Tag: Life Stories

Posted on

Reframing Reality by Pat Gourley

“There’s a quality of exultation in our differences. 
We just have it and
its part of our nature. 
There is a kind of flagrant joy that goes very deep and 
it’s not available to most people. 
Something about our capacity to live and let
live
 is uniquely foreign.”

Paul Monette

Quoted in David Nimmons’ The Soul Beneath the Skin

Reframing reality seems to be the heart and soul of being queer. In fact we could as easily substitute “I am reframing reality” for “I am coming out”. If we don’t create our own queer reality we often live very unhappy and sometimes tragic lives. This reality-reframing can be perilous and the odds stacked against us are formidable which may in part explain our rather inordinate amount of suicide, the use of mind-altering drugs, tobacco and alcohol or our preoccupation with Broadway musicals, opera, show tunes and/or women’s basketball and golf.

My own early coming to queerness in my late teens in rural Illinois while attending a Catholic prep school involved seeking out one of the male high school counselors, there were several, for “guidance” around my budding sense of difference. ‘Gay’ was not a common word in the vernacular at that time, certainly not in Catholic High Schools in Illinois, but I was possessed with the thought that maybe I was a homosexual.

Looking back with a bit of honest hindsight I sought out this particular counselor not because I wanted to be re-assured that I was really as straight as the next guy but rather because I was drawn to his masculine looks, demeanor, large hands and the intoxicating smell of his aftershave, it was Old Spice, which can to this day still conjure up an olfactory hallucinatory hard-on. I really wanted to just have “flagrant sex” with him!

That of course did happen and after that first encounter which was essentially a mutual masturbation session resulting in an orgasm that was so intense I am sure I saw Jesus winking down at me from the crucifix on the wall over our heads. I was then able to leave town the next day for Mound Bayou, Mississippi in a state of “flagrant joy”.

One of several things plaguing my adolescent mind in those years was why I was not experiencing the same excitement and obvious obsession in exploring relations with girls that my male peers were. What was wrong with me? Was my life to be a series of very unsatisfactory experiences with the opposite sex ending in a joyless marriage perhaps further complicated with offspring? Remember this was 1967 and there was no local LGBT Center in town to provide guidance.

Well that first orgasmic encounter with my counselor in one burst of “flagrant joy” totally reframed my reality. Life was not going to be a joyless, sexless drudgery after all.

I did have another lapse into self-doubt about my newfound queer reality a couple years later at college when I again sought out counseling to address the ‘homosexual issue’. This probably followed a couple of frustrating experiences with other men – I mean reframing reality is not all endless flagrant joy. This counselor was also male but not someone I found attractive physically and we ended our therapeutic relationship after the second session when he insisted that I start with incorporating more masculine behaviors into my life including ending our time together with a manly handshake. I guess the logic was if you wanted to be a man for Christ-sakes act like one – now that is a futile attempt at reframing reality if there ever was one.

It was shortly after the sessions on manly behavior that the opportunity for heterosexual sex presented itself. Perhaps it was simply a reflection of the power of the all-pervasive and suffocating reality of the heterosexual dictatorship or more likely my own well-honed neurosis but I made one more very short stab at the straight male thing and had sex twice with one of the woman in our circle of friends. Despite my obnoxious sexual performances this very strong woman was in many other ways very influential in my life and my own development of a feminist sensibility. She went on to have a great life and family obviously unscarred by my sexual ineptitude. She was very sweet and patient but in the end honestly told me that I was really bad at sex. Both times involved trying to perform with my eyes being tightly closed, relying on her guiding hand to find the entrance and thinking the whole time this is so wrong and unnatural to boot! I won’t even get into how it felt to me physically and that when my orgasm did actually occur it involved a very intense, albeit transient, reframing of reality.

The sexual part of my queer reframing of reality has been only one small part of my life however. My innate sense of difference I really do think has freed me up to reframe all sorts of realities. Realities foisted upon me by the politicians, priests, pundits and really society in general. The great life adventure that is being queer is all about reframing reality and you know it really never ends. When the world attempts to lay their realities on to us though we can always wiggle free because we have the great gift of “flagrant joy that goes very deep and is not available to them ” (Paul Monette).

© June 2014

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.

Posted on

Bathing by Nicholas

I like bathing. I like luxuriating in a hot bath after a vigorous bike ride or before going to bed. It’s relaxing, soothing, and comforting in ways that showers aren’t.

I like bathing at baths even more. It’s always nice to bathe with other bathers. At communal baths, like Lake Steam Baths on W. Colfax Avenue, tubs or pools are bigger than mine at home, the water hotter, the sense of luxury greater. Sinking into hot water to completely submerse my body feels absolutely primordial. To adapt the common Biblical phrase: From water I came and to water I shall return.

My favorite bathing establishment is the Kabuki Spa in San Francisco and I was there just last week. It is one of the must-do things whenever I am in San Francisco. The Kabuki is an old Japanese-style communal baths in the heart of an area in SF called Japantown. Japantown used to be a thriving Japanese-American community until the U.S. government rounded all Japanese Americans and sent them to concentration camps in Colorado and elsewhere in 1942. But some of the community returned and the neighborhood is still called Japantown.

When I first went there, the place had all the tackiness of post-war Tokyo—cold tiles, garish colors, 1950s modern décor; cheap looking like a Japanese monster movie. Then it got bought up by some New-Agey California operation and became a spa, not a bathhouse. All the lights were dimmed and colors softened to mellow earth tones and though it was quiet before, now quiet became meditative silence with meditative music in the background.

The new owners spruced up the place but kept all the main features—the hot pool, the cold pool, the steam room, the sauna, and, best of all, massage. There are alternating men’s and women’s days but clothing is not optional, you go naked once you hang up your clothes in a locker.

I must point out that this is not a sex palace. Sex is prohibited and staff (i.e., monitors), while they refill water pitches, trays of fruit, and towels, are constantly bustling about to make sure nobody is misbehaving. This is not to say that the atmosphere is not erotic. I mean, you can’t put 20 to 40, naked, wet, steamy men (or women on other days) in one room and not have certain interests rise. Once in a while, one man will discreetly touch another but no sex ever happens. It’s kind of refreshing.

But I digress. I have my ritual at the Kabuki. First, I take a Japanese bath. I sit on a low stool and pour buckets of water over my head, soap up and then pour more buckets of water over my head. Then I head for the steam room to warm up and loosen up and breathe hot humid air to clear out my sinuses.

Then the main attraction. After a little break, I step into the hot pool and suddenly every inch of my skin tingles as I slowly slide down into the hot and wet. It’s big enough to stretch out in and even do some bending and stretching. It is the most totally relaxing feeling I have ever had.

Usually when I go to Kabuki, I sign up for a half-hour refresher massage. You can get all sorts of massage and other body treatments lasting forever and costing a fortune if you want. I used to request this one woman masseuse because she had big soft hands that kneaded my flesh like bread dough. The massage usually takes me past the relaxation phase and into the re-invigorating phase with a calm energy returning.

When I walk out of the Kabuki two hours later, I feel not only rested but energized.

This bathing establishment is all about the real pleasure of bathing—washing, soaking, steaming. Getting clean is a pleasure all its own. Getting wet is truly a sensuous gift to your body. Water is an amazing substance. It is plain but powerful in its ability to stir our senses as well as ease our minds. Water, that most pliable of substances, can also be a source of strength and vitality. Try it. I think you need a bath.

© 22 Oct 2012

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.

Posted on

Mushrooms by Gillian

I thought of writing about mushrooms the other week when our topic was “Magic” but that led too inevitably to the psychedelic connection, which is far from the kind of magic I personally attach to mushrooms. They bring, for me, a nostalgia for the magic of innocent childhood days.

One of my very favorite things was when my mum and dad and I would go off together into the fields and woodlands to pick mushrooms. My vision of it is my mother with the basket on one arm and me swinging from the free hand between her and my dad. Perhaps this happened for just one instant, once, but you know how it goes. These things from the distant past expand themselves until they occupy vast stretches of time, and in my memory every time we went what we called “mushrooming,” I clasped each of them by the hand and swung my feet off the ground between them. We were not a touchy-feely kind of family and holding both their hands is a thing I cannot remember doing at other times or in other circumstances. It was just part of the magic of mushrooms.

Mostly we went in autumn, early in the morning, though I think occasionally we went at other times of the day and year. I associate mist with these morning jaunts, though again this might, in reality, have been just once. We looked for the mushrooms in open grassy meadows among sleepily grazing cows and sheep, and in glades of old oak trees where they grew happily on old rotting stumps. I have no idea what kind they were, though the ones from the fields were different from those in the trees. We worried little about accidentally picking poisonous ones, but I have no idea whether we were simply lucky or whether my parents had some learned or inherited knowledge about such things. Even I knew that you never picked toadstools, but they were easy to tell apart from mushrooms. Every child knew that fairies only live in toadstools; never in mushrooms! Though mushrooms do form what we always called “fairy rings,” growing in clear circles on the grass. Even when the mushrooms were not there, the rings still were visible as mounds or depressions in the grass, and as the mushrooms tended to grow again in that same ring, it was always a good place to look. These circles were sometimes just a yard or so across, but some were huge, ten to twenty feet in diameter. No-one knew why they grew in these circles so of course who else was to be held responsible but the little people? Stones the size of a pinkie or a fist or occasionally a football were also sometimes arranged in circles, always called “fairy rings” for the same reason. I loved to imagine these little creatures busily pushing and tugging at the rocks to get them arranged correctly, but was never too sure how they got the mushrooms to grow that way. Perhaps, I thought, they planted the wee seeds in a circular trench, the way my dad planted the potatoes in a straight trench.

For me, mushrooms were all about the gathering. I rather lost interest in them when we got the overflowing basket home, though I enjoyed eating them well enough. Had they been readily available in stores via mushroom farms as they are now, I probably would not have liked them, as many children do not, but back then they were rare enough to be attractive.

These days, sadly, in my opinion, picking mushrooms has, like so many things, lost its simplicity and become hugely complex. For one thing, of course, you can no longer wander freely over your neighbors’ fields and woods and help yourself to anything growing there. For another, mushrooms have fallen victim to TMI. We have way Too Much Information about them, as about most things. Did you know that there are an estimated 10,000 different species of mushrooms in North America; that a mushroom specialist is called a mycologist? Do you care?

On Google Earth, I find, you can see mushrooms from space, honest! Well, not the mushrooms themselves, but the tell-tale fairy rings left by some species. These rings are clearly visible satellite images, so you can select likely fields to visit whilst sitting at your computer. Talk about taking all the fun out of things! How can that possibly compare with tucking cold hands into Mom and Dad’s warm ones, watching the frost turn your breath to fog? How can finding something on the internet bring you memories to last a lifetime? And the rings themselves have some completely scientific explanation to do with fungus, and have lost all their magic. Worse than that, they sometimes appear on a pristine lawn and no amount of digging will destroy them so the Web recommends destroying them with chemicals. The poor old fairies are in big trouble in the modern world. And their fairy stone rings, apparently, are causes by the continuous winter freeze/thaw cycle pushing the rocks, not the little people at all, at all.

In Britain, where of course my childhood memories originate, mushrooms have become big business; not only via mushroom farms where they are cultivated en masse but also the picking of wild ones. Far from the “mushrooming” of my youth, it has now gone upscale and is invariably termed mushroom “foraging.” It seems that in order to partake of this, what at least used to be, simple pleasure one first needs to buy some expensive basket via one of many international online boutique such as fungi.com, (yes, there really is such a place!) along with an equally costly knife, the purpose of which escapes me as we always pulled them up and they exited the wet ground with a wonderfully pleasing plop. One then arms oneself with a variety of books and maps and charts so as to identify what one is searching for, and to identify the best place and time to search for it, so as not to waste valuable time and to avoid the hazard of poisoning oneself, even though only about one percent of all mushrooms can be lethal. And after all that, of course, you’ve run out of time and simply hire a “Mushroom Foraging Guide,” to lead you by the hand, instead. (Yes, there really are such people!)

Just reading about it all on WildMushroomsOnline.co.uk wore me out.

And d’you know what upset me most; the worst thing I discovered in my researches way down in the TMI depths? There is actually no scientific basis for differentiating so-called toadstools from mushrooms. They are just variations of the same thing. Oh no! Haven’t those poor fairies suffered enough? How are they to know where to live? I tell you one thing, if I ever suffered from little people envy, I’m cured. The last place I want to live in these challenging times is down at the bottom of the garden with the fairies!

And so the magic goes; the magic fantasies of fairies and the magic moments of mushrooming. It’s partly my age, of course, and partly the age. The world has changed so very much in the time that I have inhabited it, and I would be the last one to claim that it is all for the worse. Those days gone by were not necessarily better, but there’s no denying they were simpler. I have to wonder where the children of this fast-paced electronic era will find the magic, but I try to keep the faith that they will, and fortunately I shall never know.

© December 2013

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.

Posted on

Parental Warnings by Betsy

I’m sure my mother was thrilled when she saw that her second born was a girl. Her first was a boy and now this would round out the family perfectly.

However there was a down side for my mother to having a girl child. I think the warnings started about the time in life when a baby starts understanding verbal language. When is that? About age three months, I believe.

“Girls are vulnerable, boys are not.” This was my mother’s ever-present unspoken thought.

Growing up I never felt very vulnerable. Tomboys never do. Tomboys see themselves as strong and adventuresome, not puny and vulnerable. And why in the world was my brother always allowed to do adventuresome things that I never was allowed to do?

“You’re a girl and that’s life,” was the simple answer to that question.

She never actually said the words, but the next warnings came through loud and clear starting around my fifteenth or sixteenth year of life.

“It happens.” Or, “A girl can easily lose control.” Or, “A girl can easily be swept off her feet.” Or, “A little smooching can lead to more intimate contact and before you know it, it happens.” Or, A boy will take advantage if he is given the slightest chance.” Or, “Boys are driven more than girls.”

So the message “Until you are married do not get pregnant” or rather, “Until you are married don’t do anything that would get you pregnant,” came through loud and clear until–well, until my mother became too ill to worry about it any more.

My mother never knew that I was homosexual. She died before I myself acknowledged my sexual orientation. Little did she know that there was virtually no chance that I would lose control while smooching with a boy. After all, I was barely interested in any smooching at all. I wanted to go to the dances, be with friends, etc. But being alone with my boyfriend really did not appeal to me at all. This was something to be avoided.

Spending the night with my girl friend was what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, my girl friends were not inclined as I was and so sexual activity was off limits, even the thought of it was taboo. I never allowed myself such thoughts.

I wonder what my mother’s warning would have been if she then knew what I know today. I can only imagine: “You will end up a lonely woman without a husband and a family. Even if you have a partner, you will never be fulfilled. Who will protect you? Who will take care of you?

It must have been hard enough for my mother to accept that her daughter was somewhat of a tomboy. But to her credit I never, ever got the message from her that I was not valued just as I was, or that I should be more feminine or different in any way from what I was. In the end that positive message was much stronger than her warnings. I was loved and valued just as I was.

© 5 July 2012

About the Author  


Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years. Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

Posted on

Do I Have Your Dutronic Veebleveetzer Transmogrifier? by Will Stanton

I hope that whatever idiosyncrasies I may have are not off-putting and that, perhaps, they even may be at least mildly charming. Throughout all the years of my life, I do not recall ever having met anyone who was not at least somewhat idiosyncratic. Some people were far more than that; some were downright strange. I think some of them really should have had help.

When I was in college (when was that, 1902?), I was living in a dorm my freshman year. Just in that one dorm, there sure were a lot of peculiar people.

The strangest one of all was the poor fellow who thought that he had traveled several times to other planets around the vast universe. I do not recall from his lecture in the student lounge exactly how he managed interstellar travel and certainly not just by himself. Perhaps it was through the use of a unique machine, the Dutronic Veebleveetzer Transmogrifier. Or, perhaps he simply could instantaneously zap himself from point A to point B anywhere in the universe without any danger or damage to his mortal self. That’s a pretty good trick, if you can do that.

He adamantly did maintain, however, that he could prove his claim by demonstrating some of the powers taught him by aliens. One of the supposed powers that he had learned was the ability to walk through solid objects such as walls. I should not have to remind everyone that people, especially young thoughtless people, can find humor in the afflictions and misfortunes of others, and this was the case here. The laughing, jeering students demanded a demonstration, whereupon the fellow walked headlong into the cinder-block wall, knocking himself out. The students, thinking that they were quite clever, quickly picked up the stunned fellow and moved him to the other side of the wall. When the dizzy space-traveler woke up, he naturally was convinced that he had proved his claim. The students thought that this was all great fun, but I felt very sorry for the delusional kid. I hope that he did receive the help that he needed.

The dorm proctor apparently felt that at least a dozen of his charges were weird enough to house them all in a few rooms along one short hallway apart from the other students, rather like a psych ward. He did have one diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. I’m not quite sure how he made it into college or whether he actually remained.

It was Joe, however, that I’ll mention next. He was one hunk of a masculine freshman whose natural, great physical strength usually was not noted because he looked so young. No one could beat him in arm-wrestling. He sometimes made money with that ability. He had a habit of traveling out of town to rural road-houses where the inebriated laborers liked to display their masculinity by challenging each other to arm-wrestling. Joe had perfected his hustler act, appearing to be innocent and losing some small wagers. Once enough beer bottles had been raised and enough cash had been placed on the table, Joe suddenly overpowered his very surprised, final opponent. Joe would do that hustle in each roadhouse only once. Scooping up the cash, he made a discreet exit before the mystified losers decided that they had been taken and became angry.

Then there was Ted S. I’ll be mentioning him again in my October 28th reading. Apparently, Ted had developed several bad habits long before he became a freshman. One of them was a frequent overindulgence of alcohol, which I suppose was not too unusual for a party-school. What made Ted different was that he physically looked to be only fifteen, although he actually was eighteen; and he looked deceptively innocent. The trouble was that he lost all control when he drank too much. His distressed roommate finally had enough when Ted arrived back at the dorm room late one night and mistook the clothes closet for pissoir. The next day, Ted was moved to the weird ward.

The surname of one kid was Love, and he obviously thought that he was cut out to be a great lover. Although he was extremely cute and sexy and drove a Corvette, he was not quite so handsome as he thought that he should be. Being blond, he thought he should have a year-around tan, which is virtually impossible in that part of the country. So he spread generous portions of fake tanning lotion all over himself. We could spot him a block away because he was orange. At one-half block away, we could smell the lotion.

Sagmeister was probably the only true sex maniac I’ve ever met. He was a handsome twenty-something, but he really had a problem. I recall his standing in the lounge in front of a TV, talking with someone. A TV commercial with a pretty, buxom blond came on, which caught his attention. His speech slowed as his eyes became glued upon the delectable image. Then his speech trailed off completely and was replaced with loud, heavy breathing.

Sagmeister seemed to have a steady flow of guests to his room. As long as the guests were female, age did not seem to be a problem. I recall that, on one occasion, a pretty sixteen-year-old girl came out of his room and was wearing only a long, white, man’s shirt. On another occasion, however, he linked up with the well known town whore “Black Julie.” She was fifty-five and not what one would call attractive. As a matter of fact, she looked like (as the Texans say) “She was rode hard hard and put back into the barn wet.” That did not seem to bother Sagmeister. I guess that there’s no substitute for experience.

Now that I think of it, I am reminded that there were a bunch of other students with strange personalities. And now that I think of it, I guess whatever idiosyncrasies that I might have had just were not weird enough for anyone to pay much attention. Thank goodness for small blessings.

© 6 September 2013




About the Author 


I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.

Posted on

Travel by Train by Ray S

Sometime between 3:30
and 4:00 AM you can you can hear the low but urgent call of the diesel coal
train winding its way from Wyoming through Denver to somewhere south on the
Santa Fe (now Burlington-Northern-Santa Fe) railroad line.
That familiar horn brings
to my mind the first time I thrilled to that same sound.  It was the year of the “Chicago Century of
Progress” World’s Fair 1933.  The
CB&O ( Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Rail Road) ran west through my
hometown, a suburb of the Windy City and every day that new sound of the diesel
horn warned the passing of the “City of Denver” Zephyr.  It was a custom for the kids, unbeknownst to
their elders, to place copper pennies on the track anticipating the arrival of
the premier silver streamliner, and then retrieve the flattened coin as a
souvenir of the great new advance in modern passenger rail service.
Many years and various
national and international conflagrations, marriages and births our family rode
the Zephyr from Denver to Chicago to visit family.  That train carried the four of us as well as
all the other passengers on the final run of the CB&O Denver Zephyr.  The tracks were the same but the advent of
Amtrak and “The California Zephyr” had arrived and were different.  Chicago’s Union Station marked the conclusion
of a long and marvelous historical railroad train trip for us and the
Zephyr. 
Another time, another
place and another train trip.  Just a
kid, barely 18 years old and almost Christmas in 1943.  The “bigger war” had been going on since Pearl
Harbor and ’41.  Either wait for the
draft and whatever fate it held or enlist in a military service of your
choice.  What could be more glamorous,
adventuresome and heroic than becoming an air cadet in the United States Army
Air Corps?  None of the above adjectives
quite fit my personality or abilities, but “Off We GO, Into the Wild Blue
Yonder,”  or went.
After necessary
induction processes at Chicago’s Great Lakes/Fort Sheridan installation the
newly hatched cadets were outfitted with all the appropriate clothing
necessities, either on your back or in the ubiquitous barracks bag and off to
the south side of Chicago and the Illinois Central Railroad station.  Then my first and only really troop train
adventure.  No, not cattle cars, a great
number of coach cars and even some of Mr Pullman’s sleepers, but no porters to
make up your births.  A mess hall was in
a converted coach car and you passed through it to receive whatever they
prepared in the way of portable food to be carried back to your respective
car.  The I.C. (Illinois Central R.R.)
rolled on and on finally depositing the potential air warriors at a cold, dank,
coal smoke clouded (potbellied space heaters in each barracks were the only
means of heating) Gulfport Field, Mississippi.
The trip continued to
cover needed physical exams and intrusions, shots, and. of course, six weeks
plus of basic training and then as they say, “at the convenience of the
government,”  the cadet program was
declared over-subscribed to.  The hundred
or so fledgling flyers were assigned to various other Air Corps tasks and
dispatched to their new homes for various “military careers.”
So the story goes of
this train trip–from potential “fly boy” to guard duty in a Military Police
company.  The closest thing to flying was
midnight patrol of a deserted flight strip in North Carolina.
A train trip never to
be repeated and hardly ever remembered.

© 25 Aug 2014  

About the Author 








Posted on

The Memory of Words Past: Parts of Speech by Phillip Hoyle

This little
story could be of interest only to writers or to students of aging. Here’s how
it goes.
So at age
sixty-four I have just finished writing a novel, a book of over 50,000 words. I
have been pondering the future of the manuscript and in so doing decided to ask
several people to read it to see if it makes sense, holds together, bores, or entertains.
While waiting for their responses, I’m trying to plan creative ways to reread
it in an attempt to make sure I will not send a possible agent or publisher a
work that seems unpromising. A tactic I learned from my daughter-in-law Heather
is to mark all “to be” words, changing them into something active unless they
present no alternative. My own idea is to check the use of all, uh, what’s the
word? Uh, that kind of word I have sometimes had trouble with. This is awful.
Not only do I have trouble selecting the right one of these words; I cannot
even think of the name for the type of word. Am I losing my mind? That’s not
beyond possibility given my age.
I recall
after doing so well in freshman written composition 101 and sophomore and
junior ancient Greek, I went for years without naming parts of speech or grammatical
stuff even though I was writing on a regular basis. When I entered graduate
school I was surprised that I didn’t have facility with that vocabulary
anymore. When I heard my professors talking about word use, metaphor,
participles, and the like, I realized I’d have to review things I learned in
junior high. And now again, after years of writing daily, I cannot think of
some simple grammatical concept I studied in Latin, Spanish, Greek, French, and
English!
Perhaps I
can discover my lost word if I begin writing about words. So I have noun and
verb, subject and predicate. I know objects, direct and indirect. There are past
and present participles which are verbal adjectives and gerunds which are
verbal nouns. Of course I know conjunctions: how could I ever forget PBS’s
“Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” But I have forgotten the elusive
word that started all this. What is the term for words such as over, under,
above, through, and behind? What is the word sometimes connected with places,
actions, characters, things, and so forth. I want it to begin with the letter c
or p but don’t remember. I do recall how the selection of the correct word has sometimes
seemed a challenge. I can misuse them, thus my impulse to have Heather check them
in my manuscript, but I can’t ask her to since I don’t recall the word. It
would be embarrassing since she teaches writing. I have to get it. Through,
beyond, beside and so forth are examples, but I cannot recall the grammatical
name.
I had a
problem with them in Greek; back then I believe it was because I couldn’t
recall the right Greek word that in English often serves as a prefix, for
example “meta.” Did it mean through or after? See, it still confuses me. I‘ll
work at this and will probably go upstairs to read Strunk and White’s Elements
of Style. Surely that old standby will instruct me. Pronouns, personal pronouns,
articles, modifier, adjective, adverb…. Still the word I’m searching for
doesn’t arise from the grammatical murk of my befuddled brain, but I’ll keep at
my memory quest.
The words
describe the relative position of things. There it is, finally: position; preposition.
I never thought of this, but the word describes its function. It’s the word at
the beginning of a phrase (of course, a prepositional phrase) that tells the
relative position of the expression it modifies. I was pretty sure I could
recall this word, my attempt stimulating the bank of grammatical words and giving
synapses time to connect. I like that. Somehow the recollection of this word
seems hopeful, as in: I still know what I know; I still have a functioning
brain.
A question
of an old person: Could loops in the aging sensory and memory system be analogous
with (is it ‘to’ or ‘with’?) the proliferation of capillaries in the aging
circulatory system? It’s a thought, but I recall I was only twenty-seven years
old when I first realized I couldn’t recall such grammatical terms. That really
surprised me for I had been out of undergraduate school only four years and
worked among college educated middle and upper-middle class folk. In four
years, I neither heard nor made in conversation even one reference to grammar!
This phenomenon of forgetting terms reminds me of my current need to say the
name of a muscle at least once a week or I’ll be unable to find the word when I
am trying to explain something to a client. Now that list of terms I
memorized in my fifties. Should I find that consoling? But lists of words I memorized
in junior high or even earlier and have used for decades? Why should they
disappear? Oh well, I’m just happy they are still available, even if my search
for them takes me into memories and the like. Someday (soon?) I’ll start
forgetting what I’m searching my mind for but hopefully will enjoy tours of my
past as I follow loop after loop through my tiring brain. I hope I find my past
as entertaining to me as I hope my novel will be to others.
© 23 November 2012
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
Posted on

A Love Affair with Clio by Nicholas

According to Greek mythology, Clio, the muse of history, is
the daughter of Zeus and Memory. She guides mortals in the art of contemplating
their pasts.
History happens in the present, not in the past; it’s an
interaction of the present and the past. History makes the past knowable. We
are sequestered in history, prisoners of our pasts, but while we are bound to
it, history liberates us from the past.
I wrote those words while in a doctoral program in history
back in the 1970s. I find them still to be true though I’ve lost all
involvement with academic life. I find them real on a personal level now.
When I finally decided to embrace my sexuality and came out,
shortly after I left academics, I saw that as entering my history. Coming out
was a getting into. Not only was I facing my own personal past and its hold on
my present, I was joining an on-going experience of countless people before me.
I was now a member of some vague thing called “gay history.” It was bigger than
me but also something I lived each small minute of each day. What went on long
before I came onto the scene suddenly was relevant to what I might do, the
dilemmas I would face, the opportunities I would have, the choices I would
make. Being gay is my entry point. It is my entry point to real life,
happiness, community and history.
I love history. I believe William Faulkner was right when he
said, “History is not the dead hand of the past. It’s not dead. Hell, it’s not
even past.” I loved studying history and always felt that the more I knew about
it, the more I knew about me.
When I was younger—college age and in my 20s—I very much felt
a part of another kind of history. Everybody did back then even without knowing
it. We were a massive movement to expand civil rights, end poverty, explore new
ways of relating to god and man and woman, and end a war that as unjust as it
was unjustified. Because of what we, a generation, did, the world was changing.
It was not my one voice but a generation’s, a culture’s. We were history. Win
or lose, we were making history.
The knowing of history and the living of it was in some way
to be in control of it. I had a sense of impact on something much larger than
me.
I’m not sure about that anymore. I don’t doubt history and
its force in shaping the present and future. And I don’t doubt that knowing
history empowers me in living my daily life. But as I age, I increasingly get
the feeling that history is simply passing me by. History passes up everybody,
of course, and every generation sees its dreams and accomplishments fade like a
vaporous cloud on a summer day.
Some I don’t care about—pop culture, for example, is too
superficial to worry about. Some I just think what fools people are not to keep
what is now dismissed as old-fashioned—like speaking and writing in full
sentences. We say we value communication but seem unable to communicate with
all our devices. New ways are not always better ways—as some old fart once said.
But sometimes I get anxious that if I don’t climb onto whatever
bandwagon is going by today, I will be lost in some cobwebby existence of
nostalgia, just me and Clio, my imaginary friend. I fear a day, for example,
when all life and all connections will depend on an i-phone or something like
it. Will I be friendless because I’m not on Facebook? As I’m writing this
piece, my home phone is out of order and I feel as though I am marooned on an
ice floe in the Arctic. Totally cut off.
History, I believe, is best met on a mundane level. It might
be global climate change but I will see it in my withering tomato plants that
just can’t cope with day after day of super-hot temperatures. That mundane
level is usually where history is lived.

© Sep
2012

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.
Posted on

Getting Caught by Lewis

As a boy, I was not afraid of heights. By the age of four, I was jumping off the roof of the garage. I could climb almost anything. My mother—never too watchful—soon learned to find me not by looking “around” but by looking “up”.

Our house was a one-story bungalow. Next door lived an elderly widow whose house towered over ours. One day, I was playing outside, between our houses, and I heard a strange and frightening cry from an upstairs window. I could see her face. She appeared to be talking to me. She hadn’t done that before. What did she want, if anything? How could I help? She appeared OK to me. I walked away. She scared me. I had never known my grandmothers.
Soon, I learned, to my horror, that she had been doing laundry and caught her hand in the rollers of her Maytag dryer. I wasn’t punished; she was the one who “got caught”. But I sure learned something about the hazards of daily living and the need to be more responsive.
Around that time—the years have grown somewhat fungible with their passage—I noticed that a very long ladder had been placed against the side of her house. It reached all the way from the ground to her roof at the exact location of her brick chimney, from which, I was certain, an excellent panorama of our entire neighborhood could be enjoyed.
The opportunity was a prime example of what in the liability law profession is known as an “attractive nuisance”—especially for a boy who loves to climb.
So, I climbed, hand-over-hand, to the rain gutter 25 feet or so above the sidewalk upon which rested the ladder. The roof was fairly steep but negotiable, so I soon found myself perched on top of her chimney thoroughly enjoying the spectacular view.
Before long, my reverie was shattered by my mother’s voice somewhat exasperatedly calling out my name in a context that suggested some kind of a response was in order. She clearly did not see me. I waited until I thought she might have the police out looking for me.
“Up here, Mom,” I said, hoping-against-hope that she would be impressed.
“Lewis, you get down here this instant!”
Mother had made similar demands in the past but I was pretty sure this time she didn’t mean to be taken literally.
Anyone who climbs at all knows that climbing down is far scarier and more risky than climbing up, if for no other reason than you’re looking at hard objects rather than clouds and the sky. Nevertheless, I managed to make it safely down to the ground without so much as a scratch. I imagined my mother rushing over to me, sweeping me up in her grateful arms and showering my cheeks with kisses, as I’m sure I had seen done in Lassie Come Home. Instead, I got a firm thumb and forefinger on either side of my right ear lobe and a brusque shepherding through our side door and into the kitchen, where my mother posed to me the type of question designed to instill shame and guilt in the heart of a 4-year-old, naïve, novitiate Christian.
“What would you do if you had a little boy who pulled a stunt like that?”
Now, I immediately recognized her query as a “trick question”, the answer to which might very well seal my fate. Rejecting rejoinders such as “give him a spanking”, “ground him”, or “send him to bed without his dinner”, I happened upon a response that might just turn a lemon into lemonade.
“I guess I would simply ask God to watch out for him.”

I never knew whether she actually did make such an appeal. I just knew that I had had a very close brush with disaster. I also learned that religion can easily be used to manipulate.


© 4 Feb 2013


About the Author 


I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

Posted on

Reframing Reality by Ricky

Perhaps a better term would be Remaking Reality. I am sure most of us have at one time or another wished we could make changes in the actual reality we exist in or that surrounds us all. For example, changes that would allow all people to age but whose bodies would not show age or become infirm; diseases would not exist; no one would seek to harm anyone else; everyone would live peaceably; and everyone would practice good manners with common courtesy towards all. These seem to be examples of reframing or remaking reality that would be good, nice, and pleasant to have surrounding us. You could think of other changes that also would appear to be beneficial. Society could certainly gain much from such a remaking. But, what would society or more specifically, individual people lose with the changes?

At 12 years old, I remade my reality by mentality deciding that like Peter Pan, I did not want to “grow up.” To a very large degree, my subconscious made that happen mentality but could not stop the biological progression from boy to man. With some outside influences, I have lived within that reality my whole life from 12 forward. While my life’s “journey” has had great swings in stress levels and peacefulness, I have maintained a childlike personality that is able to see humor in the darkest of events and make jokes amid tragedy. I can even see the positive in negative events, sometimes even as the events are occurring.

Consequently, I can appreciate good health because I’ve experienced illness. I can appreciate the routine and proper operation of my body’s parts because I’ve experienced pain. I can appreciate and bask in love because I’ve experienced the lack of love and seen hate. I can appreciate life because I’ve seen and experienced the death of others. I can enjoy and appreciate good music because I’ve heard noise and screaming lyrics posing as music. I can enjoy family and friends because I’ve been alone. I am grateful for my finances because I’ve been poor. I appreciate my education because I’ve seen and experienced ignorance in myself and others. I can appreciate even modest food because I’ve seen starvation. I can work for peace because I’ve seen the results of war. I can be as generous as I can because I’ve seen greed destroy. I can be drug and alcohol free because I’ve grown up with alcoholics and seen the results of drug use. I can obey traffic laws because I’ve been to too many accidents where men, women, and children died. I know joy and happiness because I’ve suffered depression and sorrow. I can face life’s challenges because I’ve developed the inner strength and resourcefulness needed to overcome the challenges.

What one LOSES by remaking reality into what appears to be a happy, peaceful, bucolic existence is an appreciation of WHY such an existence IS happy, peaceful, bucolic, and desirable in the first place. The “silver lining” in the cloud of a “hard-knock-life” is, knowing exactly what happiness, joyfulness, peacefulness, goodness, and love really feel like when one encounters them. In other words, without the negatives for comparison, there can be no positives.

From a religious point of view, Adam and Eve HAD to eat that “apple” or they would not have known the difference between obedience and disobedience but would have remained in ignorance for as long as they lived. That one act introduced the negatives into Earth life and we have all been blessed as the result.

Homophobic ignoramuses don’t need to have their reality reframed or remade. All they need is an attitude adjustment by a swift kick in the pants—preferably by their fathers and a dose of castor oil from their mothers. That should do the trick. Maybe we can get the governor to arrange for “film at 11” reporting on the event.

© 18 June 2014

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com