A rambling intro before we get to the ham salad so gloriously pictured here, but rest assured we will get to it…

It may strike some as strange that a teenage boy would want to spend his Saturday evening with a quartet of fifty-something women playing a card game nicknamed ‘Dimes’ (which seems, from all minor research I’ve done on the subject, to be a sort of Texas Rummy) but it was absolutely fitting for my high school years. I was, and I remain, way more ‘Harold & Maude’ than ‘Dirty Dancing’. 

If you’re gonna play the game, boy
You gotta learn to play it right…

During my junior year, my dear friend Ann was my lifeline. Amid a sea of depression and anxiety and just getting through the age of 16, she was my misfit-partner-in-crime. With a mohawk-like swath of blond locks that she hair-sprayed dangerously high into spiky formations, a wardrobe of black and silver, and a die-hard love of Guns ‘n Roses and any other head-banging band that came with a frightening front-man, she was a formidable force. Underneath all the eyeliner and armor, however, she was a kind and sensitive soul, a non-proclaimed ‘straight-edge’ gal who wanted nothing to do with drinking or smoking or drugs of any kind, and who got straight A’s because she was smart as hell, especially when it came to math. The juxtaposition of her brazen appearance and everything that was going on underneath it was something to which I could immediately relate. We started hanging out on the weekends, roaming the mall or the Southside of Amsterdam, doing much of nothing and loving every minute of it. Our wanderings were harmless, when one considered the other antics of kids our age, but outwardly you would have thought we were up to no good, and all things insidious. I loved that – it lended us a protection that we both needed when kids were especially looking to hurt those who were different. 

Every gambler knows
That the secret to survivin’ is knowin’ what to throw away
And knowin’ what to keep
‘Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep…

It was Ann who introduced me to the card games that her mom Ginny played every week (the woman who purchased Madonna’s ‘Sex’ book for me) – along with Ginny’s friend Janice, an Aunt called Barb, and their friend Julie (whose mother Funzie cooked and hung out amiably in the background). I think the first time we played it was at some graduation party at Ann’s house – we were sitting at a picnic table and someone was passing around a bottle of Rumpleminze – Ann and I passed, but we took part in a quick make-shift card game. They called the game ‘Dimes’ because that’s what we bet on each hand. High rollers we were not. That day we only played a few hands, but Ann said they played every Saturday, and soon enough I had ingratiated myself into attending with Ann and our friend Jessica (whose Mom was Janice). 

This was a secret world to which I instantly thrilled at being a part – even if I was on the periphery with the other kids. As a burgeoning gay boy, I knew how to make the middle-aged ladies laugh against their better judgment. I could push my comments to the edge of tasteful and they would try to balk before they gave in to their laughter at my absurdity. We provided joy for each other at a time when I don’t think there was much joy in our weekday world. 

I found an appreciate audience for my outfits and hats and nonsense, and they had an appreciative mouth who was happily willing to devour any and all foodstuffs they had on hand. Julie’s mother Funzie loved me for how much I loved her food – a hungry boy appeals to many a mother’s heart. There would always be some delicious selection of dinner leftovers culled and curated by this group of Southside Amsterdam Italians, and often the simple crowning jewel for my easily-awed palette was a basic bowl of ham salad served on a cracker or small bun. 

Our food break came in between the two card games, and I soon came to understand that the cards were merely the catalyst for being together and sharing food and finding a way to make this miserable world a little more bearable. While others my age were getting their kicks and distractions fumbling about with sex and liquor and drugs, I found my fun at these card games, bisected by a hefty serving of ham salad and some sweet treat to finish it all off. It’s always been amusing to think of the yarns and rumors that people spun of what Ann and I were up to on our weekends. Pulling back the wizard’s curtain on that would always be one of life’s delicious surprises to people expecting some wild and wayward youth. 

Thus it was that most of my Saturday nights passed through the end of my high school years. I’d return to the card games when home from college too, and reconnecting with these ladies – my own quartet of surrogate golden girl mothers – was a safe touchstone when real darkness and demons worked their wretched way with me. No matter what was going on with us – and soon it would be health scares and loss and the awfulness that is the unstoppable onward march of time – we could return to the crowded kitchen table, deal out the cards, and settle into a couple of hours of not worrying, highlighted by a little mid-game feast, and bits of gossip and song snippets. The simple secret of life right there – getting through it together with good friends and good food and the complete lack of pretense and pretend. When you find your tribe, everything falls into place, if only for a Saturday night. 

Most of those ladies who saved my life are gone now, but their memory lives on – in my mind, in their children’s hearts, in this silly little blog post. Whenever Andy cooks a ham, I’ll ask that he make a batch of ham salad with the leftovers, and every time I’m brought back to those card games, and those wonderful women, and the haven we once provided for each other. 

And when he finished speakin’
He turned back toward the window
Crushed out his cigarette
And faded off to sleep
And somewhere in the darkness
The gambler he broke even
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keep…

…As we wait in joyful anticipation…

While the very beginning of ‘Swan Lake’ opens with the sly and mysterious Introduction, it is this Allegro giusto that shall set us off on this year’s sparkle sequence. It is a more fitting musical introduction of preparatory excitement, building the anticipation, and hinting at the shine and shimmer of such seasonal exuberance. It is this piece that marks the entrance of our holiday season, as an impossibly-magnificent coat of pink swings out behind us, unfurling in billowing fashion. 

Today marks our unofficial start to the season, as christened by a sparkling event – The Pride Center Gala – that may be the new kick-off we need in the age of on ongoing pandemic. Andy and I haven’t been to a public event like this since 2019, so in many ways this feels like a recalled-to-life moment, fraught with all the frisson that such a grand return brings. 

It used to be the Beaujolais Nouveau Wine Festival that started our holiday season rolling, and this has the same energy and feel to those golden days, with a comforting sense of both wariness and resignation that the world has forever altered. We have been changed as well. We can never go back to before, and so we forge new paths, finding new ways of celebration, be they comprised of gestures grand or miniscule~ or something wonderfully and whimsically in-between.

The holiday season has changed quite a bit for us – the days of immense and bombastic parties and extravagantly-overhyped events have fallen happily by the wayside, replaced with smaller dinners and intimate gatherings where friends can actually talk and share things with friends, Sunday dinners with immediate family, and short weekends in Boston, quietly ensconced in a candle-lit condo while the city whirls its winter dervishes of wind against the windows. 

The music turns like a little ballerina on a music box, and we have shifted to a Waltz – a majestic beast in traditional 3/4 time – and it carries us to lofty heights – landings on dim staircases overlooking swirling party scenes below, where banisters adorned with sparkling boughs of evergreen and eucalyptus keep their perfumed secrets, winking and blinking at the unaware crowds laughing beneath them. 

Swept back down, along a staircase that was once cramped with revelers, we shall rejoin the party, as if we were rejoining life after some extended state of suspension, like some vampire that slept a century in a silk-lined coffin, only to wake in tattered confusion, and having to start again. One finds the world greatly transformed in ways one never thought possible. It very much feels like we have been asleep for three long years. Where does one find the lifeblood after so much stagnant time away? Where does one find the energy to sparkle and shine? Where is the compass or map to help guide us through these overgrown paths? I seek for answers, I look for keys, I search the skies for signs. 

Perhaps it’s in a crystal brooch, or a necklace of semi-precious stones. Perhaps it’s in a diamond and sapphire ring to set off a coat of velvet rose. Perhaps it’s in the smoky wisps of a perfume that smells like it was delivered in an ancient decanter of Venetian glass, unmarked and sealed with some spell of enchantment, leaving a trail of sultry sillage in its wake. Hints of antique roses and sacred incense like fairies wreathed with flowers and dancing about a fire. 

And so our holiday season gingerly opens, as both a return and a new beginning – armed by a calmer yet more formidable sense of what truly matters, accented by a willingness to be open to all things, and to all people. 

The days grow ever shorter, and daylight grows ever briefer. For anyone with the slightest case of seasonal affective disorder, the elongated periods of darkness can wreak havoc with our usually-cheery dispositions. The holidays often offer a period of light, coming in tandem with the shortest days of the year, but even they can be tinged with melancholy and sadness. To offset all of that, I dive deeper into my meditation practice, focusing on clearing the mind and finding longer periods in which the body and mind may become accustomed to quiet and peace. The longer we practice, the easier it is to find such a state when we really need it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yZnI14omYw

For those who may be madly uncomfortable at the idea of total silence during a meditation practice, here is a brief video of some Tibetan singing bowls. It offers some gentle ‘noise’ to make the discomfort of complete silence easier to abide. Personally I prefer the total quiet where all I can hear is the breath. Either way, whatever form of meditation you may employ is better than no meditation at all. 

This relatively fresh ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea bloom rests amid a sea of brown and decaying ‘Annabelle’ blooms, revealing the stark juxtaposition of old versus new in bright, clarion tones. Given the warmer-than-usual autumn weather we’ve had lately, this is an anomaly akin to the azalea blooms that have been appearing next to their fall-colored leaves. It’s slightly jarring to see such bright spring-like blooms next to the red and yellow autumn leaves about to drift away. It feels off, even if we can’t be mad about the gentler weather. 

While its summer foliage gets all the green glory, the towering stalks of this fountain grass have one more trick up their sleeves as they revealed the fluffy seed-heads to top off a banner growing year. I thought they were done with this flaming post, but I’m happy to be reminded that I sometimes speak too soon. 

When the skies begin to drain of blue, and cloud cover and shades of gray become the norm, these textural aspects of the garden will come into play, made more prominent by the lack of more competitive visual stimulation. It is then that the garden takes on a subtler, quieter element – an aspect that demands closer and extended examination and rumination to fully appreciate. A lesson of late fall and winter.  

Easing into the day is an art most of us don’t make the time and effort to pursue. We sleep until the last possible minute, then rush and ramble through the preparatory things we need to do to simply function – a quick shower, a quick cup of coffee, a quick wardrobe selection – and after forty plus years it all becomes a habitual rush. When we arrive at the office or the classroom or even our desks at home, it is often as a frazzled mess of nerves and anxiety. For those of us with any level of social anxiety, the nerve-fraying is often much worse. 

To that end, I look back at how I’ve dealt with such morning mayhem, and it’s actually been rather simple. It’s also been something that came about naturally, in unforced and unplanned fashion, in one of those rare moments of your body and mentality forging a way that works for their needs. In this case, I made a habit of getting up much earlier than needed in order to afford a few moments of calm and relaxation before officially starting the day. 

This meant that at college I would rise well before anyone else, take a shower and head to the food hall for a very early, and very peaceful breakfast, which I would take alone and in silence, reading the newspaper like we did in the old days, and gently starting the mind. In later years, nervous about new jobs and new offices, I would employ the same tactic – rising much earlier than needed then sitting at my desk and slowly allowing the senses to wake, while building whatever confidence and emotional fortitude would be needed to get me through the day. That preparatory chunk of time – where I could sit in stillness and silence – was, now that I look back upon it, its own form of mindfulness and meditation, grounding me in ways that would prove helpful when dealing with whatever madness the world had in store. 

These days I do a much more formal and structured daily meditation, and I’m at the point where I don’t need as much preparation and calm to navigate the average day, but I still take a cup of matcha in the morning, pause to admire the morning be it sunny or sour, and gently ease into something as innocuous as a Tuesday morning.