February Blues

The weather here in February is hard. It may not be as cold as January, but it rains and snows, and there are few sunny days. It's chilly. Both of us have been reading books that make us nostalgic for something else. Joe's is Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, about a San Francisco gay man turning fifty, an author regretting his lost youth, who takes a literary trip around the world to avoid going to his ex-boyfriend's wedding to another man. I'm reading Gary Shteyngart's Lake Success, another picaresque novel about a guy named Barry, his wife Seema (Seema was the name of my first and last serious girlfriend in high school and the beginning of college). Barry in the book leaves his wife and three-year old autistic child in New York to go look for his college girlfriend across the country. Seema visits her parents in Cleveland. Of course, both Arthur Less, from Less, and Barry Cohen from Lake Success have lessons that must be learned to find some sort of redemption.

Last week, a committee in the West Virginia House of Delegates  proposed a rule to annul laws made in several cities, including Morgantown, to add LGBT protection to the anti-discrimination laws. The amendment to the original bill (which would have prohibited cities from changing labor laws, like minimum wage) failed, but 10 Republican men on the committee voted for it, and one went on a rant calling LGBT people "terrorists" and a lot worse. This state does not have a reputation for being gay-friendly, something Morgantown City Council has tried to change.  There is a plan afoot to have a "gay picnic" here in April, and I went to the first planning meeting Saturday, where I was the oldest queer person (including all LGBT people) by several decades. It's been lonely for us, and, with the crappy February weather, the hostility in the House of Delegates, and our literary friends, we've had our doubts.

I was at our local grocery store today, and while I knew few people there, I did run into three friends, which was good. I also saw people who looked familiar: a woman who I thought for a second was Janet the Dentist, who came to Israeli dancing at BCC, the synagogue for gay people, thirty-some years ago, pregnant. She talked about her "partner" with whom she was having the baby. When pressed, she admitted the partner was a very traditional Jewish man, and that they were in fact married. She didn't want to seem different. I saw her more than ten years ago, and she told me about having breast cancer and surgery. I wonder how she is now. And then I saw the Principal Realtor, a woman I knew from temple in L.A., who was an elementary school principal, then retired and sold real estate. Her partner in later years was a woman I had also met dancing at BCC. The Realtor passed away a few years ago from pancreatic cancer. Suddenly, I feel like people from my past, alive or dead, are showing up for me and making me regret the community I lived in, not Los Angeles so much, but the people there who were my community. Still, I think about a young friend, who grew up in Europe (now 40) who complained to me about the constant sunshine in L.A., how boring it was! I loved that about L.A., and I think about his complaint, and how, like him, I should be more grateful for what I have.

We'll stay here and live with our old-people regrets. Maybe with Joe's new contract, we'll be able to take a month in the winter and go to Palm Springs or Ft. Lauderdale, although I fully intend to win my Council election at the end of April, so maybe not, at least not for the next two years. It was our choice to come to Morgantown, and people depend on both of us here. We've made friends, some our age, some much younger, and when we don't get all maudlin but look at reality, we have it good.

Spring is here early in March, at least in the afternoons, so we are almost there. Regrets are real, as is Seasonal Affective Disorder.