Tag: Personal essay

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Empathy, by Gillian

Hmm … tricky. But so wonderful. Empathy eliminates hate, resentment, envy, in fact most negative emotions you can name. It replaces them with peace for the soul. But it’s not easy.

Perhaps some people are just naturally given easier access to it than others, but I believe we can all improve our capacity for empathy no matter the starting point.

Empathy requires the ability to see through another’s eyes, to feel what they feel and to stand in their shoes. For me, that requires some commonality with that person. In general I find a more intuitive empathy with a woman, for instance, than with a man. I frequently am able to find that empathy with men but it requires more work; more of a thought process to get me there. I easily empathize with the poor and dispossessed. I know, as many of us do, that my good life has come to me purely by chance. We look at the sad people on the street corner and say, there but for the grace of God go I. Most people can feel empathy with a child; we have all been one. All of us in this room, by our age, find easy empathy with grief. We have all felt it. Surely the entire LGBT community feels a kind of collective empathy, it’s one of the reasons we like to be together. We don’t have to explain ourselves to each other.

There is a great deal of talk of sexual harassment/abuse in the last couple of weeks. I immediately empathize with the woman, but have a struggle with the man. I can honestly say that I have never ever grabbed at or fondled any man or woman in any way inappropriately. Nor have I ever had any urge to do so. But if I think as honestly as I truly can about the lesser varieties of what we now term sexual harassment, I begin to see it through the man’s eyes. Men of our generation have lived in confusing times. I honestly think that most, certainly many, who acted incorrectly, really believed that women wanted what men wanted. We had to put up some token objection because our mothers said we should, but we didn’t really mean it; that old no really means yes syndrome. All too frequently, our protests did perhaps lack conviction. We were in a quandary. If we came on too strong with an ego-deflating rejection then the man, almost inevitably in a position of power over us, might take revenge. We would lose our job, or fail to get that deserved promotion or starring role. Or the man held some respected position in the community: priest, schoolteacher, doctor, lawyer, who would believe us if we spoke out? So we kept quiet. Other women were bribed into silence, leaving others open to the same abuse. Not that I blame the women who got bought off. Oh no, empathy with them comes easy. Which would you choose? Door #1, behind which lies nothing but screaming tabloid headlines and endless character assassinations, or door #2 which opens onto an easy life with everything that twenty million dollars can buy? No contest. And so, sadly, in different ways, we women were complicit in our own demise while men, lacking much evidence to the contrary, convinced themselves that we really did want what they wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I am talking here of the relatively benign offenses causing perhaps more discomfort and embarrassment than true trauma. Anything remotely approaching physical violence, rape, or pedophilia lies way way beyond the scope of my empathy. Which leads inevitable to that incredibly revolting excuse for a human being, Judge Moore of Alabama, who lies somewhere in the outer reaches of darkness millions of light years away from that little flash of illumination coming from any feelings of empathy from me. He is triply out of reach to me because not only is his behavior reprehensible, but he continues to deny it, and then wraps it all up in the cloak of religion and The Bible. I make no attempt to see what he sees; it would be of nightmare ugliness.

Those who support him are every bit as bad; possibly worse. The Alabama State Auditor, for example, sees nothing wrong with Moore making sexual advances to a fourteen year-old.

“There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here…,” Ziegler stated. “… Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Hello-o out there! Did he miss the memo about The Immaculate Conception and The Virgin Birth?? Honestly, all you can do is shake your head in amazement. To raise one spark of empathy for these people I would need to think about it all for a very long time, and I have no stomach for that.

Every week when I start writing, I swear to myself that I will stay away from any mention of Trump, but somehow Agent Orange manages to insert himself. I have no empathy for Trump because I am not a sociopath, so cannot begin to stand in his shoes. But because he is, I truly believe, a sick man, I do not hate him either. Though when he so smugly promises us that ”big beautiful tax cut” for Xmas while in truth planning to raise our taxes and destroy our healthcare, I think just maybe I could.

Alas, empathy, like so many things, is a double-edged sword. The Orange Ogre (did I say I did not hate him??) stood in the shoes of a section of the country’s voters and saw what they saw. He felt their anger, resentment, and fear, and built it up to the fever pitch of “lock her up”. It was his very empathy with them, which he used with great cunning, which won him the election. (Though not without a little help from Putin and a shove over the line by the Electoral College.)

With the Trump voters, my empathy goes about half the distance to the goal. (Excuse the expression but we are in the midst of football season!) I can see the world through their eyes. I can feel their fear and anger and disillusion over a future of ongoing white male supremacy which they once felt was promised and which now seems to have been taken away. But I cannot accompany them into the divisiveness, bigotry, and hatred which accompanies their fears.

Since last year’s election our country seems to be enveloped in a stinking dark miasma of Trumpian vitriol. Yet I, ever the political pessimist, do feel some hope. And it comes to me via empathy. We call it Resistance, but what engenders that but empathy? Sure, we all have our own personal fears which propel us to resist the horrors of the Trump agenda, but the vast majority of American people demonstrate great empathy. We feel the terror of refugees denied sanctuary, the despair of deportees and their destroyed families, the terrible fears felt by the families of the nine million children who will lose the healthcare provided under the C.H.I.P. program unless Congress acts before year-end. We see through the eyes of those abandoned in the devastation that is Puerto Rico, and the 60,000 Haitians who learn they must abandon their lives in this country and return to Haiti.

We empathize. We get it. We resist. If Robert Mueller doesn’t save us, maybe our own empathy will. The bright light of empathetic resistance will dispel the threatening clouds of darkness. Maybe. Maybe that is our best hope. Maybe that is our last best hope. But then, I’m a political pessimist.

© 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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I Still Get a Thrill, by Ray S


As usual my mind drew a blank when the idea of a thrill was confronted.

It occurs to me that the word thrill, like many other descriptive terms, is a matter of relativity. I suppose it depends on how easily one is excited and that of course depends on one’s frame of mind at a given time.

How thrilling was a sunset? How thrilling was last night’s romance? Or how did that hot shower feel this morning? How much of a satisfying semi-thrill was it to find you hadn’t run out of dry cereal or toothpaste and hadn’t forgotten to feed the canary?

I would have preferred to “thrill” this assemblage with some sensational revelation about whatever would prove thrilling to you—this if you were even the least bit interested, much less thrilled.

But in retrospect I do need to acknowledge to you that I am just a wee bit thrilled to be here with all of you today and have you share my pretty un-thrilling trivia.

P.S. just remembered how thrilled I was with the chocolate cup cakes I made and how they tasted. It is another semi-thrill, give or take.

© 25 September 2017

About the Author

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Finding Your Voice, by Phillip Hoyle

I started out a soprano. Then on Sunday nights at church I decided to harmonize as an alto and learned to read the line and sing the part. When my voice cracked too many times in Glee Club, I became a tenor. I stayed with that for many years. Since I was a choir director, I learned to sing all the parts, SAT and B. In the choirs we worked hard to increase everyone’s tone and range using techniques I learned from one of my voice teachers. If a section was weak on a Sunday morning, I could bolster them with my own screaming. It may have horrified some people. Who knows? 

Finding my voice as a writer was another story, one that didn’t depend on timbre or range. In fact the discussion of that concept goes on. I developed a terse style for use in academic writing. I had to warm it up it for the church newsletter and did so with a little bit of success. When I accepted contracts for writing curriculum resources I got more at home with addressing volunteer teachers. The reading level for them was eighth or ninth grade. Writing for students of different ages was more fun and challenging. That work served as my introduction to creative writing. I experimented but still don’t know that I actually developed a voice. 
When I started writing for myself, I tried for something consistent and my efforts seemed to help. But I believe I didn’t really find my voice until I had written a couple of years of weekly stories for this Telling Your Story group. Meeting that weekly goal and encouraging others to do the same, telling stories to almost the same people each week, and having an appreciative audience and being a part of this group did something for my sense of voice. I like the entertainment part of that work that reminds me so much of talking with a group of children on Sundays during many years of church work. Sometimes I made up the stories on the spot and encouraged the children to help me tell them. That got me started. Many years later I feel like I have a rather consistent voice and am happy to share my many stories with you. Mostly they are accurate to the extent of my ability to recall, but you know how that goes with the years stacking up, hearing reducing, and eyesight dimming. I appreciate that the story telling group allows me to speak whatever my voice is, found or not.
Thanks for listening, or on the blog, thanks for reading. 
© 23 October 2017

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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Hooves, by Pat Gourley

“That horse has left the barn”

When I hear the word “hooves” in nearly any context I think of horses though many different mammals have hooves. My early days on the farm never involved horses so I may have made the association of hooves with horses after watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on 1950’s TV.

I remember that the often ridiculous and blatantly racist TV westerns seemed to distinguish between native American horse-hoof prints from those of the always white settlers, American law men and cavalry by noting whether the horses had been shod or not. Native horses had no shoes where as those of the white folk always did, a simplistic view since many native tribes were quite adept at acquiring horses from settlers and others who shod their horses. On these TV shows blacksmiths were often shown dramatically forging by fire while shaping the shoes and then nailing them onto the horses’ hooves. This really is the extent of my connection with the word hooves, though I do vaguely recall older male relatives on occasion playing “horseshoes”. That was a game though that never caught on for me personally.

Another memory of hooves was the apparent use of fake cows’ hoofs being used by moonshiners wearing them to throw off federal agents chasing them during Prohibition. Not sure exactly how this worked since cows have four feet and humans only two. However wasting time on thinking about this application of hoof-foot-wear as a means to sneak to one’s moonshine still in the woods will do little to address any real world problems these days I am afraid.

I can though make a tangential leap from hooves by way of horses and cows to the phrase: “That horse has already left the Barn”. This implies of course to the after-the-fact reality that it is too late to do anything about whatever. If one adapts this as a world view these days there are many things that seem too late to do much about whether we want to admit that reality of not.

Climate change sadly is one reality that it may very well be too late to do much about. That horse seems to have galloped away and kicked the door shut with both of his back hooves. Still in my more optimistic moments I can’t help but think that if we were to embark on a Manhattan Project to save the planet that salvaging an at least livable, though probably less than desirable, planet might be doable.

Laughably perhaps I can hope that the recent hurricane evacuations for both Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and Rush Limbaugh’s beachfront properties in Florida might turn into teachable moments. That however does not seem likely.

My go to person around all things climate change and how this is intimately tied to capitalism specifically is Naomi Klein.

I highly recommend her two most recent works: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and “NO is Not Enough” subtitle “Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning The World We Want”. Here is a link to these works and Naomi in general: http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi

It isn’t that the Donald Trump’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world don’t believe in climate change, I actually expect they do. It is that they realize better than many of us that the only effective possibility for addressing this catastrophe is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life. That their greedy accumulation of goods and capital will save them from the resulting hell-scape in the end is truly delusional thinking on their part.

I feel the only viable solution being an acceptance of the socialist ethos: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

© October 2017

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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Wisdom Teeth and Weltschmerz, by Louis Brown

The two parts to my essay are (a) physical pain and (b) Welstschmerz.

(a) Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I was having trouble with my four wisdom teeth. The wisdom tooth pressing up against its neighboring tooth caused extreme pain. The first wisdom tooth extraction (Upper right) went rather well. A dentist got it out. The second wisdom tooth (lower right) was more complicated so I had to go to Flushing Hospital.

The wisdom tooth resisted being extracted by the dental surgeon’s first attempt, and he used a reasonably sized pliers. But as the wisdom tooth resisted, the pain increased dramatically, and the dental surgeon kept choosing larger and larger pliers. The last pair of pliers was quite enormous and resembled a medieval torture instrument. For about a week after that, I just stayed drunk, and I rinsed my mouth with whisky which is not only a good antiseptic, it helped deaden the pain.

A month or two after that, my two left wisdom teeth were pressing up against their neighboring teeth. The pain was excruciating. So I chose an oral surgeon or rather an oral surgery team.

I lay down on a gurney, they gave me phenobarbital, and I went into a semi-dream state, but I was still awake, and I was aware of the surgeon and the three or four nurses assisting him who were hovering over me. They extracted both wisdom teeth with surgery rather than yanking them out with pliers. Everything went smoothly, I felt no pain, and the subsequent recuperation period had some pain but it was minimal.

So, if you need to have more than one tooth extracted at a time, choose oral surgery. Phenobarbital was wonderful. You get anesthetized, but your body does not feel threatened as with ether or other anesthesias. And you are still actually awake.

(b) The other type of pain I have experienced is Weltschmerz or “World pain,” defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “sentimental pessimism or melancholy over the state of the world”:

(1) JFK got assassinated. That trauma was painful, but we discussed that already.

(2) The twin towers came down on 9/11/2001. But of course we already discussed that trauma as well.

(3) President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia on May 8, 1970. I remember the protests in this country were swift and enormous. I tried to go to a protest demonstration in Washington, D. C., but there were just too many protesters. Our bus had to stop somewhere in the outskirts of Washington, D. C., so we just sat there; some of the passengers had guitars so we made the best of it by singing peace songs and Beatles’ songs. It was fun. But the invasion itself was traumatic and caused a lot of people Weltschmerz.

(4) January 30, 1968 was the date of the Tet Offensive. That was when we realized that, actually the Communists whooped us. On April 30, 1975, the U. S. withdrew from Vietnam. Pictures of the “fall” of Saigon were quite traumatic. I felt more Weltschmerz.

(5) The death of our two friends, Steve and Randy.

On a less serious note, the French language has two interesting tongue twisters, that is le vire-langue (rarely used):

(a) Ton thé, t’ôte-t-il ta toux? Does your tea get rid of your cough?

(b) La reine Didon dîna, dit-on, d’un dos dodu d’un dodu dindon. The Queen of Carthage dined, they say, on the fat back of a fat turkey.

Of course, Dido (Didon) was not actually a queen, she was a princess, though she did run ancient Carthage.

©14 September 2017

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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Figures, by Gillian

During my working life at IBM we often quoted a favorite catch-phrase, the tyranny of numbers. As you can well imagine, we were for the most part, like most if not all businesses, largely ruled by numbers. But this particular term originated in the computer world of the 1950’s, not so long before I began working for IBM in 1966, when computers were still the size of a house and you literally opened a door and went inside one to fix whatever ailed it. Computer engineers were unable to increase the performance of their designs at this time due to the huge number of components involved. In theory, every component needed to be wired to every other component, which were typically strung together via wire-wrapping and soldering by hand, a large part of my job for the first two years of my career. In order to improve performance, more components would be needed, and it seemed that future designs would consist entirely of countless components connected by endless wiring installed and endlessly repaired manually by countless people.

We were freed from this particular tyranny by the silicon chip, reducing that multi-faceted piece of house-sized equipment to something that can fit inside your watch. But the phrase has, unsurprisingly, never lost it’s appeal. I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because we are ever increasingly, it seems, ruled in every aspect of our lives by facts and figures; perhaps more accurately the facts of figures, in everything from the entire planet and indeed the universe down to every individual. The numbers applied to both the universe and even just our planet are so huge most of us cannot even grasp them. Our sun is one of an estimated two to four hundred billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. Does that really mean anything to you? It loses me! Just the age of this planet, roughly 4.5 billion years, is beyond most of us. In an effort to help us understand such huge figures some clever people have tried to put them into a different perspective. The age of the earth, for instance, and it’s major events, have been portrayed as a 24-hour clock.* On this scale, humans don’t appear until almost 11.59 pm, dinosaurs at 10.56, and I must tell you that we didn’t manage to invent sexual reproduction until after six in the evening. (Incidentally, my own problem with this depiction is – when exactly does midnight arrive and what happens then??)

As to the personal, I used to know what I weighed, and was sadly aware that that figure (in more than one sense of the word!) indicated that I was overweight, except back in those politically incorrect days I was just ‘fat’. But simple weight is no longer good enough! Now I know what my BMI number is, which in turn tells me that if I don’t lose some exact number of pounds, I shall not be old-style fat, nor new-style overweight, but new-age obese! Talk about tyranny!

We seem to have fallen into some kind of paint by numbers version of reality, don’t we? We fail to vote because, according to the poll numbers, we already know who will win, so why bother?

If we do vote, for many of us it is meaningless because we live in a district gerrymandered – based on yet other numbers – to ensure one party will always win. Our President is voted in by one set of numbers and out by another, depending on which way our country choses to count.

This tyranny of numbers is nothing new. Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime minister in the mid-eighteen hundreds, famously said there are three levels of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

In 2010, a man named David Boyle wrote a book entitled The Tyranny of Numbers. ** He examines our obsession with numbers. He reminds us of the danger of taking numbers so seriously at the expense of what is non-measurable, non-calculable: intuition, creativity, imagination, and happiness.

‘We count people, but not individuals. We count exam results rather than intelligence, benefit claimants instead of poverty …… Politicians pack their speeches with skewed statistics: crime rates are either rising or falling depending on who is doing the counting. We are in a world in which everything is designed only to be measured. If it can’t be measured it can be ignored. The problem is what numbers don’t tell you – they won’t interpret, they won’t inspire, and they won’t tell you precisely what causes what.’

It feels so strange. As they so often do, things have come full circle. By inventing our way out of the original tyranny of numbers, we created the very devices which now create the new tyranny.

Yet there is good news. Am I not right in thinking that the LGBT community is less a victim of all the numbers games than most? Perhaps it is an unexpected benefit of having been invisible for so long. We have never been, and right now it looks as if we never will be, identified in the U.S. census.We didn’t exist so we couldn’t – and to some degree still cannot – be counted. No-one can come up with accurate statistics about us. They don’t know what beer we drink or restaurants we favor. They don’t know what ads to send to our TV’s and computers. They don’t even know where we live. Statistical generalities about our community are almost impossible. And on the other side of the coin, I think we tend to care much less about their stats anyway; possibly because they so infrequently include us or apply to us as a group, but I prefer to believe it is simply because we are more independent, more free-thinking, than many.

And I am safe in sticking with that because there are, and perhaps never will be, any statistics to prove me wrong!

* https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/https://

** www.goodreads.com/book/show/2556446.The_Tyranny_of_Numbers

© June 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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Dancing with the Stars, by Gillian

I won’t be. Dancing with the stars, that is. No matter how they beg, I will not be on that show. Not, I must confess, that I have ever watched it; but I get the concept. Star-worship is just not something that has ever been in me. Living through the height of the fan-club phase, I never even thought of joining one. There are very few famous people I would cross the street to meet. It’s not that I have anything against the rich and famous and fabulously good-looking. It’s simply that they hold no fascination for me just because they are household names. Every one of us in this room has a life story that is every bit as fascinating, in it’s own way, as theirs.

Perhaps my attitude originated in my essentially TV- and movie-free childhood. I had little temptation to idolize. Or maybe it stems from my parents’ attitude towards the stars of the day: royalty, bigwigs in the Church of England hierarchy, the local landed gentry. They must always be spoken to politely, and that was where it ended. They would be respected when they earned respect. We were every bit as good as they were and there would be no figurative bowing and doffing of caps. This was a burgeoning feeling in England in the 1940’s and ’50’s when the winds of equality were blowing strong. So, when I was about twelve and Princess Margaret was to visit our school, I was a little apprehensive over my mother’s reaction to the fact that we were all taught, in some detail, the correct way to bow and curtsey, and were expected to do so. But, somewhat to my surprise, Mum was fine with it. Apparently there were certain protocols she was willing to go along with. What mattered, she explained, was not so much external expressions of deference as internal knowledge of equality. A wise woman in many ways, my mother.

What I do value is dancing with the real stars; those of the firmament, sparkling and dancing above our heads. In the days of our youth, the world was not subjected to the vast explosions of artificial light which afflict it today. In my youth we had no electricity where we lived, and no form of outdoor lighting for many miles. On a rare clear English night, often also a cold one, Mom and I would lie on our backs on the lawn, usually huddled under a blanket, and she would point out constellations to me and relate their mythical stories. She only knew a few of the commonly-familiar ones, so the rest she made up and created stories to fit the shapes she saw. Half the time I couldn’t see what she saw, it was harder than one of her other favorite pastimes of agreeing on what clouds looked like, but I went along with her imagination to hear her inventive stories. My mother was just fine as long as she remained far from any form of reality.

In college in the north of England, long before the cities overgrew the hills as they have now, a group of us sometimes went up on the dark moorlands to stargaze. We always spent a couple of hours in the pub on the way, so our imaginings were rarely inhibited.

I have stared in wonder at the starry sky above Australia, South America, and South Africa. There is something very special about the night skies of the Southern Hemisphere. The stars somehow seem so much more numerous, and so much closer than we are used to. They take my breath away.

During the twenty-five years that Betsy and I camped all over this country in out VW van, we frequently danced with the stars. Many camping spots, especially National Forest Campgrounds, are about as far as you can get from city lights these days, and perfect for communing with the heavens. For some strange reason which we never did figure out, nine times out of ten, wherever we camped, The Big Dipper appeared at night to be clearly seen from our back window. Rarely the front, hardly ever the side windows, but almost inevitably if we woke in the middle of the night there was the Dipper, above us as we lay with our heads right below the back window.

We liked to settle in well before dark, so had no idea where the Dipper would be when we chose the site and decided exactly how to park for the night. We actually never thought about it. Yet there it would be, in the night, almost as regular as clockwork.

At Randy Wren’s funeral last week, his Rector said,

“Randy lived large.”

He did. If you have any belief in an afterlife in any form, you have to think that Randy is dancing with the stars; whatever that means to you. If anyone can do it, Randy can.

Once upon a time, Frank Sinatra crooned a popular song about the stars.

Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars….

It went on a couple of lines later,

In other words hold my hand,
In other words, Darling kiss me …..

As long as I have My Beautiful Betsy to hold my hand and kiss me, I shall forever dance with the stars.

© July 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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Three Little Words, by Ricky

Tag, you’re it! — In modern adult parlance that would be a text or voice mail message expressing mild annoyance over a non-entertaining game of phone-tag; frustration building along with unrequited curiosity. How long has it been since you have played a real game of tag? Who was it with? How old were you? Do you remember any of the other player’s names and descriptions? Were they friends, relatives, or only acquaintances? Where was the game played; in the forest, your yard, their yard, or on a school playground? Can you recall the type of weather, clouds in the sky, smell of the grass, sounds of laughter or ridicule? If you have children, did you play tag with them? If so, were they too fast for you? Did you like the game or hate it? Why?

Alas, I don’t remember clearly any games of tag; only that I did play it at various times in my youth. I also know that my speed and agility did not keep me safe from becoming “it” just as often as everyone else. It is a real shame that people tend to forget most of their childhood fun and game activities in detail. Details that would come in handy during later years when “happy thoughts” can raise us to a better mood or even take us on an adventure in Neverland, if we could find a fairy, full of dust who doesn’t mind being shaken (not stirred).

Let’s Play Chicken — That was another game from my early sexual awakening. I only got to play it once but it ended up being highly satisfying. Without going into much detail and leaving most to your imagination; I will say this much. The game is played by repeatedly taking turns touching someone in different places until one of the players says, “stop”. That player is then named “chicken”. When I played, neither the other boy nor I said “stop” so we both won and then moved on to other games.

Old Mother Hubbard — That nursery rhyme seems to mimic my financial life at this time. When I go to the cupboard to get my cats or bird some food, there it is, but when I go to the refrigerator or cupboards to get me some food, there is nothing to eat. Well, actually there is food available but it all looks foreign and I just can’t bring myself to eat fish heads and tiny dried octopi or most Russian food. One major exception is borscht, which I love. I used to tell my wife that if she ever died before me, I’d have to get married within a week or starve to death. Well, she did and I didn’t, but I’ve not eaten well at home ever since.

Disney’s Wonderful World – I’ve always loved any movie made by Walt Disney. I’ve even enjoyed some of their “Touchstone” productions, but my primary love is with Disney’s animated productions from 1949 forward. Yes, there were a few years where they experimented with weird forms of animation but they quickly abandoned it. I especially liked their blending of live actors and animation as in “Song of the South”, “Mary Poppins”, “Pete’s Dragon”, “Bedknobs & Broomsticks”, and “Tron”.

I should mention again that I also enjoy any non-animated Disney movie and will choose to watch them on TV over the more violent-laden non-Disney, non-family oriented films.

On this day before Saint Valentine’s Day in 2012, I’ll give a “shout out” to my favorite three little words, I LOVE DISNEY (always have and always will).

© 13 February 2012

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

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I Still Get a Thrill, by Ray S

As usual my mind drew a blank when the idea of a thrill was confronted.

It occurs to me that the word thrill, like many other descriptive terms, is a matter of relativity. I suppose it depends on how easily one is excited and that of course depends on one’s frame of mind at a given time.

How thrilling was a sunset? How thrilling was last night’s romance? Or how did that hot shower feel this morning? How much of a satisfying semi-thrill was it to find you hadn’t run out of dry cereal or toothpaste and hadn’t forgotten to feed the canary?

I would have preferred to “thrill” this assemblage with some sensational revelation about whatever would prove thrilling to you—this if you were even the least bit interested, much less thrilled.

But in retrospect I do need to acknowledge to you that I am just a wee bit thrilled to be here with all of you today and have you share my pretty un-thrilling trivia.

P.S. just remembered how thrilled I was with the chocolate cup cakes I made and how they tasted. It is another semi-thrill, give or take.

© 25 September 2017

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Revenge, by Phillip Hoyle

Sages of the East and West, North and South have advised against revenge. I’m sure we can add SAGES of the Rockies to the list of wise ones. Revenge will never satisfy. It begins a feud that will never end. It will define a life, not improve it. I’m old but have no experience of revenge and thus no story to tell.

But I have noticed something I want to tell you about. You’d never believe how much sex takes place in our backyard and the alley beyond. It’s a wonder we haven’t been pushed out of the neighborhood so seedy is that space in a rather quiet district of Denver where more and more children are being born and reared. I won’t try to justify what takes place in our backyard but simply describe it. Frankly, I have been surprised although I’m not sure why. Perhaps I am just a tiny bit jealous? Probably I should consider it an inspiration. I do want to mention before I continue this story that in it I’m simply a voyeur.

Sometimes out there couplings occur; occasionally a ménage a trios. I’ve seen necking that surpasses anything I ever saw or did on the top of Bluemont, that Kansas State University make out spot for undergraduates and who knows who else. I sometimes hear screams and can never determine if they are from pain or pleasure or simply the intensity of the moment. A rhythmic chant sometimes seem to say, “Won’t you come and put it to me?” Sometimes it is repeated over and over until, for me at least, it loses its allure. But the beat goes on. I’ve seen dances, flurries of activity, showing off, flirting, teasing, urging, and suggesting. I’ve seen mountings and heard noise making I don’t know how to describe. I’ve seen dirty dancing that more than rivals what I saw for years on Saturday nights at The Denver Compound and Basix dance floor. I’ve seen things done out in the open that would get a Republican to warm up.

Well, I can tell it’s time to end this tale of what my prim sister would call lewd conduct, but it seems unadvisable to criticize Mother Nature right out there in the open. The sparrows started it all years ago. Then the flickers got deep into the necking dance. You’d never imagine how noisy that gets or how enticing. Now robins come around and just yesterday some very excited chickadees—a ménage a quatre—put on the most spectacular and noisy demonstration I’ve ever seen. It’s wild out there in the backyard. What’s it like in your neighborhood? Inspiring? Invite me over.

© 14 August 2017

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