As Dad, Mom, Diane and I approached my grandparents’ rambling farm in Huntersville, North Carolina, in 1968 in our four-door Chevy Biscayne, waves of kudzu vine blanketed the trees.
At some point during our July vacation there, I remember my stoic maternal grandfather telling me this invasive plant, this weed, was blocking the sunlight.
Bit by bit, the kudzu was smothering the native plants and large trees in the southeastern United States.
In a metaphorical sense, I feel like one of those older trees–perhaps an oak or pine–that has grown through the seasons and spread its branches only to discover that the censorship and hate of our nation’s government (said kudzu vine) has insidiously wrapped itself around my trunk.
This is not a new development. I have been feeling this way for years. Trying to remain positive in the face of ICE raids, misogynistic slurs, shuttered healthcare programs, disregard for our most vulnerable citizens, the environment, and our right to a free press. The list of losses is endless.
Recently, my husband and I have lived firsthand through the threat of censorship in our community. It is causing us both great pain. It is also prompting me to realize how far we have fallen as a nation and what I am willing to tolerate or accept.
At some point, I will have more to say about this. I don’t know when or how. Suffice it to say, this kudzu vine–the 2026 version of the McCarthy era in the United States–is out of control.
I do believe that, ultimately, historians will shine light on whatever it is we are living through. I hope I live long enough to see the return of truth and reason and the eradication of these smothering vines.
Lately, I feel like an anxious hummingbird, flitting about from one branch to another. Zooming in and out, searching for creative inspiration. Trying to find sweet nectar that will help me link one idea to the next.
Maybe it’s the late-summer desert doldrums. The intense Sonoran heat has worn me down. I don’t feel the impetus to write here as frequently as I once did.
Even so, I have experienced two moments of writing bliss in the past week. Both led me to draft deeply personal poems for members of my family–chosen and otherwise. At some point, I may decide to share them publicly, but not now.
Maybe this is simply what it feels like to be living in my “late sixties going on seventy” (sounds like a parody of a song from The Sound of Music) in a world gone mad.
All the while, I try to nourish myself.
I try to help others I love who have lost jobs or are battling cancer.
I play word games on my phone when I wake up each day.
I recall the stunning scenes and pine scents of western Canada.
I pack for my younger son’s wedding in Chicago this weekend.
I squeeze in another trip to the gym.
I watch the young-and-promising St. Louis Cardinals I root for self-destruct again in the late innings.
I download the music for my December choral concert and prepare for my next rehearsal.
I socialize with friends away from the heat produced in the Valley of the Sun.
I take afternoon naps to reboot my brain.
I prepare to lead another memoir writing workshop in October.
I recoup with my husband at home. We enjoy quieter moments in the confines of our Arizona abode.
Through it all, I wonder when or if I will rediscover the time and energy to complete another book.
I live in the Sonoran Desert and the Sonoran Desert lives in me. That’s been the case for nine years. My most prolific ones as a writer.
The language of the desert–like grains of sand that blow in through the door–is now part of my creative being.
Shimmering sunsets. Slithering lizards. Skittish quail. Stray cats. Spiky cacti and succulents. Scattering snowbirds. And those are just a sample from the letter “s”.
When I served as a “Writer in Residence” at the Scottsdale Public Library last spring, I prompted the writers in my workshop to explore the role setting plays in the stories of their lives.
I asked them to consider a place in their lives that is or was prominent and how that place might be considered a character in what they have to say. In the stories they want to show and tell.
The places I have lived or frequented have certainly provided texture to my existence and informed my perspective. The orange earth of the Carolinas. The rolling hills of Missouri. The flatlands of Illinois. The rugged buttes of the Arizona desert.
They represent distinct periods in my life, and–in hindsight–I now understand better why they each deserve their proximity across my body of literary work, six books … a lifetime of stories.
The heat here in July is intense. But it is bearable because the Sonoran Desert–even in its most torrid state–is otherworldly.
At times it feels as if I am living on the moon. The astonishing natural beauty and stately saguaros–sentinels that stand tall in valleys and on hillsides here–have led me to a creative destination outside the orbit of my midwestern sensibilities.
One where I “write on” … as I just celebrated my sixty-ninth birthday and begin this final lap in my sixties. Learning and growing. Teaching and influencing.
Standing tall as a gay man, a husband, a father, a writer. Proud as a saguaro despite my visits to the cardiologist and dermatologist to manage my personal frailties. Rooted to this vivid place, the Valley of the Sun, that is my home.
***
Note to those of you who live in the Phoenix metropolitan area: On Thursday, July 16, from 5 to 7 p.m., I will be signing and selling copies of my latest book, Sixty-Something Days, at Grounds on 2nd in Old Town Scottsdale, located at 3703 N. 69th St.
This charming neighborhood place (coffee and wine bar) is one of my favorite spots in our Scottsdale, Arizona, community. It truly is an inclusive, creative space my husband Tom and I frequent to write, read, and chill with friends. In fact, I wrote and edited a considerable portion of my latest book there.
If you are in the area, stop by to sell hello, grab a book and a glass of wine. I also will have a few copies of my other five books–memoirs, poetry, and short fiction–on hand in case you are looking for options to add to your summer reading list.
In April 2026, friends at the Scottsdale Public Library gave me this shirt after I completed my “Writer in Residence” stint there.
“But when the thermometer goes way upand the weather is sizzlin’ hot,mister man with a plan is not. ‘Cause it’s too, too, too darn hot.”
***
As the heat rolls into the Valley of the Sun this week–100-plus high temperatures through Saturday–this snappy tune, which Cole Porter wrote in 1948 for his Broadway show Kiss Me Kate, repeats through my brain.
It’s certainly “Too Darn Hot” to hike outside in June here, unless you do it early in the day. That’s what I–and a young woman walking her Boston terrier–did Monday around 9 a.m. Nobody else was on the Papago Park trail near my home.
This morning I opted for swimming thirty lengths in the relative cool of Chapparal Pool. How I’ve missed submerging myself underwater (thanks to a couple of dermatological procedures that kept me at bay).
In the afternoons, you’re better off holding up in the Scottsdale Public Library to escape the heat. That’s where Tom and I have sequestered ourselves today, along with a few dozen others, strategically stationed at square wooden tables, hovering over their books and laptops.
Other than the heat references, why would I be channeling an old Broadway tune? Because my next choral concert with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus–“Broadway Lights”– is fast approaching: June 27 (2 p.m. and 7 p.m.) and June 28 (2 p.m.) at Tempe Center for the Arts.
As described in our promotional materials, “It will be a spectacular celebration of some of Broadway’s most beloved musicals. From the soaring melodies of Wicked and The Sound of Music, to the show-stopping energy of Hamilton, Moulin Rouge!, Hairspray, Into the Woods, The Book of Mormon, The Wiz, and The Greatest Showman, this season finale is packed with music that has captivated audiences around the world.”
Coincidentally, “Too Darn Hot”–timed beautifully with the inevitable onset of our desert heat–is the closing number for Act One.
If you live in the Phoenix metropolitan area, step into one of the coolest concert venues around: the Tempe Center for the Arts. Get your tickets at http://www.phxgmc.org.
You may be wondering “Since it is Pride month, is there a LGBTQ Pride element to this concert?” The answer is a resounding “YES!”
My chorus mate August and I have teamed up to write the libretto for the concert. It features nine storytellers, who will describe how Broadway music has served as a beacon for the LGBTQ+ community in happy and sad times.
Together–the music, the stories, and a slate of hot dance numbers–will combine to create a full theatrical production, which our loyal audience has come to expect.
This will mark the completion of my ninth season (singing and writing for) with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
I still recall auditioning for the chorus in August 2017. Tom and I had just moved to Arizona from the Chicago area.
I was depressed and anxious, desperately trying to regain my health, to uncover an unobstructed view after surviving a heart attack on the way west in July 2017 on our sixtieth birthday.
Finding the chorus, nurturing new friendships, and reigniting my passion for singing has been a key element in my recovery. It helped me lighten my mood and smile again.
When I step onto the stage again on June 27, I know I will feel grateful for the music and the nine years of creative discovery. But also, for this safe haven. This supportive community of people.
They have helped me to realize I still have a lot to give. I still have a lot to say. I still have the ability to stand on a stage and raise my voice, especially now as we cling to the hope that–maybe someday–our democracy can be salvaged.
Be forewarned. This is not a story about the 1967 British drama film starring Sidney Poitier.
Though as background, in a riveting performance, Poitier portrays Mark Thackeray, an unemployed Black American engineer who takes a teaching job in a working-class London school.
Thackeray clashes with a band of rowdy high school students. Along the way, he challenges their prejudices, navigates social barriers, and–ultimately–earns their respect with innovative teaching methods.
It’s a profound story about the challenges of educating through discrimination. In the end, we viewers feel the emotional triumph of Thackeray’s accomplishment and are treated to Lulu’s rousing rendition of the title song.
If you’ve never seen the iconic film, I recommend it. Few films are more reminiscent of the sights and sounds of the turbulent 1960s.
But what I really want to write about today is the labels we use to address one another, and how those monikers change as we age.
This morning, as I finished a thirty-five-minute set and dismounted a treadmill at the Scottsdale Community College gym, a fortyish man exercising behind me smiled and announced with kindness (not love), “Sir, you’ve dropped something.”
I glanced down to discover my Silver Sneakers membership card lying on the floor next to the treadmill. I thanked him profusely, picked up the card, then proceeded to wash down the machine with a disinfecting wipe.
This experience gave me pause. At this stage of life (my late sixties) I am most often addressed as “sir” in situations like this with strangers in public forums. Certainly not, “young man”. Because I am not that.
I am certainly no longer a “boy” either, even though I definitely identify as male (he/him) and an elderly neighbor refers to my husband Tom and me as “the boys”. (She has known Tom since he was a “boy” visiting his grandfather.)
Anyway, I suppose I am “sir” to the outside world as I approach my sixty-ninth birthday in July. Better than “Hey You!”, it’s a respectful, somewhat formal, fatherly (dare I say grandfatherly even if I am not one) acknowledgement of who I am and who I have become in my older-and-sorer-but-still-relatively-fit body.
But I hope you’ll always refer to me as “Mark”, that generally kind, friendly author and gay man who is doing his best to stay sane in this dystopian country by writing about our everyday happenings that fly under the radar.
May is a transitional month in the Valley of the Sun.
Snowbirds have flown away to their full-time nests east and north. Tom and I are left to our creative devices.
Despite the higher temperatures coming soon–100-plus next week–I prefer these quieter, hotter days.
There is more room in our favorite coffee shop where we write and socialize. Less maneuvering through traffic merging on and off highway ramps framed by jagged mountains that remind me I am a westerner now … for nearly nine years.
This morning at the Scottsdale Community College gym Tom and I now frequent (free with our Silver Sneakers membership), Rosalind greeted me with a broad smile.
She read and loved Sixty-Something Days, my latest book and told me she is recommending it to all of her sixty-something friends.
Active-retiree Rosalind laughed when she said, “I’m your target audience.” She offered that it reminded her how important it is for all of us to be grateful for the goodness and love in our lives.
In that moment, she shared a photo of her two, beautiful, three-year-old granddaughters who are the children of her twin adult sons.
As we parted to continue our respective exercise regimens, she volunteered that she will be leaving for Flagstaff for the summer–her own transition to the beauty and cooler temps of northern Arizona–but back in the fall to resume her desert life.
Now that May has arrived, I’m shifting creative gears.
I’ve been working with another chorus member–August–to write and finalize the libretto for Broadway Lights, the next Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC) concert June 27 and 28 at Tempe Center for the Arts.
It features eight storytelling vignettes that wrap in and around our PHXGMC set of inspiring, fun/funny, and fabulous Broadway tunes.
This evening, August, Darlene (PHXGMC’s assistant artistic director), and I will watch and listen to a stream of chorus members who are auditioning for the nine speaking roles that tell stories (fictionalized ones rooted in reality) of how Broadway music has served as a beacon for our LGBTQ+ community in happy and sad times.
I am proud of my involvement with the chorus as both a second-tenor performer and librettist. At this stage of life, time moves quickly. It’s difficult for me to believe that I have been singing with the chorus for nine years, since Tom and I moved to Arizona in 2017.
As my sixty-ninth birthday fast approaches in early July, this community of friends–truly a safe haven in our chaotic country–provides an ongoing-and-meaningful oasis during these Sixty-Something Days … ones I am grateful for even on the hottest days that surely loom beyond this stretch of ground Tom and I walk along the Crosscut Canal and Papago Buttes.
This is my space, but I feel it has eluded me lately in the blur of life.
Like the game of Chutes and Ladders, in this month of April I’ve moved forward a few paces–writing another meaningful libretto for the next Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert, Broadway Lights, in late June–while sliding back to heal from physical and emotional setbacks: two discomforting dermatological surgeries; one momentous funeral for a close cousin.
Grief has a mysterious way of throwing you into another orbit. That is where I live and breathe right now. Part of me stands on the sandy soil of Scottsdale, Arizona. Another piece is spinning somewhere else in the stratosphere.
The loss of Phyllis cut close. Not only because I loved her. But because I know she loved me. And she was a significant part of the fabric of my young life in her proximity to others I loved. Others we loved. All of whom are gone.
Our grandparents, Albert and Louise. Her mother, Violet. My father, Walter. My mother, Helen. Our aunt, Thelma.
Despite my disrupted and sometimes traumatic home life in the 1960s–featuring my father’s bipolar swings and my mother’s evening coping mechanism behind the broadsheet of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch–love existed there in our suburban St. Louis house. Love I felt. Love I excavated. Love I salvaged and carried forward. Love I still feel today.
Phyllis appeared in our home a few times a year. Usually in July to celebrate my birthday in our big backyard and in December in our living room to share Christmas dinner and exchange gifts. She was an integral presence in those moments.
There is one other moment that was purely ours. It happened just once. She must have been twenty. I was ten. She was an undergrad at the University of Missouri in St. Louis (UMSL). We both loved sports. She invited me to join her at an UMSL Rivermen basketball game.
I don’t remember much about it … how we got there, what we said to one another … just that we sat side by side in the stands rooting for the Rivermen. I just remember being proud of her. She was pretty, smart, and fun … and she wanted to spend time with her young cousin. It touched me deeply
As I write this, I realize Phyllis represented a form of stability in my life at that time … an escape to a more even, peaceful place that no one in my family of origin could provide.
Identifying that helps me to realize why this loss has hit so hard.
***
On Wednesday, April 22–Earth Day–my husband and I attended a volunteer recognition event at the Scottsdale Public Library. Alexa, the supervisor of volunteers, recognized Tom for his outstanding-and-popular movie series–and then me for my memoir-writing workshops–at the library in 2025.
We each brought home a certificate, thanking us for our volunteering efforts, along with a tiny succulent plant bearing an important message. We placed both of them on the windowsill of our south-facing sunroom in Scottsdale.
They will serve as a reminder for me that–even in my late sixties–I’m helping others grow in my community.
I know Phyllis, a life-long educator, valued that, too.
In my book, empathy is an essential quality for writers and human beings in general. It opens the door to developing deep and trusting relationships, but it also exposes us to emotional and physical pain. In this month of April, I have experienced both.
***
On Friday, April 10, Tom and I said goodbye to my cousin Phyllis.
The day before, we flew to St. Louis and enjoyed a nostalgic salad-and-pizza dinner with family in St. Charles, Missouri.
We gathered around a round, wooden table–balancing paper plates piled with food, while sifting through dog-eared photographs of Phyllis with living and deceased members of our Johnson family from the past seventy-five years.
In that space, I felt a meaningful connection with Tom (Phyllis’ husband), Austin and Bryant (her adult sons) and their respective spouses (Amanda and Kelsey).
Meanwhile, Phyllis’ four grandchildren–ranging in age from three to eight years old–danced around the island in Bryant and Kelsey’s kitchen, occasionally patting the head of Bennelli, their large-and-lovable labrador.
Despite the grief associated with the loss of Phyllis, it was a family moment I will cherish. One Phyllis would have loved.
The next morning, Tom and I drove to the funeral at Immanuel Lutheran Church in St. Charles with my sister Diane and brother-in-law Steve.
In a large open space connected to the church, Kelsey and Bryant had carefully assembled still photos–from throughout Phyllis’ life–on boards anchored by easels. They placed them beside her closed casket adorned with sprays of colorful blooms.
Overhead, at the other end of the room on a large screen, other images of Phyllis and her family and friends faded in and out on a large screen TV.
As people began moving into the church for the 11:30 funeral service, I felt anxious. Jumpy.
A mix of nostalgia and peace washed over me, as Tom and I found a place to sit at the far-left end of the fourth pew. Diane and Steve joined us there.
I scanned the program and saw that after readings from the old and new testaments–slotted between two church hymns–I would walk to the lectern to share “Words from the Family”. To give a eulogy. To pay tribute to my closest cousin’s life.
I’ve done a lot of public speaking, presenting, and singing on a multitude of stages in my life–but few things as personal as this. I breathed in deeply to quiet my nerves. I unfolded my prepared words and looked out over a congregation of probably two hundred: Phyllis’ family, friends, teaching colleagues, students, caregivers.
In that moment, my anxiety lifted and flew away. “I am honored today to remember Phyllis. She was my cousin. We were born a decade apart in St. Louis,” I began.
The words and phrases flowed effortlessly from there, as I looked into the tearful eyes of immediate family members–three generations side-by-side spread across the first pew.
“I admired Phyllis’ poise, her style, her intellect, her ambition, her sensibility,” I continued. Before I knew it, I was reciting verses from I poem I wrote for Phyllis: The Love We Shared.
I closed my notes. I left the lectern. I paused to pat Austin, Phyllis’ eldest son, on the shoulder for reassurance, kissed him on the forehead, then returned to the fourth pew and sat beside my husband.
I pulled a wrinkled tissue from my suit pocket, dabbed my eyes, and felt sadness and love reverberate throughout the church.
***
Tom and I returned to Arizona last Saturday.
Today I found myself dealing with another form of sensitivity … sensitivity to the sun.
This morning my dermatologist–in an out-patient procedure called MOHS surgery–removed a small patch of cancerous cells from the bicep of my right arm. As I write this, I am taped up with a sizeable patch over that area.
The good news is he removed all of the problematic tissue. There is no pain, just the anxiety (and the pinch of a few needles for numbing) that immediately preceded this morning’s appointment.
In a few weeks, the remnants of that procedure will fade. My dermatologist will extract the stitches.
I will be left with my fourth such scar–one on each limb ironically–from excisions and dermo procedures.
In a sense, these scars are “badges of honor” for having lived nearly sixty-nine years and survived a series of setbacks.
They are proof that as long as I live–as long as I write, sing, slather on sunscreen, and pause to remember the ones I love–I will also remain super sensitive to the blazing Arizona sun.
Back and forth from one end of the pool to the other on this hotter-than-average, magnificent March morning. March 24, 2026, from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. to be precise. Thirty lengths in the deep end of Eldorado Pool in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Somehow, I wrangled my own lane today. I don’t mind sharing but always feel freer on unobstructed Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are fewer swim-class participants to contend with on those days and–now that the Cactus League baseball games have ended–some of the snowbirds have begun to flock home.
Breathing every eight or ten strokes, looking over my right shoulder, swimming south to north, I spy the blazing sun that threatens my sensitive skin and the wispy-white contrail of a commercial plane flying high above.
Serendipitously, the repetitive swimming motion reminds me what I want to write about today. It is the tenth anniversary of publishing my first book: From Fertile Ground.
On March 24, 2016, Barack Obama was president. I didn’t imagine the waves of what was to come: the growing political insanity, the dismantling of once-reliable American institutions, the general implosion of our democracy in one decade. Who could?
Back then, Tom and I were snowbirds–splitting time between our homes in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and Scottsdale, Arizona.
I wrote most of my inaugural book–a three-generation writer’s mosaic about love and loss in my family–from the suburban flatness of northern Illinois.
But working online–back and forth like a swimmer logging laps between my editor and book designer in Nashville, Tennessee, and me in Scottsdale–I made my final edits in the rugged western landscape of the Grand Canyon State.
I remember the pride of holding the first physical copy of my first book later that week. I know I cried. It was a release of joy and amazement. Most definitely, a seminal moment I shared with my husband.
Sadness crept in, too, because I had written the book to process my grief after my mother’s passing. In a physical sense, I wasn’t able to celebrate that literary moment with her.
But I also know that writing about her and her wisdom-filled letters, my father and his unrealized poetry, my grandfather and fifty-three years of diary entries, and the general sense of freedom I felt visiting my grandparents in the 1960s at their rambling North Carolina farm allowed me to create a healing path out of my grief.
It was–and still is–a story I was meant to write and publish. One I wanted to share with others navigating the devastation of grief.
In the past ten years since From Fertile Ground was born, writing has become that free, unbridled swimming lane that is purely mine. Welcome waves of water and creativity running from my mid-fifties to my late sixties.
Of course, I take pride in that body of work and–more recently–find it tremendously gratifying to share what I have learned with other writers, who need an experienced coach … and a few practical ideas … to tell their own stories.
Today, I also pause and wonder–with a touch of sadness as I write this–how many more stories lie ahead for me. Though I still feel strong, capable, creative, and alive in these golden years swimming back and forth under the Arizona sun, I also feel more vulnerable.
Part of it is the process of aging. The other is the narrowing swim lanes of American society that constrain freedom and the expression of ideas.
Having said that, I choose to end this story on a positive note. Today, I choose to relish the goodness of my life with Tom in this rugged landscape. To give thanks for all the stories that have come from fertile ground over the past ten years … as well as those I have salvaged from the depths of the pool looking over my shoulder to beloved people and places that now live on the page.
