Tag: Gillian

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All Writing is Experimental, by Gillian

If
writing is based on life, and I don’t know what else we’d base it on, then
surely it must be experimental because all life is experimental. And not just
human life; what is evolution, after all, but a series of experiments? Trouble
is, real life experiments can be painful; just think of all those critters who
ended up on the wrong side of the evolutionary experiments.
Whammo!
Extinct!
Betsy
and I read, somewhere, in some pop-psych book, that we should all look at life
as an experiment and therefor lighten up. Rather than castigating myself for
moving back to Podunk, Iowa, and consequently being miserable and wanting
nothing more than to return to Denver, what a stupid mistake, why did you do
such a stupid thing, etc. etc., I should shrug and say, ”Oh well, just an
experiment. Rather surprising results; not quite what I expected.”
and
move happily back to Denver. We both rather liked the concept. Putting yourself
down because you made a dumb mistake, a bad decision, resolves nothing. It was
an experiment. You cannot fail an experiment. The result just is, and
you go from there.
The
problem is, even though you perhaps are free from beating up on yourself, that
experiment was darned expensive: financially and emotionally. Often for others
as well as yourself. Your girlfriend was devastated that you didn’t care enough
to stick around. On the other hand, neither did she care enough to go with you.
Relationship over. You sold the condo that you so enjoyed. And now, by some
quirk of fate, it seems to require twice as much money as you sold it for, to
buy anything remotely equivalent. That move to Podunk has cost you a bundle,
regardless of whether you call it an experiment or a stupid mistake.
On
the other hand, in defense of experiments, there are indeed many situations
which might well be improved by being seen as experimental. The one that leaps
into my mind, is marriage. What else can it be? Two kids barely out of school
promise to love and be faithful to each other for what may well be the next
seventy years. How intimidating is that? How realistic is it? Clearly not very,
given our less than 50% success rate. Wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense
to promise to give this experiment your very best shot, and see what happens.
How much lighter, less intimidating, that would feel. Perhaps under such
circumstances, marriages would actually have a better chance of survival. That
institution needs a shot in the arm. I say we try it. Life truly is a
continuous series of experiments. We might as well face it.
Aaaah!
But writing, now, that really is free, except for my time. And harmless.
Spending three hours, or three months if it comes to that, writing something
which eventually falls victim to the delete key, is probably just as
beneficial to me as that which triumphantly ends up at the print
command. The process is as valuable as the end result. It’s all a series of
experiments which result in a string of surprises.
Sometimes
I sit down at the keyboard with a firm plan in place. I know how I’m going to
start, where I meander to from there, and how it will end. All I have to do is
put down the words and that, for me, is usually the easy part. Other times I
place my fingers on the keys and my mind is a complete blank. I haven’t managed
to form one thought about the topic on which I plan to write. I flex my fingers
as if preparing to play the piano, and wait for the music to start. From this
point on, whether I have a clear plan in my head or no thoughts at all,
everything comes a surprise. Who knows where this experiment will lead?
My
fingers start to move; slowly at first, then faster. The cymbals clash. A
crashing crescendo. Silence falls. I look back to see what I have actually
written. It’s fantastic! I love it! It’s godawful. It’s crap! Most often it’s
somewhere in between. What’s that whole paragraph about? Delete. Need to
explain this better. Insert. That word isn’t just, quite, exactly,
right. A gentle man. No. A quiet man? No. A calm man. Calm. That’s the word I’m
looking for. And, in finding the right word, I see him differently. A
wonderful, totally unexpected, result of this experiment.
Writing,
from the grand design to every single individual word or even punctuation, is
all an experiment; trial and error. I rarely, even on occasions when I have a
complete plan, end up where I intended. Well! I sit back and re-read what I
wrote. Who’da thunk? I ask myself. Who knew I thought that? Apparently my
fingers did. They are the ones who seem to know where we’re going. Not me. I
just evaluate and tweak it when they’re done.
The
topic we have chosen to write about is an experiment in itself. Some I look on
with approval. I know exactly how to approach that. Others I stare at
blankly and want to strangle whoever dreamed that one up. But in reality, some
of the topics I can’t seem to raise any interest in generate what I judge as
good stories; some of the topics I love end up somewhere in the mediocre.
A
while back I read a novel, can’t of course recall either the title or the
author, which was honestly kinda boring. It was long and moved slowly, but I
persevered. You know how it is sometimes with a book like that? You have to
finish it because it really can’t be as bad as you think it is and eventually
you’ll get it. Sometimes you don’t, and you wonder how the thing ever got
published. But this one had such a twist in the tail, or tale, that I still
remember it and in spite of a good deal of boredom to be suffered I would
recommend it. If I could remember what it was, that is! The point is, I found
myself wondering about the author’s process in this particular experiment. Did
she (yes, I do recall it was a woman) plan it that way all along. The reader
must plod on through this rather uninviting story, being set up, really,
for the dramatic shocker at the end, making the effort worthwhile after all? Or
did she get towards the end of her writing and have to accept that in all
honesty it was pretty boring. Who would read it? It would get bad reviews. It
would end up being sold for 10% of it’s original price, on Amazon, amongst all
the other dismal failures. And she was clever enough to dream up a way to save
it with the surprise ending?
Reams
have been written about how famous writers planned their work, from the
intricacies of James Joyce to the ball-point scrawls of Rowling, to Faulkner,
who famously outlined his
fiction on the walls of his study, in-between bottles of
bourbon. But I would be willing to bet, no matter how well established and
researched the plan, every day of writing brought with it a myriad of surprises
and adjustments. Writing, like any artistic creation, is an experiment whether
you’re at the very top of the game or a rank amateur, just struggling to put
one word in front of another.
© 27 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.
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Believing, by Gillian

‘I believe in one god, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible.’

So begins the Nicene Creed which I learned in Sunday School and for a while repeated most Sundays of the year. But sometime in my ninth year I had a kind of epiphany, accepting that I didn’t believe a word of anything that went along with organized religion. I continued to accompany my mother to church, just being supportive, but determinedly kept my mouth shut when we proclaimed our religious beliefs of which I had, and still have, absolutely none.

So I never say ‘I believe …. ‘ using the words to denote, as Voltaire puts it, believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. That kind of belief is, to me, as cast in stone as sexual orientation. I cannot make myself believe something I don’t believe any more than I can make myself be straight. I can pretend, as so many of us did once upon a time when we played it straight, I can say the Creed along with the best of them, but I cannot make myself believe.

I do use those words, as many people use them, to mean that I have seen or heard enough evidence to believe that, based on sound reasoning, something is true. This, according to many definitions, puts me firmly in the skeptics’ box – relying on the rational and empirical: valuing thinking and seeing rather than making that blind leap of faith to belief.

In my own, albeit skeptical, way, I believe many many things.

For example: I believe that history will judge Obama well, for his sincerity and constant struggle to do what he truly believes to be the right thing. (Though he might do well to follow Churchill’s plan; he said he knew history would be kind to him because he intended to write it.) And, speaking of Sir Winston, I believe that had I ever met him I would probably have disliked him. If he were running for office in November I doubt I would vote for him. Nevertheless, I believe most sincerely that I am forever in his debt. Without his inimicable stand against the Nazis, I believe that my life would have been very very different; quite possibly a lot shorter. Similarly, I believe I would not be casting my vote for Teddy Roosevelt with his bluster and his gunboats, but I also owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Without his foresight in initiating the National Park system, I would never be able to appreciate the magnificence of nature that was once this country. It would all be unrecognizable, long ago torn away by mining and drilling, or covered in concrete jungles of shopping malls and mansions. And these realizations make me believe, in turn, that few people – yes, even politicians – are an influence solely for good or evil, though there are some notable exceptions. Life is endlessly complex, as are the people and issues we encounter in it.

My most vehemently held belief, right now, is in the reality of global climate change. As I see it, everything else pales by comparison. What does it really matter that we finally have gay marriage, or that Syria is a failed state, or that, in spite of the efforts Obama is promising to make, we are so far from getting fire arms under any kind of meaningful control in this country? If we continue not only to ignore but actively to deny that climate change is now in our faces, what does anything else matter? It will change the lives of every single person on this earth. How anyone cannot see it is a total mystery to me. 2015 was example enough for anyone. It was the hottest year on record over the entire world in 135 years of modern record-keeping. Global sea-

level surged to new heights. Glaciers retreated for the thirty-first year in a row. Record greenhouse gases fill our atmosphere. And if global statistics don’t impress you, aren’t we watching it all happening almost every day on our televisions? Tornado alley now stretches from the Gulf to Canada, and every year it is harder to define ‘tornado season’ or ‘hurricane season’ – we simply have to expect anything anywhere anytime. There were more tornado-related deaths in this country during December of 2015 than in any previous December on record. Merry Xmas, all you deniers!

Almost more maddening, to me, than such idiots as those who toss snowballs about as proof against global warming, are those who acknowledge its existence but insist that it is a completely natural climate swing, such as there have always been, and therefor of no consequence. What?? During the last ice age, which I think we can all agree was not human-induced, the area that is now New York lay under a sheet of ice a mile thick. Should mankind be around for the next ice age, which I personally doubt, will we all shrug our shoulders as the wall of ice approaches and ignore it simply because it’s a purely natural phenomenon? Surely we need to decide how we are going to survive global climate change rather than indulge in endless wrangles over the cause.

So does this mean that I believe climate change will cause the human race to be just one more species that goes extinct? There would be some justice in that, as we are, ourselves, causing the extinction of so many. But I cannot claim to believe that, per se, because there are simply not enough facts available. I think there’s certainly some chance of an extinction in our relatively near future, but possibly not. We have survived many disasters: plagues and pestilence, wars and famines, earthquakes and volcanoes. But seeing that an estimated 99% of all species which ever existed are now extinct, I certainly believe that we will not go on forever.

One day we will be gone, our Little Blue Dot will heal itself from all our depredations, and humankind will leave no more than a hiccup in the geologic history of Planet Earth.

That, I, proud skeptic, do believe.

© January 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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Hair, by Gillian

Looking back on it, I had rather nice hair when I was young, in a typically English way; golden-brown with a few coppery highlights. But I didn’t appreciate it one whit at the time. My mother created two braids for me every morning until she began school teaching again, at which time she announced it had become my responsibility. I was somewhere in the early grades at Elementary School so I guess I was six, maybe seven. Braids were the only thing I knew, so I continued them. Unfortunately, my pudgy little arms were not sufficiently flexible, not were my young fingers skilled enough, to create the braids at the back of my head. Instead, I pulled half of the loose hair forward over each shoulder and braided it from the front, resulting in braids which refused to hang down my back. No matter how often I shoved them back, they persistently sprang forward to flop down my chest. They were almost waist-length and seemed constantly to inhibit the important things in life such as lessons or games. The morning one of them dunked itself in my toast and honey was the last straw.

So I cut them off.
Inexpertly.
Unevenly.
With old, blunt, rusty, scissors.
The second I had done it, I panicked.
What had I done?
Why oh why had I done it?

I looked about me as I scooped my severed braids up from where they languished on the kitchen floor. Even as I gazed hopefully about for somewhere to hide them, as young as I was, an inescapable logic told me that there was absolutely no possibility that no-one would notice my lack of them.

My mother came into the kitchen. She stared at me, then at the lifeless braids hanging from my little fists. She remained silent, uttering not even a grunt or a sigh. She propelled me into the living room, gently took the braids from me and tossed them casually onto the open fire. I stared, in equal silence, as the hair, my hair, curled and crackled and sparked, turned rapidly black, and gave off a sickening odor. And it was gone.

I risked a sideways peak at my mother, who resumed her place in the old armchair: picked up her book, sipped her tea. I squinted at Dad, in the other armchair, reading a car magazine and sipping his tea. He was on an afternoon tea-break from chopping wood. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the grandfather clock standing on duty in its corner and the contented purr of the cat re-settling herself on Mum’s knee. I stood on the hearth, shuffling my feet, waiting for whatever was going to happen, to happen.

Dad put his magazine and tea cup down on the little table beside his chair, looked up at me and gave a solemn wink.

‘Get your coat on,’ was all he said.

We walked, my hand in his, across the fields through a cold drizzle, to the neighboring farm where we immediately saw and heard the farmer, in his barn, attempting some work on the tractor engine. He was addressing it with a string of very bad words, which he swallowed back down his throat the moment he saw me.

‘ ‘Ow do’ he greeted us genially, adding to my dad, as he jerked his head towards the engine, ‘Bloody lucky you’re ‘ere.’

I never heard either of my parents even say bloody, but it was inoffensive enough to Mr. Llewellyn that he let it slip right through his filtering system.

‘Ay,’ my dad replied, ‘Lucky you’re ‘ere an’ all.’

By way of explanation he pirouetted me around.

‘Bloody ‘ell!’ was the response as Mr. Llewellyn grinned at me, a very rare event, displaying many gaps in his jagged brown teeth. He shoved his greasy flat cap to the back of his head.

‘Dog been chewing at yer ‘air?’

He waved me to a filthy old bench outside the barn and reached for an equally filthy leather bag up on a shelf.

For the first time since I’d picked up those scissors, I relaxed. This was familiar territory. I knew what to expect. More or less on a monthly basis my dad came to the farm to have what little hair he had left cut by Mr. Llewellyn with his sheep shears. Money never changed hands. Dad was terrific with engines, so he worked on the tractor engine in return. I sometimes went along and communed with various animals while the shears took a swift swipe just above my father’s scalp. So I felt no trepidation as the shears approached. I knew they were kept viciously sharp, but I had never seen my dad’s head receive as much as a tiny nick. In no time we were done. No mirror to be held up so that I could offer my approval, simply a nod and a grin from Dad. I sat and waited for a few minutes while the two men grunted at each other and pointed to things like wires and spark plugs, and soon we were greeted by the welcome, if not too promising for the longterm, cough and splutter of the ancient tractor.

My mother reasserted control over my hair, cutting it herself with my dad’s cut-throat razor, still his preferred shaving implement but he apparently had no objection to sharing. The erstwhile braids were not mentioned again. Many years later, I asked Mom why she had reacted so strangely; so silently.

‘I think I was in shock,’ she replied. “It wasn’t that it was such a terrible thing. Just such a surprise. I had no idea. Why had you never told me you hated your braids?’

Because, I wanted to say, because …. because, Mum, we weren’t that kind of family. We never talked about anything deeper than the weather or the next meal.

But I said nothing. What was the point? A relationship is not too likely to change much after decades of entrenchment.

If I had been asked, while my parents were still alive, who I was closer to, I would unhesitatingly have said my mother. As an only child with few other kids nearby to play with, I spent a lot of time with Mom. I have written often enough before about our strangely flawed relationship, but nevertheless we got on well. She was a fun person to be with. She loved to play games and she loved to laugh.

My dad was quiet, never using more than the minimum amount of words necessary, and it took looking back from a considerable distance for me to see how his actions spoke for him, loud and clear.

Now they are both gone, I feel myself growing ever closer to my father. If asked, now, to whom I feel closest, I would definitely say my dad. It surprises me, this change of heart, but perhaps it’s simply a clearer understanding I’ve gained over the years of both Mum and Dad, and my relationship with them.

Ah well! Death, just like life, is full of surprises.

© January 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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Scars, by Gillian

We all have them. Don’t
try to tell me you don’t. Nobody gets to our age without them.
The first one I remember
acquiring came along when I was seven or eight. Mum and Dad and I were
wandering through the woods picking blackberries when a sharp, jagged, end of a
broken-off small branch scraped a gash in my thigh. These days I’m sure it
would be off to the ER for stitches, with perhaps a butterfly bandage to keep
it together on the way, but back then we were expected to suck it up and
soldier on; the result being a scar wider than necessary and very long-lasting.
I still have it.
Roughly forty years later
I needed a butterfly bandage again when I fell on sharp rock edges while
backpacking in the Shoshone Wilderness Area, miles from anywhere. But this time
I was carefully tended to by my beautiful Betsy, who had the foresight to carry
butterfly bandages in her pack.
Back again in the old
days, in college, I slipped at the top of some icy steps and fell, with my knee
doubled under me, onto the metal blade of a boot scraper. Now that one did
require stitches. But that was all it got. These days we’d be given all kinds
of physical therapy; exercises to help it heal as efficiently as possible, but
in 1959 I was on my own. It hurt like Hell to bend it, so a couple of days
later, on a bus, I stretched my leg out beneath the seat in front of me. The
bus got in an accident, the seat above my leg came down on it and hyperextended
my knee. That hurt like Hell. A week later, with my knee the size of a
football, I went off for a long-planned week’s hiking trip with a classmate.
Well, I was madly in unacknowledged love with the woman! What’s a girl to do?
Not surprisingly, I have had a lot of trouble with that knee over the years but
I’ve worked hard at keeping it in working condition, mainly through water
aerobics. It remains functional, and actually gives me less pain than it did
twenty years ago, though I’m not off on any more backpacking or even hiking
trips.
A few years back I broke
my ankle – just a simple break. It healed perfectly, leaving no scars. Then, as
some of you might recall, I broke my wrist a couple of years ago. That was a
compound fracture, requiring surgery, nuts and bolts, and a long scar which has
now basically disappeared. My ankle and wrist both healed quickly, fully
functioning in record time. That, of course, in addition to skillful surgeons,
is because I diligently did every therapeutic exercise I was given, painful
though they often were. I would like to think that I have become a little less dumb
in dealing with injuries, over the years, but much of that is because
healthcare professionals know so much more these days. Our job is just to
follow their excellent advice.
Which, it seems to me, is
much the same for our inner, psychological, scars as for our outer, physical,
injuries.
As a child, and even as a
student, I had no more idea how to deal with my inner than my outer pains.
Neither, come to that, did my parents. All of us colluded in some strange way
to pretend I had no injuries, inside or out. Just get on with life, denying the
pain. I’ve written often enough about my childhood angst so I’m not going to
repeat it, but I rode roughshod over it just as I did my mashed knee, making
both worse while denying there was a problem. Over the years, I have paid
heavily enough for that. But, as I gained knowledge and sought expert advise to
try to make my knee more functional and less painful, so I did with my inner
dysfunctions. Endless physical therapy, endless psychotherapy. Both mostly of
the self-help variety, but they worked. The trouble is, it’s so much harder to
go back; to try to fix those old inner and outer scars years later. Now, I try
to deal with both immediately. Keep exercising that wrist, don’t let that scar
tissue form or I’ll be sorry. Take those emotions out and look at them right
now. Work them over. I don’t want that psychological scar tissue building up,
either.
I don’t expect to stop
receiving wounds, and so the scars that mark them, either physical or
emotional. But as I age, perhaps becoming increasingly vulnerable to physical
scarring, I hope to balance it with a healthy decrease in psychological
scarring. Due largely to my attempts to follow the spiritual path, and in no
small part to this group where I find healing by writing out and sharing my
problems, my wounds are less deep, less painful, and heal more readily. Little
scar tissue has the chance to form. Even those big bad deep wounds don’t get
reopened as once they did. Those are the ones that are there because I’m a woman.
Because I am gay. I am happy about both, but being female or being GLB or T
leaves you constantly open to painful slashes of hate-filled sabers. Oh they
are not usually directed at me, personally, but I feel the stab of the knife of
every woman murdered because she wants an education, or refuses to hide away
her body, and of every gay man murdered in Uganda or left to die in Wyoming.
It’s certainly not that I find any of those horrors less painful, nor, alas,
less frequent. I simply, for the most part, recognize the pain sooner, deal
with it better, avoid reopening those old wounds.
Yet I am happy to have
scars. How can you live any kind of eventful, meaningful, life, and not have
them? We are battle-scarred warriors who, having fought the good fight, did not
come out unscathed. As Kahlil Gibran puts it,
“Out of
suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are
seared with scars.”
© 30 June 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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Alas, Poor Memory, by Gillian

No, I haven’t really lost
my memory in the true sense, and I have enough friends who have that I know
it’s nothing to joke about. But in another sense, I have, because I don’t know
where it’s coming from these days. It makes little sense to me. Why does it
feed me endless meaningless trivia and deny me access to the things that really
matter?
Which is it you need most
in everyday conversation, nouns or verbs? And which is it that my memory blocks
my path to over and again? And I know it’s not just my memory but that of many
older people. Our conversations are scattered with whatnots and thingamajigs.
But who is ever at a loss for those verbs?
“Shall we walk or
drive to Whatsit’s after the thingy,” I say.
Have you ever heard
anyone say, “Shall we whatever or thingamy to Susan’s after the
reception”?
No! It’s always the nouns
that go.
Whenever in my life I was
to visit a country where I didn’t speak the language, which I’m sad to say is
most, I made it a point to learn 50 words in that language. It’s simply amazing
how far you can get on fifty basic common words. Did I learn a whole lot of
verbs? No. Maybe to be and to go. And of course please and thank you, yes and
no. Other than that it was nouns; the real essentials. Needless to say my mean
little memory will no longer turn loose most of them in any language, though I
can still sometimes conjugate a few verbs. It’s as if the path to nouns has
been overused to the point of challenging travel. The road to verbs, though,
less travelled as it is, offers easy access.
My memory lets me quote
my mother’s endless proverbs and sayings without a hitch; don’t run before you
can walk, pride comes before a fall, every cloud has a silver lining, we’ll
cross that bridge when we come to it, many a true word is spoken in jest. I
don’t remember ever asking myself, after all these years,
“What was it my
mother used to say about …. ?”
No, they all spring
uninvited to my consciousness and even to my lips. But can I remember what
someone earlier today asked me to tell Betsy? Highly unlikely! Why does my
memory so insist on locking away anything which actually matters, while
releasing this endless stream of the inconsequential?
I can quote endless
poetry I learned in school. Many people know the lines from Tennyson about
loving and losing but I am one of probably very few who know the two lines
before it, so the whole verse reads –
I
hold it true what e’er befall,
I
feel it when I suffer most,
Tis
better to have loved and lost
Than
never to have loved at all.
And of course he wrote
the entire In Memoriam poem, over a seventeen-year period, to another
man, but that’s another story, and another useless one my brain lets me use any
time I want – which I must say is infrequently.
Worse yet, my memory is a
fountain of the totally ridiculous. For example, with apologies to it’s
originator, Virginia Hamilton, the following –
What
a wonderful bird the frog are.
When
he sit he stand almost
When
he stand he sit almost.
He
ain’t got no tail hardly.
When
he sit he sit on what he ain’t got almost.
I can remember that with
no effort, yet when I chance upon an old friend in the grocery store I cannot
work enough magic to come up with her name. Go figure! Ah well, I guess we all
have to work with what we have. So if you come over to chat to me and, rather
than acknowledging you by name, I greet you with,
“What a wonderful
bird the frog are,” you’ll know I’m just making the best of what I’ve got.
© 15 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.

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Compulsion, by Gillian

At bottom, my personality is not one to encompass compulsion. I am essentially too laid back, too relaxed, and also too logical and pragmatic, to be driven to do something which is not logically in my best interest. Or, as one definition has it, against one’s conscious wishes. I don’t generally let myself go in that direction; and Lord help anyone who tries to push me.

Yeah, that sounds good. Like most such statements, it is not exactly the whole truth and nothing but. It needs a little qualification.

What do I know? What can I know? I who spent the first forty-odd years of life playing a part, pretending to myself and everyone else that I need not be, in fact was not, the person I was born to be. Simply acting a part, of course I was not prey to compulsion. I was not affected by really strong emotion of any kind. An actor pretends an emotion; plays at having it, but does not truly, deep down in the soul, feel it.

When eventually I came out to myself, I must honestly admit, it was completely compulsive. I have often described it as being swept up on the cow-catcher of a run-away train; going wherever it took me, without conscious choice – and that most certainly is acting compulsively.

I cared not a jot whether coming out to the world as quickly and loudly as I could was, in fact, in my best interest. Many of us, had we looked at our coming out in the clear light of logic, would probably have stayed firmly in the closet. On the whole. it was not a welcoming world awaiting us out there.

For some time after coming out, my behavior remained compulsive. For the first time in my life, I fell madly in love. And love, or at least it’s for-runner, infatuation, surely is pure compulsion: we are compelled to pursue that person, to be with her every minute of every day, to make it last forever. Fortunately, as we settle into a less dramatic true love which goes so very much deeper than infatuation, we are able to swim free of that rip-current of compulsion and return to a more rational frame of mind.

I say fortunately because, as I began by saying, my personality is not really a good fit for compulsion. I am uncomfortable with it. It scares me. On the other hand, I have just said that the two best things I have done in my entire life – coming out and loving Betsy – resulted from irresistible compulsion. And now I think more about it, I’m not sure that Betsy would agree that I am so free of compulsive behavior. Yes, I am a wee bit obsessed with photography. And screaming Stop!! Turn around! at Betsy in the center lane of 80 mile an hour freeway traffic because we’ve just passed a perfect photo op. just might be construed as not acting in one’s own best interest!

© September 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Once Upon a Time, by Gillian

Progressive Dinner parties were the in thing, at least with my social group, once upon a way back when. I guess they’re still around, but I haven’t been involved in one in decades. It must have been the 1970’s when I was, because I was still married to my husband and living in Jamestown in Boulder County. Did you ever get caught up in those things?

Between about ten and twenty people gather, say, at our house. We have a drink or two to kick off the evening. Cocktails were popular then, though beer was always my drug of choice; or becoming a wino held a certain appeal, but I never cared for mixed drinks. Most of us, of course, puffed cigarettes as we chugged our drinks in those carefree days. After all, you’re already wrecking your liver so what’s the point in worrying about your lungs? From Jamestown we convoy to, say, South Boulder. There we gather at another home for hors d’oevres and another drink. Then on to Longmont and another home for what I think we called, back then, the main course, or simply dinner, the term entree not coming along until later. And, needless to say, more drinks. And off to Lafayette, then still a small town out in the sticks, for desert and after-dinner drinks, then to one of those new things called condos for a night cap. Finally off home in different directions, not a designated driver in sight. By some miracle no-one ever had an accident amongst all this. Nobody even got a drunk driving ticket. But of course in those days, even if you were spotted weaving your way along the center line, it usually earned you little more than an urge to be more careful next time, which you knew you could translate freely as, be more careful not to get caught next time.

In the here and now, Betsy and I might go to East Denver in the morning, to take an old friend who can no longer drive, out for lunch. On the way home perhaps we’ll make a detour to deliver a favorite candy bar to another old friend in a nursing home. Not so very different from a Progressive Dinner, is it? OK, maybe, but at least we’re sober. There is nothing good about the headline, “Great-grandmother arrested for drunk driving.”

Once upon a time, my calendar was covered in scrawled names, places, and times. But only around the edges. Essentially everything was crammed into evening and weekends. The big black hole in the middle was all WORK, leaving little opportunity for personal life. The other little squares were crowded with ferrying kids to endless varieties of activities, and adult celebrations.The future was looking wide and bright on a limitless horizon, and we were ready! We celebrated friends’ new jobs, new cars, new babies, new homes, new marriages, new lovers, and new divorces: promotions, graduations, undreamed of vacations.

In the here and now, the calendar on the fridge looks very similar. Except that it’s reversed. All the crowded-in names and places and times are in the middle, in that space once occupied solely by WORK. The outer squares are largely empty. We, like many older people, really do not like to drive after dark unless absolutely necessary. So we, and our friends and those accommodating family members, plan most things so that we can get home before dark. Somewhat in the same way, if not to the same extent, we tend to schedule activities on weekdays. Weekends are all crowded out with those wild young working folks who have to be accommodated so that they can keep on paying our Social Security.

If we are among the really fortunate, our children’s calendars are now covered in times and places they are ferrying us. The very fact that we’re still here means we are still having birthdays.

We probably still go on great vacations, but although many of us continue our education in one form or another, we don’t bother much about promotions and graduations – our own, that is. Our celebrations have taken on a different view. They tend to be celebrations of the past rather than future.Our calendars have a few too many memorials scheduled on them, our friends number among them too many now living alone, and if someone is moving it is usually to somewhere smaller, and sometimes to a place where they really do not want to be.

So the once upon a way back whenever was a much better place than the here and now? I’d go back in an instant given the chance?

NO WAY!!

For one thing, there’s one mighty steep learning curve I had to struggle my way up between there and here. I never want to have to do that again. And anyway, I sincerely love life, here and now.

Yes, the calendar has a few too many memorials and hospital visits, but it still denotes many other wonderful things – like Monday afternoons. The dates I now keep with friends seem so much more meaningful somehow than the endless get-togethers of my youth. The people mean more to me. In reviewing the memories of those Progressive Dinners, I realized that, other than my ex-husband, I couldn’t recall who any of the people were. Back then, anything that happened was just another excuse for a party rather than a true celebration of the event, or even the people involved. A “Celebration of Life” as we like to call memorials these days, has a whole lot more sincerity about it, and in some ways more true joy, than all that meaningless round of long ago parties.

No, of course they were wonderful times. My life has been great, I have terrific memories. But, from my current viewpoint, I have to say it seems almost as ridiculous to wish I were in my twenties as it would for someone twenty-five to yearn to be seventy-five.

© May 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Scarves, by Gillian

I know those of you who’ve been in this group for some time are just tired of hearing me whinge about poor battered Britain in the years immediately after WW11. Well, too bad! It happens to be the environment I grew up in and so the time and place which generated many of my childhood memories and so my stories.

And here we go again!

In the U.K., children began (and still do begin) elementary school at the age of five, not six as we do here. So in 1947 I began the daily walk to and from the same little two-room school where my mother taught. That winter has gone down in history as one of the worst U.K.winters ever, with snow on the ground for over two months and bitter cold. I developed a bad cough and what appears in my memory as a constant cold, but then most kids were sick, as I’m sure were many adults. Most of our houses were cold and damp, without central heating – for which there would have been no fuel anyway – and few people had adequate clothing and food which were still severely rationed, as were most things until well into the 1950’s. Frequently, even if you had saved enough coupons, whatever you wanted was simply unavailable anyway.

My mother decided that to survive the bitter cold, we needed scarves. But we had no clothing coupons as my growing feet had gobbled them all up in a new pair of boots. So she would knit them. Now, I doubt that wool was actually rationed, but it was not to be had. If you had old knitted garments that were simply beyond further darning, you unravelled them and saved the worn and kinky wool for future use. My mother had a cardboard box, which probably should have been sacrificed, as just about everything had been, to the War Effort, always spoken of in capitals. Somehow this tatty old thing had survived and Mum used it for storing various balls of recycled wool. We took them out reverently, handling them like cut glass. The cats had been banished from the room lest they decide that wool is a perfect plaything. I recognized some scarlet wool which I knew came from an old sweater I had had when I was little, (I now considered myself quite grown. I had started school for goodness’ sake!) and which I had worn until it threatened to inhibit my breathing. Some very ratty gray wool I recalled came from out-at-heel socks of my dad’s. Where the rest of the bits and bobs came from I had no idea. It didn’t matter anyway, they were moving on!

Perhaps a more skilled needlewoman than my mother would have been able to knit patterns, or at least stripes, with all the different colors. But Mom’s skill level was, shall we say, elementary. Before the War, when there was material available, she used to teach basic knitting to the six-year-olds. It was always facecloths, knitted on big fat needles so they came out looking more like fishing nets for the Little People. I suspect it was invariably these easy square pieces more because of my mother’s limitations than that of the kids. But my dad and I both had faith she could do scarves. What is a scarf, after all, but an elongated facecloth? She just started out with one color, tied the last piece of it to the beginning of the next, and created quite an interesting hodgepodge of colors. But Mom’s knitting was always a bit erratic. She would start out tense, her stitches too tight. But soon she would be distracted by some entertainment on the radio and the stitches got looser and looser. Before long the scarf was taking on a somewhat rolling countenance, swelling and shrinking like ocean waves. Also, to be fair, the fact that the wool was of different thicknesses did nothing to add to the consistency of the stitches. So each scarf ended up with very wavy edges, and considerable variations in width and thickness. If I could only recreate them now, I’d think they would have a pretty good chance of becoming THE fashion accessory.

My father did have a scarf but was badly in need of a new one. His apparently dated from some time Before the War and he had worn it During the War but now, After the War, it was in rags and must not have offered much protection from the bitterly cold winds of that 1947 winter.

We didn’t talk of decades in those days. All of life was divided into three time periods, always spoken of in Capitals as was The War Effort. There was Before the War, During the War, and After the War, sometimes simply referred to as Now. Before the War was a wonderful place of endless sunny days, with peace and laughter; a land of relative abundance. During the War was the land of stoicism and heroics and carrying on and making do and tightening belts and stiff upper lips, and a lot of pride. But Now, After the War, was disillusion and resentment following rapidly on the heels of the euphoria of the long-awaited peace. What had it all been for? So many dead, even more homeless and everyone was broke. Rationing and shortages were even worse Now than they were During the War.

Mum also already had a scarf from Before the War, but it was flimsy and, though pretty, not made to provide warmth. Not only was it from Before the War, but it came from some mysterious place called The Twenties. Most of the things my mother had, seemed to have come from The Twenties. She never referred to it as The Nineteen-Twenties, so I had no idea that she was talking about a time. I envisioned The Twenties as being some huge department store loaded with wonderful things – even more exciting than Woolworth’s.

Now, three strangely serpentine scarves lay proudly stretched out on the table. My mother watched proudly, waiting for Dad and me to pick the one we wanted. Dad shook his head.

“By heck! This’ll be a decision.”

He gazed solemnly at me and offered a grave wink. I wanted to giggle but somehow knew I must not. Instead I entered whole-heartedly into the game. I gave a little girly squeal, which I have to say did not come naturally to me, and wriggled in excitement.

“That one! Can I have that one?”

Mum wound it around my neck, Dad and Mom each wore one and we looked appreciatively at ourselves.

“By heck!” said my dad again, “that’s just grand!”

I have often thought, looking back, how absurd the three of us must have looked when we were out together in those ridiculous scarves; like escapees from some Dr. Seuss book. But in those days, everyone wore strange combinations of mend-and-make-do clothes, and nobody thought much about it. The aim was warmth, after all, and that we got.

Success went completely to my mother’s head. A few days later found her once again studying what was left of differently colored little balls and scraps of wool, and various needles, then at my eternally red, raw, and chapped hands.

“Gloves,” she was saying rather doubtfully to herself. “We all need gloves.”

A fleeting look of panic crossed my father’s face, to be replaced instantly by a bland smile.

“Ay, that’d be grand.” He winked at me. “But mittens,” he added, “they’d be warmer.”

“Ooh yes, mittens! Mittens!” I echoed, though I’m not sure I knew what mittens were. But I knew what gloves were, with all those fingers sticking out of them and, young as I was, I knew, as my dad did, that Mum’s knitting was not up to gloves.

“Yes,” she agreed with great relief. “Mittens. Mittens are much warmer.”

My dad was away for the next two weeks. He was an engineer, and deemed too valuable by the powers that be to be allowed to volunteer as canon fodder. Instead he worked at a huge factory a long way, at least for those days, away from home. To get to work he had to take two buses, then a train, then another bus, then walk two miles. He also worked very long very erratic hours, and so stayed in a rooming house near the factory for several days and sometimes weeks. Whatever they made at this distant factory was classified as Top Secret, another phrase which was always capitalized, so Dad never, in his whole life, talked about it. The question, what did you do in The War, Daddy? went unanswered for many a child as so many adults lived in terror of contravening the Official Secrets Act (in capitals) by saying too much, and disappearing into some distant dark dungeon. My dad did say, in some unguarded moment, that if the most exciting thing you did throughout the war was wash milk bottles, they’d find some way of sweeping it in under the Official Secrets Act.

When my father returned home this time, he was greeted by three pairs of mittens, all more or less identical except for size. The colors of all were the same random multi-colored blotches as the scarves and, on closer inspection, the shapes were not so different from the scarves. After all, with a little imagination, mittens are little more than short scarves folded over across the middle, the sides sewn up, and elastic threaded around near the open end to fit them to your wrist. But wait! What about the thumb? I had watched in fascination as poor Mum tried to knit the thumb part but could not seem to get the hang of it. After many failed attempts, she fell back on her old favorite, the elongated square. She knit what was in fact a very tiny scarf, folded it over as in making mittens, and sewed up both sides. Then, having left an opening when closing up the side of the mitten, she stitched the end open of the tiny mitten to the opening in the side of the big mitten and, voila! a mitten complete with thumb. Though in fact they looked, lying flat on the table, like nothing more than the old knitted facecloth with a miniature facecloth attached.

“Ay, that’s just grand!” Dad slid his hands into his and held his hands up, waggling his fingers open and closed. I learned later that they were way too big and would have fallen off if he had not held up his hands, and the little thumbs, as I also discovered about mine, were way too short and not quite in the right place. Who cared? They were warm! I simply tucked by thumb into my palm where it stayed nice and cozy, and ignored the little thumb addition. I must say, though, it gave me a better understanding of why hominids didn’t get far with the use of tools until they developed opposable thumbs!

Again, in hindsight, I marvel at the vision of this engineer, too valuable to be allowed to fight, turning up at this huge, Top Secret, factory, in those wildly colored, sadly misshapen mittens.

Especially in combo with the equally wildly colored and misshapen scarf, it conjures up quite a picture. And in a time and place where men rarely wore anything other than dark, conservative, clothes! But, to be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if Dad didn’t wear them once away from home, though he always wore them when he left and when he returned. What makes me suspect this is that I caught him out in another way. I went to where he was planting potatoes in the garden, to tell him tea was ready. He started for the house and then stopped. Pulling the mittens from his jacket pockets he winked at me.

“Mustn’t go in without my handbags,” and he slid them on. And always after that I noticed him popping them on before returning indoors.

Oh, and I was so delighted with that term. Handbags. Hand bags. It described them perfectly. Bags to put your hands in! For many years after that, when Mom mentioned her handbag – it was never called a purse in Britain – I would giggle and my dad would wink solemnly, which only made me giggle more. My father said much much more to me with his wonderful winks than he ever did in words

I know this is where I’m expected to say how much I loved those mittens and that scarf, and carried them everywhere with me like Linus with his blanket. Sorry! Not so. I was ever grateful for the added warmth, but they … what is the word? To say they frightened me is way too much.

But perhaps they did make me a little uneasy. They had something of living creatures about them as they constantly changed shape. The bigger gaps in the relaxed stitching snagged too easily on things; particularly on little fingers. There was an occasional dropped stitch in there too, increasing the problem. The wool was old, some of it several times recycled and so, brittle and thin. It broke here and there, causing further unraveling, as did the slow mysterious undoing of my mothers knots. I seemed eerily to me as if they were slowly but steadily unknitting themselves, some future day to disappear, returning to little variously colored balls of yarn.

After clothing rationing finally ended, after fourteen years, in 1954, we had the luxury of store-bought gloves and scarves and my mother was relieved of the challenges of knitting. But for sure nothing ever again had such character. Nor did any clothes ever again represent so much love and laughter. My mother taught me that for those you love, you do what you must the best you can. And that is all any of us can do. And my father taught me to see the humor in just about anything, and to be ever solicitous of the feelings of others.

I searched through my old photos after I wrote this, hoping to do a show and tell of those mittens and scarves. No luck. Then of course it dawned on me. Mom did have an old camera which came, of course, from The Twenties, but even if it had still worked there would have been no film available over many years.

And that reminds me of one of my dad’s favorite expressions. It’s not original, it was a common saying used by many at the time. It’s also probably the longest sentence my father ever spoke.

“If we had any eggs, we could have bacon and eggs, if we had any bacon.”

© March 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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The No-Fault Line, by Gillian

Fault,
with it’s many meanings, is not a positive word. It’s not my fault! It’s all
your fault, or The Government’s fault, or my teacher’s fault. Electrical faults
can cause plane crashes, brownouts and blackouts. The cry of fault on
the tennis court means failure; a missing of the mark. We find fault with other
people, and occasionally admit to our own. We fault others for their errors and
disclaim responsibilities by proclaiming not to be at fault. And these days we
even must have no-fault car insurance. But there are of course the biggest, baddest
faults, those gashes in the bedrock which suddenly, or sometimes not so
suddenly, jerk into violent movement causing earthquakes and occasionally
tsunamis, and the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people.
I have a major
fault in me. Within me. Ok Ok, I’ve got lots of them, I’m full of failings and
faults, but I’m talking of a geologic type of fissure; my very being torn
asunder. At a very young age, I couldn’t say when, social pressure started to
build up stress on the fault line between a straight me and a gay me – my
Straight Shale and my Lesbian Limestone. The building stresses finally caused
the fault to give way, allowing the Straight Shale to be forced up and over
that Lesbian Limestone. It got buried. It disappeared. But of course it was
still there, as are all things invisible beneath the surface of the earth or of
our psyches.
Shale is not a good
foundation rock. It cracks and breaks and splits and crumbles. It slips and slides.
With these qualities, it tends to weather and erode away quite rapidly. And my
Straight Shale layer was pretty thin to begin with! After forty years or so –
happily it was eroding at human speed not that creep of geologic time – it was
all but gone.
The fault line was
exposed at the surface. And on the other side of it, a mere step away, lay a
vast stretch of Lesbian limestone, glittering in the sunshine. I pulled my feet
free of that cloying clinging Straight Shale mud and stepped across the fault
onto that wide open, welcoming, slab of Lesbian Limestone. Only I prefer to
think of that line as a no-fault line. It’s not my fault, it’s not my parents’
fault and it’s not a fault at all.
Crossing that line
is, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, but a small, simple, step, for man or woman.  But perhaps, just maybe, as endless numbers
of people continue to cross it, it will become, in terms of acceptance and
understanding, a giant leap for mankind.
© 20 Apr 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 28
years.
Posted on

Forgiveness, by Gillian

You all remember that old
sexist joke from the seventies?
New hubby and bride ride
off after the wedding down the trail in the horse buggy. The horse is very
skittish and rears up, almost upsetting the buggy. “That’s one,” says
new hubby. The horse takes off at a gallop, stops suddenly and almost dumps
them both on the ground. “That’s two,” says new hubby. All goes well
for a while, then suddenly the horse bolts off the road and comes to a halt
after just missing a tree. New hubby takes up his rifle and shoots the horse.
“That’s three.”
“What on earth did
you do a crazy thing like that for?” asks the horrified wife.
“That’s one,”
replies new hubby.
Now there is an
unforgiving man! And I have to say, if anyone ever physically abused me, which
I’m fortunate enough to say has never happened, that would be one. And I doubt
we’d get to three. Not that I would ever shoot anyone; but I’d be gone.
I actually don’t like the
word forgiveness. It somehow implies that the forgiver is superior to the forgivee.
I have never said the words I forgive you to anyone. But maybe that is
simply because I have been lucky enough not to have had anything terrible occur
for which I needed to consider forgiveness. Nor has anyone said it to me. I
perhaps have committed an occasional transgression which required forgiveness
by my loved ones, but I knew that I was forgiven by their actions rather than
from any words of forgiveness. I am sure that my eventual coming out at middle
age required some forgiveness by my family, as it meant I was leaving.
Destroying that family in it’s current form. For some it took a while, but I
now know, again without words, that I am forgiven.
John Ortberg says, “Forgiveness
means giving up the right to get even.” 
To me that is a dreadfully superficial understanding of forgiveness. It
is so much more than that.  “Forgiveness,”
says Desmond Tutu, who certainly had to do plenty of it, “says you are
given another chance to make a new beginning.” That sounds much closer to
the truth to me.
And Bernard Meltzer
claims that when you forgive you cannot change the past, but you sure do change
the future. You change yours, if in fact no-one else’s. You cannot control
whether the one you have forgiven changes his or her ways, but you can set
yourself free, at least. You can go forward, free of the heavy baggage of anger
and resentment engendered by un-forgiveness.
Oprah
Winfrey has said, “True forgiveness is when you can say, Thank you for that
experience.”
Now that’s
a hard one. When you find out your spouse has been ‘playing away’ or indulging
in a gambling addiction which lost all the family nest egg, are you really
strong enough to say to yourself, with complete sincerity, I am grateful for
that experience?
What I am very
grateful for is that I have never been put to that test, and firmly believe I
never will be.
© 2 March 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 28
years.