Thank you, Jim... truly.
(Incidentally, Mira Mesa translates as "Look Table." All of San Diego's surrounding areas seem to have been named by first-year Spanish students. Another nearby town is El Cajon -- The Drawer. I'm waiting for the day when someone tells me to meet them in "Dónde Está el Baño.")
Perros? No.
###
In a twist of irony worthy of Hemingway, Carmen is now the only fully functioning automobile parked outside our happy home. BW awoke me at 6:45 this morning to tell me that Catwoman's car, a 2005 Ford Focus named Rene, wouldn't start. BW's own car, an '04 Civic named LaHonda (she's black) had been rear-ended earlier in the week by a woman who works at his base. After opening his trunk this morning to search for jumper cables -- which didn't exist -- BW discovered that LaHonda's trunk wouldn't shut.
This left only Carmen and me to save the day. While BW scotch-taped his trunk down, I drove CW to Ace Hardware to buy jumper cables. Then it was back home to jump-start Rene, who immediately began purring like a kitten. Then I followed CW and Rene down to the legendary Ron's Auto Clinic for a check-up. Ron diagnosed Rene as having a dead battery and instructed us to leave her there for the day. Drove CW home, waited for him to change into his uniform, drove him to base and then miraculously found my way home on the freeway.
Catwoman, in all her glory.
Quite a bit of drama before 9 a.m.! Fortunately, Carmen behaved like a trooper. I'm really starting to love that little piece-of-shit car.
Passat: There is no substitute.
###
I never read as much as I should, but I do an awful lot re-reading, especially when I'm in a new, unfamiliar situation. There's something very comforting about curling up and rediscovering a book I read years ago. And no book ever hits me the same way twice, so it feels like a new experience every time.
When I first got here, I re-read David Sedaris's "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim." Choosing a favorite Sedaris book is like choosing a favorite sexual position; they're all pretty great. He's still the only author who makes me laugh out loud at least once per story. And in the case of "Six to Eight Black Men," his explanation of the Dutch Christmas traditions, I actually laughed myself to the point where I was crying and breathless. Good stuff.
Then I re-read "The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out" by Robb Forman Dew.
I have never met Stephen Dew, but we are the same age, and we both came out to our parents in 1991, while I was a student at Michigan and he at Yale. Both of us had highly progressive, northeastern parents. And both of us found that our parents reacted with uncharacteristic shock and horror at our revelation.
Stephen's mother, Robb, a noted fiction writer, wrote a book about the experience. My mother read that book the moment it came out. She then bought a copy for every member of our immediate family, inscribing mine with the words:
Dearest Adam,
From our family heart with love & respect.
Mom & Dad.
It was a major turning point in my parents' acceptance of who and what I was, and I have always been grateful to Forman Dew for writing "The Family Heart." I told her so myself when I interviewed her a year later for "Southern Voice," a gay Atlanta paper for which I freelanced my first year out of college.
Reading it now, I am struck by so many things. First, I realize how far America has come with regard to the gay thing in the past 17 years. Remember that in '91, there were no gay TV characters. Gay film characters, when they existed, were tragic, pathetic types who usually died of AIDS before the third reel. Presidential candidates never uttered the word "gay" (Clinton was the first, in '92). Gay sex was against the law in half the country, and the word "faggot" was considered perfectly acceptable in civil discourse.
It's no wonder my parents -- and those of Stephen Dew -- reacted the way they did.
And while we're hardly living in Paradise now (as we speak, the Republicans are once again out in force using the gay marriage issue to foment fear and loathing in advance of the election) we are so far beyond where we were then it boggles the mind.
Second, I'm struck by how lovably nutty Forman Dew comes across in the book. She agonizes over her every word, her every expression, mortified that she might be hurting Stephen's feelings with her internalized homophobia. Meanwhile, she's actually about as hateful as a baby chick. Her aggressive nurturing is both comical and sad. (My own mother, I dare say, was a lot less careful with her words at the time. I recall one heated conversation ending with her calling me a "bitchy queen." But then again, I am one.)
Finally, though she often goes over-the-top, Forman Dew's writing is achingly, searingly beautiful. In the book's most haunting section, she reflects on her cousin, Bobby, who had hanged himself many years ago at the age of 12. Her memory of him is triggered by another suicide attempt, that of a close friend's son, a high school senior named Scottie.
Forman Dew is suddenly hit with the certainty that both boys were driven to their self-destructive acts because of their struggles with a gay orientation. She is reminded of a poem from her youth:
Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop.
Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up;
And isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run around my head:
"It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!"
She concludes the chapter by writing:
I believe that even one voice speaking out, one loud word to deny the enshrouding silence might have prevented Bobby and Scottie from concluding that they couldn't be anywhere, but must be somewhere else instead.
Someday I'd like to write something that good.
Homo melancholy.♥
