Something Like Home

An old Texan I know told me once that some Texas natives consider transplants like me to be immigrants. The state had been an independent republic at one time so this otherwise ultra-rational woman wasn’t as bat-shit crazy as she sounded. But not everyone living within its debt-ridden borders had wanted to go it alone. So when Washington eventually offered debt repayment in exchange for statehood, Texas accepted. Fussing and rumbling—no doubt—at what it had sacrificed to its balance bleeding ledgers.

Texas pride amuses me to no end. Everything really is bigger here, including the propensity to exaggerate. Yet outrageous as her point had been, it made an ironic kind of sense to me, less for the history behind it and more because my parents were bona fide immigrants. Now here I was, their second generation American daughter, being told that some saw me as a foreigner in my adopted state.

No flag-waving Texas nationalist, the woman had only meant to offer insight into the beliefs of her fellow Texans who’ve watched their state get overrun by newcomers for more than a decade. Between 2012 and 2022, over four million Americans moved to Texas seeking post-recession opportunities and— if they were among the almost one million from California—a lower cost of living. And that isn’t even counting those other immigrants. The poor ones risking everything to cross hostile borders, also in search of better, more secure lives. The ones Texas governor Greg Abbott now sends north to tell Washington exactly what he thinks of federal immigration laws. And—I suspect—the federalism he’d rather do without.

I came to Texas by a chance invitation and did not expect to stay. But it grew on me for its laid-back Southern hospitality. And then repelled me for its second amendment purism, racist voter registration laws and cruel abortion ban. I’ve managed to tolerate it overall because of Austin, one of the few cities in Texas most likely to defy Governor Abbott and the conservative state legislature. And because other Californians are here, though natives often blame us—and the big California tech companies that followed—for making the city unaffordable. I’ve managed to make a comfortable life for myself here by luck and by grace. Though even after more than a decade in the Lone Star State—nine of them in Austin—I still can’t quite call it home.

I tell anyone who asks that I live in Texas. But when they ask where home is, there’s hesitation. I own a house in Austin; I will probably live here indefinitely. But home? Somehow it feels wrong to say Texas. Almost as wrong as it would be to say California, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life. My immigrant parents were European tumbleweeds with no real ties to communities. They had a home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the one where I grew up. But that home was in many ways a satellite to the European cities where they came from. Because home was always there and never here. In the same way that now, in the twenty-first century, the Internet has become my elsewhere community. Maybe that’s why my parents poured themselves into that house, planting trees and grass everywhere. To create the roots and ties reminding them that home really was where they had landed.

The white stucco house they renovated and that I still see in my dreams is a memory now that belongs to someone else. Santa Monica, the city in Southern California where I was born, disorients me with its pricey crowded newness. Berkeley, where I studied then lived for almost a decade, is still recognizable despite the gentrification but now untouchable for anyone earning less than six-figures. Then there’s the green and gold landscape I remember so well. Water shortages, wildfires, floods and mudslides will reshape it if the earthquake predicted to rip the state apart, does not. One day—perhaps in my lifetime—I may not recognize California or the cities I knew there at all.

So while I may not really be an immigrant to Texas, I might as well be one. I speak without drawl or lilt, but always with a hint of slack-jawed West Coast slowness; and like an immigrant, I exist between worlds, unable to return to the place I knew because it no longer exists. Yet not quite able to fully integrate into where I am despite my fondness for it. Even the plants in the tiny garden outside my living room do not burrow into native soil. They sit atop it in raised beds or pots. Thriving, yes, above the poor soil over which they grow and sometimes brutal heat. The way I have managed to grow on landlocked prairie subject to fits of humid heat to which I will never become accustomed. Not after years taking the cooling vastness of the Pacific into every cell of my body.

It’s a small comfort that 10% of the people who have arrived in Austin since the rush started a decade ago are from my state. As is knowing that Trader Joe’s, the iconic California grocery chain, moved here the same year I did. I never bothered shopping there when I lived on the West Coast; now I love just visiting and roaming the aisles. In the way my father loved spending time at his favorite French restaurant in Santa Monica reminiscing about France. And the way my mother gushed over pasta she could find only at the Italian deli on the city’s east side. Just like we make it in Italy. The best. Separated—voluntarily and not—from what we know, we tumbleweed immigrants create homes from what we find. Because home is not a place. It is everything that keeps us close to the memories that make us who we are.

A Broken Earth & Her Mirrors

Women. The earth. I think about both these days because both weigh on me with heaviness and urgency. Each is mirroring cracks and stresses in the other like a physical call and response. I chide myself. None of this is fact. Only the intuitive leaps of a mind over-trained in the poetics of literature.

Yet still I leap. And now that habit is working overtime and particularly when I engage with the news. The same week CNN headlines proclaimed that rivers all over the world were drying up, on quieter pages it shared the insights of eight American women living in overspent bodies. Exhausted as the rivers, they’re facing challenges and demands that exceed them. Yet they carry on and will continue to carry on. Until they can’t.

It didn’t surprise me to see women and rivers featured in the same week. I live with a form of madness that sees everything connected to everything else in one way or another. Besides—and as indigenous people believe—we are the children of the earth. The Great Mother. So as the earth suffers, so do those who like the Mother also bear children. Both have bodies that make life possible. Both are governed by the same systems control the earth and created this age we now live in: the anthropocene.

The Greek root anthrop speaks to the human; the suffix -cene to our current geologic time. To the recent and new. Taken together, the word speaks of humanity. How humans have become the dominant factor in planetary evolution. But does not say that this evolution is man-made devolution, emphasis on the “man.” Industry and the pillaging of natural resources for profit has been the province of men, of patriarchy. And like women too often have, the earth has surrendered to abuse, mostly without complaint. No longer. Now the earth responds with monstrous rages. Of drought, flood and fire. With loss of life and a catastrophic rate of species extinction 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. The planet is out of balance. And all beings must pay the price.

For centuries, we could more—or less—rely on climate patterns we could read in the stars, wind, sky and earth. While never 100% predictable, were predictable enough. We could say with more or less certainty that rivers—like the Colorado, the Rhine, the Loire, the Yangtze—would flow on all continents. Other watery bodies, created and natural, like Lake Powell in Arizona and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, would fill. If not from rain, then from the melted runoff of high mountain snows. Variances would never be so extreme as to vaporize those bodies into the atmosphere and leave behind a dry, brittle earth unable to support life. The Mother could withhold, for a season, sometimes more. Or during Ice Ages, for millennia. But that withholding always came to an end; balance would return.

That reliability is gone. But climate change is not real, say some. Science is a fraud. These nay-sayers and deniers: these are the people who are most likely to believe that life-giving human bodies exist solely to benefit others. Offer comfort and pleasure. Provide labor for the industries that abuse the earth. Serve those who control those industries and society itself. Their justification? Ideologies rooted in Darwin, in the naturally-ordained dominance of males. Or beliefs built around a white-skinned God created in the image of men. A God too often used by men to justify their supremacy over all living beings, including the earth. And their dismissal or calculated disappearance of what does not suit them.

In the United States, the law that protected uterine-bearing people, gave us final say over our bodies has also vanished. What remains is imbalance. This is what I see now when I look at a map of the United States. Only ten of fifty states offer unrestricted access to the abortions that were once our right. Eleven have banned it outright and the rest offer conditional access that could be revoked by legislative fiat at any time.

Knowing this, I feel the imbalance in my body as an anger that will not go away. I think of the eight CNN interviewees and read their words over and over again. The already overwhelming challenges of the many roles women play—worker/breadwinner, mother, daughter, sister, wife—have been compounded by those created by systems in post-pandemic chaos. Now we feel the despair of disempowerment. Confesses one 35-year-old, I’m fragile as a piece of china. I am cracked, broken and tired. Just like the earth.

If anti-climate change advocates rely on denial, pro-life advocates rely on wilful scientific misreadings. Or rather, transforming scientific doubt about when life begins into absolutes, like this pro-life Wisconsin website: “[Human embryologists have concluded that] embryos are very young human beings. Pre-born children.” The movement claims to liberate women—transmen never enter the conversation—by offering “life” as an alternative to “murder.” But that only enslaves uterine bodies to the violence of state coercion and the lie of unlimited resources. Climate change is not real. Science is a fraud. Without speaking its name, these wilful misreaders of science act for patriarchy. And for a system that “tamed” the rawness of America through dispossession and human exploitation then dared to call itself a democracy.

This disruption of nature will alter life as we know it. Through migration away from the ravages of flood, fire and drought. Through conflicts over water and eventually, temperate, arable land. The question isn’t how these changes will break us but how much. And the disruption of the American body politic through the battle over abortion? No doubt that will break apart a union that once appeared whole. Not that it was ever perfect or without other perennial divides like race and class. But uterine bodies will only deepen the divides that already exist.

Indeed, the disharmony we have created in her rhythms are no mere inconvenience. They threaten us and our blue-green planet home. We look into the rivers and lakes of this earth, the bodies that offer us the water with which we cannot survive. Rather take comfort in the abundance of nature, we see man-made destruction, like the drying of the world’s rivers, everywhere around us. Nature is reflecting the very worst of us back to ourselves. Teaching us—or trying to—that the way forward is not through the narcissism of patriarchy. But through the humility of self-recognition in nature. And in every living thing on earth.

Paddling Alone

A bird watching club got me into my first kayak seven years ago. Someone, a member, had posted a Meetup promising an over-the-water tour of bird habitats on the local lake named for Ladybird Johnson, a woman who loved wild places enough to help protect them. Neon-colored kayaks often skimmed across that lake, the V’s they cut on the surface reminding me of the figures children and artists often drew to represent birds in flight. So I went, lured by the gravity-defying possibilities that water might hold.

I donned a life vest, butt-flopped from the dock into a kayak and buried an enthusiastic paddle into the water. I did not yet know to hold my elbow at a 45-degree angle. Or that dipping rather than digging my paddle would get me where I wanted to go faster and also keep me drier. Swimmer’s muscle memory made me pull my arms hard against the lake and scoop water straight into my kayak. Following the other birdwatchers—mostly women and a few men—I craned my neck to watch geese, ducks swans and the grackles I mistook for crows. But it was a lone silver egret that stole the show and my attention. Rapt at the sight of the egret beating its wings over the lake as it moved from tree to tree, I forgot the wetness that pooled at the bottom of my boat and soaked my clothes to the skin.

Of course I returned again not long after that first time, undeterred, this time without my gaggle of birdwatchers. They’d decided to meet on land and I wanted to be on the lake again because I’d fallen in love with kayaking and wanted to learn to enjoy the surface of water, the way it interacted with other spaces. The swimmer in me already understood the underside well. It was a space that demanded focus and a willingness to let go of smell and every sound except that of your own breathing. The surface was a different matter, a space where all senses could engage.

I rented another one-person kayak. The time before, I’d had the choice to take a double but declined. A single would let me stay with the group and follow or break off, as I knew my contrarian spirit would demand. Seeing birds, learning their names and learning to distinguish which cry or call belonged to which bird—all that had its pleasures. But what I really wanted was to test my own wings, finesse my strokes and turns, paddle upstream and glide under the bridges and in and out of the small green coves along the shore. And that meant a level of physical engagement with the water I could not have following binocular-eyed birdwatchers. For all their inexperience with kayaks, still managed to stay drier than I did by allowing the current push them along.

Paddling more deliberately and taking in less water into my boat, I passed a Southern gothic tangle of cedar elms sycamores and cypress, catching sight of nests that belonged to birds. Under bridges and on them, colorful graffiti—like the blind yellow Pac-Man on the Lamar Boulevard Bridge that vowed to Never Give Up—reminded me of other forms of wildlife. The hairless, mammalian kind that build as relentlessly as beavers, but didn’t always live in harmony with nature. These other animals that looked like me—they were more numerous than birds. And try as I might, I could not avoid them. As the temperatures rose, they sought the water, too. Some paddled in tandem with varying degrees of finesse. Others paddled past me alone or with canine companions in life jackets, front paws perched on the bow, noses tipped to the wind, reveling in scents no human could detect.

This time, I watched the tandem kayakers with particular interest. Men paired with men and women with women; but it was the male/female pairs I watched most closely, especially the ones where the men steered and the women sat behind. Some moved along well, if slowly; others not so much. I wondered if those couples, especially the more obviously inexperienced ones that relied on the current more than their paddles to push them along, knew that brawn didn’t matter here. What did was skill level, with the more experienced kayaker in front and the less experienced one in back. I wondered, too, how these pairs—any of them—could stand sitting between the someone’s splayed legs or having someone sit between their own. Kayaks are compact spaces; and while some might take comfort in contact, to me it would feel like too much constraint.

In a single kayak and despite the relative immobility of my legs, I could still push the boat as fast as the muscles in my core, shoulders and arms would allow. And that my less-freighted kayak would always move more quickly than tandems. I could go where I wanted when I wanted, without seeking permission or consensus. And I could own every last act and decision, for better or worse, like going too far up or down the river and getting fined for not returning to the dock on time. Or forgetting sunscreen. Or water to drink. And if I invited the lake into my kayak from sloppy strokes, I could still enjoy the cool wetness on my skin and through my clothes like the blessing it ultimately was.

I don’t know that I’ll ever try tandem kayaking. There’s pleasure—or comfort or security or all three—being among others. Ducks know this. So do geese and swans, who rarely swim the lake alone. So did my father, another bird I could neither catch nor keep, who desired the company of others but also paddled his own way. He’d tell me, the child too much like him, that I would end up alone if I didn’t learn to compromise. Of course, he rarely did and didn’t have to because he was a man; and I’d laugh at the irony he did not see, knowing he was probably right. But knowing, too, it was my choice.

And so I’ll keep paddling my kayak built for one because I prefer it like the silver egret prefers its solitude. An airy thing, it sometimes drags the big yellow feet at the end of its backward-bending legs in the water. The birdwatchers told me it does this to stir up the water and attract the fish it will eat, but I imagine more: that somehow, some way, those crazy feet keep the egret connected to what also feeds its soul.

Flowers for a Requiem

Cherry blossoms are sacred to the Japanese, who call them sakura. Pink, white, yellow and sometimes green, the flowers symbolize a natural world that is pure divinity; and in their fleeting softness, the way of all living things. Like the sakura that bloom for no more than two weeks every spring, life is briefly beautiful.

They’ve long since come and gone this year. They need cool winters to flower in March and April so they’re not a common sight in Texas. If they come to mind now, in the baking heat of a Central Plains summer, it’s because someone I knew, someone who used to be a friend, passed away less than a month before the first sakura bloomed in his adopted city of Tokyo.

Had he lived, he might have told people on Facebook about going on a hanami or cherry blossom viewing. I wouldn’t have seen that post though, or any other. Four years earlier, I’d severed every connection that had kept us tied together.

Our last contact had been by phone in 2018. I wasn’t in good place then and neither was he so I stepped away for a while. Then that while, which felt like the greatest relief, solidified into permanence. Meanness had become his habit as helplessness had become mine and the friendship had become this badly broken thing neither of us knew how to fix. He and I had known each other so long we couldn’t imagine our lives without each other. Unless I let go we’d continue to circle the drain like the bitter wedlocked couple we weren’t.

Things got better for me after that but slowly. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up and out of the hard place that nearly consumed me. But my former friend continued the slip-slide down. Two years after I cut the cord, a mutual acquaintance asked if I could put money into a fund she’d created to help him pay for cardiac surgery. He was a different man now, with a new heart powered by a pacemaker. I donated, glad to help. But the other thing she tacitly asked for—that I talk to him again—I could not do. He stopped trying to get me back into his life afterward.

I only learned about his death on social media. The mutual friend who’d advocated for his heart fund had not told me; at the time he died, she was too stunned to say anything to anyone beyond immediate friends and family. But thoughts of his passing stayed with me for days that turned into weeks then months. There was grief there, for an aborted friendship I believed I’d take with me to the end. But there was something else there, too, another sadness I’d not known before. In my youth I had not understand death or its finality; only that dying was something people— mostly the old—occasionally did. His death was different. With no ifs, ands or buts, his death swept away an invisible generational shield. Shocking as his demise was I realized it was just a prelude. Others would follow him because now death was not a matter of if but when.

He did not leave this world as my friend; but he is still the first among my contemporaries to pass into history. Which is significant not just because I will miss him, no matter the differences we had. But because he was there to witness moments with me that in their singularity, would not repeat again. Like turning twenty-one. Like leaving my college life for the great unknown. Like seeing the heart I’d held back from love shatter into more pieces than I could count. Then time passed and he himself became another kind of first: the one person to remain in my orbit for longer than a few months or years.

This man, this former friend, was a Berkeley drop-out who still ghosted campus the year I met him. His acquaintances were people I lived with at the student co-op. Stubbornly persistent, he called me, made me laugh and wheedled me for greater closeness so many times that the wheedling itself became a joke. Give it up, man, you’re crazy. It wasn’t funny though, at least not to him. I listened to him in a way few did, including the ex-Air Force father who bullied and beat him and the mother who let it happen because that’s what fathers did to sons. So he held on to the hope. And when, many years later, he came into his parents’ money—not much but a good sum—he offered what I, a broke adjunct professor, could never repay: a two-week trip east to enjoy the pleasures of a Manhattan Christmas.

He scoffed at my protests for almost a year before I finally consented to go with him, not thinking for a moment that our vacation was anything more than just a friendly excursion. Until he proved me wrong. Two nights before we left New York, he told me the strange truth: that he had intended the visit to be “the world’s longest date.” I said no again to a relationship; looking at me like an angry child, he demanded to know why. I explained what I thought he already knew. He was my friend for life, nothing more, nothing less. Though outwardly conciliatory, inwardly I fumed at his deception. The last time we had ever talked about his wish for a relationship had been more than twenty years before.

Nothing was the same after that. He became more irascible than ever. There was more I did that displeased than pleased and felt eggshells under my feet though I said nothing. Then my life went into upheaval and I turned to him. No matter what, he was still my friend…until the passive-aggressive rages became brutal enough I finally had to walk away. He became desperate after that, using every channel he could to reconnect. But I was done. Enough so that when my website tracker logged a visit from Japan just ten days before he passed away, a visit I knew was his, this ex-friend I had once loved like family felt like a stranger from another life.

He died of a disease that claims the aged and infirm, a middle-aged man who had reached the last season of his life. Now he is a signpost that tells me I am approaching the autumn of my days in a body that, though I no longer take this for granted, will likely grow older than his. These things I know and for these things I grieve. Yet I accept them like the lessons of the sakura: all things in their season, even friendships unable to withstand the inexorable test of human time.

 

 

Resurrection in the Cathedral

The Cathedral of Junk found me and that’s the truth. I was on Google Maps trying to find where the hell my dentist had moved when suddenly there it was: the Austin cultural icon I’d never heard of with fans all over the Internet. On YouTube alone, I counted two dozen videos all posted within the last decade. It’s even been covered by the Wall Street Journal, not once but four separate times.

The structure—all 60 tons of it—is actually part of a backyard art installation by Vince Hannemann, an eccentric local who calls himself the Junk King. It’s a phrase he had tattooed, one green letter per finger, on the hands that started building the Cathedral back in 1989. This otherwise self-effacing gent will gladly let you into his sanctum sanctorum. But only if you make an appointment and park in his driveway. It’s for his long-suffering neighbors who’ve had to deal with everything from goggle-eyed tourists to parties, weddings, music jams and television news crews.

Standing 33 feet tall, the Cathedral seems like a random pile of objects you can find at the Austin city dump—tires, circuit boards, toys, bottles, toilets, shopping carts, furniture, bicycles and car parts—and a few things you can’t, like a NASA nosecone. Poke around a little and ask a few questions, though, and you’ll start to see method in the madness. The material Vince collects or that gets donated to him often doesn’t make the final cut. What remains gets loosely “organized” by color, theme and form, then woven together with wire or set into place with hot glue or cement.

I took a Saturday bus from the northeast side to get to it. That meant traveling through the great glass maze of downtown I’ve come to loathe. It’s a crowded mess now, dominated by futuristic-looking high-rises and building projects that Manhattanize every square inch of land available. Traffic snarls easily here on two-lane streets not built to carry so many vehicles. The south side area where Vince lives—lush, low-rise, spacious and quiet—immediately made me feel nostalgic. This was the Austin I remembered from a decade ago, the decade I moved here. Not the postmodern monstrosity it’s become.

Entering Vince’s backyard from the side gate of his house, the nostalgia only grew stronger. This wasn’t just old Austin on display; it was the entirety of modern American life. “There’s no right or wrong way to see it,” he said after giving me a summary of the Cathedral’s three levels. “The experience is yours.” You can go in the front entrance or a side one. You can climb stairs made of tires, concrete and inlaid tools to the top first before you go in. Or spend your time examining the ancillary structures first, like the A-frame meditation mini-hut, the more-slippery-than-you think ceramic slide or the stone cairn Vince created to honor his dead pets. It’s all very surreal; and as with all surrealist art, no single truth explains it. What does is the meaning a spectator chooses to bring to the art itself.

The heat of a cloudless day bore down on me. I circled the Cathedral first before going up to the vine-covered top. The view of the neighborhood was spectacular, but I was sweating so I took the staircase down to ground-level. It was there I realized that I’d entered more than the interior of a gloriously demented playhouse. Now I was in Dr. Who’s TARDIS, the time machine that magically enlarges the moment you step inside. It was the vaulted ceilings, the patches of sky I could see through the junk. In place of buttons to push and levers to pull, I saw more objects than I could visually process, but which Vince assured me represented every decade of the twentieth century.

What catches your eye--and there’s plenty—depends on you. My own gaze was immediately drawn to Big Bird, who watches over a flotilla of rubber ducks; and then to a bunch of Barbie dolls suspended from nearby wall. In a hollow near one of the Cathedral stairwells, I caught sight of a turn-of-the-century iMac sitting next to a plastic Frosty the Snowman and Virgin Mary. A bust of Beethoven stands in its own ground-level hutch wearing headphones and a pair of women’s sunglasses.There’s an overwhelming density here, not just of objects but of untold stories. Where did that Beethoven come from? And what was the person who donated all those rubber ducks—Vince says they were a gift—doing with so many? It’s pop culture heaven touched by gravitas. And not a little insanity.

Taken all together the objects in the Cathedral create a sense of compressed time. The very old, like a collection of rusted flat irons, are mixed in with the older, like typewriters, rotary telephones and bicycle rims. There’s literally something for every memory, which helps in part to explain the Cathedral’s enduring popularity. It’s a tribute to a past that, like Big Bird and his rubber duck army, comforts. Especially during a time when everything is changing. We’ve been there, done that. But what happens next nobody knows.

For something grounded so completely in the gospel of capitalism, the Cathedral, which Vince without any plan in mind, nevertheless struck me as quite moving. Every object had been condemned to death by landfill. Yet all had been resurrected to live as part of a strangely harmonious —and still decaying—whole. All while reminding those who cared to think about it that that humans produce almost 3.5 million tons of plastics and solid waste a day, most of which will end up in soil, the water and eventually, our own bodies. We made this place; and we are making it still, to our detriment.

Toward the end of my visit, when the heat forced me into the cool ground floor rooms, I closed my eyes and listened to the chimes hanging from the ceiling. Another visitor, a stylish young thing who looked like sweat wasn’t something she did shot a video she later told Vince she wanted to post on Tik-Tok. Smiling beatifically, he thanked her. Vince doesn’t do social media—it’s too twenty-first century. He’s just a simple guy who makes art he never realized would not only feed nostalgia-hungry seekers looking for encounters with the past. But with an Austin soul that somehow got junked on the frogmarch to progress.

How Dare We

We live in perilous times. But I feel especially terrified because I’m female. It’s not just the dystopian prospect of women losing the right to control our own bodies. It’s the implication that loss could have for what women’s bodies can do besides reproduce, like speak our truths in public spaces without getting shouted down or silenced. Reading Rebecca Solnit’s 2020 memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, recently brought out how that’s yet another battle we’ve been fighting forever despite the feminist gains of the last 60 years.

In 1984, a semester after Solnit graduated from the Berkeley School of Journalism, I was unlearning academic objectivity and embracing the power of own first-person narrative voice in a women’s studies class on the other side of the same university campus. Acknowledging subjectivity was an act of radical integrity. A small but necessary rebellion against that insidious thing called patriarchy. A child who grew up in a home “where everything feminine and female …was hated,“ Solnit no doubt understood this idea, though she had yet to find her way to her own maverick brand of feminist-inflected cultural criticism.

I’d be lying if I said I came to writing my own memoir with the same feminist intention so clearly evident in Solnit’s book. Feminism was not even on my mind; that only came later, when I realized how so much of my life had been deformed by the abuses of sexism. I wrote to break nearly half a century of silences I thought would protect me but only suffocated, I wrote to save myself, my sanity and my soul. Which I suppose, in this brewing home-front war against women, amounts to more or less the same thing.

Solnit keeps me company in this plastic-elastic space of memoir that I inhabit. But she and I, the journalist and the ex-academic, we’re not alone. One 2015 article estimates that seventy percent of those who enroll in writing programs that specifically teach the craft of memoir (and its elegantly compact twin, the essay), are female. I’ll wager that’s at least the percentage of memoirs written by women I read as a professional book critic. Modern memoir, it would seem, is a “women’s” genre. But why the draw?

First-person narrative beckons with the promise of truth-telling. The straight shit. And in a world tending more and more towards forced homogeneity, that’s powerful. If you can’t be yourself enough to tell your truth in the world, you can do it between the covers of a book. Memoir is about emotional honesty, the act of voicing difficult emotions, like rage, despair, disgust. But also celebrating the unabashed joy of being who you are, flaws, weaknesses, quirks and all.

For women, that emotional honesty is critical. Almost as critical as experiencing the intimacy of reading the details of someone’s else’s life. Whether innate or learned or both, intimacy is something girls learn—and learn to appreciate—from childhood. I think of the secrets shared between girls. Whispered in ears. Written on sheets of notebook paper, then passed in class. A female-authored memoir is another kind of note, one that not only offers escape into the privacy of another woman’s internal world. But also the opportunity for other “secret sharers” to find each other and create bonds among themselves.

A memoir is therefore as public as it is private. All writers want others to know their words; but for some writers, achieving that goal is critical, less for the spotlight, and more for the light it casts on subjects not discussed. Not only about the details of one’s life. But also to shed light on subjects beyond the standard fare of the mundane. The subjects deemed taboo: Trauma. Abuse. Rape. Incest. Mental illness. Addiction. “Deviant” (non-binary) sexuality. And have others bear dignify truths through the act of witness.

I am a member of a virtual collective of memoirists. It numbers in the thousands, and membership is only open to women and non-binary people. All members must follow a strict code of conduct, which means respecting all differences like gender, race sexuality and age. This may sound like an absolutism of political correctness. But there are reasons for these rules. Reasons like the #Metoo movement that showed the world just how widespread sexual abuse—and the myriad aggressions that go alone with it—was.

I can say nothing specific about our discussions; only that members speak of struggles and successes, ask questions of or help from the collective. The group reminds me of the no-boys-allowed clubs of childhood. Back then, girls separated from boys because boys carried an invisible disease we called cooties. But now those boys have become men vested with the kind of damaging power wielded by a lying, orange-haired lech of a president. And by a now imprisoned Hollywood mogul who also thought that he could grab as much pussy and wreck as many lives as he wanted without consequences.

That’s how it is for women/non-binary people living under a patriarchal regime. We all know that any of us can become targets at any time, both in the real and virtual worlds. Of bullying. stalking, gaslighting, shaming. Anything and everything that might possibly silence us, make us question ourselves and our own self-worth. Because we are women/non-binary people who speak rather than hold our tongues like children told to be seen but not heard. Because what we do and say often involves others who have a vested interest in keeping us silent. But more than that, to maintain a status quo that has rewarded the defenders of male privilege from blotting everything that differs from truths they call “universal” and “sacred.”

Sometimes I revel in that hiddenness, that shelter that allows for open exchange. Yet I am also profoundly bothered that such a space even needs to exist. Or that women who speak about female experiences under patriarchy still find themselves the targets of mansplaining males who will not listen and seek only hear the sound of their own voices. Like Rebecca Solnit. who remembered how one conservative commentator who said “to go fuck [your]self” for speaking out about the many ways professional men—some of whom had far less expertise —had dismissed, ignored, belittled her.

Whether it’s about reversing laws that respect female autonomy or forcing women’s voices back into their throats, the endgame of patriarchy is the same. But since my days in that Berkeley classroom forty years ago, too many consciousnesses have been raised. The wheel will not stop moving forward. How dare you, said our current Vice President this past month to conservative lawmakers supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Though never having borne children herself, this Vice President still lives in a female body. A body that made her the target of a man who unquestioningly served the orange lech almost to the very end. And who, in his ignorant arrogance, claimed to speak for 62 million unborn children and their grieving mothers: How dare you, Madame Vice President?

To which I reply. Oh, yes Mr. ex-Vice-President. How dare WE.

Water Baby

I swim. Not as much as I used to and not as often as I’d like. But it’s a near-lifelong habit of which didn’t really start until I was a teenager. Before then, I mostly tread water because once the Pacific Ocean nearly swallowed me whole. I was a child when it happened, a child chasing small waves that crashed like long sandy cylinders on Point Dume beach. Suddenly a rip current summoned the water back to the sea so fast I lost my footing. Another wave broke over my head and rolled me over and over, weighing my bathing suit down with grit. As I struggled to move my limbs and breathe, suddenly, as if monumentally bored with me, the ocean flung me onto the shore just long enough that I was able to get up off my knees, gulp down some air into my starving lungs and drag myself back up the beach and my unsuspecting mother, newly afraid of water and its wildness.

In junior high summer school, we had swim lessons in the domesticated watery spaces of pools. Most kids swam easy as fish. Others—all arms and legs and jutting bones beneath tanned skins—raced on swim teams. The shallow end was my home, the place where I did some sloppy homemade version of a dog-paddle. Something that could keep my head above water. The deep end was like the ocean: something I didn’t trust. We learned to float, kick, and breathe. And then to twist our bodies and spin our arms like propellers or scoop them toward our chests while moving our faces in and out of the water. Those lessons never seemed to stick, though. I could never get the hang of twisting my neck to from side to side for air. So I thrash-swam with my head above the water, my eyelids closed against the sting of chlorine. Then went right back to treading water.

I wonder now if some part of me remembered that day when the ocean wrapped itself around me with such ferocity. The ocean covers 70% of the earth; water comprises up to 60% of our bodies. The blood that runs the human internal machine is almost all water, but also contains salt and ions in concentrations  similar to those found in the sea; the same is true of amniotic fluid. I needed the earth under my feet to feel safe, not yet aware that the water was where I and every other human came from. And that if the earth was the mother of all living organisms, then, the ocean was her amnion. So however terrifying she seemed, the ocean not a mile from my house, the same one that covered nearly one-third of the earth, was simply embracing me, unaware of her strength. Recognizing as I did not, the ancient bond between us.

Not that I stopped going to the beach. There were other ways to enjoy the water, like boogie boards which floated me on my stomach and kept my head above water. I started riding shore breakers then gradually moved out to where the three to four foot swells began to curl. I didn’t always catch them, but when I did, I savored the movement that sometimes felt like flying and that the wet-suited surfers I knew called the most radical feeling in the world. Unaware that all the arm and leg work it took to catch a wave was also building my confidence as swimmer. Enough so that once, after a late summer Pacific hurricane had churned up swells twice the size of what I usually rode, I went for it. Wearing only a two-piece bathing suit and paddling into sea without a wrist leash for my boogie, I moved up the face of a foaming white-headed wave, only to be met by an even bigger one that crashed over my head. Ripping the boogie from my hands, the wave dragged me, prone and helpless, over a spiny reef before spitting me up on land, cuts all over my feet. This time the ocean had left her mark. You do not master me. I master you.

College took me to Bay Area where, living in the shadow of the Berkeley Hills, I could look north to San Francisco and see the Pacific every day. But where I never seemed to find time for the water. But swimming found me anyway through my freshman roommate, a free-spirited Master Class swimmer. She took me to a beach in Marin where she swam in 55-degree water I avoided then hounded me ever after to get out of the library and into a heated university pool. I did, sometimes, especially during summers. But swimming only became a habit when I discovered it could counter things I could not control on dry land. Like uncertainty: where would I go after so many years of being a student, what would I do, who would I become? Those questions ate at me, bore into my core without my knowing it. Then returned my senior year as shivering sensations that rattled along the San Andreas fault line of my spine and left me feeling breathless and disoriented and my muscles rigid.

College was ending; and I was learning that graduation meant swimming in another kind of sea. A sea that a life of the mind had left me ill-prepared to face. It was then I remembered swimming, the way it softened and warmed my body from the inside. Water slowed and resisted; perhaps I needed something against which to safely crash the mad energy of my own terror. So I grabbed the one faded suit I’d had since freshman year and leapt into the blue. The first time in, I was barely able to move my arms and legs in rhythm. Even my breathing was wrong; In my land-walking nerviness, I had stopped breathing into my lungs and took shallow, half-apologetic breaths instead. It was faster that way, because I was moving faster, or my brain was. Flying off into the future, I stopped feeling the earth beneath me. I emerged an hour later exhausted; but for a short time, free of the inner tremors that shook me. The endorphin rush and parasympathetic relaxation response so much rhythmic breathing had triggered in my nervous system had calmed me. But I didn’t know that then. Only that I now, for a brief moment, I existed in the present tense, feet on the ground.

The water had mastered me again. But this time because I came to it somehow understanding that in mastering me, the water might also heal what years of worry and overthinking had thrown into chaos. Which makes me wonder now what lessons could be had for all of us, feeling the collective anxiety of this strange new world we live in. A world unmasked by disease and unmade by war on a planet we have damaged with our great, oversized mammalian brains. What if we could look into the water and see not just a reflection of ourselves and our desires, but kin? And what if we could understand that no one, not even multi multi-billionaires, will ever have even a fraction of the power nature has? So much now is out of anyone’s control; we are swamped and swimming, any way we can. But perhaps this is the lesson, the lesson of water. You do not master me. But learn my rhythms and become me and maybe you can master yourself. And survive.

Bone Digger

Most people shudder at their family’s skeletons, those broken bones of past indiscretions they wished would disappear. But mine are so much my passion I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t have become an archeologist. Then again, memoirists like me are archeologists of a kind. We track down dead things, dig up remains, speculate on meaning, evolve theories. Where or when this mania started I can’t say. Only that as a child I never failed to exasperate my parents for asking too many questions. So I learned to listen and observe to find my answers. And when that wasn’t enough, use the stealth of thieves to root through drawers, cabinets and closets I had no business looking in whatsoever.

 The family member who interested me most was Papa. My blue-blood mother had a pedigree she could trace back for centuries; but he had been a child with a Dickensian past. The little boy his foster mother never wanted enough to adopt. Born in Paris to a nameless woman who abandoned him at birth, the only thing he had besides an incomplete birth certificate was a Middle-Eastern sounding last name from a man he swore up and down wasn’t his father. I’m English, he’d say. My mother just snickered and called my father a liar. He doesn’t know who his parents are. He’s just saying that.

 The freebooting child in me didn’t forget. Which is why, more than forty years later, I spit into a tube from an Ancestry DNA kit and waited eagerly for the results. The child had not succeeded in finding answers, but perhaps the adult could. The test results excited me—at first. There was British blood mixed with blood from Germanic Europe that explained Papa’s translucent white skin. There was Armenian blood, too; but that result mysteriously vanished when Ancestry recalibrated the results several years later. Skepticism creeped in. I didn’t doubt that Papa was English. But had the bias in the laboratory—perhaps because of my name—“created” incorrect data?

 Skeptical as I was about the test, the genealogical database into which my results were entered did eventually yield a first-cousin match to an elderly man named Martin who lived in the West of England. I did not bother to contact him. Too often the other people I had contacted, the second and third cousin matches who answered my feverish queries could not help. Then the tables turned and an amateur genealogist and ex-priest who shared a connection to both me and Martin became the one to ply me with questions. Do you know Martin? Where are you on the family tree?

 I had only my father’s strange, fragmented story to offer him in return. So he looked at the amount of shared DNA I had with Martin and concluded I was a half-first cousin, the child of a relative born out of wedlock. That wasn’t all. Because he had studied Martin’s family history, he was able to offer a theory about the parent who had given Papa his English bloodline. Papa’s English parent wasn’t a man. It was a woman named Ethel Maud, the sister of the man who became Martin’s father. Her name was unsettlingly ironic; naming me had been my mother’s business, not Papa’s.

 Ethel’s story stuck with me. A spinster, she came from a respected West Country farming family. She kept house for an uncle who lived in Bristol, living there until both he—and eventually she—died. My imagination began spinning stories. Had this placid woman taken a lover in secret, perhaps—for whatever reason—not the taste of her family? One thing was for sure. If she was indeed Papa’s mother, she went to great lengths to hide her pregnancy, going to Paris to have the child, then abandoning it. Perhaps it was the very British need to keep up appearances that drove her. That and the fact that as a middle class woman of the 1920s, she had everything to lose from being a single mother.

 Despite my DNA test skepticism, I decided to take a second test just to confirm there was no Armenian connection. I would not know who Papa’s father was; but perhaps I could lay that piece of the puzzle to rest. This one, by CRI Genetics, promised insights into a deeper past that went back thousands of years. I swabbed the inside of a cheek: three weeks later, I received confirmation of British, Northern and Southern European ancestry along with a huge surprise. Weaving in and out of Northern European and Tuscan Italian bloodlines was an Asian one stemming not from the Asia Minor of Armenia, but the Asia of the Far East. The line itself was split into others that came from Bengal, the Punjab, Southern China. And even Japan.

 The romantic side of my imagination whether one of Papa’s relatives, perhaps someone on his still-unknown paternal side, was a gypsy. The Romani people originated in Northern India, mostly the Punjab region; their descendants live all over Europe and the world. But the Chinese connection? Before 1900, Asians (and Southeast Asians), came to Britain as servants or sailors, usually in service of the infamous East India Company. Those who stayed in Britain lived in London or big port cities like Liverpool; most lived in poverty or at best, working class. Perhaps a Britisher in Papa’s history had worked in India or China, perhaps for the East India Company or even as a colonial official; perhaps had a liaison with a woman there. And the child that resulted wound up in Britain, probably London. Whoever they were, these relatives, they were travelers. People on the move…just like Papa, a restless man who could never stay in one place for long.

 Going back even further, to the 1600s, the test revealed another surprise: a Taino connection from Puerto Rico. CRI Genetics had found connections to Spain; so had the first version of Ancestry DNA. It was clear now that if the test was correct, my ancestors had been part of the Spanish Conquest…and that this Taino had more than likely been a woman. I had read enough history to know that this was how empire worked: kill the men or work them until they die. Enslave the women and turn them into concubines. It doesn’t matter which side, maternal or paternal, she came from. Only that she existed and that one or more of her children had followed their father to Europe.

 With so many unknowns in my paternal ancestry (and a few on my mother’s side), I am tempted to further speculate that these people, these other ancestors, had no wish to be known, desiring instead to lose themselves in whitewash of Europeanness just to survive. One of the things I remember my father telling me over and over was how glad I should be for who I was. Which in his parlance meant white and middle class. But the curious child who didn’t obey her parents had already learned what was important to her and remains important to her still: knowing where her skeletons come from. And understanding them—loving them, even—rules be damned.  

Pasta & the Theory of Everything

Mama was an Italian lapsed Catholic who sang while she cooked. It felt so much like a ritual I sometimes wondered whether her from-scratch meals and the songs that accompanied them weren’t a substitute for Sunday Mass. The noodles, though—they always came from a box. Perhaps she bought them because it was the modern thing to do. A time-saving convenience. I only realized this after I bought a pasta machine last December, a whirring, purring dream that efficiently pushes out 200 grams of everything, from capellini to linguine, pappardelle and lasagna, in under fifteen minutes. It seemed my desire to experience something like traditional pasta had made me regress.

The machine would have competed rather than harmonized with my mother’s sonorous mezzo-contralto. But its near-scientific precision? It would have won her over. She was a trained biochemist who transformed our kitchen into the culinary laboratory that was also her refuge. I think of this now, whenever I watch my machine work. Seeing the noodles wriggle from the tiny holes of my machine’s extruder, now, it sometimes seems I’m witnessing the birth of worms. Or maybe even the threads that, according to one branch of theoretical physics, make up all matter.

I think of string theory now because my mother was a scientist. But it didn’t become a recognized area of research until the 1970s, nearly twenty years after she fled biochemistry and disavowed her connection to the laboratory.  On-the-fringe but not quite discredited, string theory suggests that vibrating “strings” create everything from single-celled amoebae to entire galaxies. Proponents further argue that it could unify space and time and everything in it with coextensive physical forces that keep large objects like planets and moons from flying apart. For believers, it’s the concept that explains the entire universe.

Just about the time homemade pasta became a menu staple, this strange theory became my personal food for thought. Like my meals, it’s one of the few things that links me to my mother. And—I like to imagine—to the aunts and grandmothers and grand aunts and great-grands who cooked from scratch,  perhaps setting the noodles they made out to dry in the bright Italian sun. The women against whose way of life my mother rebelled through science; but to which she reluctantly returned as an unhappy housewife. Those strings of egg, water and semolina flour—they’re more than a meal. They are the invisible and complicated strands that remind me of the nurturing my mother could not offer except in the food she prepared.

String theory, of course, is not nearly as linear as the pasta I imagine connects me to my foremothers. Beyond the three dimensions our senses know and the invisible fourth dimension of time, there are as many as 25 separate dimensions. They exist as tiny balls of curled strings  associated with every point in the three-dimensional world we live in and affect all different aspects of that world including time.  Depending on how these cosmic strands move, they can create an infinite variety of effects in all dimensions. These can take the form of everything from invisible “collisions” (as between atomic particles) to large body connections (as between planets and their moons).

The possibilities string theory suggests have inspired others—especially science fiction writers—to play with the related idea that strings can create universes that parallel our own and exist with different versions of ourselves and the lives we know. No wonder the strangeness of string theory appeals. This space of what ifs and alternatives—this is a space I can understand. And yet…it’s not the science that draws me, or even the squirming strands of homemade pasta. It’s the strings themselves. The idea that behind the strings that they are vibrations, expression of pure creativity. The creativity of the universe.

Which takes me back to my mother. To what I now see as creativity. She sang with Spanish-language songs broadcast from radio stations in Los Angeles; they were the closest thing to her native Italian she had. And they were sad, so full of regret. Those songs, those expressions of the artist my mother also was, reveal more about her than she would ever say or admit. Fearful of looking too far into the future, she lived in the past, in memories of what could have been…had she not come to the States, not met my father, not had children, not left the lab, not obeyed the twists and turns of her own rebel heart.

 So now, when I stand in my kitchen, watching my machine spin the flour and water it will turn to strings of pasta, I picture my mother. Not in our old kitchen, but singing on a stage, her body swaying rhythmically, a rapt audience before her. In another universe, maybe that woman exists; and maybe, she is joyful.

I’d like to think so, anyway.

 

Eying Winter

My optometrist told me I needed bifocals just as I turned forty. Right on schedule, he said. Your eyes will keep changing for a while, but by fifty, they’ll settle down. I winced. The prospect of new glasses didn’t bother me. At age three, I’d been diagnosed with astigmatism and juvenile farsightedness and bore the nickname “four-eyes” well into my teens. What did was the welcome into middle age implied in the optometrist’s words. My lips twisted; I would deal. I had no choice.

TThe prescription changed by small degrees but frequently enough that I needed new bifocals every few years. Fifty came and then fifty-one. And still my eyes continued to change. Then, around my fifty-sixth birthday this past October, I noticed something else besides the routine re-blurring of my world: small rogue particles that flitted across my field of vision. Worried that my eyes had entered an unforeseen phase of decay, I turned to Google and self-diagnosed the problem as floaters.

The vitreous in my eyes had begun to liquefy. Tiny collagen fiber bits were now floating free and clumping together, casting shadows on my retina. And that meant seeing the optometrist again to make sure I didn’t also have a matching set of detached retinas to start 2022. Then I remembered something my father had told me about a cataract diagnosis he received the not long before he died. It’s like looking through a veil. I laughed. Papa had seen his world through gauze. I was seeing mine through fine gray snow.

Perched on his rolling stool, the optometrist tested my eyes. They were healthy, except for the fact I was now in the early stages of cataract disease. Can I stop it? He shook his head. One day, perhaps in the next decade, I would need surgery to stop the white moons of full blown cataract disease from eclipsing my vision. Until then, I could only slow their development by wearing anti-glare lenses, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and wearing sunglasses outdoors. He didn’t need to school me on the benefits of shades. I wore them all the time already, mostly for the pleasure of feeling hip and young and only incidentally for the way they softened sunlight.

Though cataracts can develop at any age, they are one of the more predictable ills of those fifty and older. Live into your eighties and the chance of developing them becomes one in two. But when the disease runs in families, the risk of developing them is higher. My father never knew his birth parents nor did he know the predispositions of the genes he inherited from them. Even if it wasn’t in his DNA, I was convinced he had set himself up for cataracts. He loved the sun as much as I did. But he rarely protected his blue-white eyes from its damaging rays.

Papa didn’t live long enough to tell me what else to expect—blurry vision, decreased ability to focus and see color brightness, increased sensitivity to light—as the disease progressed. But I never forgot that veil. For years, there had been so much in his life he had refused to see. That his second marriage could not be saved. That his body and heart were failing him. That he needed a will to tell his family what to do with his belongings. That veil was his metaphor, the thing that revealed his denial. Snow was mine.

Like my father, I dislike the thought of my own finitude. But I have no veil to shield me from that fact. Instead I have snow—and my still-immature cataracts—to remind me that I am mortal. They clarify rather than obscure, reminding me how much I loved my youth, my former ability to withstand the changes and shocks of life with ease. While also forcing me to look at the truth. The snow is starting to fall; winter is coming. Though not old, I am nearing the precincts of age.

Psychology teaches that bodies often offer clues—physical metaphors—that hold the key to understanding the causes of emotional ailments. Alternative health practitioners take this idea and go one step further, claiming that all illnesses—not just psychological ones—are produced by negative emotions. Louise Hay, for example, famously claimed that everything from colds to cancer had precise metaphysical causes, which she listed in Heal Your Body. Curious, I looked up an online version of Hay’s book. Cataracts, she claims, are the product of an “inability to see ahead with joy,” the belief in a “dark future.”

Papa never tried to look beyond his veil. I think he wanted it that way, just as I believe he died willingly, no longer wanting to fight the weak heart that had nearly failed him so many times before. So yes, he had been unhappy. But would I say that this unhappiness caused his cataracts? Probably not. Or not entirely, anyway. Just as I cannot say that my own too-frequent pessimism did the same to me. I had no empirical proof, only the ambiguity of bodily metaphors.

What I can say is this. The January day I was diagnosed, I did not feel upset. I could not; outside, the day was sunny as a promise. Whatever the cause of my disease I had a chance my father did not. One day my lenses would be replaced and I would once again be able to see with crystalline clarity. All I had to do was embrace the snowfall and my cataracts. And walk into the light.

 

Queer but Not Quite

My elementary schoolmates, boys mostly, used to play a recess game called Smear the Queer. Teachers banned it because it was rough and had no rules. The kids still did it anyway, mobbing up on the small triangular playing field on the southeast corner of my school, elbowing each other as they chattered and giggled. Someone would toss a ball in the air then the free-for-all started. If the ball landed near you, you became the “queer,” the one who picked up the ball and bolted, trying to avoid the hard-boned tackle that would eventually take you down like hunter’s prey.

The name taunted as it warned. Be “queer"“—different or odd, as I understood it then—and other children, the ones with sun-tanned faces and limbs, long hair and surf shop t-shirts, would never let you forget it.  I never played the game; tall and rangy, I was still a girl. More than that, I was the kid with the mother who insisted she had to walk me to and from a school just two blocks down the street. I had no wish to call even more unwanted attention to myself.

Like most childhood games, Smear the Queer taught lessons. Not the best ones, but ones that assured survival. Being part of the group, not sticking out in any way, meant security. Conform and you got by. But the conformity demanded went beyond having the right clothes and being the right level of cool. To conform—especially if you were male—meant being tough. No sissies or gay boys allowed. And if you were that rare tough girl who dared play, the message carried an extra homophobic warning. Play with the boys but don’t risk being taken for one because in life after puberty, girls are for boys and boys for girls.

If I remember that game now, that game I did not play, it is not just because I’ve spent the last ten years excavating my past for a book. Gender and sexuality, the struggle of being a woman who loved a charming but selfish runaway father but not the patriarchy that twisted his life and my mother’s, infuse the story I tell. A scholar of women’s literature, I probed stories for how female characters, straight and gay, cisgendered and not, navigated living among the men in whose image their worlds were made. My narrative was no different from the ones I studied and loved.

Some people may read the memoir as the story of a woman with a raging Electra complex…until they see Electra’s queer patina. As an adolescent, I gender-switched with abandon, slipping  into dresses one day and clothes made for boys the next. It mystified my schoolmates but after a while they accepted it as an extension of what they saw as my general strangeness. The too-tall girl with the overprotective mother and foreigner parents who never mingled with their neighbors. All through junior high I crushed on boys and men, mostly my teachers; but in high school, I stumbled into platonic love with another girl who broke my heart with a devastation more pure and complete than any I’d know from almost every boy or man I who would ever enter—then exit—my life.

There was a boyfriend after that beautiful girl, but one who despite the intimacy and the love, sometimes turned my stomach for the way he felt like a brother. Other relationships followed. Yet the compelling connection that would make me want to stay was never there. Even when the emotional component existed, a connection of mind or spirit lacked. Once there was even a lover I did not want who came to me during a time of profound personal crisis. That was by far the worst of all my relationships for the role of victim he needed me to play and that I knowingly accepted because I had nowhere else to turn.

A beta reader told me he’d pegged me as a gender-bent demi-sapio sexual who could desire only when emotional and mental bonds existed. I hate labels but realized he was right. Though cisgendered, I have always been most comfortable presenting as a short-haired, hoodied androgyne in jeans. And when I  desire, it is only when emotional and mental bonds are also present. In other words: I’m fringe straight. A gray-ace living between asexual and sexual, queer and not queer.

Personal traumas, many of them prolonged and co-extensive, have likely played a role in the “graying” of my sexuality, the remaking of Electra. Pain and loss pushed me at different times towards gay male friends and mentors. They were safe, they did not judge, they could laugh at themselves and were just plain fun to be around. And when a twist of fate sent Electra reeling, she remembered those friends and mentors and fled straight into heart of their community where she learned to embrace the maligned rainbow of difference she had carried with her since childhood.

Living in a post-climateric female body has no doubt contributed to my grayness. Simone de Beauvoir openly lamented the loss of desire in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; other women I admire like Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer have looked at it with some regret, but always with the idea that, as Steinem has famously said, “what we keep is what we need to support ourselves.” I feel no need as perhaps I did in my youth for the connection that would make me magically whole. To use a term Emma Watson once used to describe her singleness, I am “self-partnered.”

What gives me hope these days is what I and others, like queer feminist scholar Llliian Faderman in her newest book, Woman: The American History of an Idea, have observed among members of Generation Z. They have been coming of age at a time when the “rules” to gender/sexuality naming (and shaming) longer apply. Like the transmen and women who took American by storm in the 2010s—Janet Mock, Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox to name a few—even if they are straight, they don’t like labels either. Instead they prefer to life off the gender/sex grid or by calling themselves genderfluid and/or non-binary. Some identify as LGBTIA +, some do not. Neither male or female, masculine nor feminine, they are simply humans who, in living their truths, smear straight with queer and queer with straight, obliterating boundaries.