Tag: Gillian

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Reading, by Gillian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’

But it does. It matters very much.

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

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

and probably run home to mother.

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

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

With a real woman like that, who needs fiction?

© November 2017

About the Author

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

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Hope, by Gillian

In my early days of working for IBM, on the bottom rung of the jobs ladder, I had a sign hanging by my workstation. It read,

I FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW THAT
I’VE COMPLETELY GIVEN UP HOPE.

I don’t know why I found this so amusing, but I did. Of course, as soon as I advanced to the next rung of the ladder I had to trash it, but I and my co-workers enjoyed it at the time – indeed it became quite a catch phrase for a while.

Perhaps it seemed funny at the time because I was, then, so far from giving up hope. I was full of hope and dreams. It was 1966; the midst of the swinging sixties with their promise of change and freedom. I was twenty-four and had a job which paid more than I had ever dreamed of making – eighty-four dollars a week. My future was awash with wonders! I was not to be disappointed. My life became awash with wonders, as it still is.

But the words from that silly little sign have never left my head. They pop up from time to time. There are certain circumstances when I find them to be true. Hope is not always your best friend; certainly not when it morphs into denial. On one visit to England to see my parents, I noticed a certain confusion of thinking in my dad. Oh well! I shrugged it off. He was, after all, in his seventies. It was only to be expected. (He was, of course, the age I am now – something else I would rather not think too much about.) Filled with false hope I returned to Colorado, only to be summoned back across the Pond after a few months, to deal with the reality of Dad’s dementia, which had worsened rapidly. My mother and I were both forced to abandon our hopes that he could remain at home and I set about learning my way through the bureaucracy of the British National Health Care System. I felt much better then, having abandoned all hope. Dad ended up in a facility for those with dementia in what was once the work-house in a local town. It was a very grim-looking building, but inside they had done everything possible to make it bright and cheerful, and the staff was wonderful. And it was free. I don’t think Alzheimer existed back then, and we didn’t have the knowledge of dementia which, sadly, we do now, but I knew enough to know there was no hope; that he would only get worse. The next, and last, time I saw him, he had no idea who I was. That was hard, but nothing like the shock it would have been had I been harboring false hopes.

One of my stepsons suddenly developed juvenile diabetes when he was eleven years old. Out of the blue, no more Xmas cookies, no birthday cake, no more of most of the food he loved. On top of that came the prospect of having to give himself an insulin injection every day of the rest of his life, and having constantly to measure and adjust his sugar levels. He cried. He raged. He threw things. He punched out at any of us who tried to hold him. Then suddenly, after a few crazy days, everything changed. He had given up hope and accepted his new reality. Of course he was not happy about it, but he had stopped fighting it. He is now retired from a lifetime at the post office, living happily in Nevada with his wife and large extended family. He told me once that the only time his diabetes really upset him was on a few occasions when he heard of the possibility of some big medical breakthrough, and felt a surge of new hope only to have it dashed. He had learned that hope was better avoided.

I have known people, and heard of many more, who, on receiving the terrible diagnosis of a terminal illness, were able to be at peace with it once they truly accepted that there was no hope. That is really living in the now, as our spiritual teachers would have us do. Hope is one of many things which prevent our doing that. We can never be fully in the present moment if we are forever dwelling in hopes and dreams of some future moment.

On the other hand, hopes and dreams of that better future can help those who see nothing to be grateful for in their ugly now. We recently watched a TV program, doubtless on PBS, about children growing up in poverty in this country. It was striking how many teenage boys found an incentive to stay in school, and more than that, to do well in their studies, because they hoped to get a football scholarship to college and go from there to professional football. It offered them at least a hope of a way out. What happens when they find they are not to belong to that tiny percentage of footballers, I don’t know. Has hope set them up for a mighty fall, or have they by virtue of that very hope, found some other way out?

What the Tangerine Tyrant did to his voters is nothing short of cruel. (See, I just cannot get through one story without him creeping into it!) He gave gullible people hope; but false hope.

By now most of theirs must be crashing down. Where are the re-opened mines and factories they were promised? Where is the nice clean swamp? And now, certainly, what has happened to that tax break? Oh, it suddenly became a tax increase. And they are about to lose their healthcare. No, he has taken away what hope they had and left them much worse than they were before.

You just have to get your mind off all this stuff, so thank goodness for football season! I don’t care that the Broncos are having the worst season in over fifty years. At least they know how to do it right. They are not only bad, they are spectacularly bad. Every week they fail to disappoint.

Yesterday they managed to have not one but two safeties scored against them. No team has done that since 1961. I mean, how good is that at being bad? Very clearly, they will not turn this season around.

I FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW THAT
I’VE COMPLETELY GIVEN UP HOPE.

© December 2017

About the Author

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

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Empathy, by Gillian

Hmm … tricky. But so wonderful. Empathy eliminates hate, resentment, envy, in fact most negative emotions you can name. It replaces them with peace for the soul. But it’s not easy.

Perhaps some people are just naturally given easier access to it than others, but I believe we can all improve our capacity for empathy no matter the starting point.

Empathy requires the ability to see through another’s eyes, to feel what they feel and to stand in their shoes. For me, that requires some commonality with that person. In general I find a more intuitive empathy with a woman, for instance, than with a man. I frequently am able to find that empathy with men but it requires more work; more of a thought process to get me there. I easily empathize with the poor and dispossessed. I know, as many of us do, that my good life has come to me purely by chance. We look at the sad people on the street corner and say, there but for the grace of God go I. Most people can feel empathy with a child; we have all been one. All of us in this room, by our age, find easy empathy with grief. We have all felt it. Surely the entire LGBT community feels a kind of collective empathy, it’s one of the reasons we like to be together. We don’t have to explain ourselves to each other.

There is a great deal of talk of sexual harassment/abuse in the last couple of weeks. I immediately empathize with the woman, but have a struggle with the man. I can honestly say that I have never ever grabbed at or fondled any man or woman in any way inappropriately. Nor have I ever had any urge to do so. But if I think as honestly as I truly can about the lesser varieties of what we now term sexual harassment, I begin to see it through the man’s eyes. Men of our generation have lived in confusing times. I honestly think that most, certainly many, who acted incorrectly, really believed that women wanted what men wanted. We had to put up some token objection because our mothers said we should, but we didn’t really mean it; that old no really means yes syndrome. All too frequently, our protests did perhaps lack conviction. We were in a quandary. If we came on too strong with an ego-deflating rejection then the man, almost inevitably in a position of power over us, might take revenge. We would lose our job, or fail to get that deserved promotion or starring role. Or the man held some respected position in the community: priest, schoolteacher, doctor, lawyer, who would believe us if we spoke out? So we kept quiet. Other women were bribed into silence, leaving others open to the same abuse. Not that I blame the women who got bought off. Oh no, empathy with them comes easy. Which would you choose? Door #1, behind which lies nothing but screaming tabloid headlines and endless character assassinations, or door #2 which opens onto an easy life with everything that twenty million dollars can buy? No contest. And so, sadly, in different ways, we women were complicit in our own demise while men, lacking much evidence to the contrary, convinced themselves that we really did want what they wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I am talking here of the relatively benign offenses causing perhaps more discomfort and embarrassment than true trauma. Anything remotely approaching physical violence, rape, or pedophilia lies way way beyond the scope of my empathy. Which leads inevitable to that incredibly revolting excuse for a human being, Judge Moore of Alabama, who lies somewhere in the outer reaches of darkness millions of light years away from that little flash of illumination coming from any feelings of empathy from me. He is triply out of reach to me because not only is his behavior reprehensible, but he continues to deny it, and then wraps it all up in the cloak of religion and The Bible. I make no attempt to see what he sees; it would be of nightmare ugliness.

Those who support him are every bit as bad; possibly worse. The Alabama State Auditor, for example, sees nothing wrong with Moore making sexual advances to a fourteen year-old.

“There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here…,” Ziegler stated. “… Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Hello-o out there! Did he miss the memo about The Immaculate Conception and The Virgin Birth?? Honestly, all you can do is shake your head in amazement. To raise one spark of empathy for these people I would need to think about it all for a very long time, and I have no stomach for that.

Every week when I start writing, I swear to myself that I will stay away from any mention of Trump, but somehow Agent Orange manages to insert himself. I have no empathy for Trump because I am not a sociopath, so cannot begin to stand in his shoes. But because he is, I truly believe, a sick man, I do not hate him either. Though when he so smugly promises us that ”big beautiful tax cut” for Xmas while in truth planning to raise our taxes and destroy our healthcare, I think just maybe I could.

Alas, empathy, like so many things, is a double-edged sword. The Orange Ogre (did I say I did not hate him??) stood in the shoes of a section of the country’s voters and saw what they saw. He felt their anger, resentment, and fear, and built it up to the fever pitch of “lock her up”. It was his very empathy with them, which he used with great cunning, which won him the election. (Though not without a little help from Putin and a shove over the line by the Electoral College.)

With the Trump voters, my empathy goes about half the distance to the goal. (Excuse the expression but we are in the midst of football season!) I can see the world through their eyes. I can feel their fear and anger and disillusion over a future of ongoing white male supremacy which they once felt was promised and which now seems to have been taken away. But I cannot accompany them into the divisiveness, bigotry, and hatred which accompanies their fears.

Since last year’s election our country seems to be enveloped in a stinking dark miasma of Trumpian vitriol. Yet I, ever the political pessimist, do feel some hope. And it comes to me via empathy. We call it Resistance, but what engenders that but empathy? Sure, we all have our own personal fears which propel us to resist the horrors of the Trump agenda, but the vast majority of American people demonstrate great empathy. We feel the terror of refugees denied sanctuary, the despair of deportees and their destroyed families, the terrible fears felt by the families of the nine million children who will lose the healthcare provided under the C.H.I.P. program unless Congress acts before year-end. We see through the eyes of those abandoned in the devastation that is Puerto Rico, and the 60,000 Haitians who learn they must abandon their lives in this country and return to Haiti.

We empathize. We get it. We resist. If Robert Mueller doesn’t save us, maybe our own empathy will. The bright light of empathetic resistance will dispel the threatening clouds of darkness. Maybe. Maybe that is our best hope. Maybe that is our last best hope. But then, I’m a political pessimist.

© November 2017

About the Author

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

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Clearly, by Gillian

Looking back over my life, at least the first forty or so years of it, very clearly I saw very little very clearly; both literally and figuratively.

From an early age I wore very thick glasses. Some time in my early to mid-forties I had laser surgery and discovered what seeing clearly really meant. Tests had always shown that I had 20/20 vision via my glasses, but it never offered the clarity with which I saw the world after that surgery. I cried tears of joy the next morning when I realized that I could lie in bed and clearly see the trees outside my window without first needing to grope around on my bedside table for my glasses. Betsy had to walk round the block with me when I first left the house, I was so disoriented. Everything seemed to jump up to meet me; too clear and too big and too close.

Twenty-five or so years later, my eyesight is deteriorating a little, and recently I discovered I have glaucoma, so perhaps my days of seeing so very clearly will be disappearing. Already I wear drugstore glasses for reading. That’s OK. I am just so grateful that I have not lived my entire life without ever knowing the real meaning of seeing clearly.

Oh, and how sincerely I mean that in the figurative sense as well. I could, I guess, have gone through my whole life without ever clearly seeing myself. Many have, many do, and many will in the future. And, yes, I am primarily talking about being GLBT but not that alone. Seeing yourself clearly, with all your complexities, is a serious life-long challenge. There’s an old Robert Burns poem which wishes that we all might have the gift to see ourselves as others see us. Sorry, Robbie, but I don’t see a solution there. Every one of you at this table sees me differently so I cannot imagine much more confusing than trying to see myself as every person I ever meet might see me. On the other hand, when I eventually came out to co-workers and friends there were a few who responded with well duh! looks or well I knew that kind of comments so if I’d seen myself as they saw me I might not have had to wait till my early forties to see it clearly for myself.

A good analogy of my coming-out-to-myself process I now see, looking back on it, as trying to see myself clearly via various visual depictions of myself. You know that famous Malevich painting, ‘The Black Square’? One version of it sold for the equivalent of a million dollars and, with due apologies to all sincere fans of purely abstract works, to me it looks like nothing more than a black square. Well, the first twenty or so years of my life, I might as well have been trying to see myself in that black square. Or as that black square. The more I looked the less I saw of me; hadn’t a clue. Or probably in fact the last thing I really wanted to see was me, and I was perfectly happy to see nothing more than a black square. By my late twenties I maybe had progressed to a vision of myself more akin to Suprematist Composition by the same artist, a jumble of confusion which I actually quite like, if not to the extent of the sixty million dollars for which it sold. I have always quite liked myself, but certainly saw myself as a jumbled confusion at this stage.

In my thirties I progressed to around the expressionism of Munch’s ‘The Scream’. Far from a realistic portrait but nevertheless clearly a scream – something I was feeling ready for about then. I was awash with frustration without knowing why. My life was good – no, it was great – so why wasn’t I satisfied? By my late thirties I had reached impressionism. You know, Monet’s water lilies etcetera, very clearly waterlilies but nevertheless a bit fuzzy.

And suddenly, in my early forties, I took one huge step for womankind; well – for me, anyway.

I saw myself as clearly as in any realist painting but more so. I saw the reality of my queerness with all the clarity of an award-winning National Geographic megapixel photograph.

But that, great breakthrough though it was, was all about being lesbian. I still had plenty more to look deeply into if I was truly to get a clear view of my whole self; all of me.

This group has been of immeasurable help in propelling me to dig really deep inside, to try to really see and understand what’s there and to be at peace with all of it – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Perhaps it explains the lack of appeal which purely abstract art has for me, and at the same time why I love photography. A photo can be so terrible it makes me cry or so beautiful it makes me cry, but I don’t have to wonder what it is, just as I no longer have to wonder who and what I am. I am here, I am queer, and I’m perfectly clear!

© November 2017

About the Author

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

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Ne Me Ouitte Pas / Don’t Leave Me, by Gillian

If You Go Away
has been recorded by many famous singers, but I first became aware of it with
the Neil Diamond* release in 1971.
It’s a sad song but I always liked it well enough, singing along with it on the
radio. I also had it on a Neil Diamond album on cassette.
If you go away
On this summer day
Then you might as
well
Take the sun away
………..
The refrain
is simply if you go away repeated four times.
I’m sure
many of you are familiar with the song.
I never
thought a whole lot about the lyrics until, several years later, I stumbled
upon the original version. In French, it was written in 1959 by Belgian
singer/songwriter Jacques Brel. Like it’s English counterpart, it has been
recorded by many artists in many languages: 24 to be precise. The English
adaptation was done by Rod McKuen and, sadly, to me, is a mere hint of the
beauty and power of the original French.
That was
when I began actually listening to the English lyrics of If You Go Away.
That phrase is undeniably poignant, but repeating it in sets of three several
times, in retrospect, seems a slight overkill. My life is going to be turned
upside down if you go away …… if you go away …… OK, I get
it. Somehow there seemed something slightly irritating about that conditional;
that if. It made me feel like grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking
him. Alright already! Apparently, it’s not yet a done deal so stop whimpering
in the corner and get up and fight! Do something about it!
There is a
middle passage of the song which turns hopeful.
But if you stay
I’ll make you a day
Like no day has been
Or will be again
………..
But …
really? Is that it? If I stay with you, I get one wonderful day. That’s it? No
more? Business as usual? Hardly a compelling argument. If I’m dying, if that’s why
I might go away, perhaps the offer might inspire me to the strength to hang on
just one more day. But to be realistic, it’s hardly likely to be the wonderful
one on offer, and even if it were I probably could not delay my leaving for
more than just one day.
No, the
English lyrics do not stand up to too much examination.
But the
French. Oh, the original French. What power. What tragedy. What pathos. We lost
everything when we translated the simple, ever-powerful, ne me quitte pas,
don’t leave me, into the somewhat insipid if you go away. (Of
course, I should not even use the word translate. If I had translated don’t
leave me into if you go away in my high school French exams, I’d
have flunked for sure. Poetic license can be a dangerous thing.)
Today it’s
easy to find an English translation of the original lyrics of Ne Me Quitte
Pas, as opposed to our English adaptation from the ’60’s. In the early
’80’s when I first discovered the original French version, my command of the
language was insufficient for me to gain more than a loose understanding of
most of the meaning. Now I know that the original, for instance of I’ll make
you a day etc, was –
I will offer you
Pearls made of rain
Coming from countries
Where it never rains
……….
Slightly
more imaginative. But what did it matter? All you really need is that
gut-wrenching repeated phrase: ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, don’t
leave me, don’t leave me.
My favorite
version** is by the inimitable Nina Simone,
American singer, songwriter, and political activist. Her throaty, almost
tear-filled, voice, is almost enough to make me cry without benefit of words.
The song haunts me. It leaps into my head each time one more friend or loved
one leaves this earth, which sadly happens more frequently as we age.
To stick
with French, it is a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart.
Ne me quite pas. Don’t leave me.
Although
sung in almost a whisper, it is a howl from the depth of the soul.
Ne me quitte pas. Don’t leave me.
It is a beg for mercy.
Ne me quitte pas. Don’t leave me.
Finally the words sink to their knees in
despair.
Ne  me  quitte 
pas.
Don’t   leave    me.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52B7ZWfJNHE
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q7w7gk1JhQ
© January 2017 
About the Author 
 I was born and
raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S.
and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder
area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four
stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself
as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years.
We have been married since 2013.
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Flowers, by Gillian

I was going to begin with the words, my mother loved flowers. But love is such an overused elasticated word that we are never sure just what it means, so I’ll simply say, flowers were among the most important things in my mother’s life. She rejoiced in the look, feel, and smell of them; the art and science of them. She caressed them with her fingers, her eyes and nose, and her mouth as she whispered their names to them. Not only could she identify any flower with its English name, but for many, she also knew the Botanical. As she read endlessly and traveled more she began eagerly to learn their names in French, German, Spanish, or alternate identities assigned to them in other English-speaking countries.
Take just one example; the simple buttercup. Being water-loving plants, these thrive in Britain. Where we lived they grew like weeds but that did nothing to diminish Mum’s appreciation both of and for them.
The morning sun shone on a cluster of the creeping variety, highlighting their soft golden glow still brightened by the dew.
‘Well, good morning my Beautiful Buttercups,’ she might greet them, whispering so as not to disturb them, very gently caressing the velvet gold petals with the tip of her little finger.
‘How are my favorite little Ranunculi this morning? My Ranunculus repens?’
Then perhaps she would slip into an attempt at a French accent.
‘My bouton d’Or.’
‘Coyote’s eyes’, she might add, in dreadfully Humphrey Bogart American.
She had read, somewhere, that in parts of the Pacific Northwest of the United States buttercups are called “Coyote’s eyes” by the native peoples. According to legend, an apparently very foolish coyote was tossing his eyes up in the air and catching them again when an eagle snatched them. Unable to see, the foolish, but evidently extremely creative coyote, made eyes from buttercups.
She would even offer up poems. In the case of the buttercups, all I remember was one by A.A. Milne, famously the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories, which Mum quoted as –
Head above the buttercups,
Walking by the stream,
Down among the buttercups,
Lost in a dream.
Having just this moment looked up the poem for the purposes of this story, I see that she was misquoting. The original begins –
Where is Anne?
Head above the buttercups,
Walking by the stream,
Down among the buttercups.
Where is Anne?
Walking with her man,
Lost in a dream.
How typical of my mother, I think now, that she should leave out the part about a man. Had there been mention of a child, she probably would have suppressed that, too. For her, I see through the magic of hindsight, love of flowers was a way to forget all humans and the pain that relationships with them can bring. She was safe with flowers. I used to witness the look in her eyes when she caressed them, and ache inside. She never looked at me like that. She didn’t caress me like that. Looking back now, I wonder if my dad ever wondered why she never treated him to such adoration either.
My father was the absolute opposite of my mother when it came to flowers, as was the case with most things. To him, they all belonged in a few very simple generic categories. A red flower was a rose, a blue one a bluebell, a white one a daisy, and a yellow one a dandelion. I think he really did have a genuine disinterest in flowers, quite typical of men of his time and place. Vegetables were a man’s plants. Flowers were women’s work. What good were they? You couldn’t eat them. They were simply a waste of valuable space. They harrumphed at their beauty and trampled their delicacy. Dad didn’t want to destroy them, he simply had no interest in them. But I do think his extreme disinterest and feigned ignorance was at least to some extent simply to tease my mother. Referring to a beautiful bed of dancing daffodils, Mum’s precious narcissus, jonquil, daffadowndilly, as dandelions, or the papery translucent lily as a daisy, was inevitable met with a very irritated, ‘Oh, Edward!’ from Mum and a broad wink from my father to me. Did he persist in this as much when I was not there? I have to wonder now.
Whatever the human dynamics, flowers were a source of much joy to my mother throughout her life. My example of the buttercup was played out with practically every flower she ever encountered, whether nurtured in the garden or wild in the woods. The last time I saw her I arrived at the nursing home with an armful of lilacs from a friend’s garden. She reached out her arms; not to embrace me but to gather the flowers to her.
‘Oh, Syringa!’ she whispered: burying her face in the blossoms, burying her nose in the delicious fragrance. A young girl just bringing in the tea looked at me in puzzlement. She was the daughter of someone I went to school with and new my name perfectly well. She scuttled out as fast as she could when Mum broke into –
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
She had a remarkable memory. I do not. I had to look this up from what little of it I could remember, eventually tracking it down in a poem by Walt Whitman.
The second verse reads –
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
I had to laugh, even after all these years. Of course, it would be the first verse she quoted, ignoring the second where humans inserted themselves, again unwanted.
It’s OK Mum, I tell her now. We all hope to find whatever gets us through the night. And what could anyone find, in their hour of need, offering more uplift for the spirit, more peace for the soul, than flowers?
© February 2017 
About the Author 
I was born and
raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S.
and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder
area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four
stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself
as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years.
We have been married since 2013.
Posted on

Rejoice, by Gillian

“Rejoice,
Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel”
In my long-ago childhood,
when I accompanied my mother to church most Sundays, I loved that hymn. It was
sung with much more gusto than most of the hymns. It felt that we truly were
offering a joyful noise unto the Lord. In my reedy little five-year-old voice I
belted out the admonition to rejoice, rejoice, along with the adults.
Of course I had not a
clue why we were rejoicing. Who was Emmanuel and why was he about to get
together with Israel, whoever he was? It didn’t matter. Singing that hymn made
me feel happy; all good inside After services in which it was the final hymn, I
always felt like skipping and laughing all the way home.
And it was surprising how
often it was sung in our little church. Our congregation was much too small to
enjoy the luxury of a choir to guide us. All hymns, if I remember correctly –
something of a big ‘if’ – came from the Church of England book of Hymns Ancient
and Modern, published in 1862. I checked on line and it apparently contained
779 hymns. Now that should have been enough to save us from too much
repetition; but that was not the reality. We seemed to have a small group of
twenty or so tried-and-true favorites, which cropped up regularly with an
occasional little-used one tossed in to keep us on our toes. My mother hated it
when these strangers appeared as it meant she had to practice. She played the
church organ and knew the old favorites by heart, so they required little
effort on her part. She also disliked’ the unfamiliar  because the congregation, fumbling with
unknown words and music, lagged behind the organ waiting for a lead, and
gradually the singing got slower and slower and lower and lower. The vicar, who
never sang along, simply shook his head sadly at the cacophony and vowed to
stick with the familiar the next Sunday. And the next.
Perhaps at least partly
because I associated the word with the hymn, ‘rejoice’ or ‘rejoicing’ always
represented to me something loud and jubilant; triumphant: the crowd on the
sidelines rejoicing when the home team scores a goal, the audience rejoicing at
the end of a particularly stirring symphony. This kind of rejoicing I rarely,
if ever, experienced. My family and friends were all rather quiet people who
might smile broadly at a win for the home team, but that was about as wild as
it might get.
Later in life I began to
understand that to rejoice, as the dictionaries state it, means to feel or show
great joy or delight. To feel or show. We can rejoice in silence, simply
to feel the joy within us, not expressing it with a sound; perhaps not even a
hint of a smile. That is my kind of rejoicing. In fact, I have rather come to
fear, or at least be uncomfortable with, the loud exuberant variety. Too
frequently no good will come of it. The raucous rejoicing at the end of the
soccer game ends up in fighting and even deaths. The screaming rah rah of
political rallies negates all rational thought, as does – sorry Emmanuel –
religious raving. Rejoicing loudly can perhaps be OK in a space, such as a
church, – OK Emmanuel, back at ya – where all there feel the same, but be very
combative when others present feel very differently.
I’ll just stick to my
silent inner rejoicing at the beauty of the sky, or a single leaf, or the touch
of a loved one or a smile from a friend.
That hurts no-one, and
brings me a joy that could never be deepened by shouting it from the rooftops.
© 25 Nov 2016 
About
the Author 
I was born and
raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S.
and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder
area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four
stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself
as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years.
We have been married since 2013.
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Figures, by Gillian

During my working life at IBM we often quoted a favorite catch-phrase, the tyranny of numbers. As you can well imagine, we were for the most part, like most if not all businesses, largely ruled by numbers. But this particular term originated in the computer world of the 1950’s, not so long before I began working for IBM in 1966, when computers were still the size of a house and you literally opened a door and went inside one to fix whatever ailed it. Computer engineers were unable to increase the performance of their designs at this time due to the huge number of components involved. In theory, every component needed to be wired to every other component, which were typically strung together via wire-wrapping and soldering by hand, a large part of my job for the first two years of my career. In order to improve performance, more components would be needed, and it seemed that future designs would consist entirely of countless components connected by endless wiring installed and endlessly repaired manually by countless people.

We were freed from this particular tyranny by the silicon chip, reducing that multi-faceted piece of house-sized equipment to something that can fit inside your watch. But the phrase has, unsurprisingly, never lost it’s appeal. I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because we are ever increasingly, it seems, ruled in every aspect of our lives by facts and figures; perhaps more accurately the facts of figures, in everything from the entire planet and indeed the universe down to every individual. The numbers applied to both the universe and even just our planet are so huge most of us cannot even grasp them. Our sun is one of an estimated two to four hundred billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. Does that really mean anything to you? It loses me! Just the age of this planet, roughly 4.5 billion years, is beyond most of us. In an effort to help us understand such huge figures some clever people have tried to put them into a different perspective. The age of the earth, for instance, and it’s major events, have been portrayed as a 24-hour clock.* On this scale, humans don’t appear until almost 11.59 pm, dinosaurs at 10.56, and I must tell you that we didn’t manage to invent sexual reproduction until after six in the evening. (Incidentally, my own problem with this depiction is – when exactly does midnight arrive and what happens then??)

As to the personal, I used to know what I weighed, and was sadly aware that that figure (in more than one sense of the word!) indicated that I was overweight, except back in those politically incorrect days I was just ‘fat’. But simple weight is no longer good enough! Now I know what my BMI number is, which in turn tells me that if I don’t lose some exact number of pounds, I shall not be old-style fat, nor new-style overweight, but new-age obese! Talk about tyranny!

We seem to have fallen into some kind of paint by numbers version of reality, don’t we? We fail to vote because, according to the poll numbers, we already know who will win, so why bother?

If we do vote, for many of us it is meaningless because we live in a district gerrymandered – based on yet other numbers – to ensure one party will always win. Our President is voted in by one set of numbers and out by another, depending on which way our country choses to count.

This tyranny of numbers is nothing new. Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime minister in the mid-eighteen hundreds, famously said there are three levels of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

In 2010, a man named David Boyle wrote a book entitled The Tyranny of Numbers. ** He examines our obsession with numbers. He reminds us of the danger of taking numbers so seriously at the expense of what is non-measurable, non-calculable: intuition, creativity, imagination, and happiness.

‘We count people, but not individuals. We count exam results rather than intelligence, benefit claimants instead of poverty …… Politicians pack their speeches with skewed statistics: crime rates are either rising or falling depending on who is doing the counting. We are in a world in which everything is designed only to be measured. If it can’t be measured it can be ignored. The problem is what numbers don’t tell you – they won’t interpret, they won’t inspire, and they won’t tell you precisely what causes what.’

It feels so strange. As they so often do, things have come full circle. By inventing our way out of the original tyranny of numbers, we created the very devices which now create the new tyranny.

Yet there is good news. Am I not right in thinking that the LGBT community is less a victim of all the numbers games than most? Perhaps it is an unexpected benefit of having been invisible for so long. We have never been, and right now it looks as if we never will be, identified in the U.S. census.We didn’t exist so we couldn’t – and to some degree still cannot – be counted. No-one can come up with accurate statistics about us. They don’t know what beer we drink or restaurants we favor. They don’t know what ads to send to our TV’s and computers. They don’t even know where we live. Statistical generalities about our community are almost impossible. And on the other side of the coin, I think we tend to care much less about their stats anyway; possibly because they so infrequently include us or apply to us as a group, but I prefer to believe it is simply because we are more independent, more free-thinking, than many.

And I am safe in sticking with that because there are, and perhaps never will be, any statistics to prove me wrong!

* https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/https://

** www.goodreads.com/book/show/2556446.The_Tyranny_of_Numbers

© June 2017

About the Author

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

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Dancing with the Stars, by Gillian

I won’t be. Dancing with the stars, that is. No matter how they beg, I will not be on that show. Not, I must confess, that I have ever watched it; but I get the concept. Star-worship is just not something that has ever been in me. Living through the height of the fan-club phase, I never even thought of joining one. There are very few famous people I would cross the street to meet. It’s not that I have anything against the rich and famous and fabulously good-looking. It’s simply that they hold no fascination for me just because they are household names. Every one of us in this room has a life story that is every bit as fascinating, in it’s own way, as theirs.

Perhaps my attitude originated in my essentially TV- and movie-free childhood. I had little temptation to idolize. Or maybe it stems from my parents’ attitude towards the stars of the day: royalty, bigwigs in the Church of England hierarchy, the local landed gentry. They must always be spoken to politely, and that was where it ended. They would be respected when they earned respect. We were every bit as good as they were and there would be no figurative bowing and doffing of caps. This was a burgeoning feeling in England in the 1940’s and ’50’s when the winds of equality were blowing strong. So, when I was about twelve and Princess Margaret was to visit our school, I was a little apprehensive over my mother’s reaction to the fact that we were all taught, in some detail, the correct way to bow and curtsey, and were expected to do so. But, somewhat to my surprise, Mum was fine with it. Apparently there were certain protocols she was willing to go along with. What mattered, she explained, was not so much external expressions of deference as internal knowledge of equality. A wise woman in many ways, my mother.

What I do value is dancing with the real stars; those of the firmament, sparkling and dancing above our heads. In the days of our youth, the world was not subjected to the vast explosions of artificial light which afflict it today. In my youth we had no electricity where we lived, and no form of outdoor lighting for many miles. On a rare clear English night, often also a cold one, Mom and I would lie on our backs on the lawn, usually huddled under a blanket, and she would point out constellations to me and relate their mythical stories. She only knew a few of the commonly-familiar ones, so the rest she made up and created stories to fit the shapes she saw. Half the time I couldn’t see what she saw, it was harder than one of her other favorite pastimes of agreeing on what clouds looked like, but I went along with her imagination to hear her inventive stories. My mother was just fine as long as she remained far from any form of reality.

In college in the north of England, long before the cities overgrew the hills as they have now, a group of us sometimes went up on the dark moorlands to stargaze. We always spent a couple of hours in the pub on the way, so our imaginings were rarely inhibited.

I have stared in wonder at the starry sky above Australia, South America, and South Africa. There is something very special about the night skies of the Southern Hemisphere. The stars somehow seem so much more numerous, and so much closer than we are used to. They take my breath away.

During the twenty-five years that Betsy and I camped all over this country in out VW van, we frequently danced with the stars. Many camping spots, especially National Forest Campgrounds, are about as far as you can get from city lights these days, and perfect for communing with the heavens. For some strange reason which we never did figure out, nine times out of ten, wherever we camped, The Big Dipper appeared at night to be clearly seen from our back window. Rarely the front, hardly ever the side windows, but almost inevitably if we woke in the middle of the night there was the Dipper, above us as we lay with our heads right below the back window.

We liked to settle in well before dark, so had no idea where the Dipper would be when we chose the site and decided exactly how to park for the night. We actually never thought about it. Yet there it would be, in the night, almost as regular as clockwork.

At Randy Wren’s funeral last week, his Rector said,

“Randy lived large.”

He did. If you have any belief in an afterlife in any form, you have to think that Randy is dancing with the stars; whatever that means to you. If anyone can do it, Randy can.

Once upon a time, Frank Sinatra crooned a popular song about the stars.

Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars….

It went on a couple of lines later,

In other words hold my hand,
In other words, Darling kiss me …..

As long as I have My Beautiful Betsy to hold my hand and kiss me, I shall forever dance with the stars.

© July 2017

About the Author

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

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I Don’t Know, by Gilllian

For much of my life those words represented a huge challenge; no, actually more of an obsession. If I didn’t know, I had to know. This, like so many things in so many lives, began in my teens. If teachers and parents and my high school library couldn’t tell me what I wanted to know, I would schlep into town on the bus and visit the big library, where I would struggle to find books with answers via the Dewey decimal system. Remember all those long narrow wooden drawers packed with cards? Off I’d scuttle eagerly to the stacks. 427.88 might have the answer.

This need to know stayed with me throughout my adult life, though tempered somewhat by so many other demands on my time.

Now, those library searches a thing of the long past, the answer to each and every I don’t know is, quite literally, at our finger tips. And that, in some strange way, has cured me of my obsession. Perhaps it’s just too easy; no longer the challenge it once was. Or perhaps it’s overload. In searching the web for the answer to one I don’t know, I inevitably find innumerable answers to more I don’t knows that I didn’t even know I had. (Sorry, I’m sounding a bit like Dubya!) My ignorance, I have discovered, is infinite. Or perhaps I have learned that knowledge is nothing without understanding. Every I don’t know may be answered, factually, but how much understanding of the subject has that conveyed to me?

In my old, and I would like to think at least a little wiser, age, I know that none of it matters. Yes, it’s good to know things. It’s even better to understand them. But the only really important knowledge and understanding is of myself and those I care for. And most of that will not come from Mr. Google, or even the library. It can only come from me.

Jerry Maguire, in the movie of that name, says,

“Hey, I don’t have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I’ve failed as much as I’ve succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you, my kind of successes.”

And all I know for sure is my answer to those two most important questions – do you love your life, do you love your wife? – will never be, I don’t know.

© July 2017

About the Author

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