Day 41-2 - Parkville to Carollton, MO, rest day.

There was an abrupt and striking change crossing the Missouri River. We left behind the enormous and gently sloping fields of corn and soybeans in eastern Kansas for lush green, tree-lined, curving and rolling roads leading through towns with distinctly antebellum homes and people who seem less wary of us than the hard-nosed Kansans.

Coming out of Parkville's cutesy antiqued commercial block, I have a view of Kansas City to the south. The impossibly large and unnatural sky-scrapers remind me of the smokestacks spewing incinerated waste or factory by-product that I have sometimes seen from our country roads. Apart from the mountain ranges that I have often paralleled in the last weeks, mountains which fit seamlessly, these are the biggest things I have seen since leaving. Even Denver and Salt Lake didn't seem to have this scale of gargantuan human engineering. or perhaps they did and it is the sparseness of my days in the prairie and the distance at which I ride past (making the City more exotic and foreign because I know I will not go there) that helps me understand for the first time what friends of mine, visiting me in San Francisco or Toronto, have said about the skyline: "it's so ugly."

Before, to me, that skyline has meant home. Today it hints at pollution and traffic and grassless, treeless stretches of asphyxiating concrete.

Disturbed by this vision of cities which I have never before shared, I reach up to my solar plexus for the pouch hanging from a piece of twine around my neck.

In Toronto, in the little park behind the gay community center at Church and Wellesley where countless pride day goers, summer camp kids, and candle-light vigilers have played or cried or laughed or cruised, there is a permanent memorial to the Canadians that have died of AIDS not unlike the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, except that the design allows for the continual addition of years, and names which take up space exponentially as those years pass. The inscription engraved before the first column of names is a poem by Michael Lynch. It's there partly because it's about AIDS, and partly because he was one of the founders of the drive for this permanent memorial, which I remember assembling on early mornings before pride days back when it was only temporary. I don't like the poem. But on the second anniversary of his death, the summer before I moved to San Francisco, I found myself crying gently in front of it, smearing it with some of his ashes, just as I smeared my own face, and the plaques that marked his death, and Bill's death, four years apart. I buried some in the flower bed beneath his column; where have the beautiful, the strong, the dead ones gone? They have gone to feed the roses. Two men, holding hands, stared at me being held by Ziadee, my ex-partner, (who always had more tears than I for the times of my grief) and cried their cries for the ones they lost. Afterwards, I filled up a little pouch that Z and I had bought earlier at an import store on trendy Queen Street West with a spoonful of the ashes, tied it shut, and hung it around my neck.

And there it has remained almost every day. Over time I have developed a brief ritual of breathing and focusing when I put it on every morning. I have a habit of holding it for strength in moments of weakness or indecision..."What are you holding?" asks Hallie, someone I dated, as I sit, tense, in her musty back-room apartment, wondering why I like her so much when we make each other miserable. Like my glasses, I always remember where to find the pouch in the morning, and I see what's ahead more clearly when I put it on.

As I go to pat that familiar lump under my shirt, my hand presses flat against my chest. I feel for the rope at my neck and there's nothing. I pull over to the side, shouting, "Stopping," to the riders behind me to avoid a collision, and search my body and clothing and bike bag. Nothing. I am not upset, which surprises me. I get back on the saddle and push to get to lunch. Lying under a shade tree in the front lawn on of a small but elegant home whose owners have agreed to let us spread out our tarps and coolers and bins of bread and fruit and chips, I try to remember the last time I handled those ashes turned to a kind of gravel-ly mush by the day's sweat. Could it have been Salina? That was four days ago...could I really have gone that long without noticing. Yes, I could have, preoccupied with riding, feeling strong and sure, I might not have noticed as I left the pouch on some table over night, or as it slipped off and down my shirt to land in the hidden soil beneath the gamma grass I harvested, or as it careened into a ditch as I flew over my bicycle on the road leaving town. I might not have noticed until now.

For a long moment I am paralyzed by the thought that I cannot finish the ride. Not just the 30 miles left to Carollton, but the whole ride. What will protect me? Where will I get the strength? These are unusually spiritual thoughts for me, and for a time I get caught up in reflecting on when I got to a point where I put so much faith in an icon. I don't have an answer for that, but it is new for me...the thought of this pouch protecting me and giving me strength implies a faith in something greater than myself, something supernatural, god-like, or new-age energy fieldish.

As the new movie "Contact" points out, I am one of the 5 percent of the world's population who doesn't believe in a higher power and tends to assume the other 4.8 billion are suffering from a mass delusion. That's harsh; a comforting, important, sometimes productive, mass delusion. And like Jodie Foster's character in the movie, I find myself having put faith in something that I have no evidence even exists, and comes to me in the form of my dead father.

My paralysis dissipates quickly as I remind myself that the pouch is simply the focus of some rituals I have developed to help me be more in touch with my own will...and I haven't lost that. So, newly acquainted with my will, sans accoutrements, I ride on. As of this writing, fully 5 days later (I got behind...you'll see why), I am still more conscious throughout the days of riding safely, and I am still aware of the empty space where that pouch belongs.

On our rest day in Carrolton, the first rest day without a service project, or without an interview, I go for a morning walk around this town of 5,000. Walking past a machine shop just off the main street I am transported back to the little old warehouse of Lynch Manufacturing in Dunn, North Carolina...the smell of used oil and burnt rubber, the hot air brushing by your cheek from the equipment humming, rattling, squawking in the shadows with overalled men in baseball caps standing by, nursing whatever process is going on. Shots of sunlight from an unseen window or hole poking fun at this stack of tires or that pile of rags.

Lynch Manufacturing made farm equipment as far as I can remember. Not the big harvesters or combines or air-conditioned, CD-equipped tractors, but smaller things...though don't pin me down to what. I was always more interested in the bottles of coke and mellow yellow that I could get for a quarter out of the machine on the plant floor, "Grandma Dot owns this?" I'd whisper to my dad. "Yes," he'd say...probably thinking I meant the whole place, when really I was much more impressed by the Coke machine.

The unassuming farmer who shuttles us sweat-soak, salt-encrusted, grease-smeared cyclists from our cool floor at St. Mary's School to Carollton Junior High for the showers (columns of public nozzles for the boys, individual curtained stalls for the girls) turns out to have spearheaded a 14,000 person protest 10 years ago in Chillicothe (pop. 10,000), which was key in pressuring Reagan to reluctantly sign some of the first legislation to help the beleaguered family farmers of the drought and failing-S&L plagued ag-states.

When he's not working the 2,000 acre farm that his family has operated for 150 years outside of Chillicothe, Bill Christison is the President of Missouri Rural Crisis Center, and on the board of the Nation Family Farm Coalition, which represents over 100,000 member farmers. Bill is a smart, relaxed, but angry farmer who has not stood still in the face of the monstrosity that is big ag-business, as it has encroached on the survival of family farmers and farming, and the lives of rural and urban Missourians poisoned by the astronomical environmental damage and chemically laden products that these corporate food factories inflict.

Over a potluck dinner (what is it that spurs one to cook the miraculous local sweet-corn into mush, boil fresh-picked green beans with strips of pig fat, and put Jell-O next to everything? Can we do something about this please?) Bill, his quiet but essential wife Dixie, and 10 other members of the 15 year-old Missouri Rural Crisis Center, talk to us about their work with MRCC, and what they've had to do to survive as farmers, or how they didn't. The information ranged from Bill talking about his recent media tour of Europe to (successfully) drum up resistance to antibiotic laden meat from American factory farms in the EC, to Jackie Reese who grew up a few miles from here, and went to a one room rural school with 13 other students for 10 years, and now she has to work in town at the state correctional facility while her husband tends the hogs and her children have moved away because there isn't enough work on the farm.

For the first time on this trip of meeting and talking with rural and small town Americans, I find myself really sympathizing, liking and admiring these folks. I find myself not amazed by their lives, and therefore able to see them as real and not the exotic ignorants that are given thick Southern accents in popular and high-brow culture, to emphasize how stupid they are. These rednecks are hot around the collar about big business, the environment, feeding folks in the inner city who can't get affordable or healthy food, cutting down on meat production, and keeping their communities alive. This is a rural America we don't see. This is the face of the farmer we don't see: the one saying don't support ag-business, don't buy meat unless you know a trust the person who produced it, buy organic so that there's a market for it because we hate to expose ourselves and our children to the herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizers of conventional farming. These are the "authentic" muddy-booted producers saying to us consumers: you have got to stop eating at McDonalds because it's bad for you and your environment, and it's destroying our families. You've got to, please, be more aware of where the food you eat comes from and how it was produced, because it doesn't only affect you: it affects the trainloads of overworked and underpaid Laotions that Premium First Select Hog Farms in northern Missouri pays recruiters in Los Angeles $150 a head for (if it sounds like slavery you're not far off) to work the 250,000 penned-in sows they have in their enormous complex, each of which suckles 4-10 piglets twice a year which are weaned after 2-3 weeks (10 is normal) and quickly fattened with grain laden with dozens of different antibiotics to fight the infections that their mother's milk would otherwise protect them from. Each of those pigs produces 2.5 times as much waste as a human, meaning that this one "farm" produces more waste than Kansas City, but with no mandate for treating the water used to flush it (more of which is used than in Kansas City as well), so instead it sits in artificial lagoons, poisoning the rivers and lakes and wells for miles and miles around with deadly bacteria, stinking up entire towns.

After Carollton, I look at every farmer I see with renewed respect not just for the farming, but because for the first time I see that that farmer on the tractor over there might be an activist, refusing to bow to the pressures of agribusiness to use the latest genetically altered seeds. Scraping by to compete, almost impossibly, with the over-capitalized ag-businesses flooding her market with under-priced grain simply to force her out of business. I feel good about my small efforts to consume responsibly, but I'm also inspired to know that this isn't a California fad.

I am the latest dues paying member of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center: 3,500 family farmers, and one city-kid from the coast who likes to eat their food.

In the middle of the meeting I got a call from my mom: she's in Illinois with her mother who just had a simultaneous stroke and heart attack.

Day 43 - Carollton to Moberly, MO

You don't know you're being slowly but surely strangled until the hands around your neck loosen the grip which you'd nearly grown accustomed to. Those hands, one named Heat, the other Humidity, wrapped their fingers around me and have been slowly squeezing for 10 days, never loosening, not at night to sleep, not in the day to nap or eat or chat. Not caring that they were out in the open for all to see, and all to cry, "murderer!" as they choked away my spirit. And I, deafened, dosed, every fragile pore defenestrated by their ceaseless probing, did not notice.

That is not until after last night's thunderstorm, which sent countless threads and bands and branches of shocking white lightning careening across the sky. This morning I stumbled out of the basement of St. Mary's school, ready for another beleaguering 80 mile battle with the Hands and instead a cool, fragrant breeze brushed through my hair and over my unclammy skin, saying, "The Hands are gone but it won't be forever, so today ride fierce and free."

And suddenly the back roads of Missouri are the most lush, beautiful, sensual things I have taken in since the Rockies...which seem so long ago. Senses dulled, come back sharply. Spirits drained, find laughs again. Workhorse legs are phillies on parade, lifting high and proud. I remember another reason why I am riding my bike across the country: it's fun.

In Moberly, a city struggling to transcend itself and failing, I make minestrone for the happy masses. Afterwards, most of us pile into the van and drive to the newly redone (in the theme of trying to transcend itself and failing) theater to see Contact.

Powerful movies should never be seen with people who will not let you sit through the end of the credits to have your time with your thoughts: Conclusion 1. Conclusion 2: most people are not as captivated as I am by the question of extraterrestial life. Conclusion 3: most people are not as obsessed as I am by the difference, or lack of difference between science and religion. Conclusion 4. I can overlook a lot of over-acting and some major plot flaws if these obsessions are tweaked.

My religion has been science ever since I was a kid. My faith was in the scientific method. My baptism was in the water in the sink I would try to conceptualize as clear yet substantial. My rosary was the periodic table of elements and my first communion was with Isaac Asimov. Asimov more than anyone else influenced the way I perceived the world. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of books from science fiction to childhood education (I still remember the book about volcanoes I loved as a kid) to nonfiction books looking at the bible as a history text. I loved it all...even his 1,500 page autobiography (written in a few months) which made me want to BE Isaac Asimov, to have grown up above my father's candy store in Brooklyn. To be a chemist cum author who understands it all and, an unlikely combination, can EXPLAIN it.

In the Asimovian view of the world, if you can't explain it, it just means you don't have all the information yet, not that it's unexplainable. It's a straightforward, attractive, no-nonsense view of the world. It's not simple, in fact it's incredibly complex. One of the irritations of my youth were the trekkies or sci-fi addicts or Dungeons and Dragons addicts who would constantly make pronouncements about the Way Things Are...to Asimov we don't really know the way things are, but if we try hard enough, we can find out. This is essentially the role of the hero played by Jodie Foster in Contact.

I figured out a long time ago that science is faith-based, but it takes an encounter with the alien Unknown to get Jodie to go beyond the, "if you can't prove it, it's not real" stage. My mom has been talking about and giving me books about the links between physics and spirituality for ever. Physics is perhaps the closest a science-based brain like mine comes to the supernatural: there are these laws, see, and we understand them for the most part, see, and we can reduce most things that happen in our universe and little world down to these laws (even emotions get turned into chemicals which follow these laws) but we don't know who or what or how they got set up. Now THAT'S where god or whatever you want, comes in. Many physicists are very spiritual people: they have arrived closer than most of us to Truth, and what they've found is some questions that are hard to explain without faith in a higher power.

This is real credits-pondering stuff, or should be. And real late-night-out-in-the-middle-of-Missouri-star-watching-and-wondering-stuff. The movie's ultimate answer to the question, "are we alone in the universe?" is blasé pop-philosophy, "if we are, wouldn't that be an awful waste of space?" But after so much concentration on the senses and the body and the mechanics of everyday life, I eat up this brain candy.

Day 44 - Moberly to Hannibal, MO

There are 9 boys/men on this ride and 14 women. This morning, somehow, 6 of us guys were the last to leave the church. I couldn't tell you exactly how it started, but pretty soon we were riding in tight formation to minimize the impact of the headwind, pushing nearly as hard as I could sustain for 30 miles. We passed most of the riders who left well before us and I arrived at the lunch stop where our van awaited with yet more peanut butter and jelly and chips and salsa, exhausted and famished. And injured. In my excitement at the speed, and my drive to keep up with the group, I'd managed to strain a muscle in my left thigh.

And then more inanity: John, our G. Gordon Liddy with a pony-tail and progressive politics, decided to pick on Khayam, one of the 16 year-olds from Brooklyn. Khayam has been spending an awful lot of time in the van, saying his knee is injured and then that his bike was broken. Both were true, but it was pretty clear that he also didn't want to ride. Fine. But not, for some reason that I still don't know, to John. John started calling him lazy and asking, "how come you did this ride anyway if your not even going to ride?" belligerently. And then when Khayam talked back just a bit, John says, "Have you ever been jackwhipped boy? Have you ever been jackwhipped? ANSWER ME! When I was 16 if I talked to a 30 year old man like that I'd get what was coming. Show some respect, boy." yadda yadda. So Jerry intervenes by stepping in between them and telling John to leave Khayam alone. Well John didn't like how close he was standing and starts screaming, "Get out of my face! Get out of my face Fucker! Get the fuck away from me or I'll lay you flat! GET OUT OF MY FACE!" and he's popping blood vessels and clenching his fists and he is about to hit Jerry very hard. Jerry repeats that John needs to mind his own business and leave Khayam alone if he can't treat him with respect and just as I think John is going to break his nose, he steps back and walks away. John then stares at him, teeth and fists clenched, and his murderous eyes scare me more than anything he said.

Two minutes later he is lecturing Jerry, "The first thing they teach you in nonviolent intervention is to stand off to the side, man," yadda yadda. Jerry walks away again and John starts complaining about Khayam to other people, but not to Khayam.

So I'm standing there, traumatized, paralyzed by the confrontation, pissed at John and scared of him and annoyed with myself for not intervening, me, the biggest guy, the mature guy, the problem-solver, but I'm just standing there stiffly, eating my PB and J sandwich, not tasting it.

Maybe I should ask John about those non-violent intervention classes. And people laughed the second day when I proposed non-violence as a ground rule for the trip.

Hannibal is where Samuel Clemens, whose nom de plume was Mark Twain, lived for much of his formative life. Right on the Mississippi, it was a small town that catered to the riverboat travelers and traders. Now the main industry in Hannibal is Mark Twain. I joked with Sally as we walked to the Hunan Garden a few blocks from the racquet ball courts at the YMCA we were staying the night, that I was going to order Huck Finn Yung with Tom Sawyer Sauce. I thought Vernal, UT was over the top with the one-theme scene (dinosaurs), but I hadn't been to Hannibal where there are daily shows reenacting Huck Finn, a Twain Theme Park, and on and on. Off the scale.

That night I sleep in court 3, even though it's full of early-risers, because John is in court 4; I'm easily intimidated.

Day 45 - Hannibal, MO to Jacksonville, IL

Em-eye-ess-ess-eye-ess-ess-eye-pee-pee-eye
on my bike I can ride so fast, watch me fly by
push left foot push right foot check mirror behind
ride across Old Man River to the Illinois side
Another step forward in the cross-country ride.

And if you listen very closely, you can hear the sonorous humpha humpha of trombones, and the Music Man leading the boys of River City triumphantly down main street USA:

Twenty-three tan cyclists come riding in,
forty-six fast rubber tires on the road.
Gimme a banana, gimme a banana, gimme a banana
Not a cookie for my lunch,
Gimme a banana, gimme a banana, gimme a banana
That's what I should munch.

The pastor at Jacksonville United Methodist Church is an avid actor and singer. He plays a member of the school-board cum barbershop quartet in the Jacksonville Theater Guild's production of that old classic about a huckster who comes to a small Iowa town to bilk them out of their money by organizing a bogus boys band and ends up transforming the town and being transformed himself by the love of Marian the Librarian. The pastor got us in free.

This is a big deal in Jacksonville: the 250 people in the theater of the old State Mental Hospital are dressed to the nines by local standards: puffy, frosted hair, roughed cheeks with heavy lips and pastel dresses with white shoes and nylons for the women; for the guys it's smoothed back hair, blue shirts and dark jackets with thin belts holding up matching slacks running to shiny black brogues. With a cast of nearly 100, the surprising thing is not that this is a full house; I'm sure everyone is their to see their family. The surprising thing is that there are enough people to both perform and watch this show.

And despite the awful acoustics and a Music Man who is more creepy than charismatic, this is a Big Event. In fact I get so caught up in the spirit that I almost slap down the dough for 1998 Seasons Tickets to the Jacksonville Theater Guild's shows.

Over a meal of barbecue pork steaks with fifty of the congregation, I ask a couple of the assembly if there is a way to tell the difference between feed and sweet corn when it's growing in the field, because I've been getting stuck with some mealy corn when I stop for a roadside snack. Shaking heads and awkward looks are what I get: and after seeing some of the green, yellow, orange and brown mush that, before it was boiled to oblivion with ham hocks and butter, was a fresh vegetable, it's clear why; I might have said, "I enjoy chewing on pigs I find wallowing roadside."

I forego giving the cook my recipe for dandelion greens salad. These are nice people, but witch burnings aren't just for the storybooks.

Day 46 - Jacksonville to Rochester, IL

I have the most fun when I ride with Dana. Big D, The Goofball, Consumption Girl, everyone seems to have a nickname for this tye-dyed LA surfer cum Santa Cruz marine biology major. She's had some knee problems, and she likes stopping to smell the flowers, so she falls behind sometimes. And she hates it when people wait for her, she doesn't like the pressure, so if I'm in the spirit I'll find ways of waiting for her without looking like I'm waiting. "Thought I had a flat," I'll say looking up from the roadside as she approaches. "Did you see that faun?" or "needed to stretch," or pulling off a side road until she passes by and riding up behind her with no explanation, shrugging when she asks how she got past me.

The subterfuge is all good. It's a game played on a dull day, or something to do when there's nothing to say. And you know that if she really doesn't want to be riding with anyone, she'll just lose you on a hill, which unlike anyone else, she'll ride up twice us fast as she rides on flat ground.

No hills in central Illinois. We ride together, enjoying the break from Gripe Aid as she calls it. We don't complain as much as some other people. We are teaching each other to be on our own trips, and let others be on theirs. No judgment, man, no bad vibes, just different trips is all. When this morning we learned that we were going to be holed up in Leesburg, VA for several days before riding into DC, Big D and I helped each other stay unaffected by the bad trips around us, the finger pointing and accusations and impatience just don't need to be our thing, it's okay if that's your thing, "but you don't need to let it get you," she says, "yeah, yeah! Right, right, right." Because we maybe riding the same road...

...but there are an infinite number of paths. And Big D and I are on a cornfield contact high, zonked out by the cool, dry air and the white lines and no cars in sight and we're in goddam ILLINOIS, man! Like, on our bikes, and there's only three weeks left which might as well be NOthing and NOtime because, well, because that's just our trip today. We are synched to the same cadence, riding the same bike down the same flat back road in the same Land of Lincoln that all the other Merry Roadsters are on, we are here, on the road, and all of a sudden, you see, that's just where we ARE and it's all good, all good, you understand.

Riding into Springfield it's time to find a health food store, a little recharge for the body and mind, but neither of us really needs to SAY anything, you understand, because it's that Synch that we're in, not like we guess what the other wants, but we Know, you know? I can see that Big D needs a Mocha Rice Dream cookie sandwich, and I can see that SHE can see that I need a Spirulina Smoothie; I can just feel that, as if we shared the same brain with a couple bodies attached, pedaling away, only it's not like we're anything Siamese-twinish, just I can feel that rice dream in my mouth, only its her mouth, and it's sweet and smooth and real, real cold. Nothing has ever been that cold, but it's a good cold, like a pill that's taking away a headache you'd forgot you had, and I'm picking the cookie bits from between my teeth with my tongue, only it's HER tongue, and they are soft and crumbly and they get mixed up with the crunchy chocolate coating which is quickly melting in my hands, turning my fingerprints brown, and I look at my brown hands standing a few blocks from where Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation was born and I think, "but we are all still slaves, it's only the masters that changed..." and the colder than cold is sliding down her/my throat, and it feels...purple. It's the most purple feeling I've ever had and when I look down at my hands expecting them to be purple, they are still brown only they Feel brown, the chocolate is gone but they still feel brown, and I think, "why did I never now what brown felt like before?" and I turn to Dana, and she shrugs because she knows that's what I'm thinking, she feels the brown, too, only I think it's me feeling her feeling brown.

And we're back on our bikes, the Day-Glo, twenty-one geared motor-free machines we know like a second skin, and we are motoring down the side streets of Springfield, down 7th, right on Walnut, jog left at Outer Park onto the bouncy-trouncy bricks to South Grant and right past McSomething, past the Oak Tree Mall to the foot path between it and Springfield High School and onto unlabeled streets winding, kicking up leaves as we motor by, heads turning, looking up from their $250 Nike walking shoes or running shoes or lawn-mowing or car-washing or porch sitting shoes to watch the heads, helmeted, rear-view mirrored, polyester and cotton and lycra and tan lines breaking up their bodies into unnatural parts, go by on their machines of loving grace, gracing them with a vision that's beyond their no-name street in their no-name neighborhood in their who-cares city and follow-along lives. And the ones who turn away, well they make us laugh, and the ones who stare in anger, well we play them...stare back but kindly...tip the helmet, offer some water, and those that look up from their shoes and smile, well we smile back with a wink that says, "yes, it's true, you don't HAVE to be playing their game." And we ride on, keeping the sun just up and to the right because on this afternoon day we know that going south is just what needs to happen. "Stop the headlong, weeks-long, 100,000 pedal-revolutions-long rush to the East and try a different direction," we scream-think, beaming with the freedom of it.

Coming out of the anonymous neighborhoods onto Wabash Street, Strip Mall Street, Death Monsters roaring next to the shoulderless curb, spewing smoke from their nostrils, sneering at us, daring us to try THIS road out, THEIR road out, just try it you crazy Day-Glo bikers they say; raging in their little boxed-in-metal-and-plastic-and-glass world they think they run the place. But we have no box, no shell to hide under and we can see more than just the asphalt-and-anger trip, you understand? and what we see is a blue awning with the words "Food Fantasy" painted on it, boldly, like they new we were coming. So we motor across the road and get our rice dream bars and our Spirulina Smoothie and our organic blue corn chips, while the DM's fume, stuck behind a red light; 100 tons of petrol-powered metal-and-plastic-and-glass Death Machine's stopped still by a light.

A light!

(with apologies to Tom Wolfe, whose biography of Ken Kesey and the beginning of the psychedelic movement, "The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test" I just finished reading.)

Day 47 - Rochester to Shelbyville, IL

Again with Dana today, but also with Lara who usually rides too slowly for my legs, but since we got in to the flatlands, she - all 5'1", 110 lbs of Filipina Gymnast of her - cruises. And I'm pushing the pace a bit because we get lost early on and don't know how far it is yet to Shelbyville, and I'm supposed to meet a friend that I've never met.

There's lots of stopping to get directions, even though there are few roads and they all run north-south or east-west. Mostly that's because the directions we get are like the one's from the farmer outside Taylorsville, "go up a spell, and turn onto the hard road at the prison." Pardon me? One of the blocks I've had to overcome on this trip: that Y-chromosome impairment against asking directions. But "the hard road"? At least give me something I can work with.

One of the best things about being the Director of COLAGE back when that job didn't entail a lot of meetings and deadlines, was that if someone called or emailed or (gasp!) wrote a letter, I could take some time to get to know them. Besides an important organizational tool, this was a great way to make friends. And that doesn't even go near it: imagine if you will, growing up knowing that you're special, that you are different, that because of your family and your environment you bring something unique to the table. But there's no one else sitting there! You're alone. To be sure, for years you've known that there must be other folks who can sit at your table and bring the special things you've brought, but they aren't that easy to find. Almost impossible in fact.

Now cut to a few years later and you're sitting at your table, writing something on your computer and WHAMMO! they start sitting down. Not just some table out there, but YOURS, the one that you helped put the place settings out for...they just phone or write and you're at the center of it, one of the first to sit down, and the designated welcome wagon as it were, so you get to know everyone as they sit down and despite all the work you've done looking, it's magic when you're just sitting there and they find you. And they are often just as thrilled.

That thrill of discovery, the "my god there's someone else" feeling, still happens to me. To me of all people!

It happened with Sara Connell 2 1/2 years ago, she doesn't remember how she found COLAGE. But I was sitting in the office and it was instant rapport: quick, bright Sara had grown up just outside New York City, gay dad, she was in graduate school in Champaign/Urbana (the "Twin Cities" - "which ones the city?" I ask sarcastically) working toward her doctorate in Communications on the University of Illinois. A former Manhattan production editor moved to the wilds of the Mid-West. Illini! Illini! Go! Fight! Win!

A week ago Shannon Sims joined and posted an intro to the email list for teens and adults with gay parents that COLAGE runs. I saw his intro and it turned out he lived in Chicago, so I emailed him and the next day we had dinner.

Sara, red-hair Irish-eyes broadcaster-voice, picked me up in her late model hot red Honda Civic from Shelbyville United Methodist Church. Shannon, dark-hair swarthy soccer-player-build, picked me up in his brown late-model Pontiac from the Evanston Presbyterian Home.

Although they are very different people, and my connection with them is very different, I can't help but talk about them together.

While the light was good I had to take pictures of each, "hello, nice to meet you, please assume the position." Sara was accommodating but uncomfortable, a nervousness that her cat, Toby? picked up on when I tried to pose them together, almost giving Sara a radical mastectomy in its effort to flee. Shannon, whom I treated gently after the experience with Sara (good sport she was!) loved to pose. Are you sure you had a lesbian mom and not a gay dad? "GQ!" I'd say and he'd set his jaw, thrust hands in pockets and flash a steely look off to his left. "Intellectual!" and he'd cock his chin, perse his lips and look meaningfully into the lens I held within a foot of his face. "Professional!" and he'd throw on his white coat from med-school rounds, straighten his tie, look paternally concerned and for the coup de grace, drape his stethoscope - stethoscope! - around his neck. The elderly couple whose lawn we were apparently shooting on, came home from dinner with two friends and wanted to know what we are doing. Being on my grandma's turf (she knows, but would prefer to keep her children's "foibles" private) and not having sussed out Shannon's comfort level I say, "We're shooting pictures for a book about exceptional young people," which, of course, is true.

Even though I didn't hardly know anyone with gay parents until I was 19, I grew up being the Canadian poster child for gay families. I had plenty of encouragement to think about and read other people's analyses of me and my family. Once I was 16 and hit college, I found supportive and smart people to help me talk and write and contemplate my origins and what that meant for me. You never figure it all out, of course, but the trying is fun, fascinating, maturing, bonding.

Neither Shannon or Sara has ever really talked with another person with gay parents. Shannon kept it a secret until he went to Oberlin (my pop's alma mater) where he discovered it gave him a certain cache among the hip children of the New Left. But he never got too far beyond using it as an aphrodisiac (I missed that one, though I have to admit to trying the sympathy ploy a few times when Michael was sick...I urged Shannon to keep quiet about this or we might have impostors claiming they have lesbian moms.) And Sara, told by her parents when she was younger to keep quiet about the "situation" managed to keep that trust even when she went to Hampshire, possibly one of the few places more permissive than Oberlin. Told hardly a Hampshire soul!

And yet, somehow in that isolation, they have found and are finding words, good words, to describe their experiences. Sara has a hard time whenever she tries to go back to her childhood, but that'll come if she has a chance to exercise her words. Shannon has done a lot of thinking about being a "different" man, and says that even in the last few weeks he is starting to find the words, from the email list, from me, to talk about having two moms, struggling to fit in, succeeding on the outside but not inwardly.

Oh Sara can I introduce you to Sheri, to Erika, to Rachel! Oh Shannon, can I introduce you to Noel, to Mike, to Ian! If there is a counterpoint to the joy of discovery, that thrill of a door opening you had assumed locked forever, it is knowing these wonderful people, and knowing people they should, but don't, know. It's seeing how that door could remain open as it has for me (lucky!)

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