Coyote's Den, A New Mexico Men's Page

What Might Happen, What’s Happening, What Just Happened

    Commentary shows drive me crazy. That is they would if I continued to watch them. I stopped about a decade ago. They all follow the same format, a collection of “experts”, meaning people who claim to know, speculating on the sure fire outcome of one thing or another. Then while the event is under way, commenting on what’s happening, as if we can’t figure that out, and then, when it ends, on what just happened. Ditto.
    These things accompany, “Breaking News” or “Wall Street Speculations” or “Hollywood Headline!” and of course all political speeches, and they all accomplish the same thing…nada!
    The only ones that are fun are those under the heading of “Sports”. Not that these are any more informative or useful than any of the other categories but usually they are staffed by guys (mostly) who are having fun and don’t take much of anything, especially themselves, seriously. Oh of course sometimes they do, but not for very long.
    The best of the bunch are the Fox NFL guys, Terry (Bradshaw) Howie (Long) Jimmy (Johnson) Curt (Menefee) and Michael (Strahan). Most of these guys are former players in the NFL with the exception of Curt who has been a life long sportscaster and Jimmy J. was the Cowboy’s head coach from ’89-’93….so all of these guys have solid credentials when it comes to knowing football. But better than that, and this is the best part, they seldom take themselves VERY seriously. All except for Jimmy who is from Texas. Taking oneself "seriously" seems to come with the territory in that state.
    Unlike commentators like Troy Aikman, or John Madden or Tony Dungy and Rodney Harrison though they love the game, they treat it like a GAME, not like a Life Drama. Admittedly, they will get quite serious when they have points to make about dangerous behavior on the field or injuries to players or when they want to talk about the human beings involved but they don’t go overboard when it comes to putting things into perspective….they have a tone about them that is playful and it makes watching them a much better version of SNL than SNL is. It’s like sitting in a bar watching a game with a bunch of guys who have known each other all their lives and can mess with each other without fear of stepping on toes or denting egos. They come across as both vulnerable, especially Terry B, and healthy males. Frankly, I think they are more fun to watch than the games they promote.
    Unless the Packers are playing of course.

Apology? No!

When I wrote the piece on the “Notes….” page (“No Bad News”) I was flush with what I felt was justifiable rage against the nit-brained folly of the extortionists from the Right who held us all hostage in order to win the day for themselves and their dim witted followers. Now another dawn has come and we are all sweeping up the flotsam in the empty parking lot of our countries hopes and I somewhat regret my anger, wanting instead to have been more generous of spirit or at least amusing or even entertaining in my expression of it.
    Why? Because I’d rather be compassionate than angry on my best days and, to be honest, I’m not comfortable enough with my own anger to be able to allow it to hang around for very long. In that way I’m very much my father’s son. He would blow from time to time in response to my mother’s tendency to go on and on about his refusal to get up in arms about some sleight she felt she had suffered at the hands of someone on the Italian side of the family (imagined or otherwise, it made no difference). His “blows” were loud but very brief, like a burst of flack in a clear sky, Bam! and then it was over. Mine are somewhat the same and I note that once over, I have less regret than space available for empathy.
    I remember when I was on the football team in high school our star halfback was a pushy sort who seemed to have it out for me and one day I exploded and went after him slapping him left and right and backing him up quickly. It took him by surprise and when I saw the shock on his face I immediately stopped my assault and began to apologize at which point he almost decked me with a hard left to the face. The coach stopped the mini-brawl, just in time because I was no longer fighting back….and all I felt was foolish and sorry. I’m not feeling that way about my “burst” against the “Ts” or the Right, but I am searching for what I know to be true of anyone dubbed “the enemy”, I am searching for their humanity. Wanting to understand more fully rather than be trapped in the dark and narrow corridor of perpetual judgment, a place between realities.
    A few days ago I read an “Op-Ed” piece in the Times and what it was was an apology to one and all about the writers outburst in a previous column about the same issue I blew about. He “regretted”, he said, that instead of being “civil” he had called people names and was outraged over their actions. As I scanned the “Comments” most, I’d guess at least five to one, supported the outrage and encouraged him not to retract anything, especially his anger.
    We Liberals seem to try to make-things-right, to “understand”, to be open, for the most part, to all opinions, in other words, to be inclusive, even compassionate. When the conservatives tried to capture that word years ago, during the first Bush reign, everyone knew it was joke and incongruous with the nature of conservatism. Just another word ploy from the Right, they have had great success in capturing the language after all. But this one was so out of character with what everyone knows about them even they couldn’t really buy into it. But we in the “center/left” do live this for the most part and sometimes it serves to sink us in the face of those true believers on the Right who see compromise and compassion as indicators of weakness of character and “mushy” philosophy.
    Of course I know we have fanatics on our side of the aisle as well. But Liberals, as a rule, are not lock-step marchers. Will Rogers alluded to this when he quipped, “I am not a member of an organized political party, I am a Democrat.”
    My anger is an important piece of me that is useful as a “field gun”….to be used for appropriate targets. BB guns for fleas, higher calibers when called for. My anger was, and is, appropriate to the circumstances, and I hope that more of us can accept and use ours more often when necessary and needed. This is no time for “Mr. Nice Guy” to be running the show…..we can call on him when we win a few.

Want Your Eggs Over Easy with that Divorce?

    We were ordering breakfast in the Colorado Springs Denny’s when a young couple with their daughter, around three, slid into the booth behind us. They spent the usual amount of time negotiating with her about what to eat; “I want macaroni and cheese!” she declared. “Want anything else with that honey?” Mom asked.
    “I just want macaroni and cheese!” exclaimed little Miss set-in-her-ways for about the sixth time. (Why mom thought there might be flexibility here seemed short sighted or at least niave.)
    So the order went in and the next part of the conversation initiated by dad was; “Honey, mom and I want you to know that we are going to be moving into different places. I’m going to move out of our house and mom is going to stay with you where you are now.”
    Pause.
    “Why?”
    “Well, sometimes mommies and daddies have to stop being together and each one has to live somewhere else. It’s what has to happen sometimes.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s just the way things are honey.” Comes “mommies” explanation.
    Do I need to mention that at this point we, in the next booth have paused, forks halfway to open mouths?
    Explanations continued as the “Whys” persisted….but you know how that went.
    It went on and on.
    Surely this little episode is no indication that society in general has become more and more idiotic. This was just a snap shot of two idiots adrift in a sea of common sense.
    That is right isn’t it?
    Just because we were in Colorado Springs, a bastion of Christian fundamentalism and home of James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” institute and the home of the Air Force Academy and, it is rumored, a center for meth distribution in Colorado, surely this just a solitary example of crazy parenting…..
    ........and just because the next morning we are having breakfast in a downtown café, a place with hippy pretensions and no spoons, “We don’t need them here.” sniffs the purple-haired waitress making sure we know just how out-of-it we are as one of the obviously hung over frequenters of the place comes bombing in and plays oafish loudmouth to the amusement of the staff and the discomfort of the customers. Is this just another isolated example of local color…..or an indication that we are in a virtual Oz peopled by an assortment of bizarre characters in search of a plot?
    Or is the waitress a canny observer of REAL life in the world of today and we are the odd outsiders looking in?
    Many in mainstream America, or perhaps only the with-it readers of the New York Times, might consider the fact that we were in Colorado Springs to do what we do at a Psychic Fair to be indicative of off-the-wall behavior on our part. But believe me, the level of what passes for sanity in our lives and what we experienced inside the local “Civic Center” where we plied our trade, was, far above anything we were encountering outside.
    Among the retired PhDs and former mental health workers we know who have become Tarot card and palm readers, massage therapists and “seers” of various talents and types are very few who would raise an eyebrow when encountered in any other setting. “Just regular folks.” is what we’d describe them as. The tattooed and pierced are more often the customers, we “workers” are usually conservatively dressed, though a few are sporting flowing scarves and sparkly dress, no one working the fair would stand out in a crowd in middle America let alone in Colorado Springs.
    Maybe that makes us “weird”.
    Meanwhile, I’m contemplating the idea that one day that little macaroni and cheese eater will be talking to a therapist about why she has this strange aversion to breakfasts at restaurants. I hope that therapist has a deck of cards handy.

Guns and Me and the Rock Island Arsenal

I'd always liked guns. Ever since I was a kid I'd been enamored with them. I never owned one until relatively late in life when, on a fluke, I got into the gun show business. I had gone to a gun show in San Antonio, Texas and came across a Colt Peacemaker, the classic "six-shooter" of the ol' west. It was the real thing, had a wonderful balance, and I could feel the history in it. It was made in 1903 and wore its history in its sweat-darkened wood grips and bright worn spots on the barrel and cylinder.
    I was single and I was making good money at the time so I had “disposable” income like never before, the price of $800 wasn't that daunting. Along with it I bought some "old leather". In gun show parlance, that's a holster and belt that look as if they are at least as old as the antique pistol they carry. All of this started me on the little detour in my life I’d refer to as my; “Gun Show Adventures."
    The old guns intrigued me more than the new ones, so I decided to invest money and time in acquiring a few. Part of it was the thrill of owning some of the weapons that "won the West" and I liked the combination of wood and steel forged by craftsmen into something that seemed to me to be both beautiful and functional.
    I was fortunate enough to get hold of two Winchesters, a rifle and carbine, that were made the same year as the Colt and were the same caliber; .32-20.
    I also bought three older Winchesters, the classic .44 caliber 1876 models. It didn't take much to become a gun show participant. With the Winchesters to sell and the Colt to show, I felt I couldn't miss. I'd be able to sell, buy, trade and travel while being involved in a kind of romantic quest for the “romance” of the old West.
    And so the lessons began.
    Back then the gun shows of the southwest (New Mexico, Texas and Arizona) were made up, for the most part, of people like me who were romantics about historical wood, leather and iron. At the same time there were also, in the small, dark corners of these shows, the “serious” guns sellers, the small tables of 9 MM Berettas, Glocks, AK-47s and AR-14s. Signs at those tables read; "Learn how the Government is trying to take your guns." and; "Find out how to make your Semi fully Automatic!" etc. Sniper scopes, black clothing, quick draw holsters, wicked looking combat knives......you name it, it was all there.
    As time went on, these dark corners grew into larger and longer tables and moved from the periphery to the main aisles of the shows and the phrase; "gun runners" began to be heard. Gun runners were the people who bought guns in large numbers direct from the manufacturer and they sold, actually undersold, anyone who could not buy in bulk as they did. And as the “bulk” grew so did the dark character of the shows.
    Meanwhile I was learning that in order to sell antique guns I was going to have to develop the educated eye of an antique collector and the canniness of a horse trader. There was no real source for buying old guns wholesale. You had to be lucky and smart to get a good deal on a gun so that you could turn a profit. A '76 Winchester might have a lot of “history” connected to it, but unless it was specifically a .44-40 caliber and was “near mint”, a very rare find indeed, it wouldn't attract a buyer and just turn into a paper weight. (This was before “Antiques Roadshow” was educating the broader public about the world of antiquing.) I was also naive about who could make a living at it. I discovered that most of the sellers were retired military who used their gun show sales, if they had any, to augment, not to serve as a centerpiece for a living. After a year of struggling with the gun show biz fantasy, I sold my stock, including the Colt, at a loss, and bailed out. I knew too that it wasn’t just the steep “learning curve” that was moving be towards the exit door, it was the fact that the shows were leaning more and more to the Right as the “gun runners” multiplied. The handwriting was on the wall, this was not going to be “fun” much longer. These were no longer “antique shows”, this was all about guns. Period.
    But my personal” thing” about guns continued and as I would make my annual pilgrimage from my home in west Texas to Chicago to see my folks, I’d regularly pass by the sign indicating that the “Rock Island Arsenal” was just a few miles north of my usual route through southern Illinois. The Arsenal museum was considered to be a “must see” for gun collectors and enthusiasts. One day I finally took the time to detour and check it out. The Arsenal is a huge manufacturing facility which has employed up to 18,000 workers. Built right after the Civil War and fabricated, in part, from the left over cannon balls and shells of that war, the Arsenal has built gun carriages, packs, canteen covers, ammunition pouches, rifles, tanks, spare parts, etc. for every conflict since 1865.
    They also have a huge collection of every small arm imaginable. Mounted on a glass covered wall 60' long and close to two stories high are pistols, rifles, shotguns, carbines, machine guns, flare and pellet pistols from every gun maker imaginable. Here are the Lugars, the Walthers, the Colts, the Springfield's, Remingtons, Brownings, all the makes and models from early roughly made blunderbusses to the fine crafted Kentucky rifles, to the civil war cap and ball pistols, from single shot pellet guns to the latest high tech, multi-barrel, 60 caliber machine guns.
    Guns from; the Little Big Horn, the Spanish American War, WW l, WW ll, Korea, Viet Nam; made in the U.S., Belgium, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, guns made in every country with the ability to make them. I was fascinated with them of course, especially those captured from the Indians after Little Big Horn. Talk about history!
    But three quarters of the way through the display, I began to feel something else. What was becoming more clear to me than ever before was that all of this ingenuity, all of this human creativity and effort was in service of just one single goal; to kill more and more humans more and more efficiently. To rip apart bodies, to destroy flesh. To stop hearts.
    I suddenly began to feel sick in spirit and body. It was something like the disorienting feeling of overdose. I left feeling completely immersed in and overwhelmed by the dark truth of the gun culture. It was nothing I'd ever felt before and I wasn’t sure how to negotiate my way through it. But I knew then and I know now that I'd been changed in a fundamental way by that visit.
    I still own five guns; two early 1900’s Winchesters, two black powder civil war replica pistols and a .22 pistol. I fired one of the replicas last Fourth. The .22 hasn’t been fired since I used it as a “noise-maker” to chase some cattle off our land a few years ago. The Winchesters are a kind of savings account. Worth a bit in my will. My “romance” with all of that is over. I know what guns are for and I can’t be a part of that any longer. Not in any kind of “avid” way at least….and this has led me to wondering over the years why, though I know we won’t ever get the guns out of this country, why we can't at least require every single gun owner to be licensed and have every gun that is manufactured in or imported into this country registered. The ridiculous argument that then the government would take our guns as the next step is silly on the face of it. If we require every car driver to take tests and be registered and every car to be licensed, why not something as lethal, or benign, depending on whose argument you want to side with, as a gun?
    Strange that we aren’t able to be the least bit rational about this. The uproar always seems very much like an adolescents reaction to any kind of discipline. I wonder if there are enough grown ups around to insist on some sanity about it after all?

    Nobody under the age of sixty would read this article. Why? It’s the “Harold and Maude” syndrome. Remember that movie? I must have seen that one at least ten times and there is no other movie I can say that about other than our Christmas ritual viewing of’ “It’s a Wonderful Life”. (A single exception made for, “Dr. Strangelove” which is worth seeing over and over as well.)
    But I digress.
    The “Harold and Maude” thing I’m referring to is that in the movie, in case you’ve missed this wonderfully funny tale, Harold, a late teen or early twenties boy/man gets “involved” with, no, let’s call it for what it is here, has SEX with an eighty year old woman (Maude) and much is made of the “Yuck” factor. References are made to “sagging breasts”, “wrinkled skin” etc., etc. and how could anyone who is young ever, EVER even consider getting physically close to an OLD PERSON?!!!!!
    There are two things at play here which deserve looking into;

    “Taboo Number 1”: Imagining our parents having sex with each other.
    Let’s not even go there! Right?
    “Taboo Number 2”: Imagining anyone over forty (or fifty and especially SIXTY!) having sex. Not "there" either!
    Now; let’s try being rational about this for a moment. (Not longer than that of course, don’t want to get “radical” here.) Hang in there for this; your parents, yes and mine too, had SEX with each other.
    Yes they did.
    But wait a minute! If they are still alive and talking to each other, they are probably STILL having sex!
    OK. Just take a few breaths and relax.
    Breath.
    Now breath again.
    OK, it’s true, they are probably STILL breathing (hard) and pumping away and reaching that impossible ecstasy you think only you and (Mr/Mz) special have every now and then.
    Need a little more time?
    Keep breathing, it only gets worse.
    Older people mostly have sex with one another.
    I’m trying to ease into this so you can handle it but we are going to have to go all the way with this;……never mind the “older people” thing, that was just a ploy to get you to this factual realization;
    OLD PEOPLE HAVE SEX WITH OLD PEOPLE!
    Still breathing?
    You see, I know this is true because I am one.
    Yeah, I recently made love (had sex with) a woman who is going on 63.
    Just bear with me now, you can do it.
    I did.
    Yeah, sixty-three. (Does it make it easier if I spell out the age?)
    Face it; 63.
    But that’s not the hardest part…..I’m going on 77! Yeah, and we, the two of us, had sex with each other, wrinkly skin, sun damage, the whole age shebang.
    And we enjoyed it just as much as we did when we were fifty (50) years younger. (Can’t say “better” ‘cause I don’t remember if it was ever better….it was just great.)
    So, there you are. I can report from this end of the age spectrum that having sex as an “old” person is just as good as having sex as a “young” person. (We probably make more noise, and no Mr. Comedian it’s not about joints creaking. It’s that we don’t give a damn who’s listening.) From inside these bodies that you may see from the outside as somewhat “shabby” and worn, we are still as sexually vital and alive as we always have been. And what’s the difference if we happen to be parents, even YOUR parents? We’re human beings who still enjoy ALL of life. Why should any of that be “Yucky”?
    It’s just that sex has been so associated with all things youthful that it’s hard for some to consider that it’s a life long gift, or at least it should be. And it should be accepted as such at all those “elevated” ages, all the ages over the arbitrary line in the sand our society draws….somewhere around 55 is where it seems to kick in….surely around 60.
    Of course when I was in my twenties I would never have dreamed that I’d be turned on by having sex with a sixty-plus partner, nor would I expect that should I reach over seventy anyone would be interested in me in other than a “wise-elder” role. But lo and behold, being this age is not being-this-age; it’s all about still being me. And in so many respects, I am any age I’ve been, as Mr. Rogers once said, and more so.
    Oh of course there are the usual age related “limitations” but that’s not what I’m writing about here. This is just about how we “old” folks (quotation marks intended) are perceived and how we sometimes buy into those perceptions. We are, many of us, just as alive in all the ways you, even if you are a much younger person, can imagine. Yes, ALL the ways EVEN IF WE’RE YOUR PARENTS!
    So get over the aversion to seeing us as non-sexual beings simply taking up space and waiting to check out. We’re here, and most of us are living life as fully as we ever have. And don’t lay any of that “sexy-senior” condescension on us. We are simply sexually alive and awake and capable of enjoying our lives and no, it isn’t “cute” either. It’s LIFE!
    And we’re living it!

I was about to wipe this page clean and start over again for the New Year when I re-read some of these pieces and thought I'd save what I consider to be worth another look. So, starting fresh I'm using these to "set the tone" for future creative explorations of what it is to be a man looking out from inside the package called "me"....always trying to lighten up in this "truth seaching" business. dp

If you're a male you probably don't know about the battle women waged to be treated like real human beings by medical professionals. Specifically when it comes to pelvic and urinary exams. Curtains are pulled, attitudes are softened, bodies are "draped" and great care given.

If you're a male, you know we don't get this kind of treatment. "Drop your drawers and bend over!" is the whole of the "ceremony" when it comes to a prostate exam for example. If you're lucky there is just you and the doc. If you're in the military, you're in a room full of men all bending over, or looking at the ceiling with pants around our knees and "coughing" (to check for hernias). We accept this as a matter of course.

We also don't notice that right on down the line this kind of treatment has all kinds of permutations. For example, I once had a cystoscope shoved up my penis without any medication at all. One moment I was lying in my hospital bed, the next my urologist shows up with an entourage and without a "Pardon me" grabs my penis and impales me with this tube while explaining the "process" to the rest of the crowd. I am writhing in pain and ignored.

A couple of years ago, my colon was hemorrhaging, the result of a leaking artery caused by a colonoscopy, and I was lying on a cart under an x-ray machine, shaking with cold due to blood loss, tubes in every orifice, shitting blood, puking a vile mix of bowel cleaner and being talked about by the technician to the medical intern who had wheeled me into the exam room as if I weren't there at all. As if I were a lab specimen being looked at on a screen, not a real presence. Frankly, I didn't even care, I thought I was dead anyway. As I was being wheeled out I actually had to ask if they had found the site of the bleeding. "Sorry to bother you but, is there any hope for this human on the cart here?"

And the latest episode, my six hour wait in the ER when no one, not the clerk at the desk, not the intake nurse, not anyone behind the glass in that waiting room bothered to check to see if that one person, me, sitting out there from midnight to six AM, might need to be seen anytime soon. This despite the first line on the intake form, "Why have you come to the ER" to which I responded; "Unable to urinate."

Would it have been different if I had been a female? Maybe not. But given how we men allow ourselves to be treated, not only by the medical establishment, but also by the portrayal of us as fools in commercials and sitcoms, and caricatured "heroes" by Hollywood, I wouldn't be surprised to find that it would be.

Ask most men to define "intimacy" and they will probably go to a physical description. The why of this is fairly simple, after childhood emotional intimacy with mom would seem like emotional incest and emotional intimacy with dad would be Tierra incognita.

I know, I'm generalizing, but bear with me. The reason this has come up for me actually has two points of generation. The first spiritual, the second very pragmatic. A few weeks ago I was alone in our spiritual space, our Kiva, and I was talking to a couple of spirits. I'm not going into whether or not this is a hallucination, just accept, as I did and have, that I'm relating something that is sane and true. What I was dealing with was my fear of death and what one of them, a female who we lost to the physical plane three years ago, said was, "Don't worry about getting here, we (all my relatives and friends who dwell there) will reach out and help you across. What you really need to deal with is the plane you're living on now. You're alive on the physical plane and what helps with existence there are relationships."

This was not good news for an introvert. "Relationships" is what we cope with not what we celebrate. But I got the message. I knew that this was both my challenge and my "salvation". My challenge is to reach out and make connection with another. Another who beyond my easy relationships, my wife and kids. And the "salvation" is that suddenly I do not have to suffer in silence for fear I will be seen as "inadequate" by other men. Which is what most men fear.

(I know, I know, this is about me and you and most men don't have this problem. Indulge me.)

So, I had this, for me, new information and I shared it with my wife who felt it was indeed an important event.

The "pragmatic" part came just the other day when I got caught up in an eBay auction and bought a Canon camera. I've been lusting after this camera for some time but really could not, and can't justify the outlay. I have a good Canon Rebel, 5.6 pixel SLR with which I have shot some award winning pictures so there is no "need" here. There is a "want". But circumstances presented themselves and I got hooked on the auction. (One of my daughters was looking for an SLR, I thought I'd sell her mine and spend a relatively small amount and wind up with the 12-pixel camera I was dreaming about. A further aside to the critics, this is not "penis envy". I want to make poster size pictures and that is only possible with more pixels.)

Anyway, I won the auction and now suddenly was spending a little over $400 on something we didn't "need" and felt guilt and shame.....and I was in a huge internal battle over it inside.

"Inside" is the key element here. I also kept having a memory of something that happened when I was about twelve. I found this crumpled up five-dollar bill on the floor underneath my father's hanging pants. Of course I knew where it belonged, but what took me over was the fact that I had been obsessing about getting this beautiful compass I had seen in a neighborhood sporting goods store a couple of weeks before and now I could finally get it.

We were not grindingly poor, but close to it, and there certainly was no abundance of money which would allow for such a luxury. But my desire for this special treasure overwhelmed my usually strict conscience and I rushed to the store and bought, and then hid, the compass. Of course there was no way I could hide the thing forever and when my dishonesty was exposed I had to take the compass back to the store, apologize to the owner and live, for a time, in the netherworld of guilt and shame around my parents. Their "perfect little son" had been revealed to be flawed after all.

So here it was again. This time my wife was "mom" and I was the flawed son once more. I spent a sleepless night. Finally, in the morning after coffee and the usual pleasantries, I had to get it all out. I didn't want to of course. I would rather just stay in internal struggle and just "work it out" which is my usual M.O. But I knew, somehow a part of me remembered the talk in the Kiva, I knew it was time for a new way of being in relationship.

This would have been the point at which I would have launched into some kind of rationalization for doing what ever the thing was. I would have begun defending my action so that I could feel justified. Actually, so I could not be seen as "stupid".

"I got carried away, and it has got something to do with the fact that am usually very careful about money and don't want to be foolish about spending. But the worst part of this is that I didn't want to tell you about it because I thought you'd hate me."

She got a very strange look on her face as if I had just told her I had just talked to a eight foot tall rabbit, "What? Why would I think that?"

Little by little the whole story unfurled and Elizabeth said, "You know that you will work out the money thing about this, you always do, so stop driving yourself crazy." She wasn't pissed, I wasn't in the doghouse, and, most importantly, we had shared an emotionally intimate experience that helped heal something in me and left us closer. I didn't have to work it all out on my own and she didn't have to feel that I didn't need her to help me with my "struggle" out of an emotional black hole. In other words, I needed her emotionally as much as I want her to need me in the same way.

Want to check out the validity of this issue for men? Ask any man what he defines as "intimacy" and I'll bet the first items on the list will all have to do with physical connection.....unless the man is a therapist and thus has been "trained" or a gay guy in which case he will be more likely to feel that emotional intimacy is familiar ground.

Emotional intimacy is a scary place for we males. We certainly don't go there much with each other, and even try to avoid it with our significant female relationships. We have no "training" in this area and really, no place to sign up to get it. That's what leaves us feeling so isolated.

Back when I was working in the "Men's Movement" emotional intimacy was often the subject of the weekends we set up, and the expression of all those bottled up emotions was a powerful thing to experience. "Once upon a time", so the tale was told, "when the men wept, the Earth shook." But those were ancient men, the men of Greece and Rome, today men just swallow......literally. So we're back, despite all that "Men's Movement" work, to the "freedom" to express about three basic emotions; anger, hunger, and lust.

No wonder boys are staying boys longer and longer. What male would want to risk being a grown up and be burdened by feeling the whole range of emotions; sorrow, joy, pain, fear, doubt, love, loss, compassion, and not just the narrow range of approved feelings while being a spectator at the event called "Life"?

That 'Too soon old and too late smart." phrase suits many of we men so well. It takes a lifetime of failures in relationship to women and to each other to teach we us what we must learn to be fully human. We put on the amour early because we are sensitive to begin with, even more sensitive than girls. We "get it" early that sensitive is dangerous territory for us. We try dancing in this amour for most of our lives, playing the roles we are supposed to play in order to be considered male enough. Most of us wear out early because of it. If we can get it, get the heart lesson when we have enough time left to receive the gifts our feelings can present to us, we can repair most of the damage we have done to ourselves and others. Maybe we can even pass this knowledge to our sons and other young men before all they can do is turn away from the beauty and the pain of life and swallow.

My mother never liked to talk about the early days when we lived in the very poor South Side of Chicago(for those of you who know the city it was 59th and Aberdeen) she hated to remember the hard times, the things that brought her "down". This was in the mid thirties, the midst of The Great Depression, and almost everyone was "poor". Certainly everyone we knew.

I was often baby-sat by Mrs. Lyle, an old black granny who lived next store. I remember her vaguely as a kind, warm presence in my life. I remember too that the floor slanted in our apartment, the third floor of a wooden house. And I remember that times were hard, but I can't tell you how I knew that, I guess I just "read" the atmosphere around me.

We moved when I was about four or five to what we thought of as a much better place, a mixed neighborhood of single-family homes and apartments. Blocks in old Chicago neighborhoods are set up as long rectangles with two and three story apartment buildings on each of the four corners and single family houses along the two long sides along the street. We lived on the second floor of a two-story building that was broken up into six four-room apartments.

These were neighborhoods of mixed economic levels but not mixed races. Chicago was highly segregated at the time. Second only to Jackson Mississippi according to the Urban League folks I met many years later.

I grew up in that apartment building and always thought of it as the only home I knew. After my folks moved to the newly developed suburbs south of South Chicago (Oak Lawn) and achieved their dream of owning a house, I was just an out-of-town visitor to a place my sister grew up in and the one she considered to be her only home.

That old apartment had its share of memorable "problems" that came with the territory back then. We had mice with which my father had an on-going battle until he came up with the solution of ground glass and plaster to fill in favorite mouse holes. But we never won the battle with the giant water bugs that crawled in the garbage at night. I could hear them crackling around in the paper bags under the sink and I never got over the creeps about it. I was always the first one up in the morning and to get into the kitchen I'd pre-position a kitchen chair under the chain for the ceiling light so I could, in as few steps as possible, leap up on it and switch on the light to scatter the bugs so I wouldn't step on any.

We lived on the second floor and had a water heater down in the basement, where the rats lived, which would, if my father forgot to turn it off after a bath time, heat up the first floor water to steam which, when they flushed their toilet, would erupt making them very unhappy. This didn't happen often, but when it did there would be a lot of yelling and carrying on between my father and Mr. Harms who subsequently got a mean Doberman which he kept chained up on the first floor porch and made my daily trek past him a nightmare adventure involving more stealthy approaching and leaping than even the roaches required.

I didn't spend any growing up time in the suburban house my parents bought and enlarged. But over the years of visiting I never saw a cockroach and though there were mice now and then, they were the country type and much more polite than their city cousins. They always seemed to stay in the garage.

There was no Food Stamp program back then, and my family wouldn't even consider going on what was called "Relief", so we made do with whatever we could put together. My mother's father was employed in one of those "safe" jobs for The Chicago Transit Authority so food wasn't a problem for them. My father's father had a small barbershop which brought in a few dollars to keep things afloat and my grandmother raised all the vegetables in a huge garden in a vacant lot next to the rented house they all lived in. Of the three brothers in the family, my father was the youngest, the oldest laid brick, the middle one did dry wall and my father picked up a bread route for Wonder Bread on the south side of Chicago. For a time my mother rolled cigars in a little basement shop to bring in a buck or two.

My first job at about the age of 9 was "candling" eggs. Basically it was looking at the eggs with a light behind them to see if they had been fertilized. I have no idea what it paid, I'm sure it made no difference in the overall family income. Later I sold lemonade to factory workers at a place in the neighborhood. I'd make it up in the morning, squeezing two dozen lemons by hand, there was no such thing as frozen juice, and then adding as much sugar as we could afford. I'd fill up a gallon glass jar and get some glass jelly glasses, then pile it all into a wagon and truck it all carefully so as not to spill the cargo, on down to the alley behind the factory a block or two away from our apartment building. I don't think this was an important asset to the family economy either, but it did awaken an entrepreneurial spirit in me which remains alive to this day, and which I passed on to my kids.

Over the years I've had a variety of jobs ranging from Zoning Inspector, to commercial pilot, to D.J., therapist, tool and die designer, director of advertising and even a western hat model. I've owned five houses and had a score of apartments in different parts of the country and walking up towards our home nestled in our small forest of pinon and juniper the other day, through the fields of flowers, passing our kiva and sweat lodge and seeing our tipi with its "flags" flying in the west wind, I thought; "Hmm, not too bad for a poor boy from the south side of Chicago."

My mother visited once and didn't like the isolation much. Said she wouldn't have wanted to live "way out here away from everyone." She didn't like it that we had mice now and then either.

I'm "poor" again, economically speaking, living on Social Security and Food Stamps, but rich in so many ways I haven't been before. Not even when I was making the "big bucks". I am in a healthy and warm relationship, we own our home and owe no one. We're both healthy and secure on our ten acres in the midst of hundreds..........and no water bugs.

In the middle of eating a salad today I came upon a feeling that has accompanied me from time to time; it's a regret that I never really let myself know my father. I'm not deeply sad about it, I just regret that in real time, in tangible time, not in imagination or wish filled thinking or delusion or prayer, but right smack dab in the middle of living life I never really tired to bring him in close enough so that he could share himself with me.

Not that he would ever say something one of my contemporary men friends might..some sort of "I feel such and such." a sharing of deep feeling. It wouldn't have had to be that way at all to be a genuine moment between us. No, it would have been as simple as me saying, "Sure!" when he said, "Hey Dick! You want to put some of this olive oil on some salad."

Raised by an uptight mother who felt that there were right and wrong ways to live life, even down to eating, olive oil and vinegar on a simple lettuce and tomato salad were a bit too down and dirty, spoke too much of the peasant life she felt my father's parents came from.

I'm exaggerating of course. I'm trying to make things more simplistic than they really were. My mother ate my father's salads all the time, she ate the Italian food his family fixed and fixed a lot herself. But there was a certain spice she peppered reality with when it came to food that let me know at an early age that it paid to be fussy when it came to eating anything my father ate.

Maybe it was just that she wanted to keep me as an ally and tried to make sure there was always a distance of some sort between my father and me. She didn't try anything new, I shouldn't either. This was not communicated in spoken language of course, it was a feeling transmitted by a more powerful control tool.

There I was eating the salad I had just tossed with oil and vinegar, a thing my father always used to make up and which I never ate, maybe I was a fussy eater then anyway, and thinking, "Gee, I wish he could be here so we could share this salad together. He would know then that I really loved him."

In other words, I feel a tinge of fear that he might have though that I was rejecting him in rejecting his salad.

Now; there is a place for a good and healthy sense of guilt. I know a bunch of people who could use a dose and I don't just mean teenagers. But there is a line between how much guilt is a good thing and when the line is crossed and it becomes much more than a nuisance. In fact, it begins to be crippling.

Each of our daughters is burdened by a degree of guilt, one with way too much, one with far too little and the rest range in between and are doing OK with the portion they've been given.

Too much and you are responsible for everything. Everything going wrong that is. (You are never responsible for things going right by the way.) Too little and you are responsible for nothing. In fact, everyone else is responsible and you have had no role in the action at all. At the one extreme life is hard for the one burdened, at the other, everyone else has to put up with the one who carries nothing at all.

Most of my life has been spent at the former end of the stick. This was not my father's doing; and in a sense, it wasn't totally my mother's either. Being the first born, I just sort of took it on as my lot in life, when bad things happened, it was, somehow, either my doing or my job to make it better.

I never could and I never did of course, but that's how I felt. There's still some of that left in me; a cop drives by and I check everything, the obvious things of course, but then there's also the mental checklist of anything I might be cited for. All the guilty pleasure thoughts and angry fantasies and downright crazy internal journeys that might be written across my face. This all happens in a millisecond and isn't a dwelling spot, but there it is/was and is still..a part of me.

.and there I was eating a salad my dad might have prepared, feeling guilty that I hadn't enjoyed a little mix of oil and vinegar with him.

Only in my imagining do we share it now, and this memory as well; I actually did prepare a big spaghetti dinner for him once, cooked the sauce all day just the way my grandmother taught him and me. He liked the sauce and thought my Italian sausage was too hot. I don't remember if he fixed the salad or not, but I'm sure we both ate it.

We were oil and vinegar all right, but in the end he's as much mixed up in me as the salad he, and now I, tossed up.

That's all my father said to me. And with that all the years, decades really, of missed opportunity to connect, were over.

We were on the edge of the Snake River canyon. It was the last day of a four-day trip that my mother had forced my father to take with me. I was visiting my folks in Chicago en route in my '64 VW to Moab, Utah where I was to meet my then wife. From there we would drive south to El Paso where we were living. I wanted to show her the Red Rock country of southeastern Utah first.

But my mother was insistent, "Go with him Tony. You've always wanted to see that part of the country and you never spend any time with your son. Just do it!"

"Oh I donno." And then would follow all the usual avoidances my father used to stay in one place.

But something was different this time. When he got stubborn he simply could not be moved, but there was some creaking of the wheels that my mother sensed and on the day I was ready to walk out the door my mother had packed a suitcase for him and all but carried him out the door to the little beetle.

My father never was a big talker. At least, not to me. He told jokes that were really stories about his life as a musician whenever we had people over. He'd have a couple of "Tom Collins" and off he, and they, his musician friends, would go. He was very funny and great to hear as he told the tales of life-in-the-music-business.

But talk to me.never in my life. It's not that he ignored me, it's just that we didn't relate about much of anything.

I assumed this was normal since none of my friend's fathers talked to them either. As was true of their fathers before them. That was just the way it was. Of course, this was long before TV and Father Knows Best or "Leave it to Beaver" where the "hero" father did a lot of talking to his kids. Such a thing was unknown in real life.

But there we were on the road west.and not much passed between us other than map directions, comments on the weather, and gas mileage computations. That was the real father-son communication then.

The second night out we camped somewhere in Iowa. My father hadn't been camping in many decades but he was up for it. I still have a picture of him blowing up the air mattress inside our tent. That night a bit of a rain storm came up....I should mention that we had heard what sounded like air-raid sirens about an hour before but we figured it was just the town doing a 'test". That wasn't unusual in those days and certainly not unusual in a small town.

As the rain intensified and the lightening increased, we only noted that the tent remained dry, mostly, and weren't too concerned about it.

The next morning we learned that the sirens had been tornado warnings, which explained why the rain seemed to be horizontal for a while. From then on my father suggested motels whenever he sighted the smallest cloud anywhere in the sky, my encouragement to "camp out" notwithstanding.

By the evening of the fourth day he had more or less recovered so I was able to steer us into a very nice campground at the Snake River Gorge and it was there we cooked a hot dog meal over a little fire and sat gazing at the spectacular scenery as darkness came on.

It was then that this extraordinary thing happened. I felt this arm go around my shoulders and thought for an instant that someone else had come into the camp, but it was my father who hadn't spontaneously touched me this way for as long as I could remember, and who accompanied this gesture, with; "I'm sorry."

"For what?" I asked quickly, wanting to assure him, assure him because I knew how much it took for this man to say such a thing.

"I was never there when you were growing up...but I had to work a lot you know, and....."

I stopped him as quickly as I could. I didn't want him to feel hurt about this and I wanted him to know that I knew how big a thing this was for him to do.

"I know, I understood." And I did. I understood it all along. I felt no resentment about any of it. I did want him to know me in the present moment, that's what was most important to me.

We sat in silence awhile longer and then I said, "I know things were tough and you had to work a lot. That's just the way it was."

"That's right." He replied. "I had to string a bunch of things together just to make the rent."

And we talked about those hard times, and a few good times.but the rest of the conversation was just about making talk, the "healing" of whatever had grown between us was accomplished with that one line, "I'm sorry."

Coyote's Den

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