The red LCD numerals on the clock glow 2:30 a.m. I have to pee. I tumble out of bed,
pad into the bathroom.
“Lafe, would you bring me some hand lotion on your way back?” my husband asks.
“Never mind, I’ll ch
eck the fire,” he says.
(By the way, I’m choosing to refer to myself as “Lafe” in this diary project. I’ll call my
husband “Alexander.” These are not our actual names.)
I squirt some lotion into my hand, follow Alexander out to the living room. Soft Christmas lights burn 24 hours a day and provide illumination enough for me to stand and watch as he stokes the fire. We heat our home with wood; the stove needs to be stoked once during the night in order to keep the house at a comfortable temperature. Tonight it’s not as cold as it has been—neither outside nor inside the house.
He goes to pee.
“I left the lotion by the sink,” I tell him.
When he returns to bed we snuggle against each other.
Sad and sobering thoughts
The next time I glance at the bedside clock it reads 5:30 a.m. I awake from a dream. I should get up and write it down while I remember it. Nah. I note I feel sad. Bereft, really. A decree has gone out from the social media platform Tumblr that all adult-oriented content on its site shall be banned starting tomorrow night at midnight. Tumblr is a microblogging website especially suited for posting and sharing photographs and short snippets of text. Many Tumblr blogs feature erotica. While I have not especially active on Tumblr, I do have an anonymous blog there. And it does feature erotica. It has provided an opportunity for me to examine, explore and celebrate aspects of my sexuality I otherwise keep under wraps. I’m sad to see it and others summarily banished.
I turn to snuggle up against Alexander for comfort and reassurance in a world awash in sadness and morality by decree. Then I remember it’s EDLM Diary Day. Better get up and record the dream.
But I have to pee first. As I do I consider the possibility I’ll be diagnosed with prostate cancer a month from now when I have a biopsy done. My PSA levels were high at my recent physical and I have a family history of prostate cancer—my dad died when prostate cancer spread throughout his body. My left eye is matted halfway shut. It does this from time to time. I put super-expensive-and-way-
past-the-expiration-date medicine in it last night. Hope it helps. I take a towel to put on the living room chair on as I’m wearing only my nightshirt and slippers. I write down the dream by the soft glow of Christmas lights in the plastic greenery on the mantel.
Dream of Saturday, December 15, 2018
The group I am a member of has been earning money by working as needed with a physician. These last two days it’s been my turn to serve as the doctor’s assistant. I’ve started work at 8:00 a.m., finished at 8:00 p.m., two days in a row. I figure the doctor owes us $200.
“I may want someone again tomorrow,” he tells me. “Are you available?”
I check with the leader of our group.
“What are your plans for tomorrow?” he asks the doctor.
“Well, I’ll be going to prayers near here,” the doctor says.
“We can have someone available,” the leader tells him.
Rehearsal has started for me. We are reenacting a wedding. It’s time for those of us in the wedding party to walk down the grassy hillside to stand in front of the assembly. The groomsmen go first, including my younger brother. (The dream pays no heed to the fact that in waking life this brother is estranged to me.) I wait for the bride to come in. She’s my former wife (also estranged to me in wak
ing life, but again, in the dream this is of no account). I keep waiting on the bride. The space between me and the person who walked in before me grows large. Now the audience is waiting. People nearby encourage me to catch up, bridge the distance. “I’m waiting for the bride,” I protest.
“You can’t see her; not yet,” someone tells me.
I think to myself, Oh, that’s right. The groom is not supposed to see the bride until her
grand entry.
I walk down front, join the double row of men and boys waiting here. As I do I overhear an Asian-American boy tell his dad about building snowmen today. My oldest son, at age four or five, is among those standing up with me. (In the dream this seems perfectly natural; in waking life he’s 30 and will have nothing to do with me.)
“Did you make a snowman today?” I ask, bending down to speak with him at his eye level.
“Yes, I built a snow robot.”
He describes it. I envision a robot standing tall on multi-segmented legs with two small antennae on its head.
“Twenty-seven people live in his leg,” my son says.
It takes some explaining before I understand that each leg segment is an apartment with a door, and home to a group of people.
[End of dream]
Bringing together what has been apart
The clock strikes six times before I finish recording this dream. I reflect for a few minutes on what I’ve recorded.
Jung says part of our life’s work is the union of opposites. In the dream I rehearse the marriage of male and female energies, of two people who seem quite opposite in temperament and habits. Also, estranged factions are reuniting. Maybe this is good news—that on an inner level a union of opposites is underway. I am perhaps bridging the distance between inner parts of self that have been at odds with each other.
I’ve been involved in healing work for two days in the dream, and my efforts are to be recompensed. The healer asks if I am available to continue this work tomorrow. Is there a place in my waking life where I see this happening?
Too, the dream includes creativity in action and a youthful male energy fashioning communal living space. More indication of a coming together. Yay.
Dang tho
se guineas anyway
Stoke the fire, then back to bed. Next I hear the clock strike eight, the buzz of NPR on the upstairs radio (which means Alexander is being creative in the sewing room), the gurgle of the coffeemaker. I roll back over. I dream our two guinea fowl have mounted a young hen in the chicken coop. A pile of white chicken feathers litters the floor about her. “You get off!” I yell. Apparently they already have. I feel angry. And mystified as to why the guineas mounted a chicken. How did it happen? My anger wakes me up from my slumber. I weigh the merits of getting out of bed. Nah. I’m good at sleeping and I enjoy it. As I drift back to sleep I open the barn door and there the guineas are again, having at the little hen. I am angry all over again and this wakes me up once more. Having to pee is the deciding factor. I get up and launch into my morning routine: thyroid medicine taken with a large glass of water, now a cup of black coffee— where’s my mug?
The games (we) people play
I hear Alexander come down the stairs. Hang the mug, I’ll take a kiss instead. But he’s not there. By the shadow on the back wall I see he’s gone around the other side of the partition. This house is constructed so here one can walk in an endless circle around and around an eight-foot stretch of wall dividing kitchen from dining room from hallway. I step around to the opposite side of the wall. He’s not there. I know this game. It is one of our regular delights. I chase after him four or five times around the partition before he presses himself to the wall behind the doorway curtain, feigns innocence when I uncover him there.
“Oh, hallelujah,” I say, “there is an end to this.”
“Are you getting exercise?” he asks.
“I am,” I say.
I kiss him. He looks so cute‚ bright-eyed, energetic, youthful, alive.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well for the working stiffs
Now, black coffee in hand, I whistle the Welsh hymn Calon Lân as I enter the living room wondering what poem is in store for today’s reading. Charles Kingsley (1819—1875) writes “The Three Fishers.” A story in three stanzas of three fishermen and three wives. The first stanza has the men going to work:
Three fishers went sailing out into the west,—
Out into the west as the sun went down ;
Each thought of the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the town ;
For men must work, and women must weep ;
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
though the harbor bar be moaning.
[The second stanza looks in on the women:]
Three wives sat up in the light-house tower,
And trimmed the lamps as the sun went down ;
And they l
ooked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,
And the rack it came rolling up, ragged and brown ;
But men must work, and women must weep ;
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbor bar be moaning.
[I figure the third stanza will be about the children, but no:]
Three corp
ses lay out on the shifting sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are watching and wringing their hands,
For those who will never come back to the town ;
For men must work, and women must weep,—
And the sooner it ’s over, the sooner to sleep,—
and good-by to the bar and its moaning.
I read it several times over. Set it to a tuneless dirge. Then sing it aloud to the tune of the hymn, ‘Tis Midnight and on Olive’s Brow.” Cram it to fit the metre. It fits better to “The Water is Wide,” but that’s not nearly so sad a melody. I know so few dirges. Still, the poem is wonderfully melancholic and sad. Lets me think I know something about death. Or maybe not.
A homily on hubris
“It is lunacy,” says Carl Jung in this morning’s passage from The Red Book, “like everything that transcends its boundaries. How can you hold that which you are not? Would you really like to force everything which you are not under the yoke of your wretched knowledge and understanding? Remember that you can know yourself, and with that know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else.” [p. 306]
So. We venture out into the depths, the fathomless not-knowing. We do what we can, what we must, in our own limited circle of reach. Overreach is lunacy. And dangerous to others. “Beware of kn
owing what lies beyond yourself, or else your presumed knowledge with suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit,” says Jung.
I saw this. I’ve seen this. In coming out, in knowing myself enough to claim this part of myself, I saw others fall all over themselves to tell me they knew me better than I did—they knew I was confused, deceived of Satan, outside of God’s will, selfish, stupid, disobedient, disrespectful to parents, wrong, an anathema, condemned to hell, evil, wicked, a threat to children, unwanted, better off dead. These messages were strong, many, forceful.
J., a friend of ours, listened to them and took them to heart. Turned to alcohol to ease the pain. Crippled himself in a car accident. Still washes/sloshes away his self-loathing with alcohol. Lives certain he will burn in hell when he dies.
D., another friend and mentor of mine—a wonderfully creative, giving, loving man with a unique sense of humor—struggled in secret with his sexual orientation. At last he was outed. The same societal and religious machinery that locked me in its sights lumbered into action and held him in its cross hairs. D. took his own life rather than face the threatened public shaming and humiliation.
“Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself,” says Jung. The consequences are real. Sometimes they are quite literally a matter of life and death. I hear Kingsley saying that even plying our trade within our proscribed limits is no guarantee against death—that some must work and some must weep and the endless moaning of life’s rhythm rolls on and on, moaning.
- • •
I chop onion and put it on to sauté, then sit down to read/revise my current writing project. The clock strikes the half-hour and wakes me from my reverie. It’s 9:30. The onion has not burned yet. I tak
e it out of the pan, crack three eggs. Breakfast includes over-sautéed onions atop fried eggs, red plum and coffee.
A homily on prejudice and preconceptions
The book currently on our toilet tank for bathroom reading is Halfbreed by David Halaas and Andrew Masich. It’s a biography of George Bent or Da-ha-eno, son of a Cheyenne chief’s daughter and a Missouri trader. He was raised as Cheyenne and educated in white schools. Currently I’m caught up in the events of 1864. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle wants peace, dictates to Da-ha-eno a letter that is to be sent to the commander of Fort Lyon in Wyoming Territory. Black Kettle hand-picks two men and a woman to deliver it. The U.S. soldiers have orders to shoot all Indians on sight, but these Cheyennes approach Lieutenant George Hawkins with their hands in the air, holding pieces of paper. He takes them captive, delivers them to Major Edward Wynkoop, commander at Fort Lyon.
At first Wynkoop is angry that Hawkins disobeyed orders and did not shoot the “hostiles.” Dirty savages. Not fit to live. Better off dead. Then he questions the Cheyennes. Did you not know you could be shot for approaching the fort?
Lone Bear replies, “I thought I would be killed, but I knew the paper would be found on my dead body, that you would see it, and it might give peace to my people once more.”
Eagle Head, too, indicates his willingness to sacrifice his life for the cause of peace.
Wynkoop later wrote, “I was bewildered with an exhibition of such patriotism on the part of two savages, and felt myself in the presence of superior beings.” Previously, Wynkoop had deemed them “without exception as being cruel, treacherous, and blood-thirsty, without feeling or affection for friend or kindred.” (p 134)
Hmph. Again I am reminded that people are people once I get to know them, once I lay aside my prejudice and preconceptions. Even those branded wicked, evil, unwanted, deceived of Satan, better off dead. Even those who are rich, egotistic, megalomaniac. Even those who are poor, grasping, greedy. Even those who get under my skin, make me shudder. They are all human, all somehow familiar to me. May well be superior to me in many ways.
We pay a social call on Mrs. Wick
Alexander and I feed the chickens, our goose L., guineas and feral cats, then drive to the home of Abigail (not her real name), our friend and former neighbor. We have a date with her to go to Mrs. Wick’s Café in Winchester. For some time she’s talked about going there. I’ve never been, though I am a great fan of Mrs. Wick’s sugar cream and pecan pies. When Abigail asked us what we wanted for a Christmas gift, we hinted that if she ever found herself at the factory outlet store over there she might pick us up one of their seconds at a discount. We then suggested a field trip to Winchester. Today’s the day.
Abigail asks to stop by the post office so she can run in and get a stamp. We oblige. When she goes into the building I retrieve the emergency pee jar from the trunk, get back in the front seat and fill the thing to the half-way mark. After the vehicle beside us pulls away I open my car door and surreptitiously drain the jar onto the pavement. The spectre of prostate cancer floats about me during this activity. I hop out to open the door for our friend as she returns from mailing her last Christmas card.
A widow, Abigail lives by herself and revels in the opportunity to talk with others. En route to Winchester she dominates the conversation which runs from her relatives buried in this cemetery to the people who used to live in that house and this one to the general scarcity of cows in Indiana anymore to the difficulty in getting one’s bed made and removing bottle caps with arthritic fingers. Our GPS, Alexander’s and my Christmas gift to each other, directs us down back roads. We’re skirting the city of Portland when we learn chocolate meringue was the favorite pie of Abigail’s deceased husband. I recount reading a library book to my young children during our visitation times together after their mother and I separated. It is the story of a girl who goes to visit her uncle where household rules are different. Each morning they eat pie for breakfast. Every so often my sons and I followed suit.
We pass huge wind generators and talk about their mammoth size, the numbers of them, the pros and cons of having one in your backyard. We pass through little towns and ghost towns and talk about the soon-to-be-released book, The Lost Towns of Delaware County.
The E.B. & Bertha C. Ball Center recently hosted a presentation by the book’s author Chris Flook. We pass through Deerfield. Its long-shuttered school building still stands on the edge of town. “The heart of a community stops beating when its school shuts down,” I say, thinking of a recent visit to Lone Rock, Iowa, where my great-great grandfather lived.
It’s cold and wet as we pull up to Mrs. Wick’s. Alexander drops us near the door, then goes to find a parking place in the nearly-full lot. Christmas decorations and music greet us as we step in, searc
h for an empty table. The place is not so fancy as I would have guessed. It has the feel of a small town country café where folks try to recognize us so they can say hello.
I’m undecided about what to order, finally settle for the deluxe fried tenderloin sandwich. It’s neither so big nor so good as I’d hoped. The coleslaw tastes great. I give my husband my fries to go with his burger. Abigail orders biscuits and gravy. She’s having major work done on her teeth and can’t chew very well at the moment. This doesn’t stop her from talking. She relates several funny stories. One is about the time her younger sister got locked in the bathroom at the Orpheum Theatre in Hartford City.
The eye candy beats the sandwich
Abigail holds my attention until I catch sight of three college athletes seated at the table katty-korner from us. Football players, I imagine, given how well-built they are, how muscled their arms. Home on Christmas break. Two sit facing us; one has his back to us. Two are Caucasian, one is African American. The man I can see best is also the cutest. He’s full of nervous energy. His right leg bounces up and down on toe-tip. Leg goes like sixty while buttock remains stationary. Thigh jiggles. Heel lifts. Toes rock but stay on the floor. Tan jeans stretch taut across his thighs and cuff at the ankle above black socks and white tennis shoes. Muscled arms burst from a mottled green t-shirt emblazoned with the words “California Republic,” along with the image of a brown bear set against a mountain range. Framing an infectious smile are his sharp nose, fox-like face, bright beady eyes, closely shaved beard and skiff of a mustache. He’s animated, grins often. They all three smile and laugh. He’s more thirsty than hungry. The waitress delivers breakfast platters. He soon asks for a to-go box. He drains a large glass of iced tea, then half a glass of chocolate milk offered by the man sitting opposite him who’s incongruously clad in a black dress shirt and black sweats.
Our dinner companion propounds the importance of motherhood as a profession. “All I ever really wanted,” she says, “is to be a wife and a mother.” Abigail describes the fulfillment she found in keeping the house clean and presentable; her husband often brought sales reps home unannounced. She liked doing his laundry, picking out his clothes, having him look nice. She always watched her own figure. Mowing their large lawn in a bikini was a favorite pastime. She served as taxi driver, ferrying her kids and their friends to ball games and sporting events.
My attention goes back to the trio of athletes as they now push back from the table and stand, make ready to go pay their bill. They must be basketball players, given how tall they are. They leave no tip, I
note. I feel sad about this. Kids. I am heartened when California Republic returns to the table and lays down two bills and some change.
Such a sweet life
Dinner over, we check out the pie cases at Mrs. Wicks’. While her crust isn’t anything to write home about, I love the fillings in her sugar cream pies and pecan pies. I’m especially interested in the (discounted) seconds. Alexander asks, “Do you want to get one each of the sugar cream and pecan?”
“I’m thinking about getting six of each,” I say.
“You’re not serious.”
“I am serious,” I say. “This is the first time in my life I’ve made it over here, why not
take advantage? Who knows when we’ll pass this way again?”
Ever the practical one, he says, “We don’t have freezer space for that many.”
And we don’t. But when I suggest three of each he doesn’t say no. Abigail offers to buy us all six pies we’ve selected as our Christmas gift. I tell her she could get us one. She insists on paying for all six. I suggest she buy us a mincemeat pie instead. It costs more than I’m willing to pay for a single pie, but less than buying all six of the ones we have picked out. She assents.
Alexander needs interfacing for a shirt he’s sewing for me for a Christmas gift so we stop by Wal-Mart, using the twin excuses of necessity and convenience to justify shopping at a chain we generally avo
id.
We head home by an alternate route, one that takes us near or through the small towns of Deerfield, Ridgeville, Fairview, Albany and Eaton. Early on, as we slow down to turn left at a yellow blinking light, a stopped car pulls out into the intersection directly in front of us. My husband hits the brakes, swerves and avoids a collision. I feel angry and grateful at the same time.
We pass the sign for the Purdue Ag farm. Down that way a historical marker notes the place where soldiers and horses sank in quicksand. We talk about this and muse on the untold stories that surround us.
Conversation turns to family matters, relationships, people’s temperaments. The effects of alcohol. The past. Standing up for oneself. And more.
Abigail has setting out on her counter a package of (now-thawed) frozen blueberries and a store-bought sweet potato pie she means to send home with us. We say our farewells. And eat a slice of pie each in the car on the way home. I have to pee again. I do so in the backyard.
You’re going to hell. Have a merry Christmas.
Three Christmas cards arrive in the day’s mail. Yippee. One of the cards boasts a preprinted evangelical come-to-Jesus message. My brother-in-law has underlined these lines. I’m sure he means well. Still, I find it irritating that he offers his solution for what he perceives as my problem. I’d much rather he ask questions, show interest in hearing about my faith journey, value me as a person rather than as one more potential notch in his “saved-another-sinner-from-hell” gun belt.
You’re going through hell. Will you even see Christmas?
We bury our goose N., may he rest in peace. He was a survivor, but even for survivors, “storms be sudden, and waters deep, / And the harbor bar be moaning.” A few months back N. was attacked by some woodland creature—coyote? fox? raccoon?—and though he survived, he eventually died of a tumor that developed on his injured wing. What with the frozen ground and our busy schedules we have
left him unshriven for a week. It’s warmed up enough today I can dig a grave. Alexander lends a hand, carries him out of the barn and lays him to rest in the hole. I cover his chest with feathery plumes from the maiden hair grass, then we tip in the dirt and cover the grave with logs to deter grave robbers. And I think long thoughts about cancer, how it ravages a body.
Whereas N. was standoffish, his mate and mother L. (theirs was an incestuous relationship) is friendly and talkative. But he did serve as faithful companion. To be a goose is to be a social creature, and one must discuss every detail of one’s environment with another. N. was a good listener and provided a ready audience.
And now he is dead.
A couple months ago Alexander noted what I had missed: that N.’s awkward stance was due to a hurt wing. Something had got hold of him by the wing joint and caused damage. Significant damage, as became clear later when his wing began to drag the ground. His wing tip became muddy and covered with poop. Then a tumor began to grow on the wing—again, Alexander noticed it first. The tumor grew to the size of a marble, golf ball, baseball. Nigel’s lethargy grew along with it. He could no longer run, no longer move with alacrity. He got out of our way less and less as we moved about the barn to feed chickens and cats.
I looked up online how to amputate a bird’s wing and was put off by the intricate procedure described. And by comments addressed to a person asking what to do with a duck with an injured wing: “People who can’t afford a vet shouldn’t have ducks in the first place,” and “Do the right thing and put the poor bird out of its misery.” N. didn’t look to be in misery. The tumor was growing and hampering his mobility, but he didn’t seem to be moping or gasping or moaning.
Unlike a friend of ours with end-stage breast cancer. She is slowly dying and she knows it. “My husband is going to have to learn to pay the bills,” she told us last week when we went with her to watch her great-nephew in a Christmas pageant. She coughed and wheezed, found it hard to get her breath after any exertion. Getting out of the car, up the steps and into the auditorium left her winded. She carried her oxygen tank in, had small plastic tubes running up to her nose. Her nephew had saved us seats. His father (our friend’s brother-in-law) greeted her with, “Oh, so you have a cold?”
“No,
Dad, she has cancer,” the nephew said. “I told you that before she got here.”
We talked on the way home about some of the insensitive comments she’s heard in the last few years. This was one of them.
Witnessing the progression of the disease, the toll it takes on her body and the pain it causes her is difficult for me. I wish I could offer her a cure. A few days after our excursion she had two litres of fluid drained from her lungs. “I was drowning in my own body,” she told me. Breathing continues to present a challenge. It’s hard for her to get around. When I look at her I see a woman dragging her wing tip through the mud and poop. And I hear the harbor bar a-moaning.
Divertissements
This is the first year we’ve put Christmas lights up around the roof edge of the house. A few days ago Alexander suggested (maybe in jest) we put lights on the tree house, too. Why not? We take the small artificial Christmas tree from the entry to the house and strap it into in the window of the tree house. We’ll run an extension cord out from the garage for the lights. This bit of whimsy makes me smile.
While my husband looks for a blueberry cobbler recipe I set out salad ingredients for supper. We eat salad while we watch an episode of Gunsmoke on the DVD player recently given us by some friends. A bit edgy, this episode. Three men tie up another man, prepare to whip him. Matt Dillon and Chester Goode come to the rescue just in time. Later the tension mounts even higher when the men bind Chester and prepare to his hand cut off. Too scary for me. I get up and go into the kitchen. Poke around. Supper was meager. I rustle up some celery sticks and peanut butter. Return after Matt has come to Chester’s rescue and all’s once again well with the world.
The fire went out whilst we were away and it’s chilly in the house tonight. I wear a cap Alexander’s former wife knitted for me.
We review a collection of “Terrible Maps,” images I downloaded from a blog of archaeological humor including: “Electricity Consumption in Europe in 1507,” a blank map of Europe; “Map of Roman Air Bases in the 2nd Century AD,” another blank map of Europe;
“Map of Earth if there was no land,” a rectangular box filled with blue. I get a kick from this type of humor.
Alexander makes blueberry cobbler from the gift berries while I cut vegetables for this week’s soup eternal: about five gallons will see us through the next seven days. I chop onions, celery, carrots, rutabagas, chuyotes and potatoes. By the time I put this onto cook he’s washing dishes. I join him. We discuss the events of the day—Mrs. Wick’s, the men we saw there, the time spent in close quarters with our friend. We zero in on this latter topic. Appearances have always been important to her and she often fixates on how pretty, cute, handsome or good-looking a person is—whether an acquaintance, friend, neighbor, family member or stranger. Abigail shows no signs of abandoning this way of approaching and evaluating her world. This insistence on superficial presentation disallows substantive conversation. Coupled with her seeming inability to listen to others, it grates on my husband. Too large a dose of her in too short a span tries his patience.
We decide to watch a DVD tonight. I put in Carey Grant and Randolph Scott in My Favorite Wife. We’ve seen the movie before. It’s billed as a screwball comedy, but there are plenty of gay undertones for those with eyes to see, ears to hear.
According to various Hollywood insiders, Carey and Randy were long-time lovers off camera in an era when being an out gay man would mean the end of one’s moviestar career. (How much has changed. How little.) They spent a total of 11 years living together in Hollywood. Mr. Blackwell, the acerbic designer known for his annual worst-dressed list (Madonna: “The Bare-Bottomed Bore of Babylon”), lived with the two actors for several months. In his memoir From Rags to Bitches he describes them as “deeply, madly in love, their devotion complete…. Behind closed doors they were warm, kind, loving and caring, and unembarrassed about showing it.”
Studio heads wanted to protect their stars (and their investment in them) and quell rumors about the nature of the actors’ relationship. Publicity agents labeled the actor’s shared home a “bachelor pad” and planted stories about the stream of women seen going in and out. Pressure was applied to the men to wed, to once and for all put the speculation to rest. Carey married five times; Randy married twice. After Carey’s first “arranged” marriage went bust he moved back in with Randy. Randy did the same when his first marriage ended. Eventually the two men bowed to pressure to separate altogether. They lived apart by the time this film was made.
Irene Dunn plays Carey’s wife who is lost at sea and declared legally dead. Carey marries another woman on the day the original wife reappears. The question becomes which marriage will come apart, which one come together? Randy plays the man with whom Carey learns Irene has been marooned seven years on a deserted isle. Carey is jealous of him and the two vie for Irene’s affection.
The film includes what Carey and Randy may have seen as many inside jokes and near-open allusions to the nature of their relationship. When Carey first meets Randy on screen, the latter is clad only in a bathing suit. Carey steals once glance after another. He can’t get him out of his mind—how handsome, fit and virile he looks. A scantily clad Randy proceeds to show off his athletic build and gymnastic prowess in Carey’s daydreams. Later in the film gay actor Carey Grant plays a straight man perceived as a gay man by his new wife and the doctor she’s hired to diagnose Carey’s lack of interest in her as a wife. If I had my druthers, both in the film and in real life these two men would have been able to openly celebrate their love and spend the rest of their lives together without censure if they so chose.
After the movie concludes we listen to a recording of the movie as adapted for radio. We then retire to our shared bed, our shared life, our do-it-yourself Hollywood ending to the day.
[title photo by the author; terrible maps downloaded on December 12, 2018 from a Tumblr blog
featuring archaeological humor]