The Summer of ‘67.
I’m six about-to-be-seven. It’s some afternoon in the summer. Two teenaged guys in sunglasses and short haircuts are driving a Thunderbird convertible down the street (or so I thought. I don’t know **** about cars now, and even less then…) When they weren’t driving it, they just did that polish it up and lean against it thing…
I thought it was the coolest thing ever…that Christmas I was happy to find a dark purple T-Bird to add to my toy car collection. ( I had Barbie *and* Hot Wheels. Go figure.)
I adored my uncle’s copper colored Mustang hardtop, but I liked the T’bird just a shade more…
Sun’s out, and our new porch fence and railing prove just two tempting. I’ve been eyeing them, and the bottom slats look like I could pull myself up on them, and hold the top…to be taller….and make a speech. Somehow, making a speech was something I’d never done. The parents had discovered that I had a singing voice at age four, and forced me to sing ‘Hello Dolly’ at family gatherings….but that was being *made* to take the stage…not just showing up and blathering of my own accord, which seemed like it ought to be more fun.
I don’t remember much of the content, but I do know I loudly announced my full name, age, and street adress to the sunny day and everyone in it. I was going on to some complicated list of my likes and dislikes when I was requested to cease and desist and come inside. Since I couldn’t outrun my mom, compliance was the only choice.
Maybe she should have just *let* me make that speech…I could have gotten it out of my system then….rather than now…
Some November 8’s
It’s November 8th 1961.
Two early twenty somethings head to the hospital about three months early…the child was born prematurely and dropped from 3 lbs 2 oz to 2 lbs 11 oz, before she decided to stick around.
Objectively, without the *huge* amount of baggage I carry around about them, I honestly feel sorry for those young people. My father was a jock who used to carry me on his forearm, my head cushioned in his palm and show me off to the fraternity brothers…
My mother was this super math brain who was going places, and then at 20, suddenly had to use her weekends to travel to and from the campus to the hospital where I was for two months, before I could come home, through blizzards etc etc.
And, study.
And get amazing grades.
And put up with my father’s partying, which I imagine he had begun to overdo even then, before the real hard drinking set in.
How did they do it? I don’t know what I would have done.
I didn’t show signs of “disability” after the incubator except for my lazy eye for a good while, so I was a regular baby…
it was just when I didn’t start walking, much later that they got nervous.
I wish they were alive (or in my mom’s case, more normally communicative, as illness means she hasn’t really spoken to me face to face since 2004.), so I could ask them how they did it. Finished school, went to grad and law school and raised me to a five year old while doing it, and got hit with the disability diagnosis when I was four….
Or maybe it’s November 8th 1979…
I’m student directing a non-musical version of “Sweeney Todd…” (Why they make these rather lame, non-musical versions of musicals is beyond me, but I was so happy to be involved, I didn’t give a ****.)
A frenemy, the guy I would eventually go to prom with did a nice thing and asked me to go to dinner on my birthday. (With the panicked “You *know* this isn’t an actual *date* right?,” look that all my able guy friends gave me ] and some *still* give me, heh,] when they ask me to get together for dinner, or drinks, or a film. I knew. I Knew. Jesus, did I know… I felt like I had “Funny, Smart, great Friend, but Never Bother Dating!” tattooed on my forhead..)
But I digress.
So, the frenemy has asked me out to The Mad Greek, my favorite place in Cleveland Heights for Greek food, and after the evening’s rehearsal we were heading over there…
Except that I think we had to go to Houlihan’s instead…I’m not sure…
We get there…and it’s not a table for two at all, and I was a bit bummed…there were all these people…
…that I knew! My best friends *and* much of my cast…jumpped up and yelled “Surprise!”
And, the shock of it made me laugh and fall down…directly…
Thanks Pete,Mel,Tammy,Loren, Debi,the others that I forgot, and even the frenemy Alec….
Thanks to all.
Or, maybe it’s November 7th 1981, when I had just finished my run as an actress that I’ve blogged about before…we were all required to do the physical work of striking the set, and we could not leave until it was done…I begged for an exemption about two hours into it, because I was exhausted, but moreso because my grandparents had flown in from South Carolina (!) to see me, and the rest of both sides of my family came out in force to see me kick some theatrical ass…and I wanted to thank them…
So the tech director let me go and I fled back to where they were all waiting, all those people…I hugged and cried and said thank you far too quickly…but the fact that they had come meant so much that my throat closed up and I cried…
I went *back* finished some striking, and *then* we were all invited to the directors house for wine and pizza….
And after midnight, when it was officially November 8th, somebody remembered, and everybody sang at me while I was veering toward a slight wine buzz…
Thanks to Marian, Don, Susan, Neil, Barbara, Jim, Paula David, (family) and the others I forget
Bob, Tom, Julie, Mark,Kim,Jim,Andi,Nancy,the guy who played my kid, Chuck, and anyone else who was there.
Yeah, those were some of my best birthdays…
Today is quieter…the real celebration will be this weekend…
Chinese food, a bit of writing, sending thankyou emails…
Yep, I am surely a November child…windy and cloudy and full of transition…
That’s me.
Twilight Tale
I don’t remember if this happened in the fall, or spring.
But it did happen, sometime between September 1980 and June 1981.
A group of freshmen decided that when it got completely dark, they would brave the local cemetery.
I found it interesting that at the beginning of the idea, there was a big crowd of us, out by the central flagpole….and, as we left the ‘college town’ section of those few blocks behind, fewer and fewer people were with us…they peeled off and headed back to the dorms…
I remember a couple of drunk guys, and a red-headed dorm mate of mine were among the ones I knew.
Most of them, it was clear, were posturing and joking….but weren’t actually having any “walk through the cemetery” bravery, not even those full of booze. We stood on the edge, moved back and forth a bit…
But *never* past the hedge, in where the headstones were.
It was an incredibly bright night though. The moon was full and for a good twenty five percent of the cemetery proper, it was quite the spotlight…
I was irritated. No one was moving. They had *had* this idea, but when it came to execution, they were perched on the edge, fearful of the consequence, real or imagined, of going those last steps.
While I love science and rational thought, there is a very superstitious part of my mind, back in the back….(no doubt encouraged by a youthful fascination with the vampire myth).
But it was nuts that they had come here to do something and weren’t actually going to *do* it.
The superstitious part of me tells me that what came next resulted in any and all “bad luck” that came at me afterwards.
Those who know me offline, know the yell, full of ‘projection’ training from my time as a singer…how it must have sounded in the half dark:
“Hey! Come On!” I yelled, using the crutches to lenthghen my stride, to take up as much ground as possible…
“Doesn’t Anybody Have Any Guts?!!”
And instantly I was in the moonlit portion of the graveyard, doing my version of a march through the headstones, nervous, but pleased, and intrigued by the amount of brightness from the moon, making the place look nearly floodlit in some corners, and leaving the dark’s shadow in others.
Note to the able: If you say you’re going to do something a bit extraordinary, if you have the physical capacity to do so…
Just go do it already, and consequences be damned.
Broken Bricks…
I don’t know when I decided to take this particular fancifulness into my head….I was six, I think, or seven….
At home, when my father controlled the TV, I was innundated with Bond, Mission Impossible, Wild Wild West, that I thought my uncle starred in for awhile because he and the huge ego in a smallish man, Robert Conrad, looked and sounded a lot alike…
and even after I went to bed, I’d hear it go on… The theme from The F.B.I In COLOR” shouted to three apartment complexes away from the idiot box.
I didn’t help much with the ‘mysterious” and ‘gaget’ themes either, with my daytime demand for ‘Dark Shadows’, since I was one of those dumbass kids who thought I loved to be frightened.
When I was 25 and about to be married to a guy who might-or-might-not [as far as I knew at the time] have a life threatening ilness, not just for him, but for me as well, I had an internal dialogue with that nosy, poky, investigative, downright creepy little kid I had been at six:
“You always thought being frightened and standing up to it was so all-fired cool! Dumb *itch! *This* is what it’s like to be frightened, and it’s definitely not the Brass Ring, kid!”
Very rarely, once or twice in a school year, the gimp school I attended permitted a picnic. we were allowed into a huge overgrown courtyard… that overlooked Overlook Rd…but hid it’s twists and turns and what went on beyond the wall. It wasn’t well kept, but they kept several servicable picnic benches in storage…so they would haul them out to the cleared off concrete, profoundly uninteresting north corner, and give us our lunch milk and cups of potato salad and a piece of pickle and *actually* grill some meat…* quite a thing.
I had to go scrambling to a dark corner at the south end, first thing, with overgrown weeds, ivy taking over the walls and dappled, rather than complete sunlight…the masonry was gently coming apart, a bit at a time, and a roughly arrowhead shaped piece of the stuff broke off in my hand.
Immediately, it became a key. The key. The passkey. The Master Key to the Secret Room Where All The Cool Stuff was.
I bragged about it to two of my friends, and I just *bet* them that I could use my magical key to get in that Strange Locked Door, that was in the wall just to the left of where we rowed up in wheelchairs or plain old chairs to wait for the bus. (To any adult eye, the harmless “Boiler Room” sign at the top, would have explained everything, and also explained the need to keep it locked, so that no impaired kid would inadvertantly go in there and steam themselves to death by accident.)
Well, I worked at that lock for a good forty minutes all told, for a week. I got kids to park behind me so my kneeling at the keyhole trying to jam a piece of brick into it would be less likely to be seen by any passing authority figure…
Well, no matter how loudly the Mission Impossible Theme was going in my head…I never did open that door. But, whether by kindliness or actual secrecy, my attempts were never found out, either….
Within the month the ‘key’ had broken into smaller and smaller parts, and ended up dust somewhere…
But the most satisfying kind of knowlege for me has always been the stuff I stumbled on by being poky, nosy and investigative.
Broken brick keys may not open doors….but they create the need to go find more…so they may be more than they seem…
After all.
Real Marriage
This is probably going to be the toughest post I’ve ever had to write. But the fact that twenty years ago this weekend, I got married (a radical act for a heavyset disabled woman even within a conservative fundamentalist denomination) and the difficult but fascinating discussion of marriage over at Tiny Cat Pants, makes me realize I have to write it.
All the folks defending traditional marriage…please listen up….a new dimension of the hypocritical aspects of defining marriage the way evangelical Americans do will be apparent soon.
I made the mistake of falling in love, hard, fast and unbreakable with a man born into, raised in, and called to minister to the American Evangelical Protestant faith. I was an unreligious person at the time, a kind of pragmatic agnostic. “I have to *do* what I have to *do* so get the *fcuk* out of my way…
In 1985, two days into the nutty relationship I realized that the *only* way I was going to be able to commit to this man, and him to me…was not just to *get religion* myself…and not to *fake* my participation, but learn the ropes, learn what was expected and live my life as genuinely as was possible for me in that context….but to *support* his belief, that I thought was the purest insanity for a hemophilliac in the mid 80’s to do…train for the ministry. So, I studied the NIV Bible *hard.* I did that ‘rededicate you life to the Lord” thing. I just told him that at home, in private, and with non evangelical friends I had to be *me.* Me as he met me, not with the fundie add ons. He agreed because he liked that version better….Heh. I also drew the line at “witnessing.” Reactively, I was fine discussing my faith’s positivity if someone inquired…but it was purely the way I saw my connection to God, not a Zondervan improved variety. Proactively, I would do no such thing, and was acutely uncomfortable if the situation nearly forced me into it. I can only remember one time, working in a revival, that I actually did it. I refuse to impose any belief system of mine, past or present on anyone else. It’s rude. It’s inhospitable and I cannot abide it.
It’s summer 1987. A wedding is being planned. In a fundamentalist Baptist Church. In America. Between a man and a woman.
I am summoned *alone* into the present pastors office. He is a gentle ginger haired man with Chron’s disease. and he sits me down and says because I have admitted I’m a lousy cook and a worse maidservant,and that having biological children was going to be difficult that he did not feel we should marry, and that he felt so strongly about this *that he was refusing to officiate.* He was telling me that since I wasn’t Betty Crocker or June Cleaver he would not do it.
I explained reasonably that we were two people with disabilites and so that meant that some gender norms were just *silly* for us to try and hold to. We were each going to do those things we were best at, and blow off or outsource the rest.
Listen to me evangelicals. You are full of ***** . Because some of you are narrower than *even you believe!* You aren’t defending “Marriage is only between a man and a woman.” *You* are defending “Marriage will only be between those individual men and women that we believe are *within expected norms enough* to be allowed to marry. The furor over racially mixed marriages is another example of this.
Worse yet, of course, I admitted that housewifery and cookery were not the positives that I would bring to the marriage and that that was not what my Brian’s and my marriage was going to be about and that *Brian himself* was fine with that, and Pastor could bring him in and inquisit him alone and he would tell him just that. (Which, of course he did with a few disrespectful words thrown in. The rant my Irishman brought to my apartment that night was a fine one…in my defense. )
Thank god that the Pastor did not go so far as to forbid the use of the building because as bad as that color scheme was (red carpet red pew pads, red red red red…for the blood of Christ of course.) it would have broken Brian’s heart if he could not have been married in the church he grew up in, and since I had no strong pull to a church from my youth it made sense to be married there.
The former pastor and many others just realised…”The emotional bond between these two people is just too strong not to have them marry. It’s necessary. Let them do it. Where’s the harm, and it might even be a good thing….”
And so, during the good parts of the marriage, it was about two smart, geeky science fiction and/or comic book freakos bonding in the mind, and physically too. Ours was about the physical bond, and the “life of the mind.” We dissected friends lives and interactions, our own ambitions and dreams, and parts of pop culture, over breakfast lunch and dinner. (I had to learn some sports too, and in the end that was another subject to chew over…)
*That’s* what it was about. How much fun we could jam in to the good times, how many intimate moments and days and nights, how many road trips, diners, relatives, amusement parks, holidays we could get in in five and a quarter years. That’s not a bad reason to partner up, to marry.
As I’ve discussed before somewhere in the relationship he discovered his clock was ticking and that AIDS would eventually end his life, and sometime after he knew that, he clued me in.
And marriage did become something I saw as a trap, but only after it went to hell, me sick with Hodgkins Lymphoma and him getting steadily worse.
I didn’t leave him. There was much pressure to do so for many reasons, some of them quite valid. But it was simple for me, and not about what anyones *religion* would or would not permit.
He was dying. No one in this world should die without someone at their side in some kind of way. Though I wasn’t present at the exact moment of his death, it was only traffic that kept me twenty minutes late.
And then, the night of the funeral, when I had spoken over him, the last thing I could do for him and gotten through a wierd post funeral gathering in the church gym and fled with my friends to my own apartment…after my friends left other people came and I was told again, that night, after that day that I *got through without crying or screaming or making a scene…*
“Well, we *knew* it wasn’t going to work…”
After which gem of comfort and support, I responded: “Get the fcuk out of my house, and don’t ever darken my door again.”
And ran to the bed that was now, for the first night, truly mine alone…and wept all night.
After *every damn thing* that we had survived and remained connected through as a couple, idiots were telling me that it hadn’t “worked.” (Whatever in the hell that meant.)
It *did* work. for *five years* and more.
And some of the very evangelicals that *today* stand up and shrill about “Marriage should be between a man and a woman,” gave me and my Brian messages again and again that ours was not “the real thing.”
Anyone who’s been wondering why I’ve had such trouble finding a church, well, now you know….
Until an evangelical is courageous enough to come to me and admit that my connection was real and in many ways a primer about what commitment *has to mean…* Screw it. Just completely screw it all. My connection with Deity still exists, but it doesn’t mean I ever need to have anything to do with the American evangelical mindset again.
The hypocrisy sickens me.
