Tag: Gillian

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Changing Images, by Gillian

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

                                           William Shakespeare

As most often, I completely agree with you, Will.

A reputation is a dangerous thing; good or bad, yours or someone else’s.

I guess the essence of their threat lies in the fact that we all tend to become sucked in by them, rather than by the reality of a person’s character. And, again, this is as true of our own as of others’. Being fooled by another person’s reputation, or image, is dangerous. Being led astray from your real self by your own, can be disastrous.

Reputations, and the images they create of us, can stay pretty stable throughout a lifetime, but for many of us they are fluid, changing as we grow. Who doesn’t know that wild child with the dreadful reputation in high school, who grew up to be a boringly conventional pillar of the community? Nevertheless that past reputation can hang around. Who has completely forgotten Chappaquiddick? It followed Ted Kennedy to his grave and beyond into the history books. The same for Monica Lewinsky, who will forever haunt Clinton’s reputation.

I’m not sure whether reputations have become more insidious in our modern word, or less.

In the days when most of us lived in small communities where everyone knew everyone else, it was hard for anyone to escape their established reputation and build a new one. You aren’t going to employ Bob to put in your new windows. He got caught shop-lifting at the dime store when he was ten. Probably rips off all his glass from some place. And as for letting Mary baby-sit. Remember how she knocked her baby sister off the chair that time? Well, yes, probably was an accident but still ……

These days, we tend not to know that the woman selling us insurance used to beat her children, or that the man fixing our car is a longtime alcoholic. On the other hand, anything you do or say can swoop around the world in a nanosecond, and if whatever it is goes viral, God help you!

I believe a lot of what Facebook is about is changing reputations, your own and others’, which is surely much easier to do these days than back in the small town where you were the town drunk for life no matter that you had been on the wagon for half of your life.

Winston Churchill was a perfect example of changing reputations. Come to that, he still is.

His youthful military escapades were a mixed bag, but, never lacking in ego, by the age of 26 he had published five books about them. His reputation was mixed, but he was made Lord of the Admiralty at at the ridiculously young age of 37. Sadly for him, and alas much sadder for the 250,000 casualties, his poorly-conceived Siege of the Dardanelles during WW1 was a total disaster and he was forced to resign, with his reputation in tatters. He immediately redeemed much of it by consigning himself to trench warfare, where he reportedly fought with vigor and valor.

Between the wars, his constant warnings of impending and inevitable war with Germany again diminished his reputation. No-one wanted to hear it. The Boer War was not so long over, and the British were not up for another. But when Germany broke its promises and invaded Poland, Churchill was proven right and his reputation soared. Almost instantaneously he was made Prime Minister and, with his reputation as that British Bulldog thundering around him, proclaimed by most as Britain’s savior. His very reputation, along with endless stirring speeches, did much to keep spirits high under desperate conditions, and to keep most Britons determined to go on fighting.

But that reputation, as a supreme fighter who would never give up, lost all appeal the moment the war ended. Churchill’s hawkish reputation coupled with his endless warnings over the new threat from the Soviets, were too scary for peace-time. Two months later Winston Churchill was defeated soundly at the polls.

His ego, however, remained undaunted. He had no fear for his reputation.

“History,” he pronounced, “Will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

Which he did. Over his lifetime he wrote 43 books in 72 volumes.

But still he was unable completely to preserve a positive reputation.

Although for many years it was considered akin to blasphemy to criticize such a great hero, that is no longer the case. There is much discussion these days as to whether Churchill was, to quote Dr. Andrew Roberts, “Brilliant Statesman or Brutal Demagogue.” Just from his own quotations, he was clearly misogynistic and racist, but in his day that was not condemned as it is today. So reputations change not only as a person changes, and events change, but as attitudes change.

And so we re-write history.

It’s hard to be sure what one’s own reputation is. Probably, in many cases, not exactly what we think it is or would like it to be. I do know that when I was married the first time, to a man, we were considered a really strong, stable couple. I know that because our friends were so utterly shocked when we split up. And, in so many ways, that reputation was valid. Except for one teensy weensy detail which no-one knew. In one way our reputation as a married couple was true. In another, it was as far off as it could be. But I was the only one who knew that; and I played my part so well.

When I came out, I became a bit confused. I wasn’t at all sure what the archetypal lesbian would be; but whatever it was, that’s what I would become. I observed carefully in this new world, and acted accordingly to create a new reputation, a new version of myself. Thankfully, this stage did not last long.

You’re doing it again! I said to myself. Your entire life you have created a false reputation for yourself, and now you’re finally free, you’re doing it again! STOP!

So I did.

And for over 30 years now, I have simply been me. I don’t know what kind of reputation I have.

I don’t care. A reputation is simply others’ visions, versions, of me. It may or may not be anywhere near the truth. It simply doesn’t matter.

Free at last!

© October 2014

About the Author

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

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Security by Gillian

Security, like living happily ever after, belongs in the never-never-land of children’s tales. It rarely exists; certainly not in modern reality, and in fact I doubt that it ever was thick on the ground. In those long ago days of our childhood, perhaps we locked the doors at night and counted ourselves pretty secure. But we had other terrors much worse than a midnight thief. Prior to Salk’s invention of a vaccine in the early 1950’s, we, or certainly our parents on our behalf, lived in constant terror of polio attacking our young limbs. Childhood diseases raged through schools and communities: measles and mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough, diptheria and meningitis. Today we are protected from most of those diseases but still left with little security as to health. We have to worry about old sicknesses returning in a new resistant form, or new ones – at least to us – suddenly appearing in the news, such as bird flu and sars, West Nile and Zika. Added to that, we have the fears of not being able to pay for the health care we need, just as our forebears feared it for themselves.

But at least our forefathers did not suffer from our insecurities of lack of privacy. Perhaps we have a physical privacy they lacked, but we live in constant trepidation of just how much personal information, down to the minutest detail, is available to anyone who cares to pluck it from the ether. Just this weekend I began filling out on-line applications for car and home insurance. I was amazed and appalled by the amount of data that was entered for me automatically the moment I put in my name and the first digits of my street address. It knew the answers to it’s own questions about me: it knew Betsy was my spouse, it knew every detail about her. It informed me that we are both retired and have no dependents. It filled in the year and model of our cars. Yes, I know none of this should surprise me, and at some level it did not. But there was something very unsettling about seeing it in action. A form meant for me to fill out was completed almost entirely, and accurately, by some unknown and invisible entity in cyberspace. I was a minimal presence in the whole process.

Not that here is much security in insurance, anyway. As our beleaguered climate swings from one extreme to another, natural disasters abound, and insurance rates soar. Before long I fear that all but the absolute minimal coverage will be unaffordable to many. Even if you can afford it, it is frequently unavailable. Live near the coast? Live in a floodplain? Well, gee, it just might flood there, so you can’t have insurance because you might need it. And these so-called floodplains are seriously iffy anyway, identified by computers in the garbage in/garbage out mode. I used to live in Lyons in a little house on top of a 100-foot cliff above the river, but the house location was identified as high risk of flooding and I could not buy flood insurance; not that I would have, anyway. In the terrible floods of 2013, most of the town of Lyons was washed away. But my old house stood firm and dry.

Our use of computers and all they offer can destroy our illusions of security in countless ways.

I have always, I believe, been a faithful friend. I value friendship highly, chose friends carefully, and feel safe and secure in those relationships. One of my longtime friends was a man I had worked with at IBM for thirty years. He had been supportive at the time of my coming out; he and his wife invited Betsy and me to their home and they visited ours. After he and I both retired we sent e-mails back and forth – jokes and cartoons and such – in the way most of us do.

We had a distribution list of old colleagues and scattered this silliness around. Suddenly, one day, I opened up one of these messages from my friend to find, to my disbelief and horror, pages of gay-bashing rantings. This was not tasteless homophobic humor, which I might, just possibly, have forgiven. This was pure vitriol. Hate-mongering gleaned and forwarded from all around the web. Tears poured down as I re-read it, fancying the first reading to be some kind of delusion. No. The hateful words remained. I just could not believe that he had kept such feelings from me for so many years, or that he had sent this garbage to me. I could only suppose, and still think, that he simply lost track of who exactly was on that particular distribution list. They can be dangerous things if you don’t pay attention. Whatever the reason, his true colors were clear to us all. After a night of sleeping on it, or, to be accurate, tossing awake on it, I replied. I acknowledged my heartbreak over such an ending to what I had always believed to be a firm and sincere friendship. I searched hopefully through my messages the following days, and then weeks, honestly expecting a reply; some kind of apology, some kind of explanation. None came.

I never heard from him again.

I never quite recovered from that incident. It robbed me of an innocence over friendship which I doubt I can regain. But I have tried to deal with it rationally and without allowing it to drag me down into complete cynicism and destroy other friendships, or my desire to make new ones. I have learned to say, with almost complete sincerity, that another person’s homophobia is their problem not mine. The same could be said, I suppose, of duplicity, but I find that so much harder to bear. It is not my friend’s homophobia that hurts so much, but the pretense, the subterfuge, the deceit.

Now, securely at home as a member of this storytelling group, I feel something very like my old innocence return. Perhaps lost innocence can be regained, after all. I feel safe and secure here.

I don’t fear that you are going to exhibit any duplicity; any pretense. I don’t believe that you are saying mean-spirited things about me behind my back. Oh sure, a little gossip and tattle-tale, but not real hard-core back-biting derision.

Security like that is hard to find. Reviewing it reminds me of the honor which has been bestowed on me and the pride I feel in being a member of this group.

© March 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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You’ll Never Know, by Gillian

No, I probably won’t, but I suspect that expression might soon need to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. It surely must be close to extinction. Extremely popular as recently as our younger days, attitudes have changed so much that people rarely say, or even think, these days, you’ll never know … whatever.

Not only people, but computer systems, know more about us than we do ourselves. King Soopers knows what I eat, Argonaut knows what I drink, Amazon knows what I read. A part of us seems to resent and fear this, yet we relentlessly feed the world endless information.

We shout everything from the rooftops. We tell everyone everything, from inane trivia to what would once have been deep dark secrets.

Take Facebook for instance. (Please, take it! I don’t want it.) So many people telling me so much more than I could ever need, or want, to know. Am I supposed to be enthralled by the final success of some friend of a friend’s grandchild’s potty training? Or someone whose name means nothing to me proclaiming that he, without fail, flosses his teeth six times every day? Or the myriad of lunatic responses to this claim from people I don’t know and don’t want to know?

I’d like to say that I hate Facebook, but in all honesty I simply stay away from it so I’m not involved enough to hate it. I do, however, regret the way in which it has created impersonal communication from the personal.

Once upon a time – and not so very long ago – cousin Fred would send a postcard when he visited New York. It would have the same tired photo of the Empire State Building on the front, and some version of wish you were here on the back. Nevertheless, how nice of him, you would say, to think of me. It was personal. It made you feel good.

Now, you look at Fred’s photo-journal on Facebook, detailing his trip to Bangkok. He recounts every event of every day, down to what he ate for dinner. You can imagine his trip much more vividly then you did from the old postcards, but what happened to that warm fuzzy you used to get from them? What happened to the personal touch? What happened to that oh how nice of you to think of me feeling? I haven’t a clue whether he ever gave me a thought or not. He sent this report out into the ether to be read by anyone who cared to do so. I would really get more out of a boring photo and a banal message; at least it was for ME.

A while back I heard via a mutual friend that a good friend of mine had just returned from New Zealand.

‘I didn’t even know she’d gone to New Zealand!’ I wailed.

‘It’s all been on Facebook,’ she replied, looking pitying and puzzled as if I’d just told her I couldn’t read.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of old lesbians Betsy and I belong to were joined for lunch by a few teenagers who shared with us their experiences with being …. um …. and here I shall begin to flounder because I am not too sure what they would consider the politically correct terminology. My apologies to any of you wonderful young people who happen ever to read this, which I think highly unlikely. I think their version of the alphabet soup was LGBTQIA+, the QIA being questioning, intersex, and asexual. What an education these kids are. They talk with assurance about identifying as gender-queer, gender-fluid, non-binary, and half the time I’m not sure even what they’re saying. It’s another language. And here we were, many of us in this room, when we were that age, ignorant of even one word to describe what we knew, at some level, ourselves to be. I recall that huge hurdle, as it appeared at the time, we had to leap in order simply to inform others that we were attracted to those of the same sex, or that we were trapped in the wrong body. Can you even begin to imagine trying to explain to your parents that you are never sure, at any given moment, whether you will feel that you are female or male, or to which sex you may feel attracted. Or that you chose not to identify as any gender. You just are.

For some of them, their preferred pronoun is ‘they’ rather than he or she, which is vaguely possible in the English language but when I try it I find it very confusing.

It was all starting to make my head hurt.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have every admiration for these young people: out to the world, apologizing for nothing, completely proactive on their own behalf. I’m not foolish enough to think it’s easy for them, but none of them is ever going to think, in some secret, inner, self, you’ll never know ….

Everyone knows, and I bet they’re all out, loud and proud, on Facebook.

Perhaps, if I used Facebook, I would be more familiar with the the language of today’s LGBTQIA etc. youth, though I am not ashamed to admit my deplorable ignorance face to face.

Maybe I just have to accept that if I am to keep up with what is happening in the world in general, and with those nearest and dearest, I shall have to resort to Facebook. But I’d still rather receive a postcard.

© November 2015

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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Moving, by Gillian

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the adjective as
“having a strong emotional effect: causing feelings of sadness or
sympathy.” So what is it within us, we humans, that draws us to stories or
places or events which we find moving? I know that is true for myself. I also
know the memories of such places or events, whether I have purposely involved
myself or simply stumbled into them, way outlive many other memories.
In high school I went to France with three other girls. It
was the first time any of us had been out of Britain and I’m sure we saw it as
some wild adventure. We stayed in the picturesque town of Annecy, and from the
warm glow which accompanies thoughts of it, I’m sure we had a good time there,
though any details escape me. This is supported by a few faded old photos of
happy, giggling, girls. But I remember only one thing. Our train, heading
south-east from Calais through rich farmland, suddenly entered fields growing
nothing but crosses; small white crosses which in my memory numbered in the
thousands, stretching to the horizon and continuing for endless miles. They
reside so solidly in my mind that I can feel the swaying of the train and hear
the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails as I write. Even as a silly
giggly schoolgirl I recognized the crosses as commemorating the dead of the
First World War, while France still reeled from the Second. They moved me to
tears. They are as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday.
Years ago, I have little idea when it would have been, I was
for some reason in Washington D.C. with time on my hands and went to see the
Vietnam Memorial Wall. With almost 60,000 names, the gold lettering seemed to
go on forever, like those white crosses. The weather was windy and wet and
there were few people there. I became mesmerized by one old woman who stood,
the rain mixing with her tears, silently caressing each letter of one name. Her
wrinkled old fingers gently traced the name from beginning to end and back from
end to beginning, over and over and over. I couldn’t stop watching. I wanted
badly to put my arms around her but could not intrude on her obvious grief.
Whose name was it? She seemed pretty old for it to be her son. Grandson?
Granddaughter? Why was she here all alone? My heart felt that it would break for
her.
I remember nothing else of that visit to D.C. I don’t even
know why I was there though I suspect a business trip. But I have never
forgotten those worn old fingers slowly moving over the cold wet stone.
Shortly after I retired, I found myself in a volunteer job in
Hungary for a few weeks. I resolved not to leave without visiting Auschwitz in
neighboring Poland, and so one weekend took the overnight train from Budapest
to Krakau, to spend a day which was well beyond moving; harrowing,
heartbreaking, horrifying. After some time at Auschwitz, having reached my
saturation point of the evil of that dreadful place, I returned to Krakau in a
cab shared with four others. The five of us stood silently on the cobbled
street, watching the cab rattle away. It was almost as if we huddled together
searching for comfort from what we so recently had seen and felt. There seemed
nothing to say. Eventually we began to introduce ourselves – and a motley crew
we were. There was a Jewish woman, about my age, from Wisconsin, two young
Japanese men who, as far as I ever discovered, spoke not one word of any other
language, and an even younger man who literally spoke not one word at all, so I
never knew what country he was from or what language he would have spoken, had
he spoken. Still we seemed to have some compelling need to stick together. One
of the Japanese men gestured across the street. There was a cinema, showing,
rather shockingly I somehow felt, Schindler’s List. He turned
questioningly to the rest of us and we all nodded yes in silent agreement. What
strange impulse led us to do that? It was as if our current state of numb
misery was not enough; we needed more. After the movie we performed a strange,
hesitant, kind of loosely formed group hug, and I returned to Budapest on the
overnight train after one of the strangest days of my life. But I can still
recall every detail of that day, while most of my time in Hungary recedes into
misty muddled memory. 
Betsy and I spent the whole month of September 2015 on a 5,000-mile
road trip to and from the east coast. We stayed in so many different places and
did so many completely different things that it seems, looking back, like
several mini-vacations all rolled into one. Some things were scheduled and
planned, some were simply spontaneous. Driving back home through Pennsylvania,
Betsy spotted a tiny red square on the map. Beside it, in miniscule red
letters, were the words, Flight 93 Crash Site Memorial. Although we were in Pennsylvania,
we hadn’t given it a thought. I’m not sure we even knew there was such a thing.
Without hesitation we agreed the small detour was worth it, and took off across
back roads through rolling farmland.
The Memorial is beautifully, very tastefully, done. 

There’s a long black granite walkway
following the flight path, which comes to an end overlooking another pathway
(but you cannot walk on this one) mown through the long grass and bushes of
that infamous field. This ends at a boulder placed there to mark the impact
spot. All very simple but oh so effective.

It moves you to tears and also to
shades of the terror those passengers must have felt. There is something magic
about it that almost moves you right into that plane with them. At least that’s
what it did for me.

And after all that is why we visit places like that isn’t it?
To feel. If we don’t feel moved, then why go?
But, back to the original question I asked myself, why?
Why do I need to be moved to sorrow and sadness by monuments to death and
destruction? Since I decided to write on the topic, I’ve been thinking a lot
about it and I decided that for me it accomplishes several things.
Gratitude. I simply feel enormous, completely selfish,
gratitude. It was not me. I was not there. Nor were my loved ones: not on that,
or any other, doomed flight, not in the Twin Towers, nor the jungles of Vietnam
dodging snipers’ bullets, nor any school or shopping mall mass shootings, nor
in the Asian tsunami. It revives and strengthens that everyday gratitude I
should feel for the blessed life I have lived, and continue to live.
Balance. We need the yin and the yang, that balance of
negative and positive, in our lives; the ups and downs. Without bad, we are
less able to appreciate good. I have been so fortunate, that I think I have to
indulge in collective sorrows to keep my balance; to really feel just
how good my life is.
Connection. In feeling the pain of others, I am connected to
them. Your pain is my pain. We are members of the same tribe. At bottom we are
all tribal beings, and in sharing, no matter how remotely, minimally, the pain
and terror of Auschwitz, I keep myself connected; in the tribe.
So it’s not that I get some sick twisted voyeuristic pleasure
from being moved to tears by others’ pain. 
It’s simply that I need it.
Nicolas Sparks in, At
First Site, says, “The emotion that can break your
heart is sometimes the very one that heals it…”
I think that describes perfectly
my need for being moved to tears. It keeps my heart healthy and strong when
otherwise it might be weakened by a life too lucky.
© 2 Nov
2015 
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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Bricks, by Gillian

My mother, not
someone I would identify as a religious person, used to read me stories from
the Bible. She favored the New Testament, particularly the Parables. I think
she believed, quite rightly in my opinion, that they would have a more positive
influence on me than Fairy Tales, many of which seem to be about little girls
coming to bad ends through little or no fault of their own.
Occasionally she
chose readings from the Old Testament, and one of these was the tale of Making
Bricks Without Straw. (This is how it is generally thought of, anyway, though
to be accurate that is incorrect. Pharaoh did not tell the Israelites they had
to make bricks without straw but rather that straw would no longer be provided
for them; they would have to get it themselves.) I suspect that she liked the
tale because, in this post-war time of severe rationing, she felt that she
spent her life trying to create the necessities of life without the basic
ingredients.
Be all of that as
it may, it was my introduction to bricks.
The house I grew up
in, like most homes in rural Britain, was made of local stone, not brick nor
wood. Various ambitious British monarchs building various ambitious fleets of
wooden ships had depleted British woodlands almost to the point of oblivion.
Brick was expensive. Stone was frequently there for the taking. The problem is,
rough-hewn stone such as that of my childhood home, is rather like a badly-cut
jigsaw puzzle. The pieces don’t fit together well, and require great amounts of
mortar to keep things stable. The mortar requires constant repair, and even
with that the incessant rain finds it’s way into and through the walls. The
house was always cold and damp.
When I rode the
local bus to to the local town, with it’s burgeoning suburbia, I looked upon
the brick homes with envy. Perhaps they did, as my mother said with sniffing
disdain, all look alike. But that look was warm, and snug, and cozy; none of
which adjectives could be applied to our home. They were, perhaps, 150 years
younger, but that failed to register. In the event, I moved from English
fieldstone to American wood siding and never did live in a brick house until
Betsy and I got together. Over the twenty-eight years we have been together we
have had three houses, all brick, and all living up to my dreams of warm and
cozy.
In the Britain of
my childhood, I’m not sure about nowadays, we would call a certain type of
person a brick. Ooh, you really are a brick! you’d say to the kind
neighbor who, unasked, took your children to her house for a few days so that
you could go to bed with that awful flu. He’s such a brick, you’d say,
about the friend who was always there to lend a practical hand in times of
trouble. A brick is someone thoughtful, kind, reliable, generous. Betsy is a
brick. It’s a large part of why I love her so much.
Several years ago I
signed up for a tour of Lakewood Brick Company. It was scheduled to start quite
early in the morning, and we lived in Park Hill at that time, so I left home
about 7.00 a.m.  There was surprisingly
little traffic about. Was it some holiday I’d forgotten? Rather than wondering
about it I gave thanks for quiet streets which gave me time to pop into the
grocery store to get a snack for lunch. The store somehow had an odd feeling to
it, rather the way the roads had. The few customers all seemed to be standing
in little groups engaged in serious conversations rather than actually
shopping. I was getting a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘What’s going on?’
I asked two employees who stood muttering together.
‘Oh! Haven’t you
heard?’ They stumbled over each other to give me the news.
‘A plane crashed
into one of the New York sky-scrapers,’ said one.  ‘Only, then there was another crash so they
don’t know what’s happening,’ added the other.
I forgot lunch and
went back to the car to listen to the radio. Clearly what they had told me was
what was being reported, but all in total confusion. The newscasters obviously
had no clear picture of what exactly had happened and what continued to happen.
The only certainty was; it was not good. It was serious. It was some kind of
national emergency.
What to do? Should
I go back home? To do what? Would they cancel the Brick Company tour?
Uncertainly I
turned through the high fence gates and parked, to be joined in the next few
minutes by a few other cars. The tour began as scheduled but with about a
quarter of the number expected. Those of us who had turned up gave it our best
but it was hopeless. The man leading the tour tried, but was clearly
distracted. He wasn’t concentrating on what he was saying and no-one was really
listening. Cell Phones kept chiming and chirping. The recipient would listen,
disconnect, and pass on the latest to the rest of us. Pretty soon, by some kind
of unspoken but unanimous decision, we gave up and went home through streets
that were, if anything, even more silent than before, to sit at home and stare
in horrified disbelief at our televisions along with everyone else.
Where we live now
is not very far from Lakewood Brick Company. We drive past it quite often.  But no matter how many times I pass it, it
never fails to take me back to that terrible day which so changed this country,
and indeed the world, forever.
Until I started to
write this piece, I don’t think I had ever realized that bricks actually loom
quite large in my psyche, one way and another. Amazing what you discover about
yourself writing these little Monday afternoon vignettes.
© 12 Oct 2015 
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

Sad but True, by Gillian

It is undeniably true, and equally undeniably sad, that selfish, inconsiderate, people keep insisting upon dying; often at very inconvenient times and in equally inconvenient places. Often they don’t even bother giving me any warning; which actually is of no consequence because, when I do have some presentiment of bad behavior on their part and sternly insist that they mend their ways, do they pay attention? No! They just pop their clogs, topple off their perches, in total disregard of my needs and wants.

Now, most of these people are old enough to know better. They must know that I, at a similar age, am too old to deal with emotional upheavals. Bad things just keep getting harder to deal with. So, do they cease and desist from such things? Far from it. In fact old friends insist on dying with ever-increasing frequency.

Take just last week. Nancy, the chef from Betsy’s cross-country bike trip, died unexpectedly. She was not only cook and bottle-washer, but she also rode her bike, along with the others. So her death was almost a double whammy: the loss of Nan the cook, and Nancy, the co-rider. She was also the first of the group to die, so that hit everyone very hard. I mean, just how inconsiderate is that? She was a perfectionist, and very competitive, so I guess she just had to be #1. (Actually, that whole group was made up of some very competitive people, so in a way it would not have been surprising if they’d chased each other right into the arms of that old Grim Reaper, like lemmings going over the cliffs.) But no, in the event, Nancy had to be first.

On top of that she was only 68, abandoning ship early, leaving old souls like Betsy to pedal on.

In a final act of selfishness, she had to go and die in some remote half-a-horse Wyoming town in the middle of winter. Whoa! How’s that for heaping it on? Just because she fell in love with this Wyoming rancher, just because she wanted to live on his remote ranch, just because she adored the midst of nowhere, we had to traverse the sleet and snow of Windy Wyoming on bitterly cold February days. Huh!

—————–

With that, I guess my attempt at some kind of dark humor has fizzled out. I suppose I had to try it as the only way, at this particular moment, to deal with the sad but true fact that as we age we lose so many friends; faster and faster they fall. All the tired old platitudes, such as death is just a part of life, offer me nothing, though I do try to remind myself constantly that in fact I am very fortunate: in order to lose so many friends you first have to have so many friends. Still, I hate that feeling of always waiting for another shoe to drop, dreading who will be next. Then, one day, I shall be the one who is next. Sad but true.

© February 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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Depression, by Gillian

I have talked before of how fortunate, indeed blessed, my life has been, and certainly a large part of that is not to have been afflicted with depression. Sure, I have my ups and downs, sadness and loss; I’ve shed my share of tears. I’ve occasionally spent a few miserable days in what a friend calls a ‘mean green funk’. But when I’m low it’s the result of an identifiable cause; something that has happened. I have never suffered from long-lasting depression coming upon me apparently for no reason, though probably the result of some unidentified cerebral chemical imbalance, and most likely requiring some kind of medication to eliminate, or at least alleviate, the problem. Alas, I know too many people who do suffer from clinical depression to remain unaware of the depth of gratitude I must feel for not having been its victim.

I also escaped the Great Depression with all its miseries, not being born until 1942. But I find great similarities in the attitudes of those who survived the thirties with my own, learned in World War Two. Make do and mend, never waste anything, were the watchwords children in my world grew up with, as they were for the children of the Great Depression. Reading memoirs of survivors, the things they say could just as easily be said by Depression children as wartime kids.

I still turn off the lights when I leave a room. I save every little thing in case I might be able to use it sometime in the future. It was a great equalizer, everyone we knew was in the same fix.

We were kids: we didn’t know we had nothing, everyone had nothing. Our parents tried to hide the real hardships from us. One person collecting interviews sums it up, ‘Frugality: it is their middle name.’ Yes indeedy!!

Tropical depressions; I’m sure I have been in several, but so far have been fortunate enough not to encounter their more developed selves, hurricanes. Betsy and I came uncomfortably close to tornadoes here and there occasionally on our travels, but I have never been anywhere near a hurricane. I wish I may go to my grave saying that.

Depressions in the earth sometimes collapse suddenly creating sinkholes of various sizes. These have been known to swallow up cars, trucks, buses, houses and people. A police SUV fell into a sinkhole in Sheridan, Colorado, this summer. In 2014 eight classic Corvettes in the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, disappeared into a sinkhole. People in Florida have fallen into sinkholes and never been recovered. And these things appear all around the world, not just in this country.

Depressions of all kinds seem, inevitably, to be ……. well, depressing. I looked for an appropriate quote as an ending to this piece, and found I was becoming ….. well, depressed. Then I chanced on this one by Emanuel Celler –

“The panic of the Depression loosened my inhibitions against being different.”

I could be myself.

Okey dokey! We all know the importance of being yourself: different, free of inhibitions. So maybe depressions, whether cerebral, climactic, fiscal or physical, are not all bad after all.

I’ll try to remember that when I’m trapped in my car in a sinkhole in the middle of a hurricane and I can’t quite reach the glovebox where I left my Prozac.

© December 2015

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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A Defining Word, by Gillian

We need some new words; new defining words.

But we’re creating them daily, probably hourly, I can hear you thinking. And that’s fair enough. Just how recently did I adopt, or adapt to, words like server and processor, not to mention bits and bytes and firewalls and apps. But those are all techie terms. I’m talking about sociological terminology which seems to be mired in the mud of decades.

I find it very strange, for instance, that in the English language there is no word for a parent who has lost a child. We dignify the situation of one who has lost both parents with the noun orphan. You lose your spouse, you’re a widow or widower.

But surely the loss of a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and yet our language offers no linguistic easy way out. A wife who has lost her husband can simply say, I’m a widow, and leave it at that if she wants. But a parent must stumble through some agonizing sentence, even if one as clipped as, I lost my only son.

The author Karla Holloway, in an essay on NPR back in 2006, addressed this topic.* She expressed it as needing to ‘name the pain’ in order to assist in healing. I saw what the loss of two children, before I was born, did to my parents in the long-term. I wonder, had there been a single word to express what had happened to them, if they might have found a way to tell me, instead of leaving it to my aunt eventually to clarify for me the presence of that huge elephant never absent from our home.

There is considerable on-line chat (surprise, surprise!) on this topic, and from it I discovered that few languages have such a word. The exceptions are, apparently, the semitic languages. German has an expression I find very touching, it translates literally as ‘orphaned parent’ but still it is not incorporated into a single word. Why is a single word that sums up this horrific situation so rare?

A few ideas are offered on line. Some suggest that it is only recently that infant mortality has dropped sufficiently to make it an unusual situation for a child to pre-decease his/her parents. That does offer a certain uncomfortable logic I suppose, but I don’t see how it translates into the absence of a word. Someone else offered the explanation that, with it having been such a common situation until recent times, and still being sadly frequent in much of the world, having a word for it would be redundant, like, this person, obviously a MAN, says ‘having a word for a man with a penis.’ The insensitivity of this analogy angers me, but then if I am going to be so precious I need to stay away from posts on the internet.

Another, herself a bereaved mother, suggests that it is something too terrible to be put into words. I sympathize with the idea, but we have words for so many still worse things, just take infanticide and genocide for instance, that I can’t go along with that explanation either.

Others believe the absence of the word is due to the broader social insignificance of the event. Becoming an orphan, widow, or widower, changes a person’s status in society, whereas losing a child does not. I find that incredibly hard and cold, and don’t want to believe it. Are we, the majority of the world’s population, so calculating that we only see sorrowful events which change people’s lives in the light of how they might affect us? Now we might have to support that child, give that widow a pension, or marry that widower. But we are not affected by the death of a friend’s child so consider it unimportant? Even at my most cynical, I truly don’t believe that most of us are so uncaring; so unaffected by the sorrows of our friends and neighbors, or even complete strangers.

So I remain simply baffled by the lack of this, what I consider very important, word. Someone on line suggests adopting the word ‘shadow’ because anyone who has lost a child becomes a shadow of his or her former self. Personally, I like it. It certainly describes my own parents. I have so often wished there were some way that I could know what they were like before they lost two children. But I can only extrapolate from the parents I knew, and from old photographs in which they looked so much happier than I ever saw them in my lifetime.

But I don’t expect this or any other word to appear in general use any time soon. Only technology will continue to toss new words at us faster than we can grasp them, and I shall go on struggling with Dvi/Hdmi adapters and why my Thunderbolt port doesn’t work and does it matter? Or maybe I have a vga port and does that matter?

And are these all defining words? Only my computer knows for sure.

* http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5511147

A postscript from Gillian –

After I read this to our group, Ray S. suggested using a new adjective rather than a noun.

Just as we say ‘childless’ of a person or couple without children, we could say ‘childloss’ of those who have suffered that terrible bereavment.

Thank you, Ray, I find that moving and beautiful in it’s simplicity.

© February 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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Preparation, by Gillian

Oh, Heavens! The things
that spring to mind! An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure,  Preparation H, emergency
preparedness, hope for the best and prepare for the worst, look to the past to
prepare for the future, and prepare to meet your maker.
In my younger days I
suppose I did quite a lot of preparation. I recall preparing, with my mother,
for my first day of school, for my church Confirmation and after it for my
first Communion, and probably many more firsts. They tend to pile up on you in
your youth. Then, in school and college, there were endless tests and exams to
prepare for. I prepared to go to college and, in what seemed like no time,
prepared to leave.
Then, without any
conscious intent, I seem to have entered a long phase of my life when I made
little, if any, preparation for anything. Events occurred in an apparently
random, haphazard, way. This went well; that did not. This happened; that did
not. Oh well! Shrug it off. Move on. I most assuredly did not prepare to come
out; certainly not to myself, anyway. You cannot really prepare to be hit by a
runaway train.
Now, in the latter part
of life, I find myself regressing, in the matter of preparation as with many
other things, to the ways of my youth. If I don’t prepare for just about
anything and everything, I shall forget some vitally important words or deeds,
or both. When we prepare for camping or road trips, Betsy and I now set up
‘staging areas’ where we collect things for weeks before we leave, so as not to
forget some essential. We used to basically just get in the car and start
driving, and get wherever we got. Not anymore! We plan the route, fussing over
getting through congested areas before or after rush hour. Or sometimes we plan
quite lengthy detours to avoid braving six lanes of freeway at 5.00pm. On the
other hand, we need to prepare a route that gets us to a campground in time to
settle in before dark. No more midnight arrivals for us!
One thing I know for sure
about preparation; it can be incredibly beneficial when it comes to
practicalities, but for emotions it’s a bust. At least for me. I tried, if only
vaguely, most of my life, to prepare myself for the death of my parents. That
is, after all, the normal natural course of events for most of us. It didn’t
work; I might as well never have given it a thought. I was simply felled by
their deaths. Devastated. And the heartbreak went on and on. It was at least
ten years before I was really OK with it, and that was only after a lot of work
on my spirituality. We have too many friends ending up in hospice lately.
Naturally, given those circumstances, we give it our best to prepare ourselves
emotionally for imminent loss. It doesn’t seem to help. Grief remains grief
even though it is not accompanied by shock. Even though we tell ourselves it
was for the best they didn’t linger longer.
When Betsy and I decided,
two years ago, to get legally married while we were on a visit to California,
we truly meant it when we said to family and friends, ‘Oh it’s no big deal.
We’ve been together for ever after all. It’s just signing a piece of paper.’
Wrong again! We were both
completely taken by surprise by the strength of emotion we felt. Both so close
to tears, we could barely say those words we had waited almost thirty years to
say.  We had thought we were completely
prepared, and once more might as well not have given it a thought for as wrong
as we got it.
So all I’m trying to do
now, as far as emotional preparedness goes, is preparing to be surprised. I
shall prepare by acknowledging that I don’t have a clue how I’m going to feel,
wherever and whenever, about anything. And again I surprise myself. This
unpreparedness actually feels good. It’s liberating. It’s living in the moment.
I shall know what I feel
when I feel it. What on earth is wrong with that?
© 24 Aug 2015 
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

Forever, by Gillian

Well of course there’s no
such thing. In human time, we’ll all die someday. In historic time, we see that
everything comes to an end; even in geologic time nothing is forever.
Continents wander about the surface of the earth, joining and separating and pushing
up mountains. Even our planet is about halfway through its lifespan. In
another four and a half billion years, give or take time out for weekends and
holidays, Earth as we know it will grind to a halt. As our planet cools, it
will become, perhaps, rather as Mars is now; in the same way as Mars was,
perhaps, once rather as Earth is now.
Nothing is forever. But
it’s tricky.
Via our own memories, or
through education, we know a great deal about so much that has gone before; has
not been forever. What is hard, is to grasp the current absences that will not
remain forever, so many of which we ourselves have lived. We had, in our youth,
no concept of the absence of a Ground Positioning System. We cannot
grasp the lack of something we don’t know will ever exist. Or that GPS would in
turn would lead to a voice coming from a device in your car and giving you
detailed moment by moment directions, guiding you from A to B. We did not dream
that phones would not be forever attached to the wall or that in a relatively
short time they would be capable of delivering to their users vast amounts of
information. We never knew that someday we would say, there’s an app. for
that! And it’s not just technology that shows so little sign of forever.
Most of us, people of a certain age, did not know that life in the closet we
inhabited was not forever. We could not dream that we would live to see, some
incredible day, The White House alight in rainbow colors. Come to that, we had
no vision of the significance which would one day become attached to those
colors; that rainbow. Nor could we see our part in it.
Betsy and I, along with
most of the world’s population, watched the Women’s Soccer World Cup. I
remarked to her that the fact that there even is such a thing as women
playing soccer at all, never mind a World Cup watched, in the U.S. alone, by
almost 30-million people, is as completely incredible to me as the recent,
amazing, legalizing, throughout the entire U.S., of same-sex marriage. It was
little more than two years ago that I stated, in one of my Storytime writings,
that I did believe it would arrive, some day, but not in my lifetime. Of
course, in my youth, it was something I could not conceive of in the very best
of my imaginings. All that existed was a void in thought, word, and deed, which
I could only suppose would last forever.
One of the good things, I
find, about growing old is that we really do get it. We really know that those
good times will not last forever, so we enjoy them more intensely, perhaps more
frequently, while at the same time managing not to feel that terrible sense of
loss and regret when they are over. By the same token, we know that the bad
times are not forever. We will get over it, and life will go on. Or we will
not, and we will die. And quite honestly, I cannot believe that will be
forever, either. Nothing else is, as far as I know, in the entire universe. So
why would death be the single exception? What will follow I don’t even
speculate. It is simply another of those conceptual voids, like women’s soccer
and gay marriage once were to me, which will not last forever. Someday it will
be filled. I just don’t know with what.
© 13 Jul 2015 
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.