average life

The thin air burned the inside of my nose with each breath.  There was a line of cars running down the street that stopped in front of the house in front of which I stood slowly pacing.  As I listened to my sister’s voice over the phone, I looked out at the Wasatch Mountains, which loomed in the distance.  When I’d go as a kid with my family to visit my grandparents in Idaho, I had loved to sit and stare at the Teton Mountains, but these mountains were foreign and only reminded me of the fact that I was two thousand miles away from home.

The reason I was in Utah was the party that was going on in the house behind me.  It was a monthly get-together for gay Mormons that was held by a family in the west valley.  After hearing about the party for months, I had bought a plane ticket at the last minute and had flown out to attend.  I had shuttered my blog a few months previously and was feeling a little out of touch and I had hoped that meeting some of the people whose blogs I had read for years would help me to feel a kinship with others like me.  I had found, however, that conversation didn’t come easily and as the evening progressed, I talked less and less until I wasn’t talking at all.  I slipped out the front door and called my sister, needing to hear a familiar voice.

I told her I was at the party, but was having a hard time connecting with anyone on a conversational level, that many of the people there was younger than me, and that it was kind of awkward.  I hadn’t told her who were the principle attendants at the party, however, an omission that made me feel a separation between us.  After talking for about half an hour, the conversation ended and I sat down on the curb, not ready to go back inside.  I could hear the hiss of sprinkler systems in the subdivision around me.  Man, suburbs like this creeped me out.

A couple of guys walked up the sidewalk and I pretended to be sending a text so I didn’t have to interact more than a half-smile and nod.  They half-smiled and nodded back and went into the party.  My insides sank as I pocketed my phone.  I had flown all that way to finally meet a group of people who were like me, who knew what I felt, only to find that I actually didn’t have much in common with most of them.  Most everyone was younger than me and their conversations revolved around more stereotypically gay interests, things that I didn’t have much interest in.  Everyone else was older and their conversation consisted of activism and theories of orientation, having fought the fight for so long that they didn’t know how to stop fighting, even at a party.  There were even a few married guys with their wives.

I didn’t really belong there.

My sister’s voice had provided some comfort but after talking around the fact that I was at a social for gay Mormons, I saw another world in which I didn’t completely fit.

And so I sat on the curb.

The air grew more chilly as the sun set.  I decided that since I had spend five hours on a plane, I had probably at least give the party a second shot.  I went back into the house and tried mingling a bit more, but again I found myself quietly drifting into corners.  After a while it had finally grown dark enough to set up a projector and the host slid in a DVD of a gay movie in which there was singing, dancing, and glitter.  I sighed and wondered how early was too early to leave.

As everyone rearranged into a more movie-friendly formation, I saw a woman across the room quiety sinking into her own corner, not quite sure what to do.  She was older, in her late fifties, probably.  I recognized her as one of the wives there with her husband.  I got up, grabbed a soft drink, slipped in next to her.

“What?  You’re not excited to watch this movie?” I said with a friendly smile that I had to force a bit after the course of the evening.

“No,” she said with a slight chuckle.

“Um…do you want to go out on the deck?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said with what sounded like relief.

She went and got her coat and told her husband where she was headed, he having been so caught up in the conversations of the evening that he hadn’t noticed that she had drifted away from him.

We sat out on the deck and listened to the sound of the heat pumps whirring around the neighborhood.

“No you guys come to these things regularly?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, “he only told me he was…attracted to men…a couple months ago.”

“Really?” I said, disbelieving.

“Oh, yes.  I had no idea.  He found out about these get-togethers and it was really important to him to meet other people to talk to.  So, we came,” she said.

I was amazed that he was brave enough to come having only come out to his wife two months prior.  I was more amazed at her for coming, too.

“You did seem a little out of your element, I guess,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied, “I’m still not used to the idea of all of this,” she said motioning to the people in the house, who were by now engrossed in the movie.  I heard one of the musical numbers start up.

I sighed.  “Yeah, I guess neither am I,” I admitted.

“You know what I kept thinking tonight?” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“What a waste,” she replied, “here you have all of these wonderful young men who would make excellent husbands and fathers, but they probably will never have families.  It’s just a waste.”

I wasn’t sure if I should feel offended or complemented, but I saw the lost look in her eyes and I decided that I would take it as a complement and so I smiled.

We talked more and she told me about her children and grandchildren (whom she saw no need to tell about their father, she added).  She asked me how my family and friends reacted when I told them and I said that they had generally reacted rather positively, or no real reaction at all.  We continued talking about this and that until the movie ended and then we talked a bit further still.  Occasionally one of the other wives would come and check on her and seeing that we showed no desire to go back inside, they soon defected back to the party.

I didn’t care.  We just kept talking.