Sometimes You Just Have To Ask

Today I parked my bike in a place where I never before parked it.

The funny thing is that it was a place where I used to go almost daily for about two years.  That was about a dozen years ago, at least, and I hadn't been back since.  I had no bad feelings about the place; I simply hadn't been in its vicinity.

The reason I never parked there is that I never needed to.  I worked just across the street from it and parked in a storage area of the building.  So I never knew whether or not the place would allow my bike to accompany me.

And I found out that the proprietor would let me park there the same way R.J. Cutler, the director of The September Issue got to talk to Anna Wintour:  he asked.

Actually, the proprietor is  nowhere near as ferocious as the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Vogue editor.  But he is an intense man who seems not to have aged at all since I last visited the place.  For that matter, the place hasn't changed since then--or, it seems, since the 1970's or thereabouts:

I mean, when was the last time you saw stools with Naugahyde in that shade of mustard-beige, and lampshades to match?  

The menu seems not to have changed, either.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't changed since the 1950's, if the place has been around that long.  And most of its patrons--including yours truly--wouldn't want it to.  It consists of the sorts of sandwiches and dishes diners in New Jersey and New England (away from the Route 128 corridor, anyway) would have served during that time: things like spaghetti with fish cakes, meat loaf, roast beef sandwiches and some Greek and Italian specialties.  

Back in the day, I would buy a cup of coffee and a corn muffin on my way in to work. Sometimes I would go there for a sandwich.  It was all really good.  But today they had sold out of muffins and donuts and looked ready to close:  apparently, on Sundays they stay open long enough only to serve people going to, or coming from, church and the ones finishing up the weekend shift and the nearby bus yard. 

So, I had a baklava and cup of coffee.  These days, I don't normally drink coffee, but this was one good time to make an exception.  It was as good as I remember from back in the day.  And the baklava was not soggy, as it is in too many places:  The buttery texture of the flaky pastry really tied together the tastes and texures of the nuts and honey it contained, and the slight taste of cinnamon was the perfect "foil" for the rest of it.

The funny thing is that the proprietor was looking at me as if he were trying to remember where he saw me before.  Finally, I said, "I used to work in this neighborhood, and I used to come here."  

"When?"

"A long time ago.  About twenty years ago."  I stretched the facts a bit, but the truth is that it seemed even further in the past than that.  It was, almost literally, another lifetime.

The proprietor's wife, who had been putting away dishes of butter and jars of jelly, overheard us.  

As I left, she said, "Come back, will ya?"

I promised her that I would, next time I'm down that way.

Turning Sepia or Chiaroscuro

"Sophia" had an interesting response to my post "Giving Up What I Never Had."

On her blog, she describes "A Life Turned Sepia."  Her account of her relationship to her past resonates with me.  She explains it by talking about how she "could recall finding the Dr. Who series new and exciting" when she was a child, but how or why she was, or at what particularly, is "back somewhere in the mist."  On the other hand, she says when she saw The Prisoner during her adolescence, she was "relating to the allegory, to the style, to the place it attained in the culture around me and all the feelings associated with these."  So she has a clearer, or at least more accessible, memory of it because of the repertoire of memory and emotion that she'd developed by the time she saw it, and which she didn't have very early in her life.  Likewise, early relationships and other experiences are less accessible than more recent ones.  


And so I concur with her when she says "I don't have much motivation to distance myself from my male past."  The truth is, as she points out, we don't need motivation to do that:  It happens by the same sort of process that makes Dr. Who less accessible than The Prisoner in her memory.  A result of it is that,for her, "40 years of memories have turned sepia."


My experience dovetails with hers except on the last detail. My memory doesn't seem sepia so much as it's like one of those black-and-white photographs that seems almost chiaroscuro in its composition.  Photographs or stills of actors and actresses from the 30's and 40's--and sometimes the 50's--have that look.  The details are sharp and clear, but they are remote from me--both in those photos and in my recollections of long-ago experiences.  Actually, some of them weren't that long ago:  When you get to be my age, seven or eight years seems like little more than a blink.   


Just as my life experience is so different from those of the actors and actresses in those old films and photos, so does the way I experience things differ from how I experienced them before my transition.  It's really as if a different person experienced those things.  And so, I have no desire to distance myself from that past because it's becoming distant from me in any case.   So much of it was no more mine than the lives of those actors and actresses in those old studio shots.

He Had No Future; I Have No Past

Not long ago, in the course of a conversation, I recalled something I hadn't thought about in a long time.  During my senior year in high school, I was on the committee that planned and arranged our class's senior prom.  I think I got involved with it because the faculty advisor taught a course in which I needed a grade I couldn't earn otherwise.  

That class wasn't required for graduation.  However, doing well in it might have helped me to get into a few schools and programs other people wanted me to get into.  I had no other reason to take that class or, truth be told, to be on that committee or to do almost anything else I did that year.  

I knew full well that once I graduated, I probably wouldn't be back.  My guidance counselor, who might not have been useless if he hadn't tried to drown sorrows that could swim, said as much.  It probably was the one useful or relevant, let alone prescient, thing he said to me.

What I also knew, somehow, was that I wasn't going to the prom that I was helping to plan.  Of course, I didn't tell anyone that; it wouldn't have made any more sense to them than it did to me.  If nothing else, I was learning one of the most important lessons of my life:  What makes sense and what's true are not always the same thing.

And the most essential truth--or so it seemed-- about me made absolutely no sense to me at that time.  I'm referring, of course, to my gender identity.  Nearly every day, I had to play that mental game of ping-pong:  "Your'e a man.  No I'm not.  You have a penis.  It's really a big clitoris.  You like girls.  Yes, but not only in that way.   You're an athlete.  Just like how many other women?

My understanding of gender and sexuality was so primitive--though not any less advanced than that of most people in that place and time--that I simply could not even think of showing up at the prom with another girl.  No girl in that milieu would have done that.  And I couldn't have gone with a boy, either:   No boy, no matter his identity and orientation, would have gone with another boy, even if he was really a girl who just happened to have a boy's body.

That, by the way, is the main  reason I didn't date when I was in high school, in spite of my father's and other adults' efforts to hook me up with someone or another's daughter.  My status as dateless became my ostensible reason for not attending the prom I helped to plan.  In addition, I told myself that it was silly to spend lots of money and energy over people and a place I would never, and had no wish to, see again.

I am just starting to realize how that experience affected me.  It's a reason why there are so many things to which I woulfddn't commit myself: I so often feel as if my efforts were for things of which I could never partake, and that I was always serving people who were living lives completely different form any I could, or wanted to, live.  

Every LGBT person has felt, at some time or another,  something like what I've described.  We are paying for, and in other ways serving, a society and economy that supports institutions--including marriage, as the law and most people define it--in which we cannot participate.  And I have often felt that my job as an educator is to prepare people to live in that sort of familial and societal arrangement.  

It's difficult to be involved in organizations and institutions when you know that you cannot benefit from the fruits of the labor you put into it.  It's impossible to have any enthusiasm for more than a relatively short period of time when you don't even have the right to be yourself as you're helping others to realize their dreams.  And it's none too encouraging when you can't get the people with and for whom you're working that they are operating from, and their expectations of you are therefore based upon, privilege and a sense of entitlement that they very often don't even realize they have.


I'm thinking about all of this now after learning that someone with whom I spent some time--a friend of an ex--died recently.  He was smarter, and far more creative, than I or almost anyone else could ever hope to be.  Yet he never went to college, in spite of offers of full-ride scholarships from very respected institutions.  He did well financially, and in other ways, and he wasn't boasting when he said he succeeded without much planning.  In fact, very little in his life was premeditated.  


The reason, he once told me, is that he knew that, for one thing, as a gay man, he wouldn't be able to live the sort of life for which schools and other institutions would have prepared him.  (That, interestingly enough, is the only way in which I ever heard him talk about his sexual orientation.)  And, for  another, he knew--not expected, knew--that he wasn't going to live to be fifty.  All of the men in his family had a congenital heart condition that killed them before they finished their fifth decade.  That condition is one of the few things, along with bloodlines, that he shared with them.  


So he knew that he wasn't going to be part of a nuclear family and collect Social Security in addition to a pension.  You can imagine how he must have felt about paying into that system, especially because he always was a business proprietor or an independent contractor of some sort.  


Why should I prepare for a future I won't have?, he asked.  Had I been more aware and articulate, I would have been asked that same question.  Why am I helping to plan a prom I won't attend?  


The difference, of course, is that I did have a future.  It just wasn't the one anyone was planning for me, or preparing me for.  Some of what I did to prepare that future has been useful to me; so much else wasn't.   But I can say that I do have a future of some sort, even if it isn't a very long one or one that nobody can predict.  Now, in some way, what I don't have is the past--or, specifically, my past.  Preparing for someone else's life, of course, meant that I was living someone else's life.  And there's never any future in that.

Momentoes and Memories

Last night, my mother told me she'd found a couple of things and was going to send them to me.  But she decided to ask me first.  "I didn't know how you'd feel about them," she explained.


One of those items is an envelope that contains a lock of my hair.  However, it's not just any lock of my hair:  It came from my very first haircut.  


The other item is a crochet bootie from a pair my great-grandmother, who died just before I turned seven, made for me. I remember the other bootie of the pair:  It was attached, along with a similar bootie for my brother Mike, to a frame around a photo of the two of us.  That photo was taken not long after Mike was born, which means I was about three and a half years old.  In that image, I am "holding" him in my arms:  In reality, he was propped on something and I wrapped my arms around him.


Funny, how I can remember that photo even if I haven't seen it in at least thirty years.  Even funnier is that I can remember, albeit dimly, posing--or, more precisely, being posed--for that photo.  That is certainly one of my earliest memories, if not my earliest. 


Today I was talking to my cousin--who was born a couple of months before I turned thirty--and, in the context of something entirely unrelated to this blog, he said that he could remember when he was two years old.  One memory of that time, he said, was when his mother--actually, my cousin; I refer to him as my cousin because, well, what do you call the child of a cousin?--took him to see The Little Mermaid.


She died when he was four years old; from then on he was brought up by my aunt and her sister.  But he still has vivid memories, which he's shared with me, of his mother.


I suppose that if I were to clear my mind, I could remember to when I was two years old, perhaps even earlier.  If I did, how would that change the way I see myself--or other people?


Anyway, my answer to my mother's question:  "Of course!"  Just as there's no denying who I am, there's no denying who I was.  

The Trauma of The Beginning of Spring

Today everybody looked tired. I thought I might've been projecting, but a few co-workers told me, without my asking or prompting, that they indeed were as tired as I thought they were.

Maybe it had something to do with the rain, which started falling yesterday morning. It hasn't been particularly heavy, but it's been dreary. Although temperatures have been mild, the sort of rain we've had doesn't leave people with the sense that spring is on its way, much less present.

I'm starting to worry about something. Today I bumped into the head of the office of academic advisement, a very nice professor of social work and three Spanish professors who indulge my terrible accent when I speak their language. I hadn't seen any of them in some time, and they were all very friendly to me. In fact, the Spanish profs--all female, two of whom are, as best as I can tell, straight--embraced me warmly. Somehow, though, I felt lonelier after seeing them, as well as the social work prof and the director of advisement.

Lately, I notice that whenever I'm at the college and not in the classroom, or otherwise working with students, I feel like a stone in an ocean. Seeing the people I saw today made me realize that so much has passed and, in some way, I am a different person now because of it. It's almost as if they were talking to someone who doesn't exist anymore. In a very real sense, he doesn't. Nor does she: the one who followed him and preceded me.

Some people are committing all sorts of petty treachery. Others, I think, have tried to be friendly or at least have made gestures toward that. Somehow they are more more alienating than the ones who are hostile or treacherous.

Maybe I'm suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Memories bubble to the surface and I don't want to talk to other people, even if they ask how I'm doing. If I were going to tell the truth, I'd say that during the past couple of days, all I can think about are the people who were once in my life but are gone from this life. They were friends, lovers and relatives who, in one way or another, had to deal with their own sorts of pain, as I had to deal with mine.

In my case, I didn't know how much pain I was in until I wasn't in it anymore. That's something I don't expect most people to understand. My old social worker and therapist, on the other hand, probably would have understood. In fact, they both said that the experience of being in the closet, not to mention the prejudice and sometimes violence we experience and internalize, is a kind of trauma. And in that sense, they said, helping LGBT people is often like helping trauma victims.

It's the beginning of spring. But the harshness of winter is neither so far in the past nor from the surface. Or so it seems.

Hearing About What I Never Had

I'd never talked about her before. I hadn't even thought about her--until I talked to you last week.

Keith owns a shop that sells and repairs vacuum cleaners and sewing machines. Last week, I bought a filter for my vacuum cleaner from him. I've been doing that every few months for the past few years. Today I went because my vacuum cleaner sounds like a jetliner without its muffler. (Do jetliners have mufflers?) Keith probably has lots of customers like me, as his father did before him.

His father was taller and had broader shoulders--or maybe he just seemed to. He was friendly and polite in an almost paterfamilial sort of way. Keith, while shorter, has his father's good looks, which are an odd combination of ruggedness and innocence--rather like Charles Lindbergh. But he is friendly more in the way of a peer. Perhaps I perceive him that way because he's around my age.

Plus, somehow I cannot imagine his father talking about a girl he hadn't seen since he was a teenager. On the other hand, Keith described her at length, and emphasized that although he was in love with her, "it wasn't a sexual relationship."

I actually didn't mind that he spent more than an hour talking about her with me, for I was not in a hurry. I'm sure he didn't mind either: Business was slow and, I guess, talking to me made the time until closing pass more quickly.

Still, I wonder why he talked to me--someone whom he barely knows--about his first love. He hadn't talked about her to anyone else before me, he said, and he was acknowledging, also for the first time, that he misses her.

I can understand missing someone you once loved. But I couldn't quite relate to the schoolboy romance aspect of the story. I had crushes on a few kids, but I never even spoke of them to either of the friends I had when I was in high school. Had I the words for what I actually felt, that would have been terrifying: In talking about what I felt, I would have been revealing more about myself than I would have wanted anyone to know.

So I don't have a teenage love to talk about in my middle age. Somehow that has never bothered me: As it is, I sometimes feel that I remember too many things about which I can do nothing now. Plus, once I graduated high school (and, for that matter, college and graduate school), I really didn't want to have any connection with it. That is not to say that I wanted to move on; rather, I simply wanted to get away from the people who knew me before they could get to know me intimately (and not only in a sexual way) and to escape from whatever portraits they'd framed of me.

As a high-school senior, I helped to plan my class's prom but didn't attend it. I didn't have much more of a social life in college; in fact, in spite (or maybe because) of the thousands of peers who lived, studied and worked with me, I never felt so isolated in my life. As you can imagine, much of that had to do with my difficulty in coming to terms with who I am.

As for the loves I've had...Sometimes I miss the good times Tammy and I had in the first couple of years of our relationship. But I don't have any wish to be with her again: I know that we could not replicate those times, much less to create what might have become from them. And I certainly have no wish to be the person I was in those days, save perhaps for my physical conditioning.

The others--the males as well as the females--I don't miss at all. In that sense, it's odd that Keith would make me the first person in about 35 years to hear about his first love. Or is it?

Leaving and Becoming, Again

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas. In some countries, it's celebrated as Christmas. In the church in which I was raised, this is called the day of the Epiphany.

Today I can't honestly say I've had any epiphanies. I guess we're not supposed to have them every day. I'm not sure I could handle that, anyway.

Around this time last year, I was teaching the same course I'm teaching now, during the winter intercession. It was a larger class, and it was in the evening. It was an odd time, really: I'd write or ride or do something else during the day--the afternoon, really--before going to class. The course I took--good mainly in the sense that it confirmed that taking more like it is not something I want to do--hadn't yet begun. What I had begun to do, however, was to count the number of days until my surgery.

It all seems oddly distant to me now. It feels a bit like looking at a fading black-and-white photo of myself and other people---family members, perhaps, or classmates--in poses, clothing or settings you can't recall as they're shown in the photo. If you're a child in such a photo, you seem more serene or simply cuter (or not as cute as) you recall yourself, or more precisely, the way you look in that photo.

It's like one of those memories you carry that somehow doesn't seem like one of yours, or a story that you've remembered, and possibly even told, in the way you heard it from someone else because you didn't yet have your own way of describing it to yourself.

That, by the way is, as near I can tell, the only way to gain knowledge or memories that are relevant to your own life: by describing, in your own way, your own experience to your own self. And that becomes possible when you are the subject and not the object of your own narrative.

Oh, no. I hope I don't sound like one of those dreadful texts I read in that course I took last year. If it does, I guess I had to start somewhere. Right?

I know this much: You become that subject only when you do. That is the only way to become, to learn: by doing.

And I guess there isn't a whole lot you can do with those memories frozen in amber...or sepia.

Lives Begin And End With The Old And New Years

Today, over lunch, Bruce pointed out, "This will be your first year in your new life."

As he's been in my life for longer than any other friend I have, it was especially gratifying to hear from him. And Charlie, the proprietor of Bicycle Habitat (where I bought my two Mercians as well as a bunch of parts and accessories) said the same thing, almost verbatim, when I stopped in his shop.

On the penultimate day of this year, it's difficult not to think about the upcoming year--or the one that's passing, or the ones that have passed. In some small but odd and interesting ways, they all intersected today.

I've known Charlie and Hal, his ace mechanic for only a couple of years less than I've known Bruce. I used to work for American Youth Hostels, when it was located on Spring Street: just around the corner from their shop on Lafayette Street.

Today, when I went into Habitat, I saw Esta, Charlie's wife, for the first time in about twenty years. She concurred with my perception of time: Our last meeting was shortly after the elder of her two sons was born, and he's twenty-three years old now, if I'm not mistaken.

Of course, the last time she saw me, I was essentially a different person. She said as much. Actually, she said that she doesn't recall me, as I was then, so well. I didn't mind that, actually. But then she also said that even though she couldn't recall my male incarnation that well, something was "familiar" about me when she saw me today.

She's not the first person to say that upon seeing me again after a long absence. I didn't ask what she meant. It might have been my speech, my body language or any number of other things.

I've encounters with people I hadn't seen in some time and even though I couldn't very well visualize the way those people were in earlier times, they were also "familiar" in some way.

I don't know what she was picking up on. But I know that I tend to remember people by something more essential, if I do remember them. It could be some glimpse I had into their characters, or even their souls.

Getting a glimpse of somebody's soul, however, isn't always as wonderful as it sounds. Indeed, nothing can be more terrifying sometimes--especially, it almost goes without saying, when you see darkness there but have no language for expressing it or any other means of defending against, or fighting, it. That is what sometimes happens to children.

And it happened to me more than a few times as I was growing up. Perhaps the most extreme example came with a longtime family friend. Something about him had always given me the creeps; I knew, for reasons that I could not explain, that neither I nor any other member of my family was safe around him.

Tonight my mother explained at least part of that man's dark essence: "He was manipulative. That's something you had to understand if you were going to spend any time around him." Yes, that was something I felt when I was a very young child, even though that word wasn't yet in my vocabulary, much as the language of self-help books and pop psychology wasn't part of most people's everyday parlance at that time.

He always managed to get people to do things that were not in the interests in their well-being. That's how he was on a good day. On a bad day, he'd wreck something in your life without your seeing (at least not immediately) his hand in it. Then he would offer his hand to help.

By now, you might have guessed what he did to me. Yes, he sexually forced himself on me. I'm still not exactly sure of when was the first or last time he did it. I know that the first incidence of his forcing himself on me that I would recall--when I was thirty-four years old--took place when I was about nine years old. Though it was his first sexual exploitation of me that I would recall, I know it wasn't the first or last I experienced with him.

When he "finished with" me that day, he made me swear I wouldn't tell anyone. I kept that promise for about twenty-five years. The truth was, for many years afterward, I wouldn't have known what to say, or how to say it, even if I didn't have any fear of what he "might do to" me.

So why am I mentioning him now? Well, I was talking to Mom a little while ago, and she told me she found out, the other day, that he died in February. She learned of this from someone else he manipulated and took advantage of, though in very different ways from the way he abused me.

In one sense, I am more fortunate than that person who gave my mother the news: I haven't seen the man in more than thirty years; he was in her life until near the end of his.

So how do I feel about his death? Well--as terrible as this is to say--not a whole lot. Not having seen him in so long, I am past hating, and even fearing, him. Whatever rage I felt over what he did to the child I was is gone now: That child, by necessity, has become me. He cannot harm that child again, just as he cannot harm me now, or anyone else who came into contact with him.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that he didn't improve the life of anyone he met. In fact, I'd say he wrecked a few lives and derailed a few more. But, at least now he can no longer hurt anyone.

I can't say I feel relief or an urge to sing, "Ding dong, the witch is dead," or anything like that. All I know is that another chapter of my past is done, on this penultimate day of the year that started in one life and ended in another.

What Came My Way--And What Came of-- Yesterday

Yesterday I had two surprises. One of them wasn't pleasant; the other might be.

First to the unhappy surprise: One of my brothers--the one who broke off contact with me after I "came out"--wrote an anonymous comment to this blog. One of the reasons I didn't post it is that he addressed it to me by my old name. If he wants to refer to me that way for the rest of our lives (assuming, of course, he ever thinks about or talks to me again), that is his right. As we say in the old country, he can call me whatever the hell he wants. But it would have been a bit incongruent, to say the least, to have something on my blog that's addressed to someone who does not exist.

Then he disputed much of what I've said about the relationship I had with him and his kids. Of course we all see things differently, but I never said that I was a court reporter. Rather, I write more about how I have experienced one thing and another. I don't expect him or anyone else to have experienced anything in quite the same way as I have. He claims that I was making my relationship with his kids seem closer than it was. He is right about this: I didn't see a lot of his kids. But I always enjoyed whatever time I had with them, and I thought about them often between visits--as I do now. I never said anything more--or less--than that.

He also took issue with the way I "came out" to him and the rest of my family. Maybe, with that wonderful gift called 20/20 hindsight, I could see a better way of having done it than I did. But given all of our circumstances at the time, and with what I could discern from talking to other people who had to do the same, I made the best decisions I could at the time. Perhaps someone else would have done better. It just happens that I'm not someone else.

Also, he complained how much I revealed about him and his family and expressed his belief that it cast them in a bad light. The irony is that his comment revealed more about him and them than I ever could have. So, in keeping with his wishes to the degree that I can (I can't be his male sibling or go by my old name.), I didn't post his comments. I will say no more about him and his family unless he decides to be in touch with me again. And I will continue to harbor no ill will toward him or them.

The other surprise came in my e-mail box. After opening her message by introducing herself, she wrote, "I've been trying to find some old friends and for some reason, your name sprang to mind."

I'd love to know for what reason. She didn't mention money or children. The latter is not surprising, as we did nothing that could have made them possible. And, as far as I know, we don't have some common relative.

The tone of the e-mail was friendly, as she recounted some of the things she's done since we were last in touch, which had to have been at least twenty-five years ago. She moved, trained for a new career, worked it for about fifteen years, then lost it in the recent economic turmoil. Now she's teaching in what she described as a "career college."

In her message, she said that she followed the name by which she knew me until it became the name I have now. (Well, she didn't say it that way, but it's the best way I can summarize what she told me.) And voila!--She found out that the guy she used to know is now a girl. And, along the way, said guy got married and did a few other things that weren't quite in keeping with either the young man she knew or the woman I am.

She also mentioned that she's still single (I advised her not to be in a rush to get married.) and that she's undergoing a religious conversion. Ironically enough, it was through her old religion that I met her.

All right, now I'm going to reveal another secret: When I was in college, I became involved with a Christian fellowship. In fact, I got involved enough to write for, then edit, its newsletter and to be a housemate of its leader.

All the while, I identified myself as gay. I did so mainly because I didn't know how else to identify myself: I wasn't terribly attracted to women. I wasn't terribly attracted to men, either, though I had relationships with a couple. But, somehow I thought that if I had no real interest in being involved with a woman, I must be gay. And while the thought of it scared the shit out of me, at least it allowed me to function, in some way, as a male. Although I knew that I am female, the thought of doing what it would have taken--at least at that time in my life--to live at one was simply unfathomable. Translation: It really scared the shit out of me.

So I was looking for some sort of refuge and solace, you might say. Yes, I was in a lot of emotional and spiritual pain. Why did I have to live my life with the conflicts I had with my gender identity and sexuality?, I wondered. Actually, within myself, I screamed that question. And I screamed it at God, as I understood--and desperately wanted to believe--in Him. Others were beseeching the Lord for his grace and forgiveness; I was crying "Why? Why? Why?"

Plus, I still had that totally desperate wish for something better (translation: easier) than what I had and what I knew.

Desperate: Now there's a word that describes much of what I've done in my life. I was trying to hold the truth about myself at bay. All of those drinking games and physical contests with men couldn't keep it away. Nor could the love of another woman, or the desires of a man. Nor, for that matter, could immersion in the Scriptures or a life dedicated to the dictates of the Holy Spirit, whatever those were.

Interestingly enough, being part of that Christian fellowship probably got me, at least in some ways, through those college years. Because I was editing that newsletter, I was always in contact with some people who studied hard and weren't malicious. The fellowship's leader, with whom I roomed for a year, probably got me to study, or just to do something constructive, when I was ready to give up. (He talked me out of leaving school at least once.) And, even though I essentially renounced my gender identity and sexual self, the people in the fellowship probably kept me more intact emotionally than I might have been because, at least, none of the males would challenge me to beer-drinking or beard-growing contests, or goad me into raping women. I admit that I did more than my share of drinking "on the sly" and a couple of times the fellowship's leader brought me back to the house when I couldn't get there under my own power.

And, it was in that fellowship that I met Elizabeth, who would become my best friend for many years afterward. She wants to forget that now. But I can't really judge her: After all, if the woman who e-mailed me yesterday or anyone else I knew from those days had tried to contact me, say, ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't have responded. I was trying to forget those days and to make some kind of a life for myself among people who didn't know my past. If you've been reading this blog, you know how well that worked!

Anyway, I am very interested to see what, if anything, comes of the contact I've just had with a friend I hadn't seen or heard from since my days at Rutgers, nearly three decades ago.

Autumn Wind

The sun disappeared behind, then reappeared from, clouds that streamed across a sky in which the gray of this morning's rain turned almost instantaneously into the crisp blue of autumn, then took on, almost as quickly, the first orange tinges of a sun ready to set.

Only the wind moved faster than that sky. And it was this day's only constant.

It was the classic autumn wind, a prelude to the autumn dusk. Perhaps I will remember this day in another year, as that wind is the brush and the dusk is the paint of recollection.

Nothing makes me feel more strongly that a day has passed and I am another day older--though, perhaps, richer in spirit--than having moved through and with that wind and arrived at that autumn dusk.

So why is it such a struggle for me to find the language for this day, for this feeling I now have? Perhaps it is because none of what I have experienced today--in fact, for some time now--is a repetition of a recollection. What I no longer experience is what I now call the Eternal Present: when every moment is simply a replay of one that came before rather than a segment of a progression.

People who live in the Eternal Present, of course, do not call it that. If they're aware of their situation at all, they might describe their days and lives as a cycle of "same shit, different day." Or "same shit, different year." A Buddhist might call it, "same shit, different lifetime." Then again, I don't think a Buddhist would say that because, it seems to me, that a Buddhist wouldn't think that way.

That's because "being in the moment"--which every Buddhist I know talks about--seems, at least to me, to be the exact opposite of The Eternal Present. Being in the moment means, as I understand it, being present and accountable for whatever is in your life at the moment. On the other hand, adherence to The Eternal Present prevents people from being present in the moment--which is to say their own lives-- for it implies that things will be as they have been, whether or not people do anything differently.

This day's sky and wind and sun were parts of a moment that is one of a train of many others that are different, in almost imperceptibly subtle ways, from the ones that preceded and the ones that will follow it. They may be conduits of memory, and they may become memories for me. But that doesn't mean that they will dictate what I will experience the next time I see the wind turning moving through an autumn day into the dusk.

Tonight my memory is of the beauty of that sky and the way the sun reflected in my eyes and the wind rippled against my skin.They are wonderful, but tomorrow I will wake to something different, even if it is a reflection of the same sun and an echo of the same wind in the same sky.

Remembering a Female Friend

This and tomorrow's date were, for much of my life, the most difficult part of every year to get through. So far this year, it's been, if not easier, at least more productive and fulfulling.

It was on this date, many years ago, that Cori hung herself from a rafter in the house where she was living. The evening before, she called me. She spoke vaguely about how everything felt "dim and grim." No love in her life, no job, no permanent address, her family not speaking to her. I told her that all those things were temporary--something I didn't believe myself at that time--and that for someone as beautiful and intelligent as she was (something I meant from my heart)--her turn had to come, and soon.

Then she talked--rambled, really, which was not so unusual, except that her voice felt calm--no, that's not quite the word, nor is serene--in an otherworldly kind of way. It was that sort of calm, the kind of sun seen in the sky before the so-called perfect storm comes in. "I'm coming right over," I said.

"No, that's OK. I'll be all right."

"I just want to make sure..."

"Don't worry about me..."

"You just guaranteed that I will."

"I'm..."

"I'm coming."

A few minutes later I walked up the rickety stairs to the room she rented in that house. I motioned to knock but saw the door ajar. I pushed it softly and walked slowly, almost on tiptoes, toward her back. She turned.

We embraced--not in that strangely truncated hug of white Americans, but as if we were holding on for life; both of us were drowning, but I ostensibly had gone to help her. The truth is, I needed her as much as, possibly even more than, she needed me at that moment. I knew she was in a bad way, but I didn't yet have the sesnse of trying to save her life. It was more like I was trying to save myself, to redeem myself--from or for what, specifically, I wasn't sure.

Finally, after some back-and-forth about how we felt lost, abandoned and misunderstood, she told me something I'd suspected, sort of, but did not have the words or spiritual means to comprehend, much less communicate, even less to understand: the dilemma of her life. Of course, I was nowhere near acknowledging my own conundrum, but I nonetheless talked with Cori.

"I hate this fucking body." She pointed toward her crotch. "Fuckin' hate it"

"What's wrong with it?"

"I'm not supposed to have it. I'm not supposed to be a man." Exactly what I would've said about myself--and didn't want to hear.

Yes, Cori was born male, in the same sense I was. She spent the last night of her life with me, crying herself to sleep for the same reasons.

Cori, of course was not her given name. But I have chosen to remember her that way, as a young woman. I hope that she has other vessels bearing her memory and spiritual essence into the world. And I hope some of those human bearers are better than I was, or am.

Only in the last couple of years have I begun to lose some of the guilt I felt for so long. Still, I sometimes wonder why I got a chance to live as I always wanted, while Cori and so many others didn't.