An All Too Obvious Metaphor

This morning I sat down to re-assemble a jigsaw puzzle...of me and my husband Mark putting in the final piece of another puzzle. (Mark's wee nephew Milo was looking on from the side.)

In June 2007, my mother-in-law, Helen, had brought together her three sons with two spouses, one long-term boyfriend, and three grandsons to a big house on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, to commemorate her sixtieth birthday.

I found a puzzle in the house and obsessively spent a couple of hours a day, over 3 or 4 days, putting it together. The others would walk through and comment as they passed by or wandered onto the porch, while I stayed dedicated to my self-imposed task. (I like to finish something once I start.) Mark has helped from time-to-time and Milo had often come in and stared on rapt. Someone took a photo to memorialize the finishing it. So we all got into the picture.

That Christmas Helen had the photo made into a puzzle, which has sat on our dining table in the box, unopened ever since.

Today I scattered the little pieces on the table and started to put it together. "Oh," I thought, "I'll work on this for an hour or so and leave it off." Of course, I'm not that person so I spent the next several hours putting the pieces together.

Separating the edge pieces from the others. I started with the most recognizable parts - which were Mark and my smiling faces. Milo came together in fits and spurts. Other parts of the picture began to emerge unexpectedly - like the puzzle within the puzzle. Edges of some pieces would give clues to their destination because they contained the hard outline of some object - a chair, a table.

After putting together the middle and center, the outer edges challenged me. The detail in the photo was fuzzy and the colors and shapes simliar. Then my friend John called to catch up and make plans to meet later today. As I listened to him I still scanned the pieces looking for something to come into recognition. As occasional but close friends do, he asked about the state of my marriage. "It's good. Solid. Sometimes stale. I tend to focus on what needs to be fixed - in any circumstance - so I have to remind myself that a stable, happy relationship is a good one; especially a marriage that is almost five years old."

Our cat - Mills - walked across the table, threatening to disturb the unassigned pieces. He was quite likely to nudge bits onto the floor. I picked him up and tossed him away. He returned to the table top so picked him up and set him further away. All the while John listened to me curse the cat - "goddammit Mills!" - as the cat squawked back at me. I said goodbye to John and Mills left me in peace.

I returned to the gaps in the picture and the scattered, unintelligible pieces. I stared at some and then the fuzzy details started to make sense; not entirely but enough to try them out with the grain in the wall that would line up a row or gradation in color and light that made a piece of the puzzle more appropriate to one place than another.

Flashes of success were followed periods of staring and seeing nothing. Sometimes I would take a bit and try it here-and-there and - not often - it would snap into place. I finished the last area - of blurry grasses and leaves in a sprint. With fewer pieces to consider each one found its logical spot quickly and in a neat succession.

The picture of two smiling men - married - and a little boy looking on had been reconstituted.

A Cry for Help?

My husband sent me an email last Thursday with a subject line matching the title of my most recent posting.

ok so that made me sad again. We can go somewhere for the summer, just not while I have this job.

It just how passive aggressive a blog can be even if that isn't your intention. I hadn't blamed him or even thought much about him when I typed out my bit of melancholy.

It's nice to know he reads what I've written.

Where Did Everybody Go?

I boarded the L train yesterday morning with no trouble; at 8 o'clock in the morning. Without having to push myself into the mob inside the subway car or wait for the next (or the next-after-next) to arrive, I walked right on to it.

The gym has been quiet too. Relatively. Yesterday there were only two people per lane in the basement pool at Equinox on Greenwich. Ah the luxury of it!

But I'm suspicious. The men at Equinox are getting fatter and hairier. Or the handsome, fit men have migrated to the next happening gym. It happens. Gay men who work out slavishly move from gym to gym every year or so like birds in search of the ideal nest. David Barton has a live DJ during prime time, so they may have set down their wieghts and relocated there...for now.

I've never been clued into the next thing. I always seem to pick up on a trend a little late, just as the bleeding edge has already found the next "it." Or maybe the A gays have gone off to Fire Island for the summer, having spent the Fall and Winter sculpting the perfect pecs for shirtless dancing in the Pines.

All of this relative emptiness has me feeling left out. I have no plans for the summer. No vacation to look forward to; no summer share.

I should appreciate the extra room in the pool, on the sidewalks, and the occasional seat on the subway.

In a city that suddenly feels deserted when it is still quite crowded, not participating in the summer rituals of sun and fun can leave you wandering around like a wallflower waiting for a dance.

A Younger Man in Dublin

Last week I spent a few days in Dublin; mostly for work with a Saturday for myself tacked on to the end of the trip.

The last time I'd been in Ireland was the end of September 1997. I tried to resurrect those memories so I could compare the then to the now. My remembrances were more like flipping through a set of random snapshots. "T'anks a million," I heard that 100 times when the Irish would get off the bus. I took a lot of buses back then. The All-Ireland Gallic football tournament had filled the city to overflowing, so I had to stay at a bed & breakfast in Donnybrook, which is a suburb just outside of Dublin proper, but it made me think of the failed Broadway musical based on the "The Quiet Man." (I didn't know any of the songs or even the plot though a vague vision of the LP cover would flash into my mind each time I boarded that bus to Donnybrook.)

I met an Irishman in a gay bar and asked him to dinner. I had wanted a proper Irish dinner.

"You'll have to bear with me, but if I wanted to eat Irish food I could just as well go home to my mom and dad." I asked him what he'd like. "Mexican," he replied.

I remember pints of Guinness that had to sit and settle before getting topped off. It looked like black sludge but tasted piquant and creamy. That hadn't changed in thirteen years.

Mostly I had this sense of my 27 year old self compared to the man who will turn 40 this Fall. Dublin had been my third trip out of the United States in 1997, after Warsaw and London. I had a job that had sent me to those cities for a month or more at a time. Dublin was tacked on to the end of the London trip. Those had also been my first trips abroad in my life. Coming from New York I had felt so cosmopolitan, but my almost 40 self knows that I was really a young man, a boy perhaps, wandering into a world that was much, much broader than I had any sense of.