There’s a new girl in town. She twists and tumbles between the gravel and spiky cacti on the otherwise ordinary sidewalk outside our Sonoran door.
Blanca purrs, arches her back, and flashes penetrating blue eyes. Of course, scraps of sliced turkey, ramakins of milk, and endless strokes of her fur follow.
We might have scooped her up, but discovered Blanca belongs to a neighbor. That misfortune won’t prevent our pampering or shared shenanigans.
I’m not a wily weather forecaster, sage soothsayer or tenacious tarot card reader. Just someone (like you) who is alive in 2020. Trying to stay healthy and sane. Hungry for certainty.
In times such as these, I wish I were a premier prognosticator. Not a pollster. I’m done with that margin-of-error stuff. I want news of actual results from the future.
Of course, the outcome of the presidential election is at the top of my list. Along with the arrival date of a reliable vaccine. But I also want to know if and when it will ever rain again in the Phoenix metropolitan area. After our hottest summer on record, we’ve gone months with no more than a few errant drops of natural moisture.
At least the days are cooler. On this morning’s walk, I wore a sweatshirt and long pants for the first time in seven months. The temperature was seventy degrees. Yes, I am a desert rat.
There is one other important piece of information I need from the future. Will that Carlo, mid-century chair (saffron upholstery with brass legs) Tom and I ordered ever arrive or is it lost forever?
I will now proceed to share the details. While in the throes of the global pandemic, we have been making a number of improvements inside and outside our condo: painting and carpeting our bedroom and den (check); casting our votes for the November 3 election (check); replacing our interior doors (happening this coming week); buying and receiving a stone-colored Carlo mid-century couch for our living room (check); and welcoming a lovely and comfortable chair into our refashioned den (???).
After a minor hitch, the couch from West Elm arrived on October 17. Ryder (the people West Elm contracts with) were supposed to deliver the chair before that. But I got one message telling me the truck had broken down and we would need to reschedule. We did that. Then I was told by Ryder they had misplaced our beautiful chair. An angry outburst ensued. Our chair was likely somewhere in a local warehouse and didn’t make it on the truck for the rescheduled date.
West Elm later told us the chair had been found. So we rescheduled the delivery a third time … last Thursday. The chair never arrived. I’ve had two or three additional intense conversations (with various Ryder folks and two West Elm managers).
Now it is Sunday, October 25. Two months until Christmas. I’m done with the angst. I have entered a Zen stage with the missing chair. Maybe it will arrive. Maybe it won’t. West Elm assures me they will get to the bottom of this and make it right in some fashion. I believe them, but I’m not holding my breath. Worst case scenario? I’ll get our money back.
After all, in the scheme of things, the mysterious case of a missing chair is small potatoes. As a new surge of COVID-19 cases crosses our country and November 3 approaches (finally), all I really want for Christmas is a blue tsunami, a new president, a reliable vaccine, a day or two of rain for the Valley of the Sun, and the end of this 2020 madness.
Is that asking for too much?
It is one of my earliest vivid memories. I was standing alone in June 1962. Outside the west side of my childhood home in Affton. Looking north toward the street. Wearing my high-top Keds and cargo shorts with crazy pockets. One month shy of my fifth birthday. The wind raced past my crew cut.
Our three-bedroom brick ranch in south suburban St. Louis, Missouri appeared nearly identical to two dozen others on South Yorkshire Drive. With one exception. Ours featured a flowering pink crab apple tree with stair-step limbs I loved to climb and droppings that stained our driveway.
At that moment, a clear and welcome thought jumped unannounced to the forefront of my brain and lingered for a few minutes. It swirled through my consciousness.
“I am also different. I have important things to say.”
As I look back at that memory, I realize that on some level I must have known I was gay. Not the same as most of the rest of the boys. Maybe even special. It was an intuition. A gut hunch without empirical data.
I was a shy child. I stayed out of trouble mostly. I didn’t rock the boat. I obeyed my parents. Later, I listened to my teachers and dodged bullies in middle school halls. I had lots of fears and creative ideas. Unfortunately, I never voiced many of them.
Now–nearly sixty years later–the voice that was never fully realized in my developing years has found a forum of its own. This is my two hundredth blog entry since launching my site in May 2018. For you who follow me frequently–especially the handful who comment regularly–thank you for taking the time out of your busy life to read what I write.
Recently, the pace of my postings has slowed so I can devote my attentions to another creative endeavor. I am currently finalizing a collection of essays and fantasies about my life in Arizona. My goal is to send these to my editor in November and publish my fourth book early in 2021. Rest assured, I will keep you posted on the delivery date of my newest arrival.
I suppose my writing commitment (in blog and book form) is my way of making up for lost time. When I sit before my laptop, spin my stories, enter my words, and press the “publish” button, I feel as if on some level I am speaking for that “different” little child who stood on his St. Louis driveway and pondered the world’s possibilities and problems.
I keep writing because he and I have important things to say.
The 1990s were a tumultuous decade for me. I survived a divorce in 1992 and my father’s death in 1993.
Beyond those two cataclysmic personal events and my desire to remain a constant force in the lives of my young sons, I struggled with the elephant in the room: how to love my emerging gay self in an often uncompassionate, unaccepting and unenlightened world.
In my thirties and early forties, the risk of being rejected by my family and friends–because of who I am and who I love–produced monumental anxiety and fright. It tore at the fabric of my sense of security and belonging.
Slowly, with the support of two skilled therapists and a small circle of trusted friends, I came to realize that I needed to come out to my sister, mother, sons, colleagues, friends and neighbors to grow and flourish as a human being.
There was fallout from my decision. Some ex-friends dropped me along the way. But with time, patience and understanding, the people who mattered most in my life adjusted. They loved me more for being me. As a late bloomer, I discovered an authentic life.
After I came out to my mother over the phone in the late nineties–I lived in the Chicago area; she lived in the St. Louis suburbs–she wrote me a letter which I included in my book From Fertile Ground about my journey after her death.
“My main concern is how very difficult your life is and has been because of your sexual orientation. That is a big load to carry. Thank heaven you can now share it with those who love you!”
Remarkably, after this breakthrough, our relationship grew. It became far more genuine and meaningful. With time, I introduced her to Tom, my future husband. She learned to love him like a second son.
Today, on National Coming Out Day, I’m sharing this story with the hope that at least one person (someone struggling with sexuality or gender identity) will feel less lost and less alone.
If that is you, I encourage you to breathe deeply, find professional support if you need it, trust your instincts and–only when you are ready–come out. Live authentically. Find your true life. The truth will set you free.
One more thing. Be prepared to continue coming out every day for the rest of your life, because even though you would prefer to sky write the words “I am gay” for the world to see at the same moment, life is never static. Plus, you can only change hearts and minds if you are visible and unrelenting.
Back in March, when news of the pandemic began to assault our senses, Tom and I agreed we wanted to introduce a splash of color into our home. To bring a fresh bunch of store-bought flowers into our haven each week. To ease the pain of 2020 by creating our own bouquet of happiness.
Now that October is with us, I’ve been craving fall colors. Though I smile every time I see the scarlet bougainvillea blooms swaying in a gentle breeze outside our back door, we don’t enjoy crisp apple-picking days in the Sonoran Desert or a traditional array of autumn leaves.
This week we brought home burnt orange roses to ogle over. As I freed them from the plastic wrap, the interior designer in me recommended placing them in my mother’s canary yellow Fiesta pitcher from the 1940s.
Full disclosure. In the past week, I also have bought and consumed organic pumpkin spiced applesauce, transferred two decorative harvest dinner plates (Mom also left those behind) from the hutch in our sun room to our kitchen cabinet, positioned our plastic jack-o-lantern on top of our living room bookshelf, and rescued two orange-black-and-white, witchy-and-batty cupcake dish towels from the cupboard.
After all, it’s October. Even if it is 2020, we have to manufacturer our own of version autumnal happiness and humor our Halloween hankerings. Our lives are more than COVID-19 results and election prognostications. We must maintain some sense of stability and go on living.
Some of my earliest and most vivid “learning” memories happened at the library. To be precise, it was the Tesson Ferry Library in South St. Louis County in the 1960s. I remember finding quiet comfort there with my mother on autumn Saturdays. I don’t recall the titles we checked out, but my sister and I always left with two or three books in our arms. Stories to be read at home. Books our busy mother often read with us.
At that point in life, I never imagined I would become an author. Or that some fifty years later the manager of acquisitions at the St. Louis County Library would call me (on my deceased mother’s birthday) with happy and fortuitous news. The library had purchased four copies of From Fertile Ground, my book about the grief I felt after the loss of my mother.
Now in my sixties, local libraries in Arizona deliver a dependable dose of quiet continuity. They connect my early days as an eager reader with my later days as a memoir writer … and provide community outlets for me to connect with avid readers.
All of this is a prelude to say I’m excited and proud to be exhibiting at a Local Author Fair this Saturday (1 to 4 p.m.) in Mesa at the Dobson Ranch Library, 2425 S. Dobson Road. Authors from across Arizona will be there exhibiting, selling and signing their books. I love these opportunities to talk with readers. To hear about the kinds of books that interest them. To share my stories and memoir writing tips.
If you live in the area or happen to be visiting the Valley of the Sun, I hope you’ll stop by to say hello and spend part of your Saturday at the library.
Here in Scottsdale, Arizona, I have a good life. Warm, simple and true.
Exhibit A: though it’s late October (more than a month since most outdoor pools in the U.S. closed for the summer), today I completed my morning swim as I usually do at our Olympic-size community pool … thirty lengths under blue skies and eighty-degree temperatures.
Despite this frequently idyllic scenario, every locale has its drawbacks. For us in the Sonoran Desert, it’s the unforgiving heat in June, July and August … especially in the summer of 2019 when monsoon storms mysteriously didn’t materialize … and the fact that we live a few hundred miles from the closest beach on the Pacific Ocean. Put another way, we have plenty of sand, but no sand dollars to dazzle our days.
Unless, of course, you have a thoughtful friend such as Glenn. On Monday, having just returned from a week in San Diego, our neighbor and gentle-yoga comrade surprised Tom and me with a little beauty from the west coast: a handful of bleached skeletons of dead sand dollars.
Unfortunately, we weren’t home when Glenn stopped by, so he left them in a transparent tray near our back door. Who knew these sandy gems would one day wash up on the shore in land-locked Scottsdale, Arizona?
According to folklore and Wikipedia, sand dollars have come to represent all sorts of things. For instance, coins misplaced by mermaids or the lost citizens of Atlantis. Christian missionaries saw symbolism in the five-fold radial design, comparing it with the Star of Bethlehem.
I prefer to think of the sand dollars simply as a gift of nature. A reflection of grand, infinite, and ever-radiating design. Something like ripples of water on the surface of the ocean or individualized snowflakes that fall and decorate the sky and then the streets (not in Scottsdale, but surely back in my previous hometown of Mount Prospect, Illinois).
Better yet, I see sand dollars as a symbol of the interconnected way friends like Glenn enter and influence our lives. At first they may appear on the periphery. But over time they make their way on shore. They begin to leave their own personalized mark. They remind us to be grateful for the kindnesses of neighbors and friends who grace our lives. They teach us to be thankful for the goodness of our sand dollar days.
Three gather to whisper, one natural grace.
Sure shiny October, rare shady space.
Beckoning branches, bowing before.
Triumphant triad, truth to adore.
Forever delight, never ignore.
Palm and pine and sycamore.
By Mark Johnson, October 20, 2019
Ordinarily, pruning branches in our condo complex is something our landscape crew attends to. But they haven’t appeared lately. So, last week Tom and I dusted off our hedge trimmers. We gave haircuts to the fig and orange trees in our row. We didn’t mind. We had the time, energy and motivation.
Today, I stood in front of our mid-century condo. Gazing east as the morning light forced me to shield my eyes. Surveying the overgrown boughs of a luscious lemon tree that shrouded the sidewalk to our parking lot. Hands on hips, I uttered these seven words:
I think I’ll prune the lemon tree.
Yes, a guy born and raised in the Midwest, near towering oaks and majestic maples that abandon their leaves every October, now trims fragrant citrus fruits in autumn and says these peculiar things. Who is this crazy person? Where did this new language come from?
Let me be clear. This wasn’t the first time I was privy to this sort of newfangled, desert phraseology. In the fall of 2017, just a few months after my husband and I left Illinois and moved into our Arizona condo, he shouted the following previously undocumented sentence as I wrote at my desk:
There’s a lizard in the sink.
As calmly as possible, I pressed “save” on whatever I was writing and scampered into the kitchen to see what Tom had discovered. Indeed, there was a lizard in the trap of the sink. He was no more than two inches long and frozen like a tiny statue exhumed from an archaeological dig. I’m sure he was frightened by the two giant heads peering down at him.
If you’re an animal lover like we are, you’ll be delighted to learn that we didn’t freak out and smash him in the sink. Instead, we kept our wits. We scooped him onto a piece of paper and carried him outside to safety.
Slowly, he slithered off into the desert landscape to resume his natural existence. Just a few yards away from where the freshly shorn fig, orange and lemon trees live in this sun-drenched land of sand and saguaros.
I never thought I’d live here. Oh, lemon trees and lizards, I never thought I’d say and hear such things.
Eight o’clock on a seventy-degree October morning. Tom and I walk three thousand steps west from our condo door and arrive here. Squint and you can conjure the head of a giant tortoise emerging over the hill … waiting to be fed. In reality, the only ones scouring for breakfast are the three microscopic bighorn sheep climbing the Papago buttes in the Phoenix Zoo on the right side of the frame.
Surreal giant tortoises and real bighorn sheep on a spectacular Sunday. Such is life in the rugged, yet serene, Sonoran desert.
Mark Johnson Stories 