Dateline – Chandler, Arizona

And so the trek across the country begins anew. I’m on the southern route this time, coming across I-10 and should arrive back in Birmingham either Friday late or Saturday early. I’m not planning on any other major stops and I have an extra day in my time table in case of an unforseen delay. I decided to come back this way as I-10 is the only major cross country route I haven’t driven and this completes the set. However, as I left the San Gabriel valley and headed into the 110 in the shade of the California desert, I started to question my sanity. At least the car is new and the air conditioning works well.

I slept in some this morning and stopped in Palm Springs to have lunch with Shann Carr, another old friend from Atlantis days. She’s a fixture on the LGBT entertainment circuit and one of the warmest, funniest humans I’ve ever had a pleasure to know. She’s working Palm Springs real estate these days so she doesn’t have to take gigs she doesn’t want to and still working on her plans for an LGBT focused conference/resort/production studio. (If anyone has a spare eight figures lying around the house, I’ll put you in touch).

Then, it was back to I-10 and searing heat and such wonderful towns as Blythe, Quartzite and finally Phoenix where I decided to stop for the night, but on the far east side in Chandler so I can avoid the city traffic when I get underway in the morning.

Story time: Some of you have probably heard this one as it is perhaps my favorite of all the odd things that have happened in my life. It comes to mind due to today’s drive through Palm Springs and the California desert.

When I had just turned 26, I finished medical school and matched for residency in Internal Medicine at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. I had liked the feel of the program when I interviewed there and Vickie Rozell was living there at the time so I knew I would have at least one friend in town so in June, 1988, I pulled into town with my U-Haul and my first apartment in midtown, a block from the old governor’s mansion and two blocks from Music Circus, one of the last of the old fashioned summer stock in a tent companies. My intern year is mainly forgotten due to chronic sleep deprivation, but about nine months into it, I met Steve, who would become my first partner. How to describe Steve? He was a person who provoked strong reactions in other people, both positive and negative. I used to call him a human catalyst because you could put him in any room with others and all sorts of interesting reactions would begin to happen.

About three months after we began dating and were starting to become serious, we went on our first vacation together. Steve was an LA boy who had grown up just outside of Hollywood, and who seemed to know everyone of his generation in the area, having been a property manager in both West Hollywood and Venice Beach. His favorite place was the desert outside of LA and San Diego, especially the Anza Borego area, so we loaded up the truck and headed off to Palm Springs and the desert state parks. I had never spent any time in the desert and the contrast to the lush green of the Pacific Northwest wilderness was somewhat alien to me.

Years later, in 2001, Steve died after several years of serious pulmonary disease. I knew he wanted to be cremated so I decided to do that and to take his ashes to the Anza Borego and scatter them there as he so loved the place. Steve knew he was dying, so he had made pre-need arrangements at the local funeral home. He was on hospice and died at home and the hospice folk called them and they came and took him away that morning.

The next day, I went down to make arrangements for the cremation. “I’m sorry sir, we can’t cremate him” said the unctuous little funeral director behind the desk. “What?” I exclaimed. It turns out I had run into a little quirk in Alabama law. Apparently you cannot authorize your own cremation in the state, it must be done by your legal next of kin. This was many years before gay marriage was even a possibility so I did not count. I looked the gentleman in the eye and said. “His parents are dead, he has no children, he has been estranged from his siblings for decades and I have no contact information for them. What do you want to do about it?” The funeral director hemmed and hawed (and he was an obvious queen so he was sympathetic as to the predicament) and then said “I have an idea”. He got hold of the cut rate crematory in town and arranged for Steve to be transferred there.

So off I went to Cremations-R-Us thinking I was just going to run into the same dilemma. The gentleman there however said “We’ll hold him for three days (wink wink). If no one comes to complain, we’ll cremate him and no one will ask any questions (wink wink).” I was good with that and a few days later, I went down to collect his cremains. As I was going to scatter him, I did not buy the fancy urn and he was in a plastic bin inside of a cardboard box with ‘Cremated Human Remains’ printed on it in large letters.

About a week later, I packed up the car and, rather like I am doing now, headed off on a cross country jaunt to the Anza Borego with Steve resting comfortably in the trunk. I met an old friend of ours from Sacramento in San Diego, and together we went out to the desert where I scattered him so he could dance on the desert wind and be part of the spring bloom. At the last minute, however, I decided to honor his love of genealogy and family by keeping some of him back so that I could take him to the homestead in Eastern Kentucky where the first traceable Spiveys had lived. Back the box went in the trunk, but considerably lighter.

I then headed up the Oregon coast, eventually reaching Seattle where I spent some time with my family. My next planned stop was Alaska. Craig Mollerstuen, my college roommate with a million frequent flyer miles, had given me a ticket to Anchorage so I could come up for a few days. I was due to fly out on September 12, 2001.

Of course, the events of the day before precluded that from happening and, as air travel was uncertain, I decided to head back across country and the ticket was converted to round trip from Chicago. I arrived in Chicago a few days later, left the car at the airport, and had my Alaska interlude. The flight back was a redeye depositing me in Chicago around 6 AM so I collected the car and headed for Detroit as I had made a lunch date with Cindy Naas Nathan and her family in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river.

When I got to the border tunnel, security was on high alert as it was only about a week after 9/11 and they were stopping everyone to check their cars. I pulled into the security line and the nice border guard asked me to please open the trunk. Of course I did it without thinking and the first thing he removes is the box labeled ‘Cremated Human Remains’. Oh boy, do I have to go to the special place where various guards do a major once over on the car. “Why are you importing human remains into Canada?” (I’m not, I’m just passing through). “This box is awfully light. Where’s the rest of them?” (Already scattered). “Where’s the death certificate?” (It hadn’t yet come when I left town). I told my story to several layers of bureaucracy and finally, the head honcho decided I was harmless and let me through.

I was a bit late for lunch after that so I, of course, had to regale Cindy and her family with the reasons why. I had never actually met her before this lunch. We had gotten to know each other over writings at epinions.com and she had been a big fan of the original MNM columns. Lunch was delicious (including Ed Grover’s squash soup) and afterwards I headed towards Toronto which was my next scheduled stop.

As I was heading that direction, I began to worry about Steve in the trunk. If I had had difficulty getting him into Canada, what sort of problems might I have getting him back into the USA where everyone was in a state of collective freak out. Various things occurred to me. I could ditch the original box and put him in a box of Cheez-Its or something, but I had visions of being singled out at the border for a search and some officious type pouring him out by the side of the road. I also discarded disguising him as aquarium gravel. I still hadn’t quite figured it out when I went out to dinner with friends in Toronto. One of them was an antiques dealer and he said “Stop, leave him with me. I’ll handle this”. So Steve remained in Toronto while I continued on my trip.

Several weeks later, after I had returned home, I received a package from Toronto. Steve returned home disguised as an Ebay purchase of a Murano glass fish. The next month, I had one of my usual runs to West Virginia with the mine workers and I took him with me and made a detour to Kentucky and scattered him at the home place.

I found out later that my visit had caused problems for Cindy. One of her young sons, having heard my dining room tale of the border crossing had gone to school the next week and told the teacher. “My mom met this nice man on the internet and he came to our house with a body in the trunk of his car”. She received a very concerned telephone call from school officials and had to explain that she was not, in fact, consorting with axe murderers.

And, as Samuel Pepys says, so to bed.

Dateline Burbank, California –

Tonight’s entry is coming to you live from beautiful downtown Burbank as that’s where I could get the cheapest hotel room with double Hilton points. These kinds of things become important as you age. It was another relatively easy drive. Down 101 from the Bay area and then cut over to I-5 for the boring part of the central valley and then up over Tejon pass and down into the LA basin. It’s a drive I’ve done dozens of times and one I’ve never been very interested in. During the ten years I was in Sacramento with Steve, we did it two or three times a year with his LA roots and friends so we would run down for long weekends fairly routinely.

Had dinner tonight with the two Waynes. Wayne Moore and Wayne McDonald whom I first met more than twenty years ago through Atlantis Events trips, We had dinner together in West Hollywood at a very nice Brazilian place directly across the street from the Abbey which was very definitely in full swing. (If you don’t know what the Abbey in WeHo is, google it). I sat with my back to the action, which is probably highly metaphorical in some way.

Spending a couple of hours in conversation over sangria and chicken carbonara brought up a lot of memories which are the basis of tonight’s story. This one is important because, in retrospect, it was the beginning of a major turning in my life but I didn’t recognize it at the time. This takes place in the fall of 1997. The winds of academic politics that would shortly destroy clinical geriatrics at UC Davis had started to blow and life was uncomfortable, but not yet the full blown disaster that would take place in the next year. Steve and I decided we needed to get out of town for a bit and we had been told about this relatively new gay tour group, Atlantis Events which bought out club med type resorts for the LGBT community. So, ever eager to try something new, we booked week with them at a resort called Blue Bay about an hour and a half north of Manzanillo.

We arrived at the resort on a chartered bus with dozens of gay men (and a few token lesbians) and, as we were a long term couple who were new to the group (and Steve had already made quite an impression with his force of nature personality), we were asked if we would volunteer to be part of the first night’s entertainment which was sort of an adult summer camp ‘lets make the couples look ridiculous on stage and see what good sports they can be’ event. i don’t remember what all we were asked to do. I think there was some dating game type questions, and pop the balloon between various parts of our anatomies and then we were asked a Broadway trivia question, which, of course, I got in nothing flat.

The half of the four couples (including me) who were fastest on that were taken backstage and told we had to do a drag lip synch number and we were given four choices, including Evita singing Don’t Cry For Me Argentina. I immediately grabbed that one as Evita was Steve’s favorite musical and because of the choices, that was the one that had a dramatic moment and something to play. I was made up, put into the wig and a white dress (and looked remarkably like Patti Lupone) and, by luck of the draw, was the last to go. It was my turn, I was shoved out on stage in front of several hundred slightly sloshed gay men and the music started. I hadn’t been on stage in costume since college, fifteen years before, but I knew the words, and I knew how to be sure the number built and how to sell it and so I did.

Wayne Moore found me the next day and introduced himself (he was part of the entertainment staff) and I can still hear him say “Where did that come from?” and he wanted to know what sort of performer I was. I disabused him of the notion, telling him I was a poor medical school professor on holiday. Later in the week, he had a sing along piano bar show which I went to and, having had a few drinks and being a show queen, I sang along with them all. He told me that he could pick my voice out of the crowd and it wasn’t bad. A seed was planted. It wouldn’t come to fruition for about another six years but a piece of my brain awoke telling me telling me that maybe I could get up on stage in a musical and be at least adequate. So in someways, Wayne is one of those responsible for my late life second career and for that I will always be grateful.

I went on a half a dozen more Atlantis weeks with Steve and more again after he died, first by myself, and then with Tommy early in our relationship. At that point, Tommy and I were starting to age out of their demographic and we took our last trip with them in 2005. The resort at Blue Bay remains one of my happy places. It was miles from anything and became a self contained LGBT paradise for a week, looking out over a little bay where the dolphins would frolic in the evening. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such sheer joy as dancing on the upper terrace with a couple of hundred other men celebrating the utter exuberance of being alive as the sun sank into the western sea.

The entertainment staff from that period – Wayne Moore, Shann Carr, Russ King, Bruce McDonald and others became a surrogate family that helped me through the most difficult period of my life to date. They were there when Steve was healthy, when he got sick, when he died, when I was alone, and when I found new love. And we got to hang out on tropical beaches, in Manhattan, in Barcelona, in Rome, and Kiribati. And of course, there’s Rich Campbell who is responsible for it all.

Dateline – Menlo Park, California

Another day with Vickie Rozell in the Bay area. Today was San Francisco day. We started with the drive up the 101 to the city and headed over to Ocean Beach for brunch at the Beach Chalet at the end of Golden Gate Park between the windmills. The building dates from the 1930s and is chock full of WPA murals. We then battled traffic from hell across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County to see Marin Theater Company’s production of Marjorie Prime.

The play, which I knew nothing about going in, fit right into the themes of this trip as it is about the nature of memory, family, the need for companionship, and what is possible for the elderly with incipient dementia in a changing artificial intelligence world. Joy Carlin played the title character and I remember seeing her in all sorts of things at ACT in San Francisco and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the early 80s. 35 years later, she’s still got it.

Back to the city for a brief tour. It hasn’t changed that much in 20 years other than more people and more traffic. We ended up with dinner at a Taiwanese fusion restaurant in the inner Richmond and a screening of Solo: A Star Wars Movie in Japantown.

Tonight’s story brought to you courtesy of Star Wars and Marin County.

The original Star Wars came out in late May of 1977, 41 years ago now for those of you no good at math. It was the end of my freshman year in high school and, in those days, the cineplex had not yet taken over the world so it opened in a single downtown theater in Seatlle, the UA on 6th Avenue and Blanchard. My parents had read about it in the paper and thought it sounded like a good family outing so on the Friday night of opening weekend, they packed the three of us kids up and we headed downtown. We were surprised to find a relatively long line and the 7 PM sold out. My parents, being pragmatic, decided if this many people had showed up, something good must be going on so we bought tickets for the 9 PM, went to dinner and came back. We all loved the movie, even my mother (who I think found echoes of the Saturday matinee serials of her youth in it), went home, went to bed, and woke up the next morning to see the reviews and the beginnings of a cultural juggernaut in the papers and on the TV news. The three stars were actually in Seattle, on the first leg of a publicity tour, and I caught them on a local talk show looking like the proverbial deer in the headlights as it dawned on them that this little movie that wasn’t supposed to amount to much was turning into a phenomenon.

I of course, saw The Empire Strikes Back three years later in the summer of 1980, the summer after I graduated from high school and everyone in my generation eagerly anticipated the third installment of the trilogy. During my first three years of college, I remember many cafeteria conversations, speculating on possible plot points and reveals. (The one of my friends who guessed that the love triangle would be resolved by revealing Luke and Leia to be brother and sister won some plaudits among our circle.

Return of the Jedi was released in late 1983 at the end of my junior year of college. We all wanted to go but it was so popular that finding tickets for that opening weekend was difficult. There was no world wide web yet and you had to get advance tickets through Ticketmaster. After some scrambling, we located some at a cinema in Marin county so a bunch of us pooled our resources, loaded up in two cars, and took the drive that I took today to Marin and back. I remember that our consensus was the film was a bit of a disappointment and not quite the caliber we were expecting but could anything have lived up to the level of anticipation we post adolescents had placed on it? The day we went was also the day I had found out I had been selected to direct the big spring student musical, Anything Goes so I was in a particularly celebratory mood. I had just turned 21. I was fully adult. Anything was possible.

That day was thirty five years ago this week. Cycles and circles. If I could, would I go back and tell that young man anything? Would he listen?

Dateline – Menlo Park, California

Today was a relatively easy driving day. I came down the Sacramento river valley, and made a brief detour into Sacramento proper where I drove past the condo and the house that Steve and I had lived in during our years there. I’ve been gone long enough (nearly twenty years now) that the city now feels alien and I don’t recognize most landmarks instinctively the way I once did. There was barely a twinge of nostalgia at seeing the old house (which I still miss in some ways having been uprooted from it before I was ready) but I miss it from an interior feel, the exterior means nothing. And someone has painted it a rather hideous shade of olive green.

Then it was on to the SF Bay area. I could have done without the hour and a half traffic delay on I-80 between Vacaville and Fairfield but other than that the drive was uneventful and I arrived at my old friend Vickie Rozell‘s house. Vickie and I went to Stanford together back in the day and she now lives between campus and the great wall of Facebook headquarters so we went for a nice walk on campus. The weather was lovely and I was reminded of what a golden time undergrad years were, both in terms of the experience, but also the climate. People were working in the drama department scene shop so we were able to go in and walk the stage of Memorial Auditorium, site of many of my early theatrical experiences. This was followed by a walk through central Palo Alto, where many of the buildings are the same, but the tenants are not, capped by floofy cocktails and dinner at a Burmese restaurant (think Thai/Szechuan/Indian fusion).

Today’s story involves Vickie and my undergraduate roommate Craig Mollerstuen. The three of us became fast friends my sophomore year. It was the same year that Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along crashed and burned on Broadway and we always thought that the trio ‘Old Friends’ was very much our song. Vickie was a couple of years ahead of us and had graduated but, like most Stanford graduates, was loathe to leave the mother ship. She did eventually get a job working for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and was up there for the season. The problem was, the season ended in October and didn’t begin again until February and without income, she couldn’t pay rent during that period.

Craig and I, our senior year, had enough stage carpentry experience that we decided to build a loft for our dorm room. Stanford’s dorms at that point dated mainly from the 40s and 50s and you more or less had a twelve by twelve cube to work with. Another dorm on campus, Toyon, had solved the lack of floor space problems for years with a loft system that was handed down from year to year and we thought we could replicate something like that in our dorm, Florence Moore Hall, or Flo Mo, on the other side of campus. We constructed quite the serviceable loft with two elevated beds at seven feet off the floor and a built in carpet covered couch/cot lower down.

Our dorm that year was a co-ed four year dorm of three floors with about 70 kids and 3 resident assistants. I don’t know what barrel the RAs were scraped out of that year, but we had three of the more clueless and unhelpful ones on campus (I don’t remember any of their names). Because of this, the freshmen were kind of at sea and our room soon became the center of social life on our floor with late night trivial pursuit and the freshmen feeling like they had seniors whom they could talk to.

We knew about Vickie’s essential homelessness from November to February and hit upon a bright idea. She could come spend the time on campus and direct a musical revue and she could stay in our dorm room. And so she moved in, sleeping on the built in couch. We got her an extra key from somewhere and she just became part of dorm life. Most of the girls, who saw her in the bathroom in the morning, thought she was someone who lived at the other end of the hall whom they hadn’t gotten to know yet and the clueless RAs, so wrapped up in themselves, never noticed that the population of the dorm increased by one for three months. (She did go home to her parents over the Christmas break).

When it was time for her to go back to Ashland, Vickie gave me a stuffed vulture. She says that the first thing she would see in the morning was me peering over the edge of my loft bed, looking down as to where I could jump down without landing on her. I still have it.

On the road again…

Dateline – Red Bluff, California

Got up early this morning to begin the trek southward toward the Bay Area and LA as I complete my grand rhomboid tour of the USA. Sad to leave family and friends in the Seattle area but if I am going to be back in time for various Birmingham obligations the first two weeks of June, it had to be done.

It was a very grey Northwest day the whole day down I-5 with the threatened rain finally arriving by the time I hit Southern Oregon. I stopped in Ashland for a lovely dinner with Tony Navarretewhom I had not seen in some years and who has relocated there with his wife from the rigors of Silicon Valley. We caught up on various topics over Thai food and decided we need to do this more than once every couple of decades.

I wanted to get over the Siskiyous before bed so I kept going for a few more hours and stopped in Red Bluff, the first wide spot in the road in the Sacramento River Valley after you descend from the mountains. Being a holiday weekend, motels in more scenic locales had all jacked their prices. I’ll sleep tonight as long as my body feels like it and continue on to the Bay Area in the morning.

Today didn’t bring up any particularly good stories, just lots of memories of driving up and down I-5, something I did fairly regularly for the first 35 years of my life when I assumed I would always be a west coaster. I flashed on 8 year old me packed in the back of the family station wagon as we headed to San Francisco to visit the grandparents. No car seats or seat belts, just the suitcases, a bunch of pillows, and a book. Then there was 18 year old me, full of trepidation, being driven by my father for my first year of college at Stanford with two suitcases of clothes, a bicycle, a typewriter and four boxes of books. Late teens me rodding up and down with various college friends to and from Seattle, especially in Craig Mollerstuen, my college roommates car (I didn’t have a car until I was 23 and in my second year of medical school) – the one with the 8 track deck and the only 8 track tapes we had were Supertramp’s Crime of the Century and Journey’s debut album. Then mid 20s me, finally in my own car, a 79 Ford Fiesta visiting all of my California friends while in med school. 26 year old me loading up everything I owned (now considerably more than 8 years earlier) in a U-Haul and heading with my friend Mark Sandberg (long dead like too many other people I have known) to Sacramento to begin residency and finally 30 something me travelling with Steve in his pickup back and forth from California to visit Washington friends. So many trips, so many milestones, so many familiar place names rolling past.

With the dreary grey weather, the zen of distance driving, and the familiarity of the route, it felt, in some ways, like all of those journeys, some of them major milestones, had collapsed into one and I could really feel like I was all of those very different people for a while. And perhaps that is part of maturity, embracing all of you and accepting it in a coherent whole.

Dateline – Seattle, Washington

Last night in Seattle. I’ll be up early tomorrow and heading for California and will spend the long weekend there before trekking back across the country. I have a wedding on June 2nd I promised to be at so as long as I careen into town by about 4 PM on that date, I think I’m OK.

Today’s theme was back to the 80s. After a farewell visit to mom, who was having another sleepy/grumpy day, I went down to Portage Bay to meet Barry Roitblat for lunch. The restaurant was adjacent to the south end of the U of W campus so I wandered a bit through old stomping grounds as the Department of Oceanography where my father taught for thirty years was there as is the medical school which made the mistake of conferring and MD degree on me in 1988. There are a plethora of new buildings on that end of campus but the med school’s halls look the same. I went and looked at my class composite that’s hanging with all the others of the last fifty years. My photo in it is hideous. Fortunately, I think that’s the only copy.

After lunch, spent a little time with my father working on genealogy puzzles. We’re stuck on my great great grandfather Crandall who does not seem to fit into the Crandall family at all (being an old New England clan, they are well documented over the last four hundred years) but ours are either in the wrong place or are the wrong age to tie into the lineage properly.

Then off to West Seattle to meet friends Teresa Mosteller, Paula Podemski and Scott F. Arend for dinner. We all date back to mid 80s Seattle musical theater together and Paula and Scott still work professionally in the business. Lots of old stories and catching up and really good Mexican food at a restaurant on Alki Beach. The last time I had been to Alki Beach was for Teresa’s wedding 26 years ago. And two years ago, I attended her daughter Emily McDonald‘s wedding and it was her 25th birthday today and she stopped by to say hi as well. The cycles and circles keep manifesting themselves.

The last stop was R and M dessert bar on Capitol Hill for coffee and tres leches cake. Old acquaintance Marc Adams runs it when not working for HeartStrong, his charitable group that assists young LGBT people coming out in conservative christian college environments.

So, I’m trying to think of a good 80s story… When I first came back to Seattle from college in the mid 80s, I started to work for a musical theater company called Evergreen Theater Conservatory which, at that time, was performing on Capitol Hill in an old warehouse space across the street from the old REI building. One of my early shows there was ‘A Chorus Line’. I was ASM/props on the show (And it wasn’t terribly prop heavy) so there wasn’t a lot for me to do. The director, whom I shall not name but long term Seattle theater folk will know who it is) rewrote the end of the show to have Zach cast different dancers than scripted both to surprise the audience and because of the actual talents of his cast. One of the actresses, who was playing a part cast in the script, but cut in this production, was having none of it and called the licensing house leading to cease and desist letters and phone calls. The director fired her first tech and we went into second tech with a hurried replacement. Then we lost the dresser for the quick change so guess who got to do that assignment. Dress and preview were a bit of a nightmare but Thespis worked his usual magic and it all fell into place opening night, as it so often does. Every time I am working on a show and it’s not gelling, I think of Geoffrey Rush in ”Shakespeare in Love” and his blind bumbling certainty that no matter the disaster, all will be well. I wish I could have that kind of faith. Years ago, my mother told me that if I was directing, she never wanted to go to my opening nights. Every time she did, she would look at me and she would swear I was about to sick up on the row in front of me. I took her words to heart and from then on, always invited my parents to the second week

Storytime – The story of the tattoo…

There have been some questions regarding the tattoo and what it means so I’ll tell the story. It all starts with my sister, Jeannie, who is five years younger than I. Jeannie was the wild child of the family and has always marched to her own drummer. She had her challenges in the 80s but by the 90s had gotten her life straightened out, went to art school and began her dual career in restaurant management and as a graphic artist, specializing in restaurant art (murals, menu design, things like that). She spent years working for many of the better restaurants in town (The Palace Kitchen, Volterra, Blue Water Bistro) but got very tired of being on her feet all the time and the punishing hours.

Back in the 90s, when Steve and I were together, she got her first tattoo. Something in body art spoke to her and more rapidly followed. Being an artist herself, she became interested in the process of creating body art and came to understand skin as another medium for creative expression. She started to learn the craft in earnest, worked for herself on an ad hoc basis and eventually gave up the restaurant biz to concentrate on tattooing full time.

When Steve died in 2001, she suggested I get a tattoo as a remembrance. I brushed her off and said I just wasn’t going to do something like that. Then, Tommy and I got together and, over the years when we would visit she suggested that we both get tattoos of some stripe. We never took her up on that offer although, about three years ago, I told her half in jest that if I lost Tommy, I would let her tattoo me with a Steve/Tommy memorial piece, not thinking that I would have to revisit that for some decades.

Of course, Tommy died last month, somewhat unexpectedly, and while I was up here visiting, I was reminded of that promise so I told her to go ahead and dream something up. Both Steve and Tommy had symbols in my mind. Steve’s symbol was Daffy Duck. Those of you who knew him will immediately know why. And he loved Daffy and the whole Loony Tunes gang. Tommy’s symbol was the Teddy Bear. He was given a number of them over the years and the two of us turned them into a formal collection. Every trip or special event, we bought a Teddy Bear so there was never an argument about souvenirs. Many of them ended up as part of the Christmas decor every year.

My sister took my thought of Daffy and a Teddy Bear together and added the musical staff in the shape of a heart behind them. I had had some trepidation behind actually going through with it, but now I think it was the right decision. They are both part of me and always will be and now that has a physical manifestation.

And so the time came to do something I had hitherto left unexplored. Visit my sister for a tattoo. She’d been trying for years. The time had finally come.

Dateline Seattle, Washington –

So I did it, I actually let my sister tattoo me today. I had told her a number of years ago that if I lost Tommy, she could do a Steve/Tommy memorial piece and so the time came for me to undergo the needle. I think it turned out rather well (picture below). I’ll let you all figure out what it has to do with Tommy and Steve…

Not a whole lot else going on today. A visit to mom (another quiet and somewhat grumpy day) and then some shopping for some new clothes and for a piece of Seattle art as a thank you to Melissa who has been caring for the cats in my absence. That was pretty much it until tattoo time.

What did I think of the tattoo experience? Didn’t hurt as much as I thought it might. My sister seems to know what she’s doing and it didn’t take as long as I was afraid of. I don’t know that I will continue to collect them. I don’t plan on losing more husbands.

My arm is aching and I’ve taken ibuprofen and going to bed early so I don’t have a story for tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

Dateline Seattle, Washington –

Today was a low-key day with the theme of family history. I went out to see my mother for a bit this morning, but she was having none of it and didn’t seem terribly interested in engaging at all. I don’t know exactly what my mother’s dementia is, but I suspect a hereditary variant of Pick’s disease as language seemed to be the first major faculty to go. Her mother did not have issues, but died relatively young, at least by today’s standards but then 75 was considered quite elderly. Her actual cause of death was aortic valve disease from old rheumatic fever. Today, they would have plopped a new valve in but back in the 70s she was considered far too old for cardiac surgery. My mother’s grandmother and her great aunts all had the same pattern in old age of a progressive dementia that began with losing the ability to communicate. If it is hereditary, I have a 50/50 chance of carrying the gene as these processes are all autosomal dominant. Not something I’m going to worry about. Can’t do anything about it anyway.

I had lunch with my cousin Jenny, the pseudo-sibling closest to me in age, at a nice place with a terrace overlooking the water. We sat for several hours with our gourmet burgers and iced tea talking over family stories and how we, who seem to be the designated archivists of our generation, need to get all the family papers and history and photos in order for the next generation and the ones to come after that. The power of narrative and the human story keeps coming up this trip. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.

Dinner with my father, sibs, and one of my nieces. More family stories, mainly for my nieces benefit and we had fun poring over photographs that have been tucked away for years. I did break down over dinner and tell my sister, the tattoo artist, that she can tattoo me tomorrow evening. It’s a Tommy/Steve memorial piece and going under the T-shirt.

Story of the evening – based on my conversations with my cousin. My mother’s mother, Alison Jean Maxwell Wood, was born in Dumfries, Scotland to local gentry (her grandfather was a Victorian developer, trained as a mason, he bought up land, built houses, and sold at a profit netting a tidy sum). Her father, trained as a physician was also an amateur historian (some of his books on local history can still be found.) At the turn of the twentieth century, he relocated his young family to Edinburgh to improve his practice and my grandmother grew up there. Her father died when she was in her teens from some sort of pulmonary problem but she was bright and had caught his interest in medicine. She therefore spurned the idea of early marriage, got herself educated and admitted to the University of Edinburgh as a medical student, something that well bred young ladies of her generation just did not do. When she graduated, she became a pediatrician in the Lake District of England, serving the young mothers of the small towns and making her rounds on a motorcycle.

She met my grandfather, several years her junior, who was a medical student at the time, and married him after he finished his training. He then carried her off to his home in South Africa. She took one look at the indolent colonial lifestyle of the 1930s and informed my grandfather that they would stay there over her dead body. The dilemma was solved when my grandfather was offered a position as anatomist and orthopedic surgeon at the University of California medical school (later to become UCSF) and off they sailed for the new world, arriving in 1931. My mother soon followed in 1932 and the rest, as they say, is history. My grandmother never practiced once they emigrated to the US. She threw her energies into helping my grandfather with his career (and as he rose to become the founding chancellor of UCSF she did pretty well at that) but she always remained a quiet, but strong behind the scenes advocate for women in medicine from the 30s through the 60s.

My grandmother died when I was 13 so I never got to know her as an adult. I think we would have gotten on well. For years my mother would tell me, whenever I would pontificate on the health care system, that she could swear she was listening to her mother.

Maybe I come by it honestly.

Dateline, Seattle Washington –

And I finally started to hit my stride and figured out how to tell an interesting story as well as talk about my day.

I did get up in time this morning to go to church and made my way to University Unitarian which is a couple of blocks from my brother’s house in Wedgwood. On my way, I stopped in at Starbucks for my usual caramel macchiato and who should be in front of me in line but my sister-in-law and niece so there was a nice little impromptu visit before I headed off to service. The service this morning was a sort of UU bar mitzvah/coming of age ceremony for the kids finishing middle school and entering high school. As the church is just a few blocks from where I went to middle school in the 70s, there was something sort of full circle about the moment. Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, my home church was celebrating the end of the religious education year and the children’s choir performed the last song Tommy taught them, ‘The Rhythm of Life’ from Sweet Charity but with some more appropriate lyrics for children in a church setting. I did get to see it on video and am sorry I could not have been there in person. I am going to make sure UUCB has the resources to continue children’s music.

Met up with an old high school friend this afternoon and caught up and swapped stories about life and what various classmates have been up to over the years. (Second caramel macchiato of the day…) The rest of the afternoon was devoted to catching up on a legal case I am working on and margaritas. My father makes good ones.

This evening, the whole clan gathered at my sister’s house for dinner and a belated birthday cake for me. The younger generation are all definitely into adolescence and growing into lovely young adults and hung out together while we older ones swapped family stories and bemoaned the general state of Seattle.

Various and sundry stories occurred to me during the day but this is one which I told to my cousin’s wife at dinner as she had never heard of it. This one is very much a Steve story…

Those of you who have known me a while know that the period of roughly 1997-2002 was an absolute disaster for me personally where, through no fault of my own, most of the adult life I had built for myself was destroyed by a lot of factors outside of my control. I had relocated from Seattle to Sacramento in 1988 as I had matched for Internal Medicine residency at UC Davis Medical Center there. It was during my first year there, my internship that I met Steve, who was 14 years my senior and where I ended up coming out and developing, at long last, a successful relationship. I finished residency in 1991, and then signed on for a two year fellowship in geriatric medicine which ended in 1993. I then was immediately signed for faculty and launched into my academic career.

Things went well the first few years but in 1997, all sorts of political undercurrents, way above my pay grade were infiltrating UCD School of Medicine. One thing led to another and weak leadership in geriatrics didn’t help and in the spring of 1998, after the School of Medicine and the Health System went to war with each other over various issues, the clinical geriatrics program got caught in the crossfire and in April, 1998, I was handed, five years into an academic career, a sixty day pink slip as the health system completely eliminated the clinical geriatrics budget which included my salary.

The collapse of the program virtually overnight made all of us who were part of it politically toxic even though we had nothing to do with the issues. After several months of interviewing elsewhere in California, being offered a job, and then having that job rescinded several weeks later, it was clear that something was happening along back channels and that if I wanted to remain employed, I would have to leave the West Coast. I asked Steve where he wanted to go. He told me somewhere warm with a beach so I started looking for a job in Florida.

I spent the summer of 1998 interviewing for Florida jobs (most of which I did not care for) and the recruiter for UAB kept calling me up and saying things like ‘Alabama is really close to Florida’ but the two gay boys from California were not really interested in the heart of Dixie. The recruiter became such a pest, that I finally relented and Steve and I agreed to come to Birmingham to take a look. Neither of us had ever been to Alabama before. We tacked a few days on to the end of a Florida interview trip.

The plane from Miami to Birmingham turned out to be a small commuter jet with broken air conditioning, a surly flight attendant, the smell of incontinent animals, and mail stops in Orlando and Tallahassee. We arrived in Birmingham hot, sweaty and generally grumpy to find a 25 year old recruiter in his little suit with his 19 year old assistant in his little suit all happy to see us and make a good impression. We were having none of it and trudged off to baggage claim. There was the suitcase, but no garment bag… And no garment bag… And no garment bag. And, wait a minute. Here comes the garment bag, which had been caught in some piece of machinery during the journey and shredded ruining all the good clothes for the interview tomorrow.

Steve went ballistic. He marched into the Delta baggage office and had a small psychotic break, throwing ruined suits and dress shirts at the poor clerk while yelling at the top of his lungs while the poor man behind the counter kept writing us checks for their value. The little recruiter and little recruiter assistant blanched and high tailed it out of there having decided that there was no way in hell we’d seriously consider this job. I eventually got Steve into the rental car and down to the Tutwiler hotel where we showered, located the closest J.C. Penney and went off on an emergency run for a blazer and slacks so I would have something to wear the next day other than a dirty T-shirt. When we got back to the hotel and got to bed, I looked at him and he looked at me and we agreed that no matter what else happened on the interview trail, that after today, this would be where we ended up….. and we were right.