Mother's Day

She was just a senior in high school when she became pregnant with me. As happens far too often in such cases, she and her boyfriend, my father, fought a lot after she found out she was pregnant, and they broke up before I was born, never to marry. She tried to hide her pregnancy as long as possible from my grandparents, but eventually, she was just too large to keep it a secret. I was born two months after she graduated from high school.

She had been a star basketball player. There had even been people from the Redheads, a national women's basketball team, who had talked to her about joining the team. My grandparents, her mother and father, objected, of course, not wanting her to leave the small town in Mississippi where they lived. She never got to go to college on a basketball scholarship or on an academic scholarship, and as a result, she never had much of a chance to obtain the kind of high-paying job that her intelligence--she graduated fourth in her class--might have warranted. She worked most of her life as a secretary for an international pharmaceutical company.

She met another man and fell in love with him a couple of years after I was born. They married and had a son, my brother, three years younger than I am. The new husband wasn't overly fond of being a parent to someone else's son, so I wound up living with my grandparents, an arrangement that lasted for the rest of my childhood. My mother and this man (the anger is still there, yes) moved to Illinois, where they both found work, and she eventually realized he was not a good husband and father. They divorced, but she and my brother stayed in Illinois. She once told me that the hardest choice she ever made in her life was leaving me with my grandparents, and it really hurt her when she asked me while I was still just a child if I wanted to move up north with her and I said that I wanted to stay with my grandparents. I had known no other life at that point, and I was scared to leave what seemed so comfortable at the time.

It was almost a decade before she found another man to marry. He's a good man, this new stepfather, incredibly patient and funny and generous. He had three kids of his own from an earlier marriage, so we made an odd "Brady Bunch" with our three boys and two girls. Family trips in the summer were an experience with everyone piled into the back seat and then two motel rooms at night to keep the peace. For the most part, though, we got along well, and eventually, we all grew up and went to work or off to college. We became adults with lives and careers and issues of our own, and they became the people we call or visit every now and then.

Both of them are retired now. She loves going to the casinos to gamble away my inheritance. He loves to golf. She's become very enamored of the first great-grandchild. He's two and spends a lot of time with Papa and Gam Ma. He was there today, in fact, when I called to wish her a Happy Mother's Day. He was sleeping at the time, so we were able to talk uninterrupted.

I sent flowers, of course, two dozen pink roses, which she loved. She stopped our conversation a couple of times to smell them again. Her favorites are wild flowers, but I couldn't find a nice enough bouquet of those to send. I had also mailed two cards, one serious and one funny, our tradition for such events. We talked for more than an hour, with her telling me about the squirrels in the backyard and then about all of the people back home who are either ill or who have died. Our conversations are very stream-of-consciousness.

I only see her about once a year if I'm lucky. I try to go back to my grandfather's house for Thanksgiving when I can so that I can be with them all, but the trip is expensive and at a very bad time of year for travel, both airplane-wise and work-wise. I also try to call when I can, but she and my stepfather have been known to hop into the car and just drive to any place they might be interested in seeing. After they retired, they took a tour of the Great Plains. No one was really told they were doing this. They just loaded up the car and drove.

I love my mother, and I tell her this whenever I talk to her. I know she hasn't always understood me. She didn't quite fathom why I majored in journalism or later in English and history. She didn't truly understand what graduate school was or why I wanted to go to it. She doesn't quite get what all I do in my current job or perhaps even what a community college is. And she certainly didn't want to deal with her elder son being gay when I chose to come out to her at the age of 30.

But you know what she did? She grew and evolved. After six months of silence, she started to ask me questions. She met my Partner At The Time and really liked him. I think she might have been even more distraught over our break-up than I was. She still tries to ask me if I'm dating anyone, so hopeful is she about my love life, but I try to avoid that disaster of a topic if I can. And she called me the day after the election last November to tell me how sorry she was that Proposition 8 passed. She kept saying she couldn't understand why it was anyone's business who her son marries.

She still brags about me to all of her friends. She used to share my grade reports with the other people at her job, and she kept pictures of my college graduation up for years after I started to get gray hair. She was so excited when I was chosen Teacher of the Year for my school that she took the program from the event to everyone's house for months after that. She asks me about events on campus that she has never attended but which she knows are important to me. She makes it clear that she supports me.

She won't read this, by the way. She and my stepfather are pretty serious technophobes, particularly him. She just knows that I did a son's duty today and called to say hello and catch up. She got her flowers and her cards, and she's happy because I remembered. She will tell my stepfather what we talked about, and she'll even share the conversation with the two-year-old great-grandchild, who only knows me by the picture that I gave her for Christmas five years ago. I hope she knows, though, that my love for her goes deeper than just the flowers and cards and phone calls. I'd see her more often if either one of us were able to do so, but I think she understands that we each have lives to lead. That's one of the most dear of lessons I learned from her and her confidence in me all these years.

The picture above is one of my favorites of her. She must have been in high school when it was taken. I have no idea whose car it was. I just look at her face and see a young girl with all of the promise of the future ahead of her. I like to think that there's still some of that optimistic young girl in her.

The Halfway Mark

This is turning out to be a particularly brutal week. It's only Wednesday, and I already feel like I've put in two full weeks of work in three days.

A quick recap:

Monday was the End-of-the-Year Celebration for the Transfer Achievement Program. I managed to squeeze this in during my lunch break.

Tuesday was the Humanities Division Scholarship Tea. I presented one of the honorable mention recipients for the Creative Writing Award, and I got to present the biggie, the English Scholarship.

Wednesday was the day I promised to take my lunch hour to conduct student evaluations for a colleague. It was also the day of the Interclub Council Awards, but since I didn't get nominated for the "Advisor of the Year" Award again this year, I didn't see any point in going. The students in the club I advise can never seem to get their act together to nominate themselves for "Club of the Year," and no one ever seems to recall that I'm their advisor. Sigh.

Here's what is yet to come:

Tomorrow is the annual luncheon honoring retirees. It's a barbecue, and luckily this year, it falls during the time I'm free for lunch. That's not often the case.

Friday is the Men and Women of Distinction Banquet. I am serving once again as co-emcee for the event, and I'm presenting one of the men during the ceremony. I have to be at rehearsal at noon since I wasn't able to participate last year and now have no idea how the new venue is set up. The banquet doesn't start until 6 p.m., so I'm either going to nap in my office or go to a movie that afternoon during my break.

Saturday is a retirement party at a local restaurant for an instructor who has been working at our college longer than I've been alive. He officially retired in December but has been teaching part-time for us this semester. He's moving after the semester ends, and we're honoring his 46 (!) years of teaching with a dinner in his honor.

Did I neglect to mention that I still have classes to teach while all of this is going on? In fact, three of the classes (both sections of freshman comp and my American literature class) have submitted rough drafts that I have to read and return this week. The two developmental writing classes have individual conferences this week, so I've been spending four hours at a time sitting down with students and trying to help them get their last essay ready to be handed it.

All of this would be fine if I didn't get up at Insane O'Clock each morning to go to work. I should be going to bed at Stupid O'Clock in order to get enough sleep, but I can never seem to manage it. (Thanks to the Stephanie Miller Show for the time names.)

I have a feeling that, on Saturday night, I'm going to come home and collapse face first onto the rug in the living room. I'm just hoping that I wake up in time to come back to work on Monday. I don't know when I'm expected to do my laundry or go grocery shopping, and the newspapers are beginning to pile up. Before this week is done, this apartment may look like the interior of Grey Gardens. All I'll need is a few dozen cats and maybe a raccoon or two.

Poem in Your Pocket

Yesterday was the last day of National Poetry Month. It was dubbed "Poem in Your Pocket Day," a day when you're supposed to share with other people a favorite poem. (See, you carry it around in your pocket so that you're always ready to read it aloud to anyone you meet.) As in recent years, I photocopied some poems to share with my classes, and I tucked a couple of other poems into my back pocket and read them to colleagues and friends.

The first is one of my all-time favorites. It is, of course, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

The second is a more recent poem. It's entitled "The Next Poem Could Be Your Last," and it's by the great Rafael Campo.

Imagine death. No fun. No poetry.
No further arguments with relatives.
No work to do. No boring life to live.
Imagine, death: like making pottery
Or writing eulogies, it takes some skill
To do it passably. Like argument,
It needs resistance to be shaped against.
Like relatives you fight the urge to kill,
You know you won't. Like work, there's never less
Of it. Imagine: death is almost life.
Except it's fascinating, like a knife.
You lose yourself just staring at the edge.
You lose yourself and suddenly you're not
Alive, you're dying and for fun you try
To write your eulogy. You tell some lies,
Pretend you're wry and brave. Imagine that.

The last poem I carried yesterday was not shared with everyone. Only a select few got to hear it. It's Aaron Smith's "Clarification," and it's one of the few good poems about sex and/or sexuality that I've read in recent years.

Last night I followed a man
around a bar hoping to brush
against his green T-shirt
to feel the pad of his chest
against my shoulder
or arm, but before that
he danced with his shirt
off, tucked in the white
band of his underwear, lights
marking his body, music
making him a story whispered
ear to ear through a room.

I've been thinking
how the erotic lives in
what we're denied, the object
about to be exposed, on the verge
of coming undone.

The night we met I asked
you to take your pants off.
What I really meant was
unzip them and let them
ride low on your hips.

Two other people distributed copies of poems yesterday, and a couple more had poems to share. I'm sure my friend C celebrated Poem in Your Pocket Day, but I didn't get a chance to see her. This post should have been made yesterday, I know, but I hope the sharing of poetry continues throughout the year.

Goodbye, Golden Girl

Another one of my beloved Golden Girls has passed away. Bea Arthur died yesterday here in Los Angeles after a battle with cancer. We now only have Betty White and Rue McClanahan as the surviving members of the foursome who were such a part of my life during the 1980s and have remained a favorite thanks to reruns on various channels since then.

I never missed an episode of The Golden Girls when the show was airing on NBC, and a friend and I would call each other each week to talk about what had happened. I still recall vividly the show where the Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche have been arrested in a sweep of a hotel frequented by prostitutes. Rose starts talking about a possum, and Dorothy says something to the effect of how many "exploding possum stories" Rose has told lately, only to be reminded that it was a pig, not a possum, that exploded. My friend called me during the commercial, said two words, "exploding possum," collapsed into giggles, and hung up. We had to wait almost half an hour after the episode before we could talk without laughing.

You know how people like to watch shows with four female characters (Sex and the City, Designing Women, etc.) and try to determine which one they and their friends most closely resemble? Everyone thinks he/she is a Carrie, and everyone wishes they could be a Suzanne. Well, play that game with The Golden Girls, and you'll find me as a Dorothy. Ironic, isn't it, that I'm a Dorothy and a Friend of Dorothy's?

Arthur was a master of the put-down and the withering look. She could silence anyone with one glare from those intense eyes of hers. Just two words--"Shady Pines"--would be enough to freeze her mother on the show, Sophia, played by the dearly missed Estelle Getty. Arthur also had the ability to sing and dance, talents that were at times put to good use on the show, perhaps most effectively in the episode where Dorothy and Blanche are competing for the attention of the men at the Rusty Anchor. Dorothy's rendition of "What'll I Do" silences the room, and she starts to bring sheet music to the bar to sing on a regular basis. Her version of "Hard-Hearted Hannah" is a treat.

Arthur also created the memorable title character on Maude. She was best known for her line, "God'll get you for that, Walter," but my favorite episode was built around a telethon where she promised that "Mark Spitz will drink a glass of milk on this very stage." Maude was a strong feminist icon of the early 1970s, but Dorothy Zbornak from The Golden Girls was a fitting companion, a symbol of what women could do for each other and on their own.

I have to mention Arthur's most famous role on the stage and in the movies, Vera Charles from Mame. The movie version cast Lucille Ball as Mame, a horrible decision given her age and inability to carry a tune any longer. She sounded like Michigan J. Frog, and the cameraman had to shoot her through so many layers of cheesecloth you could barely recognize her. Arthur, though, was perfectly cast. Her duet with Ball (and, earlier, with Angela Lansbury, in the stage production) on "Bosom Buddies" is note-perfect. One of my favorite songs in the show, though, is her rendition of "The Man in the Moon Is a Lady." Her delivery of it is incomparable. The video clip is from a Jerry Herman tribute. Unsurprisingly, Arthur stole the show just as she often did.



One of my prized possessions--including all of the seasons of The Golden Girls on DVD--is the CD of her one-woman show, Just Between Friends. She tells stories of her career, she tells jokes, she sings, she does it all. I listened to it again this morning after reading in the newspaper about her death. I will miss you, Bea. We don't see your kind much these days, and the world is a sadder place as a result.

Happy Birthday

Today is Barbra Streisand's birthday. The above picture was snapped by her brother Sheldon. I hope there's still some of that little girl inside of her today as she celebrates her 67th birthday.

Every gay man has a diva, at least one. She's someone whose work he admires and/or whose life story inspires him. I have friends who are enthralled by Judy Garland or Cher or Edith Piaf or Bette Midler or Marilyn Monroe. Even today's young gay men have divas although they're having to make do with people like Britney Spears and Taylor Swift, sadly.

My diva has been Streisand since at least 1975. That was the year my mother took me to see my first Streisand movie, Funny Lady. I enjoyed the movie, but it wasn't until the following year, with the release of the soundtrack to A Star Is Born, that I became a full-fledged fan. I bought the single and the album. Then I had to buy a second copy of the album because I wore the first one out playing it so often. To top it off, I had my grandfather drive me and a cousin to the movie theater in Corinth, almost an hour drive away, to see the movie when it opened. I was hooked, and I was only thirteen.

I own all her records. I once owned them all on vinyl, but now I have them all on CD (well, except for The Owl and the Pussycat soundtrack, which isn't available on CD). I have seen every movie she's ever made, and I own all of them on DVD now. I've seen her in concert twice, first at Arrowhead Pond when she returned to live performing and then a few years later at the Staples Center. In fact, I flew my mother out to Los Angeles so that I could take her to the Staples Center concert. It was really her love of Streisand that made me into a fan. In some small way, I hope the concert was a little bit of repayment.

I'm not an obsessive fan, just so you know. I don't have an entire wall of photographs or anything like that (the way Richard Simmons used to have). I just like her singing and her acting, and I admire the work she has done throughout her career on behalf of civil rights and the environment. She's a lifelong Democrat and so am I, so we share opinions on a lot of social issues.

What I think draws me to her is the story of how this shy, awkward girl grew up almost in poverty. Her family was lower middle class at best, and she claims they didn't even own a couch when she was growing up. She was an outsider at school, and she was frequently taunted by the other children because of her looks. She knew she wanted a career in show business, but even her mother discouraged her, telling her to learn how to type since she was going to wind up as a secretary. (That's why Streisand has always had such long nails, by the way, to spite her mother.) Despite all of the negativity that surrounded her, she made herself into a star. There's something quite remarkable about a person who decides to listen to the voice inside her head instead of all of those voices that surround her.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch to see the connection to a shy, awkward kid growing up in rural Mississippi who manages, despite his family's poverty, to get a college education, move to California, and become a relative success as a teacher despite all of the people along the way who said it would be too difficult. I was told by a lot of people along the way that I wouldn't be able to make it at the university level, that I would miss my family if I moved away to go to school, that I wouldn't like California, that I'd never get a job teaching at the college level. So you see I can somewhat empathize when I read Streisand's biography even though I'm not an entertainer.

It isn't as if you have to accept wholeheartedly every move that your diva makes, by the way. She really does have poor taste in song selection sometimes, particularly since the 1980's. She has made some very oddball choices in films too (e.g., All Night Long, Nuts). She can be infuriatingly stubborn too, supporting some politicians and/or candidates who are just not exceptional choices.

Yet I'm willing to forgive every misstep whenever I hear her sing "Evergreen." I still cry each time I watch The Way We Were. I can still vividly recall that moment when the curtain was pulled back to reveal her at the top of the staircase in The Concert. That's what it means to have a diva, that unconditional love for her talent and her drive and her accomplishments.

Happy Birthday, Barbra.

Going Up

Yesterday, the folks who have been working on the elevators in my apartment building finally finished. It's been five months (actually, almost six now) of having only one elevator in service at a time. You're probably wondering why having just one would be a problem. There are thirteen floors to my building and twelve apartments on each floor (eight of them are two-bedroom apartments). That's 156 apartments, most of them occupied, many of them by more than one person, sometimes by entire families. One that I know of on the first floor has eight people living in it. (And the bottom floor is called the Main Floor, not the first floor. How very cosmopolitan and vaguely European of us.)

During peak times, like the morning and afternoon rush, those elevators get very full. Everyone is trying to go to work or trying to come home. Many times over the past few months, the door to the elevator has opened to reveal a dozen people crammed inside and no room to add just one more. I have climbed six flights of stairs more than I care to remember, including a very memorable day when I had to make the trek three times with my laundry. And you probably just shouldn't ask how much fun we've had on the days that people moved in or moved out. Imagine trying to squeeze in between the mattress, box springs, bedside tables, lamps, boxes, and everything else someone has crammed into that small enclosed space. It's a good thing I'm not claustrophobic. And no one is in a very welcoming mood, frankly.

The repairs have been necessary, I suppose. The elevators haven't been upgraded, pretty much, since they were installed in the late 1940s-early 1950s. They needed to be modernized. They are far more sleek looking inside, compared to the carpeted walls we had before that always made me think of a rumpus room. We now have a lovely voice telling us in gentle tones which floor we have stopped on, no doubt for those who are visually impaired. And the buttons are easier to read, thanks to the larger size. Yeah, I know I'm getting older when I appreciate "large print" elevator buttons.

Not everyone has caught on yet, by the way. We all still wait beside the one that's been working the past couple of months by itself. When the "new" one opens up, people are reluctant to step inside because they aren't sure it's truly fixed. I've been in it twice now, and I have to say it's a smooth ride up to my floor now.

Just as an aside, I should mention that a couple of the guys working on the elevators the past couple of months were model-handsome, well built young men with attractive faces. We get some of the hottest people here to take care of and fix stuff. When the rewiring project was going on last summer, one of the crew members stopped traffic when he walked around the hallways. He was just that good looking. Even the two young guys who haul out the garbage bins from the basement each Friday could be working the runways. I don't know why that is. I'm just grateful for it.

I'm also very grateful to have both elevators working again. I've been hoping they'd get finished in time for me to buy a new set of living room furniture before summer school starts in mid-June. The current set is very shabby, having been used now for the past thirteen years. It's white-ish (white adjacent?) and shows dirt far too easily. I'm ready for a change, but I wouldn't have dared to have any furniture delivered when we had only one elevator in service. So it looks like I'll be shopping in the next few weeks for a new, smaller, darker couch or sofa (still don't know the difference) and chairs. It's going to look like a whole new apartment when I'm done, hopefully, and now I have brand new elevators to ride to get to it too. Such small pleasures in life, sometimes, I know, but aren't they worth it?

Too Hot to Fish

When I was growing up in the South, on days like the ones we've been having so far this week, my grandfather would sometimes remark, "It's too hot to fish." If you don't know much about older Southern gentlemen like my grandfather, let me enlighten you. It has to be mighty hot to be too hot to fish. They love going to a creek bank or a pond somewhere and spending all afternoon in the sun waiting for that tug on the fishing line. For it to be too hot to do that is saying something.

I went to see the movie Adventureland on Sunday (good movie, by the way), and when I got in my car to go home, the temperature gauge inside the car read 109 degrees. It was 3 p.m. I immediately cranked up the air conditioning and rolled down every window in hopes that I would not burn to a crisp immediately. Of course, the gauge is a reflection of more than just the actual temperature; it also is heavily influenced by the amount of sun, so I know it wasn't truly 109 degrees. However, we did go over the 100-degree mark on Sunday.

And in the city where I work, we topped out at 100 degrees on both Sunday and Monday. Monday was a particular delight because I got to walk from my office to class several times during the day. Then, on the drive home, between 7 and 8 p.m. or so, the gauge in the care consistently read more than 90 degrees. For most of the ride, it hovered around 95 or 96 degrees. This was after the sun had gone down, a time when the temperature usually drops to something more comfortable.

This morning it was already 71 degrees when I got up at 4:15 a.m. It never cooled down last night, and today was still near the top of the thermometer. I don't know if we set another record today like we have the past couple of days, but I wouldn't be at all surprised.

I'm realizing more and more that these extremes of temperature (way too hot or way too cold) are what truly bother me, and it gets particularly bad if the temperature rises and falls a lot during the same week (wich is apparently going to be the case here this week). If it stays relatively consistent, I'm fine with the weather in California. However, it's April and we've already hit 100 degrees a couple of times. I'm coming home exhausted and sweaty and more than a little smelly, I'd imagine. (Sorry for anyone who's had to stand or sit close to me the past couple of days.) I need more moderate weather.

Yes, I know I grew up in the South where the temperatures are even higher and the humidity creates another charming factor. But I've not lived in the South for 19 years now, and I know I wouldn't survive a full summer there. A week in New Orleans one May a couple of years ago almost killed me. It was already 100 degrees with 90 percent humidity at 8 a.m. How anyone lives through that is beyond me. (Well, I know how they do it. They stay indoors where the air conditioning is working.) I have all of the windows open here and a fan going, and I still think it's too hot.

Relief is on the way, according to the weather forecast. I'm hoping the cold spell we're about to face (dropping to a frigid 78 degrees tomorrow) will be more permanent than this 90-100+ stuff we've endured recently.