Happy New Year!

I hope that the end of this year brings you fulfillment and that the coming year brings you hope, and that you will always find peace and happiness.  Thanks for reading!  (I can't believe this blog is almost three and a half years old already!)

Tomorrow: What We've Been Waiting For

I can understand how all those gay couples who are getting married tomorrow must feel:  Two years and two weeks ago, I was feeling something very similar, I think.  On the eve of my surgery, I felt the sense of anticipation I imagine those couples are feeling. 

They have done a lot of planning, I’m sure.  Some may have planned to get married in Massachusetts or Canada or some other place where same-sex marriage was legalized before Andrew Cuomo signed it into law in this state. Others may have been waiting to get married here in New York and would not have considered any place else. 

But they all have something in common:  They have been waiting.  Some have been waiting for as long as they can remember, as I had been waiting to live as the person I am.   Others may have never thought about marriage until they heard about other gay couples getting married in other places; they may have, somewhere along the way, given up hope of having the sort of life their parents and most of their friends and peers have had.  They may have lived in long and deep despair, as I did, and will soon see it turn to joy.

And, just as I had faith but still hoped that everything would go well, I am sure most of those couples want everything to be just right, whatever that means for them.  But, I would guess, they know that whatever happens, everything is going to be all right, or at least, they will be living in synch with themselves, living the  lives they, as human beings, have a right to share with other human beings.

When I had my surgery, I felt as if I had, in some way, given birth and had entered into the race of people into which I had always belonged, even if I had lived in a sort of exile from it.  I’m guessing that at least some of those people who are getting married tomorrow will feel their own versions of those senasations.

Pedalling To A Dream, Twenty Years Later

The other day I pedalled to and from work--my regular and side jobs.  And during my ride home, I took of my favorite detours.

I took this photo from Fort Totten, on the North Shore.  I think it's the first time I rode inside the former base after sunset, much less by the light of the full moon we had the other night.  


Once, when the Fort was still an active military facility, I took a moonlight ride through the park just outside the gates.  Then, as now, a path skirted the edge of the water and passed underneath the Throgs Neck Bridge. That path and park were as lovely then as they are now.  

That night--more than a lifetime ago, at least for me--I coasted down Bell Boulevard, from St. Mary's Hospital, where I was doing poetry and creative writing workshops with handicapped and chronically ill kids.  The wonderful thing about doing poetry with kids of that age--especially those who have never gotten out of their wheelchairs or beds-- is that you don't have to tell them to dream.  For them, their unconscious and conscious lives are one.  Even if they cannot escape the constraints of their bodies, they aren't simply imagining that they are running, flying, jumping or dancing because their minds and are actually in moving in a jeu d'esprit with the light of their own stars.


I remember pedalling on that cold, windy night with a moon as full as the one I saw the other night and wishing that I could have brought those kids there with me.  After all, if I could be so moved, I could only imagine what kind of effect such a night in such a place would have on them.


Then I got very angry--at myself, because there was no one else there that night, and at that place for stirring up such passions in me--when I realized that all I was wishing for them was my own experience which, by definition, they never could have, any more than I could have lived their lives.  And the crisp clarity of that night's sky--which was reflected, again, the other night--was, in reality, as chimeric as the lights seen in the mist.


They might have enjoyed being in that place as much as I did, but they didn't need it--or, at least, they didn't need it as much as I did--in order to dream.  In fact, the crisp, almost brittle, moonlit chill seemed like the clearest sort of reality the way any sort of shock or trauma does the moment after you experience it.  It seems so real precisely because it's the only reality you have at that moment.  But that is exactly the reason not to trust whatever perceptions or sensations you have at such a time--though, of course, you cannot trust anything else. There is no past or future, there is only the present--not even the Eternal Present-- just the moment, repeated a million times every second until there is no other moment to repeat.  Repetition does not generate clarity; it merely breeds familiarity.  


And so I pedalled home that night.  And some of those kids where wheeled back to the homes of their biological or other families, while others stayed in their beds in the hospital.


What I didn't realize, at least consciously, was that I was dreaming of the ride I took the other night.  Heck, I didn't even want to know, much less admit, that I could still dream that way.  


I was very tired the other night:  Some would say that I probably shouldn't have ridden.  But, somehow, even though I was pedalling at about half my normal number of RPMs, I felt as if I were levitating on bay water rippling between the surface of the path and the moonlight that was reflecting off it.  That is not to say that it was all effortless; I was very, very tired.  But I was not exhausted; I was not beaten:  I couldn't help but to ride, to keep on riding, as the light of that moment filled me.  


In other words, I was in a dream.  I hadn't gone in pursuit of it, at least not the other night.  But I really never had any choice but to follow it, even when I didn't know that I still could still dream it.


I fell asleep not long after getting home.

Sleeping Off The Past 50 Years

Last night, I fell asleep some time shortly after 7:30 pm and woke around 6:30 am.

For some people, that is not a remarkably long slumber. However, it is the longest I've had in a very long time.

I had gotten into bed after Valerie, a petite, dark-haired nurses' aide, helped me to rearrange my pads and the two tubes that were attached to me and chafing in one spot whenever I sat down. She suggested that the job would be easier if I were to lay on my side. After she finished, I started to read a chapter of Marisha Pessl's "Special Topics In Calamity Physics," a novel I've been reading for no particular reason.

Anyway, I read only a couple of pages before I fell asleep. I don't recall drifting off: I went directly into an eyes-firmly-closed, unconscious slumber on no account of what I was reading.

Some time before I woke up, I had a rapid-fire series of dreams that, I believe, were connected by that logic by which dreams swim, sometimes languidly, other times with the force of one running for her life, through our internal seas of memory and conflict.

I normally don't make a great effort to remember dreams, but here is one I recall from just before I woke: I boarded a train at a station that looked like like the Queensboro Plaza stop on the N, W and 7 lines of the New York transit system. That train made its usual descent down a ramp of tracks that passed the Long Island City factories on its way to the long, deep tunnel under the East River that leads to the mosaic of the Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan.

However, the train did not go to that station. Instead, it took me--I was the only one who disembarked from the train--to another station constructed of curved girders and glass tinted very lightly of linen sunlight that, because it was so gossamer-like, seemed to be floating many stories above something. But the station platform on which I stepped stood exactly level with the ground.

And there was no gate, or any other device, to allow people to enter or exit the station. Rather, I walked directly from the platform to a lawn that skirted some large body of water: from what I could tell, it was an ocean, though not any I'd seen before.

There, a rather stooped man, somewhat older than I am, met me. All around me were women, of all ages (all ages that I've ever seen, anyway), of different sizes, races and demeanors--all of them in the starkest yet most pristine white dresses I've ever seen. At that moment, I noticed I was wearing a dress just like the ones they were wearing.

The man didn't introduce me to the women so much as he led me to them. They all seemed to know who I am, and in that dream-logic I've mentioned, I knew them, too, even though I have never seen any of them in my waking life. One of them was walking to some place; I knew (again, in the logic of that dream), that I was supposed to follow her, at least for the time being. She wended her way through one group of women, and we all seemed to be making a sort of intutitive introduction to each other that did not require names, or even eye contacts.

And then I found myself following those women--to where, I didn't know.

About the man in the dream: He is transgendered. I know him in my waking life. I did not know him when he was named Charlotte; I have known him only as Charles. (He insists that people call him that, not "Charlie.") I know of his past only because he's mentioned it, only in passing.

Somewhere in that walk with all those women, I woke up. Joyce, who had her surgery yesterday, slept in the other bed in the room where I slept. I didn't want to take the chance of waking her, so I picked up the book I was reading when I fell asleep. I read a couple of pages, until one of the characters said the following:

You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on. Some people pull the trigger and it all explodes in front of them. Other people run away. And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there. When you're moment comes, Blue, don't be afraid. Do what you need to do.

Of course, this is nothing new as wisdom. But imagine that you were struck by lightning and it caused you to let out long, cathartic tears. That is what seemed to happen to me.

I can recall now two moments in my life when I did exactly what I had to do: When I woke up from a "lost weekend" and got myself into an AA meeting, and on that day when I saw a woman crossing the street on her way home from work and realized that, if I were to live at all, I would have to occupy time and space as she--and other women--do. But even those two moments paled into what I've always thought of as my memory.

Now I am starting to live the outcome of those two moments: life as a sober woman. I have absolutely no idea of what lies ahead. It may be fifty years or fifty weeks long. Whatever it is, and however long it is, it will be the result of the only choices I could have made if I wanted to live, and to live as the woman I am.

Perhaps I needed to sleep off the past 50 years, and perhaps I did that last night.