Snow Away-A Braided Essay

I am checking my phone in the car passenger seat while Paul grants and revokes driver’s licenses.

“He gets a license. She does not,” he says.  

I want to ask him if I would retain my license, but I already know the answer and it rhymes with snow, which blankets our world, plunging me into a deep abyss of despair.

“I’m flashing my lights. That means go! Go-Go!” Paul shouts at a hesitant driver.

A memory comes to mind, of a persistent go-go boy dancing on top of a bar in Key West. He leans down and asks us if we would like to go play together in the back room. 

“No, thanks,” I mutter and we both offer him a dollar bill to make him go away. I stuff it into the top of his briefs and Paul stuffs it from the bottom, our finger tips meet in the middle, like Lady and the Tramp coming face to face at the end of a long noodle. A year into our relationship, we find this to be utterly adorable in a way that only new couples could.

“Adorable,” Paul uses that word all the time now. When I wake up in the morning, my eyes puffy, hair looking like Cruella de Vil on crack, Paul will ask me “How’d you get to be so adorable?” I’ll silently think to myself that A) he is blind; B) he is much too perky in the morning and C), what was C going to be? I can’t remember now, but God how I miss swimming in the sea.

There are only a few weeks of the year that we can comfortably swim in the ocean in Maine, but I could sit forever on the sandy beach in the evening when the sky blushes pink and watch the waves roll in. 

Rollin’ with my homies. 

Who sang that song?  I look at my phone to check iTunes.  It was Coolio. That’s it. 

Mary-Ellen used to always say that, as if to say “Cool,” but said “Coolio,” instead. Or did she used to say “Cool Beans?” I can’t remember now, but over the holidays we met and shared stories. She has not changed one bit.  It’s funny to think that we kissed one night in high school after a “White Russian” drink party I hosted when my mother was conveniently away.  Both of us drunk and thinking what the hell, we’ll give it a try and then both of us feeling like we just kissed our sibling. 

I’m not certain what to think about the Russian Olympics.  We have stopped buying Russian vodka although I can’t say this has swayed Putin into changing his horrific anti-gay laws in the least.  I often wonder why any sane gay person would want to live in such a frozen place anyway.  Move to someplace warm I say, like Key West. 

Paul looks over at me and I can tell by the way he says it that I have missed it the first time he asked. 

“I said what are you thinking about?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I reply.

“It must be awfully empty in that head,” He says.

I look out the car window at the piles of snow, turning black from the gritty dirt and stained yellow from dogs marking their territory. 

“I guess I was just thinking about how much I fucking hate snow.”

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Don't Say It

He is stirring green beans and butter in a red plastic bowl when I realize that I could watch the way his long fingers grip the fork for the rest of my life.  He scoops the beans out onto two plates, turns and hands me one while raising an eyebrow. 

“What?” he asks.

“Looks good,” I reply.

They are frozen green beans, nothing special.  Eat them and you will grow strong.  But there is a weakness growing inside of me and I can feel the tendrils squeezing my lungs.

“Don’t be the first one to say it,” my brother says.  “You will look silly.”

When we drive along the rocky coast of Maine and watch the green ocean swell like it is a living being larger than eternity I do not say it.  When the snow dances and blankets the back yard in a sea of white and clings to the branches of the pine trees I do not say it. When the foolish moon kisses his sleeping face with horizontal shadows late at night in the stillness of the bedroom I do not say it.

“Has he told you yet?’ My brother asks.

“No,” I say.

“Good. If you tell him you will scare him away.”

Night after night I watch him cook buttered green beans, turkey meatloaf Florentine, buffalo chicken and listen as he pours out gurgling red wine.  I tell him that I am not dating anyone else. I tell him that he makes me laugh.  I tell him that I have never been this happy before, but I do not scare him away because I do not tell him.

“I have to say it.”

“Are you sure?” My brother asks.  “What if he doesn’t feel the same way?”

His question seizes me with doubt. I am a fool.  It is too soon.  I pack up the words and store them away.  The ocean is simply a body of water.  The cold snow is something to shovel and the moon is just a moon.

The alarm has failed me and I am running late for work.

“Have you seen my striped shirt?” I shout.

“It’s hanging up in the closet. It’s ironed,” He shouts up the stairs.

“I don’t have time for breakfast,” I say. “Where are my shoes?”

“They’re by the door,” he says.

I slip on my shoes. He is a smiling sentinel clutching a brown paper lunch bag, the top creased underneath those long perfect fingers. 

“It’s breakfast,” he says.

My lips graze his lips.  

“I love you,” it slips.

“Me too, now get your ass to work before you’re late,” he says.

The vine clutches my heart and squeezes the air out of my lungs as I run down the steps.

“What did he say?” my brother asks.

“I am such a fool,” I say.  

He'd told me long before I told him.

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Take Me Home, Country Roads

There is a road that runs from our cottage in Maine down through the Webhannet Marsh and to the ocean.  It is exactly one mile and the fine, sensible residents of this small town gave it the fine, sensible name of “Mile Road.” Often I will run on the shoulder of this road, past the marsh grass and laughing sea gulls, the tasty smell of fried haddock wafting from Billy’s Chowder House, onto the wide sandy beach and each time, it is like coming home.

My thoughts are free to run as well and this time they take a jog through my thirteenth year, when I was a skinny, pizza faced, metal mouthed adolescent who preferred sitting in front of a piano to the football games on the TV that my brothers were constantly screaming at.

 

“Can you stop playing that stupid piano, doofus?”  my brother Chuck would shout.

“Can you stop playing with your organ?” I’d shout back and fist-a-cuffs would ensue.

My mother grew concerned that I spent too much time at the piano and not enough time in front of girls. So she enrolled me in the local youth football league where she hoped that some quality time spent sweating, grunting and tackling other boys might somehow shift my perspective. 

It did not.

I was not aggressive enough and soon became the laughing stock of the team.  I would ride my bicycle out a half hour before practice and hide in the trees across the street listening to my mother shouting out the back door “Bee-uhl!” she gave my name two syllables “It’s time for practice!”

As my mother wizened up, my avoidance tactics became more creative. 

“Mom, the John Denver concert is tonight and you know how much I love him,” I lied.

My mother’s eyes narrowed as I weaved the story and advised me that I could go to the concert on one condition, if I brought a friend along.  My heart skipped a beat.  I had no friends.

I called up all of the neighborhood boys that used to be my friends and one by one they declined.  I would pay for this at school the next day.  My brother Chuck displayed a surprising sense of fraternal affection and agreed to go with me.

“Man, that Starland Vocal Band can sing!” He boasted when we got home referring to the warm up group, “They’re going to be around a long time,” he prophesized and then sat down and began to strangle his guitar attempting to master “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin.

Eventually I moved far away and married the high school quarterback who likes to shout at the TV during football games and we bought a home in this small corner of Maine where the fine, sensible folks said “Why not?” when asked if same sex marriage should be made legal.

My mother came for a visit recently, joined us and some friends at a local piano bar for drinks and songs one beautiful summer night. “Are you two brother and sister?” a slightly inebriated young nearsighted gay man asked my mother, much to her delight and to my chagrin.

“Bee-uhl, tell them to play Country Roads,” my mother asked me and I complied.  I regarded her face, flush from a pink cosmo and the tasty compliment as she sang two octaves higher at the top of her lungs with about thirty other bellowing gay men. I kissed my husband Paul, gave my mother a hug and for all the world,  it was very much like coming home.

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A Fryeburg Fair Fable

Pigs can see in a 300 degree radius, which increases their panoramic vision but decreases their bifocal vision.  In short, they can see the world around them, but not too far down the road. 

We have come to the Fryeburg agricultural fair, driving through a string of small Maine towns with names plucked from other places; Cornish, Limerick and Hiram.  The towns sprung up at the confluence of the Ossippee and Saco rivers hundreds of years ago and to my eyes appear relatively unchanged. Grassy green hills with white clapboard churches, their crumbling cemeteries filled with original settlers, rest beneath blue skies heavy with the scent of pine and pitch. I can’t help but wonder how they got here or for that matter, how I did. 

By artificially increasing the light--for instance using electric lights in the stable it is possible to begin the breeding season in a mare.  Given the right amount of light, mares become irresistible.

The descendants of those original settlers join us on this bright October day, ambling through dusty hay barns and gravel paths.  Teenage boys, full of swagger, wearing bright green John Deere baseball caps and camo jackets pretend not to notice girls in skinny blue jeans and tank tops running their fingers through long gossamer strands of hair while glancing over their shoulders. I look sideways at Paul and think about that cold November night; our first kiss among the banks of snow under the parking lot light.

The best cows give over twenty five gallons of milk each day.  One gallon of milk weighs over eight pounds.  It takes twelve pounds of milk to make one gallon of ice cream.

The crispy scent of fried dough and the sweet smell of boiled down maple sap from the sugar house mingle in the air.   Paul buys me a sticky, crumbly apple crisp topped with vanilla ice cream and offers my stepson Nick a box of fudge.  Beanie opts to eat nothing and I worry.  I still remember the time late at night when her insulin pod malfunctioned.  Paul drove the 180 mile round trip to Boston to retrieve another pod at two AM when the other one malfunctioned, no complaints and nothing but smiles.

A champion racing pigeon can be released 400-600 miles away from its home and still return within the day.  Feral pigeons mate for life

I slow down my pace and drift behind Paul and the kids, watching the dust rise up from their shuffling feet. They move slowly as a group, each one seeming to have the innate sense of where the other one is.  And then like the dust, I find myself floating among the crowd.  If I were to rise up high enough I might look down and see the road we took today and floating higher still I’d see the highway connecting Maine to Boston and beyond that the highways south. 

Nick tugs my shirt, pulling me back to Earth.

“You scared me Billy, I thought we lost you,” he says.

“Not a chance," I say.  

I may not know what lies down the road, but I know which one will bring me home.

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The Treasure We Seek

I suppose it happens to all couples after a certain amount of time.  You get to a point in your relationship where everything big has been discussed and what remains are the bits of conversation that you might have with a parrot.

 

“How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“How did you sleep?”

“Good."

“What do you want for dinner?

“I don’t know.”

Paul and I are no different, except that we added the following to our repertoire somewhere along the lines:

“How’d you get to be so cute?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your job?”

“To sit here and look pretty.”

“Who are you?”

“The big dog.”

The questions are always posed by Paul and if you were to eavesdrop on our conversations, aside from feeling terribly bored, you would perceive the passion in my replies to be comparable to your average fast-food worker and at times filled with the same contempt.  He likes to ask these questions when I am busy writing or when I have one eye open and a hand outstretched for the snooze button.

At some point he actually began to sing refrains to my replies.  For instance, he might have asked me if I was hungry and if I said “Yes,” he would sing something like “Willy is so hungrrryyy,”  in a falsetto rock star voice, no less.

He is in an interminably good mood juxtaposed to my often pensive one.

One morning recently the questions and singing reached a fevered pitch.  As I struggled to wake up and iron my clothes, I could take no more and asked Paul, for the love of God, to please stop singing.

And then there was a stunned silence. 

*********************************************************

It was the sound that made me open my eyes, like an insect buzzing but more digital.  With one eye squinting in the brilliant September sunlight I turned my head to see an old man in his seventies sweeping a metal detector in a two foot swath of beach, left and right, left and right.  He wore white ankle socks with sneakers and his head was covered with a beige brimmed cap.  He did not raise his capped head, keeping it always focused on that two foot wide path waiting for a signal.

I put on my sunglasses and looked around me.  The coastal autumn light in Maine paints the colors so vividly that you feel as if you have been lifted up close to the sky among the listless clouds. A woman stood facing the sea, her hands in her pockets and her head tilted slightly upward.  The dark sunglasses covered her eyes, but her immovable stance implied deep contemplation.  She stared out at the horizon where the water met the sky at some reflection of a memory.

She waited twenty paces ahead of her husband wrapped in her own thoughts.  They never spoke. He never looked up but would occasionally stoop down and dig a hole with his hands looking for a long lost treasure.

I thought how odd it was that he mined for someone else’s lost articles; a ring, a necklace or some coins, hopelessly searching that narrow band. I wanted so desperately for his wife to drop her ring in the sand and wait for him to find it.     

“What are you thinking about over there Willy?” Paul asked interrupting my reflection.

I thought about that question, about all of the Marco-Polo queries that he peppers me with throughout the day pinging through the emotional distance.  More than questions, they’re affirmations.

“Just thinking about how lucky I am,” I finally replied.

One more added to the repertoire; many more to be discovered.

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Life Virgins

Watching TV home improvement shows is my religion.  Specifically a show called Property Virgins, which sounds slightly offensive. Like a couple of naïve teenagers have ventured out on a first date with a realtor who strips them of their cash and sweet talks them into buying a new home.  The host will laugh when the virgins ask a silly question “Ha, Ha, Ha!  You are such virgins” and I’ll cringe, because who wants to be reminded of their first awkward fumblings in the back seat of a car when they are attempting to purchase a new home?

At the beginning of the show these virgins will list what they must have and simply cannot live without: four bedrooms, two and half baths, walk in claw-sets (which I understand is southern speak for closets) stainless steel appliances, granite counter-tops  a man cave for the TV and a big back yard for their little fluffy dander mop named Boo. Often, the final decision will hinge on whether they think Boo will have sufficient yard space to use as his toilet.

“I might could live without a three car garage,” the wife will offer begrudgingly and in the background you’ll see the husband mouthing the words “No way in hell.” 

“Our budget is $157,000,” they’ll say.  This is firm.

 “Ha, Ha, Ha! You silly virgins,” the Realtor will laugh.

She will then take them to the most beautiful neighborhood and stroll beside them smugly asking if they like the area, knowing full well that they couldn't possibly afford it.  These shows used to be based in Toronto, but apparently all of the Canadian property virgins’ cherries have been popped. Now they exist in Possum Snout, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.

“I love it!  I could see us living here forever!”  The virgins will say in unison.

When the Realtor has them in the palm of her hand, she’ll bring down the other fist and squash their dreams.

“These homes cost 1.2 million dollars!”   

The camera zooms in on the devastated faces of the couple.  Clearly these virgins have never performed any Internet research on the area.

When all is said and done the virgins choose a home that is never what they expected in the first place and always just a tad over their budget, but they couldn't possibly see themselves living anywhere else.  The final scene shows the couple, no longer virgins, sitting on their front porch smiling and entertaining friends with a nice cool glass of Riunite Lambrusco and watching little Boo pop a squat.

When I was young I prepared a list of many things I thought I couldn't possibly live without;   a McMansion in the suburbs, this person’s love, that person’s friendship, the C-level job title, designer labels, bulging biceps and the list goes on.  I thought I had them all too. 

Then one day God appeared wearing a scarf thrown back over her shoulder walking along beside me and asked how I liked the neighborhood. I told her this was everything I thought I ever wanted.

“Ha, Ha, Ha! You silly life virgin,” she said and then Squash!

Pan the camera to a look of devastation on my face.

Of course you know the final scene. I am sitting on the deck of our tiny cottage in Maine with friends and family I never thought I’d have in a place I never would have considered, but can’t imagine any other way.

 

There are some lessons to be learned from these home improvement shows.  One, Boo will end up pooping anywhere, two, your guests don’t care what you serve them (even Lambrusco) as long as you invite them into your home and three, you can plan all you want for the life ahead of you, but never forget that life has its own plan for you.  And that plan is almost always better than anything you could ever have imagined.

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The Marginal Way

When I set up the ironing board and plug in the iron in the two foot margin between our bed and the wall, I turn off the window air conditioning unit in order to avoid tripping the circuit. I gaze through the window at the peeling paint on our neighbor’s building ten feet away and ask Paul “Are you the least bit concerned that your pay cut will affect our standard of living?”

He is not yet fully awake, drifting in between the land of reality and dreams.  He lifts his head, opens one eye and scans the room. 

“Sweetie, I know you’ve become accustomed to the finer things in life, but we may need to make some cuts.  Will you iron my work clothes?” he says and then adds “Oh, I’m wearing them.” 

He steps out of bed, pulls on a pair of boxer underwear, takes one step and sits down at a desk in the corner of the room.

“That was a rough commute,” he says while stretching his arms up over his head.  When I walk past him to fetch my shirt, he reaches out one arm and without looking, gooses me.

“See that? We were meant to be together, my hand naturally falls at the right height,” he says.  Five years in and the fire is still burning.

Being eternal optimists, we are one lottery ticket away from financial freedom and one catastrophe away from destitution.  Many people, art gallery owners for example, see two middle age gay men walk into their chic boutique and think “Ka-ching!”  Those people would be wrong.  They will point out a darling little objet d’art and look at us expectantly. 

“Holy cow, we’d have to sell one of our five children in order to afford that!” Paul will say and I’ll watch the gallery owner totter off on her little broomstick heels in disgust.

When I’m finished ironing my clothes, I fold up the ironing board and carry it outside of our bedroom.  I open the closet door and our youngest child steps out, stumbling over the shoes on the floor.

“Beanie, you could have at least turned on the light while getting dressed in there,” I say.

“That’s OK Willy,” she says and flops back onto the sofa made up as her temporary bed. 

Something happened to my dream of being a millionaire, of having a big home, fast cars and healthy bank accounts and I’m well aware of what occurred. It was consumed by five children, two ex-wives and three college payment plans.  But, we’ve made our bed and now we have to lie in it. Sometimes there aren’t enough beds to go around and someone gets stuck sleeping on the sofa, but Beanie doesn’t seem to mind.

Throughout the day I think about our lives; of our 497 square foot third floor walk-up in a neighborhood on the very edge of the Boston city limits and our even more palatial cottage in Maine, nearly twice the size at 900 square feet, under occupation by two of our children.  It sits behind the Rite-Aid, but we don’t mind.  There at the edge of the tony towns of Kennebunkport and Ogunquit we get a cool ocean breeze and if we ever run out of anything, liquor let’s say, Rite-Aid has it.

We live in the margins and at times, it’s easy to get lost. But, as two gay men we know a thing or two about surviving here.  Sometimes the edges get sharp and I begin to worry. Paul can see it etched into the lines of my forehead when he picks me up from work.  “Turns out my pay will remain the same,” he casually mentions and for a minute the wind escapes my lungs.

We sit down for dinner in our tiny kitchen and I pour Paul a glass of wine, the ten dollar stuff because today’s good news deserves more than our usual seven dollar bottle.   I gaze through the window and see our neighbor sitting alone at his dinner table. 

“He’s always alone.  I wonder if he can see us?” Beanie asks. 

I look at Paul and Beanie, think about our four other children and a hundred pictures flicker through my mind.  It pauses on a picture of Paul and Beanie, lying on a blanket one early June day in the park. I think about her question and that’s when I realize that it doesn’t matter what anyone else can see, because there in the margins, I can see us.         

 

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Touchstone

The short winter days of New England are drained of all color and replaced with its absence, white, black and gray.  The naked branches, gnarled and arthritic bend under the weight of the sunless sky and the lakes and ponds become frozen.  I moved into a one bedroom apartment, optimistically called a garden level but more realistically described as a subterranean hovel the first time my wife left me in the winter of 2005.

There were three small rooms with no space for color; the walls, the cheap wooden kitchen cabinets, the appliances, the linoleum floors, the metal folding closet doors and the popcorn ceilings where all devoid of pigment. For all of its whiteness, the light was scarce; limited by the sun’s winter struggle and the small rectangular windows perched just above the soil line.  The furnishings, a mattress on the floor, a cardboard box for a night stand, a tattered upholstered loveseat and an old tube TV screamed early American squatter.  The complex was made up of cinder block buildings too far from Boston and not far enough away on the edge of Interstate 495 in a town called Marlborough.  In my mind the name of the town conjured up the image of  a nicotine stained, leathery old cowboy hacking and sputtering in his final days, an apt description of the town.

Brazilian immigrants made up the largest population of the complex.  Any rare interaction with adjacent neighbors was limited to two or three words of mangled English. Foreign food smells seeped into the halls and Portuguese television stations shouted through the walls.

On New Year’s Eve, I found myself alone, sitting in the car outside of Longfellow’s Wayside Inn located in an affluent bordering town watching the glow of the red inn’s windows become brighter in the encroaching darkness. A festive couple parked their car, kissed and quickly made their way through the cold into the Inn.  I imagined the orange glow of the fire, the red table cloths, the green pine boughs and the laughter that fell like broken glass. A light snow began to fall as I made my way back to my apartment.

I fell asleep that night looking at a smooth polished stone sitting on my cardboard night stand.  I had collected it from a Maine beach on a sunny summer day, fascinated by its perfect roundness and glittering bits of quartz.  Who knows where its journey began or where it would end, tossed and tumbled by the tides its true beauty at last revealed. 

Under the crushing weight of white I dreamt in color that night.

 

 

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Maine: A Sense of Place

We ride our bikes, Paul and I in the evening down Mile Road.  Past Billy’s Chowder House, a weathered gray cedar sided building content in its solitude on the edge of the salt marsh overlooking the Webhannet River. The smell of fried haddock mixing with the salty air fills our noses and teases our appetite.  We turn and follow the road hugging the coastline.

The air feels as if it has travelled a great many miles to reach this point, born on the open prairies where it meanders in slow waves over meadow grasses pushing larks into flight. It soars upward and over the Appalachian Mountains before tumbling down into the tiny cone of New England where it becomes cool and compressed and shoots out over rocky Wells beach on this margin of Maine, running loose and free like school children sprinting into the school yard as the end of day bell rings. There it mingles with the frigid Atlantic ocean and pushes up great emerald plumes of water against the rocks frosted with the seltzer air, fizzing and releasing the briny, saline sea.

The light too plays with the air.  It starts out small; silver and hushed in the morning clinging to the fog like a quivering newborn all wet and cold. The Webhannet River is metallic as it snakes through the salt marsh. The light brightens and becomes bolder during the day bouncing off of the water droplets and salt particles in the air; a prism like effect intensifying the greens of the rushes and cord grass, blues of the sky and sea and reds of the beach roses to their primary and truest selves.   In the evening it lingers, blushing orange, pink and coral in the turquoise sky reflecting itself like giant blobs of paint in the tidal pools. For a single instant when day and night balance themselves the thin strip of beach houses separating the marsh from the sea are washed aglow.

The sounds are layered, the constant pull and release of the waves alternating between whoosh and silence.  In summer the laughter of adults and children’s delighted squeals wrapped in the waves, release and repeat themselves as the waves crash and fizz. Tiny piping plovers move as a single organism back and forth chased by the cresting tide. The gulls, some stoically regarding the sea and others painted full winged against the sky release staccato laughs. In the distance the sound of a bell buoy clangs softly, tossed by the swelling sea.

At Crescent Beach we park our bikes and walk along the shore, littered with blue and grey egg shaped stones. We breathe the ocean air in and it becomes a part of us. The oxygen and minerals themselves nutrients.  In this way Maine is forever with us, a part of our blood.

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Mainely Christmas

A Gift from the Sea

Christmas Tree-The Cottage-Wells, Maine

 

Long Shadows-Ogunquit Beach Maine

Season's End Ogunquit Beach

Clouds-Wells Cottage Maine

This is for You-Wells Beach Maine

Tidal Pool-Wells Beach Maine

Skipping Stones-Wells Beach, Maine

 

Starshine-Wells Beach, Maine

Say Cheese, Wells Beach-Maine

Taking Flight Before Sandy-Wells Beach, Maine

Fall Colors-The Path-Wells Beach-Maine

The Path to Wells Beach-Maine

Ogunquit River-Footbridge Beach-Maine

Boothbay Harbor-Maine



Peeling Paint-Boothbay Harbor-Maine

Rocking Porch-Boothbay Harbor-Maine

Rose Hips and Beach Roses-Footbridge Beach-Maine

The Fence-Footbridge Beach-Maine

Reflections-Ogunquit Beach-Maine

  

Footbridge-Ogunquit-Maine

 

Seagrass-Wells Beach-Maine

Christmas in July-Nubble Light-Cape Neddick-Maine

 

A Thorn Between Two Beach Roses

 

Paul and Bill-Cape Neddick-Maine

 

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Stardust

The stars floating above our heads on this Cool Maine evening look the same to me as they did when I was a thirteen year old boy surviving North Carolina. Every Sunday night I would flick on the garage light, throw open the back screen door and noisily drag the wheel-less trash cans down the gravel driveway. After placing the metal cans on the curb there would be a sudden piercing silence. Looking up at the starry sky I would imagine what life on a planet circling one of those distant points of light might be like; wondering if there was some lonely alien boy looking back at me.

But I was certain that any civilization existing on a distant planet would be far too advanced to be touched by divorce, discrimination or Sunday night football.  This was the year that my kind- hearted eighth grade teacher, Sister Mary Claire asked us to write a letter to our grown up selves; a message in a bottle to be delivered sometime in the distant future. 

I remember feeling self-conscious about what to write. As a thirteen year old gay boy in the south, I didn’t talk about my feelings, I suppressed them and goodness knows I didn’t eat them,  I was far too skinny.  So, I wrote a generic letter:

            Dear Bill,

            Wow, I can’t believe you are an adult now, congratulations!

I hope that life is good for you now and that you are happy.  I am sure that a lot has changed.  Are you still best friends with Willy?  I bet you are.

Do you still live in Greensboro?

Well, I better go now.

Sincerely,

You (Ha, ha!)

I don’t recall ever receiving the physical letter.  Perhaps Sister Mary Claire threw them all away in a rage after catching most of the eighth grade class in the field at recess smoking marijuana.  Or maybe she lost them when she was transferred to a convent in a crime riddled neighborhood of Baltimore.  Many years later I heard that she left the Catholic Church.  Perhaps the yellowed letters written with a number two pencil sit in a shoebox under a disenchanted aging woman’s bed who stares out at the expanding galaxy of her own past.  But it was less the actual delivery of the letter and more the act of writing it that spoke to me.  That there would be a future Bill in a distant world was enough of a message.

It did not occur to me then that Sister Mary Claire might have written a letter to herself. But we are all made of stardust.  I think we both searched the heavens looking for answers while the world around us spun out of control.

When Paul and I bought our cottage in Maine I bought two solar “sun jars”.  We place them under the full sun during the day and sit by their soft yellow light under the stars at night.  Tonight, I look up at the stars, and see their history; see the light that left on its journey through space years ago.  Looking across the table at Paul’s face I see the answer to that thirteen year old boy’s question and more importantly, the delivery of his message. 

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