By Way of Explanation.

I haven’t blogged in such a long time because I don’t know how to write about my mother’s death. I know this isn’t the first time I’ve written that I don’t know how to write about something, but those other times it was just a matter of sitting down and writing and, then, I’d find myself writing about whatever it was I didn’t know how to write about. But I’ve tried many times since she died to write something, and it seems even that I’m constantly in my head formulating sentences about it that I, after a few minutes or hours, hate. Nothing I come up with is true.

Two possible reasons stand out: One, it’s too big, it defies the format, writing is how I figure things out, organize my thoughts, make sense of things, and this cannot be figured out, made sense of, organized. And two, in some fundamental way I feel like I don’t even know who I am without my mom, as an artist, but even more generally as a man, as a person.

As I move through the day, I find every mental thread has no origin. It just ends in mid-air at the thought, “But she’s not here anymore.” No anchors, no reference points. Those threads held my world together. I guess that mental process was involuntary, subconscious, or at least so habitual -- and complete -- that it didn’t usually register, because I was never so aware as I am now how I must have experienced everything as my mother’s son. And now it’s just me.

It’s not exactly correspondent to the brute sadness of the loss, which is intense and real, the longing that wells up and I want to just collapse and cry, but more like just a change in the order of the universe.

Since discovering, not as long ago as I might have wished, that my most effective, and affecting, writing was the closest to the bone, the stuff that hurt when it came out, that embarrassed me even sitting here alone typing, that those were the stories or the details within stories that “worked,” I have written about failure, about sex with strangers, about new love, STDs, a painful breakup, my marriage, skin diseases, fear of aging, fear of the gym.

I’ve grown to love this kind of intimate confessional writing because it calms my mind, and because it connects. In the sunshine and shared, the embarrassing, shameful, painful thoughts and experiences become less embarrassing, less shameful, less painful. And everybody apparently is full of shame and embarrassment and pain.

So I want badly to write about my mother’s death. But I don’t want to share my thoughts until I feel more sure of them. I’m as far from sure as I could be.

I'd Dance on the Grave of That Post Office If I Could.

This news gave me some perverse pleasure this morning.

I've been reading letters from the early 80s, research for something I'm thinking about writing. Many of them are from my mother and I'm, not surprised because I remember it well, but amused or amazed or something by how much we wrote about the Peter Stuyvesant Post Office on 14th and 1st. That place was some kind of black site for packages or a portal to hell or just a clusterfuck of bureaucracy and poverty and I don't give a shit about your mail.

I had a P.O. box when I lived on 10th between 1st and A. They'd put a yellow slip of paper in my box to let me know that I had a package. I'd wait in line, and wait and wait, and then more often than not they wouldn't be able to find the package. More than once, the package was just gone without a trace. Two or three times, they found it months later, beat to shit like they'd been kicking it up and down the stairs all that time, and of course everything in it was smashed.

Mom used to send me care packages from time to time. (Reading her old letters, I'm struck by how much she worried about me. I must have shrugged a lot of that off at the time. If you'd asked me before I started reading these letters, I wouldn't have said that she worried more than a little that my life was so precarious back then.) After a loaf of banana bread arrived weeks later moldy, she stopped sending homemade perishables. Eventually she stopped sending packages at all, at least until I moved to Brooklyn. (U.P.S. sucked almost as bad. If you weren't home to receive a package, you had to go to Siberia or Hell's Kitchen or something to retrieve it and we were back then very much opposed to going above 14th St.)

I think the Stuyvesant P.O. has been closed for years, but they're finally getting around to tearing it down. I am not sorry to see it go. In fact, if I knew when that wrecking ball was going to swing, I'd walk up there just to see it crumble.

TBT.

I spent yesterday afternoon putting old letters in chronological order because I'm going to read my correspondence and journals from 1983 and 1984. I think there's a play somewhere in there that I want to write. I found 2 letters from Eduardo, my first serious boyfriend, that I didn't know I had.

There had been a lot of letters from Eduardo. A few months after we met, we were separated for a while. I went back to Indiana to finish school (which I didn't do, not then) and he stayed in New York. We broke up soon after I returned.

During our breakup, I threw a shoebox full of his letters in a dumpster. I did a lot of things during our breakup that I later regretted. I thought all the letters were in that shoebox, but I found one a few years ago. And then 2 more yesterday. I also found, clipped to one of the letters, a scrap of paper with his phone number written on it, which he must have given me when we met.

I guess it might seem strange for a happily married man to be so enamored with past love ephemera. But my husband knows I'm obsessed with this kind of biographical archival stuff, and also it was over 30 years ago and Eduardo is dead. So.

Mom.

We had a memorial gathering at Mom and Dad's house on Tuesday evening. Around 50 people came: Mom's friends from the League of Women Voters, her book club and wine tasting and neighborhood friends, friends from earlier days, and family. My sister Kay, with help from her and Mom's friend Susan, made our favorite cookies from Mom's recipes. Mom's grandson Aaron -- Kay's middle son, my nephew -- played Nocturne in F Minor by Pius Cheung on marimba. (Mom was immensely proud of Aaron; she was so happy the last couple years watching him become such a serious young musician.) And I read the following words:

>--<

So many people have said to me these last few days, “Your mother was a remarkable woman.” I always knew that. I’ve always felt proud of that.

She was born on September 1st, 1939, which was also the day Hitler invaded Poland, so I never had any trouble in school remembering the date WWII started.

She grew up on a farm in Illinois. Graduated high school at 17, got married at 18, had a child a year and a half later, another the next year, and the next year started thinking maybe she didn’t want to be Catholic anymore. (With a little family planning, she had my sister six years later.)

She and my dad made a life for themselves, full of things they loved, things that were important to them, things that brought them pleasure, and they saw it as their job to make sure that Mike and Kay and I were able to do that for ourselves. That’s what I think I learned, more than anything, from Mom. How to make a meaningful life. I think a testament to that is how Mike and Kay and I all have pretty different lives but have all found fulfillment and meaning and love.

Growing up, there was no place I wanted to be more than with my mother. We spent hours together, usually in the kitchen, talking about whatever came to mind.

She loved cooking and baking. One of my earliest memories is of her baking big sheet cakes for neighborhood association meetings. In the late 60s, a black family moved into our neighborhood on the northeast side of Indianapolis and almost overnight a couple dozen For Sale signs appeared in front of white families’ homes. She learned about blockbusting, which was a tactic where realtors would target a white neighborhood and sell one house to a black family and then blanket the neighborhood with fliers offering quick cash to white families who wanted to sell. Then they’d sell the houses to black families at higher than market financing. They were taking advantage of racism to make a killing, and to Mom, this was so obviously wrong that she helped create a neighborhood association to fight it.

My mother taught me to cook, and she taught me to look around, to get involved, if something is not right to say so, and to do something about it if you could.

We wrote letters back and forth all through my 20s, then email, and then with Facebook we were in touch often daily, sometimes more.

Conversation with my mother was one of the great pleasures of my life. I feel so grateful that on the last days I spent with her, her last days, we spent time sitting in the kitchen, talking. About food and politics and whatever came to mind.

She taught me an appreciation for beautiful things: art, flowers, the landscape, mountains, lakes, music, leaves in the fall. From her I learned the rewards of curiosity -- reading, history, culture, and travel. She loved to travel with Dad, whether it was just up to the lakeshore in Michigan or a drive cross country to Colorado and Utah.

She saw my artistic temperament, so she enrolled me in art classes on the weekends and Suzuki violin after school. When we were very young, she took us kids to museums and concerts and plays. It’s because of her that I wanted to have a life as an artist. She told the home nurse last week that she was still looking forward to coming with me to the Tonys and sitting in the front row.

She didn’t get to come to the Tonys, but she did get to come to my wedding three years ago. Her joy in that, her joy that that was even possible, was, I think, even greater than my own.

She was remarkable in the way that she loved her family. These last few years when she was experiencing so much uncertainty, and fear, and pain, she helped US all deal with our own fear and emotional pain. She never stopped thinking about what we needed, what would make us happy and calm and reassured. When we were so scared, so worried about her these last few years, she taught us how to face it, taught us by example to calm down, that she was going to be okay. We looked to her, as we always did, for guidance, even when eventually it was guidance in how to care for her. She let us know that there was no good in panicking, that the only way to do it was one day at a time.

These last few days since she died have been so full of her presence; she’s still so much here, in this house, in every conversation. She’s only been gone four days. But my mind wanders to the future, to when I’m back home doing what I do, and all the countless times during a day when I have something to share, some small success or something I read that I think she’ll get a kick out of, and I think what am I going to do without her? My hero, my biggest fan, my faithful correspondent.

But so much of that constant presence of her in my life wasn’t even about talking to her, seeing her, it was just the way I felt her in me, the way I feel her in my head when I’m reading the paper and griping about Mike Pence. I feel her in my arms when I put a chicken in a pot of water to make soup. Or send an email to my state senator. Or feel outrage at some injustice. Or vote. She lives in me in the way that I love reading and Patsy Cline, in the way that I hate noise and grocery store tomatoes.

A sense that she is alive in me: the only thing that makes this bearable is telling myself that that will not go away. Because now I just want so badly to hear her voice on the phone, to see a message from her show up in my inbox. To see her face light up when she says my husband’s name.

She lives in all of us she touched in countless ways. It has been comforting the last few days, all the sweet words from her friends, my friends, our scattered family, and everyone here today. It does feel like we share the pain of her loss and that lessens it.

Mom had a good life, and she was well loved.

I Reject the New Normal Like I Rejected the Old Normal.

I was just moments ago poised with my little finger over the Return key, in danger of being one of those people on Facebook who write 1000 words in a comment field, and then I remembered "I have a blog!" And I haven't posted anything in a month.

A few days ago, my friend T sent me this link to a story about drag queens being banned from a Pride event in Scotland, and I posted it to Facebook with, "Will someone tell me again how assimilation leads to freedom? If this is gay rights, I don't want rights. I don't think I even want to be gay any more."

A good friend suggested that this ban is stupid but that it is a well-intentioned desire to shield people from pain. My friend is serious and thoughtful and supportive of greater freedom for everyone, but I think, like many "liberal allies" he's wrong on this one. I hope he will not take my response personally.

I don't think this policing of queer expression is as benign as that. Part of it is about protecting people from pain, yes, but the larger part is about suppressing behavior that doesn't conform to their worldview. It's particularly noxious when it's directed at drag because drag queens have always (explicitly and also just by their very existence) been the ones fighting hardest, taking the biggest risks, provoking the hard questions about gender and sexuality and identity that have made it possible to even have a Gay Pride event in the first place, let alone gay marriage and civil rights and all the other stuff. Rather than shutting them out of the celebration, we should be down on our knees thanking them every day for the modicum of safety we enjoy.

Before I got married -- a fact that complicated but didn't essentially change my stance -- I was much more vocal about the danger of putting all our energy into the gay marriage campaign. I, along with many many other queer people, saw this coming, and it's infuriating to see it play out. All that shouting and marching and writing -- and loving -- has led us to this, a world where expressing a trans identity means looking like Caitlyn Jenner and expressing homo love means getting married. And the whole range of expression outside that new norm is suspect if not banned outright.

I am so mad!

3 Things I Saw From the Balcony Monday Night at About 9:30 p.m.

A slightly stooped grey-haired man in black pants and white shirt, wearing a black yarmulke and carrying a thick black book at his side, walked at a relaxed pace along the sidewalk that cuts through the playground from our building to the building opposite.

Our neighbors next door, who have lived in that apartment since this development was built in the late 50s when they were a young married couple, whose window I can see into if I lean over the railing, sat at their kitchen table under a bare fluorescent light fixture with books open in front of them and talked animatedly.

While I was looking at a star about 40 degrees up from the horizon and due east, wondering what star it was, the only one visible and so perfectly centered in my view, just below it a burning meteor made an arc across the sky and disappeared behind the Williamsburg Bridge.

On The Porch.

We have a balcony. I keep calling it the porch, and maybe a balcony is a kind of porch in the way that an apartment is a kind of house.

When I lived in Nashville in a rented room in a big purple Victorian house while I working on my film (2003?), every afternoon all summer there'd be a thunderstorm of Biblical proportions -- you wonder why they're so Bible-obsessed in the South? It's the weather -- and I'd take a break from logging footage of my life falling apart and watch the deluge from a big wicker chair on the wrap-around porch. The thunder could make me actually jump -- one time the lightning struck so close it split a tree right across the street.

When I lived in Austin on East 15th St. with J, there was usually no place I wanted to be more than the porch. In the afternoon when the 100-degree heat felt sexy as long as you stayed in the shade with a cold beer and didn't move a muscle. In the evening when it cooled slightly and the air was thick and swampy like a ghost story.

Here, our balcony overlooks the grounds of the co-op complex and a small playground. In the afternoons, there are dozens of children playing, their parents and grandparents sitting on benches watching them. They are mostly Jewish as far as I can tell, and I assume conservative (in the general sense, not the theological sense) from the way they are dressed and from the way that the playground clears out at about 5:30 because they all, I'm guessing, go inside to eat dinner as a family. There's something, at least from a distance, very appealing about such an old-fashioned way of life.

I read 25 pages today, which is a personal triumph. I haven't been able to read lately, now that I'm not commuting every day. I miss that 2 1/2 hours of built-in reading time, but that's not the only thing preventing me. I just can't stay awake. I never sleep well, have never slept well, but for the first few days here, I did sleep through the night and thought things had changed. I think it was just fatigue from moving. Now I'm back to the usual waking up every 30 minutes or so, lying awake for long stretches in the middle of the night, and usually waking up completely an hour or so before the alarm goes off.

After several days of not being able to read more than 3 or 4 pages without falling asleep, I decided to try napping. The last 2 days I've taken an hour nap after lunch. It's magic. Now I can read without falling asleep. I'm reading The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses -- which, despite the fact that it's like 8,000 pages long is kind of a page-turner, and when I can keep my eyes open it's quite entertaining and fast-paced.