 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ARCHIVES: May, 2005 |
The Agenda:Testing the Premise: Are Gays a Threat to Our Children? What the "Dutch Study" Really Says About Gay Couples Federal Hate Crime Statistics: Why The Numbers Don't Add Up Favorites:
Photo Essays:The Anasazi Ruins of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico Now Showing / Reflection on Hayden, Arizona
|
Still Life At Sunset
|
||||||||||||
 |
|
© LookingForSam / Family Photos |
I don’t remember why Easter was there with me in the field across the street from their house. My great-grandmother rarely ventured off of the front porch. If it had been earlier in the day, you might find her there stringing beans, shucking corn, or playing Scrabble with her sister Christine who lived in the cottage next door. If she left the porch, it was to tend to her prize rosebushes that grew in great towering heaps up the trellis that formed an arch across the porch. But this late in the day she was much more likely to be inside watching television with the rest of the grownups. Instead, for some reason this evening she was there with me in the field.
We all lived within a very tight radius of my great-grandparents’ house. Not only did her sister live right next door, but my grandmother's house was just three doors down and our own family lived just a few short blocks away. So it was pretty common for all of us to get together sometime after suppertime – which for Easter and Cecil was about 4:30 but for the rest of us it was closer to 6:00. Like clockwork, we’d make our way to Easter’s and Cecil’s house in time for the grownups could catch Hollywood Squares at 7:00, while my brothers and I entertained ourselves however we could.
Maybe that summer evening it involved playing in the field across the street. And maybe that evening’s Hollywood Squares was a rerun, or maybe they just didn’t feel like turning the TV set on. All of those vacuum tubes gave off a lot of heat. Sometimes on days like today Easter might say, “We haven’t had the TV set on all day. It’s just too hot.”
At any rate, it was very unusual for her to be out in the field that late in the evening. In fact, I don’t remember any other time when Easter was in the field regardless of the time of day. And now that I think about it, she wasn’t the only one there with me that evening. So was my mom and my grandmother, and even Aunt Teen.
That makes this memory even more unusual – the field was kid’s territory. Grownups rarely bothered to cross the street, except for when Cecil would take me along on his daily walk and we’d sometimes cross the field and climb the levee to get a look at the barges on the river. But for whatever reason that evening we had all gathered in the middle of the field: my great-grandmother, her sister, my grandmother, my mother and me – four generations facing the setting sun.
Portsmouth was a gritty steel-mill town in those days, and the tall stacks of the open hearths constantly belched a torrent of rust-colored smoke which swirled throughout the valley. People would see the red haze and shrug, saying, “Red is the color of money.” This haze mingled with the clouds that evening, adding a surreal Technicolor brilliance to the sunset. The sun peeked between the clouds here and there, shooting multihued beams across the sky. The mixture of fiery colors was intoxicating. Maybe that’s why we were all there in the field that evening. Maybe we were drawn there by the garish show of purple, red, pink, orange, and so many other colors for which there are no names. Whatever brought us together in that field, we stayed there, silently transfixed by the dazzling display before us.
After a while Easter broke the silence. “Will you look at that? Words can’t begin to describe it. I’d love to paint a picture of it so I could have it to show to people.”
My grandmother exclaimed, “Well mom, you should! That’d make a very nice picture.”
We turned to see Easter looking down at the ground, sweeping the grass with her foot as she considered the idea. Then, in a lower voice, she continued, “No, if I tried to do that nobody would believe it. They’d just look at it and say it looks fake. They’d say sunsets don’t ever really look like that. I’d have to tone down the colors for them to believe it, and then it wouldn’t be the same.” We turned again to face the setting sun, and we had to agree.
“No,” she continued, gesturing towards the sun with a wave of her hand, “there are some things in the world you just can’t paint.”
I don’t like memes. They can be very entertaining, but in the wrong hands they can become a too-easy solution for lazy people who have run out of ideas for their blogs. So naturally I was eager to participate in this one. Here’s how it works:
When I asked Lisa to interview me, she responded with these five questions.
1. What is the best place you’ve ever visited, and what made it enjoyable?
It’s hard to narrow them all down to just one place. For spectacular scenery, there’s no place like southern Utah. The friendliest strangers in the world live in Carrizozo, New Mexico. Marfa, Texas is home to a strange mix of cowboys and world-renowned minimalist art. Ohio and Kentucky is chock-full of the most picturesque small towns in America, something that almost nobody knows. Then there’s Mexico, Upper Michigan, St. Lucia, the Osage hills in Oklahoma – I find just about every place I’ve ever visited to be endlessly fascinating.
But I’d have to say my favorite place is London. For such a huge city (it’s the eighteenth largest in the world), it has an amazingly intimate scale, which I noticed before I even got off the bus from Heathrow. This massive city feels like a very nice town. The streets are narrow, the sidewalks are full of people, the traffic is heavy but courteous. The buildings are generally small, which means that every square foot matters. This also means that tables are close together in restaurants. The Underground is a strange mix of the not-quite modern and the Victorian. Busses are everywhere, as are the famously clean and ubiquitous London cabs. Walk any street and turn a corner, and you find yourself in a nice quiet neighbor(u)rhood anchored by beautifully serene church that has stood sentry for the better part of four hundred years. It’s hard to imagine a city so large which works so well at being such a thoroughly pleasant place.
We're not good at melding size with intimacy here. One is inevitably sacrificed for the other, and this being America, size wins every time. Which is why find yourself standing in the middle of a desolate downtown street looking up at an oppressive office building with no discernable entrance. After all, everyone enters from the garage, not the street. And they come and go in their shiny hermetically sealed vehicles, never once setting foot onto open sidewalk. In fact, the sidewalk is typically devoid of all human life, except for the occasional representative of the ill-clothed/ill-housed/ill-fed demographic.
London has largely avoided this, with the glaring exception of Canary Wharf – which proves that even the British can stoop to building banal “edge cities” in the name of economic development. But otherwise, they’ve managed to demonstrate that size and intimacy are two completely different things, and that these things don’t have to be in competition with each other. The city’s vitality is found at street level.
So even if they didn’t have the Academy of Ancient Music, the British Museum, the Tate Modern, St. Paul’s, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the queen, The Royal Lying-In Hospital (I should have taken a picture!), Harrod’s, Seven Dials, sexy accents, Soho, Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park, sexy accents, Trafalgar Square, sexy accents, terrific beer, sexy accents, or Jerry Springer the Opera, London would still be my favorite place in the world.
Either that or Cambridge.
2. From what little I’ve seen of your writing, it seems clear to me that you are driven. What motivates you?
I have no idea. I admire story tellers – my great grandmother was a master. I learned so much from asking her simple questions and listening to her go on for the rest of the afternoon. But I’m not much of a storyteller myself.
But one thing I still do is ask questions. And if I don’t write down the answers, I’ll forget them. I want to remember them because I’m afraid someone will ask me the same questions and I won’t know what to say.
3. Have you ever stolen anything?
Well, let’s see. I’ve stolen moments. I’ve stolen away. I stole my English teacher’s thunder by cracking a joke. I stole third base. I’m always stealing glances. I stole a kiss on Lake Texoma. Almost every idea I ever had once belonged to someone else.
But if you’re asking me about an object that I took that didn’t belong to me, I’m surprised to say that I cannot think of a single thing. I coulda sworn there was something, but if there was, you’d think it would have come to mind by now.
4. Do you have a piece of furniture that everyone knows is ‘yours’? As in, “nobody bettah be sittin’ in the green chair, that’s Jim’s.” If yes, please tell me everything about it that makes it special to you. If no, do you have hopes and dreams to attain a favorite green chair one day?
Nope. I pretty much plop my butt down on just about anything that’s handy. In fact, having “my” chair would run counter to my nature – I I would never want to put anybody out. I tend to adapt to situations rather than insist that a situation adapt itself to me.
But my willingness to adapt has its limits, especially when I feel my autonomy is threatened. For example, I insisted that my house was NOT going to be painted the same dull tan color as every other Faux Santa Fe house in the entire blessed Southwest. It’s my house, paid for with my money. Why should it look exactly like everyone else’s? For a nation that claims to prize individuality, why is there such an immense pressure to conform? My builder fought the idea every step of the way, but I held firm: I will not have a brown house!
So my house is red, the only red house on the block and one of only a few non-tan houses on this side of town. A few of my neighbors tell me they love it. Most of the rest have resigned themselves to it, even if they haven’t gotten over it entirely.
Sorry, I got off topic. A chair? Nah. One’s as good as another.
5. Yard sales: potential for hidden treasures, or a huge neighborhood annoyance?
I suspect that my life is grossly incomplete because I cannot rouse the energy to get up so early in the morning to scour yard sales as a proper gay man should. I’m sure many a strange and wonderful thing passes from one undeserving hand to another as I sleep in. I love kitsch and strange furniture from the fifties through the seventies, and I presume yard sales and estate sales are the best places to find them. But if they hold any potential for hidden treasure, I have failed to realize that potential. We do dollar stores and Nogales instead.
As for yard sales being an annoyance: believe me, there are very few things my neighbors could do to annoy me. Remember, my house is red.
Okay. Does anybody want five questions?
 |
|
| Me and my brother |
© LookingForSam |
Back when I was in school, the guidance counselor made me take one of those personality tests which said that when I grow up I should be a teacher, clergyman or social worker. I looked at those results and said, “Forget that! They don’t make any money.”
So I followed my Dad’s advice and studied engineering. I am now that reasonably successful engineer that my father would have been proud of. But my success, such as it is, really isn’t based on any brilliance or technical prowess on my part.
I’ll never have a patent to my name, and my work will never appear in a professional journal. Yet somehow, I’ve managed to do okay. I was even promoted to some level of middling responsibility, which is pretty much when I discovered that the secret to success is to simply pretend to be much smarter than I actually am. It has worked remarkably well.
Okay, when I say that it has worked “remarkably well”, I mean that as in it-pays-the-bills-with-a-little-left-over, not in the I-have-derived-incredible-meaning-and-satisfaction-from-my-career sort of way. Most definitely not. And while I suppose I could complain about this (and sometimes I do), I know that I’m pretty lucky in many respects. The grass can be pretty green on both sides of the fence, even if the shades of green are a little different.
But sometimes I can’t help but think that I could have done better, at least in the job-satisfaction sort of way. I’d consider a second career, but the prospects of going back to school are so daunting that I can’t work up the enthusiasm. Let’s not forget: just because I act smart, it doesn’t mean I am smart. That’s a whole different matter altogether.
I just took another one of those online tests, and my Briggs-Meyer’s personality score is ISFJ, which pretty much matches how I tested some thirty years ago:
“ISFJs are often unappreciated, at work, home, and play. Ironically, because they prove over and over that they can be relied on for their loyalty and unstinting, high-quality work, those around them often take them for granted – even take advantage of them… Because of all of this, ISFJs are often overworked, and as a result may suffer from psychosomatic illnesses.
“Traditional careers for an ISFJ include: teaching, social work, most religious work, nursing, medicine (general practice only), clerical and secretarial work of any kind, and some kinds of administrative careers.”
Secretary? Nah. Medicine? The sight of blood makes me nauseous. The others? Sometimes they sound tempting, but only in that listen-too-me-I'll-tell-you-everything-you-need-to-know-for-your-own-good kind of way. Believe me, you don't want that.
I guess for now I’ll just stick to what I’ve been good at so far: pretending to be smart in engineering. Given the options, it's probably safer to pretend to be smart at software engineering than, say, medicine or religion. Engineering is what brought me here, and I guess that will have to be good enough. At least until they catch on to me or I suffer a psychosomatic illness.
Yes, there’s always that to look forward to.
I didn't know about this until I looked more closely at the tool-tip that pops up next to the Microsoft Update feature:
|
|
So yes, the good news is that the good folks at Microsoft have changed their minds. It will be even better news when (or if) they continue to maintain this position during Washington State's next legislative session.
Chris asks me that a lot and I usually don’t have a good answer. I’ll be driving down the road looking off into space, or staring at the scattered newspapers on the dining room table. I’ll be lost in the silence of the moment, and suddenly the silence is broken.
What are you thinking about?
How do I answer this? Do I tell him that I’m thinking
about how the great Stoic philosopher
Epictetus said that the key to living a life of imperturbability is to
understand what can and cannot be controlled and to use that understanding
correctly, and how that very simple concept served as the turning point on
which my life drastically changed, and that is why I don’t get upset over
many of the
things that used to upset me, and that is also why I haven’t the slightest
concern whatsoever about what people may say about me because I can’t
control that either? Do I then tell him about how that concept somehow
managed
to became one of the
philosophical
underpinnings of Alcoholics Anonymous, even though as far as I know, the guy
who founded AA may never have even read Epictetus?
Do I then tell him that this reminds me of staying overnight at my
grandmother's house and seeing a copy of the
Serenity Prayer (which perfectly echoes the thoughts of Epictetus) that
my grandmother had framed and hung outside of my alcoholic grandfather’s
bedroom door as though it
were some sort of talisman to ward off the evil spirits of the spirits? And
that is why the "Jerry Sienfeld" episode in which George Costanza’s father
goes around screaming “Serenity
now!” never fails to crack me up, and that is also why I think Jerry
Stiller is one of the great comedic geniuses of his generation?
Or do I just say, “Oh, nothing.”
Sometimes my mind wanders so far afield it’s hard to get anyone caught up to date.
And sometimes I’d rather not say what I’m thinking about. Like when I’m thinking of a mindless lyric from an old Schoolhouse Rock song that I am desperate to get out of my head, but it popped into my head because I remember sitting on my grandmother’s living room floor watching television on a Saturday morning while I wondered why my grandmother’s bedroom was at the back of the house and my grandfather’s bedroom was at the front of the house. My grandmother, whom I’m pretty sure never read Epictetus, said it was because he snored, and I believed it because, well, he really did snore. Lolly Lolly Lolly, get your adverbs here! Come on down to Lolly's, get your adverbs here!
Now why should I inflict that song on Chris like that? It’s not his fault he asked such a simple question.
But sometimes he persists. Come on now, I know something’s going on inside that head of yours. It’s at that point when I'm tempted to engage the nuclear option of belting out the only other song that managed to squeeze Schoolhouse Rock out of my head (The sailors said, “Brandy, you’re a fine girl”…), but it seems like a cruel thing to do in response to such an innocent question, don’t you think?
What are you thinking about?
Oh, nothing. And sometimes that’s the truth.
|
|
Sometimes my mind reaches a perfectly blank state, and all I'm really doing is watching a cloud slowly drift by in the early Arizona afternoon, a single wisp that slowly dissipates in the dry desert air, dissipating like thoughts in my brain. It’s there but it’s fleeting; it drifts slowly, now it’s barely visible, slowly disappearing into the thin air that holds it so high in the cold, crisp sky. Then it’s gone. Just like that.
What are you thinking about?
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
