Tag: Life Stories

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When I Identified, by Phillip Hoyle

In college I was studying to be a minister and a musician. I had been in preparation for both for years in a family deeply involved in the church’s work of education, administration, eldership, and music. In this last category Dad was the church organist and all of us kids sang in church and school choirs. In undergraduate years I studied Bible and theology and eventually added a major in sacred music. Choral and vocal music were my great passion. I also liked teaching although not preaching.

Identifying just where I would work in the church showed me how much I treasured the music and educational ministries. I worked hard in these areas for years directing choirs, developing music libraries, writing curriculum resources, organizing special events, supporting time-worn groups like Sunday School, teacher training, Bible studies, and the like. I organized drama programs, directed musicals, planned special services and events, especially around holidays. I excelled in and enjoyed such work. I also did pastoral work, for example, making hospital calls, visits to care homes, marrying couples, burying the dead, memorializing people who figured large in the congregation or completely unknown to me. I preached but never identified as a preacher.

In seminary I learned that the Master of Ministry degree was the last surviving graduate professional degree designated as ‘generalist’. Given my experiences in several churches before I attended seminary, that idea seemed an apt description. While I liked the wide variety of work it demanded, I found myself more and more drawn to the artistic parts of events. If a design called for crafts, my goal was to make them art projects with freedom. I thought that this was the best way to communicate with children something lasting and religious. I wanted the kids to learn things they couldn’t forget and learn skills as well as information. So I planned art projects and eventually wanted to do that work myself beginning with collage, graduating to mixed media, drawing, and eventually painting. I attended art workshops. I enjoyed art for myself as well as for my church related work.

In Albuquerque, Cecelia Daniels, a woman in the congregation, gave me a book telling me she wanted to teach it with me. I read the book but didn’t really like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way with its workshop approach and New Age and sometimes magical idea. I knew that Cecelia had years of training in group process and sensitivity training. I wanted to learn from her more than I wanted to teach. The thirteen weeks of the course somewhat changed my self-understanding. It also facilitated changes in other participants. Cameron’s Artistic Recovery spoke to me. While I hated the affirmations Cameron insisted I use daily, I wrote them anyway, even the one: “I, Phillip Hoyle, am a brilliant and prolific artist.” I forced myself to affirm that idea daily for many years always thinking: I’m not so sure about brilliant or prolific. (I still write it occasionally and still get emotionally stopped.) I know the problem is that I was a musician who didn’t really think of himself as an artist, a writer who didn’t think of himself as an artist. I realized I was always an artist mustered the courage to identify myself as one.

Identification as an artist was just as much a challenge to me as identifying myself as bisexual.

OH, this story was about WHEN.

I realized I was in love with a man when I was 30 years old. That was 40 years ago. I realized I was an artist when I was around 40 years old. Of course there were hints years before related to both identities. I wonder: is coming out or coming in or coming to really all that difficult? I suspect so, AND I suspect there are more identities to be adopted in the years to come. I just hope I’ll be sentient enough, brash enough, and happy enough to make them.

© 25 June 2018

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Running Away, by Gillian

I thought about this in the sense of escaping, but we’re going to write about escape in a very few weeks so I’ll skip that idea.

So now what? I guess I’ll just have to re-cover some old ground and pepper it with quotations to make it seem more interesting!

Writing or talking of my mad dash from the closet, I have often likened it to hurtling along on a runaway train over which I had little, if any, control. It was almost as if I had never actually made that conscious decision to come out, although of course I had, at some level. But it didn’t feel like that. It simply felt as if some wild-west movie train with a big old cow-catcher on the front had scooped me up and run away with me. (As Kimberly McCreight says, in Reconstructing Amelia, ‘Sometimes its hard to tell how fast the current’s moving until you’re headed over a waterfall.”’) I had no objection, but I was just along for the ride until we got wherever we were going. Doug Cooper, in Outside In, asks, ‘Am I running away or moving forward?’ It’s difficult to feel firmly that you are moving forward when you have very little vision of where you are going. Yet in a way, I did know. I knew I was going to be openly gay. What I did not know was what exactly that meant. But that was not truly having no destination; rather it was having no experience or knowledge of that destination. As Glenda Millard says, in A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, ‘Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.’

As a child I never remember harboring thoughts of running away, or wanting to. On the other hand I was often accused of letting my imagination run away with me. Thinking back on that now, it sounds very like a somewhat passive form of running away; which, in turn, sounds typical of me – back to the cowcatcher and that runaway train. I seem to have a pattern of allowing things to happen to me rather than proactively forcing the pace.

And, as I continue thoughts along that vein, that seems still to be true. Now it is time constantly running away with me. I am not running away from or towards anything. Life is close to perfect right where I am. But alas time is not content to let me be. Time rushes headlong at me from the moment I put a foot on the floor in the morning. It grabs me up and rushes me through the day. I am by nature an early riser; nevertheless before I have even planned my day it is lunchtime and before I actually start anything it’s suppertime which means it’s almost bedtime. Life is one constant rush to keep up with itself.

Why does it do that when we are running out of time, anyway? Surely time should slow down in order to preserve as much as possible of what is left; but no, off it speeds in a rush towards the point where it, or at least our portion of it, will, inevitably, run out.

And on that cheery note I shall give up on this topic. But I want one erudite end quote; something that will anchor my ramblings with style. I don’t even have to turn to The Web, I already have the perfect words stored midst the jumble of quotations in my head.

“How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”

Dr. Suess

© March 2018

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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When I Knew, by Nicholas

Don’t you get tired of being asked, well, when did you know? I don’t know. Or, I always knew. When did you know? 

You know how it goes. If I knew then what I know now would I have done what I did? Or would I have done it sooner? 

When I knew was when I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to know. 

When I knew was when I noticed that my eyes were drawn to seeing men and that women were just walking by.

When I knew was when I began to see those men when they weren’t around. 

When I knew was when I began to see those men when my eyes were closed. 

When I knew was when I was out with a date and she gazed longingly at me while I was thinking: I should go. 

When I knew was when I saw men ballet dancers doing beautiful things with their beautiful bodies. Swaying, leaping, turning, lunging.

When I knew was when I saw a picture in the newspaper of men mourning the passage of a referendum rescinding a civil rights ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota. I wanted to be with them.

When I knew was when I said to myself: I am goddam sick of being alone.

When I knew was when I walked up to the booth for Gay Rights at the Ohio state fair and said, I’m with you.

When I knew was when I knew I wanted to love those men.

When I knew was when I knew I wanted to be loved by those men.

When I knew was when a friend, soon to be a boyfriend, held me in his arms and got me naked. I’ve been naked ever since.

When I knew was when I a stranger walked into a Dignity meeting and said: God, I’m home.

That’s when I knew

© 2 April 2018

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

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Rolling Thunder, by Gillian

My mother was peeling potatoes. I was standing beside her shelling peas. It was not a dark and stormy night, but it was a relatively dark and very stormy morning. As we prepared Sunday lunch the thunder crashed above us, echoing up and down the valley where we lived as it always did. My dad came into the kitchen, saying, as he always did when it thundered,

“By ‘eck, ‘ear that thunder rrrroll.”

(I chose this topic because I wanted to be able to say that! It wasn’t until I returned home after a year’s absence that I realized how strong a Welsh accent my father had. Of course, in my own defense, he was a man of so few words that perhaps it was not so surprising that I had never noticed his accent. By ‘eck, ‘ear that thunder rrrroll was about as verbose as he ever got!)

Mum and Dad and I all loved thunder storms. But this time my mother got a bit carried away in her enthusiasm and, potato peeler still in hand, opened the outside door to get a better look. Well, my mother never was the most practical of people! Simply opening the door invited the lightning bolt right in. It hit the knife blade, burned across the floor from Mum’s feet to the chimney corner, up the wall and it was gone. It happened so fast we might have thought we imagined it except for the black scorched trail it left behind. My mother felt nothing and, though speechless with surprise, was unhurt.

That little incident might, I suppose, have dampened my enthusiasm for thunder storms but it did not. Roaming around this country in our camper van for twenty years, Betsy and I have sat in many a campground, cozy inside our van, reveling in the thunder crashes and the lightning flashes, the rain streaming down the windows as the van rocked in the howling wind. We watched smugly as the poor unfortunate tent campers struggled, out in the pouring rain, to prevent their wildly flapping tents from taking flight and chased rolling camp-chairs through the trees. The most memorable that I recall was on a hilltop in Missouri from which there was a spectacular 360 degrees view. In any direction we looked, countless streaks of lightning ripped across the angry black sky, the lightning flashes lighting up the night all around us. It really was breathtaking.

I still love thunder storms, and still greet then eagerly, but must confess that in recent years they have tended to come, around here anyway, with accompanying hail storms which a do not welcome. They can be so damaging to so many things, not the least of which is one’s bank account.

Whenever I hear a good clap of serious thunder, I immediately hear my dad’s voice rejoicing.

“By ‘eck, ‘ear that thunder rrrroll!”

But sadly my love of the expression rolling thunder was dampened during the Vietnam War, when Operation Rolling Thunder consisted of a sustained aerial bombardment of North Vietnam lasting from 1965 to 1968. During that period it is estimated that we killed approximately 72,000 North Vietnamese civilians. Of course, I really had to dig to find those numbers. We rarely hear of actual human beings dying. We hear that during Operation Rolling Thunder we dropped 864,000 tons of bombs on the North, inflicting physical damage valued at $370 million. Nice clean unemotional impersonal statistics, proudly proclaimed under the inoffensive name Rolling Thunder.

Of course none of this began or ended with Vietnam. I am no military historian – nor do I want to be – but I think this practice of naming military operations began in World War Two for purposes of secrecy. And of course it involved many countries, not just the U.S. The Allies had operations under such harmless names as Primrose and Croquet, Stonewall and Teardrop. The Nazis had Wonderland, Rainbow, Reindeer and Buffalo. At least I can understand the need for secrecy, but today there is nothing secret about these operational names. Rather we shout them out for the world to hear, these harmless-sounding names. Desert Storm suggested nothing worse than a little blowing sand. Valiant Guardian, in Iraq, had something of the kindly uncle about it. Operation Crescent Wind in Afghanistan, an effort to bomb hell out of The Taliban, is suggestive of nothing more violent than a gentle parasail above the cliffs. If we called these Operations what they really are, they would boast names like Operation Spreading Terror or Operation Killing Anything That Moves. But we sanitize everything. We don’t murder innocent civilians. Instead we have collateral damage. Miriam-Webster defines collateral as: secondary, subordinate, indirect. I’ll bet it doesn’t seem any of those things to those who become collateral damage.

Good Lord, how on earth did I get so far off track? I suggested, and then chose, the anodyne topic of Rolling Thunder in order to have a gentle trip down Memory Lane. But somewhere I took a wrong turn and ended up in The Land of Ranting and Raving.

Enough!

The End

© November 2017

About the Author

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

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Eye of the Storm, by Phillip Hoyle

I must have entered into the relationship through the eye of the storm. Our connection was pacific, even inspiring at the beginning, but somehow the eye passed and I found myself caught up in a hurricane of problems.

The calm beauty of our first nights together featured a sexual exploration like I had never before experienced, the two of us touching, responding, initiating, enjoying a reciprocal openness and delight. That second morning when I had to leave early—well 3:00 a.m.—to feed my visiting family, he again said, in a childlike voice, “Don’t go.”

“I have to go, but the kids leave today. I’ll meet you after work; we’ll have the whole night together. I’ll fix you breakfast.”

“I want to fix you breakfast,” he insisted.

That third night turned out like I’d hoped, and we basked in one another’s presence, held onto each other, actually slept in his bed. And then I was introduced to his skill as a cook, that breakfast the first of many meals we shared in following months.

But within a few weeks I knew he was HIV positive, was in deep legal trouble facing a third degree sexual assault charge, had twice tried to kill himself, had serious financial problems, was just newly out to his parents, was getting medical attention through Denver Health, had recently been in the hospital, had decided he wanted to stay well, and wanted me to move in with him right away. I also found out he was college educated, creative, funny, sweet, and made my heart pound extra fast whenever he showed up—always late. I was hopelessly in love with this guy in a way I had never experienced before. He said he was in love with me as well.

The storm brought many trips to the hospital and clinic for tests, imaging appointments, surgical procedures, examinations of new symptoms, introductions of new medications, and more. Fortunately the intensity of these problems was matched by the intensity of our enthusiasm for one another. Our days provided new revelations of our pasts, experiments of intimacy, delight in giving ourselves to each other through conversation, touch, laughter, dance, and food. Our storm was not a fight but rather an accommodation to delights that we hoped would have a long future. But as the weeks went on the specter of failure kept trying to get through the door that had been left ajar in spite of our love. We watched the building intensity of the storm, the complications of treatments, the appearance of symptom after symptom, the confusion of diagnoses. We were both wearing down, not in our love or commitment, but in our imagination of a future. And there were other challenges: work, exhaustion, and fear. Fear was my largest challenge. I had lost too many people from my life in the prior six years: parents, my marriage, a good friend, and the too-recent death of another lover. My grief over that loss had not sufficiently subsided. Still I was not thinking of running away. We were tight Rafael and I. But I wished I weren’t going through all this again, especially when I had never had such feelings of love with another human being.

My lover’s parents lived in Mexico. They had little English; I had little Spanish. I had wanted to meet them before another hospitalization. That didn’t happen. I met them as my lover’s condition complicated, as his death neared. The storm ended then, at least the main part of it. Yet a storm lingers in me. Fifteen years later it still roars on occasion.

The ancient Etruscans believed that once grief visits it never goes away. I have many joys, and in my old age can list grief after grief. Now I work hard to welcome grief as a friend, even when my losses do not feel particularly friendly. I keep looking for the eyes in new storms I encounter and appreciate the ways their calm equips me to live with acceptance and supports my overall joy in life.

© 9 July 2018

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Running Away, by Pat Gourley

“I don’t make history. I am history”
Joan Baez

As with many quotes, I begin my pieces with this one is tangential. In fact, it is so tangential that I may not be able to twist it around to the topic but I liked it so much after reading it in a recent New York Times (NYT) interview with her I had to use it.

I suppose one could easily make “running away” a metaphor for staying in the closet and this may have been the case for me personally way back when. Perhaps a physical running away was what my moving to Denver in 1972 with a straight woman and three other closeted gay men was really all about. None of us on this sojourn to the Queen City of the Plains were “out” to any of the others but suspicions were running high. Give us a bit of a break though since the powerful ripples created by Stonewall had yet to make it in any big way to the middle part of America we were fleeing from.

Though I pretty much was over any running away from being queer by the mid-1970’s I have still managed to do my fair share of running away in other areas of my life. I could have for example jumped-in head first to Radical Fairie politics and I think probably have actually moved in with Harry Hay and John Burnside or at least hitched my wagon to that trip in a much more intense way than I did. Harry ever so subtly over the years was always encouraging me to do more implying that I was not living up to my queer potential.

Running away though may have its advantages at times. For me in 1980 falling in love with the man who would be my loving companion until his death in 1995 had many advantages. This choice of staying in Denver rather than picking up and moving to L.A. to be near and much more involved with Hay and the Radical Fairies worked out well. And let’s face it I think I made a much better nurse than I would have made a full-time Queer Activist even one in the orbit of the mercurial and prophetic Harry Hay.

I could go on about other areas where I have turned tail and headed for the hills but enough about me. The newspaper the Wichita Eagle first reported this past week the death in Wichita Kansas of Adrian Lamo at the age of 37. Yes, I will be quoting from the Wichita Eagle which will probably never happen again though remember the Koch Brothers are also from Wichita, with Koch Industries based there, so never say never.

Lamo was a very adept hacker. Most notably he hacked into the NYT and Microsoft among others in the early 2000’s and was convicted of computer fraud in 2004.

His greatest notoriety though came from turning Chelsea Manning into the Feds in 2010. Manning had shared with him that she had turned over to Wikileaks a large trove of classified documents pertaining to the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan including clear evidence of American war crimes.

Manning had reached out to Lamo as someone she thought she could trust admiring, I suppose, his brazen hacks into very powerful organizations. And perhaps and I am speculating here she felt she could trust someone with clear ties to the LGBTQ community. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors had in 1998 appointed Lamo to the City’s LGBTQQ Youth task forcefile://localhost/. https/::www.wired.com:story:adrian-lamo-has-passed-away-at-37:

Lamo testified against Manning at her trial in 2013 and she was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in federal prison. This was the harshest sentence ever for a whistleblower. Barack Obama though commuted her sentence in 2016. A full pardon with honors and recognition as a true patriot would have been more appropriate but we’ll take the reduced sentence.

Quoting a friend of Lamo’s, one Lorraine Murphy, from the Wichita Eagle piece of March 16th, 2018 she described him “as someone who bounced around a great deal… He was a believer in the geographic cure. Whatever goes wrong in your life, moving will make it better.” http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article205629184.html

The “geographic cure” is something synonymous I would say with “running away” and engaged in I suspect in a disproportionate manner historically by queer folk everywhere.

Lamo was quite open apparently about queer aspects of his life but he seems to have been a poor soul often running away from something. I certainly do not know enough about the man to speculate what sort of ghosts were chasing him. Unfortunately, he is now dead and Chelsea Manning is alive and thriving and running for elected office in Virginia. Maybe the better part of valor is to face things head-on and not pick up and run away.

And though she may think she is no longer making history Joan Baez has never as far as I can tell ever run away from anything and neither did Chelsea Manning. Both women are heroines I can try to emulate in my own life and invoke when the temptation to run away presents itself, as it certainly will again.

© March 2018

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Reading, by Gillian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’

But it does. It matters very much.

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

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

and probably run home to mother.

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

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

With a real woman like that, who needs fiction?

© November 2017

About the Author

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

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Get Over It, by Terry Dart

Kind of cranky sounding. But crankiness can be par for the course when one has gone past middle age. There have to be some perks to the added aches and pains of ageing.

Well, get over that we are older. Our appearance is no longer like the “unearned beauty” of the young. We move slowly, may drive more cautiously and more slowly.

We may not be hell bound to hurry everything we are doing, to rush hither and thither.

We may use such expressions as thither and thither, cool, or far out. We may want you to shut up during the movie. Or, we may talk during the movie. However that would be rogue behavior, since the rude-aged usually have died off before having had a chance to develop a sturdy, consistent rudeness.

Perhaps we elders have things we should “get over,” But at our ages we can forgive ourselves for putting that off.

This is quite brief; even briefer than usual for me. Too bad we aren’t discussing books we have read or poetry or sports or the importance of Mount Rushmore, or the Fourth of July, or current events, or snails, or sea shells, or favorite fonts.

I suppose I will just get over it.

© 2 July 2018

About the Author

I am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.

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Losing Touch, by Gillian

I will, before long, I expect; I’m rapidly losing other senses. My hearing is not too bad, but I don’t seem to smell the wet grass or the salty ocean with the strength I did as a child. Fresh strawberries and tomatoes right off the vine sure don’t taste as good as they once did, and my eyesight is battling the effects of glaucoma, so I have little reason to expect my sense of touch not to deteriorate. My mother had terribly inadequate blood circulation, leading to frequent complaints of not being able to feel her hands and feet, or feel with them. She would put me to work peeling potatoes, slicing bread, shelling peas or folding the linens, because, she said, she could not feel what her fingers might be up to. After she cut herself twice and then dropped our best kitchen knife on the stone kitchen floor where it broke, she was only allowed anywhere near a knife on really hot days – rare events in my pre-global-climate-change England. I don’t seem to have inherited that problem, but my Beautiful Betsy has exactly the same thing so before long I shall probably be called upon to perform all our household chores involving sharp utensils.

My dad lost touch. Sadly, it was not a problem with his fingers and toes but with his mind; his very being. Through dementia he lost touch with everyone and everything, including himself.

I first noticed some confusion on a visit home when he was in his early seventies – a little younger than I am now. I mentioned my concern to Mum but she shrugged it off with, well, Dear, I’m sure our minds aren’t quite as sharp as they once were. But she exhibited none of it, I noticed, and in fact she never did and was sharp as a tack till the day she died. I, of course, was living in Colorado and only saw them once a year or so, though out of necessity my visits became more frequent and of greater duration as they aged. The next time I returned, after this particular trip, I was aghast at my father’s mental deterioration. It was harrowing; heartbreaking.

He floated in and out, drifting from lesser to greater confusion and back again, all the time knowing he was losing touch. At one stage he held his wrist towards me, tapping at his watch – a much-valued possession. He gazed at it, then looked at me with tears and a look of such anguish in his eyes that I almost burst into tears myself, but of course I knew I must not.

‘I can’t remember,’ he faltered.

‘What is this? How do I make it work? What does it do?’

‘Oh .. um … nothing much …’

I ran my fingers gently over it. I had to put some cheer in my voice.

‘It sure is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? I tried, desperately.

‘It is,’ he agreed. And smiled.

Not many visits later I returned to see him safely settled into a memory care facility. By then it was easier on all of us. He no longer drifted in and out of differing cognitions. He had no idea who I was or who Mum was or who he was. He no longer struggled with what his watch was for.

He seemed remarkably at peace, so Mum and I were able to find peace for ourselves.

Right now, I am losing touch myself, though not, thank you God, in the way my dad did; at least not yet. Rather, I make a conscious effort to lose touch. I can only inhabit this current socio-political reality for a limited amount of time. I simply have to escape. If Agent Orange can inhabit a reality that is all of his own making, then surely, I can escape to my own alternate reality on occasion? I have a collection of home-made VCR tapes, mostly of ancient Brit sitcoms. Some of these shows are really pretty bad, but in my alternate reality the worse they are the better I enjoy them. So, most evenings I head for the basement TV, descending to my alternate reality as I say to Betsy. Though to be honest even bad Brit sitcoms reach a higher standard than this current American reality show in which we find ourselves, so in fact I am rising up to my alternate reality.

Margaret Atwood says –

‘You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.’

Sorry, Margaret, I’m a fan of yours but I tried it and I didn’t like it. I reserve the right to lose touch.

© February 2018

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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The Effects of Side Effects, by Nicholas

I went to see my doctor the other day. In the course of our visit, I told him that I did not like a medication he put me on a year ago. The medicine seems to work OK in helping me keep my blood pressure at acceptable levels. But I told him I did not care for some of the side effects and I wondered if there was something else that didn’t have those side effects. There are, after all, a million blood pressure meds available.

Yes, of course, he said, here is something else you can take and handed me a new prescription. Great, I thought. I can get rid of those annoying problems. When I got the script filled, the pharmacist asked me if I’d used this med before. I explained to him that this was new to me to avoid the side effects of another med. Yes, he said, it will not give you those problems, but it will cause other side effects, like slowing your heart rate and you might get tired more easily.

But I get tired already, I thought. I don’t need a medication to enhance that. I went home and got on the computer and started Googling this med to see what else it might do that I should be warned about. Up popped a long list of side effects from fatigue to constipation to sleeplessness and about 20 other things I don’t really need help with. I stopped at “in rare cases, may cause an urge to suicide.” So, I guess I’ll stay away from railroad crossings and high bridges.

I sighed. It seemed I was just swapping one unpleasantry for another unpleasantry.

Why is it that medications produce only negative side effects? I want medication with positive side effects. Like these.

Imagine these warnings as part of the requirement for truth in labeling. This medication:

1. May cause a sunny disposition.

2. May enable you to laugh more—even at jokes that aren’t actually that funny.

3. Will enhance the taste of chocolate, especially with red wine, even the cheap stuff from Trader Joe’s.

4. Warning about operating a vehicle: When starting this medication, get in your car and drive. Go as far as you want.

5. Can cause a rash of good feeling toward others.

6. Can cause an itch to travel to exotic places where people wear less clothing.

7. Can make you laugh. If laughing lasts more than four hours, seek medical treatment immediately.

8. May stimulate an urge to listen to old Joan Baez records. Stop taking immediately if listening to Joan Baez for more than four hours.

9. Call your doctor if you notice a funny story to tell about your dog or cat.

10. In rare cases, can improve your tennis serve.

11. Can diminish your fear of Republicans.

12. Do take if you are pregnant, planning to become pregnant, or otherwise will be around children of any age.

13. May cause constipation—in people you don’t like.

14. May cause you to fall in love with the next person you see. Do not administer more than six doses in a 24-hour period.

15. May increase your need to eat banana cream pie.

16. May increase agility on the dance floor.

17. May decrease your urge to read a newspaper or watch the news on TV.

In rare cases, some users of this medication have reported that it actually worked. So, don’t go killing yourself.

© 22 April 2018

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.