What Kind of Times are These?

© Jennifer Finney Boylan

Historian Claire Potter

Last week, as prelude to an evening of poetry,  my colleague Peter Harris– a writer and a professor here at Colby College–gave a short reading from Adrienne Rich’s  “What Kind of Times Are These.”   “She burned through the fog that I lived in like an acetylene torch,” he said.  “I had never seen anyone so intensely Alive with a capital A.   I felt my life change in an instant.”

“This is not somewhere else but here,” he read. “Our country moving closer to its own truth and dread/its own ways of making people disappear.”

We all nodded, sharing a sense of love for the poet who had died the previous week, at the age of 82.

As Peter headed back to his seat, however, one of my students suddenly catcalled from the back of the room.  “She may have been a great poet,” he said, “but she also hurt transgender people!  She helped Janice Raymond write ‘The Transsexual Empire,’ a book that is still oppressing trans men and women everywhere.”
There was a lot of murmuring in the room at this moment, as you might imagine.  The host for the reading, poet Adrian Blevins, reclaimed the podium and said, “Thank you.  Perhaps we can find the words to talk about this issue after the reading.”  Moving right along.

We did talk about the issue after the reading, although a lot of what we talked about was whether it was appropriate to denounce someone during a moment devoted to her memory. The word we most frequently found, as it turned out, was “awkward.”

And yet I was grateful, as one of the only openly trans people in the room, that someone had said something.  On the way home I thought about Rich, and her genius, and her “trans-misogyny,” and above all, about  the inscrutable contradictions in the lives of artists.  It’s true that she counseled Raymond during the writing of 1979‘s execrable Transsexual Empire; Raymond writes that a transgender person, rather than being a vulnerable soul desperately trying to find peace and wholeness, is actually some sort of gender spy, determined to “colonize feminist identification, culture, politics, and sexuality.”  Rather than responding to transgender people–men and women– with compassion and love, she essentially compared us to some cultural cousin of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Rich is credited by Raymond in the forward to her book as having provided “constant encouragement.”  In one chapter of the book, Raymond refers to Rich describing trans women as “men who have given up the supposed ultimate possession of manhood in a patriarchal society…”  Trans-men (people born female), for their part,  don’t appear to be on her radar at all.

My awareness of all of this work complicated my mourning process, to say the least.  On the one hand, as for so many readers, Rich’s poetry opened doors for me and changed the way I saw the world.  Her words encouraged me to believe in language as an agent of change.  “A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill,” she wrote, “what and when to burn, or even how to theorize.  It reminds you.. where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.”
One of the “wicks of desire” lit for me by Rich’s work was the hope of living an authentic life, a life defined not only by my queerness but by my love of my wife and my sons.  Rich’s work simultaneously inspired and criticized that hope.

And yet, I keep wondering whether it’s fair to judge an artist by a single statement;  surely she was not alone, among second-wave feminists, in feeling a sense of uncertainty around the lives of trans people. My friend, the historian Claire Potter, notes, “Some of Rich’s greatest achievements are difficult to separate from her essentialism.  In my view, fighting transphobia wherever it appears is intimately linked to understanding how some liberation movements gain solidarity and traction by isolating other oppressed people whom they perceive as insignificant.”

Still, I would much rather celebrate Rich’s passion for language and feminism and social change than dwell on her contribution to a dated book that, of course, she herself did not even write.

The culture has made big strides in its understanding of transgender people since 1979, when Transsexual Empire was written. It seems as if each month brings news of more progress for trans people. The Miss Universe organization, for instance, announced this week that trans contestant Jenna Talackova–disqualified earlier from the Miss Canada pageant–will now be able to compete. (Full disclosure:  the author serves on the board of directors of GLAAD, which helped negotiate the policy change.)  In the last year, several trans people have managed to comport themselves in the public spotlight with dignity and grace, including Chaz Bono, who proved on Dancing With the Stars that being the son of Sonny and Cher doesn’t interfere one bit with a man’s ability to do the tango.
Meanwhile, when Mike Wallace died this week at 93, there was a similar sense of mixed emotions among LGBT Americans.  On the one hand: the twenty Emmy awards.  The Peabodys.  The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.  On the other:  the 1967 CBS News report, “The Homosexuals,” an hourlong special that generally condemned the “deviant” gay lifestyle;  the interview of at least one of the participants was later edited to make him seem “less happy.”
Wallace later said, “I should have known better,”  and regretted his participation in the program.

But for thousands of LGBT people around the country, the name of Mike Wallace will always be associated–along with his many triumphs–with a program that made our lives harder.

Mark Antony said that “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones,” but I’m not sure.  Is it only by our worst moments that any of us should be judged?

A life is full of so many moments.  I can attest that my own life has contained, in equal measures,  things I am proud of as well as things that bring me shame.  I am hopeful that it is my good works that will outlive me, and not my mistakes, although odds are that when it’s time to write my own eulogy,  it will not be the love I tried to bring to my wife and sons that is first remembered, not the sentences hammered out slowly over long Maine winters, but instead, some fool thing I said on some talk show when an interviewer caught me by surprise.  In spite of what I hope has been a good life as a teacher and a parent, my tombstone will almost certainly read:  Asked Oprah Winfrey How She’d Like It if She Had a Penis.

If Adrienne Rich did not know the words, in 1979, that would provide solace for readers like me,  she still wrote the poems that enabled me to find that language for myself.  “I came to explore the wreck,” she wrote, in her most famous poem, “The words are purposes. The words are maps.  I came to see the damage that was done, and the treasures that prevail.”

I met Rich, once, fleetingly, at an AWP Conference.  I held a door open for her as she entered a hotel, and she passed through that open door, moving slowly with her cane.  She paused upon the threshold, and looked at me.  Her eyes were full of passion, and fire, and love.

“Thank you,” she said.

Wikipedia reports, “For his part, anchor Mike Wallace came to regret his participation in the episode. “I should have known better,” he said in 1992.^[25] Speaking in 1996, Wallace stated, “That is — God help us — what our understanding was of the homosexual lifestyle a mere twenty-five years ago because nobody was out of the closet and because that’s what we heard from doctors — that’s what Socarides told us, it was a matter of shame.”^[27] However, Wallace was at the time of broadcast close friends with noted designer James Amster (creator of the landmark Amster Yard courtyard in New York City) and Amster’s male long-term companion, men whom Wallace later described as “a wonderful old married couple” and “[b]oth people that [he] admired”. Despite this personal knowledge, Wallace relied on the American Psychiatric Association’s categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness rather than his own experience in creating the episode. As recently as 1995, Wallace told an interviewer that he believed homosexuals could change their orientation if they really wanted to.^[16]“

The complete Wikipedia entry on the show is here.

I know what my friend historian Claire Potter would say, “Historicize, historicize, historicize,” and that’s a good approach to take to most things.  Surely the public perception of the lives of gay and lesbian Americans has changed since 1967 in ways almost impossible to over-state at this hour.  Still, looking back, it’s a dark hour, especially for those of us for whom the struggle for full equality continues.

Here’s a short recap version of the episode.  Make sure you have something ready to throw at hand.CBS News:

The Homosexuals, CBS, 1967

In the years since then, it’s become clear to me that the world is full of strange places, and that Iowa is probably neither more nor less full of them than anyplace else.

Still, it’s a delight to be asked back, and I am looking forward to meeting  readers and students.  Looking forward!

love,

jenny Boylan

world’s tallest woman.

The theme of this years conference is:  IDENTITY • MEMORY • TESTIMONY

Here’s a link to the conference’s home page; that site also provides a complete conference schedule.  Events kick off Friday afternoon with a walking tour of Maine Women Writer’s History in Portland.

Hope to see you there!

An Address to a consortium of allies attending independent high schools in the Philadelphia area– Haverford, Episcopal, Shipley, Agnes Irwin, Penn Charter, Springside, Friends Select, Germantown Friends, and Baldwin.   These are the rough notes (from which I frequently strayed) for the speech given at Penn Charter, March 15, 2012, to an audience of roughly 500 students and their teachers.   The  talk was sponsored by the Multicultural Resource Center, run by the amazing Karen De Gregorio.

Hello everyone.  Thank you for having me.

Okay, so first off?  If any of my Haverford teachers from the 1970s are here?  Can I just say:  you guys look different too.

It may surprise you to learn that I haven’t come all the way from Belgrade Lakes, Maine in order to talk to you about what it means to be transgender.  By which I mean, specifically that if you haven’t been freaking out about how you suspect you really ought to be a member of the opposite sex by now… you can probably cross it off of your list of things to worry about.  It‘s not something that’s likely going to start bothering you simply as result of hearing me talk to you today.  It’s a fairly rare condition, and learning about it  today isn’t going to do you any lasting harm. Which is roundabout way, I suppose, of reassuring you that it’s not contagious. I hope that’s a relief.

Let’s also pause to say that if there are some of you who are struggling with our gender identity, and you want someone to talk to about it, you can probably start just by e-mailing me. My e-mail is jb(at)jenniferboylan.net. And If you didn’t commit that to memory, you can find it on my website, and if you send me a note, I’ll write you back and we can have a conversation about it all.  I’ll keep it confidential too,  if you want.  You should know that I’m an English teacher, not a therapist, and  that the things that turned out be true in my life may  not be of much use to you.  But still, I’m always glad to help, if I can.

There. That’s out-of-the-way.

What’s probably more important to address than the specifics of transgender experience – which by the way I will try to loop back to later in this talk – is the more important subject of  what it means to be different. What’s strange, if you think about it, is that on paper, anyhow, we all say we value individuality, difference, people pursuing their dreams. You have to think that on some level it’s  the thing that we value above all others;  it’s even in the Declaration of Indenpendence, for crying out loud, our national reverence for the pursuit of happiness–  whatever happiness might mean to each Ameircan citizen.  AT the same time– and especially in high school–there’s this insane pressure to conform, to be like everybody else. And yet over time you find out that everybody is struggling with something, even – sometimes especially – the cool people.

My experience of being transgender–can you imagine that, a  transgender girl at an all male school, Haverford, in the 1970s–  what’s the expression?  DUDE.  My experience meant that I was suffering – from my earliest memory of being alive – with something so fundamentally weird that it was almost impossible to explain to other people.  I mean, that really is one of the worst aspects of being trans, at least for me it was. The thing that was so fundamental to my sense of self, the certainty that I had a spirit that was a different gender than the body in which I found myself –  was something that other people have probably never even thought wants about ever even possibly being a problem. What was it like? It was really hard.

Overtime I guess what I’ve learned, though, is that everybody’s carrying something in their hearts. And even if it’s not something as strange is being trans, that doesn’t make any less hard if it’s the thing you’re struggling with.    Whether  its sexuality, or gender identity, or race, or being bullied by others, or eating disorders, or being OCD or ADD or autistic, or just your own impossibly weird parents,  everybody has a burden to carry.  It can be a hard life, this one, and it can be hard even if you’re relatively normal.  Not that  I’ve ever met anybody who’s actually normal, but you know.  I can imagine that if there are such people, they have a hard time too.

So. How do you survive when in your private heart you know you don’t fit in?

Well one-way fitting in is to pretend you’re something you’re not. To put up a brave front and do what you have to do in order to get along.  Learn to be a first-class fake.

I’ll pause here to plug a relatively new book series of mine, Falcon Quinn.  I actually have a couple copies here.  Falcon Quinn is kind of a bizarro-world Harry Potter;  only with monsters instead of magic.  Our hero Falcon, and his friends find themselves, at the age of thirteen, turning into monsters– Banshees, Sasquatches,  Chupakabras,  Wind Elementals,  Abominable Snowmen, frankensteins.  they get sent to a special school where they’re taught how NOT to be monsters, how to imitate human beings. So they literally can survive in the world without people trying to kill them with stakes or silver bullets.  The question in Falcon Quinn, then, becomes:  is it better to be something you’re not, if it means survival?  Or should you embrace your true self, if your true self is, say, a zombie?

There’s a scene in Bride of Frankenstein– the old version, with Boris Karloff– that strikes me as emblematic of what adolescence can be like.  The monster comes upon a mirror one night, and he’s never seen a mirror before– and thus doesn’t know that the terrifying thing he’s looking at is actually himself.  AT first he’s scared, as all the humans are when they first see the monster.  But then, slowly, it dawns upon him that the terrible thing he’s seeing is himself.  (acted this out, complete with groaning).

For me that was what it was like to be a teenager, and I suspect, that on dark days, it’s what  it’s like for everybody.  (groans)

I remember when I went to the Haverford school, occasionally other students and what frequently teachers, including the headmaster, would make comments or jokes about transgender, or gay people, and  the punchline was always something about how messed up you have to be if you’re one of those people.

What could I do, except to stand there with a stupid look on my face and laugh and say yeah. I guess you would have to be pretty messed up ha ha ha ha.

It puts me in mind of the Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, who, back in the 1970s, was the swing vote in a case called , Bowers versus Hardwick. That  case held that  sexual acts taking case  between consenting adults done in private, ought to be legal. Justice Powell, who wound up voting against the case, later turned to his clerk, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a homosexual.”

As it turned out, his clerk was gay.   But because he was in the closet,  he couldn’t tell Justice Powell.  At the time, all he could  do was turn to Justice Powell, and say, “Actualy, I bet you do.”

The other strategy, of course, is to live your truth out loud.  But how do you that?   Bob Dylan has a tune called  Absolutely Sweet Marie, in which he sings,, to live outside the law you must be honest.

What I say, and what I learned at the Haverford school all those years ago, was that to live outside the law you must be smart.

I would never consider myself one of Haverford schools better students.  In fact, last year when I spoke at Haverford, my old biology teacher, Mr. Alford, came up to me after my talk and showed me a test that I had taken back in 1973, a test on which I’d  gotten a  29.  Out of 100. Thanks Mr. Alford.  What a great memory!

Look I wasn’t a great student at Haverford school by any means. But in spite of my grades, Haverford school did do one incredible thing for me. It woke me up. I had these great teachers, most of them anyway, including Edward Hallowell and Todd Pearson and Robert Ulysses Jameson.  they taught me how to write, and how to read critically.  They gave me the very thing I needed to survive– the ability to trust my wits, and the faith that if I worked hard enough, I would find the words to explain the thing I felt in my heart.

So thanks guys. I’m not sure that I am exactly what you had in mind when you devised your curriculum. But one way or another,  the gifts you gave me in your classrooms actually helped to save my life.

So how is it that you connect other people? How do you explain to people the thing that’s in your heart if that thing it’s in your heart is almost unimaginable for other people? Will you can give them lectures, I suppose.  I know that there are plenty of  teachers who think that that’s a good way of getting information across to people.

But lectures can only take you so far. Over time, I’ve I found that the best to make people understand what you feel is by telling them a story.

Among professors of creative writing, there’s an old cliché, show don’t tell. You’ve probably heard people use that line before. It’s a way of suggesting that in stories the best strategy is scene setting and dialogue,, as opposed to telling, through narration and summary and exposition. It’s probably advice you’ve heard before, if you’ve ever tried to tell a story– show don’t tell.

This thing is, this  turns out to be true in life as well. If you want people to know something show don’t tell people what you believe.  Show it.  Live your truth out loud.

It was Gandhi himself who said, Be the change you wish to see.

That doesn’t mean that if you want to work for civil rights for trans people you have to change your sex. Which I hope comes the relief and most of you.

What it does mean is that if you want to change the world, treat people were different from you as if they are human. Treat them as vulnerable, fragile, noble, complicated people who just like you, are trying to make sense of this strange and wonderful and terrifying life

You want to change the world? Be more loving.

Okay, so with all that in mind, I want to read you a story from this collection that came out last year called IT GETS BETTER.  Some of you probably know about this project; it was created in response to a series of suicides of LGBT young people, including the celebrated case at Rutgers which is actually going to trial right now.   The idea was to remind young people that life is long, and that there are good reasons to have faith in the future.  There were a lot of contributions, not only from people like Ellen DeGeneres and Barney Frank, but from President Obama as well.   This piece was my mine.

(At this moment I told the story from the It Gets Better anthology.)

In the early morning rain

By Jennifer Finney Boylan

© 2003 & 2010 Jennifer Finney Boylan. A slightly different version of this essay appears in Jenny’s memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (New York: Broadway/Random House, Inc.)  2003.  Used by permission.

When I was young there was a time when I figured, the hell with it.  I’d never even said the word transgender out loud.  I couldn’t imagine saying it, ever.  I mean, please.

So instead, one day a few years after I got out of college,  I loaded all my things into the Volkswagen and started driving North. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I knew I wanted to get away from the Maryland spring, with its cherry blossoms and its bursting tulips and all its bullshit. I figured I’d keep driving father and farther north until there weren’t any people. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do then, but I was certain something would occur to me that would end this transgender business once and for all.

I set my sights on Nova Scotia. I drove to Maine and took a ferry out of Bar Harbor. I drove onto the S.S. Bluenose and stood on the deck and watched America drift away behind me, which as far as I was concerned was just fine.

There was someone walking around in a rabbit costume on the ship. He’d pose with you and they’d snap your picture and an hour or so later you could purchase the photo of yourself with the rabbit as a memento of your trip to Nova Scotia. I purchased mine. It showed a sad looking boy—I think that’s a boy– with long hair reading a book of poetry as a motheaten rabbit bends over him.

In Nova Scotia I drove the car east and north. When dusk came, I’d eat in a diner, and then I’d sleep either in the car or in a small tent that I had in the back. There were scattered patches of snow up there, even in May. I kept going north until I got to Cape Breton, which is about as far away as you can get from Baltimore and still be on dry land.

In Cape Breton I hiked around the cliffs, looked at the ocean. At night I lay in my sleeping bag by the sea as breezes shook the tent. I wrote in my journal, or read the poetry of Robert Frost, or grazed around in the Modern Library’s Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. I read one up there called Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.

In the car I listened to the Warlocks sing In the Early Morning Rain on the tape deck. I thought about this girl I knew, Grace Finney.  I thought about my parents.  I thought about the clear, inescapable fact that I was female in spirit and how, in order to be whole, I would have to give up on every dream I’d had, save one.

I stayed in a motel one night that was officially closed for the season, but which the operator let me stay in for half price. I opened my suitcase and put on my bra and some jeans and a blue knit top. I combed my hair out and looked in the mirror and saw a perfectly normal looking young woman. This is so wrong? I said to myself in the mirror. This is the cause of all the trouble?

I thought about settling in one of the little villages around here, just starting life over as a woman. I’d tell everyone I was Canadian.

Then I lay on my back and sobbed. Nobody would ever believe I was Canadian.

The next morning I climbed a mountain at the far northern edge of Cape Breton Island. I climbed up to the top, trying to clear my head, but it wouldn’t clear. I kept going up and up, past the tree line, past the shrub line, until at last there was just moss.

There I stood, looking out at the cold ocean, a thousand miles below me, totally cut off from the world.

A fierce wind blew in from the Atlantic. I leaned into it. I saw the waves crashing against the cliff below. I stood right at the edge. My heart pounded.

I leaned over the edge of the precipice, but the gale blowing into my body kept me from falling. When the wind died down, I’d start to fall, then it would blow me back up again and I didn’t. I played a little game with the wind, leaning a little further over the edge each time.

Then I leaned off the edge of the cliff at a sharp angle, my arms held outward like wings, my body sustained only by the fierce wind, and I thought, well all right. Is this what you came here to do?

Let’s do it then.

Then a huge blast of wind blew me backwards and I landed on the moss. It was soft. I stared straight up at the blue sky, and I felt a presence.

Are you all right, Son? said the voice.  You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.

Looking back now, I am still not sure whose voice that was.  You can call it god if you want.  Or my guardian angel. The ghost of my father, maybe.  I don’t know.  Does it really change things all that much, to give a name to the spirits that are watching out for us?

Still, from this vantage point—over twenty-five years later –it feels to me as if that voice was coming from my future self, the woman that I eventually became, a woman who, all these years later, looks more or less like the one I saw in the mirror in the motel. Looking back on the sad, desperate young man I was, I am trying to tell him something. It will get better.  It will not always hurt the way it hurts now.  The thing that right now you feel is your greatest curse will someday, against all odds, turn out to be your greatest gift.

It’s hard to be gay, or lesbian. To be trans can be even harder.  There have been plenty of times when I’ve lost my hope.

But in the years since I heard that voice–Are you all right Son? You’re going to be all right–I’ve found, to my surprise, that most people have treated me with love.  Some of the people I most expected to lose, when I came out as trans, turned out to be loving, and compassionate, and kind.

I can’t tell you how to get here from there.  You have to figure that out for yourself.  But I do know that instead of going off that cliff, I walked back down the mountain that morning and began the long, long journey toward home.

Returning to podium.  Okay.   So I will be happy to answer your questions about anything you want to know at all.

(A round  of question-answering and ad libbing, followed by a concluding paragraph about the journey of the mythic hero.  I also read from the ‘crisis of conscience’ scene in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  I encouraged the students to find their courage, to be  themselves, to slay their dragons, and to be kind.)

I also quoted, somewhere in here, lines from Paul Simon:  ”I believe in the future, we will suffer no more.  Maybe not in my lifetime, but  in yours  I feel sure.”

Thank you.

I came downstairs one morning to find that my son Sean had created this heart-shaped circle of origami cranes.

So there’s a little news…  dates set for the publication of my next book as well as the 10th anniversary edition of SHE’S NOT THERE.  Some family journal entries. And a calendar of spring travel.  Heavens, as Dorothy liked to say.  How people come and go here.  (The origami heart-shaped circle of cranes I post in as illustration here was made by my son Sean, who stayed up late one night making birds from paper.  And demonstrating his own coolness, and the wonder of the world.)

First off, next week kicks off a month or two of travel.  Some of these events are open to the public.

On March 15, I’ll be speaking to a large consortium of private school students in the Philadelphia area– students from (I think) Haverford, Episcopal, Penn Charter, Agnes Irwin, Baldwin, Shipley.  This will sort of be an “encore performance” of the talk I gave in December 2010 at Haverford, my alma mater.  That event was life changing and wonderful, so I’m hoping this one is not a comedown.  The event itself will be at the Penn Charter School, with two talks– the first to the students at 10 AM, the second to teachers, at 4.

That weekend, I’ll be going to the beach house  in New Jersey I used to go to with my high school friends, and lo and behold, I’m retreating there once more with the same group of men, now aged 53.  ”There are places I’ll remember, all my life, though some have changed.”

Following week will see me in New York City for GLAAD media awards gala on Saturday March 24.  I will be hosting a table.  If you’d like to join me, please send me an email.

The week after that, April 4, I will journey to Grinnell, Iowa, for a reading.  Schedule there is still emerging, but I’ll be the guest of the English Department, and will give a talk as well as sitting in some classes.

It is possible I will be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the week after that, although that’s still in flux, so stay tuned.

That’s it for travel except for the second GLAAD gala, which will be in San Francisco on the weekend of June 2nd– so if you’re West Coast based, prepare for me to ask you for your support.

Next up:  pub dates have been set for my 2013 books. Looks like May of that year, in time for Mother’s Day to support my book on parenting– and on the differences between motherhood and fatherhood– STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU: PARENTHOOD IN THREE GENDERS.  That will also be the date for the publication of the expanded 10th anniversary edition of SHE’S NOT THERE, which includes a new preface, a new last chapter (bringing the story up to date), and a new epilogue written by my wife Deedie (called Grace in the book).  Looking forward to all of that, and what will probably be a vigorous promotion and touring schedule all around it.

Finally, the future looms in all kinds of ways up here in Maine. For one thing, my older son has been accepted E.D. to Vassar College, which is amazing.  He’s in Spain this week, doing an intensive  language course in Madrid (and seeing the sights).  Brother Sean departs for three months as an exchange student in Capetown South Africa  by April third.  By the time he gets back, Zach will be off for his summer as a camp counsellor.  So the whole family won’t really be all together again until August– and then, just fleetingly, as we’ll be preparing to send Zach off to college shortly thereafter.

In order to celebrate and note that, we are intending to climb Maine’s Mt. Katahdin  together in late August.  And look all around at the broad world.

Last weekend, I made pizza on a Saturday night. Deedie and I had martinis, and we all watched Harrison Ford in Witness on TV.  It was nothing special, just a fun Saturday night with my boys, my family, all of us together.  But it occured to me that such days are not endless.  In fact the days of this version of our family now begin to seem short.

We raised our boys to leave us– that’s the whole point, isn’t it?  But it’s a moment worth noting.  I love them all so much.

Came back from playing in a rock and roll band in a bar late last night, stood there in the driveway looking up at the early spring sky.  Four stars in a row, on either side of the setting moon.

What is this world?  What is this life?

This was made abundantly clear during a recent family trip to Florida, when one day, between our time at Animal Kingdom and Epcot and Universal’s Islands of Adventure, I dragged the family over to Cape Canaveral.  There, we boarded a bus to view launch pads 39-A and 39-B, rode something called the “Space Shuttle Launch Simulator,” and gazed upon the silhouettes of the Mercury-Atlas and the Gemini-Titan and many others relics in NASA’s somber and beautiful “rocket garden.”

“The Atlas was the rocket used for the last four Mercury missions,” I excitedly told my sons, “replacing the less powerful Redstone used by Alan  Shepherd and Gus Grissom in the suborbital missions of Freedom 7 and Liberty Bell 7.  But it was John Glenn who first rode the Mercury Atlas in Friendship 7, and it was the power of the Atlas that enabled Glenn to attain Earth orbit.”

My son Sean checked his watch.  “Don’t be like that,” I suggested.

“Like what?”

“Bored.”

“Why shouldn’t we be bored?” my sons asked, reasonably enough. “There’s nothing to do here!”

“Because,” I said.  “Space is important!”

“Maybe to you,” said Zach.

The day before, we’d been to the new Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios, a park whose corporate symbol is a giant spinning planet Earth.  The family had awakened in our vacation condo at dawn, then screamed down the highway in order to be in the park  at “rope-drop,” the moment when Universal officially opened and the crowd of many hundreds began stampeding toward the Wizarding World.  We’d wound up waiting in a 30-minute queue at Hogwarts anyhow, before at last being loaded onto our “broomsticks” and rocketing around the Quidditch field and having dragons breathe faux-smoke in our faces.

In the Sixties, Hogwarts was called The Moon,  He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named  was known as Nikita Kruschev, and The Boy Who Lived was Colonel John Glenn.  It’s hard now to imagine the obsession we had then with the progress toward outer space, but I can assure you that each launch from Cape Kennedy was anticipated by my friends and me with the same breathless wonder that my boys later reserved for the release of each successive volume  of J.K. Rowling’s  brilliant heptalogy.

I cannot tell you the seven horcruxes without consulting Wikipedia (okay, fine: the diary, the ring, the locket, the goblet, the diadem, Nagini the snake, and whoa: Harry himself).  But I can instantly tell you the name of the vehicle the Gemini capsules docked with in 1966 (the AGENA); the only manned Saturn mission to use the Saturn 1-B rocket rather than the Saturn 5 (Apollo 7); and the names  of the three Apollo 1 astronauts killed in the terrible flash fire of February 21, 1967–Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee.

I am grateful I  grew up at a time when the country had such a strange and outsized dream.  For those of us who observed it all as children, the space race was an important counterpoint to the decade’s hope-shattering violence.  (There is a powerful moment in Lorrie Moore’s novel, Who Will Save the Frog Hospital? when one character of my generation turns to another and says, by way of explaining our youth,  “We ice-skated to ‘Eve of Destruction.’ ‘The western world, it is exploding,’ and we’d do these little spins and turns.” )

It took longer to get in to the Space Shuttle Simulator ride at Kennedy. than it did to board the Mission: Space ride at Epcot.   The line snaked around the building, and our progress was slow.  To pass the time, my sons relived the awesomeness of the Wizarding World. They’d bought  wands at Ollivanders. They’d drunk butterbeer.  My older boy, a high school senior, had purchased  a set of robes that bore the crest of his preferred house:  Hufflepuff.  (“I’m hard working and loyal!”)  We’d determined which member of the family belonged to which house.  I was deemed a Slytherin.

At last we were strapped in to the simulator.  We listened to the countdown, which, embarrassingly, gave me chills.  There was an ear-blasting roar, and the faux spacecraft shook so hard I feared my glasses would fly off.  Then a voice from Mission Control said, “We have a serious  problem!  Guidance systems are malfunctioning!  You’re going to have to fly manu–”

At this moment, all the lights  came on and the doors of the ride  opened.  Our astronaut corps was confused.  At the moment the shuttle was simulating a malfunction, the ride actually malfunctioned.  A man with a huge beard  came into the room and apologized.  “Sorry, man,” he said. “This happens sometimes.”  The representative of the Slytherin house,  predictably,  made a few sarcastic remarks about how running the simulator “wasn’t exactly rocket science.”

The dude unplugged something, and plugged it back in, and then closed the doors and launched us again.  The second time, when we went through the simulated malfunction, everything went just fine. A few minutes later we stepped out of the simulator and into the Florida twilight, where the sun was now disappearing behind the rocket garden.

I remembered reading my sons the first Harry Potter book a dozen years earlier, and my younger boy’s love of the description of the Quidditch matches. “I wish I were Harry Potter,” Sean had said, back when he was four.  “I want to fly through the air.”

I had tried to explain to him that when I was his age, Americans had done just that.

Standing there on the Florida coast, I saw the moon, shining down upon the earthbound rockets.  It looked very far away.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of 12 books including She’s Not There, a memoir (Broadway/Random House).  She is Professor of English at Colby College in Maine

My dogs Indigo and Ranger on a January morning.

You don’t survive in Maine very long if you don’t make peace with winter.   I love warm days and sunny skies as well as the next gal,  but I have to say I have come to love the heart of January in my home state.  After summer it may be my favorite time of year.

This is the real deal:  week after week of temperatures near zero, snow up to your waist, rivers filled with jagged schooners of ice.  This is an honest, Fuck You winter, the kind of weather that, as Garrison Keillor once said, “is natures way of reminding you that the world is not all about you.”

Part of what I like about January in Maine is the result of my own weird work schedule– Colby College, my employer, has a “short term” in January, and usually I am off for the whole month, the result of my less-than-full-time contract with the school.  And so I take January to write, to build fires in the wood stoves, and to read.  Right now I’m in our summer place, finishing up three weeks of writing and revising two new books that will come out next year– one, the updated version of SHE’S NOT THERE (the 10th anniversary edition) and the other, a new memoir about parenthood, STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU.

The summer place in winter has a naughty moon-base feeling to it.  The bird feeders and the summer furniture are stacked up around the living room; the front porch is deep in snow.  Through the window I can see the sun reflecting off of the frozen lake.  After I finish writing this, I’m going to build a fire in the wood stove and finish up some reading I need to do for the coming semester.

Since almost no one knows I’m here, the phone doesn’t ring.  It is the quietest place on earth.  It’s just me and the dogs, the warm glow of the fires, and all the words I can find to set to paper.

Still, winter in Maine is not entirely silent.  Here are twelve sounds I hear:

Jenny B watches the young people on sleds.

One is the woomph of a frozen pond.  The water moves beneath the ice and the whole lake goes werrrp, a deep, warping groan, like something from outer space.

The dogs stand at the edge of the ice, snow on their black ears, and growl at it.

Two is the plow guy, doing the driveway in the middle of the night.  The heavy blade scrapes against the asphalt, the tires spinning around as our man revs his engine high enough to push the snow.  I think about our plow guy—whose name is Jared–when the snow is deep, how he spends hour after hour in that truck, driving around from house to house when everyone’s asleep. I feel bad when there are two storms right in a row, and Jared has to get right back out on the road and do the job all over again.  There are some winters when I think he never sleeps at all.

Three is the sound of a frozen stream, the clear merry sound of cold water rushing against ice,  like some strange music,  full of motion and hope.  A strange contrast to the ice-bound world.

Four is the shush of skis against new snow as the cross country skiers glide through woods, across fields, down hills.  Their heaving breath comes out in clouds.

Five is a car stuck in a snowbank, the tires spinning around and around. Car doors open, and close.  There’s cursing.

Six is the sound of Storm Center on television, early in the morning, from a room downstairs.  There’s a sudden cheer, followed by the patter of young feet on the stairs.  The kids run into the bedroom and announce, “No School!” Then the parents sit up in bed and groan as they imagine every last thing they had planned for that day instantly disappearing.

Seven is a maul chunking against the top of the log as the wood splits into two nice even pieces.  I usually split wood in the basement, so sometimes the tip of the maul ticks against the cement floor in the follow through.  Then I split the two pieces I just made into four, and sometimes the four into eight.  The smaller the piece of wood is, the higher the pitch as it falls to the floor. Clunk.

Eight is the birds, the few of them that remain.  I hear them in the morning as I go down the dark driveway to get the newspaper: black-capped chickadees, northern cardinals, ruby crowned kinglets, Bohemian waxwings.  They sound cold.

Nine is a car left car outside.  Return to the car to find a crust of ice on the windshield.  So out comes the scraper.  Sometimes—on a good day– the crud slides right off.  Other times you have to get serious, prying off that ice like you’re scraping burnt chocolate off a frying pan with a spatula.  How big does the hole you chop have to be in order for you to drive the car?  Sometimes I see drivers peeking through tiny portholes, like they’re driving a tank.

Ten is a snowmobile, heading across Great Pond.  Sometimes there’s a whole group of them, making a sound like a swarm of angry bees.  Other times it’s just one guy.  Late in the day I see them all parked outside the Sunset Grill in Belgrade, a basketball game on the TV, glasses of Irish coffee lined up on the bar.

Eleven is an icicle falling off the rain gutter and shattering on the driveway in a thousand pieces.  Once, one fell on my head, and I looked upwards, angrily, and cursed the sky.

Twelve:  In the middle of the night the power goes out and I’m suddenly woken by the shocking sound of nothing at all.  I’m warm beneath the covers, though, and the family is safe beneath our roof, the two grownups, the two boys, even the wicked oscars swimming in the fish tank.  While we were sleeping, the dogs have jumped up in the bed again.  All warm and soft, the creatures bark at some imaginary cat, in their dog dreams.

I lie there for a while in my dark house,  in a sleepy kind of wonder, and listen.

I finally have fallen in with a group of musicians so marginal that there is literally nowhere further to fall.  We have a ball together, the five of us. We’ve played out a handful of times, and will probably continue to do so in the years to come.  It’s a jam band, which means that, on the one hand, we only have like five songs, but on the other, since each one is an hour and a half long, we don’t really need more than five songs.  Plus, we never remember how they go, so each time is different.

The instrumentation is pretty wild too– it’s a classic rock and roll rhythm section of drums, bass, and guitar, with two wild cards– me on keyboards, and Luke on the electric fiddle.  Dave LaGrange– who was part of the “Blue Stranger” circle– plays rhythm and sings and when he feels like it, which is a lot of the time, he whips out a lead as well.

In truth, the band is pretty freakin’ great–a few originals, but mostly things like Neil Young, Grateful Dead, the Band,  a few bar classics.  Lots of improvisation.  A good time.  I love playing with these guys– a nice slot for a keyboard player to fill.  I get to fill in the holes as I feel them, and then step up and do big piano or organ solos now and again too.

Anyway, I asked my friends on Facebook if anybody wanted to make a logo for the band, and just like that, four or more logos were drawn up by people I hardly even know, for free.  Amazing thing, the internet.  I said I thought the band emblem should be, “a three toed sloth hanging from a tree,” epitomizing our driving sense of ambition.  So here, for your consideration, are some of those logos. What do you think?

“On stage the band has got problems; they’re a bag of nerves on first nights.” –Rolling Stones, “Torn and Frayed.”

P.S.  and if YOU are a design nerd, or are just the kind of person who wants to hang around the house messing with images of three-toed sloths, draw up one of these your own self and send it to me.  Thanks. And STRAGGLE ON!

The Boylan house, about 1920.

This coming weekend,  my spouse Deedie (“Grace”) and I will go down to Devon, Pennsylvania, to say goodbye to the house that my family has lived in for the last 39 years.  Since my mom’s death this July,  the family has been going about the necessary steps to sell the old house, and if all goes well, we will close next Wednesday, the 21st of December.

The last month or so– since we first accepted the offer on the beautiful old place–has been hard emotionally.  I guess I felt as if we’d said a proper farewell to my mom this summer– but turning our keys in the lock for the last time presents us with a new kind of loss, and this one’s not so much about saying goodbye to my mom (again); it’s about saying goodbye to our own history.

We moved into that place in the summer of 1972.  I had just turned 14.  For the next four decades, it was the “mother ship,” the place we could always return to, the place where we know our hearts dwelled.  Both of my parents died beneath its roof;  one of my children was conceived there.  It was the place where I lay on my back at age 15, dreaming of a future that I believed to be impossible.  It was the place where I proposed to Deedie, and she said Yes.  It was the place whose doors opened to me after I spent months and years traveling the world.

And so we say goodbye not only to a place, but to a connection to the people we have been.

I’ve been wondering about a proper ritual for taking my leave, and have asked a few friends about good ways to make this break.  One friend suggested “smudging”– walking around with a bundle of smoking sage leaves. Another said to touch every wall and say, “Thank you.”  A third proposed a three stage ritual, one for each floor– on the top floor, eat something sweet, and be glad for life’s joy; on the middle floor, eat something bitter and acknowledge life’s pain and loss; on the first floor eat something salty, and acknowledge life’s flavor and continuation.

I even got as far as imagining my “items.”  The sweet would be handmade chocolate; the salty would be a Philadelphia soft pretzel, preferably purchased at a WaWa; the bitter would be some Angostora bitters, possibly shaken into a nice Manhattan.

But I suspect all of this is too histrionic for me.  Instead I bet we will just drink a little Irish whiskey, sing a few songs, shed a few tears, laugh at a few stories.  A ritual only makes sense if you believe in its power;  and the power of Irish whiskey and song is what I suspect I will trust most at this hard juncture.

The thing is, I really do want to leave the house–this last, final time– with a sense of hope, a sense of completion, a sense of a cycle complete.  There’s no point to going all the way down to Pennsylvania just to make myself sad again.  I want to bid all of this bon voyage, with love, and sadness, and hope.

My agent Kris Dahl says that the Devon house has appeared in virtually every single thing I’ve ever written.  It appears in various guises in the stories in Remind Me to Murder You Later; it’s the model for the abandoned high school in The Planets.  It’s the castle in the Falcon Quinn series, and of course it stars as itself in my memoir.

The places we live in make us who we are.  I grew up in this rambling, elegant, slightly eccentric house, a place full of books and creaking stairs, empty rooms that no one knew what to do with; a living room with a warm fireplace.  There’s a windowsill on the landing between the first and second floors where I made out with the girl from London I wrote about in She’s Not There; there’s a walk around the block I’ve taken with my father and mother, with Deedie, and with my own children.

And yet, I’m not the first person to take my leave of this house in the last 100 years. The Hunt family– from whom we bought the house in 1972, and who moved in in 1949–had to pack up their things when their father died. Al Hunt, who of course went on to be a well-regarded journalist, wrote me when I told him the house was sold– “Just hope you all are as fortunate as we’ve been: turn that treasure of a house over to people who care, appreciate and will infuse it with the same joy it has enjoyed for past 62 years. I think about it most every day, wonderful memories: xmas eve parties, dinner table discussions/arguments, swimming parties, painfully small kitchen, monkey in the third floor bathroom, an exuberant feeling when I walked throough tbe door after any absence. I have a picture of that house in our bedroom.”

Yes, that’s right, he said monkey in the bathroom.  And yet Jesus the Monkey (so called because, well, what did people yell when they opened the bathroom door and saw a monkey swinging around the shower rod?  ”Jesus!”) was not the strangest thing ever to dwell beneath that roof.

Here’s what we know:  soon a new family will live there.  The family in question is a lovely young family, with three small children, who– if the fates smile– will spend their lives beneath that warm, crazy roof, blessed by its many lovely rooms, and, above all, by each other.

I was blessed to have this house in my life.  And now it moves on.

There’s a scene in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” after Humphrey Bogart and his fellow prospectors are taking leave of the mountain where they discovered all the gold.  As they walk away for the last time, Bogart looks up at the Sierra Madre one last time, and says,  ”Thanks mountain.”

For this strange, blessed, heartbroken, hilarious, joyful, tragic life,  so much of it lived beneath the generous eaves of my family home, I am grateful.

Thanks mountain.