Tag: Nicholas

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The Storylines by Nicholas

A singer has settled into my neighborhood. I heard him the other morning as the first gray feathers of dawn lightened the eastern sky. Every morning very early he starts his quest way before I am ready to start mine for that day. Sometimes he’s close enough to wake me from a sound sleep—like outside my window. It’s a robin, I think, and he is looking for a mate. He will sing out his sweet, melancholy notes until he finds one.

It’s clearly a song he’s singing, not just bird chatter chirping away. There’s a melody and a pattern that he repeats over and over. In some sort of bird language I imagine him singing, “I am here. I am here for you. Come and find me or let me find you so we can make beautiful love together.”

This spring morning ritual comes from a bird not normally thought of as a songbird, like a canary. It’ll go on for another month or so and then the robin will return to his normal quiet with an occasional chirp or tweet. But for now he needs to communicate and let the world know where he is.

When Jamie and I designed our wedding ceremony, we included a favorite poem by a friend of ours. It goes like this: “When I have bidden/ farewell to Time,/ what claim might win me entry/ into Bliss? /Just this:/ foolish and sinful as I was,/ my true Love heard my song/ and I heard His.”

Songs, like poetry and other writing, are a form of communication and not just entertainment. Singing is one way we have of defining ourselves, reaching out to others, and establishing our place in the world.

Australian native people have a thing called the Songlines in which they navigate their surroundings by singing songs in a precise sequence to find local landmarks such as waterholes that tell them just where they are. These navigations also guarantee their survival in a vast and harsh land. Some songlines are short, some span long routes and use different languages. Beyond being a navigational tool, the songs also tell of a people’s place in the world. They are sometimes even called Dreamlines. Bruce Chatwin, a gay writer, traced many of the Aboriginal songs and dreams in his 1986 book The Songlines.

Every Monday afternoon, we gather here and sing our songs to each other. By telling our stories that are our individual songs, we announce our place in the world. We are defining ourselves by our stories, our tales, our songs. We are noting the landmarks in our vast landscapes as we say who we are, where we’ve been and what we’ve done. We are saying that we are here, we are here for each other and for whomever wants to join us. And maybe we have been there too. Watch out for that danger; be ready for great joy when you make it up that hill; when that happened to me, this is what I did about it. Our stories tell of our shared experiences as a community and a people. Our stories are creating, as well as reflecting, our lives.

To all those like us, we say, join the song. You don’t have to be a songbird to join in. You just have to want to let your presence be known so we can find each other in the dim light of a spring dawn in a hard land.

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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The Interview by Nicholas

It happened one day when Jamie and I were visiting his grandmother who lived in Palo Alto, California with her daughter, Jamie’s mom. We were living in San Francisco at the time, about an hour north, and frequently drove down the Peninsula to visit Jamie’s parents and grandmother. This day was a little different because Jamie’s folks were away so that made us Grandma’s chief entertainers/care givers for the day.

Grandma G was in her mid-80s and totally together mentally. Because she was getting up in years and finding it difficult getting around, Jamie’s parents moved her from her home in Chicago to their rambling ranch-style house in sunny, mild California. It wasn’t a move that she was totally happy with but she seemed to get along well enough and didn’t complain. At least not to me and Jamie.

She was always happy to see us. One day we brought her a piece of this fabulously delicious peanut butter cake with peanut butter and cream cheese frosting from one of the exquisite bakeries in our neighborhood of San Francisco. She loved it and told us that this was her day to sin. What day was that, we asked. Any day I want, she said. We always brought some cake down with us after that.

I don’t know that I would label Grandma G a “character,” though she certainly had plenty of character. She once told us that sometimes she stayed up all night reading a book she just could not put down. She was sharing a secret like a kid who deliberately went against curfew to do what she wanted.

She’d had an interesting career and for a time had had her own radio show on homemaking, complete with her own show business radio name, on a station in Chicago. She had also been very involved in liberal politics in Chicago—one of the first women to do so—and in the Presbyterian church. Grandma G is probably the reason Jamie’s family turned out so solidly liberal and progressive minded. Jamie likes to show a photograph of him and Grandma at a 1980 Chicago rally for the Equal Rights Amendment, the one that would have put gender equality into the U.S. Constitution.

I always enjoyed our visits to Palo Alto where it was usually sunny and warm unlike San Francisco with its chill and fog. I felt like I was actually in California there.

Jamie was busy doing something outside, cleaning the pool or something. Grandma and I were in the family room chatting about nothing in particular when the questions began.

She was curious, in an innocent grandmotherly way, about me and Jamie, her favorite grandson. How did we meet, she asked. I told her the story of friends inviting us both to dinner, meeting at their house and then going out. Jamie and I hit it off, he offered me a ride home and, after talking a while, we made plans to get together.

Did we love each other? Yes, I said, sort of gulping as I wondered just where this conversation was going and where was Jamie.

Did Jamie treat me well? Oh, yes, he does, I said. Very well.

Does he apologize when he hurts your feelings, asked Grandma. Well, yes, I guess, I said. He hadn’t really ever hurt my feelings in the short time we’d known each other but I imagined he would apologize if he ever did so.

I imagine there were more questions, but then Jamie returned to the room. I joked about being grilled by Grandma and the conversation shifted to another topic. I’ve always had a fond memory of that afternoon and my brief interview by the matriarch.

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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The Strangest Person I Ever Met by Nicholas

One day she walked into my office and sort of collapsed down into a chair and said, with a mixture of patient weariness and eager anticipation, “I just can’t wait till I get my tits.”

Rebecca (not her real name) was a volunteer at the GLBT Community Center where I worked and she frequently tossed off quips about where she was in her transition.

“You’ll get them,” I assured her, “and they will be beautiful.” Like, what do I know about boobs, I thought.

I really didn’t think it very strange that Rebecca would announce to me such a private anatomical detail. We were always chatting about something at The Center. This was just real life the way real people lived it. No more “strange” than if she’d said, “I need to buy a new car.” Though a good deal more personal. But then one cannot transition in private so why be secretive about the process.

That was her attitude and I was always impressed by Rebecca’s ability to be open and light hearted about her life and its changes when so many others seemed to carry theirs around like a heavy stone on their backs. Rebecca seemed not only determined to make her life her way but to enjoy it along the way.

I didn’t find that so strange—actually, more admirable than strange. But it occurred to me that there are people in this world whose eyes would have bugged out at a statement that, to them, would have been as strange as if saying she was from Mars.

I don’t really know strange people. At least I don’t think so. I once knew a guy whom I would call strange, as in weird. I assume he’s long dead since he looked like a walking corpse when I knew him in San Francisco in 1969—where knowing strange people was a daily occurrence. Frank lived in the flat below me and his full time and sole occupation seemed to be smoking pot and doing probably any other drug he could find in the dark confines of his room. One day he emerged into the sunlight and showed the most sallow and droopy skin I’d ever seen on a body still alive. Now, that’s strange, I thought, and not very appealing. I stayed away and always have from “strange people.” Weirdoes just don’t interest me.

But then some people would say that my life is pretty strange and full of weirdoes—faggots, dykes, radicals, mystics, people of integrity and ethics, animal lovers, even. I know a woman who once took a squirrel she’d hit with her car to a vet to try to save it. Now, that’s strange. I’d never do that.

One of my best friends is beyond the beyond, as the Irish say. He’s intersex. Now, we’re totally outside the binary, as he puts it. Pronouns don’t even apply here though, since you have to check one box or the other, David has always identified as male. With intersex people we have not just men, women and those transitioning, but suddenly the biological permutations are near endless. He used to have tits but lost them when forced into more male-inducing hormone treatments as an adolescent. He tells me he misses his tits and the fine soft skin he once had. He’s taught me a lot.

So, no, I don’t like “strange.” But in a way I require some strangeness in my friends. Strangeness is, after all, a very subjective judgment. What some call strange, I call interesting, unique, human, being alive, maybe even fun. Life is strange enough all by itself. And if you’re not even a wee bit strange, you need to fix that. Take a flight on the astral plane, listen to those voices in your head, drop everything and go on a meditation retreat, paint your toe nails purple, sit down and read a book. You know, weird stuff.

To some people, I suppose, I might be the strangest person they’ve ever met.

© 22 July
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.


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Cleaning as Metaphor by Nicholas

The winter was long and dark with many days overcast with clouds that looked like they’d been beaten up and bruised. Little snow came to cover the frozen dust. Some days the only good news was that there was no bad news.

But then fresh green sprouts began pushing their way through the winter muck. Small yellow and purple blossoms appeared. Spring happens no matter what. And with spring comes cleaning—cleaning house, cleaning the yard, cleaning up my life. 

I like to clean. There’s something about cleaning and being clean that says to me “fresh start,” “things are under control,” “I actually can do something about something.” Dust bunnies be gone, I am in charge. House cleaning is a metaphor for getting life in order and I like order. I can’t say when the next dash to the Emergency Room will be but, damn it, I can keep the bathroom clean. House cleaning is really about power.

I also like cleaning house because I have a fondness for stupid little busy work, i.e., chores. Chores take up time, distract one from whatever you need distracting from, and give one the illusion of meaningful activity, of doing something that, really, after all does have to be done. Chores are an existential act, a sign of being, or, if you’re a philosopher, being-ness. Cleanliness may or may not be next to godliness, but it is right up there with human-ness. It’s like your mother used to say about your room: “Does some animal live here?”

Cleaning house is important. It is so important that I am willing to pay someone to do it for me. After all, the exchange of money is the highest form of activity in American society, so it is fitting that this noble endeavor should be further honored by the payment of cash to another to do the actual cleaning. 

I keep a pretty clean house and since we don’t have kids or dogs, our house does not collect inordinate amounts of dirt. But still, dirt does accumulate and there are some things that I just won’t do. I will vacuum the carpets but I hate dusting things. I almost would rather throw them away than dust stuff. So, I pay someone else to dust my trinkets and souvenirs. 

House cleaners come into my house and make my little house cleaning busyness look like actual work, like a science. I know I can trust these professionals. They know how to tackle a project like dusting wooden slat venetian blinds. I would just slap the things around and get fed up, say it looked good enough and quit. But cleaners take to it like a surgeon doing an operation on a vital organ. They have a plan of attack and follow it. I figure, it’s knowledge and skill I am paying for, not just relief from drudgery. I admire the professionals who actually do take house cleaning far more seriously than I ever do.

I used to be one of those professionals making my living for a time cleaning up other people’s messes while I struggled to make a living as a freelance writer and journalist. It is work cleaning a house and that’s another reason I don’t begrudge someone what I pay them to clean up my dirt.

But sometimes I just let the cleaning go. Today, for example, I did not get around to cleaning the bathroom which does need it. Instead I spent the morning finishing this story. Some things trump even house cleaning. 

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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Snapshots [Le Flaneur] by Nicholas

The French, they say, have a word for it. In fact, the French have words for things that nobody else even knows exist. Le flaneur is an example. I don’t know how to translate that term into English because the object—in this case, person—it describes doesn’t really exist among English-speaking people. He is found only in France and, really, only in Paris.

Perhaps, boulevardier comes close but you can’t define one French term with another. A flaneur is a man of the streets but not what we would call a street person. He is not a bum; he is a man of leisure and some elegance. Not ostentatious American elegance but that quiet Parisian elegance. And I’m afraid I must use only the masculine pronoun here because I don’t think there is a feminine equivalent. Lady of the streets means something completely different.

Le flaneur has been translated as stroller since the word comes from the French verb “to stroll.” Edmund White even wrote a whole book about Paris using the perspective of the stroller. Le flaneur, he writes, “is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or an afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of time is antithetical to the true spirit of the flaneur. An excess of the work ethic inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to wed the crowd.”

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a flaneur even though, Americans are particularly unsuited to flanerie, says White, and I am probably guilty. I admit my ramblings are usually not purely aimless. I usually have little stops to make, things to do, like go to the bank or something. But surrounding my points of busyness, I wander. I do “wed the crowd,” as he puts it, which is simply to be part of the multiplicity and anonymity of a group of people on the street going about their business, hurrying to appointments, running to catch a train, doing some errand, or just walking.

Denver isn’t Paris and it can be difficult at times to find a crowd to amble with. San Francisco and New York are the best USA cities that allow such socializing. But I manage.

Setting out, I hop onto an RTD bus—driving would be counter to le flanerie—and head into the city center. Whatever Monsieur Le Flaneur does, he does in public spaces. In fact, it was while riding the #10 bus, a route running often enough that you can use it spontaneously without a schedule, that I realized that that was what I was about. I like to spend my free time rambling about the city just to see my city. Many times I will have some errand to run but I mostly wander to a set of favorite spots, noticing what’s on the street from those awful paving stones on the 16th Street Mall to new destruction or construction. I spend hours reading or writing in a warm café on a cold day. Common Grounds coffee house is one favorite, Tattered Cover bookstore is another, The Market café is a frequent breakfast stop as is Udi’s for lunch.

The other day found me heading over to Platte Street across the river to drop in on the Savory Spice Shop. I needed some herbs and spices and they have the best Vietnamese cinnamon in town. I also like just to breathe in the aromas of all the spices and herbs and blends they have. On that clear, crisp winter day, I strolled over the pedestrian bridge over the river and through the park, this bit of nature slicing through the heart of urban pavement. I ambled into downtown admiring the views, the fresh air, and all the people out jogging, bicycling, or just walking from where they were to where they would soon be. Each moment of observation was like a snapshot of this city. I ended up near Union Station, presently under construction and soon to be a hub for commuter trains. I was watching the city being built as Denver creates more spaces for itself to live in.

So, that is my goofy tale. Rambling through the city, noting all the variety of activity as my urban cohorts—workers, students, shoppers, diners, fellow travelers—go about their day. A tale of goofing off—an Americanized version of a little bit of Paris.

© 11 April 2013

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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Music and Memory by Nicholas

Some songs I associate with specific times and places. One note from the Swedish disco group ABBA takes me right back to my disco dancing days when we were all dancing queens.

The most evocative collection of singing that I have and rely on to recall a favorite era in my life, a time of enormous growth, is all the albums I’ve saved, and sometimes even replaced, from the 1960s. The rock music of that time captures my sense of those days with all their turbulence and delights.

The plaintive ballads of the Grateful Dead are still sweet to listen to. The harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young invoke American folk music and country western tunes. And those British bad boys, the Rolling Stones, take off in another direction with their raucous and violent lyrics and guitars and drums. Their song Gimme Shelter with its wild thumping beat has practically become my anthem over the years. “Oh, the storm is threatening my very life today.”

Then there are the romantic and psychedelic imaginations of the Moody Blues and Steve Miller and the Doors. The Moody Blues are just dreamy like many of the idle, dreamy days I spent back then (and now) conjuring up another world. Steve Miller and his band sang goofy songs about the Last Wombat in Mecca with his Texas twang. But it was Jim
Morrison of the Doors who was the most remarkable poet of ‘60s rock after Bob Dylan. “Strange days have found us; Strange days have tracked us down,” he wrote. “We shall go on playing or find a new town.” All powered by magical drugs and a bit of genius.

A lot of the music of that era came out of the politics of the time—the movement against the war in Viet Nam, civil rights struggles, early environmentalism, and the once and future youth revolution. We were going to remake the world and in many ways did and the starting point was the music. I don’t know how many anti-war rallies I took part in that began with Country Joe and The Fish singing I Feel like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag that told mothers and fathers that they could be the first on their block to bring their son home in a box and other sarcastic lyrics protesting the war.

I was a great fan of Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of those San Francisco bands that combined blues and country and lots of politics with a catchy rock beat. There’s a song of theirs popular in 1968 that I find myself humming more and more now. It was youthful protest then but poses the question of what are you going to do about me. We have to do something, the refrain goes, about pollution, media lies, war, lousy jobs, violence, injustice. “I feel like a stranger in the land where I was born,” they sang, and I still feel that 40 years later.

Jefferson Airplane sang a mix of ballads about protest and the revolution that never happened. But we thought it would. In 1970, a lot of people hoped or feared that revolution was exactly what we were about to face. So the Airplane (their name is of course a reference to drug use) called for revolution in its Volunteers of America rant right after they sang that we could all be together. We didn’t worry about contradictions back then. Unfortunately, their call to revolution came closer to the end of the movement than at the beginning of it.

I’m not waiting for the revolution any more. But I do still listen to this music. I listen to remember those times and the urgency of our calls for peace and justice. I also listen because the music is just plain good. The musicians and singers were top notch and they pulled together so many musical styles like jazz, rock, blues, country and sheer poetry. These songs are part of my history and I do not walk away from my history.

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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Walking in the Grove by Nicholas

It’s a gentle place. It’s a quiet spot in the middle of the busy park in the middle of the noisy city. The National AIDS Memorial Grove sits in one of the few natural ravines in the eastern end of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It is secluded but surprisingly only a few steps from busy city streets and busy sections of the park.

Before the place was consecrated as the National AIDS Memorial, it was a non-descript, out of the way quiet respite in the heavily used eastern end of Golden Gate Park. It was always one of my favorite places in the park. With only a short walk from my apartment, I could be in a completely quiet and peaceful domain. When it rained, a slow stream flowed down the center of the ravine. Tall redwoods, scrub oak trees and large shrubs shaded the area. Soft blankets of fog would float through the tall ferns in the lush ravine. A sort of path meandered through it, wandering up a slight incline toward the western end. In that crowded park, it was an area overlooked by most hikers. I loved to wander through it, stopping at times to rest on a stone or log and meditate in this little wild outpost of nature left alone in the mostly manicured park.

Begun in 1991, the AIDS Grove is actually a federally designated memorial site like the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington and Mount Rushmore. Volunteers constructed a serene place where people can come alone or in groups to hold memorial services or just to remember among the rhododendrons and redwoods. It is a place dedicated to all lives touched by AIDS.

In the grove are six flagstone gathering areas, numerous Sierra granite boulders and 15 freestanding benches. The paved Circle of Friends, located at the Dogwood Crescent in the eastern end of the Grove, is the focal point of the area. Presently, nearly 1,700 names are inscribed in circles radiating out from a center point. When completed, the Circle of Friends will include 2,200 names of lives touched by AIDS.

Some of the names I know, many I do not and most are hard to read in those concentric circles. But whether their names are there or not, I think back to Bill and Chester and Wayne and Ari and the day I announced to a friend that I just was not going to go to anymore funerals for a while.

It’s still one of my favorite spots in Golden Gate Park though it is a busier place than it used to be and doesn’t have that wildness it used to have. At first, I didn’t like the change, this intrusion of gardening on what had been a private little unkempt respite in the city. But I have since come to love the Grove. It is good to remember. I urge you if you are ever again in San Francisco to seek it out and spend some time there, quietly.

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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The Wisdom of LGBT Identity (Living Outside the Box) by Nicholas

  Gay is code. The word “gay” was used by generations of gay men to refer to a lot more than a state of happiness. One could say one had been to a gay party over the weekend and most co-workers would assume it was a pleasant get together while some would know the fuller and more specific meaning. Not only was this clever code, it denoted that you were a clever person—smart, witty and gay—and you went to interesting, unusual, maybe ever artful, parties. Gay set you apart not only as a sexual minority but as a lively, quick-witted, sophisticated individual.

  It’s a good thing to be born outside the box or to be thrown outside the box and have to imagine your own life because you have no standard guideposts to lean on. That, to me, is the heart of the wisdom of being L, G, B and T. Imagination is required for each of those letters. And your reward for each imaginative step you take is that you are blessed with more imagination. Gay liberation simply took that quality beyond cocktail hour. Being gay means one accumulates imagination, one develops the colorful side of the brain—right, left or both, maybe. You just make it up as you go along.

So, here are some points I have learned as I have made it up and watched others make it up as we go along.

        1.) Life is about more than money in this money obsessed culture. Life choices are not always made just on the basis of good career moves (although coming out these days can be a good career move). There are other values to live by, like integrity, satisfaction, wit, intelligence, selfhood, fun.

        2.) Life is not always fun. Sometimes you have to upset the apple cart and put yourself and those you love through some stress. The road to happiness can have some bumps along the way but happiness is still to be found at the end of the journey.

        3.) Life is not always fun, part 2. There are consequences. You take care of those you partied with or marched with or worked out your identity with. You do not abandon the needy, the sick and the dying.

        4.) Still, however, when you’re having fun, really do it. Don’t just have fun, make it fabulous fun. You want to give—or go to—parties that will become legends.

        5.) Question authority, all authority, especially the highest authorities. Defy standards everyday—it is, after all, the little things that count. Most lives aren’t lived in historical epochs but on a day-by-day basis with daily resistance and daily creativity.

        6.) Life is not all about just being young. As we grow older, we grow richer in experience and feeling. Having re-invented youth and masculinity, having restored a number of city neighborhoods, having shown America another model for compassionate, community-based health care support, we are now busy re-defining old age.

        Yes, there’s still that urge for the fabulous. There won’t be pastels in any nursing home I go to.

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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I Do Deviate by Nicholas

     I am not terribly fond of the term “queer.” I do not share the enthusiasm for that word that many younger gays and lesbians seem to. I came out in the great age of gay lib when we most wanted to show the world how not-queer we were. I needed also to show me how not-queer I was. 

     “Queer” depends on a context. It needs a norm to deviate from. It needs a norm from which to accuse others of not measuring up to or violating. Queer back then meant weak, inadequate, incapable, diseased, shameful. A queer was one who couldn’t live a healthy life. A queer was sunken in lust and incapable of rising to the romantic heights of love.

     I’ve had my lusts for sure but have known and given love as well. The problem for me is that while I do not identify as queer nor take any pride in being queer, I am definitely not normal—normal as defined by present day American culture. I do deviate. Let me count the ways.

     Sex, of course. I, a man, have sex with men. Not normal, though I hardly see it as queer. Most of that sex is currently with one man—my husband—in a sort of nod to normality. But I guess that is queer, for me to talk of a husband.

     On to politics and the queer thing shows up again. Though I see many of my political views as fitting easily into mainstream liberal American thinking, I can’t help but feel that is getting queerer and queerer. For one thing, I value intelligence. So that by itself pushes me off the political stage. I tend to be critical of politicians, all politicians, even those on my side. I don’t believe Barack Obama can fix the economy and certainly not in ways I would think essential—like helping poor people instead of rich ones. But Republicans on the other hand would only make a bigger, more inequitable mess of it. I would really rather see an American president talk about investing more money in public transit than giving nice speeches about gay marriage. Go figure. I must be queer.

     I do see myself as part of some larger things like a community, a society, a world, a natural system. That’s queer in the individually greedy USA. I don’t mind paying taxes and think that more people (i.e., those who have fed hugely from the money trough) should pay more so others can count on a decent life. Now that’s really queer. My lavender is now turning pink, as in pinko.  

     I can’t leave out religion because this is where I get really queer. My soul pulls me in to be part of one though I remain highly skeptical of it. I guess I’d call myself Christian though I prefer to follow the example of Jesus Christ as a man seeking to include everybody in his fellowship. I find it intriguing that Christ taught with stories and parables and not the heavy-handed lectures that his followers prefer today. I think that the “Jesus is my personal savior” approach to spirituality as kind of preposterous and egotistical and the body and blood stuff is just gruesome and distasteful. 

     I see the Christian message as one inspiring humans to be kind, do good, practice humility, and restrain egoism. It is a way of questioning, not of imposing answers on others, not a way of trumpeting ego and excluding people you don’t like because of something handily called “god’s will.” I am so queer, in fact, that I like to say your faith is only as strong as your doubts.

     Well, it seems that I am more queer outside of bed than in it. And that is a status that I highly cherish and value in friends as well. One is better off being queer not only because the sex is actually better but so is the rest of life. Be yourself means, always be yourself, that unique person with your unique perspectives. It’s a full-time job being queer.

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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Is that the Rocking Chair Creaking or Is It Me? by Nicholas

          I don’t have much to say about fingers and toes. I have the usual number of each and none hold any fascination for me. My digits perform the usual duties and pleasures just fine, require the usual routine care, such as clipping of nails, and have yet to pose any problems. No story there.

          Other body parts, however, are getting to be more challenging these days. Yes, I’m of that age where body parts, though still the sources of many pleasures, do require attention. As someone once put it, when I wake up now everything is stiff except what used to be.

          Aches and pains rove around my body from head to toe, stopping most frequently in my lower back. But other areas have put in their demands for attention as well. For a while I had to deal with plantar fasciitis—what used to be called heel spurs—which appeared and disappeared mysteriously. There’s little relief, except for some ineffective exercises and angrily cursing, until it just goes away.

          To celebrate enrolling in Medicare, my body decided to launch a whole new issue by blowing out my knees. I came home from a trip to San Francisco, a great city to walk in and up and down, with aching knees. The ache went away and then it didn’t and then it went away and then it didn’t. Now except for walking, standing, sitting, kneeling, stooping or laying down, I’m fine. Running is out of the question, but that never did appeal.

          So, I saw a knee specialist doctor who informed me that this was just part of growing older and just happens to a lot of people regardless of injury or prior abuse of delicate joints. I was showing early signs of osteoarthritis in my knees. Early?, I said. What’s it going to be like when it’s late? I’m hobbling around now. He told me not to climb stairs or walk up or down hills (but I am going to San Francisco), use ice for other than cocktails and take Aleve.

          He told me to put off any surgery as long as possible. No argument there. I’d rather keep my old knees than get new ones. Luckily, the thing I enjoy most—bicycling— is about the best thing I can do to combat the degeneration. And I have a whole new set of stretches to do each morning. And there’s always Aleve and ibuprofen and maybe glucosamine to help.

          Well, what can I say except that getting old sucks. Sure, it’s better than the alternative but it still sucks. This is the first experience I’ve had of physical limits due to aging. Suddenly comes the realization that I’m not making all the decisions here. Choose as I might to be active, that activity might be reduced because, well, I just can’t do it anymore—like spend hours on my knees tending my garden. Now limitations mean changing how I live each day. My independence is being questioned.

          Since my ego hurts far worse than do my knees, I refuse to give in. My response is not to just fall onto the couch and grab the TV remote even though I am fully entitled to do so. I’m doing the regimen of stretches the physical therapist gave me though I don’t much like them. And I’m cycling and spinning as much as I can. And the ice—which actually feels good even if it doesn’t do much.

          A friend who has also been dealing with this stuff and is in his 70s still takes five-mile hikes, limping along at his own pace. So, I say screw it. I’m not into five-mile hikes but I will take my walks along the ocean shore when I’m in San Francisco next week and will probably walk up too many hills to get to that fabulous restaurant at the top, but that’s what I’m going to do. And when the time comes for a knee replacement—which I hope is years away—I’ll deal with that.

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.