(or – They Say Confession Is Good For The Soul, But …)
Today is Sunday the third of November, 2002. It is 5:01AM, according to the little number down in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. I’ve been awake for a while now, thinking. Ruminating. Cogitating. Turning things over and examining them from several angles. It’s not insomnia, really. Doris and I went to bed early and were both asleep before ten last night. Yesterday was very busy, and was both physically taxing and an emotional stretch. But I’ll get to that later.
A little background. When I was in college I had a friend whom I will call “Lila” (primarily due to the fact that her name was Lila) who attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, the same storied set of ivy-covered halls where my sister and my wife received their degrees. Lila had one friend named Jay and another named Kris, and the four of us kinda hung around together whenever I was in town. I was working on my Mech-E degree up the road a piece in Atlanta, but I had to do the Co-op program to pay for it, my folks not having the necessary fiscal solvency to shell out big bucks for my education. Most of the time I spent working for actually money was in the Macon area. Georgia Power Company was building a new power plant just north of there and I was a teeny-tiny little cog in that effort. But that’s only the setting and has nothing to do with this story.
I’d met Lila when I was seventeen. We had both won a place on the National Merit Scholar Star Tour of Georgia (yeah, I was a major geek – get over it) and had bonded more or less instantly. We kept in touch after that, which is how I came to meet Jay and Kris. Turns out we all had a near-maniacal love for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. We’d sit around for hours playing Tolkien trivia in the Mercer Student Union. Kris was writing a story of his own, a piece of high fantasy that I frankly thought was pretty good. He never did finish it that I knew of, but the plot looked good, and his prose was solid. I wanted to know how it ended, but …
Doris and I got married in 1983. I didn’t graduate until 1985. Doing things that way was tremendously difficult, and I really don’t recommend it to anyone else, but we just couldn’t live without each other, so there you are. I’d have married her at fifteen, if I had known her. So, anyway, we were living in the student ghetto beside Georgia Tech, with this fellow student, an Architecture major who was one of the most unique individuals I’ve ever known (again, another story that has nothing to do with this one, but quite entertaining in its own right). Kris came by to visit once, and I could tell he was awfully upset about something. I suspected, but did not say anything.
(As a quick aside, you should probably know that I spent many, many years behaving like a jerk, and got the necessary jerkism techniques pretty much perfected. I like to think I’ve improved, but it’s taken a long time. A very long time.)
Later, after I’d graduated and we’d moved to Macon so Doris could finish her degree, we heard that Kris had “come out”. My initial reaction was along the lines of, “Well, considering his upbringing, that’s hardly surprising.” I’d met his parents, and he’d confided some of the details of the hell that passed for a childhood in his case. But he had never been the type of person who would press charges against his family and friends, regardless of whether or not they deserved it.
Point of information: I’d become a Christian in late spring of 1986, and if you’ve been around new converts much, you’ll know how strident and gung-ho they can be, especially those of us who were jerks to begin with. Doris went through that at the age of thirteen, and managed to tick off all the other (decidedly non-Christian) members of her family. She’d told me all about it, but my skull can be extraordinarily thick, and my ability to apply life lessons from other people’s experiences has never been all that well-developed. So, in that context, hearing second-hand about Kris’ own ‘Conversion To The Dark Side’ made me sad.
Fast-forward to 1991. Lucy is two, Joe is six months, and we are living in New Bern, North Carolina. New Bern isn’t the backside of all Creation, but you can see it from there. We were thirteen hours by Interstate from the nearest relative, and the area was socially backward and spiritually stunted. Doris was battling severe post-partum depression. We didn’t like the church we were attending, but it was the least of evils available. I HATED my job with Bosch Power Tools. My boss was insane, a workaholic who drove his direct reports mercilessly, and who could have given lessons in mental torture to Torquemada.
Happy? No, you might say we weren’t happy.
Things were tense at home. I was putting in sixty-hour-minimum weeks at a time when Doris desperately needed my presence, and help dealing with the kids. I had my resumé out to several headhunters, but hadn’t heard anything positive. I was on the Board of Directors of the local Crisis Pregnancy Center, which I’d helped to start. That was actually the high point of my stay in New Bern. It was only open two days a week, but we saw over seven hundred clients in the first six months of operation. Normally, that wouldn’t even be tangential to the story I’m telling, except for one little detail.
CPC’s had gotten some really bad press from a heavily-slanted “exposé” one of the network news programs had done. Our center had absolutely nothing in common with the place they’d “investigated”, but we got lots of hate mail anyway. And most of the writers made it clear that a] they were gay, b] they “knew what kind of lies and filth we were spewing”, and c] they thought the Center should be burned down.
Did I mention that we weren’t particularly happy in New Bern? I did? Good.
So Kris calls up out of the blue and says he’s found “the one” for him and they are going to be coming through the area, and they’d love to stop by and visit for a couple of days, if that’s okay.
And I turned him down. Cold. If I remember correctly, I said I wouldn’t condone them being together under my roof. His reaction, you can probably deduce. That was the last time we communicated.
That was 1991.
I’ve wondered many times what ever happened to him. I knew he’d been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, and knew what all that entailed, and wondered how it would have affected his relationship with his partner. But, due initially to an inflexible attitude, and due later to a sense of regret and embarrassment for that same attitude, I never tried to contact him.
And time passed.
……….
Thursday. As in, last Thursday, October 31, 2002, Halloween, I had a few minutes to myself around lunchtime, and went through one of those exercises that even a modest ego occasionally demands: I looked for myself on Google. I wanted to see whether there were any “Gone Wylde” references on the web associated with my name. So I just typed in Clint McInnes and hit Search. And I was moderately well-pleased. Yeah, most of the ‘Clint McInnes’ files had nothing to do with me. One is a numismatist from New Zealand. One runs a Mazda discussion board. One is a rock-climbing artist. I’d like to meet them some day, maybe see if there is any resemblance, but I rather imagine that will remain only a wish.
However … one of the references stopped me cold. You know how Google gives you a little snippet of the file in question? This one said “… even Clint McInnes, whose rejection so many years ago still smarts …”
The URL contained the word “evandal”, which was the name of Kris’ SCA persona. I clicked the link.
Yep. That’s him. There’s a picture of him and his partner on the home page. He has a goatee now. And he looks happy.
I read through the site, discovering things, remembering things. Followed some links. He and his partner live in Savannah. He still writes. He manages some genealogical sites. He spent some time in the hospital battling Crohn’s, but is better now. Not remission exactly, but better.
Learning all this gave me more than somewhat to pause. I had a link. I had an email address. And I had what amounted to (or possibly what had developed into) an old debt. I thought about it a lot on Friday, trying to make up my mind what to do. What, after all this silence, would I say if I did write? Lots of things came to mind, but life has a tendency to get in one’s way when introspection is required. Also, subconsciously, I think perhaps that I was afraid of what he’d say. No one enjoys rejection, even if it is deserved.
So I decided to sleep on it a while, let it percolate, so to speak. I had a very busy weekend ahead, lots of physical activity and chores around the house. Saturday I went with Doris yard-sale-ing, and we found lots of good stuff. I got an electric weed eater for five bucks, a replacement for the gas-powered model that had finked out on me back in the spring. Spent some of the day weed-eating and some mowing, ending up with the realization that I needed to buy a rake, since our old rake had broken. I headed over to Big Lots to look for a rake.
They didn’t have one. Rakes, they informed me, are a seasonal item, and it is no longer Autumn, in retail terms. Funny, looked to me as if most of the leaves were still on the trees. Oh, well, guess I’ll have to go to Lowe’s. So I head back to the front of the store, and practically run into Kris.
No kidding.
I didn’t recognize him immediately. He didn’t recognize me at all. I had a full beard, lots of bushy hair, and contact lenses in college, so it’s not his fault. But I got a couple of aisles down and it hit me: that’s Kris. I turned around and went back, found him, spoke, and …
Well, it turned out a lot better than I’d anticipated. He and his partner were in town visiting an old friend, who, it turns out, lives a block and a half from my house! We talked for about twenty minutes there in the store, swapped cards and stuff. Kris came over later and we spent the evening chatting and getting caught up. He met our kids, got reacquainted with Doris, and we had a truly wonderful visit. A lovely visit.
As if I needed any more evidence that God has a sense of humor. He certainly has a sense of the dramatic. Heh. The Big Lots in Greenwood, South Carolina. Cute.
Kris is heading back to Savannah today, but we will be getting together again before too long. Much time has passed, much hurt needs to be dealt with. But I think now that everything will turn out all right.
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Oh, and by the way ....... two days after I first posted this, my son Joe found a perfectly good rake in the garage. Identical in almost every respect, in fact, to the one I ended up buying at Lowe's.
It's that Divine Humor thing.