Post 108 - June 27, 2020

Day 108…

Our niece graduated from High School yesterday in upstate New York. We couldn’t be there because only immediate family were allowed to be present at the actual ceremony. The rest of us were all meant to be able to watch it via streaming on YouTube.

Of course, something screwed up and the feed didn’t work. We got a scattered bit of the Star-Spangled Banner at the very beginning and then the picture froze. All of us from different places in the country were all frantically texting each other. The live stream never recovered. Somebody though, taped it so we should all get to watch it later on. Michael’s sister sent us photos of the graduate and her bf. At the end of the ceremony, there was a parade through the town with all of the graduates in their separate cars. It looks like they all had fun.

It’s tempting, I think, to take the idea of our lives being on pause too literally. Our lives aren’t on pause. It’s just that some of the things that we usually do to fill them have stopped for the moment.

That was our niece’s High School graduation. She’s not going to get another one when the virus recedes. That was pretty much it. It wasn’t a normal graduation ceremony, but it was pretty memorable. I’m going to guess that forty years from now she will remember it a bit better than I can remember mine, now.

My Dad graduated from High School in 1941. In December of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and World War II began.

He went into basic training and was eventually shipped overseas to Europe. He stayed there through the end of the war, fighting in the last major counter-offensive launched by the Germans called the Battle of the Bulge. At the end of the war, his infantry division was one of the first to go into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

That whole journey started for my Dad when he was the same age our niece is now. He didn’t plan it. It just happened to him. What he went through in the Army while the normal course of his life was on hold, and as horrific as some parts of it were, in some way became the defining experience of his life. He met people from other parts of the country who became life-long friends. He told stories about them and about what had happened to him, right up until his passing sixty some odd years later.

In the time I’ve spent in Japan, I have been able to visit both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the cities that were obliterated by our atomic bombs. In both places, I thought about my father who would have been fascinated by everything that I saw and did there. He never stopped reading about the war or watching movies about it. Going to Europe at 19 years old instilled in him a life-long love of traveling that he passed down to both of his kids.

When the war was over, he returned to the US and finally, after the seemingly endless delay, went to college. He majored in Chemistry. He got a job writing for a chemical magazine. The magazine made him their European correspondent. Much to his delight, he was posted in London where he met my mother.

Downtown, in part of the park surrounding City Hall, an occupy Wall Street kind of tent city has sprung up. The young people living in the enclave are advocating for Police reform. They are doing everything that they can to push the “defund the NYPD” agenda forward. They want $1 billion of the proposed annual budget slated to go towards the Police Department to, instead, be siphoned off to other social services. They believe that those social service organizations are far better equipped to deal with some of the issues the Police are currently in charge of.

I was down there yesterday taking some pictures and looking around when I got roped into moving supplies into the food area. Food and medical supplies have been donated and areas for them have been set up. There are social workers onsite who seem to be coordinating the organization and flow. Hammocks have been strung up on fences and between some of the park’s trees.

Most of the people there look around college age to me. The combination of the economic shut-down and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations have created the time and space and spark for these young adults to get energized and focused. Will they still feel the same way when this is over? Who knows? Some may eventually drift away, but for some of them, this could be the beginning of what they do for the rest of their lives.

The whole idea that we what we are currently living through is a time that, at some point, will be over, is something that I think we have to start moving beyond.

When the AIDS crisis hit us in the early 1980’s, I was about the same age as my Dad was during the war and just a year or two older than my niece is now. At the time I took it as a cruel joke being played only against me. Just as I was starting to get confident enough to start living inside my gay skin, to do so meant a potential death sentence. I spent years waiting for it to be over. Well, it’s still not over. As the years have passed, however, I, along with everybody else, have figured out how to live another way.

Friends of mine, who contracted the virus, were obviously far more impacted than I was. Some died, but some survived. And fought. Today, forty years later, they are still fighting and living with it. That “pause” in all of our sexual lives, in many ways, has made us the people that we are today. Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS started in much the same place that the enclave down at City Hall finds itself. Desperation. Something HAD to change. Did the people who started it think that it would turn into their life’s work? I sincerely doubt it, but it did. Without exaggeration, in the last forty years BC/EFA has raised and distributed HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars impacting more lives than there are starfish in the sea. Careers were made. Life-long causes were taken up.

The attention that the gay community, commanded, and DEmanded, during that time is one of the main reasons that, today, I am sitting in my living room writing this next to my husband. In the early 1980’s, the idea that someday I would ever be able to marry another man was utter science fiction and fantasy. It would never happen.

We have, throughout our collective history, been continually beset upon by wars, plagues and uprisings. The coronavirus is just the latest in an infinite series that will continue long after this particular virus has been either dealt with or absorbed.

Rather than thinking of it as a disaster sent from above to end our world, maybe it is better to just step back from it and see it for what it actually is.

Plot. 

Isn’t COVID-19 just the next bend in our story?

Our lives aren’t on hold. Parts of our lifestyles might be, but our lives are chugging forward as lives are wont to do.

Our niece’s strange quarantine graduation is one of the things that is going to change the course of her life. Maybe not radically, but, at the very least, she now has a story to tell.

Yesterday, Michael and I had a socially distant picnic dinner in the park with a couple of people that we have sort of formed a bubble with over the past few weeks. We all have portable chairs now. We got ours in P-town last year for the beach. They’ve been sitting in our storeage unit gathering dust. They are perfect for the park. I made us some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to bring using some of the sour dough bread that Michael’s been baking. We brought some wine in a thermos.

All of us in our little group are theatre people. None of us are realistically likely to be going back to work until the spring at the very earliest. Before this, I would never have described us as the kind of people who would ever picnic in the park. Michael bake? Really? Times change.

Next spring’s a very long time from now. A lot more of our life’s plot is going to unfold on our way to getting there. When we do finally get there, the whole industry confronting us is going to likely be quite different from the one we closed three months ago.

It’s all about the journey. It always has been.

We shouldn’t ignore it and wait for it to end. We should enjoy the ride and take it all in because we aren’t coming back this way again.

And buckle up.

And… wear a flipping mask.