TKM

“Would you rather have your birthday presents before we go, or after we come back?” le domestique asked last Friday. She was about to whisk me away for a weekend at the El Morocco Inn, a gay-owned spa resort in Desert Hot Springs, a tiny desert town situated over a bubbling natural mineral oasis about 15 miles outside of Palm Springs.

 

“After,” I said, because I’m all about the delayed gratification.

 

That said, we took off for Riverside County, a part of California we’d given serious thought to boycotting for the foreseeable future in response to its lopsided support for Proposition 8, which its voters passed by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points (compared to Los Angeles County, where it passed by a margin of 1 point). Kiss our money goodbye, assholes! was our immediate reaction to the vote. If we need to pass through your county to get somewhere else, we’ll make sure we head out with plenty of cold drinks and a full tank of gas so that all we spend in your hellhole is toxic emissions.

 

But here’s where le resistance gets complicated. If you look at the county-by-county vote, represented here in the Los Angeles Times’ handy electoral map (use the pull-down menu to access the Prop. 8 stats) in green (where the majority voted yes) and purple (where the majority voted no), you’ll see that we gays don’t have a lot of wiggle room if we want to patronize only gay-affirming counties. While the purple parts are certainly among the loveliest parts of the state, there’s a whole lot of icky to avoid—including every county bordering Los Angeles, with the two most decisively God-loving, homo-hating counties, Kern and Tulare—which each passed the measure by a staggering margin of 50 percentage points—stacked one above the other north of L.A. County, like tiers of bile and spite atop California’s anti–gay wedding cake. (Kern, immediately bordering L.A. County, was particularly notable among California’s 58 counties for being the only one whose clerk defied the court’s marriage equality mandate by poutily ceasing all marriages through her office when she was told she couldn’t selectively deny them to same-sex couples.) When I was younger my father was fond of saying that people in Kern County “would just as soon shoot you as say hello.” His was a cautionary tale, as I was a teenager given to spontaneity, including frequent half-cocked solo driving trips in search of beauty and solace among the High Sierras, which rose majestically—and nonjudgmentally—over the Kern divide. I shrugged off his seemingly hysterical pronouncements about the locals as I drove through their towns to get to California’s most spectacular national parks, preferring to think of rural Californians as quieter types who just craved a little elbow room. Now I’m forced to rethink my position: Maybe they really would just as soon shoot me as say hello.

 

And then there’s our southerly neighboring Riverside County, another hotbed of conservatism. Yet Palm Springs, residing squarely within the county, has more gays and lesbians per capita than San Francisco—estimated at nearly 50% of the permanent population—has elected two consecutive gay mayors, and regularly seats gay city council members. And there are dozens of gay-owned resorts and businesses that damn well deserve our patronage. Boycotting Palm Springs because it’s surrounded by Riverside County would be like picketing the Episcopal Church—which has gone out of its way to welcome, affirm, and even consecrate gays—because its worship services reference the same Bible fundamentalist nut jobs thump in their crusades to condemn us. 

 

Besides, Palm Springs residents have perfected an über-laidback vibe that makes the rest of California seem practically uptight by comparison, and my need to decompress has achieved Trauma Level I in the days following the election. 

 

I’ve been taking the Prop. 8 vote hard—personally even. “It’s not a referendum on you,” le domestique has said more than once, but that hasn’t stopped me from losing sleep at night. The anxiety and dread I had felt for months before the election has evolved into a state of mourning, with the sheer indignity of having my rights put up for majority vote compounded by the cruel echo chamber of loss. Every morning since Election Day, my mind is struck on awakening by thoughts of Prop. 8—before I know whether it’s a workday or a weekend, before I remember anything interesting that might have happened the day prior, before it even occurs to me whether I need to get up and pee—and every morning I have to reprocess feelings of sadness and disbelief and anger all over again.

 

The few days immediately following the election were the worst, when I felt simultaneously numb and raw.  I don’t know if it’s possible to fully express to anyone who hasn’t experienced it directly what it’s like to finally feel like a first-class citizen in her own state after a lifetime of being held separate, only to lose that status five months later by a simple majority vote of her fellow citizens, citizens who were allowed to vote on the scope of my rights in a way that theirs have never been negotiable, citizens who considered the scope of gay rights on the same ballot and in the same manner that they considered the scope of the rights of farm animals, citizens who chose, in the end, to expand the rights of farm animals—passing an initiative to mandate larger cage sizes for egg-laying hens and other livestock by a statewide margin of more than 26 percentage points—even as they opted to diminish the rights of gays by a statewide margin of 4 points.

 

 

What saved my sanity most those first few post-election days was seeing the outpouring of emotion among my community—all that sadness and anger and passion and exhilaration that spontaneously hit the streets and came marching right past my office building the day after the vote, shutting down Wilshire Boulevard for hours; if the folks below look a little exhausted, it’s because this protest started at 2 o’clock that afternoon in front of the Los Angeles Mormon Temple, then morphed into a peaceful march around the city that lasted well past sunset.

 

 

Two and a half weeks later, I’m still waking to thoughts of Prop. 8 every goddamn morning, but while many of the same feelings of hurt and anger and loss are stirred, the emotions already feel partially processed, and it’s such a relief not to have to start from scratch each day.

 

My therapist and I have agreed that I’m going through a fairly typical mourning process, as though I’ve suffered a death of someone dear, and though I’m able to seek respite from my grief in sleep, or in brief moments of distraction, my consciousness is otherwise haunted by the constancy of this loss that seems to consume all the oxygen in the room. The good news, we’ve agreed, is that the mourning process eventually resolves and life returns to normal, and I see that happening for me—in fits and starts and by small degrees, with steps backward in between.

 

The evening before my birthday I sat in a perfectly heated Jacuzzi under billowing sheer canopies and a starlit desert night at our magical, intimate inn—and despite the beauty and comfort and peace I found myself surrounded by, my core was again weighted down by the constant sadness of these past two weeks.

 

“We got married!” le domestique said, trying to cheer me. “No one can take that away from us.”

 

“We haven’t even received our license in the mail yet; it could get annulled before we have it in hand,” I countered glumly.

 

“We got married, and nothing changes that,” she said firmly.

 

“Even if our marriage stands, so long as Prop. 8 is valid, don’t you think ours will always be a marriage with an asterisk?” I asked. “Like we’ll always have to explain it somehow: ‘Yeah, we got married during that five-month window in 2008.’ Don’t you think people will think of these as fake marriages, like the San Francisco couples in 2004?”

 

“No, we got married legally, and there isn’t anyone alive right now who won’t remember this time,” le domestique said.

 

The next day we went to Palm Springs City Hall to participate in the nationwide coordinated city hall demonstrations. (Sure, I went to a protest on my birthday, but after the demonstration we would return to the spa resort for scheduled massages—perhaps marking us as softies among the civilly disobedient.)

 

The mayor spoke, along with a number of city council members, ministers, organizers, and activists, including Harvey Milk campaign worker and AIDS Memorial Quilt founder Cleve Jones, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and thanking for his inspiration. Ahead of the curve as usual, Jones proposes that we focus our energies on the federal government, not individual states, to overturn all 30 of the existing constitutional marriage bans legislatively, and that we don’t stop there but insist that the incoming administration of Pres. Barack Obama together with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid act with appropriate speed to address LGBT inequities in military service, adoption, immigration, employment discrimination laws, hate-crime protections,  and access to social services. Visit Seven Weeks to Equality and read what he has to say—and sign the petition. I promise it’s worth the click.

 

 

Attending the demonstration lifted my spirits. (It was our second, after one the week prior in Anaheim, in another conservative hotbed, Orange County, my old stomping grounds. Though my battle cry was “Let’s storm Sleeping Beauty’s castle!” sadly, we got nowhere near Disneyland.) Later that night, instead of speaking only of innocuous things at the inn’s circular bar amid all the straight couples at happy hour, we chatted gamely with the innkeepers about the demonstration, Prop. 8, and the fate of our marriages. A couple who was celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary—and who the night before had asked a fellow straight couple of eight years for tips on staying together—overheard us talking to the innkeepers and remarked, “Wow, 14 years! Do you two have any tips for us?” It was a good moment.

 

The next morning we were sad to leave our little gay desert hideaway in the middle of “red” California, but we had jobs to get back to—not to mention those birthday presents.

 

On arriving home, le domestique retrieved the mail and sang out, “Hey, look what we got!” And there it was, an envelope from the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office of birth, death, and marriage records. Having neither celebrated a birth nor suffered a death—despite my grieving—this seemed indicative of a rare and precious thing. The envelope was unexpectedly hand-addressed, like a highly personal gesture of goodwill directly from the registrar-recorder. And inside was our certificate of marriage—with no obvious asterisk denoting the state of limbo in which we’ve felt so cruelly suspended—engraved with the Great Seal of the State of California.

 

 

I needed that reminder that, essentially, the state still had our back, because I’ve lately come to realize that in part what I’m mourning is the loss of California. I grew up here. This is my state, one that I’ve always felt proud to live in—perhaps insufferably so in the eyes of some of my friends. And while I was stressed and anxious about Prop. 8 having made it to the ballot, and while I fully realized that I should brace for the worst, in my heart I thought, Not here. Not in my fucking state.

 

Ours was the first state to pass a marriage-equality bill legislatively, in 2005, and the legislature passed yet another bill in 2007, after the first one was vetoed by our movie star governor, who reasoned, against the din of Republican angst over “activist judges,” that our rights were a matter best left to the courts. When our rights did come before the state supreme court, the justices made marriage equality the law of the land, which boded well for gays in the rest of the country—but also made our state’s constitution a national battleground—since it was the California supreme court that trailblazed the eventual overthrow of anti-miscegenation laws nationwide with its Perez v. Sharp decision in 1948, a full 19 years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which found that the right to marry is a basic civil right and that the infringement of that right violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sixty years later, the California court referred to the Perez case in its same-sex marriage ruling repeatedly and compellingly, only to see its ruling overturned five months later by “the will of the people.” 

 

 

On November 19, California’s supreme court justices announced that they had decided 6–1 to hear an appeal on the constitutionality of Proposition 8. We’re not disputing the result of the vote or trying to subvert the democratic process, as our opponents would have their unthinking followers believe; we’re contesting the validity of the proposition itself, asserting that it never should have made it to the ballot in the first place without prior approval of the legislature—a case we tried to get heard prior to the election. It is frightfully easy to mount a citizen-driven ballot initiative in California: It took just 1.1 million petition signatures to get it on the ballot—in a state with over 25 million registered voters—and it required a simple majority of 50% + 1 to pass. Good enough when one is deciding whether to increase the size of cages for egg-laying hens. Not so humane when asking an electorate to weigh in on the rights of a historically unpopular minority. Had the citizen-driven initiative process existed at the time of the Perez ruling, I’m quite certain that an anti–interracial marriage amendment would have been placed on the very next ballot and that it would have passed resoundingly, because in 1948, “the people” weren’t any more ready for a Mexican-American woman to marry an African-American man than they are ready in 2008 for me to marry the woman I love. 

 

Every U.S. citizen should be concerned about what the church lobby has been able to accomplish with voter-driven initiatives. Gays may bear the brunt of attacks from those who wish to legislate morality, but propositions aimed at curbing gay rights in Florida and Arkansas this election cycle also affected straights. Domestic-partnership benefits for couples of all sexual orientations were wiped out in Florida, forcing many senior citizens to choose between continuance of the pension and Social Security benefits they earned during their first marriage and basic relationship recognition, including hospital-visitation rights, with the partner they’ve found a new life with. And all unmarried couples, gay and straight, were barred from adopting or fostering children in Arkansas, which is pretty tough luck for the approximately 1,000 children currently languishing in orphanages and group homes in the state. Do you suppose the folks who voted to keep all those kids safe from sinfully cohabitating couples will now step up and take on an extra charge or two to make up the difference? 

 

 

It’s funny, in the days immediately following the election, I was worried about legal challenges by our side. I felt that the Yes on 8 crowd had gotten exactly what they wanted: a mandate from “the people” proving that they still weren’t ready to accept us as fully equal citizens; they could now point to Prop. 8, just as they’ve long pointed to Prop. 22, to say that “the people” want to enshrine heterosexual hegemony in California law. We could bring lawsuits, I thought, but we’ve already lost in the court of popular opinion, so could we ever really win our rights back in the near term?

 

My thinking has evolved since then, as I’ve reminded myself, as I’ve so often reminded those who tirelessly beat the “activist judges” drum, that it is among the court’s most sacred duties to protect persecuted minorities from the tyranny of the majority. I also reminded myself that 5,796,637 Californians—nearly 48% of the electorate—did vote against Prop. 8. Exit polls calculate that self-identifying lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters make up just 6% of the California electorate; that accounts for 727,162 of the no votes, assuming that all LGB voters affirmed their own right to marry. That leaves 5,069,475 self-identified heterosexual voters who joined our tiny minority and voted to protect our rights. Compare that to 2000, when only 2,909,370 voters—38.4%—said no to Prop. 22’s call for heterosexual dominion. Subtracting the 6% of the total number of Californians who voted on Prop. 22 whom we can assume were LGB—451,682—all from the con side, leaves us with 2,457,688 straight allies in 2000. It’s nice enough to think that we’ve moved the needle in our favor by nearly 20 percentage points, from a 23-point loss on Prop. 22 to a 4-point heartbreaker on Prop. 8, in eight years, but it’s astounding to confront the sheer number that represents: In 2000, 2.5 million straight Californians stood up for our equality; in 2008, 5 million did.     

 

And I have a message to those 52.2% of California voters who, when it came time to cast their vote, were too blinded by lies or homophobia or plain narrow-minded disgust to envision equality for their gay neighbor or coworker or cousin—because if you think you don’t know anyone gay at this point in your life, you’re just being willfully ignorant: You’ve stopped the marriages, for now. You’ve put us on notice that, the way you see it, our relationships aren’t like yours. But you’re on the wrong side of history, and one day not very long from now you’ll either lie about how you voted November 4, or you’ll scramble to justify your positions, digging yourself deeper and deeper into your unknowing, incurious, paranoid world as you trot out all the discredited arguments about the myriad ways you felt threatened by our simple plea to be treated with dignity and respect.

 

Or maybe you’ll just blame your vote on your preacher, because it’ll be easier to admit to blind allegiance than bald bigotry.

 

In the meantime, le domestique my wife and I are one of the 18,000 couples who got married between June 17 and November 4, and you may threaten my tenuous grip on first-class citizenship and seek to demean me in myriad ways. But the wind is at my back, and from what I’ve seen in these past couple of weeks, Prop. 8’s passage has done more to galvanize the forward momentum of gay rights than any event in my lifetime.

 

 

 

We’ll get same-sex marriage back in California, all right, but we might just get it back as a result of federal legislation overturning all 30 of these embarrassing, un-American, criminally offensive constitutional amendments. 

 

The final lines of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America seem particularly apt here: 

 

“The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.”

 

Sign hand-painted by the talented Treecup, who also officiated our wedding, because she’s full-service like that.

I’ll bet you thought we’d forget, caught up as we are in our own California drama. It’s true that we do tend to get a little insular way out west, but you can’t blame us, really, given the constant predictions—and fervent wishes—that “the big one” will finally hit and we’ll just break off and float out to sea, an island at last. (For the record, geologists say that the way the tectonic plates are arranged, an earthquake with the power to move our land mass would more likely shift us farther north than detach us from these United States, so the rest of the country is kind of stuck with us—and us with it.)

 

Even on this, your first day of legal same-sex marriages, you seem to be in an excellent position to maintain your equality, since Connecticut is free of the often-whimsical constitutional initiative process that allows tyrannous majorities to reverse court protections for less-than-popular minorities. And since the free-thinking citizens of your state have just voted down their once-every-20-year opportunity to mount a costly constitutional convention—so prayerfully endorsed by the God-loving, homo-hating Family Institute of Connecticut—you’ll have plenty of time now to show the good people in your state that, just like those of your Massachusetts neighbors, your marriages will do nothing to threaten theirs. The failure of your constitutional convention’s passage being our nation’s sole ballot question that could be considered a gay-rights victory this election cycle—however indirect, and however much we can thank the role of fiscal concerns, over nebulous ideals of equality, for their influence over practical Nutmeggers—we owe a debt of gratitude to Connecticut voters for that tiny ray of light that pierced the California-Arizona-Florida-Arkansas sweep of homophobic darkness.

 

 

And I just checked an online poll in the Hartford Courant that has y’all ahead in the public-approval sweepstakes, with 68% of respondents saying they support the right of same-sex couples to marry (with 22% saying that they do not, thanksverymuch, and 10% saying that they support civil unions only). True, this is based on only about 9,000 responses so far, and truer, this is a question that shouldn’t even have to be asked in 2008—as natural as homosexuality feels to many readers of this blog, this would be, for us, akin to a newspaper querying readers on whether blue-eyed people should be allowed to marry brown-eyed people—but still, it’s a promising start to a hopeful time in your state.

 

Alas, we’ve been too busy protesting Prop. 8’s passage to shop for a gift, but what I would personally wish for you is this: I hope that the joy you take in your weddings is as breathtaking and liberating as the joy I took in mine. I hope you get that newlywed feeling—even those of you who have been together for decades. I hope you feel, as I did, like first-class citizens at last, at least in your own state, and that you walk a little taller with your husbands and wives as a result.

 

I know that you won’t take your marriages for granted. I have yet to meet a same-sex couple who has treated their right to marry with anything less than stunned reverence. We have wished and hoped and fought for this for far too long to see it as anything less than what it is: equal recognition, at last, of our right to love.

 

Mazel tov!

The following is a letter I wrote to my family, sent today, six days before a ballot initiative comes before California voters that has been described by the pro–marriage equality camp as “Gettysburg,” and by the anti–marriage equality folks as “Armageddon.” And the Hyperbole Award goes to…  

 

Dear Friends—

 

Well, e-mail may seem like a clumsy way to announce this, but Elizabeth and I got married. We had to act quickly to make sure we were legal ahead of the November 4 election—just in case Proposition 8 passes and closes the door on same-sex marriage—and we did so quietly because, after being together for 14 years, we already felt married.

 

But now I have to admit, actually being legally married does feel different.

 

In the absence of legal recognition, Elizabeth and I defined our relationship for years on our own terms. Then when California introduced a domestic-partnership registry in 1999, we went downtown and signed up for the handful of benefits it offered at the time. Over the years California legislators fought to expand our rights under that registry such that, by 2007, domestic partnership was practically identical to marriage—except in name. And that difference in name was a constant reminder that in the eyes of the state, our relationship fell under a category of recognition that held us separate from our relatives and so many of our friends.

 

Now that artificial separation is erased, and this joy I feel being married represents something far more profound than a shift in nomenclature: It’s the realization of true equality, and it’s been a long time coming!

 

I hope that you don’t mind my using the occasion of my marriage announcement to politick just a little bit, because these feelings could be very short-lived if Proposition 8 wins. Honestly, there’s never been an initiative on the California ballot more threatening to my ongoing rights and happiness. As a family member, you’ve always treated me as a first-class citizen, and I have every reason to think that you’re in favor of the state treating me likewise. Still, given that so many voters have reservations about same-sex marriage based on what the initiative’s supporters have been saying, I can’t let this election pass without addressing the topic directly with those who care most about me.

 

A few truths:

 

First, neither the California Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage nor Prop. 8 will have any effect on what is taught in schools. The state superintendent of public schools has himself appeared in television spots to assure voters that curriculum will not be affected in any way, and the California Teachers Association explains in a press release: “Proposition 8 will not affect teaching in our schools. That’s a lie crafted to scare people into voting for Proposition 8 and stripping Californians of rights they already have. Not one word in Prop. 8 mentions education, and no child can be forced, against the will of their parents, to be taught anything about health and family issues at school. California law prohibits it.”

 

Second, the marriage ruling has nothing to do with adoption laws. In California, same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children, and Prop. 8’s passage would have no effect on the state adoption code. The defeat of Prop. 8, however, would have a profound positive effect on the children of same-sex parents. Granting gay and lesbian couples the privileges and benefits of civil marriage, far from posing harm to families, affords the children of same-sex couples the same advantages and stable family structures that children of opposite-sex couples already enjoy. Approximately 60,000 children are currently being raised by same-sex parents in the state of California; it’s frankly impossible to reconcile sincere concern for the welfare of children and families with a concurrent rejection of this population’s needs for equivalent benefits and security.

 

Third, the Supreme Court ruling was not the work of “four activist judges.” Three of the four judges who voted to affirm same-sex marriage were appointed by Republican governors, and they weren’t creating “special rights” for gays and lesbians—they were recognizing the equal rights and protections already present in the California state constitution for all citizens. Prop. 8’s supporters say that such things should be decided by the people, not the courts, and in a perfect world, I would agree. Unfortunately, gays and lesbians are a tiny minority—about 6%, by latest estimates—and a historically unpopular one at that. The most sacred trust of the court is to protect the interests of minorities from an unsympathetic or unknowing majority, and this court took that tenet to heart. Sadly, Prop. 8 needs only a simple majority of 50% + 1 to reverse the court’s ruling and its protections for my community.

 

Fourth, marriage equality poses no threat to religious freedom in California. No church or minister of any sort can be compelled to marry anyone, gay or straight.

 

Lastly, a domestic partnership is not the same thing as a marriage. If it were, it wouldn’t need a different name.

 

If Prop. 8 passes, legal consensus says that my marriage to Elizabeth will likely stand, along with the 11,000 other same-sex marriages that have taken place since June 17 in what has been an incredible summer of love for same-sex couples, but our feeling of first-class citizenship would be diminished. Relegating gays and lesbians to a second class is what this constitutional amendment seeks to do, singling out a minority population and stripping them of civil rights that all other citizens enjoy.

 

Before 1998, when Alaska passed the nation’s first state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by majority ballot vote, no constitution in the United States had ever been amended to rescind rights from a law-abiding segment of the population. It should have been impossible to do such a thing in America, but since then, 25 other states have passed similar constitutional amendments—largely through campaigns employing scare tactics that targeted gays and lesbians as a threat to American families and values—and this year, amendments are on ballots in Florida, Arizona, and California. I hope you’ll join me on Election Day in telling the rest of the nation that those kinds of scare tactics just won’t work here, and that that kind of discrimination is impossible in California.

 

Thank you for your love and support.

 

And please, if you feel that I deserve the same rights that you do, forward this e-mail to your friends—or, blog visitors, send a link! I feel strongly that people of all political and religious persuasions believe foremost in honesty, and however emotionally close to this issue I am, I think all will find that I’ve presented the facts plainly and truthfully.  

 

In a joint press conference held Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., leaders of the Brigadoon Republicans, a gay conservative political action group, and the International Brotherhood of Unicorns announced that they are joining forces in the interest of greater visibility and increased political leverage.

“This is a great moment for both of our causes,” announced a man in a coat and tie who preferred that his name be kept off the record because he’s not out to his family. “We have so much in common with unicorns everywhere, constantly having our veracity questioned, our sincerity doubted, our lives ridiculed. And we love their logo!”

“We’re really looking forward to this new partnership,” affirmed IBU executive director Bedazzle at the press conference. “But not in a gay way. We’re not gay.”

Buttercup, president of the unicorn-agnosticism organization Stop Horning Around, which staged a protest near the press conference, charges that IBU isn’t a political action organization at all but rather a “group of single-minded extremists working to enforce their own belief system in the name of naked self-interest.”

“That’s so offensive to us,” said Bedazzle. “We stand for so much more than proselytizing people to believe as we do. We happen to advocate for small government and lower taxes. Also, can security please get this child off of me!”

Brigadoon Republicans members wore unicorn masks to show solidarity with IBU members, whose platform they say they fully embrace. “We’re really on point with IBU and are looking forward to joining them in their lobbying efforts,” said a spokesman. “We’re hoping to bring a male, Christian, post-adolescent voice to the age-old struggle for unicorn recognition.”

Asked whether he thought lesbian members of his organization might help bridge the gender gap in unicorn acceptance, the Brigadoon Republicans spokesman replied, “We don’t believe in lesbians.”

As I write this, I’m not in Hawaii or even in a Starbucks but in our home office, a room that shouts every bit of our house’s 1954 vintage with its dark-paneled walls and diamond-paned windows; we’ve paid homage to its build era with the odd Esther Williams movie lobby card and a framed oversized pullout RCA Victor magazine ad announcing the company’s latest line of 17 television sets, several of which are lovingly caressed by ladies in ball gowns. The view through those diamond-paned windows diverges sharply from 1954, when it was reportedly among the first few houses in our neighborhood, an area of the San Fernando Valley then dominated by apricot orchards. It now overlooks a well-traveled thoroughfare bisecting our thoroughly residential neighborhood, and on weekends I can often expect to watch a recent immigrant, perhaps undocumented, fixing his truck. I’m not crazy about car repairs taking place in my front yard, but I know whose side I’m on amid all the current anti-immigrant Republican hysteria, if only to differentiate myself from these folks:

Honk for spelling proficiency!

Let’s play an analogy game!

Recent immigrants are to many U.S. citizens…

as Eleutherodactylus coqui tree frogs are to many _____________.

If you answered “Hawaiians,” put a gold star on your forehead and proceed directly to the lightning round! And if you want to incur the wrath of same, stage a demonstration for “nonnative” species’ rights anywhere islanders gather.

Our first night on the Big Island we kept looking up into the trees trying to identify the bird emitting this relatively high-pitched but sweet co-qui call. The sound was everywhere, but there were curiously few birds in sight. When we tabled the issue the following morning at breakfast, our B&B hosts told us that the owners of the call were not birds at all but rather tree frogs:

The nonnative species has become a scourge across the island due to that tireless co-qui, used by boy frogs much as a male human would use Barry White records: to both repel other males and attract females. And like Barry, who “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” the little boy frogs court and impregnate the hyper-fertile ladies all the livelong year. (The males average a tiny 34 millimeters, while females reach an average of 41 millimeters, with the pronounced size difference attributed to the burden of all that reproductive energy expended by males.) So successful are the boy frogs at creating more frogs that their species, introduced accidentally to several Hawaiian islands in the mid 1990s via plant matter, has reached densities in some rain forests of approximately 8,000 specimens per acre. That’s about the same density the little devils have achieved in their native Puerto Rico, the difference being that in Puerto Rico they’re reportedly revered as a beloved native species and a symbol of territorial culture, much as Mexicans, all the rage reportedly in Mexico, are seen as encroachers in Los Angeles, especially when they’re not cleaning your toilets.

Mind you, some of the folks who disparagingly pronounced the coqui a nuisance nonnative species themselves arrived in Hawaii later than the frogs did—much as most “native” Angelenos’ families lazily trickled into California quite some time after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the United States “bought” the Southwest from Mexico for $15 million and a psych! fingers-crossed promise to honor Mexican citizens’ preexisting property rights in the territories. Truly, the guy fixing his car in my yard may have a greater claim on my yard than I do—unless I play my Native American card.

If we could all just agree that the concepts of nativeness and citizenship are wack, we’d probably get along a lot better. But U.S. citizens are an I-me-mine lot, even if their families first immigrated to the United States in the 20th century, glossing entirely the part where their own tired, poor, huddled masses were disparaged as wretched refuse by preexisting 19th-century immigrants, who were in turn looked down on by 18th-century immigrants, who seemed like upstarts to Mayflower importees, of whom my own longest-standing North American forebears, the Peigan Blackfeet tribe, were understandably leery.

My Native American bloodline has since been diluted considerably by breeding with Swedes and Germans, but it’s that eighth-part Blackfoot blood that most captures my imagination, both because of the Ninawaki (“manly hearted woman”) tradition—aberrational tribal members identified by early European settlers as women who, contrary to the submissive Blackfeet feminine “ideal,” dressed and acted like their male counterparts, held tribal ranks, owned horses, told bawdy jokes, and sometimes engaged in warrior roles—and because, I suppose, if anti-immigrant assholes want to distinguish native versus nonnative species on a scale of centuries, I’ll gamely play that Native American card and ask them how many millennia their people have been here and suggest that maybe they should vacate my continent. Also, if the Blackfeet Nation ever exercises its sovereign right to establish large-scale gambling on its Montana reservation, I want a piece of my casino.

The Hawaiian Islands having been formed by volcanic activity, there aren’t really any native Hawaiian species, but by casual observation, the imposed cutoff for native versus nonnative species seems to be around 1950. If you landed or were brought to one or more of the islands before then, congratulations, you’re a Hawaiian species. If not, you’re a nuisance, especially if you make a lot of reproductive noise or mess with the ecosystem of a preexisting species. Take the nene—about which le domestique can tell you much more—a Hawaiian goose that serves as the official state bird (it is found in the wild exclusively on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island). The nene (pronounced nay-nay) is a threatened species whose numbers declined to near extinction around 1952 thanks to hunters and other mean predators and maybe not the best survival instincts on the nenes’ own part. Through human interventions like captive breeding programs they have bounced back from a paltry 30 birds to between 500 and 3,000 today, but there’s a new recent immigrant in town to fuck with the nenes: the Kalij pheasant, a Himalayan breed disparagingly referred to as “those damn chickens” by many residents.

The Kalij pheasant arrived in 1962, a dozen years too late to be considered native, and thrived like a mofo such that by 1977 it was declared a legal game bird. In other words, “We’re lousy with these guys, so let’s shoot ’em”—an attitude not unlike that of self-appointed border vigilantes, who seemingly never got over their crushing disappointment at being rejected from any real job that would allow them to discharge a firearm in the line of duty. Thanks be to heaven that God recognized the need for the Second Amendment when he wrote our glorious Constitution; otherwise we might question the deep and patriotic need for random people to stockpile weapons at a ratio of 200 million firearms to 300 million Americans, and if we didn’t have all those guns, how would we ever feel secure?

One reason the Kalij pheasant is so successful on Hawaii is that it breeds quite competently in the wild [see also: coqui tree frogs]. Adding to its advantages, the Kalij is an omnivore [see also: humans], so while the nene is all finicky with its diet of leaves and berries, the Kalij krew is sucking down entire plants, from roots to buds, robbing the nenes of current and future crops in a single sitting.

I feel for the poor nenes (to say nothing of honest-to-god, born-here white guys), but should coqui tree frogs, those damn chickens, or even brown people really be faulted for thriving in a new environment? Adaptation is a handy skill that’s otherwise lauded by humans. As an invasive species to Hawaii myself, one of my first acts on arrival was to purchase a basic Hawaiian grammar book, both because I’m a big freakball and because I didn’t want to mangle the names of streets and people and seem too much like a tourist, though I’m guessing that any cred I attained in my prodigious ability to pronounce Queen Lili’uokalani’s name was blown as a result of my visit to the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory:

Learning about the 12-letter alphabet, including all five vowels plus seven consonants, explained the paucity of hard sounds among all those mellifluous mingling vowels, and picking up some basic rules—like every syllable and every word must end in a vowel sound, no two consonants can occur without a vowel separating them, and the accent almost always falls on the penultimate syllable—helped me adapt to my new environment. Not that Hawaii has much of an adapt-or-die vibe, but failure to adapt can be so ugly. Consider the Bradys.

I wish I could tell you that I didn’t think even once about the three-episode Hawaiian vacation arc of The Brady Bunch while visiting the islands, but that would be a lie. I was reminded of it on our very first day, as we hiked the very first trail at Volcanoes National Park. The Bradys didn’t even go to the Big Island as far as I’m aware, but they trotted gamely alongside as we walked past the steam vents of Kilauea, as I undoubtedly drove le domestique to murderous thoughts by painstakingly describing every bit of trouble various family members encountered as a result of Bobby’s having picked up that infernal tiki idol.

That isn’t to say that my Brady memories weren’t corrupted. For instance, I remembered that Don Ho had made a guest appearance, but I misremembered that it had in fact been he who told Bobby the idol would bring an invasive species like himself nothing but heartache; now that I’ve refreshed my memory at the information gettin’ place called the Internet, I’m reminded that he was warned off the idol by those same random guys who told Greg about the big surfing contest that he should enter—because Greg had clearly and obviously become a championship surfer on the flight over.

Le domestique had to be reminded of these basic plot elements because she [claims she] has maybe never even seen the Bradys’ Hawaii triptych! She is, however, aware that the Bradys had run into similarly stressful situations on their Grand Canyon trip, which led us to speculate on a hike through a stunningly beautiful rain forest that the Bradys simply should not have traveled, because they never encountered such strife when they stuck to their own turf, which happens to be the very San Fernando Valley that we call home, which volleys up another issue: As SFV dwellers accustomed to our soft city life on a piece of land which, however licked lengthwise by the Pacific, is contiguously linked to a whole continent’s worth of infrastructure, are we not just as ill-equipped to meet Pele on her own terms? Le domestique picked up a tiki idol in the Honolulu airport; had she slipped it into her theoretical purse instead of setting it back down—after noting that it was made in China—would we have ended up like the Brady boys, hapless hostages of a late-career Vincent Price in his creepy cave lair?

Which brings us to the Thurston Lava Tube, the product of an approximately 500-year-old lava flow that could easily have served as the set for Price’s cool tiki cave hideout. It seems that as a lava flow cools, the outside can form a solid upper crust even as lava continues to flow through its insulated center, forming a tunnel. It’s kind of like a Twinkie, another potentially 500-year-old product, with its creamy goodness excised. Unlike the Thurston Lava Tube, no Twinkie has yet been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—but fear not, the little sponge cake can’t be denied its due forever.

VNP has been kind enough to illuminate a section of the TLT that is fairly uniform in width and height such that the average invasive species can amble through it without a flashlight and get the subterranean vibe without need of much courage. But there is kindness also in letting nature stand for itself, and because Hawaii is cool like that, VNP has left a much longer section of the tunnel—a portion less regular in width, height, and depth—dark and craggy and separated from tourists only by a gate and sign warning of its undeveloped nature and the absolute necessity of self-provided light sources beyond that point. Again, I have to hand it to the country of Hawaii for warning tourists of potential pitfalls and then leaving it to us to decide whether we’d like to face the very slight odds that the awesomeness that lies just around the bend could claim a life, perhaps my own.

Happily, le domestique had packed a headlamp, so we surfaced to the rainforest exterior and made our way back to our rental car, then returned to descend its murky maw. As she who is inordinately fond of dark, drippy, and slightly dangerous places, I pronounced the undeveloped part of the TLT an early trip nominee for Coolest Place Ever!

Sharing a single headlamp posed its challenges, but we held hands. Tightly. Tighter still when I noted the similarity in sights and sounds to the very creepy horror flick The Descent, wherein a swell group of nonnative species of the gal variety go spelunking only to encounter subterranean cannibalistic humanoids way scarier than any late-career Vincent Price could ever be. They sound like giggling cockroaches and look like this:

Let’s play an analogy game!

The humanoids in The Descent are to the Sleestaks of Land of the Lost…

as the Thurston Lava Tube is to a ___________.

The dark side of TLT is the kind of place that makes a person feel brave and scared witless all at once—and maybe a little happier for the experience once it’s over, at which time I wanted to do it again. Not unlike riding a roller coaster backward, a terrifying proposition Magic Mountain (now Six Flags) used to occasionally offer up back in the day on its monster wooden coaster Colossus. I was never the bravest kid on the block, but the first rule of hanging out with boys is, Do as they do, and don’t cry about it. So I rode the damn roller coaster backward, never happier than when it finally pulled back into the station. Coming home from Hawaii hasn’t yielded that same sense of bewildered relief, but I know that if I overstayed my welcome there, the stigma of my invasive species status would eventually get me down. I had to return to my “native” soil, because unlike the coqui tree frog, I’m neither willing nor able to replicate myself 10,000-fold to claim my piece of the rain forest, especially when just a one-eighth share is enough to claim sovereign casino gambling rights. I’m waiting, my Blackfeet people.

Speaking of roller coasters, I apologize for any jarring segues, tangents, or abandoned roads you may have noted in the preceding text. My brain is currently laboring under the auspices of Her Royal Highness Mania, which bestows on my thought processes all the fluid melody of free jazz—and makes me think everything I’ve written is fucking brilliant! She’s a fun friend, until she’s not, at which time I may sheepishly delete this post and salt the cyberspace it once occupied.

As I write this, le domestique and I are Hawaii-bound for a twin 40^th-birthday celebration, mine having passed with much blog fanfare in November and hers yet forthcoming in March. She observed just moments ago that this is our first ever flight from Los Angeles without the psych! westbound takeoff–U-turn combo. Departing LAX, planes always take off over the Pacific, after which eastbound flights turn around and head on their merry overland way. This time we brashly continued our westward trajectory, prompting me to observe that this is also our first flight entirely over water and therefore entirely without emergency landing opportunities, which was kind of a weird place for me to go, because I’ve never worried about flying. I blame it on Lost, which films in the country of Hawaii. (Le domestique is trying to fool me into believing that Hawaii is actually part of the United States; she’s funny like that.)

 

While waiting at the airport for a red eye—the espresso/coffee beverage, not the icky itinerary—I saw a flight attendant lose her grip on her cappuccino only to catch it between her stomach and the wall of the coffee counter without spilling a drop. “Nice save!” I said, to which she merrily replied “Thanks!”

 

“That seems like a good omen for your flight today,” I added—unwisely, it turned out. She looked at me like I had just licked the foam from her drink, and it was only then that I realized that’s kind of an asshole thing to say to a flight attendant, reminding her that on the slim chance that her flight goes very, very badly, she could soon die screaming. And while unforeseen dangers lurk in every life and career, no one has ever suggested as I’ve left for work that my day might yield life-threatening complications—beyond perhaps a confluence of articles so incompetently written that I pulpify my brain with repeated blows to the skull from my desk dictionary, which, while only slightly less likely than a plane crash, is more self-determinable.

 

The idea of horrible things that can happen on planes seeped into my brain when we arrived at the airport, simply because LAX was the least busy I’ve seen it since pre-9/11 days. We walked right up to the self-serve kiosk and checked ourselves in, then le domestique noticed that the plane was only about half-full, so we delightedly switched our seats to an empty middle row of three, leaving a vacancy between us so that we can stretch out a bit and, as the need arises, flail our arms about wildly without striking one another. Our luck continued as we delivered our checked baggage directly to a waiting TSA guy and waltzed through security. For several years after 9/11 I was pulled aside at airport security for an in-depth search of my bags and person EVERY TIME I FLEW, lending little credence to officers’ claims that I had been randomly selected. Perhaps I share my name with a person of interest to the United States government—like maybe that bog turtle expert is a fugitive shoe bomber—or it could just be that TSA training highlights the probability of gender-vague troublemakers. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad to have escaped the long arm of the TSA law, because I really dislike having stern people paw around in my undiepants and such.

 

As a copy editor by trade, I would ordinarily spell out the full name of any organization or government bureau on first reference, with subsequent references given in acronym form, but I’ve forgotten for the moment what TSA stands for, and at 30,000 feet I’m temporarily denied help from the Internet. I’ve heard that some foreign air carriers already provide free in-flight Wi-Fi as a tonic to bored travelers, and while I wish my own country’s airlines would embrace the concept, I understand that those same foreign carriers are allowing in-flight mobile phone use as well, and if it’s a package deal, I’m against it. I guard my sanity too jealously to be forced to listen to Mr. No Inside Voice narrate his journey to his Bluetooth or, worse, drone endlessly to a business associate about how their Cincinnati office is totally on board with the idea to move forward on the plan to introduce their strategic objectives at the next planning meeting of the oversight committee for Strategic Idea Summit 2008: How to Introduce Your Plans for Maximum Forward Movement With Minimum Oversight.

 

I became absolutely convinced that we had passed through a time-warp portal and entered the Golden Age of Air Travel when a flight attendant handed me a hot breakfast of eggs scrambled with sour cream and chives, potatoes, ham, fruit, and a muffin. Other than your complimentary beverages, not a single four-hour flight I’ve taken in the last decade has resulted in anything but some weird processed “havarti” cheese ’n’ crackers, a cookie, and, when lucky, a smile, so I can only surmise that this five-hour-and-nine-minute estimated flight time is critical to the awarding of victuals.

 

Le domestique just observed that no amount of mahalos on a form obfuscates the fact that the country of Hawaii makes its visitors fill out a survey disclosing just what it is exactly that we’re up to in their environs and also whether we’ve brought along any live seafood or virus cultures. And our 50-something mainlander flight attendant did not engage in the spirit of aloha when I asked her whether, as domestic partners, we could submit a single “family” declaration form. “Excuse me?” she said.

 

“We’re domestic partners,” I repeated, indicating le domestique. “Can we fill out a single form?”

 

“If you’re a family, you only have to fill out one form,” she said, halfway gone before she finished speaking. Her tone excluded the sunny interpretation that she was surprised I would even have to ask such a question since, as we all know, love makes a family.

 

At any rate, I let le domestique’s form speak for the both of us. But if I had filled out my own form, I would have categorically denied any intended mischief pertaining to crustacean or virus smuggling, and I would have disclosed to Hawaiian officials that I have come to their country for the lava…

 

 …and the coffee!

 

“Wouldn’t it be neat if you could go coffee-tasting like you can go wine-tasting!” I enthused to le domestique a week or so ago, after I realized that the Big Island, on which we’ll be spending the lion’s share of our trip, is where the Kona coffee lives! Hey, wouldn’t it be even neater if there were a way you could find out whether such a thing is possible in just 0.31 seconds, which is how long, sans typing, a Google search for “kona coffee tasting” took to return 1,740 results! Six hundred coffee farms have convened along one 25-mile stretch of scenic country roads for my tasting convenience. Whee!

 

We had actually booked on the Big Island for that other alluring hot liquid. Living as we do in Southern California, we’ve got all the white sandy beaches anyone could ever want or need, but there’s simply nowhere we can go when we want to watch liquid fire devour everything in its path. To me, lava seemed worth the five-hour plane trip almost by itself. I have always been a fan of its lamps. And look-see here how close the country of Hawaii lets tourists get to its fiery blobness:

 

It’s heartening to know that my intimacy with lava* will be limited only by my own personal stupidity level, and frankly, I think our country could take a lesson from the Hawaiians. Word to the United States, if you don’t allow someone to get eaten by a bear every now and again, all the pot banging in the world will simply fall on deaf ears.

 

An online friend of mine who lives on Oahu says one can spend her whole week’s vacation at Volcanoes National Park and still not see everything worth seeing there. I would contend that one can spend those same seven days plantation-hopping in Kona and still not taste all the coffee worth tasting. Now, le domestique and I have wine-tasted our way up and down the Californy coast, and even still, what I don’t know about wine could fill a book—while other tasters use their little golf pencils to scribble notes like “ashy” and “aggressive tannins,” I keep mental notes of “like” and “did not like”—but about this coffee beverage I am much more discerning. My therapist encourages me to curb caffeine intake—and she has a point; with the neurotransmitters in my gearbox already capable of making my brain rev like a stock car on race day, taking on excess sugar or caffeine is just tempting fate—so when I told her of my planned coffee tour she wondered aloud whether, like wineries, the Kona tasting rooms might better be equipped with spitting tureens. 

 

When wine-tasting one is bound to encounter a tour group or three wherein a dozen or so people are carted from winery to winery by limo or van such that they can eschew the spitting and get completely blotto with impunity. Coffee-tasting obviously harbors dangers of a different sort, so tour maps carry a travelers’ advisory suggesting that it is perhaps wise to participate not only in the tasting opportunities but in any tours offered of the plantation, its harvesting and roasting facilities, and any historical exhibits, thus putting a little distance between one’s cups of caffeine. That all seems reasonable to me; half a dozen plantations on I may be in a frame of mind to bring in a harvest or two. Concurrently, le domestique may be in a frame of mind to force-feed me the anti-anxiety meds I didn’t need for the plane trip over. 

*It turns out my intimacy with lava is also limited by its current trajectory, which is veering inconveniently away from the national park’s edges and really inconveniently toward a couple of straggler houses† in a subdivision previously decimated by lava flow. The only way for touristas like us to see it would be by helicopter. I suppose I could have found this out via a simple Web search weeks ago, but that would have spoiled the searing disappointment I felt on finding this out instead my first morning here.

 

†As homeowners in California, where earthquake coverage is excluded from standard insurance policies and sold as a separate product, we were naturally curious as to whether those poor stragglers were covered for volcanic ire. We learned from a friendly tour operator whose tour we weren’t on but who nevertheless stopped to show us pictures of his own recent lava encounters—because that’s the way Hawaiians roll—that there are three designated lava zones for insurance purposes: He owns a home in zone 2, where he pays approximately double the rate of someone in zone 3, where the danger is most remote; then there’s lava zone 1, in which the doomed subdivision lies, where insurance cannot be had for love or money.

I am posting this on day three of our trip, because that’s how long it took us to stumble across Wi-Fi on the island. Granted, we weren’t trying all that hard, and it’s gratifying to see that there are fewer Starbucks outside the airport than there are inside the airport (three, just in the terminal we came through); on the other hand, we’re in a Starbucks now and are grateful for the Wi-Fi-portunity, so, Mahalo, Starbucks! We are here following a five-hour coffee-tasting marathon (and even I recognize my limits, so I’m currently sipping a green tea lemonade). The tasting experience? There were no spitting tureens. It was awesome. More later! 

 

Sometimes we need our mates to point out the obvious, to challenge our sense of normalcy. Normalcy in this case being a slight blurriness of the world—about which I had been audibly rueful on more than one occasion—thanks to glasses whose prescription remained predictably static as my eyes merrily continued their maturation process.

Our vision degrades most noticeably during that first decade after we’ve been prescribed our first corrective lenses, or so I was told by an optometrist during those formative years, when my prescription seemed to turn on the whim of a fruit bat (a species which—non sequitur alert—was recently discovered to have a menstrual cycle similar to that of humans).

Once we get over that 10-year hump—as did I in my 20s—we expect to tuck into several decades of more-or-less stabilized impairment, changing glasses according to whims determined by nothing more than our own idiosyncratic sense of style.

I didn’t know I was about to fight this vision war on two fronts.

“I’m going to write you a prescription for separate single-vision reading and distance lenses or progressives,” said the 15-year-old optometrist who examined me.

“Progressives, like bifocals?”

“Yes, but because you have a reading-intensive job, you’ll want a wider field of vision in your reading glasses, so I recommend you keep them separate,” he said, avoiding the b word. “But like I said, I’ll write the prescription for either or.”

So this is how bifocals happen. No one sits you down in a quiet room to break the news, or presents them as an optional upgrade—“Tell me, Ms. Morrison, have you ever considered progressive lenses?” You just turn 40 and the next thing you know you’re at LensCrafters* weighing the merits of juggling two pairs of glasses versus the do-it-all wonder of bifocals, now euphemistically re-branded “progressives.”

(*Ordinarily I would balk at patronizing big-box vision over my friendly neighborhood optometrist, but I don’t live in a friendly neighborhood, and the last time I went to a local independent optometrist I disliked him and his entire staff more intensely than I would have preferred given how much money I was giving them. And even if le domestique hadn’t been the one to set up my appointment—after I approached her with my old glasses and pitifully asked whether she thought a broken piece might be successfully glued—I might have recalled that LensCrafters has a program wherein they repurpose old prescription glasses through clinics where some needy someone with a level of vision impairment remarkably similar to my own can walk away with my ex-glasses, which I suppose kind of makes us sight sisters, each with one not-so-bad eye and another eye that just doesn’t try very hard at all. Just imagine, someone in some dusty village in Mali could be walking around in my Oakleys, or those Giorgio Armani torties I wore in college, or even those ill-advised John Lennon glasses I bought back in my early 20s—apparently without looking at myself in the mirror first. I hope all the new owners of my old glasses get to look at themselves in the mirror first. Do Malians have a “geek chic” equivalency?)

Other than the bifocal thing, it had been a pretty routine exam—except when the tech insisted that I “guess” after I failed to pick up any more than two dimensions in the last couple of lines on a depth-perception test.

I blinked hard and opened my eyes wider, as if to let in more of the magic required to gauge depth, and scrutinized each line for its 3-D letter again. “Dunno,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.

“Guess,” she repeated gleefully, like she was the keeper of some really awesome gossip she was dying to tell me.

“Can’t I guess ‘none’?” I asked. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I didn’t want to randomize, because it seems to me that eye exams would have a sort of inverted guessing penalty. Like, SAT scoring assesses fractional point deductions for wrong answers, but here, correct guesses could result only in compromised vision assessment.

“Just guess,” she said doggedly.

“OK, I guess ‘none,’ ” I said firmly, because I’m no fun at all.

Later, five minutes into my post-exam shopping, the same woman walked up behind me and asked if I had found anything yet.

“No, I’m still looking.”

“I’ll help you,” she said gamely.

I didn’t want her to help me. At all. I had le domestique on hand for any necessary consultation. Besides which, the saleswoman/tech whose name I’ve forgotten clearly had taste dissimilar to my own. For starters, she wore a pink blouse, and also, she was recognizably female.

“Um, maybe give me some time to get an idea what I want first,” I said.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can make suggestions,” she said, punctuating her eagerness with a little bounce on the last word.

If you get any pushier, I thought, I may make some suggestions of my own.

I glanced around the store to confirm my suspicion that other shoppers were being allowed to go it alone. Maybe pink blouse thought she could mentor me and save me from my own worst instincts. Surely she doesn’t look that way on purpose, pink blouse may have thought, filled with a sense of altruistic purpose. I will help her look like the female of her species.

Employing a language of certainty, I managed to shoo her away, but only for a little bit. I’m a very slow shopper, and anyone who thinks I can make a decision about something I have to wear every day—on my face—in a period briefer than, say, the menstrual phase of a fruit bat (24 hours) doesn’t know me at all. Even if my brain’s processing speed weren’t impaired, my decision-making capacity and I divorced ages ago. (Typical sad story: It wanted a level of trust I just couldn’t give it, so it ended up shacking up with some teenage boy who, it bragged petulantly, never questioned it, ever. Last I heard they were doing 20-to-life in the federal pen.)

Pink blouse was back. “Have you found anything?”

I know when I’m beat. I retrieved all the frames I had liked and put them in the little velvet-lined staging area she was holding. If it’s possible to grant someone else some small happiness at no cost to oneself, one really should.

But there was a cost, because now, based on the frames I had chosen, pink blouse thought she had a bead on my baseline taste and commenced her mentorship by showing me frames that, to her, resembled what I had chosen but had a little more of the something she thought I should want, like maybe rhinestones.

I’m not a fashion-forward girl. In fact, I find some fashion so disagreeable it’s viscerally upsetting. For instance, it makes me angry that the very worst fashion instincts of my mid-’80s high-school era are galumphing attitudinously down the catwalk in 2007:

Ill-fitting high-waisted (called “paper-bag waist” in the industry) jeans? Et tu, Diesel?

Because my fashion sense shoots blanks, I generally jones in one of two frame directions: rimless, or something evolved from your standard-issue GI horn-rims. (I can’t wear contacts, as I found out when I was going through the hiring process for the LAPD—yeah, I know, more about that another time—which requires contacts instead of glasses for officers who need vision correction. I got insane levels of calcium deposits no matter how diligent I was about cleaning my lenses, and my optometrist said that just happened with some people. I imagine that for the right contact-intolerant candidate, the department might have granted special dispensation to wear glasses, but we never got to that bridge—my psych evaluation required disclosure of my mental health treatment history, making whether or not I could wear contacts utterly moot.)

Pink blouse was having none of my standard-issue nonsense, as she tirelessly brought me frames that I pronounced too shiny, too flashy, too glossy, too trendy, too sparkly, too clubby, too colorful, too Dolce&Gabbana, etc. She cajoled me into putting some of them on, for her, but I drew the line when she approached me with frames that had a sort of pink undertone.

“They’re pink,” I said.

“They’re not pink.”

“They’re pink enough,” I repeated, assuming the crossed-arm stance of a child refusing cough syrup.

“Just try them. I want to see them on you,” she said.

I shook my head and turned away from her. We’d crossed some weird line now, like I was shopping for school clothes with my mom circa 1974. Why can’t I pick out my own frames like all the other kids?

Once we had settled on five frames, one of which she had picked out—yeah, I threw her a bone—I sat down at one of the fitting stations and began assessing them in a more concerted way. I eventually narrowed my choices to three, and hers didn’t make the cut. It came down to a rimless frame, a horn-rim-esque frame, and these racy frames in a frost-gray color:

The Ray-Bans were pretty flash for the likes of me, but I really liked them. I especially liked them on the shelf, and I tried like hell to like them on my face. I put them on, I took them off, I put them on, I took them off, I put the horn-rims on and took those off and really quickly replaced them with the Ray-Bans, like if I could do that fast enough, then maybe I could effect a side-by-side comparison with myself. Le domestique weighed in; she liked the horn-rims best. Pink blouse weighed in; she liked the ones she had picked out that I had already eliminated best. Then pink blouse shopped me around to her coworkers, and I put on and took off all the frames for them too, imagining as I did so that to a person they were thinking, Well, sweetie, they’d all look better if you grew some hair.

As you might guess, I rejected the Ray-Bans in the end. I know they weren’t actually all that flashy, but they were just flash enough that when I put them on I couldn’t get past the idea of a 40-year-old who had just been prescribed bifocals making a lame play at fashion relevance. Like maybe I should just go get some paper-bag waist jeans to go with them.

Instead, I embraced my age, though I took the optometrist’s advice to get separate reading and distance glasses—and not just to avoid the idea of bifocals; I understand that I’m still fighting a two-front war—so once I narrowed my frames to two, the only choice that remained was which prescription to put in each. That was pretty easy, since I was really the only one who particularly liked the rimless pair; they would be my reading glasses, leaving the frames with three-way approval (with the caveat that pink blouse still liked the ones she had picked out best and was only on board with this second choice as a conscientious objector) as my all-the-livelong-day glasses. These are they:

But wait, there’s a denouement.

The standard-issue pair was ready the same day, that being the whole LensCrafters about-an-hour shtick, but rimless glasses take longer—about a week. So I reported to the store the following Saturday—wearing my other new glasses, naturally—to pick up the not bifocals. I gave the optician my name and sat at the fitting table. When she presented them to me, I took off my glasses and replaced them with the new pair, causing her to gasp theatrically.

“Oh, my God, those are so much better on you!” she said with a big sunny smile on her face. “They’re like night and day!”

I looked silently back at her, wondering whether she would dig this hole deeper or go ahead and knock off for the day.

“Your old glasses, I don’t know, they just didn’t suit your face, but these were a great choice,” she shoveled.

I waited another beat before I said, “Actually, these are just my reading glasses. The other ones are my primary glasses; I got them here last week.”

A blank expression flickered ever so briefly across her face before she rebounded. “Oh, well, they’re both great,” she said, then bid me, “Put the others back on.”

I did, and she said, “Yeah, you made two really great choices.” Then we proceeded to my fitting, over which there was some disagreement as to whether the glasses were sitting crooked (my assertion) or my face was itself crooked (her assertion). Rather than argue against the latter, I proposed that an adjustment be made regardless, making the glasses either rest even on what I thought was my properly balanced face, or align with rather than against this newly reported asymmetry. She made the adjustment, but she also made it clear that this was one of those customer-is-always-right gestures, which she might rephrase as “The customer is always right inasmuch as I’ll do any stupid thing they ask so long as they understand that they’re actually wrong.”

A few weeks ago le domestique complained on her blog about our Select Comfort bed, and much to our surprise a real-live Select Comfort customer service representative read her post and attempted to address the problem. So it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that LensCrafters representatives are currently standing by and—beyond marveling at my copy editor’s fastidious attention to the styling of their company name: solid, with an internal initial cap—wondering how my already great shopping experience might have been even better! So here are some takeaway lessons:

1. Don’t make clients “guess” when they and their eyes reach an impasse during the exam.
2. Don’t stalk clients as they shop.
3. Trust that the client probably thinks about her personal aesthetic more than you think she does, and that she means with all her heart to look like that.
4. Never insist that a client try on frames she doesn’t like, not even for you.
5. Don’t grimace when a client tries on a frame she has picked out—unless the client grimaces first.
6. If the client grimaces when she tries on a frame you picked out, don’t try to coax her out of her unfortunate fashion retardation. No means no.
7. If the client makes a blanket assertion that she does not like, say, pink or rhinestones, assume that she won’t like anything you bring her in the pink or bejeweled family. If the client says she doesn’t want anything “too Dolce&Gabbana,” assume that this includes, among others, frames actually branded Dolce&Gabbana.
8. If you think the client is being a poopyhead about all your great suggestions, see rule 2.
9. Never insult a client’s old glasses—even if you think the new ones are ten thousand times better—not just because they might not be such old glasses but because regardless of how old they are, she picked them out at some point, liked them at some point, and has likely been wearing them—in public!—for a considerable length of time. She doesn’t so much want to hear how lame they were.
10. Even if the customer isn’t always right, pretend that she is right about the symmetry of her features. Arguing with her about whether her face is crooked benefits no one.
11. I cannot emphasize this enough: Disclose the price of the lenses the first time a client asks, and when she says she doesn’t need scratch-resistance, glare protection, or any other treatment jacking up the price of her lenses, don’t insist that the optometrist prescribed the upgrades. Doctors do not prescribe scratch-resistance.

Other than that, everything was great.

——————————————————–

Update: As alluded to in rule 11, pink blouse tried to up-sell me numerous unnecessary lens treatments without disclosure. Her initial quote included a charge of $300 for the lenses alone, with no description as to what that included. When I said that price was absurd, she sort of shrugged her shoulders like a bored teenager. It wasn’t until I insisted on being shown a schedule of charges that I discovered her quote had included not only an upgraded lens material that I hadn’t asked for but numerous special treatments, none of which would have been covered by my insurance. I then specifically said I wanted absolutely basic plastic lenses—the kind my insurance would pay for—at which time pink blouse presented me with a LensCrafters price schedule listing basic plastic lenses at $120.

On February 7 I received a document from my insurance provider explaining what was covered and what wasn’t and noticed a line item for “scratch protection coating” (a treatment I had specifically declined), charged at $20, of which I paid $15. The lenses themselves—the absolutely basic plastic kind I asked for, the ones that are covered by my insurance provider—were listed at $100. Nice, LensCrafters. Enjoy that extra $15 you weaseled out of me, because your ethically challenged business practices guaranteed I’ll never come back.

Now, what was the name of that review site I ran across the other day? Oh, right, PissedConsumer.com. Must go there now.

A musical suite was once composed for me. Only a handful of people are aware of its existence, and I’ve never played it for anyone I know. It strikes me as egotistical to mention it, let alone sit someone down and bid them, “Listen to my symphonic tribute!” Besides, it’s too painfully personal and evocative of the only relationship in my life in which a heart other than my own was broken—casting me firmly in that other, less sympathetic role.

I met Jay McHale in 1987, when I was 20 and working in my first career as a buyer for a retail music store. He was a sales representative for an independent distributor in Minneapolis.

Of the many sales reps I spoke with in those days, Jay was easily the worst at his job, with the actual selling of product taking a backseat to the joy he took in describing it. Where salespeople from other distributors might tag a performer as “Scottish folk rock,” Jay might liken the artist to a cross between Silly Wizard and the Triffids, with a short stack of pancakes on the side and a long weekend ahead—and if you happened to be unfamiliar with any of the bands he made reference to, no matter, he would in turn gleefully relate their capsule history, career highlights, and must-have albums—and because his enthusiasm was 100% infectious and 0% pretentious, one was never made to feel ignorant for having to ask.

Our “sales” calls grew increasingly longer and more frequent, and inevitably we began to swap personal information. It turned out he was 29, older than me by a decade—at a time in life when a 10-year age difference seemed significant. He was born in Racine, Wis., and had a degree in religion from the College of St. Thomas. He told me he had seriously considered the priesthood but never felt genuinely called to service. He was bonkers for the Twins, the Brewers, and baseball in general, immediately adopting my hometown Angels as yet another hard-luck team to root for. He was also a musician and composer who reflexively downplayed his talents.

We swapped phone numbers and took our epic conversations home from work.

You know where this is going, especially if you’ve ever heard me go on wistfully about the Man I Almost Married. Not having come out to myself until the ripe old age of 25, I was still years from that bit of self-awareness. Still, I had only dated a few guys in high school—and only one for a long enough stretch that my lack of physical affection toward him was notable. (And that particular high school boyfriend did note it—the word frigid may have been used.) I certainly had my reasons for not putting out, but like anyone, I longed for connection. Though I wouldn’t articulate it to myself at the time, in retrospect I can see why a long-distance relationship might have been particularly appealing to a lesbian in gestation.

But this isn’t really about me.

I first visited Minneapolis in early 1988. Jay would later write that I had “brought spring to Prospect Park,” and it was true that by the time I left, the bare trees and chill that greeted my arrival had given way to sunshine and new growth, all within the short span of a week and a half. It was a remarkable display to a Southern Californian unaccustomed to such showy seasonal shifts, but Jay was far more a force of nature than I. He took me to about a dozen of his favorite places my very first day there, including multiple record stores and music shops whose staffers seemed uniformly to adore him. I would see several of them later that night when Jay’s then-current band, a power-pop quintet deceptively named Twelve Angry Men, played First Avenue’s 7th Street Entry.

A perfect gentleman, he had arranged for me to stay while in town with his friends Michele and Gail, who lived just down the street from him. And when Jay and I took a side trip to Winnipeg, he asked for two beds at the hotel desk without consulting me. Maybe he was acting on some kind of psychic energy; maybe he was himself reluctant to get physical, whether because of his Catholic faith or his worries that my parents might think ill of a guy 10 years my senior bedding me. (On my departure my mother did make a crack about the possibility that I was flying 2,000 miles to meet up with an ax murderer, but she admirably withheld further judgment.)

While we were both certainly aware of the sexual tension, it never dominated our time together. As he confided in me at one point, a couple of his friends had told him that if after a year of long-distance flirtation we didn’t want to hop into bed together on first sight, something was deeply wrong; he told me he shrugged his shoulders in response and said that what we had was even better—and he meant it.

We sublimated sexual energy mostly through sharing music—and really, if you’re not having sex, aren’t there far worse ways to fill that space? When I heard a new album I loved, what excited me even more than the personal discovery was the idea of playing it for him. We sent packages back and forth, usually with recently discovered favorite CDs accompanied by a long letter and a few items we had come across since last we spoke or wrote that just reminded us of each other. I lived for UPS deliveries. Once I got a package full of fall leaves. And once I received two cassettes containing seven movements collectively called The Suite for TK. (While I had never much liked diminutives of my name, I liked that Jay called me “TK,” incorporating my middle initial, which stands simply for “Kay.”)

With Jay I could talk about someday starting a record label or founding a music festival or living in a lighthouse, and he would respond as if my dreams were perfectly rational and attainable goals. (In fact, he would later start his own record label, Catacombs, and even help to found a music festival, so attainable is in the mind of the dreamer.) Our visits to each other invariably included side trips wherein we would drive off all half-cocked with no reservations and no clear destination, which led to a number of strange nights in the kinds of motels one ends up in after driving till 2 a.m. before deciding to look for vacancies. We found that span on the clock between a prudent bedtime and single digits to be the most fertile for appreciating a new album—perhaps one to which we had delayed our first listen in anticipation of just such a moment. On one of those night drives together we stumbled on the Northern Lights and it seemed as though Jay had arranged the spectacular display—like the sky, in a fit of modesty, had pulled a diaphanous shower curtain about itself—expressly for the enhancement of our listening party. It’s hard to talk about a guy like that without sounding wistfully idealistic or just sappy, but anyone who met Jay would concur that there was magic in him.

I say “was” because I learned this week of his death, which actually occurred five years ago. It was a heart attack, his second apparently. He was 44.

How did I not know about his death before Thursday last? We lost touch, I offer lamely. Even from the most important people in our lives, we drift. We don’t mean to, and if we knew that the last time we spoke with them was going to be the last time we’d speak with them, we’d certainly handle things differently. I last spoke with him, by phone, circa 2000. It was uncomfortable on both ends, and that’s all I feel at liberty to say.

Since I found out about his death, however tardily, I’ve been doing the kinds of things people do when a person important to them dies: reading through the many letters he sent, mourning his loss—both to me and to the universe—listening to some of the music he introduced me to, and kind of mentally assembling a virtual mix tape of music released since his death that I know he would have loved.

That’s no small feat, as his interests ranged far and wide. A memorial concert that was held in the spring following his death featured an array of Jay’s compositions in genres including pop, folk, jazz, Scandinavian music, and liturgical songs. He was instrumental in forming three local bands that I know of: the art-punk-jazz band 2i, the big band Steak Face, and the aforementioned power-pop force Twelve Angry Men. He played with countless other groups including the “celtodelic” Irish punk-folk band Boiled in Lead and the Violent Femmes, the latter of whom was appearing at First Avenue the weekend after Jay died and had reportedly asked him—via a phone message he never chanced to hear—to join them on stage.

I think the improbable tale behind the founding of Minneapolis’s Nordic Roots Festival provides a neat illustration of Jay’s catalytic properties: The story goes that in 1996 a Swedish folk label looking for U.S. representation sent a box of CDs to a Minneapolis distributor, where it sat around in a warehouse until a curious Jay McHale discovered the dusty, still-sealed box and took it home for a listen. He went characteristically nutty for what was inside and started playing favorites for his friends, among whom was a founder of the Rykodisc label, who in short order would found NorthSide, the only record label dedicated to Nordic folk in the United States. By 1999 NorthSide had attracted enough fan support to launch a festival dedicated to music from Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Jay would serve until his death as an enthusiastic coordinator of the annual event—which still thrives, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. As he said in a 2001 article about the festival, “Whatever excites me, I put it on tape and pass it around. I love to toot the horn for something that’s underrated. Hedningarna’s [third album], Trä, was my Revolver. Hedningarna was a pivotal musical experience for someone who didn’t think there was anything new. This was what I was looking for.”

This all happened well after our relationship had ended, but as I read about it I thought, Well, of course, if anyone could parlay his enthusiasm for an orphaned box of CDs into a new record label and a festival dedicated to the music therein, that’s Jay.

It turns out I didn’t break his heart after all. I won’t let myself off the hook for hurting him, however unintentionally, but I need only read online remembrances of his life here and here and elsewhere to understand that his heart could never truly be broken. What he thought he saw in me was really just a reflection of his own soul, best summed when he wrote, “I believe you are driven by an inextinguishable love for all the ordinary and extraordinary things that life lets us bump into. To be able to see the sacred in the tiniest of things and to view the really big important stuff with the leavening of humor, optimism, and clear vision.”

Yeah, that’s Jay all right.

Cue outro:

The road’s dark with the stars full on
And they’re above you just the same
Like an answered prayer in the sound-charged air
You will be there as the night will soften
Road ends, and without directions
We will drive it just the same.

—Josiah “Jay” McHale (August 22, 1958–October 16, 2002)

You know that urban legend that says if you’re out for a pleasant night drive and you see a car with its lights off, DON’T FLASH YOUR BRIGHTS AT THE CAR, because, the legend goes, it could be a gang initiation wherein thugs drive around in the noir until they encounter a driver courteous enough to signal them, at which time THEY WILL KILL YOU DEAD!

The frequency with which that cautionary tale is circulated and cited as fact speaks volumes about the American psyche: Think twice about drawing attention to yourself among strangers, however friendly your intentions, because you may be singling yourself out for attack!

Well, I flashed my brights at the Episcopal Church via a December 19 Advocate.com commentary praising the gay- and lesbian-inclusive platform its leaders and members have embraced over the last several decades, a movement that reached a boiling point with the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay and actively partnered priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. The church has since been wracked by conflict both internal—several dozen conservative U.S. congregations and one entire diocese have left the national body in protest—and external, with the worldwide body to which the church belongs, the Anglican Communion, threatening in fits and starts to cut the whole darn U.S. province adrift. Much more detail can be read in the essay itself, should you be so inclined.

Mine was meant as a friendly flick of the brights, a little shout-out to the church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has held the progressive line despite enormous pressure to back down, and its beleaguered members, the majority of whom favor an inclusive church even if such a platform visits uncertainty and strife on their denomination. In recognizing and praising the national church’s vanguard position, of course, I noted its fallout, including the recent secession of that aforementioned diocese (in my own home state of California, no less), an unprecedented event within the church that underlines the recalcitrant position of Anglican traditionalists, many of whom habitually drive about with darkened headlights and a frank willingness to lash out at those who threaten to illuminate the world beyond their frosted windshield.

Given the Advocate.com audience, I anticipated a largely LGBT readership, thus vastly underestimating the Internet’s powers of dissemination. Remarking on the commentary’s Web traffic the day after it was posted, our digital media director said that the piece was logging the kind of numbers we typically see only on breaking news of, say, homophobic Republican senators caught in flagrante delicto with gents in public toilets. And you can’t just make that shit up; we have to wait—sometimes months between occurrences—for such gifts from the news gods.

Happily, most of my traffic was of a friendly persuasion. Plenty of nice Episcopalians, both gay and straight, clicked through from links on progressive blogs; several even took time to drop me an e-mail noting how gratifying it was to see a story acknowledging a straight Christian voice in matters of LGBT social justice. But links to my commentary inevitably also landed in a couple of inhospitable Web neighborhoods, the kind of places where we dykes and faggots had best drive through quickly if at all, lest the thuggish local holy men shoot out our headlights and smite us under cloak of darkness.

When my commentary came to the attention of members at a certain conservative Anglican blog, I was subject to much disliking. (I’m given to understand, courtesy of the aforementioned conservative Anglicans, that gay and lesbian folks overuse the word hate because, in truth, we relish victimhood. So chastised, I won’t be throwing that word around here, nope, not even when speaking of the only emotion I can think of that could possibly inspire random heterosexuals to spend such significant amounts of their limited time on this earth contemplating and communicating the kind of vitriolic hate not-liking speech that springs from the mouths of homo haters dislikers—other than that stultifying fear among certain types of their own inclination toward the love that dare not speak its name.)

What surprised me about the response among conservatives was the personal chord struck by their hatred disliking. Of course I knew when I published the piece that at least a few traditionalists would see it, and of course I knew they would like it not one bit; the commentary lionizes those very stances of the Episcopal Church that make its detractors go absolutely nuclear. But I think I did a fairish job of presenting the facts as well as my opinions without resorting to personal attacks, so I suppose I expected an in-kind response. If any. I mean, really, who the hell am I that those concerned with the serious work of calibrating the nation’s moral compass should waste energy shouting me down?

It took just four comments at the aforementioned blog for its readers to regress from parsing my text to parsing my appearance. From there, nearly half of the 31 comments to the link were concerned with, first, whether I was a boy or a girl, and second—after they deftly worked out that my first name, Teresa, and my self-identification as a lesbian indicated girlness—how much I didn’t look like a girl. Friends, I have met the enemy, and it attends junior high school.

The emphasis on my appearance seemed especially odd since I didn’t say one word about what John-David Schofield, the bishop who led the secession movement in central California, looks like:

But why go to town on a man’s appearance when there’s so much to say about his actions? Namely, that he has betrayed the will of his own denomination by refusing ordination to women, railing against gay and lesbian inclusion in the church, and operating an “ex-gay” ministry through his cathedral—naturally, he is himself a closeted homo (another factoid I didn’t mention in the commentary), having gone on record as an “ex-gay” years ago in an interview his followers now deny exists. But really, isn’t it more of a surprise these days when a virulently antigay leader isn’t a great big closet case?

Regardless of whether parishioners in crystal cathedrals ought to throw stones, they did so with delight—during a week in which I hope they also found time to celebrate the birth of their lord and savior. At one point the discussion addressed the likelihood that my appearance and orientation indicated a history of sexual abuse, an incredibly popular trope among the religious right—Google “childhood sexual abuse” and “lesbian” and your top hits will be “studies” conducted by fundamentalist organizations showing that a lesbian orientation is practically a gift with purchase of molestation. Was the poster asking the others to lay off discussing my appearance in deference to that probability, or was he gamely making sport of sexual abuse survivors? I’m honestly not sure, but I’m certain that the only time it’s appropriate for a stranger to bring up the possibility of my or anyone else’s sexual abuse history is never.

I responded by flicking my brights again, helpfully providing the Anglican blog community with a link to my earlier essay about gender, seeing as how they were so very interested in sussing out mine. Then a funny thing happened: The comments sort of petered out. Oh, sure, there was the peanut gallery member who countered with a link to an article about female aggression and lack of maternal behavior among spotted hyenas, appearing to suggest that, like the hyenas, women like me might be successfully treated with anti-androgen drugs to curb our masculine aggression (omigod, if they only knew how not aggressive I am) and cultivate feminine behaviors. A second poster brought up another popular conservative trope: that they don’t so much hate dislike homos, they just don’t understand why we always have to run around flaunting our relationships.

I know, right? It’s nearly impossible to go to mainstream movies or read popular books without being subjected to same-sex love story after same-sex love story. We lucky homosexuals grow up in environments where our sexuality is constantly reinforced as the norm.

To add homosexual insult to heterosexual injury, a person can’t go anywhere without seeing us engaged in acts of explicit physical affection!

If only we homos could just step back for a moment, we might recognize that ours isn’t the only valid kind of relationship.

Hey, your god just called. He hates dislikes disingenuousness.

Despite the aforementioned couple of stragglers, about 15 minutes after I announced my presence at the hateful dislikeful blog, the theretofore spirited commentary on my androgen-laden hyena-like ways ceased. Were the sanctimonious creeps turned off by the idea that their words didn’t appear to hurt me? Were they legitimately embarrassed to discover that I was privy to their ugliness? Or were they simply not interested in having an actual conversation with participation not strictly limited to those who completely agree with them?

Among many brilliant things le domestique has been heard to say, one of my favorites is, “The Internet slices people too thin.” Whatever personal inclination we want to feed—liberal or conservative, gay or straight, secular or religious, cat or dog, Mac or PC—there are scores of blogs and discussion boards online where we can get precisely the information and resonance we think we need. Such a sense of belonging is truly wonderful. But as the ease and abundance of access draws communities of common interest closer together, it pushes camps who disagree ever further apart, because increasingly, if we don’t want to, we don’t ever have to talk to anyone we don’t already completely agree with. It doesn’t bode well for the promotion of an open society. (For an accounting of 21st-century regressions of liberties and attitudes in the United States, read Naomi Wolf’s essay “Ten Steps to Close Down an Open Society” at the Huffington Post. It’s a chilling reminder of how far we’ve strayed from what most people think of as incontrovertible U.S. ideals.)

My flirtation with the Episcopal Church had consequences both expected and unexpected. While I have made much of the negative reactions by traditionalists, the positive response was tenfold the negative. Never has my writing been so profoundly rewarded as by the gratification and fellowship I’ve felt with Episcopalian readers these last couple of weeks. Confronting that same firewall of depersonalization their conservative counterparts sought so lamely to penetrate, many progressive Christians simply flicked their brights back at me to acknowledge that my gesture was well-received. Those who pulled over to invite me to their churches did so not to pressure or proselytize but to let me know that their doors would always be open.

To clarify, I have not had a religious epiphany. Nor can you expect me anytime soon to gift you with a New Testament—or even an Amy Grant album. This secular humanist doesn’t expect to undergo a faith makeover in the foreseeable future. But I have experienced a shift in my attitude toward Christianity. After a decade of static from the religious right, I had developed a bone-splintering knee-jerk reaction to the ecclesiastically inclined. I didn’t cultivate it, but I didn’t deny it oxygen either—like most people I seek online resources and news stories that reinforce my worldview, and, well, being an atheist sometimes makes me feel like a freak, like I’m missing something that everyone else sees, and feeling like a freak can make a person a little defensive, especially when religious organizations are actively distributing free bumper stickers condemning my right to equality.

Like the conservative Anglicans I encountered, I too had become a bit blinkered to the idea that a monolithic concept—in my case Christianity, in theirs homosexuality—is best viewed in full light of the individuals who give it life. I’ve since been reminded that for every Christian who dims his headlights to get a bead on his enemy, there are many more who understand that true humanitarianism is contingent on communication with people outside one’s immediate faith and social circles. In this age of increasing polarity I’m grateful that such people exist at all, and even more grateful that so many of them flicked their brights back at me to signal that my message was well met—and perhaps also to let me know that those shadowy thugs in the next car, for all the dire warnings we’ve heard of their quick and powerful wrath, are only threatening if we give credence to their legends and thus snuff our own lights.

“Into each life some rain must fall,” sings Ella Fitzgerald. “But someday the sun will shine.” Readers, that sunny day came for me when le domestique and I laid eyes on this:

Our joy was irrepressible, for we knew we had found the perfect kickoff offering for our White Elephant Consensual Re-gift Spectacular 2007. And now we would like to pass our sunshine on to you!

For your consideration, we have a dynamic mixed-media (foam and plastic) artwork. And it is a clock also! Which tells real time! And you may think the colorful googly-eyed sea creatures are purely decorative, but they sway to and fro in a happy ticktock motion for your entertainment, making telling time funner than ever! See, look, here I’m making it move with my finger, but you can make it move all by itself with a single AA battery.

May we share our good fortune with you? Just be the first person to say, “Heck yes, I want it!” in comments to this here post, privately send me your address (will not be sold to predatory lenders), and I’ll ship it to you gratis, postage paid and everything!

What do you gotta do in exchange? Just offer a similarly desirable white elephant re-gift on your own blog, paying the weirdness—or just unwantedness—forward. Christmas can go on forever—and without the really lame mall music!

C’mon, you know you want it, and if you’re fortunate enough to be a parental unit, you can blame your desire for it on your child. No one on the Interweb will be the wiser when you instead set it lovingly on your own bedside table.

Do not hesitate! Tell me you want it now!

Please.