We Get The Storm

I know this hasn't much to do with being transgendered, or about changes in one's self.  But I want to show you something that happened only two blocks from where I live:

The same storm system that sent tornadoes tearing through large parts of this country gave us a storm that, while not quite as powerful, pounded us with heavy rain and hail, and slammed us with wind gusts over fifty miles an hour.  Those winds tore a side off the tree and left large limbs on the other side of the street.

I'm glad I'm not the owner or driver of this car!

Another Storm

Yesterday morning, the wind drove the rain and whipped the snow around. That, of course, made the weather seem even colder than it actually was. The rain and snow melded into something wet, heavy and frozen that was neither rain or snow but turned, instead, into needles that pricked the cold, wet wind into the pores they opened.

Toward evening, those raindrops/snowflakes puffed into white, almost cloudlike clumps that were still too dense and wet to be called flakes. Surprisingly, students in the last class I taught actually paid attention to the lesson. Of course, once that class ended, most of them left campus as quickly as they could.

I stayed for a while after class ended. I had work to do, and I figured that the snow wasn't going to affect the subway, at least not too much. I normally don't mind being out in the snow, at least when it's fluffy. But last night's precipitation was merely slush in whiteface, so I wasn't especially eager to venture out into it, even though I wanted to leave the college and go home.

In a way, my desire to go home was ironic. This winter has seemed, if not brutal, at least endless, as it seems to have grabbed us on Thanksgiving weekend, when I moved into my current place. My friends are elsewhere. So, I feel, are the allies and friendly colleagues I have had at the college. The prof with whom I talked most often is out on maternity leave. Others seem less friendly. I thought that was merely my own perception, or misperception, but Anita, who used to work as an office manager in the writing program, also seems to think so. She brought it up during our conversation after we bumped into each other in a ladies' room. I hadn't seen her in at least a year, since she was transferred to another department in another part of the campus I have almost no reason to go to.

The prof whose office is across from mine has been rather friendly since we broke the ice early last semester. However, I hardly talk to some of the faculty members with whom I used to spend time. That's happening as I--and they--spend more time on campus, partly because our class sizes and the demands placed on us have increased, and partly because of the weather. Under those conditions, I feel sometimes as if we were in a modern-day iteration of Hitler's bunkers.

When people are hunkered down in the same place away from the same storm, that doesn't always produce camaraderie, much less empathy or friendship. But weathering the same storm might. At least, that seems to have happened on my way home last night, when I met a young trans woman in the ATM vestibule. She's new to town, and I told her where to go for counseling, medical care and other things.

She is in--or, at least, she is entering--storms like the one I've weathered. Perhaps we will meet again. Perhaps the storm will pass, or at least lessen, for her.

How I Became Bourgeois In The Storm

Today I took one of the strangest walks I've ever had. It wasn't particularly long, distance-wise--at least, not in the scheme of walks I've taken throughout my life. But in terms of time, it was one of the longest walks I've taken in years.

Perhaps it seemed so because there was no moon tonight. Rather, rain fell throughout the night, sometimes torrentially, other times just barely more than a drizzle. (One thing that hasn't changed: I am still the sort of person who prefers a drizzle in Paris to a storm on Long Island.) When rain cascaded from the sky, I ducked for cover in two coffee shops, a Rite Aid and a Brazilian gift shop. And I also spent some time in a Home Depot store, where I bought some material for a small (at least, I expect it to be) project.

Anyway...Even though I walked streets along which I sometimes shop and through which I pass when I ride my bike to work (which, of course, I haven't done since June), I felt--for a moment, anyway--that I was taking a tour of my past, even though that was not my intention.

That feeling came to me after I turned the corner of 46th Street at 34th Avenue just after crossing Northern Boulevard. That block of 46th Street is lined with row houses that have pitched roofs in a sort of Tudor style. Interestingly, they are more vivid on a night like tonight than they are under a moonlit sky: Their shape does not lend itself to silhouettes. Nor does the light that fills, but never seems to escape from, the windows of those houses: It makes the lines of those windows and roofs all the more stark in the darkness.

In other words, you know that there are people inside those houses. But you never see them, much less the lives they lead.

Somehow, though, I imagine those lives to be in symmetry with the sharp lines of those houses reflected in the rain-slicked street. Although the street was quiet--almost eerily so for an urban neighborhood--I could almost hear, inside of me, conversations that did nothing to disturb the instrumental music--all muted strings, no human voices--playing in the background, possibly on one of the "beautiful music" stations on the radio.

Less than a mile, but about four decades, from that street lived my great-aunt and uncle. When I was a kid, we used to go there every once in a while. My brothers and I liked it because his house was near LaGuardia Airport, and sometimes Uncle Jim would take us to see the planes taking off and landing. Plus, even though his house was actually smaller than the one in which my brothers, Mom and Dad and I were living, it seemed so much more opulent. Cut-glass dishes in shades of cobalt and crimson rested on a dark wooden coffee table that seemed almost Oriental, at least to my eyes at the time; those dishes were filled, though not overflowing, with small hard candies. And we sat on a sofa upholstered with a velvety material (I thought it was real velvet.) in a claret hue.

My great-uncle Jim, who had been a prizefighter in his youth, went into business and eventually bought that house we were visiting. Of course, I didn't know the word bourgeois in those days, and when I did learn it, the context in which I learned it gave it a negative connotation. However, I would realize much later that it fit that house, and the lives he and my great-aunt Minnie were living in it, perfectly.

Also much later, I would understand that their house (He always said it, and everything else, belonged to both of them.) and the lives they were living in it were a refuge from, and a buffer against, the storms that were never far away--from their lives, or anyone else's. He had grown up poor and had fought in boxing rings and on battle fields. By the time I knew him, he had renounced both. From what I heard, my great-aunt was behind that: She belonged to a church, I forget which, that espoused pacifism.

Back in those days, the Vietnam War was raging and, in part as a response to it, young people all over the nation protested violently. It was also during that time when the months from June through September came to be known as "riot season": Many years later, I would realize just how close my family and I came, on at least a couple of occasions, to the confrontations when we were on our way to or from that house, or other places.

Tonight I got caught in another kind of storm. My waterproof anorak kept me dry above my waist. But even as my feet were soaked, I walked with the knowledge that I was as secure as anyone who was inside one of those houses. You need to be at home in order to feel that way. Somehow I understood that back at Uncle Jim's and Aunt Minnie's house in Jackson Heights all those years ago.

Now I am, finally.