In contrast to some other members of my family, I’ve never been over-attached to any one place, for to be so seems somehow contrary to my nature. But one time I found myself living in a place just right. It happened when I moved with my family to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There I discovered a small city large enough to explore, exotic for me in its social and cultural mix, with an Old town that took me away from the day-to-day by offering me a world of fantasy and comfort. A city of visual contrasts including mountains, deserts, volcano cinder cones, lava flows, ancient peoples, Territorial and Pueblo revival architecture, an 18th century church dedicated to San Felipe de Neri, tall modern buildings, US Route 66 running right through its middle, home of the University of New Mexico with its Lobos. A city of museums, festivals, sports, arts, and more, Albuquerque hosted the annual Balloon Festival, but more than that, hot air balloons drifted over the city whenever the conditions were just right and they often were. And Albuquerque was home to the New Mexico State Fair with all the things one might expect from a Midwestern fair plus a strong Native American and Hispanic American presence.
And people just loved living there. And I was there in the right city working in the right church. Close to the university and just a block off Route 66, that church had become more democratic than any I’d ever worked in. A liberal and educated perspective dominated, and I fit in there having found a place and job that seemed just right.
In Albuquerque I could exercise my western and Indian fantasies, view art every day, enjoy mild weather, and eat green chilies regularly. And I moved there at just the right time of my life, when our children were ready to desert the nest and fly away. So Myrna and I were left alone with a wonderland to wander and explore. And we did so: two stepping our way through a cowboy world, running around with several groups of colorful friends, experiencing a diversity of activities and relationships we had never before found. The dynamic of the two of us discovering activities together was a most important factor in my feeling that I was in a place just right.
Something fine happened to me there in Albuquerque, yes something delightful and very costly to the new camaraderie Myrna and I were beginning to enjoy. I turned and turned like a Shaking Quaker until I found a place just right for me on the Kinsey scale. I was no longer worried over the concept of the scale—you know, the science of it all—but began celebrating my position between its #3 and #4 markers. Concepts were still present, of course, after all this is my story. I looked at the scale like a preference of conscious ego states on the Jungian-based Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and in my preferred bisexual place connected with my friend Ronnie and then with another man. The affairs were meant only to be “additions to the report” of my life, certainly not “a correction” to it. But there I was feeling all just right with myself and my buddies. The affairs ended when I left New Mexico but the feelings accompanied me to Colorado and eventually to Oklahoma and pushed me into a life away from my family. I had been to a place just right and nothing else felt like home. Oh, by this I do not mean Kansas where I grew up, not that kind of starry-eyed “There’s no place like home,” but rather, some other place just right, a relationship within me and with the rest of the world. And that feeling continues in various and exciting modes in Denver, my new place just right. And even in this board room at the GLBT Community Center of Colorado where when gathered with the other storytellers each Monday afternoon, I feel just right. Yes, a place just right.
Denver, July 8, 2013
About the Author
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot
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