Once Upon a Time, My Way
Chrysalis: Noun
The transformation from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis and, finally, adult
He emerged from the chrysalis of self-conscious adolescence
Wikipedia
I had no idea, really, that a definition like this could so succinctly describe my transformation from my “self-conscious adolescence” into the butterfly I was meant to be. But there it is, laid out like a table of contents, there for me to simply give in to and follow along with the words and the lives and the thousands of others who were emerging from their (usually) troubled roots to find themselves in the same place and time and join with our compatriots to live a life few, if any, had ever even imagined possible.
I knew I had to go there, that place, that City of cluttered hills and fog-shrouded valleys. I knew it when I was 12 years old. My mother and my uncle brought me to San Francisco from our home in Maryland for the funeral of their brother. It was 1964. The Boeing 707 seemed like the Wizard’s balloon that had magically transported me to a Oz-ish fairyland of colors, and tastes, and flavors unknown to my small-world, country self. Everything about this strange new world was vibrant and agitated and buzzing with a life that insinuated itself into my core. The ice plants that lined the 12-lane freeways were a blur of succulent colors so exotic that I carried some home from my aunt’s garden and nursed them in the kitchen window for years, trying to coax another bloom out of them. Just a few years later I would find, once living here, that they are insidious, creeping weeds but, even in their lowered stature, seem exotic to me still, 60 years later
I flew away from my home when I was a young man to a land far, far, away.
It was a fairy tale time; in the universe, in my life, in the lives of so many that I met in that shining city on the hills. There was hope, emergence, gayety in everything and everyone. I had never been in the closet really but now, here, in this San Francisco, I was untethered from the expectations of my home and family and the childhood I had, in so many ways, simply endured. Those of us from that early time of life who are still in touch with each other after over 60 years have a bifurcated and disjointed view of our childhoods.
On the one hand, we all agree that we had the last idyllic, freeform, childhood of almost any generation. We had farms, woods, horses, creeks, barns, and trails. We were booted out the door early in the morning with a bag lunch we packed ourselves, transistor radios and extra batteries in hand because we waited eagerly for every Beatles’ song with an anticipation that, for the day, matched Taylor Swift proportions. “Home by dark.” That was the admonition from our mothers. “Dark” was a fungible asset. There were no streetlights to trigger a timeline, and it got darker sooner in the woods, but we could claim the wide-open fields as still “light” and really? The moms were so busy with the younger kids and having dad’s dinner ready that we got away with shit. After riding all day, we had to groom and bed down the horses, and the barn was well across the fields and we were unseeable and unsupervised there all the time.
On the other, more sinister, hand there was abuse of all nature occurring in almost all our homes; from fractious, neglectfully abusive parents to sexual abuse, beatings, and even sibling rapes. We silently, intrinsically, knew a bit about this, (hinted at it maybe?) and sympathetically, subliminally, supported each other knowing all our parents were crazy. We saw the whipping bruises on the backs of our neighbor girls’ legs under their skirts on the bus to school. Unspoken shame. It honestly took 50 years for my favorite little sister to admit she had been raped by our brother for years.
Yet the silent shame of abuse and neglect somehow could not overpower or negate the simple, rural, joy we all experienced daily. Nature was our playground, our school, our healer, our confessor, our very best friend. In the end, despite everything; the abuse, the disfunction, the shocking later-year admissions, we still all, to a person, hold up our shining childhoods as paragons of perfection in the age of innocence we thought we were living. How that happens I cannot say. I am simply grateful for a memory bank of those early years that sustains an image of our childhoods that I cherish, still. Really, it is silo behavior starting early. Maybe, in those fractals of fiction we each created for ourselves, were the seeds of my discontent. The driving need for me as a young gay man to escape, to travel, to see the world, to find my world, just go.
I had been extraordinarily lucky and privileged at an early age. My older sister had married and moved to Germany with her Army husband and started producing the first and only grandchildren. My mother, the driving force of everything she touched, booked she and the father and I on a 707 (eastbound unlike the Albert Hammond hit It Never Rains in Southern California. That was a 747 and it comes later in this tale) and off I went to spend two summers in Germany and the rest of Europe essentially on my own as a sixteen-year-old. Formative, impactful, educational, eye-opening to name a few things that shook me into a new life and imbued me with a lifelong need to travel.
It was the 60’s and globally all bets were off. I remember buying a tailor made, teal, bell-bottomed suit on Carnaby St. in London, in 1968. Who got to DO that? I did. My cousins who lived in London, took us to a Chinese restaurant, something we barely had in my country life outside of canned Chunk King Chowmein. I had octopus for the first time. Frankly, it chewed like a Rubbermaid doormat, but the experience awakened my taste for foods of all cultures. I have been a Californian for 50 years now and I can say Calamari ranks up there in my food profile dominance even with the inauspicious start. My very first jobs in San Francisco, were as chefs in restaurants. The through-line was established…early.
I never knew and never asked in 1964 my mother and uncle took me on that first Westbound 707 to San Francisco. Noone in my family had flown in anything since 1940 when another uncle had run out of fuel and crashed in North Carolina and killed he and his copilot. Now, another uncle had died in San Francisco, young, and for some reason the mother-in-charge decided I need to attend the military funeral at the Presidio. My mother and accompanying uncle, fueled with Manhattans, initiated my first flight. That was my first glimpse of sunny California. I remember on the ride from SFO to my aunt’s house in the San Mateo Hills I saw magical flowering berms of delight along all the freeways. Bowers of flowers everywhere. Bougainville, Ice-plants, Bottlebrush, it was paradise. 8-lane freeways with traffic literally flashing past at 80-mph. I remember as my aunt drove, my uncle, in the front seat, gripping the dashboard and mashing his foot on the “brake” he wanted control over. The image is still there. I was home and maybe I didn’t know it then, but barely 12 years later I really was home. My die had been cast and much to my mother’s bemusement in the end, she had made the mold.
In the ensuing decade I managed to graduate high school (barely) and slog my way to a BA (barely) and on being asked what I wanted for graduation by my parents, the answer was simplistic and direct; a ticket to San Franciso. They knew I would never return. It feels now like a truly western expansion saga of one hundred years before. An educated young man takes flight in search of his own destiny and heads west. In so many ways it was exactly that.
I became a real student now. This California life was the template for how I intended to live from then onward. The buildings of the City dripped and oozed with history. My imagination took flight and my curiosity was lit from within by a fire that rivaled the Great Fire of 1906. Nothing would sway me, intimidate me, or cow my enthusiasm for life. This new life I was finally living.
Living, My Way
I have lived with a wild abandon that many have feared and avoided. I have never played it safe. Those who know me know I think through music, lyrics in particular. I play it in my ears as I hike; it triggers thoughts, memories, and most importantly pathways forward into pieces I am compelled to write down. Music is my Muse, I suppose. Now that I have left the chrysalis of my youth far behind on the path I have travelled, there is only one set of lyrics that keeps reverberating, loudly in my head. The adult me is growing tired, the body is quite literally beat up and starting to fail me. It is all going according to plan. This butterfly had been transcendent in life. Beautiful to be me. I’m also sure fascinating to watch unfold but there are few left who have had that unique view and so I am left, as we all are, essentially alone as I approach my end. And who better to sing me out of this extraordinary life and time…….
And now the end is near
So I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case of which I’m certain
I’ve lived a life that’s full
I’ve traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way
Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exception
I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you know
That I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall
And did it my way
I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing
And now as tears subside
I find it all so amusing
To think I did all that
And may I say, not in a shy way
Oh, no, no not me
I did it my way
For what is a man, what has he got
If not himself, then he has not
To say the words he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way
Songwriters: Paul Anka / Gilles Thibaut / Claude Francois / Jacques Revaux