She and Ellen wandered the cobblestone streets of Boston.

They stood in sunshine that fingered its way down through the tile roofs and alleys of the old brick buildings.

They went to Man Ray on the weekends, the club across the river where they were the straight girls amid the gay men.

They danced with abandon and without worry. The music was loud and they absorbed it into their bodies and their bones. It pulsed in their blood. The watched the beautiful men dancing with each other under the flashing indoor lights.

The women’s room was in the basement. They emerged from their stalls to find tall muscled men in drag reapplying mascara.

Back across the river, on the sunlit street by DeLuca’s, they talked with their Man Ray friends, their faces shadowed with the worry that was beginning to creep through the alleys and the streets.

More than twenty years later and she’s remembering those months, those years. She’s picturing again the basement of Man Ray, where next to the women’s room was a narrow window set into a brick wall, a window that gave onto a sealed-off 1950’s living room, a perfect movie set living room, cut off from the world, a lamp burning on the coffee table.

She remembers how she and Ellen used to stand on tiptoe, peering silently into the inaccessible room  of the past. She remembers how the drag queens brushed by them, young and male  and beautiful, tan skin stretched over muscles and that invisible blood.

And life was bleak and sweet and you

conjured yourself up inside me, a
something that began to be
and which I imagine now
still being, a grownup, much
older than I was at the time.
There you are now,
tall one, head full of curls,
turning in the doorway to smile at me.
I imagine you, all these years later,
having grown up without me
in that faraway parallel world.
This would be your birthday, and
I send my love to you
over the bridgeable divide:
You drew yourself together
from a blue wool blanket on a narrow bed,
from Neil Young on a tape player,
from a stack of books on a wooden desk,
from a red maple leaf ironed between wax paper,
from a stuffed dog worn thin with age,
secret zippered pocket in its soft belly.

This is how it was:

You sat on the couch
and I climbed in your lap.
You shook out the paper and
then folded it in half, and
again into quarters, and
then smoothed it straight.
I leaned back against your
giant chest and waited.
You pointed to each panel
and read the black and white
marks above the bright picture.
When you finished one quarter,
you turned the paper over and
read the next, refolding,
smoothing, and turning.
It was Sunday.
We called them the funnies.
Your voice was a bass rumble
reverberating in my ears and chest.
Sometimes, these days,
this is the kind of memory that comes
floating up from the other loud ones.
Your finger pointing at the words
rising above bright pictures,
leading me from page to page.

Last week, in the church for the non-churchy, the minister, after talking about unexpected gifts, asked everyone to turn to a stranger and give that stranger an unexpected gift. The gift could be a handshake, or a wish, or a something. An anything.

She didn’t much want to give an unexpected gift, because she didn’t feel like talking to anyone she didn’t know – she is one of those under-the-radar members of the church for the non-churchy, and all she really wanted to do was sing and recite the ending prayer – whether it can be called a prayer, in this particular church, is debatable, but that’s what she calls it anyway – and leave and walk the two blocks home to make corn pancakes for the still-sleeping occupants of her house.

But the man at the far end of the aisle was smiling nervously, and she realized that maybe he didn’t want to give or receive an unexpected gift either, which somehow made it okay.

She considered making up a free verse poem for him on the spot, perhaps about his salt and pepper beard or green cardigan, and reciting it. No. She considered giving him a simple handshake. No. She considered giving him a kind statement, such as, “I didn’t want to give an unexpected gift, because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but you have such a nice smile that I changed my mind. My gift to you is this nice smile in return.”

No. Ugh.

Then she knew what she would give the man. She reached into her bag, into the side compartment, and pulled out a gold coinlike object with the Chinese character for luck stamped into it. She slid down to the far end of the aisle and pressed it into the man’s hand.

“My unexpected gift to you is this 24-carat gold good luck stamp. My friend Kingsley gave it to me years ago. Now it’s yours.”

The man at the end of the aisle smiled that nervous smile and said, “I’m not good at this. I don’t really have anything to give.”

She took his nervous honesty as an unexpected gift in itself and shook his hand.

Kingsley, the friend who had given her the gold good luck stamp, had been another unexpected gift, many years ago. In a time of great frustration because no matter how many times she sent her stories out, no one wanted to publish them, she had taken to copying them herself, at Kinko’s, and folding the pages over and stapling them and leaving them here and there in coffeeshops and laundromats.

One of these stories had made its way to New York City, where an older Chinese-American man found it and read it. She had included her P.O. box on the folded and stapled story, and he wrote to her there.

That first letter, so long ago – seventeen years now? – had been typed on a manual typewriter that could have used a new ribbon. It was a short letter, explaining that he had read her story, and that he himself had once visited an uncle in the country who raised chickens. (The girl in her story had a flock of psychotic chickens.)

He had included his name – Kingsley – and his address in Queens.

She wrote him back, thanking him for his letter. He wrote back right away.

And thus began the friendship between her and Kingsley. For many years it was letters only, a penpal relationship, between her in Minneapolis and Kingsley in Queens, a man old enough to be her father. She had lived in many apartments and houses in her life. He lived in the house he had been born and raised in, and where he had cared for his father and his mother until their deaths.

The letters became expansive and elaborate. They remain that way to this day.

Kingsley makes his own envelopes out of magazine pictures that he thinks might interest or amuse her. He pieces together the correct postage out of stamps from a collection which strikes her as vast, spanning many decades of postage.

Kingsley reads several newspapers a day and an average of two mystery novels a week. As he reads, he keeps a pair of scissors on the table next to him, and clips out articles and cartoons that he thinks she might appreciate and includes them in the large, handmade envelopes.

Something she knows about him that he did not tell her, but someone close to him did: He tape-records, from the radio, winter and summer weather reports. On the hottest summer nights he goes into his backyard (Kingsley does not have air conditioning) and lies on the grass and listens to a winter weather report. And on the coldest winter nights (Kingsley does not like cold), he closes his eyes and listens to a summer weather report.

Twice a week or so Kingsley takes a series of subways from his home in Queens to Chinatown. He always carries a backpack, and in the backpack, always, is a selection of Tupperware containers of various sizes. He eats lunch at one of his favorite Chinatown restaurants and packs the leftovers into his Tupperware to bring home, enough to feed him for the next day or so.

A camera is always in the backpack, too, so that Kingsley can photograph the meals at the banquets he arranges for his cousin and friends in his favorite Chinatown restaurants. Each of the many courses is photographed, labeled in his block printing on neatly scissored rectangles of Post-It notes, and affixed to the photos, which he includes in the large homemade envelopes with their colorful stamps.

For many years he sent her a box of rich red bean cakes every year in the fall, at the time of the Autumn Moon Festival. She and the occupants of her house love red bean cakes and looked forward to them every year. Then, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Chinatown bakery that Kingsley always bought them at folded from lack of business, and the red bean cakes were no more.

So many things he has sent her over these many years:

Ginger honey crystals, to dissolve in warm water, when she catches cold or has a sore throat.

Candied ginger, a treat because he knows how much she loves ginger in all forms.

Thin, extremely gingery cookies, ten in a pack, ten packs in a small box, mailed to her at regular intervals because she told him she has searched her city for them and cannot find them.

Silk Chinese dresses far too small for her, that had belonged to his mother.

Cotton t-shirts for her children.

An antique Chinese lock.

Tapes of radio shows that he has particularly enjoyed.

Books, usually with a Chinese theme.

Recipes for her favorite Chinese foods, often accompanied by the ingredients to make them.

Once, years ago, a telephone calling card fell out of one of the packed envelopes. She didn’t use it because she’s not a phone person and she didn’t have his phone number. One day, on a whim, she looked it up online. There it was, Kingsley, in Queens.

She calls him now if she’s going to be in the city. They meet for lunch or dinner in Chinatown. Once, he was there with his cousin and two of his cousin’s friends. It was a meal of several courses, pre-arranged by Kingsley, and before the end of it she slipped away so as to pay the bill secretly.

All these years, and he had always paid. All these years, and all the many and varied boxes of treasure he had sent her. But when she returned to the table, Kingsley knew what she had done. He could not look at her, so great was his embarrassment. She, wanting to do something nice for him, had ended up hurting him.

When one of the large and beautiful envelopes arrives now, she writes to him within a week or so, instead of the longer lag time that used to be her routine. Life is precious and too short, and she wants Kingsley to know that she loves him, and that she treasures their friendship.

When she writes to him, often with pen on lined notebook paper, she thinks of the forty years she  wrote to her grandmother, hundreds and hundreds of letters, none of which she threw out, one of which she pulls out at random if she is having a day in which she misses her grandmother particularly badly.

Long ago Kingsley sent her a rubber-banded old cardboard box containing jewelry so shiny gold that she, being ignorant, assumed it was the sort that she would buy for her daughters in the toy aisle. Later, when she found out it was not costume jewelry, she wrote to Kingsley, to tell him it was too valuable for her to keep. It was my mother’s, he wrote back, and I want you to have it for yourself and your daughters.

Among the jewelry was a gold coinlike object, stamped with the Chinese character for luck. May it bring the man at the far end of the aisle good luck, she thinks now. Good luck like the kind that came unexpectedly her way so many years ago, when Kingsley entered her life.

There are many men in the world celebrating a birthday today, millions and millions of them. There aren’t that many birthdays to choose from, when you think about it – only 365 possibilities, and we all have to share them.

We focus in on the man in the photo up there, the one wearing the plaid shirt and the white socks, the one holding the fat cross-eyed baby, his firstborn, on his lap.

Happy birthday, man in the plaid shirt. You might be wearing one today, although I don’t know that for sure. When I picture you, I picture you in tan polyester pants with a stain on the front, and a short-sleeved plaid cotton/poly blend shirt. Large brown tie shoes.  Black socks. A zip-up jacket.

Where are you now? In the 35-year-old new room, maybe, perched on a chair ludicrously small for your large frame, playing computer solitaire.

Looking for your wallet, which you will find, after searching the kitchen, the dining room, the new room and the living room, on the mantel above the fireplace.

Putting a hat on and heading out to your car, which will be unlocked, with the keys in the ignition, to drive five miles to the diner, where you will meet your cronies for breakfast, a 30-year and counting ritual.

Stooping down to rough up the fur of your dog, or, more likely, sitting in your recliner and calling her to you so that you can manhandle her large bulk into your lap and rock her.

Making your way down to the  vast woodpile and chopping some more logs into woodstove-size chunks.

You are the man who took his children on a two-week road trip every summer, road trips that, over the years, came to encompass nearly every battlefield and fort in the eastern  states, north to south and back again, who who came out of the gas stations – back when you paid for your gas inside at the counter – with his hands full of candy bars, one for each child.

Who sat for hours with your parents after the massive meal had been eaten, catching up on all the latest news. Who, not young yourself, bent to the floor and picked your mother up in a single motion after she fell leaving that one restaurant.

You are the one who short-sheeted your sergeant’s bed in basic training, and slipped the dead fish between his covers. You are the one who hung the tire from the butternut tree, who stayed up all Christmas Eve putting together the race track, who makes the stuffing at Thanksgiving.

You are the one so tough and uncomplaining that the doctors didn’t believe you were in any real pain even though your appendix had burst 24 hours prior, the one who had to lie down on the floor of the doctor’s office to  make them believe you.

You are the one who drives your fearful rural friends to Yankee Stadium every summer, who books the cheap motel where you all cram into a single room, and you are the one who tells the stories afterward.

You are the one who puts your campaign sign on the front lawn, opposite your wife’s opposing-party campaign sign.

You are the one with the big frame and the big station wagon who wore the flame-orange polyester shirt to Parents’ Weekend at your firstborn’s exclusive upper-class college in the mountains, your giant voice roaring with laughter; the one that all your firstborns’ friends gravitated to.

You are the one who drives the old people and the young unable people and the people without cars or friends to their doctors’ appointments.

You are the one who wept when your father died: the first and only time your children saw you cry.

You are the one who called your firstborn on her 33rd birthday and told her you loved her on the answering machine tape, back when there were still answering machine tapes, and she yanked it out of the machine and put it away in a drawer, where it has accompanied her to every one of the six apartments and houses she has lived in since.

Happy birthday.

Have you ever played the game True, True, Not True? (If that is indeed what is called. You sit around and take turns telling two things about yourself that are true, and one that isn’t, and the others in the circle – best played around a campfire – guess which is the untrue thing.)

This is a variation, in which I list some of the things I saw yesterday, down here on the forgotten coast. Everything on the list is true except for one. And which one is it?

A brown pelican, gulping down a large fish and then flying in a prehistoric, cawing way low across the water in search of another.

An old celadon-green sink, rusting at the base, propped outside a junk store.

A very old woman in a black pantsuit and a black hat, escorted into the raw bar by her crimson-faced, pickle-brained middle-aged alcoholic son, who, every time he rose to pull himself another beer from the tap on the wall, found something new to salute: a wooden Indian, a photo of a football team, his own reflection in the window.

A bald eagle circling high over pines on an island, maybe looking for prey or – more likely, from the way he drifted back and forth – enjoying the steady breeze off the ocean.

Two alligators, one sunning his eight-foot body next to a pond, the other barely submerging and floating along lazily.

A hunched woman of indeterminate age, wearing a pink Piggly Wiggly t-shirt and a pair of men’s sansabelt pants, her eyeglasses mended with what looked like a popsicle stick and duct tape, trying to sell several used copies of “The Shack” and one copy of “Slim for Him” on the street corner of a tiny Gulf town.

A large man enthroned on a golf cart, putting down the dirt street of a trailer town, his two dogs – one a black pit bull, the other a shepherd mix – cantering a block behind him.

Two enormous jellyfish, beached and no doubt dead.

A handsome, wide-shouldered man, crouched before an abandoned yellow one-story home overgrown with vines, two enormous pink wooden crab legs extending from either side of the front door, taking a Polaroid photo.

An unsteady wooden sign pointing the way to the Love Fellowship Church, three blocks that way.

Two large black-bristled wild boars charging through a palmetto grove.

A bubble of saliva dropping from the trembling mouth of a hungry dog crouching on the floor waiting for his bowl of food to be lowered before him.

A wizened potato, many times microwaved, being used as a bedwarmer, just as they did it back in the Laura Ingalls Wilder days (only without the microwave).

A man wearing a New York City subway #7 cap – Manhattan to Queens – hunched before a glowing computer screen in a many-windowed round house on tall stilts.

A partially-knit scarf trailing a ball of rust-colored wool, which upon closer examination reveals its knitter to be incapable of remembering when to knit, when to purl, and how to keep a stitch count constant.

A folded piece of scrappish-looking paper which, when opened, is covered with the names and nicknames of various people, below which is written, in capital letters, THANK YOU.

A week after Lent began and although she’s not Catholic and never was, that whole Catholic Lenten thing seems to have filtered down through the air and water so that it’s a part of her. The idea of it anyway, the idea of giving up something for six weeks.

Each year she carefully considers giving up something, something that means something to her, but has she?  Ever? Honestly, she can’t quite remember.

Way back when that photo was taken – she’s on the left there, in the baggy bathing cap – she was more committed to the idea. Six weeks isn’t a long time and it seems entirely possible to give up virtually anything or 42 days, doesn’t it? And yet did she?

Consider for a moment the little girl in the upper right, one of her sisters, the one in that cute plaid bathing suit. That little girl did indeed follow through one year on a major vow: Give up all desserts. For six straight weeks not a bite of dessert touched her lips. And yet on Easter day the stone was rolled away from the freezer, and from the freezer did issue forth 42 days’ worth of desserts, carefully tinfoiled away and frozen until the day of dessert resurrection.

Can that possibly count as a Lenten sacrifice? She thinks not.

It is already one week into Lent and once again she is mildly tormented by the thought of sacrifice and what, if anything, she should give up. Because there is so very much to give up.

Refined sugar, that’s always a big one among her friends. She herself doesn’t crave it enough to make it seem like a big enough sacrifice, though.  Her one small cup of strong coffee with heavy cream in the morning, that would be a true sacrifice. But she doesn’t want to give it up. Therein lies the problem. She may be too wedded to her vices to give them up.

Is one small cup of strong coffee with heavy cream in the morning a vice, though? A vice implies harm, and is the coffee truly harming her? She thinks not.

She could give up painting her toenails, but that wouldn’t work because she almost never paints them anyway. She could give up Milky Ways, but they’ve gotten too sweet lately, so that wouldn’t work.

She could give up her Wednesday Powerball purchase, but then she would also have to give up the many dreams that accompany the weekly purchase, and that would be a sort of death-in-life, would it not, which seems antithetical to the nature of the sacrifice. Besides, she won $3 in last Wednesday’s Powerball, which must mean that she is inching ever closer to the pot o’ gold.

She could give up her dream of being an Olympic speed skater, but that wouldn’t work either, for too many reasons to go into here on this humble blog.

Maybe a sacrifice can mean not the taking away of something for 42 days, but the adding in thereof. She could do yoga for one hour every day for the next six weeks. She could practice meditation – focus on the breath, return to the breath – for one hour every day for the next six weeks.

She could give up cussing – not one single swear word will issue from her lips for the next six weeks – but she knows damn well (see?) she wouldn’t be able to follow through, and how self-defeating to attempt something you know you will never succeed at.

She returns to the photo at the top and gazes upon the little girl with the baggy swim cap drooping off her head. Tell you what, little girl: Let’s give up swim caps! Let’s give them up not only for the next six weeks, but for all eternity. Now that is a sacrifice not only worth making, but possible.

We applaud you. Go forth and be bareheaded, my child.