To make matters reasonable, I am going to pull off the feat of keeping all the answers to Twitter-length, otherwise known as 140 characters or fewer.  For those of you who are not Twitter denizens (Twenizens?), you will see, over and over again, both its strength and its weakness. Brevity: the soul of wit, but also of vast oversimplification.

When kept to this constraint, we can see that sometimes a pithy reply is best.  Many Twiterers (-erers), however, myself included, are compelled to post strings of related Tweets when one won’t do.  Do let me know if you think a thought/conversation ought to be strung out a bit more and we can carry on in comments or in another post.

For context, students were assigned the six-part essay I excerpted here a few years back: “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad.”

Q: Has your brother, brother’s wife, partner’s mother, and spouse adjusted to you referring to yourself as “baba” or lesbian dad?

A: Easy, on the 1 hand: I’ve never been anything else. But family slipped a little 1^st few wks; newbies do weekly. I explain; it all works out.

Q: How old is your child and how is your child handling having a mom and baba? Does the child refer to you by those titles or has the child opted for something else?

A: Girl 5, boy 3. They’ve only known us, so our family’s the baseline reference pt. Gal often calls me Babbi. I try not to think of the kid in The Brady Bunch.

Q: Do you regret not being the one to bear the child or labeling yourself as “baba” or lesbian dad?

A: Never, never, & never. Much to my great relief on all points. I use descriptor “1/2 way betw. a mama & papa” most often. Makes sense to all.

Q:  ”…the more we talked, the more I realized…how clearly the existing paradigms make space for biomom, and biodad. Bio, bio. And then me: nonbio. I was off the radar, legally, socially, viscerally.”  What did the term ‘bio’ mean to you? How did you define it? And did it change after your child was born?

A: Good Q. It meant a ton more before kid than after. But 1^st yr was challenging. Now? Hardly relevant, except in eyes of the law. There? Huge.

Q:  Did you suffer from an identity struggle? If so, how did you overcome it?

A: I’ve not met the queer person my age who didn’t. Closest I got to suicide: 1^st yr in love w/ my best friend. Overcame slowly, w/ community.

Q:  I found it particularly interesting that throughout all of the articles, one main thread that wove the events together was the concept of legitimzing. Whether it was your relationship, your feeling “non-mommish”, the idea Baba. How important do you think it is to express and begin to formulate concepts like the kind you have made recently?

A: H-UGE. W/out sense of clarity re: who I am, parentally, this all might not have been possible, or so easy/rewarding. Me AND kids benefit.

Q: All of these articles resonated innovation of ideas, definitions, and behaviors that go against the ones society is used to. How have you dealt with this in the past before, that has helped you when dealing with something like parenthood?

A: I think it was great that I was very stable w/ my gay identity before parenthood. Faced, won the battles. P-hood requires focus on the KID.

Q:  How has your role as a Baba evolved or grown than what you expected it would be like?

A: I find I’m who I’ve always been, just now the parent version. But I do float in space between straight dads & moms. That’s been interesting.

Q:  What is the toughest part about being a parent?

A:  1. LACK OF SLEEP! 2. Obligation to confront own character flaws daily (ouch). 3. That it’s all so very transient. I love this gig.

Q: How do you express your masculinity and femininity?

A: With as much flair as possible. I feel most akin to an 18th. c. dandy.

Q: Looking at your first blog [ed note: essay excerpt], I noticed that you speak in sociological terms of the concept of gender. Do you have an educational background in sociology?

A:  Why yes, as a matter of fact I do! Ethnic Studies minor + Sociology coursework @ Berkeley. American Studies Ph.D. program @ Minnesota.

Q: Why do you think that humans need to place themselves in categories? What else in your life have you tried to categorize, define, or identify?

A:  Mysterious, but: makes “thinking” simpler. Sometimes helps, usually hinders. As a scholar type I seek to identify & define a lot, & categorize AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.

Q: You mention that children are the easiest to explain being a “Baba” to. Who, or what type of people, are the most difficult to explain to and why do you think that is?

A:  Kids lack preconceptions & their biases are gut- & experience-based. Adults w/ disdain for innovation find new ways of seeing harder.

Q: did writing and reading what you thought help you understand something you over saw when u were thinking?

A: Absolutely. Always does. That’s gift #1 of the writing process.

Q: do think the title of “baba” gave you the confidence of being the parent figure or if you didn’t have it you would have been as determined or confident as a mom or dad figure?

A:  Interesting. I do feel like making/using a 3^rd name has ultimately been BRILLIANTLY LIBERATING. Must. Escape. Reductive. Dichotemies.

Q: What is it about the term father that you feel is inaccurate to describe your role and title in your family and our society? Why is it that the term mother needs no alteration or even produces any hesitation in a lesbian-couple family?

A:  The term describes my *role* OK. Lots of mannish lesbians love stretching the meaning of “mom.” More than those who want to stretch “dad.”

Q: Do you think that with the dynamics of what gender is to our society these days that we should re-evaluate all gender-role based terms we encounter in order to better reflect the true feelings behind each person or party?

A:  That’d be nice. Language does evolve with both our conscious & unconscious help.  In the end, we all probably hear what we want to anyway.

Q: What do you think is the most important message your feelings, experience, and explanation of your role as a lesbian dad or baba offer to adults and/or children?

A:  Other than love conquers all? That parenthood betwixt conventionally fixed genders offers both parent and kid a TON. It’s available to all.

Q: What role did a father/father figure play in your life, and how did that influence your perception of parenthood and your identity as “Baba”?

A:  My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life. My mom, now gone, had a bigger hand in daily parenting. Pops sees us both as 21^st c. dads.

Q:  Are you still concerned with verifying your authority to be a parent in the eyes of those who are less understanding of same-sex parents? If so, in what ways do you confirm your authority to them?

A:  Getting my kids to see me as an authority figure is way more pressing. Truly? It all boils down to them, & they love me, hell or high water.

[Liked this? Go vote LD Best Parenting Blog for this year's The Lesbian Lifestyle Lezzy Award. Or cast a vote (daily 'til March 2) for any other of the other fine gals' work. We're all one big happy family.]

There’s a story that goes along with this.  Details to be appended to this here post later tonight, after I get the kids in bed.

Long ago, back when people picked up newspapers in their hands in the morning and read them, then put them down and went on with other parts of their day (what a time!), The San Francisco Chronicle used to run a piece called The Question Man.  Somebody – presumably The Question Man – went around town asking folks some interesting question. A column’s worth of the short (Twitter-length) replies were printed alongside a thumbnail photo of the respondent and her/his name, age, occupation, and hometown. Through this we got a pulse-reading from our neighbors on matters great and small.

While I read it regularly – along with Art Hoppe and Herb Caen and later Jon Carroll —  none of the questions or answers were memorable. Except one: “When is a person ‘middle aged’?”  The phenomenon (middle age) was a speck in my distant future, but I took a mild interest in the answers just the same.  Some folks named a year — 30, 40, whatever. Others used some other marker, like “When your marriage is older than your dog,” or “When you are the same age or older than movie stars and national-level elected officials” or some such.  But one really stuck with me.  One woman said, “Middle age is when you no longer apologize for yourself.”

This last definition of middle age has stayed with me as the most compelling, until last Sunday night, when I discovered that middle age is really when you are capable of SPRAINING YOUR FINGER PLAYING AIR GUITAR WITH YOUR KIDS.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  Dictionary definition of “pathetic.” I’ll only add, for the record: it was to Lynard Skynard’s “Free Bird,” and it was worth it.  And this post took me 40 minutes to type.

As I quipped on Twitter the other day — and that’s pretty much the main thing you can do on Twitter, quip:

3 kinds of menopause. Angry kind. Weepy kind. And chuck the broccoli over yer shoulder into the kitchen when yer son refuses to eat it kind.

Then I added:

Guess which kind I have.

Really, that was a rhetorical question. Thus the lack of question mark. The kids don’t lose any sleep at night wondering which kind of menopause Baba has, either. What I like to think is that they don’t lose any sleep at night worrying about it either.

Fortunately, as all sane people do in intermittently insane situations, we fold whatever wrinkles we can into humor as quickly as possible. So by the end of the evening, this event had taken on the stature of household legend, a standard against which all future outbursts of frustration will likely be judged.

Meanwhile, the girl child decided to issue an all-purpose reminder.  Her spelling is idiosyncratic (warned you before!), but I think the gist comes across.

Finally, in desperation, Rufus says, “Everybody has to go to school. Even God had to go to school.”

This statement elicited a chuckle from the girlie. “But God doesn’t even exist!” she said, delighted at the double-layered hoodwink.

“Well, many people do think God exists – these kids did.” I say. A brief series of hypothetical playground debates flash through my head, each featuring the cute little faces of her Agnostic, Animist, Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim,  Sikh, and Unitarian (wink) classmates.  ”What’s really important,” I add, ”what’s most important, is that you’re respectful of whatever it is that someone believes.”

“Mama and I don’t think God exists,” she says.

“Well she does, just not in the way that lots of other people do.”

I think to myself the more complicated details behind that. She believes in god, maybe even more, godness. Not the capital-G God  attributed to organized religion, but more a God-like entity that represents the combined power of love and life and all such very large things. She often even calls this god, for lack of a better name.

“You don’t think God exists, do you Baba?”

“Not really, no. But I do believe in the natural goodness in all people, and in kindness. And I also believe that can sit alongside those who believe in God.”

“Like those people who came to our porch, who you talked to forever?”

“Exactly.” Man I exhausted those Jehovah’s Witnesses. But they left with a smile (and probably a “talkative heathen lesbian” notation in their book), and my girlie witnessed the whole thing.

“What’s important is that it’s okay for someone to believe what they believe, and we can believe what we can believe.”

Clearly she got the take-home message.

“Yep, pretty much.”

“I believe there’s a red thread that connects all people together.”

Months ago, we’d read The Red Thread, a beautiful tale about adoption and belonging. Author Grace Lin takes the Chinese “red thread of fate” myth, which connects people destined to be together, and threads it through the theme of international adoption. Our girlie just took a good idea and extended it to its logical conclusion.

I was about to launch into further discussion of the beauty of this belief, how true it feels to me, too, how it does a nice job of illustrating something I think of as integral to the Buddhist teachings that I try to pilot by, but she abruptly brought us back to the matter at hand. She’s a lot of things, our daughter is, but sentimental is not one of them.

“Go back to reading, Baba.”

And so we did.

I wanted to caption this picture “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well,” but the beloved thought that would be too strange and obscure.  Also, if I used the actual Shakespearean line, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio” and so on, it wouldn’t hook the same way, since we’re all too accustomed to the mis-quote.

At any rate, she’s not holding the swanky PB & J sandwich in her hand like Hamlet held Yorick’s skull, so the whole notion is even farther off the mark.  Plus I don’t think she’s contemplating the capricious transience of life.  It’s not so much “memento mori” here as it is “memento peanut butter is still really gross, and just because I told Baba that I would think about trying it doesn’t mean I have any intention of actually doing so.”

Observant locals may recognize the location as the memorable Garden Court at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel; those familiar with the joint might also recognize that the crown dealie is part of the “Prince and Princess Tea” they offer youngins. The beloved initially thought we were humoring Baba when we went there to celebrate the girlie’s first week of Kindergarten. After all, by the end of the week we both realized that getting through this first Kindergarten week milestone easily took as much out of us — if not more — than it did out of her.

Before we even got onto the subway to head into the city, though, it became quite clear that the upcoming fancy tea was way more huge for the child than for the parent.  For a gal currently fascinated by fairy tales and those who populate them, visiting the closest thing to a palace we could find and then pretending to royalty was as near as she could get to a dream come true. Between first hearing of our plans to whisk her off to this tea, and her finally discovering from Helmuth, the Garden Court maitre d’, that she could, she asked ”Do I get to keep the tiara?” at least five times.

For a scepter, she was given an 18-inch long, pencil-width dowel bearing on it an elaborate, twisty, multi-colored lollypop. After she’d eaten her fill of chocolate-dipped strawberries and fancy cakes and slurped down her cup of hot chocolate (peppermint tea was an option, but it’s not like she heard that once the words “hot chocolate” had passed the waitron’s lips), she picked up the scepter and traipsed gentle laps around our table swaying it to and fro.  ”Sweets to you, sweets to you!” she repeated in her high falsetto as she wiggled the scepter in our general direction like a divining rod.  On one or two laps she came dangerously close to clipping the gal at the neighboring table. It’s all fun and games until you knock a patron unconscious with your lollypop scepter.

Meanwhile her ma and I ate more slowly. Little salmon sandwiches. Egg salad ones. Cucumber ones. It took a while  before I got to spreading the rose petal jam on the fresh scone, but when I did, the flower scent (more pungent than you’d expect, coming from the jam) was like Proust’s madeleine.

“My mother loved roses, the scent of them. In flowers and in perfume.” Long pause.  ”She would have loved to have been here.” I say this to the beloved as if any of the above information would have been news to her.

She looks at me sympathetically. In the background, the pianist renders a lilting, graceful version of “Bennie and the Jets.”

“She was the Anglophile’s Anglophile. Never travelled to England but always wanted to. Insisted I have strawberries and clotted cream when I was in London that time.”

The beloved smiles sweetly, and continues to say nothing. She’s heard all this so many times before. We courted, after all, amidst my year-old mother-loss grief.

“This granddaughter. God would she have loved to have known this granddaughter.”

We both take in and exhale our biggest breaths.

The beloved says to me, “I’ll bet she is here, right now.”

The girlie makes another tip-toey lap, pausing to knight me, then moving on, barely missing the sandwich tray on her way out.

“Yep,” I say, “but I’ll bet she wouldn’t have expected to find me here in this outfit.” Back home the girlie had insisted I get as fancy as possible, which to her always means the light blue tie with the polka dot flowers on it. Dark grey Italian wool suit, BR off the rack. The middle class gal’s Saville Row bespoke.  She is thrilled when I am got up this way. I on the other hand, when I am got up this way and not heading directly for a queer event, feel like ROTC officers probably do on the Berkeley campus on dress uniform days. Or a version thereof. I am proud, I am comfortable in my skin, and I am well aware that I appear unusual at the least, perhaps even surprising.  At the most I might inspire  what I hope will be only isolated pockets of well-restrained, inward derision. I quietly hope I don’t get bopped upside the head, especially in front of my daughter. Old fears die slowly, maybe even never die completely.

The girlie pauses in her circumnavigations. “Why, Baba? Why wouldn’t she have expected to see you in this outfit?”

She asks it in the way kids ask questions like these: their tone tells you that they already half-know the answer, and they’re asking as much to discover how you’ll answer as what. By now the pianist is on to the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”

“Well honey.  Every new child invites their parent into a dance. Sometimes it’s a dance the parent knows already and loves, sometimes — most of the time — there’s something new about it.” I check to see she’s still with me, and she is. “My mom was a girlish girl, and she expected me to be that way. But I wasn’t. So she learned how to dance with me as a boyish girl.”

I don’t tell her yet how complicated that dance was. Pain here, grace there. The long, arduous walks through the aisles in Capwell’s, the now-defunct department store where our mother would get my sister and me our fall school clothes. Me, longing for the stuff hanging on the racks over in the boys’ section, and rarely being able to even identify that longing powerfully enough to advocate for myself, much less succeed in scoring the full-on Leave It to Beaver regalia I wanted. And yet the Tonka trucks, the HotWheels, the baseball gloves I did get for my birthdays. My mother’s lingering disbelief that my lesbianism wasn’t rooted in some negative experience with a boy, somewhere, somehow. And yet her tireless, passionate advocacy of my full self — as much of it as she was able to see.

We never got to the end of that dance together. Did not. Death came first, and I will never forget the St. Paul bar I was sitting in, a month and a half after she died, when that realization grabbed me by the lungs. I held my face in my hands and wept without ability to stop weeping, minutes on end, and the three or four people with me could only look on sympathetically and occasionally pat my shoulder.

I have gotten there with my dad, I thank the heavens. One afternoon a few years back, when I was thanking him for the hand-me down shirts he had just given me, an old habit between us by then, I said to him: “Pops, I’m the son you never had.” And right back he said, “Doll, you’re the son I did have.”

I look at my daughter, tiara akimbo, lollypop scepter at half-mast in her limp wrist, this evidently girlish girl. She fixes a level, unblinking gaze back at me, the only Baba she’s ever known. Then she raises her scepter again, and continues her dance.

]]> http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/09/royal-treatment/feed/ 21 http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/07/scattered-notes-from-an-anniversary/ http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/07/scattered-notes-from-an-anniversary/#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:35:06 +0000 Lesbian Dad http://www.lesbiandad.net/?p=2470 Herewith, scattered notes and photos from the beloved’s and my anniversary date  (a la the Baba’s Day pictorial), because the main dealie sitting on my shoulders these days still defies direct address, and yet squashes close to flat so much of everything else.  Thus making truthful personal narrative somewhat challenging.   The “main dealie” to which I refer still being the weighty, utterly unexpected early passing of a dear old friend.  Her hometown memorial will be just this Saturday.  My dear dear friend, her beloved, was on planes and in rental cars all day today in a long, long journey to go speak at it.

Emily Dickinson said “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” and she’s right.  ”Too bright for our infirm Delight/The Truth’s superb surprise,” says she, and I’m telling you I still need sunglasses to make out my morning eggs and toast.   ‘Til I can even get to the point of telling that truth slant — “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind–” — best I can do is gather up a breezy narrative of my beloved and me celebrating many happy years together.  Because there it is, sitting there alongside the eggs and toast, irony and all. 

We secured an unprecedented twelve hours of childcare and were shocked — shocked! — at the number of distinct conversations that could be initiated and completed during this time, when no toddlers or children under five were present. (Note to other parents of young: DO IT! Quarterly at least! It’s so worth it! And I’m not talking date, I’m talking extendo-date, several hours past the length of your ordinary night out.)

After a delightful conversation-filled subway ride, we strolled on impulse to… tea at the Palace Hotel! Preceded by champagne! Sure, it cost an arm and a leg. Sure, we’re living on borrowed time. Whatever. It was grand, and I’d do it again in another week if given half the chance. Fortunately for our family budget, the beloved doesn’t even give me a quarter the chance.  Or an eighth. How do you think we made it fifteen years without being impounded?

The pianist at the Garden Court — where they serve tea at the Palace — may as well have been a potted palm or a ficus benjaminus.  One or two folks posed by him for photos, but rarely was he directly addressed.  He was part of the pretty, pretty scenery.  I wanted to applaud after each song (”S’wonderful,” “You Are So Beautiful,” and a respectful rendition of “Never Can Say Goodbye”) but the beloved told me It’s Just Not Done.  Since she’s a theater professional/musician and a vet of the food service industry, I believe her. (The two terms are nearly redundant, don’t you think?  Theater professional, food service industry worker.)

Incidentally, I am so not kidding about her vet status in the food service industry. Nary a block would pass by, as we toodled around her native Minneapolis in our courtship those many years ago, during which she wouldn’t find a restaurant and causually intone, “Worked there.  And there. Got fired  from there for being a spy.  Totally not true. Worked there. Quit there.” And so on.  The life of an actor. 

At the table to our right were two debutantes in matching peach-colored mini skirts and matching white three-quarter length coats, whom the beloved and I both felt sure signed their checks (separate!) with their parents’ money. We, on the other hand, signed our check (together!) with what should have been our kids‘ money. We both felt okay with that.

Further on past the spendthrift debutantes was what the beloved dubbed the “Ladies Who Lunch” table (for the musically inclined, here, from the 2006 revival). Who are we to judge. Some of them might have thought the same of us, except we were a party of two, only one of whom could reasonably be accused of being a lady. The other of whom, if you accused her of being a lady, would remove her pocket square from her jacket and slap you with it.  In as gentlemanly-like a fashion as could be mustered.

The ceiling of the Garden Court is gorgeous, but not the kind of thing you want to be under in an earthquake. Just a guess. While we nibbled our tea sandwiches, I told the typical exaggerations about Enrico Caruso’s experience here at the Palace during the 1906 earthquake — that he exited the hotel in nothing but a towel, vowing never to sing in the city again, and so on.  He did stay at the Palace, and had sung in Carmen at the opera house the night before the earthquake.  And he did skedaddle as soon as he could — took a ferry to Oakland and hopped the nearest train to New York and thence off to la bella Italia (his account here).  But the towel part was a bit of an exaggeration.  By now, the beloved is fairly used to them, and rolled with this one with characteristic aplomb.
 
Full-bellied from the tea, we were off to a side alley pedicure! For her, not for me.  I had never been into a nail emporium, and it was an education.  Slash kinda creepy. Several of the gals there asked me more than once whether I’d like one too, and I kept having to find gracious ways to say NO WAY ARE  YOU KIDDING ALLOW A PERFECT STRANGER TO HAVE AT MY CUTICLES WITH SHARP OBJECTS?!!

(A gal quoted in this ditty on la vie butch opines that the Butch of Today submits to mani/pedis with a casualness with which our kind once approached auto repair and hating men. I have clearly not received the email, neither about the mani/pedis nor the mani/haties.)

My discomfort over the notion of a pedicure was difficult to convey gracefully, but I tried. I might have slipped a bit and mentioned something about the sharp objects and cuticles in earshot of a woman whose every extremity was being ministered to by the nail emporium staff, and thus was unable to move.  I might have attempted to apologize to her.  It might or might not have worked.  Still, the beloved left very, very happy, with shiny red toenails.  I mean burnt sienna toenails.  I mean burnt cabernet toenails. Whatever. They shined.

From pedi to the SF Museum of Modern Art! And the Avedon exhibit! Scrumtious. I adjusted my pocket square in the reflection of his über-famous  photo of Davinia with elephants (above), thoroughly appreciating how apropos such a gesture was, in the room of the exhibit dedicated to his fashion photography.

En route to our dinner (below): doesn’t she look like a movie star? I trotted next to her for half a block taking paparazzi-like pictures, just because. Ah, young love.

We dined at a swank, much-Yelped & -Chowhounded restaurant!  Whose matire d’ had the good sense to consult his notes about our reservation and wish us “Happy Anniversary” upon our entry!  A card bearing the same wishes greeted us at our nifty corner table.  Nice touches, and befitting a restaurant in a city that prides itself on being the nation’s gay mecca.  I noted when I made the online reservation that it was our 15 year relationship anniversary and our one-year legal gay-married anniversary.

One day, people, one day, this kind of gracious and courteous support of our seasoned love will not be notable, even in other towns. One day. Just who knows when.  Meanwhile, I appreciated it. When our love began to sprout, back in the mid-1990s, this sort of graciousness would have been even more notable.  Fifteen years before that, I wouldn’t have even been comfortable being evidently lovey-dovey with my partner in a restaurant.  Alright I was still a coupla years shy of coming out thirty years ago. But still.
  
At first, I wanted to spank our waitron for being too perky and brash (”ladies”!! she kept traipsing up to the table and addressing us as “ladies”!!), but after enough of the perky and brash Pinot Noir I was willing simply to talk about spanking it instead of the waitron.  But over time I got used to her.
  
Not more than a few minutes into the meal, the hetero couple nearby us had complaints about their wine.  I stifled the impulse to offer ours up for a spanking, since it deserved one probably more than theirs did. Then another hetero couple sat down between us and the wine-complaining hetero couple, and the two couples traded stories about various vacation spots and fancy restaurants and such-like.  The beloved noted a perfect criss-cross man-to-man convo, with the gals offering demure, occasional, decidedly minor side chit-chat. I thought stuff like that only happened in movies. Of the 1930s.

If we weren’t so busy having fun, we would have listened in some more and learned a bit about how the other 9/10ths live. Geezum peezum, though. I mean, we were digging into our kids’ lunch money for this dinner, and the folks next to us just thought, on a lark, they’d pop into the city and stay the night.  You know, at a hotel.  Which notion had occurred to us as a way to celebrate our 15th anniversary, but, you know, it would have cost us our kids’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner money, so nope.  

As I say, though, no neighboring snootery could squelch the enjoyment of two harried parents out to dinner at a place that served food accompanied by sauces. On the food. That took time and skill to cook.  O lordy lord do I look forward to the time either or both of the kids’ palates can bear anything close to a sauce, since I rather like cooking them. Meanwhile, we slog through the culinary wilderness, hacking away at the underbrush of kid-friendly fish sticks and pasta-with-parmensan and peas-with-butter.  

Incidentally: one of the many things I love about my beloved is that,  in full view of the snooty couples, she ran her finger down the side of her steak knife to pick up the dripping juices.  And popped the finger into her mouth to suck ‘em off with a satisfying smack.  I’m just saying.

Another thing I love about her is how very different she is than me in oh so many ways. We had been recollecting memorable moments of the past fifteen years, and had seguéd into quizzing one another on the random, rare factoids we either of us might not know about one another. You know, old couple hi-jinx. I had just won a string of three quiz questions, and she eagerly pressed me to quiz her.

So I did: What activity filled my summers, my 5th grade through my 7th grade years? It took a heavy hint or two, before she recalled that I used to play “Star Trek” with my childhood chum Darla (yes: her real name), in the vast fields behind my house. I wore a blue velour shirt, Darla wore an orange one; we taped on our home-made Starfleet insignias and brandished plastic phasers and communicators we’d made from kits. Hours and hours of buddy-bonding enjoyment.  My beloved, unfortunately, was blurry on some of the details, and not because of the perky and brash Pinot Noir.

“Okay,” I say. “But who played who?”

“She was the Captain!” the beloved blurted out.

“Whose name was….?”

“Piccolo! Cuinard! Something like that!”

“Wrong Star Trek!”

“Dang! Okay, okay, but you were #1!”

“Wrong Star Trek again!”  We’ve got a cultural divide here, plus the May-December thing going on. 

“You were– you were– you were Scotty!”  It was so sad, the look of triumph on her face. I told her I knew she loved me anyhow.  (Darla: Kirk. Me: Spock.  But many of you knew that already.)

On the other side of us was a pair of women who were clearly not a couple.  I suggested to the beloved that they were sisters. One had blond hair, the other brown, but otherwise their features were quite similar. I launched into the gazillionth re-tread of an old joke of mine (singing the first five words of the Donny & Marie song, “I’m a Little Bit Country (I’m a Little Bit Rock n’ Roll)”, and the beloved commenced to guffawing. Why? Fifteen years. You only need the joke cues; no longer the whole joke.  In another fifteen, I’ll be able to shave it down to even fewer notes.

We had neither the belly space nor the money for desert, but it came anyway, thanks to the graciousness of the fine upstanding establishment.  All manner of confections, all featuring chocolate. I went to say something to the beloved just after she had sunk her teeth into the first of them, but she waved her hand in front of my face.  ”Don’t interrupt me,” she said, as soon as she could catch her breath.  Thereafter I didn’t.

When the waitron came with the tab, she proved her queer-cultural ignorance by placing the tray down next to me. The mannish one.  ”Close, but no cigar, my sweet naïf,” I think to myself, as I push the tray over to the be-lipsticked beloved, our Family’s CFO and primary breadwinner. We lesbians do things differently.  We’re kind of like Canada.  Only the day before the beloved had demonstrated to some of the gals in her summer theater production how you can lead in a dance, even while you hold the arm position of the follower. “Polly and I have danced this way for years,” she said, to muffled chuckles.

With any luck, we’ll continue to.

Today’s the last day this button is true.*  Tomorrow, the beloved and I will have been together for 15 years.  Fifteen!

I’ve had a very low output here at LD while I’ve been licking my wounds and refocussing my vision after the death of an old friend.  There’s much I might like to say about the past fourteen years with my beloved, which has included far more strum und drang than I expected (I was planning on rainbows and unicorns, like all of us poor schmucks).  Seems like life is, at best, equal parts sturm and rainbow.  Some might even say you don’t get the rainbows without the sturms, but of course if they said that mid-sturm, they’d probably get smacked upside the head with a fish by some malcontent sturm-weatherer.

But anyhow.  I may not muster much more than these brief notes.  So I will say that I have felt struck with a bolt of phenomenal good fortune for my beloved to have (a) crossed my path, (b) asked me out (some notes on our courtship and commitment ceremony here) and (c) stuck it out this long and made a Baba of me. Next best thing that ever happened to me, after her asking me out.

I’m also fortunate to be among those 18,000 same-sex couples who remain as hitched today as we were a year ago, when I wrote:

A day can go by, probably more now, after the fullness of kids, when we don’t manage to hug or kiss one another.  But we roll over and curl into one another’s bodies in our sleep, expecting to feel some part of the other — ankle, waist, wrist — as much as we expect the feel of the sheets.  Our love is no longer the spark in the air between us, it’s the air itself.  We are an old married couple, about to get married.

And tomorrow, we’ll be an old married couple, celebrating our first legally married anniversary. Thinking about old friends who don’t have what we have, but should. Appreciating every moment (or trying to), knowing that there but for the grace of — ? — go either of us.  There, eventually, one of us will go.  And then, after a time, the other.  Meanwhile we pay as close attention as we can.

Do I get another ten years of this? If I do, I promise/threaten right now I’ll be singing this duet with her (me: Tevye, her: Golde; natch).

*  I picked up a coupla buttons like this at one of the election day trainings, and always thought that button campaign had a kind of poignant-pitiful supplicant tone to it. Like knowing how many years we’d been together would somehow make a difference. (We deserve our nuptial strife and discontent as much as the longevity, even if state protections may aid some aspects of the longevity part.)  But did it help? Not enough. Least wise not this last time around.

Per usual, the kids loved the cooking process nearly as much as the eating process.  But not more so.  They ate their muffins at totally different rates of speed, boychild ramming his in his mouth, girlchild slowly picking berries out of what she called “their little caves.”

This is the simplest of all pleasures: baking something with my kids, watching them eat it. And yet yesterday, I would say this activity — particularly watching them eat the muffins, with such total absorption in the task — ranked as what Lily Tomlin’s “Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” character Trudy would call a “peak experience.”

I have little doubt that this muffin-making expanded to fit so much emotional space because the recent sudden death of a friend — and the impact of that death on those who love her — has blurred so much of what used to occupy my daily attention.  There’s space now for me to see.

In 1908, what is thought to have been a meteoroid or comet exploded in a Siberian forest, flattening roughly 80 million trees over in an area of over 800 square miles around the blast site.  (The Tunguska event.) Oddly, some trees still stood  among the ruins, though shorn of their branches. This visual image has always stayed with me, and often seems to be one of the few means to convey what it feels like to inhabit a space after a great shock has taken place.

I’m way out at the 700 mile marker, but I have a fairly unobstructed view of the epicenter.  At least I can picture it very clearly in my mind’s eye, having spent so much time lately at or near others of these epicenters. Strewn about in that quiet, post-shock landscape are a great many treasures, and you could fill your hours walking around in wonder, looking at each one.  A basket of blueberries, pregnant to plump with their freshness; a dozen crumbly-soft blueberry muffins;  the sight of children — your children — eating them, berry by berry.

I have  not been able to square away the time to do a proper narrative intepretation of the day, but meanwhile, I’ve uploaded a slideshow of over 75 images from this year’s SF Pride.

Not included here are the blurry camera phone images of Kellita, “Queen of Carnival SF 2008 and  Head Feather, Hot Pink Feathers Dance Co. & Showgirl Academy,” who did an impromptu performance for us Pride-weary BART subway train riders. That’s yet to come.

Love the t-shirts, even love the font on the t-shirts. 

Their son is adorable, and had the best deadpan stare at the camera, from beneath a very fabulous hat. But, since I err on the conservative side w/ kid images (other than me own), the little cutie will have to remain as cute as your imagination can conjure.  

[Update (small world dep't.): Papa reads LD! So we corresponded, and I've got the A-OK to put their son's adorable mug up here, so I swapped the photo. They write about their beautiful family at Endless Grins. G'wan over and say hi. Also g'wan over and see what their son's t-shirt said. Dave (Papa) wrote about the day they had (Daddy John, & cutie Caden), and the reception they all got for their t-shirts. Seems I was one among a crush of paparazzi.]

Am still scrambling for the nonexistent time to do up a whole pictorial narrative of Pride. Severely delimited childcare this month, compounded by Life.  Meanwhile I’ll trot these pics out daily ’til I can get the whole shebang up.