It was a stillness I’d only ever read about. We’ve come close to more than our fair share of tornadoes over the years. New York has been surprisingly fertile for them in recent seasons it seems, so while it’s a wee bit early for them, all bets are off in 2020. By the way the temperature skyrocketed into the 80’s in just a couple of hours, it felt like something major was on the march.

The stillness was pronounced. Maybe all the wind we’ve had of late made it more noticeable. It was a quiet that crashed, a quiet that clanged and clattered, a quiet that made a disturbance. As I finished up my daily meditation, I opened my eyes and looked out the front window. Sunlight, strong and warm – the strongest and the warmest of the year by far – brought out every scale of the arborvitae hedge, each deep red leaf of the Japanese maple, and all the softly-hued blooms of the lilac bush. It was a beautiful day, but something was off. It was too quiet. Too still. There was absolutely no breeze, no movement. It was like a photograph, or that moment when the video freezes, but it’s not really frozen. It was an eerie atmosphere. The air of anticipation – typical Friday emotional fare – was heavier than usual.

The wind picked up. It was high at first, and only the tops of the oaks and pines swayed slightly. Birds cried out a bit, and a squirrel meandered through the front yard. I walked through the house to the back patio, taking down two new hanging geraniums from their newly-erected canopy perch. I’d only just assembled it, and a few years ago we had a storm that took a similar structure out within a few short days of going up. That heartbreaking moment was why I had already secured this one with two ropes tied into the ground.

Andy came out and we looked at the Kwanzan cherry tree in full bloom; he lamented the likely fall of all those pretty pink petals. I did too. There was another shift in atmosphere and things went silently still again. We paused to admire the cherry tree for a little while longer. I also took a before-the-storm selfie, which is the featured pic above. I almost always forget to take any photos with the cherry as a backdrop, until it’s too late. It looked like I only had a few more minutes to make it this year.  

We went back inside and waited for the storm to arrive. Andy monitored the progress of the line of them, and soon they were bearing down with full gusts and cold drops of rain. The temperature, which had gone all the way up into the lower 80’s, plummeted twenty degrees. My ridiculous sleeveless shirt was a joke in this weather, but I got a couple of videos as the storm began to tear down the cherry blossoms. 

The wind was stronger than I expected, even with all the storm warnings, and I suddenly panicked that the canopy wasn’t going to stay in place. Quickly, I tied two more ropes to the frame, getting pelted with wind and rain in the process but not caring because I was determined not to lose the canopy this soon. Plus, I have needed a haircut for three weeks so no amount of wind and rain was going to mess up the mop on my head and part of the masochistic side of me wanted to see how bad things could really get. 

I watched as the fig tree and tomato plants whipped around in their newly-planted homes, hoping they could withstand the vicious rush of wind. I’d nestled them together beneath the canopy in the hopes they would weather the onslaught better en masse. The sweet potato baskets would stay hanging on the frame, lending their weight and soaking up the rainwater since they needed a drink. 

Almost as soon as it began, it was over, and inwardly I thanked the powers-that-be for sparing us a tornado or a gust that might have ripped the canopy down before we’ve even had a chance to enjoy it. The first storm of the season was done. We had weathered it with some preparation, some last minute fortification, and whatever luck that kept the plants and the yard intact. The rain remained, and it was a peaceful balm, gently nourishing the gardens and the lawn. 

Spring was always wild this way.

If this was a Saturday night in my teen years, I would most likely have been at a smoky home in the south side of Amsterdam, at a table crowded with older women and a couple of female friends my age, playing a card game called dimes, adorned in some ridiculous wardrobe, and acting unlike almost every other teenage boy in America ~ and you would have seen me at my happiest. Also at that table would have been my friend Ann’s mother, Virginia ~ Ginny to everyone who knew her. She passed away this morning, and I’m writing this to honor and remember her. It’s all I can do in this dark time.

She is the woman who bought ‘Sex’ for me. The year was 1992 and I wasn’t eighteen yet and the stores wouldn’t sell it to anyone my age. But Ann’s mother drove us to the Rotterdam Mall where we picked up Madonna’s ‘Sex’ book and ‘Erotica’ album, imprinting an indelible memory of hilarity and fun in my life. In those days, I didn’t have much of a social life and my family situation was strained with the burgeoning confusion of a gay boy’s adolescence steeped in the strict Catholic upbringing of my parents.

My friend Ann was a bit of an outsider too, and when we found each other it came at just the right time. She welcomed me into her family ~ so different and so much more fun and looser than mine, a bit crazier too, but crazy is sometimes what a kid needs. At the heart of it was her mother, Ginny. She was no-nonsense, put up with little to no shit, and could be as gruff and tough as she was sweet and vulnerable. She adored and doted on Ann, and counted on her even as she was the youngest.

Every weekend, I hung out with Ann, and we would end up at a card game with her Mom and a few other women from the neighborhood. Ginny, Julie, Janice and Barb welcomed me to their card tables, which rotated every week at a different home. No matter what was happening in the rest of my life, those Saturday night car games became a grounding place of safety for me.

When things at home weren’t good, when I couldn’t find acceptance in my own house and from my own family, I turned to mother figures like Ann’s Mom. All those card-playing older ladies became surrogate mothers to me at a time when I didn’t know how to relate to my own family. On Saturday nights I would assemble at their kitchens, decked out in some insane ensemble, usually with a hat perched atop my head or some collection of rosaries around my neck. We carried ourselves like we were celebrities, and maybe in the south side of Amsterdam we were. I kept my head held too high to make much of whispers.

One night on a break from college I walked in wearing silk pajamas, a silk robe, and bandaged wrists. They asked about it only once, and it was enough. In their concern was the only lesson I needed.

We saw each through life and death like that. I grew up and left the warm smoky lair of those mother dragons. They sharpened my claws and toughened my scales. Ann’s Mom was an especially strong figure in that circle, fiery and passionate one moment, and immediately breaking down into laughter the next. I could have that effect on her, and my love for her daughter protected me, endearing myself to her. I called her Gin-Gin, and she rolled her eyes at me, half-exasperated by my silliness and half-enchanted by it. She held equal admiration and enthrallment from me. In the beginning, I would watch her as she lit up a cigarette and expertly doled out cards, her bracelets and rings dangling and sparkling and fascinating me in the light and the smoke. A couple years later she stopped smoking ~ simply and instantly stopped and never looked back, a study in strength and defiance.

Like Ann, she had a ferocious sense of humor. I did my best to make her laugh, which alternately annoyed and entertained her, and she was always game and up for any of my crazy requests. (See the ‘Sex’ story.) At every card game there would be a few moments where both of us ended up laughing so hard we could barely breathe, my stomach sore from the underutilized muscles that made us laugh, my face exhausted from seldom-seen smiles and all-too-rare glimpses of happiness.

Gradually my attendance at the card games dwindled. Ann and I went away to college, though we returned on certain weekends and holidays and summers and would reconnect and reconvene at someone’s house for a game of cards. And every time it was like nothing had changed, even if everything had. We moved out of Amsterdam and forged our own lives, and every now and then we would get together, but the ladies were growing old. We all were. Weddings were replaced by funerals, and one by one these women began to disappear. Ginny held on longer than most of them. She was always the strongest and most determined.

A while back I visited her at the nursing home. Ann had warned me she wasn’t always herself and would try to get me to take her out of there. It was a late summer day as I made my way along the Thruway, further west than Amsterdam by an exit. On the rural roads leading to the nursing home, stands of corn stretched to the sky, the ears fully formed and showing bits of their silky tassels like proud graduates. It was sunny and beautiful out ~ too beautiful for the sadness of seeing someone grow old, but there was beauty in that, I reminded myself as I walked into the building. I found her easily enough and she was in a wheelchair by her room. Unsure of whether she would recognize or remember me, I approached cautiously. It took only a moment, and then she knew me before I had to introduce myself. A few glints of mischievous determination returned to her eyes. We talked a bit as I crouched down to get closer to her. She leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, the way she sometimes did at those card games when she wanted to tell me a secret. “Al, you gotta get me out of here,” she said with a little smile.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go to the dining room.” One of the nurses showed me where to go and I pushed Ginny around the corner and into a sun-filled room where a handful of other people sat at various places. Some waved and said hello. Ginny waved and said hi to a few, then beckoned for me to stop at our own little spot, whispering how this person was crazy, and that person was nice, and it was like nothing had changed. I remembered how she would drive me home after every card game: “Bye Al” she would say, adopting Ann’s nickname for me, then drive back over the bridge to the south side of Amsterdam, back to her own family.

She motioned for me to come closer. “Listen, I need to get out of here. Will you get me out of here?”

Ann had prepared me for this, thankfully, because if it had come up without me knowing it would come up, I’m not sure what I would have done. Part of me wanted to take her out and drive somewhere to talk and play cards and eat ham salad sandwiches and rewind the years and the toll they had taken on us. Instead, I told her that she had a nice place here, how much I liked it, how fancy it was to be taken care of, and how I would love such a set-up. She half-chuckled at the line of bullshit, but maybe she believed it. She only asked one more time to take her out of there, squeezing my hand as she did so, and I politely declined and told her Ann would be visiting in the next week, and she would want her to be there. By the time I had to leave, it felt like she had returned a bit to the woman I remembered. It was the last time I saw her, and I’m glad for that. Before driving away in the summer sun and heat, I paused in the parking lot, wanting to cry but not knowing why or how.

She is gone now, and my heart breaks for Ann, who has lost so much. On this beautiful sunny spring day, Ginny can join her husband, and her two children, Gina and Danny, and maybe there is solace in that.

Maybe.

It was a wedding gift from a dear friend who departed this earth too soon. In the jumble of gifts and the giddiness of the time, it still managed to stand apart as a favorite, never relegated to the attic or basement, rising above to take pride of place in our entryway, where it has remained for a decade. Alissa gave us this Michael Aram vase, and it has been holding flowers and memories ever since. With her passing, it has come to mean a little more, and where once I may have taken it for granted – a vase is a vase is a vase – I now see it as a reflection and a reminder of a friend’s exquisite consideration and taste. So much so that I’ve been looking into expanding our collection of Michael Aram art.

Mr. Aram incorporates nature, mythology, craftsmanship and a fine appreciation of beauty and elegance into all his designs. Through the use of texture, design, a masterful melding of function and form, and just enough whimsy to set itself apart from very other vase in our home, his work stands uniquely above everything else we display. The vase that Alissa chose for us is part of his Black Orchid collection, whose buds and blossoms and stems wind themselves fancifully around their objects, whether it be a vase or a serving utensil or a candlestick. I’ve become particularly enamored of the Black Orchid objects – picture frames and nut bowls and a glorious pair of candlesticks. The idea of procuring an item for each room of our house is a tantalizing one – a thread of beauty running throughout our home feels especially lovely when our home-base is being used more than ever.

In addition to the Black orchid line, Aram has also pursued motifs of cherry blossoms, pomegranates, ginkgo leaves, and dogwood trees – all of which I love, and whose expression finds whimsical grace in otherwise-everyday items. He manages to turn even a tissue box cover or a toothbrush holder into a work of art, expertly proving that even the most mundane object can become something artistic and aesthetically pleasing when executed with the proper panache. It took a good friend to turn me onto a new artist, bringing beauty into our home and making the world a little more lovely. We need all the loveliness we can find right now.

At this time in our history, we are looking at a relatively quiet summer season, and what I have long promised and strived to create – namely a relatively quiet summer season – may at last find fruition due to circumstance and deliberate planning. The universe brings us what we can and should handle when we are ready, and not a day sooner. 

Summer has occasionally been the time for changing things up here – as when I took a summer or two off from blogging. I’m not going to do that this year, as I’ve been told this place is one of the few online spaces where things remain more or less peaceful. The most scandalous thing you might find is a naked male celebrity or my own nude self finding ways of expression and creative spark. Yes, there may be a serious post now and again, but you know my voice here by now, and you know things never stay to serious for too long. Life is too short for that.

In this year when we remain unsure of just about everything else, we know we can count on summer in some form or another. Even if it snows in June, which I fully expect it to do…

At the tail end of Mother’s Day, when the cold wind has died down, and our socially distant visit to Mom and Dad in Amsterdam has concluded, I open up FaceBook and stumble upon one of my brother’s friends starting a live piano session. Being fortunate enough to have a considerable number of talented friends in my feed, another live session is nothing new or exceptional, but I remembered Karl as being one of the craziest friends my brother ever had – and that is saying something. Maybe it was Amsterdam on my mind, maybe it was the sudden calm of night, or maybe it was the music – most likely it was all of that, and so I stayed on his page, listening as he played his Sunday evening beer jam. It had a bit of the blues in it, a bit of grace, some God and some devil, and such tender gorgeousness that at one point I had to stop and sit down, on the verge of weeping for something so heartbreakingly beautiful.

When we were kids he lived a few blocks away from us, on Summit Avenue I think, and it was just him and his sister and their Mom. At least, that’s how I remember it. As he was one of my brother’s friends, I didn’t invest that much. Hell, I didn’t invest that much in my own friends. And there was also something in him that scared the crap out of me. Like I said, he was legitimately one of the craziest of my brother’s classmates, known for doing absurdly dangerous things at which most of us cringed in both awe and admiration. Wild in a way that we would never understand, as if he had seen things too traumatic to leave him anything other than changed in the way that trauma changes you. And it was something neither my brother nor I could access. We were lucky for that. My brother took it all in casually without breaking stride. I was more fascinated and intrigued, drawn in by whatever brush he had with darkness. I sensed even then a kindred spirit in anyone who had been hurt.

In the dusty, musty, rusty bin of his garage, my brother and I would sometimes find ourselves hanging out while Karl would test the waters of whether he could come out and play. Broken bits of a bike he had torn up in daredevil antics littered the dirty floor. Dim and devoid of color, the memory is a rare sepia-toned one. So much of my childhood is recalled in vivid color, or at least the super-saturated Kodachrome photographs that make up my memories. This one comes back drained of its Technicolor vibrance, as if still covered in a coating of dust, untouched and unexplored.

I remember his mother, never without a cigarette, her bright blonde curly hair messily tied up and always half spilling out of some bun. She wore torn denim shorts and a halter-top in the summer, always at exotic odds with most of the mothers I knew. There was something dangerous about her too, or maybe that’s just my overly-sensitive kid coming out in unexpected ways. In a similar aspect, that’s why Karl scared me, more for his unpredictability and utter disregard for safety in his daredevil ways. I am loathe to admit that we may have pushed him to greater stunts, to jump off higher cliffs, to thrash and wreck what little was left of his old bike. Kids did that – we pushed each other to do the things we were most scared of, just to see, just to watch, just to survive. It didn’t matter if the other person got hurt. Kids are awful sometimes. We didn’t know. We didn’t care. We didn’t think much through. And when we found someone willing to risk it all we didn’t value them so much as a friend as much as a show to be seen, especially on hot summer days that droned on and always carried an air of boredom in a town like Amsterdam.

We played hide and seek together sometimes, and if we were on the same team I felt both emboldened and terrified. Alone, he could frighten you with mischievous eyes glinting with feral ferocity, but as long as he was on your team you could count on him to fight to the end. You didn’t want to know what he went through, you just wanted to make sure he was on your side. There was little enough a kid could control. Choosing which team to be on was all we had some days. And so I was always glad when Karl was on my team. It was the only way to attempt to control the uncontrollable. Another thing I didn’t think of: what might happen if the person on your own team decided to self-destruct and bring the entire team down with him? What if someone in your own home decided to burn it all to the ground without a modicum of self-preservation? I was lucky. I never had to find out. We didn’t stay long at Karl’s, at least I didn’t. Brief brushes with such drama were intoxicating, but only in small, measured doses. We’d be back on our bikes and pedaling somewhere else before soaking in too much. I think we knew, or were warned, not to enter the house proper. My brother never seemed quite as spooked by it as I did, though I never let on. I peppered him with questions to no avail. He either didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered to remember. Even though he was younger, I always wanted to be more like him. To not care, to not be bothered by things like that. Or to take it in and move instantly on, leaving it behind, letting it go. Instead, I stayed haunted. By a dusty garage and a broken bike. By a lost baseball and shards of glass. By a confused half-smile and a curl of smoke. By all that was unsaid and unexplained.

Are there kids who band together to keep themselves safe? I am sure there are. We were lucky – we were never in such mortal danger. And maybe that’s why we never had to get close to anyone, to truly rely on someone to be there to save our lives – because our lives were never endangered. No more than any average kid’s life is endangered, though I suppose all of us were in some way. Somehow we each managed to survive our childhoods – Karl, my brother, and me – and all three of us did it such vastly different ways. These days Karl makes beautiful music. My brother makes beautiful furniture. And I’m just trying to make some sort of beautiful peace with the past.