I’m over eighty and gay. I was sitting in the anteroom to the offices of a dance studio because the massage therapist for whom I was early had no waiting room. While there I watched a man in his late thirties with a baby not more than nine months old who was putting on himself a somewhat tangled snuggie/papoose halter. He wasn’t talking to the child. He wasn’t smiling. He was concentrating on what he was doing. The baby was relaxed, sitting on a chair watching its father who glanced at him/her often. I saw that theirs was a very stable, trusting, and loving relationship. When I perceived this, tears coated my eyes, as they do now writing this, because I was struck with a love I have never felt before for the child I never had. It was so sudden and strong it hurt.
The experience shocked me with its intensity and surprised me that it happened to me at all, but I knew I had to put it aside. I was much too old to fill this particular gap in my life whether I wanted to or not. But it hurt so much! At the same time I wasn’t displeased with myself…
A week or so later I decided to walk across the park to see a friend who lives on Central Park West. The sun was shining when I left my apartment; it became overcast when I crossed Lexington Avenue, and was drizzling as I approached the little pond in the park where children sail boats. Mothers and nannies were scattering for home with their children and charges to escape what was obviously about to become a downpour. Then it did become one.
I heard the loud crying of a baby and then a mother, I assumed, shouting, “Shut up! Shut up! You little selfish brat! You never stop! Shut up or you’ll be sorry. You’ll be very sorry. Just you see!” If anything the baby screamed louder.
“Okay, you asked for it and this is it. Bye, bye, baby. Ha, ha, ha.” She really laughed, then turned and ran toward Fifth Avenue still laughing.
I called after her, as loud as I could, “Wait! Stop! Don’t go! Don’t…” I can’t run anymore but she was out of sight, out of earshot by the time I reached the little boy, as I later learned he was. He looked clean enough and well enough dressed. I picked him out of the stroller and found as I felt the back of his diaper that he was wet from the outside in and not the reverse that I could tell. He was probably cold so I knotted my six-foot muffler loosely around my chest, wrapped him in his blankets, and stuffed the whole bundle against my chest facing me into the muffler. I told him what I was doing as I did it… It was now raining steadily. I talked to him so he would learn to recognize my voice. When my beard brushed his forehead he stopped crying, which I took to be a fine omen. I collapsed the stroller, put it under one arm, and held him comfortably in place with the other. He felt very nice.
As we walked to the Fifth Avenue crosstown bus stop I hummed to him melodies – Brahms’ Lullaby, if you can believe it. Then I started to think again, “What the hell have I done? What am I going to do with this child? How can I get away with keeping him and pretending that he’s mine? I’ll say he’s my great great grandchild. His mother had to leave him with me temporarily because of some family emergency. She couldn’t trust him with anyone else in the family. No, no, that’s not a good idea. There is no one else in the family alive. That might work better. There are still tenants in the building that have known me for the thirty-five years I’ve lived there and knew my partner and that I’m gay. How can I care for him? I’ll go on line and find out how, but caring for him will be beside the point if I can’t keep him. If I get away with it, at my age how long can I keep him? Long enough to expose him to much that I know and love. Five years more or less…maybe…I hope.
I was going to start humming some Oklahoma when I noticed he was warm and sleeping. He’ll cry sometimes! The ladies in the building will love him. The guys at the VA are going to be jealous and so will some of them at the LGBT Center. He can’t and won’t be a secret. I’m going to need a lot of help and advice. He’s going to go every place I go. If he’s not welcome I won’t go. I’m going to have to do a lot more lying and a lot more pretending but one thing I won’t have to pretend is that I love him.
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