is this too early to have these things to say? Jason—not the swimmer, but the waiter (I hate to reduce him to a label)—is the reason Stephanie and I visit the Sole Proprietor, a classy restaurant in the otherwise desolate city of Worcester, Massachusetts. She brought me home from there just now.
Some men get away with nothing but good looks. They are beautiful of flesh, and I do not mean to diminish that beauty one iota, but others are more than superficially beautiful. With them, beauty is really NOT only skin deep, and we all have always known it. There at the roots is where beauty is most difficult to husband, impossible to immitate, and precious as gold to find. Jason is a looker, but deep down, he is far more beautiful than that.
mary Hastings was a saint whom I had the great good fortune to know. She had emphysema, and like the monks of Tibet, had learned how to live—spiritually, and even mystically—with less than enough oxygen. It frees the mind to know things beyond the brain's organic limitations. She knew these things.
Mary was, last of all, my landlord, in the mid-eighties when I occasionally kept my first boyfriend with me in the room above her's in her little house in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. When he was not banging my bedboard against the wall—never often enough, but embarrassisngly more than once—I would visit her, in the midst of her books and copies of the National Catholic Reporter, and discuss things like the emerging Liberation Theology, and recieve her mentoring and wisdom. She never preached. The example of her life held far more volume than I have, even yet, been able to absorb.
all through my youth, Mary and her husband and two sons lived next door, and Mary was my mother's best friend. With wry humor, I recall how their visits extended sometimes long beyond their goodbye's. Their visits had a formal phase, during which they sat and talked in the kitchen over coffee, and an informal phase during which they continued to talk as my mother followed Mary on her way out. Once, investigating my mother's prolonged absence, my father and I discovered them—Mary at the foot of the outside stairwell, and my mother at the top—where they had spent an hour finishing their conversation, despite the winter chill.
Mary's husband died before I was ten. He had been drunk every day I knew him, but he used to give candy to us kids in the neighborhood. With effort, I renmember his gin-blossomed Irish face smiling down at me kindly, and suggesting he had a 'goody' to give me. But where? Well, in his pocket, of course. I had to fish around in his pocket to get the candy. Mary's husband died some years after I had been raped.
In the mid-eighties, the banging bedboard in my apartment above Mary might have been a statement of something more than merely that I was gay. Patsy Hastings was no small contributor to the sainthood of Mary Hastings.
she was a loving woman, despite the difficult world in which she lived. She lingered for years, yet with joy, every day, after she gave up her house, where I briefly stayed. She spoke of the beauty of dusk, as we beheld it together from the sixth floor of UMass Medical Center, shortly before her death. She loved me; I know it well. She loved me.
Such souls are beautiful; therefrom emanates a soft glow—unique and unmistakable—through both the echoes of childhood hysteria, and through the din of a packed restaurant. They bow in supplication to their personal burden, not fighting it, and they do so with a genuine joy that splashes everyone around with a precious blessing, like a water-fight in the desert.
Happy National Coming Out Day. I hope my coming-out will one day, truly, be complete. It might be, already. And it might never.
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