Tag: Gillian

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The Eyes of Love, by Gillian

The only living creature who actually looks upon a human through the eyes of love surely has to be the dog. The first time I was married we had a dog who gazed at me with what I saw, anyway, as pure adoration. His eyes glowed, his mouth smiled and his long wet tongue lolled down below his chin.

‘How come you never look at me like that?’ I asked my husband one day.

From that day on I would occasionally glance towards him only to find him staring at me in a weird glassy- and bug-eyed way, his head on one side and his mouth half open and his tongue hanging out but far from reaching his chin. He did it from hands and knees on the floor to rolling around on the lawn. ‘A’ for effort but it was no good. It fell way short of canine idolatry. I have never asked Betsy to give it a try.

Of course, the expressions we see in animals’ faces are purely our interpretations. Maybe that doggie worship that we see simply means something like, where the hell’s my dinner? Maybe when the cat who owns you reduces your ego to the size of a pea with that look of pure disdain, she is really thinking how very wonderful you are; but I seriously doubt it!

In many parts of the world we humans put great stock in eye contact. How good we are at interpreting what we see in another’s eyes, though, is questionable. On occasion I really am seeing my Beautiful Betsy through the eyes of love, simply enjoying watching her every move as she plants the petunias, and she will suddenly say, very suspiciously,

‘What? Why are you staring at me like that? Did you want me to plant these somewhere else?’

Not long ago I read a story about a young man who, I was convinced, kept looking at me with the eyes of love – well, maybe not quite, perhaps infatuation or at least lust – until he confessed that my fascination for him was simply that I reminded him so much of his mother!

But seriously, being regarded through the eyes of love is a truly beautiful thing; one of the greatest gifts in life. A longtime friend of mine, a woman without a partner in life and no children or siblings, said, when her mother died not long after her father,

‘Now there’s no-one left to look at me with love.’

I thought it one of the saddest things I have ever heard. We all need to be looked upon through the eyes of love. I was going to continue, in fact we all, down to the meanest of us, deserve it.

Perhaps Eva Braun even looked at Hitler that way. But visions of the Orange Ogre leapt into my head and no, I’m sorry, everyone does not deserve it.

The best of all, though, is looking out through your own eyes with love. I cannot, or I choose not to, imagine a world in which I have no-one and nothing on whom or which to gaze with love. And you know the best thing about that? It is one of very few things that are completely within my own control. No-one can take it from me. I cannot force anyone to look upon me through the eyes of love, but how I look out through my own eyes is completely up to me. Should I ever be left alone, bereft of anyone I perceive as loving me, as my friend felt herself to be, I hope I can continue to see many of those around me through my own eyes of love. And failing that, surely I can still fall back upon the love for all things, both animate and inanimate, that I so valuably learned from my family as a child. There is always a flower, a rock, raindrops and snowflakes. When I can no longer look through the eyes of love, I guess it will be time to go.

© 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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My Happiest Day, by Gillian

I
thought I might begin with some really icky remark such as, every day is My
Happiest Day, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it! Equally, I
couldn’t begin to pick out my very happiest days, never mind one single day. I
have been blessed, and the vast majority of my days have been happy, though
with some, inevitably, more so than others.
But,
on giving the topic some serious thought, I decided that I owe the presence of
this multitude of Happy Days to the few bad ones. They were the days which
taught me humility and compassion and, above all, gratitude; the very gratitude
which has given me so many Happy Days.
I
could never describe the day I spent visiting Auschwitz as a Happy Day, but I
will always be grateful for it. The shock and horror of the awful place, with its
indescribably dreadful memories, afforded me huge gratitude for the time and
place in which I live my own life of peace and tranquility; a peace brought
about not by denying the evils of the past, and, alas, the present in too many
other places, but by acknowledging how unbelievably fortunate I have been, and
continue to be, in my own life.
The
days my parents died were most certainly not Happy Days, but their deaths, and
the depths of my loss, brought it home to me, perhaps really for the first
time, how much I loved them and how grateful I am to them for the start they
gave me in this wonderful life. Barely a day goes by when I don’t think of one
or both of them with a love so strong that it still catches me by surprise.
A
few years ago a blood clot found its way into my lung and couldn’t find its way
out again. As I lay in the hospital bed with oxygen tubes in my nose and blood
thinner I.V. in my arm, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself. Poor me! Why me?
Then I recalled that a blood clot in her lung was what had finally killed my
hundred-year-old ex-mother-in-law. I remembered a TV interview with tennis
legend Serena Williams in which she talked of being ‘on her death bed’ with a
clot in her lung. It hit me; I was lucky to be alive! In a nanosecond I went
from being sad and sorry to being oh so very grateful to be alive. A miserable
day was suddenly a Happy Day.
Of
course, the bad days that end up creating the good, don’t have to be huge
dramas. Small incidents can have much the same effects. A good, longtime,
friend of ours died a couple of years ago. Barb was a lifelong Cubs fan, and it
hit me last week how sad it is that she is not around to revel in her team’s
first grab at glory in over a hundred years. But, remembering the many Happy
Days Betsy and I shared with her and her partner over the decades, my gratitude
for them, both on my own behalf and that of Barb, relegated baseball to a mere
speck of dust on the reality of life.
Poor
Stephen, suffering all his current health problems, offered in an e-mail that
he was grateful he was not in pain.
Right
there is the secret of Happy Days; gratitude. Gratitude for everything that is.
I
am so in thrall to gratitude that I am endlessly grateful for it.
And
that’s the last I shall say about gratitude, for which I am sure you will all
be very grateful.
© 17 Nov 2016 
About
the Author 
I was born and
raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S.
and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder
area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four
stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself
as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years.
We have been married since 2013.
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Fond Memories, by Gillian

In the basement I have a
box labeled MEMORABILIA. In it are all kinds of bits and pieces from my
childhood; mainly things which once belonged to my parents. It is indeed a
motley collection. You will be glad I have brought only one to share.
My mother occasionally
wore a headscarf the like of which I have never seen on or off anyone’s head
since, though I understand many of them were produced. It is made of silk, and
rather than the usual flowers or paisley patterns or famous landmarks, it bears
a map. These ‘escape maps’ as they were called, first originated in Britain in
1940, and  over three million were
eventually produced throughout the war years by both Britain and then the
United States. The intent was to help airmen downed behind enemy lines to find
an escape route and evade capture, and I imagine a spy or two might have found
them useful. They were made of silk primarily because so much of it was
available from damaged parachutes. But silk is durable and light-weight but
also warm – a blessing in an unheated plane, and, I should guess, if you found
yourself trying to survive in Poland in January. This particular map is of part
of Eastern Europe and The Balkans. Sadly, I never had a photo of Mum wearing it
as headscarf, a purpose for which it was, of course, never intended, but at
least I still have it, and in fact I can probably see her in it in my memories
much more clearly than I would in an old faded photograph.
OK, an interesting little
bit of trivia, but my fond memories of the scarf stretch out beyond those of
Mum wearing it. To begin with, unlike most of the occupants of that memorabilia
box, I remember when and how this one entered our lives.
I think I was six or
seven, so it was somewhere in the late 1940’s, when a young German man came to
stay with us. I have absolutely no idea why, but my father brought him so maybe
it had something to do with my dad’s job. Dad had spent a little time in
Germany after the war; something to do with rebuilding German industry with
Allied help rather than with Communist assistance. The young man’s name was,
rather unremarkably, Hans, and I was completely captivated by him, as, though
with a little more subtlety, was my mother and, I think, even my father.
He was the archetypal Arian,
a Hitler poster-boy: tall, slim, piercing blue eyes and a shock of white-blond
hair. He was also charming, and, apparently, charmed by all things English –
including us. He bowed and clicked his heels, rising deferentially from his
chair every time my mother or even I rose from ours. He asked my father
interminable questions about anything and everything and clung to every word of
his reply. This was fine when the topics were manly things like machinery and
especially cars, but not so good when other responses were solicited.
‘Oh vat iss thiss,
please, in English?’ asked poor innocent Hans, delicately fingering a daffodil.
‘Oh, that’s a dandelion,’
replied my father, carelessly, as one to whom all yellow flowers are
dandelions.
‘Oh, ja, so this
iss the dandelion!’
Poor Hans seemed
enraptured. Luckily my mother was there to come to the rescue.
This was the first time
in my young life that anyone had ever stayed with us. I don’t remember how long
Hans visited, but the days he was there were magic. I became a beautiful,
charming adult. My mother became a vivacious teenager and my dad, at least by
his own standards, became positively verbose. It was as if we were suddenly
able to do everything a little better, but with less effort, than before. When
he left, our beautiful, light, colorful, bubble burst. We floated back to earth
and became ourselves once more. But none of us ever forgot that visit. It was
as if this magical stranger had shown us, for a little while, who and what we
could be.
Before he left, Hans gave
my mother a gift in appreciation of her hospitality. There was no such thing as
gift-wrap paper anywhere to be found either in Germany or Britain at that time,
so very apologetically he handed her this little package wrapped very neatly in
tattered old brown paper.
He further apologized for
the gift itself. Gifts of any kind were not thick on the ground in either of
our countries at that time, either, so he really did not need to apologize,
but, this was all he had, he said, looking completely downcast.
All three of us looked in
some confusion at this cloth map. The history of ‘escape maps’ only surfaced
many years later. If Hans had any idea of it’s true purpose, he said nothing.
He shrugged. ‘It iss … jou know,’ he gestured over his head, lightly skimming
his beautiful hair, ‘for the head covering ..’
British Silk Escape Map Fig 1
The light dawned. Mum
immediately popped it over her head, knotting it loosely at her neck and
striking a kind of would-be film star pose. It was, in fact, a strange kid of
headscarf, but my mother didn’t care – and anyway she loved maps – and I was
too young to judge. My dad smiled appreciatively. To him, I think my mother was
beautiful whatever she wore.
‘Ja. Iss goot!’ Hans
approved.
A few minutes later he
caught the local bus into town and we never, as far as I know, saw or heard
from him again.
For the rest of my life,
as my knowledge of World War Two progressed, I wondered endlessly about Hans
and his part in the war, and before. Had he been in the Hitler Youth? Almost
certainly, I would think. Was he in the Gestapo? The SS? Or a mere
foot-soldier? He had no visible scars or missing limbs or a tell-tale limp. He
looked too robust to have been in a concentration camp; neither did he have
numbers on his arm. Perhaps he hadn’t lived in Germany at all? But he did soon
after the war. And finally, most puzzling of all, why and how did he possess a
British escape map?
British Silk Escape Map Fig  2

British Silk Escape Map Fig 3
British Silk Escape May Fig 4

I shall never know the
answers to any of my questions, and finally I have become at peace with the
handsome and charming Hans, whoever he was; whatever he once had been. Now, I
simply find it incredibly ironic that one of my most treasured objects, and all
the fond memories that go with it, was given with such sincere humility, by a
German. It took a German to cast, just for a few days, a cheerful light to brighten
my corner of the endless gray gloom that was Postwar Britain.
© October 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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Hunting, by Gillian

The
first game I remember playing in my life was ‘Hunt the Thimble’. My mother
introduced me to it when I was, I suppose, about three. The thimble had
originally belonged to my great-grandmother, and was made of silver worn almost
paper-thin by generations of use. To me it seemed the most wonderous,
brilliantly-shining object I had ever seen.
I
loved it, and was consequently brought to tears when Mum told me she had hidden
it and I had to find it. The glorious object was gone; the responsibility of
having to find it too great. No doubt puzzled at my reaction, she set about
joining me in the supposed search, and in no time we found it. We did it a
second time, together, after which I had grasped the concept. I willingly
covered my eyes for the third time of hiding, and said something like, No!
Me! when my mother made to join me in the search. I was into it now. The
game was on.
We
played that game endlessly, until I was in fact much too old for it – 25 or 26.
No, no, just joking, more like 5 or 6, but still an age by which I probably
should have outgrown it. Looking back, I rather think I had but my mother had
not.
After
a couple of days of my being the lone seeker, she suggested I hide it
for her to find. Ooh, fun! Thereafter we alternated hider and seeker,
she being every bit as thrilled as I to hunt for and eventually find the
gleaming beauty.
She
loved either role, exhibiting as much excitement when I neared the hiding place
as if I was approaching the end of the rainbow with its proverbial pot of gold.
We both played our own games within the game. Sometimes, the hiding place was
too easy. Almost immediately I started the hunt, I caught the gleam of
highly-polished silver from behind Mom’s tea cup. I feigned blindness and faked
a continued search for some time, so as not to curtail my mother’s pleasure.
Once or twice, my search went on too long, the hiding place too clever, and I
became irritated. Then Mum would say she had forgotten where she put it and
would join me in the search, and it was fun again.
I
grew tired of ‘Hunt the Thimble’. We, just the two of us, had played it too
often for too long. But Mum so enjoyed it. How could I disappoint her? It was a
small price to pay. I continued to play; to fake the challenge of the hunt and
the thrill of discovery.
And
so, with this innocent toddler game, began two things. It was the start of the
strangely reversed role I had, for the rest of my life, with my mother. I took
care of her needs, rather than the reverse. Even as a child I read to her, I
let her win at card games, I made her tea, I tucked her up in bed. I was the
parent; she the child.
Another
pattern began with ‘Hunt the Thimble’. 
As I outgrew the game ahead of my mother, I began my acting career. I
pretended emotions I did not feel, desires I did not have, and continued to do
that extremely well for the next 40-odd years of my life. That innocent bit of
‘pretend’ in a childhood game grew into an ability to fake a completely
artificial heterosexual identity for decades. Such mighty oaks from tiny acorns
grow. The reversed roles shared by my mother and me were never to be corrected.
They were too deeply entrenched. But at least I eventually managed to retire
from acting to live, finally, happily, as the person I was born to be.
© September 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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Men and Women, by Gillian

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then. 

Katharine Hepburn

If I remember rightly, which seems increasingly unlikely these days, we went through a phase a few decades ago when we were supposed to believe that men and woman were really not so different. It was probably a ’70’s thing. Then in the early 1990’s along came John Gray’s best-seller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and accepting our differences became OK again. He wrote a sequel, Why Mars and Venus Collide, in 2008, so clearly he sees no reason to back down! And for all that George Carlin responded with,

“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”

I must confess, I’m with Gray.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have loved, and do love, a number of women and men; some family, some not. I always worked with a lot of men, but when I retired, long out as a lesbian, I entered an essentially female world. I found myself actively searching out ways to be around men. I had always had men in my life. I missed them. But missing men and loving men in no way suggests that I see them as some alternate version of women. Men are different. They make me different. I interact differently with them, I feel differently about them, I expect and want different things from them. Indeed, if women and men are in fact NOT very different from each other, I will make them so; at least in my own mind.

But to me the differences are glaringly, blaringly, obvious. You only have to watch groups of little girls playing, versus little boys. Surely most of us have seen it in our own families. Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, are different not only because they each have unique personalities, but simply by virtue of their gender. Sure, some of it is nurture, the established norms of society, but I believe it is also, overwhelmingly, nature. If we are all basically the same, why do transgender people feel so compelling a need to be ‘the other’?

Years ago, our neighbors had two little pre-school girls. Being extremely liberal parents, they determined not to channel their daughters along any pre-established gender lines. They bought them toy bulldozers and trucks to play with in the sandbox. And there they lay, rusting and abandoned while the girls played happily indoors with dolls and tea-sets.

Take one, admittedly very negative, example. Violence. Of the 12.996 murders in this country in 2010, over 90% were committed by men. Over 90% of ISIS member are men. Almost 90% of the domestic violence cases in this country are committed by men. Looking back, just in my own lifetime, at violent leaders: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pot Pol and the Khmer Rouge, those responsible for the Rwanda genocide, Jim Jones and his Temple, Timothy McVeigh. All men. Not one of all our horrific school shootings was done by a woman. Nearly 90% of victims of domestic violence in this country are women. A statistic on this issue which I find truly horrifying – the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2012 was 6,488. The number of American women who were murdered by current or ex male partners during that time was 11,766. That’s nearly double the amount of casualties lost during war. And of course it’s not just women who suffer. Just look at our history of male violence against people of color and native peoples. Surely there is something other than nurture responsible here?

Testosterone springs to mind as the easy answer. But that begs another question. There is little evidence that gay men have less testosterone than straight men, so why are gay men, on the whole, not so given to violence? At least, I believe they are not, although statistics are hard to come by. Gay men, indeed, are much more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators. Dictators historically have consistently destroyed their gay populations. ISIS tosses them off roofs and stones them to death so I doubt gays are flocking to join their cause.

I have never in my life been abused personally. I have never been a victim of any kind of violence. But, tragically, that leaves me one of few outside of the straight white male population of this country, and most of the rest of the world, who can say that. I look forward to a world led predominantly by women and gay men. I truly believe it would be a better place. Unfortunately, I don’t see it coming any time soon.

© May 2017

About the Author

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

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Assumptions, by Gillian

We all know the old saying that if you ass/u/me, you simply make an ass of u and me. I enjoy plays on words, so I like that one. It is also absolutely true. Assumptions of any kind are never safe, and we’re frequently sorry. We learn pretty fast about many assumptions we should never make: the bus/plane/train will leave or arrive on time, teachers and parents are always right and life is always fair, if I always tell the truth I will be rewarded, and Mr. Right will come along and we will live happily ever after.

As we get older, we adjust to more subtle assumptions we should not make. Self-improvement books tell us not to assume everything in the world is about us; indeed, to remind ourselves on many occasions, this is not about me. Similarly the assumption we make that we constantly need to offer our opinions is erroneous. One book has an entire chapter challenging me constantly to ask myself, Why Am I Talking?

Erroneous assumptions about any given situation often turn out to be very embarrassing, even under circumstances where no-one else knows the assumptions I was making in my own heads. One of my favorite stories on these lines is from when I was somewhere in my mid-thirties. I managed an IBM department which employed several temporary employees in addition to the permanent staff. I began to notice one of the latest temporaries, a very attractive young man, eyeing me a little too often; a little too much. I groaned to myself. This was not good. I was married.

I was going to have to deal with this situation. And soon. Lo and behold, only a couple of days later, the man came into my office. He shuffled his feet and looked a little uncomfortable. Then he said,

‘Sorry if you’ve noticed me staring at you. I’m kind of embarrassed but I have to tell you. You remind me so very much of my mother.’

And if that statement doesn’t take the wind out of a girl’s sails, then I don’t know what does!

Although I have told the story quite often since, at the time I was so very glad that I had told no-one about this sexy young man who clearly had the hots for me!

Assumptions must change constantly with changes in time and space and circumstances, but I missed the boat on that one.

Changing political assumptions, now, another boat I missed although I did run to catch a later one. Growing up in in the extremely socialist Britain of the 1950’s, I always assumes that The Government, always with a psychological capital G, had my very best interests at heart. The very existence of The Government was in order to make my life better. I never once questioned that assumption. I had no doubts. Then, in this country, I encountered the likes of Reagan and Nixon and one more assumption bit the dust. That assumption was, of course, doomed, wherever I lived. Had I stayed in the UK it would have died just as swiftly, as the socialist Britain of my youth crumbled under the weight of Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism. I certainly see nothing in the current political scene that hints of any revival.

So as we age we leave a trail of broken and battered assumptions in our wake. Not that I claim to miss them much; their absence doubtless leaves me with a healthier, saner, ability to make rational decisions. But I notice, as I age, an occasional new assumption insinuates itself. I always assume, for instance, that at my time of life it is not a good idea to buy green bananas.

© March 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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September 11, 2001, by Gillian

I had signed up with Denver Museum of Nature and Science for a daylong tour of the Lakewood Brick Company on September 11th of 2001. We lived in East Denver at that time, so I left the house early for what I anticipated to be about a forty-five minute drive during the morning rush hour. I was astonished to find myself driving unimpeded along almost empty streets. Was this a holiday I had forgotten? One of those newer ones, perhaps? No. Many people were not excused work on those holidays; not enough to make for this absence of traffic. And anyway the museum would not have scheduled a tour on a holiday. I was driving my old pickup without a functioning radio, so could not get any news. I had not turned on the TV before leaving home. I was puzzled. Puzzled, but not worried. Arriving early due to this lack of traffic, I popped into King Soopers to get a snack for lunch. There was something strange about the store, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. The few customers were standing about in small groups, talking. So, I realized, were the employees. I felt a little shiver of apprehension.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked three women huddled together in the deli. ‘Has something happened?’

That opened the floodgates. They tumbled over each other to tell me all they knew, which really was not very much. Or at least not very much for sure. Amongst all the utterances of I heard and they think and a lot of maybe this and maybe that, I gathered that a plane had been highjacked and flown into a building in New York.

‘And now they think,’ said one woman in a breathless whisper, ‘there’s another plane been highjacked, too.’

For all the lack of hard facts, clearly something really bad had happened; was happening. What to do? Should I just go back home? Were they still going to have the tour? I decided at least to check in at the Brick Company, where less than half of the scheduled number actually turned up, but we decided to go ahead with the tour as scheduled.

It simply did not work. This was before the days of everyone having a smartphone, but some had cel phones. There were constant calls home and relayings of the latest updates to the rest of us. We were all distracted, to say the least. It was the one day in our lives that we could muster absolutely no interest in the making of bricks. It took little discussion to cancel the rest of the tour and just go home.

Now we live not far from Lakewood Brick Company and pass it quite frequently. But no matter how much time passes between that terrible day and this, I never see it without feeling a lurch of my stomach. I return instantly, if only for an instant, to that feeling of nausea and fear and dread and overwhelming sadness. And if, on a very rare occasion, I find the streets unusually quiet, panic starts to grow. What’s wrong? What’s happened? And that’s OK. I should not forget. But to me, the real tragedy of that day is what we made of it. It fills me with a despair beyond sadness. Rather than it bringing us understanding of, and even empathy for, the innocents of the world dying in their numbers everywhere every day, we used it to justify the ever-increased use of our own killing machine; to murder those same innocents. That is a tragedy truly worthy of the name.

© 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.

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Smoking,by Gillian

“I
quit smoking when I was in college”,  I
say, righteously; but that is a huge distortion of the truth!
It’s
not exactly a lie. I have probably not smoked more than ten cigarettes since
the late 1950’s. But I didn’t quit in the sense of the huge conscious
effort of concentrated willpower the word implies. I just kind of drifted away
from it and never really missed it; rather in the same way I had drifted into
it. It was attractive, for a while, in the way of all forbidden things,
especially to the young. We smuggled ill-gotten packs of cigarettes onto the
school bus, puffing away at them huddled on the back seat while the driver
turned a blind eye. He chain-smoked so why should he care if we took a few
inexpert drags?
I
didn’t quite get the attraction, but of course did not say so. There’s a limit to how much of an odd-ball one
is willing to become, and holding a cigarette between my fingers for a few
seconds every now and then was a cheap price to pay for belonging: not being an
outcast. (Being the child of a local teacher offers many challenges.)  Nobody seemed to notice whether I ever
actually placed the cigarette between my lips, much less inhaled. Life was
easy.
In
college, at any social gathering, I always had a drink in my hand. So did my
fellow party-goers. Most of them also held a smoldering cigarette. But the
drink was my membership card, so few, if any, noticed the lack of burning
embers.
A
few years later, at a party with several twenty-something co-workers, my husband
and I both had the obligatory drink-in-the-hand when the joint came by. We both
passed it on, untouched by human lips; untouched by ours, anyway. We both knew
that we had enough of a challenge controlling the attractions of alcohol and
had no need of another.
So,
in a very strange way, booze has saved me.
But
the attitude of the medical profession towards drinking and smoking which I
find rather strange.
“Yes”,
I acknowledge, “I probably drink more than is good for me.”
“Do
you smoke?” is the inevitable response.
I
think if I said, “There’s a huge pink elephant in the corner of your office,” the
reply would probably be, “How many packs do you average a day?’”
© August 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.
Posted on

Movies, by Gillian

I have never been a
really fully-paid-up member of the movie-goers club. In fact I seem to have
had, over my lifetime, something of a love/hate relationship with movies. The
love side has been made up mostly of documentaries, or what they call ‘docudramas’,
which probably makes me something of a dull person to be around; someone who
prefers, for the most part, fact over fiction. Strangely, though, the opposite
is true of books. I rarely read non-fiction books, much preferring to escape
into the land of make-believe.
Perhaps it is in fact
that very make-believe which has tripped me up. My childhood, in the time and
place that it was, related little to movies. There were cinemas in the towns in
the England of the 1940’s and ’50’s but I and my family and friends had no way
to get to them. There were early TV’s, too, in some places, but non of us had
one. So escape was down to books. And once you are accustomed to using your own
imagination, making the written story and characters look exactly the way you
want them, it’s hard to switch happily to strangers creating the images for
you.
And then, of course,
there was the gay thing. Though barely even subliminal, in my youth, it was
there. Reading the book, I could make Jane Eyre’s obsessive love be for a
somewhat androgynous Rochester. I could even, and this requires some strength
of imagination, believe me, picture poor innocent Catherine Earnshaw with a
vaguely unisex Heathcliff. But when, later in life, I saw the Wuthering Heights
movie with that darkly menacing Laurence Olivier, he was so completely
masculine that all fantasy faded. So, I couldn’t really get into movies because
they were so overwhelmingly, 100% at that time, heterosexual. So was
literature, but anyone can take it wherever they want. These days, of course,
we say that ol’ Larry was bisexual, if not homosexual. But either way he’s
completely masculine. Books offer more options than movies.
One member of this
Storytelling group, who rarely attends now, wrote one day of trying so hard to
hide his infatuation with Tab Hunter. I cannot recall that day’s topic, but I
had written of my attempts to fake an attraction to Tab Hunter. I
bought, in our nearest Woolworth’s, a black and white pin-up photo of him, to
attach to my school desk. Oh the sad irony of it, I thought. Two of us, sixty
years ago, thousands of miles apart, trying so hard to use Tab Hunter – and why
him, I ask myself – to define, or not define, our homosexuality. Thank God,
those days are largely gone.
Now, when there is such
vast choice of movies, I have favorites of all kinds. But I have still never
fully embraced ‘going to the movies’, except for drive-ins which I always found
to be great fun. For the most part, movies became more attractive to me when
they became readily available from the comfort of my own home and my own couch.
One of my very favorite,
totally fictional, movies, is ‘Cloudburst’, with Olympia Dukakis; the story of
two old lesbians running off to Canada to be married. It is funny and sad: that
perfect combination that creates fiction at it’s best. I also watch ‘The
History Boys’ every time it’s on TV. A wonderful ‘docudrama’, which Betsy and I
had somehow missed until it appeared on TV a couple of weeks ago, is ‘
Freeheld’, the true story of a New Jersey police lieutenant, dying of cancer,
fighting for her registered partner to receive her pension after her death, as
would be the case with a heterosexual couple. There are endless documentaries,
not to mention a full-length movie, about Alan Turing and all he suffered for
his homosexuality. It’s not that all I ever watch is movies, truth or fiction,
depicting the plight of members of the GLBT community; but they exist.
That is an ever-amazing
thing to me.
They exist.
Movies and I have
followed the same path. We have been on a long journey, but we have arrived.
And we will never, can never, go back. No matter what rhetoric spews from the
mouths of those filled with hate, from Anita Bryant to our newly anointed
vice-presidential candidate, we cannot, and they cannot, undo what we have
done. I, and all of us here, now know ourselves. Everyone else know us. We tell
our stories and the movies tell our stories; not the stories of us, in this
room, perhaps, individually,
but of us, anywhere and everywhere, collectively. We have travelled from
invisibility to out and proud.
If John Cray and I were
kids today, we could, at least in many schools, each embrace some modern
equivalent of Tab Hunter quite openly; I with indifference and John with
passion. Movies have played a huge part in our journey and we owe a debt of
gratitude to those who conceived them, financed them, produced them, and above
all to the many straight actors who were brave enough to act the part of a gay
or lesbian in the early days, when they put their careers at risk by doing so.
In fact, As Roger Ebert,
long-time film critic. stated so beautifully,
“We live in
a box of space and time. Movies are
windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the
sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of
it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.”
Through movies, others
perhaps learned not only to see us, to know us, but, just for a short time, to
be us.
© July 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.
Posted on

Public Places, by Gillian

Over
the fifteen years that Betsy and I had Brunhilda, our VW camper van, we made
great use of so many public parks I couldn’t begin to count them.
That’s
how I started this piece, not really knowing where it was going from here. But
a thought struck me. Why couldn’t I begin, and eventually succeed in,
counting them? Betsy and I, ever anal, kept logbook-type diaries of every trip
we ever took with ol’ Brunie. 

So.,
I lugged armfuls of dusty old, and some not so old, notebooks, up from the
basement.

I
began to count, using that age-old tried-and-true method (though admittedly
very low-tech) of four short strokes with a line through them counting five. I was
surprised to find it actually only took me an hour or so, but admit to the
somewhat loose totals at which I arrived.
We
have camped for about 125 total days in over 50 National Parks. Several of
these were a few days together, as we explored the Park.  

We
have camped for over 150 days in State Parks in almost every one of the lower
48. In fact, I believe we have camped in every single state, neither Betsy nor
I can think of one we’ve missed, but I’d have to check through all those old
books again, not to mention all that illegible handwriting, to be 100% sure and
I really don’t care that much right now; in fact, I doubt I ever will! Many of
these stops were just one-nighters; a useful, but also frequently very
beautiful and interesting, place to stay on the way to and from somewhere else.
Town
and county parks, often only discovered by chatting to the locals, also often
tended to be one-night stands but nonetheless are frequently undiscovered gems.
Often, they are centered on some feature of local fame: an old historic cabin,
a little one-room local museum, a unique geologic formation, or the old water
mill. We have spent about 60 nights in such locations, and it’s here you tend
to meet interesting locals looking for someone new to talk to, and invariably wanting
to have a good look inside Brunhilda. Some places we have camped while Betsy
pedaled her ass around this State or that, have not in fact been campground at
all; merely the local school ball field or the town park – facilities are
always made available to a bicycle group wanting to stay the night and perhaps
leave behind a few bucks when they leave.
We
have camped 12 times in National Historic or Geologic Sites, frequently well
off the beaten path and little utilized, and so, very quiet. These are also
usually places of great interest, occasionally enough to keep us there for a
second night.  

Our
very favorites are probably the BLM or National Forest campgrounds. They are
inexpensive, quiet, and usually well away from any freeway. They are in deserts
and forests, on beaches and lakes, beside major rivers and tiny trickling
streams. Humans are the minority of their visitors. We share them with animals
and birds. We share them, sometimes not so gladly, with snakes and bugs. But,
despite the latter, we have returned several times to some of the 50 or so we
have used, often staying more than one night.
Our
public spaces are great gifts to us, some from the present but mostly from
previous generations. I am ever grateful to those with the foresight to create
these places, and to the avid campers of the early years of cross-country
motoring who engendered the need for established campground amid the beauty of
the wild, such as we enjoy today.
© 6 Jun 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.