Into--Or From--The Cold

The past couple of days have been windy. Yesterday, before I went to work, I heard the clatter of something brittle toppling and breaking. Turned out to be one of my landlady's planters on her porch.

And it has turned markedly colder. The weather had been mild, if rather gray, through much of the fall. Cold as it was today, the sun shone.

Why am I talking about the weather, again? Well, these days are reminding me of when I first began to take hormones. I took my very first dose on Christmas Eve; about a month or so later, I started to feel some of the effects. Among them were my increased sensitivity to cold. It seemed that around the end of January or the beginning of February, the winds grew stiffer and the air grew colder than anything I could recall from previous years. As a matter of fact, around that time, one of the most intense blizzards this city has ever experienced dumped nearly two feet of snow, as I recall. I don't know whether the weather actually turned significantly colder at that time. But it certainly seemed that way.

Other people have assured me that it has indeed been much colder during the past couple of days: They're feeling it, too. Still, I can remember when I would venture out on a day like this in not much more than a long-sleeved cycling jersey and a vest. Sometimes I even wore shorts. When I went out today, I was wearing my English duffle coat with the toggle buttons and a long scarf. It was warm enough, even though I wore a faux twinset that isn't as heavy as it looks underneath my coat. I felt a little bit cold around my thighs and knees: I wore a wide flared skirt that fell to my calves and boots that came up to about two inches above the skirt's hemline. But I didn't wear heavy tights; I wore a regular pair of dark gray pantyhose. What was I thinking?

Then again, I often find that whether I feel cold, hot or something in between is not always a function of how much or what I'm wearing. If I were an astrologer, I'd say that, as a Cancerian, I am affected by the phases of the moon and the tides on the sea. I probably am; I probably would be even if I lived in Nebraska. Barbara Kingsolver wrote about something like that in "High Tide In Tucson." Her daughter had some sort of amphibious animal, as I recall, in a terrarium. Even though they were about a thousand miles from the ocean, that animal--I forget what--was sleeping and sleeping according to the rise and fall of the tides.

Like her daughter's "pet," I have the lunar and littoral cycle within me. That is probably the reason why I have always been drawn to the sea, and why I would live by its rhythms even if I were far away from it.

At least, I think I have the moon's and the ocean's clock programmed into my body's mechanisms, if not my DNA. It's the most plausible explanation I can find for the sensations I have, which sometimes seem out of sync with, or at least independent of, external stimuli.

But today actually was cold. I can tell you that much.

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.