I am enjoying so much being back here in the house that Bill and I owned from 1991 to 2010. I’m house-sitting for my friend, Deanna, the current owner while she is away at a family cottage. It’s emotional for sure being here with all the memories from those twenty years that Bill and I lived in the house and given that I sold it after Bill died. We did a lot of restoration and renovation after we bought it in 1991 as illustrated by this photo:
Deanna is taking such loving care of the house and the gardens are looking magnificent:
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Facebook Post: July 7, 2023
I’m in Stratford for ten days. First stop, spending a bit of my birthday with Bill.
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FB Post, July 9, 2023
“King Lear” – my first play this year at the Stratford Festival. Regretfully, I found it one of the weaker productions of this classic I’ve seen. Paul Gross is excellent as Lear but the cumbersome staging undercuts his and others’ performances. I’m spoiled having seen last year the stunning double bill of “King Lear” and “Queen Goneril” at Soulpepper in which Tom McCamus provided the most convincing Lear I’ve ever seen. That production had me captivated from first to last unlike my experience this afternoon.
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FB Post, July 11, 2023
My second play of this season at the Stratford Festival: “Women of the Fur Trade.” Brilliant writing, brilliant acting, brilliant directing. “Part rom-com, part Canadian Heritage Moment and pure comedy gold, Winnipeg playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade is an uproarious satire of survival, the male gaze and our shared cultural inheritance.” A new work that won the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival New Play Contest. Kudos to the Stratford Festival for staging it.
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FB Post, July 12, 2023
My third play of this season at the Stratford Festival – “Monty Python’s Spamalot.” A fun evening at the theatre with lots of laugh-out-loud moments.
This is broad, wacky, silly, irreverent humour – like when King Arthur in battle slices off both arms of a foreign adversary with his sword followed immediately by a monk crossing the stage calling “alms for the poor” or when Arthur and his knights are celebrating that the gullible French hauled into their fort the giant wooden rabbit that the Brits had left at their door only to realize that they had forgotten to hide in the rabbit first.
Seeing this production is nostalgic for those of us who adored the Monty Python TV programs and movies of the 70s and 80s (such as the 1975 “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” from which this play is “lovingly ripped off”).
It’s goofy and absurd humour in an innocent sort of way in contrast to the cynical and mean-spirited comedy that is so prevalent these days.
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FB Post, July 13, 2023
A day like today is why I love and support the Stratford Festival.
My fourth play of this season’s Festival is Shakespeare’s “Richard II” radically adapted by renowned Canadian queer playwright Brad Fraser. More about my enthusiastic reaction to this provocative production in a minute.
(Audience advisory: this is going to be a long post.)
I spent the morning attending a Meighen Forum panel discussion on “Richard II: The King and the Character” with panelists including playwright Brad Fraser and actor Stephen Jackman-Torkoff who plays King Richard in this production.
Some insights that I gained from the discussion:
⁃ Shakespeare made up a lot in writing “Richard II” as he obviously did in his other plays including the four “history plays” of which “Richard II” is considered the first in the narrative sequence;
⁃ King Richard II reigned from 1377 to 1399, two hundred years before Shakespeare wrote the play and historical knowledge of previous eras was much more limited at that time than it is today;
⁃ further, Shakespeare wrote not to depict accurate history as much as to entertain but even more so to engage the audience of his day in reflecting on issues that were of interest to him as a person and as a playwright;
⁃ doing the kind of significant adaptation that this 2023 production represents is actually fairly typical of how Shakespearian plays have been performed over the majority of the 400+ years since the Bard wrote them;
⁃ it was only starting in the 1920s that a rigid orthodoxy emerged dictating that the text was sacrosanct and the plays should be performed unaltered; understanding the motivations for this new rigidity is a complex question;
⁃ for the majority of history prior to the 1920s, the plays had been adapted and performed in ways that attempted to connect with the audiences and the societal contexts of the times;
⁃ Director Jillian Keiley’s approach to the play and Brad Fraser’s adaptation are radical; still using much of the original text, Fraser shifts the play setting from 14th century Britain to the 1980s New York gay disco and bathhouse scene; and instead of using a white Anglo-Saxon male as Richard, director Keiley cast Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, a young Black non-binary actor;
⁃ let me quote here from the house program in a note on adaptation and aesthetic by assistant director Kwaku Okyere:
“Equating the intersections of Blackness and Queerness with Divinity is a radical act in and of itself (King Richard believed himself to have been personally chosen by God to be monarch). Placing the exultation of these marginalized identities within the context of a well- known Shakespeare play is truly remarkable and, more importantly, incredibly subversive. Subversion is further reflected in every aspect of this show; from the lean adaptation of the play from its original to the choreographic dance-theatre aesthetic of the production to the sumptuous Studio 54 meets Met Gala costumes that adorn the performers’ bodies.
In Brad Fraser’s adaptation of Richard II, we find a Richard who is Black, queer, much more a lover than a fighter and deeply human in all of his complexity. In so many ways, the king at the centre of this play subverts and begs us to question our inherited understanding of what a person in power looks like and therefore how they should act.
This new take on an old king also mirrors the ways in which we should question our understanding, inherited or otherwise, of the current state of the world and those who— for better or worse—hold power within it. We hope this production will open up this conversation in a way that is contemporary, sexy, heartbreaking and, at times, hilarious. We hope you lean in. We hope you engage in this conversation with us.”
The production has generated considerable controversy and backlash. Not everyone is leaning into it.
Now let me share my personal reaction to the production.
I had some sense of what I was getting into from conversations with others who had already seen it, reviews in the press, and word on the street. So I wasn’t taken by surprise.
That said, I found myself struggling to connect to the performance for the first ten minutes or so. And curiously, the difficulty that I was having felt somehow familiar. But I couldn’t place why it felt familiar, until suddenly, I had a flashback to the 2022 production of “Hamlet” at the Stratford Festival when Amaka Umeh, a genderfluid, Tkaronto-based storyteller of Nigerian (Igbo & Ikwerre) origin was cast as Hamlet. On that occasion, I also was having problems getting into the production.
My initial difficulty with both the 2022 “Hamlet” and this 2023 “Richard II” was the history of traditional approaches to Shakespearian plays that I had experienced, and indeed loved, through my six decades or so of theatre-going. Those many earlier performances were wonderful but they had implanted in my head certain conscious and subconscious expectations of what the characters looked and acted like. Once I recognized what was going on in my head as I watched these new approaches to “Hamlet” and “Richard II” and relaxed into the characters as they were being presented to me by these actors, I got totally engaged. I took the plays on their own merits in the here and now and went along for the ride.
And my goodness, what a ride this “Richard II” is. The play came alive, was coherent and authentic, and resonated deeply with my life as a gay man for whom the 1980s were a pivotal time.
I can’t praise highly enough the performance of Stephen Jackson-Torkoff in terms of his strength and vulnerability in portraying the flawed and deeply human King Richard and in his powerful command of Shakespeare’s text. The program notes that, “the entire play is, unusually, composed in verse, with frequent forays into ostentatious rhymes. These locate the play stylistically and temporally in 1595, alongside “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, rather than with the later history plays.”
I already have a ticket for the CanadianStage production of Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance” in March 2024 in which Stephen Jackson-Torkoff will be performing. I saw a production of it in New York in March 2020, the weekend before Broadway closed in the face of the gathering storm of the Covid-19 pandemic. I can’t wait to see it again, this time with Stephen in the cast.
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FB Post, July 14, 2023
I had lunch today with King Richard II (actor Stephen Jackman-Torkoff).
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FB Post, July 14, 2023
My fifth show at this year’s Stratford Festival was “Rent.”
I had never seen a production of it before. Rock musicals are not my standard go-to form of entertainment.
The first half was well-performed. I was struck by the intricate harmonies in the songs and the excellence of the performances. It was quite a full house and, as energetic as the actors were, the audience seemed somewhat lethargic in their response. I certainly wasn’t lethargic but neither was I super-engaged emotionally.
But then came the second act. The emotional intensity ramped up a hundredfold for me in performances of songs such as “Seasons of Love,” “Without You,” and “Goodbye Love.” And I was totally unprepared for the final scene. The impact was like a bomb detonating in my heart. It wiped me out. I left the theatre in tears.
There’s a lot that’s been going on for me during this week in Stratford and this afternoon “Rent” contributed to that emotional richness.
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FB Post, July 15, 2023
My fifth show at this year’s Stratford Festival was “Rent.”
I had never seen a production of it before. Rock musicals are not my standard go-to form of entertainment.
The first half was well-performed. I was struck by the intricate harmonies in the songs and the excellence of the performances. It was quite a full house and, as energetic as the actors were, the audience seemed somewhat lethargic in their response. I certainly wasn’t lethargic but neither was I super-engaged emotionally.
But then came the second act. The emotional intensity ramped up a hundredfold for me in performances of songs such as “Seasons of Love,” “Without You,” and “Goodbye Love.” And I was totally unprepared for the final scene. The impact was like a bomb detonating in my heart. It wiped me out. I left the theatre in tears.
There’s a lot that’s been going on for me during this week in Stratford and this afternoon “Rent” contributed to that emotional richness.
This year’s birthday pic is of me dressed in fancy duds as host/MC at a recent donors’ event of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra where I chair the TSO Maestro’s Club.
I’m dressed much more casually for my weekly volunteering at the meal program for street folk at Saint Luke’s United Church and for my twice/week volunteer shifts at HQ, the new sexual and mental health clinic for gay men, trans and non-binary folk.
Sweat pants and T-shirt suffice for the monthly online gay men’s book club that I curate and host.
Regardless of the apparel, these activities nourish my soul and keep me engaged socially with wonderful people.
The busy schedule can get tiring … I’m 73 after all, not 23. But I hope for many more years of such a satisfying life.
My tree is purple, the colour of the pancreatic cancer ribbon. Wandering nostalgically through the Hudson’s Bay Christmas decorations department in November 2009 just three months after Bill’s death from pancreatic cancer (two weeks after his diagnosis), this tree seemed to leap into my path. I had never seen a purple tree before. Each year now, it is loaded with mementos, some of which will be profiled in coming posts during December. The photo on the wall beside the tree is the last pic that I have of Bill and me together, taken in Puerto Vallarta in about 2005. We are smiling.
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Christmas’21 Pic#2
This is the ornament that Bill and I bought in 1976, our first year together. Bill liked the image on the reverse side – he would say, “that’s us, two waifs in the storm.”
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Christmas’21 Pic#3
People flow into our lives and then sometimes flow out. This beautiful glass ornament was a gift from a couple who used to be good friends. We would visit back and forth in each other’s homes. Then, for reasons lost in the fog of years gone by, we drifted apart. But I still have their gift and think warmly of them each year when I hang it on the tree.
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Christmas’21 Pic#4
When I was putting up my decorations this year and doing some things differently than last year, I found myself with an extra garland strung with lights. I walked around my condo wondering where I might use it. My eyes fell on the book shelves in my living room. Most of my books are in large bookcases in the library (a slightly pretentious name for my second bedroom that I use as a study and office.) But several years ago I was running out of room there and so built a set of shelves in the living room. I culled from the library bookcases, books that had the most significance for me because of how moved I was by them, the sheer beauty of the writing, the poignancy of the story, the usefulness of what I learned from them, the particular circumstances I was in at the time of reading them, the role they played as research material for my own writing, etc. The books on these shelves are special friends whose company I enjoy and it’s nice having them close at hand. I keep adding to their number. So this Christmas, I’m celebrating their friendship with a garland of affection.
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Christmas’21 Pic#5
The Catedral de Mallorca gleamed onshore as I approached the port of Palma de Mallorca several years ago while on a Mediterranean cruise. Construction of the Cathedral began in 1306 and was completed in 1601. Between 1904 and 1914, the renowned Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí completely reworked the Royal Chapel at the front of the central nave. Gaudí is best known as the architect of la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I spent a long time in contemplation sitting in a pew in the Cathedral, staring at Gaudí’s creations, and reflecting on the joys and tragedies in my life, the adventures, the challenges, the richness of relationships, the nourishment from arts and culture, the enjoyment of travel, and the deep satisfaction of home. Two things struck me: gratitude for it all and profound appreciation for the spiritual depth. I bought this Christmas tree ornament in the gift shop as I was leaving the Cathedral. Each year when I hang it on the tree, I am reminded of that conversation with Gaudí and God.
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Christmas’21 Pic#6
Tucked into a corner of my living room is my antique tree. The tree branches are made of dyed goose-feathers. We bought it in the mid-1980s from two friends who ran a gift shop, Yorke Town Designs, in the Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto where Bill and I lived at the time. Goose feather trees originated in the late 19th century in Germany and are considered the earliest style of artificial Christmas tree. Ours is decorated with genuine antique ornaments, some of them over 100 years old, that Bill and I either inherited from our own families or found in antique stores. I like imagining the many Christmases in various homes where they have been lovingly and carefully unwrapped and placed gently on a tree. The bees-wax candles (that are never lit) are mounted in original antique metal bases clipped onto the branches. On the table at the base are two photos from the 1920s of my maternal grandmother’s home with decorated rooms and a big Christmas tree. On the wall above my tree in an old oval frame is a portrait of Bill and me that we had taken in 1977, a year after we’d met. Given the antique nature of the frame, Bill got the idea to have us dress like a couple of frontier homesteaders and to have the photo coloured in sepia-tone to give it an antique flavour. The past lives on and is treasured in this little corner of my home.
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Christmas’21 Pic#7
Our angel atop the antique Christmas tree that I profiled in yesterday’s post.
Bill taught piano and voice to children and adults in our home. He liked working in particular with children who had special learning needs or who came from difficult home situations. Around 1980, a ten-year-old boy brought this construction worker toy to Bill as a Christmas present. It was one of his favourite toys and he wanted to give it to Bill. There was a lot of stress in the boy’s home and Bill had become a very special and supportive adult in his life. He told Bill that the construction worker was for the top of Bill’s Christmas tree. Bill thanked him and replied, “But we put an angel on top of the tree.” The student’s eyes dropped and he said quietly, “So, boys can’t be angels?” Chastened, Bill made a quick recovery, and said excitedly “Of course they can!” He found a couple pipe cleaners (remember them?), fashioned one as a halo and the other as a security belt to hold the construction worker/angel atop the tree. That young boy would be a 50 year old man now. I imagine he remembers Bill. I wish I could let him know that his angel still occupies its place of honour on top of Bill’s Christmas tree.
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Christmas’21 Pic#8
From 1972 to 1981, the Egyptian Government sponsored the blockbuster travelling exhibition “Treasures of Tutankhamen” to raise funds for badly-needed repairs of the Cairo Museum. The exhibition had record-breaking runs at the British Museum, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and others around the world. In the fall of 1979, it arrived at the Art Gallery of Ontario here in Toronto. Bill and I, as longtime AGO members, visited it on the first members’ preview day. When we came into the gift shop at the end of the exhibition, we discovered that there were a few “minor” antiquities that the Egyptian Government had sent to each of the sponsoring museums for sale to patrons. Bill asked the clerk if we could take a look at a sarcophagus head encased in a plexiglass box. We were told that it was likely salvaged from the deteriorated sarcophagus of a royal court official and had been dated as between 2,500 and 3,000 years old. We examined it and Bill said to the clerk, “Okay, thank you,” by which I thought he meant thank you for showing it to us. But no, he meant, thank you, we’ll buy it. We agreed that it would be our Christmas present to each other for that year … and our birthday present to each other … and our anniversary present to each other. You get the idea. We have cherished it in our various homes ever since that November 1979 day. The following year in June 1980, we joined an AGO-sponsored tour of Egypt. We had such a wonderful time.
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Christmas’21 Pic#9
What would you do with that extra avocado that you just didn’t need for the guacamole? Some creative soul decided to cover theirs with paper-mâché, mould it into a Santa face, and paint it. I found it in an out-of-the-way antique shop in the Berkshires (MA) several years ago where this Santa ornament wasn’t the only bit of kink. 😉
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Christmas’21 Pic#10 – Christmas 1970 in Paris.
I took a year off between my third and fourth years studying for my BA psychology degree in Waterloo and went to Paris to have time and solitude to read in areas of interest that I had beyond psychology (philosophy, history of art, theology, literature, etc.) I enrolled at Université de Paris-Sorbonne partly in order to get a student visa that would allow me to stay in the country for a year but mainly so I could access the marvellous Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève with its vast collection of books. It was a monastically solitary year and the most intellectually stimulating of my life – all I did was attend class in the mornings, spend every afternoon reading in the library (except for Thursday and Sunday afternoons when as a student I could explore the Louvre for free), and write in my one room cold-water flat in the evenings. (I took the selfie below on one of those studious evenings in my room.) I sent a letter at one point to my psychology professor back home which I later learned he read to his class describing me approvingly as having sought out my own Walden Pond. I lived on 5 francs a day (about $1 Cdn at the time) which bought me a baguette, a bit of fruit and cheese, and a copy of the paper Le Monde. My one hot meal a week was on Sunday evenings at an Algerian or Tunisian restaurant on the Left Bank after attending the evening organ recital and Mass at Notre Dame.
On the cold, snowy Christmas Eve of that year, I went to the Midnight Mass at Notre Dame. A young man with a backpack sat beside me. We chatted after Mass. He was a Swedish student who had taken a year off his studies to hitchhike around Europe. He had no idea where he would sleep that night. I invited him home to my place. He gratefully accepted the invitation. I had splurged earlier that day and bought a Bûche de Noël that we shared as our Christmas Eve dinner. We slept (platonically) in my single bed and he headed off in the morning. It remains one of the most memorable Christmases of my life.
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Christmas‘21 Pic#11 – Family Memento Crystals, 1st pic of four.
As my parents aged, I was their principal caregiver since both my brothers lived in the US, my younger brother Rick in New York and my older brother Jim in Phoenix. For a number of years, Rick and his wife Diane sent Bill and me one of these beautiful Swarovski crystals each Christmas as a token of appreciation for our caregiving of Mom and Dad. These six crystals have come to hold great significance for me, especially this year, as I now think of them as representing the six immediate family members who have all died – Mom in 2005, Dad in 2007, my brother Rick and my partner Bill in 2009, and my brother Jim and Bill’s (and my) dear Aunt Mame in 2021. I have placed them as my Christmas table centrepiece this year. I watch sunlight sparkle through them in daytime and candlelight reflect off them at night. I marvel at the beauty of these Christmas crystals and I celebrate the lives they represent. (Over the next three days, my posts will feature them in pairs – Bill and Aunt Mame tomorrow, Mom and Dad on Monday, and Rick and Jim on Tuesday.)
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Christmas’21 Pic#12 – Family Memento Crystals, 2nd pic of four. Bill as the man-in-the-moon and Aunt Mame as the smiling sun.
Bill always teased me about the difficulties I had making out the image of the man-in-the-moon. I chose to think of this crystal as representing Bill because sleep was important to him. Six months after we first met in 1976, Bill was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He lived with it all the rest of his life. Fatigue and pain were the main symptoms he experienced. He’d spend a lot of time in bed. And in August 2009 after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and deteriorating rapidly, he was essentially confined to a hospital bed set up in our living room as part of the palliative care. From that bed he could see the moon through our large windows looking out over the city. Aunt Mame brought sunshine into Bill’s and my life. She used to babysit him as a child and was one of the only members of his family who accepted him when he came out (a gay uncle was the other). Aunt Mame and I grew even closer after Bill’s death. This photo of her and me is from May 2014 when I invited her as a special guest on the occasion of my being awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Victoria College (U of T). Aunt Mame had such a joyful personality as is apparent from our beaming smiles in this photo. Aunt Mame died of cancer in April 2021. She had a bronzed baby shoe of her beloved “Billy” buried with her. I marvel at the beauty of these Christmas crystals and I celebrate the lives they represent.
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Christmas’21 Pic#13 – Family Memento Crystals, 3rd pic of four. Mom and Dad.
Though the snowflake crystals are fairly similar, the upper one has more pizzazz which captures Mom’s dynamic extroverted personality. The lower one appears more sedate which is a reflection of Dad’s quiet grounded demeanour. People often said of Dad, “such a gentleman.”I love the pairing of these two photos taken at polar ends of their life together as a couple. The affection and caring between the two of them is deeply engrained in the images, joyful and exuberant as a young couple and compassionate and mutually supportive in their twilight years. I marvel at the beauty of these Christmas crystals and I celebrate the lives they represent.
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Christmas’21 Pic#14 – Family Memento Crystals, 4th pic of four. My younger brother Rick and my older brother Jim.
I’ve chosen the upper Christmas snowflake crystal to represent Rick and the lower one to represent Jim simply because Rick died before Jim and the upper crystal predates the lower one. Rick died by suicide on January 23, 2009. Jim died on January 23, 2021 from Multiple System Atrophy (a rare disease that mimics Parkinson Disease but is more aggressive). The “coincidence“ of them dying on the same date shocked and troubled me. Several months after Jim’s death, a friend whose partner had just died was telling me about weird coincidences that he was experiencing around his home that struck him as perhaps “signs” of comfort from his deceased partner even though he knew that sounded crazy. Something about that conversation stimulated my imagination and I began to conceive of a way in which I could give meaning to the January 23rd coincidence. Even though Jim died of natural causes, perhaps Jim “left” on the anniversary of Rick’s death in order to meet up with Rick on that horrendous date, be reconciled with him, and be together henceforth in whatever spirit realm may exist after death. I then was further jarred when I recognized another “coincidence” – the friend who had told me about the “signs” from his deceased partner was named Ken which was also Dad’s name. So, I took a further step, conjecturing that perhaps I could think of Dad’s spirit having facilitated this coming together of my brothers. All this makes no sense to my rational mind but it sure has granted a massive blessing of meaning and solace to the grief that I carry in my soul.I marvel at the beauty of these Christmas crystals and I celebrate the lives they represent.
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Christmas’21 Pic#15
This beautiful stained glass angel was a gift from dear friends a few years ago. I have an increasing sense of a spiritual dimension of life that transcends our physical lives. My experiences accompanying so many immediate family members as they have died and sensing their on-going presence in my life in undefinable ways provides much fodder for such reflection. Maybe images of angels are useful (and artistic) visual representations of that spirit world. As such, they evoke love and hope.
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Christmas’21 Pic#16
These are old well-used Christmas Carol books. “Yuletide Melodies” doesn’t have a date of publication listed but does have the price printed as “50cents in Canada.” More tellingly, it has my Grandmother’s signature “Mrs. Perschbacher” on the inside cover. Grandma taught piano lessons all her life and, as a single mother, raised her five girls, including my mother, on the proceeds of her teaching supplemented by taking in boarders. Mom used to tell us that she charged 35 cents and refused to change that as the years passed. Grandma started my brothers and me on piano lessons and then Mom took over when Grandma got too old. “The Christmas Carolers’ Book” was printed in 1935 and has my mother’s signature “Lillian Hallman” written on the front cover. Mom sang in the church choir and used this book to play and lead carol singalongs at Christmas parties in our home. “Christmas in Song” is a 1947 publication, stamped “Price: $1.35 In Canada,” and is inscribed in the inside cover with “W. Conklin. Please return.” Bill taught voice and piano to children and adults for the 33 years that we were together as a couple. Finally, “Christmas Carols” is also one of the books that Bill used with his students. It was printed in 1957. Bill’s patience with the students to whom he loaned it must have been wearing a bit thin because he wrote in the front of this book, “Property of W. Conklin. Please return!!” Lots of music played and sung from these books over the years.Group Christmas Carol singing does not hold the place that it once did but it still does occur. This Sunday, some of us members of Saint Luke’s United Church are heading to sing Christmas Carols across the street in Allan Gardens where through our Out-of-the-Cold meal program we distribute hot meals twice a week to homeless folk and others in need. The carols will hopefully provide them with a bit of nourishment too.
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Christmas’21 Pic#17- The cottage Christmas that wasn’t.
A few years after Bill and I met, we bought a rustic cottage in the Kawartha Highlands. It sat on a beautiful heavily-treed lot jutting out into Lake Fortescue with water frontage on three sides. Over the next several years, we did a lot of upgrades, some pragmatic such as insulating (we planned to use it during the winters) and some more extravagant like the large deck on the west side for romantic dinners at sunset. Springtimes were joyful with the purple snowdrops and white trilliums poking up in the woods. In the summers, we often hosted family and friends for fun times on the dock and quiet campfires at night. Falls were spectacular with the changing leaves. And the winters, well, they could be a challenge. We didn’t go up that frequently during winter months except for about five days over Christmas.We had wonderful Christmases there, cross-country skiing on the frozen lake, lights on trees around the cottage, a decorated tree inside with presents underneath, lots to eat along with the eggnog and rum (or Bill’s preference, Southern Comfort). To keep us toasty and warm we had a fireplace and wood burning stove … and each other. It was a magical romantic fairyland for us. Until one Christmas when we could have died.
We drove up on that Christmas Eve, the car packed with our presents, food for five days including a turkey and all the trimmings to be prepared, extra warm clothes, and Rufus the cat in his carrying cage. There had been heavy snowfalls that December and the driving was a bit tricky. The private lane from the county road to our cottage was about a mile in length and was never plowed. We always left our snowmobile with trailer parked at the end of the lane and would use that to get to the cottage. But on this occasion, the snowmobile would not start. Neither Bill nor I were mechanically-inclined and we couldn’t figure out what the problem was. It was either a moonless night or overcast. I remember that it was very dark. The snow was so deep that we sank up to our knees with each step. Our snowshoes were, of course, in the cottage. We had no option but to walk in the lane carrying supplies. We couldn’t carry everything so we started the first trip with the most important, including Rufus. It took a long time and we were exhausted. But once in the cottage, I got a fire going in the wood stove, and we warmed up. My legs were so tired from the slog that the muscles were twitching. I lay down for a moment to let them calm down … and promptly fell sound asleep. Bill was anxious about the supplies that were still in the car and, being the determined man that he was, put on his snowshoes and trudged out for another load. I woke up at some point and discovered to my alarm that he was missing. I raced up the lane (as much as one can race while wearing clunky snowshoes) and found him about half way back dragging a load of more supplies that he had retrieved from the car. He wouldn’t let me help him. He was convinced that he could make it to the cottage and insisted that I head to the car to get the final load. With great difficult but even greater perseverence he did make it to the cottage. And this is the guy who several years earlier had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis of which fatigue was a major symptom. I eventually got back to the cottage as well with the final load.As each of us had made our trips back and forth, we would stop for short rest breaks but had to discipline ourselves not to lay down on the snow and especially not to rest our heads down or we seriously risked falling asleep and freezing to death. During what was left of the night, Bill would occasionally wake up and then rouse me to confirm that he was in fact in our bed in the warm cottage and not asleep on the snow hallucinating that he was in the cottage. The experience so traumatized us that the next day, Christmas Day, we packed up Rufus and the food, headed back out the lane to the car, and drove home to Toronto. We left our presents at the cottage. We’d open them in the spring.
We sold the cottage the following year. The magic was gone.
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Christmas’21 Pic#18 – my Charlie Brown Christmas Tree
Several years ago, I dropped into my local garden centre in December hoping to find a small potted evergreen that I could decorate with lights and place on my balcony. I had left it too late. They had no trees left. As I was about to leave, I noticed some of the summer supplies piled in a back corner including wire pyramid frames used to stake tomato plants. An idea was born. I bought one.Back home, I took a couple lengths of artificial cedar roping and wound them around the frame. I then intertwined some lights and attached Christmas ornaments securing them well. I mounted my creation on a sturdy wrought iron urn and wired it tightly against the balcony railing. Voilá, my balcony Christmas tree.Because it is an open frame skeleton, wind can pass through it easily. It has withstood five or six Christmases on my balcony and is still, more or less, in good shape. However, the winds on a 31st floor balcony have left their imprint. From the side in the daylight photo, you can see how the frame has gradually bent over time. But it is an evocative distortion of the original shape. As soon as I had put it up this year and stood back to admire it, I noticed the significant tilt. The image of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree came to mind. With that recognition, I was more pleased than ever with my humble creation.
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Christmas’21 Pic#19 – Orient Express
A luggage tag is an unusual ornament to hang on one’s Christmas tree. But given that my tree is primarily decorated with meaningful mementos, this tag from my 2010 trip on the Orient Express fits in well.Bill and I had each been to Venice as students before we met and we went together in 1999. We were making plans to visit once more as the starting point for an excursion on the Orient Express. And then Bill died. I knew that he would still want me to go so I took the trip alone in October 2010. It was an emotional memorial trip. This baggage tag is a tangible reminder. I spent a week in Venice first before boarding the train that would take me to Prague, Paris, and London over the course of five days.Bill loved Murano glass but during our 1999 trip we never made it to Murano Island to see the glass factories where they make their beautiful creations. I went this time … accompanied, I sensed, by Bill’s spirit. I had no intention of buying anything. But after exploring the fascinating (and hot) glass-blowing factories, I wandered into a few stores. I was instantly enamoured by a graceful light fixture that I saw in one shop designed to look like acanthus leaves. I knew immediately where I’d like to have it – hanging in the library in our condo above the desk where I sit to write on one side and where Bill’s chair rests on the other side. I bought it, had it shipped, and mounted it in the library.Bill finally had his own Murano glass chandelier … and he’s been generous in sharing it with me ever since.
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Christmas’21 Pic#20 – Stratford Christmases
Having sold our cottage in the late 1980s, Bill and I started looking for an out-of-Toronto place for weekends, summers, and Christmas times (where we wouldn’t need a snowmobile to get from the road to our house cf. Christmas’21 Pic#17). We settled on Stratford as the location for two main reasons – it was close to Waterloo where my parents lived and for whom I was assuming increasing caregiving and secondly, Bill and I loved the Stratford Festival. As kids, we had both gone on school trips to see plays and Bill had actually sung in the tent in the first season when he was a boy chorister in a Toronto Anglican choir that gave a concert at the Festival. As a couple, we had come to the Stratford Festival many times to see plays. In 1991, we bought an 1887 Victorian house in the downtown area. It had been duplexed years before which was what we were looking for on the expectation that one or other of our sets of parents might need our help with accommodation as they aged. As it turned out, Bill’s parents lived with us in the upstairs unit from 1993 until their deaths.
We did a lot of restoration and renovation in the first few years that we owned it. The house had not been in good shape when we bought it. Bill, with his fine design sense and drawing on photos of the house that he found in the Stratford City archives, restored the exquisite historical details, added a wonderful conservatory with large windows on the back, transformed the grass lawns in front and back into magnificent gardens, and rearranged the layout of some of the rooms to be both more useful for our living purposes but also more amenable to entertaining.
And entertaining we did, a lot, particularly grand garden parties in the summers and big Christmas Open House parties in December. We found Stratford to be a very social town. We made friends quickly amongst our neighbours, cast and crew members in the Stratford Festival company, and the large gay population of the town. For one summer garden party, we decorated the yard with streamers and balloons, rented half a dozen long banquet tables, set them end-to-end in the garden with the fifty or so guests seated around them, and served a six-course Italian meal complete with lots of wine. A few fireworks capped off the evening. But it was our big Christmas Open House parties that became something of a tradition during the twenty years that we owned the house. We would schedule them on a Sunday in December. They were come-and-go sorts of affairs with people arriving anytime between 2pm and 10pm (though the party often went on much later). Over the course of the Open House, we would usually see 100-125 people come through. The pile of winter boots in the front vestibule was quite a sight. I love this photograph of Bill as host-extraordinaire taken at one of those Christmas parties. The joy and effervescence of his personality shine through. I sold the house in 2010, the year after Bill died.
(The first pic below is of the house when we bought it in 1991 and the second pic is after we completed the restoration/renovation. The third pic shows Christmas decorations outside with wreaths on the railings, cedar roping embedded with lights around the door, and one of our multiple inside Christmas trees through the front window. In the pic of my Bill, dear friend Bill Aitchison, (aka Didi Chenille, also aka Billy DeVine the piannaman) is at the piano leading robust Christmas carol singing.)
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Christmas’21 Pic#21 – The Millennium Christmas Party
The biggest party that Bill and I ever had in Stratford was in December of 2000 to celebrate three events – the beginning of the new Millennium, the year of my 50th Birthday, and the upcoming year of our 25th Anniversary as a couple. We decided the occasion merited a dinner and dance for lots of friends and family and was too ambitious to be accommodated in our house. So we rented the ballroom of the Queen’s Hotel (of course) in downtown Stratford. Stratford was quite magical that night with sparkling freshly fallen snow and Christmas lights around town like at City Hall. Most of the people who came were friends from Stratford, but others came from Kitchener-Waterloo (including my parents), some from Toronto, and my brother Rick and his wife Diane flew in from New York. The evening started with drinks and hors d’oeuvres followed by a big buffet and then dancing late into the night. Bill and I circulated non-stop chatting with everyone. A precious photo from the party is this one of my parents on the dance floor. Dad was starting to manifest signs of dementia and Mom was having mobility problems but they weren’t going to pass up this opportunity to dance. It was the last time that they were able to do so.At the end of the party, Bill and I went around letting everyone select one of these small silver and blue Christmas decorations as a little take-away of the evening. We had been in Paris the previous month and bought a whole bunch of them for this purpose of distributing them at the party.In the photo of these remaining ornaments, they are sitting on a silver platter which was what Bill and I carried around the room that night laden with lots of these decorations. Our names are inscribed in the middle of the platter with the date of our first date. You can’t see it in the photo but around the outside of the platter are the names of our parents: Adelle and William, Lillian and Kenneth.
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Christmas’21 Pic#22
To the surprise of none of you, my Facebook friends, mine is a proudly gay home including (especially?) at Christmas.
– The twisted rainbow Christmas tree was a gift several years ago from two friends who knew well my passion for Christmas decorations and my robust gay Pride;
– The rainbow-coloured bells sitting at its base are a gift this Christmas from a friend who visited the other night. He’s one of about a dozen gay friends whose partners have died since Bill’s death in 2009. The glass cherub candle holders on either side are gifts from another of these gay widow friends and had been bought years ago by his deceased partner. These are precious Christmas gifts for me this year. I have endeavoured to provide support to all these guys in their grief journeys based on my experience in losing Bill. The support has been mutual. Many long conversations about love and loss with lots of tears and laughter have taken place in this home so imbued with Bill’s spirit;
– The decorations on the tree of a pink triangle, a rainbow-coloured triangle, and an AIDS ribbon represent my lifelong experience as an openly gay man engaged personally, professionally, and politically in the struggles for justice and equality and who has been HIV+ since 1993 remaining healthy thanks to good medical care, exercise, nutrition, and rest;
– I’ve hosted many gay parties in my home ranging from quiet intimate dinners, to raucous Christmas celebrations with 60-70 guys that went late into the night, and unique events like “A Queer Classical Music Soirée” organized in Pride month 2019 with my friend composer/pianist Adam Sherkin where 50+ classical-music-loving gay men attended raising money for Rainbow Railroad that helps queer folk escape persecution and violence in their home countries;
My two major volunteer engagements in retirement are with Saint Luke’s United Church and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. In both, I’ve been open as a gay man and they’ve been open in their embrace of me:
– At Saint Luke’s, I chaired our process of becoming an Affirming Congregation in 2012 and during World Pride in Toronto in 2014 we hung a large welcoming banner;
– At the Toronto Symphony, I chair the TSO Maestro’s Club (the association of donors) where I act as host in the members’ lounge and where many of the women tell me how much they appreciate that I notice and comment on their beautiful outfits (an awareness I attribute to my gay sensibility, lol) compliments they don’t get from their fashion-challenged oblivious heterosexual husbands, and I am pleased at how each June the TSO recognizes Pride month in a variety of musical and other ways including adapting their logo to incorporate the progressive gay flag.
Celebrating gay life with gratitude at Christmas time and year round with all its joy, energy, sorrows, loves, losses, friendships, challenges, and hope.
*****
Christmas’21 Pic#23
Over the past weeks, I’ve shared photos and stories about many of my Christmas decorations. Here I post a view of the full Christmas fairyland in my condo. I took the photo on an evening prior to the arrival of guests for a Christmas dinner party that occurred early in December before Omicron exploded into our lives.
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Christmas’21 Pic#24 – Handel’s “Messiah”
I went to a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” just prior to the Omicron variant really exploding in our midst. Fatigued by the pandemic and nervous about what might yet be coming, I was badly in need of something to lift my spirits and I got it through the beautiful “Messiah” performance. It brought to mind a previous TSO/TMC “Messiah” performance ten years ago about which I wrote a blog post at the time.
On this Christmas Eve of 2021 when hope seems to be in short supply, it feels appropriate to re-share that blog. Originally posted on Dec. 15, 2011 on https://davidghallman.wordpress.com:
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The Secret Message in Handel’s “Messiah”
George Frideric Handel hid a secret message in his “Messiah” when he composed his masterpiece oratorio in 1741. The incredible code has remained undetected until last night when I discovered it at the conclusion of a brilliant performance by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and soloists.
Let me explain.
My partner Bill was a music teacher of piano and voice. Over our thirty-three years together, hundreds of children and adults came to our home for lessons. They adored him. Bill was something of a larger-than-life character and highly respected as a music teacher. He always had a waiting list of students anxious to secure a place. With the children, he had infinite patience. With the adults, not so much.When Bill and I first met in 1976, fell in love, and started living together, we discovered that one of the things we shared in common was a passion for music, especially classical music. There was always music playing in our home. Over the decades, we went to countless musical events in Toronto and in major concert halls and opera houses around the world.One of our favourite Christmas traditions was attending the TSO performance of Handel’s “Messiah” every year. Bill was suddenly and unexpectedly diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer on August 7, 2009. He died two weeks later in our home. The story of those incredible two weeks and of our thirty-three-year love affair is told in my memoir “August Farewell.”
As with many people who lose a loved one, there is a powerfully-charged emotional dilemma about what to do with the special traditions that were shared together. My choice has been to embrace the traditions come what may.And so, in a fragile state, I was at Roy Thomson Hall last night for the annual performing of Handel’s “Messiah.”I held it together pretty well throughout the performance … until the finale.
The oratorio ends with a chorus concluding in a stunning choral “Amen” that soars on for three to four minutes.All of a sudden, as the 150 voices of the massed choir were reverberating through the concert hall, I wasn’t hearing “A—men, A—men, A—men,…”I was hearing “Hall—man, Hall—man, Hall—man,…”
Throughout our thirty-three years together, Bill always called me “Hallman” – “hey, Hallman, where’s my coffee?”, “nice work, Hallman”, “I realize I frustrate you sometimes, Hallman, but you know that I love you”…
The choir sang on and on. “Hall—man, Hall—man, Hall—man,…” surrounded me, poured over me, embraced me. Tears streamed down my cheeks, tears of sadness mixed with joy and overlaid with hope.
Bill was directing a chorus of angels calling out my name.
At least that’s how I experienced it.I know that Handel’s coded love note from Bill to me was discernible to my ears only. No matter. It was intended for me after all.
****
So on this Christmas Eve 2021, as we deal with the sadness of this on-going pandemic, let us not lose touch with the joy that still resides in our hearts through our relationships past and present, and let us not lose hope in a future where love, whether sung to us by a chorus of angels or not, will carry us on.
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Christmas’21 Pic#25
Merry Christmas, my dear friends. Pottery crèche that Bill and I bought in Colombia forty years ago resting on a crocheted tablecloth that Mom made sixty years ago.
Happy Pride Sunday, everyone. June is Pride Month, a time when the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Two-Spirited community, along with those who support us, have a special focus on our long struggle against persecution and discrimination individually and as a community, to celebrate the progress made, and to recommit to helping others particularly those in more repressive countries when gay and lesbian people are still being oppressed and, in some cases, killed because of their sexual orientation.
Our choir prepared a short video this year for Pride to be part of a larger production from the Toronto United Church Pride Network. Our video is based around the hymn “Come in, come in and sit down, you are a part of the family. We are lost and we are found, and we are a part of the family.”
“We are a part of the family.” I want to talk about three types of family this morning – our biological family, our chosen family (a term that’s very important to many gay people who have been rejected by their biological family), and thirdly our spiritual family. In today’s Gospel, Jesus had some interesting observations about family that relate to each of these types of family – biological, chosen, and spiritual. I’ll get to those comments of Jesus in a moment.
Regarding our biological families, every gay person has a story about coming out to their families. And many of those stories do not end happily. What many people have not understood is that various sexual orientations and gender identities are part of the wonderful diversity of God’s creation. My sexual orientation as homosexual is as fundamental and intrinsic to my nature as heterosexuality is for straight people. But for centuries, homosexuality has been seen and treated in societies as a sickness, a crime, and a sin.
My coming out story to my family is one of the happier ones. My parents, particularly my mother, seemed to know that I was gay long before I told them when I was about twenty. They were supportive but they also admitted that they were worried that I would face discrimination in my life and they worried about whether I would find a loving partner.
Well, I did find a loving partner. And many of you knew Bill. Bill and I were together as a gay couple for thirty-three years until his sudden death in August 2009, two weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Bill was not so fortunate in coming out to his parents as I had been. They rejected him and he was estranged from them for much of his adult life. But later in life, his parents ran into financial difficulties, and Bill and I took them in to live with us in our home in Stratford. They lived with us for over a decade until their deaths.
There was one member of Bill’s family who was always supportive of him – his Aunt Mame. She used to babysit him as a child and the two of the remained very close all their lives. After Bill’s death in 2009, Aunt Mame and I became very close. We used to talk on the phone a lot and send emails back and forth. At one point, she wrote, ”I am very, very happy that we are still in each other’s lives. Love Aunt Mame.” She just died in April of this year and it’s a huge loss to me.
Now, I want to say a few words about chosen families. We use the term “chosen family” to refer to friends who become very important in our lives and with whom we develop loving ties that bind us for life. Some of you will recall that after Bill died, I had a memorial service for him at Saint Luke’s on Sunday afternoon September 13th, 2009. Many of you stayed after the morning worship to attend the memorial service. Many of you provided generous assistance with hosting the reception after the service. Hoon Kim, Gordon Winch, and Malcolm Finlay all participated in leadership. The church was packed. Over four hundred people. There were members of the Saint Luke’s congregation and a few members of Bill’s and my biological families but the vast majority were members of Bill’s and my chosen family, friends with whom we had become close over the years. For many gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and two-spirited people whose families have either been hostile or grudgingly accepting, our chosen families become the most important people in our lives because they accept us fully. Many in our chosen families are also gay of course. This helps explain why a sense of community is so important among gay people. For many of us, our friends in the gay community are our family.
Now let me turn to the third type of family, our spiritual family. In the Gospel reading this morning, Jesus makes some very curious comments about family. It seems that he had a fluid definition of family. He was preaching to a crowd and his family came to see him. Quoting from the Gospel of Matthew:
A crowd was sitting around him; and they said, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers.” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 3: 32-35).
Jesus has an expansive definition of family. He says, that whoever does the will of God is my spiritual family.
Saint Luke’s is a fundamental part of my spiritual family. Bill and I had been living in the Beach area of Toronto and going to a United Church there. In 2005, we moved back downtown. On weekends, I was often traveling on business or tied up in meetings. So Bill started visiting United Churches in the area to find one for us to attend. Some had professional choirs or high-powered preachers but, for him, something was missing. Then one Sunday he came to Saint Luke’s. When he walked into the sanctuary before the service, a bunch of young boys were running around, probably Justin, Abraham, and Jepath, I suspect. One of them stopped when he saw Bill. “I haven’t seen you here before,” the young boy said. “Well, no, this is my first time,” Bill replied. “Oh, well, welcome,” the kid said and then tore off to continue playing with his friends. Before the service began, over a dozen people approached Bill and welcomed him. When I got home that evening from my meeting, the first thing Bill said to me when I walked through the door was, “I’ve found our spiritual home.” And so, we started attending Saint Luke’s and you welcomed of us warmly as a gay couple. The support from the Saint Luke’s family around the time of Bill’s death was very meaningful to me.
And then in 2014, as a congregation we went through the study process leading up to becoming an Affirming Congregation. It is out of that process that we have the Affirming Statement that we read at the beginning of every service. The photos in the choir’s Pride video are from the Covenanting Service at the culmination of that process.
In the Gospel, Jesus talks about those sitting around him as part of his spiritual family. Pointing to them, he says, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Just as those people living around him then and there were part of his spiritual family so the Saint Luke’s family here and now is part of my spiritual family.
But there is second aspect of spiritual family that comes out for me in this morning’s scripture lessons. In the Epistle reading in 2nd Corinthians, we hear,
So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day … For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. (2nd Corinthians 4:16, 5:1)
I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately and what comes after death. Over the past fifteen years, I have accompanied during their last days, eight immediate family members – my parents, Bill’s parents, my two brothers, Bill, and Aunt Mame.
None of us knows what happens after death. In my faith journey, I have been struggling with this question, particularly given the number of family deaths I have been present for. The Scriptures, like these verses in Corinthians, point to some way that our “inner nature” is welcomed into God’s house after death. So do we reunite with our loved ones, whether members of our biological or chosen families, in a new spiritual family hosted by God?
Though I don’t know the answer, I do occasionally get glimpses. And one of those happened during our Saint Luke’s Zoom worship service on Sunday, January 17th of this year. That was the Sunday that Malcolm Finlay preached. He had just begun his sermon when my cell phone rang. I noticed that it was a call from Jaye, my sister-in-law in Phoenix. I stepped away from my computer and took the call because my brother Jim was in very poor health and nearing death. Jim had woken up enough to be able to speak so Jaye called me right away. Jim and I had a brief emotional conversation. It was a video call so I was able to see him. We said how much we loved each other. The call only lasted a few minutes. Jim was too weak to continue. After the call ended, I came back into my study and sat down again at the computer. The service was continuing. Malcolm was preaching. Seeing everyone on the screen, it seemed to me like you all were the visible incarnation of God’s presence for me at that moment. You were the incarnation of God’s arms wrapping around me holding me after I had just had those precious few moments with my dying brother. The following Sunday during the celebrations and concerns, I shared with you, my spiritual family, the story about that call and the news that my brother Jim had died on Saturday.
It felt like more than a coincidence for that video call with Jim, the last time we were able to see and speak to each other, to have happened during my Sunday worship with my spiritual family. It felt like a sign of God’s presence connecting life here and now and life after and beyond, a spiritual family that binds in some mysterious way the realms of this world and the next.
So, I feel blessed to have had a biological family almost all of whom have unfortunately died, to have a large chosen family who are very much alive, and to have a spiritual family that includes both you folks alive and well at Saint Luke’s and others whom I’ve loved in my life and whom I still love but who have passed into God’s arms.
I have felt welcomed in all three types of family and I try to contribute to the well-being of all three.
I invite you, similarly, to give thanks to God for your biological, your chosen, and your spiritual families. For God is the foundation of all the various types of families that we have with all their uniqueness and diversity.
As we say in The United Church’s New Creed,
“In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.”
Aunt Mame, my deceased partner Bill’s favourite aunt, died today of a cancer that was detected a few months ago and progressed rapidly. I send my deepest condolences to her family and close friends who cared for her with such love.
Aunt Mame babysat Bill as a child and they were close all his life. She was supportive of Bill when he came out and she embraced me when Bill and I became a couple. She and I developed an especially deep connection after Bill’s sudden death in 2009, two weeks after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. She loved “August Farewell”, the memoir I wrote about Bill, and she shared it with her friends. She told me that she was proud of us and wanted others to be introduced to this story of a loving gay couple. As recently as two weeks ago, she lent her copy of “August Farewell” to the palliative care nurse looking after her; hearing Aunt Mame talk about Bill and me, the nurse expressed interest in reading it.
Aunt Mame and I stayed in regular touch with each other through the years. She was always interested in hearing about my travels, enjoyed the photos I sent her, and was keen to learn about interesting people I was meeting through my TSO involvement. We would chat about what was going on in each other’s lives, the fun stuff and the difficult stuff. We found it delightful that we shared the same birthdate of July 7th.
In 2014 on the day I was given an Honorary Doctorate by Victoria College, University of Toronto, I hired a car and driver to bring Aunt Mame from her home in Sutton to Toronto for the Convocation ceremony. She was thrilled to be there and I was thrilled to have her with me. We both wished Bill could have been present and we both knew he was. The pic below is from that day.
Years ago, I gave Aunt Mame a bronzed set of Bill’s baby shoes as a memento of him. She was touched by the gift and told me, “I loved my Billy so much. I’ll have these buried with me.” During our final phone conversation, she told me that those arrangements were in place.
She had been in hospital but, as she wished, she was able to spend some of her final days in her own home with in-home palliative care before being transferred to a hospice. We had in-home palliative care for Bill too when he was dying and I can still picture Aunt Mame’s visit. Here is what I wrote about it in “August Farewell”:
* * *
Friday, August 14, 2009
Bill’s aunt Marion, one of his father’s sisters, comes down from Sutton for a visit this afternoon, driven into Toronto by a friend more accustomed to city traffic than she. Mame, as Bill affectionately called her over the years, sent a letter earlier this week:
“My heart is just aching over your diagnosis. I am so sorry. The only comfort I have is your relationship with God. You have never doubted his love for you or that he walks with you at all times…“
Mame arrives with a bouquet of roses and a card addressed to both Bill and me for our anniversary coming up next week. She is the only family member to acknowledge it.
I try to wake Bill and tell him that Aunt Mame is here to visit him. She leans over the rail of the hospital bed set up in our living room and kisses his forehead. With the pain and the morphine, he’s been going in and out of consciousness the last few days. But he opens his eyes, looks directly at her, and seems to smile. She sits by the bed holding his hand, reminiscing about years gone by, thanking him for his concern for her over the years, and laughing about their many phone conversations.
Blinking back tears from her eyes, she turns to me. “You know my friends were so impressed that Billy used to call me all the way from Mexico when you boys were down there in February each year. And last October, when there was all the publicity about the economic crisis, he phoned and told me not to worry, everything would work out all right. He even asked me if I needed any financial assistance, which I didn’t, of course, because of my pension. My best friend was so jealous because she said that her own son didn’t show as much concern about her as my nephew showed me.”
Turning back to Bill she says, “Well, little Billy, I shouldn’t overstay my welcome. I can tell you are tired. Just remember that I love you so much and I’ll be praying for you.”
I’m grateful that she’s family. To me as well as to Bill.
* * *
The past few months and especially these final weeks have been very difficult for Aunt Mame and for us who love her so much. The diagnosis was terminal and the day by day journey toward that end has been inexorable. But she was often our comforter. On occasion when she found herself still alive, she would joke, “Oh, I see I missed the bus again.” She told me in our final phone conversation, “I want you to listen closely, David. You need to know that I am at peace and not afraid of dying.”
That was an almost identical role as her nephew Bill played twelve years earlier when he was consoling his distraught partner, family, and friends telling us, “I know you’re upset and worried for me but everything is going to be okay. The pain will be over. I’m going soon. I just ask one thing of you. Be kind, to yourselves and each other.”
Aunt Mame was a beautiful, vivacious, and caring woman. She has been such a blessing in my life. I will miss her terribly.
* * *
Aunt Mame and I had so many conversations over the years, some in person but many more by phone and email. A few samples of her messages to me:
February 19, 2011: “I was in bed reading the last of August Farewell and I was in tears. Your’s and Bill’s story is so very beautiful. You had everything – together. What happiness you found with each other. That’s really kind of rare. You knew Bill’s every need and want, sick or well. What a blessing you were to each other.”
April 12, 2012: ”I am very, very happy that we are still in each other’s lives. Love Aunt Mame”
April 4, 2014: “Dear David. I am still sitting here completely stunned. What a beautiful gesture arranging for me to come to your honorary degree Convocation. I am overwhelmed. I have never had anyone treat me with such kindness before. You are one of a kind, David. No wonder Bill loved you for so many years. Love Aunt Mame”
August 17, 2015: “Happy Anniversary and thanks for the photos. Obsess all you want, David. With wonderful memories that you shared with Bill, it would be very sad to let them just grow old and fade into the past. I know that I am very prejudiced, but I think you do everything right. Enjoy your past!! Lots of love, Aunt Mame”
December 30, 2018: “I am so sorry that you are having this heart problem. You are young and healthy and it is better to have the open-heart surgery now, rather than wait until you are older and, perhaps, not as healthy as you are right now. Please take care. My heart will be with you on your surgery date. Love, Aunt Mame.”
January 23, 2021: “Dear David. I am sincerely sorry about your loss of your brother Jim. You have really known a lot of sorrow in your life. Your heart must be broken. Take care of yourself, and stay well. Love, Aunt Mame”
February 13, 2021: “It’s a wonderful feeling going back over the past through our pictures. Thank you, David, for sending these. They’re beautiful. I hope you are well, and keeping safe. Love, Aunt Mame”
Pics:- Aunt Mame and I celebrating together in 2014 on the day I was given an Honorary Doctorate by Victoria College, University of Toronto. – the last pic I have of Bill and me together taken in about 2005 in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel “The Prophets” is one of the best books that I have read. It is not a perfect piece of writing. But, for me, it is a masterful piece of writing for a simple reason. It speaks to me.
I could name many excellent books that I have read but where “The Prophets” leaps ahead of many of them in my estimation is the profound degree to which it drew me in personally at many levels – artistic, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and perhaps most of all, spiritual. I became engaged with the story and the writing so profoundly because, I think, it spoke to four issues that are in the forefront of my consciousness these days, specifically:
Memory and the future;
grief and suffering;
the capacity for same-sex love in hostile environments; and
a spiritual dimension to life that transcends time and our physical existence while simultaneously being grounded immanently, intrinsically, inherently in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts.
So, my reaction to “The Prophets” is intensely personal and subjective. I’m responding to it through my current obsessions.
Before exploring these four themes, let me comment on the writing style. I‘m sure it’s not to everyone’s tastes but it sure is to mine. Robert Jones Jr. writes with such a poetic, lyrical, and metaphorical style, it’s as if I’m listening to symphonic music throughout the entire reading process, music of many genres (some quite foreign to me) and of many varying intensities, rhythms, and techniques from quietly melodic to raucously cacophonous. Many of the chapters are instrumental solos, some are rapturous duets, a number are exquisite chamber ensembles, and a few are full-blown orchestral explosions.
One of the ways in which this musical writing style manifests itself is the way that Jones seamlessly interweaves three levels of narrative: a description of the action; the characters’ emotional and psychological reactions; and a meta level that draws in connections from distant pasts and from spiritual dimensions beyond our traditional western rationalist understandings. Almost every paragraph Jones writes in “The Prophets” draws on all three components in such an organic manner that we experience it as a whole, unaware of these distinct levels until we step out of the narrative for a moment.
Now to my themes.
Memory and the future:
In the chapter entitled “Maggie,” Jones writes: The pounding in her chest subsided and she scratched her cheek to stop from weeping. Was it memory or prophesy? She couldn’t tell. Sometimes, there was no difference. She held on to herself regardless and put past and future things as far away as they would let her – as though that mattered. Visions had the keys to the cage and would let themselves out whenever they pleased. This condition had to be lived with. There was no other way. (pg. 37)
This speaks to me because of my life experience over the past twenty years of the deaths of so many family members. I feel a calling, from wence I don’t understand, to preserve my memories of the lives of these deceased loved ones and of my relationships with them. But the memories are not just cognitive mementos to be pasted in a scrapbook of sorts. They have an on-going presence in my life. I interact with the memories, the painful and the joyful and the in-between. They have a lived reality in my life today. And there are patterns emerging out of this “blood memory” (to adopt a word that Jones uses) that colour not just the present but seem to extend into the future, scoping out possibilities yet unrealized, anticipating the unanticipatable. “The Prophets” in a wholly different context put into words for me what I experience as the on-going reality in my life of these loved ones who no longer exist in functioning corporeal bodies and who, I feel, will somehow continue to interact with me into an unknown future.
grief and suffering – so many examples in “The Prophets”:
the scars lined them the same way bark lined trees. But those weren’t the worst ones. The ones you couldn’t see: those were the ones that streaked the mind, squeezed the spirit, and left you standing outside in the rain, naked as at birth, demanding that the drops stop touching you. (pg. 60);
when Kossii in the bowels of the slave ship discovers that his lover and newly married bridegroom Elewa was dead: and the words couldn’t leave his lips. Stuck in the crevices of his mouth and tying his tongue. He wanted to scream, but a lump lodged itself in his throat and the air couldn’t flow. He coughed until the tears, finally, from somewhere, somehow, ran and the saliva too, leaked, and his face pulled itself into foolishness … ‘Disaster’, he thought. ‘A pure, plain, disaster.’ Not only because of what he had already lost but also because of what he would have to lose. (pg. 245-6)
I marvel at Jones’s capacity to describe in excruciating detail not only the physical realities of torture, pain, and suffering but also the psychological and emotional components that are often hidden from view.
the capacity for same-sex love in hostile environments:
Samuel and Isaiah were drawn to each other from the first moments when the child Isaiah, having been torn from his parents at a slave auction, arrives at the planation with a wagon load of other new slaves and Samuel, having been there already for a while, offers him water; (pg. 13)
And that connection grew: Isaiah watched as Samuel’s untrusting eyes fully embraced him. He saw himself there, in the gaze of the deepest shade of brown he had seen outside of dreams, warm and enjoyed. He opened his own eyes a bit more, inviting Samuel in so that he could feel the warmth was waiting for him, too. (pg. 18)
And in the last chapter entitled “Isaiah”:… the tip of Samuel’s trembling tongue on the edge of Isaiah’s impatient nipple. That was the thing to make the heads roll back and the face worship sky. That was the thing to unfurl itself, a delicate bloom holding on to the dew like joy. That was the thing to cause the many waters to rush toward the calm and therefore to harbour. Yes. That was the thing. (pg. 361)
And others could see it too, even their betrayer Amos: “…it was well known that Samuel and Isaiah inspired everything around them to dance: some old folk, the children, flies, the tips of tall grass … Amos covered his eyes because Isaiah and Samuel were bright and coated in a shining the likes of which he had never seen. A shame that he would have to be the one to smash it.” (pg. 76)
Some may find Jones’s descriptions of the magic love emanating between Samuel and Isaiah to be too romantically depicted, using “romantic” here in its literary pejorative sense. But I don’t. I relish this writing. In part because I’ve experienced that “shining” in the past in contexts that sought to negate our love. And in part because I long to experience it again.
a spiritual dimension to life that transcends time and our physical existence while simultaneously being grounded immanently, intrinsically, inherently in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts.
I don’t know what I believe about life after death. “Believe” is the wrong term to use here. We don’t and can’t know in an empirical sense what follows death and so there’s nothing that we can say that we believe in in the same way that in these pandemic days we can say that “we believe in the science.” Figuring out what we think or feel about life after death is more a matter of faith. And my faith is in a pretty confused state these days. But I’m finding that that confusion is actually quite a fertile place to be and I’m enjoying it. The reason that I’m so immersed in these reflections is, in part, because of the writing that I’m doing called “A Tapestry of Dyings” where I’m chronicling and reflecting upon my journeys with seven family members as they’ve died.
This kind of territory is the very ground that “The Prophets” traverses, at least as I read it:
As the spirits address the reader in “Judges”, the first chapter:
Forgive our laughter.
You thought you were the living and we were the dead.
Haha. (pg. 2)
Maggie to Samuel in the chapter called “Samuel”:
Maggie pointed outside, and Samuel saw a shadow flash.
“Uh huh, You seen it, too. I can tell by your eyes,” she said. “That mean you got it.”
Samuel was still looking outside but the shadow had already passed. “Got what?”
“The favor. It something that get passed down. Sometimes skips a generation, but you got it somehow…what I saying is there be a whole better place for you and Isaiah, maybe not somewhere, but sometime. Whether that particular time is in front or behind, I ain’t got no power to tell.” (pg. 302-3)
“The Prophets” is replete with instances where the characters, specifically the Black characters, are aware of further realities beyond their physical enslavement and encounter mystical personalities, signs, manifestations other than those tangibly around them. Some of them recognize this spiritual dimension to life and embrace it. Some of them try to fight it. The white characters, in Jones’s telling, are oblivious to it and, I think, for good reason. The white characters think that they are in control and exert that control on everything and everyone around them. They don’t realize that there is so much more going on around them than they’re aware of.
I have a sense that there is so much more going on around me than I am aware of. A spiritual dimension or dimensions beyond the physical. And I’ve gotten glimpses of that most intensely at the moments of death that I’ve witnessed.
The light grew brighter and brighter and Samuel screamed.
“KAYODE!”
The tiny bits of light that were once Samuel, maybe still Samuel, swirled upward, into the night, with no regard for who or what they were leaving behind, blinking, twinkling. (pg. 368-9)
I’m sorry to report that my older brother Jim died today, January 23rd, in Phoenix where he lived with his wife Jaye. January 23rd is also the date on which my younger brother died in 2009.
About ten years ago, Jim was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. But this past fall he started to deteriorate quite rapidly and his doctors came to the conclusion that he was suffering from the rare Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), a disease that mimics Parkinson’s symptoms but is more aggressive and more destructive of bodily organs. His decline since early December has been rapid and inexorable.
Throughout his long illness and the extremely challenging final months, Jaye cared for Jim with incredible perseverance, sensitivity, and compassion. During the last few weeks, she was assisted by in-home palliative care with nurses and personal support workers visiting several days a week.
Because of the pandemic, my two nieces who live in Canada were not able to visit their dying father.
Nor was I.
Jaye made sure that we all had opportunity for video calls with Jim while he was still aware enough to recognize us.
Photos: – Jim and his wife Jaye with me here during a visit to Toronto in 2015. – In the large family portrait (1965?), Jim is in the middle and my younger brother Rick is on the left. Rick died by suicide on January 23, 2009. Mom and Dad died in 2005 and 2007 respectively. – The photo (1955?) of the three Hallman boys is … precious.
Daily Posts on Facebook and Instagram, December 1 – 25, 2020
#Christmas2020 Pic1. The first Christmas decoration that Bill and I bought in December 1976, six months after meeting, falling in love, and moving in together.
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#Christmas2020 Pic2. An indoor and an outdoor Christmas tree framing my reading chair in which I blissfully pass countless hours and the piano at which I inexcusably spend far too few hours.
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#Christmas2020 Pic3. A contrast of eras, Dickens Village and today’s Toronto skyline. This year’s Christmas centrepiece on my dining table. We had a pine hutch in the kitchen of our Stratford home and on one of its shelves Bill arranged the Dickens Village pieces (of which there are many more than I’ve used here). He kept it there year round. Bill had Multiple Sclerosis and on nights when he couldn’t sleep he’d make himself a drink, sit on a stool in front of the hutch, and tell himself stories about the goings-on in the Village, especially the juicy gossipy bits.
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#Christmas2020 Pic4. Our goose feather Christmas tree, hung with antique ornaments. Feather trees are considered one of the first artificial trees used as a Christmas tree. Feather trees were usually made of green-dyed goose feathers which were attached to wire branches. They originated in Germany in the late 19th century and became popular in North America during the early 20th century. On the wall above it, you’ll see an old style photo from one of our early years together where Bill had the two of us dress and pose as a couple of 19th century frontier “buddies,” his inspiration being the beautiful oval frame that had held an old family portrait.
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#Christmas2020 Pic5. The memento tree. In November 2009, a few months after Bill died of pancreatic cancer, I was wandering through the Christmas decorations section at the Queen Street Hudson’s Bay Store feeling … well, you know. I turned a corner and saw before me this purple tree. Purple is the colour of the pancreatic cancer ribbon. This tree graced my home that Christmas and has continued to every Christmas since. The tree is decorated with the annual ornaments that Bill and I bought over our 33 years together supplemented by meaningful ornaments that I have found over the years since his death as well as touching gifts from friends.
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#Christmas2020 Pic6. With this year’s decorations, my piano is playing (pun intended) its part with cedar roping, lights, and an arrangement of holly branches arrayed on the piano lid. I collected the pine cones from various places and they all have their own stories – one is from Avondale Cemetery in Stratford where our niche is; I picked the large one up in Idyllwild Park just outside Palm Springs; I brought the small ones home from the grounds of the UN in Geneva on my last work trip there before retiring. During the Christmas season, the usual music books on the piano (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin) are replaced by these old Christmas carol books: the top one “Yuletide Melodies” belonged to my grandmother Emma Perschbacher (her signature inside) who taught music lessons in her/our family home in Waterloo from the 1920s until just prior to her death in 1964 to hundreds of children including my brothers and me; “The Christmas Carollers’ Book” has my mom’s signature on the cover, Lillian Hallman, and was used when she played for sing songs at parties in our home or at church; the bottom two books belonged to my partner Bill who was a music teacher much beloved and respected by his students. Bill was generous but strict as is evident from his inscription inside these books: “Property of W. Conklin, please return!!”
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#Christmas2020 Pic7. My Pride Christmas tree, a gift a few years ago from a couple friends who knew how much I was into Christmas trees. The three gay-theme ornaments on the memento tree a) the pink triangle which was used by the Nazis in the concentration camps to designate homosexual men, bisexual men, and transgender women; in the 1970s, it was reclaimed by the LGBTQ community as a symbol of protest against homophobia; b) the rainbow triangle ornament combines Pride and the triangle history; and c) I bought the red AIDS ribbon key chain as a Christmas ornament in 2013, the 20th anniversary of the year 1993 when I tested HIV+.
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#Christmas2020 Pic8. Dickens Village with Tiny Tim on Bob Cratchit’s shoulders and a grumpy Ebenezer Scrooge beside them. If you look carefully, you can just make out “E. Scrooge” in Bill’s handwriting over the doorway.
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#Christmas2020 Pic9. A beautiful cranberry glass ornament from my friend John Russell that he found at the Art Gallery of Ontario and gave me last year (2019) accompanied by a Rubens angel. John looked after me for three weeks after my open heart surgery in March 2019 and sweetly noted in his Christmas card that his gift of the Rubens angel was an ongoing presence to watch over me.
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#Christmas2020 Pic10. This little prancing beauty was our 1990 Christmas ornament purchased late fall of that year at the Banff Springs Hotel. I was there as theme speaker at an environmental conference and Bill had come with me. While I was in sessions, he would curl up with a book in a comfy chair by one of the grand fireplaces, a roaring blaze keeping him warm while November snow fell outside. Hotel hospitality staff fell in love with Bill, connecting with his irreverent humour that skewered the pretentiousness of some of the hotel guests. They kept the fire stoked and him well supplied with beverages. The reindeer ornament still carries the light aroma of the cedar from which it’s made.
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#Christmas2020 Pic11. Every Christmas my table is covered by this crocheted tablecloth that Mom made. I can recall as a child seeing her crocheting countless of these medallions that she would then stitch together into tablecloths as gifts. Later in life when her fine motor skills were not up to this precision work she took up knitting afghan throws, one of which rests on my sofa and gets used on chilly nights.
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#Christmas2020 Pic12. The goose-feather tree holds our collection of antique (or at least very old) ornaments. I love the elegant unpretentious simplicity of them. The two bells have “GDR” stamped on them indicating that they were made in the German Democratic Republic, that is, East Germany. And what’s the story behind that very old and curious Hindenburg-type blimp? I never light the candles. A few of the ornaments come from my family, some from Bill’s, and others we picked up at flee markets or antique shops over the years. It fascinates me to imagine the Christmas settings in which these ornaments played a role – children, parents, and grandparents (or perhaps a lonely senior living alone) hanging them on a tree; the character and location of the houses or apartments in which these folks lived decorated for Christmas; the Christmas mornings’ excitement of unwrapping presents from under the tree holding these ornaments; the diverse complexities of Christmas emotions in the homes where these ornaments hung, joy for some, loss and grief for others, perhaps even conflict and heartbreak and abuse for yet others. If these ornaments could only talk and share the stories they hold.
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#Christmas2020 Pic13. Before Bill died in August 2009, he told me that instead of a funeral he wanted me to throw a big party with lots of our friends, lots of booze, and everybody telling jokes. His heritage was half Irish, after all. At this wake/party, he wanted me to give each of our friends one of our Christmas ornaments as a memento of him. So, prior to the party that I held in early September, I dug out the Christmas boxes from the locker and put together a big collection of our decorations, that is ones that I would be willing to part with. On the night of the party, I laid them out on the table (amongst the food and booze) and people were invited to select one that they could take home as a Bill-souvenir. One of our longtime friends, Susan Wiseman, who owns and operates Casa de los Arcos in Puerto Vallarta where we have stayed for many years each winter was sorry that she couldn’t attend the party and asked if I could keep one of the decorations for her. (Bill’s connection to Susan went back to the 1980s when Bill taught Susan’s daughter piano lessons when we were all living in The Beach neighbourhood of Toronto). Susan sent me a photo when she put the Bill-memento ornament that I gave her on her Christmas tree in PV, a wooden carved love-bear. Bill’s nickname for me was “Bear.” Bill loved our annual stays at Susan’s so it’s comforting to see this memento basking in the Mexican sun on Susan’s tree. (Btw, I disregarded the other half of Bill’s dying wish. I did indeed have a funeral/memorial service for him. It was mega. Lots of music and lots of friends sharing reminiscences, funny and poignant. The church was packed with 400-500 people.)
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#Christmas2020 Pic14. My favourite angel on the tree. Handmade by Zulu women in South Africa through Zimele dedicated to developing community self-reliance. The Fair Price guarantees income for their households, helping to fight poverty. A gift several years ago from my Canadian-South African friend and neighbour Thean Beckerling.
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December 14, 2020
No fantastic holiday parties this year. But one can still dress up … and fantasize.
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#Christmas2020 Pic15. A Santa souvenir from a trip Bill and I took to Paris in 2000, a city that we loved. When we first met in 1976, we discovered that we had both studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, Bill for two years 1967-69 and me for one year 1970-71. We took that as a sign, among others, that we were meant to be together. Both sets of parents had been opposed to our travel plans but we each persevered, financing our study trips on our own from savings accumulated through part-time and summer jobs the previous years. During Bill’s time in Paris, he lived above a restaurant and paid his room and board to the proprietors by cleaning the restaurant each night after it had closed. During one of his summers, he made extra money smuggling wine back and forth across the French/Spanish border. He also studied one summer at Le Cordon Blue. When I was there, I lived in a single room cold water flat on the 5ième étage of an old apartment building with a toilet in the hall shared by four other apartments. It cost me 250 francs/month ($50). I lived on 5 francs/day which bought me a copy of Le Monde, a baguette, and a bit of cheese. My one hot meal of the week was couscous at an Algerian or Tunisian restaurant on the left bank on Sundays after attending an organ recital and evening mass at Notre Dame. I had classes at the Sorbonne each weekday morning and then would spend all afternoon in la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève where I would read anything I wanted – art history, philosophy, literature, history, political science, theology, etc. Thursday and Sunday afternoons were spent at the Louvre or Jeu de Paume because entrance was free for students on those days. It was the most intellectually stimulating year of my life and also the most monastic. Christmas was particularly lonely. I attended Christmas Eve midnight mass at Notre Dame followed by gorging on the Buche de Noel (Yule Log pastry) that I had splurged on back in my room.
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#Christmas2020 Pic16. Bill taught piano and voice to children and adults in our home. Around 1980, a ten-year-old boy brought this construction worker toy to Bill as a Christmas present. It was one of his favourite toys and he wanted to give it to Bill who had become a very special and supportive adult in his life. The boy’s home situation was not the best. He told Bill that it was for the top of Bill’s Christmas tree. Bill thanked him and replied, “But we put an angel on top of the tree.” The student’s eyes dropped and he said quietly, “So, boys can’t be angels?” Chastened, Bill made a quick recovery, and said excitedly “Of course they can!” He found a couple pipe cleaners (remember them?), fashioned one as a halo and the other as a security belt to hold the construction worker/angel atop the tree. That young boy would be a 50-year-old man now. I imagine he remembers Bill. I wish I could let him know that his angel still occupies its place of honour on top of Bill’s Christmas tree.
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#Christmas2020 Pic17. Yeah, that sounds about right. (The tree decoration was a gift a few years ago from my longtime friend Denny Young … who knows me well.)
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#Christmas2020 Pic18. Pretty as a picture … or, maybe not? I come by my love of Christmas decorations honestly. It’s in my genes. Mom used to decorate a lot, actually Dad did the decorating as per Mom’s direction. And Mom’s mom, Grandma Perschbacher, did as well as is evident in these two photographs of Grandma’s house in Waterloo that I think were taken in the mid-1920s. On the left side, the large dining room table festively set for Christmas dinner is the same table (recognizable by the stubby legs) at which our family ate many Christmas dinners as my brothers and I were growing up. All warm memories. The photo on the right, though, gives me pause. You’ll notice the opened presents displayed under the tree. They’re mainly dolls. Grandma Perschbacher had five daughters, my mom being the youngest of the five girls. Sometime in the next few years after this photo was taken, her husband left the family to live with another woman in Toronto. It must have been traumatic for the family and a minor scandal in the church in which they were deeply involved (the two of them had met and started courting while in the church young adults group; one of my aunts was the church organist). Mom almost never spoke about her father except on rare occasions when she would express shame about coming from a “broken home” (in her words). I look at these dolls under the Christmas tree and try to imagine the tension that presumably existed in the home, even on a Christmas morning that’s supposed to be about joy. And I think about Grandma Perschbacher, putting all the work into the Christmas decorating, buying or making the dolls as presents for her daughters, and preparing and serving and cleaning up after the Christmas dinner for the family and guests. After her husband left, Grandma raised her five daughters surviving on income from teaching piano lessons, taking in roomers, and some child support that her husband sent to her. As she aged, she lived with us and mom looked after her until she died in 1960 when I was ten years old. My recollections of her are not affectionate ones. We kids were scared of her. She was a cantankerous person at that stage of her life when I knew her and she was a trial for my mom as her caregiver. But when I think of the difficult life that she lived, I cut her a lot of slack. And I recognize that in her home … and in many other people’s homes … Christmas is not as picture-perfect as photos like these might suggest.
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#Christmas2020 Pic19. Bill and I moved into our first house in the Toronto Beach neighbourhood in 1984. This ornament was the natural choice for that year’s Christmas tree. The house was one of the original buildings on Kenilworth Avenue and had apparently been an early postal station around 1900. It was tiny, constructed of wood and stucco, had a significant lean to the kitchen floor at the back of the house, a crawl space basement, and a low ceiling in the small gabled bedroom upstairs on which we bumped our heads many a time. And it was devastatingly charming. Our first year there, we invited two friends to join us for a traditional tourtière Christmas Eve dinner. Bill constructed a hanging wreath with evergreen boughs. He embedded candles in it and then suspended it over the table. It was similar to this pic from the internet … but, being Bill’s DIY model, not nearly as secure. We had a wonderful evening with good friends and Bill’s homemade tourtière, our table lit by the warm candle light from the wreath hanging above our heads. What made that Christmas Eve particularly special was that we succeeded in not burning the house down.
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#Christmas2020 Pic20. Bill and I picked up a lot of these delicate ornaments on a trip to Paris in November 2000. We bought them and brought them home to give as little take-away gifts for each of the 100+ guests whom we were inviting to a big Christmas party that we were throwing in December to celebrate three milestones that year – our 25th anniversary, my 50th birthday, and the new Millennium. One of my favourite mementos from that wonderful evening, in addition to these remaining ornaments, is a photo of my parents dancing. My mom was having mobility problems by that point in her life and my dad was showing early signs of dementia and yet there they were enjoying themselves on the dance floor. It was the last time in their lives that they were capable and had the opportunity to do so. In this pic these ornaments are sitting on Bill’s childhood Christmas Rudolph plate.
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#Christmas2020 Pic21. A parade of Santas. – Upper left: our collection of old Santas, some more of the Saint Nicholas variety, including the tall papier-mâché one that opens to hold candies and my mom’s ceramic salt and pepper Mr. and Mrs. Claus that I still use on my table every Christmas;- Upper right: a 4” metal Saint Nicholas mold with clamps perhaps for making candles or chocolates or something else (any ideas?);- Lower left: a creative plaster-of-paris Santa figure formed on top of an avocado with fine detail in the sculpting and painting; found in an antique shop run by an eccentric kinky gay guy in the rural Berkshires (Massachusetts) in the summer of 2017;- Lower middle: a sweet Santa ornament given to me a few years ago from friend and neighbour Frank DeMois;- Lower right: our cat Simon in our Stratford home (in 2005) not at all thrilled about having to play the role of Santa even though he should have been inspired by all the actors and company friends from the Stratford Festival who were often in our home during our years living there (1991-2009).
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#Christmas2020 Pic22. My partner Bill and I were the principal family caregivers for both sets of our parents during their declining years. My brother Rick and his wife Diane in New York sent us one of these Swarovski crystals each Christmas as an expression of their appreciation for our caregiving. In 1998, Bill’s dad died. In 2005, my mom died. In March 2007, Bill’s mom died and in April my dad died. In 2009, my brother Rick died by suicide in January and, in August, Bill died suddenly of pancreatic cancer. Because of the reason that these crystal decorations were given to us and from whom, this Christmas display is a treasured representation for me of these six lost family members.
“Your absence has gone through me,Like thread through a needle.Everything I do is stitched with its colour.” M.S. Merwin
The silver tray on which I’ve placed them this Christmas was bought by Bill and me in the mid-1980s. We had our names engraved in the middle along with August 17, 1976, the date on which we had our first date. We were both so excited/nervous about that first date that I arrived an hour early at the location to make sure I didn’t miss him and he brought along a friend to bolster his confidence. In subsequent years, we always celebrated our anniversary on August 17th. (I still do.) Around the outside of the tray are engraved the names of our parents: Lillian and Kenneth (my parents), Adelle and William (Bill’s parents).
In this other photo of the crystals, you can see prisms of colour cast on the back wall by the sun shining through the crystals. I like the implied metaphor.
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#Christmas2020 Pic23. I love this city and I love the view of it from my condo. I recall so many special moments in Toronto over the years, such as when I was:·
10 years old: the thrill of Mom putting my younger brother Rick and me on the train in Kitchener and us being met at Toronto’s Union Station by my Auntie Ev, my mom’s eldest sister, for an exciting day ogling the mesmerizing Christmas window displays at Eaton’s and Simpsons department stores on Queen Street, visiting Santa, and riding the subway;·
21 years old: walking into the St. Charles Tavern, my first step into a gay bar; sitting nervously with a beer on a stool at the horseshoe bar; after about ten minutes, feeling a pair of arms wrap around me from behind and hearing a voice whisper in my ear, “I have to have you”; thus began my first relationship; for the next year and a half while I was still living and going to university in Waterloo, I would come to Toronto to spend the weekends with Clyve, a 32-year-old beautiful Black ballet dancer, at his apartment on Sherbourne St. (in a building that I can see from my condo);·
26 years old: now living in Toronto, being asked out on a date by a hot guy I’d been admiring in the gay dance clubs (Manatee and the Maygay) for months; he took me to a play at what is now Buddies in Bad Times Theatre on Alexander St.; the connection between us was immediate and intense on many levels; within two weeks, we were living together in my apartment at 100 Wellesley St. E. (a building that I can see from my condo balcony); Bill and I were together as a couple for 33 years until his death in 2009;·
50 years old: Bill and I attending a concert of opera superstar soprano Cecilia Bartoli at Roy Thomson Hall; we line up to get a CD signed by her after the concert; when we reach the front of the line, Bill, to the shock of everyone around including me, starts singing to her in his fine tenor voice one of her own arias (Cacinni’s “Amarilli, mia bella”) but changes the words to “Cecilia, mia bella”; her handlers try to shut him down but she waves them off, leans back, and listens with a huge grin on her face; when he finishes she applauds, congratulates him on his fine Italian, and signs our CD: “Per Guillermo & David, con amore (Amarilli), Cecilia Bartoli, 20/10/2000”;·
70 years old: Christmas 2020, in this pandemic time, not being able to share my decorations and view of the city with friends in person at any of my usual seasonal gatherings of small intimate dinners or big house parties; instead, I post photos of the decorations on Facebook and Instagram with little stories of their history and what memories they evoke; and in response, I receive back from you, my sweet friends (in Toronto and beyond), such warmth.
I love this city.
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#Christmas2020 Pic24. May the star that guides you, guide you well, and may the star upon which you wish, grant you your wishes.
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#Christmas2020 Pic25. Merry Christmas, my dear friends. Whether you’re a believer or not, may you resonate with the Spirit of the Bethlehem Child and find your heart imbued with a passion for justice for all peoples and all creation, for peace that overcomes violence, for love that defeats hate, for hope that surmounts despair, and for life in all its fullness.
(Handmade pottery crèche from a trip Bill and I made to Columbia in 1979.)
The Toronto Gay Men’s Literature and Arts Salon (Zoom Edition)
November 17, 2020
In June of 2013, I picked up the novel “Harvard Square” by André Aciman because I had heard good things about Aciman from friends … apparently, he had written a gay novel in 2007 that people loved entitled “Call Me by Your Name.” I had somehow missed that earlier work. With “Harvard Square”, I found the storyline relatively interesting but I was irritated all the way through by various aspects of the author’s writing style.
In particular, we as readers were constantly being told what the narrator is thinking and feeling. Listening to a character’s internal dialogue can be a powerful story-telling tool when it is done subtlety and nuance. But it’s off-putting when it is used obsessively and depicts the obvious and/or the predictable as I found it to be in “Harvard Square.” I am more engaged as a reader in a piece of fiction when I have to surmise what a character is thinking and feeling by observing their actions and speech. As editors are fond of saying, “show me, don’t tell me.”
Fast forward to September 2017. I went to see the film version of “Call Me by Your Name” at its première at the Toronto International Film Festival along with almost every gay man in the city. I fell totally in love with it.
I then read the 2007 novel on which it was based and loved that too. In “Call Me by Your Name,” Elio is the narrator. We experience the whole story through his eyes, including his thoughts and feelings. But I didn’t have the same negative reaction to reading so much of the internal monologue of Elio’s heart and mind as I had in “Harvard Square.” Was that because of differences in Aciman’s writing style between the two books or had my perceptions changed?
In February 2018, I was thrilled that James Ivory won the Academy Award for best screenplay for “Call Me by Your Name”, his first ever Oscar. He was 88-years-old at the time. He and Ismail Merchant were romantic life partners and creative professional partners for forty-four years from 1961 until Merchant’s death in 2005 and the two were responsible for the beautiful Merchant/Ivory films “A Room with a View,” “Maurice,” “Howard’s End,” and “The Remains of the Day.”
What impressed me so much about James Ivory’s screenplay of “Call Me by Your Name” was how he had captured so perfectly the tone, the poignancy, the essence of the novel which is difficult to accomplish with a novel written in the first person. A common device used by screenwriters when translating such a personally narrated novel is to use voice-overs in the film. That sometimes works but it is also, in my opinion, a lazy way out. Much more difficult is what James Ivory did. The screenplay was so brilliantly crafted that it is as if we are Elio, falling in lust/love with Oliver from the moment that he sees him arrive at the villa, struggling with Elio to decipher whether signs from Oliver are positive or negative, riding Elio’s rollercoaster of emotional responses as the relationship takes on an intimate reality while Oliver’s summer sojourn in Italy draws towards a close. What James Ivory did in the screenplay was to evoke the atmospheric essence of the novel — the soul of Elio.
Which brings me to André Acimon’s newest novel “Find Me”. Since I had loved both the book and the film of “Call Me by Your Name” so much, I was looking forward to “Find Me” billed as a sequel. I was initially somewhat put-off by the structure. I wanted more of Elio and Oliver and what I got in the first section “Tempo” was 115 pages of a heterosexual bawdy romance between Elio’s father Samuel and Miranda whom he meets on the train. Elio appears in the second section “Cadenza” but no sign of Oliver. Instead, we’re introduced to Michel with whom Elio sort of falls in love but with the shadow of his soul-shattering love for Oliver hovering in the background. A drunken moping Oliver surfaces in the third section “Capriccio” pretending outwardly to be enjoying himself in his straight persona while longing for his long-lost Elio. Finally, in “Da Capo,” the last ten pages of the novel, our lovers are reunited for what appears to be a happy ending.
Despite my initial misgivings about the structure and my glib synopsis above of the four sections, I came around to the judgement that, in “Find Me,” Aciman has produced a brilliant non-sequel sequel to “Call Me by Your Name.”
Firstly, each of the four sections are written in the first person, three different first persons: Samuel in “Tempo,” Elio in “Cadenza,” Oliver in “Capriccio,” and Elio again in “Da Capo.” And the voices are all distinct and perfectly reflective of the characters. With a few minor exceptions, I was not distracted but rather thoroughly entranced by being privy to the thoughts and feelings of these first-person narrators through the internal monologues as Acimon writes them.
Secondly, as I moved further and further through “Find Me”, I came to an appreciation of the brilliance of structuring this sequel in such a way that we readers are thrust into three substantively different stories whose common thread is that each are built around protagonists who are the principal characters in “Call Me by Your Name.” This is so much more interesting than if we just had been bequeathed a second novel of Elio’s and Oliver’s romance, part two. In fact, the weakest part of “Find Me” is the final section where Elio and Oliver are back together. I think that’s partly because there’s no real tension to the storyline at that point.
Thirdly, I loved the interweaving of musical motifs, metaphors, chapter titles, and critical plot elements. This worked most effectively for me in “Capriccio,” the Oliver chapter, that I think is the most beautifully written part of the book with its overwhelming poignancy.
Finally, I guess I am a romantic at heart. I was swept up in the various love stories in “Find Me”, those that burst forth in passion and joy so suddenly and unexpectedly for the characters and those that gave way to the searing and poignancy of loss. They come close but don’t quite match the heart-rending conversation between Elio and his father in “Call Me by Your Name” after Oliver has left when Samuel says,
“You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship … if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it … we rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste … right now there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it, and with it the joy you felt.”
The Toronto Gay Men’s Literature and Arts Salon (Zoom Edition)
September 15, 2020
I’ve never really gotten David Sedaris, or more accurately, I’ve never really understood all the hype round him. “Calypso” is the fourth Sedaris book that I’ve read preceded by “Naked” (1997), “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” (2008), and “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” (2013). I saw him live 8 or 9 years ago at what was then called the Sony Centre. The hall was sold out, packed with adoring fans.
I’ll grant you that he can be very funny. There’s a point in the short story “I’m Still Standing” where he is arguing with his husband Hugh about Hugh’s obsessiveness with privacy when he’s in the bathroom.
Hugh won’t even let me in when he’s peeing. I’ll call from the other side of the door. “I had that in my mouth ten minutes ago and now it’s a private part?” Hugh yells back, “Yes! Go away!”
Sedaris’s humour often has a dark side as is characteristic of much satire. I relish darkness in writing styles but I’m not as attracted to it when it veers toward cruelty. In “The Spirit World” he talks about how he sometimes plays with audience members at book signings by pretending to know things about them like their astrological sign or about their family.
I met a young woman a few years back, and after being right about both her sign and her sister, I said, as if I were trying to recall something I had dreamed, “You were in a…hospital earlier this week, not for yourself but for someone else. You were…visiting someone very close to you.” The woman fell apart before my eyes. “My mother has cancer. They operated but…How do you…I don’t…What are you doing?” “I can’t help it,” I told her. “I know things. I see them.” I don’t, of course. Those were just guesses, pulled out of my ass in order to get a rise out of someone.
It’s one thing to have a nefarious fictional character in your story but when you’re describing a real-life experience of your own and then not to express any remorse about having played a mean trick on someone … well, I find that off-putting.
Sedaris does have that wonderful gift as a writer to take mundane day-to-day situations and describe them in such a way that I as a reader become totally engrossed. He’s nowhere near a Proust in that skill nor does he come close to my current favourite Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard who, like Proust, can write for pages and pages about something as trivial as waiting for a friend to show up at a café and after reading his prose for half an hour I look up from the page, shake my head, and try and figure out how I got so swept away in his writing about something so seemingly inconsequential.
Sedaris’s writing about the quotidian does have an intimacy to it on numerous dimensions: he’s brutally candid about his own foibles including for better or worse, his scatological ones; he’s mercilessly descriptive about his family’s eccentricities; and he’s totally matter-of-fact about his life as a gay man and his relationship with Hugh. This personal and familial intimacy in his stories is more evident in “Calypso” than his earlier books.
His style as a humourist, his ability to describe the ordinary in interesting ways, and the intimacy of his stories make “Calypso” an engaging read. But is it great writing? Apparently many of the hundreds of thousands who buy his books and attend his readings think so. I just don’t think that I’m one of them.
But, and this is a “but” that overrides much of my lack of enthusiasm for Sedaris as a writer, I’ve come to appreciate through reading “Calyspo” how courageous Sedaris is. He’s a little man physically, as he regularly reminds us, but he seems to have an innate strength and fearlessness to toss his vulnerability out onto the table for all to see. The prime case in point for me in “Calypso” is his descriptions of his relationship and interactions with his sister Tiffany, her struggles with mental health issues, and her eventual suicide. His writing about the alcoholism of his mother is also poignant but it didn’t resonate with me as much. I did not have an alcoholic parent whereas I did have a sibling who committed suicide.
The last time I saw my sister Tiffany (Sedaris writes) was at the stage door at Symphony Hall in Boston. I’d just finished a show and was getting ready to sign books when I heard her say, “David. David, it’s me.” We hadn’t spoken in four years at that point, and I was shocked by her appearance. Tiffany always looked like my mother when she was young. Now she looked like my mother when she was old, though at the time she couldn’t have been more than forty-five. “It’s me, Tiffany.” She held up a paper bag with the Starbucks logo on it. Her shoes looked like she’d found them in a trash can. “I have something for you.” There was a security guard holding the stage door open, and I said to him, “Will you close that, please?” I had filled the house that night. I was in charge—Mr. Sedaris. “The door,” I repeated. “I’d like for you to close it now.” And so the man did. He shut the door in my sister’s face, and I never saw her or spoke to her again. Not when she was evicted from her apartment. Not when she was raped. Not when she was hospitalized after her first suicide attempt. She was, I told myself, someone else’s problem. I couldn’t deal with her anymore. “Well,” the rest of my family said, “it was Tiffany. Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all know how she can be.”
This is what happened. Sedaris doesn’t softpeddle it. He tells it like it is. He doesn’t describe his residual persistent guilt. He doesn’t have to. It’s there, unmistakably there.
I’ve done a lot of writing but I have not written about my younger brother’s suicide except for a short reference in my memoir “August Farewell” about my partner Bill’s sudden pancreatic death in which I mention that my brother Rick took his life in January 2009, six months before Bill’s death in August 2009. There would certainly be lots to write about: the deep depression that Rick went into after retiring from a senior academic position in New York City, a depression that he hid from everyone except his wife who was forced by him to keep it as a secret; about Rick’s sudden disappearance from their home in Brooklyn leaving behind a suicide note saying that he was driving to Canada; about his phone call late that night to me, the last person he spoke to; about him being found the next morning hanging from the back of his hotel room door in Waterloo, our family’s home town; about my meetings two days later with the police who investigated and the funeral home once his body had been released by the coroner; about the memorial service that I organised and conducted in New York City the following week on behalf of his traumatised wife; about Rick’s appearance to me in a dream several weeks later in which he calmly told me “I can explain”, a dream out of which I awoke screaming with anger and was held for hours by Bill as I wept.
I have not written about my brother’s suicide. Yet. I am working on a book, but only for myself, not for publication. I’m calling it “Brushes with Death.” It will have five chapters. The first is on my testing positive for HIV in 1993. The second is about Bill’s and my caregiving for our parents as they aged and died. I’ve written those first two chapters. The third will be about Rick’s suicide. The fourth will be about Bill’s death. And the fifth will be about my open-heart surgery last year.
David Sedaris has given me a gift in writing about Tiffany in “Calypso”. For that I’m very grateful.
in my condo. I took the photo on an evening prior to the arrival of guests for a Christmas dinner party that occurred early in December before Omicron exploded into our lives.
davidghallman 