Dateline: Spokane, Washington

Happy birthday to me, as I enter the tail end of my fifties. One more year until another milestone and another decade. I tend to alternate between good and bad decades with the even ones being good ones so hopefully my sixties will be kind to me when they get here. God knows I’m becoming far older than I ever intended to be but that’s the way of the world. We all age at exactly the same chronological rate although the physiologic varies a bit depending on genetics, environment and life choices. Somewhere close to six hundred people have messaged, texted, Facebooked, called or otherwise let me know they were thinking of me today. I am reading and responding to them all but it may be a few days before I get to all of them. Scrolling through the Facebook well wishes is always interesting. As each familiar name goes by, it brings up images of the time of my life that that person entered it – childhood playmates, school friends, colleagues, people in the opera and theater worlds, vacation buddies… each important and each a reminder of how many people we touch as we go through life, hopefully in positive ways. Sources tell me I even got a shout out on Birmingham Mountain Radio this morning. That’s a new one.

The last few days in Seattle was relatively uneventful. I got some writing done, did my usual geriatric Q and A for my father’s senior community residents (only this time, it had to be done via video than in person due to Covid precautions), and had some time with old friends. The immediate family gathered for my birthday dinner last night and everyone was well and made merry over a salmon dinner. This morning, I had breakfast with my father, admonished him again not to leave his building without his stick for improved balance, got his birthday blessings and headed out on the return journey. Rather than head directly east, I first went North and had coffee and a long chat with Craig Mollerstuen, my college roommate who has relocated from Alaska to Bellingham. That put me in position to cross the Cascades via the North Cascades Highway and Washington Pass, a road I had not taken for some decades. It doesn’t open until late in the season due to the snows and had only been clear for about a week so there was very little traffic. The pass still had a good foot of snow on the ground but there was none on the pavement and the weather was spectacular allowing for amazing views of Liberty Bell mountain and the surrounding peaks. My favorite mountain pass remains Logan Pass in Glacier National Park but this one remains a close second and is far less known.

From the mountains, down the Methow valley and then over various back roads of Eastern Washington. I crossed the Columbia River at Chief Joseph dam and an hour later passed Grand Coulee dam in its canyon before heading on to Spokane for the night. It’s been many decades since I was last on most of the roads, some of them not since childhood and various sites and place names brought up memories predominantly of family vacation road trips of the 1970s. Grand Coulee dam always makes me think of my father, who worships at the altar of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, piloting first a station wagon, and later a van, full of family and camping equipment singing ‘Roll On, Columbia, Roll On’ with its verses celebrating various Washington state sites. Or passing the sign to Ritzville and remembering my sister at roughly age six, being vastly disappointed to find that the town was not made of crackers.

Tomorrow is more mountain driving through the Rockies. The weather promises to be fair so it should be uneventful – as long as I remember to keep myself well caffeinated.

Dateline – Seattle, Washington

Time to check in. All is well. I can tell that I’m pretty unplugged from life because I keep falling asleep if I sit still for more than about five minutes. Nothing terribly exciting has happened the last few days. I’ve had family time, a meeting with my editor (book is on track to be finished and available for purchase by late June), some time with friends, and a lot of napping. It may not be the most action packed of weeks, but I think it’s what I’ve needed. I have two more days here and then will depart on Tuesday for the trek back across the country. I’ve figured out the first two thirds of that based on time, distances, and weather. I’m going to leave the last third up to happenstance when I get there.

Seattle is home and also not. My relationship with the city is very much of the ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ variety. The Seattle I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s no longer truly exists. It pokes through from time to time like a pentimento but newer trends and sights and people have long since transformed the small city of my childhood into something else. The Seattle of my past was a city of self sufficient neighborhoods, each a village of friends and neighbors who knew and supported each other. Each one had its own small commercial district where the majority of commerce was done. A trip to the mall or downtown was a significant event. The geography of the town – you could only go so far before running into a lake or a ravine – kept the various regions insular and small town feeling.

Downtown, when I was a child, was dominated by the Seattle Center and Space Needle, the old World’s Fair grounds, at one end and Pioneer Square and Smith Tower at the other. There wasn’t all that much in between – a few high rises dating back to the 20s and a lot of undistinguished post war stuff filling in the rest. The Pike Place Market was there, but had not yet become a fish flinging tourist mecca and there was a great deal of discussion about tearing it down as it had become rickety and in poor repair over the years. Things started to change in the early 70s and I can remember pretty much when all of the modern skyscrapers went up, starting with what was the SeaFirst Bank tower (now Safeco Plaza), joined by box after box of chromium steel and tinted windows going up routinely over the next couple of decades until they started to run out of room. Now, as the tech giants expand, more and more buildings are going up South of Lake Union and whole sections of town are unrecognizable.

The huge growth in tech has led to a huge influx of population. The city itself has about 50% more people than the city of my youth. The metro area is nearly twice as populous. As the city is hemmed in by water, it has minimal land area for expansion leading to increasing density, increasing real estate prices, and increased pressure on public goods and services. The neighborhoods of middle class homes are being bulldozed for multifamily dwellings and workingmen’s bungalows are being replaced my large modern homes, often in a horrifically unattractive boxy style that makes them look like a particularly ugly dentist’s office of the 1970s. The rapid increase in rents has pushed many of the poor out of housing entirely and many of the parks and public green spaces are sprouting tent colonies.

Maybe one of the things that keeps me in Birmingham is that the feel of the city is similar to what Seattle once was. When I go out in Birmingham in my part of the city, I am apt to run into friends and acquaintances (at least in non-Covid times). There’s a feeling of community among those of us professionals of a more liberal persuasion who choose to live in the city itself rather than in the suburbs. It’s an urban environment, but small enough to be manageable and for someone like me to feel connected to the life and health of the city as a whole so I can both feel like I can support it and it can support me. I’m not sure that Seattle could do that for me these days.

Seattle, as ground zero for Covid in the long ago days of March, 2020, continues to take things relatively seriously. Most citizens are wearing masks indoors without complaint. Outdoor dining is popular (and it’s warm enough now for it to be comfortable so I’ve been taking advantage of that). The majority of the citizenry is in process of receiving their vaccinations so I haven’t felt unsafe at all during this visit. Vaccination rates, in general, are starting to fall off significantly as those with interest and whom have been pursuing them have achieved their goals. Roughly 1/3 of the population is now totally vaccinated and we’ll hit about 1/2 over the next month as all the vaccinations in process are completed. I figure we’ll end up somewhere around 60%. Not enough for herd immunity by a long shot. What should we do as a society to increase that number? I am uncertain. There are significant ethical and other issues at play with any potential plan. I’m going to cogitate on this a bit and get back to it in another musing.

In the meantime, masks up indoors with others, wash your hands, and keep your distance.

Dateline Seattle, Washington:

I have arrived. 2800 miles, twelve states and five hotel rooms later, I’m ensconced with my father in his senior living apartment near Northgate. The last leg of the journey was as uneventful as the previous. From the Boise river valley (where Boise, Nampa, and Caldwell appear to have all grown together in a single strip mall) into Eastern Oregon and Ammon Bundy country and then up over the Blue Mountains and into the Palouse. Crossed the Columbia River outside of Pendleton and then up through the Yakima valley and Washington wine country and over Snoqualmie pass and down to Puget Sound.

Now for a few days of family and Seattle time before having to undertake a similar journey in reverse. The unplugging from everyday life for the last few days has been good for me. Nobody has been asking me for more than I have to give and I’ve been responsible to no one but myself (and Hope, the red Prius). I’ve discovered I still enjoy long distance driving but it takes a little more out of me at nearly sixty than was true twenty or thirty years ago. My constant companion this trip has been the audio versions of Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, modern fantasy of the blood and guts school. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Game of Thrones with its flawed and morally ambiguous set of heroes and the fantasy tropes of magic definitely playing second fiddle to the realistic human interactions and wars between various peoples. I’ve enjoyed them.

One thing I noticed during this trip was that I am very much a child of the West, even if I have lived in the Deep South for nearly a quarter century. There is something different about the feel of western mountain air on the skin, a crispness that’s altogether different from the languid feeling of the humid air of the south that makes me feel like I’m safe and home. Then there’s the vegetation – the look of evergreen forests on craggy mountains that are so different from the deciduous trees of the south and east. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had returned West after Steve’s death – or even after Tommy’s but I still think that the decisions I have made are the correct ones. When I retire, perhaps I can spend more time on the West coast even if I don’t relocate.

It was announced today that Broadway theater will be returning as of September 14th without capacity restrictions. I’m trying to decide what I think about this. Having been inside those theaters many times over many years, they are based on a business model of crowding as many people into as small a space as possible. While I am definitely feeling more comfortable about being out and about with widespread vaccine distribution, the idea of being crowded in with 1500 strangers for three hours in a building built in the 1920s prior to modern ventilation systems still gives me pause. I’m thinking the Broadway League is assuming they can just pick up where they left off in March of 2020 but I’m not so sure. Their core audience of older people with disposable income will be cautious. The industry and unions were not overly supportive leading to a lot of the talent leaving the city and working out life patterns. The world has moved on over the last fifteen months and will want to see artistic expression that incorporates that. Going back to old forms and tropes without thinking them through thoroughly is not going to be a recipe for innovation. Maybe it’s time for a fifteen block section of midtown Manhattan to stop being the sole arbiter of theatrical success.

And I remain concerned over the two tiered society that vaccines are creating. The vaccinated folk are wanting to return to normal but normal is going to create situations where unvaccinated folk (whether by choice or necessity) are going to be brought into danger by usual human behavior. I am afraid we’re going to continue to have localized epidemics in unvaccinated communities. In communities of choice, often rural and politically conservative, this is going to lead to healthy young people becoming seriously ill and potentially dying when they don’t have to. It’s also going to continue to put enormous strains on rural health care systems which are already under siege from low tax bases, and conservative state governments not wanting to spend on social services.

Some have suggested that a ‘vaccine passport’ is the easiest solution to all of this. I’m not so sure. The vaccines remain ‘experimental’ as they have not yet been given full approval by the FDA and remain under emergency use authorization and it would be unethical for any public agency to require vaccination with an unapproved medication. The current trend to monetize such things through private corporations and data systems is rife with issues. Creating systems that work primarily electronically via smart phones leaves out a huge section of the population that doesn’t understand or have access to the technology.

As things open up, I think we all have to keep up on the latest research and public health guidelines and then adjust our own risk management decisions to what makes sense for ourselves. I would not have made this trip a few months ago, but my vaccination status and the reduction in caseloads made me decide that, as long as I was prudent in behavior, that this would be an OK thing for me. I’ll continue to weigh all the evidence and, in the meantime, I’ll wear my mask indoors with people I don’t know, keep my hands washed and not get too close.

Dateline Boise, Idaho

I’m definitely back in the West and heading into old stamping grounds. Today’s drive wasn’t difficult. Starting in Southwest Wyoming, along Interstate 80 over the border into Utah and then threading through the various canyons and mountain ranges outside of Ogden and up into the Snake River country of Idaho until reaching the flat river valley of the Boise River and the city of Boise itself.

Thirty five years ago, I spent a summer in Boise with a couple of wild women doing my OB/GYN clerkship. We lived together on the upper floor of an old house containing a local OB/GYN practice and spent our time catching babies at St Luke’s hospital and observing gynecological surgery at St Al’s across town. The house is still there. The practice is not. (It dissolved not too long after our summer there – we medical students had ferreted out the inappropriate relationship between one of the partners and the office manager. We weren’t going to say anything but we did make bets about how long that was going to go on before it caused an explosion). I don’t remember too much about downtown Boise from that summer. It was hot. The downtown area was tired and old – feeling stuck in a decaying 1950s-60s. The Boise of today appears to be in growth mode, like a lot of older cities. Much of downtown has been redone with new restaurants, bars, hotels and businesses and the millennials are flocking to new housing units in old buildings. A block away from my hotel is ‘The Basque Block’ a collection of Basque restaurants, a Basque grocery, the Basque cultural center, and some upscale watering holes. I had a very nice dinner and drink under a large Basque flag.

As I was sitting there looking at the millennials having their dinner and drinks, I couldn’t help but wonder if I helped deliver any of them. All those babies are turning 35 this summer and are likely parents themselves. I also wondered what I might say to 24 year old Andy if I were to meet him coming down the street. If he would even begin to believe some of the twists and turns that life was going to start throwing his way shortly after that summer. I doubt I would have believed any of it. At 24, I was just trying to get through medical school with sanity intact and wasn’t really thinking about much else. Highlights of that summer were innertubing down the Boise river, and a side trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. The actual OB/GYN work was not a highlight. Although I did like playing with the newborns. I just wish I hadn’t had to send some of them home with their parents who were obviously unequipped for the rigors of child rearing.

One more driving day tomorrow and should be in Seattle in time for dinner.

Dateline Rock Springs, Wyoming

I don’t know what was wrong with me yesterday, but ending my driving early, going to bed and sleeping for ten hours was the right decision as I felt pretty much back to normal today and had no difficulty with today’s long drive of over 600 miles. My initial thought was to cut back down to Denver and cross through the Rockies on I-70, but then I checked the weather report which announced a significant winter storm in central Colorado with up to foot of snow so I decided that might not be the best of ideas so I stayed on I-80 through Nebraska and in to Wyoming. It started to snow as I passed through Cheyenne and continued to do so through the mountains surrounding Laramie but it wasn’t more than a dusting so it didn’t cause too many problems other than a little bit of issues with visibility – the entire world being reduced to shades of gray and white between snow, cloud, and mountains. It was all over, by the time I hit the Continental Divide and I coasted on in to the exciting town of Rock Springs Wyoming without incident.

I can’t say a whole lot about today’s drive as it wasn’t terribly exciting. Western Nebraska was flat and the highway seems to continuously cross various branches of the Platte River (so named after the French word for flat). It’s a steady incline in elevation over the miles, barely noticeable, and then, you’re in the mountains of Wyoming and going over passes at 8,500 feet. On the other side of the mountains comes miles and miles of high plains scrub land full of sagebrush and sweeping skies and only needing Clint Eastwood to complete the picture. I have two days of driving left to Seattle. I’m not sure which route yet. I’m going to check out weather maps and such tonight before making a final decision.

The news from Covid land today was not good. The CDC experts are despairing of the US population achieving anything like herd immunity due to the political unpopularity of vaccines in certain quarters. What does this mean? It means Covid is likely to be with us for years, decades, permanently. I don’t think we need to panic about this as individuals. Those with a belief in science and a couple of hundred years of epidemiological understanding will be OK. Amongst those who don’t, or who belong to less privileged communities that are more difficult to reach with vaccine and the like, the disease will continue to spread and pop up in epidemic fashion and we’ll continue to see serious illness and death, but not in the numbers of the last year. It didn’t have to be this way, but that’s the political reality we have to live with.

I’m starting to get a little worried about the next couple of election cycles. The speed with which the Republican party is trying to whitewash the Capitol Insurrection and various other criminal enterprises combined with a complacency amongst the Democrats now that vaccines are distributed makes me think that maintaining congressional majorities is going to be difficult. And, if there is a shift in power at the midterms, all of the social trends that have led to an anti-science/anti-knowledge/anti-enlightenment approach to governance will come roaring back emboldened and who knows what sort of national problem they will intersect with to cause some other sort of disaster. Rant over.

Time for some bad TV and sleep.

Dateline Grand Island, Nebraska

The headache went away but I still wasn’t feeling great this morning when I headed back down the road. After a few hours, it became clear that my original plan to haul myself all the way to Denver was not the best of ideas as it would require more driving hours than might be good for me and I would rather not fall asleep at the wheel and run off the road if I could avoid it. So, I ticked off the Kansas towns as they went by – Topeka, Junction City, Salina… Looking ahead on I-70 it became pretty clear that by the time I hit the high plains of Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado, there would be a paucity of population centers and Hampton Inns so I turned right at Salina, headed up through Kansas and Nebraska farm land, and stopped early for the night in Grand Island, Nebraska for a nap before dinner and family Zoom night conversation afterwards.

Not much to say about the Prairie. It goes on forever and is very flat. Most of the fields visible from the highway are beige spring stubble giving it all the sepia tone of the Kansas sequences from The Wizard of Oz. I can’t say much about Grand Island other than its the home of the Nebraska State Fair and, was one of the heartland towns that had a terrible Covid outbreak earlier in the pandemic. I’m keeping away from the natives, snuggled up here in my hotel room as it begins to rain, the bolts of lightning vying with the green and red of the Applebee’s sign that dominates my view for the attention of my visual cortex.

I don’t think I’ve got any good stories about driving across the Great Plains. Tommy and I never did it together. Steve and I did it more times than I care to count. Amongst other things, he was a genealogist who kept himself busy tracing all of the Spivey descendants from the three Spivey brothers who originally immigrated to the Ashville, NC area in the 1760s. We would pack up the truck and head out for a couple of weeks in the courthouses of the Midwest and Appalachia looking for clues. He did the driving, I read to him. In later years, when I had routine work in DC, he would come with me and we would rent a car and head south, removing the need to cross the empty quarter of the continent. This was all before GPS and smart phones and there would be any number of fights over the large road Atlas as we tried to figure out the best way to get to some small county seat in Arkansas or Tennessee or Kentucky. During one of these trips, late in the year and I can’t remember where we were going or why, we were driving along I-65 through Kentucky when it began to snow. Steve, having been raised a Southern California boy, had never actually seen snow fall before so we pulled over at the next rest stop so he could caper about and catch snowflakes with his tongue and all of those usual childhood rites of passage that had been denied him until his forties.

More Great Plains tomorrow and then into the Rockies.

Dateline – Overland Park, Kansas

I have a headache. I don’t usually get such things but I very definitely have a frontal headache tonight which started more or less when I got out of the car at tonight’s Hampton Inn. I think it’s just eye strain from driving all day and a couple of Tylenol and some rest should take care of it without too much difficulty but it is reminding me of how much I don’t like not feeling well, especially when I’m not at home. This last year or so of isolation not only kept me Covid free, but it also kept me away from all of the other viruses and cruds I usually come into contact with so I’ve kind of forgotten what feeling under the weather feels like. As I have gotten older, I’m getting less interested in powering through work when not feeling up to snuff and am much more willing to use a day or two of my eight months of accumulated sick leave.

Today’s drive was uneventful. West from Memphis across Arkansas (typical rural Americana) and then I decided to turn North and drive through the Ozarks. I had been through them once before with Steve on one of our trips when we were tracking down some 19th century branch of his family tree but remembered little about them. What I found most interesting were the outcroppings of sedimentary rock sticking up from placid green hills, a gentle reminder that the central US was once a vast inland sea for many millennia. Things like that are reminders of how relatively unimportant anything going on today is in terms of geologic time. 6,000 years of recorded human history is a blink in the history of the planet. The Ozarks these days bring two cultural touchstones to mind: Joan Hess’ delightful Maggody murder mystery books and the recent Netflix series with Jason Bateman which suggests that rural Arkansas is full of feuding drug cartels.

Descending from the Ozarks into Southern Missouri brought me to Branson where I managed to resist the siren call of theaters featuring Biblical spectaculars, acts from Hee-Haw, and half forgotten comics. I also skipped the jeep tours through the cave, the indoor water parks, and the zip line tours. (I have no idea which of these may actually be in operation during these times of Covid, but the billboards live on). Then on to Springfield, Joplin, and up a Missouri Highway toward Kansas City that apparently passes through a large Amish community as I passed four of their horse carriages and a number of barns with hex signs. Stopping for the night on the outskirts of Kansas City and considering what tomorrow might bring. No matter how you slice it, it’s likely to be the Great Plains.

I looked over Covid coverage this evening to find most of the articles are about the slow down in vaccination rates as the portion of the population seeking vaccine has been accommodated and the portion of the population avoiding vaccine remains resistant. I don’t know how to solve that one and I’m not certain that governmental mandates over our currently divided population are going to be helpful. I think it may start solving itself through the marketplace. As Covid becomes more and more of a preventable disease, the health insurance industry will become less and less interested in paying for its costs in those who are eligible for vaccine but refuse. I suspect we’ll start to see insurance companies requiring surcharges, much as they do with smokers, or having riders to their policies excluding coverage for Covid complications in those who could have been vaccinated. We shall see.

Going to find a bad movie and go blah for the next few hours.

Dateline West Memphis, Arkansas –

And he’s on the road again… roughly three years after the last time I did the cross country drive. I seem to do them when I am in turmoil. Disconnecting from my usual life and patterns and driving for hours seems to help me recenter in some way. At least this time, I’m not in acute grief over the death of a partner, but I do figure I’m grieving in some rather odd ways – mainly connected to the ongoing saga of Covid that’s defined all of our lives over the last fifteen months. It’s led to lots of little deaths. Deaths of plans, deaths of certainties, deaths of possibilities. And then for me, there’s been the very real deaths that I’ve had to help people through – children grieving parents, parents grieving children, spouses grieving and adjusting to widowhood – as there are now 576,000 empty chairs at the American table and some of those are for my patients and their connections.

The vaccine has been a game changer, of course. My patients, many cooped up for over a year, are able to venture out some without being panicked and families are able to gather together for the first time in a while. Even with that, the legacy of mental health conditions that have been left behind is enormous and I’m only just beginning to unpack that particular box. A large part of my day is spent working through grief and depression and anxiety left in Covid’s wake as that’s now the major thing affecting my patients’ health, far more than their blood pressure or their diabetes. I feel a bit inadequate to the task but I usually muddle through somehow.

I finished up my usual work day around one thirty this afternoon, ran by the accountant to drop off my tax paperwork so I can get my refund, and then headed home to pack. I like to travel and can usually pack pretty quickly and get supplies for anything from snowstorm to desert heat into a single suitcase (one of the things one learns growing up in Seattle when the weather can do anything over the course of a weekend). Suitcases packed, trusty laptop in its bag, I kissed the kitties good by, threw things in the car and headed out. I’m making this trip up as I go along. I have nearly a week to get to Seattle and a continent full of possible routes. We’ll see where I end up.

I decided Northwest was as good a direction as any so took I-22 out of town past all the Walker County towns I know and love from VA house calls, and then on beyond into Mississippi. After Tupelo, which seem s to have little reason for existing other than housing Elvis Presley’s birth place (will he be remembered in another few decades, after the boomers are gone?), I was driving into a glorious sunset straight out of Gone With the Wind for an hour or so as Mississippi gave way to Tennessee. I figured Memphis was far enough and stopped in the West suburbs, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi for the night. With the crossing of the river, I guess I am officially in the West again. Can’t say much about Memphis. The famous civic pyramid seems to have become a Bass Pro Shop and it was too dark by the time I got to the bridge to see anything of Mud Island.

Tomorrow, I’ll either head west towards Little Rock and Fort Smith or north towards St Louis. We’ll see what I feel like after breakfast. Twenty three years ago, on our drive across country from Sacramento to Birmingham to start our new life, Steve and I stopped for the night in Fort Smith. It was Halloween weekend and, while in the motel room we turned on the TV and a local commercial blared for an Evangelical church’s Harvest Festival party, an alternative to demonic Halloween. Biblically correct costumes were encouraged. Steve looked at me, rolled his eyes, and announced that he wanted to stay an extra day so he could show up as Jezebel. (He would have too, if I had let him, but we had a van full of furniture to meet in Birmingham and could not afford the extra time).

My stops for gas and Dr. Pepper show that masks appear to be unknown here in the heartland. I’m trusting in my vaccinated status and I’m still wearing one when going indoors. And keeping my hands washed and sanitized. And keeping a wide berth. It’s not over until its over.

It’s April 28th again. Another year past and now Tommy has been gone for three years. I thought about going out to Parrish to put some flowers on his grave but other life chores intervened. I don’t think he minds. He was never one for fuss and ceremony and ritual unless it involved children and socializing them into the mysteries of the grown up world. Valentines? Anniversaries? Forget about it – he had no patience for the Hallmark holidays. I once made the mistake of bringing him roses at work on our anniversary. He was not amused and let me know just what he thought of that gesture and my lack of imagination for executing it in no uncertain terms. But, if a child or group of children of his acquaintance had something special that needed celebrating, he was all over that. While packing up the house this last year and moving, I found his stash of all purpose child gifts. They’re being used appropriately over time.

Tommy and I didn’t talk about death much. I think there were two reasons for that. The first was the shadow of Steve that hung over our lives. As Steve was dead, he was both omnipresent and unknowable to Tommy. They never met (well – I did figure out later that Tommy had probably waited on Steve and I at the Eastwood Olive Garden a couple of times after we first moved to Birmingham but neither Tommy or I had any real memories of it). Talk of death with Tommy would, of course, rope Steve into the conversation and that was a subject best left in the past. The second was that Tommy had far too much living to do and way to many plans to let a little nuisance such as death get in his way. Even during that last hospitalization, he was working on wig designs and plots for his summer shows and trying to figure out how to go back to school again for yet another degree (he was interested in seminary with an eye on a concentration in church music and hymnody. I found a few sketches for an idea for a musical setting of the Latin Mass in his papers. That would have been an interesting – and massive project). The one time I remember asking Tommy about what he would want in terms of arrangements should he die, he looked at me and said ‘You’ll have to figure it out, I won’t be here’ and went back to whatever he was working on.

Tommy’s relatively quick decline and unexpected death was very different from my experience with Steve. With Steve, we had roughly two years from the time we learned he was seriously ill with his pulmonary fibrosis until his death. We both knew it was coming, made some basic arrangements and then, basically never revisited the subject until it actually happened. There was no need. We lived our lives around his living, not his dying and those two years were some of the best times we had in our thirteen years together. Steve let go of the rat race of trying to be successful and make money and buried himself in his art and his garden and his love of the little things in life and was pretty much at peace, possibly for the first time in his life. He had not had an easy existence as a younger man. He came out as a gay man in high school at age fourteen. That’s not an uncommon story these days, but that was 1962 and his attitude from the beginning was to defy the world and anyone in it who would not accept him for exactly who he was. He spent his 20s and 30s in Los Angeles, part of the avant garde set around West Hollywood and Studio City, where he knew everyone and went to all the parties of the demimonde in the late 60s and 70s. He had all sorts of stories. The 80s and HIV destroyed his life and decimated his social circle and friendships, causing him to flee North to the Sacramento area to become his mother’s caregiver after she was diagnosed with cancer and where we met.

Between the two of them, I had nearly thirty years of partnership/marriage whatever term you want to use for it. I wrote a sermon a few years back, before the Obergefell decision, on the word marriage as applied to gay couples and how our inexact language uses a single word in law for two radically different constructs -a civil contract that defines a family unit in the eyes of the state and a sacred covenant that defines a union in the eyes of a church. The pro gay marriage forces were fighting for the contract. The anti gay marriage forces were fighting to protect the covenant. They’re still talking at each other rather than to each other so I don’t believe for a moment that this particular war is at an end. I miss the coupled state, having been out of it now for three years, but I don’t know if I want to do the work necessary to get back in to one.

Keeping a gay male relationship alive and solid is difficult. There aren’t a lot of supports and foundations for it within either gay culture or straight culture. One believes that you should be free to find the next hot thing, the other believes that you’re intruding on sacred ground in some sort of burlesque. This requires two men in union with each other to have to pour enormous resources in terms of emotional energy into the relationship and to be willing to make sacrifices to their socialized roles for the good of the unit. It’s very hard. I have nothing but admiration for my friends who have managed to do it over the years because I know just how much work they have to do behind closed doors and nothing but sympathy for my other friends who can’t overcome all of the obstacles and make it work over time. I’m never going to say never in regards to a potential third husband, but I have no plans to start looking in the near future. There’s a number of hoops any potential candidate would have to jump through and I know I’m not going to just settle to have someone in my life. Maybe I’m a victim of Mona’s Law from Tales of the City as defined by Armistead Maupin – you can have a hot lover, a hot job, and a hot apartment but you can’t have all three at once. I’ve got the job and housing covered so the third might be asking a little too much of the universe at the moment. If I do find someone, going back to Mouse and Tales of the City, I just would like someone with whom I could buy a Christmas tree.

Sleep well, both Steve and Tommy, and know that I am forever richer and better for having been yours.

I still feel like I’m running on empty. Fortunately, only five more days until I get my time off and can hopefully recharge the batteries. One of the major reasons I decided to turn this into a road trip was a chance to simply disconnect from my usual world for a while. The nature of my job and career is such that there are lots and lots of people out there who rely on me for succor and counsel and empathy. I have a lot to give but every one of those encounters leads me to give away a bit of my self and my energy and eventually, the well starts to feel like it’s running dry. A couple of weeks without feeling like everyone wants a piece and I will hopefully start feeling a little more in balance.

Tonight is the Oscars. I’m not watching. This pandemic year as upended my usual moviegoing habits and I’ve seen none of the films up for the big awards. There are a few that are on my radar and which I should catch streaming on one service or another eventually. The theaters are starting to open up again but I don’t think I’ll feel comfortable going in to sit among strangers with my overpriced bucket of popcorn and soft drink for a while longer yet. I’ve been watching more long form television than film recently – that seems to be where all the good writers have drifted to and it comes in easily digestible chunks between work projects, writing projects and keeping things up on the home front in the evenings. There are plenty of older films out there to keep me going when I truly want a movie (or when MNM needs something to review for her column). Will I be able to go to the movies again? I’m sure I will but I can’t imagine feeling safe prior to the fall and even that is going to depend on what happens with Covid numbers and with all of the ramifications of the never ending politics of vaccines.

The big hotspot at the moment in Covidland is India, likely driven by variants which are more highly infectious, although the authorities are still trying to figure out why cases, beaten back over the winter and early spring, started to skyrocket over the last few weeks. There’s so much that we still don’t know about this disease, its pathology, and its epidemiology. Apparently, last month was election season in India with Prime Minister Modi and other politicians addressing huge crowds. Per usual, the virus exploited a change in human behavior patterns to its advantage. There is one variant in India that has the health authorities concerned. It has changes in spike proteins allowing it to bind more tightly to human host cells making it significantly more infectious. If this variant combines with the ones originating in Britain that make it more transmissible person to person, we may have cause for alarm. I have a trip planned for India in the spring of 2022. I shall, as always, be cautious.

This week marks the third anniversary of Tommy’s death. I know it’s time to move on (and in a lot of ways I have) but the whole pandemic nature of our lives keeps me cocooned away from the world when I’m not at work. I’m getting better about going out than I was a few months ago, but seeing people socially still seems a bit awkward and forced. It’s as if the usual rules of etiquette have been put in suspense and we’re all feeling our way together into some new patterns of being with others that are not of ones immediate family circle. Handshakes and hugs are still pretty verboten. Subjects to talk about are somewhat limited when no one has done much over the last year. I feel like I need to take a lesson from Eliza Doolittle and stick to two subjects – the weather and everyone’s health. So if you hear me asking about a new straw hat that should have come to me, you’ll know the reason. I’ve been told the next of the Zoom theater projects is Pygmalion with me as Colonel Pickering so I may be picking up a few Shavian epigrams honestly in coming months.

I had Hope, the Red Prius, serviced and detailed this weekend, making sure she was ready to drive 6,000 or so miles the next few weeks. The folks at Hoover Toyota told me that all was well so, if the pistons fall out in the middle of South Dakota, you know whom I will be calling on the Gods of the Lakota to strike down in vengeance. I’ve downloaded some decent books to the audible account and I’ve mapped out at least four different routes. Having driven across the country a half dozen times, I’ve seen a good deal of it so which one I take is likely to depend on weather patterns, snow reports, and my mood of the morning after downing a caramel macchiato from the closest Starbucks. Now I just have to pack a few necessities (travel was easier before my dependence on CPAP which takes up a third of a suitcase) and find my decent sunglasses. Yes, I will write my usual travelogues. I need something to write with them: family stories? Covid updates? Discussions of aging and health topics? A bit of all three? I generally don’t know what I’m going to write when I sit down to bang on the keys and produce these musings but I do take requests and often a comment or something someone says to me will inspire a topic.

The weather is lovely – get out and enjoy it, as I did this afternoon with Opera Shots in the Opera Birmingham Parking Lot. The next one is Sunday May 16th at Collins Bar downtown. That block of 2nd Avenue North will be closed so get a drink from Andrew J. Collins and enjoy some good singing. I’m planning on returning from the road that day and whether I turn up or not will depend on when I get back to town. Enjoy your martini, but remember to social distance and keep your mask on around people you don’t know. And grab some Opera Birmingham branded hand sanitizer while you’re there.