If You Build It, Lesbians Will Come...with their Dogs and Ducks

I met Tommie (with a girl ‘ie’) during the late ‘80s in San Antone while I was doing my student teaching. I was a mess but had the radiance of youth and could jog four miles without breaking into a sweat.  The  outer disguise helped me avoid punishment(s) that would have been good for me to face and own.  

I was fit—too fit, allowing my mind to determine what my body needed, starving it for optimum performance—to do what earth moving task? Get a job?  This is the kind of sophomoric stuff you do when you’re an invincible mid-20 year old and want to avoid the inevitable reality that you've postponed while constructing a theoretical life on a college campus. I was a machine without a plug in the outlet. 

To add to the molotov cocktail—I wasn’t planning a marriage or being told that I needed to do what the other girls were doing—I was gay, living outside of societies rules. I was on my own, making up rules for peculiar—and non-monetarily beneficial—odysseys. I considered myself lucky to be under society's radar.

After graduation, I headed south to Corpus.  I needed to remember my mom and her stabilizing ways.  Tommie moved to Austin (and then Houston and then back to Austin) with her life partner. We met up a decade later in a coffee house where I listened to her performance poetry. She was good on-stage, and I was shy.

Our lives were always out-of-sync, but once in a while a poem would arrive via snail mail for the other to deconstruct (and enjoy). We always had a way of finding each other. I received this email yesterday:

I want to have my friends around me growing old. Lesbians make us feel comfortable. Lifelong friends, I want to hold close forever.

The plan:

• a few acres

• our own houses

• a community house

• the garden

• a pool

• a driver 

...I want more wiener dogs, a cat, a couple of chickens, a goat, maybe a duck. 

I have thought of being old longer than I can remember. Nobody can ask for more than to have those near us when you die. I don't mean to be morbid. I just realized I can't run more than 2 laps.  I'm carrying more weight than I can handle.

My favorite memory of you: that awful run we did where the tracking was off. We are soul mates, never partners. It's just that we understand each other. Nice!

During my many moves, I’ve met many lesbians who share the same narrative—A Final Community.  The story opens with land that’s magically or purposefully set aside by a benefactor. Cottages are connected by golf cart paths. At dusk, everyone meets in the middle. There’s always a community garden. Tommie added a pool. I imagine we’ll need a Jacuzzi that heats our bones and a sauna too. Although we all have dogs, the diverse narrators never allocate space for them.  I guess it goes without saying that we assume each pack will sleep at the foot of the bed in their respective cottages. That’s the way I would want it.

We, as an unified community, haven’t really formalized a retirement plan. If so many of us share this dream of living, and dying, with strangers who have shared similar quests, I wonder why we haven’t built such a sanctuary. I have to guess that while we want to be with those who mirror our desires, we haven’t given up on the straight community. That’s where we all started. I know that I’m not ready to wean myself completely away. I get a lot from their random and diverse life exchanges. I like being lost, determining my position, amidst their alien priorities.

In addition to receiving this testimony of love from Tommie, Love Heroine came over last night and watched the first episode of Lip Service with me. I wanted him to meet that "ridiculously attractive cop." I wanted him to resent Frankie for her selfishness, and say “Oh, hell no. I wouldn’t date that one [Cat].”  He did all that with me.  Camaraderie about stuff that doesn’t matter is back pocket, storehouse, medicine for when the They-Them twins are making new rules that are counter to logic.

But, the best part of the entire day was when Mic-Monk dropped in. She met Love Heroine for the first time and gave me a present. It is a groovy Buddha necklace. She was so excited to give it to me. She visualized the gift and while hunting for the piece parts that she had planned to meticulously connect, she found a completed one on-line. She bought it, just like that! Surprises and testimonies of love are the best interruptions in life.

If I moved all of my stuff to the lesbian compound, Mic-Monk, Love Heroine and Dim Sum would have to drive out to find me. We would be unnaturally separated from our organic gatherings. That would be a sad state of existence. Maybe the other narrators have figured it all out and that’s why no one has built Utopia yet.

If you’ve built a Utopia in exile or in the middle of an alien community- share the (+/-) with us!