I have a postcard I sent to mom long ago, that I keep on one of my bookshelves with a bunch of odds and ends from passages of my life. Oh, and also some books. This particular postcard was one I found among her things after she passed away. Every now and then I take it off the shelf to read once more.

I would have been dating, or thought I was dating, strike three, “K” who was living on Hilton Head at the time. I would have been making a good living as a contract software developer renting a very nice garden apartment in Cockeysville, Maryland.

It was a time before affordable cell phones and the end of long distance charges. He and I would chat for hours on our land lines. The new cordless telephones were a blessing for us. We could chat together while going about our household chores as if we were together. This was a time when long distance rates still applied, so if he called me the plan was, since I was making good money and he wasn’t, that we’d hang up and I would call him and take the charge. We’d talk for so long the batteries in our phones would give out and we’d have to restart the conversation on the corded phones for a bit. I’d make plans to go visit him in Hilton Head when I was between contracts, or could take a long weekend. His place in Hilton Head was less than a day’s drive down I-95 so it was easy to spend time together with him. I was in love…again. This time, I thought, it’s really happening. I have a boyfriend.

But it was more a thing in my own mind than his. At some point I started making plans to move down there to be with him…I’d talked with a recruiting agent with the firm I contracted for, who told me there were jobs down there to be had, though mostly in North, not South Carolina. But it was shortly after that K dumped me for another guy who lived in Massachusetts he’d been chatting with on AOL. That guy eventually moved down there and they began living together. He told me later that he decided to call it off when he heard me talking about moving down there.

Anyway…this is a postcard I sent to mom during one of my visits to K. Mom knew…but we had a don’t ask don’t tell agreement she enforced almost right up to the day she died. So it’s my sad little way in my scrawly handwriting of trying to tell her that her boy is gay and he’s in love with another guy.

She liked K. He was a good Baptist boy from our church. I like to think she’d have reconciled herself to it if it was him. Anyway, she kept that postcard. Now I have it. Every now and then I look at it and remember K and I strolling the beach late at night when nobody could see us holding hands and looking up at the stars.

Apologies for the long post, but I have to get it out of me. I think it’s important.

I’ll write another blog post later about why I had a stay in the hospital…long story short I was having atrial fibrillation that came and went, and so I went to my cardiologist to see what could be done about it. He and his assistant took one look at my cardiogram and checked me in to the hospital immediately. I was to receive a procedure that shocks the heart back to normal beating the next morning, after a period of observation. That procedure turned out to be unnecessary when my heart went back to normal on its own, but I got an overnight stay out of it. And another pill to take every day.

That hospital stay turned, unpleasantly, into a dialogue…I won’t say argument…on religion. It got particularly energetic when my hospital roommate had a visitor, who turned out to be a minister in their church. Actually they both were but they didn’t out themselves before they had a chance to make their conversation with me seem like just a friendly chat about one’s faith and not a crusade to win my soul to their particular Christ.

I could have thrown it all back at them, but my roommate and I were in the hospital just then because our hearts were acting up, and I didn’t want to have an emotional fight over religion. Or any other time actually. I could say that’s because I’m getting old and tired, but those of us who grew up in homes with someone who was angry all the time avoid getting into heated fights if we can.

So instead while they were winning my soul to Christ I just stood my ground and answered back their theologies with the stories of science as best I knew them, and my own moral values because I’ve nothing to be ashamed of there. I did try to keep the conversation away from my sexual orientation, although in retrospect I think they decided eventually that I wasn’t One Of Those People because I didn’t present to their stereotypes. It wasn’t because I’m afraid of those conversations, I just didn’t want it to start being all about that, which it would have. I wanted to keep the conversation where I thought it needed to be. 

Like a lot of deeply fundamentalist, not necessarily religious, people, they came to the conversation serenely confident they had Truth. Robert Ardrey wrote about another set of dogmas, which he called the Romantic Fallacy [of human consciousness], in African Genesis thusly:

“As we experience it today, the romantic fallacy is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence.  So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.”

I think that applies to certain kinds of religious fundamentalism. Rose colored glasses, in other words. Or as James Burke once said, what we see is what our knowledge tells us we’re seeing. Eric Hoffer writes that an empty head isn’t really empty, it’s full of rubbish, and that’s what makes it so hard to get anything new into an empty head. Sometimes you see the truth of it the moment people open their mouths. When my roommate started on about the Bible and Truth I knew where it was going. He and his fellow minister were going to run the usual routine on me once they figured out the best line of attack, and where I wanted to keep the focus of the conversation on was Watch it not working.

What is Truth? You could say in the time of Donald Trump nobody cares what is, or what is not true. But I still care. I care very much.

I also made a choice to be careful that nothing I said sounded like a direct challenge to their religion or their beliefs. I reckoned just standing my ground was challenge enough, and I didn’t want the conversation to become nothing more than a lot of flag waving. Of course they were about to challenge My beliefs. I needed saving after all. Fine. I wanted them to see something that they wouldn’t if I made them get all defensive. I wasn’t interested in changing any minds, because I reckoned those minds were unchangeable. I wanted them to see something.

I’m 71 years old. I’ve been there and done that. I know what I’m about better than you know what you’re about. Now watch it not working…

This all begins when I went for a visit to my cardiologist that turned into a hospital stay. First they took me to the emergency room where monitors were hooked up and a drug administered to slow down my heart rate, which had hit a peak of 170. When they could, they moved me into a hospital room with two beds, one of which was already occupied. I was disappointed, but willing to make the best of it.

I had gay friends who would tell me the reason I was single and lonely was I was too shy. They almost had me convinced when they took me to various clubs and just let me wander around, and I could not work myself up to engaging anyone in a chat because I didn’t know any of them. It was my high school crush who cleared it up for me. He worked in a German themed restaurant in Disney World with Oktoberfest seating, which many Americans don’t like. One day he complimented me on my ability to get a table of standoffish people talking to each other. But in Disney World I had dozens of built-in icebreakers. Hi…where y’all from? This your first time here? What’s your favorite park? All I ever needed was an icebreaker, which these “friends” would never give me because People who look like that want people who look like that. But if I have an icebreaker and I can get people talking then it’s actually pretty hard to shut me up. 

A hospital room gave me a pretty good icebreaker, but I realized I had to think about how to say it. If I asked “what are you in for”, that might sound too much like a bad joke about being in prison. So instead I asked conversationally “what brings you here?” In a hospital that’s a kinda personal question, and I was fine if he didn’t want to talk about it. He looked to be an older than me African American male, and I didn’t want him thinking I was uncomfortable being roomed with an African American, so I tried to be friendly. He told me what it was that brought him there; we were both heart patients, although his heart situation was slightly different from mine. It made sense to me that the heart patients would be grouped together.

At first, naturally, our brief chats were about our health and how getting older brings changes in our bodies that we just had to deal with. Those would segue into chats about how much the world around us had changed over the course of our lives. I told him about the work I did, and was doing at Space Telescope, and he was amazed at the pictures that came down from Hubble. How, he asked, did they get those pictures down to earth from a telescope in space. So I explained as much as I understood about the instruments on Hubble, and the way the image files were microwaved back down to Earth. He simply nodded his head, thinking.

I began to suspect we were not on the same page politically when he said later that night that he’d never thought he’d live to see two men kissing on TV. Well neither did I when I was a gay teenager trying to navigate a world that gave me static from practically every direction. 

I could have said something smartass back to him then, but we were on cordial terms just then and I didn’t want any arguments that would raise my heartrate again after the nurses went to all the trouble to slow it down. I pick my battles.

The next morning he had Fox News on his TV. Okay. Fine. Whatever.

When the nurse came that morning I was told the procedure they’d wanted to give me was called off for now because my heart had returned to what they call sinus rhythm all on its own. I mentioned again that the atrial fibrillation and rapid heart rate was a sporadic thing, and I was told I’d be held there longer for observation in case it did come back. I hoped that didn’t mean another overnight stay because the night before between all the wires on me and the activity out in the hallways I got absolutely no sleep, despite how amazingly comfortable that hospital bed was. 

A co-worker came the previous evening before I was moved to my room with a charger and cable for my cell phone, which allowed me to stay in touch. Then I discovered the hospital bed had a built-in USB connection to charge a phone. 

Nice!

So while my roommate watched Fox News that morning, I doom scrolled, tempted to go find some videos of two men kissing. But mostly I watched cat and train videos.

Lunchtime came and I was told I could have solid food again. We were brought lunch. After that my roommate struck up a conversation with me that quickly turned to religion. Much later I began to wonder if every conversation we’d had right from the beginning of our stay together had been just his way of sizing me up for the best approach to saving my soul. 

It began with questions about my job. We had another friendly chat about how we watched our space program put men on the moon, and all the changes and improvements we’d seen over the course of our lives in the pictures we got from space. We were the first generations, I said, who have seen the horizons of other worlds. He agreed it was an amazing time to be alive.

Now he began with telling me how amazing it was to see things that were so far away, and deftly segued into wondering how we knew how far away the galaxies were, and what force it was that brought the universe into existence. I talked about the doppler shift in light, what we knew so far about the Big Bang, and the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. He wondered aloud what force existed to produce the bang. Something had to be there before it. That something had to be God.

I’m 71 and I’ve been proselytized so much over the course of my life I can tell the difference pretty quickly between a simple sincere statement of belief and a prelude to picking the lock on the door to my soul. Okay, thinks I, that friendly chat about my job all this time was just so he could suss me out and figure where to start on me wasn’t it.

He began talking about the Bible and asked me if I’d read it. I assured him I had. He asked me if I was familiar with Proverbs chapter 8. Not off the top of my head says I. He directs me to Proverbs 8:22-31. He asked me to think about what it said. Read those verses he says to me twice more, and think about what they say.

I call it up on my iPhone and give it a read, then follow up with some of the commentary because it was one of those ambiguous passages you could read just about anything into, and I wanted to see what, if any consensus there was about it. 

22 The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;

23 I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.

24 When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water;

25 before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth,

26 before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth.

27 I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,

28 when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

29 when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

30 Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day.

31 rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind. 

The commentary I read ranged widely as to its meaning, but it was a passage my roommate said that told us Wisdom existed before the creation.

Okay, thinks I, the science geek, one way you could look at that is it’s saying the physical laws that emerged in the Bang were there before the Bang, and necessary for the Bang to happen. But I think too long about how to put that to him, and now he’s telling me that Truth existed before the creation. 

Well…okay…I can dig that too. Probably not the way you do though.

Then it turned, oddly, to a discussion about how ancient Hebrew is different from the modern, and how that turned into mistranslations of the original text. Most Bibles he said, are false (no surprise there). But there was one true Bible (yes, of course), and it is based on the ancient Hebrew, that only a few have translated correctly. And of course, thinks I, your religion just happens to have that True Bible translation and none of the others do. The heathens after all, are the people in the church across the street.

I bring up the fact that the New Testament was originally written in other languages. Yes, he says, but that’s not the old Hebrew. Only the old Hebrew is correct, because it was written before the rest of the Bible, closer to creation, and to the Wisdom that existed before the creation. That is why it has Truth. I just want you to think about that, he says. I don’t reply that I could think about how deep the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland really went but I’m not tying my brain up on that one either. 

He asks how often I read the Bible. I deflect for the moment and tell him I was raised in a Yankee Baptist household. It seems to surprise him. I add that I have several Bibles at home including a modern English version of Tyndale’s Bible, and the Book of Mormon (I declined to mention my copy of The Satanic Bible). At the mention of Tyndale he seems impressed. Did I know that Tyndale was executed for translating the Bible into English? I said I was aware of the story, and that Tyndale’s crime was making the Bible accessible to the common man and woman. Also that I liked Tyndale’s plain spoken English more than the floral Elizabethan of the King James. I bring up the fact that different faiths have different versions of the Bible. This includes the Catholics I say, noting we are in a Catholic hospital (there were Catholic style crucifixes inside every room I was in, above every door). Yes, says he, but there is only one True Bible. 

Yes, thinks I. The one you read.

I tell him I recognize the importance of the bible as a historical document, but the bible speaks with many voices. And while the people who wrote its books were just as human as any of us, they lived in a time so long past it’s almost impossible to take the meanings you read in it for granted. I ask him to consider how much detail we have about the culture in America during the Revolutionary War period, and the thinking of the people who lived through all that, and that was only about two-hundred and fifty years ago. The events of the Bible took place thousands of years ago.

I tell him some of my experience trying to learn other languages and what I discovered about how language influences our understanding of our world. English for example does not have gendered nouns, Some languages have two. German nouns come in three genders…male, female and neuter. What is the understanding of the world in a culture where “mirror” is masculine and “cat” is feminine even if it’s male, and “girl” is neuter. How do you read the poetry of other peoples without knowing you may be missing what the poet intended you to get? It’s risky. I tell him that I’ve heard the poets say that translators are traitors.

It’s getting on into the afternoon. We are visited by the nurses again, and I am visited by a doctor who says he is working with my Cardiologist on my case. It looks like I will be discharged later in the afternoon if nothing about my heart changes. I am relieved. I want to be done with all this wiring connected to me. It makes if very difficult to move around, let alone go to the bathroom. My roommate is also told he will be discharged soon. He told me previously that he’d been there for four days by then.

Then my roommate gets a younger visitor who I assume at first is a family member. He brings my roommate some fried chicken which smells delicious. Apparently it came from a local eatery, not a chain. Are we heart patients allowed fried chicken? I have no idea but none of the staff seem to have objected. The nurses who came in afterward all knew the name of the place it came from and were enthusiastic about it. I accept my roommate’s offer of a piece of it. It was…okay.

My roommate continues his attempt at salvation while his visitor just listens in. What are atoms he asks me. What force makes them they stay together? It must be God. How is it that a rock and a feather both fall to earth together when they weigh so differently. By now I’m well aware that his questions are rhetorical and intended to elicit a response from me that he can hook into a Bible verse. I have watched this game played so many times. But instead of giving him snark, which I might have in any other setting, I take his questions seriously. 

I talk about Albert Einstein’s ideas on how mass curves spacetime. I talk about the difference between mass and weight in a gravity field. But how does gravity make things move, he asks. There must be some force moving them. How can satellites remain in motion around the earth if there is nothing moving them, he asks. I reply with Newton’s first law. Objects in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by some external force. But how can it just stay in orbit around the earth unless there is something to keep it there at that distance. I relate the story of Newton and the apple, adding that it was Newton that gave gravity its name.

His visitor just keeps listening throughout all this, occasionally telling me he finds our discussion very informative. Yes, of course you did, I will later think.

My roommate asks me if I believe in God. 

So here’s the direct question. Sort of. He doesn’t ask what God but I think it’s a pretty safe bet he means the one he believes in. So here it is, Now it’s either out myself or duck. Kinda proud that I’ve never once ducked whether it was this or my sexual orientation.

I tell them I don’t believe. I don’t use the word Atheist because it is such a loaded word amongst the deeply religious and I don’t want all the baggage that comes with it getting into this conversation, and then they stop seeing the person in front of them for a scarecrow stereotype. To the degree I can, to the degree it’s even possible, I want them to keep seeing a person, not a thing. I am an unbeliever. That is enough for them to know.

I mention a favorite quote by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: I believe in God but I spell it nature. I tell them that for most of my young adult life I considered myself an agnostic. H.L. Mencken once called agnosticism the most beautiful religion because it just trusts, has faith, and doesn’t subscribe to any particular theology (he once called theology an attempt to explain the unknowable in the terms of the not worth knowing). But I eventually grew out of that and now it’s I accept nature as best as science reveals it to us. I think this world and the universe as it is, is beautiful. Nature is beautiful. Reality is what it is. Science, as the physicist Richard Feynman said, is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. And you, he added, are the easiest one to fool. By which I said I was pretty sure he meant beware of confirmation bias. You see what you expected to see and then you look no further and you miss something important. This was an attempt to keep the conversation on the track I wanted it to stay on.

Watch it not working… You do not have the key and the door will not be forced…

I tell him about my favorite landscape artists, Frederic Church and others of the Luminist movement. Church especially painted stunningly beautiful landscapes that were informed not only by his religion (he was a Calvinist), but also what was called in his day, the volume in stone. They believed that everything that was in the Bible is also revealed in nature, and could be understood with careful study.

I didn’t add, then Darwin came along and spoiled it for everyone.

Finally his visitor starts to join in, and now I discover they’re both ministers in their particular church. 

We’re not here to proselytize you, he says, but to give you a better understanding of the biblical Truth. Yes, of course. A difference that makes no difference is no difference. He begins to tell me about how the Bible is authoritative, and that if we follow its teachings we will have the lives God intended for us to have. 

Oh…thinks I this is a tag team now is it…

Think about that, he said. Where else can we know life God wants us to have.

I tell them I appreciate they’re not here to proselytize me. I relate again how I was raised in a Baptist (yankee) household, and Baptists (the yankee Baptists we were anyway) offer testimony in lieu of outright proselytization, and hospitality. It isn’t join our church or face eternal fire and brimstone (although I sat in on some tent preaching that were spectacular displays of fire and brimstone), but sit with us and be welcome. And they believe in what they call Soul Competency, which is that every living person has that inner light to guide them to a relationship with God. I say I am not a believer, but I still accept that my responsibility is to let people find their own way, and simply offer my own testimony and hospitality. I am simply giving you my testimony, I say. You teach not by preaching, but by giving testimony, and by setting an example. 

But God give us that example in His Word, and His Son.

Yes, yes… I said I accept a different authority. “My Book is the volume in stone. It’s there everywhere around us, not just the stars in the sky, but the rocks in the ground (channeling that the lord is my rock quote). If you believe God created everything, okay, then a pebble on the ground is God’s handwriting. God made it, if that’s what you believe. Perhaps Wisdom existed before the creation, but if God created everything, a pebble is God’s handwriting. A grain of sand (channeling Blake here) is the original manuscript. Everything else is commentary.”

“Your mileage may vary”, I say, “and I’m okay with that because I still accept soul competency and besides I don’t think religion matters. What matters is the heart.”

The visitor keeps smiling and says that he can see I’m a good man and that the bible shows us the way to be better men.

And I came back, “Thank you. I can see you’re both good men too. And I appreciate what you’re telling me about how the bible is a guide. People who lived thousands of years ago speak to us in it. But that guidance is there throughout the story of mankind’s history (I want to speak my truth as much as I can in their language so they don’t instantly blank out over wokeness). We can read it in other books besides the Bible. And in those other books the people who lived that history speak to us too.”

I say, “That human history tells us what matters is you’re not mean and selfish and cruel. What matters is you’re trustworthy. What matters is you speak the truth, take responsibility, do your share of the work, and chip in and help out when you can. What matters is you’re the sort of person Mr. Rogers was talking about, when he said ‘look for the helpers’.

“That’s the important stuff. Everything else is detail.”

And the comeback was “and God shows us in His Book how to become that person.” 

I could see by then I’d made my point, by how automatically the prefabricated replies were being dispensed. They weren’t prodding and sizing me up anymore, looking for the right pick for the lock. Instead I could see them just waiting as I spoke for the relevant biblical comeback. Which I took to mean they were on automatic pilot now because they’d give up on getting their Truth into me and now it’s just standing up for theirs, which I wasn’t interested in disturbing anyway. The existence of the likes of me being disturbance enough.

The conversation ended shortly thereafter, when my roommate was told his discharge papers were ready for him to sign. I was told mine were coming. Please I begged, get these darn wires off me then so I can get dressed.

So I’d made my point. The two ministers probably left still confident they’d seen a lost soul in need of salvation, and that I would not be moved probably made them very sad. But what they also had to have seen was an unbeliever who would not be triggered into outright hostility. What they saw was an unbeliever who was willing to patiently explain himself and keep standing his ground. When they asked me to think about what they were telling me, I gave them evidence that at age 71 I’d actually been thinking about it for quite a long time. What they saw, hopefully, was some depth behind the patient face of an old longhaired baby boomer who began dressing himself for discharge with a summer shirt full of cat faces. Whatever it was they took me for to start with, they must have found I was not that. 

What they made of it afterward I have no idea and I don’t care. I gave them testimony, and hospitality.

Before he left my roommate gave me a card with a link their church’s website and some bible studies.

Maybe at some point in the future one of them finds themselves doing a little gardening, or sidewalk cleaning, sees a small pebble and remembers what I said. Because whether or not you believe in an almighty creator, the rock has to outrank the word.

[Update…]  In retrospect it occurs to me that neither one of them offered me their testimony. It was all just What The Bible Says. At least I might have seen them as more than simply a couple of ministers doing to me what I’ve had done to me so many times before. Place holders for a type. But I reckon they didn’t want to be more than that. Testimony might have brought them down to my level.

A few weeks ago I tried my best to roust myself out of the fatigue that’s been plaguing me for way too long, and at least Try to develop some film that’s been sitting patiently in my darkroom. I have several rolls of Fuji Neopan 100, 120 film shot in the Hasselblad (and maybe also in the Mamiya C330), some of which have probably been sitting there for a couple years. I got as far as loading the film onto reels and putting them in the tank. Then the tank sat there loaded for at least two, maybe three weeks. I’ve no idea which. 

This is where my head is at these days. It’s been making me think it’s time to pick out a coffin…except my will says to scatter my ashes back home in California, the land of my birth.  Then the other day I saw a post on Facebook from the Washington DC gay paper, The Washington Blade. It was about a reenactment of Frank Kameny’s historic protests for gay rights in front of the White House…in 1953.

You either have to be a gay or lesbian person of my generation or older, to appreciate how much guts that took back then.

Time was I would not have hesitated to be there to be a photojournalist once more and document that with my cameras. But I’m 71 years old and I’m tired all the fucking time anymore, and as soon as I thought I have to be there, I also thought but I’m too damn tired anymore. 

Something deep inside of me…I have no idea what it could have been…pushed me forward. I took a train down to DC, got a room at my usual hotel, and at the appropriate time I got on the Metro, got off at Metro Center, and walked to the White House. And for the first time in years and did my photojournalist thing, and felt alive again.

I came home and started going through my photos. The plan is to have another sub gallery up in my Life And Times gallery with the shots I got of the reenactment in it. Then I found a roll of black and white with some interesting shots I hadn’t catalogued.

Why my art photography will probably never be well liked…

While working on that I noticed I had a third sub gallery for Sleep Talking God that I never finished, and I also started working on that.

Then just now I finally developed those two rolls of Hasselblad film I loaded several weeks ago.

Something triggered me…I have no idea really what it was. And I’m still tired all the fucking time. Maybe it’s just a spring awakening. Maybe I’m getting over regret at going back to work and not diving into my creative arts like I’d thought I would in retirement. I’m regretting going back, much as I loved that job and everything I was able to accomplish being a part of the space program. But things there are different there now, in ways that prevent me from fully engaging in the work I used to love. Right now if I had it to do over again I would decline the offer. But I was on a downhill spiral then anyway, so maybe it makes no difference. Part time retired or not I still have to wake myself up somehow.

This is a start. Hopefully.

Walking back from the grocery store yesterday morning, I chanced across a neighbor walking to their car and we started chatting. Being pretty much in the same age group the conversation took a turn toward the trials and tribulations of growing old. We compared notes. Yes, back in the day we could recover from small injuries pretty quickly. She mentioned her husband once played in a band and still had his drum set in the basement. I mentioned my Alembic bass that I’d mostly taken up because kids of my generation were supposed to learn a musical instrument and I still felt that even though I’m a graphic artist, it would help my mindset if I did.

I guess it was my usual way of making banter, but as she was getting into their car she mentioned that however old I am I still act like I’m young.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. After mom died I entered a period of therapy, and the shrink who worked with me told me that I “present young.”

I can tell you it’s not affected in any way. If anything I’ve had to work most of my adult life at allowing me to be me…my school years prior to Woodward were so stifling, plus the constant static I got from my maternal grandmother simply for being my father’s son. And…yes…having to deal with my sexual orientation when that became a thing. Who do I trust? Who can I be open with? Where can I just be me? Those moments when you have to suddenly decide whether to be true to yourself or duck never stop coming. But you learn to handle them…for better or worse.

All I can think is I was always a science kid, and us science kids never stop enjoying discovering things about nature and the world around us. Which means you never ‘grow up” because you never stop growing.

Sure you move into different stages of life…you get a job, you take on responsibilities you didn’t have to when you were a kid…but you stay curious. Life keeps on being an adventure, even in your old age. Yes it can be harrowing at times. Heartbreaking even. But still an adventure. There is always something more to be discovered.

So I present young. It’s just me. I reckon I won’t have that second childhood they talk about old people having, because I never got completely done with the first one.

I see by my Google Calendar that tomorrow (Sunday the 23rd of March) is I Have To Stay Inside My Comfort Zone Day…

The day I asked if we could do something together on his own time and he told me no, “I have to stay inside my comfort zone.” This should be a special day for making myself comfortable.

That’s two Very Special Days in March! I think I shall have dinner at La Cuchara tomorrow…

If only that technology in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind was a real thing. Except…

Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her…

Joel comes to his last remaining memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk…

No. No, if that’s what you go through on the way to forgetting then I don’t want to do that.

I’ll live with it if erasing the memories are more painful than living with them.

And make myself comfortable inside my comfort zone.

Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s a character in a Hemmingway novel who is asked how he went broke, and he replied “Gradually then suddenly.” Growing old is like that. At least it’s been like that for me. 

And I’ve noticed I have it good by comparison with a bunch of my kidhood peers. I still get a lot of complements on how young I look for my age (71). But that might mostly be because of something a shrink I went to once told me, that I “present young”. Mindset does affect appearance. In many ways I still have this inner point of view that I’m a teenager or at best a young adult.

So this morning at Disney world, as I’m coaxing my stiff body into my clothes for a walk around Saratoga Springs (I did a lot of walking yesterday and I’ll probably do that again today), that I have to realize once again that I’m Not a young adult. I’m an old man. It still mostly doesn’t bother me, or at any rate I can ignore it most of the time. It’s when I can’t that I wish I had my twenty-something body back again. But this morning I had a thought: what if I actually could be transported back into my twenty-something body again, even if just for an hour or two while I stroll around the parks here. Would it be a pleasant couple hours, or would it shock me to actually see how much aging as taken away from my body over the decades, that I haven’t really noticed because it all happened so gradually?

Maybe its just as well I don’t have that kind of magic.

It’s been a while since I’ve developed film. I can tell by how I had to wash all my measuring flasks before I began filling them with chemistry. That, and all the times I had to look up some figures in my Kodak dataguides because none of it was fresh in my memory.

I discovered something about how much I’ve aged in only a couple years or so. Thankfully the right hand doesn’t have the tremors my left does, but it’s there. I notice it when I’m trying to do some delicate work, like threading a developer tank spool. And the muscles in them are noticeably weaker. Either that or the crimping on the ends of the film cassettes has got tighter. It was a surprising amount of effort to pop them open with the cassette opener I’ve used since I was a teenager.

But I got four rolls of Tri-X Pan done. I’ll scan them in later and see how long they’ve been sitting there waiting to be developed.

The weakness and loss of fine precision in the hands is ominous. Maybe I can get some of it back by diving back into drawing. I could fill in some blanks in A Coming Out Story maybe…

I am so easy to manipulate once you have the key. Oh I can come off as a stubborn single minded I Don’t Care What You Think so and so, yes. Also The Brat can be provoked out of me given certain specific events. Just ask a certain German someone. But once someone has that key I can be talked out of or into practically anything.

Obviously I guard that key carefully. It’s why I will often just walk away from a situation I don’t want to be in, rather than talk it out and get dragged back into somewhere I don’t want to be, especially if it’s someone I like, or did like at some point. It’s very easy for me to brush off angry people. It’s super easy for me to take a walk from someone who questions my intelligence after I’ve already taken the measure of theirs and found it wanting. But if you have that key it’s nearly impossible for me to keep my mind made up about anything you don’t want me to keep it made up about.

So just a few days ago I got a shock at work, and that on top of all the changes to the work environment which had to be made for security reasons (the arms race in cyber space between the good guys and the bad never lets up and we have an active mission going on) made me determined to go back into retirement. I was in tears. A bit of software I’d created that I was intensely proud of got snatched out from me with no notice. I was simply cut out of it. That, and the constant security roadblocks I was colliding with trying to do the work I was tasked with, was too much for me. I’m 71 years old and too old for the stress and heartbreak. I had not come back out of retirement for all of this. I told them I was retiring. Again.

The short version of the story is I got talked out of it.

I’m easy.

I’m hoping we’ve all arrived at an understanding that I’m just keeping an open mind. I have not committed to staying. We will, hopefully, work though things and see if the solutions proposed are agreeable to me after all.

But I have my doubts. There is more to me than the computer nerd/software engineer, but all of it centers on the fact that I am (yes I know it sounds pretentious to say so) an artist. I bring that to everything I do creatively. If the work isn’t worth giving my heart to, then it’s not worth doing. You only get one life and let me reach back into the religion of my childhood and say (I mean this) that it’s a sin to allow yourself to do work without heart. It’s like sex without love. Okay…yes…I realize there are people who are fine with that as long as the money is good. I am not. It’s why for most of my young adult life I bopped from one job to another to another. Once my heart stopped being in it, I was tendering my resignation. Although sometimes I got the boot before that when my sexual orientation became an issue. Which I was fine with because I don’t want to be anywhere people like me are held in contempt either.

There is art I have brought to my work that I must continue to be able to bring to it if I am to stay long term. In the short term, there is a Very Important project I am committed to bringing forth, a proof of concept, and I am going to do that however the f*ck I have to, because I agree it is Very Important and I am Going to get it done.

After that…

Details to follow…

I started feeling a sore throat, and having a rasping cough the second day of my train ride back home, and hoped it was just the dryness of the heated air in the train. But no. By the time I got home I was ready to admit I’d caught a flu, despite having had the shot. Not the first time that’s happened to me. Back home I was weak as a kitten, barely able to climb the stairs to get myself into bed. At the age I am now, 71, these things hit me really hard.

Hemingway wrote a passage in one of this stories where a guy was asked how he went broke. The answer was “gradually, and then suddenly.” I’m here to tell you that’s how you get old too. Gradually, and then suddenly. Two therapists I have visited, one when I was feeling lonely and suicidal and the other much later after mom passed away, both told me that I “present young.” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t about my fashion choices, but something about me that, to the therapist, suggested my mindset. And it’s true that, unless I’m looking in a mirror, or more painfully at the skin on the back of my hands and arms, I still see myself as a young man. Catching a flu now, at this age, yanks me out of that mindset pretty forcefully. But not entirely.

I’m not afraid of dying…death isn’t a thing we ever know because by definition if you’re dead you stop knowing anything. So you won’t know you’re dead, or even that moment it happens. But seeing it coming can be unpleasant. It isn’t death I worry about, it’s decaying. I don’t want to go slowly. Especially now that I’m at that senior stage in life where the internal young man mindset gets scary revoked whenever I get sick.

Like now. I’m not even sure it was a flu I had that I’m just now getting over. It only acted like a two-thirds flu. Pretty sure it wasn’t COVID since my blood oxygen levels have been good throughout. Looking over the online information it might have been that Respiratory Syncytial Virus going around. The symptoms I had match except for the physical weakness I was experiencing. But that could just be a function of…well…my age.

Doesn’t look like I’m dying this time. Hopefully I hold onto that present young mindset right up to that last moment…when it comes.

So now I’m two and a half decades past the year 2000. You should have seen what the future looked like when I was a 1960s teenage boy.

I began the year 2024 two years fully retired, vagueing out on life and unable to be creative about anything.That first year of retirement was pretty good. But I began to spiral inward after that. 2024 began to resemble a bad period of my life back in my twenties when I just sat all night in my bedroom listening to music and zoning out. I couldn’t draw, my photographic eye would not open. The difference between then and now is I’m in my 70s and a heart patient, and I’ve given up finally on ever having a boyfriend, let alone a spouse. It never happened and never will now. So once again I was just coasting along spiraling inward.

But then I ended the year back at Space Telescope working part time. That’s perked me up somewhat, but the initial thrill of being back among people and places I knew for decades is wearing off, and while I still love this job and the workplace I’m still that lost empty soul when I’m back on my own time. I took a train ride to Oceano (I love train rides), bought a small sketchbook here to try and do something, anything, to get that creative spark going again, even if it’s just practicing drawing hands, but it’s excruciatingly hard. I brought the Leica M3 along (it’s good for travelling light) and I think I managed to get a few good shots while I was here, so my photographic eye has opened up a tad. I have the office laptop with me and work to do that I enjoy because I don’t yet have enough leave time banked I can just take the holiday weeks off completely.

I’m 71. How did I make it this far without someone to love and be loved by. I feel like I died years ago and I just never noticed it so I’m still going through the motions of a life. I’m in reasonably good health. I just got a good review from my cardiologist, who would probably disapprove of the Cuban cigar I smoked tonight, let alone my intake at Old Juan’s. I should count my blessings, but I feel so empty. And given the situation here in the United (sic) States I am not looking forward to 2025. I can’t bring myself to wish anyone a happy new year considering, though I’ve wished it back whenever someone passing by has wished it me. Sorry. It just seems unreasonably optimistic.

Soon I’ll be back in my little Baltimore rowhouse, my solitary life, and a job I love for as long as the Republicans will let NASA have a budget for space telescopes, or they get Executive Order 10540 restored, and someone comes to my desk and tells me I can no longer legally work for a NASA contractor. Drifting along through the rest of my life is probably for the best. Paying attention to the world around me is only going to make me unhappy, which I really don’t need.

Happy As Best You Can Manage New Year!

Facebook Memories shows me this one from the end of 2015…

Why do I stay on Facebook anymore? I left Twitter after Musk turned it into a fascist playpen and went to Bluesky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). But most of my friends and classmates are still there and that Memories feature is a nice way of looking back. But not always.

So this was when I realized the Christmas card wasn’t just late…it wasn’t coming at all. They say hindsight is 20-20, but I knew something was up then. I knew it years before when we sat at that table where he worked and passed a ski ticket I found back and forth like a talking stick, and he tried to explain to me how living in the closet fucked him up so badly he didn’t know some days who it was he was looking at in the bathroom mirror, and I needed to look elsewhere. But whenever I came into his presence I fell back to being that awkward clueless teenage geek I was in 1971-72 and I kept coming back anyway. And some visits he seemed grateful for my company, and others he was icy cold. By then our conversations were not private and I realized that it was when I told him I was coming down that Icy Guy appeared, and when I just showed up unannounced it was all smiles and conversation like it used to be. But that was not sustainable. 

So anyway that was the year I sent a card and he didn’t. He was being told, just like when we were schoolboys and the family learned somehow that he was talking to that faggy kid at the school… We agreed to go to Great Falls with our cameras. I never said that. Yes you did. I just don’t know why you’re calling me. You gave me your phone number. Well I didn’t think you’d use it. Two and a half months after this Facebook memory he told me never to contact him in any way, shape, or form, and I felt betrayed and angry and I lashed out, and said things maybe I shouldn’t have, but he said things to me that cut deeply and after everything we had said to each other it was completely unfair. 

So it goes. Maybe I should have paid closer attention to when he said life in the closet had fucked him over. I’d seen how it did that to other gay guys of our generation, I just didn’t want to see it in him.

I was sitting down to a lovely Kobe beef steak when I got his angrygram. What I should have done then and there was send him a shape.

Regards your angrygram of March 6, please accept this truncated dodecahedron by way of reply…

Then I should have drawn up an Affinity Return/Exchange form for him to fill out. Please include original receipt…

…which gives me an idea.

Well that was a short stint at being alcohol and tobacco free…

Those readers (there must be a few of you) who read my previous post about the dark time probably won’t find what I’m about to say as strange as others. I’ve touched on that dark time in other posts…this one from just a year ago for example…when I said that I could see it happening again. I wrote that post during my second year of retirement when, as I said, I could feel myself entering a downward spiral of inactivity. In that post of several days ago I wrote that I’d accepted part-time work at Space Telescope and I was pretty sure it would bring me out of it, like it had that first period of darkness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more alive I began to feel. 

Well…at least mentally. Physically I’m still a 71 year old man who never worked out as much as he should have. But even that is abating just a bit more every day. I walked in to the office the first couple days I was back, though the walk back home was more fatiguing than the walk there. The new Mac Pro laptop they gave me is heavier than I expected, almost as heavy as the older Macbook Pro I have that was top of the line in its day, but no longer runs the most current versions of MacOS. This new Macbook Pro is Very Nice and I considered buying one until I saw how much they cost.

So I got a new and up to date Mac laptop, with the Institute’s VPN software and all the other accoutrements necessary to work from home. As I am part time I don’t get my own office, though I think I would if I was expected to be at the office most of the time. I think this is not the case now. The work I will be doing is almost exactly like the work I did before I retired, which means some of the machines I will need to be working on at kept off the internet tubes for security reasons. So when I need access to those machines I will have to be present in the office. 

This first week was for reorientation, getting my access card established, and getting back into the work. So I was there every day, although one of those days I broke early, went back home, and picked up where I left off back in my den with the office laptop connected to the household network. That was mostly to make sure it all worked remotely too. And as I said, I suspect I will be doing most of my work from home. That’s because the Institute is very tight on office space. So tight us part-timers don’t get our own offices.

What they have for us, and for remote workers who need to come in from time to time, is a hoteling system. A bunch of offices are dedicated hoteling rooms with desks that have laptop connections and monitors available by way of a reservation system. If you know you’re coming in one day, or even on the spur of the moment, you go to the hoteling reservation system, see what’s available, and reserve a desk. That’ll work out fine for me, except I tend to want to bring in snacks, K-Cups and ice tea, which I don’t want to keep backpacking in every day. Be nice if I could just leave a bunch of stuff there.

At my old office on the ground floor (which, due to the steep grade around the building is actually two floors below street level) I had a mini fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker. Above my desk I had a lovely poster picture of Maligne Lake and Spirit Island, which I used to joke was my window (it was an interior room). That’s up on my bedroom wall now. I had a bunch of office supplies and computer cables, adaptors and other things I needed every now and then. Plus a bookcase with all my computer manuals, software and documentation. I have no place for any of that now. No official place.

My project manager says I can leave my computer books and stuff in the test lab which is off limits to everyone except those of us in the testing and integration branch. That’s okay…sort of…but meetings and tests are often conducted in there that I can’t be disturbing. And I still need a place for my snacks, coffee and ice tea.

Well it turns out that after I retired, they made the room my desk was in a hoteling room, and I can reserve my old desk to work at for the days I’m in the office. So I’m going to keep doing that, leave my snacks, K-Cups and office supplies in its desk drawers, and see what happens. I could see bringing in a small cooler for my ice tea every day, and maybe a sandwich, but then I’ll have to drive it and the walk into the office is very refreshing.

My branch had a small pre-Halloween party during lunch in one of the conference rooms and I got to socialize a bit more with all the new faces, and a bunch of the ones I remembered from before I retired. All week I kept crossing paths with people I worked with in the before I retired time, and it was more uplifting than I’d expected.

All week I walked down hallways I’d walked a bazillion times in the before time, and not much at all had changed, other than people I’d known were in different offices now. But that was always a thing at the Institute. The main building is small, and they have always been tight on office space, and it was not unusual at all to find your co-workers, computer labs, and conference rooms even had been moved around. I was something of an outlier in that I managed to keep one office for (I think) about 15 years. Which was how it ended up being almost a home away from home.

The employee cafeteria is the same, but the menu is Much better. The shared Keurig machine around the corner from my old office is still there…I checked to make sure while I was scoping out what had happened to my old office. I made some coffee with it and a K-Cup I’d brought with me just in case.

The work is the same, but not in any kind of boring same old same old way. I built and administered several computer testing facilities, wrote software to measure progress on various projects and generate reports for Goddard and NASA. Now the Institute is moving on to new projects and I will be a part of all that, again, working on new things for new space projects. So it’s what I’ve always done for them, but it’s the next steps forward in space telescope explorations. I would not have come back out of retirement for anything else but this.

I’ve put it like this often and every time I do it stuns me to see what it is that I am a part of: We harvest light from near the dawn of time and give it to the world to study and learn from.

So I’m back in the saddle again. And I feel like I’ve been reborn.

I feel…young again. Somewhat. And well of course I’m not actually. I’m a 71 year old man and I really feel my age sometimes lately. Especially that first day I had to be in the office at 9am. For two and and three-quarters years I could just slow walk myself out of bed because I had no schedule to keep. It was wonderful. It was liberating. And then it wasn’t. That first day back was a bit difficult. Getting up on time was difficult. Walking into the office with a heavy backpack was difficult. The walk back home was hard. Some of that is probably that spiral downward and inward I was getting stuck back on. 71 is a hard time to try and regain some physical stamina, but I can feel my body awakening a tad, as my mind is reawakening. I’m seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. Wide awake eyes.

It’s like I’ve been reborn. Those are the only words I can find to describe it. But I am not the same person I was in the before time.

Last day of my first week I set myself a goal to have a new system my project manager wants established online and available for the others to test. Almost right away I ran into a difficulty I needed our IT staff to work with me on. And there was some back and forth and I got stuck and it did not get done. There will be more back and forth next week. But that is nothing new. Our IT people are the best, but even with the best people there will always be things that need to be worked through, and especially when you are breaking new ground with what you are doing. And we are always breaking new ground.

Time was I would have stressed massively over not getting it done. What’s different now is I’m an old man, which doesn’t mean old and tired but someone with more life experience than he had when he was younger. It means I’ve walked down these roads many times and I know the territory. What’s different now is I have felt death tapping me on the shoulder a bit more insistantly than before. It gives you some perspective.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore; I care deeply that the things I am tasked with get done and get done Right. But I am not going to stress out over it like I would have in the before time. I’ll keep my project leads and my users in the loop and we will work through it and we will get it done together.

Some lessons take a lifetime to learn. I was an only child. Teamwork has been mine. Also, that family doesn’t have to feel suffocating. But that’s another story for another time.

There is no growing up, there is only growing. And…every now and then…being reborn.

They asked me why I’d come back out of retirement. A few friendly jokes were made and we went our separate ways, knowing we’d see each other again at the office soon. I could appreciate why they might not have understood. Our lives weren’t all that different, but different enough.

I’ve been trying now for just over a year to get a head of steam up for doing some of the art projects I have stacked up. And…I couldn’t. I have artwork on my drafting table and in my iPad that I can only touch occasionally, and then on briefly. Mostly they just sit unfinished. My cameras sit untouched. I have rolls of film sitting in my darkroom and chemistry to develop them with that I haven’t touched. 

I would lay in bed for hours flipping through the social media posts on my smartphone. Often it’s just staring at the beautiful guys on Instagram or YouTube. I have a Google search string that brings me photos of beautiful long haired guys that I flip through, one after the other. Then I put the phone down on its charger, turn off the light and try to sleep. I imagine stories about gay couples having adventures in science fiction or fantasy worlds until I can finally sleep. Sometimes I try to write these stories but I have no energy to really dig into it.

It began to feel all too familiar. Like it’s the 1980s again, and I’m sitting in my bedroom with the lights turned down, almost off, and I’m staring of into the darkness outside my bedroom window, unable to feel anything inside of me.

I think of that period in my life as the dark time.

In my photo catalogs there’s a note about the discontinuity in catalog numbering. Actually there are two. The catalog numbers begin with a 10000 series. Those are the rolls of film I shot starting in the early 1970s when I was just getting serious with photography. I started counting the rolls of black and white negatives at 10001. At some point suddenly there is a shift to a 20000 series. That discontinuity I explain in the notes, is the gap in my photography that occurred when I lost all interest in my artwork, and for a period of time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I did nothing creatively. It wasn’t just my photography that suffered, but apart from a series of drawings on the topic of gay first love…and these disturbing drawings…

I did nothing. In part, it was I didn’t want to see what was coming out of me. But also, I had lost interest. The urge to get it out just wouldn’t come. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

The late 70s and early to mid 1980s were a dark part of my life. In 1973 my first high school crush, strike one, suddenly moved away and I had no idea where he went but I was certain I would never see him again. By 1980 I was coming off of a disastrous crush on a straight classmate, strike two. Then I made it to my 30s, which I was told was over the hill for gay guys, without having found that significant other to love and be loved by. That period of time was Reagan/Moral Majority/AIDS time when hostility toward gay people was hot and venomous. I began to believe that I would never have a lover, that I was somehow cursed, too ugly, too weird to be lovable.

Much later in my life some gay guys I’d regarded as friends told me essentially that no, I’m not too weird, and no I’m not cursed…I’m just too ugly.

I was mostly unemployed, save for the random Manpower job. I spent my days walking aimlessly in the neighborhood, and my nights in my bedroom in the apartment I shared with mom, blasting my mind with pot and alcohol, listening to music and staring off into nowhere, long past midnight.

I came close to suicide several times. Once I sat on a bridge over the railroad tracks waiting for a train to come along that I would jump in front of. Some part of my mind wondered what that would do to the engineer who saw it and I backed away. But I kept thinking of ways to do it that would be instantaneous and not involve anyone else. Thankfully I was not in that creative place just then where I could actually think of one. In some ways, oddly enough then, the emptiness may have spared me. I didn’t care enough about living to even figure out how to end it properly, artistically.

I don’t remember much about this period in my life. Sitting here now It’s hard for me to even to get the timeline right. All I remember, is darkness and sitting alone at the foot of my bed. I created no art because there was nothing inside.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. There are times I wonder if some kind spirit in the great beyond looked kindly on me and put some lucky breaks in my path. I regard myself as a man of science, and I am an atheist, but I am also an artist and sometimes I can’t help but wonder.

I would spend nights listening to my shortwave radio, as if tuning in signals from a planet earth I could only listen to from light years away. With the money I made doing random jobs I bought an inexpensive Commodore C64 to pick up radio teletype signals. There was a kit you could buy with a software cartridge and tuner box you’d connect to the radio speaker. It would translate the bleeps and chirps of RTTY transmissions into characters on a screen. I discovered teletype news and weather services I could tune into and read.

Then I learned about computer bulletin boards and bought a modem and software to connect to various BBSes. That led me to some gay bulletin boards and FidoNet echos and I began tentatively reaching out to other gay folk on them, and I began to feel less alone. But just a little. Nobody I ever wanted to get close to wanted anything to do with me. One said I was too intense. Another was willing to let my cameras give him some love, but not me.

The Commodore’s user interface was its BASIC interpreter and I began experimenting with writing programs. Later I learned that Commodore PET Basic was written for Commodore by Microsoft.

One day at a HAM fest, while I was looking for tubes for one of my shortwave radios and a stereo preamp I owned, I discovered I could buy parts to build my own IBM PC compatible computer. Building one was easier than the Heathkits I used to build because it was just a matter of buying the right circuit boards and plugging them together with a power supply and case. I got it working, and began surfing the bulletin boards with it. Then I bought a copy of Microsoft Quick Basic I began writing computer programs as I had done with my C64. It drew me in.

I discovered a world that had its own sterile beauty…one of logical structures, cold hard steel and chromium algorithms. I discovered I could build logical structures whose beauty I could admire and love without needing to go near the parts of my heart where I didn’t want to go anymore. It was a kind of art I’d never known existed. The art of pure logic. I dove into it. I got good at it.

It was the time of the dot com boom and anyone who could make the little microcomputers do tricks was in demand. I did volunteer work for a local gay BBS and made a program to distill the file a fellow user who worked for a wire service provided that contained news about the community you almost never saw in print anywhere. We were a people not fit to print in family newspapers. The program I wrote in Basic would separate the articles into individual files formatted for the BBS software we were running and create the menu items for each. Then another program I wrote would upload them into the correct directories on the BBS server.

I got better and better at teaching micro computers to do tricks. I developed and wrote a membership support system for a local gay activist organization, that had a backend user database in dBase 4. Among other things it generated welcome letters for new members, and reminders about upcoming dues.

All of that was unpaid volunteer work, but eventually I began getting temp contract work making very good money teaching those little computers do tricks for various businesses. I got work at a contract job agency and my first worksite was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services writing report software for their work measurement system. It was the lucky break I needed right when I desperately needed one, because by then mom had retired and moved south, and I was living in a friend’s basement with no prospects except maybe to end up starving on the streets someday.

Because of those little computers I soon had my own apartment. Then a new car…a little Geo Prism. I hopped from one contract programming job to another, each time gaining more experience and new skills that made me even more marketable. My income rose. Eventually I landed a contract, and then full time employment where the Hubble Space Telescope was operated. I thought I’d somehow died and gone to heaven. I still had no boyfriend, but I had work I was good at that I enjoyed doing, and it came with a good income and benefits. I still had no love life, but I began to feel less empty inside.

One day, while walking around the campus, I saw them setting up for student spring fair. Seeing that reawakened something inside of me, and went back home, grabbed my camera and some Kodachrome and began wandering around the rides they were setting up, taking art pictures again for the first time in over a decade.

I revisited my photography equipment. By then I’d bought a small rowhouse near enough to the campus I could walk to work. I established a tentative darkroom in its basement bathroom. Back in high school I used to commandeer the bathroom in the apartment I shared with mom to develop film and make prints. So this was another reawakening. The smell of photo chemicals took me back to a happier time.

I discovered I had enough income I could buy all the camera and darkroom equipment I ever wanted but could not afford when I was a teenager. I bought lenses I could only dream about when I was a teenager for my Canon F1. I’d bought that camera on fast food work money the summer between my junior and senior years, but I could not afford the good lenses for it, so I bought generic low costs ones. Now I could buy the good ones. Then I found another newer second hand F1 body in a camera store and bought that. Eventually I bought the Hasselblad I’d always wanted but considered a dream only.

I bought a good film scanner and revisited my film catalog. Now I had a computer with photographer workflow software on it to help maintain the catalog. I created the 20000 series numbering to account for the before and after time. In my refrigerator I’d kept a large tray of exposed film I never got around to developing during the dark time. I’d kept that film refrigerated because while I’d lost interest in the art I could not bear to let it and the images I’d shot deteriorate into nothing. That was probably some thread of interest in life keeping me alive during the dark time. I began to develop and examine what was on those rolls, and rediscovered something of the life I had before the darkness that I’d forgotten. At some point a 11000 catalog series was established to account for the rolls I shot in the before time but never developed or cataloged during the dark time. 

I established an art room in the basement of my rowhouse with my drafting table against one wall, and my art room computer and film scanner against the other. I bought a tabloid size flatbed scanner so I could scan in my cartoons and other artwork and put it up on the website I now had where I could display my photography and my cartoons and other art for the world to see.

I still had no boyfriend. In fact by this time strike three had entered, exited, and then re entered my life giving me another false hope, only to be dashed later on. But having that job in the space program lifted me out of that darkness enough that I could endure that. I was making art again. I felt alive again.

For twenty-three years I worked that job and made art in my spare time, putting some of it on my website. I started a weekly gay centric political cartoon that got me the notice of the editor of Baltimore OUTLoud, a local gay community newspaper. He invited me to contribute my cartoons to the newspaper, and that eventually led me to becoming a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Cartooning was the first love and it felt like another dream come true.

I started a cartoon story about my first teenage crush and how I came out to myself. I did it mostly to try and understand what had happened to me back in high school, and how it influenced the adult I eventually became. Then after 34 years of searching, and after being dumped by strike three, I found strike one again.

We began talking. And occasionally, flirting. But he was married and I didn’t want to interfere, just be friends again. Maybe. Hopefully. Eventually I was to discover we were never really all that compatible to begin with. A big cosmic joke. In a better world where gay teens could date and find out who was good for them and who was not, I’d have figured that out and had a good cry over it back then, not 34 years later. We had an argument and he ordered me to stop speaking to him, which I was completely fine with because I was angry at the things he said to me. Logically. But my heart I felt the darkness coming back. I ignored it.

I still had my art and I could use it to get the grief out of me. But grief like that never goes away, it just becomes part of the background noise. He was the first, but it was more than that. If you read A Coming Out Story, what you see is a very confused teenage boy who was fed all the usual myths, lies, superstitions and playground jokes about homosexuals, trying to come to terms with why he was crushing on a male classmate, then suddenly realizing that he’s in love…that wonderful terrifying confusing exhilarating first love…and it told him like nothing else could that everything he’d been taught about homosexuals was a lie and there was nothing wrong with him. There are gay kids who were driven to suicide by that self realization, but it was by loving him that I knew there was nothing wrong with me.

And then he told me to go away.

If I’d had that happen back when I was a teenager I’d have been crushed but eventually I could have got over it and gone on with my life. In theory now that I’m an adult with an adult’s life experience under my belt I should have been able to get over it even easier. But the way it happened then and now just made it worse.

I coasted along with it, and with the knowledge that came with it, that I’d tried to find love and failed all my adult life. Strike one, strike two, strike three, and all the almosts, and nearlies, and could have beens in between. Deep inside after that argument I knew it was over for me. There would be no boyfriend, let alone a spouse to have and to hold. But I buried it and just kept walking.

At age 69, I retired.

I’d had a heart attack a couple years previously, but it was not a serious one. Just enough to remind me that I was getting a lot closer to the grave then I fully appreciated. I got myself to the hospital in enough time that my heart didn’t suffer much damage at all. But after that I was put on meds for blood pressure and heart rate and after an initial bounce up I began feeling tired all the time. So I retired in order to give myself some time to enjoy that was completely my own, and work on the art projects I was now fully engaged in again.

The first year of retirement was wonderful. I had all the time in the world. I could go stay with my brother in California for months at a time. I could world endlessly on my art. I could take a road trip and explore new places with my cameras anytime I wanted. By then I had my dream come true car…a Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan. I drove it for days and days from one end of the country to the other. It was and amazing time. But I was still just coasting along with an understanding I didn’t want to look at…and then it wasn’t wonderful anymore.

In the second year of retirement I began a downward spiral of inactivity. And once again I began to lose interest in my art. You can only coast for so long.

Last summer I spent several months in California with my brother. Knowing I wanted to retire back to the land of my birth but could not afford to, he kindly made a room for me in his house. The part of California he lives in is stunningly beautiful, and my cameras would give it lots of love every time I visited. But last summer I could barely manage to touch my cameras while I was there. I told myself that it was I had covered that ground so much there wasn’t anything left to say about it photographically. But that’s bullshit. When what I think of as my photographic eye opens and I take a camera walk I am always seeing new things to work with. Last summer I could not see anything. The eye would not open. I felt empty inside whenever I tried.

I began to feel fatigued all the time. I spent days out there barely getting out of bed, often taking walks, mostly to my favorite Mexican restaurant where the margaritas and the food are excellent. I would go for walks in the evening, cigar in hand, imagining stories I could write, thinking about places I might drive to on the way back home, pondering ways I could finally move back home to California, thinking about anything except how I had failed at finding love. One day I got so fatigued and dizzy I went scared to the emergency room, but the nurse and doctor there could find nothing wrong with me. I eventually came back home to Baltimore with just a few rolls of film I’d shot and nothing to show for the drawings and cartoons I was working on.

Now there are rolls of film in my darkroom waiting for me to develop them and I can’t find the energy to do that. There is artwork on my drafting table, and in my iPad that I’ve no energy for completing. 

That first period of darkness came about, I’m pretty sure, when I was approaching and then turning 30, still had no love life, and was beginning to think it might never happen. The thought of that scared me and I pushed it down. Of course I’d find someone to love. Everyone does. But no…not everyone does, and I was no one special. I failed and failed and failed again, and it was just too much. But then this was the world I came of age in.

Now I found myself entering another period of darkness. And lo and behold, who comes to pull me out of it…a second time…?

A few months ago my project manager at Space Telescope asked me if I was interested in coming back to the Institute part time. I said Sure! I loved that job, the working environment was wonderful compared to the bottomless pits I’d worked in previously. And it was doing work I was good at, and for the space program. We are adding text to the textbooks. We harvest light from near the dawn of time and bring it to the world to study and learn from. How many times in a lifetime do you get to be part of something like that. Of course I’m interested. No need to convince me. And actually transitioning to part time work was what I’d initially wanted to do, but was told it wasn’t being offered then.

So we had lunch, and we talked, and we talked. And I went back to the office for a new round of talks and interviews about the part time position they had an opening for. And while I was there I was greeted happily by people I’d worked there with previously. Hi Bruce…nice to see you again…  I felt wanted, I felt needed. Those are good things. And I signed the paperwork and later this month I go back to the Institute part time.

And I’m pretty sure this keeps me from falling completely back into it, like it did before. Just to walk around that campus and know that I’m a part of everything going on there will be a wonderful feeling. And at some point I know I’ll be back to doing my art in my spare time, and using my cameras again. And since I’ll have vacation again I’ll be taking new road trips and seeing new sights, and visiting the land of my birth again in a better mindset.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. Maybe some kind spirit in the great beyond is still looking kindly on me, still putting random lucky breaks in my path. I had a meeting with my project manager a few days ago to get some detail about what I’ll be working on when I return, so I can hit the ground running. Afterward I met a couple of my co-workers who asked me in a friendly but curious way why I was coming back out of retirement. They themselves are probably getting close to it and cannot wait.

I explained that having so much time all to myself turned out not to be so good for me and they made a few friendly jokes about it but I can appreciate how they wouldn’t totally understand. They have families, they have kids, maybe even grandkids now, and wives they love to keep them company and keep them engaged and active when they retire. I had a lifetime of failure at the one critical task of adulthood to look back on, and nothing to look forward to. And now I have this wonderful adventure in space exploration to look forward to. And I feel alive again.

I’ll keep working it for as long as my health and congressional funding hold out. It’ll be a good life. Not the one I was hoping for, but a Much better one than I had any reasonable expectation of having. I had enough money in my retirement accounts, and in my social security benefit since I waited two years to claim it, to live comfortably until Death tapped me on the shoulder.  And now you know why I came back out of retirement instead.

When you walk through a storm
Keep your chin up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone