Coming Out on Live TV

Last summer, I was pruning the boxwoods in our garden in Maine, when my neighbor Irene, a retired schoolteacher, and self-professed book maven walked by and said, “Hey, Edward Scissorhands, I saw your book in the New York Times.” 

I waved the shears at her and said, “Thanks!”

She dropped the hand she was using to shield her eyes from the sun, and scrunched up her face contemplating my reply, Thanks?

“I mean, so what did you think?” I corrected myself.

“You ready to be the poster child for all of this?” she asked.

“Um, sure, yeah,” I replied.

She raised one eyebrow and displayed a closed-lip smile. It’s a look I’ve seen before, typically, when my youngest daughter, Marisa, uses a phrase I don’t understand. Something like, “Ugh, Dad, you’re such a stan.” She’ll give me that look, and I can read the question in her face before she asks, Do you even know what that means?

“Um, sure, yeah.”

I published a book, a memoir about my personal experience. I wasn’t the first person to come out later in life, or as I like to say, Fashionably Late. That always gets an eye-roll from Marisa.  

Irene didn’t say anything, but I could read the question in her facial expression, But really, are you ready?  As she walked off, she shouted, “William Dameron tamps down the tall grass of untold experience,” echoing a sentence from the New York Times Review. That phrase has become somewhat of a joke in our household. We use it any time we try something new, like when I tell my husband, Paul, I tried a new pork chop recipe, and he’ll say, “Tamping down the tall grass, huh?”  

Since that summer day, I’ve received emails almost daily from people who’ve read my book. Most are kind, a few decidedly not, but almost all of them state the same thing: they feel heard. I reply to every single one. It is not something I take lightly. While I may have written one of the first literary memoirs about a person coming out later in life to his spouse and family, I am not the first one to do it. I can joke about many things, but I stand in awe of those who come out, often in environments much more hostile, sometimes life-threatening.

As queer people, we make a decision every day whether to come out or not, to co-workers, new neighbors, a manager, new clients, or even the taxi driver. It gets easier, but there is always that split second thought, is it safe?

Recently Philip Schofield, the host of This Morning, in the UK, came out on live TV. In light of those events, The Times published an excerpt from my book, and the BBC interviewed me on the Victoria Derbyshire program. Because I joined by skype, the studio didn’t want to consume the bandwidth by sending their video back to me. While I was being interviewed, I didn’t get a chance to see what the studio looked like. Maybe that’s a good thing because when they sent me a screen capture later, I certainly looked like the poster child for coming out and also? it reminded me of a scene from the movie Edward Scissorhands when he appears on a TV program.

In that scene, an audience member asks Edward if he has ever considered corrective surgery. “Yes,” he replies quietly. Then, another audience member stands up and says, “But if you had regular hands, you'd be like everyone else.”

That line slays me.

Read more...

Adorable Little Stories and Great Big Books

Years ago, when I told Paul I was going to start writing this blog, he cocked his head and said, “OK.” I had heard that tone in his voice once before when I told him my attorney suggested he sign a prenup agreement. What he said then was something like, “OK, give me that stupid agreement. I’ll sign it.” It wasn’t indignation or resentment, it was bemusement, like don’t worry, you can keep your Franklin Mint Star Trek plate collection.

I narrowed my eyes and said, “You don’t think I have anything valuable to say?”

“Sure I do, sweetie,” he replied reaching out to finger the top button on my shirt. “But, what are you going to write about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, swatting his hand away and looked up at the ceiling like the answer might be hidden in the rafters. “Stories.”

“You’re going to write adorable little stories?” he asked.

The truth is, I really didn’t know what I was going to write, but after that comment, I was for damn sure going to write something, and whatever it was, it would make the world sit up and take notice. It would make Paul bow down before all of the beautiful words piled up at my feet. It would make the angels weep.

What I wrote was the first crappy blog post that I forced Paul to read and that you can still find here. I will never remove it because it makes me laugh with its oh so noble sense of purpose. And also? It lets me know how far I have come.

After that post, many stories followed and then they jumped onto The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Salon, various other places and then to The New York Times. But this blog is where I fell in love with writing. It has been my proving ground, my laboratory to experiment in until I finally figured out what it was that my stories so desperately needed to convey: It is never too late to become who you were meant to be.  

Lately, the posts on this blog have been few and far between, but don’t worry, dear reader, like Evita Perón, the truth is, I never left you. Early in the mornings and late at night, I have been writing something a bit longer than a blog post. On July 1st, 2019, more than a decade after I came out, my debut memoir, TheLie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out will be published by Little A. It’s not an Adorable Little Story, but I hope you will love it as much as I do, as much as I love Paul.

When I finished writing the book, after my agent said, “Slice your heart open and let it bleed out onto the page.” After my editor who is also a poet, coaxed from me the most difficult, and beautifully terrifying words I have ever written, I gave the book—my quote-unquote Star Trek Plate collection—to Paul.

It was the story of my destruction and my creation, the story of Us, my precious. I waited. One day passed without comment, then two, then three freaking days. On the fourth day, I was about a ten on the anger scale and cranking it up to twenty-five. On the fifth day, we boarded a cross-country flight to California together, and I imagined how I would ignore Paul for six and a half hours and flirt shamelessly with the cute flight attendant. And then he pulled out his iPad, sat it on the little folding table and opened up my book.

“You are not seriously going to read this while I sit next to you are you?” I asked.

He clapped his hands like a kid with an adorable little toy. I looked through the window at the clouds below us, stealing sidelong glances at his face and at his finger scrolling through the pages of my life. After six hours, he attempted to swipe left multiple times. We sat in silence, the only sound my beating heart and the hum of the engines.

“The period end period,” I said.

He stared straight ahead.

“WELL?” I asked.

The startled passenger on the other side of Paul shifted uncomfortably in her seat, angling her body away from us. If he didn’t know how much I detested the word, Paul might have told me I sounded a little shrill.  He held up his finger, like give me a minute. I’m about to sneeze.

Look at him, I thought. Look at that same old stupid Maine t-shirt he always wears.

I glanced back through the window at the tiny roads stitched into the landscape, at how they crisscrossed in seemingly senseless patterns. I thought about all of the years invested in this book, all of the pain. When I looked back at Paul, he pulled that stupid old t-shirt up to dab his nose, to wipe his cheeks, to blot his eyes.

Look at that face.

How could I not love that face? That old t-shirt. That old Paul. My husband.

My weeping angel.

  

Dear Reader: Keep up to date with my book news by following me on my author website, won't you?

Read more...

The Turkeys

The turkeys woke me this morning. They roam our Boston neighborhood in a gaggle, like a gang of delinquent teenagers. They are unafraid; defiant even as they strut across the sidewalk daring pedestrians to cross their paths. I’ve witnessed them charging the oblivious passerby, their brown wings extended, red wattles flapping and eyes narrowed. This morning, they are just outside my window.

When I lived in Franklin, MA a lifetime ago, the turkeys hung out on a rural back road next to a restaurant called “Ma Glockner’s,” an establishment famous for their chicken dinners served with a fresh cinnamon bun. It opened on Maple Street in 1937 on Thanksgiving Day, serving the domesticated big breasted, white, dumbed down brethren of the wild turkeys.

The land surrounding the restaurant could have been lifted from the pages of Watership Down; sun-dappled stones walls, birch leaves alternating green and silver as they shudder in the cool breeze and rabbit warrens burrowed among the twigs and russet colored leaves of the forest floor.  

I used to pass the turkeys of Maple Street on my morning and evening commute. I was mostly unaware of the beauty surrounding me. But every once in a while, one of those damned birds would run along the side of the road, hook a left and attempt to become airborne. Their lumbering bodies would tumble mere inches over the hood of my car, more like an awkward long jump across the road than a graceful bird taking flight. Startled, I’d pull my car into the parking lot of Ma Glockners and wait for a minute while my heart stopped pounding.

I sat there once, listening to Al Green on the radio singing “Love and Happiness.” The tune so sweet it made me tear up. A strip of clouds blushed orange in the western sky. Squirrels chattered in the Oak trees, turkeys huddled. I wanted a love that would make me do right and make me do wrong. Next life, I thought.

But here I am.

Each morning, I check the balance of my 401(K). I calculate the years until retirement. I glance at Facebook. I wait for an email from my agent. Perhaps he worked out a deal at two AM with a publisher and sent me a contract. It could happen. I re-read the same essay I have been working on for two months. I delete a comma and then I put it back. I look to see if any of the publications have accepted my submissions.  

How easily we fall into a routine. But this morning the turkeys gathered outside of my window and sang me a song. Gobble, gobble, gobble—“Wake up mother-fucker.”

Read more...

When I Woke Up

When I was floating between jobs in the 1990’s, I worked as a reader. Breadwinner for my young family, and all I could scratch up were the lousy crumbs from a temporary job scoring high school essays, which were part of Ohio's standardized assessment exam.

I had to score the essays on a scale of zero to five. A zero meant there were no words written. A five was stellar, as if perhaps this should be published in a literary journal. A score of one meant they had written something, a word or two, typically some permutation of “This sucks,” or “Fuck you.” Judging by their essays, teenagers in the urban core of Cleveland, Ohio were brimming with hostility. Like most things in life, it was the essays in the middle that got messy. What was the difference between a two and a three, or a three and a four?

Most of the essays began verbatim, using the writing prompt, “One morning I woke up and discovered that I could fly.” What often followed was a quotidian trip drifting through the neighborhood as jealous friends exclaimed, “Hey, you can fly!!” Many of the girls flew to the mall to go shopping with their friends, or to Hollywood where they employed celebrities in cameo appearances. Brendan Fraser often appeared in a loincloth, fresh from his role in “George of the Jungle.” They would “make out,” but it rarely progressed beyond first base. Even in uncirculated print, teenage girls fretted about being called a slut.

Then there were the essays where girls drifted up to bedroom windows and secretly witnessed stepfathers committing some type of abuse, or boys flew into closets and stole guns. These were unscored and forwarded to my supervisors; middle-aged women, who poured over the words, with knitted brows, as they tugged at their sweaters, pulling them closed.

The essays were read twice by two different scorers. If we wanted to keep our jobs, we had to maintain a high accuracy rate with the tandem reader’s score. As my rate flailed, I worried that my temporary job would become a zero. Many mornings when I woke up, I wished I could fly away.

“Look, if the word ‘Slumbering’ is used in an essay, that’s an automatic four,” one of the readers confided to me in the break room. She was heating up her lunch, a single sweet potato, in the food-splattered microwave. It was the same thing she brought in every day. Karen was thin with stringy brown hair and paper-white skin with a slight blue sheen. She had the unsettling habit of staring at my forehead during our conversations. When she caught me looking down my nose at her shriveled-up potato, she glanced at my ham sandwich and said, “I think meat tastes like dried blood.”

“A four for slumbering?” I asked, patting the hair on my forehead, checking for fly-aways.

“Well, they have to write more than that, but you get the gist. More syllables and better word choices equals a higher score and vice versa.”

As my accuracy rate grew, so did my friendship with Karen. We shared the tidbits of our lives over lunches of sweet potatoes and ham sandwiches. Karen’s dream job was somewhere in the wilds of Wyoming where she could live and work on a ranch while writing and paying down her Grand-Teton sized school debt. Mine was to become employed full-time at a job that offered benefits; it was a three, though at the time I would have scored it a five.

Here is the thing about dreams. When life is a one or a two and you’re just trying to make ends meet, to be like everybody else, a three—somewhere in the middle—sounds pretty damn good. A five is unfathomable.

Every once in a while an essay deemed exemplary would be read aloud by a supervisor, giving us a break from the monotony of kids flying to the ubiquitous mall shopping trip, or drifting above the popular crowd and dropping egg-bombs. The first essay I scored as a five resonated deep in my marrow for reasons I could not then understand. I handed it to my supervisor, chest puffed out, as if I had written it myself.

“This is good,” she said. “Beautiful use of language and imagery, but I’m afraid it’s only a high three, perhaps a four.”

“But, she used the word slumbering,” I protested, “See? Right there.”

“It’s poetry, really, but how did the writer change? What do we discover about the narrator in the end that we did not know in the beginning?” she asked.

In the essay, the girl drifted above a handsome boy she loved, a honey-colored moon in his inky black sky. While he slumbered, she tugged at his tides and painted his face with her moonbeams. She was forever trapped in his orbit.

After I read the essay to Karen, she put down her fork-full of potato and asked, “Have you ever been in love like that?”

“Not yet,” I replied.

Her eyes fluttered for a moment and then her gaze drifted down from the bulls-eye on my forehead to the tears rolling down my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It was just such a beautiful essay,” I said, waving my hand in the air, brushing it off. But, while I was dreaming about life in the middle, this teenage girl from Sandusky, Ohio burned a hole through my forehead, pulled out a five and held it up for me to see.

On Monday morning, Karen didn’t show up for work. Later in the week, I received an e-mail from her. She woke up Sunday morning and decided to start driving. We shared fat e-mails about the dusty ranch and the colorful characters in her new Wyoming town, how the sky was so big, you could see a storm coming from a hundred miles away and how at night it grew so cold that when she went to the toilet, she was afraid her stream would freeze up.

I became employed full time at a company that offered benefits. I don’t know what happened to Karen. Our lives got busy and somewhere along the way, we lost touch with one another.  I imagine her steely gaze looking up at the windswept clouds racing over the Tetons. I lived in that messy middle for many years, moving up the ladder, hoping each fresh job in every new city would offer a benefit that the previous one did not, authenticity. When I finally figured it out, the storm of divorce kicked up and then it passed. 

Here’s the thing about dreams, you don’t necessarily have to fly away in order to make them come true, but you do have to wake up.    

I got up, brushed off the dust and became an IT Director for a prestigious consulting firm with stellar benefits in Harvard Square. Even so, sometimes at night, I lie awake, worrying about the college debt my children have amassed and wonder how I'll make ends meet. Then I’ll look over at my new husband Paul slumbering, as the full moon paints his face. A sense of lightness tugs at me and pulls me up. I am forever, happily trapped in his orbit. I found my five.

Read more...

Word Fishers

When you are writing a memoir, each morning you sit at your desk and kill your father, slander your mother and shame your children.  This is the price that you pay for seeking your version of the truth and that truth is like a wadded up ball of string that you pick away at slowly.  You may be able to get a purchase on the beginning and the end, but the middle seems hopelessly riddled with knots.

Once you untangle the twine, you are not even half way there.  You tie a hook on the end and throw it into a sea of words and hope to catch something, anything.  Most days pass without a tug.  Then, you feel a slight nibble and you struggle to reel it in.  Sometimes the catch is too small, sometimes too big and still others are monsters with razor sharp teeth and dark eyes too terrifying to consider. You cut the line.

At night, when sleep eludes you, the words swim through your mind. 

They shudder with a bright silvery flourish just beyond your grasp, but you try to remember. In the morning you say “Here, this is the spot,” and cast your line.  If you are patient, you catch a few and then some more until the boat is teeming with words.

Once you have enough, you select the best and prepare them, fry them, broil them, bake them; add a bit of salt here, add a dash of spice there until they are ready to be consumed.  You place your dish proudly in front of other fishers of words.

You wait.

You wait.

You wait.

“This dish is too cold.”

“This dish is too hot.”

“This dish stinks.”

They pick apart the words and spit out the bones.  They ask if you considered baking it less or baking it more or adding this spice or just throwing the whole damn thing out and starting all over again.

You swear off fishing for words. 

“I can sit on the beach with my friends,” you say.  They seem perfectly happy, you think. You rest.  You drink.  You go out to dinner, but you cannot stop thinking about the monster that lurks in the murky depths of the ocean. 

The next morning, when the world is sleeping and your dreams are like the mist on the sea, your line breaks the glossy surface. You let it sink deeper and deeper until it reaches the abyss where the weight of the words on the string threatens to capsize the boat.  You kill your father, slander your mother and shame your children. Because you know that if you don’t catch the words,the words will devour you.   

 

    

  

Read more...

Word Vomit

After the third (or fourth?) glass of wine I tell Sam that I write because I believe in life after death.  Both of these statements are true.  I write.  I believe in life after death.  But, I can’t connect the two in any logical sense and he can see that I am struggling with the word vomit that I have just chucked up onto our high top bar table.

 

“Because you’re going to come back and find what you wrote?” he asks me.

“P-Possibly,” I stutter and take another sip as his eyes narrow.

I am waiting for him to say this is the stupidest shit he has ever heard.  But he doesn’t, which surprises me.  He reaches into his drink with his index finger and thumb, plucks out an ice cube and pops it into his mouth. He pushes his eyeglasses up on his nose and shrugs.  I think he has finally decided to find my pointless statements charming. 

“Dameron, check out that dude,” he says while crunching the ice cube and motioning behind me with a nod of his head. 

Correction: He has decided to ignore my pointless statements and cruise the bar. When my head spins around, he admonishes me “Don’t do a Linda Blair!” But, he drops the “R” so that it sounds like Blai-uh. 

My face contorts reflexively into a disgusted look.  He laughs and says “C’mon’, he’s adorable.”

I’m sure his mother thinks so I think, but I do not say this aloud.  He has forgiven my word vomit. I’ll give him this face vomit.

We’ve been friends for six years now and this is our equivalent of the monthly sleep over; brushing each other’s hair, playing records and talking about boys.  We plan significant events together; fiftieth birthday parties, trips to Florida. Our exploits from the past have already taken on the sepia tinged quality of urban legends, referenced in some way each time we get together. 

“OK, let’s do our ‘Where’s Waldo?’,” he says to me and we rotate our heads like Linda Blai-uh minus the projectile split pea soup.  There is is no sighting of “Monkey Boy” or “Y” who we always reference by placing our hand in the middle of our scalp to signify how advanced "Y's" receding hairline has become.

We don our coats and amble on the brick paved sidewalk to Fritz, where the ceiling is painted black, surly bartenders hurl drinks, Donna Summer is moaning on the stereo and men pretend to watch sports on the wall mounted TV’s while they check each other out.

“This place is a fuckin’ dump.  It needs to be gutted,” Sam says.

He is referring to its imminent closure and reopening as a fancy new restaurant.  But still, we find ourselves here once a month.

When it’s time to go we walk to the corner together.

“See ya’ buddy,” Sam says and gives me a hug. My throat catches.

He walks towards the South End and I walk to the Green Line, the new Liberty Mutual building towering over us.  Hard to believe how much has changed in just six years.  I met Sam at the lowest point in my life when I felt like I had no friends.

When I step off of the T, I take a wider arc than is necessary, my spatial judgment impaired. “Damn Sam,” I laugh and think I must remember to write down this scene. In the morning, head throbbing, I find a note that I had taken on my iPhone: I write because there is life after death.

        

Read more...

Saranac Review

"We opened the bar door and stepped out into the night.  There is a truth in the piercing silence that washes over a person at two in the morning under the starry Colorado sky. The beat and hum still pulsing through our veins, we walked to his car, Don’s arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist and then his lips on mine; thirst and hunger. The air molecules melted into a heated mixture of our mingled scents; orange, cloves and salty skin. Suddenly, I was at the basin of Phantom Canyon as a cold wind blows in and a June snowfall glitters the red canyon walls;  and then at the top of Royal Gorge on a suspension bridge staring dizzily a thousand feet below at the Arkansas River cutting through time. When the camera zoomed back in, it was just above us, our foreheads touching and my arms resting on his shoulders as we breathed deeply, the distant hum of the bar behind us and the moonlit sky stretched over the silent Rockies. And then I heard the hum become Sheila’s words, like the recognition of an alarm in a dream. She was walking quickly towards us. “He’s not sure if he’s gay yet Don!”   

But there was no more confusion.  I knew."

*****************************************************************

I am thrilled to announce the inclusion of my short coming of age/coming out memoir "Splintered Light on Clear Creek" in this year's edition of the fine literary journal, the Saranac Review.  This edition includes works by many award winning poets and authors.  I hope you will give them a visit.

Read more...

The Queen and Me: Excuse Me But You're Standing on My Platform

My plan for the conference was simple.  I would casually bump into a literary agent who would immediately recognize me and sign me up on the spot. It would be exactly like those old black and white movies where the film director, innocently sipping his coffee, is suddenly struck by the beauty of the young waitress framed in soft-focus and shouts “Kid, where have you been all of my life?” but with less sexual tension and more color. I had business cards imprinted with my website address.  I was prepared.

The target market for the conference was women, which didn’t faze me because A) aside from lesbians, we tend to like the same things B) The gaggle of literary agents would all ask “Who’s that man?” and most importantly C) My shy bladder could escape to the quiet solitude of the men’s restroom alone.

Here is something you should know if you are one of the few men at a women’s conference.  You have the uneasy sense that there is something stuck between your teeth, but that thing is not in your teeth, it’s approximately two feet below.  I might have been more comfortable in drag, but Paul always told me that I would make an ugly woman. I wasn’t willing to take that risk.

You should also know that these women are serious about promoting their blogs. In fact they become their blogs.

“I’m Mommy needs Xanax. What’s your platform?” A disheveled woman in her late forties asked me. 

I searched my business card as if it might have the answer written on it.

“You must have a platform.  Without it you’re nothing,” she said impatiently.

“I was chosen as a ‘voice of the year’,” I replied, confident that this would trump the lack of a platform.

“Oh, you wrote that piece about the beige coat!” She perked up.

“No, someone else wrote that.  I wrote about the two lesbians.”

“Doesn't ring a bell, but that one about the beige coat, yeah that one was really good.”

“Thank you,” I replied and considered asking her for a Xanax, just to smooth out the edges.

During the question and answer period women confidently stepped up to the microphone and asked the only question that seemed to matter.

“Hi, Mommy needs Vodka here,” a young perky woman introduced herself and took a quick curtsy while the other women whispered “That’s her!”

“How do I market my platform?”  she asked the speaker.

One by one, Martinis and Minivans, Mama Loves Moonshine, Margarita Mommies, Mommy is Moody and Mental Mama all probed the speaker for insight into their brands. If one thing was certain, they all had a platform, even if it was a rickety thing propped up with liquor and broken dreams.

I retreated to the men’s restroom and met Tyrone, a maintenance worker leaning against the sink and staring into his reflection.

“Tough day?” I asked

“Man, you have no idea.  All these women. They a mess!”  he replied

Just then, we heard a woman, I can only assume it was Mommy Needs to Pee, shout into the bathroom “Anybody in here?” Tyrone’s eyes grew big as an army of women stormed the men’s room.

“Sorry, line's too long in the ladies room,” Mommy’s Gonna’ Bust a Gut shouted as I quickly zipped up my fly.  Tyrone ran.

By the end of the day it was clear that without a platform I was never going to attract an agent. Somewhat dejected I joined thousands of women in a large hotel ballroom with a small illuminated stage on one end and endless rows of seats.  There was a buzz and excitement in the air.  Queen Latifah would soon appear to host the reception and recognize the “Voices of the Year.”

Time dragged on. The Queen was M.I.A. and the excitement was beginning to morph into disappointment and frustration.  Women were tweeting using the hash tag #WhereTheBitchAt?  I searched the room for exits, having witnessed firsthand the stampede effect of impatient women.  

Suddenly the lights grew dim and music filled the room.  Queen Latifah sauntered onto the stage, dabbing her mouth with a napkin and shouting something about Chicago’s best pizza.  The room exploded into applause and screams.  And that is when it struck me. If I were to dress in drag, this is exactly how I would do it; all big hair, flawless skin and swagger. I’d take my sweet ass time eating pizza while people waited for me. My stage name would be Billoncé.

And then I was on my feet applauding.

There in the dark, women stood on the platform and weaved stories of despair, happiness, laughter, love and joy that joined together forming a chorus of life discovered through words. There in the dark we were all the same-no big hair, make up or any other trappings. There in the dark, I found my light, my platform “The only way out is in.”  Into that place where we all connect, singing of that thing that makes us human, authentic.

Finally the Queen asked all of the “Voices of the Year” winners to join the stage with her.  Here was my chance to be noticed.  As I walked onto the stage Outlaw Mama grabbed my hand and whispered into my ear “You should be up front” and pushed me into the spotlight.  There amid all of the flashing camera lights and applause, Queen Latifah glanced over her shoulder in my direction. And it was exactly like one of those old black and white movies where the glamorous actress notices the young undiscovered writer, arches her beautiful eyebrow and mouths the words meant only for his eyes.

“What the fuck is that man doing all up on my platform?”   

Read more...

Postcards From The Past



She sat down next to me and reached her arm across the table. I mistook this extension of her hand as a welcome and so I turned to smile and introduce myself.  “I’m just plugging in ma’ phone,” she said dismissively and turned the plug over several different ways while squinting and pursing her lips looking for all the world like a monkey trying to figure out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Her short grey hair was permed into tight curls and her eye-glasses rested on the end of her nose.  She wore a denim jacket.  There may have been a button pinned to her lapel.  She was the type of person who would wear a button--flair--that might say something like “World’s greatest grandma’” or “If you can read this button, back off!”  That type of thing.

“So, you’re publishing something?” she asked without looking up.  She was reflecting on my question to the leader of the seminar regarding publication and how to attract an agent.

“Yes, a short memoir,” I said.

“M-hmm, and what’s it about?”

I paused.  It wasn’t like I didn’t know what it was about.  I had labored for months on it.  I could have recited it word for word, but telling the world’s greatest grandma’ that your memoir is a story about how your lesbian aunt and her psychic girlfriend took you to your first gay bar when you were eighteen years old fell short of grandma’ material.  But I told her anyway.

“And your mother never knew?” She asked, looking up briefly and sucking the wind through her teeth as if a popcorn kernel was stuck there.

“I told her,” I said.  It sounded defensive.

“M-hmm,” she said tilting her head back and looking down her nose-tip glasses.

“This woman up front, now she’s got a story!” She said pointing to a woman in the front row.  And she did, too.  Her grandfather travelled the west in the early 1900’s taking pictures during the day and developing them at night, turning them into post cards.  She planned on retracing his footsteps, visiting all of those places he had been.

“Well, it’s more of an idea than it is a story, she hasn’t written anything…” I said and then the old woman shoved a picture into my hand.

“That’s my grandfather, my mother and that’s me,” she pointed with her wrinkled finger at an old black and white photograph.  She turned it over and pointed out her website and explained that she would be writing a story about her Greek ancestry and her mother’s recipes.

“Kind of like my Big Fat Greek Wedding.  But none of us were fat,” she said.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out my card and gave it to her.  On the right hand side was a picture of me. She held up the card next to my face and looked from me to my card and back again, smiling enigmatically.  I knew what she wanted to say, that this picture looked better than the person sitting in front of her. 

But if you stretched back the borders of the picture you would see a handsome man sitting next to me, the tilted evening summer sun painting everything the golden color of a memory and Nubble  lighthouse just up the road sitting on a rocky outcropping in the cold Atlantic ocean . If you could rotate the picture you would see five young adults laughing, one of them holding the camera and telling their fathers to smile.  

No one could ever look as good or as happy as that person in time.

The old lady waved the young woman from the front row down and began to tell her how much alike their stories were.  For the life of me I could not understand how my “Big fat Greek Wedding” was anything like Postcards from the Wild West.  But it did not matter; she could see herself in that picture just as surely as she could not see herself in the picture of an eighteen year old boy sitting in a bar on the edge of some Colorado town.

We wished each other luck and parted ways, returning to our time machines hurtling down the roads to our past. The young woman from the front row sleeping under the open sky with nothing but a big yellow moon, crying coyotes and her grandfather’s voice to keep her company, the old lady, young again, baking sweet walnut sugar cookies with her mother’s ghost and a young, uncertain boy sitting on a bar stool listening to his Aunt Sheila tell him that he was beautiful just the way God made him.

Once in a while, we'll pick up a postcard and jot a few lines on the back, letting you know we made it here or how beautiful it is, but we can never be certain who might receive our postcards from the past or if you can even understand the handwriting.  Sometimes you might recognize a piece of yourself in one of those pictures or hope to visit a place that we have been and you might tape it to the refrigerator in your mind so that it sticks with you for a while.  When that happens it’s like electricity. Because each of us is really just searching for a connection that lets us know that we are not alone, that we are alive.  And when that happens?

I hope you’ll write back.

    

Read more...

The Story in The Story

It is six thirty in the morning and I am sitting at our dining room table with a cup of coffee on one side of me and the window half open on the other.  I opened the window hoping that inspiration would be carried on the back of the cool morning breeze. The half-light of the sun barely illuminates the living room, which makes the dark grouping of objects seem more like a suggestion of furniture instead of concrete reality. If I were to stretch my arm through the window I could almost touch the brick corner of our neighbor’s building.  But it remains just out of reach: as does any inspiration for a story.

As a writer a great deal of my time is spent trying to bridge the world around me with the world inside of me. Often times, Paul will catch me staring blankly into space.  I worry that he feels like he is living with a person who is experiencing the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease; someone who is not always present in the world.

He will snap his fingers in front of my face and say “Hello? Can you repeat what I just told you?”   When I flatly recount his story verbatim he’ll look at me and say “Wow, my story sounds even more boring when you tell it.”  To which I respond
“Not really.”

But that is the crux of the matter.  Any story can be told, but it is the way in which it is told that matters. If I write about my grandfather’s table, I can describe the way it looks.  It is round with dark grained wood, curved legs and has multiple leaves to make it bigger. All of these things are true.  It is an object in this world.  But if I speak of its journey from the mountains of North Carolina to its spot in our dining room with our blended family sitting around it for the first time together on the evening before our marriage, it becomes something else. It becomes the bridge between this world and my world; a story in a story.

“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” Rodin said.

I suppose that is what I do with a block of words.  Whittling them down until the story hiding inside of the story is revealed.  It runs in my family.  My grandfather did this with his drawings.  We would sit at his dining room table and he would begin to draw as if the picture already existed on the paper and his pencil merely highlighted it.    And so must his mother, who was a musical prodigy, have done the same with him; at the very same table singing in French as she played the Mandolin. The love of art and the art of love played out over and over again upon this table.

Paul walks into the living room humming and arranges the pillows on the now clearly defined sofa.  The clock above me plays its tune and strikes eight.  I sit up, stretch my arms, look out through the window and catch a glimpse of my neighbor sitting at his kitchen table.  I wonder if he has been there the whole time.

“Did you find any perspiration?” Paul asks playfully, knowingly misusing the word as he kisses me.

“Yep” I say, ready to join the real world again.  “It was there in front of me the whole time.”

  http://yeahwrite.me/81-open

Read more...

The Perfect Arrangement

When I first started writing I would flip through the rolodex of memories in my mind, pluck out a story and transcribe it from beginning to finish: The End. Wham bam, thank you Ma’am. It was an accurate account, but it was hardly inspiring. As my writing skills matured my synapses rewired themselves forcing me to become introspective, preoccupied and dare I say it? somewhat of a diva. Objects became repositories of memories. The chair was no longer just a chair. I would weave two seemingly unrelated stories together and become frustrated when Paul could not see the perfect arrangement.

“So, you understood that the ducks in my post represented a dormant memory taking flight, right?” I would ask Paul impatiently.

He would stare at me blankly and reply “Can we have this discussion with your shirt off?”

“Savage” I would think to myself and then whip off my shirt. “And the symbolism of the snow on the path, tell me you got that?”

Absent mindedly he would say “Nope.” And then ask “Sweetie, where is the kitchen?” Frustrated I would wave my hand without looking up from my notebook and say “Over there” until I felt his puppy eyes boring into my skin. “OK, it’s there!” I would say bending my forearm back towards my shoulder in an exaggerated body building pose.

“Oh yeah, that’s where it is baby!” He would say while grabbing my bicep.

I would roll my eyes and focus my attention back on the computer screen. Clearly we were operating in two different worlds. I became obsessed with the idea that every word had been written and the only thing new I could add was to arrange them in a unique way. But at the same time Paul began to engross himself in planning the furniture for our new cottage in Maine.

We would sit silently on the sofa, me arranging and then re-arranging words on my screen while Paul searched the Internet diligently for the perfect deck table.

“Look at this one. It is perfect!” Paul exclaimed. Lost in my words it took me thirty seconds to process his statement. “Yep, that’s it.” I said flatly.

Our local IKEA store ran out of stock of the Perfect Table before we could purchase one.  Paul was morose and became obsessed with finding a replacement. He created a diagram of the deck on drafting paper complete with all of the door locations and paper cut outs of the Perfect Table and chairs. He would show me how the table’s leaves could open up and the chairs could be arranged to fit all of us around the Perfect Table. There was just enough room for this arrangement.

On weekends we would drive to IKEA and Paul would sadly visit the spot where the Perfect Table once resided in its own little outdoor diorama; replaced by an inferior table. Tempted by the smell of cinnamon buns I guided him towards the exit. “Come on, we’ll get a frozen yogurt and a cinnamon bun. I’m sure we can pick up a table at Target.” I said in my most sympathetic voice. He gave me the “how could you? “ look as if I had just brought a date to his funeral.

“It’s just a table” I said while licking the icing from my fingers. We had spent enough time looking for this table and I wanted to go home and get back to arranging words.

But he never gave up. Then one day he checked the stock at an IKEA in Long Island, New York. There were five tables in stock. In a rare intersection of personal life and business his travels took him to New York and then I received this e-mail:

      Subject: Porch Table

      Purchased and in the car! Great Success!

I refrained from typing a reply asking how the actual business portion of his trip had fared.

We drove up to Maine this weekend to survey the construction progress on our cottage. During the car trip, I sat silently in my world, arranging words in my head and I can only imagine that Paul must have been arranging the Perfect Table in his.

At the construction site, we stood on the deck under a surreal blue sky. The Webhannet River snaked across the marsh and just beyond the pine trees the New England Sea sparkled in the afternoon sun. “This is where the table will go.” Paul said proudly. “It's just the right size for our family. You can sit here with your notebook and a glass of wine as you write, looking out over this view.  That should make Willy happy.  Can you see it?” He asked beaming. At a sudden loss for words, I replied "Perfectly."

Sometimes a chair is just a chair and sometimes words are just words, but sometimes? A table is much more than just a table.

Read more...