O Tempora! O Mores! or Eyeglasses versus Contacts

28/04/2013 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings Tags: contact lenses, Elton John, soft contacts, Trotsky, wire rims 3 Comments

Digging through old photos and studying the changes my face has undergone, I tracked the appearance and often the disappearance of eyeglasses starting at age 15. It was the beginning of the school year in eighth grade, while sitting in the back of the large old classrooms that I realized perhaps it wasn’t ‘normal’ not being able to read the blackboard. A visit to the eye doctor confirmed I was myopic. To demonstrate how radically different the world was in those days, a large downtown Cleveland optician carried only two choices of frames ‘for boys’-all black or grey with clear bottoms. Both were hideous. The two-toned ones seemed more palatable to me.

Those glasses spent more time folded in my pocket than on my face and when worn, were swiftly ditched whenever a kodak came into sight. At home, or in the presence of either parent, they had better be on my face “because we paid good money for those goddamn things so you better wear ‘em”. (I am still curious to know if anyone around in those days was regularly spending BAD money.) There is no picture extant of me in those specs.

After a few years my prescription changed and luckily so did the frames. This time I got the chance to buy the black version which I wore religiously through the end of high school. Not that I felt they were any more chic, I actually had grown to depend on glasses if I chose to see more than three feet ahead of me. Once we graduated and began earning weekly paychecks from our summer jobs, my best bud Billy decided we owed it to ourselves to buy contact lenses. They were the hard plastic version-the only kind available in 1968. I adapted well and they became a part of my daily routine like shaving, stick deodorant or tooth brushing.

Contacts thrust one into a league far superior to the bespectacled masses. It was an elite club which enabled you to engage in conversations about endurance. “I wore my lenses for twenty-two hours yesterday!” or “Last Saturday night we went out drinking and I fell asleep on my cousin’s couch and wore mine until noon on Sunday”. You shared tips on cleaning and storing them. I remember college kids turned me on to using baby shampoo instead of the expensive cleaner the opticians sold. There was also that nasty trick of taking out a smarting lens, popping it into your mouth to clean it with saliva while massaging it between the tip of your tongue and the inside of your lower lip.

One night Freshman year while visiting in the lounge of a girls’ dorm just before curfew (when all the men had to leave) I was practicing this rather unsanitary trick when someone cracked a ridiculously hysterical joke. As I stifled my laugh for fear I’d spit out the lens on the carpet, I inadvertently swallowed it. I flew to the Health Center in minutes, fearing the tiny, pale green plastic dot might certainly lacerate my small intestine. The nurse nonchalantly waved me off saying “Check your stool tomorrow. You’ll pass it with no problem”. I had NO intention of dung inspecting, even if it were my very own. And did she actually expect me to stick the fecal-tainted thing back into one of my eyes? There wasn’t enough baby shampoo in the world to cleanse it back to life. Anyway that was what the $15 a year replacement insurance was all about.

Who would guess that after spending $200 hard-earned dollars on contacts, John Lennon could resurrect wire rim glasses and make them fashionable? These were the very same eyeglasses we made fun of Grampa and Gramma for wearing. By Christmas break I had a pair of my very own. I found the coolest pair that were silver octagon shaped. On campus I was the big nosed guy with curly hair and silver stop sign glasses. They were so hot. They were a fun change, but I didn’t give up on the contacts which I still wore regularly all through university.

When I moved to NYC my contacts began to bother me with all the dirt and grit blowing around the streets. I had to clean my lenses at least once during the daytime and again when I got home if I was going out for the evening. I didn’t dare wear my spare glasses because they were dated and I was not about to look out-of-it. Again a recording artist appeared to save the day: Elton John Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Glasses-huge, honkin’ glasses-became the rage. The bigger, more colorful, the better. People who didn’t even need to were wearing them. They became a fashion statement, not to make one look intellectual, just outrageously cool.

There was this shop on Third Avenue, up the block from Bloomies called The Ultimate Spectacle. I walked by it almost daily on my lunch hour. There I found and fell in love with my very own Elton John’s. They were popsicle red, enormous, rounded-square frames and they cost over a hundred dollar-just the frames, mind you. I was poor, could barely exist on my salary but I had to own them. My rent was late that month, or I didn’t pay the electric, but they became mine. For thirty dollars more I had the lenses tinted rose. I was into this pair of specs for nearly two hundred bucks but I was so very hip.

That year I was going back to Cleveland for Christmas. I’d had the glasses for months, so they had now become just my glasses. Their impact had been somewhat mollified. My Dad always had this quirk about spending money when we were kids. If we told him what we’d paid for something, he railed and claimed “they saw you comin’!”. Mom began the practice of chopping the price in half. If it was ten dollars, she’d admit to spending five. He would still bitch and moan, just not as loudly. When we asked for money to buy anything, he’d give us what he thought it should cost. If we complained that we could never find anything with so little money his stock answer was always “When yer payin’ yer own way, you kin buy whatever the hell you want”.

My folks picked me up at the airport and it was a short ride home. Lunch was ready for us when we got there. In minutes we were around the kitchen table with plates of food before us. My father speaks: “You been home ten minutes. Aren’t ya gonna’ take off yer sun glasses?”. When I informed him that these were, indeed, my eyeglasses, he called out “Jesus Christ” then just stared at them in silent disbelief. I speak: “Remember when you said when I start paying the bills I can buy anything I want? Well I bought these and they cost close to $200″. He was mute. I’d finally won. And I was so chic I couldn’t stand it.

Trends come and go and much sooner and quicker in big cities. The Eltons were old and I still wore them because I couldn’t afford not to. In less than three years they were declasse in Manhattan and my mother had just purchased nearly the identical pair in blue in a mall in Cleveland. My friend Janet gave up a similar pair of big bug frames for the new soft contacts. They were bigger than my original contacts but much cheaper. The creepy part of them was taking them out. Hard lenses popped-out by blinking. These gooey suckers required kind of peeling off your eyeball, as though you were performing corneal surgery every night before bedtime with only your thumb and forefinger.

Fresh from Janet’s inspiration I rushed out and bought into the latest vision craze myself. They had to be ‘boiled’ each time before wearing. Included in the $75 price tag was a plastic case the size of a large shot glass where the lenses soaked in saline solution. I remember the case was just big enough to not fit into my hip-hugger jeans’ front pockets. You bought salt tablets that dissolved in distilled water. Also included was an electric cooker. The case sat in a cradle and this little steamer boiled water which caused them to clean in their salty case each night. The whole process involved with these new lenses was like an experiment from Watch Mr. Wizard. I took to my softies quickly, wearing them all day from the get-go. The only problem was they didn’t correct my particular vision problem as well as glasses could.

Over the years I bought into anything that came along: photo gray glasses, gas permeable contacts, reading glasses that I wore over contacts, reading glasses that I wore on a cord around my neck and switched back and forth all day long with my regular glasses. One thing I’ve never done was wear bifocals, sorry Ben Franklin. I started wearing progressives in my mid-forties and pray I will always be able to afford new ones. Just last summer I invested in my first pair of prescription sunglasses because cataracts have begun growing in both eyes and bright sun can be difficult to deal with.

I’ve had several variations of what I affectionately term Trotsky glasses through the last three decades. The lenses are perfectly round, either metal or plastic or a hybrid of the two. They seem to suit my face well. I even had a pair that were periwinkle blue. When my hair and beard were still salt and pepper, people often commented I looked like Steven Spielberg in them. One could do worse, I suppose. I have saved a London Underground pass from the 80s because the ID photo is such a gas. With my Trotsky’s, full black beard and thick curly hair, today I would be on the Terrorist Watch list of every western country for sure.

Just like so many things in life, my newest glasses are remarkably the same as those simple black ones that took me through high school. These adult-sized frames are a slightly more attenuated version ‘handmade in Germany’. An update which makes them more today is that the outside is black and the inside a faux ivory. Regardless of style, they help these weak, sick, old eyes see better. Between the cost of the frames, the progressive lenses and the special non-glare coating, they cost almost as much as my first car-a then six-year- old Chevy Corvair Monza (red convertible/white vinyl interior) $375. Oh the times! Oh the customs!

The Liebster Award – Discover New Blogs

21/04/2013 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings 5 Comments

This weekend I was notified by fellow blogger of ramblings of a supposed disease free mind (martinpwilson.wordpress.com) that he had nominated GayDinosaurTales for a blogging award. His blog is one I have been reading and following with much pleasure. He is a Canadian currently living in London and a faithful, dedicated blogger who posts regularly. The Liebster Award began in 2010 and has been created to help spread the readership of bloggers and reach more of an audience. There are countless blogs out there which are well-executed, smart, witty, touching, artistic-just waiting to be discovered.

Here are the Liebster Award rules:

Thank the Liebster Blog Presenter who nominated you and link back to their blog.
Post 11 facts about yourself, answer the 11 questions you were asked and create 11 questions for your nominees.
Nominate 11 blogs you feel deserve to be noticed and leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been chosen.
Display the Liebster Award logo
No tag back.

Facts About Me

I get weepy and tear up at the dumbest things.
I still miss smoking cigarettes after quitting more than a dozen years ago. If I were told I had only three months to live, the first thing I’d do after picking myself up off the doctor’s floor would be to buy a carton and continue inhaling.
A two-hour long hot bath is a weekly ritual, even in summer.
I adore anything British.
My life would be empty without the pitter-patter of tiny feet in the house (NOT children but dogs and cats).
I am manic about pretty old dishes. I have china cabinets and cupboards full and still can’t stop buying more.
I despise house-cleaning, yet it is the first thing I do whenever angry or upset about something.
I have eaten pepperoni pizza and a garden salad every Thursday night for over twenty years.
As much as I like to talk, I am better at listening and am always amazed at the extremely private things people share with me.
I am truly awed by people who can draw or paint and feel totally cheated that I can do neither.
As much as I’ve learned to value my private time, I do best partnered.

Answers to the questions from my nominator

If you could be anybody you wanted, who would it be and why? David Sedaris, because I have been following his career since early public radio days and have read his every printed word. He is witty and real and doing exactly what I would have loved to be doing.
What do you enjoy most about blogging and how does it make you feel? I have always written-since I was a kid, but I am lazy and writing often makes me feel lonely. Blogging creates a sense of a deadline that keeps me at it and helps get it done (with some regularity).
What’s your writing ritual, if you have one? I write my drafts on my iPad using Pages and then transfer to WordPress on my iMac. I’m still old school in the fact that I have to print out drafts to proof before posting because I can’t really see it until it’s on paper.
What is your favorite thing in the world to watch on TV/live? One favorite is tough. It would have to be PBS Masterpiece. It’s so well done and so eclectic it affords variety but at the same time guarantees quality.
What was the best moment of your life? That would be having a play I wrote chosen in a New England playwriting competition. I went to the performance directed by someone I knew only from a few phone conversations and acted by a cast of total strangers. I sat and watched a story and characters I had put down on paper come to life before my eyes-amazing!
Which is your favorite picnic/relaxing/refreshing spot? Provincetown, Massachusetts where we enjoy many visits throughout the year in all seasons. It is a place to relax, recharge and just be.
What blogging platform do you use? Did you try any other platforms before deciding on this one? WordPress. I considered a few others, but liked WordPress from the get-go.
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why? Montreal. It’s where I truly feel I belong. (Click on Montreal in my tag cloud.)
What is one thing on your bucket list you absolutely must do before you die? Travel to Slovenia where all four of my grandparents were born.
What thing/person has annoyed you the most? Ignorant, bigoted, conservatives.
What is your prized possession? What makes it special? My gold wedding band I exchanged with David. It represents who we are individually and together.

My nominees are

Robert Patrick
Junk Thief
The Xanax Diary
The Closet Professor
EatGayLove
Malleable Reality
Dadicus Grinch
37, Gay and Single
Purple Gloves
Coffee and Cardigans
Life from A to Z

My questions

If you could invite one person to dinner (living or dead) who would it be and why?
What quirk do you have that sometimes embarrasses you?
What is one thing on your bucket list you must do before you die?
Is there a particular time of day in which you prefer to write?
Where is the place that you feel most at home?
Why do you blog?
If you could be anybody you wanted, who would it be and why?
What one thing you’ve done that you will leave behind after you exit this world are you proudest of?
Who is your blogging idol?
When you are not blogging, what do you most enjoy doing?
Have you already, or do you plan to publish your work someday?

Thanks again, Martin and good blogging to all.

A Posting in the Style of Nora Ephron (my hero)

20/03/2013 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings Tags: America the Beautiful Calendar, commitment ceremony, gay marriage, gay relationships, Ogunquit, smoking cigarettes, weekly allowance 5 Comments

When I was five years old, I couldn’t wait to be in double digits so I could reap the same benefits as my older brother. He got a twenty-five-cent a week allowance. I wanted in on the cash too. I had my own needs. Once I arrived at ten, I only wanted to be sixteen. Not so I could get a learner’s permit, but so I could smoke cigarettes. My parents decided to allow my brother to smoke when he turned sixteen. He’d been smoking down by the railroad tracks since thirteen. If it applied to him, family law deemed it would hold for me too.

At ten I didn’t want to smoke to be like my older brother. I never wanted to be anything like him. Smoking was cool because there was this young couple down the street, unlike any people in our neighborhood. They were in their late twenties and their names were Ray and Jeanne. He didn’t work in a factory like 99% of the men on our block. Ray worked in an office. He wore suits and ties everyday. On Sundays he didn’t wear a suit like the other 99% did because Ray and Jeanne didn’t go to any church.

They owned a dark green MG convertible. It was the first and only foreign car I knew until high school. Jeanne drove the car too. Not many ladies on our street knew how to drive. Why should they? They all had husbands to drive them if they needed to leave the house. Jeanne was pregnant and didn’t go to work. Sitting on a small screened in patio, she would wait for Ray to come home each night. Once he arrived she would go inside and fix drinks. I would visit with this young couple after school which is how I knew the routine. Jeanne would often ‘fix me a coke’ in a glass glass which I would sip like they sipped their cocktails. I would watch them sip and smoke their filtered cigarettes. How cool these two were. They were just like real Americans on TV.

My parents didn’t smoke cigarettes. They were too busy being ethnic and second generation. I was in third grade before I learned that I was American and not a Slovenian. What a shock. They had drummed into my head since conception, that I was 100% Slovenian-on both sides. All four grandparents came here from the old country. It was their mantra. Once I understood the difference between nationality and heritage, I yearned to be a WASP. I began to identify with pilgrim hats and collars and buckled shoes. I never asked them before they moved away, (once Ray and Jeanne had their baby), but I was certain their ancestors had all come over on the Mayflower.

After reaching sixteen all I looked forward to was leaving home/leaving town. I despised them both with all my being. To accomplish this I would go away to college. I chose Kent State, too far to commute from home. While there, enjoying some independence for the first time, I turned twenty-one. Yet another age-milestone was achieved. I was now an adult responsible for myself. My first major adult decision: move to New York City to become an actor. This manuever provided my total freedom.

In my early twenties I played extremely hard. I drank moderately, smoked weed nearly daily and practiced homosexuality clumsily. By my late twenties I still drank moderately, still smoked weed but had graduated to hedonism. I dated as though it were a full-time occupation. In between boyfriends I found time to experiment in all the sex venues Manhattan had to offer in the 1970s. It was exhilarating, beyond fun, at times frightening and often exhausting. It was also dangerous on many levels. Those of us sharing in this wild ride had no idea of the possible consequences our sexual abandon might bring.

Entering my thirties I was already coupled with my partner Alejandro. We’d set up housekeeping together. My third decade was spent discovering the bigger world. We traveled European capitals and Caribbean beaches. New York City became my jumping-off point. I learned to taste and cook new cuisines. It’s hard to imagine living in a world without Indian food, couscous and guacamole. During this period I changed jobs and careers like fashion changes seasons. I learned much about the man I am by sharing my life with another man. Nearly three years of psychotherapy was a productive source of self realization too.

As a kid, our insurance man always gave us one of those America the Beautiful Calendars every year. You know, the pretty picture ones with the cheesy shots of the Grand Canyon and Painted Desert. It hung in our basement rec room. The only month I was drawn to in each year’s edition was either September or October. It was orange and gold leaves strewn across some quaint New England town common. This is exactly the place where I turned forty, in Alejandro’s eight room Victorian on the common. I opened a toy shop in the front of the house and played store. It was great having my own business, but even better when it closed. Working for someone else is wonderful because they have to pay you every week, whether it was a good week or not.

From this same calendar page locale I finally graduated from college with a BA and began work on my master’s. Barely into my forties, a relationship of nearly thirteen years came to a halting end. I found myself starting over again in a studio in an old apartment building in a city in central Massachusetts. It was not easy being newly middle-aged and living what is typically a young person’s life. I made only a few stupid choices. I managed to enjoy some quality alone time in the process.

I feathered a nest, purchasing a tiny bungalow to call my own. David found me by the time I’d worked out most of the kinks in the house and my psyche. We had our commitment ceremony after six years together. A year later the Commonwealth of Massachusetts made it possible to marry so we did that too. For the life of me I cannot remember what year we first exchanged our gold bands on the beach in Ogunquit, Maine. They are the same rings we used for the succeeding ceremonies. We each buried our surviving parent in the same year, 1999, sharing official orphandom together. Our losses brought us closer.

Now I have reached ‘the sixth floor’, as a colleague of mine refers to it. Being sixty-something begs the weary question: “would you ever want to go back to some specific age?”. Five would be great, just for the naps. Wouldn’t it be incredible if your boss demanded you lie down for an hour each afternoon, then had a yummy snack ready when you woke up? I would not want to be twenty-anything again. Even the great times were painful on some level. My thirties were the most exciting. You’re old enough to appreciate everything that comes your way; you’re wise enough to cull friendships to discern which are worth keeping. The forties were final exams. You are tested on what you’ve learned so far and if you’re ready to go on to final jeopardy. And the fifties prepare you to let go of things and to practice saying goodbye.

Without having gone through the sixties, (as opposed to the 60s which I have gone through-decades ago), I’ve no idea what to anticipate. I can only assume it will be a slightly diminished version, a mish-mash conglomeration of the last few decades. Whatever time comes after, I look forward to as many episodes as I can grab ahold of.

* * *The picture is from my photo portfolio taken in NYC by IanAnderson. I always said it would be on the dust jacket of my first book. Of course I would’ve had to have been published by age twenty-six for the picture to be relevant.

Kennedy to Kent State: a retrospective of our lives

16/12/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings Tags: JFK, Kent State, Nixon 2 Comments

My visit to this exhibit coincided with the final week of the Obama/Romney race to the White House – a week in which nearly all rational behavior totally abandoned me. I had become crazed, uncertain of the outcome and fearing the worst, that come January, we would all be pledging allegiance to the United States of $$meric$$. At times I felt the poison coursing through my veins might permanently taint my personality. There was so much vitriol being spewed in my path that I had grown afraid to speak the words Democrat, liberal, Obama or Elizabeth Warren out loud for fear of Romniprisal. I’d declared my own moratorium on phoning family back in Ohio because they had branded me a socialist for my support of my president. I needed a break from the present to go back and savor my past.

You see, it was precisely 1960 in Mrs. Nelson’s fifth grade class and our social studies unit centered around the presidential campaign and election, that I began to understand our political system. It clarified for my ten-year-old mind what that old man who had been living in the White House playing golf and having heart attacks actually was supposed to be doing. I now could differentiate between senators and congressman. Being Catholic, my nun in weekly catechism class was campaigning for Kennedy, of course, instructing us to demand our parents vote for him. This was the same lady who constantly hammered home the concept that “when” (not if) “the communists invade Cleveland and threaten to kill our mothers and fathers, we still must vow that Jesus is our Savior”. Many of my protestant friends in fifth grade who were pro Nixon said that if Kennedy won, our money would be changed to read: In Pope We Hope. I didn’t believe them for a second. Nevertheless I could not understand how anyone would NOT vote for Kennedy. He was so vibrantly handsome and smart with a pretty wife. Nixon was ugly and never smiled and his wife looked very sad standing next to him in her frumpy mink coat.

From Kennedy to Kent State has been beautifully mounted with press photos from the Worcester Art Museum’s own collection. Even though the title infers 1960 to 1970, it actually begins a bit earlier with a wonderful black and white of an ample bosomed Sophia Loren sitting at a small table with Jayne Mansfield, checking out her ginormous breasts. In those days it was referred to as decolletage, (Zsa Zsa had a ton of it too). Today it is prosaically simply ‘tits’. A youngish mother and her adolescent daughter were in front of me as we appreciated this photo. “Who’s Sophia Low-ren?”, the daughter asked. “Oh you know her”, mom answered, “she’s an old Italian movie star, but I have no idea who this Jayne Mansfield is!”. I wanted to butt in and tell them she was Mariska Hargitay’s mommy, but bit my tongue, realizing how very long ago 1957 was in realtime.

There are some wonderful Kennedy and Nixon campaign photos and inaguration shots of a stunning JFK juxtaposed with paleolithic Dwight D. Eisenhower. Standing at the podium delivering that über historic address, the corresponding quotation on the wall reads …that the torch has been passed to a new generation… Rather than tugging at my heartstrings as it always has before, suddenly my reverie was interrupted by the fear of the pending election and the possibility of Mitt Romney behind the great seal of the President of the United States’ podium, seizing power and my paraphrased version would read ‘and the torch has been dropped’ or worse, ‘extinguished’. My thoughts nearly tarnished the remainder of the exhibit for me. But iconic images of civil rights demonstrations, the Beatles, Vietnam and my own Kent State snapped me back into a 60s zone. It managed to vividly recreate my own life from fifth grade to college sophomore. I left in a semi-euphoric state, yet the gnawing of this pending election twisted my stomach with each bumper sticker and lawn sign that came into view on my ride home from the museum.

So many times in my lifetime the joking response to a possible terrible outlook for America was an exodus to Canada. Not only did this seem unfunny to me at this point, the prospect of what might happen to our country surpassed frightening. Mitt Romney had been governor in my state which I tolerated because I had to, but President – that was beyond my scope of acceptability. The wonderment that transpired on election night was amazing and elevated my spirits. My negativism was replaced with a euphoria that carried me up from the doldrums of red versus blue, right/left, liberal/conservative. The torch had neither been dropped nor extinguished, but passed to yet another new generation. This aging, greying Kennedy’s Child stood among them, applauding and relishing the sweet smell of their victory which was all of ours to appreciate.

Montreal Musings – or – Songeries de Montreal

30/09/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings Tags: AMTRAK Montrealer, Beaudry Metro Station, Gare Centrale, Le BBV, Le Drugstore, Montreal, Resto Pub Saint-Andre, Simons 2 Comments

While driving through the still very green Green Mountains of Vermont earlier this month, I was trying to calculate how many trips I have made to Montreal in the past thirty-odd years. I can only guesstimate it to be near three dozen. David and I have made the trip once a year during the sixteen years we have shared together, some years twice. I began visiting in 1980 while I lived in NYC on the advice of a friend who had spent over a month traveling throughout eastern Canada the year before. From that very first time I fell passionately in love with the city and unlike so many interests in my life that have waned with time, my love has never faltered. As we passed the six-hour car ride, I wondered what it was that kept me still so excited about a place that by now should feel somewhat passe. Was it just the fact that I mourn my youth, and keep returning simply hoping to recapture it?

For many years my trip was alone and via the Montrealer, the night train I would take from Penn Station in Manhattan. It left about 8:00 p.m. and meandered through New York and Vermont, arriving the following morning right after breakfast. I was living at the time with my partner Alejandro, who frequently traveled to Europe on business. Often while he was away for longer trips, I would take off north on my own. From the very first visit I felt a real sense of belonging, walking through Montreal’s village. That was unusual in those New York City days, since I considered myself a dyed-in-the-wool Manhattanite whose heart belonged one hundred per cent to the Big Apple.

The trip itself, although lengthy, was when the vacation began for me. The train was always full or near full, regardless of the season and most people on it boarded the cars in a party mood. There was a Club Car where you could smoke and smoke I did in those days, as did probably 75% of the passengers. It was standing room only until the wee hours and there was a piano player and a pretty well-stocked bar. A Snack Car that served actually GOOD food was always busy as well. Normally I didn’t make it back to my seat until after 1:00 a.m.

Trains always have had this lullaby effect on me, so I could get comfy enough in my seat to get in a few very good hours of sleep before we crossed the border just beyond St. Albans, Vermont. Canadian custom agents would board the train and go from person to person, checking for proof of citizenship. Once they left there was still plenty of time to splash water on your face and head off to get some breakfast and grab a morning cigarette or two (always my favorite nicotine fix – that first one of the day with coffee). Once I even splurged and got a sleeper car which was quite a lark. There’s something bizarre about being bare assed and recumbent in a tiny bed watching the countryside clickity-clacking by in the darkness while nestled in your own little private pod. The train pulled into Montreal’s Gare Centrale late morning – a really stupendous place with good food, drink and shopping just beyond the platform. Alas, the train is gone now. I was able to ride it the last time (from Massachusetts) in the early 1990s.

My vacation then and now still centers around Rue Sainte Catherine, the main drag which runs east/west through the downtown. SIMONS, a large clothing store for both men and women is a relatively new addition to Montreal for me. Over the past six or seven years it has become the first stop the morning after our arrival. Although most of the clothes are targeting the hip, young market, still I manage to dig through and find great things suitable for people my age and at reasonable prices for the style and quality. Winter wear is the best, since Montrealers manage to be chic and trendy even in the most brutal discontenting winter. I was there for New Years 1993 and I cannot recall ever being so frozen. Something about the wind and the St. Lawrence that makes zero unlike anything I have ever had the misfortune to weather.

As we walk further east along my favorite street, the big city shopping area begins transitioning into a quainter, more neighborhoody feeling. The main campus of UQAM University of Quebec at Montreal, is pierced through the middle by Ste. Catherine Street. There are great little restaurants all around offering international fair, many of them student-affordable. Of course there are also lots of neat little bookshops and stores selling school supplies, notebooks and the like. A block or so ahead and you reach le Village.

The Beaudry Metro heralds your arrival into the gay center of the city with its rainbow painted pillars on the entrance of the station outside. I had read a bit about its history years ago and knew that it was the early 1980s, those same years I was discovering Montreal myself, when bars and other gay businesses began to move east into the Latin Quarter to form the Village. It was on our most recent trip that I learned from a charming man named Francois, who had moved to the Paris of North America as a young man, that actually it had begun even earlier in 1976 when powers that be decided to clean up that part of the city for international guests when hosting the Olympic Games and pushed it all eastward.

Of course not every shop in the twelve or so blocks that officially comprise ‘Rainbowland’ are gay establishments, but all are welcoming with a relaxed and open flair. We have adopted Resto Pub Saint-Andre recently into our itinerary for a light lunch and glass of house sangria. There is a sort of 80s feel to the place that has its own certain charm. Tables in the window offer a wonderful view of the parade of foot traffic up and down Saint Catherine. The wait staff there is young and interestingly representative of a large portion of the population which speaks English haltingly and is far more comfortable speaking their native French. It reminds me that even though we enjoy all the comforts of the good ole’ USA, we still are in another country.

David and I love slot machines, so no trip north would be complete without visiting the Casino Montreal, originally built for Expo ’67 – a combination of both the French and Quebec Pavilions. For those who enjoy the sport of gambling, I would have to confess we do not find the slots particularly “loose”, but it’s still an enjoyable segment of each visit. You can also play slots in many of the local bars. We have taken to enjoying our first few hours after arriving to town at a place called Le Drugstore, drinking some wonderful Canadian draft beer while playing the slots there. This place has always been a sprawling bar covering several levels, suffering name changes along the way. One of the few times I was there unattached (as a single man) it held the distinction of being the sight of a real first for me. This dashing and handsome man walked my way and we caught each other’s eye and ended up spending an hour or so chatting, getting to know one another a bit. He was very interested in getting into my pants – to be truly prosaic – and I was similarly intrigued in him. I remember his name was Alain and approximately my same age, forty-one. He invited me to go back to his place close by, smiled provocatively, kissed me gently and excused himself to use the loo before we left on foot. He never returned. Ignorantly I waited for about ten minutes then went downstairs to the john to see if he was all right. He was nowhere to be found and I had been duped. I wasn’t as hurt as I was pissed. I smile a wise little grin each time I return and step through the doorway, remembering Alain, my Montreal heart-breaker.

This month’s trip we stayed again at our favorite Bed and Breakfast du Village, luckily getting one of the last available rooms. It is quite popular these days, enjoying high ratings on TripAdvisor and loads of satisfied repeat visitors. It was fun having breakfast with a table full of folks from all over the globe. Philippe and Nicolas are charming hosts and now have added to their family with a beautiful French Spaniel named Sloobi who will melt your heart. It is a comfortable, smart-looking house, immaculate and impeccably run.

Reading and rereading this posting, I can answer the question I posed at the onset. No, it is not about recapturing my youth that causes me to return to my Montreal. It is the comfort I feel walking those now comfortable streets. The unique style of its people and the places I enjoy going to there that make me want to return. The special flavor that IS Montreal beckons me again and again and I am powerless to not heed the call.

Gramma’s Journey

10/09/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in Childhood, Musings Tags: America, Cleveland, Ellis Island, Krska Vas, S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, Slovenia, tenant farmer, The Old Country, Yugoslavia 2 Comments

This is a great story, but it is not my story. My maternal grandmother shared it with me when I was very young, in hopes of explaining what and where The Old Country was that she and Grampa always talked about. With time and more often my own persistent cajoling, she retold her story, each rendition focusing more on a different portion, giving up remembered new details decades later. Gramma was a quiet lady, not a flamboyant or theatrical personality like my mother. Whenever we were alone, always a treasured time for me, I would work her into a story-telling mood. Her heartfelt delivery was even and deliberate, as though she were reciting from memory a history text she had studied for a class long before.

The place where they lived, Slovenia, had been erased from the maps (and the globe in my older brother’s bedroom) after the First World War, reduced to just the northern most part of Yugoslavia. This was a confusing concept for even a precocious six-year-old to fathom. For me it existed in the handful of photographs carefully mailed in letters Gramma would receive a few times each year in those pale blue tissue paper envelopes covered with airplanes and pretty stamps. It was a place we had sent some of my clothes I’d outgrown for cousins of distant cousins I had never met, poorer even than we were. The Old Country was where Gramma and Grampa grew up without cars or refrigerators, sidewalks or radios – an almost make-believe place which utterly fascinated me.

She was born in a town called Krska Vas, second child of tenant farmers who raised pigs and chickens and grew beets, cabbage and potatoes. Her mother was responsible for running and working the farm with her children’s aid, as Gramma’s father was a cobbler who traveled from village to village, making boots and shoes and training apprentices. When Gramma was twelve she was apprenticed to a seamstress in the next village, learning to sew and in return, caring for the woman’s children as payment. She had a real aptitude for the trade and soon was able to tackle complicated dressmaking for the master craftswoman. What she dreamed about while she sewed, away from her home and family, was becoming a nun. Her father’s uncle was a priest and her mother had been raised in a convent. The only thing Gramma loved more than going to church was receiving Holy Communion, so she attended daily Mass regularly.

Within a year’s time, everything in her world would change. Her father left for America with her older sister. They would find jobs and save to send enough money to bring them all to Cleveland. Gramma returned home to help her mother with the farm and to care for her four younger brothers. Franck required special help because he had always been sickly. An already difficult life became more burdensome for Gramma and her mother without her father and big sister. They struggled day-to-day, working outside to keep the farm going and inside raising four boys under the age of twelve.

The year 1915 proves to be momentous. In January, brother Franck dies at age nine and is buried in the church cemetery with only a tiny wooden cross to mark his grave. The fighting that had begun when Emperor Franz Josef declared war on Serbia the year before, is now being waged all across Europe. Life is not only hard, life is now dangerous as well. After more than three years of working in Cleveland, the money has arrived to book passage for America. A passport for a 16-year-old Gramma and another for her mother which includes the names of her three sons aged 14, 6 and 4 are issued in October. They are scheduled to leave from Rotterdam on November 27th. Because they will be traveling steerage, they question what they should bring with them. My Great Grandfather instructs them to wear all the clothes they can and to bring the pots and pans and household goods wrapped within the feather beds.

Gramma always described the journey as over three weeks long, which as a child I interpreted to be spent entirely onboard the ship. As I grew older, it seemed she might be embellishing the time frame. We family members who have since researched the trip nearly one hundred years later realize it was no exaggeration whatsoever. They left their village by ox cart for the capital city, fifty miles away, at some point switching to a faster horse-drawn version. These were people who knew only a near-Medieval existence of muddy, narrow paths and day long journeys on foot to a neighboring village. They boarded a train in Ljubljana for Vienna, a distance of some two hundred fifty miles. Along the way they ate bread and soup once a day – the cheapest and most nourishing they could afford. And everywhere they went, each dragged a round-ball bundle of possessions. Gramma had a satchel as well which contained comb and hair brush, scissors, the family’s rosaries and prayer books and a very few precious photographs.

While changing trains in Vienna for Rotterdam, they were awed by the size of the city and the number of churches and huge buildings her brothers could count from the train’s windows. It was another seven hundred miles to the port where their ship would be waiting and three more days. They were guests of the Red Cross the night before the ship sailed and had to climb many stone steps to enter the building – something that none of them had ever done before. Red Cross provided breakfast the following morning consisting of huge bowls of hot cereal with cream and raisins. They were elated as raisins were a treat reserved only for holidays and special occasions.

Once on board the ship, deep within its bowels, they were relieved of dragging their bundles, but the compartment was dark and confining with no privacy for anyone. In this space Gramma and her mother would pass the next twelve days with three rambunctious little boys. The North Atlantic can be very rough, especially in late November and when there is a war raging in it, the crossing is even more daunting. Each time the ship neared a passing vessel whether it be military or otherwise, they stopped and sent up their flags, denoting they were a neutral ship carrying passengers. It added time to their trip, yet kept them safe.

But one day, about midway in the voyage, a German U-boat surfaced alongside them. Their flags raised, the Germans still signaled they were coming aboard. Once on the ship they grilled the crew and demanded everyone leave their cabins, easily intimidating the already nervous crowd. They took bags of the mail bound for the U.S. and dumped them overboard. At this point in her story, my Gramma would tearfully reflect how frightened they were as they watched thousands of envelopes floating in the waves. She sobbed at how cruel the sailors were - so destructive, hurting innocent families by destroying precious news from home. Once the U-boat disappeared below the sea, her mother instructed them to go back to their compartment where they knelt and prayed the rosary together. She begged God out loud for protection, questioning what had her husband been thinking when he decided she should be responsible for putting her own children in so much danger.

The final morning on the S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, Gramma remembers seeing bits of debris, branches and leaves floating in the ship’s wake and then gulls and seabirds flying above. Soon they could make out something other than sea and sky in the horizon. By the afternoon they passed the Statue of Liberty and they retreated below the last time to pray and gather their things. She told me about entering Ellis Island and the enormous staircase they had to descend. Tired of lugging their feather bed loads, the boys got the idea to roll them down the stairs. Of course the weight of the bundles found their own momentum and they bounced and bowled through the crowd, pushing and knocking over people in their way. My Gramma would smile and recall that her mother’s first duty in the USA was to slap the living hell out of those three boys, reprimanding them mid-staircase, even before they had been officially welcomed into the country.

Boarding the train to Cleveland she could finally allow herself to become excited about this new home and the thought of seeing again, after nearly four years, her beloved father and older sister. As they got off the train, Gramma saw a strange man standing with them. Once she’d kissed her father, he nervously introduced her to his co-worker from the foundry, a man he had somewhat promised her to, sight unseen – the man who would, in less than a year’s time, become her husband.

After their three children were grown and married and most of us grandchildren were born, Gramma and Grampa sailed to Europe, visiting their homeland in 1957. Even all those years later they had to travel by oxen to arrive at Grampa’s village. I remember the picture of them in the primitive wooden-wheeled cart, taken in front of his family home, still standing after two world wars. They stayed for three weeks and although her village was less than two days journey, Grampa did not want to visit, since none of her family had remained there. It was not until years after he died, in 1980, that Gramma flew to Slovenia and returned to Krska Vas, an eighty-year-old woman. She was driven into town by car. There were highways now and electricity and telephones and color television. She was amazed at the modernity, but also at how much of her little village was recognizably still the same.

The morning of her arrival there was much activity centered around her precious parish church. It seemed as though there was some sort of celebration beginning. There was a television crew from Ljubljana and visitors from everywhere. They learned it was the 75th anniversary of the blessing of the bells in the church tower. Gramma remembered the day as a small but impressionable five-year-old, recalling with clarity the huge cart rolling into town carrying the massive bronze bells. Even the Bishop had visited their town to bless them before they were installed. In minutes a reporter was holding a microphone to her mouth, recording her recollections for State TV. It was only a small moment in a month-long visit that warmed her often throughout her final years of life.

She visited the church cemetery, hoping to locate the grave of her little brother Franck who she had lost years before. She contacted the pastor and while he searched old parish records inside the church office, she wandered through the church yard, walking and trying to remember the spot where he had been laid to rest. The priest came out with the old record book and confirmed she was standing only a few feet from the actual gravesite. She placed flowers on the spot and knelt and prayed over him. It had taken her sixty-four years, but she was back home.

On June 25, 1991, nearly a year after we buried Gramma, Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. I celebrated for my grandparents, that their homeland once again had its own identity. I was proud for its people but more so for the memory of my Gramma. I began this by saying it was not my story, but rather her story. Actually this is the story of us all, unless your family name happens to be Eagle or Bear or Cloud. And it doesn’t matter if your family came here as steerage, in a wagon from Canada, a truck from Mexico, on the Mayflower or a 747. Each had its own hardships. Most trips were difficult and made at a high cost one way or another. Every voyage held a certain danger, a little trepidation, some perhaps, even intrigue. Tears were surely shed before, during or after the journey. There were those who did not stay, returning to the safety of the world they had known from birth. But the ones who did – the Grammas and Grampas of this country – gave us the gift that came of their great sacrifice.

The Corn Stand Caper

07/08/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in College 1968-1972, Junior/Senior High School, Musings, NYC 1972-1983, The Nineteen-nineties Tags: AIDS, best buddy, class reunions, college jobs, friendship, gay relationships, summer jobs 2 Comments

That schmaltzy poem about ‘friend for a season/friend for a reason’ has made its way into nearly everyone’s email inbox, but the truth is you are extremely fortunate if you have made even one friend for life. The high school clique that had formed in my sophomore year, due to a formidable yet ephemeral young drama teacher, hung together even after we graduated and left West Buttfok. Deb Mae remained home our first three years of college. Billy, my closest compatriot attended a small state school in southern Ohio. Selma and Eddy went to Kent State with me, although with twenty thousand students it was easy to lose hometown acquaintances, so we tended to lead separate lives at university.

Deb Mae had been Debbie until The Group went to see Bonnie and Clyde our senior year of high school. The two of us were so taken by the film, we went back the following day and sat through two consecutive showings (remember when you could spend the day in the movies for the price of one admission?). We adopted these truly lame southern accents, so in order to make her a more believable belle, I christened her Deb Mae and it stuck. The two of us had solidified a friendship the first year of high school, long before Mr. Allen came and worked his magic. She was new to the school, having gone through eight years of Catholic indoctrination. We often walked home together, living just a few blocks apart. Debbie’s mom died when she was eight, leaving her father with three children – another daughter, five and a baby boy, three. The day her mother passed away, her father returned from the hospital, took her aside and announced “your mother is dead, so you’ll have to be the mommy now”. She assumed the role seamlessly, cooking, cleaning, raising her siblings and keeping everything in line, including a sometimes unruly Dad. She did a remarkable job, seldom complaining about her lot.

I would stop in regularly on our way home. She’d make a pot of coffee for me (she only drank Tab) and we would smoke cigarettes and kibbutz as Debbie cooked supper. We realized a few months into our friendship that we had been in the same kindergarten class. It was easy to remember the only kindergartener in the entire school with pierced ears. She was of Hungarian descent on both sides, and a blonde beauty to rival any of the Gabor sisters. Wonderfully female, curvy and attractively big-busted Deb Mae possessed the sweetest, softest voice and a loving heart.

Eddy and Selma I had known since sixth grade chorus. Eddy had always had this ‘thing’ for Selma and they related to one another like a feisty, sparing couple who’d been married for at least thirty years. She was tall and lanky with long, straight hair and bangs – the perfect hippie. He played piano and loved the Motown sound long before we even knew there was a name for that kind of music. Eddy needed to hear a tune on the radio only two or three times before he started banging it out on the keys of the nearest piano. He was our accompanist whenever we wanted to sing, possessing a biting sense of humor that made us roar. A Polish American, he bore the brunt of all those horrible pollack jokes which were the mania of the time.

Billy was my nemesis turned counterpart. Sitting in the desk directly in front of me in homeroom from seventh grade on, I hated him because he was so heinously obnoxious. He was loud and silly and so horribly fey it made me uncomfortable to be in his presence. I was acutely aware of my own feminine propensities, doing everything I could to keep them at bay. Here was this flaming fairy mocking himself in a desperate attempt to gain attention anyway he could. I either ignored him or ridiculed him until Mr. Allen cast us in productions and our characters were forced to play off one another. In time we grew to become brothers. I’ve had no closer friend in this world than my best buddy Billy.

The first two summers everyone came home from college. Returning to the womb to work and save for the following year, no sooner would we be back when those group dynamics would kick in and we were tenth-graders again. Eddy would be bossing everyone around trying to get us to do whatever he selfishly wanted. Billy, ever the idea man with a relentless drive to see it through, choreographed our lives as a group, scheduling each minute and chaufering us in his family’s pale turquoise Rambler station wagon. Deb Mae was our heart and our den mother. Selma was the misfit in this group of misfits. She was there because Mr. Allen had put her there and neither Selma nor any of us ever challenged his decision. She was one of those sad souls who meanders through life with a dark cloud hovering overhead. Me, I was the mediator, the peacemaker who smoothed the ruffled feathers which regularly came from five people foolishly attempting to live life as a single entity.

We’d started our own West Buttfok Summer Theatre after graduating from high school, so at night those first two summers we rehearsed for a show like we always had. Even though we all loved theatre, it was more of an excuse to not be apart. As if this extreme togetherness wasn’t already more than unhealthy, and our summer jobs were not enough, Billy devised a scheme to make some easy money on weekends. We would open a corn stand – yes, a CORN stand.

Billy’s Lebanese grandfather had done this for years. He lived on the last rural route in West Buttfok where a handful of old family farms still existed, although none were in operation. Some of the families kept large vegetable gardens, selling tomatoes, peppers and the like on the roadside when there was an abundance they couldn’t consume themselves. Being business savvy, his grandfather had hooked up with a farmer about thirty miles away who grew sweet corn and he bought it weekly to sell with his homegrown vegetables. He told customers he grew it all out back in his fields.

Billy figured we could do even better, being college students working to pay our way. Selma’s folks lived on that same road but at the opposite end from Grandpa. Our only problem was her back yard was small, which was evident from the road. The story we would tell was we grew the corn, but “on our farm in Aurora”, (exactly where the corn did come from – so we wouldn’t really be lying). Selma’s parents thought our scheme was brilliant and loved helping our enterprise.

The first weekend we had one hundred dozen ears delivered. At the crack of dawn Saturday morning the farmer’s truck dropped off these oversized burlap bags filled with more corn than any of us could ever have imagined. Concerned we surely had been cheated, Eddy charmed the girls into helping him count each bag full. There was a substantial overage. We paid 35 cents per dozen for which Grandfather-up-the-road charged a dollar. Being new, we opted for 75 cents a dozen. We sold out early that first day, more than doubling our money, disappointed there was nothing left to sell on Sunday. The next week we increased the order to two hundred dozen. Greedy Eddy longed for more, so he talked Billy into visiting a wholesale produce market in Cleveland at five a.m. and buying tomatoes and cucumbers. Again, there wasn’t a veggie left by Sunday afternoon.

Billy and I realized that with blonde, buxom Deb Mae and long-haired, hippie chick Selma kept front and center, cars were stopping, looking and buying. Eddy worried that the girls might give incorrect change, cutting into the profits, while Billy and I feared that his obnoxious personality might frighten customers away. In the end, we all hovered around the corn stand the better part of the weekend. Between our theatre background, group dynamic and the delicious Silver Queen corn, we were moving lots of produce and having a great time together doing it. We planned on running through the last weekend in August. We’d built up quite a following our first month and regular customers were bringing us new ones.

Early in August Billy got a phone call from the Corn Man. They had over picked their fields and would not be able to supply us for the coming weekend. Billy and Eddy were devastated. The girls and I said no big deal, we’ll just sell the vegetables from the market. Billy worried that no one would stop without the corn piled high on the side of the road and promised he’d figure something out. Friday night, when typically we all took in a movie, he announced the solution. He contacted a neighboring farmer near our supplier who could give us as much corn as we needed, but….we would have to pick it ourselves. “How hard could picking corn be?” I can still hear the pollack saying.

The plan was for the three guys to drive separate cars in a caravan before dawn, pick enough corn to fill the first car and return to Selma’s so the girls could open. We would drive the other cars back when they were sufficiently corn-laden. Deb Mae and Selma would go to the wholesale market to buy the produce. The most remarkable news was the corn would cost only 15 cents a dozen since we were doing the real work. We could all hear the cash register which was lodged somewhere in Eddy’s chest going”ka-ching”.

My bedroom was pitch black when Billy and Eddy frightened me awake with their cackling taunts to “git up boy, we gottsa’ pick us some corn!”. As we reached the farm, the sun was finally visible and the owner gave his five-minute lesson in corn picking. The three of us had dressed for perhaps a backyard barbecue, but certainly not to manuever our way through the tall August growth. There was barely enough room to work your way down the endlessly long rows. We were shooing off pesky bugs who were busy biting as the early sun was toasting us. The long green leaves on the stalks had razor-sharp edges which microscopically sliced our arms and legs and there was no avoiding them as we reached into the plants to pull off each ear. We were giddy and sweaty and scratched and achy but we were picking with a frenzy, filling up burlap bagfuls of corn, desperate to take advantage of the 15 cent price point. Eddy drove the first car back, eager to check on the girls to see how they fared at the market. He was uneasy leaving this task to anyone other than himself.

We spent another several hours picking, but by noon the overhead August sun was unbearable and we still had to fill the cars with so many bags full of corn we barely had room to drive. Unloading the corn back at Selma’s, we guesstimated we’d picked way over two hundred dozen – much more than we paid for or had ever sold in one weekend. The girls bought two crates of beautiful Chiquita brand cantaloupes at an incredible price along with the customary tomatoes and cukes.

As I came out front to sit with the girls, I saw an obviously heated and animated lady hanging out of her car window, gesticulating with a cantaloupe under Deb Mae’s nose. Our Deb was so gentle she would never defend herself so as I ran to her rescue the woman leaned out further. “Is there a problem, Ma’am?” I asked approaching. She slowly began “I was just asking your college friend here how you grew these beautiful cantaloupes with a built-in Chiquita label? Special seeds, maybe?”. This was a huge oops. Well-intentioned Deb Mae had been telling people the cantaloupes were grown on “our farm in Aurora”, without checking for the colorful label stuck to each melon. Thankfully there were no other customers around as I attempted to make Deb Mae look innocent, however this lady felt she’d been duped. We gave her all her money back, plus a half-dozen ears of corn with our apologies. Luckily my corn-picking battered body served as proof to her that we did grow the corn and she apologized to us profusely once Billy and Eddy joined in Deb’s defense, similarly bruised and bleeding. “You kids are really hardworking. Your parents should be so proud of you!” and off she drove.

We chastised the girls for not peeling the labels off the cantaloupes and we waited in fear that someone else might show up and cause a similar scene. No one else did complain, but at some point that afternoon, we agreed this weekend should be the swan song for our corn stand. We’d made an incredible amount of money, deciding it best to quit while we were far ahead.

Epilogue

Billy left for acting school in London midway through his junior year of college. Deb Mae moved to Houston with an aunt and uncle who were ex military to find a husband. Her mission was accomplished quickly but she was divorced after only three or four years. I never even met the guy. There she remained and ended up with a Texas drawl which sounded remarkably like her bad Bonnie Parker imitation. I moved to NYC and Eddie landed a public relations job in San Francisco after we left Kent State. Selma began teaching and moved to Florida a few years later, eventually marrying and having a son. We’d managed to get out of West Buttfok as we had always dreamed, just all to separate parts of the world. The years began to pass quickly. Around Christmastime we would make our way back to the scene of the crime, but never all of us at the same time. We didn’t see Billy for years while he was in Europe, but he corresponded regularly. Before the end of the 70s he came back to the states and moved to L.A. It looked as though time and distance were wreaking havoc on The Group.

It probably shouldn’t have seemed anything but obvious that inevitably all three of us guys came out around the same time and later settled into long-term relationships. I never met Eddy’s partner, but Billy and I shared several wonderful visits both on the West and East Coasts with significant others in tow and alone. The piece de resistance was 1988 and our West Buttfok twenty year class reunion which I’d vowed since graduation day I would never attend. The group came together, deciding we would meet in spite of the high school we all loved to hate. It was a three-day weekend I treasure to this day. We celebrated our five years of breathing as one – laughing, crying, holding on to our youth for dear life. Each of us left our spouses in their respective homes so as not to bore them and to give us the freedom to be our silly tenth grade selves. We were all thirty-eight, grown up and responsible, each of us stunning in our own way, yet malleable enough to sneak back in time to our golden callow days. It was seventy-two hours of unabashed bliss in which we relived our life moment by moment, memory to memory.

It was there, on the last evening before boarding planes in all directions back to real lives that Billy told me his partner of nearly ten years was HIV positive. Billy wasn’t being tested yet, because he was healthy and needed to begin his role as caregiver. His companion was gone in a little over a year. Deb Mae was visiting Eddy in San Francisco and the two went to the memorial service. Eddy announced shortly after that, he too was positive. It was something I had almost grown accustomed to hearing about in our community in those days, but when it came so dangerously close the hurt was all the deeper. A few years later Eddy was hospitalized for the last time with pneumonia. I called and spoke with his sister who stood vigil over him and she held the phone as I told him to keep fighting, knowing from the feeble, broken voice he had long-lost the battle. He was buried in a small cemetery in West Buttfok. All these things came so swiftly together I cannot say exactly when Billy told us he also had fallen prey to the insidious plague. THIS was more than I could bear.

Luckily he was able to get the cocktail and though he battled a laundry list of incredibly gruesome diseases, he lived and worked and traveled and we corresponded and spoke regularly for several wonderful years. He spent a few days in Boston while in a period of exceptionally good health and we had a fabulous visit, even though it was obvious there was a third party coming between us that we neither wished to name or face. My best bud Billy died in 1998, six days short of his forty-eighth birthday. He requested that I speak at his memorial service in L.A. but I knew he was always the stronger of the two of us and that I could never weather the pain of such an ordeal. I wrote a piece entitled A BEST FRIEND and his sister delivered it for me at his celebration. His passing was one of those slap-across-the-face realities that causes you to sit up and marvel at the gift we so take for granted.

So it was Deb Mae and me. Selma had drifted from us soon after the reunion, cutting off all communication. Deb learned she was divorced and battling an auto immune disease which made it difficult to teach and raise a son on her own. Deb Mae and I made it a point to chat together monthly. She held a top position for a huge corporate travel company – imagine – the girl Eddy doubted could make proper change for 75 cents worth of corn. She never remarried but had a long-term relationship with a guy who could not commit for over a dozen years. She and I now met in West Buttfok every other year during Christmas. And as wonderful as it was to be together, as much as we laughed, reminiscing about The Group, our bad jokes, pranks and fights, I sensed we both were thinking the same thing: who would it be? Who would bury whom? She had written on the back of her senior picture “If you die before me, I’ll kill you”. She often said it to me in jest, until the deaths began and it ceased to be funny.

One of those years we didn’t get together for Christmas, we also hadn’t touched base until a few months afterwards. When I finally called, she was short with me, asking why I was calling. I was totally taken off-guard. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I asked my friend of a million years. She assumed someone from her family had called to tell me the news she couldn’t bring herself to share with me. The virus she thought she’d been battling all winter was actually stage four lung cancer. It looked bad. No, it was grim. She had an appointment with a new oncologist who was doing a drug study. She would try anything, she told me sobbing. I began literally shaking in fear of her words, making those horrible grimaces you can when invisible on the other end of the phone, finally breaking down to cry along with her. THIS JUST WAS NOT FAIR, GOD DAMN IT.

In six months the tumors had shrunk remarkably and she was feeling good. She could laugh again and make plans. We met in West Buttfok and spent a weekend visiting and she got to meet David. We had begun planning our committment ceremony for the next spring, and she was excited to finally get to see Provincetown and to celebrate with us. Other than a wig, she seemed to be her old self. Everyone was hopeful.

Then there were these spots on a brain scan and a whole new treatment regime began. It nose-dived from there, but she still talked about what she was going to wear and what we would do in Cape Cod after the ceremony. In a few short months she ended up in the hospital. Once again I found myself making another deathbed call, talking with yet another sister. The cancer had spread rapidly throughout the brain. She was losing motor functions and the ability to speak, but she could still hear. Her sister held the receiver for her. What could I say to the girl I met in kindergarten, the woman I adored like a favorite sister? All I managed to get out was “I love you, Deb”, over and over. Palpable emotions and this awful moment in time had caused me to lose the ability to speak myself. She babbled some unintelligible sounds into the receiver. Her sister assured me her face had registered she knew it was me and that she understood. She died the following afternoon, April 2, 2003, a month before our committment ceremony.

So it was me. At fifty-three I was the last one. What were the statistical chances of my surviving them all I wondered? Who cares. What a sense of loneliness I was feeling! I longed to know if there was some purpose in being the last one. Was I saved because there was something left undone for me to do, or was this all some grand cosmic joke? Though I had decades ago shed the mantle of The Group to take on my own persona, there was still a comfort in remembering the safety we had shared in our cocoon. It shielded us as outcasts in a place where none of us felt we’d ever belonged. And when I needed some protection to not be so alone, I found I’d been left instead the lone custodian of memories for people and stories and laughter that had now fallen silent.

The Afternoon The QUEEN Met Me

03/06/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings, NYC 1972-1983 Tags: 1976, Bicentennial, Bloomingdales', Elizabeth II, Her Royal Highness, interior decorator, the Queen 1 Comment

I love the QUEEN – the real one – Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, aka My Majesty. That’s how I refer to her, because Her Majesty just sounds too detached, while My Majesty shows a much greater affinity I feel. I did not always revere her as I do now, though to say I have always been an anglophile is truly understatement. It all began as a young reader in the sixth grade, stumbling upon a richly illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol in our school library. I saw the original black and white film for the first time that same Christmas on TV. I was haunted by the story and it was sealed. Forevermore I was totally enthralled by anything remotely British. Of course I assumed that London and its environs were unchanged from my original Dickensian picture: dark alleys filled with filthy, streetwise urchins living life in the sewage-filled gutters versus the posh, hoity-toity upper crust who ate with sterling silver on the finest of china and spoke eloquently clipped English. I was clever enough to realize they had progressed well beyond the England of Shakespeare but not too far from that of Victoria.

Imagine my chagrin not two years later upon first seeing The Beatles and film footage of their Liverpugnian roots. It was a shock to the naively conceived image of my Britain. At that same point I figured out exactly who this Elizabeth II was. I could not believe their QUEEN, with the glorious history of ancestors whose royal bums had warmed the very same throne, could end up looking like this dowdy, over-accessorized plain jane. And what the hell was with that pocket-book, I wondered. If she felt she needed to schlep it with her all over the bloody world, couldn’t she find some lady in waiting to inconspicuously carry it for her, rather than hanging the goddamn thing over her arm like a huge wet sock?

Despite the QUEEN, as an English major my first two years at University, my taste for British literature added even more fire to the flame of love. I often lost myself in a faux existence that allowed me to live a fantasy life on the other side of the pond, taking on the persona of a Brit who was a pastiche of all the Alan Bates characters I enjoyed in films. I did everything but sport a fake BBC accent because I was so smitten. Oh how I wished I’d been born there instead of here! It must have been due to some errant stork who’d somehow got his signals crossed or a bit of topsy-turvy from a long-lost Gilbert and Sullivan plot.

So, it’s the summer of 1976 and I am living not in London, but rather in Manhattan in my first solo apartment and working in a small custom furniture business, while New York City is celebrating the bicentennial. Most other American cities might have made the celebration into a big church bazaar or carnival, but NYC was planning an “event”. The Tall Ships is still etched in my memory as one of the many incredible episodes that made up the ‘salute to American show’ we witnessed that very Red-White-and-Blue July.

My job at the furniture company was one of the coolest on my very varied resume. In a manner of speaking, I ran the entire circus. I wrote the sales, managed both the small showroom and office, paid the bills, did customer service, payroll and liaised with the owner/boss in his factory across the river in Long Island City. Because I was this one man band, along with a ton of responsibility I enjoyed an equal amount of freedom. I had to open the showroom every morning on time and rarely took an hour for lunch, closing for fifteen minutes to run to the bank or post office and grab something quickly to eat at my desk in between duties. But I could make and take personal phone calls galore, my friends freely visited to hang out, I had access to petty cash for perks (as long as they were modest) and I could and would be as nasty or nastier than some of the acutely obnoxious clients I was often forced to deal with.

Plus there was NO dress code. Our clients were interior designers – drek-o-rators – as those of us on my side of the business affectionately called them. They were an artsy sort, so that nearly anything and everything could be deemed suitable attire. I would safely estimate the design business in the city at that time was 60% female/40% male. Of those men, easily 75% were gay. I was a part of an industry that allowed me total freedom to be my own unedited self and I took full liberty. I dressed as I would to go to any respectable gay bar in town – casual queer. Since it was summer and the city can be brutally hot, it meant jeans (denim or white), penny loafers with no socks and a cute summer shirt. I hated short-sleeved shirts because my upper arms were willowy skinny. I took to wearing these gauzy Indian cotton shirts that were semi-sheer, very tight-fitting with three quarter length sleeves. They were embroidered in the same color thread as the shirt and came in pastel colors. I even had a bright red one which was one of my favorites that I was wearing to death with the white jeans these bicentennial days.

Everywhere you turned it seemed, the city was awash in patriotica and before it was all over many of us feared we would drown from overkill. The buildup was so grand how could they ever finish without blowing up the entire island of Manhattan as a grande finale? I remember taking a beginning jazz dance class at that same time in a studio in the west village after work. It met twice a week for an hour, taught by this wonderfully silly and very campy little gay boy, mid-twenties like myself. We were working on this routine to BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR. I will never forget him or the song; the choreography I never remembered even then. At the end of each hour, when we would run the whole number adding that evening’s new segment, after positioning the needle onto the 45, he would leap back to join us shouting “Everybody – Moms and Dads and kiddies too, let’s put on over very best Betty Ford bicentennial feet and five-six-seven-eight!

It is lunchtime on Friday July 9th and I am walking up Third Avenue on my way to a favorite deli for a sandwich. As I pass Bloomingdale’s, there are two cops setting up those grey wooden police barricades along the sidewalk at the back door on 59th Street. I am wondering if there is some robbery in progress with hostages taken inside or something similarly horrible. One of the cops tells me “da Queen a’ England is comin’ ta Bloomies in a coupla’ hours”. I chuckle thinking he is jesting. A lone lady in her forties is standing near with a small Union Jack flag on a stick and in the loveliest of perfectly formed English, assures me the police are correct. She is wearing a summer frock in an insipid pastel shade. The dress seems terribly out-of-place and what makes it so conspicuous is that it’s not only ugly but also something that she would have worn to a fancy day time party perhaps ten years earlier. I approach her and thank her for her news update in my best American-speak and once she sees she has ahold of my ear, she senses I am hers for the afternoon.

We introduce ourselves. All these years later I cannot be expected to remember her name, but just as it should have been, it was suitably perfect for her and that tired party dress so I shall call her Lydia. She is one of those persons who has the uncanny ability to maintain a nearly frozen demeanour to her entire body, while her eyes and facial movements seem overly animated and dance about as she gushes with excitement and joie de vivre. Lydia patiently explains to me, as though I were from another galaxy, that The QUEEN will be coming in a few hours to shop in Bloomingdale’s, walking through the store with her husband, Prince Philip, then exiting through the doors we are standing in front of to get into her waiting car to go to another engagement. Lydia is chatting me up as though The QUEEN is either her sister or a childhood friend and I, her only crony in town. She tells me that they will be closing off Lexington Avenue for twenty blocks in order to reverse its normal downtown direction to uptown, “since Her Majesty can only get out of her car from the right side”. She assumes this is something I understand the reason for and I am not admitting my ignorance of this elusive fact.

When she finally gives me a chance to contribute to the conversation, I say some terribly ignorant Yankee-ism like “I adore anything British”. She asks how many times have I visited the UK on holiday and I am loath to admit I have never left the US, yet I know I daren’t lie because she will surely quiz me. She begins to tell me about when she left her home in England to come here, and it is clear I need to be getting back to the office long before she will possibly be able to finish her story. Oh, but it’s Friday, I rationalize to myself and in The City most people are already on their way to their weekend plans. I continue listening intently to my charming gal pal Lydia, telling me her saga.

She begins to explain the odd-looking jewelry she has fastened to the top of her bodice. She is a nurse and proudly displays the pin which The QUEEN herself had given her upon graduation from nursing school. I am totally taken aback to think that Elizabeth II, Monarch of the Empire, has time to pin nurses on their uniform lapels. But then Lydia certainly wouldn’t make something like this up, I know. “That was the first time I saw Her Majesty”, she proudly reminisces as she reverently caresses her medal. I learn that the same QUEEN came to visit a new hospital in Lydia’s hometown and did a walkabout where she got to see her again. That is why she is so excited about this afternoon, because she is hoping Her Majesty will do a walkabout outside Bloomies. “Do you really think she might?” I question. Suddenly, at the thought of seeing a celeb in the streets of New York, I instantly become interested in the Pocketbook Toter myself.

I quickly run across Third Avenue to a phone booth in the middle of the block and call my boss at the factory. I tell him that the QUEEN is coming to Bloomies. After several minutes’ explanation of which queen I’m referring to, he asks me “So what?”. In a mixture of frustration and elation I answer “So I am NOT reopening the showroom this afternoon”. I hang up and return to our prime location directly behind the police rail which is slowly beginning to fill with curious assorted bystanders. It is a mixture of crusty, seasoned New Yorkers and polyester-clad bicentennial tourists still celebrating. We learn from the growing crowd that we have at least an hour’s wait before The QUEEN’s car even arrives at the main entrance on Lexington Avenue. No one seems to know just how long she will be shopping inside the store either. Common sense tells me she will not be shopping at all; The QUEEN does not go to stores, stores come to The QUEEN.

I begin to worry that the two of us may get squeezed out of our places. She assures me we hold the best possible location to see Her, because as they come out the door, the entourage will have to move onto the sidewalk directly in front of us in order to board her car for the trip uptown. The police barricades will hold us if pushing and shoving should ensue. Lydia is growing more excited in anticipation of a possible third meeting with HRH and her fervor becomes infectious, even though my opinion of the monarch Herself is still rather questionable. I have not once let on to my new dear friend that I have always felt Her Majesty was a bit of a frump.

Loads of people stop to ask what’s going on and now Lydia and I take turns, acting almost like tour guides fielding questions. I try discouraging folks, fearing how a crowd may impact my view and Lydia’s heart is unselfishly thinking about her QUEEN and having the best welcoming turnout possible. I gingerly advise her that here in the U.S. we are not very devoted to any monarchy, especially the one which we have been celebrating our long fought independence from. The good-natured Brit just smiles a bad toothy smile and looks happily forward to the royal visit. Soon someone spots the arrival of her car on the next block and we know in only minutes Elizabeth II will be entering the building.

Less than half an hour later her car has rounded the corner and is parked behind us. Police are coming from every direction and positioning themselves at the door, on the corners and a few are neatening up the crowd behind us, getting them out of the middle of the street, even though it too is now closed to traffic. I survey those behind me, guessing several hundred have gathered in approximately four rows behind us. Still Lydia and I hold firmly to our prime spot. There is visible stirring behind the glass doors and in seconds they are pushed open and held by what I guess to be store security. The first few out the doors are unrecognizable faces to me as they step out of the way and onto the pavement. From behind the door now emerges a turbaned woman and a tall blond man. “There she IS!”, squeals a jubilant Lydia. “Ohhhh, doesn’t she luke lovely!”, she coos. At this moment the bright afternoon sun catches the royal couples’ faces like a spot light as they move away from the building’s shadows. I audibly gasp at the sight. These two people are breathtakingly stunning.

Their Royal Highnesses are no more than twelve feet away from us. They are shaking hands with the store big wigs and smiling at the crowd. The QUEEN is wearing a beautiful silk dress of light lime green with small cream polka dots and matching turban hat of the same fabric. Pearls are her jewelry. Her shoes and handbag are a matching lime green. Her skin is nearly the same creamy white as her polka dots. Philip is blond and lightly tanned, walking behind her, straight and tall. They are the handsomest couple I have ever seen. Lydia begins to frantically wave her small Union Jack flag about her head calling, (not shouting) “Yawh Majesty, Yawh Majesty!”. The QUEEN begins to walk towards the car and the crowd. She has these blue eyes. People are reaching out to her over the wooden rail, extending their hands. She moves forward beaming a wonderfully bright smile, acknowledging the crowd but avoiding any contact. Now the distance between Her and us is cut in half. The QUEEN spies the flag and Lydia waves all the more feverishly.

SHE gently moves towards Lydia and once before her, Lydia falls into a deep curtsey. Elizabeth II reaches her gloved hand to shake Lydia’s and my friend beams, touching her nurses’ pin, telling Her Majesty politely when and where she had given this to her and I begin to swoon. The QUEEN is speaking with my friend, Lydia about the hospital in her town now. She is so close I can smell her perfume. Her eyes are this incredible blue color, like lapis with tiny lights behind them to make them almost glow. I’ve never seen eyes like this before. I become excited, so in awe of this woman who stands only inches from me, as close as Lydia is to me. Overcome by her presence, by this incredible moment in time and the magic which seems to be taking place, I begin to clap. Not clap as in applause, but clap like a baby does with great pauses in between each singular slap of my hands coming together. I fill the spaces in between the claps with a shout “the queen”. If this silly behaviour of mine isn’t enough, I add to the mix a jump. And with each succeeding CLAP – “the queen” – JUMP I kangaroo bounce higher and higher on my best Betty Ford bicentennial feet. In short, I am making a total ass of myself before the Queen of the Commonwealth, having totally lost all control. With one short, quick look SHE walks past me, her husband following behind on their way to the waiting car, swiftly putting an end to my silly dance.

I cannot say that Her Majesty leered at me, or glared at me or gave me a dirty look. But I do know she looked directly at me, this silly, skinny poof and her bright smile changed into a somewhat disapproving frown for an instant, which caused me to cease my foolishness mid-clap. But I had caused those majestic, incredible, intensely blue eyes to make contact with mine. For a second in her lifetime she recognized my existence in her world and that was all I needed. I was besotted with her. At that very moment she had become My Majesty.

My Majesty aboard The Britannia in 1971 and a side of her we never really have seen.

Everything I Know About ESL—- I Learned From My Grampa

20/05/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in Childhood, Musings Tags: ESL, folklore, POC Beer, Slovenia, story-telling 5 Comments

For both my father and mother, English was their second language and so my generation is the first to speak it as our mother tongue. This is a fact I’d known since childhood, but never really understood until I began teaching English as a Second Language at a private university in Central Massachusetts. Like any job, it has its humdrum days and times when I wish I were anywhere else but in front of a classroom, yet the experience is still most days personally gratifying with a sense that I am doing something that actually affects people’s lives for the better. One cannot ask for more than that from an occupation.

All four of my grandparents individually emigrated from Slovenia, then a part of Austria-Hungary, just prior to or during the First World War. Both grandfathers served in the army of Emperor Franz Joseph I. My paternal grandfather apparently spent his mandatory two-year military gig trying to find ways to get out of his conscription and failed woefully. My mother’s dad, “Ata” (father in Slovenian-which even Gramma called him) found his army experience to be some of the best years of his life. His huge repertoire of stories was replete with anecdotes of his time as a young soldier just prior to the outbreak of war in Europe. It was my Grampa, (what we kids called him), who hooked me with his art for storytelling, captivating my childhood and silently mantling me with the task of family chronicler with his passing.

Gramma began to learn English from my mom once she started school. She insisted my six-year-old mother bring her text books home each night and teach Gramma what the nuns had taught her earlier that day. As my mother often recounted, it was an incredible learning system because while Gramma gained the basics of the language, my mother was reviewing what she was just beginning to absorb herself. Grampa, on the other hand, had no time for such games. He was working in a malleable iron factory ten-plus hours a day. He learned English from his foreman, his supervisor and coworkers, the bus driver and the factory cafeteria workers. In Cleveland in the 1920s that meant Germans, Russians, Poles, Italians, Serbs, Croats and Hungarians and all the other Eastern Europeans who had flocked to this thriving industrial city for work and a new life. His new language skills were hardly skills at all, but rather basic survival language that served him well till the end of his days at eighty-six. He spoke what language teachers term fossilized English.

He conjugated the verb to be as follows:

I be guud/You be guud/She be guud/We be guud/Dey be guud.

As an example, his present tense would be structured “Today I be verry guud” (the “r” is rolled in Slovenian). The past tense he formed “Yesterrday I no be so guud”. For the future, however, he did adopt the use of gonna’ “Tomorrrow we gonna’ be verry guud”. Even as a youngster, I didn’t find Grampa’s English peculiar or unintelligible. I understood him perfectly, convoluted grammar and heavy Slavic accent included. His unique form of English seemed perfectly logical to me. It was his heartfelt stories about the old country that captivated me and I hung onto his every imperfect syllable to hear him recount each and every one of them.

My mother didn’t drive until well into her forties, so my father chauffeured her to all the evening Adult Ed classes she taught for years, dragging my little brother and me around with him. Two nights a week she had classes on the east side, so we waited for her at Gramma and Grampa’s house. My dad adored his father-in-law, admitting he was closer to him than his own father. I am certain the feeling was mutual. I loved spending time with Gramma because she was Earth Mother to me, the most loving and generous-with-her-affection woman ever to come into my life.

Time around the kitchen table listening to Grampa, however, was the ultimate treat and I never tired of his colorful tales. His props were the Raleigh Plain End cigarettes he smoked, punctuating his sentences with long, dramatic drags and very vocal exhales and P.O.C. Beer (Pride Of Cleveland) guzzling the last third of a bottle in transition from one story to the next. He chain-smoked those Raleighs for years, amassing tons of coupons until, in the early 1960s, suddenly switching to Kents (with the micronite filters). I remember they cost 21 cents because often, mid-story, he would send me to the corner store with a quarter for another pack and with the four cents change I bought a small bag of loose penny candy, running back quickly so as not to miss his all-important ending. There were dozens and dozens of stories over my lifetime with Grampa, seemingly never repeating himself. Yet some were my special favorites that I would beg to be retold and he performed those requests with extra vitality, not wanting to disappoint.

One of those treasured tales was the day a four-year-old Grampa was told by his father that he had to say goodbye to his dying mother. There were two older brothers as well, but the central character was Grampa. His mother had been ailing for days and now the end was in sight. He was old enough to understand what illness was, but certainly had no idea about the concept of death. He was instructed to kiss her goodbye. His father and brothers were crying, fully grasping what was coming to pass. Grampa was only fixated on his mother’s head lying against her pillow. He knew that underneath that pillow lay a box of chocolates she kept hidden, given only as the most special of treats – doled out sparingly. They were incredibly poor tenant farmers struggling to produce enough to fill their own stomachs once they had provided the required compensation to the landlord from whom they leased their tiny farm.

After leaving his kiss on her cheek, he waited for the others, taking his cues from them. When they saw that she had passed, his father and brothers consoled each other. Grampa took the moment to quickly slide the chocolate box from under the pillow and hurry outside where he could hide and gorge himself on every one of the remaining candies in his mother’s carefully guarded arsenal. He remembered knowing it was very wrong to eat them all himself, but the temptation was too great to pass up. He spent the entire night sick to his stomach. The others thought his vomiting was due to anxiety and fear, after all, the little boy had lost his mom. He always ended the story by saying: “Becoz my mooderr, she die, my fahderr, he merrry agen and den I haf mooderr-een-lauw. I be shem for wat I do to my poorr mooderr, dead een herr bed, steeling da kendee frram underr dee peelow. I steel be shem forr myself – eben too-day”. He would lift his eyeglasses to dry the fresh tears from underneath his eyes. Each time he told that story, I would tear up myself for the poor little four-year-old Grampa I saw there before me.

But the all-time favorite story for me, I came to realize as an adult, was what must have been purely Slovenian folklore. Grampa explained that this had happened to his father, Michael, years before my Grampa was born, when his father was a single young man. It was harvest time for the wheat and the neighboring farmers would help each other in the difficult and painstaking task. Normally they traveled by oxen, but because of the distance, their neighbor picked them up before dawn with a horse cart. My Great Grampa was excited about this job because of the large village they would pass through, but more so because of the speed of the horses.

The farm was enormous compared to other neighbors and the job of the wheat harvest even greater. Many men worked the entire day in the sun, cutting and baling to finish before the rain. It was well after sundown when they were done, stopping because it had grown too dark to see in the fields anymore. Exhausted, Michael and his father climbed back into the horse cart for the journey home. There was only a lantern next to the driver to light their way, so they had to travel more slowly than they had that morning. They passed through the large village, but could see very little in the heavy darkness.

As they entered into the open road in the direction of their farm, they soon came upon a crossroads where they would have to continue straight ahead towards home. The horses began to slow as they neared this rural intersection – something was in the middle of the road. The driver said it was a large black cat that was frightening the two horses. They began to buck and as they did, the cart lurched back and forth so that Great Grampa Michael and Great-Great Grampa had to hold on tightly to not be thrown out and trampled to death by the spooked horses. To gain control the driver used his whip on the oversized feline that refused to budge from her spot. According to Grampa, he did so by hitting underhanded with the whip in an upward motion. As the whip struck, “dee somma-nah-beetch cot, she grow up eento a ‘supernitza’ (Slovenian for witch).

At this point in the tale, I was peeing myself in fearful anticipation, as I watched him mime the whipping technique with his sinewy, strong-arm. His face grimaced in terror as he dramatically over enunciated the word for witch and he was frightened all over again as he terrorized me with the story his father had handed down to him. Usually my own father would interject here, his doubt concerning the veracity of the tale. Grampa always confirmed, shaking a crooked, arthritic finger near my father’s face “Frrank, wat I be telling you ees wat my fahderr, he tell me. End my fahderr, he nay-berr say no ting wat ees not dee trroot”. Then he would turn to me, still sitting mesmerized in total awe, wanting so to believe this really had happened. Cautioning me with that same gnarled finger “Wain you arre trraveling in dee rroad at night and you git to dee crross – eef you see bleck cot – nay-berr heet dee cot up. All-ways heet de cot down. Adderrwise, you gonna hef dee supernitza and she gonna’ try git YOU too!”.

The odd part of the story was, he never did explain how they dealt with the midnight witch in the road, yet that never was much of a concern to me. And I knew from his face and the implicit tone of his voice, he truly believed every word his father had imparted to him. Grampa had left his father, oldest brother and step mother in Slovenia when he came to ‘Amerrika’ at twenty-four and never saw them again. He took a trip back only once, in 1956 when he was sixty-eight years old and they were all long gone. As much as he loved this country and all the benefits he gained from immigrating here, he could never let go or tire of his beloved Slovenia. He spoke passionately about it every time we were together around his kitchen table where he held court. Although he was sort of a tough, man’s man, misogynistic, shot -and -a-beer kind of a guy, he openly wept when the family gathered together and my mom led the singing of old folk songs, his booming basso voice occasionally joining in on a particular favorite of his.

Once I left for college, those evenings of tales became few and far between. He didn’t often take to story-telling when we were all together with the entire extended family to celebrate the holidays. I marvel today at his ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand, especially having to do it with a language always foreign to him. I mourn all that I missed by never understanding his mother tongue and how much richer and more enthralling his tales must have been in the original. And I measure my own ability, even with the obvious language edge over him, and I pale in his shadow.

A DIY Forced Hiatus

31/03/2012 By gaydinosaurtales in Musings 2 Comments

About six weeks ago, David and I were cleaning our TV room where we spend most of our waking hours at home, when we noticed the sofa was beginning to show signs that its end was nearing. The poor couch suffered those telltale symptoms of sadly sagging springs and flattened cushions which can no longer be plumped or coaxed back to life. I got the brilliant idea to replace it with our perfectly good living room sofa that was smaller and would give us more space in the somewhat crammed TV room and we could buy a new living room sofa. We headed to my favorite furniture store the very next day and found a wonderful one. It’s down-filled, therefore nicely pluffy and subtly striped yet not too formal. It will fit well with the eclectic potpourri I have put together in my years in New England. Driving home I decided it might be a good time to have the oriental rugs professionally cleaned too. No sense in buying a gorgeous new sofa and sitting it upon a slightly dingy rug.

Once back home, I beelined for the living room with the new sofa still imbedded in my brain as I assayed the area. I knew it would fit size-wise, but what about the color, I questioned myself as I studied the gold walls around me. Maybe I should paint them a lighter shade? Our dining room opens up to this one in a huge archway and I’ve been dying to paint it a deep, intense red, just like one of our favorite restaurants in Montreal. In mille-moments it was settled. I would be painting both rooms, taking advantage of the fact that the carpets would be gone for their cleaning. And while at it, I might as well find a furniture repair shop and get the dining chairs re-glued. Four of the six were really wobbly and the joints were opening up when dinner guests sat in them.

In a little more than twenty-four house I had committed myself to hours of labor: ladder climbing, bending, kneeling and stretching these arthritic bone – cleaning floors, brushes, rollers, paint trays and myself – while completely upsetting the entire downstairs of the tiny yet furniture-laden house so we can barely move about. And we won’t even begin to count the dollars spent on the shit you need to buy just to get the project going. Let’s just say, not counting the cost of the sofa or the junk man to remove the old one, I’m into this job for well over a grand. And although I hurt like the first day at the gym after a ten-day vacation (not that I’ve seen the inside of a gym in more years than my flabby body wants to count) it hasn’t been as bad as some DIY projects I have suffered through in my years. There were a multitude of moments when I wondered why I just didn’t purchase a new couch for the TV room. But then anybody could do that. And today the new sofa was delivered, the rugs came back and so did the repaired dining chairs. I can start putting the rooms back together this week.

So why am I sharing all this drivel? It is my written excuse for my spotty postings this month. I need lots of time and no distractions in order to write. I can play online with my Ipad from almost anywhere, sneaking a few minutes here and there during my day. I can knit while watching TV and listen to NPR while writing checks to pay my bills. I “read” books via my Ipod/Audible.com in the car while commuting to and from work. The only way I can write is to shut the world out and spend the hours I need to spend. I’ll let you know how the rooms turned out.

gaydinosaurtales

Musings and recollections by a gay man of a certain age

Category Archives: Musings

O Tempora! O Mores! or Eyeglasses versus Contacts

The Liebster Award – Discover New Blogs

A Posting in the Style of Nora Ephron (my hero)

Kennedy to Kent State: a retrospective of our lives

Montreal Musings – or – Songeries de Montreal

Gramma’s Journey

The Corn Stand Caper

The Afternoon The QUEEN Met Me

Everything I Know About ESL—- I Learned From My Grampa

A DIY Forced Hiatus

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