Despair

To feel like you’ve been left behind. To feel like you have nothing to offer. To feel like no one cares. To watch your life dwindle down as your hopes and dreams slip away. To know that this is where you are at, this is what you have come to--cold, lonely and broke. Deliver me from the pain of being me.

COMFORT AND JOY

by Gary L. Cottle
     Woodrow Hill was a classic bully; he lurked in the background, observing, watching for weakness, haunting our classroom, our playground, our lunch hour.  Just when you were about to forget about him, he’d lash out, go right for where it would hurt the most.  For instance, Woodrow knew just were to stick the knife into Timmy Tolliver.  Timmy was usually a quiet, wallflower of a boy, an overweight, insecure pup wanting praise and not getting it, but every now and then he’d have some little story to tell that he thought was funny, an anecdote, a yarn that maybe his grandpa told him, or his mom, or maybe just something he heard on TV.  With mirth in his eyes, and animated fingers, he’d find the nerve to relate a jocular tale to one or two who’d care to listen about a dog who would bark along with “The Star-Spangled Banner“ or about some old woman who had collected so many buttons over the years her house was now full of them.  That’s when Woodrow would step out of his shadowy world, and with a voice that was all too real, too caustic, he’d say, “Shut up, Tubby Tolliver.”  Woodrow had Althea Jones’s number, too.  When Woodrow would catch a smile on Althea’s round, dark face, he’d callously proclaim, “People with big lips should never grin.”  He was like some bitter, forsaken angel put on earth to keep our spirits tethered.
     For the most part, I escaped his most brutal, most inspired punishments.  That is until I was nine years old and developed a weakness that Woodrow, with his uncanny and precocious insight into childhood psychology, was able to see.  I returned from summer vacation to begin the fourth grade with the knowledge that my mom had stomach cancer, and that she wasn’t losing weight and feeling tired all the time because of some strict diet she had culled from a women’s fashion magazine.  I even knew she was going to die.  And it is for this reason that I was determined to make really good grades and stay out of trouble.  I didn’t want my teacher, or the principal, or the school nurse, or the attendance clerk calling my house to further dim the already bleak pall that had been cast there.  I wanted to be a trouble-free kid.  How did Woodrow know this?  And why was he so determined to spoil this last gift I wanted to give my mom?  At the time I had no answers for these questions, and he probably didn’t either if you had asked him.  But, nevertheless, he picked up on the basic nature of my desires and exploited them.  He’d taunt me relentlessly every time I was within earshot, provoking me, luring me away from my better nature, tempting me to give in to my growing need to throw the first punch.
     “Did your mommy dress you this morning, Graham Cracker?”
     “My name is Graham, Graham Hardy, not Graham Cracker,” I hissed, an admittedly feeble retort, but remember, my hands were tied behind my back.
     “I hate graham crackers.  I hate graham crackers.  Don’t give me any graham crackers.  Keep those graham crackers away from me,” he all but sang two inches from my face.
     “Funny.”
     “Look, it’s almost noon.  It’s almost your feeding time, Graham Cracker.  I’ll bet your mommy is already in the parking lot waiting for you to come out.  We all know you still suck her tit for milk.”
     In the end I outwitted Woodrow.  One day after school I ran ahead to a deserted stretch of road I knew he had to travel to get home, and I hid just inside the woods.  And as luck would have it, Woodrow did eventually walk by, alone.  I called out his name and was shocked to see the momentary panic sweep across his face when he searched around for the person daring to speak his name aloud, head and eyes suspiciously turning this way and that.
     “Over here, Woodrow.”
     He quickly resumed his tough-guy pose when the timber of my voice registered in his mind, and then he said, “Come out where I can see you, Graham Cracker.”
     I had already witnessed the crack in his armor.  I knew Woodrow had his tender spots, too, but still I was scared.  I knew that I couldn’t let him lay a hand on me, couldn’t go home with even a scratch, and it would be best if I managed to avoid getting any dirt on my clothes.  But I found my resolve, waved my hand so he could see where I was, and said, “You…come over here.”
     As he moved toward me, I stepped further into the woods so that any car that happened to drive by wouldn’t see the impending altercation.
     “Why are we going back here, Graham Cracker?  You’re not planning on sucking my tit for milk, are you?”
     When he laughed at his own joke my stomach churned, and for a minute I felt faint.  But then an amazing thing happened, something so perfect that it was like it had been planned since the moment I was born, a predestined event.  When he got near, I managed to hit him square on the nose.  Boy, was it a clean punch!  It was, in a word, beautiful.  To this day I don’t know why he didn’t try to block the blow.  Surely he knew what I was going to do.  When my hand made contact with his face, an aftershock traveled up to my shoulder and down to my gut.  Immediately blood was running down his chin, and he sank to his knees.  His swagger and sneer where wiped away, at least for the time being, in one fail swoop.
     “Damn it, Graham!  You better not have broken my nose.”  Suddenly he sounded reasonable.  Suddenly he spoke to me, used my real name and not the nick he gave me, as if we were old friends, and as if I should be ashamed for being so thoughtless.
     I bent down close to him and stated with conviction, “You better leave me alone from now on, or I’ll break your neck.”  And then I went home without any outward signs that anything had happened.
     When Woodrow came to school the next day he didn’t have a bandage on his face, so apparently I hadn’t broken his nose, but he didn’t bother me anymore after that, and that’s all I cared about.

     For several years following this event Woodrow and I didn’t have anything to say to one another.  In the interim, he went through a couple of transformations that were so quiet, so pianissimo that I didn’t even notice until one day I looked up to discover Woodrow was no longer a bully.
     At first he merely stopped digging for those sore spots.  He still observed us, I’m sure.  He was always there, but he didn’t engage.  He remained in the background for a long time, but not in a shy, timid way.  No one ever turned the tables on him; he was never bullied.  Woodrow, as I’ve stated, just stopped looking for a fight.
     And in high school he became a little more socially active.  He wasn’t exactly the life of the party, but he did have friends, and he was involved in a few things.  For instance, he was on the yearbook committee, he took pictures for the yearbook.  So he was essentially still observing, but in a way that was more useful and less menacing.
     One day in the library he was sitting across the table from me, and he looked up from the book he was studying and said in a hushed tone, “Graham, aren’t you in                  Mr. Plimpton’s fifth period geometry class?  I have him second period.”
     I was kind of shocked that he was talking to me.  Shocked that he would know when I took geometry, or anything about me.  I looked over at him and noticed his hair, how perfect it was--he must have spent a lot of time on his hair--and his glasses made him appear domesticated, safe.
     “Yeah.”
     “Could you help me out a little?  I’ve been having some trouble with it.”
     “Yeah...  Sure.”
     It was as simple as that; he asked me for help, and we started talking as if we had gotten along famously from the start.  I began tutoring him in geometry, and American history.  Within a month we were best friends.
     Almost every day after school we’d spend a couple of hours together doing our homework, or just hanging out, usually at his place.  I can still remember the first time he took me home with him as if it were yesterday.  I was surprised to learn that he and his mother lived in a makeshift basement apartment under his grandparents’ house.  He explained that his grandfather was “pretty good” at things like carpentry and plumbing, and that the old man was the one that had fixed this place up for them when his mom had divorced his father.  The apartment was functional, and it still had the semblance of a basement; the floor joists had been left exposed, and nothing seemed to match--dishes, towels, or even furniture.  The assorted belongings had undoubtedly been gathered up from yard sales, church bazaars, and the attics of aunts and neighbors.  I found that I was very comfortable there.  It was like Woodrow was on a camping trip that never ended.
     He had made a few insinuations about how hard his father had been on his mother and himself, but I didn’t know how ugly it had been until one day in October.  We had stolen a six-pack from his grandfather, took it to the deserted picnic area of a nearby park, and shared the beer while sitting across from one another.  We had grown quiet.  I looked around at the de****d trees as well as the carpet of fall colors and remembered the time I had led him into the woods so that I could punch him in he nose all those years before.  That’s when Woodrow picked his can up from the table, held it in the air like he was going to make a grand toast, and said, “This stuff can turn you into a fool or a devil if you let it.  It turned Dad into a devil.”
     He went on to tell me how his father used to spend all of their money in bars, and how he’d come home late at night drunk and abusive.  Woodrow didn’t hold anything back.  He was forthcoming with all the painful details.  He spoke of violence, both physical and verbal.  According to Woodrow, his dad would say something mean, and then jab a closed fist toward whomever was closest, using his hands to punctuate the cruel sentences he delivered to his wife and son.  I sat and listened in stunned silence and imagined what it must be like to have a father who hated me.
     On the drive back into town, Woodrow sat over in the passenger seat sullen and withdrawn.  He probably felt exposed after having revealed so much.  Maybe he wanted to take back a few of the details.  I have since learned that the children of abuse are generally secretive, but I had won Woodrow’s trust.  After being an enigma for so long, after first hiding behind technically precise insults, and then silence, and finally trendy clothes, he had given me the key to what made him tick.  I knew instinctively that I should even the score, so I told him a few things about my own father.
     I told him how I was supposed to spend the night with my aunt and uncle a few years after my mom died, and how my uncle decided to take me home early when my newborn cousin developed a fever.  I told Woodrow that we walked through the front door unannounced only to discover that Dad wasn’t alone; a woman was there with him.
     “When she left she took this overnight bag with her, so I knew she had been planning on staying the night.  When she left, Dad acted really nervous.  He asked me if I wanted anything to eat, even though Uncle Kip had just got through explaining that we had been to a sub shop before the baby got sick.  And then he asked if it wasn’t time for me to go to bed, even though he knew I didn’t go to bed until ten.  I was just embarrassed for him.  Couldn’t look him in the eye.  This was the guy that had been dragging me to church every Sunday morning and to prayer meetings every Wednesday night as if our lives depended on it.”
     I thought Woodrow might chastise me for complaining about that incident, or tell me that I should be grateful for having it so lucky--and I did have it lucky, compared to Woodrow--but Woodrow was very sympathetic.  He pointed out that I was just a kid back then, and that it must have seemed to me at the time that my father was cheating on my mother, even though my mother was dead.
     He added in a very gentle tone, “You do know that your Dad was probably really lonely?”
     “Yeah, I guess,” I stated weakly, “but we’re lonely, too, and we don’t sneak girls into the house.”
     Woodrow laughed at this and said, “Get real.  That’s only because we haven’t found a willing girl, Graham Cracker.”  This was the first time he had called me that since grade school, but now the moniker was meant to cajole not humiliate.  “I don’t know about you, but I need all the comfort from the ladies that I can get.  I’d sneak ten of them into my room if I could.”
     He gave me a playful tap on the shoulder, and I just had to smile.
     A special bond had developed between us, one that can only can be formed in youth, a time when the world is still new and the outer layer is still wet with dew.  There was only one bumpy episode between us in high school.  That was when we both announced our intentions to ask the same girl to the winter formal.  I’ll never forget how Woodrow’s expression twisted when he exclaimed that Bridget Dalson didn’t need a “soft, sniveling fag” asking her out.
     “Why would she want to go out with you, Graham?  You’re such a momma’s boy.”
     I saw then that all the cruelty that used to come to the fore when he was a kid was still there under the surface, and learning this made me sad rather than angry.  My bones suddenly felt as though they were made of lead.  It was hard for me to look up.  I simply said, “You know I don’t even have the option of being a momma’s boy,” and turned to go in the opposite direction.
     Before I lost sight of Woodrow, I noticed his expression turning from hostility to regret, but the change wasn’t enough to relieve my hurt.  I kept walking away even as he said, “I’m sorry, Graham.  For a second I forgot your mother was dead.  I’m sorry, man.”
     He hardly ever called me on the phone, but that night he did.  He said, “Look, about today…  I went off the deep end, went a little crazy.  Okay?  But I have to tell you that I really like this girl, Graham.  If you like her too, then let the best man win.  But if all you want is a date for the dance, then please find another girl to ask.  Ask twenty, but please let me have a clear shot at Bridget.”
     I wasn’t sure if I really liked Bridget or not.  I knew that I liked the looks of her, and I knew I liked the way I felt when I was around her, but Woodrow was my best buddy, and he seemed so sincere.  So I forgave him and agreed to step aside.
     With our disagreement resolved, the tension between Woodrow and myself evaporated, and the memory of our argument was relegated to the place where we kept that knowledge of our fight in the woods.  We simply never mentioned it again.  And Bridget did go with Woodrow to the winter formal, and they began to date regularly after that.  Woodrow seemed truly happy, and I was happy for him.

     That spring we graduated.  The look on Woodrow’s face at the end of that last day of class, when we had crossed the finish line, will always be first and foremost in my memory of those times.  I was walking down the hall, my feelings blank, just wanting to make it to my car.  I wanted to get out of there and let the reality of what happened sink in after I had gotten away.  But Woodrow came bounding out of nowhere and started grabbing at me, mussing my hair, jumping up against me, and finally throwing his arms around me as if he wanted me to carry him.  I did manage to hold him up in the air for a few seconds.  His joy was so infectious.  Someone, probably Mr. Hollinghurst the music teacher, had put on the Hallelujah Chorus from Handle’s Messiah and was broadcasting it over the intercom.  It was playing at full volume.  In a triumphant delivery, what seemed like hundreds of voices were singing with great conviction, “He shall rein for ever and ever.”  And then all the female voices started singing, “King of kings…  Lord of lords…” And all the male voices were stating at the same time, in a way that could not be refuted, “Forever…  And Ever…  Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!”  What a moment!
     We somehow made it to the parking lot, and there Woodrow stepped in front of me, put his hands on my shoulders, looked right in my face, and said several times, “We made it!  We made it!”  A flood of emotion surged through me, and I became aware of the promise of that day: happiness, freedom, success, life everlasting.  But then a few good-natured jeers from fellow classmates--“Take a pill,” “Get a life”--brought us back to reality.  We waved one final goodbye, and we each headed toward our own cars, our own futures.  Little did I know that Woodrow would never again be so familiar after that day.  We would never again be so close.
     There was a party after commencement of course, and both Woodrow and I were in attendance, but because we both assumed we’d be getting together later, we spent that time saying so long to everyone else.  And then I started working as an intern in our U.S Congressman’s local office, and Woodrow went to work in a mechanic’s shop.  We were both busy that summer.  I found time to date, but not seriously, and Woodrow kept going out with Bridget.  Woodrow and I ran into each other a few times on the fly, but there was always something that called us away before we could really break the ice.  And then August came and I went away to college.

     I didn’t come home for very many visits that year, and when I did, I didn’t look up Woodrow.  However, I now wish I had.  I have to admit that I was caught up in my new life, and I wasn’t thinking too much about my old high school friends, not even Woodrow.  I even tried to ignore Dad, and only paid him those aforementioned visits, short visits, begrudgingly.  Now I realize I was acting like a typical college freshman jerk, and I’ll always wonder if there was something I could have done to prevent Woodrow’s downfall if I had been there for him.  But I didn’t see him anymore until the next summer, and by then it was too late.  I called him up and invited him to share a few beers with me one evening in that same state park in which he made his confessions concerning his father.  It was my intention to tell him all I’d found out in the past year, and what I planned for the future, as well as hear him out on the same subjects.  Oh, the big ideas of young men…  They could carry the world.  And here I wanted them only to carry Woodrow and myself back to our friendship, our forged brotherhood.
     I was there waiting on him in that deserted park for a long time, at that same picnic table we had shared before.  I waited a long while with my cooler there beside me.  I was about to leave when someone pulled up beside my car and came to a stop.  And then a man got out, and started walking toward me.  I was shocked to realize it was Woodrow.  The clothes he had on were covered in motor oil, his hair was greasy, and he had become very skinny, too skinny, and there was something about his color that was off, too.  He didn’t look good.
     When he got near he didn’t say anything, only nodded his head as he sat down.  My expression must have embarrassed him because he looked away.  I thought he was going to tell me he had cancer.  Really, that’s what I thought he would tell me, but on that evening he never made any attempt to open up.  He asked me what school was like, but he didn’t seem interested in my answer.  And when I asked him about work he only grunted.  I made the mistake of telling him he should go to school, or take some kind of training.  I reminded him how much he liked photography and expressed my belief that he’d make a great newspaper man.  But I must have come across as judgmental.  He retorted, “You should mind your own damn business.”  After we had only one beer when he said, “Look, man, I’m sorry, but I have to go.”  I tried to stop him, but he was already on his feet.
     A few days later I ran into Bridget Dalson in town, and I asked her about Woodrow.  I asked if he was okay.
     Her face became cold when she stated, “How should I know?  I don’t see him anymore.”  And then she made some excuse and walked away from me.
     But that night she called to apologize and asked me to meet her the next day for lunch.  The following afternoon, I found her on the terrace of the Westmore Tea House dressed very smartly, like a New York model.  When I came up to her table she lowered her sunglasses and warmly asked me to join her. 
     “Graham, you’re so handsome today.”
     She was acting very grown-up and in charge of herself, and this made me feel like I was five-years-old at first.  But then I fell for her charm.  After that the only thing that distracted me from becoming ever more mindful of her beauty was what she had to say about Woodrow.  The story she had to tell me struck at the foundation of whatever innocence I had managed to hold onto.  But I maintained my composure as I heard about how first Woodrow wanted extra money to buy a new car, and then how he had gotten involved with some guy that used to come into the shop he worked at, a dealer.  I listened as Bridget explained that Woodrow planned to sell for only a few months, but then he started sampling the goods and had gotten hooked.  And from then on he couldn’t stop selling because he needed the extra money in order to pay for his own habit.
     “My God! Didn’t anyone try to stop him?”
     This question must have sounded like an accusation because Bridget’s lips became tight when she said, “I was away at school most of the year, just like you, Graham.”  But then she softened.  “Maybe I could have done more, but last summer I realized Woodrow wasn’t right for me.  We were going in two different directions.  I tried to break it off a few times, and by the time I managed to actually do it--this was last Christmas--he really wasn’t listening to me anymore.  He didn’t even trust me at that point.”  She looked down at her half-eaten chef’s salad and added, “I had been going out with guys I met at school, and he knew it.”
     The first thing I said following this disclosure was, “Are you seeing anyone now?”
     In a bittersweet way, Bridget turned one side of her mouth up, and, with just a hint of mischief in her tone, answered, “No, Graham, I’m not seeing anyone now.”

     That summer Bridget and I started to date, and even after we went back to school in the fall, each of us would make a special effort to return home on the weekends, our common ground, so that we could see more of each other.  The next year I transferred to her school and we moved in together.
     At first we talked about Woodrow a lot, but in time we became more interested in discovering each other, and Woodrow was relegated to the back burner.  We found out that we shared a love for jazz and old movies.  We both liked reading ****ens and enjoyed talking about the social injustice expressed in his stories.  We both liked getting away to someplace quiet --a country inn, or a cottage in the woods-- more then vacations in the city or weekends at a beach covered wall-to-wall with people whose exposed pink skin glistened from being doused with sun block.
     All through school we grew closer and more comfortable with each other.  Bridget became a lawyer, and I earned my doctorate in American history and began teaching, and still we were together.  That isn’t to say we didn’t have our differences.  Bridget was more politically conservative then I was, and the lady knew how to argue her point.  She also didn’t want to start a family until she had what she termed a nest egg.  I tried to explain that the majority of children from the start of civilization had been born to parents not fortified with a “nest egg,” but she was intransigent.  And my simple need to have a son or daughter when I was young couldn’t win in the face of her logic and practicality.  But all that aside, the more we were together the more I couldn’t imagine going on without her or trying to find someone else.  So one Sunday morning I got up and made steak and eggs, and when she came into the kitchen wearing woolly boot socks, a worn chenille bathrobe that had been passed on to her by a beloved relative--I couldn‘t recall which one--and a paint splattered ball cap pulled down low over tangled bed hair, I asked this radiant creature to be my wife, to be Mrs. Graham Hardy.  And she said yes!
     Our wedding was held the same weekend of our ten-year class reunion, so a lot of our old friends were in town, and many of them were able to witness our nuptials.  I had watched Bridget’s face transmogrify from a girl’s to that of a young woman’s over the years, and since I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror every morning as I brushed my teeth and shaved, my own maturation seemed remarkably gradual, but looking out into the crowd, both at the high school gym--decorated with balloons, streamers, and welcome back banners--and at the church the morning Bridget and I said our “I dos,” and spotting people I hadn’t seen since they were teenagers, and noticing what they looked like now, how much they’d changed, made me realize that none of us were kids any more.  We were all still young, but we were adults, each and every one.  But becoming so mindful of this seemed to underscore the rightness of getting hitched.  It was time to move on, time to be a grown-up.
     There was one person’s aging process I failed to take note of that weekend, and that was Woodrow’s.  Bridget and I discussed inviting him to our wedding, but only fleetingly, and only because it seemed necessary.  Neither of us could really imagine him there, and since it was a safe bet he wasn’t going to show up at the reuinon either, we just bandied his name around a bit as we made our guest list, and then we let it drop.
     Woodrow was still in the area, but he was living on the other side of the county.  I never saw him.  Howerver, I did hear about him from time to time.  He had already been married, and divorced, not once but twice, by the time Bridget and I walked down the aisle, and he had two kids, a boy and a girl, one from each marriage.  He had also spent a couple of stints in jail, once for petty theft, and another time for passing bad checks, and he had been sent to prison for a few years for possession.  The sad thing was he had been in a car accident, one that supposedly left his handsome face disfigured.  From what I heard, he very nearly died in the accident, and the woman he hit, a middle-aged wife and mother of three, did die.  They tried to get Woodrow for vehicular manslaughter, but there was some mix-up at the hospital that sacked the government’s case against him.  The toxicology screen they preformed on him was lost before it ever made it into the hands of the authorities.  So there was no way to prove he was drunk or high when the wreck occurred, but in light of Woodrow’s history, everyone knew what had happened.

     The years slipped by after Bridget and I got married.  When we both hit our mid thirties, I saw our twenty-year high school class reunion looming in the not too distant future.  Boy, that one was hard to believe!  Hard to stomach, too.  I had become a tenured professor, at last, at a small liberal arts college, Nolan Randolph University, near our old hometown, and I was generally thought of as a pretty idealistic teacher, one that cares more about helping students then getting published.  People who knew me well were aware of the fact that my idealism had a pitina on it.  I became just a little wounded when I found out that most students don’t care about history; most just want to get credit for a required course and go on to make money, and have fun.  But I didn’t lose all hope. 
     Bridget had done well also.  She was by then a partner in the firm of Wilson, Oliver, and Tate--a firm that mostly handled liability cases--and soon after, during the month of September, she won her first big reward and walked away with a rather large bonus.  She was, and still is, the real breadwinner between the two of us.  I’ve been kind of a kept man, and I’ve been kept very well, thank you.  We have lived better then our parents ever thought about living.  It has been my general impression that Bridget works too hard, and I’ve told her as much.  I more or less assumed that once she became established, and had attained that all-important nest egg, she’d slow down.  But when she won that big settlement it seemed to only make her more ambitious.
     As for Woodrow, well, the years weren’t kind to him.  The man fell into a loosing streak early on, and he never pulled out.  Right before Christmas one year, just a few months after Bridget became such a big shot, he was in yet another car accident.  This time he wiped out a whole family--a mother, a father, and two girls--and he got himself killed himself in the bargin.  The toxicology screen was salvaged this time, and the details of that report are just too shocking to talk about.  If Woodrow had lived he would have surely went to prison for many years.
     A rather sad and ironic twist to the end of Woodrow’s story is that his mother decided to have a viewing for him on Christmas Eve and to bury him on Christmas day.  Christmas is supposed to be about birth, not death --right?-- a reminder that the dark of winter will be followed by light.  I couldn’t get my mind off of Woodrow when I read the newspaper articles and the obituary.  On Christmas Eve I found myself home alone while Bridget was at work.  I was lost in nostalgic images of Woodrow as the bullying little boy, and the good-natured young man he became for a while, a short while.  I relived that episode in the duff-shrouded park, the one where he told me about his abusive dad.  Of course, the way he looked that last day of high school haunted me.  The expression on his face had been a promise that had gone unfulfilled.  As long as Woodrow was alive I believed, somewhere deep in a hidden part of my being, that he’d turn his life around, and live out the dream that was on his face that day.  But when he died, the dream died with him.
     I was thinking about Woodrow when Bridget called from her office to ask me to wear the “good” suite that she had gotten for me that evening, rather then one of the rags for which I was notorious for wearing, at least in her eyes, on campus.  We were scheduled to go to James “T-Rex” Tate’s Christmas party.  James was the senior partner in Bridget’s firm and was called “T-Rex” because of his ability to rip apart witnesses on the stand.  He was a pompous, preppy bore who liked nothing better then to regale people with descriptions, and sometimes demonstrations, of his lastest, overpriced purchases: golf clubs, Oriental carpets, leather lodge sofas, SUVs, BMWs, purebred dogs, plasma televisions, and vacation homes.  This would not have been so bad if it wasn’t for his apparent need to be praised and supported for how he spends his money.  Under normal circumstances I would have whined and expressed my displeasure at having to endure yet another Christmas Eve at the house of that dithering idiot with the brilliant legal mind.  But as it was, I simply said, “Alright, honey,” and absentmindedly hung up and went to get out the suite in question.
     I got dressed early and then put on my warmest coat, wrapped my neck with a wool scarf, and following this, I went for a walk before it was time to go to the party.  It seemed to me that I was walking aimlessly, just getting some air.  However, within fifteen minutes I found myself standing in front of a funeral home, and not just any funeral home either, but the one in which Woodrow’s wake was to be held that very evening.  I looked around at the parking lot and saw that it wasn’t nearly as full as it was when a wake or funeral of a person who was highly esteemed was going on.  But there were a few cars there, and when I looked at my watch, I realized that it wasn’t too early to go in.  Subconsciously I must have planned on going ever since I saw the notice in the newspaper.
     The old Victorian house had been used as a funeral home for a long while.  I, in fact, couldn’t recall a time when it wasn’t used for this purpose.  It was the funeral home Dad engaged when Mom died, so it was a little surreal to walk through the door and see everything looking so familiar.  Because my recollections were that of a child, everything now seemed somewhat shrunken in size.  I felt numb as a woman who worked there offered me her hand to shake with business-like kindness and then took my coat and scarf.  I felt numb when I walked into the viewing room.
     There was a simple but handsome casket in the room, a few flowers, and only several people; I quickly looked about and counted four heads.  There was a girl, about eleven years old I’d say, in a red velvet dress and patent leather marry janes, and a slightly older boy in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, a man about sixty wearing a green ****ie work uniform, and then there was Woodrow’s mother.  She looked so much older then she did the last time I saw her, older and heavier, too.  Her dress closely matched the little girl’s in color, and her hair looked freshly done, in an out-of-date style.  I instinctively walked over to her and expressed my condolences.
     “Thank you.  Your Graham Hardy, aren’t you?”  I shook my head, and she turned her gaze to the casket.  “We’re going to say goodbye to him tomorrow.  It’s Christmas.  He’ll go to heaven if we bury him on Christmas.”  There was sadness, fear, and longing in her voice, underlined with a palpable tinge of anger.
     “Yes,” I said, even though her comment wasn’t really a question.
     “He was a good son,“ she added defensively--was she trying to convince me or herself?  And then her face went blank as she said,  “He was always trying to find his way.  He kept his eyes open…  He was always looking for a break.”
     “Yes,” I repeated, not knowing what else to say.
     When I found the resolve to walk over to Woodrow and look at him, I had to force myself not to gasp.  There was only a slight resemblence left of the young man I once knew.  The thinness of his face and body gave him a cadaver-like appearance that I’m sure he sported long before he died.  And the jagged scares on his cheeks and forehead-- souvenirs of that earlier accident to be sure--were still clearly etched into his heavily powdered skin.  I stood there a moment while I tried to recapture, without much success, the numbness I felt when I came in.  And then I walked into the next room, full of empty chairs and sofas, and sat down in a spot were I could observe the viewing room and Woodrow’s family without feeling obtrusive.
     I sat there long after the Christmas party was underway.  I was sure that Bridget would be highly upset with me, but I couldn’t leave the funeral home, especially since no one else showed up to pay their respects to Woodrow.  Everyone most likely thought Woodrow was a monster.  Most were probably glad to be ride of him.  But I knew he wasn’t a monster, or if he was, I knew that there was a time when he had tried not to be.  Maybe he used to watch us so closely because he was trying to figure out where he fit in.  Maybe he never saw a niche with his name on it, other then that of the bully, or the bad guy.  I didn’t really know.  Maybe he just hadn’t tried hard enough.  I was reaching for an answer I could understand.  I wanted to believe that things could have been different.  I didn’t want to surrender the memory of Woodrow as reprobate to the black hole of eternity.  As the minutes ticked by a mantra formed inside my head.  I kept saying regretfully over and over to myself, “It didn’t have to be like this, buddy.”
     I only bearly noticed when Christmas carols started to be played over the intercom.  I just sat there and watched Woodrow’s mother, and the man I took to be her husband, linger silently in the next room, as Woodrow’s children walked around them, looking lost and bored.  But then the somber “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” came on, a song that is incongruously not so very merry.  “…Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day, to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray…”
     The song brought my emotions to the fore, and I rushed to the men’s room and locked myself in; I had just turned the bolt when I burst into tears.  After sobing for several minutes, I cried out, even though I had never been particulary religious, not since I was a boy anyway, “Sweet Jesus, help me!”
     When I had collected myself, washed my face, and exited the lavatory, it was getting late.  So I retrieved my coat without saying anything more to Woodrow’s family; I just glanced into the viewing room one last time as I walked by and saw the pinkness of Woodrow’s forehead and a tuft of his hair sticking up out of the casket, and then I left.
     When I was on the porch I immediately noticed a slim, elegant woman standing under a street lamp out in the parking lot.  The woman looked like an angel.  It took me a second to realize it was Bridget.  She had on her green cashmere coat that she got especially for the holiday.  Her back was to me as I made my way across the parking lot to where she was, but when she heard my footsteps, she turned.  I thought she’d be angry, but she smiled when she saw me.
     “How’d you know I’d be here?” I asked.
     She put her arm through the crook of mine and said softly, “Lucky guess.”  When she stepped in beside me and laid her head against me, she added, “He was my friend, too.  You could have asked me to come along if this is where you wanted to be tonight.”
     I simply said, “I’m sorry,” and then I asked, “Where’s your car?”
     “I came on foot.  I wanted to walk in the snow.”  She looked up at the flakes coming down for a second and so did I.
     “Not from the Tate’s?”
     “No, of course not.”
     “Didn’t you even go?”
     “Oh, I made an appearance, and then gave my excusses.”
     As we made our way toward home, Bridget said, “I’ve got a couple of presents for you.”
     “Really?” I asked, wondering what she could be hinting at.
     “I talked it over with James, and he’s agreed to let me do some pro bono work.”
     “That’s nice.  I’m proud of you.”
     “Well, you’ll have to help me out.  I want you to look through the applications and decide which cases are the most deserving.”
     “I’d be happy to do that.”
     She hesitated and then said, “And Graham, I think it’s time we had a baby.”
     This brought me to a full stop.  All I could manage to say was, “Are you sure?”
     She laughed at how shocked I was, and then retorted, “I’m willing to have a little faith if you are.  It takes some faith to give life to a new person, you know.  Faith in the world.  Faith in tomorrow.”
     I responded quietly, and maybe with a modicum of despair, but not without tenderness and love, “Yes, I know.  Let’s go for it.”

Christian Deathwatch

by Gary Cottle

I come from a fundamentalist background, but I was never truly taken in by literalism. I was always much more concerned with my relationship with my relatives and how they would react to me being gay and my refusal to accept their ideology than I was with the fear that they might be right. Of course I considered what they had to say, especially when I was young, but fundamentalist Christianity never really resonated with me. And since I didn’t have a solid belief system when I went away to college, I was full of philosophical questions. So I studied religion and philosophy.

I took a religion class my freshman year, and I had to read an essay for that class that changed my perspective on religion forever. It was titled Deathwatch, and it was written by a liberal theologian who claimed that many modern-thinking Christians believed that Christianity was slowly dying. He was writing as a person of faith, so this was a matter of concern for him, and he assumed it would be a matter of concern for his readers. But he claimed there was nothing to be afraid of. He pointed out that since the beginning of human history, religions have come and gone. It’s a normal process of human development. If a particular religion does not serve the needs of the society in which it exists, it will fade away, and most likely a new mythology and tradition will spring up in its place.

Ever since then I have viewed religion as a kind of cultural inflection. It might be a vehicle for spiritual expression that can be passed down from one generation to the next, but the mythology should be viewed as symbolic. I came to believe that if there is any truth in religion, then the truth is actually greater than the religion, and those who concretize the mythology actually kill it because they rob it of it’s only value, which is symbolic. Taking mythology literally is like trying to read Shakespeare’s plays literally. Doing that would ruin the experience, right? Who cares if there was actually a boy and a girl named Romeo and Juliet? That’s hardly the point.

If a religion does not help people live their lives, then they’re going to lose interest in it. If you can’t relate the stories and the rituals to your life, then they become meaningless. But for whatever reason, there are those who insist on taking everything in the Christian Bible as literal fact. They like to think of themselves as the guardians of the faith, but by attacking any attempt to rethink the old myths, they will, in the long run, make their faith more and more irrelevant.

The pace of change in the modern world has accelerated, and we have to try to keep up. For some this may be hard, but their grumbling won’t hold back time even for a minute. History will march on with or without them. It is to our advantage that we stop advocating rigid gender roles. It is to our advantage that we stop insisting that certain races are superior to others. It’s not simply that this is right thing to do, but these changes in attitude serve our modern society. These changes help us survive. If you think women should stay home and cook, clean and pump out babies while her man is out in the field working, then you should have been born in the seventeenth century. But you’re living in the modern world. Here we have an overpopulation problem, and it would be disastrous if every woman spent her life raising six, seven, eight babies. And most work outside the home no longer requires a great deal of upper body strength. We need brainpower, and we can’t afford to dismiss someone because of how they dress, or what they have between their legs or who they like to have sex with. Our economy is global, so we need people who are willing to do business with those on the other side of the world and not get their panties in a bunch if they have to deal with someone with a different skin tone or a different religion. These are the realities of our modern life, and our rituals and belief systems need to reflect who we are now and help guide us through our modern world. If our religion tells us to turn out backs on the modern world, then what good is it? It’s not like we can go back in time.

Give Me That Old Time Religion
by anonymous

(Chorus) Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
That’s good enough for me

Shall I worship Zarathustra
just the way we use ta?
Be a Zarathustra Booster
What a thing to be!

(Chorus)

Or maybe Aphrodite
She’s beautiful but flighty
and doesn’t wear a nighty,
now there’s a sight to see.

(Chorus)

Or perhaps I’ll choose Apollo
a decent god to follow
I’d grovel and I’d wallow
Brought low on bended knee.

(Chorus)

"We'll go worship with the Druids,
And we'll drink fermented fluids,
And waltz naked through the woo-ids,
And that's good enough for me!"

(Chorus)

Elohim or Yahweh?
Allah or the highway?
I think I’ll just go my way.
That’s good enough for me.

(Chorus)

I Love What You Do To Me

I cherish my interest in beautiful young men. I adore them. I would love to become a photographer so that I could spend my life taking beautiful photographs of them like the one above. I wish I had the skill and talent of a Dutch master so that I could spend my life painting them. I find poetry in every curve of their bodies, in the color of their skin, eyes and hair, and in the timbre of their voices, in the way they laugh and smile, in the way they walk and run, and in the way they stand, sit and lay. I love them. And it doesn’t matter to me if I never find a single one who returns that love, I still love them. And that love fills my life with tenderness, warmth, passion, lust, meaning and purpose. Life would be very dull indeed without that love. I like what I like. I don’t question it. It is a gift to experience those feelings, even if the feelings aren’t returned. I’m sure those I’m not attracted to are worthy, whether they be men I don’t find particularly appealing or women. My lack of sexual and romantic interest in them is not a conscious rejection. Of course it might be easier for me if I found hairy, middle aged chubby guys to be sexy. It would be even easier if I found women sexy. But I like what I like. And if I go to my grave without ever having one of my beauties love me back, I will still appreciate on a deep and profound level my adoration for them.

To the Christianists who would have me pretend I'm someone I'm not

As for all this crap about how people should lead false lives, deny their feelings, try to fit in, and conform to the expectations of others... Soren Kierkegaard described the inability to be one's self as "the sickness unto death." Self-sacrifice is one thing, but if you hide who you really are, then that is dishonest, and healthy relationships are not founded on dishonesty. (Watch Brokeback Mountain if you think LGBT people who made the mistake of marrying the wrong person in their youth should just fake it for the sake of their spouses and children. It doesn't work.) And pretending to be someone you're not is a kind of spiritual death. Q: If you are not who you are, then who are you? A: Nobody.

S.K.'s thinking was a thousand times more profound than these jot and tittle fundamentalists. They interpret the Bible in light of their own prejudices, but because of their insistence that they are only following the literal Word of God, they can not accept that something of themselves exists in their beliefs. In their minds, to disagree with them is to disagree with God. And that is self-serving and prideful.

Socrates, another profound thinker, said, "I know nothing but of my own ignorance."

When I think of all the libraries in the world with all of their books that I will never read, filled with ideas that I'll never even know about much less understand, and how these ideas that are not mine and never will be are dwarfed when compared to the vastness of the universe we live in, it amazes me that there are people in this world who insist that they know the "mind" of God with an absolute certainty and are not at all ashamed to demand--not merely advise or voice their opinion--that others live their lives in a certain way because they speak for God.

Here's a comment from an insane I-know-the-mind-of-God Christianist I found on Amazon

 ‎"Here is another thought:

"God's intention for marriage was covenant. Gods way of sealing and confirming convenant is through blood. Read your Bible. Blood of the foreskin...(The covenant with Abraham) Blood of Jesus (the new convenant of salvation) AND THEN...the blood of a VIRGIN when she comes together with her husband for the first time. The way God designed a vagina. NOW he did not design an anus this way. There is no blood and covenant God has with homosexuals.

"Another thought on marriage. Marriage was designed as a symbol to show the relation and love between the groom (JESUS) and his bride( the church) We all agree that bride is FEMALE right.
"So how would God be pleased in gay marriage where we represent HIM married to HIMSELF!!

"Comon people! Wake UP AMERICA...and this was all sais in love:)"

_____________


Stupid, hateful people who come up with stupid, hateful ideas, and then they try to shove those ideas down everyone else's throats because they think their sick imaginations are a perfect reflection of "the mind of God."

This person can believe whatever he wants and live however he wants, but I want no part of his disgusting blood lust or his brutal understanding of love. Is this really his religion or is he telling a horror story?

If your god can't appreciate the love of LGBT people, then you can keep your god. 

If you can't see the love, beauty, kindness and dignity of LGBT people, then maybe you should put down your ideology and look at them a little harder.

Maybe that disgust you feel for people who are not harming you does not come from godliness.  Maybe it comes from your black heart.

What happened to you?

Homophobia and discrimination, what can we do about it?

Coming out is usually very helpful, both for the individual and for LGBTs as a group. Coming out allows people who have been fed a pack of lies about us to see for themselves that we are not the devils we are made out to be. But it’s not a good idea for everyone, especially for those who are still emotionally and financially dependent on unsupportive family members, and those who are still dealing with internalized homophobia or who are particularly vulnerable to the harsh judgment of others. I suspect that a lot of those who seek “ex-gay” therapy were outed before they were ready to defend themselves.

I think it’s also important to keep in mind that we’re not simply dealing with misconceptions that can easily be dispelled. We are under attack from a hate machine that is pumping out incendiary propaganda on a daily basis. Those who built the machine, and those who keep the machine going largely do not care about the truth, or reality or fact. They don’t care if they hurt us either. They have a larger political agenda, and we are merely pawns. A lot of people involved in keeping the hate machine going derive their livelihoods from the hate they spew. Many have their very identities wrapped up in what they’re doing to us. So who will they be and what will they do if they stop hating on us? If those are hard questions to answer, then it’s not likely they’re going to give up the fight anytime soon no matter if beloved family members and friends are in the way.

Ideological thinking is a powerful "drug." Many will simply ignore reality in order to continue to believe they have all the answers. Some people will kill for their ideology. History is full of examples of this. And many of those who are steeped in Christianist ideology will even throw away their own children before they look at the world from a different perspective. The alarming number of LGBT homeless youth is evidence of this.

It used to be that nearly every white family in the South with even a little money, they didn’t have to be rich, had a black maid. These black women often lived with the families they worked for. They cooked and cleaned and they were often the primary caregivers of the children in the house. They were often thought of as family. And of course these women were out, out, out. But still racist attitudes persisted. It took a lot more than whites knowing some black people they liked to change things.

When Christians Lie

by Gary Cottle

Last week “historian” David Barton claimed something rather remarkable on a radio program. He said that the leading pediatric association in America had sent letters to superintendents of nearly all school districts in the country warning them that anti-bullying programs which teach kids to respect LGBT people would cause some to become homosexual. He claimed that, according to this supposedly “leading pediatric association”, such programs planted a kind of gay seed in the minds of young people that could take root and flourish.

Well, it turns out that this “leading pediatric association” Barton referred to is the American College of Pediatricians (ACP), which should not be confused with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The difference between them is huge. The American Academy of Pediatrics has over 60,000 members. It is, in fact, the leading pediatric association in America. The American College of Pediatricians, on the other hand, has at most a few hundred members. And this group was formed for the purpose of advancing anti-gay Christianist beliefs. It is not the leading pediatric association in America, far from it. And their claims are not scientific but faith based even though they’re packaged in pseudoscientific language. The things they claim about gay people do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. Barton may as well have cited the American Telepathy Syndicate and tried to pass it off as AT&T.

So basically, Barton lied. I’m sure he would claim he didn’t, and that he just has a different opinion as to what the leading pediatric association in America is. And I’m sure many of his devotees would believe him. I, however, am not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I have seen the pattern, and not just with David Barton, but with the whole Christianist establishment. They have grown used to lying about us.

Here’s a list of some of their false claims:

--Gay people choose to be gay.
--Homosexuality is caused by a distant and/or hostile father.
--Homosexuality is caused by an overbearing mother.
--Gays were molested by other gays as children, and that turned them gay.
--Kids turn gay when they’re seduced into the lifestyle by gay adults.
--When kids hear about homosexuality in anything other than condemnatory terms, they might be tempted to turn gay.
--Gay kids aren’t bullied.
--More gay kids than straight kids commit suicide because they know being gay is wrong.
--Unhealthy activity engaged in by gay kids is proof that they have chosen or were seduced into a dangerous lifestyle.
--Most gays are promiscuous. Most have hundreds if not thousands of sex partners.
--Gays are far more likely to molest children.
--Gays want to seduce or indoctrinate children so they can increase their numbers.
--Most gays have HIV/AIDS.
--Gays have a shorter lifespan.
--Gays are more violent than straights.
--Gays are responsible for the Nazi Party.
--Gays are really not interested in marriage. They just want to subvert the institution of marriage and destory the family.
--Gays aren’t good parents.
--Gays want to destroy religious liberty and create a totally secular society.
--Gays want to destroy this country.
--Gays hate God.
--Gays can become straight if they want to.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

The propaganda war against LGBT people began a long time ago. As soon as LGBT Americans became more visible in our society back in the 1970’s, Christianists--Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant for example--began to ratchet up their anti-gay rhetoric. From the start, they didn’t rely on strictly Biblical arguments. They used to their advantage the common misconception that gay men seduced teenage boys into being gay. They claimed that LGBT Americans were out to upend the moral foundation of our society and that they were a threat to children.

When the medical establishment began moving away from the idea that homosexuality is a disease and research scientists began to explore the possibility that homosexuality is inborn, it was decided that Bible thumping and the reliance on old myths wouldn’t be enough. So Christianists began to manufacture “evidence”. To the uneducated and to those who want to believe the lies, this “evidence” sounds very convincing, but on closer inspection, the fake scientific arguments fall like a house of cards. The citations of so-called research coming from organizations such as NARTH and ACP and individuals such as George Rekers, Joseph Nicolosi, and Paul Cameron is very telling. NARTH, just as ACP, is not a mainstream organization. Their claims do not hold up to peer review. And men such as Rekers--who has advocate severe punishment for boys deemed effeminate--Nicolosi and Cameron are widely dismissed as kooks by scientists and medical professionals, but Christianists present them in such a manner that you’d think they were Nobel laureates.

When Christianists claim that they know gays can become straight, they do not rely on real science to back up this claim. Instead, they turn to the anecdotal testimony of people like Allen Chambers who has admitted that he’s still attracted to men and to Janet Boynes who has admitted that she was never exclusively lesbian.

And Christianists aren’t above manipulating and misrepresenting data from scientists doing legitimate research. For example, Sen. Al Franken recently caught Focus On The Family’s Thomas Minnery misrepresenting the facts on Capital Hill about gay parents.

Our society has underwent a paradigm shift in the last one hundred and fifty years. Women began demanding the right to vote, there was a relaxation of gender roles, and the concept of sexual orientation was introduced. The shift kicked into high gear in the 1960’s with the marketing of effective birth control, the Sexual Revolution, the modern Women’s Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement. How we as a society viewed sex, sexuality and gender roles changed rapidly. But the dissemination of accurate information didn’t always keep pace with changing times. Some caught on to the concept of sexual orientation quicker than others. And even now some older people may be honestly confused. But, in my opinion, younger people--say those under 50--who are still holding onto their homophobia don’t want to know the truth.

Christianists have decided to draw the line in the sand at homosexuality. Divorce, premarital sex, babies born to unwed mothers, sex and nudity in movies, magazines and on the internet, women refusing to be obedient to husbands, women earning their own money, unmarried couples living together, mixed marriages--both in terms of race and religion--are all common now. These things are generally viewed as simply being inescapable facts of life even by many of those who disapprove. But there are still enough bigots out there willing to think the worst of LGBT people to make scapegoating the gays profitable and politically advantageous.

So what are we to make of these Christian extremists, these Christianists who are spreading the lies? I think that our society has a tendency to let people slide if their unusual or unfounded beliefs are based on their faith. In many respects, this is a good thing. But the Christianists are hurting people. They are engaged in a sustained, deliberate, orchestrated, decades-long attack on LGBT people that has not only slowed the advance of LGBT rights, but the attacks have lead directly to instances of depression, suicide and homelessness among our youth. Most, Christian and non-Christian, view vicious and hurtful lies with disdain. Of course few of us are above telling lies. Many of us even occasionally tell vicious lies with the intention of hurting those we don’t like. But the Christianists have constructed a hate machine designed to pump out lies and distortions on a daily basis, and the machine has been in full swing for years. So I think it’s time we stop letting Christianists off the hook simply because they claim their ideas about homosexuality and gender stem from their religion. Even by the standards of their own religion, Christianists are involved in something that is despicable. They may claim to be Christian, they may claim to be righteous, but a lie is a lie.

　
　

Late For The Party--Chapter One

by Gary Cottle

     At forty-one, no one had ever told me they loved me, not in a romantic sense at least. Sure I had heard my mother say it, various other relatives, friends, but no boyfriend had ever looked at me and said, “Gary, I love you.” Most of the time I tried to believe that I was, in fact, lovable. I sometimes told myself I was merely unlucky in finding the right guy, but that wasn’t really true.

     It’s probably fair to say I did everything I could to make sure there was no love in my life. I steered away from making those connections that might lead in that direction, for I was, and am, terribly shy, morbidly shy. In fact the word “shy” just isn’t serious enough to connote my intense feelings of awkwardness, and my propensity to avoid meeting new people. Full on social phobia is the thing that kept me from having what others might term a “real life.” But I had managed to make do despite my affliction. I took care of the house I shared with my father--cooked, cleaned, mowed the grass. I had my books. I rented DVDs regularly from Blockbuster. I had my writing. And I had my internet friends. I was grateful for my quiet little life, and at forty-one, I was more happy, more satisfied than I had ever been. I had spent my youth in a state of suicidal depression. Psychotropic drugs, appointments with psychiatrists, and vacations in hospitals were the mainstays of my twenties, but I had survived by settling into an existence that was tailored down to fit my limitations.

     However, self-doubt, regret and loneliness were always there just below the monastic simplicity. For several years I had lived in relative contentment and peace, but the truce I had made with the demons of my younger self was fragile, and I knew from the beginning that this period of muted comfort would be short-lived.

     May 14, 2007 was the day I was told my father was going to die. The news was very grim, but I was, more or less, prepared for it. It was almost a relief to look at the situation directly and admit the obvious. The doctors had been telling me Dad would eventually return to our home in Fayetteville, West Virginia. They pretended he was going to get better, and for a while, I pretended to believe them. My father had been sick for years. He had his first heart attack in January of 1986, and there had been quite a number of close calls after that, but he had always managed to hang on and bounce back. However, he turned a corner the summer before he died. He became very tired. He stopped eating. He lost interest in nearly everything. He didn’t want to talk on the phone. He didn’t want to see friends or family. He stopped smiling. He lost nearly all traces of his legendary sense of humor.

     For quite a few months, I assumed he was depressed, and I thought the lack of exercise and lack of proper nutrition was making him listless. But sometime after the new year, the truth began to settle in. I realized that part of him was already gone, and I knew he wasn’t going to snap out of it. Right there in front of me, my dad was slowly packing it in. He spent most of his time sitting on the sofa staring blankly at the television, and he stopped looking at me or saying anything when I walked by him. When I spoke to him, his expression would remain blank and I generally got monosyllabic responses. His life was over. We were just waiting for his heart to stop.

     When I got home from the hospital on May 14, I was thankful our small ranch house was quiet and still. Even though I was alone in the house, I retreated to my room. It had been my refuge for seven years, and I needed to feel I was in my safe place so I could let the news sink in. I had seen one of my father’s doctors while at the hospital, and he had confirmed my father’s prognosis was poor. Dad was going to die, maybe in a matter of days, perhaps hours. I turned the air conditioner on in the window above my bed and let the chilly air wash over me and the mechanical buzz drown out all distractions. For a long while I thought of nothing other than the fact my father was never coming home again and that everything was about to change.

     Eventually I decided I was hungry and ate a modest dinner, and while eating, a feeling of urgency came to me. I had to do something. I had to finish a certain project before I could face what was about to happen to Dad. I needed to plant my vegetable garden. It was already getting late, and it would soon be dark, but I pressed ahead. I changed into my work clothes, locked the front door and went out the back.

     Planting a vegetable garden had become a yearly ritual. The idea first struck me soon after we moved into our house on Maple Avenue back in 2000. There was enough space in the backyard, and I had by then already developed an interest in gardening. Dad discouraged me as he usually did. He warned that the soil wasn’t rich enough. He said that the backyard was probably too rocky. He claimed that simply planting a garden would be backbreaking work, and then I would have to go to the trouble of watering and weeding it all summer. He was always like this. Any time I expressed an interest in something new, Dad would do his best to hold me back, always, from the time I was a small child.

     I don’t think he meant to crush my spirit. I think he was truly afraid I would be disappointed or hurt. He was one of those people who was always keenly aware of the pitfalls. He was a bit of a Chicken Little. Life had burned him a few times, and I guess he wanted to spare me, but hearing all those admonishments--admonishments that seemed to be coupled with a lack of belief in my abilities--for decades was disheartening. Even though I tried to resist his negativity, a large portion of his pessimism seeped in, and on top of that, my self-esteem was left in tatters. I became a reticent, reluctant person. My gut instincts resembled that of Macon Leary’s, the accidental tourist, and like Macon, I learned the hard way that you will end up getting hurt anyway even if you’re careful not to take risks. There is a price to be paid for shunning the various calls to adventure that come your way. If you play the game, you may lose, but you sure can’t win by sitting it out.

     Even though I grew up to be way too cautious and reluctant, by the time the ambition to plant a vegetable garden came over me, I had determined that I could ignore Dad’s dour attitude if I wanted--sometimes anyway, if I gave it everything I could--so I went ahead and tried my hand at raising a vegetable garden the summer we moved into our little ranch house on Maple Avenue. I was not in the best of health even though I was still a fairly young man then, but I wasn’t planning on plowing up forty acres. The lower part of the backyard was often soggy and wet, and several large shade trees down there blocked the sun. There was a small, one-car garage on one side of the lot, and the gas line went straight up the middle of the backyard. That left me with a 15x15 foot plot to work with. My vegetable garden would be about as big as a modest sized living room or a good sized bedroom. It was a manageable project, and I made a go of it. I grew several varieties of heirloom tomatoes--including Mr. Stripes--bell peppers, banana peppers, crookneck squash, a couple of rows of Silver Queen corn and Blue Lake green beans. I even grew a few cantaloupes and watermelons.

     The vegetable garden was a success from the start. My efforts, just as my efforts to raise flowers, gave me a tremendous sense of accomplishment, and this was something that had been lacking in my life. The vegetables and the beautiful flowers provided a sense of optimism. I came to know, in a deep and real sense, certain things did pay off if you planned ahead and worked steadily and faithfully toward your goal. It was a marvelous renunciation of an abiding odious belief that I didn’t have it in me to achieve anything worthwhile.

     I regularly spent hours working in the yard during the summer months. The work made my body stronger and I felt more fit than I had in my whole life. And because I was working with plants and using my muscles, I felt alive and part of nature. I learned to rejoice in feeling exhausted. I did what I had to do. Then I slumped lazily onto my garden bench which sat on a small porch along the side of the garage. I could survey the back yard while sitting on the bench, smell the freshly cut grass, look at the old maple trees, watch birds. And my vegetable garden was right there in front of me. The summer air was always warm and humid. It covered me like a blanket. I could hear lawn mowers in the distance buzzing, dogs barking, and the wisps of conversations coming from neighbors’ kitchens. Everything seemed right with the world when I sat there on that bench and recovered from my toils.

     By the first of July, I would have green tomatoes large enough to fry, a delicious treat, and then the tomatoes would ripen and other things would be ready to harvest and eat. Having fresh vegetables daily for several weeks in summer was like a celebration, and it just so happened that Dad enjoyed the vegetables more than I did. He was a West Virginia country boy, and back in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, back when he was young, almost everybody who lived in the country grew vegetables. Grocery stores were much smaller back then, and most people were poor and they didn’t have the money to buy a lot of stuff from the store anyway, so of course they grew many of their own vegetables. Dad had grown accustomed to farm fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions… So he missed them, and when I started bringing in goodies from our backyard, it was like I had restored a cherished part of his past he thought was gone for good. He would often go out into the garden and check on the progress of various individual vegetables, and he would beam with appreciation when it was time to pick them and eat them. Much to my surprise, I had managed to do something, at long last, that made my father proud of me.

     Everything was all set the evening of May 14, 2007. I had already scrapped away the sod and loosened the soil with a maddock that had been part of my father’s tool collection since I was a child. This was the backbreaking work my father told me about. But each year I managed to get it done. I had already mixed in 10-10-10 fertilizer and several bags of humus. And a couple of days prior, I had a neighbor take me to Southern States and a couple of local nurseries so I could buy seeds and seedlings. Now I had to dig the holes using my small spade and drop my babies into place. This meant I had to crawl along on my knees for a few hours, a task not quite as labor intensive as the sod removal with the maddock, but it wasn’t easy, and I was already tired. But I went on with it. I worked without taking any breaks. The sun soon went down and the only light I had came from the sconce by the backdoor, but I kept at it. When I was finished, I was exhausted, my knees ached, and I was covered in dirt. But my garden was planted. I was glad I had managed to get that chore done, but I was also sad. I was consciously aware of the fact that this would be the last time I would plant a vegetable garden at our house on Maple Avenue. In a sense, I came of age in that house even though I hadn’t moved into it until I was in my thirties. While living there, I found out that I was capable, I could do things, at least certain things, and I felt useful for the first time in my life. But my time there was about to end, and I was all too aware of this.

     It was about eleven o’clock when I limped back into the house. I was thirsty, I needed to pee, and of course I needed to shower. But I immediately noticed that the answering machine was flashing in the darkened living room. I hit play and heard someone who identify herself as my father’s nurse ask me to call her back as soon as possible. So I picked up the receiver, punched in the number and asked to speak to the woman who had called me. When she came on the line, she informed me that my father was having difficulty breathing and that I needed to return to the hospital at once.