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?

To The Ocean, Again

Today I took another ride late in the afternoon. To the ocean--I have probably pedalled more miles simply to bathe my body and mind in blue waves and to feel a breeze that grows cooler against my skin as I near the beach than I have ridden for any other reason.

Well, today I didn't bathe my body in anything but sweat. I simply rode and allowed myself to see clearly in the bright sunlight refracted in the sea's haze.

During my first year of living full-time as a woman, I had a Chinese student who went by the name Angie, which just happens to be my mother's name. She'd heard from other students about me--that I was such a good teacher, she said. But, of course, she also knew about my transition, although she didn't know me before it. Practically everybody in the college knew about it: Think about that if you're ever thinking about transitioning in front of 12,000 people!

Anyway, one day I was going over a paper with her. Out of the blue, she exclaimed, "You know, you really are a woman. Everything about you flows--like water. And your life is like the tides."

Wow! Here was someone whom I didn't pay large sums of money to dissect my life and--thankfully--wasn't "into" astrology. (I thought saying "into" would go out with mood rings, pet rocks and disco balls. Alas, that was not to be!) But she--whose third language is English!--expressed my essence more honestly and succinctly than I would have. For that alone, I should have given her an "A"! (Actually, she did get an "A" for the class, for other fine work she did.)

I admitted to her that I have always been drawn to major bodies of water, and have almost always lived no more than a few minutes from one. I simply cannot imagine living in a place like Oklahoma, whatever charms it may hold.

Now, there are countless men who love the ocean at least as much as I do. Some of them become sailors or oceanographers or ichthyologists; others simply go to the beach every chance they get. And I'm sure they feel "connected" to the salt and waves.

Not to aggrandize myself, but for me being a woman has also meant not only identifying with the sea and its power, fury and beauty, but in some real sense knowing that the ways the waves reflect the sky and obey the moon, and seeing most clearly in the mist of tides washing onto and away from the sand, are the essence of who I am.

And so I am drawn to it; so I was drawn to it just as I was drawn to other girls and women as I was denying that I had anything in common with them. During my last days of living as a man, I rode a lot to and in mountains. That got me in much better shape than I'm in now, or possibly will ever be again, but it isolated me, too, even when I was riding with groups of other cyclists.

I mean, I have nothing against mountains. But people, usually solitary men, move to them to retreat from the visscitudes of life; it makes sense that monasteries are often nestled among high outcroppings. I did that, too. But in the end, it is always water--especially the sea--that draws me, whether or not I want to deal with my own reality.

As I did one chilly, breezy early October day in my senior year of high school. Like most kids at that time, I was deciding between what I would choose from the career and life directions the adults in my life had prescribed for me. Even then, I knew none of them were right. But worst of all, I knew I couldn't fill the one expectation everyone had of me: that I would become a man.

I didn't talk about that with anybody because I knew what almost anyone would say: I was simply afraid of growing up. They were right, at least in the ways they defined "growing up."

And so I pedalled that day--a Sunday--from my parents' house to the beach in New Jersey. I was alone: The few people on the beach that day were strangers, and every one of them was probably as individualistic or as much of a misfit as I was. (One person's individualist is another person's misfit.) On either side of me, the sand stretched as far as I could see; in front of me, the sea spread to places I'd heard about but had yet to see. I knew those were my real choices and nobody could guide me toward one or the other.

I remember believing that knowledge came from a woman, or at any rate, from some feminine force--possibly the sea itself. Of course, today I realize that it was my essential nature--by which I would consciously begin to live much, much later. Maybe the woman I would become, refracted in the sea, was speaking to me.

Many years later--only a few weeks after I'd begun to report to work every day as Justine--I pedalled to the Coney Island boardwalk on a day very much like the one I described from my teen years. And, as the sea streamed by the corner of my eye, I found myself--in my mind--reassuring that teenaged boy that everything was OK and would be; we were at the sea and neither it nor I would abandon him.

And on this very summer-like day, I knew we would be all right, for we were at the sea. And we would return, again--for what the sea, and that boy who took care of me, have given me.

I know I'm going to the ocean, again. Maybe for a swim--even if I've gained weight and don't want complete strangers to see it! Put on that bathing suit; the ocean will not abandon me. Because I will return, again.