Ten Minutes' Worth of Memoir Free Writing

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

When did a community you were part of use music to overcome a difficult time?

 It's my first day back at high school, straight from my father's shiva. I'm standing in a so-far empty classroom when a dance is announced over the PA system and they play some of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing". I burst into tears, after not having cried at my dad's (z"l) funeral, because the music sounds so, so good. It's the first music I've heard in seven days. No one knows my father's dead, other than teachers; that's how at arms-length I kept everyone back then, punning compulsively to distract them from my attraction to the girls among them, if possible.

The music -- that particular song -- reminded me of my continuous and mostly unrequited horniness and also made me resolve to go to the dance that weekend. Anything to get out of the house, where I was stuck with my grieving mother, my older sisters having left years prior.

That song reminded me: I'm still alive. I'm still alive and I'm sexual and I'm reachable. That song pulled snatched away my numbness.

That song makes me feel the same way every time I hear it. Only I know, though, till now. Get up, get up!*

*Written during the Reading & Writing Club at my synagogue last Wednesday, and I didn't write about my community because the fastest thing that came to mind when I got the prompt in bold above was about the first music I heard when I returned from my dad's (z"l) shiva. The prompt came from http://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises.

Rest in Peace, Toonces, the One and Only

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

How I Came to Get What's Special About Cats

Toonces, photo-bombing a picture of Phoebe

Growing up, there was Fluffy and Chummer and Jody and Tigger, but they were my friends’ dogs. Amy had a big, long-haired cat, but she didn’t hang out with us like the dog did and had an air of mystery accordingly. At home, we were allowed only turtles, so I didn’t really get what it meant to have a pet.

A relatively short time after Pat and I got together, in the early ‘90s, her sweet bull terrier Meghan Jonquil died of an aneurysm. I’ll never forget how, inadvertently, I offended one of our fellow Or Chadash congregants by announcing both the death of his grandfather (z”l) and Pat’s dog from the bimah (pulpit) that Shabbat.

Suddenly, I’m reckoning with the death of a being who represents the closest I’ll come to directly parenting anyone. At a moment like this, I wish I’d left it at turtles – with them, I was more so their siblings, since my older sisters mothered them.

Toonces’ sister Phoebe is lying on the table next to me as I write this and I’m trying not to feel survivor’s guilt in her behalf. Why did Toonces get cancer, but not Phoebe? Why did Toonces get cancer at all? Why did my father (z”l)? Both of their lives were cut short – his at 56 and hers at nearly 13.

Toonces and Phoebe almost weren’t Toonces and Phoebe. For the first 16 years of our nearly 24-year relationship so far, I denied Pat a pet. I didn’t grow up with a cat or dog at home and so I didn’t get it. No, I said, they’ll just smell up the house and you won’t pay attention to me once we have a pet.

Finally, I relented because I felt guilty. I was working full-time and earning a Master’s part-time and felt bad at leaving Pat alone so often. OK, we can get a cat from P.A.W.S. (the local shelter at the time), I said dolefully. We went down there and agreed on adopting an older cat, since they’re usually less popular and because Pat said that in their wildness, a kitten would drive me crazy.

We looked at cage after cage and I felt terrible at having to choose a cat and then leave the rest behind. We returned a couple of times to a cage with two gray-brown, striped American tabbies. The P.A.W.S. rep came over and said cheerfully, “Would you like two? They’re sisters.”

Oh, God, I’m a sister myself. We can’t separate sisters. The P.A.W.S. person told us that they had turned five in May. Pat & I agreed that each of us got to name one of them. I called one of them Phoebe and Pat called the other Muffin … but not for long.

Our first evening with them, Pat looked at the littler one and said, “You’re no Muffin. You’re a Toonces!” It might have been as Toonces was staring down at her from the ceiling beams of the laundry room. It turns out that Toonces was so scared of her new environment she remained on the ceiling for a week, except to use the litter box.

From then on, she maintained her Toonces-like reputation, routinely springing from a loose tile in our basement’s raised ceiling onto the back of Pat’s  La-Z-Boy rocker, surprising Pat every time. A woman once said to me, “I prefer dogs. Cats won’t obey.” It was then and even prior that I realized I adored cats for the same reason; intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful sort.

Phoebe and Toonces – well, really, just Phoebe, as Toonces never really cottoned to me (nor Phoebe to Pat, interestingly) – have claimed affection from us utterly based on their whims. I have loved the serendipity of it all. For instance, Toonces would join Pat unpredictably while Pat was eating breakfast and would walk into Pat’s newspaper-reading arms, and lean into her chest. She’d come to rest, hanging her front paws over one of Pat’s bent elbows. Pat called it, “Table.” Toonces would jump up on the table and slink toward Pat, and Pat would look at her and ask rhetorically, “Table for Toonces?”

Toonces really didn’t care much for my touch, but her little face was so cute and her mischief mostly funny, and she charmed me. I did not do the same for Toonces apparently; yesterday morning, amidst her lethargy in her illness, I gave Toonces a series of pets and she did as she did so often when I petted her: Immediately following, she bathed the very patches I had touched – the cat equivalent of wiping one’s hands on one’s pants post-handshake, in front of the person whose hand you just shook. Even so, I was amused. “Pat, look at that. She’s ill, but she’s still got enough strength to wash me off of her fur.” Kindly enough, when we petted her for the last time this afternoon, she let me, period.

Earlier today, Pat & I recalled that prior to Toonces’ meal time, she would sit up against a wall with her arms across her belly and would look remarkably like a person as she waited for me to feed her sister and her. And in the mornings, if I didn’t wake up when she was hungry, she’d walk over to my night table and start tossing books off of it. And at dinner time, when Pat called, “Kitties!” Toonces would run three adorable circuits around Pat’s La-Z-Boy before entering the laundry room, where she was fed, nightly.

For cats, I’ve learned, everything they do is socially acceptable as far as they’re concerned, except they’re not – not concerned … except with each other: Little Toonces was an especially good sister. Any time she heard Phoebe cry out, she was by her side nearly instantly, even though typically, her loyalty-reward from Phoebe was being batted on her little head. Oy, Phoebe, who’re you going to bat around now, just Pat & me? We’ll take it.

Buoyant Blues

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Escaping, Through Music, But Not Really 

Starting at 1:40, which is probably where it always began when DJs played it on WBLS-FM, the song almost makes me forget my grief. Almost:



It's a great time when songs like this are playing on the radio -- my dad's employed again and I'm learning Disco and Ballroom dancing from David Jones in my hometown, Stamford, Connecticut, so that I feel like I belong at the 11 Bar Mitzvahs and six Bat Mitzvahs I attend between 1977 and '78.

This song comes a year later, but it's the sort we Hustled to at all of the Bar and Bat Mitzvah receptions, and I miss it today. Who knew then that five years later, my dad (z"l) would be dead of common bile-duct cancer?

This next song...



...also gets good about 30 seconds in and almost makes me pound away the blues of my pastoral session from earlier today. A Rabbinical Intern at our shul, wants to know what God would say to me after I ask, "When can I just fall apart?"

"Never," God says, I tell her. He says, "Keep going. It won't serve you to fall apart."

At ~1:20 in, God might as well say:



Or He could be as Kind as a number of the Psalms and pledge:



The Rabbinical Intern tells me, "Let's look at Psalm Chaf Zayin. Keep reading."

I read aloud, "For my father and my mother [in that order] have left me; but the Lord will take me up."

"Do you believe that you can let God into your life to help you?" The Rabbinical Intern asks me and I'm almost embarrassed at her revival-style inquiry.

"I *can*, yes, but will I?" I say, barely aloud.

Last night on Twitter, a former Modern Orthodox Jewish day schoolmate and I had an exchange of tweets around an article that compared and contrasted coming out as Atheist to coming out as lesbian, gay, bi or trans. He's an Atheist and one of only three friends of mine who identifies as Atheist...that I know of. He's definitely not:



Didn't God give me this great music for dancing, escaping, wanting to live, for hope and joy, even in the midst of my sadness and fury?



Can't I shut my eyes right now, even as I'm typing and be transported through the furniture from *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*? Dancing the whole way! God, for a moment, I've become even younger than Bat Mitzvah age.

Now, back to the present, where I feel very alone. Indeed, Pat is not home right now, but even with Phoebe, the kitty, here in her plush bucket-bed next to me on the floor, I'm just by myself, except for my Disco and Funk friends:



What if I could time-travel and heed the eventual call of this video to go to Barbados for a weekend in 2010, for three days and nights of "Pure Rare Grooves"? There's no such thing as a geographic cure, they say, but it doesn't stop me from wanting to escape my mourning. I am parentless. I am childless. Who will mourn for me? Ok, that was melodramatic.

Ever since I went to a '70's dance party at my friends' Stephanie and Laura, I'm craving dancing in public, and there seem to be fewer opportunities for public dancing than when I was younger. "Don't stop me and I won't stop you," as this song commands:



"Are you angry at God?" asks the Rabbinical Intern.

Later, I think of an answer: Not when I'm dancing, or rollerblading:



Or "Funkin' for Jamaica" and getting to see the beautiful, female singer for the first time by watching the video, which I usually don't like to do; what they produce is always less appealing to me than what I see in my head. Not this time, though. And the mens' spirit is uplifting. They love making the music maybe more than any musicians I've ever seen.



The Psalm book I was reading from today had been a gift to my mom (z"l) from me. I inscribed it 15 years ago, in 5760 of the Hebrew calendar:

5760

Dear Mom,

May these Psalms comfort you whenever and wherever you need comforting.

Love,

Sarah

When the Rabbinical Intern and I were talking earlier, why didn't I notice that my mom (z"l) had underlined part of the last sentence of the very Psalm that the Intern asked me to read aloud, "...be strong, and let thy heart be of good courage...."

Dafke on Yom Kippur

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

The Right Way to Mourn

What's the right way to mourn? Is it OK to be checking out a row of two appealing couples of women sitting behind us during Shacharit services at Yom Kippur? Is it all right to be resenting every older person I see among the congregation for being alive while my mother (z"l) is not?

How about leaving Yom Kippur services right after Yizkor, the service where we honor dead family, and skipping the rest? Can I blame that on my grief? Last year, my mother (z"l) was with us for Yizkor, so there was no question that we'd be leaving right afterwards, since she was older and said she could not sit for that long.

Feeding My Demons vs. Myself

One of our two rabbinical interns, Ruhi Sophia Rubenstein, delivered a drash (sermon) this morning that talked of feeding, rather than trying to starve, our demons. She recounted the story of Plimo and Satan from Ein Yaakov: The Ethical and Inspirational Teachings of the Talmud.

She gave an example of the danger of trying, say, to thwart the urge to gossip. Instead, she suggested, those who love to gossip can look at what it is about themselves that loves information and stories.

I'm not sure I can have an I-Thou relationship with any of my demons, or how I'd prioritize their presence. One of my demons, as I've come to see it, is sugar. I've not eaten any refined sugar, honey, fructose, barley malt, molasses, rice syrup, corn syrup, maple syrup, jaggery, brown sugar or sugar substitutes like saccharin or Splenda... for more than 20 years, ever since I realized that I felt allergic to it and it made me feel super-unhealthy. Same with alcohol, which turns right into sugar. And then 10 years ago, an ENT specialist, Dr. Kenneth Brookler, suggested that in my particular case, I could not tolerate most stuff that turns into sugar, including flour, potatoes, rice, corn, and sweeter nuts and fruits, like pecans, macadamias, figs, dates, pineapple, grapefruit, mango, melon...so I stopped eating those foods, too.

How ironic would it be if dafke (for precise spite) on Yom Kippur, I went ahead and fed my demon itself? How have I not done that on Yom Kippur, since 1990? I've not eaten sugar on Yom Kippur by not fasting. I've eaten three meals a day with nothing in between, just like I do every day because I don't ever want to be so ravenous that I grab whatever's closest, which could be something sugary.

Grief Is a Gift

Ruhi made another suggestion that moved me earlier today, asking that instead of "beating" our hearts with our fist, as the liturgy suggests we do during the "Al Chet", we simply knock on them gently, each knock, hoping that our heart will open a bit more.

This suggestion, to knock on our hearts, struck me additionally as a way to wake up my heart. During my physical recently, I learned that I have Right Bundle Branch Block (RBBB), which means that sometimes, my heart beats a bit too slowly. Today, I felt like each knock was an attempt to pep up my heart to full wakefulness.

If my heart were not just fully open, but also fully awake, I think I would feel -- all the time -- like I did when the miraculous Sally Wilfert sang one of our congregant, William Finn's, "Anytime (I Am There)" from his "Elegies". You can hear it for yourself from her by going to ~5:30 of this beautiful video. My wife Pat & I were fortunate to run into Sally Wilfert as she headed toward a bathroom after her performance and I didn't detain her long -- just long enough to squeeze her hand and say, "Thank you for making it possible for me to cry." She smiled luminously and with kindness.

While Rabbi Kleinbaum encouraged us just prior to Yizkor that numbness is also a feeling, nothing's as cleansing as a good cry when I feel sad (and nothing like a good laugh when I'm happy, and also, sometimes when I'm sad, too). Of course, such strong feelings are enervating, so I'm beat now and most of me just wants to lie down and fall asleep...but I recall Ruhi's encouragement to wake up my heart, so I need the rest of me to stay awake, too.

"Sarah Must Have Smiled"

I've been writing about feeling sad here, yet the sun has come out while I've been blogging. Whenever the weather turned from gloomy to sunny, my mother (z"l) always used to say, "Sarah must have smiled." Maybe I smiled for a moment a bit ago, recalling one of the lyrics from "Anytime (I Am There)", "Anytime you wash your hands/ I'll be around." I'm 49 and to this day, any time my mom (z"l) saw me emerge from a bathroom, reflexively, she asked, "Did you wash your hands?" I guess now, she won't need to, since she is there "anytime [I] wash [my] hands".

This is what grief looks like...

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Putting a Brave Face On It

This is the first day I've put on makeup since my mom (z"l) died on June 4th:

Pat said, "You look like your mother. At first, I thought that was a younger picture of your mother."

It has been 13 weeks since my last haircut. At first, I was honoring Shloshim, but now, I have three reasons for not cutting my hair:

1. When it's longer, it's wavier and my mom's (z"l) hair was wavy; it's a way of hanging onto her.
2. I feel young in my grief, not youthful, but like a teen again, like I was when my dad (z"l) died and my hair was longer then, too.
3. The longer my hair is, the more vulnerable I feel for whatever gender-stereotype reasons and it makes sense to me that my outside should match the way I feel inside these days.

This picture is not flattering, I know, but it's really how things are right now and I felt like documenting this time.

Sixteen Days Later

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Poor Me

Pat & I were going to go to shul, so I could say The Mourner's Kaddish publicly, but the service tonight honors LGBT Pride, so as I posted in a Facebook status update earlier, I opted out, thinking it would feel more festive than I felt. Instead, we finished binge-watching Derek, a superbly poignant series about an autistic man who works in a home for the aged.

Here are the last books my mom ever read or considered reading with her book group:

• The Fallen Angel
• A Lucky Child
• A Walker in the City
• The Canterbury Tales
• Jews Without Money
• I Married a Communist

Here are the books I've taken out of the library since her death:

• The Orphaned Adult
• Matters of Honor
• Rose of No Man's Land
• How Animals Grieve
• The Other Side of Sadness
• Healing Your Grieving Heart for Teens: 100 Practical Ideas - Simple tips for understanding and expressing your grief
• Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve

The two best book recommendations my mom ever made to me were The Crock of Gold and Cutting for Stone. The first novel was about magic and love and the second, about yearning and grief, and living through both.

That's where I am now -- grateful for the magical parts of my life and for all of the love I experience and express, but living through yearning for, and grief around, my mother (z"l).

I wish I could check out of real-life till I finish reading all seven of the books I listed above, if not also the ones from my mother's book group list (though I don't want to re-read *The Canterbury Tales*).

Suddenly, I was jealous of my age when my dad died -- 17 -- as I thought about how many fewer responsibilities I had then, but that's not really true. I had to continue showing up to high school and had to do well enough to get to go to college. I also forgot to consider how love-lorn I was as well; I had a secret girlfriend then, who was already a freshman at a too-far-away college, and I knew my attachment wasn't requited, not really.

So compared to when my dad died in November of '82, I didn't have love or meaningful work then, but I also didn't have to settle my parent's estate, like my sisters and I do now, now that we're the only adults left in the upper-part of the chain. My other responsibilities, to Pat and our kitties Phoebe and Toonces, and to my management and the team I manage at work, and are more welcome than not at this time. I can always renew the library books....

Finding Some Peace After a Rollerblading Jaunt

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

"Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain" -- Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock

I'm not sure which photo moves me more. Last night, I photographed the nearly in-bloom peonies in the rain and this afternoon, they were sunbathing in full bloom. I witnessed their sun bath when I returned from rollerblading. I lay down on the lawn and photographed them.

Music Joint-filled Jaunt

I have a semi-secret place I go to rollerblade, where I don't need to wear a helmet and where I can sing along to my iPod with no fear of cars. I'm not a fancy figure-skating type, but I'm highly-proficient, with 45 years of skating experience. After swimming, ice-skating was the first sport I learned -- both at four years old. Today's jaunt featured 30 minutes worth of the "B"'s of my iPod:

• Baghdad Cafe (Callin' U), A:Xus - At 22, the lyrics, "...a desert road from Vegas to nowhere, someplace better than where you've been" helped me end the first full-fledged relationship I had with another woman, as I figured that a road to nowhere would still be better than where I had been.
• Be Near Me, ABC - In high school, my friend and her family were new immigrants and lived in a condo, rather than a house, but they had MTV and we didn't. Roxy Music and ABC were featured on it at the time.
• Beautiful, Bombay Rockers - I cannot relate to the girl to whom they're referring in this song, as they say she's in 7th Grade and everyone's mean to her because they are jealous of her. In 7th Grade, I was just willing myself to develop and be noticed by anyone for something other than being tall.
• Beautiful, Me'Shell Ndegeocello - Her music is among my favorite for rollerblading; it transports me beyond where the rollerblades can because her voice is lush and she's usually telling a story I relate to, or imagine I could. I can't recall when I first heard Me'Shell Ndegeocello's music -- probably when I lived in Chicago -- but I've loved it ever since.
• Beautiful Girl, Bombay Rockers - When Pat & I lived in Bangalore for six months in 2007, a helpful Planet M employee recommended the Bombay Rockers when I asked him to suggest an Indian pop group whose music was cheerful with a beat.
• Beautiful Stranger, Madonna - This album reminds me of being with a couple of IBM colleagues in Madrid, Kris and Miguel. They took me dancing at a lesbian club and Madonna's latest music played then. This song was older, but it still conjured that time for me as I was rollerblading today. "Hung Up", I think, was one of the current hits then, in 2006.
• Before I Let Go, Maze, featuring Frankie Beverly - The melody was so cheerful, but it belied the singer's reluctance to let go of his beloved, and so when it first came out in '81 and now, I ignored the lyrics and focused on the good mood its melody inspired in me.

As I pulled off my wrist-guards and 'blades, "The Best Is Yet to Come" was playing and I couldn't wait to get home to work on this blog-post. As it has turned out, I could detail only memories triggered by my iPod playlist and then needed to leave the rest of it overnight. It was too challenging to write this next part. But today, a day later, I'm moved to do so:

It's Facebook's Fault

The other night, in my Facebook stream, I saw a picture of my first and former best friend's mom from when she was probably in her early-20s. My former best friend's older brother and only sibling had posted it on Mother's Day as a memorial tribute. She was a beautiful woman whose features were so different from any of the women's in my family; she was blond with a bit of an upturned nose and seemed exotic to me. She died several years ago, but I found out only recently. Even after my friend and I were no longer friends, our mothers remained friends for 35 years, until my former friend's mom moved away. My mother wondered aloud with me recently, "I wonder if she is still alive. I'm afraid she isn't."

"I'll go on Facebook and see if I can find out." And I searched for the brother's name and found him. Yes, their beloved mother had died several years ago. And she was sort of another, early mother to me, too. What was an appropriate amount of grief for someone I had known for only four years, 40 years ago?

A Hot Dog with Every Visit

My former best friend and I met when we were four, in nursery school. I'd get off the bus with her from school nearly daily and then I was there on weekends, too. I took it for granted. It was automatic. My sisters were more than half a decade and nearly a decade older than I, and at my friend's house, the kids -- my former friend and her brother -- were my age or just a few years older. My former friend's brother became as close as I'd ever get to having a brother and their curly, sweet Airedale became a quasi-pet for me. Relatively, their dad wasn't around as often as their mom, and their mom became another mother to me. She fed us, asking what we'd like for lunch and I always asked for a hot dog. At home, my mother made salami and eggs sometimes, but hot dogs were only for dinner and not very commonly.

At school, we learned to ice-skate and my former friend was a better skater than I, learning to skate backwards sooner and she took figure-skating lessons. By contrast, I was steady and confident minus any tricks; that steadiness served me for rollerskating and rollerblading, starting in my early teens. During my jaunt yesterday, I thought of the little rink by our school, where we'd go throughout the winters from ages four to eight. Probably, she kept going there, but I don't know, as our friendship was over by the time her father died, when we were eight.

My former friend's dad was many years older than her mother and still, his death was premature, from a disease. He took us kite-flying once, at the Stamford branch of UCONN. I was impatient and then it was fun when he helped me, so that my kite finally became airborne. Our dads liked each other, too, and at one point, I think they were working on a pie-slicing invention together, but it didn't happen. They hatched a number of ideas that they didn't commercialize. I think they just liked using their imaginations together -- like my former friend and I did, for four years.

My former friend was better at everything than I and I loved going over to her house and doing whatever she initiated. Make Spin Art? Sure. Help put a pair of her flowered, cotton underpants on the dog? Yes. Play with her Barbie camper, and always agree to be Skipper while she was Barbie? Indeed. Sit in their guest cottage at a small table, where she held a glass paperweight and told my fortune? Definitely. Look for arrowheads under an overhanging boulder on their property that my former friend said was an Indian shelter? Yes! Help collect eggs from the chicken-coop? Of course. Hang upside-down off the back of the couch, singing along to the lyrics of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree"? Why not?

Were Differing Degrees of Literacy a Harbinger for the Inevitable End of the Friendship?

My former friend was reading The Wind in the Willows when we were five and I would not learn to read for another year. That same winter, she sent me a postcard from her family's vacation in Barbados. It was in her block-print handwriting and not only couldn't I write yet myself, I had to ask my mother to read it to me.

Maybe my former friend was tired of our differing aptitudes. Maybe she was sick of initiating what we'd do when we played together. Maybe she related to what she read in *The Wind in the Willows*, "Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!" I never did read the book. I simply cheated just now and found a quote and imagined her latching onto that sentiment. I didn't need new horizons. I never needed to be anywhere but shuttled back and forth between my family's house and hers. I could have done that for years longer. I wondered why it ended. She stopped calling and I never asked.

Nine Years Later, a Shivah Call

When my father died of cancer at 56, my friendship with my former best friend had been finished for nearly a decade. I was a senior in high school, 17. My former friend's mother paid a shivah call, since she was friends with my mother, but when I saw her, I felt as though she had come to see me even though she had probably come to comfort my mother as much or more than she had come to be kind to me. Her visit was a relief. She offered to take a walk with me and I don't recall our conversation during the walk. I had written her a note, in case she came, and gave it to her at the end of our walk. In the note, I told my former friend's mom that I was less grief-stricken than I might have been, since I felt like I still had two parents, since she had been so motherly to me in my early years.

No One is Perfect

Nearly 20 years ago, I saw my former friend's mother one more time. My eventual wife Pat & I were visiting my mom -- from St. Charles, Illinois, where we lived at the time. I don't recall the context, but my mom suggested we drop by my former friend's mother's home. My memory is that Pat was with me, but she doesn't recall the visit, so perhaps not. My former friend's mother was as beautiful as she had ever been, and seemed the same, just visibly older, and so did I...except that I had also publicly chosen a woman as my future spouse (whenever it would be legal to marry her), whereas when I was a kid and an adolescent, my former friend's mother did not need to acknowledge a romantic relationship I would have with anyone of my own gender.

Some years later, my mother told me that my former friend's mother told my mom that she couldn't accept my lesbianism. My hot-dog-providing-loving-beautiful-kind-other mother was telling my actual mother that she could not reconcile it. Fortunately, she never told me her feelings. She must have loved me too much to want to hurt me by telling me.

Finding Some Peace, and Again, It Was Facebook's Fault

While I had seen my former friend's mom once as an adult, I never saw my former friend again, after her brother's bar mitzvah, when we were nine or 10. And we were practically strangers by then, or at least that's how it felt. Over the years, I've thought, what would my former friend say if I asked her why she ended our friendship? She got bored? Or worse, what if she didn't even recall why? And why did this rejection still hurt me 40 years later? And what would we have had in common if we had remained friends anyhow? Once we no longer went to the same school, what was left? Is that what occurred to her then -- that we had too little in common to stay friends?

Historically, whenever I've thought of this former friend, I've time-traveled back to being eight and sitting across the aisle and behind her at her father's funeral and feeling sad not only about her dad's death, but also at the death of our friendship. The other night, though, something sort of soothing happened: After seeing the memorial photo on my former friend's brother's Facebook wall, I commented on it, describing how lovely their mother had been to me. Later the same night, my former friend's college-aged daughter clicked, "Like" on my comment.

What the heck, I thought: I'm curious if I'll be able to see any photos of the daughter and maybe of my former friend. Why not click on the daughter's profile? I did so. And I got to see both of my former friend's kids -- a teenage boy and college-aged young woman. And then my former friend! I clicked on photo after photo, finding the facial features I recalled from our childhood and was amazed to see them on this grown woman. Being able to at least see what she looked like as an adult was a bit of comfort.

Americans in Paris

Just as I was beginning to feel stalker-ish, a beautiful photo emerged: My former friend and her daughter were standing on a sidewalk in France apparently and my former friend was holding a poster that urged, in French, equality for her daughter, and the daughter was holding a rainbow flag and French poster that declared, I love my mother who accepts me. I don't know the sexual orientation of my former friend's daughter, except that currently, she does not identify as heterosexual.

Maybe my former friend and I had more in common after all, or maybe she had more in common with my mother, and I with her daughter. It reminded me that all of us are more connected than we realize, even as there are vast differences among people. And I thought of the 1995 Pride Parade in Paris; I was in France on business and Pat had to work, so my mom came with me and during the weekend, we marched with the Beth Haverim Juif Homo (Beth Haverim Jewish congregation's gay) delegation.

There we were, nearly two decades apart: two American mothers and two American daughters from three generations, demonstrating ultimate loyalty to each other on the streets of Paris. And if that's the peace I can take from our having been friends, it's enough. I think I feel closer to my former friend now that I've seen that photo than I did when we were friends. Here are some snapshots of my mom's and my experience at the 1995 Paris Pride Parade:

Life or Death, and Purpose

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Driving Back from NYC with Pat Last Night

"I turn to stone, when you are gone, I turn to stone," the radio sang as Pat and I turned onto the Allwood exit on our way back from a movie and dinner in the city with our friend Gerard.

"That's ELO. Caryn Lesnoy (z"l) loved that group," I said to Pat, "She was my friend who died of ovarian cancer when we were just 17, remember?"

"Ovarian cancer at 17! No one would even think to look for that at such a young age. Appendicitis, maybe, but...how unfair!"

"Yup, and she's buried right next to my dad (z"l). I thought it was awful to lose him when I was 17, but imagine if I'd lost my own life at that age! And how mad I was when one of our classmates came to my dad's funeral and just kept bawling while looking at Caryn's grave. She was stealing the show. Meanwhile, I had turned to stone. There was just shock, no tears."

Riding a Bus in Bangalore with a (Normally) Beijing-based Colleague a Few Weeks Ago

My Chinese colleague and I were discussing our parents' influence over our choice of universities by way of getting acquainted. My colleague said that she had no choice; she had gotten into a premier school and that is where her parents determined she would go through graduate school.

"My dad, who was dying of cancer at the time -- and our immediate family knew it -- wanted me to go to the University of Michigan for undergrad. 'Look, Sarah, they have a great newspaper that you could write for,' he said, holding up a copy of 'The Michigan Daily' and hoping to appeal to the part of me that wrote for my high school newspaper. I thought he was crazy. I was not interested in Michigan at all. I wanted to go to a different school, and to stay on the East Coast. I visited the college I wanted to attend and within two days, hated it; I recognized everyone on campus. It was too small. He was right."

My colleague looked at me and was smiling attentively. I wondered how culturally shocking it was for her to listen to me say that I was ignoring a dying wish of my dad, or any wish of a parent, given her culture's respect for parents in general. I continued:

"I also had a favorite teacher, Mr. McWilliams, who insisted, 'You must go to Michigan. You need to expand your vista.' I knew better, though, I told him, just as I had told my dad. The campus visit to the other school had not yet happened and then I did not let Mr. McWilliams know that I had changed my mind and opted to choose Michigan. Instead, I let it be a surprise; it was announced during the Senior Awards Banquet, along with a list of other honored Seniors. 'Sarah Siegel, University of Michigan.' And my dad was right. I did write a bit for the Arts section of 'The Michigan Daily' and it was the perfect school for me." And then I couldn't speak with her further, as inconvenient tears interrupted me.

Embarrassing! My Chinese colleague and I had just met and I was crying in front of her. She didn't say anything, but her expression changed and the compassion on her face urged me on:

"Both of them -- my dad and Mr. McWilliams -- were right and initially, I didn't want to listen." I held up a string of pearls that were lying on my neck and said, "No one else here will know this, but I wore these pearls today on purpose, so that my parents could be with me during the session I'm leading. On the day I graduated from high school, my father had already been dead for seven months. Before the ceremony, my mother handed me these pearls and a card that she had signed from both of my parents and said, "These pearls are from your father and me."

"Thank you for telling me that," said my colleague, with the reverence used for a secret that was revealed only to her. And then I swallowed and pulled myself together and returned to the present, feeling vulnerable, but grateful to my colleague. The session later that morning was lively and I felt that it was purposeful -- that I had been of service.

Calling Mr. McWilliams, Who Was Still Alive

Upon my return from India, moved by how moved I still was, recalling my father's and Mr. McWilliams' influence on my growth as a learner and person, I decided to be bold and phone Mr. McWilliams, to invite him to meet with me and catch up. We had not spoken since my graduation 30 years ago this year and his final message to me had been in my yearbook: "Just stay young long enough to grow old."

He had come to my father's funeral and shivah and told us that it was his first-ever funeral, let alone first shivah. I think my father-loss struck him as having adult-ized me overnight, and again, I did and did not heed his advice. After all, how could I not grow up instantly, losing my father at such a young age? In parallel, how could I ignore my well-established love of roller-disco, junk-food and the romantic yearning that practically any adolescent feels, including one who is experiencing a particularly complex version, struggling to accept her (secret, she hopes) lesbian sexual orientation?

Three songs from that time -- or their choruses, anyhow -- seemed to reflect perfectly what I was feeling then: "I Don't Need This Pressure On...", "Don't Drink, Don't Smoke. What Do You Do? Subtle Innuendoes Follow...", and "It's Like a Jungle Sometimes. It Makes Me Wonder How I Keep from Going Under...."

My feelings then: I don't need this pressure of having to complete college applications in the waiting room down the hall from my dad's hospital bed, of a dying and then dead father, of juggling a boyfriend and a secret girlfriend, of being the only one of my parents' children left in the house with my widowed, wild-with-grief mother, of having to continue getting good grades and taking AP courses, to ensure my place at a decent school....

My feelings then: If I keep busy, cultivating a prudish image and being a compulsive punster among my peers, I'll never have to be found out as the radical romance experimenter that I am...except, hearing this song, I worry that there's likely some crack in my veneer that I can't see, or that the song will give people ideas about me and dispel some/all? of the mystery.

My feelings then: This song reflects my fury at being trapped as a the too-young daughter of a dead father that I did not have enough time to get to know sufficiently. Life is a jungle that is thwarting me and urging me over the edge in parallel. Either I will either be trapped, or I'll lose my head.

Providing a 30-year Update Without Overwhelming Each Other

When I reached Mr. McWilliams the other day, his voice sounded older and the same, and I considered that I was likely older now than he had been when he was my teacher. Mr. McWilliams agreed to meet and then called back to postpone our meeting due to some doctors' appointments to which he needed to drive a friend.

In the meantime, between the first and second calls, I started trying to imagine what I would discuss with him.

To understand my investment in this conversation, you need to know that Mrs. Honan, Rabbi Kosowsky and Mr. McWilliams -- in that chronological order -- were the three most profound teachers I had from nursery school through my Master's program in Education. Mrs. Honan and Rabbi Kosowsky both were dead at a young age, by the time I was in high school. All three teachers were even better educators than all of my university and grad. school professors, and what they had in common was a belief in me and my creativity, and they encouraged both.

Mr. McWilliams was the person who exposed me to the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Herman Melville, to that of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, among others. This was the person who taught me Creative Writing, and who took our class to Broadway on field trips, including to see "The Fantasticks" and "A Chorus Line". I think I learned to be empathetic through the stories he had us read and see, and I know I confided in him in the journal he had us keep for Creative Writing. Only in that journal -- that only he saw -- did I refer to my father's imminent death. I told none of my friends or peers. Just Mr. McWilliams. And just in writing.

My mother and Mr. McWilliams, and my cousin Gila in Israel who I nearly never get to see, are the only older people still alive from my childhood who remember watching a chunk of my development, from their adult perspective. Why haven't I contacted him prior to now? Because that was then? Because he was larger than life and not someone I ever imagined sitting down and having a human-to-human conversation with that didn't involve major literary themes? Because I might crack open from all of the memories he triggered for me? Of my early, awkward relationship with my sexual orientation? Of my early hopes of being a writer, which haven't materialized professionally? Of my father-loss and overnight childhood-loss? Isn't it easier to keep the sleeping dogs tranquilized?

Maybe, not to flatter myself, but maybe at a minimum, I'd also remind Mr. McWilliams of an era of his own life that he'd prefer not to revisit for whatever reasons. Maybe we won't end up having a reunion after all. We've rescheduled tentatively for June 8th.

Mr. McWilliams was so happy I was going to a Midwestern university and seeing a bit of the world; he was from Canton, Ohio originally. I recall that because during the first days of my freshman year in Ann Arbor, I went to a then-popular soda fountain/lunch place/candy store called Drakes and found that some of the candy-by-the-pound was from Canton, Ohio. That's all I [will ever?] know about Mr. McWilliams' early life. So far, he and I have stayed alive for many purposes, and only this week have they begun overlapping again. Even if we do not cross paths further, both of us have served our purpose to each other, I think. We did so back in 1979-83.

What I'd Want Mr. McWilliams to Know If and When We Met

1. In 1983, I was the anonymous sender of the Valentine's carnation that read, "You are loved. -- Rex Humbard" [the name of a Televangelist that was popular then], though I think he already knew
2. Somehow, the literature he chose for us to read and study and how we discussed it with him in class made me a more sensitive, better person, permanently
3. Learning from him made me feel confident that I had creativity to share as a gift with the world and I am grateful for the confidence he helped me build
4. Flannery O'Connor became among my favorite writers and was included among the authors in my undergraduate thesis, and he first introduced me to her
5. I loved his sense of humor and ended up with a funny spouse, who is Irish like him
6. I struggled mightily with accepting my sexual orientation, but the works he chose for us to read and see helped me, since a number of them dealt with gay, if not lesbian, themes
7. I'm fundamentally using my creativity in my work
8. Although I'm not a professional writer, I do blog and write routinely, as I feel compelled to
9. His gruffness never fooled me. I knew he loved me and nearly all of his students
10. I hope he lives for many more years, with good health.

Grief and Gratitude

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Another Reflection on "Joy and Pain, Like Sunshine and Rain"

"Honey, everything's OK, don't you think? Fundamentally?" This is what I'm telling our cat Phoebe as she whimpers/kvetches while zig-zagging around the room.

And it is, thank God. It's also a sad time. Thirty years ago this month, my dad (z"l) died of common bile duct cancer. I keep thinking of him. And then this morning, I open up "The New York Times" to see that my friend Susannah Sheffer's dad (z"l) died on Friday of complications from a stroke. Reading about Mr. Sheffer, I'm 17 again. I went to the designated URL to post a memory:

Zichrono l’vrachah (z”l)/may his memory be for a blessing. The Sheffers were kind to me during the Summer of ’82 by hosting me in their home for three days a week, so that I could serve as an intern at the Museum of Philosophy at Hunter College with their daughter Susannah and other teens.

My father (z”l) who was a toy and game designer, was dying at Columbia-Presbyterian that summer and I needed a distraction. We lived in Stamford and drove in to see him daily. My mom told the museum’s director that I could serve as an intern if he found me a place to stay 3 nights a week. The Sheffers kindly took me in.

Once while at the Sheffers’, I turned Susannah’s radio to WBLS-FM and bobbed my head to “Rapper’s Delight” — R&B, Rap and Funk were also distractions from my dad’s imminent death (Groups like The Clash were more Susannah’s speed). Mrs. Sheffer walked past Susannah’s room and stood there listening, apparently amused and bemused in parallel.

I remain grateful for the Sheffer family’s kindness when I was 17, and am sorry for the loss of Mr. Sheffer; my mom and I know what it’s like to lose a dear, funny, creative husband and father.

This morning, I spent three hours, cleaning up our front-, side- and backyards, raking away dead leaves and mowing grass. I cleared away the dead stuff and enabled what was underneath to breathe more easily. My tidying up the yard was a classic example of humankind, trying to control nature and make it neat.

Nature is not neat. It is super-symmetrical and then wildly jagged, and in any case, not ultimately tameable, but I sure was trying! We wanted to control my dad's (z"l) wellness, too, and couldn't. And we wanted to keep our power during the Sandy storm, but couldn't.

Even as I mourn the loss of my dad (z"l), Mr. Sheffer (z"l) and a number of tree-limbs, I am so grateful for the life I have today, which I like to inventory every so often:

• Pat Hewitt & I have been together for 20 years and married officially for 16 months
• We love our mothers, who are still alive, and our siblings, and niece and nephews
• We have two feline daughters, who delight us, Phoebe and Toonces
• We have close friends
• We live in a well-maintained house in a great town, just 14 miles west of NYC
• Our synagogue is led by gifted rabbis and has lovely congregants
• I love the work I do and mission I have, and the management and company with whom and which I'm affiliated
• I've met some of my closest friends at work
• I'm free to be a corporate activist for LGBT equality for our clients and colleagues
• Social media enable me to express my creativity among new channels
• My employer sent me to India on a 6-month assignment (and Pat was able to accompany me), and it sponsored my Master's, which I earned last May
• My physical and mental health are good
• I feel free to experiment at work
• Art abounds, whether on TV, in films, museums and books, and I relish all of it
• I know how to swim and can find a pool to use nearly everywhere I travel.

I lost my dad too early, but life has continued, and vividly, even so.

What Will We Do When We're No Longer Outsiders?

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Death and Art Propel Big Questions This Weekend

At the funeral of our neighbor Megan of blessed memory earlier today, bookmarks-as-mementos sat next to the guestbook. One of them featured a girlhood photo of Megan and a quote: "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -- Wayne Dyer

The quotation reminded me of some insights shared with me earlier this weekend, and how I might change the way I look at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity.

Last night, with our friends David & Gerard, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Katz, the co-curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Most of the works he featured in his slideshow included metaphors and symbols and codes that were dense and tense and rich for eyes that could recognize the homosexual subtext of them; in a number of cases, Jonathan Katz decoded them for us, as a number of them were subtle.

As I watched and listened, I was touched by the artists' ability to make visible to any degree a segment of society that between 1898 and 1991, and even still, today, depending on where in the world we live, typically was marginalized, stigmatized or at the very least, in the shadows.

During the Q&A afterward, I asked, "What happens when LGBT artists are no longer outsiders?"

Jonathan Katz said, "Other differences will emerge....It will not be central to their themes."

I was shaken by this answer. And I told David and Gerard so after walking through the exhibit together.

Gerard: "He was saying something hopeful, I thought, like that even heterosexual artists might include us as subjects and we'd just be more visible."

Me: "Maybe I'm too literal, but I don't ever want to be lesbian just incidentally. It's part of my core identity."

David: "I'm literal, too, but maybe assimilation's not so bad. I mean, isn't it nice being married now?" (He meant, he to Gerard and me, to Pat.)

"Yes, *so* nice. Your use of the word 'assimilation' helps me a bit because it reminds me of some alarmist Jews in my community who say that Jews will disappear if we assimilate too much, and yet, we've been here for 3,000+ years. I don't really think we're gonna disappear, since we've hung on for this long."

Dance? No, Lurk Around the Margins.

We said goodbye, since I was ready to go home, while they wanted to linger at the exhibit a bit longer. Making my way toward the exit, I found a free dance party on the third floor of the museum.

Oh, the music was so good with Rhianna's voice bouncing off the paintings in the nice and dim, cavernous room. I was nearly ready to enter the dance floor and move alone among the crowd, which likely would have been fine had I not been too shy.

I wished that Pat were with me, so that I'd have a partner. It struck me that no one would even notice us; in fact, we might stand out more so for being older than most of the crowd, rather than for being a same-sex couple -- to Jonathan Katz's earlier point. After "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics played, I slunk away to my car in the parking lot. When that song was first popular, I was most of the dancers' ages, and I just owned a bicycle and a subway pass, and a radio/tape-deck I got as a premium for opening a bank account.

Driving home, I thought, Oh, no! Have I become like the lesbian separatists who used to alienate me when I was first getting involved in the gay community in the late-'80s? Who thought that "womyn"-only spaces were supreme while I thought they were unappealing and even obsolete as a group due to their insularity?

There's an analogy, right? AIDS and other societal realities made lesbian separatism untenable back then, just like today, staunchly gay, lesbian, bi or transpeople were misguided whenever we ghetto-ized ourselves, smothering ourselves with an insecurity blanket; more and more polls showed that younger people weren't half as discriminatory as previous generations, so why did any of us hang on so fiercely to separateness and outsider status?

Still, the chip on my shoulder had become comfy after all these years of hauling it and the prospect of heeding Wayne Dyer's/Megan's advice to change my thinking was scary. Earlier today, I spoke with a heterosexual relative, to tell her of my new confusion around my identity, and of my fear of losing my minority status and as usual, she had great on-the-spot wisdom in response:

Sarah, you don't have to be ghetto-ized or Marrano-like anymore [in this area of the world]. And compared to Jews, I think there's less of a chance of LGBT assimilation causing the end of LGBT people, since you won't intermarry.... And in any case, don't worry that you'll lose your identity when people stop being hateful, as there will always be hateful people; there are persistent taboos in every stripe, like unwed mothers. There's always someone who will make sex dirty.... Sex is the engine for intrigue and betrayal and murder and art and politics.... Your sort of desire won't disappear just because it's more so accepted. It will simply be less underground, which should be good, right?

We Are All Outsiders.

In 1998, two years after Pat & I moved in to our neighborhood, Megan, Steve and their young son Ben moved in three houses down from us. I never brought them a house-warming gift, or any food or drink. Never invited them over. Promptly forgot their names as soon as Megan introduced her family and herself to us one day in the street. Thereafter, Megan would drive by us while we were raking leaves or gardening and would always wave. Whenever she had her car-window down, she'd address us by name, and I always felt bad that I had to try to stretch "Hi" into a multi-syllable word, since I was too embarrassed to ask Megan to tell me her name again.

Every time she passed us, she smiled whole-heartedly at us, but after all, what did we have in common with a woman who had a husband and a young kid? So why bother to be friendlier and learn more about her by talking with her? When other neighbors with whom we've been friendly since we've moved in, called to tell us of Megan's sudden death from a massive heart attack the other night, first, I was relieved and ashamed finally to know her name, but then realized that I'd lost the chance of ever being friendlier with her.

What did we have in common? Through loving eulogies from her husband, son, brother and best friends, I learned what I never bothered to find out from her while she was alive: One of only two other families in the neighborhood (that I know of), Megan's family and she were Jewishly-affiliated, attending High Holiday services and bar mitzah'ing their son, who was now 18 -- our nephew and niece's age...like Pat & me, originally, Meg & Steve spotted each other across a room...like part of Pat's heritage, Meg's was French-Canadian...and volunteered from the early days, helping PWA's (People with AIDS), and so likely saw a number of friends die over the early years, like we did. And probably, we'll never discover how much more we might have had in common. It's just ironic, and tragic, how I was so busy, being shy of a stereotypically nuclear family, that I didn't stop to consider that Megan and her family felt like outsiders in the neighborhood initially, which we could have softened by being friendlier.

The other bookmark-as-memento that sat next to Megan's funeral-guestbook had an adult photo of Megan, smiling the smile I recognized, and the quote associated with it came from the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: "This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess."

Teena Marie: Magic

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Need to Photograph, Scan & Post My Roller Skates in Tribute

Teena Marie, who died at only 54 last night, was among the best musical reasons to go on when I was a teenager.

Her music was the soundtrack for so much of my rollerskating, and then rollerblading, solo-sessions from 13-27. Moving to her music on or off my skates, she made me feel romantic, joyful, soulful, even beautiful, and in good company....If she could sing this great music that played mostly on "urban contemporary," i.e., Black radio stations, then it also made sense that I, a Jewish girl in the suburbs, loved listening to it.

This feels like when Aaliyah died, since I love both of their voices, but Teena Marie's death reminds me that my adolescence definitely has passed.

Comfort-Kitty

The thing about cats is that they don't comfort their human parents reliably the way that dogs are famous for doing. I'm just lucky that it's warm behind the computer and Phoebe's little face is facing me while I grieve and write and listen to a YouTube Teena Marie playlist in parallel.

In tribute, I'll re-post a Facebook note I responded to here:

My Life as Teena Marie Song-titles
by Sarah Siegel on Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 9:35am

"Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like (or think will actually do this) and tag me. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think."

Your Artist: Teena Marie

Are you male or female: If I Were a Bell

Describe yourself: Ooh Wee

How do you feel about yourself: Still in Love

Describe where you currently live: Out on a Limb

The first thing you think of when you wake up: It Must Be Magic

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Behind the Groove

Your favorite form of transportation: Don't Look Back

Your best friend is: You're All the Boogie I Need

Your favorite color is: Midnight Magnet

What's the weather like: 14K

If your life were a TV show, what would it be called: Ooo La La La

What is life to you: Squarebiz

What is the best advice you have to give: Work It

If you could change your name, what would it be: A Rose by Any Other Name

Your favorite food is: I Need Your Lovin'

How I would like to die: Just Us Two

My soul's present condition: Jammin'

The faults I can bear: Young Love

How would you describe your love life: Since Day One

What are you going to post this as: My Life as Teena Marie Song-titles

Sad News About a Favorite Author

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

E. Lynn Harris is Gone

In July, 2002, I wrote the posting below on IBM's internal online community space for gay, lesbian, bi and trans IBMers and our friends. E. Lynn Harris of blessed memory visited IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1998, to talk about his experience as an IBM seller nearly 30 years ago and his transition to writing.

God, he's dead. Look how vital he looks in this photo that I took [not included below, as I cannot locate all of the other three people in the photo to ask their permission to include it]; at the time of that picture, he was a year younger than I am now! He inspired me and gave me perhaps delusional hope: His books were wildly popular and if he could write books after leaving IBM, maybe upon retirement, I could, too, I fantasized. If I am fortunate to stay till my retirement-age, I'll be older than E. Lynn Harris was at the time of his death....Who knows how long anyone lasts?

This is another era, gone. Michael Jackson was my 10s and teens and onward, but E. Lynn Harris got me through the deeply self-searching, KD-Lang-Constant-Craving years. Though his main characters typically were closeted football players, I related to their coming-out struggle and always hoped they'd find peace by the end of the novels; usually, they did.

Thank God for social networking. My partner Pat came up to tell me he had died -- she had just heard it on CNN -- but then I was able to go to Twitter and click on "Lynn Harris" to see a slew of tweets about it. And then I could go to iseecolor.com, since I'm already a member of that social network and was able to post my comment; it's a moderated site and I don't yet see mine appearing, but am hopeful. Meanwhile, I saw lots of grieving women, adding their condolences, and just one man. Everyone but me was black, except for one Latina. I found the most apparently kindred spirit among them, Skyy, a 25-year-old lesbian from a town near Memphis, who said his books helped her come out as a lesbian and as a writer.

Well, here's the writeup from July 30, 2002:


I've included a "USA Today" feature under this [not included here], which focuses on E. Lynn Harris' latest novel and I thought it would be fun to review what he told us when he came to IBM four years ago:

Former IBM sales rep E. Lynn Harris addresses DNGs [IBM's Diversity Network Groups]

E. Lynn Harris, sales rep at IBM from 1977-81 and now author of best-selling fiction, spoke to members of the EAGLE -Tri-State, BlackNet of New York and Spectrum of Poughkeepsie Diversity Network Groups at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown on August 18, 1998. Excerpts of his presentation are included here.

Sarah Siegel, EAGLE - Tri-State Coordinator, introduced Mr. Harris:

I'm delighted that E. Lynn Harris is joining us today for EAGLE's third program in a series.

The Tri-State chapter of the Employee Alliance for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Empowerment at IBM along with BlackNet of New York and the Spectrum of Poughkeepsie black diversity network groups are lucky; we're in a popular part of the country and have an easier time drawing in speakers than some of the more remote chapters. We're also privileged to invite speakers like E. Lynn, who have worked for IBM and feel good and reflective enough about their time here that they're happy to come back as alumni.

I'm especially excited about E. Lynn being here because he's serving as a terrific bridge between our diversity network groups at IBM. I'm also grateful to IBM Research, particularly Kim Sherman, for hosting today's program.

I was first attracted to the fiction of E. Lynn Harris by his book covers. They always feature people who look like they live lives I'd want to read about. The second feature that appealed to me was his bio., which always mentioned his prior role as an IBM sales rep. The third feature was each story itself, especially when it included scenes in Chicago, where I lived for seven years. My favorite feature of E. Lynn Harris' fiction, though, is the complicated quality of his characters' romances.

Last summer, I accompanied my partner Pat on a business trip to Boston. Over the weekend, we visited MIT, including the bookstore. There, prominently displayed among the bestsellers, was the hardcover edition of *If This World Were Mine*. I was proud to see that the product of an IBM alumnus was a hit at MIT.

Of course, it's also nice when products of current IBMers are popular at MIT -- which reminds me to do a brief commercial for a plan I have to produce a series of lunch-time programs beginning this fall called, "How to Be an IBM Leader." It will feature IBMers who have led an interesting team, project or product to market and who are also members of one or another diversity network group at IBM.

That is, I'd like to hear wisdom from people who are leading IBM while at the same time who are proud of their identity. Please contact me if you or any of your colleagues qualify and would like to treat us to a presentation of your positive work
experience.

Meanwhile, I can't wait any longer to hear from someone who led while at IBM and who is now a leader among writers: E. Lynn Harris.

E. Lynn Harris:

I got to IBM in really a 'round-about way. I was majoring in Journalism at the University of Arkansas. I had plans of being a lawyer, not because I had any burning desire to be a lawyer, but because it seemed like a good occupation and in the neighborhood I grew up in, Little Rock, Arkansas, most people were teachers, and lawyers were well-respected, so I thought it would be a good kind of job to have.

I thought I had done everything right. I was the first black, male cheerleader at the University of Arkansas; I was the president of my fraternity; I was in *Who's Who.* I did everything that I needed to do to get into law school and I figured if I was going to go to law school, I was going to go to the best, so I only applied to Harvard.

I didn't get in, but I didn't get rejected. I was in a pending file because I had good grades and OK LSAT scores and all of the activities and stuff that they like, but IBM came up to the University of Arkansas and they were looking for minority students. The only requirement was that if you had a 3.5 or better, they wanted to talk to you. And I had no interest in talking to IBM. The recruiter called my house every day he was up there...He said, "Will you just come by and meet me?"

He told me, "Well, you know about IBM."

I said, "Well, you guys make typewriters, don't you?"

"Yeah, we do that, but we also do some other things...."

It was one of those things that despite my better judgment, even though I would have rather been going across the country to different college campuses, teaching cheerleading [that summer], I took the job at IBM....When I got the bad news from Harvard, IBM said, "We want to offer you a marketing-rep job in Little Rock, Arkansas." I turned them down...because I grew up in Little Rock and wanted to see the rest of the world.

The recruiter said, "Well, where do you want to live?"

As a cheerleader, we used to travel all the time, but we used to always stop in Dallas...and I said, "Dallas."

He said, "Let me call you back," and he called me back 30 minutes later and he said, "We're going to fly you to Dallas tomorrow...."

The problems that I ran into as a salesman the first year -- because I was not out as a gay man -- had to do more with the fact that I was 21 years old, trying to tell people that they needed to spend a million dollars....

I left IBM basically because I wanted to move on. One of the issues or problems I faced as a gay man was that at IBM, I was creating a history that was untrue in terms of my personal life, so it never came up. I always had a girlfriend out of town, and when I got ready to leave, they did not want me to leave. The thing was, well, I'm going to get married and if you guys can't get me a job in Houston, which is where I wanted to go and it was very industry-related; you had to have petroleum experience to get a job as a salesman. I made the 100% club every year that I was there and what have you.

For me it was just a thing of that I had burned out in Dallas and I was still searching for the answers to my life and I spent the next 10 years searching. I went to work for HP. I went to AT&T, sold software for some of the vendors that IBM started going into joint partnerships to sell software with. I could always get a job because I had had that IBM experience.

My first four years with IBM had been successful, so I *never* had a problem getting a job. What I didn't understand was that there was an underlying sadness in my life and I started writing because of that sadness.

One of the things that I used to get compliments at IBM about was the business letters that I wrote. In a sense, that's how I started to write... Also, during this difficult period of mine, I was losing a lot of friends to the AIDS epidemic and one of the things I would do and had always done was to write letters.

You can give so many cards, but these letters would just be letters about our friendship and the things that we had done and I would make them like little stories and the reason that I did that was because I didn't want these people to leave the earth without knowing how I felt. You can give 'em a card saying, "You're a great friend blah blah blah," but I would write these letters, "Remember when we did...."

My mother always used to say that some of the best gifts that I had given to her were some of the letters I had written to her when I didn't have any money for gifts, and a friend of mine who was dying told me how much those letters meant to him and said, "You really ought to try to do something with this. You ought to tell our stories."

It was from reaching rock-bottom that the career in writing started. And even when I wrote the first novel and it was rejected soundly from every major publisher, one of the things you learn as a salesman is rejection, so you find a way around the rejection, and I learned that no didn't always mean no, which a young lady always corrected me, "Unless you're on a date."

And so I just decided to do it on my own and some of the experiences I had had at IBM helped me in being able to self-publish a novel and to go out and market it and to get the word going from some of the things I had learned at IBM marketing training. Also, when [a large publishing company] had heard about me -- heard about this young man, selling books out of his car to beauty shops -- they expressed an interest.

They had rejected my work at first, but an executive vice president had read *Invisible Life *and had fallen in love with it...had seen the book, the self-published edition, in a book store and it was on the best-seller list there because it was Atlanta and this was the only bookstore that was selling it, so it was on the best-seller list because it was the only store where people could get
it in Atlanta.

He bought the book and sent it to this vice president. This guy has since been promoted in [a large publishing company] for, quote-end-quote, discovering me. This lady called me...and all she said when she called was that someone had given her a copy of *Invisible Life* and she enjoyed it and she told me she worked at [a large publishing company].

I was living in Atlanta. She said, "If you're ever in New York, give me a call. I'd like to take you to lunch." That's all she said.

I didn't even have an agent then. So two weeks later, I go to New York and I finally get an agent and the agent tells me what he's going to do, how he's going to contact all of these publishers about how *Invisible Life *was selling underground so to speak. And I asked him, "Is [a large publishing company] one of the companies you're going to send it to?"

He said, "Yeah, yeah, I'll probably send it to [a large publishing company]."

I said, "Well, this lady called me from [a large publishing company]...."

"What's her name?"...I told him the lady's name and he started to laugh, "...She's one of the most powerful women in publishing." He said, "I'm going to give her a call." And he called her and told her he was representing me and she told him she wanted to meet me....

The night before, I did these presentations like I did at IBM, stayed at Kinko's all night, had these presentations on reviews I had gotten; how many books I had sold; why this was a good move for [a large publishing company] to re-package this book; I had all of the sales figures; I had letters; these packets and everything. I put on my best IBM-blue suit, white shirt, red tie, the whole bit, groomed for about an hour before the meeting....

Someone said, "Well, where are we going to start?" There was the executive vice president, there was a senior vice president, who had just discovered John Grisham, an editor and my agent, who I had met only once before and this was the first time my agent had seen me in action and everyone was just looking around the table.

I said, "Why don't I start?" I stood up, passed out the presentation and just went up there full-force and they were standing there with their mouths hanging open. Needless to say, I got a contract the next day.

When my agent went out of the room, and he represents people like Joyce Carol Oates; Alex Hailey over his whole career; Richard Wright, my agent said, "I've never seen anything like that in my life."

"What do you mean?"

"You left them speechless. When you left the room, the first thing they said was, 'He's going to be great when it comes to the big interviewing.'" The first contract with [a large publishing company], looking back on it now, was not an awful lot of money. They got me for three books for $90,000. The way the publishing industry works, it is one of the few industries where they pay you for something they don't have.

Most times, a first-time novelist has to have a finished product, but now, they buy my books based just on an idea. I don't have to give them any kind of proposal. I just say, "I'm going to write about this--" like the book I'm working on now, which is the completion of the first two books. It's going to be the third part of a trilogy.

"Fine," they say. How much money do you want for it? I let my agent do the talking when it comes to that, but...my marketing background helps me because I've been involved in everything.

Writing the book is the easiest part. What a lot of writers don't understand is that you have to get out there and you have to market your book and you have to market yourself, you have to let people know, you have to be available. I mean some of the hardest work that I've done, probably since I left Endicott, is when I'm on tour...when I'm getting up at quarter to five to do an interview with someone who hasn't even read the book....

Countless interviews. And going to different signings. It used to be I had signings where it would be a room -- maybe five or six people and sometimes, in Oregon I had a signing where it was only one and the guy didn't even know why he was there. He just kind of happened upon it -- when I first started out. This last tour, I had signings of over 700 people, and sometimes up to 1,200.

The thing that I realized and the thing that I always focus on is to make sure that number one feels like number 1,200. That's looking a person in the eye -- these are the marketing skills of going in and asking someone to spend a million dollars.

Now, I'm only asking them to spend $24, but it's just as important to look them in the eye and thank them and to tell them how important to me they are because I realize that it's not [a large publishing company] that pays my salary because [a large publishing company] doesn't give me a penny more than what I sell. When they give me advances now, they give me advances based on my track record, which is pretty good.

*Invisible Life *is approaching 500,000 alone for one novel. So now, I do in fact have a track record, but I'm involved in every aspect of the marketing of my novels -- from the design now, to what cities I'm going to go to, to what events I'm going to do, to everything. Like one of the things they wanted to do when I started to get bigger was to say, "We're going to take an ad out in 'The New York Times Book Review'."

I asked, "How much would that cost?" And they told me and I said, "No, we can use the money somewhere else." They were looking at me because a lot of authors with their ego -- they want the full-page ad in the Sunday "New York Times Book Review" and they want the TV ads. I said, "That's not where my audience is. Put it in radio. Put it in putting me out there on the road, so I can look people in the eye."

I mean, because I'm at a point right now where I could just say, "Put a novel out there, don't need to go out and promote it; people are going to buy it just based on reading the novels before," but to me, that would defeat the purpose of what I've worked for.

To me, I still want to tour because it's a way of going out and thanking people who've supported you. When it first started out and I had sold 5,000 or 10,000 books, I almost knew all of those people. When they would tell me they sold 100,000, I wanted to know who these people were and where they lived and how they found out about me.

And even now, I want to be involved in every single thing that goes on with my book. That's one of the reasons I'm here in New York as opposed to Chicago, where I live because as I'm finishing a novel, they're already doing the marketing for a book that will come out in March.

They're already deciding where they're going to send me. They're deciding what TV shows they're going to go for, what magazine people they're going to go for, how they're going to market the book in terms of its direction -- because my audience
has grown.

It not only includes African-American gay men, who are my base, and then African-American women took it over completely; they're still my largest audience -- but I've seen people of other backgrounds.

I recently had a chance to go to Richmond, where people paid money to sit with an author and the lady who sat next to me was this white, mid-50s school principal, who had paid $1,200 to sit next to me and she said she was my biggest fan. She knew things from my book that I had forgotten. I asked her, "How did you discover my books?"

She said, "I'm a principal and a couple of teachers were reading one of the books and told me I had to read it. I read the first one and I was hooked...." So my audience is growing and that makes me very, very happy, but I shall never forget my base....I went to a reading that was supposed to be at a gay bookstore and there were more women there than anything.... The ladies in the front row reminded me of church moms and my grandmother.

I will tell you that the experience at IBM has been most beneficial to me. I learned so many things there. I think the things I learned that were most helpful were some of the social skills, some of the things that I wouldn't have learned at home. I was raised by a single parent. The dress, how to listen...to learn never to be afraid to say, "I don't know," or, "I can find that out," or to think before you speak in terms of making promises....

Someone asked me once where I get my polish from and I said, "From every person that I've ever met," and that is true. At IBM, we used to have a guy in the garage, Leroy...an older, black guy, who was the wisest guy in IBM at Turtle Creek.

...Right now, I have the best job in the world. I'm under a great deal of pressure right now because my novel was due a week ago and it has not ended in my head....But I'll tell you what: I'm having the greatest time. When I look up in my hotel suite and it's 8 o'clock and I've been on the computer since 4, it doesn't seem like I've been working. I'm tired physically, but I'm not tired about the work I've been doing....

This novel's been difficult because I have to avoid becoming a celebrity author. I read about authors like Truman Capote and James Baldwin and I get invited to a lot of different things. Last Sunday, I went to Whitney Houston's birthday party.

I mean I've met a lot of different celebrities who've been fans of mine, so I get invited to a lot of things that it's just good to be at and be seen at, but I've realized, too, that it's the work that's important. It's the writing that I love...so I've had to learn some lessons in time-management....

E. Lynn Harris invited questions and one of the audience requested that he do a reading.

He read pages 5-9 from Chapter 1 of *And This Too Shall Pass,* where Zurich, the main character, calls to tell MamaCee, his grandmother, that he's the NFL's newest starting quarterback, but first has to listen to her regale him with local news about obscure people he doesn't remember.

E. Lynn finished the reading and continued:

This came about from a conversation I had with my own mother. Every Sunday, I called my mom and it never failed that she wanted to tell me about somebody I didn't remember from when I was growing up and that's how the story got started.

Questions from the audience:

What was your reaction when you first heard that IBM was going to give domestic partner benefits to its gay and lesbian employees?

I was pleased. I *would* say that I was kind of surprised. I don't know if any of you have gone through the training thing, but in your first training class, they send you to Endicott and you stay at the Homestead. It was like going into some kind of elite society. When I was there you had to learn the IBM history....it was steeped in tradition and it was like going into an exclusive country club. And being gay was not a consideration. Being black could, at times, be a problem....

How can IBM attract and retain more gay, black talent? More black talent? More gay talent?

...For all of my adult life, I heard the rain of my dreams. And when I say, "I heard the rain," I heard what other people thought I ought to be...I remember telling friends that I had been offered a job by IBM and they were astonished and when I said I was thinking about not taking it, they thought I had lost my mind. I heard the rain. I heard fraternity brothers. I heard family members. I heard the world: IBM. You'd be foolish to turn it down....

It was only when I started to hear the snow, the silent dreams that I heard when I was alone, did magic start to happen in my life....

I don't think IBM would have any problem in keeping gay and lesbian and black employees who are meant to be there because they've always had the reputation for being fair and that's what I found....

I don't think companies like IBM will ever have a problem in attracting the top talent -- if that's what they're supposed to do, if they're supposed to be a salesman or an engineer or a research person, this is a good home. It still has a very, very valuable name.

How can IBM market to the gay, black community, in terms of our products?

It's still top-shelf. IBM is still Rolex. It's still Mercedes. There's competition out there most definitely. I recently bought a laptop and it was between a ThinkPad and a Toshiba. The reason I didn't go with the ThinkPad was that I wanted it small, but I still needed to have the CD-drive and I think you guys have come out with one since then. But I still have friends at IBM and I do a lot of charity work.

This young man, who's a student at Cornell, who grew up in homeless shelters -- someone called me and told me, "This young man's doing well at Cornell, but he needs a computer." We contacted IBM...we ended up buying him a ThinkPad because I really do believe that much is given, much is expected, so the name is still top-quality.

And one of the reasons I still include it in my resume is because it makes people look at you, quote-end-quote, in a different way....When I left IBM, I interviewed for 11 jobs and got offered 10 of them.

Which bookstores are most receptive to your books among the gay, black and mainstream bookstores?

...Gay bookstores would take 10 on consignment...and black bookstores would, too; one of the things that I think has been heartwarming about the whole situation is that black bookstores embraced me almost immediately without reserve, which is not exactly what I expected....

The chains have supported me. They didn't support me at the beginning, but now, you know, I do a lot of signings and most of them have gay and lesbian and African-American sections, but one of the things that being on "The New York Times" best-seller list has helped me with is to move me, quote-end-quote, out of both of those ghettos if you will. What I've found that is so interesting is that they have the gay and lesbian books and the black books back-to-back, in the corner, at the back of some of the stores.

One of the concerns I have is that there might not be another Terri MacMillan or E. Lynn Harris because it's like the music business in the sense that if your first book isn't a hit, then they're going to be hard-pressed to publish your second one no matter how wonderful it is.

A final comment came from one of the [black, male] audience members:

Listening to you speak brought back vivid memories of being a rep in New York City. It's kind of interesting to know that I wasn't the only one.