Sharing the January Landscape

There are men whose sadness has lain open before me.

Inexplicably, over the years I have been lured less frequently by hearty, easy laughter and more often by the silent wonder with which some men have watched their own disappointment and loss. I pride myself that I can name it when I see it in others – the landscape their eyes follow, the story they start to tell and then stop.

I become bored by the party atmosphere when it covers over the paths by which individuals got there. I would prefer the spot before the fireplace, the sidewalk leading out into the night. Few imaginings hold me like the snow that might fall upon me and another man cleaning our cars together, our eyes catching the gestures by which we each sweep off the evidence of the hours we spent away from them.

I have driven away into the moods of a January day so many times. I have wanted the strange pleasure of the phone call, the message that comes from another corner where a man finds he regrets his winter a little less for sharing it.

When Christmas Hits

It is not easy to predict when Christmas will hit each year.

Those of us intent on decorating a living space may expect something to strike home when we sit with our tree for the first time. Or for the last time.

Those of us who buy gifts may await some decisive shiver of satisfaction at our final taut tug on a bow or at the look on the face of the person who gets to loosen it.

Those of us who like to sing with others may know the favorite carols without guessing which verse will catch in our throat at that telling point in the season.

But we expect Christmas to hit.

That is why many of us spend time, spend money, spend creative energy in the weeks of December. We do not want to miss it – whatever precisely that something might be this year.

Some promise to ourselves will get kept.

Some vision of our lives will move into greater focus.

Some part of our heart will feel alive in a way that we had not known we needed.

What comes down faster – snowflakes in the light of the street lamp in front of my apartment this evening? Or the words with which I can begin to say thank you?

Oh, the snowflakes, the snowflakes.

Visual Adventures

Although I spend a significant part of every day with my eyes closed in sleep, I do have some choices to make about what my eyes do the remaining sixteen hours. I say I have "some" choices because I am not totally free on my commute to and from work. I am required then to “keep my eyes on the road” – usually the same road I travel four other days of the week. Likewise, the earliest minutes of my day work best if I watch my step even on routine travels from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and the other rooms in the apartment.

There are things I have to do in a day, places I normally need to go, and I am limited in the scope I can give myself for visual adventures.

The way my home looks – isn’t that an interesting way to talk about what I get to look at in my home? The furnishings of my home, the hangings on my walls do not “look” at me or at anything else, do they? I can muse, however, over what other people might think or what comments they might make if they were the ones looking at a framed photograph I have hung over a work area I arranged in a backroom.

That photograph and its framing resulted from a gamble I made six years ago. I was making choices then about another set of rooms where I would begin single life again after more than two decades with a partner. The particular wall hanging about which I am speaking – a “found object,” a vintage snapshot of a family posing for a casual picture in their side yard – did not have to pass muster, so to speak, with anyone else living daily in its presence.

That photograph is one of the visual adventures I safeguard for my occasional pleasure these days. I do not have to look at it, but something I can only call love makes me attend to the adventure that someone else had with a camera one day decades and decades ago. I love the ease of the people gathered before that camera, their ease with one another and their ease with themselves. Nothing about the wooden fence along which they stand suggests a home that others would automatically envy.

My attraction to that picture is one of the loves with which I happily choose to surround myself these days.

White Roses

It is a preference of mine at this time of the year to bring roses into the apartment. They are so clearly alive.

There is a softness to the curves by which they loosen, moving from tightly enclosed bud into blossom.

The white makes the green look greener. When I have branches of pine or fir to tuck around the white roses, something complicated occurs. Some collaboration between the ways nature grows and matures -- green needle, white petal -- seems a human thing to contemplate.

A shrine emerges to the heart. Something very personal, very individual -- a question feels posed for which the heart tries to be ready, winter or no.

The Full Story of Our Hearts

Last night I took from the shelves a book that I had been given in 1978. The man I am living with these days searched out his copy of the same book.

At the midpoint of Advent, I had the occasion for the first time to pray with him in our living room the Evening Prayer for Gaudete Sunday.

Richard and I had spent our Sunday afternoon in a movie theatre. Arriving early for a screening of The Imitation Game, we had found seats in a still empty theatre and eaten an easy lunch that we picked up on our way there. Each of us had brought an expectation of finding entertainment in the film about Alan Turing, British World War II code breaker. I am sure we did not expect to emerge from the theatre as moved as we finally were by the story of a brilliant man whose same-sex attractions had forced on him great loneliness and – eventually – criminal charges.

Both Richard and I at one time in our twenties had studied for the priesthood. Exiting formation programs well shy of ordination, we had each of us devoted ourselves in later years to teaching religion. We each of us were cautious about who in our separate schools would know the full story of our hearts.

Briefly last night I stepped back into the words of an old school of prayer. It was not reverie I encountered but words that I had read before. It was not happenstance that I had read them before. When a tradition has trained you in a rotation of scripture, you are not surprised to meet yourself again in this way. December – Advent – a familiar set of psalms and canticles and antiphons awaits you each year if you are prone to pick up a breviary.

For some, Christmas remains stubbornly and irrepressibly theological.

I do not mean to suggest the kind of debate that occasionally erupts when denominations or traditions meet. Or do not meet.

I do not mean angels in disguise descending into the midst of troubled families in Christmas movies and television specials.

Christmas is theological because it expects no surprise at the prospect of a God who takes serious who we all might possibly be.

Something like Christmas gets Richard and me thinking afresh about our true selves.

If I Had the Time

If I had the time, I would sift through all the boxes and shelves at home where it is likely that I have stored Christmas stuff in years past. I would sit on the floor and create piles – gift bags and rolls of wrapping paper, ribbon and ornaments, snowflake-shaped punchers and gift tags. I know where to find envelopes with the remainders of card designs that I once selected – sometimes created – to convey various years’ greetings.

If I had the time, I would scroll through the camera roll on my iPhone for images of Christmas trees and crèche sets. Advent wreaths and Christmas cacti and the occasional roses from men I would have been dating in December are recorded there as well. Then I would go through the desktop at work and the laptop at home and hunt for jpeg’s of various holiday foods – fruit cake and clementines and peanut butter cookies and the one-time Christmas dinner at the dining-room table in a house where I used to live.

If I had the time, I would re-read all the posts on Writing Cabin that touch on the weeks leading up to December 25 each year. I would page through journals and notebooks in which I have attempted to capture the mood of certain Christmases. I would comb the pages of prayer books for cards that I had used as bookmarkers and on which I may have written an intention or recorded an inspiration from Advent meditations.

If I had the time, I would let my mind travel casually through the memories – car rides past the stone houses of a Pennsylvania countryside on Christmas Eve, meat dressing mixing with sweet-potato casserole on the edge of a dinner plate, the scratches on an LP of carols sung by "60 French Girls."

So what makes a claim on me this final month of the year?

A part of me just needs to write and find out.

The Season Comes to Writing Cabin

Rocking Chair

It started with the arrival last week of a rocking chair, the kind that marks a milestone in the commitment of an employee to an educational institution. We had talked for a couple of months about the chair; Richard had secured its safety in the home of friends with whom he had been living before he and I met this past winter. The addition of the rocker to the furnishings in my television room would create still one more space in the apartment where Richard and I could be comfortable in the other’s company.

For someone who did not count himself familiar with most current programming, the so-called television room had also become something of a catch-all for books and media and framed photos and a vase from Venice and gift bookends in the shape of monks reading. Recently my parents’ cedar chest had appeared, relocated from the home of a niece nervous for the safety of her toddlers; its surface made an impromptu home for an old-style boom box and stacks of CDs that would not yet have been returned to their shelf in the room’s bookcase. A towel covered the seat of my overstuffed recliner and allowed the cat another place to sleep when Richard hovered too near her usual haunts in the apartment.

Until the television room became a space that we could share, the gentle clutter of the room made no pressing claim on my attention. That situation changed as soon as I sat in Richard’s rocker last week and saw the room from a perspective that had not previously been accessible. The balance of the room changed. What I could see changed. What I wanted to see changed.

And then something significant happened: what I did not want to see became apparent.

So Saturday came with its fall sunshine and I began the cleaning. I could not explain to Richard what I expected the room to look like by day’s end, and so I gently declined his offers of help. The excitement of the task before me was a subtle one that I did not know how to share without losing its guidance.

For example, I had not foreseen the bucket of hot water and Lysol that I would need. With an old tshirt submerged in the soapy water and then wrung out, I wiped down the floor – under the bookcase, under the cedar chest, under the recliner. The sunlit air in the room smelled different when long months of dust disappeared.

I shifted stacks of CDs – both mine and Richard’s – and moved piles of books from one room to another.

I sprayed Endust on a paper towel and wiped picture frames clean. The faces of friends and family were clearer looking out at me from photographs behind the glass.

Even that distant time in Venice felt closer once the vase got some attention.

By day’s end, I was sitting in the rocker and looking over at Richard in the recliner as he read aloud to me from a library book. The lamp by the recliner was bright. The cat must have found the whole situation too inviting and jumped onto the recliner and settled into a warm space next to Richard.

I liked what I saw of the day’s efforts.

Back Bay Ministry

He was a handsome man.

Boston Back Bay. A December evening in the late 1970s.

Barely four months transplanted to New England, I had not yet been inside any of the brownstones that make up that first neighborhood across the Charles River from Cambridge. There was a somber, old-fashioned elegance about the entrance hall into which I was buzzed.

Truth be told, I do not retain the clearest memories of the evening. I know some of what happened. I know there was an apartment-sized Christmas tree in the process of being decorated. I know there was a dinner that he had prepared for the two of us. There was wine.

He was a handsome man. Walking around his rooms in stocking feet, he seemed at ease with a guest visiting for the first time. I will admit to having been taken aback by his invitation at first. We had been part of a conversation at a divinity school residence in Cambridge. Recently ordained, he was living alone now and pursuing the life of a Harvard graduate student.

It makes sense that I would have ended up talking to him over dinner about my being gay. How being gay affected the landscape of my spiritual life was a topic I longed to open up before people. New England had felt an ideal place to do that in the late 1970s, and this man had seemed potentially an ideal listener to secure.

Earlier this week I saw a name like his online. Having hardly thought about him since that winter meal we shared in his Back Bay apartment, I got to wondering what his life had become. I wondered whether I could find out. I had heard long ago that he was no longer in orders.

And it happened. His name came back to me. The search engines worked. I scrolled the images of a man in his sixties busy about his professional life in another part of the country. His life in ministry at one time had helped me feel his presence as a brotherly and welcoming one.

Here is that brief episode of memory by which I greet a younger me on the receiving end of the kind of care that bears remembering.

Fall Cemetery in New England