Looking for poetry
I chose to spend this Christmas Day, for the first time, with Danny. A considerable crowd of friends showed up at the house for roast ham last night; we were 14 altogether. Today Bill and Daniel headed to Hamilton for the morning, so Danny and I were left to the quietest Christmas I can remember, and I'm pleased with that.
I phoned Stephen, my parents and my daughters, then we went to Golden Griddle for brunch. Our matronly waitress, Joanne, seemed pleased to look after us. I suppose some lonely people show up there on Christmas Day, but I was simply content to accept her hospitality. Afterwards we drove to High Park for a walk.
I've always managed to make this a happy time, but some years were easier than others. The first Christmas after I came out, 1996, I was cast adrift. I don't remember all the circumstances, but spending that day with my children was not an option. My parents had been reasonably supportive during the first few months, but Mom and I had quarreled suddenly and unexpectedly in May; by December we were still barely on speaking terms, so going home would have been unbearable. I had recently met the first intense love of my life, a man named Dan, who was scheduled to move in with me on New Year's Eve, but he spent Christmas with his wife and children. I didn't have any particularly close friends to spend the holiday with.
Doug, someone I knew from Gay Fathers of Toronto, had asked me to look after his house in the Beaches for the holidays while he took his children to visit relatives on the East Coast. The place was well equipped with a Jacuzzi and porn library. In hindsight those days seem lonely, but for me it was all new, things I had never done before. I attended the Metropolitan Community Church's massive, fabulous Christmas Eve service at Roy Thomson Hall, then drifted and caroused through Toronto's gay village picking up tricks and a case of crabs, scoring my 50th man for the year. It was a strange celebration of freedom for one who had no sexual experience with men whatsoever for the 11 years preceding. Somewhere I still have that list of 50 names, and what the men were like. It was in my nature to personalize them as much as possible. After my relationship with Dan, I stopped keeping track, but I doubt I've ever been as promiscuous as during 1996. That Christmas week in Toronto I was in high party mode, blindly enjoying every hour, living fearlessly and ferociously in the present.
Many things have changed since then. For several years I couldn't bear to spend December 25 either with my family or at home in my Guelph apartment, but have managed to spend more Christmas Days than not with my daughters. After years of rough going with my parents, I mostly enjoy spending time with them nowadays, and can put their idiosyncrasies into perspective. I've spent holidays without any lover, feeling lonely. I've lost interest in promiscuity, and my middle-aging body has demanded a limit to carousal. The past three Christmases I was with Danny, but only in thought, over the phone; that's why I made it my priority to spend this day with him.
High Park was quiet under a strangely pearly sky. We passed other family clumps playing with new cameras or sitting together on benches. Most of the dialogue we heard was not in English. A man in bright yellow jogged up and down the hill. A middle-aged woman gestured strangely, like a prophet, towards some ducks on the lake, then stumbled into the underbrush. The ducks dappled and paddled, oblivious to her surrealism, orange legs hidden in blackness.
I tried to form verses in my head, but love songs and poems are too often founded on longing and bleeding. I couldn't find any suffering inside, unless it were the merest hint of fear, the tiny part of mind that knows we can't depend on anything. Life is whimsical. It can snatch away the best loves and dreams achieved.
It's best to let the future go have its way with our eventual selves, not worth the worry. If I never write another poem in my life, but walk every day in contentment and belonging, I would be better off. Even so, I somehow doubt poetry is dead.