Short Circuits (2 page)

If anyone has any questions as to why I do not care for reality and became a writer, I'd be happy to answer them.

* * *

REMEMBERING FAMILY

Just before I went off to the navy, I gave my cherished wooden DC-3 model airplane to my cousin Tom, then probably around five years old. He is now the police chief of South Beloit, Illinois, just celebrated his 38th wedding anniversary, and he and his treasure of a wife, Cindy, have two children and four grandchildren. I rely heavily on Tom's knowledge of police procedures for verisimilitude in my novels. He recently told me he'd been reading my blogs and wondered why, after my having done blogs on my grandparents, aunt and uncle, (all following later) I had not done one on the rest of the family. And so here it is.

In the mid-to-late 1930s my dad's job was to train managers for newly-opened Western Tire Auto Stores in Northern Illinois and Northern Indiana. Whenever a new store opened, we would move to whatever town it was in for the several months it took Dad to train a permanent manager. The logistics of constant moves were bad enough without having to stumble over a very young boy at every turn. As a result, during the move and settling in period, I would be shuffled off to my beloved Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck for a few weeks. They already had three sons...Charles (Fat), John (Jack), and Donald (Cork), thirteen to sixteen years older than I. But because I spent so much time with them, they were like brothers to me.

As the years passed and WWII came and went, Fat, Jack, and Cork all married. Fat and his wife, Shirley, had two sons, Jackie and Ronnie, four and eight years younger than I. Cork and his wife Nornie had four kids: Judi, Tom, Karen, and Dave; Jack and his wife Veda had no children. All the second generation kids grew up and went off and started families of their own and, as is the history of the human race, each new generation is like the ripples moving out from a stone dropped onto a calm surface: the farther away the ripples get from the initial drop, the harder they are to keep track of.

I've never made the distinction between first and second cousins: to me, they are all just “cousins” and I love and admire them all equally. All have done very well for themselves in their own lives: Tom, as I mentioned, is a police chief, Judi and Karen are/were nurses, Dave works in an atomic power plant in Mississippi.

I am eternally grateful to everyone in my family for their complete and unquestioning acceptance. As I've mentioned, I am the family's only gay. They all knew it long before I told them, though it was a totally open secret. They all knew Norm from our six years together, and when Ray and I came from California to drive around Lake Michigan, Jack and Veda had a family dinner for us, and Ray was simply accepted as my partner. Not one member of my family has ever for an instant made me feel unwelcome or as though I did not belong. I only wish every other gay and lesbian could say that.

Shirley, Fat's wife, never missed sending me a birthday card until she died. Veda and Jack have been married for…it must be close to 65 years, now…and Veda has not missed a birthday in all that time.

My parents, Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck, Fat and Shirley, Cork and Nornie are all gone now, and I cannot allow myself to dwell on how terribly I miss them all. Grief is a deep and frigid ocean with a strong undertow which can sweep those who venture into it out into the depths to drown, so while I occasionally find myself standing on the shore, I never allow myself to go near the water.

If you have family, treasure them and love them and never hesitate to say how important they are to you. I hope mine knows.

* * *

THE TEENS

Odd, though I spent six years there, my memories of my teenage years are not so much string of beads, one thought attached to the next, as they are a small pile of unrelated incidents—like these blogs—which have to be picked up and considered individually. Of course, the more I think about those years, the more memories surface.

I suspect that one reason my memories of my teens are not more organized is because I wasn't very fond of them. Lots of minor teen-type angst, lots and lots of raging hormones. As already indicated, I did not like my high school days and have almost no memories at all of them, except for an unrequited crush I had on a trombone player in the school orchestra. Being gay in high school is not easy. I had to put up with all the problems that come with puberty, plus dealing with the acute awareness that I had almost nothing at all in common with my “peers.” I don't recall many incidents of harassment, and I was out to no one, not even my best friend Lief. However, I did take full advantage of the fact that raging hormones also affected my straight male classmates who were more than willing to experiment. (I distinctly recall a couple of times when, in the course of this experimentation, I was almost caught by my parents.)

I'm sure I had several acquaintances I might have considered to be friends at the time, and there are a number of names and faces which swim to the surface as I write…people I liked to varying degrees, and a couple I would rather like to run into again.

That I did not date is hardly surprising. At one point, my parents lined me up with the daughter of one of their friends. She was a student nurse at a nearby hospital. I arrived to pick her up and was told she was unavailable. I was vastly relieved on the one hand and not a little hurt on the other because I do not take any form of rejection well. I attended one party where Spin the Bottle was played, though I was excruciatingly embarrassed. I think I did kiss one of the girls simply because I had no way to avoid it, but really would have preferred one of the boys. Perhaps that was the beginning of my deep resentment of the arrogance of heterosexuals in assuming everyone is like them.

As for academics, I was a C+ student, largely because of my oft-mentioned laziness. I do not remember ever taking homework home.

We did not get a television until I was, I think, 14. I remember how people used to gather in front of hardware store windows to stare in awe at snowy images on huge, clunky-looking floor-consoles. Rockford was 90 miles from the nearest television station, in Chicago, and did not get its own station—singular—for another year or so.

I used to love coming in to Chicago, a two-hour bus trip, and would usually be so excited at the prospect that I would not sleep more than a couple of hours the night before. I took my first commercial airplane flight on a 20-passenger DC-3 from the newly opened Rockford airport to Chicago's Midway airport. There was no O'Hare at the time.

Everything changed when I left for college, of course. I entered an entirely new world and an entirely new phase of my life. I felt, in some regards, not unlike a butterfly breaking out of the cocoon of my high school years. Whereas I was utterly neutral to high school and everything and nearly everyone associated with it, I to this day look back on my college years with nothing but delight—and, of course, the inevitable-for-me sense of longing and loss at the fact that they are gone forever. And if I was a different person when I entered my freshman year in 1952, I was different again when I returned from the Navy in 1956 to pick up my studies where I'd dropped them to join the NavCads. But by that time, I was no longer a teenager.

So many doors have closed behind me, but always there has been an unopened door ahead. I must learn to be satisfied with that.

* * *

THE YEAST YEARS

It is absolutely amazing how the mind works. I was trying to think of a subject for this blog, and my mind kindly provided the mental image of flipping through an old-style library card file…you may remember: those long wooden drawers with little brass pulls and a brass-framed rectangle on the front, above the pull, into which a card could be inserted to designate the drawer's contents: a 3x5 card of every book in the library by subject, title, and Dewey decimal number.

And suddenly I was back in the Rockford Public Library, a staid, solid building of grey stone on the west bank of the Rock River, just off the downtown area. It was the kind of library anyone from anywhere in the U.S. would instantly recognize as being a library from six blocks away. One of my very first jobs, if not my first, was as a page in the library (even then I delighted in that image); my job was to return books to the stacks, go down into the archives and retrieve old books, magazines, and newspapers requested from the front desk.

I think I was in 10th grade at the time. I can pinpoint it by the fact that at one point my first serious love interest, who was a junior high classmate and whose name I'd best not repeat here, came into the library one evening while I was working. I'd changed schools, which had necessitated our parting of the ways, but I was still madly in love with him. (Well, for a teenage boy, it's a little difficult to tell the difference between love and lust, but I was pretty sure it was love.) Anyway, I distinctly remember having him go with me into the basement archives where we…well, if you need a diagram, let me know. Had we been caught, I can only imagine the scandal, and the possibility of that happening undoubtedly only added to the excitement of the encounter.

I think the library closed at either 8 or 9 each night, and I would then walk across the river and up to North Second Street, where I would catch the bus for home. There was a bagel shop on the corner, and each night I'd stop and buy a bagel which I would not eat until I reached the end of the bus line in Loves Park, Rockford's immediate suburb to the north. We lived a mile beyond the end of the bus line, and I would eat the bagel while walking home, often through the bitter cold and snow of winter.

I still have somewhere a newspaper photo of me and some other library employees admiring the library's acquisition of an 8mm movie projector: a newspaper-photo-worthy event in those oh, so innocent and oh, so long gone days.

I don't think I worked at the library all that long: less than a year, I'm sure, and my specific memories are few. I remember the cart I'd push, the odd echoes of footsteps through the stacks, and the distinct smell of books, and the sense of calm and knowledge residing therein. I can picture the cards in their little sleeves inside the front cover of the books, and the lines of rubber-stamped dates.

Looking back, they were my yeast years: I was a lump of dough, most of the ingredients of my life having by that time been mixed together to produce who I was and would become. But there had to be a calm period of warm but indistinct memories which allowed the yeast to rise before being put into the oven of college. It was a good time.

* * *

A SIMPLE MAN

Let's face it…I'm a simple man (some would argue in all senses of the word). I have simple wants and simple needs and all I ever want is whatever it is I want right when I want it. Don't bother me with having to think before I act, or having to figure out how things work. Getting from point A to point B should not involve circuitous trips through every other letter in the alphabet to get there.

If I go somewhere I expect to have my wallet with me. I'm far too busy to have to think about getting it out of the pants I wore yesterday and putting it in the pants I'm wearing today. It should know enough to be there.

When I leave my apartment, I expect to have my keys either in my pocket or in my hand. I don't see why I should have to go back inside and spend twenty minutes looking for them.

When I buy a new piece of electronic equipment, I expect to plug it in and start using it. That's what I paid for, that's what I want to do. But,
noooooo
…they insist I read the manual. I do not like reading manuals. I am totally lost before I finish the “Getting Started” page. Yes, I want to get started, but I don't want to have to read about it…I want to
do
it! And what's the point in reading 47 pages of gibberish I do not understand? They might as well write instruction manuals in Sanskrit for all the good they do me.

I want to be 25 again, and will be damned if I'll accept the fact that that will never happen. I
want
to be 25 again, so don't just sit there, make it happen! (And here we touch upon another aspect of my problem: I do not see why I should have to do something when others know how to do and can do for me far better and more quickly than I can. I appreciate their help, but since they already know, why should I have to bother knowing it, too?)

I am perfectly happy to share my expertise in…well, whatever it is I may have expertise in…with anyone who would like it, so why shouldn't everyone else do the same? (And here I must admit that I rely on my friends far, far more often than they rely on me.)

When I have a question about something from an organization or company, I expect to pick up the phone, dial their number, and immediately talk with an actual human who can help me. I do not want to have to press one for English and then sit on hold for six hours listening to endlessly repeated and patently cynical assurances that my call is very important to them and that I will be connected with the next available representative. If I'm paying for service from a company or organization, I damned well feel I have the right to immediately speak to someone about it. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is.

I try very hard never to lie to people…though at times a small evasive untruth is less complicated and frequently less hurtful than going into a detailed explanation of the truth, and I don't want to be lied to. For all my flaws and weaknesses, I am not stupid, and deeply resent being treated as such, especially by people I don't know and who see me as only a walking dollar sign.

I have never understood why the concept of simplicity seems so very, very complicated. What can be simpler or easier than the Golden Rule, for example? Yet have you noticed not only how few people seem to practice it, but how universally it is ignored by anyone with real or assumed power?

Logic is simple, and the lack thereof has kept me away from exactly the things which draw others: organized religion, for example. I am a liberal and a Democrat…they are not always or necessarily the same…largely because I find their basic premises logical. It's all so very simple. Why are there not more people like me…and, I trust, you?