Moving, by Betsy

Fernwood Place, Mt. Lakes, N. J. to Charles St, Hammond, La. to Wells College, Aurora, N.Y. to St. Rochester, N.Y., to University Apt., Rochester, N.Y. to Scottsville Apt to Quaker Rd, Scottsville, N.Y. to 3 different places in Leyden, The Netherlands, to Glick Place, Ft. Detrick, Frederick, Md. to 2025 Ash St., Denver, CO, to Glencoe St. to Dahlia St. to Lakewood Green, Lakewood, CO.  Over my lifetime of 80 years I have moved 14 times. That means I have moved on the average every 5.7 years of my life.  That would not be too bad for a nomadic tribe, but I am not a nomad—at least, I didn’t think I was. This seems like too many moves to me.

The longest stay in one place, 15 years, was the Fernwood Place home in New Jersey.  This is where we lived when I was born. We left this home for Louisiana when I was 15.

So there followed many moves. After that it would be only two or three years of being established in one place.  Funny. I never realized that my home had been disrupted so often until I started writing this piece about moving.  It doesn’t feel like I moved a lot but it turns out I did.

There are some benefits to our moving a lot. One is that my birth family at the time became very close. When I was young and we moved to the deep south we all had a huge adjustment to make.  Being with my siblings and/or my parents made me feel secure. For my brother and sister and me during that period of adjustment, there were no life-long friends present to distract us from the familiarity of each other and the rest of the family.  While everything was new, I appreciated more that which was familiar to me; namely, my siblings and my parents.

The same situation existed when I was a mother. My children were quite young when we moved to a very unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar language.  At first, they had to stick with each other and with us their parents just to get through the day.  They appreciated the familiarity of each other.

There is another up-side to all the moving. When you move you tend to throw things out that you don’t need. You can move them, but that can be expensive and if you haven’t used something in the past five years, why keep it?

Books are an item neither Gill nor I have ever thrown out over the years and so between us we accumulated lots and lots of books. The last time we moved, the moving guys remarked that they had never seen so many books. ‘Though we have been in our current home for over 5 years and plan to stay here, we have gotten rid of about 1/2 of our books just in the last year.  It wasn’t that hard, really.

I have talked with people who have lived in the same house all their lives. They seem very calm and settled which is understandable. However, universally they say they dread ever having to clean it out.  They don’t even know what they have. Well maybe they won’t have to clean it out, but someone will.

Gill and I have been in our Lakewood home now for 5 years. If I am still upright 10 years from now, I will have been here 15 years. Hey! I lived in my birth home for 15 years. I will have gone full circle. Is that an omen for the future? After 15 years in the same place, if I am still alive will I have to go to assisted living?  Maybe my time will come and I will leave in a box. Good thing I’m not superstitious. Any of those things could happen, but I do not believe it is pre-destined. It does give me a goal. Be in one home for more than 15 years.

© 3 Nov 2015 

About the Author 

 Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

Moving, by Gillian

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the adjective as "having a strong emotional effect: causing feelings of sadness or sympathy." So what is it within us, we humans, that draws us to stories or places or events which we find moving? I know that is true for myself. I also know the memories of such places or events, whether I have purposely involved myself or simply stumbled into them, way outlive many other memories.

In high school I went to France with three other girls. It was the first time any of us had been out of Britain and I'm sure we saw it as some wild adventure. We stayed in the picturesque town of Annecy, and from the warm glow which accompanies thoughts of it, I'm sure we had a good time there, though any details escape me. This is supported by a few faded old photos of happy, giggling, girls. But I remember only one thing. Our train, heading south-east from Calais through rich farmland, suddenly entered fields growing nothing but crosses; small white crosses which in my memory numbered in the thousands, stretching to the horizon and continuing for endless miles. They reside so solidly in my mind that I can feel the swaying of the train and hear the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails as I write. Even as a silly giggly schoolgirl I recognized the crosses as commemorating the dead of the First World War, while France still reeled from the Second. They moved me to tears. They are as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday.

Years ago, I have little idea when it would have been, I was for some reason in Washington D.C. with time on my hands and went to see the Vietnam Memorial Wall. With almost 60,000 names, the gold lettering seemed to go on forever, like those white crosses. The weather was windy and wet and there were few people there. I became mesmerized by one old woman who stood, the rain mixing with her tears, silently caressing each letter of one name. Her wrinkled old fingers gently traced the name from beginning to end and back from end to beginning, over and over and over. I couldn't stop watching. I wanted badly to put my arms around her but could not intrude on her obvious grief. Whose name was it? She seemed pretty old for it to be her son. Grandson? Granddaughter? Why was she here all alone? My heart felt that it would break for her.

I remember nothing else of that visit to D.C. I don't even know why I was there though I suspect a business trip. But I have never forgotten those worn old fingers slowly moving over the cold wet stone.

Shortly after I retired, I found myself in a volunteer job in Hungary for a few weeks. I resolved not to leave without visiting Auschwitz in neighboring Poland, and so one weekend took the overnight train from Budapest to Krakau, to spend a day which was well beyond moving; harrowing, heartbreaking, horrifying. After some time at Auschwitz, having reached my saturation point of the evil of that dreadful place, I returned to Krakau in a cab shared with four others. The five of us stood silently on the cobbled street, watching the cab rattle away. It was almost as if we huddled together searching for comfort from what we so recently had seen and felt. There seemed nothing to say. Eventually we began to introduce ourselves - and a motley crew we were. There was a Jewish woman, about my age, from Wisconsin, two young Japanese men who, as far as I ever discovered, spoke not one word of any other language, and an even younger man who literally spoke not one word at all, so I never knew what country he was from or what language he would have spoken, had he spoken. Still we seemed to have some compelling need to stick together. One of the Japanese men gestured across the street. There was a cinema, showing, rather shockingly I somehow felt, Schindler's List. He turned questioningly to the rest of us and we all nodded yes in silent agreement. What strange impulse led us to do that? It was as if our current state of numb misery was not enough; we needed more. After the movie we performed a strange, hesitant, kind of loosely formed group hug, and I returned to Budapest on the overnight train after one of the strangest days of my life. But I can still recall every detail of that day, while most of my time in Hungary recedes into misty muddled memory. 

Betsy and I spent the whole month of September 2015 on a 5,000-mile road trip to and from the east coast. We stayed in so many different places and did so many completely different things that it seems, looking back, like several mini-vacations all rolled into one. Some things were scheduled and planned, some were simply spontaneous. Driving back home through Pennsylvania, Betsy spotted a tiny red square on the map. Beside it, in miniscule red letters, were the words, Flight 93 Crash Site Memorial. Although we were in Pennsylvania, we hadn't given it a thought. I'm not sure we even knew there was such a thing. Without hesitation we agreed the small detour was worth it, and took off across back roads through rolling farmland.

The Memorial is beautifully, very tastefully, done. 

There’s a long black granite walkway following the flight path, which comes to an end overlooking another pathway (but you cannot walk on this one) mown through the long grass and bushes of that infamous field. This ends at a boulder placed there to mark the impact spot. All very simple but oh so effective.

It moves you to tears and also to shades of the terror those passengers must have felt. There is something magic about it that almost moves you right into that plane with them. At least that's what it did for me.

And after all that is why we visit places like that isn't it? To feel. If we don't feel moved, then why go?

But, back to the original question I asked myself, why? Why do I need to be moved to sorrow and sadness by monuments to death and destruction? Since I decided to write on the topic, I've been thinking a lot about it and I decided that for me it accomplishes several things.

Gratitude. I simply feel enormous, completely selfish, gratitude. It was not me. I was not there. Nor were my loved ones: not on that, or any other, doomed flight, not in the Twin Towers, nor the jungles of Vietnam dodging snipers' bullets, nor any school or shopping mall mass shootings, nor in the Asian tsunami. It revives and strengthens that everyday gratitude I should feel for the blessed life I have lived, and continue to live.

Balance. We need the yin and the yang, that balance of negative and positive, in our lives; the ups and downs. Without bad, we are less able to appreciate good. I have been so fortunate, that I think I have to indulge in collective sorrows to keep my balance; to really feel just how good my life is.

Connection. In feeling the pain of others, I am connected to them. Your pain is my pain. We are members of the same tribe. At bottom we are all tribal beings, and in sharing, no matter how remotely, minimally, the pain and terror of Auschwitz, I keep myself connected; in the tribe.

So it’s not that I get some sick twisted voyeuristic pleasure from being moved to tears by others’ pain.  It’s simply that I need it.

Nicolas Sparks in, At First Site, says, “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it…”

I think that describes perfectly my need for being moved to tears. It keeps my heart healthy and strong when otherwise it might be weakened by a life too lucky.

© 2 Nov 2015 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.

Moving by Pat Gourley

Moving from one abode to another has been something I have done quite a bit of since moving to Colorado in December of 1972. A quick and probably incomplete count would indicate at least 13 moves and different living situations. And as of today I am seriously entertaining the possibility of a move back to San Francisco after the 1st of the year.

Now I suppose this could be viewed as an immature and possibly pathological inability to settle down but I prefer to look at as a chance to cleanse. This was brought home to me in a short comment on Facebook that someone made to a friend’s post about “moving again”. The commenter said he viewed his many moves as cleansing behavior since these changes in locale usually resulted in the jettisoning of fair amount of accumulated stuff.

I suppose if I tried to further rationalize my frequent moves I could put a Buddhist spin on it and think of it as one more lesson in impermanence. Now this lesson of impermanence certainly has come easier to me in my life than say a Syrian refugee whose home has been blown to bits or the Palestinian family who have repeatedly had their homes demolished by the Israeli army. It is even hard for me to imagine the loss experienced by people whose homes in South Carolina that were recently flooded or abodes blown completely away by a Kansas tornado.

When I think about it though my major lesson in impermanence has not been related to any physical moves I have made but rather by the death of my loving companion David in September of 1995. In the last days before his death when he would lay down to try to temper the significant pain he was experiencing and that liquid morphine was only dulling he would ask to be covered in a purple sarong I had purchased at some Grateful Dead concert a few years earlier. It was this simple piece of cloth that somewhat soothed his soul. It wasn’t his nice car, his extensive Haviland China collection, our nice home or the many of his beautiful stain glass creations but rather my foot rubs and then covering him with that shawl.

I still have that shawl now tattered and frayed and it lives on my zafu as stark reminder of my own impermanence. These days as I contemplate a move back to OZ the main driver for this planned relocation is to get back to the strong village aspect to living at the B&B. I have many more friends here but I don’t live with any of them and this is really a bit of a lonely situation. The likelihood of an old wrinkled HIV+ queen finding another partner is slim to non-existent.

I have used my current job at Urgent Care to partially fill this void of being alone and though I like and enjoy the company of my co-workers the seemingly endless stream of folks with abdominal pain, bleeding vaginas, heroin addiction and homelessness can be taxing.

I do enjoy people being in my business on a daily basis in my actual living situation. If I were to die at home now my cat would eat me before anyone would find me. In San Francisco I would have folks looking for me frequently if for no other reason than that they want their breakfast and it would be highly unlikely that they are seeking me out because their vagina is bleeding or they are jonesing bad for their next smack pop.

So once again I will be moving as a way of dealing with my own inevitable impermanence and hoping my last dance is in the company of folks who love me and I them.

Addendum February 18th, 2016: I will not be moving back to San Francisco but rather staying in Denver and making a concerted effort to incorporate even more fully the many friends I have here into my everyday life. Details on this decision will follow in future ramblings.

© November 2015

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Moving, by Carol White

While thinking about the word “Moving” I find myself drawn to emotionally moving experiences more than physically moving from city to city.  One of the most moving experiences of my life came about in 1986.  Here are some of the events leading up to it:

In 1980 I was living in Denver, Colorado.  February of that year was the initial meeting of PFLAG Denver that I attended and the first meeting of several parents who were soon thereafter to become dear friends.  I have already written a story for this group about the beginnings of PFLAG and the events in 1984 that led to the formation of the 140-voice PFLAG Festival Chorus that sang for the national convention in Denver, which was the first time that I had conducted in 16 years since being fired from the church.

Today’s story is about the women singing in that chorus who wanted to continue to sing together, and became the Denver Women’s Chorus.  Immediately following the PFLAG Festival Chorus, the 70 women decided to continue rehearsing at St. Paul’s UMC in Capitol Hill.  Naturally, the very first performance of this new DWC was at a PFLAG meeting in December with Christmas songs.

Then came the big night — our very first concert as a women’s chorus, which we held at North High School auditorium.  This was exciting stuff!

We got Jane Vennard to be our MC.  Jane is the sister of Dottie Lamm, who was married to the Governor of Colorado, Dick Lamm.  Jane had been married to a gay man at one time, so she was a member of PFLAG, and we had an “in” at the governor’s mansion, which was very neat.

Leading up to this concert, one of the things that we talked about in rehearsals was that when you sing, you are not to pronounce the letter “R” in a song.  For instance, the word “mother” would be “mothuh” and “father” would be “fathuh”, etc, etc.

Well, Judith and I went to Laguna Beach, California, to visit Bishop Mel Wheatley and his wife Lucile for a few days.  We stayed at a hotel right on the ocean and watched the seagulls flying by.  When we got back to rehearsal, I told the chorus that one of the seagulls flying by was singing, “I enjoy being a gull.”  Would you believe that we actually sang that song at that North High concert, and one of the chorus members dressed up all frilly and danced while we were singing it.  It was actually tongue in cheek.

Anyway, after the concert we were so high and so excited that we had a big cast party over at the home of one of the singers whose name was Susan.  Jane Vennard was dancing on the piano bench.  We were all dancing so much that the old North Denver house was actually shaking, and I remember forming a long line and dancing out into the yard singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

Later came the Paramount Theater concert with Barbra Higbie as the special guest.  One of Judith’s friends brought a straight male friend with him, and of course, this was the first gay concert he had ever been to, and he asked John, “Why do they sing?”

We tried to answer that question first by saying that it’s the title of a Holly Near song, “We are singing for our lives.”  Then Judith reminded me of this saying:  “A bird does not sing because it has an answer.  It sings because it has a song.”  And I said that gay and lesbian people have always had a song, but the tragedy of it is we have never been able to sing it before, and the beauty of it is that now we can!

At the end of that Paramount concert Judith and I got to ride to the cast party at the Hilton Hotel downtown in one of those horse-drawn carriages with Barbara Higbie and her partner.  That was a blast.

Then came our first GALA Choruses Festival in Minneapolis!  The Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses had formed a few years earlier from its beginnings in San Francisco to several gay men’s choruses around the country, and they had had their first choral festival in New York City.  This was their second time to get together to sing.  We were the only women’s chorus there, along with 16 gay men’s choruses. 

We boarded the plane in Denver, and as we attained cruising altitude at about 30,000 feet, Judith and I went up and down the aisle passing out a quote for each member to keep.  It read like this:  “Years from now, when you are old and grey, you will be able to look back and say that ONCE in your life you gave EVERYTHING you had for justice.”

Soon we were on the stage at Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis performing to a sold-out crowd, when Suzanne Pierson was singing a solo on a song that she had written, “No Child of Mine,” and she forgot the words.  The chorus came in with her and saved her.  So while our performance as a chorus may not have been perfect, still, afterwards when we walked into a restaurant on the downtown mall in Minneapolis, we would get a standing ovation from the men singers who were sitting at tables in that restaurant, and they would say, “Oh, the Brahms, Oh, the Brahms.”  They evidently loved the Brahms numbers that we sang.  And they really appreciated our being there.

But the final night in Minneapolis was the piece de resistance.  We were on stage with all of the men’s choruses, about 1,000 singers as I remember, and there was an orchestra on the floor in front of the stage and they had hired Philip Brunelle to conduct and we were singing a commissioned work by John David Earnest called “Jubilation.”  Woah!  Unbelievable highlight!

After the concert, some of the members were so excited that they actually JUMPED off the risers rather than stepping down.  And then we ALL went out into the plaza outside the hall and, as one member later said, we “sang to the heavens what the hall would not contain.”  Close to 1,000 of us standing there singing and singing and singing, every song we could think of. 

That was moving!  That was the highlight of my life to that time.  And most of us returned to work in Denver and could not even tell people where we had been because we were still not out, for fear of losing our jobs and the support of our families and friends. 

Times have changed in the last 30 years.  Judith and I are retired and out to everyone now.  The Denver Women’s Chorus is still singing.  The Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses has produced a Festival every three or four years since then, from Seattle to Denver to Tampa to San Jose to Montreal and others, and finally back to Denver in 2012.  In fact, they were so impressed with the facilities here at the DCPA  that they are coming back in 2016 so that they can use Boetcher, Temple Buell, and Ellie Caulkins Opera House all at the same time for simultaneous concerts all day and all evening for four days in a row over the July 4 holiday in our great city. 

The number of choruses participating actually doubled at each festival from 16 to 32 to 67 to 120, and has finally leveled out at over 190 choruses around the world with over 10,000 singers. 

I am registered as a single delegate for the July 2016 festival, and if you like choral music, you can go to their website and register too.  IT WILL BE A MOVING EXPERIENCE! 

© 2 Nov 2015 

About the Author 

I was born in Louisiana in 1939, went to Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1957 through 1963, with majors in sacred music and choral conducting, was a minister of music for a large Methodist church in Houston for four years, and was fired for being gay in 1967.  After five years of searching, I settled in Denver and spent 30 years here as a freelance court reporter.  From 1980 forward I have been involved with PFLAG Denver, and started and conducted four GLBT choruses:  the PFLAG Festival Chorus, the Denver Women’s Chorus, the Celebration ’90 Festival Chorus for the Gay Games in Vancouver, and Harmony.  I am enjoying my 11-year retirement with my life partner of 32 years, Judith Nelson, riding our bikes, going to concerts, and writing stories for the great SAGE group.