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Today, as I write this, I celebrate my 45th birthday. People have told me birthdays, after a certain age, are nothing special. “Just another day to me,” people say. “Why would I want to be reminded I’m another year older?” friends ponder. I think the answer is simple: To celebrate you lived another year, to wonder about what’s next.
This past December I surprised my Great-Aunt Rita on her 98th birthday. The dining room table was festooned with flowers. You might think a spread of at least half-a-dozen bouquets would be on the sideboard. But, at my great-aunt’s house that piece of furniture is equally but more solemnly festooned with statues of the saints. A 3-foot-high St. Jude, the patron of hopeless causes, stands at center.
My aunt was happy to see me. An emotion not expressed by most of my relatives upon discovering my presence.
“You, you remembered my birthday,” she said. “You came to see me!”
My aunt, at nearly a century old, was not only happy to have a surprise guest, but was welcoming two more people to the home she shares with her daughter. She donned a party hat. She refused prosecco and wine…at first. Clearly, to her another turn around the sun is truly something to celebrate. Capriciousness be damned!
I was asked to write about being a gay guy from Philadelphia moving to Aztec, New Mexico. I start off with my birthday because once again, after many moves, it’s my first birthday living in a new city.
Well, I can’t say “city” given the prairie dogs in the lot down the road. So, “living in a new experience.”
What support do I find here, my editor asked. After all, the change from bustling city scenes to vast desert mesas is abrupt. The support comes from my fiance Jewell, whom I followed here, his sister, whom we moved in with and his mother, who has a pottery studio where I glaze some of her projects. As a high school lad, I fancied a career as a painter. So rediscovering the use of brush and colors has been very uplifting and — that word again — supportive. I find support in sitting on the porch with my love, just looking at the garden we are bringing to life. I find support in the charming and shocked questions I am asked in my retail job by customers about my move.
“What made you come out here?”
“How’s a guy from one of the country’s biggest cities end up here?”
“Well, what do you think of,” he motioned to the outside, “of it?”
The desert I assume he meant, not the parking lot.
I find support in their curiosity. While I deeply care about where I live and always move to places which I feel a connection or an attraction to, I know it’s up to me to make it work — not just to be happy with my surroundings but to embrace my circumstances.
I’ve moved many times. It’s hard to say where my wanderlust actually began. You would think after my parents uprooted me from an idyllic suburban upbringing at the tender age of 8 to “move over the bridge”, as Philadelphians and New Jersians call it, that I would want to hold onto a semblance of permanence as much as possible.
But, no. I was teased at school — the bullies were just as meanly amused that my parents were older as they were that I am deaf in my left ear. Of course that kids “knew” I was gay before I knew did not make me feel welcome at school. At an early age, I didn’t long to go over Judy Garland’s rainbow. No, I longed for Europe and New York.
High school was much better. I am almost ashamed, but really thrilled, to say I am in a group text with two friends from those days in which we chat almost every damn day. I then went to college in Manhattan. Two hours away from Philly, it was close enough but a world away.
New York would be my home. That would be my permanent home. Then came graduation in May 2001. Then the towers fell on Sept. 11. I struggled to stay, but it no longer felt like home. There was too much of the ghost of “old New York” versus the suburbanization of Manhattan. Too many of my friends were forced out because of high rents or a lack of the jobs to support them.
Ultimately, I was off to Miami. My ex-husband fell in love with Oregon and a decade ago he put me on a flight to Portland to set up housekeeping for us in the Rose City. The pandemic hit and Portland no longer seemed to hold a rosy future. Much to my old friends’ communal shock, we — meaning my fiance Jewell and I — boarded a flight back east to Philly.
That was five years ago.
Then of course, there are the friends. The friends scattered about the country. None of them seemed surprised I decided to move again. Their lack of surprise was equal to my coming out — no surprise at all.
“I knew you’d find a reason to make it the next best place for you to live,” Paul, my friend, college classmate and former publisher and editor exclaimed in another group chat with college-era friends. This is how he answers the question, “Where the hell is he living now?”
For the physical connection of support, there are Pride celebrations in Albuquerque. We may go and find that support by making new LGBTQ+ friends. But for the moment, with the rocky landscape off in the distance, which happily reminds me of Cézanne’s paintings of the South of France, and the icy breezes off of the La Plata Mountains, I can say support comes in the shape of new adventures. Support comes from the excited curiosity of not knowing what lies ahead.