I dream and gaze into a Sonoran sky,
where flames no longer lap at my tired tail,
and concrete runs smooth and cool,
and trusting birds fly slow and low,
and spirits rise high above tall trees,
and the constant chase has ended,
and the kitchen door is always open,
and I finally realize I’ve found home.
I try to be careful, but I’m not a superstitious swimmer.
Life flows cooler and bluer when I navigate the deep end.
Back and forth in thirteen feet, more washes over and around me.
I have more room to glide, more room to imagine, more room to dream.
In January 2014, the fog of grief occupied my brain and body. My mother had been gone one year, but I hadn’t yet found a constructive way to heal and process my grief.
Along the way, my husband Tom and therapist Valerie encouraged me to embark on a new path that would help me recapture my creative spirit.
I decided to leave my communication consulting career. Soon after, I began to write personal stories that mattered to me. Vivid recollections inspired and spawned by grief. Observations about love and loss in my family that helped me chart a new course and publish my first book, From Fertile Ground.
With time and reflection, I wrote four more books about the tender and whimsical ups and downs of childhood, the poignancy of leaving one home and surviving to find another, the adventures of creating a new life in the Arizona desert, and the poetry that has stirred inside me for thirty years and finally escaped to land on a page.
In small and large ways, my mother is in every one of those books and numerous essays. Yet she didn’t live long enough to read any of it, except one poem I gave her on Christmas Eve 2009.
I know now that writing about her in new and different ways has kept her wisdom and generosity alive and accessible for me.
July 26, 2024, would have been Helen F. Johnson’s 101st birthday. I knew I wanted to write about that, but until my fingers hit the keyboard, I wasn’t sure what I would say … because I thought I’d said it all before.
Maybe I haven’t.
How I loved and admired–and still remember–her tenacity. Her legacy of letters. Her devotion to family, friends, and the power of nature.
She would have loved the artistic life Tom and I have created in Arizona among the buttes and cacti. Writing stories, screening movies, singing songs, feeding stray cats.
Making new friends, while remembering old ones. Doing our best to guide and encourage my sons–her beloved grandsons–as they make their way toward the middle of their lives.
Cherishing each moment of our retirement years, without ever knowing where it will lead. Never wanting to know how or when it will end.
On July 26, 2012, we celebrated my mother’s eighty-ninth birthday together. It was her last.
Twelve years have passed. I’m much older, more appreciative and impatient. But also, wiser. Healthier. Gayer. Grayer. More contented with my own life and legacy. More worried about the world’s plight.
Grief is no longer my catalyst, my nemesis, my companion. Of course, I see it in the rearview mirror. But, with the passage of time, I discovered higher ground without the ghost of grief.
I no longer think of my mother every day. But when I do, I am grateful for the moments she and I shared–the gifts of memories and photographs I treasure–and the propensity to write about it.
All of this runs through our DNA.
I’m back home. Inside the furnace, better known as the Valley of the Sun.
I have begun to reemerge from an affirming, magical, inspiring five days of LGBTQ bonding and music with my chosen family at the 2024 GALA Festival in Minneapolis.
From July 10-14, 7,000 singers (representing nearly 300 choruses and presenters from around the world) inhabited the Twin Cities.
We owned the stages. Occupied the hotels. Flooded the restaurants, bars, shops and streets with gaiety and glee.
But it was more than the magnitude of this quadrennial event that has left an indelible imprint on my creativity and identity. It was the sense of joy, kindness, support, and human possibilities that dazzled me most.
At a time in this country and our world where so much hatred abounds, I was reminded that when love is present–when people truly come together to care for one another and cheer each other on–we can be that Bridge Over Troubled Water (one of the songs my Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus mates and I performed) of hope for one another.
This was my third GALA. I shared all of them with my husband Tom: 2012 and 2016 in Denver; 2024 in Minneapolis. Each one has nurtured me, deepened my sense of artistry and compassion, and reinforced the importance of rekindling/kindling old and new relationships.
In this 2024 installment, over a five-day period I was able to reconnect and celebrate with friends from Chicago (who perform with the Windy City Gay Chorus and the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus), Washington, Seattle, and–of course–Phoenix.
A friend and ex-colleague (from my past consulting career) who lives in the Minneapolis area, also surprised and delighted me by attending our performance on July 12. It was a treat seeing her again.
If you follow my blog, you know I have written five books. One is a book of poetry; the other four are memoirs or creative nonfiction. I’ve also written lyrics and librettos for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
Already, I have begun to scribble ideas in a spiral notebook that were sparked by my latest GALA experience. Who knows? This may lead me to a stream of poems or lyrics I have yet to compose.
For now, I will leave you with an idea and image that captured my attention on Saturday as Tom and I watched a series of choruses perform inside the auditorium of the Minneapolis Convention Center.
A few rows in front of us, a couple neither of us knows relaxed and leaned in. Away from the heat and fire in the world, they rested their heads against one another. They held each other. They listened to beautiful music in a safe space.
Many of us in the LGBTQ community have spent large portions of our lives searching for answers, longing for love and understanding.
The beauty of the GALA Festival is that–through the power of music, relationships, and community–we can move from longing to belonging.
Moving beyond this amazing and affirming five days in the upper Midwest, we will continue to raise our voices inside our choruses and be our authentic selves outside in the everyday world.
Truly, we are much more than a large collection of singers. Together, we represent a movement of kind, talented, and diverse humans with the power to change hearts, minds, and attitudes.
The smaller one opened the door for me this morning … sometimes it’s the taller one. That made me happy … they were happy, too … I needed to feel the cool tile on my parched paws.
I was hungry … I didn’t catch a bird or a rat yesterday. Today I twirled around the taller one’s legs … the smaller one’s legs, too. They gave me something fishy and yummy … a little crunchy, too.
The taller one watched me as I ate … said something about a gold-framed mirror (I think) from his mom (I think)? He was happy he and the smaller one kept it when they came here 7 years ago … I guess, like me, they came from some other place.
They were opening lots of bottles … taking lots of pills … washing them down with water … their voices were scratchy … I think the smaller one and the taller one like each other.
I heard the taller one say that he was happy with the success (I think) of his concerts (I think) … but that it sucks (I think) that both of them (the taller one and smaller one) have to fight off Covid (I think) … again.
Hmmm, what is Covid?
The smaller one said it was like having a vacation (I think) at home together … that doesn’t sound so bad.
The smaller one and the taller one are nice to me every morning … and they keep feeding me. So, I want them to always be here when I stretch out on their mat … or under their bench while I eye the birds.
I want them … the smaller one and the taller one … to never go away.
I will keep coming back as long as they … the smaller one and the taller one … are here to rub my back and feed me.
Don’t look at me. It wasn’t my fault.
I have no idea what happened.
Sure, I’m a free spirit with time to kill
and now a better view of the butte,
but you wouldn’t dare blame me.
I’m not unhinged … not in this life.
I last visited my father’s grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in September 2021.
If there is such a thing as beauty to behold in a final resting place for those who served, it exists there just south of St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi River–fourteen hundred miles east of where I live and write today.
On this Memorial Day, I remember Dad–and the thousands of fallen soldiers gathered around him–with twelve lines I wrote on August 27, 1996 … almost three years after he died.
This poem and forty-one others appear in my book A Path I Might Have Missed.
***
The Soldier on the Hill
I talked with the soldier on the hill today.
We sat, we cried, we laughed, we prayed.
The bells rang true, the trees stood free.
A breeze swept past to welcome me.
Shadows filled the landscape then.
Tempers rose without his pen.
Snowflakes fell, the grass turned green.
All without a change of scene.
Now the soldier rests with them,
Hand-in-hand–all blessed again.
They greet another trailing soul.
Who makes the journey past the knoll.
What will happen, when our last
parade of Palo Verde petals
paint the blue sky yellow?
Beyond the frantic flight
of ever-fluttering pages,
who will pause to remember
what we did, what we saw,
what we knew, what we missed,
who we loved and carried forward,
who we–proud and bold–held,
before the blossoms fell?
May casts a quiet spell of desert sensibility.
Brief morning showers spawn feline revelry.
Lonely pomegranates hang ready to ripen.
Roses, hibiscus, and bougainvillea vie nearby.
Shiny lizards adorn loveseats and walkways.
Still waters wait for summer waves to come.
Reflecting and writing meld in my brain. They often occur — in a blur — before I touch my keyboard.
Yesterday, I witnessed a graduation celebration, one table over in an outdoor cafe in Tempe, Arizona.
Today, it has morphed and merged with a blurry family photo, a 1979 memory in Columbia, Missouri.
Graduation day is just the beginning, the departure leading to unknown learnings and destinations.
We can’t really know where we will land, who we will love, or what we will do, until we make our way.
It is less about what we do, more about how we do it and the contributions we make along our journey.
That’s what determines who we become, what we recount decades later miles from where we began.
Mark Johnson Stories 