So I’ve initiated a “staff departure” and my last day of part-time work at Space Telescope will be at the end of this month. Then it’s back to the retired life again. When I came back I set myself a goal of working it at least until the Roman Space Telescope launched. And now it has. So my goal is met. And I think this time, it is time.
That first time I really didn’t want to belly flop into being retired but part-time work wasn’t available at the Institute then. So when my project lead came to me after a couple years and asked if I was interested in coming back part-time I jumped at the chance. Now I think it really is time to move on. I’ll always be a part of it, my den walls are full of artifacts from my 26 years working for a NASA contractor, but it will be good to have the time to explore my art more. I want to give my cameras and my drafting table more love now.
I’m going to miss having that extra amount of income, and it’s probably going to be scary watching my 401k slowly shrink, but so it goes. It’ll be a comfortable, if not fabulous retired life. I have a house of my own. My car is paid for. My health insurance is good. My neighborhood is walkable.
…is going to be a walk through hell. This from a Facebook page I follow…
I was planning on taking a road trip to Oceano right after retiring, then I remembered we have an election coming, and I will walk through fire if I have to so I can cast my vote. I’ve been getting the Maryland mail in ballot ever since COVID but I don’t need to mail it back as there is a convenient drop box not far from the house. But given how badly Trump and the republicans want to screw up the mid terms (if we even have them) I will stand in line at my polling place if need be to cast a vote.
Which means no California trip until after the election, and maybe even not then depending on the mood of the middle part of the county I’d have to drive across with my Maryland plates afterward. We shall see.
But, 1) use the drop box or 2) if Trump’s USPS won’t send Maryland it’s paper ballots, I’ll vote in person. Early if I can, if it’s still allowed, or on election day if that’s what has to be.
Everyone needs to plan ahead for this one. Consider every possible way they can screw it up and how you will work around it.
This Keeps Up And I May Not Be Able To Even Drive Around Town…
…let alone take a road trip to California after I retire (again).
I took a drive to Manheim Pennsylvania yesterday, to The Turntable Store where I had my Nakamichi cassette deck in for repair. The Turntable Store is a small, classic audio shop that sells used component stereo equipment from the late 20th century, and also does repairs. They also sell used vinyl and open reel music.
Funny story…sort of. I asked the owner once if he ever got in any Heathkit stereo equipment, like maybe an AR-15, which I wouldn’t mind owning one of, and he looked at me funny. Then I realized that “AR-15” designation was a tad unfortunate these days and I had to explain. In Heathkiteze “AR” meant it was an integrated Amplifier and Receiver, “AA” was a unit that was only the amplifier section and “AJ” was the receiver section only. I still own the AA-14 I built back when I was a teenager that I use as a headphone amp.
I did notice he had an AJ-14 receiver for sale there I could have bought to complement my AA-14, but I have the Radio Shack FM receiver dad gave me long ago as a birthday present so that’s not being replaced.
On the way there and back I couldn’t help noticing something I’ve been dreading for a while now. Diesel is over six bucks a gallon now! $6.30 in some spots. Great. Swell. Though I can’t afford to retire to the land of my birth I can still enjoy California fuel prices. But if it’s over six bucks around here I don’t want to think what it is in The Five Cities. I may not even be able to afford another road trip to California for the rest of the Trump presidency, and maybe even beyond, let alone living there.
While insomnia scrolling late last night, or early this morning depending on your point of view, I chanced across this thread from Joshua Marshall on BlueSky, and it focused me for the first time really on something I’d noticed long ago, and yet didn’t really look at. That saying of Orwell’s that To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle is more truth than I would like at times.
Back then I just assumed he was Brazilian because that was what he always emphasised to me. I just figured he was descended from Portuguese settlers since he didn’t look like a native Brazilian. Then his family moved away and I learned they have left the country and I was devastated. I figured he’d moved back to Brazil. When a fellow classmate said they’d probably moved back to Germany I was confused. Why, I asked. He’s German came the reply. Really? That classmate looked at me like I was a clueless dolt, which back then I probably was, and said His father’s name is Wolfgang!.
Oh.
Many years later I managed after much searching to reconnect with him again, and now he’s working in Epcot Germany as a waiter, and I go visit Disney World for the first time after he encouraged it…
Come on man, it’s your heritage…baseball, mom, apple pie and Mickey Mouse…what’s wrong with you…
…and I go to Epcot Germany to see him for the first time in 34 years. And there I’m immersed in Disney Germany where Epcot World Showcase brings young adults over from the host countries to work in the park. And I finally get to see him again after so long, and I notice but don’t notice how I’m hearing a lot of German accents in there…but not from him. His voice sounds like it always did back in high school and that thrills me so much I don’t ask myself why he doesn’t have that noticeable German accent the others in there do. In the back of my mind I just assume it’s because he spent most of his young adult life here in the States, and he picked up the American accent because he was immersed in it.
Which, as it turns out, is probably the case…
The BlueSky thread I was reading this morning was about Elvis Presley’s manager, the infamous Colonel Tom Parker. Parker always claimed to be a southern good ‘ole boy born in West Virginia, but it was a carefully fabricated act. He was actually Dutch, born in the Netherlands as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and he came to the US at about the age of 20 by way of simply walking off a ship he was working for while it was docked in New York City. That age is important because it meant he had to work at disguising his Dutch accent.
Marshall notes this was probably why he claimed to be from West Virginia instead of the deep south, where his accent would have given him up. Locals know instantly who is one of them and who isn’t by how you speak the language, just ask the Ephraimites.
A Shibboleth is any custom, tradition, or way of speaking that identifies someone as a member of a particular group or marks them as an outsider.
Here in Baltimore Maryland the locals here know instantly I wasn’t raised in Baltimore the moment I start talking. That working class bawlmer accent is pretty recognisable here and elsewhere in the state. Saying he was from West Virginia gave Parker just enough distance from the deep south that his accent could be believable by the good ‘ole boys and still be accepted as one of them. Sort of. As Marshall says…
This whole issue of language acquisition has always fascinated me in itself. Your brain at 10 is not the same as your brain at 20. Certain aspects of your brain fix at different ages. And even though you can learn new languages through he ability to integrate these very subtle intonations that make up a native accent elude all but a very, very small number of people if they learn the language past that age. In any case … Tom Parker! How’d he do it? I needed to figure this out so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this afternoon and the answer, to me at least, is as interesting as the question. He kind of *didnt* hide it.
He had a reasonably good accent. And what he did was affect and give people to think that he had a bit of a lisp or some kind of speech impediment. And I suspect he said that he was born in West Virginia – despite the fact that his professional life was around Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee because A) it’s a bit of distance from those states around the Mississippi River AND B) because there are all sorts of odd-sounding (to us) Appalachian regional sub-dialects.
So if anyone ever thought well, Colonel Tom speaks a bit funny, dont-he? well thats because he has some sort of upcountry hillbilly twang from somewhere in West Virginia where was born and also he’s got some kind of lisp. So just let it go. So basically how he hid his accent is that he didn’t. arker apparently spoke a variety of Lower Mississippi English with the kind of mild Dutch accent you’d expect from someone who by the mid-50s had lived in the US for about 25 years. But he had this cover story of Lisp/West Virginia accent you don’t know about. And it worked.
It seems once upon a time that the cover story of the object of my teenage crush was he was from Brazil…which he was…but not to tell anyone but close friends that he was actually a German. In retrospect that was probably because he got a lot of teasing from the other kids about the war.
Fact is the first thing he did when we met again after 34 years was try to suss me out about my feelings toward Germans…
You know what Germans are famous for…right? Beer?
That too.
Pretzels?
That too.
Gummy bears?
That too.
Complaining?
***
And when he sent me that Christmas postcard with the Christmas greeting on it in both English and German I felt a wave of shame over all the WWII German jokes my childhood friends of mine and I told each other over and over again, and for accepting Hollywood’s German stereotypes. I can barely watch one of my favorite movies, Casablanca, without cringing at the stereotypical evil German, Major Heinrich Strasser, played to the hilt by Conrad Veidt (who was himself a German refugee having fled the fascists with his Jewish wife). It’s hard for me to watch any of those movies now without thinking of the guy I once thought hung the moon and the stars, and how it must have made him feel living here since he was a kid. He would have had to endure all of it.
David Low, master of the political cartoon art form, for all his forceful anti Nazi imagery (he was put near the top of Hitler’s list of people to be hunted down and arrested after a Nazi invasion of Britain) also pretty forcefully reminded the victors not to blame all Germans for what the fascists did…
So to me, the oddball art kid who couldn’t stop gawking at him, he emphasised his Brazilian birthplace at first. Why his family lived in Brazil long enough for their youngest to be born there was something I never asked him about. I figured it would be a pretty sensitive subject. But I have never doubted that he is a good man. Had we more time together and the ability to talk to each other sincerely, with trust and no worries, I think he would have eventually shared more of himself with me. Because he kept flirting with me I like to think we could have become boyfriends, although it was 1971 and not a good time to be gay, even in liberal Montgomery county Maryland. So that’s probably a fantasy on my part. I have often wondered if mom, who loved her boy to the day she dies, I have never doubted it, would have thrown me out of the house if I ever came out to her. At least two of my senior year classmates were almost certainly boyfriends I think, because of how close they were, and how you never saw one without the other.
That was the world gay kids lived in back then, and in some places even still. I’m pretty sure his family put a stop to his spending time with me when they found out that he was talking with queer kid from school. Bavaria was and still is a very conservative and insular part of Germany. So it never happened. Then they moved away and I was heartbroken. But it never occurred to me to question why he had no German accent, which was how I didn’t know until I was told that he was German.
I see it now. He was immersed in American English at a young age. I know this because I have all the old high school yearbooks and he is in there from what would have been age 12 at least, and he may have been here well before that…
So I’m pretty sure he speaks German correctly among other Germans, since he would have learned it from his own family who were originally from Munich. Perhaps other Germans would know as soon as he opens his mouth that he is Bavarian, just as the locals here in Baltimore know I’m not from here, and if you have the ear, that my family (mom’s side, the side I grew up with) were central Pennsylvanian. But he spoke American English among us without the German accent because he was immersed in it young enough to absorb it that way without having to work to overcome the German fricatives. When you’re a kid you pick up the manners of speech from the world around you and your voice muscles naturally adapt to it. When he was young he learned German from Germans, and American English from how that is spoken here in the Mid Atlantic states.
But not Bawlmer. Obviously. No hon…I’m not from around here…
This poor guy that I used to be. I feel so afraid for him. He is so happy now, but does not know what’s coming…
September 22nd, 2007
Message In A Bottle
It’s been almost a year now since we talked. It was amazing that last time, to hear your voice after so long: you sounded just like you did way back when. It took me back…almost like that first time I called, and heard your telephone voice. Well…actually it was better, because that first time, I think I might have gotten you into some kind of trouble. You remember. You gave me your phone number that Friday before school was over, and we agreed that I’d call you Saturday and maybe we could both take our cameras for a hike somewhere…like maybe Great Falls. By the way…I still have that roll of film of yours you had me develop. I think I gave you the contacts I made, and some prints, but somehow I ended up with the negatives. I can mail them to you if you like. Anyway…I called and asked whoever it was who answered if you were home, and then you got on the line and you were all like…uh…sorry…I didn’t think you’d call…why did you call…I can’t go anywhere…I didn’t think you’d call…like I wasn’t supposed to call, which really confused me because we’d agreed I would call and you gave me your phone number which isn’t the sort of thing you do when you Don’t want someone to call you. Next Monday morning I met you at school it was like nothing had happened. There were times while we were seeing each other, when I wasn’t sure when you were teasing and when you were serious. And you always kept me at arms length from your family. For years afterward I wondered if I’d gotten you in some kind of trouble with your parents for giving me your number. Maybe we should have agreed you would call me.
Say…maybe you should call me now. It’s been almost a year. It would be nice to hear from you again. We’re too far away from each other to go for that camera hike like we were going to back then. But we can chat now, can’t we…without it getting you in trouble…right?
Wave back sometime. Please. It would be the best birthday gift ever.
I still vividly remember how I knew it was him even before my brain was parsing the words on that answering machine recording, just by the sound of his voice. After all those years. It was 1972 all over again…and I was that kid all over again…and that should have been the warning sign, because it didn’t end well back then either.
See…This is why I wish you’d let me email you…I could just bop these little questions back to you and maybe get a quick answer, instead of putting them into the Christmas card I’m sending.
My friends up here are just a tad too disorganized this year to count on them doing anything all together this New Years, alas. I’ve pinged them and pinged them and it looks like it’s just going to be catch as catch can and I tend to slip right between the cracks when it’s like that. I have a week off between Christmas and New Year and I don’t want to spend it moping around the house alone. Be nice to take a drive in my new car somewhere…particularly somewhere it’s warm. Somewhere I’ve never seen before.
So…basically…will Disneyworld be open during the week between Christmas and New Year…?
And…
What part of the complex, in your experienced opinion, would most appeal to a single adult? I’m not interested in the kiddy stuff, or the thrill rides so much (Unless I had a companion to thrill along with). I’ll probably just be wandering around all by myself. So maybe something to engage my mind and my curiosity? If such as that even exists at Disney? Epcot Center maybe? Or is there something else you think would be better?
And where would you suggest I get a room for a few days. Something basic, and not horribly expensive.
Well I reckon Disney World’s out. Thanks for the warning about the crowds during Christmas week guy. And here I was wondering if they were even open then…
This takes me back to a time Before. Before what you ask? Before everything changed. That poor guy writing those words. I feel so…not sorry…afraid…for him.
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind postulated a technology that allows you to erase unpleasant memories, but what if you can go back to the moment before you stepped on the path that brought you to the place where you were even considering it? What if?
A choice. To have lived the life you did…not to be able to revisit that past or change any part of it. Just…not to go there. Knowing only that I don’t reconnect. That’s all. Chose. Accept what came of doing the thing, or don’t do the thing.
Would I? Would I chose the path not travelled? That question is going to haunt me now for days.
Well…for one thing…Pretty sure I wouldn’t have spent so much money on Disney parks and stuff. I mean…I told him I wasn’t interested in theme parks. He had to talk me into going. Not very hard I admit…he did want to see me again after all. And after thirty-four years of searching for him, I sure wanted to see him again.
Maybe instead I spend that money on travel to other countries and places. Maybe I do more road trips. There’s still a lot of North America I haven’t walked on, and now probably never will.
What if I could decide not to do the thing that brought me back to him? What if I could decide to stop looking for him? Just…stop. End it. Ache forever not to see his face and his smile again, and hear his voice, because that’s what it would be. I was aching all those years I searched for him. And afraid. Never to know if he was even still alive, and did he survive the HIV epidemic. Stop. Stop asking. Stop needing to know. Stop needing. Chose differently.
Could I even do that? Would have even been in my power to do that? I’d begun drawing A Coming Out Story to make sense of what happened to me back in high school. I figured I’d never see him again and I just had to get it out of me, and also hopefully make some sort of peace with it. By the time I started on it so many years had passed I had to figure if I ever did find him again he’d be set with an all around better guy than I could ever be, much more good looking, not a geeky little artistic weirdo like me, and I’d just have to accept it. He was a catch, and I was an unhandsome oddball. But at least I’d know he was still alive.
And then I did the thing, and I found him again. And that set me on the path to now. And…Knowing.
I know exactly the moment I could chose not to do the thing. It’s right there. That one moment. What if I could stand in that exact moment, knowing how it turned out when I did the thing, and decide not to do it, and lose that thread of my life. Forever. Never to happen. Never to Know.
Could I really chose not to do the thing? I don’t know. This is going to haunt me.
Something amazing and wonderful happened to me just now. Never let it be said that it’s all over when you hit 70.
I was at my local Texas Roadhouse for an end of the week dinner and margarita. When I asked for my check, I was told somebody there had paid for me. I had to ask for clarification twice because I wasn’t sure I’d heard it right. But yes…somebody there paid my check. That has never happened to me before. Ever.
I suspect I know who it was. Sitting next to me was a friendly older man and his wife. He complemented my tie-dye t-shirt and I explained to him about the lady in York who does them by hand, and for a brief moment we reminisced about that time in our lives. He seemed a cheerful friendly sort and I think it was a gesture of one aging 60s kid to another. But I don’t know that for a fact.
All I know is for the first time in my life I went to a bar/restaurant by myself just to relax and enjoy a nice dinner and a margarita, and when I asked for my check I was told someone there paid it for me. There’s a young gay guy somewhere deep inside who is all kinds of over the moon now. After all this time…
“The gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized. New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.”
-Martin Sherman, Playwright, author of “Bent”
“But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible.”
Larry Kramer wrote a novel about that period in NYC, titled Faggots. It got a lot of static but he had a point, distilled down to this one line toward the novel’s end: “The fucking we’re getting is not worth the fucking we’re getting.”
Had you come of age back then, you could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, perverts, queers, that needed to be isolated from the rest of society, for the good of society. If many of us fixated on sex it was because that’s what we were told was all that was all there was to us. But there was a necessary element of Yes We Are defiance to it. I can appreciate that too. Progress, as George Bernard Shaw once said, is made by the unreasonable man. Also the unreasonable woman.
But it was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but not the only one. There was still the rest of it. Making that space for our sexual lives was important, but also the space for our love lives; Our whole lives. We couldn’t be neighbors so long as we were criminals. We couldn’t be people so long as we were sodomites.
I reckon I don’t really need to hide who it is I’m talking about in these remembrances anymore. He doesn’t read my blog (Hi!) and his comfort zone turned into the Berlin Wall a decade ago anyway. But I get these memories posts on Facebook now and then that remind me that it was real…
Some days I visit he’s being a jerk and doesn’t want to talk to me. Others, like last night, he’s all warm smiles and cheerful eyes and just can’t stop talking and we stay long past park closing time and I’m walking on air all the way back to my room. But then it’s always why can’t we spend some time together outside the park and his comfort zone won’t allow it.
So either way I have to struggle to get my vacation started back up again. If he’s grouchy then I’m miserable and just want to go home. I’ve called vacations off early when it’s been that. If he’s full of sunshine and smiles then I feel like I’ve hit the high point of my trip and why bother staying. There’s that back to the reality of things after the visit let-down to climb back out of somehow. I have to remind myself I need the break regardless.
This morning I’ll hit the grocery store for some perishables I couldn’t bring down with me, and more ice tea, and maybe something from the liquor store so I’m not always paying Disney prices for alcohol. Then spend the rest of the week chilling out, maybe working some more on A Coming Out Story (I brought my drawing things). But I’m in a state now I really have no words for, or at any rate words I’m willing to speak. He said something to me that lifted me out of myself in a way only someone who really gets you can. And it took a load off my psyche certain other gay someone’s I know weighed me down with for years.
It was all about how I don’t interact well with people. Too shy, too self absorbed, blah, blah, blah, your photography has no people in it, blah, blah, blah… Biergarten is “Octoberfest” seating, which means you get seated at a table with other random guests and you’re expected to talk and share a good time together. This time I was seated with a group that seemed really stand-offish. They just gave off chilly vibes. But after a while I got them talking about where they’re from and what they do, and of course when they found out I work at Space Telescope and on Hubble and James Webb they got all interested in that. And by the end of the night we were all chatting happily.
And after they left he and I were chatting and he noticed too how chilly that group was initially. He’s worked this line of business for so long now he can probably read a table the second he walks up to it. Then he said he’d always seen me open people up and that I was good at it and that I was always getting everyone talking and having a good time no matter how chilly the table seemed at first.
Well…yeah… One thing is you always know you’re with other Disney people here…so that’s something. It’s not like you’re in some random bar with bad mood people. We’re all Disney people here. And that Disney kid just comes out of me here. It’s a kind of freedom to be that kid I once was I never really appreciated I was missing before I started coming here. But I’m not the hopelessly detached single certain other people somehow managed to convince me I am either. I’m not that…so how did I get to thinking of myself like that? He just pulled that out of me with a few words and the look on his face when he said it.
He does that. It’s when someone shows you things about yourself you didn’t know, but should have known, that makes it serious. And…it’s been like that since we were teenagers. When he’s not in a touchy mood, it’s still like that.
But we never got the chance other kids did. And now he has his comfort zone, and I need to get on with my vacation. Somehow.
And speaking of those certain other gay someones…
Hi! I’ll be 73 in a few weeks, just a couple months after I got my Parkinson’s diagnosis. The search for someone to love and be loved by is in my rearview mirror now. I will die having been single all my adult life. You could have made a difference in one gay guy’s life. And…actually…you did! You and every other homophobic nutcase. Be proud!
A few weeks ago I received a glossy oversized flyer in the mail, advertising a silver and gold buy in Hunt Valley. BACK BY POPULAR I have some silver and gold I dug up during my downsizing adventures here at Casa del Garrett that I inherited from mom that I didn’t think was a good fit for the Greensburg Historical Society since it didn’t directly relate to mom or that part of Pennsylvania; not very much but enough I thought I could get a few hundred bucks for it maybe. So when I got a flyer in the mail advertising a gold and silver buying event…
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND! GOLD BREAKS THE 4K MARK!
WE BUY NO MATTER THE CONDITION!
…I decided to go see what they’d offer for it.
It was a big oversized glossy flyer, so I was expecting some sort of large venue with tables and buyers to look over what was being offered. And a big line since it was BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!
What I found when I got there was it was being held in a small office suite with nothing at all to suggest it was even being held at that address, other than the security guard in the lobby who knew it was happening and directed me to the right floor. There was nobody at the front desk to check me in.
So I wandered around for a bit and eventually a young lady appeared from the outer hallway. I’m guessing she’d just taken a bathroom break. I showed her the flyer I was mailed. She looked at me very seriously and told me there was only one buyer and I might have to wait as long as an hour and a half or two hours to see him.
I thanked her and walked away. I think I know what was going on…do you?
Big glossy advertisement. GOLD BREAKS THE 4K MARK! WE BUY NO MATTER THE CONDITION! Yeah. Yeah. There’s the bait. Someone willing to sit and wait for up to two hours to have their stuff appraised is probably desperate enough to take whatever they’re offered.
Or they’re bringing them stolen goods, and maybe this is a sting of some sort.
I don’t know, and I don’t care. Even if I was desperate for money I wouldn’t touch something like this because I’m either likely to be cheated or investigated. So it’s all back in my safe, all but the two 24 carat gold rings I found with the letters LBC on them and the date 1913. Those are mysterious enough I might let the Historical Society look them over. Near as I can research it, the rings either indicate they belonged to a Women’s Co-ed branch of the Independent Order of Foresters, a Fraternal society popular across Pennsylvania in 1913, or the Lackawanna Business College of Scranton. I cannot pin down who in the family would have been associated with either but it would be interesting to know more.
Last night around 1:30am I got an alarm from my home security system. It was a water detector I’d placed next to the hot water tank. Given that unit was close to twenty years old, I pretty much knew what happened, I just hoped it wasn’t flooding the back of my basement.
I ran naked down two flights of stairs to the basement, and was relieved to see it was just a small stream of water coming from under the tank, not a torrent. I turned off the water to the tank, turned off the tank heater, mopped up the water on the floor with some bath towels I’d staged next to the washing machine for cleaning, went back upstairs, got dressed, then went back down for a closer look and ponder. I am about to retire (again) and I was hoping to save a few grand to help me bridge the gap between paychecks and 401k withdrawals. Now it was looking like I’d be spending a few grand on a new hot water tank instead.
I put a bucket under the draincock and opened it, figuring I should start draining the tank before the leak gets any worse. Hardly anything came out, probably because sediment and/or corrosion was clogging it. I never did any of the usual preventive maintenance on the tank, which mostly involves periodically draining the tank and letting it refill to prevent sediment buildup. My bad. So now it’s looking like it might take me all day to drain the tank. But a little online research and I got a tip to open some of the hot water spigots to allow air into the tank as it drained. In retrospect I should have figured, but it’s the middle of the night and my brain isn’t at full steam. So that improved the drainage but only barely.
I set a timer to periodically check on how the bucket was filling, went back upstairs to my den, started up one of my computers and went online to Blue Dot, the place that did my new central AC/furnace. They did a super job on the new unit and while they were here they offered to replace the hot water tank as well and give me a quote, which I passed up. I figured I’d ping them to do the job. I set up an appointment to have someone come out and give me an estimate. Then I began figuring out my new budget reality and how to work around not having hot water.
Luckily I’d already done a load of dishes and laundry. There’s a shower in one of our unisex bathrooms at work I can use if I have to, and a laundromat just down the street that I’ve used before when the washing machine that came with the house failed. Figured I could boil some water on the stove to do dishes; the first apartments I lived in had no dishwashers and when we moved into one that did I thought we’d hit the big time. And some things like my Disney mugs and classic Fiestaware aren’t dishwasher safe so I do those by hand anyway.
So I had a plan, went back to bed and tried to get some sleep. I had a presentation I had to make at work the next morning and having lost most my night’s sleep I wasn’t sure I could manage it. But I did, then went back home to wait for the guy who wasn’t from Blue Dot after all (they don’t do plumbing stuff it turns out) to come and give me an estimate, which I accepted. I’ll have (hopefully) a new hot water tank by this evening as I write this, and a few grand less in my savings. So it goes. Tell you how it went later.
This came across my Facebook feed the other day, from user Ty Garner…
If I could go back and tell my 12-year-old self one thing, it would be this:
Love is one of the strongest forces you’ll ever know. It will make you believe, endure, forgive, and wait longer than you should. But no matter how unstoppable your love feels, it can never carry the weight of two hearts alone.
The purest intentions, the deepest loyalty, and the kindest soul cannot make someone choose you. Love isn’t proven by how much you’re willing to suffer—it’s proven when two people keep choosing each other.
Never mistake the strength of your love for the promise of theirs.
Memo to my 12 year old self. Take this man’s advice. You’re a good kid, a beautiful kid. You deserve a boyfriend when you’re older, who will bring you coffee and road trips.
Also…you will need to learn to use a straightening iron…
This came across my Facebook stream yesterday. Another chapter in the old heartbreaking story of what bigotry has done to our lives…
Paul Bettany’s father came out at 63, fell in love with a man, and spent 20 happy years with him. Then his partner died – and what happened next is heartbreaking.
While most people know him as Vision, far fewer know about the story that shaped him. After his father Thane’s partner Andy Clark died in 2015, the elder Bettany – in his 80s and a lifelong Catholic – went back into the closet.
He told people it had all been “a big misunderstanding” because he was “concerned about getting past Peter through the pearly gates.”
Paul has spoken openly about how devastating that was to witness. “He was unable to mourn the person who I think was the love of his life,” he said.
It’s part of what drew Paul to star in “Uncle Frank”, playing a closeted gay professor – his very first film role had been in an adaptation of the gay play “Bent”.
“I want everybody to just live authentically as the person they are,” Paul has said. “However hard that is, it’s absolutely better than pretending to be something other than you are.”
I have witnessed people my age and younger going back into the closet after a period of outedness rather than stand up to the pressures of family, religion or career. I’ve stood up to those same pressures and I know it can be frightening and painful, but the alternative is, as C.S. Lewis said in a different context, damnation.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” -C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”.
My house is a mess now, but that’s because I’m downsizing in anticipation of second retirement in September. I pulled a bunch of stuff out from under the basement steps and began sorting through it a couple weeks ago, giving some to recycling, some to Goodwill, and some to the Greensburg Historical Society. I’m still going through it, and I’ll be distributing stuff around again and again over the coming weeks. But it left me with a lot of empty space…enough that today I was able to move stuff out of the storage room and close it. That’s a monthly rent off my back now.
I told the lady at the storage place why I was downsizing and with a smile she told me to enjoy my retirement “this time.”
This is a process I expect to take several months…I’ll be able to work on it more energetically when I don’t have days at the office…but at the end of it I want the house to be a lot lighter in weight than it’s been. Because I want my life to be lighter in weight going forward.
It’s the hypocrisy, not the sexual orientation. And not the closetedness. Lots of basically decent people stay closeted for reasons of their own, ranging from family issues, and religious struggles to legitimate fears for their lives. I’ve known a few. Be careful who you judge for being closeted.
That said…these guys are creeps. It’s okay to judge someone for being a creep. And if they’re secretly enjoying the bodies of other men, let alone the hard work LGBT people have contributed to make this a better world, while actively supporting hate mongers, then they’re also thieves.
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