no kids, no plants, no pets

That’s always been my motto…no kids, no plants, no pets. I said that to a relatively new friend of mine, and she said, “Oh, nothing that needs nurturing.” That gave me SERIOUS pause. Literally, I stopped in my tracks, my eyes got wide, and I thought, “Can that possibly be true”?

I have always thought it was more of a responsibility issue. I always knew that I didn’t have the patience to raise children, and both kids and pets mean that you have to be home a lot, which I am not. I like the idea of being able to walk out the door of my house, turn the key, and not come back for a month if I don’t want to. Yes, that gives me a lot of freedom, but you remember what Janis said about freedom. The plant thing is just because my housekeeping is sketchy enough without all those dead leaves dropping all over the place.

So what have I done with all that freedom? Usually gotten involved with women with kids and pets. Nearly every serious relationship I have been in has been with a mother. Is it because I am hoping that some of that maternal nurturing will be left over for me, or because it allows me the space, while they are spending quality time with their children, to roam around out there in the world? I am both an extrovert and a seven on the eneagram, so I need lots of external stimulation.

After some serious thought, I decided that my motto did not mean that I was unable to nurture. I bring my girlfriend coffee in bed every day, pack her lunch if we have leftovers, and drive her son all over town.

Last week, when I was out of town, her son and his friend wanted a ride to a party at 10:30 on Saturday nite, and when D. said no, they said, “If Judy were here, she’d take us.” I think my friends see me as someone who will drop everything and lend a helping hand, if possible. So all in all, I’d say I am a pretty good nurturer.

So what did I do this weekend when my girlfriend was away at witchcamp? Took care of her 15 year old son for five days straight, cooked and cleaned up, watered the plants on the rooftop garden, and made sure the cats were fed and let out (no litter boxes here, thank god).

Although I am thoroughly exhausted and don’t understand how women have survived child-rearing, I must say I do have a feeling of satisfaction. Per the magnet on the refrigerator, “I say, if the kids are still alive at five, I’ve done my job.”

No kids, no plants, no pets..... that's not exactly how it turned out. And I couldn't be happier.

my first pagan hand fasting

My girlfriend priestessed a lesbian, pagan hand fasting last weekend at a retreat center in Charles Town, West Virginia, on a former plantation. It was on the last full day of spiralheart witchcamp, so we took the red-eye, or the shut-eye, as the airlines like to call it, to Washington, D.C. and then drove to West Virginia.

I actually liked West Virginia, at least the part of it that we were in...the NE corner about 1 hour outside of D.C. where West Virgina, Virginia, and Maryland all meet. You can always judge a place by the reaction when I walk in to an all male, all white barber shop and sit down in the queue. I think shock sprinkled with southern hospitality trumped any potential hostility.

The ritual was beautiful, the bride was stunning, and the butch groom had dress clothes on for the first time in years. It was mighty powerful, as most of the people in the circle had been at the witchcamp for almost a week, and the energy in the octagonal wooden room was palpable.

In addition to D., there were at least five other participants. Four different women called in the directions and welcomed the ancestors, and a gay man welcomed our queer allies and reminded us that certain kinds of love are still illegal, at which point, my damp eyes gave way to sobs.

They jumped the broom on literally the same land where slaves had jumped the broom in unions that were also not recognized by the law, and the rings were passed on a purple ribbon around the circle of at least fifty people, and everyone gave a blessing and a wish to the couple.

After the ritual, D. came over and asked me how I liked the hand fasting. “ I want one”, I said. She laughed.

Our hotel was in Harpers Ferry, WV, where John Brown led a slave uprising in 1859 and seized the Federal Weapons Arsenal. The town is very old, especially by California standards, and had an old haunted hotel with a view of a gorge on the Potomac River. (Click on the other pics on that page to see how beatiful the gorge is.)

There was a great flea market one block away from our hotel (not the haunted one), and we got sick at some of the LOW prices on stuff that was way too big for us to schlepp home. All in all, the vibe in West Virginia felt good to me.

We spent the rest of the weekend in a suburb of DC with the witchcamp teachers and organizers, and I was privy to hours and hours (and hours and hours) of camp debrief and some deep pagan theological discussions. One of D’s friends asked me if I was pagan, and I said “No, but now that we have been together for over a year, I am familiar with all of the holidays.” D. asked me which one I liked best, and I said Brigid, because I like all the books of poetry on the altar and the Brigid poetry slam in blogosphere. Although for Beltane, the antique postcards of maypoles are also very beautiful. Oh yea, and the sex part is good too.

The changing of the seasons means the changing of the altars at the house, and as a visual learner, just noticing the changes in the altars teaches me the meaning of the holidays. This weekend opened up a lot of questions for me, mainly just about the nature of “the divine”.

As Marga Gomez would say, “Who has it ? Where can I get it?”

a desk of one's own

Well, my days as a serial monogamist are over. There has been a steady stream of dating, but I never met Ms. Forever. Until now. I recently asked my girlfriend to marry me, and she said yes. They say Capricorns are late bloomers, which may be true, as I didn’t get this relationship thing figured out till I was 52.

So after you ask a woman to marry you, and she says yes, there are some plans to be made. When we first started seeing each other, her 15 year old son was not too keen on the idea of his mother having a girlfriend. As matter of fact, I couldn’t even walk into the house when he was here. We have come a long way since then, but at the time, we were talking about not living together for four years-after her son went off to college.

As I have begun to spend more and more time at D’s house, we have bought some furniture and rugs together. A series of events this summer resulted in my staying here every night for over a month. We had been casually talking about my moving in around December or January. The other night, she said, “Why don’t you just move in now. Like October 1^st.”

It’s always challenging to move in to someone else’s house, but we have come to recognize our venn diagram of taste in furniture. She has even agreed to let me paint ONE room white…well, off white. I now have a desk and computer over here, so I have one little spot that’s all mine, and I can feel my tastes migrating back to antique oak (from the mid-century blond and clean lines I came to love when I was in LA).

Sometime in the next couple of years, there will be a large party of some kind to celebrate the fact that I am “the freak ball she wants to spend the rest of her life with.” The where and what are still very much up in the air, but one thing I do know, I want faerose to make the cake!

talk to me

We saw “Talk to Me” today, the movie with Don Cheadle about Petey Greene, an ex-con who became a radio disk jockey in the 60s in Washington, DC. WOW! It is a fabulous movie.

Why is it only playing in one movie theater in all of San Francisco? It is hard to believe in this day and age that a politically relevant movie about racism and the civil right movement is not playing on at least as many screens as Pirates of the Caribbean or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Maybe it is true that the primary market for the movie industry is 15 year old males. I’ve heard that for years, but it is hard to actually accept it. But what about all the art houses, like the Embarcadero? I read some on-line reviews, and several people mentioned the limited release of the film.

I sincerely hope that word of mouth turns this movie into a sleeper, and that it gets a wide release. The soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission.

A few things struck me. Petey Greene sat in the same high-back wicker throne that Huey Newton sat in. I wonder which came first. And when we got home, we were telling my girlfriend’s 15-year old son about the movie, and he asked, “What’s a disk jockey?”

It was one of those moments when you feel really old, but glad that you were around in the 60s. So go see it, dig the music, and make sure you bring plenty of Kleenex.

the accidental garage sale

Today I worked like a rented mule. Two men from the San Francisco Day Labor Program and I put 2,740 pounds of junk from my girlfriend’s garage and carriage house into a 14- foot rented truck and took it to the dump.

This task had been planned for a few weeks, so it was a bit serendipitous that a few days ago a flier was left on the door announcing a block-long garage sale. How could we say no?

A few words on the carriage house. It really is a stable in the back yard that actually housed a horse. There is a hay loft on the second floor. There must not be too many of these left in the Mission, because two gay men who stopped at the garage sale almost fainted when they caught a glimpse of it through the open garage door. They were members of the Victorian Alliance, and D. took them on a tour. They begged her not to tear it down or upgrade it, but to leave it in its state of “arrested decay”.

Because we were cleaning out the carriage house during the garage sale, everyone wanted to come back there, and people were literally buying things as I was unearthing them

We found some original tools from the early 1900s, but the best moment was when one woman asked, ”What about the stuff in the truck? Is that for sale”?, at which point she jumped up into the truck and started digging around. She took a few things, and I couldn’t stop marveling at the magic of it all.

After we cleaned out the carriage house and the truck was loaded, we started giving everything away for free. Seeing the look on people’s faces when we said “it’s all free” was payment enough.

We also did some rearranging and clearing in the house. Then we went and celebrated Bastille Day at a cute French restaurant in a tucked away corner of Nob Hill. We had a fabulous meal! When we left, I asked the waiter if he could call us a cab. He said it would probably take half an hour, and the best thing was to walk four blocks to California Street. Since we could hardly walk, that sounded like a horrible idea.

As we stood on the corner pondering our fate, a few full cabs went by. D. said maybe one would drop people off at our restaurant. Lo and behold, one stopped, let people out, and we hopped in. We were reaping the karmic rewards of our free garage sale.

Let’s see how the spirits rest tonite.

take me out to the ball game

I don’t really like baseball, but I do love AT&T Park, formerly known as SBC Park, formerly known as Pac Bell Park. It’s one of those new stadiums that never had a non-corporate name. Somehow the pre-corporate stadiums always manage to maintain their pre-sponsored name. “The Stick” will always be “the Stick”, no matter how many never-before heard of corporations buy the name.

So once or twice a year, I like to go to the park and sit up high and look at the bay and do nothing for three hours. Some people bring their laptops and “work from home”. I just like to sit there.

Last night I found myself at the ballpark at the Home Run Derby, part of All-Star Week. It was mostly through my own naiveté. I thought I was buying tickets for the All-Star Game for my girlfriend’s son.

He is the ultimate athlete. Through a friend, he met Jerry Rice, who said to him, “You look like a ball player.” His feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks. So it just didn’t seem right that the All-Star game would be in San Francisco for the first time in 23 years and he wouldn’t be there.

So I went on Craigslist and bought two tickets to the game, or what I thought was the game. Turns out they were for the Home Run Derby the night before. No wonder I thought I was getting such a good deal. You can imagine everyone’s disappointment when I realized that he didn’t have tickets to the Big Game. So after I calculated how much money I have saved by reaching 53 years of age and never having had children, I decided rather than selling the Derby tickets, I would go myself and get him another set of tickets to the All Star game, where he is right now.

So I invited my friend and colleague Craig, and off we went. If I had only followed my intuition and brought my overcoat(summer in San Francisco-you know how it is), the evening would have been perfect. At one point, I said that baseball would really be boring now, after seeing only home runs for three hours. Like having only dessert for dinner or eating an artichoke heart without having to eat all the leaves first. Home runs are exciting.

It’s been a mighty expensive week.

a tale of two cities

I just got back from New Orleans. I went as a tourist, plain and simple. I have one word to say after spending four nights and three days at a beautiful hotel in the French Quarter. GO!

The best thing you can do for New Orleans right now is go as a tourist. It is as safe- if not safer- as any another tropical tourist destination I've been to where you combine (a) white tourists with money and varying degrees of class consciousness with (b) the poor people who live there, and (c) heat and humidity. I was not asked for money once, which is not what I would say about Havana.

It brought home to me that two parts of a city can exist side-by-side, and the reality of the people who live there couldn’t be more disparate. That split existed in New Orleans before Katrina, but the gap is even wider and more apparent now. Aside from being shown on international television during "the storm", as they call it, almost two years later families are living in small FEMA trailers a few blocks outside of the French Quarter.

One whole section of the "projects" is shut down to protect the safety of the former residents, while identical projects on the other side of the freeway are occupied. The story, unconfirmed by me at this point, is that they want to put a golf course on the site of the public housing units that the tenants are fighting to save.

One story I read today said there they found burn marks, traces from bombs, on concrete sections of the levy that divers brought up.

This all couldn’t possibly be about a land grab to gentrify New Orleans? I had heard theories of this at the time, but even I couldn't go there. But seeing who has rebuilt and who hasn't makes it all so black and white, as they say. Why rebuild your house when it could happen again? The levees are not being improved, just patched.

On my way to the "swamp tour", I saw miles and miles of abandoned suburban, garden-style apartment complexes whose shells were basically intact. I saw blocks and blocks of wood-frame houses in an African-American neighborhood relatively close to the French Quarter that were boarded up, and what few houses were occupied had FEMA trailers parked in the front yard.

I am inspired to return as a vounteer, possibly with a project to rebuild green. But I say just go. Go shopping on Royal Street in the French Quarter and see those beautiful old trees and mansions in the Garden District and eat the best grits and fried oysters and oyster po' boys and crab meat cheesecake and the "you-name-it-it's good". And go hear jazz and support the musicians. They need us. For better or worse, tourism is their major industry. Who knows, you might even see a ghost. (hmmmmmm..i swear i tried to get that link to work about 12 times....that link just might be haunted)