Not Lost, Only Moved

In previous posts on my other blog, I've said that I've never regretted going on a bike ride.  I've also said that I never felt worse after a ride than I did when I started it.  Oh, I've felt tired, in pain and had other physical maladies. But they all healed, probably because riding my bike relieves me, at least for a time, of mental and emotional stresses.

Although I've never wished I hadn't gone on a ride or felt less happy than I was before I took the ride, that's not to say that I don't experience things that make me sad.  I've gone to favorite cafes, bookstores and even bike shops, only to find they'd closed. I've also ridden to some place or another only to find that a lovely, or simply tranquil, piece of land has been turned into a shopping mall or tract housing, or that some other place has been changed beyond recognition.

Of course, some changes--like the closure of a deli or restaurant--are inevitable.  Actually, in the grand scheme of things, change is the only thing you can count on.  As Lao Tsu wrote, "Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow."

Well, while riding late this afternoon, I saw a change that I simply can't resist.  It's something that's been done, and there's no turning back.  So, according to Lao, I won't create sorrow.  But I'm feeling some now.

That change involves something that was as important to my childhood as the places in which we lived.  I was pedaling up and down residential streets in Queens and Brooklyn, in and out of neighborhoods where hipsters and Hasidim and Hispanics--and people with all sorts of other identities--live.  I skirted the edges of the neighborhoods--Borough Park and Bensonhurst--in which I grew up.  I found myself on Ditmas Avenue, at East Fourth Street, where I saw this:

If you've been in that part of Brooklyn, you might think it looks like any number of catering or event halls.  As a matter of fact, that's what that building was--before I entered it.  Long before I entered it, in fact.  

By the time my family moved to Dahill Road, about half a dozen blocks away, that building had become a place where I would spend almost as much time as I spent in the house or in school.  In fact, during the summer, I would spend hours there that, during the rest of the year, I would have passed in school.

It was the Kensington Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.  Everyone knew how much I loved to read, but in my family (immediate and extended) there weren't many books nor much money for them.  (Also, I think that the strains of blue-collar jobs and child-rearing didn't leave my parents, or other adults in our circle, with much energy for reading, to themselves or with kids.)  But that library, it seemed, had an endless supply.  And the librarians were happy to see a kid whose reading didn't consist only of school assignments.

Plus, going to the library was one thing neither my mother nor anyone else questioned.  If I wanted to go anywhere else, I had to say what I planned to do there, who would be there and who would go with me.  When I went to the library, she said only, "Just be home for supper."

Usually, I would take a few books--story or poetry collections, histories or books about exotic and faraway places--and browse them at one of the tables.  Most days, I succeeded in getting a seat at the table by the center window:

Now, from that window, one could see only up and down Ditmas Avenue, East Fourth Street and a few nearby streets--and over the rows of houses.  But I could see far enough that all of those things eventually faded into a scrim of cirrus clouds, a wall of rain or a vista of twilight.  The world opened out in front of that window, just as world opened with the books I took from the shelves of the Kensington Branch.

Seeing it closed, I feared the worst, since the library budget seems not to have increased since the days when I was using that branch.  But, in riding along, I found out that the Kensington Branch had merely moved to another location, about the same distance--though in another direction--from the house in which I lived.  In other words, I could have walked there just as easily.  And my mother probably would have told me just to remember to be home in time for supper.

A Book About Jazz: Music To My Ears

Lately, I've thought about writing a transgender children's book, or one for young adults.

If I do, I won't be the first:  Jazz Jennings of Florida has just published "I Am Jazz".

Her aim, she says, is to show children--whether or not they identify with the gender assigned to them at birth-- what it's like to be transgender.

I want to read it:  It sounds like the kid of book I wish I could have had when I was growing up.

Even more to the point, she's living the life I sometimes wish I could have lived:  She began living as a girl at age five.

From The Neighborhood

Yesterday, for the first time in a couple of weeks, I felt decent and had a few free hours at the same time.  So I went, naturally, for a ride.

The sky was as blue as the air was crisp:  Fall had arrived, if not officially, and yet another summer, another season had passed.  On such a day, I can understand how someone can be agoraphobic:  An open space--whether of land or sea or sky--can seem like a huge, yawning emptiness when there are no markers, physical or emotional.

So all anyone can do--or, at least, all I could do-- was to move through it.  That I did by pedaling, by pedaling Tosca, my fixed-gear bike.  I had a feeling I wouldn't ride a lot of miles, and that I'd ride them slowly, so I wanted to get some kind of workout from them.

As it turned out, I rode about 50 or 60 km, or a bit more than 30 or 35 miles, along the steel and glass shorelines and brick byways that have lined so much of the path of my life. 

A meander from the East River and the bay took me into the heart of Brooklyn, specifically to this place:

On the sidewalks in front, and across the street, from this building careworn and harried, yet content, men and women prodded groups of pale but energetic children as their feet stuttered about the grid of concrete blocks.  Although those children looked different from the way my brothers, my peers and I looked, something was very, very familiar about the rhythm of their steps and their calls to each other.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised.  Although I had not been there in quite some time, I know that building, and that block, as well as any in this world.  In fact, I know it so well that I can tell you that nearly half a century ago, it didn't have the canopy you see in the photo.

Nor did it have the gate that now encloses the courtyard:

By now, you may have guessed that I lived in that building very early in my life.  Some of my oldest memories, for better and worse, are of those days.  

I think it's a co-operative now rather than the building of rental apartments it was in my childhood.  Also, as you probably have guessed, it's populated by families of Hasidic Jews.  In my day, nearly all of the families--of whom my family knew most--consisted of Italian- or Jewish (non-Hasidic)-Americans.  The men worked blue-collar jobs or had stores or other small businesses and the women stayed home and raised us.  In that sense, I guess we weren't so different from the people who live there now.

Then, as now, it was very unlikely that a woman--much less one like me--would have been riding a bicycle down that street--or, for that matter, any of the other streets I pedaled yesterday.  I turned, not quite at random, down a series of avenues and roads and other byways until I reached the southwestern part of Bensonhurst, not far from Coney Island.

I wasn't feeling hungry, but I stopped at a pizzeria--Il Grotto Azzuro--on 21st Avenue, near 85th Street.  From the street, it looks like one of many others of its kind.  But I went in anyway.

"Can I help you?"  The man's accent seemed even more familiar than anything else I'd experienced throughout my ride.

After ordering a classic Neapolitan slice and a white slice, he chimed, "You're gonna have the best pizza there is.   How did you know you were gonna find it here?"

"I followed my nose," I intoned, playing along.  "I always follow my nose when I'm riding my bike."

Somehow I sensed his claim wasn't hype.  Even if it wasn't the best pizza, the guy really believed that it was.  After finishing both slices, I ordered another Neapolitan, even though I was quite full.  "You're right!," I exclaimed.

Those Neapolitan slices were certainly the best I've had in a while.  Even though they were slices and it was five in the afternoon--near the end of the lull between lunch and dinner--it and the white slice tasted fresher than many I've had from just-cut whole pies.  

Sometimes, in the course of a bike ride, a slice of pizza or a bottle of beer can seem like the best you've ever had because you're tired or hungry. (I think now of the sugar and lemon crepe I gulped down after pedaling up Le Col du Galibier.  I've had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other crepes in France.  But that one was the best.) However, I felt surprisingly good in spite of my recent illness and, as I mentioned, I wasn't hungry when I found Il Grotto Azzuro.

It's been there a while.  As I ate, another customer--a lifelong resident of the neighborhood--told me he'd been going there for more than 30 years.  I hope it's there for at least that much longer: The neighborhood is changing. 

So fueled, I continued down to Coney Island where, after thumping and clattering along the boardwalk (All of it is now open), a guard waved me into Sea Gate, which counts Isaac Bashevis Singer and Beverly Sills among its onetime residents.   I'd heard the area, not surprisingly, took an even greater hit than the surrounding neighborhood from Superstorm Sandy.  But, while the beaches were as eroded as those in Coney Island (though less so than those of the Rockaways or parts of New Jersey), most of the houses seemed to weather the wind and tides well.  Most seemed little different from what they were at this time last year; a few were still being repaired. 

At one of those houses, someone who didn't know my name called me:

  
Of course I stopped.

He capped his head with the palm of my hand and tiptoed along the rails, rubbing the side of his body through my fingers.  I think he knew I'm "from the neighborhood."

Going Through It Again

Today I was talking someone who’s related to me but not part of my “nuclear” family.  (I won’t get into the implications of that term!)  He’s a couple of years younger than half my age.  We talked about one thing and another; he mentioned some high-school friends he’d recently seen.  Then, he told me something I was not expecting from him, or anybody:  “I’d really like to go through puberty again.”

As someone who experienced puberty “again”, I didn’t know whether to laugh, argue with him or react in some other way.  Before I started my transition, I simply could not imagine myself going through puberty—or, more precisely, what it meant for me—again.  For a long time, I wished that I didn’t have to experience it at all.

The difference between the way I used to feel about my puberty, and his wish that he could experience his again, could be summed up as follows:  He told me that in his puberty, he experienced his first attraction to a girl.  “I knew I was straight.  Nothing has ever made me happier,” he claimed.  On the other hand, my puberty meant—to my horror—that I was becoming a man. 

For a long time, I was angry about that.  Not only did I have to become a man—at least by the definitions that were accepted at that time—I had to deal with sexual feelings that I couldn’t reconcile with being a man or a woman, at least as I understood those terms at that time in my life.  Because I didn’t have what academics call a “frame of reference” and a vocabulary to describe my feelings in a way that would have made sense to anyone I knew at the time, having those feelings was even more bewildering and terrifying than seeing my pubic hair grow around a sexual organ I didn’t want.

I wouldn’t want to go through any of that again.  However, I am thankful that I did.  When I went through my second puberty, in my 40’s (when I started taking hormones), much of what I felt made more sense to me—and was even cause for joy—as a result of the changes that came during my early teen years.

One of the things I realized was that in puberty, the emotional and mental changes are even more important than the physical ones.  So, while I was happy to see my breasts grow and the lines in my face soften, I was even more thrilled to not only experience the giddiness and crying jags, and new depths of feeling about everything from songs I heard on the radio to a Shakespeare play, and to feel my senses open in ways I never imagined on walks and bike rides.  Best of all, I had ways of understanding those things, and the fact that I wasn’t developing new sexual feelings as much as I was able to more thoroughly experienced the ones I’d had since my first puberty.

Still, even though I am glad to have experienced my “second” puberty, I cannot understand why my relative, or anyone else, would want to re-experience his or her pre-teen puberty.  Then again, my first puberty brought me into a part of my life I’d never wanted to experience, while my relative got what he’d hoped for when he experienced what will most likely be his only puberty. At least I got what I’d hoped to have from my second.

The Day Before Thanksgiving

In the last moment of my life, I saw the day before Thanksgiving...


I'd just pedaled a few strokes around the virage; a bed of wildflowers turned, in an instant, into a glacial field.  The sun was so bright it turned into the kind of liquid haze through which dreams skip and float along with the words that make sense only in those dreams.


It was noon.  We were all lined up--the boys on one side, the girls on the other--to leave school for the day, the next day, and the three days that would follow.  For some reason, when I was a kid, that was always my favorite moment of the year.  Even the seemingly-capricious discipline of the Carmelite nuns who taught in our school could make that moment less happy.   They could cast a pall over the day before Christmas Eve, over Holy Thursday.   Whether or not they loaded us down with homework, they left us in such a mood that Christmas, even if we got the gifts we hoped for, seemed more like a truce, and Easter was just too holy of a day to really consider as a vacation, even if we were home for the week that followed.  


But noon on the day before Thanksgiving always seemed like the most carefree moment of the year.  In most years, it began the last interlude of Fall; the lights of Christmas only accented the darkness that consumed ever-larger parts of the days that would follow.  In that moment, on the day before Thanksgiving, one could still see the last flickerings of the autumnal blaze that burned green leaves into the colors of the sunset.  Somewhere along the way, they turned as yellow and, for a few days, as bright as the sunlight that filled the air around the mountain I was climbing on my bike.


It was just about noon; I would soon be at the peak of le Col du Galibier, one of the most famous climbs on the Tour de France.  From there, I would have a long effortless ride to the valley.  In the meantime, each pedal stroke would become more arduous.  I'd been pedaling all morning, but even more important was the altitude:  I was more than a mile and a half above sea level.  The air is thinner, and even though my breath steamed as I puffed up that mountain on that July morning, the sun burned through the layers of sun screen I'd lathered on my arms and face.  


Bells rang.  Dismissal?  Or the cows in the herd down the mountain?  I stopped for a drink and one of the crepes I'd packed into my bag.  I took a bite and a gulp.  


You're free.  I wasn't sure of whether I was hearing that.  Perhaps I was giddy from the thin mountain air.  Yes, you're free.  But I wasn't hearing it:  It was being told--or, more precisely, communicated--to that child who was being dismissed from school on the day before Thanksgiving.  You can go now.  What are they talking about?  Who's "they"?


You don't have to do this again.  I'd never heard that before, certainly not in those days.  What did that mean?  What won't I have to do again?  Climb this mountain?  Go to school?


Down the Col du Galibier, through the Val de Maurienne, as the eternal winter of that mountaintop turned into the hottest day of summer in the valley, my mind echoed.  What, exactly, wouldn't I have to do again?


Near the end of that day, I reached St. Jean de Maurienne, just a few kilometers from Italy.  There, I would see the stranger who, inadvertently, caused me to see that I could follow no other course but the one that my life has taken since then.  A year later, I would move out of the apartment I'd been sharing with Tammy; about a year after that, I would change my name and begin my treatments.

The End Of Memory: Beyond Forgetting

Yesterday I rode my bike through a part of Brooklyn in which I spent much of my childhood.  I hadn't been there in four years.  The last time I was there, it was an unusually hot for this time of year, but would have been absolutely normal, say, in late July or early August.  The same could have been said for yesterday.


And, yesterday shared another trait with that day four years ago:  There were no shadows, as if the heat had evaporated them--or, perhaps, prevented them from being born in the first place.


Actually, what I just described is also how I remember every summer day--and many in other seasons--in that neighborhood.  Everything seemed burnished into a tablet of a moment would last for days, weeks, months, years, and even entire lifetimes.  It's what I sometimes call the Eternal Present.  


Yesterday I also did something else I did on that day four years ago:  I stopped by the church in which I served as an altar boy and the parish school, diagonally across the street, I attended. Both looked much as they did then and, in fact, as they did in my childhood.  The church seems not to have aged at all:  Although not an unattractive building, it's not an architectural or historic landmark of any sort.  The school, on the other hand, is an even more ordinary structure, and it did look shabbier from the outside than it did four years ago, not to mention the way it looked when I attended it forty years ago.  


One difference, though, between now and the recent or distant past is that I had no compulsion--from others or from within me--to go inside either one.  When I last went to the neighborhood, four years ago, I entered the church for the first time since my days as an altar boy. There, I confronted the "ghost" of the priest who molested me.


So, really, I no longer have any reason to go into that church.  Actually, the neighborhood felt almost as if it were no longer part of my life.  In one sense, it isn't:  I've changed.  And, of course, the neighborhood has changed.  It is because of those changes, in fact, that I was surprised to see the that the school, and even the church,  were still there:  Nearly everyone in that neighborhood is a Hasidic Jew.  In fact, all of the announcements I saw taped to lampposts and the signs on the stores are printed in Hebrew characters.


But even if the neighborhood were still filled with blue-collar Italian- and Irish-Americans and non-Hasidic Jews, as it was during my childhood, it would have felt like a neighborhood that was no longer, and perhaps had never been, mine.  Or, at least, the things I remembered would have been merely the past rather than my specific memories.  And, you might say that I've "moved on" from having confronted the "ghost" of that priest.  He is long dead, and the boy he fondled and whose lips he pressed against him has become the woman whose image on the distant horizon of his life tormented him precisely because she--that is to say, I--was the one who sustained him.  That I did that, and have become whom I've become, may be the only things that no one can take away from me.  And I'm certainly not about to let anyone--much less a ghost--steal them from me.  


That, by the way, is also the reason I have decided not to pursue it legally.  For one thing, those multi-million dollar settlements the media trumpets are only single notes in the cacophony the legal system.  For another, I simply don't want to relive or even recount what happened for lawyers and judges--or, for that matter, any other civil or ecclesiastical authority.  And, finally, I don't know how many years I have left.  I'd prefer not to spend them dealing with the legal system.


I don't know when, or whether, I'll go back.  For now, I hope I won't need to. 

Normal Childhoods

Today I stopped in Keith's shop again. I really do need to get a new vacuum cleaner soon. I could probably borrow one for one or two cleanings, but after that, I'll need to have my own. I was almost ready to buy one that was more expensive than what I had originally planned to get: It seemed better-made and has features that would make it usable even if I were to live in a place with a floor made of exotic hardwoods--or shag carpets. And it seems like it would be very good at picking up pet hairs.

But then I saw another model I hadn't noticed last week. It doesn't have some of the features of the other model I'm considering. But it's German-made, with a Siemens motor.

I was about to buy that one, but Keith suggested that I think about it for another day. Well...it means that I'll go to his store again and we'll have another conversation. Hmm...is that what he wants? I'm sure that, like any other businessman, he wants to make money. But he really seems to enjoy the social aspects of having a store, too.

And that's been half the fun of going to his shop. But today I did something I promised myself I wouldn't do: I talked about my recent changes. It came about rather accidentally, when we were talking about the music we grew up with. (He's maybe a couple of years older than I am.) That, of course, got us to talking about crazy things we did when we were young. I mentioned something--it's a long story, so I won't get into it here--I did with an old girlfriend.

There was a long pause. His face didn't change expression, but I could see that he was a bit surprised. "Yes, I was living as a guy in those days," I explained.

Then he became more curious about my early life. Of course, I only told him a little bit, but he seemed rather astonished at how "normal" it was. Yes, I played sports, drank and got high with the guys and did all sorts of "macho" things. But, I explained, that was all part of a facade I was keeping up. Jokingly, I said, "But they should have known something was up when they gave me a box of Crayolas and the first color I picked was magenta."

Yes, I liked "girly" things, even if I kept my wishes to myself. I wanted to play with dolls and to wear purple or pink or red. Although I tried to project as masculine an image as I could, some people, like my mother, knew that I wasn't that way, deep down.

So I was normal on the outside...and inside I was a train wreck waiting to happen. What's even more shocking to me now than what a seemingly-normal childhood I had was the fact that I survived the conflict between it and what was going on within me.

Yes, it is a wonder that I survived it. Other people I knew didn't. I don't know what it says about me: Some people say I'm courageous. Others, like Keith, say I'm strong. Whatever it says, I know I did the best I could.