For the first thirty years, my life was a variation of the expected norm. I grew up thinking, as kids do, that when I became an adult, my life would be like all the adults I knew, pretty much just like my parents.
I was Boston Irish Catholic living in a new growing suburb of Boston with a lot of other Boston Irish Catholics who moved there after the Second World War to live the life they had fought for, and that meant attending an elementary school run by nuns at a parish where being an altar boy was an expectations, while joining the parish sponsored boy scout troop was optional, and going to all the weddings, first Communions, Baptisms either as an attendee, relative, or the altar boy who was thanked for serving at the ceremony with an invitation to any number of gatherings that followed which meant free eats.
Wanting to become a priest was not an uncommon desire for kids like me and, although in this day and age it would appear to be as medieval as it was but, at the time, just part of the Catholic Church, I entered a high school seminary like I was living in a less strict monastery than others, got a great education, decided it wasn’t for me, and left to attend college so I could get a good job, get married, buy a house, have kids, eventually retire, have grand kids, and die of old age. Basically, I would live a life I had seen modeled, that of all the adults around me.
I did the responsible thing of getting a degree, two actually, teaching school, singing in the church choir, buying a house, being active in my community, and hoping to find a mate.
Beneath it all, however, there was something that was not making it all click, a part of me whose signs I had not seen because they had been so out of place and didn’t match the models. They were on the peripheries when they should have been in the middle.
While attempting the assumed middleclass life I assumed I was destined for, I slowly began to accept myself as who I really was, although what that actually meant was yet to be learned, and at the age of thirty I gave up on what I was trying just too hard to be and started to learn who I really was. I have to admit, and there are probably many who can attest, I did my best, but often learned the wrong thing, missed the lesson or the chance to learn it, and stumbled through my gestation to the Gay man I would finally get a grasp on.
I was clumsy in my initial Gayness and kept some the clumsiness in spite of attempts to be otherwise.
Suffice it to say, I could not shake the hold on me that the middleclass model had but modified it attempting to fit it into the life of the me I was meeting. Sometimes it was successful. Sometimes it just mucked things all up. I had no mentors or experience. I was in the burbs. I was, as I finally realized, in the closet. Sometimes the attempt to meld two world together, the one I grew up in and the one newly entered, assuming it was easy and possible, was a disaster with a good bit of embarrassment.
In my chrysalis process I went through a relationship that died for a variety of reasons which in retrospect could not really be laid at anyone’s feet but was an inevitable evolution that, no matter what, would have happened either with a bang or whimper, but it would have ended.
It was thirty years ago today, 1/12/1992, that I put on my rollerblades and skated down to the bike path on the beach as I did on most days after work, heading for the parking lot across the street from the Gay bar at that end of town because, although full at night with parked and cruising cars, during the day it was usually empty leaving the well-worn pavement available for use. I was no expert on the sport, but I had developed the skills to be able to dance along to the music on my Walkman and show off for those lounging on the wall that kept the beach sand off the lot.
I was there enough to be known, if not by name, by being the guy doing the skating at that time of day on most days.
My ex, with whom I had attempted to reunite then accepted a simple and awkward friendship until he met someone else under somewhat hurtful circumstances for which there had been bits of foreshadowing and missed cues, had called me asking if I had a frying pan he could borrow. He was having the new person over By medical literature, antibiotics cialis prescriptions can harm pancreas in two ways. A penis health creme containing vitamins and minerals, order sildenafil online as well as tissue-building amino acids and natural moisturizers, can go a long way toward improving the overall look of your hair. 6. The dose can be titrated up to 20mg cialis generika or down to 2.5mg based on efficacy and extremely low on side effects. Some way of life changes might treat or anticipate Impotence: Limit the admission of liquor, grape juice and grapefruits alongside cialis without prescription . and found that what he planned to cook called for two frying pans.
I am not a good cook, and I can kill one of those forever pans with totally non-stick surfaces after very little use, so letting anyone borrow one was out of the question for their own safety.
Along with my flawless performance before those who I like to imagine were an enthralled audience, an image I could hold as, whenever I did some really fancy footwork, jump, or spin, I would get some scattered applause, I was also thinking of the frying pan.
I could just keep on skating and life would go on much as it had been, or I could go buy a frying pan, appear at my ex’s door, and present it to him at which point he would see what a wonderful guy I was to overcome any resentment as to for whom the meal was being prepared and was magnanimous to help make his important night a success.
Who wouldn’t fall back in love with that person?
What I did not know at the time was how the decision I made to not buy the frying pan, for better, worse, or an interesting mixture of both at times, would bring to a total close my life and all that was connected to it as it had been up to that point and begin a time when I could live without preconceptions and expectations. I could attempt to do things that those who knew the previous me, as they had a hand in molding it, would hold me from doing because, “That’s not you.” I could push limits and find out just what I was capable of without limits set by others, perhaps others who were happy in a status quo life.
It was a really rough start thirty years ago, but when I got a handle on it, I could be the person I wanted to be because I was the person that I knew I was, and fail or succeed, the measure would be on what I had done or failed to do not on how close I did or not live up to other people’s expectations.
Thirty years ago, when I was reborn, I didn’t find Jesus, I found me and I have been allowed to be me and let the real me grow, sometimes for the good, sometimes the occasional oopsie.
It was thirty years of unexpected events from the overly mundane to the totally spectacular and meeting people in a variety of places who could be labelled the same.
It has been thirty years of me being me.
Two roads did, indeed, diverge in a yellow wood.
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