We are the change we've been waiting for.

A little "art" I created in a Naropa class last week:  Anna
Dickinson, the 19th century Quaker abolitionist and
orator (and lesbian) observing 9-year-old (lesbian) me.

While Facebook friends and my classmates and professors at Naropa's Summer Writing Program celebrated the SCOTUS marriage-equality decision last Friday, I struggled with anger.  What were we celebrating, really?  The Supreme Court's decision that my fiancé and I deserve basic human rights?  I thought about the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, and wondered if African American families felt celebratory or exhausted and angry when it was announced.  Of course my child should get to attend school with your child.  It's about time.  Or the 1919 passing of the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised women in the United States 143 years after Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he helped write the text of the U.S. Constitution.  I've seen the photographs of women celebrating the amendment, victoriously holding their placards aloft.  But surely they felt anger, too.  One hundred and forty-three years?   The fight was painful, vitriolic.  Opponents hurled insults at the suffragettes:  she's really a man, she neglects her children, she's a Sapphist. Many suffragettes did not live to see their dream of the vote realized.  When justice takes so long, how can we forgive the time frame and just celebrate?

I carried these brooding thoughts with me to a table at the Naropa Café, where my poet-friend Val was gesturing for me to join her.  Val is much older than I am:  short gray hair, life-worn, a poet shaman who wears bright scarves, believes her dreams, and talks openly of a difficult past she barely survived.  We're connected because we're both writers and we're both lesbians.

"I can't shake this anger I'm feeling today," I told her.  My bones felt heavy.  I told Val what I'd been thinking about Brown and Abigail and celebrations, and she nodded, agreeing, but I caught the glint of loving amusement in her eyes.  And suddenly, I heard how young I sounded.  I came out as a lesbian at age 28, in 2005, after famous people like Ellen had begun to come out (1997), after the last sodomy law was overturned in Texas (2003), after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage (2004).  I was born eight years after the Stonewall Riots (1969).  And I didn't feel like celebrating?  In the middle of my own sentence, I burst out laughing.

Val grinned.  "The world is changing," she said.  "It's our work to be midwives to all this change.  We've got to celebrate.  It's our work."

It's our work.  I celebrated the rest of the day without hesitation, cheering with all the rest when Anne Waldeman introduced our Friday colloquium with a joyful fist in the air and a "How about that Supreme Court decision?" I checked Facebook more often than usual, and felt only glad to see all the rainbows.  Meredith texted from the World Series of Poker in Vegas:  "Because of the Supreme Court decision today, I've already won!"  Determined to be a midwife for all this change, whenever it arrives, a friend and I toasted Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer at dinner that night.  What does anger accomplish?  The change is happening.  People who struggled with police at Stonewall never thought they'd see this day.

This morning, I sit outside on the front porch with my coffee, the sprinklers nourishing the new plants in our garden, and contemplate change in my own life.  In four years, Mitike and I have moved three times:  Juneau to Fort Collins, Fort Collins to Boulder, and now to Denver. Four years ago, Ali died.  Only two years ago, I emerged from living all the time inside grief.  And now, in this past year and a half, as if something in me was finally prepared to midwife good, life-giving change:  I met Meredith, I got a few pieces published, I earned an MFA, I found a good high school English job, and I got engaged.  When the assistant principal at South High asked me why I was moving to Denver, I told her I was moving in with my fiancé, and that she lives just a few miles from the school.  It wasn't long ago that it was dangerous for a teacher to come out to an administrator.  The assistant principal just smiled and said, "Congratulations!  Will the kids have to get used to you having a new last name next year, then?"

This morning, I feel only joy.  Yes, these changes that seem obvious take too long.  Yes, we have a long way to go in this country to craft a safe and equal world for people of all races, backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc.  But this morning, I'm watching the sun glint off the droplets of water on my new yarrow and coneflower plants.  In a year, I'm hoping these plants fill this garden, but they're still new.  They're waiting for the soil to be right for their roots, for the sun and rain to nourish them just enough.  Then they'll grow tall and full.  For now, I'll stand nearby and write, a midwife for all this good change.

Review of "Cloudburst"

In "Cloudburst" (2011), Stella (Olympia Dukakis) and Dottie (Brenda Fricker) are lesbians in their 80s who live in a little house by the sea in Maine -- more or less peacefully, though their 31-year relationship contains some playful spark. All is well until Dottie's granddaughter, Molly, tricks her blind grandmother into signing away her power of attorney, which allows Molly to have her put in a nursing home.  Enraged, the fiesty and potty-mouthed Stella sneaks into the home, rescues Dottie, and then heads north to Canada in her rickety red pick-up truck, determined that if the two of them are legally married, they can be protected.  On the way, they pick up a sad and lost New York dancer/hitchhiker named Prentiss.  The majority of the movie is filmed in the cab of the truck or in the little Canadian towns just north of the Maine border.

This film is wonderful.  Stella and Dottie are realistic characters, and their relationship contains the solidity and rough patches a 31-year relationship is bound to contain.  The love between the two is palpable: it's sweet to have the third-person observations from Prentis (Ryan Doucette), but the audience doesn't need that perspective to see Stella and Dottie obviously love each other.  Like the camp comedy of the 1950s, the quest upon which the two women embark to gain legal protection for their relationship is hilarious and over-the-top, as Stella's ridiculously foul language and inappropriate comments get them into trouble and Dottie's blindness causes her to stumble into one very embarrassing situation.  However, like that camp comedy, the film is actually saying something serious.  Look at these two lesbians who have been together 31 years.  Really?  They live in a country where their commitment to each other isn't legal?  Where they have to roadtrip to Canada for legal protection?  At many points in the campy roadtrip scenes, such as the moment when Dottie and Stella get caught in the fast-rising tides, a sense of doom creeps into the comedy.  The two women are together, but barely.  Stella's right to be paranoid.

Olivia Dukakis is incredible as Stella, to the end of the film.  The trick for the viewer is to see her, finally, as Dottie did in her love:  as a woman who has endured too much, who loves big, who knows to recognize her "best day" when it comes.

Every lesbian should see this film, to honor our oldest generation of lesbians, to hear about 1950s lesbian culture and rules, and to find comfort in the camp and truth in the serious.  Other people should see this film, too, but they won't understand it the way we will. . .

Time for what? Pink Match.Com?

At a family wedding last weekend, three different well-meaning family members told me it's time I started dating.  No one said it obnoxiously.  All three said it with love, and even with sensitivity.  It's only been two years.  And it's been two years.  You're only 36.  Maybe it's time?

Weddings motivate some people to try to scatter the hopefulness of love like grains of rice, like the bubbles that were popular for awhile, like the butterflies my sister considered having released at her wedding until she found out they die shortly afterwards.  Here:  look at this young couple, so much love and hope in their eyes.  Now you try, too.

I have, twice.  With my former husband Matt ("ex" connotes anger and bitterness that does not exist between us; we're dear friends, still), I had the traditional wedding, registry and all, the move to our own apartment, the attempt to set up a life together.  Then I met A___, gradually understood I was lesbian, struggled through the grief of a separation and divorce from Matt. . .and then with A__, I had passion, a deep sense that soulmates actually do exist, the hope of a long life side by side, the planning for the future.  Then she died.  (That's a condensed version of eight years).

Sure, only 36.  It seems most people haven't lived so many different lives already.

Yesterday, Matt and his second wife Sarah (as in, her name is Sarah, too) had their first baby.  I'm happy for them.  But maybe I can't help feeling a little self-pity, too.  I am living life, I am moving forward (that's far more than I could have said about myself a year ago), and yet sometimes my sadness about living life alone overwhelms me.  I never imagined I'd raise a child alone, or that I'd go to bed every night alone, or that I'd plan my future alone.

But my family is wrong that dating is the solution to my sadness.  It's A___ I miss.  It's A____ for whom I look on the streets, for whom I listen in new friendships, about whom I hope to dream when I fall asleep.  If I'm always longing for her, it will never be fair to attempt a connection with someone else.

Anyway, I don't know how I'd even begin.  A lesbian friend (in a long-term partnership) told me this weekend that Boulder's odd:  progressive, open-minded, but entirely lacking in GLBT hang-outs -- no cafes, no bars, just a small "Out Boulder" office on 14th Street and Spruce, a few websites, an annual Pride Fest.  Meeting someone here depends on chance, the eye contact that informs the other that yes, we are looking for the same -- the accidental brush of a hand that contains more fire than a stranger's would normally.  My friend joked that maybe I should wear a sign announcing my identity so women could find me.  A lump formed in my throat.  I don't want that, I don't want that.  I catch myself peering down the street, wondering when A___ will come striding toward me, her dark eyes sparkling with laughter; I wait for her to whisk me away to a place where we can finally be alone after all this time.

Another friend -- a straight one -- told me just yesterday to sign up with Match.com or to find one of the iPhone apps that match people with other interested people who are within 100 feet.  I stared at her, incredulous.  Really?  You're too young, she told me, your life isn't over.  DO something about it!  You can't go the rest of your life with no sex, no one to hold you, no one to talk to at night.

I had to turn away to watch our children play together on the playground dinosaur.  No, I don't think I can live the rest of my life that way, but I don't think I can allow anyone else into that space that I gave so fully to A___.  It's true that I long to be touched -- just tenderly, lovingly.  A dad at the playground reached up to move a strand of hair from my eyes yesterday while we talked and I nearly burst into tears at the touch, which would have startled him.  How I miss the comfort of a body that loves me.

After my daughter went to bed last night, I actually looked up a few of the dating apps.  Photo after photo of women, of varying ages, marketing themselves:  "Looking for a friend and something more!" "Love to hike and have fun!"  I don't belong in those web pages any more than I belong at a bar.  And I'd much rather be at the bar, sipping a glass of wine, listening to music.  I'll wait until Boulder has one.  Maybe, when that happens years from now, I'll be ready for the next step.  Not yet.  For all my loneliness and my disappointment that I am so utterly alone in this life now, I am still in mourning. . .