When Thanksgiving Becomes Real

Susan leaves the following comment on my post about Jack:

I'm surprised he didn't recognize that not supporting the Equal Rights Amendment because "all my kids are normal" is no different from not supporting the Civil Rights Act "because all my kids are white." No doubt given the public education that has occurred in the past 20 years about the normality of homosexuality, he would get it today. His photo is on my fridge anyway -- and I never had the privilege of meeting him. You couldn't know Fran without loving John.

Well, that same sense of fair play impels me to say—he did get it in the end. I know because Johnny told me what Jack had said to him, a few days before he died.

“He said that he and Mom had gone to Puerto Rico, and then he started talking about these two old guys in Mineral Point….” Johnny reported.

I knew, of course. Their names were Edgar G. Hellum and Robert M. Neal. And they had discovered a little town with molding old buildings and done something with it.

Town was called Mineral Point, and nobody was particularly impressed with those damn old houses. Tear ‘em down, and use the stones for patios or garden walls!

Instead, Mr. Edgar and Mr. Bob—that’s how they were known—created Pendarvis House, and then Shake Rag Alley. Then went around collecting old recipes. Started restoring more and more buildings.

Provided jobs when jobs were needed.

And were good, honest people. Employed Mr. Curtis—an expert mason—who had retired from Taliesin, perhaps because Wright was so fond of that “stick-out stuff”: the stones not flush but sticking out and then recessed. Bad for the mortar—frost got in it….

Mr. Curtis on Wright?

“Mr. Wright was good to me,” he said, “but, let’s see, I think I still have seventeen hundred dollars coming from him,” which he never got.¹

A familiar complaint from the townspeople around Spring Green.

No whisper of it regarding Mr. Neal and Mr. Bob.

I was perhaps twenty when we all went to Mineral Point.

“How is Mr. Edgar,” asked Jack.

Or perhaps it was Mr. Bob. Doesn’t really matter. The two were a unit, and take away one?

“He’s not been the same since Mr. Bob died,” was the answer.

“Of course,” said Jack.

‘Right,’ I thought. ‘It’s all well and good as long as you don’t make waves. Here are two gay guys and EVERYBODY knows they’re gay, and they turn the town around and put everybody to work, and start a restaurant that gains national fame, but nobody says a word! What crazy shit is this?”

I was just coming out. I was young, and harsh. I made judgments then that I think—I hope—I don’t make now.

Now, of course, I marvel that they had the gumption to do it.

Like E.M. Forster, Jack believed in an aristocracy of the plucky, and knew it when he saw it:

“I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.”

And so, yeah—he had no respect for the married guys lurking in the shadows on the Capitol Square late at night, trying to figure out who was vice squad and who was legit—and available. Mr. Bob and Mr. Edgar he could get.

“I’m very sure that Jack would have expected you and Raf to get married, if you had the option,” said Franny, when we talked about him years later.

Was that why I spent a couple thousand bucks to travel to Massachusetts for “a piece of paper,” as guys who prefer not to make a commitment always say?

Or was it that I wanted to hear—and to say—words that Mr. Edgar and Mr. Bob would never have imagined two men would say in front of a judge?

“In sickness and in health….”

All of us owe a lot to people like the Messieurs Edgar / Bob.

As well, we owe a lot to the people who acknowledge, and celebrate the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. The legislators who vote for marriage equality and then go home to explain to the constituents. The straight people who march with us. The people who speak up, when remaining silent is so much easier.

Thanksgiving, and the serial holidays that trail it, is not a good time for me. The days are short, my mood grows dark. And yesterday, I experienced a little moment of sadness. How many years had I battled depression? How many defeats had I brought on myself? Now I, more happy than I have ever been, had to wonder: what would my life have been, without this darkness?

The answer, of course, is that my life would have been different.

But I wouldn’t be who I am now. Some sort of writer who trots each morning to the beach, plunges into the water, returns home and begins his work.

Someone who broke through the barriers of biochemistry and habit, badthink and depression, sorrow and sabotage. Someone who matter-of-factly hears the steps of his husband coming up the stairs, and waits for him to greet the cat.

“What’s for dinner,” he will say.

Chicken.

‘I’m so happy,’ I will think.

Robert Neal, 1942, baking a Cornish pastry

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1. Material and quotes drawn from the book On the Shake Rag, published by The State Historical Society of Wisconsin and The Memorial Pendarvis Trust.