I searched for him for 34 years. Before the Internet all I had was various blogs and USENET news groups where I would post the occasional message in a bottle. I got no replies. I paid money for CDs of all the national public white pages (the part of the phone book with just the names, addresses and phone numbers of people who hadn’t paid to have their numbers private) so I could search for him by name. But there were hundreds, if not thousands of people with his first and last names and I did not know his middle name, or that he was actually going by his high school nickname.
Then the AIDS crisis hit, and I walked between the panels during the Names Quilt’s first showing on the Washington Mall, and afterward I had recurring nightmares of walking among the panels and finding one with his name on it. Worse were the nightmares where I was walking in the halls of our old high school and seeing him walk by emaciated and covered in kaposi sarcoma lesions. I would wake up crying my eyes out.
Eventually, in desperation, I did a thing that finally, Finally, led me right to him. I had a phone number. Trembling, I called it. Thankfully I got his answering machine, not him, or I would have probably choked and squeaked out some pathetic hello, uh, hi, uhm, maybe you don’t remember me…but anyway…hello…hi…is this Tom…from back in Woodward…hello…hi…uhm…ah…how are you…hello… But the moment I heard his voice on that answering machine I knew it was him after all, I didn’t even need to hear the message, and I instantly became that awkward geek of a teenage boy I was back when I first laid eyes on him and my jaw dropped.
I hung up and carefully composed a message to leave on his answering machine. Then I called again, thankfully got the answering machine again, and trying hard to keep my voice steady, left the message.
Just so my friends know… I got a response to one of my messages in a bottle this afternoon. Finally. After so long…
You walk in an empty landscape under an endless sky. The earth under your feet is flat, hard, solid rock. Ahead of you is cliff, overlooking a great valley. There are mountains on the horizon. So far away. And…what looks like, perhaps, a city in the distance. Just at your feet is a pool of water, in a small hollow in the rock. Its surface is unnaturally calm.
Look down into it. You see your reflection. It is deceptively clear. You see yourself, here, now. As you are. Right this moment. You see every detail of your face, sharp and crystal clear, looking back at you. But unlike most people who come this way, to look into this pool, you know that this is not all there is to you. There is more. The rest of you is there, in the darkness below the surface. You know this.
Reach a hand into the water. Did you slack through most of your life? Did you walk it with your eyes closed? Your mind blissfully content with the moment? Never questioning. Never doubting. Never wondering? Then the pool is quite shallow. Your hand reaches the bottom soon, and encounters only the same hard smooth rock you have just walked across. But if you kept your eyes open, and your mind active, and your heart engaged, then it is quite deep. Your hand does not touch bottom no matter how far into it you reach. The water is cold. It is dark. It is deathly still.
Reach down as far as you can. Then stir the water. Just a little. Careful. The reflection of you, here, now, ripples away. Watch. Something else, something from deep down in the pool, shimmers up to take its place.
So for years now…34 years to be exact…I’ve been throwing these little messages in a bottle out into the world, where, hopefully, they would eventually find there way to a certain someone. So what happened between us back when we were both teenagers is pretty central to who I am today. So I finally got a reply. After 34 years of searching for him I finally found him. So we talked. For just over an hour we talked. You have to expect that 34 years is a lot of time for things to happen. And things did happen. Many things he told me about. And many things I can only guess at from what he would only allude to. He sounds just like he always did. It was like picking up the phone and talking to him back in 1972. It was eerie. It was wonderful. It was thrilling. It was disturbing. He’s the same guy he was back then. And he’s different. And things have happened in 34 years. Many things.
And I feel like…a gently whirling dust devil just suddenly smacked into me and threw parts of me that no one has ever touched or disturbed in 34 years reeling into the air, scattered across the sky, and now I’m just standing here becalmed, watching it all lazily settle back down, and I know it will still be me when it does, but different, and I don’t know what will happen next because those parts of me ran so old and so deep and so still…
“How do I get to Tucumcari?”
…and then, of course, I had to deal with the consequences of doing the thing that brought me back to him. Four months later it was this:
Unforgettable…That’s What You Are… Unforgettable though near or far Like a song of love that clings to me How the thought of you does things to me Never before has someone been more
Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry. I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now. This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from. There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t. There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release.
I want that part of me back. I really want it back. But it’s a struggle. I have my ups and downs now…and this week has just been particularly bad. I’m sorry. Nothing more for now. I just can’t. I guess this is why I’ll never be a professional cartoonist or artist. I’m sorry. I just can’t. I’m sorry.
I remember skies Mirrored in your eyes I wonder where you are I wonder if you Think about me Once upon a time In your wildest dreams
I started my semi autobiographical cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, as I said at the time, to try and make sense of what happened to me back in high school, back when I finally had to admit not only am I gay but I’m crushing madly on a classmate, and it’s 1971 and neither one of us have any hope of that magical first crush being anything but as confusing minefield of feelings and fear. I had no idea back then of where he’d gone or even if he was still alive.
And then I found him. And we started talking again. And it was wonderful again. And a minefield of feelings and fear again. For most of us of our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall.
We talked and talked and talked. It was wonderful. A little tentative flirting happened, but it was impossible and we both knew it. But I still held out hope we could be friends, if long distance ones. Even that turned out not to be possible. I was out and proud and he needed me to be closeted, at least in public around him, and by then I’d stood my ground so often and had the life bruises to show for it that I wasn’t doing that for anyone, let alone the guy who made my heart sing when I was a teenage boy. Even if he never loved me back, even if we weren’t really all that compatible to begin with, I was never going to betray that moment when I discovered how wonderful it was to be in love, how wonderful life could be after all. But he had his comfort zone and he told me to my face that he was going to stay in it.
A few years later we had one last heart to heart where he told me things I could swear he’d got from a stint in ex-gay therapy. He told me there were times he’d look in a mirror and not know who it was looking back. This was the guy teenage me once thought hung the moon and the stars. I walked back to my hotel room thinking this must be what it’s like living in Nietzche’s abyss.
Ten years after I found him again he told me to go away.
I’ve struggled to bring my cartoon series to a proper end ever since. I tacked on an ending but it isn’t the one I’d planned, and there was so much more I wanted to tell. But I have no energy. That life-on-hold emptiness inside me never left. I’m only still alive now because I’m so used to it being there.
I got my Parkinson’s diagnosis last July, after nearly two years of struggle with various doctors and ER staff about random dizzy spells and periods of almost debilitating fatigue. I got a new GP and she got me a brain scan (no anomalies detected) and a visit to a neurologist who gave me clarity.
So I’m on the standard med, carbidopa-levodopa (which I internally joke as takeadopa-leaveadopa, which I get at my local little free pharmacy…I should do a cartoon on that…) and it has improved things noticeably, mostly in the realm of physical symptoms.
But it’s a menu of five entries, and some side dishes, not all of which are getting better. Tremors are, until lately, minor, and mostly in my left hand. The others, balance, fatigue, stiffness, and brain fog, come and go. Every day is one or two different entries, of various portions.
When I was diagnosed, the neurologist said I was borderline late onset Parkinson’s, and that I had five, maybe as long as ten more years before I would be needing help. Which was good to know. Maybe my finicky heart will take me off the playing field first. As of now, this is my working cure for Parkinson’s.
That’s because my terror is the tremors start getting into my right hand, which is my drawing hand, and I can’t draw anymore. I’m already seeing how the left hand tremors are making it hard to type out things on the iPhone, because holding it, and a camera steady in both hands, is challenging when the left won’t stop shaking, even if it’s not very much (this is why having tremors mostly in my left hand is Not the blessing it might seem).
But it is the right hand that is always in control. So of course now it’s starting to get into my right hand. Not so it’s noticeable to anyone but me, because I am used to having precision in that hand. And this is really dragging me down because when the right had precision goes I’m done for.
I’m extremely right handed…a thing I discovered reading a paper about how some gay males who either have no brothers or are the first borns are more likely to be. There was an attached questionnaire you could take that asked you which hand you used for various tasks, and it was clever. Brushing your teeth, using a broom, dusting, wiping off a table, cleaning a window, that sort of thing. And the choices were left hand always, left hand mostly, either-or, right hand mostly, right hand always. There were about a dozen of these questions and I was ticking off right hand always on all of them. It surprised me to learn that even most right handed folks switch off from time to time on these task, while I never did.
Yesterday I noticed, because it was hard not to, the tremors were becoming evident in my right hand.
I have transitioned back into retirement, and I should be feeling great about it. A couple days ago I was. I’d made plans to visit the ancestral Garrett homelands in California, and hang out with my brother in Oceano. I’d bought train tickets from Baltimore to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to be driving cross country during snow and ice season, and also across red America after election day. I figured I’d decide how to get up the coast to Oceano when I got to LA, since the train schedules going north don’t always sync well with the Southwest Chief. Then I realized I had time left on my Disneyland annual pass and I could take a MetroLink to Anaheim and spend a few days in California Adventure and then take the Surfliner north to the Grover Beach station, which is walking distance to my brother’s house in Oceano.
So I was in a great frame of mind. Then. Later that afternoon I took an ad-hoc hike along the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore and it was a sunny pleasant sky blue day. Got a nice BLT at a local shop next to the trailhead. I was feeling wonderful. There was however, a problem I was waiting to get resolved the next business day. I have been in a state of despair ever since. I’m typing this now after waking up from a bad nightmare.
When I got what I thought was going to be my final paycheck plus all the vacation time I’d accrued, it was massively less than I’d thought. So I asked HR to look into it, and naturally it’s my fault, or so they say. And the tax man’s. This is going to make things difficult for me for the rest of this year, and it’s too late to cancel my train tickets and Disney hotel reservations without taking another big hit.
And while it’s true I have enough in my 401k to retire comfortably, the problem for me at this point is the current managers of my 401k have much more stringent rules for making sure you are not and never have been married that the other one I was previously on did not. Which is (hahaha) why the Institute dropped them and pushed us all onto the current one. So the buffer I thought I had to tide me through the paper are you or are you not or have you ever been married chase isn’t there and I’m going to be struggle to make ends meet until this new 401k manager decides I’ve satisfied requirements. And they have fucked me over dragging their feet on other matters before.
Saving grace of all this might be that at 73 I am subject to the Required Minimum DIstribution now and this current 401k manager has already informed me that I have a chunk out of my 401k I now I have to withdraw. Hopefully this means they will get serious about letting me do that.
Here’s the thing many of my friends and practically all my classmates don’t really get about me. I was raised by a single divorced mother and didn’t get a chance to finish college because the money ran out and what great granddad Garrett had put aside for me and my brother got disappeared somehow. I knocked around this and that low paying job for half my working life. And even when I started making a good living as a software developer it was contract work at first with zero benefits.
Mom didn’t have any tangible property when she died, let alone a house in Montgomery county that could be sold for a big profit, and I just don’t have the foundational wealth most of the rest of my classmates and co-workers have. It’s not like they’re rich by any means, just comfortably middle class. I on the other hand, am literally a kid from the other side of the railroad tracks.
If it wasn’t for the benefits I had at STScI I wouldn’t have anything but social security to retire on at all. The 401k and b have enough in them to let me have a comfortable, if not fabulous retirement, but I can’t tolerate sudden complexities very well at all. Like having to go through a paper chase just to prove I’ve never been married before I can access my retirement funds.
Most working people in this land of the free and home of the brave can’t tolerate surprises either. We have lived hand to mouth for most of our lives, if not all of it. I’m also excessively lucky I can still keep my employee health plan, even accounting for how that and Medicate part B increases are likely to eat all of the coming SS COLA increase and then some. You’ve no idea the panic that sets in whenever I hear republicans talking about cutting social security.
I’m just anxious and sick to my stomach right now. I just want to stay in bed for the rest of the week. Maybe the rest of my life.
I was out and about a couple nights ago, just wandering around my little corner of Baltimore, and chatting with a friend in DC via cellphone. The kid who grew up with telephones wired into the wall, and local long distance charges through the roof, is loving how all that changed in the 21st century. I carry my phone with me in my pocket and it is also my music library, weather radar, encyclopedia, and all around handheld computer. I was feeling great since my short afternoon hike on the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore. Despair was to come the next day but just then I didn’t know that. It was a lovely blue sky day and the evening was cool and but not so cold yet that I couldn’t be out and about in a flannel shirt and no jacket.
I decided to stop for a drink at one of my favorite restaurants, I won’t say which because of what I saw going down and what I did about it.
This particular restaurant served a specialty drink that they smoked in front of the customer before serving it. I discovered this delightful thing about smoking a drink at the upscale Basque restaurant across I-83 from me. They call it a Blue Velvet and it is decadently good. But that restaurant had a fire and it’s been closed since last January, although they say they’re opening back up this December. So when this other place started serving a smoked old fashion I tried it out and it was excellent. If pricey.
So I go inside and sit at the bar. A new bartender is there…a young woman I’d never seen before. She asked me what I wanted and I asked if she could make me that smoked old fashion and she said yes.
So I’m chilling out at the bar while she’s making it. Eventually one of the regular bartenders comes back and starts working the little glass washer at the end of the bar. He sees me and asks me if I want my usual food and I say no, just a drink tonight. I don’t really know this bartender, but he seems to know me. There are other regulars behind the bar I see often, but this is late Sunday night and so I suppose these are the off hours staff. He’s tall, thin and bearded and he seems okay. But his interactions with the young woman really put me off.
She starts walking over to me with my drink and the guy grabs he by the arm as she passes by him and says something to her. It wasn’t a rough grab but it was a grab, and the first thing I’m thinking is no, you don’t touch your staff like that. He says something to her and she nods and walks over to me and puts my drink down.
The process at this restaurant involves putting a smoker over the glass. They apparently get them from one of their suppliers and it has that company’s name on it. It’s a wooden thing that fits over the glass and has that company’s logo carved onto it. On the top of the smoker is a small bowl the bartender fills with some wood like hickory, mesquite, or red oak. Once the bowl is filled a torch lighter is used to burn the wood, and smoke drifts down from the bowl and covers the top of the drink. At the Basque restaurant the bartender would bring a small bottle prefilled with smoke and pour the smoke from the bottle over your drink while you watched. It’s all very theatrical in a way but that’s part of the enjoyment.
So this new young bartender starts trying to smoke my drink using their smoke top device, but it isn’t getting the smoke down onto the drink. I’ve seen this happen before and suggest to her that the smoker is clogged. She agrees. But then the other bartender comes over and sees the problem with the smoker and basically takes over the process from the young woman. He brings over a new smoker, fills it’s bowl with wood chips and starts torching it himself, saying in front of her and me that he needs to show her how it’s done so she doesn’t screw it up. And I’m thinking no, this is not how you train your staff. This is how you make them want to quit.
I can appreciate there are customers who will get all ornery when they’re being served by inexperienced staff, but that’s on them. I’m fine with being part of the process of teaching someone their job, especially when I can see they really want to learn. And this young woman was, before the other guy came along, pleasant, cheerful and wanting to make my time there good. It wasn’t her fault that the damn smoker she picked up was clogged. The other thing is you give staff the tools they need to do the job, and don’t be putting it on them when the tools fail them. Get them better tools.
So now there is discord behind the bar. The young woman is upset and she goes off to work the tables in the seating area; a task I think she was mostly there for and only did behind the bar while the other bartender was away or on his break. Periodically she comes back to the bar to take the drink orders from the tables, and goes into the kitchen to bring out their food. But a definite chill is in the air and I am completely sympathetic with the young woman.
I hear another staff member, also young woman, just casually say to the guy “She’s pretty angry at you.” He seemed to shrug it off. I saw him talk to her semi privately a couple of times but what was said or what it was about I had no idea. Whatever it was it didn’t clear the air.
I am loath to insert myself into other people’s drama, but there are limits. I kept an eye on the movements of the young woman until I saw an opportunity to catch her eye away from the others, and motioned her over to a spot where we could talk without being seen.
I told her 1) I saw him grab your arm. That was way out of line. 2) you do not criticise staff in front of the customers, that is completely unprofessional. 3) the crapped up smoker was not your fault.
She thanked me but the look on her face was thanks enough. I went back to finish my drink. At some point someone, or some someones (there were other young women working there) must have said something to the guy because he came over and apologised to me for putting all that in front of me.
Okay…I’m a gay male and the dynamics of straight male/female interaction is a foreign land to me. Fine. But I think I get workplace dynamics pretty well. You keep your hands off your co-workers. Train your staff with a measure of patience and humility: you had to be trained once yourself. Keep your criticisms private. Keep it away from the customers. Whatever it is.
Of all the symptoms of Parkinson’s, the one I dislike the very most is fatigue. Tremors at this stage I’m in are trivial. I get the occasional stiffness, mostly in my thighs, but it’s not bad. I get the dizzy spells randomly. The brain fog comes and goes. But fatigue, when it hits, slams me down. It sucks the minutes of my life I still have left away and I just want to stay in bed and I get nothing done.
I have to be careful though, and not attribute everything that happens to me to Parkinson’s. The fact is I am 73 now and so some of this, maybe even most of it, is simply just my getting old. Also, my heart. I was told when I had the heart attack in 0ctober 2019 (tomorrow is the anniversary), that I have a leaky heart valve. I’m three years away from the time my cardiologist and the surgeon that did my angioplasty say are when I’ll probably need it replaced.
They say it can be done nowadays without opening up my chest. Lovely. Another scary procedure to be done inside my beating heart.
I have a book I purchased to write everything my family would need to know upon my demise. It’s titled “Sorry, It’s Your Problem Now.” I should probably get to work on it…
Here’s the birthday cake I bought for myself, on the kitchen table at Casa del Garrett. Vanilla cake with vanilla butter icing! In retrospect I should have asked for a shot of insulin to go with it…
I really appreciate them coming out with those number candles!
In the background is the Glenn Close Cruella de Vil doll I inherited from mom’s collection. I found it while going through mom’s things deciding what to give to Greensburg Historical Society. I’m keeping it. I’m still trying to decide where to place her which is why she’s on the dining room table, but I’m tempted to let her oversee the bookcase in my den between where I keep some Disney World memorabilia and the shrine to my three strikes.
The crab is an Alebrije I bought in Epcot Mexico a few years ago. I’d never seen an Alebrije crab and I live in Maryland near the bay, so…
This came across my Facebook stream today. It’s from Bob Dylan about being age 80, and it gave me a few things about my own age 73 to ponder…
Some of this applies to me at 73, some not. There Is a certain freedom in being old…the closer you get to the grave (I’ve told my brother I want to have my ashes scattered on a hillside near Oceano with a view of the ocean) you can see more clearly what matters and what does not. People have come and gone from your life and some of those you grieve and some you wish had gone sooner: You see better what matters in a person. But the fact is I was always hard to program. Not sure where that came from in my heritage, maybe more from dad’s side than moms, but it was always there. In retrospect I think it was the curiosity. I was a kid that couldn’t stay away from science and technology. Books were my friends from an early age, and reading will grow you inside. But if I am truthful, I bore easily. Being confined in a religion or ideology of any kind feels suffocating. My mind wants to explore. It’s one reason I’ve always had trouble with focus. But this has kept me from being trapped by pretty illusions for very long. On the other hand, I am an artist; I weave my own illusions. That is very much a two edged sword. Picasso said art is a lie that makes us see the truth. But us gay kids know it can also be a refuge from a world that hates us.
The fire Dylan mentions is still there in me, but the body isn’t telling me been there done that, but do you really think you can finish it at this stage. A Coming Out Story is finished but really not. Not in the way I wanted. I just ended it because I thought I was running out of time. I am seriously hoping that second retirement motivates me to flesh it out like I always wanted. I take some comfort in what Jacob Bronowski taught me; that no work is ever finished; you just take it as far as you can and then stop. What the artist leaves behind isn’t finished pieces so much as mile markers. This is where I am now…this is what I see. I will leave a bunch of those.
I know Very Unpleasantly what Dylan means by having that understanding of what you could have changed when it would have mattered. Things I did still haunt me. Even worse, things I didn’t do. Things I never said when I should have, (Hi Tico!) I have to live with all that now because it’s all water under the bridge…or Yesterday’s Snow, as the Germans say.
As for not being surprised by anything anymore, I hope I never reach the point where I am never surprised by anything. Even the unpleasant surprises keep you engaged.
Time. That business about time standing still and we’re the ones that move. I object. As Prior Walter said in Angels In America, “The world only spins forward.” Everything moves.
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…
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.
This is good, but let me add some detail specific to me at this point.
#1: Yes…all this. I thought it was just about having tremors. But no…there are entire subsystems that are affected by not having enough dopamine. I actually don’t have much trouble at all with tremors, and that almost exclusively on my left hand. Which is good because my right hand is my drawing hand and I’m not ready to lose that yet. It can be a challenge now though, when I need to steady something with Both hands. Like (sigh) a camera.
#2: The feedback I get now and then is mostly about random, slight, but noticeable speech difficulties. Sometimes brain and mouth don’t want to cooperate. As to the face, I think it’s mostly just resting grumpy old man face. When I’m talking to you it’s pretty lively.
#3: This is the big one. People I’ve only socialized with online don’t see any of this. Anyone who’s had my physical presence probably doesn’t notice much of this at all. Living with it is all this. Except for pain. I am in no pain. Thankfully. A little muscle stiffness is all, and so far that isn’t bad.
As far as anxiety and depression…I’m a gay man who came out to himself in 1971, but to be brutally honest I knew when I was 14, I just lived in denial until that moment in December 1971. Anxiety is something a gay guy just lives with. Also any kid, gay or straight, who was raised in a very religious household, or one with a lot of family drama. I grew up with a bunch of that too. Anxiety is an old friend.
I’ve no digestive issues except I notice lately I’m losing a little more of my appetite, which has always been slight anyway, as anyone who’s ever dined out with me and seen me not touch half of what’s on my plate can verify. But I could use losing a few inches off the waistline.
But the rest of that…yeah. Fatigue. It’s the worst. So far. Brain fog comes and goes, but focus, concentration, is harder to accomplish now. Which I need at work, and my drafting table…
…and for photography. I have taken a pretty well stocked camera kit with me on various road trips and not touched any of it, over and over and Over again. I did get something out of me on my recent trips to Sunbury, but I was hoping to get more out when I went to Greensburg last week and my cameras remained untouched the entire time. I had to apologize to them when I unpacked the car. It’s really starting to distress me.
I’ve had insomnia for decades, I’ve learned to work around it, so I really can’t say Parkinson’s is making it any worse. I don’t consider vivid dreams a problem. I have very few nightmares. Mostly they’re just strange and kinda fun. Sometimes they give me story ideas.
#4: Yes. Yes. Yes.
#5: My friends and co-workers are all good people who don’t need telling. I have wonderful neighbors on my little Baltimore rowhouse street. I feel at ease with all of you. As for the rest of humanity…I think Sartre was mostly right, but the exceptions make dealing with it worthwhile. I try to be patient and remember that I can be pretty annoying too.
I am not asking for understanding, but curiosity. Stay curious. If you have that mindset then you know how I’m dealing with this. It’s an interesting puzzle. I’m learning more about human neurology probably than I otherwise would have.
…fatigue, brain fog, balance problems. But all that didn’t start until a few hours after I got up. In that little window of time I got some stuff done around the house, working off a long term project of downsizing, sorting, filing. I’m really not seeing the benefit from the new medication the neurologist was telling me I’d see. There is some, but it’s disappointing. I have a follow-up appointment with him first week in August. We’ll talk.
I dropped off a bunch of stuff with the Greensburg Historical Society last Thursday, but there is more I need to uncover here. Plus, I am gathering stuff to donate to Goodwill. The sad truth is selling, or even giving away stuff is difficult. There is a “Buy Nothing Hampden” page here I’ve had some success with in the past, but lately no bites. I took a bunch of things to recycling knowing that at least some of it can become something new and not just end up in a landfill. The stuff I take to Goodwill can find another home. But I need energy to do all this and Parkinson’s, plus old age too I’m sure, leaves me with very little.
I’ve been thinking it over and I suppose this diagnosis of Parkinson’s seems sudden to most of my friends. Pretty sure not to my brother in California, who has seen me struggling at his house with fatigue and balance and memory. My co-workers and project leads have seen me struggle to get words out when I suddenly can’t put a sentence together, because brain and mouth momentarily stop cooperating. More distressingly is a loss of mental focus that I was hoping the meds would improve. But since most of my socializing these days is online, most of my friends and classmates wouldn’t have seen any of this building for the past couple years. And it’s been a gradual thing, punctuated by a few sudden episodes of fail.
I’m really not in a bad way now, and probably won’t be for quite some time; just not the fully functional me I used to be, even accounting for age. It’s mostly subtle…until for a brief few moments it isn’t. If the diagnosis seems sudden to you, rest assured it is not to me, or to anyone who has had my physical presence for more then a day or two; something is a bit off with Bruce.
I am grateful for the diagnosis because it gave me clarity, Finally, as to what was happening to me, and something to take the measure of, and try to manage.
But there is so much more I need to do. I have artwork I want to get out. It’s going to be harder than I’d anticipated, and I’m not going to get everything done I want to.
I’m in Greensburg Pennsylvania presently, the ancestral home of my mom’s side of my gene threads. I used to post these travelogs often here on my blog in real time, but I don’t anymore because thieves and burglars might be listening in and see an opportunity to break into my house and steal things; and never mind I always have neighbors and security cameras watching and my alarms set. It’s the world we live in now. But I’m getting tired of that, and I think I’m going to post about my travels here more often.
I’m here in Greensburg to drop some family history I inherited after mom passed away. Family bibles with birthdates, death dates, and marriages recorded in them, and lots and Lots of old family photos and random artifacts. I’ve given it all to the Greensburg Historical Society. I still have family living in the area I suppose, but I’m completely estranged from them because of how mean they were to my mom. The only person I’m still close to on that side is mom’s cousin, who stood by her all throughout her life and whatever the family drama was. But like mom, she doesn’t live here anymore, and hasn’t for decades.
As I type these words I suddenly realize that, like mom, and her mom, mom’s cousin never had any interest in returning to Greensburg after they left, long, long ago. Mom took me here often when I was a kid for visits, but in retrospect that was mostly for her mom’s benefit, to visit old friends and the one son she still had living nearby. We would stay with a distant relative, whose relationship to mom’s family I’m still uncertain of. I still have fond memories of those visits, but that was before the family drama really started touching me.
When I came to the Greensburg Historical Society the other day to drop things off, they gave me the tour of their collection so far. The people working here are very nice folks, history nerds, and so friendly it did my heart good because my feelings toward this place are mixed now at best. I’m writing this to my blog just to put this one more little message in a bottle out here for you because the collection of German artifacts they have surprised me, and then made my heart ache in a different way from the ache I expected to have being here. I always knew in the back of my mind the German influence here in central Pennsylvania, but seeing it all collected together and representing a significant part of the history of this place startled me.
There was a magnificent old bible, one of those big heavy embossed leather bibles with heavy metal clasps to close it, well preserved in a glass display case, and it was in German. There were school books in German, travel books, written histories of Pennsylvania and Westmoreland County. Stories of the people who came here, made a life here, in the language of their homeland. The folks who work here said they’d brought a translator in to help with cataloging all that. And I immediately thought of you, and wished you were there with me just then, because you could have looked all that over and told them things about it that maybe they didn’t know. And I began aching for a life I never had a chance to have, and which probably one you wouldn’t have wanted with me anyway. The old dream that will never completely die, but that becomes something to just acknowledge, like getting old.
I’m letting go of all that family history now because the Parkinson’s diagnosis leaves me with a new perspective. You always kept telling me toward the end of it, that I needed to let go of the past. Live in the present you said, using the word as a double entendre. I wouldn’t exactly call Parkinson’s a present, but it works well enough as a mile marker. I can let go of a lot of stuff I’ve carried with me since mom died, because I was never much a part of it anyway, and I am going to need to carefully manage the energy I have left to me. I’m sure at some point the people in my family here became aware that mom’s son by the father they all despised is gay, but they’d have kept me at arms length anyway because I was his son and the sins of the father will always convey to the son if he’s the only convenient target.
Mom loved me, I’ve never doubted that, but she’s gone now and my connection to the others was tenuous at best because that was how they wanted it ultimately, and I came to accept it. The life of the only child teaches him how to rely on himself. The only one who took an interest in me was the one who left Greensburg for California and he never went back either. How I’ve wished I could have grown up closer to him. But then I would never have met you.
The trick in letting go of things is knowing what parts of that life you lived made you the person you are, what you need to honor and respect, for better or worse, and what was just the back story, not your story.
Nighttime In A Heat Wave Does Not Mean Lower Temperatures.
I really needed to get some more cat food, in case Walter comes for a visit (he didn’t last night). And cookies. But talking even a short walk is risky in this heat, and especially for someone my age. I decided to wait until after sundown and the temperature dropped to at least 95. One of the perks of living where I do is there is a really good Giant Food store that’s not more than a 10-15 minute walk from my front door.
Out on the front porch it was still like an oven but not so intense that I didn’t think I could manage it. So I grabbed a small canvas shopping bag and headed out. All I needed was a few cans of cat food to tide me over until I could drive out to Cockeysville and the Pet Smart there. So I wouldn’t be carrying a lot back home.
What I hadn’t figured into this was that the intense heat of the last couple days had really baked the pavements and everything else in my environment, such that even if the sun wasn’t bearing down on me and the sky was getting dark, the heat was rising up at me from the ground all around me.
But I made it. I have food (and cookies). Probably not venturing out again until Monday when this heat wave is supposedly scheduled to end.
Oh yes…I went on a crash diet. After I reconnected with my high school crush after 30-something years. The pain of holding those Oh So Nice bluejeans in my hands just now was almost as bad as the memories they drew out of me.
So…recently my storage room raised its rent on me, which still isn’t much but I’d like to get it off me before I second-retire this coming September. It shouldn’t be too difficult with all the stuff I’ve decided I don’t need to keep anymore going to recycling. But I have seasonal stuff I still need a place for. Garden stuff for spring and summer, Halloween stuff for fall. My Christmas stuff has a place in the basement, but I might get off a bunch of that too since I don’t see myself putting up a tree here at Casa del Garrett (East) anymore. I’d rather spend the holidays in California with that side of my family now.
I have two cedar chests, one that’s been mine since I was a kid, that allegedly my maternal grandfather built himself. The other a very nice old Lane I inherited from mom. What’s in both of those I think I can let go of, and repurpose them for the seasonal stuff. I also have two old steamer chests I inherited that are allegedly from the trip from England to America mom’s side of the family took when they came here to live. One of those is in use for storing bedding. The other I have completely forgotten what’s inside of it, which is a good indicator that whatever it is I don’t need to keep it.
The fact is I don’t recall much of what’s in the two cedar chests and so just now I opened the one I used to have in my teenage bedroom, only to discover it packed full of shirts and bluejeans I cannot get into anymore, that I could as recently as 2008 – 2016. Those, uncoincidentally, were the years I’d reconnected with my high school crush and I went on a crash diet after he asked for a photo and I was too embarrassed to show him all of me. For about eight years after that I felt that I looked pretty cute. We had our nuclear war in 2016 and for some reason I gained all that weight back.
So I suppose I was saving those shirts and bluejeans on the off chance my waistline would drop back down to 30-31 inches. But that’s unlikely now. A shame because I thought I looked pretty nice in them once upon a time. You get that slight male hourglass (which I define as having a waistline that’s visibly narrower than your hips and chest) and a lot of things look good on you that Really Don’t if you don’t got it. All the low rise hip hugging bluejeans I just discovered in that cedar chest for example.
It all goes to one of those clothing bin drop-offs I see around here.
Been a while since I updated my blog but don’t think that means I’m bored with it. Far from it given how unpleasant commercial social media has become. But the Parkinson’s diagnosis has thrown me for more of a loop than I’d originally thought (that happens) and I’ve been engaged in a process of downsizing and letting go. I’ve taken several large storage containers full of stuff I’ve saved for nostalgia value to recycling because I’m feeling now like that past I had, while valuable and important, is not something I need to keep as close anymore, if I’m to spend a few final years of my life in peace and serenity. And adventure.
It seems to me now that there is a lot I should just let go of, so I can be me, and not as much a replay of the me I was once. Some of it I will never let go of, because it made me the person I am today. But I don’t need the details of my past as much as I’d thought I would. Those 16 and Tiger Beat magazines I saved to remind me of the closeted gay teenybopper I once was, I can send to recycling and let the paper they were made of become something new, just as I can finally become something more than everything I used to be. There is a saying that’s particularly relevant to gay guys my age and my generation, to the effect that the task before us is to remove everything about us we had to become in order to survive, so we can finally be our authentic selves; the persons we were always meant to be, and would have been if not for all the hate we had to endure. And I have always said there is no such thing as growing up, but only growing. I think that diagnosis of Parkinson’s has given me some perspective. I am letting go of a lot of stuff, so I can grow, while I still have time to grow. Before I become a prisoner inside my own body.
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