Did You Think About Me Today?

A gay son wonders if his mother misses him on his 38^th birthday.

Did you think about me today when you noticed it was June 27? Did you think then that I’d turn out like this 38 years ago when you first saw me? Did you wonder if I’d be okay? Did you want the world for me? Did you wrap me up, change my diapers, and hold my head close to you feeling the warmth of my breath against your neck and wonder what I’d be like today?

Did you raise an eyebrow when I flapped my hands funny during the terrible twos, and when I cried at my first haircut that freed me of three years of toe-headed curls? Did you squirm when I ran around the back yard with a washcloth on my head screaming, “I’m a girl! I’m a girl!”

Did you wonder when I was sissy six what kind of wife I’d marry? Could you imagine me being married when I played Wonder Woman on the second grade playground? Did you want to protect me from bullies? Break little Susi’s neck when she called me a faggot? Did you want to shoot Ryan with that NRA approved rifle when he beat me up behind the bathroom at school?

Did you listen outside my bedroom door when in the seventh grade I cried myself to sleep at night? Did you want to intervene but didn’t know how? Did you wonder why I learned to sew and make brightly colored shirts with collars that stood straight up when my friends were wearing 501s and t-shirts? Did you wonder why I looked like Duran Duran but sounded like Sandi Patty?

Did you notice my self-hatred at saccharine sixteen, even though I put on a devil-may-care front? When you slapped me in the tub, did you think that maybe I just had a different opinion? Did you make me fear hell because you knew I wanted to kill myself but that I wouldn’t if I was afraid of afterlife consequences?

Did you think there was something wrong when I dated girls after I was allowed to at 18, but couldn’t stay with any of them? Did you think about my clumsy attempts to prove myself with them? Did you think I’d be confused when I loved them deeply but got sick when I thought about them in “that way?” Were you glad when I professed my virginity, waiting until it was sanctified between a man and a woman?

Did you consider what being a virgin until twenty-seven might do to a man? That celibacy might not be everyone’s option? That god might not be testing me? That he might have created me beautifully in his own image?

When you visited me once as an adult, did you secretly peek in my bedside diary and label me crazy? Were you mortified, taken blameless, or disgusted when I came out? And when I later told you I was dating a man?

Do you know what it’s like to be rejected for simple things? Simple things that shouldn’t matter? Things you hold dear? To be in love with a man? To want children without the option?

Do you know what it’s like to lose your family, your alma mater, your best friend, and your livelihood because of who you are?

Do you wish I’d change? Or do you secretly agree with the laws that are changing?

Are you glad I might finally have a voice? Are you frightened?

Do you miss me like I miss you? Do you wish you could have frozen my childhood and kept me in your arms?

Do you wonder what I’m doing today? On my terrific thirty-eighth birthday?

Awake (Poem)

Smother me with pearls my love.
Feed me your lilac stream.
Stir my fever and catch me at the joint of slope and valley.
Whip me to ice warmed heights.
Bare my soul and lay open my bashful beginnings.
Answer my timid confession; hypnotic and canonical, I crave.
A preset fire entreats my desire and inaugurates an ancient journey.
Starlight carves up chance for escape and breath shortens – delicate, pleasure-cycles.
Night breaks my freedom to refuse; stomping into submission my morals and my escape.
And I transition.
Embracing the sliver of happy coming that ends its pulsing journey.
Miniature excuses split on the rocks of unrestrained passion and blades of silver lift the knighted user to excess.

Smell.
Beat.
Rhythm.
Domination.
Fantasy.
Stop.
Exhausted on a field of broken delight.

Shock.
Sleeplessness.
Paranoia.
Expulsion from streets of gold and cloudy sidewalks; St. Peter’s gates slice closed.
Rivers dry.
Lofty thoughts sink identity’s horizon.
The path is cleansed for excess and the frothy milk of purity has set aside the stench of belonging and expulsion.
A caper.
A dandy.
Street cred mates with sensible judgment and gives divine consequence.

Lace up desire and throw away stock answers.
The two cannot meet again.
But go as fraud – as charlatan to puritanical examination.
Arbitrate the traditional role of inquiry and reset the jester again.
Heart is virgin but carcass is want.
Void.
That is what they say.
Expelled.
Confiscated by love’s wolves that once threatened only from the woods.
The sepulcher churns.

Escape my blow, narrowly missed and caught ragged on the wing of bias.
Critic, narrow your sight and take aim at your journey – black and wry in the blotted face of clarity.
Reason, sorry with dormant journey, scolds repentant seasons spent dried up in the mouth of loneliness.

Awaken spirit and broach new senses.
Understanding.
Definition!
Taper the line and vituperate the cross.
Efface the timeworn stein for fear and welcome the burgeoning passage of light.
The serpent spits on the face and opens the steamy fragrance of life; filling the cup of passion and entreating the rhythm of the unborn.
A connection never to be forgot is satisfied and hands over the given place.

Split middle and narrow flight.
I hesitate at the opening crush between old and new.
I am in the middle of the aisle for life.

Caught (Poem)

I.

Untended love.

Still virgin.

Tormented by secret passion and domain.

Unable to surrender self and hiding in a shell of undone dreaming.

Accept the pedestrian for reality and shun truth from light.

Burn like a heater that cooks air without thermostat.

Melt on the heart of man’s expelled air.

Thought tormented by memory blanks out messages of wrought complacency.

The old be old.

The forgotten forgot.

II.

In times of prosperity happiness swirls: the eddies of generality.Congenial spirits mock the forsaken. The emancipated.

Life encouraged to flourish, but cannot when weighted by the volume of the known place.

The unknown dunce of too much time spent foraging berries of mediocre living.

In the trailer. In the track-house.

In the cliff house of climate escapes the soul-joy music.

Music of unrequited oversight in torrent of token gesture and posture.

Filled with lice and eggs, unhatched.

Slave to knowledge escaping fulfillment from the virgin underbelly of burned-out flesh.

Beneath the silence flies the mass of pregnant drink, from which heavy mounds belie.

Moaning.

Memory blanks again and the surge of renewal returns.\

Vigorous on the silent night of empty synapse.

Cognition begs attendance and the spirit fills transformed.

Electricity arcs pink and green and raw with the rainbow of promise.

Aisle ways ripe with passion tend to neater matters of art, and functional purpose takes hold of the fruit it labors.

Nighttime darkens the basket the old man carries and screeching trains halt the scraping cane of the old woman.

She does not understand a word.

The stoic belly of a bench holds trappings for a next day’s meal, the final pursuit of the elderly lost and benevolent.

The functioning frail carry on by day and screech by night – all those things that operate south of reason.

Unwrapping the mime of complex thought to its barest point and, like a faulty bishop over a child, exploiting the favor of another joust.

Itself being final and resolved to acrid smoke-filled coming.

Collegial is the art of learning.

And as the mountain builds the river begins to overflow and pour its contents downward.

To the valleys.

To the sickly, thirsty basins that do not appreciate the path by which the refreshment comes, but only to the heaping bounty that results.

Flowers of truth, flavored with pure and relenting difficulty, bloom in successive, sunny beauty.

The second more radiant than the first.

III.

The test-tube of civilians.

The acronym for complex manners is written on the sign above a station reasoning that matters are held in confidence and truth, when, in fact, they are not.

Forms are detailed and handed over and signed.

Forms to perplex and complete a cycle.

Sloths beware! You are anonymous. These forms are for you!

And befuddled they remain who attempt to resolve lack of wealth and power through these conventional means.

Manners go far.

But not-so-far as they have been taught without knowledge of the forefather’s way – knowledge beguiling knowledge that careens toward hazard.

Shelter a moment away and go empty handed to the bard of indignity.

Counsel me tonight, led by understanding I cannot justify nor deny.

Attempt treason to my house before the sickness thuds outside my window and wakes me from years of question.

Tonight the sickness lies like a foul breath on the back of my neck.

Vile on the package.

Crisp in the familiar face of want.

Crackle goes the wrapper when opening a cake-filled mightiness that precedes any volume of will.

~

A Life to Tell Kate

The swamp cooler jammed through a hole in my mother’s silver 1958 Airstream trailer chugged while she decided whether to abort me or keep me. I floated unaware and unseen beneath her expressionless face in a basketball-sized placenta sac, warmed by her heartbeat and a slender feeding tube. It was 1970.

A thousand cicadas beat their tymbals on her front porch, drowning the steady song of cars and trucks passing by thirteen feet away from her front door. Hearing gravel pop under the weight of a slowing car outside and seeing unsettled dust, she pushed herself to an upright sitting position to see more, adjusting the underside of her belly. Despite her doctors urging to eat nutritiously and stop smoking, she couldn’t get used to the growing pressure I placed on her back. She was nineteen and her mother’s blue Granada was pulling into the drive. My mother wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and stood up.

The only thing I can tell you is that I was born on June 27, 1970; six months after my parents married and three months before my father became a Christian. He was eighteen and she was nineteen, and she would follow his Christian example three years later. Just out of high school: he had a good job as a night janitor at the college and she had a dream of becoming a veterinarian. She had been a rodeo barrel rider from age 13, and used her status as rodeo queen to bring attention to neglected animals. He was a skinny, angular, dirty-blond haired idealist looking for safety.

Friendship (Diary)

Friendship is loving unconditionally and without reservation. It's picking up the tab and letting the tab be picked up. Friendship is not measuring bank accounts and job titles: rather the beauty and joy with which one enjoys life. Friendship is laughing loudly and screaming wrong trivia answers at the top your lungs, while whispering your secrets and knowing they won't be shared. It is forgiving as deeply as the hurt and forgetting anything ever happened. Friendship is unfailing, unflappable, infalable, faultless, and guiltless.

Friendship is a never-ending joy that brings light to the lives of those included.

My Top Five (Commentary)

When I turned 28, I was finally done with school and got a bee in my bonnet. I decided that I needed to be more well-read. I asked a friend to hit me up with some books and she pointed me to "The Top 100 Books Recommended by The Library of Congress".

Daunting.

Since then I have read 32 of those books - all of which were on-the-mark. Except Ulysses (James Joyce). Fuck me running. I thought I would just kill myself right there.

But between the recommendations of some "more literate friends" and a variety of on-line reviewers, I submit the following Top Five Book List for friends to read.

1. Blindness, Jose Saramago
Complete serendipity, I loved it.

2. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
E-mail me when you get to "that part".

3. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
So it has the Oprah seal that you have to hide from other passengers on the train ... and it's about to come out as a movie ... it's a great book that you won't want to end

4. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
I want to kill myself for not "getting it" the fist time around. But what did I know at age 15?

5. Martin Eden, Jack London
When he wasn't writing about wolves, he was writing poignant, heartbreaking stories about the sea. Who knew?

So what's on my nightstand right now?

A Garden of Earthly Delights, Joyce Carol Oates
The story is intriguing. But while she re-wrote this originally published in 1966 novel in 2003
it has too many syntax errors, and way too many commas. As if she couldn't ever catch breath
enough to string yet one sentence together without a pause. And she says she's an English
teacher. Clearly, she's never read Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Lynn Truss) or Words Fail Me (Patricia T. O'Conner). (Love them both. Swear by them...both!)

Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
A book recommended by a former boss. Interesting insights into her psychi.

What's on your Top Five list?

Fair Weather Connection (Diary)

I lived in New York on September 11, and had just exited the cross-town L and was headed one block to 41st Street when I looked up and noticed what a beautiful day it was. The WTC was glinting in the dry, cool weather ... the unusually clear blue skies in Manhattan. I wondered how my former colleagues on the 71st floor of Tower 1 were doing. Such an uncommonly beautiful day in Manhattan. What a beautiful day. I should get in touch. Then the horror unfolded and the phone lines jammed.

I'm moved to blog about it now, if not very briefly, because during a recent visit through a Titanic artifacts exhibit, I read that a survivor of that horrible night said it was exceptionally clear: that the stars were especially bright and it was a smooth, beautiful night with a sea silk smooth.

I can't figure out the connection, but it brings it all back to life again. I don't really talk about it much.

Duffel (Poem)

Into night my gaze flies to meet the One who needs me.

The One who wants me in exchange for a melancholy truth.

That I harbor, punctuated.

Bold.

Eternal.

I spring from it like tomorrow is escapable.

Penance unpaid.

Blight transgression on the wind of escape?

Charmed.

Lulled.

Yes, fussed into lumpy tranquility, I hold back disbelief.

But unconnected.

Relieved that the mess has gone but frightened by consequence.

Of blackness rising into my face.

Even as my gaze flies back up to the One who needs me.

Deflected.

Deaf.

Better to be lukewarm than to have known and left.

Stains lie tattooed: mortal.

Swank in defiance.

The cocktail pressures me to a time when things were simpler.

Straightforward.

Resolved.

Unending and peculiar.

Questioning the chalk line.

Longing to make truth without question.

Distinct in my gauzy excuse for sanctity when hell boils.

Ready.

For my crash.

My end.

Here is where angels lived.

North, south. And east, west; falling to time’s pit shorn short of its readiness.

Bleak and vigorous.

A wad of sanctions keeps the chaste harness of purity, until in tiredness they give way.

To spitfire.

To enchanted nights of murky replenishment; finding no end.

Every day needing more.

Drying when the cap is left off.

Bleeding into the pocket that nurtures.

I’m in the middle again.

An alacritous blighting, my duffle packed.

A necklace braided with teeth on edge.

Shivering in their mold and upon which light will never shine as fully again as it did in purer, more delicate times.

When the world was happy to ignore the beast staring back.

And when time approached with the knowing that one day it would end.

Into night my gaze flies to meet the One who needs me.

I spring from it like tomorrow is escapable.

The Mop of Praise (Diary)

The Mop of Praise, honey, sits on my head.
Underbrush.
Overgrowth?
Either way, it has an orbit.
Like a ch-ch-ch-chia pet run amuck.

People in the street peek at me.
I think, "Boy, I must be looking runaway sexy today."
They just wonder where I got my muskrat hat.

Don't think I'm alone
The garden needs weeding, but you haven't the time.
The hedges need trimming but you can't pay the gardner 'til next Tuesday.
Why spend $57 plus a fat tip now
When you can do it in 30 days?

Meanwhile the unrulies rule
The follicles frolic
The people stare.

Where's my hat?

Public Record (Essay)

Stupidity salted the minds of nearly every adult I grew up around. Jesus was most important. The acronym for “joy” represented “Jesus first, yourself last, and others in between.” Life involved puppet shows, flannel-graph stories, and vacation bible school.

It didn’t matter so much that a member of our congregation named Lonnie attacked his wife’s boyfriend, who then stabbed him until he fell in a heap onto the handlebars of his daughter’s tricycle.

Human troubles were no concern for the godly. Lonnie ended up living in paradise because his last words had been to request forgiveness for his sins. Sins that for the public record had placed him in jail and child custody into the hands of his wife.

What mattered was the redemption of his wife who was fornicating with the man who knifed her husband. Her mental health notwithstanding, she needed also to ask God to forgive her, repent of her wickedness, and all would be made whole in a jiffy.

There is great assuredness that comes in putting everyone else first and yourself last. Excuses become your muse and you never have to face your own spirit.

Weeding Nebraska (Essay)

A toe-headed five year old in the western Nebraska town of Scottsbluff, I was daily found wedging myself into stacked piles of hay. Or looking out the second story window of my family’s farmhouse at all the dark skinned workers picking beets in the fields. I often balanced myself along a stretch of road behind our barn, trying to stay inside the soggy tracks left by trucks and rainwater, pretending I was a gymnast.

Life in Nebraska was rich with Frisbee games and worried sicknesses over kitties whose skin hatched maggots and later died. Upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my brother, bees built a nest in the ceiling above his bed and one day the crash we heard from downstairs crammed our home full of its angry occupants. We took flight through the front screen-covered porch, past the maggoty kitties; a bee tornado underway.

It was my regular chore to weed the front garden, surrounded by crops. It must not have seemed a big deal to grown ups. But to me that plot of twenty rows might have stretched for miles and I made the most of spending my afternoons experimenting with potato bugs, tomato worms, and peas.

I hunkered and stared into the sky, and found there was an awfully surprising lot of things going on up there.

The sky is Nebraska’s commodity, trumped only by corn and beets. There is so much sky that when a boy looks around half his experience is blue. It is filled with powdered sugar lumps and streams of coffee crème in the daytime. At night, it is decorated with glittery sequins when you squint just right, making sparkles dance around inside your eyelashes until your eyes water up and you have to wipe.

There were usually crisscrossing trails of smoke that looked like pipe cleaners frayed on one end. A tiny speck of a plane led at the front of the trail, filled with important people. I wondered if they were going somewhere from Omaha and I knew they were important and rich. My friend had once drawn a plane with people jumping out. I wondered if I would ever see people jumping out of a plane into my garden.

I wondered where a plane might take me. How did it feel? Were the people nice? Could I go to China in one instead of drilling a hole all the way there? As I grew, the silliness of flying and pipe cleaners dimmed and I forgot about it.

Until last spring.

Twenty-eight years had come and gone with idealized memories of my time in Nebraska. My sister was born there. My father started preaching there. I started kindergarten there.

It was still a soft memory every time I flew across middle America from New York to San Francisco and back. On the airplane I noted on the satellite tracking system that Scottsbluff was a marker chosen to show passengers a trip's progress. Why did they choose that little town to represent such a huge segment of the states? Why not the state capital? Scottsbluff is a blink of a town. Every time I deplaned in San Francisco, I vowed to revisit the little place. The town that gobbled up my dad’s capacity for independent thinking. The town where the third child in our family was born.

In that town I coaxed a little Mexican girl across the alley to take off her shirt for me. There was nothing there but little buds, of course, being five or six years old. Corky, an eighth grade boy across the street would push me around in my purple wagon, tirelessly letting me do brodies in the gravel driveway. We made paper baskets and filled them with lilacs on May Day so we could go hang them on the doors of old ladies, ring the bell, and run off to hide, watch, and giggle at our goodness.

The alley between our houses was filled with large gravel and served one Easter as the cement factory to our jelly bean-emptied dump trucks. That is until a real dump truck came through and honked us straight out of our imaginary cement plant.

I Tried to Think About Rows of Corn (Essay)

I sat, a sixteen-year-old waif facing my upright piano. Images of half-naked boys playing basketball on the playground next door imprinted on the back of my eye, blocking the thicket of white, black, white, black, white, white, black piano keys before me that had contoured my life since the age of seven.

I tried to think about rows of corn; their green and golden stalks crisp, half dying while fruit ripened in their hairy husks. Or of ballet slippers thumping dry wooden floors at some magical concert where their wearer leapt and became carried through misty light, into the battons.

But the dusk lit leopard lines of those boys enthusiastically shooting hoops. Four feet within eyeshot of me now. Clouding my vision. Robbing my imagination of whatever thing, but skin, arches, and luminous arms. Huddling beneath the chain circle they worshipped, they burst, unknowing that a tiny, bony being lay fifty feet away coveting the earthy position of their sneakers.

The latch on the door – the ball bearings of which had long since masticated to the point of causing a loud snap every time they were engaged – crunched, and my father stepped in to inquire about the silence coming from the study.

My visions disappeared like sweetener in coffee, remaining in hot flavor and noticeable to the taste, but invisible altogether from the outside.

Like a habit, the loom of damnation that gamely swallowed me at times like this turned off my readiness, and the fragrance of predestination became, as always, equally possible and at once out of the question. Could a sinner like me enter heaven? Or would the wickedness I knew I was becoming exhaust my future in the physical and spiritual world?

Father said dinner was ready as he tugged at the drapes, an act that hurried night too soon into our home each evening, like a child hurries the opening of his presents.

I wanted to say that I wasn’t very much hungry, but instead belched out a munificent statement about unfinished scales and, please, just a few more exercises before closing the lid.

Wet with anticipation I directed my eyes, which to this point had been pointed forward into the scratched wood of the piano, toward my father’s silence as he stood there. Aside from my mother and sister, he and I were the only ones alive at this moment. The traces of playing next door vanished, and except for our family and my father’s obdurate flock, I knew the only thing that mattered was that we were bound for heaven. And I knew it not only because of father’s rich study of and empathy for the scriptures, but from the feeling I got when we stepped outside the boundary of our home.

In the grocery store, sinners lined the aisles, scouting scandal papers to read while loading their carts with spirits; then hurrying home to turn on their television sets. To curse loudly and laugh louder.

I wasn’t hungry, but I lied and said food was what I needed after all.

We parted, and the blackened room gulped up the distant, repetitive smack of inflated pigskin against asphalt.

That night I visited my demons. Vice entered my bunk and I rebuked it in vain as I had since I was eleven. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. I was getting older and this was who I was becoming. My slow revealing of that which I had known since I was six. As foreseeable as the sunrise, I knew that the inevitable would swallow me. And I begged God for death before bravery or cowardice made me step over the line of righteousness.

Balls (Essay)

My relationship with balls has always been hot and cold. Mostly cold. The tactical effort of throwing, catching, heaving, and batting never came to me.

As a child asked to strip off my shirt for a game of P.E. basketball, my doom would be sealed. I was the skinny one, picked last, or next to last, depending on which of the other ball-mishandler losers had successfully faked being sick that day.

For a betting person, I was a sure thing when it came to catching. If someone had said, “I’ll bet you a million dollars Jared won’t catch that football,” they might as well go to the store and collect because that thing was going to bounce off my face, guaranteed.

I remember when the curse finally broken for one magic moment. By a miracle just short of divine, I caught the football. It had bounced off my face already but I somehow got it back and started heading like hell for the end of the field. I made a touch down that day. I thought it was because I was a very fast runner. But laughter impairs one’s ability to run, jump, move, and tackle. And that day my classmates had no shortage of laughter after I had run, alone, to the wrong end of the field.

If I had my way, P.E. would be banned as a required academic course. I would legislate it right out of the school yard and a whole country of children who are afraid of catching balls wouldn’t have to do it anymore and a lot of therapists couches would be freed right up.

My Homeless Old Man (Diary)

Saturday night at the downtown end of the 96th Street subway platform, I watch a man of about sixty-five measure his steps down the stairs into the station. He walks carefully, carrying a heavy plastic bag in his left hand and a loaded blue duffel in his right. His head hangs down and he shuffles like other prematurely elderly people I've seen. Those who are tired. Or just alone. My train is taking a long time to come, giving me time to notice the stain on his filthy khakis. His inability to find a bathroom in time.

Slugging his way along, he has nearly descended the stairs when an express train trundles into the station. As it nears a stop, the old man steps away from the bottom of the stairs with importance.

In a moment he is frozen in the middle of a swath of frenetic passengers who are on their way past him and up the stairs, going this way and that, a mad stream of New Yorkers on their way to this place or that important place.

I think he may be run over, but he confronts the torrent, slowly putting down his plastic bag, hooking his left thumb under his chin. He lifts his head to face the crowd.

I am sickened. He has no control over his neck muscles. Only his hand to support his head that on its own rests on his chest. He greets his audience with a little smile, murmuring. I cannot hear. I presume he is requesting money, or food, or some other assistance of a passerby or another who might be willing to help.

I've been victim to the cunningness of other beggars. On this round, however, my little old man receives hardly more than a glance as reward for his considerable effort. He carefully lowers his head again with his hand and starts to pick up his bag when a second train bangs into the station.

Fastening his left thumb under his chin again, he lifts his head and mutters again his requests, incredibly with renewed hope on his face. He smiles his skimpy smile to encourage the gaggle of disembarking passengers.

He is a bit closer to me now, and having the same bad luck with riders. I'm conflicted as I reach for my wallet and find only a ten dollar bill and two twenties. He has not seen me yet and I wonder as my local train approaches whether I should jag off and forget about him entirely. Or if I should drop him a twenty and wish him well.

I am embarrassed as I get on the local train with my withering fifty dollars still intact. My train lurches forward . I am sick as he pales out of sight. My tears are as much for me as they are for him. For the pig of a person I have become to let an old man go hungry in his urine stained corduroys.

He with his hand holding up his head and grinning just a little to inquire whether someone might spare a dime.

I go home to worry whether I should go out for dinner or order in.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph (Diary)

God. Jesus. Mary and Joseph. It has all been said ad naseum in books, on television, on the street, in magazines. They’re words that mean as much as saying “twinky” or “hammer.” Where did they come from?

Train Tracks (Essay)

I spent many dusky warmed evenings in childhood sitting on a section of railroad track located on the Upper Sacramento River with a fishing pole and a tackle box nearby. But with an Olympus 35 MM camera in my pouch, or a sketch pad for art class, the only action that fishing pole ever saw was as a subject for my pen or camera.

I often fantasized as trains grumbled by about where they might be going. Where they had come from. And how far they might be able to take me from the roar of the river, the smell of pine, and the croaking of frogs at sundown.

The bed in which the tracks lay narrowed at the spot where I usually sat along a cutout piece of mountain, leading onto a trestle and across the river. The tracks were often warm, heated either by the settling sun or with the leftover energy of a recently passing train. If you stretched out on them the tracks they protected against the approaching cool of the night air.

On the narrow spot where I often sat, I would watch my brother just down the bank where he and his fishing buddies angled for the last remaining chances at catching a crappy or trout. There was a twist, a switching stick, and a slow rise in the track. It was a place where trains could choose to go one way or another.

I took many photographs of this section of track. Some pictures had a tackle box and fishing pole artfully posed. Others had a book I was reading propped against a railroad tie. All of this accomplished before the quiet whoosh of wind in the trees, the hiss of the river, and the metallic sounds of trucks passing by on the Interstate high above were muted by the scream of a freight train shaking earth and making it clear to whom the track belonged.

Often, as I would rush to collect my belongings and move them from the harm's path, I would pump my arm to the passing conductor. Being so all alone in the middle of nowhere he would answer back with a blast loud enough to cause the railroad nails to back up out of the ties they were fastened to.

A human connection to somewhere else.

Gay Hoopla (Diary)

Carson, from “Queer Eye”, I am not. I am not surprising anyone by design or living in a house with six strangers getting my gay angst on. I have my own Grace; but no Liza for me, and only small helpings of Cher, please. If I ever attach a rainbow sticker to my bumper, please call my mother and tell her that I loved her.

I am a moderate, usually even-tempered, and seldom-catty 33-year-old gay son of a Fundamentalist Christian minister. I went to a Christian liberal arts university, which could arguably be labled an oxymoron. And although I knew I was gay from age 6, I was a virgin until age 27.

Mine was the punch in the gut, overly-fabled story that deserves to be played out in schtick. Last-picks in P.E. Not so creative slandering in school halls. And girlfriends who agreed to wait until we were married. God bless them all.

Not surprisingly, the recent media mainstream gaysplosion has placed me on a teeter-totter of emotions. My balance, which has always been misbalanced, is off. And I wonder how it is impacting every day straight Americans. What I first considered to be a nationwide “a-ha” moment when Will & Grace ratings spiked, now begs me to wonder not only when it will fizzle – or hopefully, level out – but more importantly, how middle-straight-America will make sense of it all? Do they know the inside jokes? Understand the struggle that led to them?

Part of me says that the timing is right. But even this reasonable boy who grew up at the foot of the Cascade mountains, leading worship from a piano every Sunday and appearing in school musicals thinks it might be too much of a good thing.

Eggnog 2003 (Poem)

Hearth beckons the warmth of this holiday
Nutmeg and gingerbread perk
The kettle rumbles
Roars
I rush from the couch
To take from the fire
Jazz circles stab the air
Nighttime and stars
Vanilla flavored
Recorded bagpipers
Strings
Trumpets
Each holiday its own
Plaid and gold wrapped on the mantel
Pine needles crisp
Loaded with red and purple charms
Sparkling white and gold
Milk strands of eggnog poured
Curtains drawn
Better to peep at snowdrifts
Angels
Bangled pillows. Kissing
As light snowflakes
Filter neck down
Teasing
Blistering
Circling up and twirling in
They land here
There
To cozy the season
Twilighting season’s senses
Of we who love

Pollywogs (Essay)

Standing in 120-degree heat on the back porch of my family’s mobile home, I looked miserably through the dirtied glass of a five-gallon mayonnaise jar. My unlucky pollywogs were slowly drifting into their own heaven, even as the promise of their new legs began to sprout.

Catching pollywogs was an annual affair for me and my friends. Watching them die was, too. As soon as school was out each year we were in the creek catching little black-brown underwater bug-fish with tails. There was a way to do it. To swiftly, gently accost and capture. Not quite squeezing the life out, but wedging just enough pressure to get them into a jar quickly.

The creek at the bottom of our street, which was two towering hills with a valley in between, a great place to drive fast and bike even faster, was covered by a cement bridge that hid the sunlight enough to let pollywogs and other stream creatures warm up and cool off as they wished.

I don't now why it was such an attraction because I always ended up a few weeks later on the back porch, watching my dying pets. Lamenting the day I ever stepped my bare feet into the icy creek bed.