My husband is an excellent cook. He prepares our dinners with love and panache. I am more the pancake-and-egg guy in our relationship. Breakfasts are my thing.
Occasionally, we switch things up. Today is one of those days.
Our friend Jeremy has invited us to his Thanksgiving potluck this evening … a low-key gathering with friends and a few in his family.
Yesterday, I decided I would make a pot of chicken chili for Jeremy’s Friendsgiving today. It is simmering in our slow cooker as I write this. It’s a delicious, easy, non-traditional dish.
I haven’t made it in years, but the timing is right. The weather is cooler. I want to prepare something meaningful to share with our friend, who is managing his way on the road of life through a monumental year of personal growth mixed with significant detours and setbacks.
As background, Jeremy came out to his friends, family, and the world a little over a year ago. He and his wife are no longer a couple, but they continue to be loving parents to all five of their children. It’s impressive that even during this period of uncertainty they have maintained a respectful relationship.
I know fatherhood is important to Jeremy. He loves and supports his children. I remember how difficult it was for me to balance my fatherhood, demanding career, and “gay awakening” thirty years ago. I suspect it is the same in this moment for Jeremy.
All of this leads me back to this recipe for chicken chili. In the early 1990s, after Jean and I divorced, I felt broken–broke, too–and I existed in a fog, especially in the colder months.
My sons spent half their time with me in my tiny apartment. I needed to find inexpensive, flavorful dishes, which I could prepare for dinner for Nick, Kirk, and me. To feed and nourish us. To keep us close.
This chicken chili recipe is one I made frequently thirty years ago. Not so much lately. But it makes perfect sense to resurrect it today. To bridge the past of balancing my gay identity and single fatherhood with the present of Jeremy’s.
So, I am making chicken chili now for about a dozen (Jeremy’s supportive friends and a few of his children) who will gather on a coolish and likely rainy Saturday evening in the desert.
Together we will give thanks for friendships … the potluck of life that nourishes us and allows us to learn and grow during good times and bad.
On August 25, 1975–fifty years, five decades, twenty-five pounds thinner, and half a century ago–I was a long-haired, idealistic college freshman hustling across campus in the rain.
It was my first day of classes at the University of Missouri in Columbia. (My mother took this photo during college break a year later.)
This naive, relatively-shy-but-often-fun-and-exuberant eighteen-year-old boy (he was not yet a young man but was an aspiring pre-journalism major) knew little about the world or himself.
But he was determined to find his way one hundred-and-twenty-five miles away from his parents and childhood home in the St. Louis suburbs.
Mom and Dad paid for my tuition, books, and room and board in Hatch Hall on campus. I vaguely recall the total bill was less than one thousand dollars per semester.
Looking back, I think I may have spent half that amount on frivolous expenses like pizza, sub sandwiches, and beer.
That money came out of my pocket. From what I earned and saved during the summer of ’75 as a rollercoaster operator at Six Flags. But I could always count on care packages and frequent small checks, which Mom sent in the mail.
John was my roommate freshman year on the fifth floor of Hatch Hall. We were good buddies, close friends from the late 1960s when we were junior high classmates.
Though we had different career aspirations which dictated non-intersecting class schedules (John was pre-med), we were inseparable in many ways from August 1975 until May 1976.
There wasn’t much to our room. Minimal clothes. Primitive, uncomfortable desks and chairs. Single beds and random posters on opposite walls.
John brought his stereo, turntable and speakers. I brought a small black-and-white TV and popcorn popper. I recall us convincing our parents to split the cost of a mini fridge.
Wearing tube socks and denim cutoffs like all the other guys, we tossed Frisbees in the quad under the columns and played tennis across the street from our dorm. Through it all, we made friends of all sorts who lived up and down our hall and across campus.
After a full week of mostly boring, required classes, fall Friday nights included parties at Hinkson Creek (an abandoned quarry mine close to our dorm) where all the kids drank and many swam.
Football Saturdays in the fall of ’75 were fun, rooting for the Tigers in the student section. More often than not, the final score spelled defeat.
We wandered home to our dorm rooms aimlessly to sleep off the beer and prepare for Saturday nights … disco dancing to Donna Summer and roller keggars (drinking more beer while roller skating).
I remember zooming around a rickety indoor skating rink, dodging wooden pillars and puddles of beer. What a mess and what a stupid idea … and I didn’t even like the taste of beer!
By this time, John had a steady girlfriend … Sharon. (They met soon after John and his family moved to the northern St. Louis suburbs before his senior year of high school.) Sharon attended a different in-state college in Kirksville, Missouri.
I dated lots of girls my freshman year … but never for long. I was trying to live up to some ridiculous notion of masculinity that never felt like the true me.
The one exception was Carol. We were close in high school. She was sweet. That relationship lasted into college, but it quickly fizzled. I needed my freedom and time to learn who I would become.
Operating on a protected, fearful level, I remember feeling attracted to many of the cute boys in my classes and at Hatch Hall. But my gay identity and secret desires lived only in my subconscious.
I remember feeling anxious and alone. Constantly.
It would be three years before I would meet Jean at Mizzou. We were both Journalism students. There were sparks between us that developed into love and marriage in 1980 after she graduated.
Underneath it all, the attraction I felt for men grew stronger. But without a healthy avenue for my personal discovery, my depression deepened.
The reality is that from 1975 through 1979–my college years–there was no productive way for me to experiment with my sexuality and date other men. Whatever happened had to come under the cover of darkness.
***
If we live long enough, time, age, mistakes, and transformation … like the constant tumbling of water over rocks … can produce smoother edges and actual wisdom.
In spite of living a closeted, unfulfilled sexual life in my college years, I got a good education at the University of Missouri. I earned my Bachelor of Journalism degree in 1979. It opened many doors for me professionally.
The good news is I eventually found my way personally in my thirties and forties. Tom and I have been together twenty-nine years. I’m proud of the trusting, loving relationship we have created together.
There is irony in all of this. While he was a freshman trying to find his way–at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in August of 1975–I was doing the same a few hundred miles south of him.
We wouldn’t meet until we were thirty-nine … twenty-one years later … but that would also happen in the midwestern humidity of August.
***
Postscript: Next month, Tom will join me on a trip to St. Louis. We will attend my fiftieth high schoolreunion, where I will reconnect with a few hundred of my Affton High School classmates … the class of ’75 … most of whom I haven’t seen for at least thirty years.
My college roommate–John–and his wife Sharon will also join us. Somehow, over fifty years, five decades and more than half a century–we have sustained our friendship across the miles and supported each other in the important moments.
Raising children … and, in their case, grandchildren. Being there for my mother’s funeral at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in 2013. Coming to Chicago for my marriage to Tom in September 2014.
Each time we see each other (now it’s mostly winter visits here in Arizona), John and I are able to pick up where we left off.
Even though our lives have grown and changed in innumerable ways, we have maintained a mutual sense of love, respect, and continuity.
When Tom and I landed permanently in our Scottsdale condo, it was an odd year.
Odd in a meteorological sense; when we pulled into our carport, it was 112 degrees outside on July 12.
Odd in a traumatic sense; I had suffered a minor heart attack six days before on our 60th birthday.
Odd in a serendipitous sense; the cardiac trauma happened in St. Louis (where I was born) in the middle of our move.
Odd in a numerical sense; it was 2017.
That year, we did our best to settle into our new life. We focused on the most essential items: buying a new air conditioning unit and creating a new healthcare regimen to rehab my heart and restore some sense of normalcy to our lives.
We were two mid-century guys, doing our best to settle into our mid-century condo, happy to have survived a scary personal experience, grateful for the chance to write a new chapter in a space that had been home to Tom’s grandparents (and, in a more limited sense, his parents) years before.
Sadly, by 2017, they were all gone. Even so, we had an important remnant of their lives to keep us grounded. It was our turn to–slowly–make it our own.
Under more normal circumstances (i.e., not enduring a heart attack in the middle of our move), we might have pushed more aggressively to transform our condo. But surviving together superseded remodeling and refreshing.
With time, I regained my strength. Tom and I both began to breathe more easily. When a little thing called Covid arrived in 2020, it prompted us to rethink our space, because–of course–we had more time to stare at our condo walls.
In 2021– it was odd again — we hired a paint crew to turn both bedrooms green and serene. We replaced the carpeting there. Later that year, we remodeled our bathroom.
Now it’s another odd year: 2025. Odd (as well as disturbing) in more ways than I care to enumerate in this essay. Let’s just say it’s the perfect time to wave goodbye to dingy off-white walls and adorn our living room and sunroom with a splash of two new colors.
With all of that as my preamble, I’m in the mood to tease you a little. Guess which two colors on this palette will appear inside our home beginning next week.
When the work is done (and we have replaced the tired grey/blue carpeting in our living room and sun room, too), I think it will feel like we have finally created the Arizona space Tom and I imagined eight years ago in April.
That’s when we put our suburban Chicago home on the market as the daffodils bloomed on another chilly midwestern day.
That’s when we began to pack up our most important possessions in Illinois for a chance to create a new life of unforeseen friends, books, blogs, stories, movies, and memories in the Valley of the Sun.
I was about to embark on a journey. But not remotely ready. Nonetheless, I was expected to begin Day One of a new job, in uniform as a United Airlines flight attendant.
A crowd of other newbies gathered around me. We lined up to have our security photos taken by a young, rather handsome cameraman with a large head. He teetered on a tiny chair with his knees protruding beyond his elbows.
When it came to be my turn, the blond figure told me to stand on an X marked on the floor. Then, he stood to reveal his true height.
His elongated body stretched for nearly eight feet before he snapped my photograph and disappeared behind a funhouse mirror.
A primitive machine spit out my image, but I don’t remember receiving my security credentials.
About this time, my husband appeared on the other side of a window that contained a metal tray below. He told me he wanted to slide cash to me under the glass. He thought I might need it on my journey. He said he would meet me on the other side. I felt disoriented and dismayed.
Moments later, I found myself standing in front of a harried female administrative assistant. She sat behind an old desk with stacks of papers and files surrounding her. She worked for United. She told me I needed to board my first flight in about thirty minutes, but that my hair was unkempt.
As she handed me a boarding pass, she spieled off a list of complicated directions that would lead me to a trusted stylist in the terminal. She insisted there was time to accomplish this necessary task, though I would need to run to catch my flight.
I felt anxious. Unprepared for my journey. Unsure of the safety protocols. Disturbed that the length of my hair was causing me trouble. Lost in a once-familiar Chicago terminal that was now foreign to me.
Numbers–like true stories that capture a moment on a page–are meaningful.
They aren’t merely markers on the shore of life waiting to be washed away with the next high tide.
They measure our progress. They tell us how far we’ve gone; how much we’ve achieved; how many we’ve accumulated.
My dad loved numbers, especially twin digits. On his fifty-second birthday–December 4, 1965–he wrote a poem about their significance in his life as a twin.
I published Unity 66 and the Twin Digits in the context of my first book. It belongs there, embedded alongside and intertwined with the writings of my grandfather, mother, and me. In its purest form, From Fertile Ground is an immersion into our family’s writing DNA.
Despite Dad’s volatility, he could be an exuberant, charming man. He believed in celebrating life’s mundane and magnificent moments as they happened.
On the road of our family vacations in the late 1960s (from his position behind the wheel of our white, four-door, 1965 Chevy Biscayne sedan), he announced to my mother (in front) and my sister and I (in back) when the odometer of our car was about to reach a milestone.
“Hey kids … we’re about to reach 50,000 miles.”
That was our cue to sing with him like circus clowns dancing to a calliope from the backseat.
“Da da da da … da da da da … da da da, da da … da da … da da da!”
Earlier this week–on April 7, 2024, to be precise–I hit the five hundred books sold mark since February 2016 when I first became a published author.
(If you are one of those who have supported my creative writing pursuits, thank you! I’ll bet there are a five hundred more who’ve read my books free through libraries and Goodreads giveaways I’ve sponsored.)
How do I know? First, I keep track of all my book sales on a spreadsheet I update monthly. Second, my Amazon sales dashboard tells me that someone in the United States bought number 500, my book of poetry, that day.
Of course, these aren’t best-selling numbers. Not even close. I’d need to add a few more zeroes to play with the big leaguers. However, numbers–while important–aren’t necessarily equivalent to quality or creative impact. (If you’ve seen the movie American Fiction, you know what I mean.)
At any rate, for an independent writer operating with a paltry budget, my book sales numbers aren’t too shabby.
Somewhere, on the highway of life and in the universe of creative possibilities, I imagine my father smiling at me from the front seat through the rearview mirror with the wind buffeting his combed-back hair.
He’s gripping the wheel with his left hand, while waving an imaginary conductor’s wand with his right. He’s singing along with the crazy circus music from our 60s family vacations.
Like my husband Tom–last night sitting on the fold out couch in our cozy Arizona den–my father Walter–if he were still alive–would be telling me to keep writing about the things I enjoy.
Because writing, telling, and sharing serendipitous stories is what I was meant to do. No matter what the numbers say.
We all endure specific days–or months–that test our best intentions and weigh on our psyches. January is that month for me.
Long before Tom’s father died January 14, 2012, and my mother followed January 26, 2013, the first month of the year represented a period of Midwestern malaise, forced hibernation, and cold, lingering darkness.
Of course, I live in a warmer, brighter climate now (despite freezing temperatures the past few mornings). I am thankful for that, especially as Tom shares images of his sister and brother-in-law snow blowing and shoveling outside their suburban Chicago home.
Since my mother’s death nearly eleven years ago, the years have passed with a gauzy flutter like pages of a book swept away by a winter’s squall.
Yet January’s weary sensations–grief masked in a cocktail of Christmas memories, vanilla lip balm, and her last graceful smiles during breathing treatments designed to ease her congestive heart failure–appear on cue.
Last weekend, Tom and I packed away our Christmas decorations and recounted cherished memories of quiet holiday moments together and the adrenalin rush of my holiday concert. Adjusting to the rise and fall of this season is always a bittersweet process.
But this week I was eager to recoup our less-cluttered space. To move ahead. To read and write new pages. To protect, nurture, and regain a more normal rhythm away from the madness of news that reminds me–frequently–just how fragile our democracy has become.
My mother and father–who survived the Battle of the Bulge in World War II–would be horrified.
In the depths of 2020, my husband and I began a tradition of buying bouquets of flowers to place in a vase in our living room. As the walls and woes of Covid and our political angst closed in, it gave us hope to see a splash of color on our coffee table.
Less than ten days into 2024, like each of you I have my dreams and doubts, wonders and worries.
But writing about this spray of lavender carnations Tom and I brought home (then displayed in a smoky-blue ceramic pitcher my mother left behind, and placed atop a Spring-like, bird-laden runner my sister gave us for Christmas) helps me breathe, reflect, and relax.
Mark Johnson Stories 