I am back home in Los Angeles, at least the place I call home, after an extended stay on Cape Cod. As Joe and I boarded our prop plane from Provincetown (yikes, only an 8-passenger plane), heading for Boston, the song The Theme From A Summer Place started playing in my head. (this time it seemed all the passengers weighed about the same, as usually, they place some plump people throughout the rows, and some thinner folks in-between, this time it was sitting wherever you want, except for the back row…perhaps that is the haunted row, but that is another blog). For those of you reading this who are men and women of a certain age, A Theme From a Summer Place was a really great make-out song which hit the make out charts in 1965, sung by the Lettermen!“…There's a summer place Where it may rain or storm Yet I'm safe and warm For within that summer place Your arms reach out to me And my heart is free from all care For it knows There are no gloomy skies When seen through the eyes Of those who are blessed with love…(Theme From a Summer Place/John Barry) I had been privileged enough to spend my summer in a TOWN, where it mattered NOT with whom you liked sleeping with, for whom, you were sexually attracted and most amazingly, a TOWN where gender-neutral pronouns were used, discussed, a bit tricky at first to get used to, but eventually not an issue. And this IS a place where when a Gay Pride parade is in process, not a single wanna be homosexual repressed American Christian Evangelical member of the Taliban was seen carrying signs telling me to rot in hell, God hates Fags, or my favorite “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve (kind of catchy that last one.) Those poor WANNABE HOMO’S whose only chance to escape their CLOSET or is it their self-made prison, either haven’t caught on to the magic of Provincetown or their spouses, might actually become suspicious of this exact location to PROTEST).
We arrived at Logan International Airport in Boston, and the recesses of living the life of equality, freedom, and inclusion soon felt like the tides of AMERIKA, flooding in at the rate of a tsunami. No same-sex couples holding hands, not too many men hugging one another, just that Fraternity kind of hug (the kind many college students wished could have gone a bit further than just a hug and a pat. But life is real, reality only a perception, and living your life, sometimes an easy choice to make, or sadly one thrust upon you. As we waited at the Gate for our flight to LAX, a woman, perhaps my age, maybe younger, began to cough, and cough and cough. She shuddered as the gooey phlegm sputtered through her fingers, she had nothing but her hands to cover her mouth. Two older couples slid a few seats away, one very hissy man, said “oh really, what is SHE doing here, and two younger women quickly grabbed their suitcases and SIGHED, as they left, one saying to another, can’t somebody do something. No hero, here, but I still had the magic dust (its Provincetown so perhaps it was still the magic fairy dust or the Unicorn dust) over me and pulling out some tissue, I offered her at least some kind aid. The woman thanked me and began telling me she was flying to LA for a condition. It was not my business, and I did not require more information. The coughing jag began again and a woman of color having a few extra sturdy napkins from the nearby Starbucks walked over to the same woman and handed the brown stiff paper to the lady with a condition. Suddenly fewer and fewer and fewer folks sat next to this woman. Again, just because now and then I feel I have the weight of the downtrodden on my back, I rushed to a Hudson Airport Store and found a pack of Kleenex Tissue. I came back to the woman and asked if should call for medical help. Her answer was NO…but thank you. The woman of color walked next to me and asked why I offered to help, I was quite confused by that question. Because, I said, she seemed to be in distress. Then I asked, why she had offered her Starbuck napkins, and the response was the same as mine because it seemed she was in distress. So, I suppose Boston Logan Airport was not quite flooded by the differences that the Trump/#Moscow Mitch/GOP had hoped via the infusion of Putin’s Oligarchs, Amerika was headed for!
It was time to board our flight, the lady with the condition apparently convinced the Gate attendants at Jet Blue that she was indeed in distress and boarded the plane first…I was relieved. Joe and I said goodbye to New England, sighed that familiar sigh of both leaving a place you love and also that deeper sigh of knowing you would now be held hostage for at least 5 hours on seat most likely invented during the Crusades! And as I boarded the plane with my husband, the man I have loved more and more each day, and an old song from one of the Resident Camps, I worked as a counselor, came rushing from my gut to my brain to my tongue. “When the light of each summer’s day reaches its end, I’ll sit by the fire with all my new friends, a million tomorrow’s may never erase, the fun and the joy, the beauty of our summer place…”
