Amy and Me

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.   

From Cardboard Bicycles to the Voice of God

One of the strange things about being a blogger is that you frequently start out fully intending to write about one thing, and then discover yourself compelled by what seems a better, more interesting affair.

Though the first intention—an Israeli guy who’s making cardboard bikes—is pretty interesting. The cost alone is amazing—he estimated each bike will be less than fifteen US dollars. Most people pay more for a good bike lock than that.

I know all this because the good Taí sent me a link about the bicycles from The Economist. And it seems that the inventor, Izhar Gafni, has done his damnedest to use everything recycled. The hand bars are derived from Coke bottles. The chain is from recycled car rubber, as are the wheels. The frame and most of the rest is made up cardboard, which Gafni has folded, to increase strength. After that, he applies a resin to increase resilience, and waterproofing.

The low cost makes the bike a godsend for poor countries, since transportation is often a critical problem in the lives of poor people. I looked it up, in those days when I was championing everything from green roofs to the Lion’s Club eye glass donation to making an actual windmill be the star in Wal*Mart in the sign outside our stores.

Bicycles for Humanity—an organization starting in 2005, has shipped over 45,000 bikes to Africa. That’s not nothing. For a culture based on cars, the bike is a toy. But here’s what the organization says in its webpage:

A bicycle solves the problem of mobility and helps empower people to change their life. The mobility a bicycle provides allows people to travel greater distances in a shorter length of time and transport much more weight. Mothers can carry containers of water back to their village in a fraction of the time walking required. Students get to school faster saving precious daylight for studies. Parents transport more items to market to sell. Healthcare workers are 3 to 4 times more productive.

It’s estimated that ten million bicycles are dumped in landfills in Europe and North America. But these bikes are critically needed in Africa, and other developing nations.

Well, in those long-gone days of my bearing the standard of sustainability at Wal-Mart, I would have proposed something like this. Wal-Mart donates all its cardboard—or at least that usable for the bikes—to a local factory set up to produce the bikes. Wal-Mart also provides support for marketing, human resources, finance, and logistics. And of course, for every bike purchased at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart donates a cardboard bike for the kid in Africa who needs one.

In those days, ideas like the one above came as regularly as flies to a picnic. And, like the flies, the ideas were always swatted down. One of the first victims of corporate positivism is the shadow side—a negativism to anything that is new and—especially—not vetted by the boss.

In fact, for all the thinking outside the box that we were always adjured to do, there were people who practiced rote inside the box. Because it’s not only possible to make bicycles from cardboard, you can actually make furniture from paper.

Or at least papier—as in papier mache. It was quite a Victorian thing, like the horsehair upholstery used on couches. And primarily it was tables and decorative objects. But not always—check this out:

Nice, hunh? And since it’s been around since the mid-nineteenth century, pretty durable, as well. The British Victorians, it seems, listen to offbeat ideas at bit corporate America.

What some people listen to, it also turns out, is the voice of God.

I know this because it really seemed unlikely—could I make a post out of a cardboard bicycle? I’m only on page two here, and 639 words. So I was trawling, looking for something with a little more heft than just a bicycle.

CNN came sailing through, as it so often does. And who could not click on a link, “My Take, If you Hear God Speak Audibly, you (Usually) Aren’t Crazy.” Clearly a thing to check out.

Full disclosure—I have had an audible hallucination. By which I mean I perceived a voice that was exactly the same in feeling and experientially as the voice of Mr. Fernández, each night, three feet away from me at the dining room table.

And in fact it was Mr. Fernández’s voice that I though I heard, saying the words that he says every night to his favorite cat, Kitty.

“Yo,” I shouted.

No response.

There was nothing eerie or uncanny about it. He simply wasn’t there.

Nor am I alone. About one in ten Evangelical Christians say they have heard the voice of God, according to T. M. Luhrmann. Gallup, in 1999, reported that 23% of Americans had heard a voice or seen something that was not there in response to prayer.

Nor is it only God we’re hearing. A surprising number of people report hearing the voice of a person they have lost, and are grieving. Twenty-eight percent, according to one study in Wales, over 60 percent, according to Dr. Phil.

In contrast, the rate of schizophrenia—the hallmark of which is hallucination—is only about 1%. And the messages / hallucinations tend to be different—the messages coming through prayer are filled with peace and love. Psychotics tend to hear quite the opposite.

Well, it’s a curious topic—what’s real and what’s not. There are also, by the way, negative hallucinations—when you don’t perceive something that is there. They probably happen a million times a day. How many times, when I was practicing the cello, focusing so intently on the music, did I lost sight of the actual cello—the reddish-brown varnish, the nick on the purfling—that I was playing?

And there are a number of diseases and conditions that can produce hallucinations: epilepsy, migraines, steroids, even too much caffeine.

Come clean. Besides that one hallucination, I’ve come very close to others. It was in my darkest moment on depression, and it felt as if only enormous willpower could keep me from changing my thoughts into voices. I was, I think, at that threshold where thought becomes voice.

Better minds than my mind will figure it out. In fact, one of them—Oliver Sacks—is soon to be out with a new book entitled Hallucinations. So he may prove or disprove my theory: the center for recognition of oral speech (that is, the voice speaking next to you) is very close to and intimately linked to the center that processes words, including the words that form our thinking. Sometimes, with stress, fatigue, varying chemicals and different diseases, the connections are lost, or jangled. A thought becomes a voice.

Well, why not? We live in part in a land of mystery: a thought becomes a voice, or a form, like the vision of Jesus after his death. Oh, and also a more prosaic land, where a cardboard box becomes a bicycle.

Which, for a kid in Africa, might be both a mystery and a miracle.

Boys Beware

It was a curious coincidence, hearing of the danger of the homosexual just after having read a biography of one.

“Homosexuals are sick,” announced the computer speakers. “But not a visible sickness like chickenpox or the measles. Mentally sick.”

“What in the hell are you watching?” I asked Mr. Fernández.

“Boys Beware, an educational film from the fifties.”

Wrong—it was from 1961.

And it was educational in everything but the message. Although some of the message made sense. Don’t get into cars with strangers. If a friend does, write down the license plate number, and the make of the car. If you have any doubt, go to your parents or a trusted teacher.

“He traded his life for a newspaper headline,” announces the narrator. For some of them—in my case us—can be violent. And careful, they / we may seem normal. Even really friendly—always a dangerous sign. One of the four boys in the movie makes the mistake of going to a motel. Well, why not? The guy—a suspicious type with sunglasses and a mustache (right, central casting wasn’t being imaginative that day)—had bought the boy a coke, taken him fishing, and then showed him a little pornography. The boy reports the presumed molestation to his parents—the man is arrested and convicted, but Jimmy is given “probation in the custody of his parents.”

Oh yeah? Isn’t this the classic “blaming the victim?” Shouldn’t we look on the kid as, well, a kid? They do stupid things, sometimes.

Well, it was shot in black and white, there in 1961. But apparently the message was no less timely—or important—in 1973, when they decided to shoot it again in color, though with the same script and soundtrack, but different actors.

1973 was the year I graduated from high school.

I tell you this because the ten minutes of nonsense that you can see below was the absolute background for my formative years. The men in their suits and their ties. Mother in her skirt, sweeping the walks. Even the voice of the narrator, with his folksy talk about “young people” is a voice no longer heard.

You never stop coming out, is a frequently-expressed truism in the gay world. Watching this film, I wonder if I can ever fully rid myself of the self-hate that comes with being told, for the first two decades of my life, that I was sick and perhaps criminal.

Perhaps? Well, unless I chose celibacy, definitely criminal. I didn’t realize, somehow, that the 1950’s were perhaps the worst years for oppression of gay people. In 1953, Eisenhower decreed a ban on homosexuals working in the federal government. Most gay people resigned--why wait for the axe? Joe McCarthy of Appleton, Wisconsin, threw fuel on the fire a few years later, and by then it was automatically assumed, if a man resigned from a government post, he was gay. The police are raiding bars, and taking a nice little pay-off in bribery money. Thugs are looming everywhere--to beat and bash gay men senselessly. Among all of this trauma, it's a wonder that there were men who continued trying to live their lives.

One of whom was Samuel Steward, a professor, a friend of glittering literary figures, and later, a tattoo artist. He travelled to England to meet Lord Alfred Douglas. To France, to meet Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Through them, he meets Thornton Wilder, and has a physical relationship on rare occasions for the next twelve years.

And apparently, he’s a gifted teacher, judging from the letter from a former student quoted at the end of the book. But he tires of it, and goes into tattooing. Then, after a dozen years or so of work, he closes up shop and retreats into a small cottage behind a bungalow.

The description of the inside of the house is heartbreaking. A compulsive collector, he can throw nothing away. Papers are everywhere, along with the empty food cans and the newspapers the dogs have urinated on. The stench is unbearable. It takes the executors of the estate several months to clear out the house.

He was a sexual renegade, writes the author. Yes, in the sense that he had plenty of sex, and didn’t feel much shame about it. But I wonder about that. How could anyone—he or I or any of us who grew up in an environment saturated with shame and sickness not have been, or still be, affected? 

Braver than I

He had read my book, as I had read his. But that had been a long time ago—how would it read now? 

And what would I make of the dragons in the book—my uncle and my cousin’s girlfriend? The book is A Crossing and the author is my cousin Brian Newhouse. And I’m happy to say it’s just as good as I remembered it. 

Brian ventured from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic sometime in the nineties on a bicycle—but this is only incidentally a biking book. In fact—blessedly—it’s not at all a bicycling book. It’s a book about a nice guy and two lunatics. 

 “A cock tease,” was Franny’s diagnosis of Karen, Brian’s girlfriend, after she had read the book. She’s a hyper-“religious” girl who likes to test Brian’s “faith” in the Lord by proposing to sleep—and nothing else—together. So he’s lying there, stiff as a board in many senses, and she puts his hand on her breast. 

Brian? 

There is such a thing as too much Minnesota nice. And Brian, you’d crossed the line a country mile back. 

Well, eventually he can stand it no more, and goes to sleep in the guest bedroom. I’d have left the house and never looked back. Karen uses religion variously as a cudgel or a noose, and she’s no dab hand at either. When Brian can take it no more and breaks up with her she attributes the event to the work of Satan, who cannot abide the sight of two loving Christians standing together—the man leading, being a “cover” for the wife. 

I know—pass the Mylanta…. 

Well, he got an interesting character out of her, at any rate. 

And the other lunatic? His father. Just as crazy on Christ as the girlfriend, if not more. 

In the early days, my father would get a call from my aunt, saying that Bill was down in the village, preaching against sin and vice to drunks leaving the saloon. My father would get in the car and drag him home. 

“He was a really funny, high-spirited kid,” said Franny once about Bill. “Then, something happened to him, and he just turned into a religious nut….” 

Who also uses the Bible as a weapon. There always was something sad about going to their house, a farm on the Illinois / Wisconsin border. Religious tracts were everywhere—by the toilet, in the barn, on the table. A sermon was always impending, looming like an August thunderstorm. Any remark could be slash, meant to jolt you to your senses, repent, accept Jesus into your heart, get saved. In short, become as crazy as he. 

It might have been tolerable if there had been any joy, any fun in it. But this is the real fire-and-brimstone stuff, that old-time religion of talking in tongues and walking to the altar and accepting Jesus into your heart. Satan is real and he has his claws in his wife and his brother and his kids. By definition, anyone who is not saved is…. 

 …fallen? 

I don’t know. Nor do I know how he stood it, feeling that he was alone in his faith, and that his family was headed for perdition. 

Also don’t know how anybody else stood it. Because in addition to the religion, we get a guy who has an emotional straitjacket that no one can cut through. This one we know, on the other side of the family. Because Jack never got the religion, but the repression? 

Not in spades—more like the backhoe. 

“Once, my father came back from one of his trips, looked at me, and then shook my hand,” said Jack, my father. “He’d never done that before, and we never did it again. The only time I can remember touching my father….” 

Or how about this? 

“I always tear up when I hear a train horn. Makes me remember seeing my father off on trips so many times.”  

My brother Johnny took him on, as Brian took on his father. And one of the most heartfelt, poignant moments in A Crossing is the moment when Bill calls Brian and they talk at last. Brian gets it off his chest—he crossed a whole continent to get a good word out of the old man. And what does he get? A flip remark about a bad penny from a father who has judged, and judged him a failure. 

Oh, and is sorry he ever had him in the first place. 

Johnny did much the same thing to Jack. And Jack, stunned to hear that Johnny seriously questioned—hey, do you love me?—went to the hardware store, got a plumb bob, some string, and a piece of dowel. Then he went to the garage, found a board, nailed in a support, put the dowel as a crossbar, and hung the plumb bob. Next, he wrote a letter: 

Johnny, 

There are two things that are true.

 1. A plumb bob always hangs true 

 2. A father always loves his children 

 I love you, 

Pop 

Brian waded through this mess, though how I don’t know. “You were never abusive,” he tells his father at one point. 

Yeah? I think telling a kid he’s gonna go to Hell and suffer for eternity and the devil has entered him and if he doesn’t repent now he will…. 

I think that’s abuse. Brian praised Iguanas for its courage. 

I think Brian is braver than I.

Death of a Patrician

Now then, what to do about Ernest Chausson?

On the face of it, there’s not much that needs to be done. Despite the red squiggle that my computer has put under his name—and its suggestions of Caisson and Chausses, neither of whom I know—every music lover will know him. The Poème for violin and orchestra gets trotted out regularly, and his Poème de l’amour et de la mer falls not in the “pass the Kleenex” category but in the “hand over the razor blades.” Besides beautiful, it’s heart-wrenchingly sad.

So his reputation is secure—as long as there are violinists and mezzo-sopranos, Chausson will be heard.

The fact everybody knows about him is that he died in a bicycle accident. What isn’t known, however, is whether he willingly crashed himself into a brick wall—quite a metaphorical death, hunh?—or whether it was an accident.

He had been depressed for some time. And composition, for him, was no easy affair. “Not at all prolific,” states Wikipedia, and notes that he left only 39 opus-numbered pieces.

But he had a number of blessings. Money—first of all. His father had made a bundle redeveloping Paris (those famous boulevards are Chausson Père, partly). Friends—among whom were pretty much everybody in the cultural world of France at the time, as well as Turgenev and Albéniz. A wife and five children. A reputation that was just flourishing at the time of his death.

There was everything to live for.

The curious fact about depression is that it’s everything and nothing. An amputation, an infection, open-heart surgery—all that’s visible, on some level. But there’s not much to see, in depression. Until you choose to ride hard into a brick wall.

I read once that depression is the worst disease in terms of quality of life. Having spent some time in that dark forest, I can believe it.

It may also be that having too much money, or too much affluence / influence can be a curse. It didn’t hurt Trollope to have to get to the Royal Post every morning at 8AM. For all that the routine of work grinds you, it also grounds you.

Or just keeps your mind occupied. For in the music of Chausson, there’s the feeling of a man with quivering sensitivity. As well, a man with perhaps too much time to feel, a man who has passed feeling and entered into brooding. One commentator writes that if Chausson is to music as Proust is to literature.

He had many talents. He wrote, and then destroyed, a novel. He drew and painted, and had many friends who were artists. (Not surprising, then, that Chausson left a major collection behind….)

But he was stymied by that weapon that every writer or composer fears the most….

…the blank page.

Dead Dog Beach

“It’s called underdevelopment,” said a friend over coffee. He’s not only Puerto Rican, he’s an independentista, but he’s lived in the states for years now.

What did he mean? Well, let’s revisit the gentlemen who sell parking on the streets. They are indignant because the police are harassing them. The police are responding that they are merely enforcing the law. They also argue that making a statement like, “hey, gimme five bucks and I’ll make sure nothing happens to your car,” is slightly intimidating. In addition, no one “owns” the street, and these gentlemen have effectively usurped public parking and made it private. “Hey,” say the guys, “you should be glad we have a job! The government hasn’t given us a job, so we made one ourselves! Bíjhte? You see?”

You get that?

If not, you may be living in a developed country—meaning that there is a common agreement, a social contract that is understood and honored. Laws are obeyed, efficiency is the norm, the system works.

What works in Puerto Rico is the human connection. And it applies to basic things. Years ago, I had a problem with my phone. I did what any normal person would do—went to the phone company and got a work order number.

Absolutely the correct thing to do.

What did I do wrong?

I omitted step two. Because the second part of the process is to locate a pala or shovel. That’s anybody who works for—or knows somebody who works for—the telephone company. You need the work order number not to get the work done, but to tell your friend—or the daughter of the hairdresser of the assistant to the division of customer service.  

You know what happened. I waited and waited and waited some more. Then, I mentioned the situation to a student at La Fortaleza—the governor’s mansion. The words were barely out of my mouth when she was calling….

…the president of the telephone company.

I live three blocks from the mansion. And how many telephone company trucks were outside my building 45 minutes later?

Look—it shouldn’t be that way. The president of the telephone company shouldn’t be getting calls about a work order. Nobody can have a friend in every one of the hundreds of government agencies. And sending three trucks to my house that day was just a bit overkill….

A friend in Puerto Rico is like a friend nowhere else. A friend will move the firmament to help you. A friend will cheerfully pick you up at the airport at three o’clock in the morning, bringing along his entire family and all of their boyfriends / girlfriends and take you home where his wife is making an asopao (a Puerto Rican stew / soup) and everybody will crack open numerous beers and tell stories and jokes.

In short, we do people very well here.

Animals?

Err, no. Yes, there are people who are ardent in their love of animals. But at virtually every restaurant, there are stray dogs hungrily staring at you, imploring you for food. To an animal lover, it can be a shock coming to Puerto Rico.

Which is what a woman did. Christina Beckles, a former Golden Glove boxer and a major animal lover, was here on the island with her husband. A professional stunt man, he was filming a miniseries here on the island when the chauffeur of the van he was riding in deliberately ran over one of the 150,000 stray dogs that haunt the island. Shocked, he ordered the driver to stop the van, got out, and rescued a group of puppies.

They discovered that there were several known dumping places for unwanted animals. And that the island’s five shelters had a euthanasia rate of 97%. So they went to one of the most notorious of the dumping places—Dead Dog Beach—on the southeast coast.

Dead dog because the kids do a little target practice after hours, and leave their kill on the beach.

Well, Christina decided to do something about it. And so far, she has rescued 60 dogs and given them away to good homes. She started The Sato Project, sato being the Puerto Rican word for mongrel. She visits the island four or five times a year, and is in daily communication with a woman who feeds the dogs at the beach.

She is—you might have guessed—British.

Oh, and also a saint….

The Killer in Your Kitchen

It was the alert doña Taí who advised me of it.

“You ever heard of the Boston Molasses Disaster?”

Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? And if it weren’t, why, having lived in Boston for a year, had I never heard of it? Definitely something to check out.

It seems that on 15 January 1919, a huge vat of molasses exploded in the North End of Boston, creating a 40-foot wave that rushed through the city. Killed 21 people and several horses; 150 people were injured. And it did some serious damage to infrastructure. Take a look below….

Well, in my zeal to alert the international readership of this blog, I checked all this out in Wikipedia. Only to discover that there was a reference to another disaster.

The London Beer Flood.

Jump back a century or so, to 1814, in the St. Giles section of London. A vat of beer explodes, and causes other vats to explode in a domino effect. All in all, 323,000 imperial gallons (no idea what that is, but it sounds impressive…) of beer flood the city. St. Giles is an area of poor houses, with many families living in basements. These flood, and the death toll is eight.

Well, it seems that nothing is safe anymore. There are killers in the schools. Molasses can kill. Beer as well, in a way I had never thought.

With all the mayhem afoot, I’m happy to report that a great bunch of kids from Ponce, Puerto Rico, decided to cheer up a food court in their hometown. Here they are, in full swing!

An Atheist Confronts Christmas

Mostly I ignore it. Or laugh at it, which isn’t hard to do. For years I sang all the gringo Christmas carols with the worst possible Puerto Rican accent. “Jingle bells” became “jinger bears;” the “one-horse open sleigh” became the “one-whore open sleigh.”

A few things helped. I didn’t have kids, so I was spared having to do the whole thing—the shopping, the putting up the tree, the pretense about Santa. And in Puerto Rico, Christmas is an entirely different affair.

“Why are all the Christmas carols so sad,” asked a student. I knew what he meant, and tried to explain. “Imagine a time of year so dark, so cold. You’re outside, trudging home, the wind is slapping snow in your face. At last you can see the house. It’s totally dark, but you can smell the wood smoke from the chimney. Your legs are tired from the effort of pulling through the snow. Finally, finally you can see—there’s a single candle burning in the window. You’re home.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“It’s all about a light, a single light, that you see in the darkest time of the year. And there’s no reason for that light—in fact, it’s miraculous. You stare at it, this one tiny flame that at any moment can sputter out. It’s infinitely small. Yet it may become larger, grow, warm you and your family and your neighbors. You can cook. You can see. It’s this small, miraculous, filled-with-potential flame that has no reason, no reason whatsoever, to be in your life. You stare and stare, full of wonder.”

“Silent night, Holy night,” he sang. Or rather, parodied. You could have gone out for a cigarette, come back, and still not have gotten to the third line….

“Look, it’s just something in the culture.”

“But it’s a birth, it should be happy, joyous….”

I never convinced him, of course. He left thinking that we celebrated the birth of his Savior with increased and renewed fits of melancholy.

“Christmas is just the time of year when happy people make the rest of us feel more miserable,” said a depressed patient to me, years ago.

I knew what she meant. We were hanging out by the TV, trying not to watch anything about Christmas. We were ignoring it as hard as the rest of the world was shrieking it at us. Oh, except for that afternoon, when family and friends weren’t visiting.

Who wants to go to a nut house on Christmas day?

So occupational therapy had thrown the “Christmas dinner” two days before. We were on marginal staffing. Anybody who had less than a fifty-fifty chance of harming himself or anyone else was discharged.

I worked a lot of those Christmases, operating under the theory that I wasn’t going to celebrate it any way—why shouldn’t I let someone for whom it meant something have the day off? Let some woman be with her kids.

That seemed reasonable up until a couple days ago. When I looked at a guy whom I had first seen as a kid holding his own kid.

And realized for the first time—I didn’t have that.

And I wish I had.

It’s about how you define it. Kids didn’t come into the equation—they were rigorously excluded. So of course I was working those Christmases. Why sit at home and listen to the sounds of joy and delight—presents under the tree!—that weren’t there? Better to go hang with the depressives in the madhouse.

In just the way that generations of Blacks accepted Jim Crow for years, we accepted that we’d never have kids. We squared our shoulders, lifted our chins, got on with our lives. Some of us got kids into our lives as teachers or pediatricians or uncles and aunts. Some of us pretended we didn’t want parenthood. We had better—or at least more expensive—vacations.

That same exclusion worked for God. For most of two millennia, the Christian churches had some news for us gay people, and most of the time it wasn’t stuff you wanted to hear. So now, in the last 20 years, I can find a church that accepts me, embraces me.

So?

Well, yesterday was Christmas Eve, the big holiday here. All of the family was gathering. I got sick.

Was it psychosomatic? Can you really bring on severe diarrhea just by wishing to be anywhere else?

My doctor might say yes. My stomach says no.

Whatever. It was going to be very loud in a very small place. People were going to sing, play the typical percussion instruments, dance, tell jokes. It would be five or six hours of forced gaiety.

I am, by a definition that got redefined, childless and godless. I cannot see that little flame, that flicker that may die, or may grow and warm and transform and reform us.

I’m outside, looking in. But I leave the following, for those inside.