Happy New You Year - and Merry Christmas!

 

   Happy New Year! 

   Yes, it is a new year.  A new year has begun.  So, Happy New Year! 

   But, also, Merry Christmas!  Because Christmas isn’t over. 

   Yes, that’s right.  Christmas isn’t over. 

   In England and Mexico and most other countries, Christmas only starts on Christmas.  Remember the 12 Days of Christmas.  Remember Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Christmas Day is actually the first day of Christmas.  Christmas actually goes on until Twelfth Night – January 6 – Epiphany, Three Kings Day in Mexico, when the three magi are said to arrive at the manger with their gifts for the baby Jesus.  In some countries, like Italy, gifts aren’t exchanged until January 6.

   It’s really unfortunate that, here in the U.S, January 6 is now associated with a very different, upsetting event. 

   That’s not the only unfortunate thing about Christmas in America. Here, as soon as Christmas Day is over, on the 26^th, all or many of the lights and the trees and the decorations start to be taken down, no more Christmas music is heard, there are no more Christmas specials on T.V.  It’s right back to business as usual.  When I was growing up, it was unusual that my family kept the tree up until New Year’s Day or just after (but no later).     

   Another childhood memory: when we were once watching the Rose Parade on T.V on New Year’s Day, and one of the marching bands was playing a Christmas song, I asked my mom why they were playing that song now that Christmas was over, and she reminded me that Christmas wasn’t over.  After all, we were still singing carols at mass, and people there were still saying, “Merry Christmas” which I also found curious for some years (yes, I was brought up Catholic).    

   And when we lived in London for a year, there were no Christmas specials on T.V until Christmas Eve, and then they were on until New Year’s Day (here, there are loads of specials aired before Christmas and then none or hardly any after Christmas). There was also no newspaper for three days, including Boxing Day, which drove my dad nuts – but that’s another story. 

   Anyway, I do find it unfortunate that we Americans are so eager to be done with Christmas, to pack it in.  It makes me sad and also a little nuts. 

   I get it that some people, maybe many people, are sick of all the buying and wrapping, all the clutter and busy-ness, the endless carols and old Christmas songs playing over and over everywhere.  Yes, take down the Santas and the snowmen. 

   But what about the lights, the lights the shine out and make the cold nights a bit less dark and perhaps a bit warmer, reminding us of the comfort and joy, the peace and goodwill that Christmastime is all about, supposedly?  Are we really tired of the colorful lights that brighten the dark and cheer us up in this bleak, dreary season?  Why does everyone rush to take them down, pack them away?

   Perhaps, after everyone has gone on a spending spree on gifts and feasts, the lights along with all the decorations and the all the songs playing aren’t useful anymore.  Perhaps, here, in this country where everything ends up being geared toward money and, most importantly, the spending of money, the songs and the decorations and the lights and the T.V specials aren’t needed anymore. 

   Unfortunate, sad, crazy-making indeed. A balm that I have come up with is, after taking my Christmas tree out, hanging a string of colored lights above the alcove framing the bay windows in my living room.  The lights are especially nice to have on during grey and/or wet days, and I leave them up until daylight saving time or shortly thereafter, depending on the weather.    

·         *  *

   Perhaps one reason why I don’t want Christmas to end, or the lights to go down this year in particular – and why I haven’t posted in so long - is that the last two and a half months have been a hell of sorts.  In my last blog back at least that long ago, I wrote about getting a pressure sore on my bottom and that I hoped it wouldn’t get that bad. 

   Well, it turned out I was hoping for too much. The sore got to be pretty bad – not nearly as bad as the massive one I got after my spinal surgery almost seven years ago, but it got bad enough, deep enough for the doctor to sternly tell me to lay down as much as possible, if not all the time. (When a doctor is stern, you know it’s serious, and you listen and obey.)

   So, that’s essentially what I’ve been doing since mid-October – laying down, except for meals, doctor’s appointments and a few events (like seeing Anita Hill speak at Pomona College). I won’t lie: it has been devastating. It has been super hard, Hell, like I said.  Not only has it taken me back to the year after my spinal surgery, when I was bed-ridden, making me all the more aware of being disabled.  It came during my favorite time of year, with the cooling weather, the unique light that comes in October and November and all the Fall colors. On top of this, I watched concert after concert, presentation after presentation go by and having to miss them. I feel like I’ve been robbed. All this has been devastating, like I said. At least I’ve been at home and not in a nursing home, like I feared and like the doctor seemed to threaten when he was stern and said that “more drastic measures” would have to be taken if I didn’t stay off my bottom. 

   The sore is much better now – the doctor is happy – but it’s still there.  I’m getting up more, for concerts, shopping, Quaker meeting, doing a bit of writing (like this, a little at a time), but I’m still lying down for a good part of the day.  This is still a pain, in both ways.  Pressure sores can take a long time to heal, sometimes plateauing at one stage, but I’ve been making good progress and hope to be back to business as usual, including posting more here before too long. Getting up more now may well be delaying the healing, but, as long as I don’t regress, I think this is vital for my sanity and to keep me from being completely in the dumps. 

   Is it any wonder that, this time in particular, I want Christmas, or at least its lights and hope, to go on for a bit longer. 

   What’s more, I’ve ended up with not having internet since early last week. To my surprise, and some horror, as one who didn’t venture onto the internet for years (for fear it would take over my life, as I heard and read reports of) and who continued to pay bills with checks and use snail-mail for years, etc, I have come to use and rely on the internet for a whole range of things.  Not only do I use it for e-mail, paying bills and the like, I rely on it to listen to the radio, read the Los Angeles Times and watch television (I no longer pay for a T.V service - I’ve come to really like watching what I want when I want to watch it and to watch it without commercials!). So, other than getting up to write this in spurts and watching a few shows one of my attendants knew how to download onto my tablet using his phone and recently using the slow and spotty hotspots on my attendants’ phone, I was lying down with no radio to listen to and no television to watch.

   Talk about disabling!  Talk about devastating! 

A pain in the ass

    Lately, I’ve been wondering if I should change the name of this blog, perhaps to something like The Aging Queer.  Or even Queer Interrupted.
   Many of my recent posts, in the last year or so, have been about increasing limitations, like not being able to travel as much, and dealing with and finding ways to compensate for them (or not). It seems that this has been the running theme, that this is now what this blog is all about.  
   I have developed, yes, a new limitation.  This one is painful, sometimes quite painful, literally and otherwise.  I now have a pressure sore on my butt, in the same place as the one I had after my surgery but nowhere near as horrendous as that one. Nevertheless, it has gotten to be quite significant, and, strangely enough, I feel this one.  (I guess the nerves back there have come back, which I guess is a good thing?) It is like sitting on a walnut.  Yes – ouch!  
   (One of my attendants and I have figured out that I must have gotten it while I was in the hospital for four days in July – like how I got the first one.  Unfortunately, I was not aware of it and went on with life as usual – and not so usual, going on a four-day trip to the Central Coast – and it was some time before I could get an appointment with the wound specialist.  There was some talk that my Roho cushion was the culprit, but one test disproved that, and, besides, I just learned that, insanely, I’m not eligible to get a new one for another two years!)
   The wound is being treated, with medicated dressings being stuffed into the wound every night.  Okay.  But I’m also lying down for about an hour and an half during the day, and I lie down after dinner or after I get home if I go out in the evening. I really hate having to lie down like this.  I resent this.  It really cramps my style, as they say.  It gets in the way of things I want to do (including maybe going out for the day). It funny that two or three years ago, I liked lying down like this, but not anymore, now that I’m doing more things!  Also, it impacts me in other ways.  Like, yes, I can still go out on my strolls, which I especially enjoy now in the Fall, but going over all the bumps in the road and on the sidewalk does hurt my butt all the more. I’m also checking out different pain relievers – Alleve, Extra-Strength Tylenol, Motrin. The doctor won’t prescribe any, and I want to stay away from opioids.   
   What I really don’t like, what I really worry about, is that the nurses at the wound specialist keep saying that I need to lie down more.  I fear that I won’t really heal, that the pain won’t go away, unless I lie down much more if not all the time.  I don’t know if I could handle this.
   The other night, my attendant said the wound is looking a bit better.  Hopefully, the doctor will also say this when I go back on Monday.
   Don’t worry.  I’m not changing the name of this blog.  I’m not ready to.  As the name of my favorite disability rights group says, I’m not dead yet!

The old and/in the new

 

   For some time after my surgery, I was saying that I was going to have a new life.  Now that my abilities were greatly diminished, I was going to do different things and put what I used to do away, in the past, and be satisfied with that.  Like a snake shedding its skin, I was going to shed my old life and live a new life, almost as a new person. 

   I have been discovering that it doesn’t work that way.  I just can’t forget about my old life and be a person with a new life.  The snake is still the snake with a new life. 

   I don’t wear bib overalls everyday as I used to, because they are now a pain to put on and take off, but I do wear them on many days, especially if I’m going out.  I just can’t not wear them, because, after all this time, they are a big part of who I am if not who I am.  (After all, I am the Overalls Guy.  Actually, I didn’t intend for this.  I made Overalls Guy my handle on YouTube, and it was suddenly my name on my Google e-mail account.  For a while, I was bothered and embarrassed, but then I grew into it like into a new pair of overalls; it just made more and more sense, because that was who I was.)

   I can no longer wear my mismatched, rainbow-laced high-tops, because it hurts too much, but I just couldn’t give them away.  They sat hidden, wasted, in their shelves, but then I thought of an idea my friend gave me (actually for my overalls). They’re now nailed in a row on top of a wall in my office, and I get a kick – pun intended – every time I see them.  Too bad I didn’t think to do the same with my Docs. 

   I continue to go to concerts and talks at the colleges here, although not as many talks as I used to go to, and I now get more rides, but I do go home if it’s light out and the weather is nice. I keep having memories places where I’ve traveled, now that traveling is so much harder, especially when someone talks about going on a trip.       

   There are many other examples of this big and small.  I reflected on this in my latest Courier column with came out on Friday (with another title and with the right byline and picture after coming out with the wrong byline and picture in the previous edition).

 

           VENTURING OUT, GOING BACK IN THE PASSING SEASONS

   A group was making its way through the crowd seated on the lawn in the darkening, warm summer evening.  The guys had glow sticks around their necks, and the young woman had one crowning her head, like a string of daisies.  Others walked past with hamburgers, ice cream and other treats from the concession stand as the band played on into the night. 

   Suddenly, I was in Grass Valley, on the beautifully grassy, wooded Nevada County Fairgrounds. The band was playing, and the night was coming on noticeably earlier in July. I was laughing, remembering the time my friend gently guided me toward the parking lot where our campsite was when I was going the wrong way after getting a contact high. My friend was laughing at me as I awkwardly navigated my wheelchair through the dispersing crowd. 

   Except this wasn’t mid-July, and it wasn’t the California WorldFest, an annual festival featuring bands from all over the world that I went to for about the five years before a spinal surgery in 2017 left me far more disabled, making traveling far and camping much more difficult if not impossible. 

   No.  This was late last month, and I was at Memorial Park for the Monday night concert.  Not only was it the last concert for the summer, it was the final performance by the Ravelers, the Claremont-based cover band that has been playing gigs for over 35 years. To celebrate, a friend bought and fed me a Hagen Daz ice cream bar with chocolate and almonds at the Kiwannis Club concession stand. 

   Summer has come and is going – yes, fast.  The college students have been back, and school is under way already.  This year has gone by so fast.  I think it’s because of all the rain and cool, seasonable weather we had, with the hot weather not arriving until, literally, July 1. The year didn’t drag along as usual with sometimes long periods of warm, even hot weather starting in February or even January. 

   Maybe it’s the unusual weather – weather we should always be having – but these memories, these flashbacks, keep popping up, like sudden shifts in a movie or a novel.  It is likely also because I’m venturing out slowly, ever so slowly, after the pandemic (not that COVID is done with), which came on just as I was venturing out after my spinal surgery. 

   Last month, for example, shortly before the last Memorial Park and Ravelers concert, I ventured out farther, more boldly, than I have so far, driving up four hours to San Luis Obispo.  In the last five years or so, I have been flying to the Bay Area to see family and friends.  This was easier after the long drive became too difficult for me, but it rendered the Central Coast a flyover zone. 

   This was unfortunate. I have always enjoyed stopping or staying in San Luis Obispo on my way to and from the Bay Area, but I forgot how lovely it is.  San Luis Obispo has gotten to be quite a place, quite a hot spot, not unlike the trendy Bay Area but laid-back (“SLO”) and also reminding me of what I love about Claremont.  And everyone talks about up north, and, yes, the coast up there is spectacular, but the Central Coast has its own if more subtle beauty and charm. 

   I stayed in the hotel where I always used to stayed, and I ate at favorite restaurants and visited old haunts, but I also had new adventures, like having breakfast at the Madonna Inn, which was, as I’ve always heard and imagined when going by, a real trip. I returned very satisfied and, again, with more appreciation for what we have here in Claremont. 

   I was also sad – sad I can no longer go camping as I used to love doing, including at Morro Bay State Park; sad that I can’t travel as easily, as far and as often as I used to; sad that I don’t have the crazy adventures that I did – at least not as crazy and not as many. 

   For sure, this hurts like Hell, but it means my life has been sweet and rich.  And, unlike the seasons 

that go by faster and faster, these sweet, rich memories stay.

A nice place to grow up, grow old

 

   I guess I’m pretty unique these days.  Except for my years attending U.C Riverside and a couple years living in Italy and England, I have lived all my life here in Claremont after my parents moved here in 1962, when I was 2. This is quite different from what I hear from most people with their stories of relocating, sometimes from state to state and sometimes a number of times. 

   I was thinking about this in the last month or so, as another school year ended and there was another weekend of graduations at the colleges here.  I was thinking about I have grown up and now am growing older in Claremont, about seeing so many others do the same and about how Claremont is a special, unique place to grow up and to grow older and old. 

   This is what I intended to write about in my latest Claremont Courier column, published two Fridays ago and featured below.  I don’t know if I nailed this exactly, but it does reflect on my seeing life and its passages in this town. 

     GROWING UP, GROWING OLDER, IN AND ON STAGES, IN CLAREMONT

   “I hate high school.”

   We were driving into the parking lot of Claremont High School. What I really meant was that I hate the speed bumps in the high school’s parking lot, remembering the quote I once read in a senior wills – senior wills! How high school! – edition of the Wolfpacket:  “College is high school without the speed bumps.”

   Despite some mixed feelings about my days at C.H.S and despite feeling a bit weird about still going there and seeing all those awkwardly young, not-o-young kids where I was in a similar awkward state some 40 years ago, I was there to offer support and admire some good work being done. I was being dropped off one Friday evening last month to see the latest production at the school’s theater.

   I don’t attend the football games and other sports events at the school, but I do cheer on the “theater kids.” While this play, “Rumors of Polar Bears” by Brian Dorf about teenagers wandering in an environment decimated by climate change, wasn’t my cup of tea, I am more and more thankful for this program offering a safe and stimulating space for these kids who may not fit into the sports and pep scene.

   And it’s great to see that, after 60 years and, remarkably, just two directors, the work as director of this program is now being carried on, and capably so, by Mohammed Mangrio. He was a student of Krista Elhai at Hemet High School before she came to Claremont to start a 27-year run as the theater director, where she was beloved, demanding and tireless, taking the baton from the legendary Don Fruechte, who founded the high school’s theater program and for whom the renovated theater is named.

   On the way home that evening, going down College Avenue and noting how Pomona College was set up, decked out for commencement that weekend, I didn’t say I didn’t like the colleges’ graduation ceremonies, but I did find myself thinking of how they reminded me of something I didn’t like when I was doing theater work. 

   I didn’t take part in theater when I was in high school.  No, my work in the theater came much later, and I loved it. What I loved most about working in theater was rehearsing.  I loved creating a scene and working on it, working with others to make this happen, collaborating to bring a vision to life and making it better and better.  I loved this creating together, this collaboration. 

   When it came time for performances, I wouldn’t say they were a let-down, but I was always a bit sad, disappointed, yes, let down, that the creating together was over. 

   Driving home past the commencement stage set up at Pomona College that night, it occurred to me, perhaps because I had just seen the “theater kids” at the high school in a play, that the colleges’ commencements are a bit like what I remember performances were like.  Yes, they are something to cheer, something to be proud of, but, at least for us townees, all the fun, really good stuff is done.  All the talks, concerts, plays and other presentations that had made our lives in Claremont all the richer over the past eight months are over. 

   I dare say the students have the same bittersweet feeling.  They may not say so now, just glad to be done with all the hard work and that they’ve made it out alive and with a degree, but they will soon see how good, how rich, how, yes, fun all that hard work, all that learning and creating and collaborating with new friends and professors was. And they’ll miss it. 

  Summer isn’t as sleepy – or dead, as I used to think – as it used to be in Claremont.  (Or maybe those growing up now think that Claremont is dead in the summer?) But, still, decades later, summer is a quiet time, a down time, in Claremont.  It is an invitation to reflect on the activities and accomplishments in the past months, whether at the colleges, in our schools or in our lives, and to take a breather and prepare for what’s next.

Right on Target (or not?)

 

   They were so gay.  Not only that, they were completely cheesy. 

   Fuck it!  I bought them. 

   They were me.  (Once, years ago, some time before I came out, when I was again buying cheese at the market, my attendant told me I’m a “cheesy guy.” I didn’t argue.)

   The shortalls – shortalls! – were light blue, baby blue, with rainbow straps and rainbow patches showing through manufactured rips in the legs.  Not only that, there was no zipper in the fly.   

   Like I said, completely cheeseball.  And femme. 

   And me. (Again, if someone says that I’m not completely cis or whatever, I don’t argue.) I dig wearing them and rocking them when I go out.  Especially without a shirt.

   Sure, I’m wearing cheesy, fag girl fucking shortalls.  What about it? 

   I sort of had the same reaction to the display of Pride items where I saw the shortalls a few years ago in the front of the Target store – exactly like the ones now being attacked by right-wingers and being sent to the corner, if not out of the store, literally, this Pride Month.  Yes, it was totally  cheeseball. I also didn't like that most of the items tended to be for women - the cis in me talking.  But more than that, it bugged me, creeped me, that, like at Pride Festivals, a big corporation was cashing in, making money off the queer community. 

   On the other hand, I thought it was cool, way cool that it was out there on full display.  I loved it that I was seen, I was reflected, loudly and proudly. 

   There was another time I was in Target that was even more powerful to me.  It was a few years earlier, and it may or may not have been during Pride month.  I was in the store, and a guy who worked there walked by, wearing the standard red shirt.  But instead of the small logo, it had a large target on the front of the shirt with a big, all-color rainbow curving over top. 

   I was thrilled.  I loved seeing this guy out there, saying publicly that he’s gay like me, that I wasn’t alone.  But I also loved the other message he was sending. 

   Yeah, I’m gay.  What about it?  AND Target, my employer, has my back. 

   Or, I now have to ask, does it?