I began this blogging odyssey seven years ago today. That’s longer than I stayed in all but one of my jobs during my communication career, and the most obvious measure I can think of to show and tell you how important this is to me.
The crux of it is this. I continue to write here and trade comments with you, because it is the best way I know to express my individual voice at a malignant time in our country. I don’t want our voices to be denied.
But, from a purely literary standpoint, I write and publish my thoughts at least once a week to keep me sharp and centered–despite the rust that has gathered around my edges.
Tom and I gave this angel to my mother many Mays ago when she lived in Winfield, Illinois. It anchored the container garden on her balcony patio.
I remember how much she loved it.
When we moved to Arizona in 2017–four years after she passed–I knew I had to bring it west with us. I knew it needed to adorn our patio in Scottsdale.
So, the angel and her companion bird rest there on this Sunday morning … blowing wishes into the universe and hoping for a better day tomorrow.
Thank you for being my companion on this long-and-winding road.
Our beloved Brokeback Mountain poster–which Tom and I purchased in Evanston, Illinois, more than fifteen years ago–leans against one of our Scottsdale walls. It waits to see which wall it will grace in our newly remodeled condo.
Sculpted or not, spectacular public art soothes the sharp edges of our daily lives. For just a few moments in the center of any city, it frees our minds of responsibility and replenishes our spirits … especially when it pays tribute to local nature and history.
Mark Rossi’s Three Blacktail Jackrabbits, located at 700 S. Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe, Arizona, reflect the natural history of the Phoenix Salt River Valley. His Groomer Rabbit, Guard Rabbit, and Restful Rabbit (built in 1993) welcome passersby with whimsy and provide a year-round oasis.
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.
In the course of any life–whether you are a woodpecker, hummingbird or a species without wings–sometimes the best you can do is to find nourishment where you can … and just hang on.
When you’re living through a full-blown constitutional crisis–and feeling vulnerable–you need to find ways of coping and caring for the ones you love.
So, I bought two of these beaded rainbow wristbands from the Human Rights Campaign for Tom and me to wear.
We are wrist-banding together.
This is a symbolic gesture. I want the world to know that this gay couple isn’t going anywhere, though it is a period in the United States where some would prefer that those of us who are different would go away.
But I–we–remain visible.
As I write this blogpost, I realize it is number 500 … a true milestone for any writer.
When I began blogging in May 2018, I had no illusions of where it might lead.
I simply wanted to give my books and literary voice more room to grow, more visibility.
For that reason, I suppose it is fitting that today I choose to write about my gay identity and continue to exercise personal aspects of my voice … visibly.
In many respects, the life my husband and I lead is not all that different from any couple.
We shop for groceries together. Go to the gym together. Enjoy quiet moments and meals together. Love and nurture each other.
We do our best to support each other and our family members during highs and lows.
We spend time with our friends. They are young and old, straight and gay, black and white.
We love and respect them, and they love and respect us.
I think it’s accurate to say this about our friends: we enrich each other’s lives, no matter our skin color, religious beliefs, cultural perspectives, gender identities, or sexual orientations.
It is a personal jolt to realize–and read on trusted news sources each day–that our differences are under attack and being eroded in my home country … the country I still love.
I don’t think I’m depressed. But I am definitely sad and angry. Definitely grieving. Me and a boatload of others of all backgrounds and persuasions.
There are times when I want to scream from the top of a mountain. “This is my country, too. How dare you try to take that away from me!” But then I wonder, “Is anybody listening?”
So, I bring this here, instead and I type these words in blogpost number 500.
At any rate, thank you for joining me–possibly even enduring me at times–on this blogging journey since May 2018.
As long as I continue to feel I have something important and relevant to say (to shed light on the topics of the day … to celebrate a literary success or the latest Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus performance … to pay tribute to those I love … to tell a funny story about our stray cat Poly … to observe and honor the beauty of nature … to share a vivid, meaningful memory about my childhood … or to pen a poem that is in need of artistic space and oxygen) you will find me here.
I hope you have been informed or entertained and will continue to tag along with me on this organic literary odyssey, wherever it may lead.
As I walked the treadmill at the gym this morning–on Abraham Lincoln’s two-hundred-sixteenth birthday–a weird, dark, and discomforting question swirled through my brain.
What if we–all the diverse people in this country, all the people of color, all the LGBTQ folks–were gone?
According to the Arizona Forestry and Fire Management Agency, “Mr. Big” is the largest red gum eucalyptus in the U.S. Located in the picturesque desert confines of Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona, he stands 117 feet tall with a circumference of 22 feet. He was planted here as a three-year-old sapling in 1926.A wooden fence and security camera surrounding the base of the tree are designed to discourage thoughtless people from carving their initials in the trunk. On February 6, 2025, I captured this photo of Mr. Big with my husband Tom during our Boyce Thompson visit. Mr. Big’s presence, threats to nature from global warming, and the upheaval in our country have inspired me to write this poem.
What ailed me for three years–2013 to 2016–was grief spawned by the loss of my mother.
Listening to Annie Lennox’ soaring voice–her Nostalgia--pulled me through and beckoned me to complete my first book From Fertile Ground.
You see, Annie’s rendition of twelve stirring and mostly southern-sometimes-smoldering tunes written in the 1930s and 1940s primed the pump of my southern sensory memories.
Sometime in 2015, I unearthed a tender memory of making homemade peach ice cream with my grandmother Georgia on the rickety porch of my grandparents’ North Carolina farm.
It was Annie who reminded me that I had Georgia on My Mind. Sherrell Richardson Ferrell, too–S.R. for short. He was my farming grandfather who left behind more than fifty years of diary entries.
Annie’s music, Georgia’s love, S.R.’s spartan stories (primitive blog entries really), and Helen’s litany of letters (she was my wise mother) gave me all the creative inspiration I needed to finish and publish my first book in 2016.
Why is this all relevant today? Because I have Helen on my mind. She died twelve years ago on January 26, 2013.
For the most part, my writing and the constant love and support from my husband Tom have helped soften the grief as the years continue to roll by.
Helen would have been happy for me on both counts. She suspected Tom and I would retire in Arizona one day.
However, I doubt she would have imagined the entirety of this literary chapter for me, which lately includes teaching memoir writing at our local library. (I’ve been asked to lead a third workshop in April.)
Or the growing community of loyal followers Tom has inspired with every immersive movie series he hosts (also at the Scottsdale Public Library). His next series–Movies That Matter: The 1970s (a tribute to six film directors)–begins tomorrow and continues on most Mondays until early April.
I firmly believe it is the arts and the artists–like Annie Lennox, even the less renowned ones like Mark Johnson and Tom Samp–who through their music, writing, painting, poetry, and true cultural perspectives will help pull us through this dark and uber-turbulent period in our once-proud country.
For now, that is the hope I cling to. Along with the memories of love and gratitude–the nostalgia–framed by indelible moments with family and friends past and present, who I love dearly.
No, those aren’t the names of three of Santa’s reindeer that will pull his sleigh tomorrow night.
But if you were one of more than 100 singers, dancers, and musicians on stage–or any of the 900-plus jubilant audience members who attended three sold-out shows–you felt sparkle, magic, joy and a lot more positivity, lush music, spectacular solos, and elfin storytelling pulse through your bloodstream at the Herberger Theatre (Stage West) in Phoenix over the weekend.
What you see here is the culmination of Recycle the Fruitcake, just breaths away from the end of act one of Lights, Camera, Elves!
I think it’s fair to say this number brought the house down in laughter, music, and mayhem.
Squint and look to the far right. That’s me wearing a giant gingerbread man costume. (My chorus pal Ezra played the other gingerbread man on the left side of the frame.)
Billy and Michael (two other dancers and chorus members) helped me perform a quick-change backstage.
They inflated my costume in about thirty seconds, so that I could return to bounce on the apron of the stage.
I waved my arms like a seven-year-old … not the sixty-seven-year-old guy I am … for twenty seconds. It was exhilarating and as close to skydiving as I will ever get.
Moments before I marched across the stage–arms extended carrying an enormous tin of toxic fruitcake, wearing a full-body orange hazmat suit, and teasing the dancers and the audience–“cause you never really know where fruitcakes might have been.”
Today–the day after our final holiday performance and an exuberant and playful cast party around Dale’s and Jim’s rainbow Christmas tree–I give thanks to the entire experience.
Even a slightly pulled right calf muscle didn’t deter me from hitting the gym with Tom at 9 a.m. and looking ahead to a quiet Scottsdale Christmas Eve with him … followed by a low-key Christmas Day with my older son Nick and his family.
Because as Derik (another second tenor, who played our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus Santa) proclaimed near the end of our performance with a pink garland wrapped around his neck and the twinkle of Darlene’s piano keys over his shoulder …
“The magic of Christmas isn’t just in the gifts or decorations. It’s in the stories we share, and the music that brings us together.”
See you here in 2025 for more stories and more music.
Mark Johnson Stories 