varying percentages. However I know many lesbians who love to cook, so decided it came down to my mother. She cooked as necessary for my dad and me, but it was always apparent that it was more of a chore than a pleasure; my attitude exactly to cooking for my family, although I managed to keep four teenage stepchildren from complaining too much. I’m not sure whether that’s a testament to my unexciting but perfectly palatable meals, however, or to their forbearance.

It was only later in life when, perhaps, you look back on things with at least slightly less distortion, I realized that for most of the years that I lived at home, Britain was under severe food rationing. In a world where many things, including practically anything imported, were simply unavailable, and what was available severely rationed, no wonder she lacked a certain enthusiasm. Doubtless some women reveled in the challenge of creating gourmet wonders from dried egg substitute (though we did get one real egg per week) and substituting ground potato for just about anything and frying sausages that were 90% bread crumbs. My mother was not among them.

I still have one of her cookbooks from that time and some of the recipes are astounding:

Carrot Fudge: well the thought’s enough to gag you. But, hey, the recipe was simple and easy; grate and cook as many carrots as you can spare, flavor with anything available; juice squeezed from fruit in season, artificial vanilla, left-over tea. Add gelatin, cook a few minutes, spoon into a flat dish. Leave to set then cut into cubes.
Yummm

Or there was SpaMghetti, which called for spaghetti, four eggs from reconstituted egg substitute, one half can of SPAM (God Bless America,) ¼ cup grated cheese (or grated potato if not available), onions and parsley, pepper and salt, as available. While spaghetti is boiling cook other ingredients in margarine if available or lard if available or water if nothing else is available.

Now you just try working up a fervor for that!

And, looking back, my poor mother did try so hard.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a very early birthday. I think I was three or possibly four. Mum produced, with a grand flourish, a birthday cake. Surpri-ise! Well I doubt my brain actually had a grasp of any such concept. Rationing allowed us very little in the way of cake at all, and I’m not sure if I had ever even seen a real pre-war style frosted cake, let alone tasted one. Only many years later did I have the remotest concept of the hording of ingredients and the trading of coupons this production must have cost.

It smelled delicious. I remember that.

And I was not the only one who thought so.

The dog sprang from the fireside mat, gained the table in one quick lunge, knocked the cake on the floor, and inhaled it. Apparently she, being considerably older than I, did recognize such pre-war visions of taste-treat sensation.

My mother was inconsolable. She wept. She roughly shoved the dog outside – about as close to animal cruelty as Mum would ever get. My dad shook his head and clicked his tongue and said, “Never mind,” – about as close to verbosity as he would ever get.

I remember feeling very confused at all this drama and then I sat down on the floor beside the remains of the shattered cake and scooped up finger loads into my mouth. It was delicious. Who could fault the dog?

I started to giggle. My mother, who always had a good sense of humor, soon joined in.

Dad, looking much relieved, winked solemnly at me and sat beside me on the floor, jabbing big hairy fingers into flattened frosting.

As he had anticipated, my mother responded with a disgusted, “Oh Edward! Get up!” but we both knew that secretly she was delighted with our response and our evident delight at her cake, even if it was not served quite as she intended.

She even relented and let the dog back in eventually, to clean up the dregs my dad and I had left on the kitchen linoleum.

There were still years of rationing to follow, but I don’t recall Mum ever going for the Big Cake Event again, and she certainly did not once rationing ended and cakes were readily available in the local bakery. So, whether or not it originated with rationing, who knows? (Though Brits of my generation and up do so love to blame the Germans.)

All I know for sure is, I’m with her. A woman’s place is no longer in the kitchen, and I would rather spend my time writing my silly short stories.

And as it’s almost Thanksgiving I shall close with a relevant quote from Erma Bombeck?

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times takes twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Lakewood, 2012

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.