My bags are packed, I’m ready to go. But I’m not standing outside anyone’s door but my own waiting on an Uber to the airport. I am getting the heck out of dodge and flying across the pond to spend ten days in Ireland. Yes, this space will turn into the usual travelogue with the next entry. I don’t have a lot to say about the trip yet other than I have packing for international travel down to a science and it only takes me about half an hour to locate everything and get it all in order. I often do a theme color when I’m packing clothes for an excursion. It would be appropriate for me to choose green for this trip but I don’t have a lot of green in my wardrobe. ‘Difficult color, green’ is a line from something delivered as a bit of an insult but for the life of me I cannot remember where it’s from. I seem to be mainly doing blue and gold this trip. Stanford, forgive me.
I just finished up a brief run in a reading of a new play ‘Teachers Lounge’ for Encore Theatre and Gallery presented as a reading the past two nights. Seven middle school teachers in an inner city school and their interactions in the staff room as they deal with underfunding, indifferent systems, and try to maintain their sanity and their calling to teach the kids and help them grow. The themes, characters, relationships, and language are all there but there needs to be more – as the script develops, I hope we learn more about these people, their motivations, and their backstories. My character is detached and at the end of a long teaching career, showing up and going through the motions. A friend came up to me afterwards and suggested that perhaps he’s actually a ghost and that’s why he barely interacts. I hadn’t considered that. Might be an interesting angle as development moves forward.
I have felt the presence of ghosts this week. Not my usual ghosts of Steve and Tommy who have evolved into something more comforting and more just part of me over the years, but fresh ones to remind me of aging and mortality and that nothing, including long life, is promised to any of us. I found out this week that two men who were very much part of my past had died within the last few months. I wasn’t in routine communication with either one of them so it’s not surprising that I was unaware until relatively recently. The first was Bill. I met Bill in New York in the fall of 1987. It was my very first trip to NYC and I was over the moon at finally having made it to the Big Apple. I was there interviewing for residency programs in internal medicne – Cornell, NYU, side trips to Yale and Brown. The first night there, I attended my very first Broadway show on Broadway with my high school friend Bob Kummer – Into the Woods with the original cast (it was the second week of the run). The second day, after completing my interview about 3 pm, I headed back to Time Square and got in the cancellation line for Les Miserables to try my luck. A few minutes later, an attractive young man of roughly my age got in line behind me and we started to talk. He was interested in many of the same things I was. We kept talking. We made our way through the line and lucked into two tickets second row center. We kept talking. We went to dinner. We kept talking. We went to the show. I was falling hard which was a new experience for me.
I returned to New York to see him a few times. He came out to California the next year to see me. During all of that, I figured out he had far more mental health demons than I was prepared to deal with and that he was not a good person to have in my life. I ended up putting him on a bus back to New York around Christmas of 1988. We never saw each other again but every once in a while, he would pop back up with a letter or on social media. He became a social activist in the non-profit sector, always chasing after some elusive happiness that was always just beyond his reach. He constantly relocated to new cities and would become rapidly disenchanted when they could not render his life perfect. His mental health took a toll on his physical health and he had at least one stroke in his early 50s. He was never able to afford appropriate medical care and most of the time was without health insurance. He died in March. It appears to have been sudden, probably another stroke. The two of us would have been a disaster as a long term couple but his brief stay in my life created the conditions which allowed me to forge a successful relationship with the next man I met whom I found attractive. I met Steve about six weeks after I put Bill on that bus. I can’t say I quite understand what it was that Bill gave me, but whatever it was, it was allowed me to have the life I have had.
The second man who died in the last few weeks was Josh. Josh was Tommy’s ex. At the time I met Tommy in the fall of 2002, they had been broken up as a couple for some months, but economic necessity was forcing them to continue sharing the house they lived in. (It was Josh’s – inherited from his grandmother. Tommy’s salary as a nurse with the federally qualified health center wasn’t quite enough to allow him to move out and set up independent housekeeping). This rather peculiar situation led to my and Tommy’s budding relationship to have a somewhat more accelerated timeline than it might have otherwise and cemented us together more quickly than I might otherwise have allowed. (He moved in about nine months after our first date). Tommy and I would run into Josh occasionally over the years and relations were always cordial. There were happy endings on both sides. Tommy and I were a suitable match until death did us part. Josh eventually met his husband Greg and beame a bit of a historical footnote as Josh and Greg became the first gay couple married in Alabama when it became legal after Obergefell. I don’t know what happened to Josh. He’s about a decade younger than I am and I had not heard he was ill. Greg, unfortunately, developed a premature dementia and Josh took care of him at home as long as he could until he had to be institutionalized.
Both Bill and Josh inadvertently gave me great gifts by helping create the conditions through which my two marriages came to be. We never know how the threads of the tapestry are going to turn out as we can only see the full pattern in hindsight. I hope they are both at piece and my condolences to those who knew and loved them.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 