TRAIN WHISTLES

I remember when I was about six, my first grade teacher, Miss Long, took us on a field trip. It wasn’t a distant one. Just from the Centennial Primary School to downtown Wapakoneta a few blocks away. I recall its being a bright blue day, crisp and cold, since we went first thing in the morning.

Wapakoneta train station, built in 1917

We gathered around the teacher like a gaggle of goslings, our breath visible in the morning air. We were on the cobbled platform of the old brick freight depot, on the west side of the Baltimore and Ohio rail line. I don’t know if, as usual, I wasn’t paying attention or what, but I remember asking myself what we were doing there, even if it was exciting and fun to be playing hooky from the classroom.

Then the teacher said, “All right, children, here comes the train.”

We heard the shrill whoop of a steam whistle in the distance, the tracks trembled, and then there was the chug-chug-chug of a steam locomotive, and more whoops of the whistle. We all squealed as the steam engine, pulling a freight formation behind it, hissed vapor that enveloped us on the platform. The train came to a stop at the depot and stood there huffing and sighing like some large, powerful animal that was taking a breather before chugging on. We could smell the coal burning hot in the fire box, and we could see the tender loaded with more mineral fuel behind the engine. Smoke, like our own breath, billowed into the clear morning air from the locomotive’s stack.

Reading Railroad #602 - Painting by Fred Schuster

We were too young to realize the historical significance of the event. We were witnessing the last stop of a steam locomotive in our town, and one of the last regularly scheduled steam freight services on the B&O line.

My home town of Wapakoneta is definitely a train town. Besides spurs that go to the site of the old stock yard and the now defunct cheese, canning, churn and handle factories, there is a main line that runs right through the center of town. When I was young there were still coal yards along the tracks.

When I was still a primary schooler, we lived for three years near a siding. It was at the end of our street, South Pine, on the east side of Wapakoneta. I had friends in the neighborhood who were as curious as I was. Both their mothers and mine had forbidden us to hang out on what was known as the “right of way”, a sort of grassy easement near the rail spur. They told us “dirty old bums” hung out there and, if we didn’t want our throats cut, we’d best steer clear.

Hobos riding the rails

Of course, we went anyway. We even had a treehouse down there. And the thought of its being a dangerous, threatening place, made it all the more attractive. We never saw any of the rail hobos our mothers told us about, but we did once discover unsavory evidence that someone had spent the night in our treehouse.

What we actually most liked to do was to pretend we were hobos, with just the clothes on our backs and riding the rails to exciting destinations. Occasionally, we would climb up into some boxcar left standing on the siding. We would pretend we were hiding out, being careful not to be seen by a railroad detective, made infamous by The Grit (a national newspaper targeting a rural readership), for tossing bums off of moving trains after beating the bejesus out of them.

There was only one time we did that with adult permission—although not that of the B&O Railroad. Centennial School was just down the alley from my house and the teacher took us all on a little hike down the road to the easement. It was for our primary school “Hobo Picnic”. It was a day when we all had to dress up, as best we could, like tiny rail bums and carry our lunch in a bandana tied to a stick over our shoulders. The teacher thought it would be more authentic if she took us down by the tracks, and, incredibly, she gave us all permission to climb up into a boxcar standing alone there on the rails.   It had been left with the doors wide open. It was empty except, at the far end, for a stack of still wet hides, probably, we figured, from the nearby stockyard. I still remember their raw, rank odor.

Old Wapak station in use prior to 1917

It was hard to live in Wapakoneta and not have trains in your blood. I mean, there were, and still are, townspeople irritated by the constant delays that having level-crossings all across town signifies. If you’re driving east-west from one end of town to the other, chances are good you’ll have to wait for a mile-long freight train to lumber through. But many of us who grew up in a train town found the passing of each rail convoy to be a satisfying if minor daily event. Many of us still love the click and the clank of wheels meeting the track, the jerking clunk of the couplings as the locomotive slows and accelerates, the rumble you can feel in your chest from the heavy formation rolling down the tracks, each loaded boxcar with a gross weight of a quarter-million pounds.

Another factor that made railroads special for us was that we lived just down the line from one of the world’s most renowned locomotive manufacturing operations, Baldwin Lima Hamilton. It wasn’t called that until it merged in 1951 with another famed locomotive-maker, the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. Before that, it had been known as the Lima Locomotive Works, named for its home base, the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, my father’s home town, located up the track fifteen miles north of Wapakoneta.

The Baldwin locomotive firm had been a railroading pioneer, founded in 1825. That was when locomotives were being built by hand, a time when there wasn’t even machinery to manufacture the huge cylinders that train engines required, and they had to be turned and bored by hand. The company was named for its founder, Matthias Baldwin, who was originally a talented gold and silversmith but with an obsessive interest in machinery and practical mechanics.

In the early days of his firm, Baldwin partnered with a talented machinist called David Mason. This was the beginning of the Baldwin Machine Company. But it didn’t become the Baldwin Locomotive Works until, after experimenting with steam-driven machinery for several years, Baldwin and Mason, in 1832, put together their first successful steam locomotive, which they called Old Ironsides, an engine they sold to a Philadelphia rail line that, until then, had been purchasing from a steam locomotive manufacturer in England.  

The Old Patagonian Express - La Trochita

I recall once, many years ago, waxing nationalistic on this subject, when I was watching a documentary in Argentina, where I live. It was about the Patagonian Trocha Angosta, a narrow-gauge train that once linked numerous remote destinations in the wilds of the Patagonian region—with a section of the rail link still operating today, but mostly as a tourist attraction, although some local residents still use it to get from point A to point B.

Once a thriving wild west frontier line, La Trochita, as it is fondly known—and better known to Americans as The Old Patagonian Express, since the 1979 best-selling travel book of the same title by Paul Theroux—employed a score of narrow-gauge steam engines, powered by coal from the Río Turbio mines of southern Patagonia back then, but today converted to fuel oil. Anyway, in this particular documentary, they explained that the little stretch of La Trochita that is still in operation is served by seven steam engines that are still operable. When asked about the make of the locomotives, a commentator said they were all Henschells and Baldwins, which he described as “English”.

Well now, at the time, I didn’t yet know that Henschell engines were German, but I sure as heck knew that Baldwins were American. And like a good native son from a Midwestern train town, I didn’t hesitate to get hold of the TV channel airing the program and give them a piece of my mind.

Baldwin's "Old Ironsides" - 1832

The Baldwin Locomotive Works struggled in the firm’s earliest years, living project to project for American railway companies. It went through especially difficult times following the panic of 1837, a US financial crisis that sparked a major depression that would stretch on into the mid-eighteen forties. For more than a decade after that, BLW would, to a large extent, live off of steam stock production for railways in the Southern states that were using the rails to an increasing degree to move their agricultural production.

The secession of states below the Mason-Dixon line over the burning question of American slavery practices seemed once again to spell hard times for the Philadelphia steam engine builder. But those concerns turned out to be short-lived. When the Civil War broke out, the Union military began moving troops, supplies and ordnance increasingly by rail, and steam engine production burgeoned as a result.

Baldwin would remain a powerful player in US railroading from then on, until the advent of diesel locomotives. Baldwin had difficulty making the transition from steam to diesel, which led to its post-World War II merger with the Lima Locomotive Works (by then known as Lima-Hamilton, after a previous merger with a machine-building firm based in Hamilton, Ohio).         

Lima Loco's Shay geared locomotive

Long before the merger with Baldwin, however, Lima Loco, as it was colloquially known, was already famous worldwide, for building some of the world’s finest steam locomotives. Founded in 1869, the firm was known, prior to 1878, as the Lima Machine Works.  But it was in that year that industrialist James Alley contracted Lima Machine to construct an innovative geared steam locomotive, specially designed by Ephraim Shay for the lumber industry.

The first Shay engine was completed in 1880 and became an instant hit throughout the US logging sector.  Over the next decade, Lima Loco would turn out some three hundred such steam engines. The Shay locomotives were low-speed, high-traction steam engines designed to pull heavy loads through mountainous terrain. But by the twentieth century, Lima Locomotive had largely covered that market, and was already turning to “super-power” steam technology.

Shay "Dixiana" logging train

This was a homegrown concept developed by Lima mechanical engineer William Woodward. His development concentrated on maximizing the locomotive’s prime capability—namely the generation and use of steam power. This so vastly increased the power and efficiency of Lima’s steam engines that the New York Central railway ended up buying more than three hundred of the Woodward-technology locomotives. While Lima’s production had earlier concentrated on pulling-capacity, the new locomotives of the nineteen-twenties were built for speed, and it was during that time, when my father was a boy growing up in that town, that Lima Loco became internationally renowned for building some of the world’s fastest steam engines. The maximum expression of this new breed of locomotive was the Berkshire 2-8-4, a powerful iron workhorse with a top speed of seventy miles per hour.

The Berkshire 2-8-4 super-power steam locomotive

In hindsight, the Lima Loco was, quintessentially, a steam locomotive builder, and it was superb at what it did. It was proud of that history and sought to hold onto to it, remaining ever loyal to steam. Seeing the writing on the wall, it was the new partner, Hamilton, that pushed to make the switch to diesel technology. Between 1949 (the year I was born) and 1951, Lima-Hamilton constructed just one hundred seventy-four diesels, making it the smallest diesel builder in the US.  Using Hamilton engine technology, more than three-quarters of the diesel locomotives that Lima-Hamilton built were thousand-horsepower switchers for use in America’s train yards. A rare few are apparently still in service today.

Lima Locomotive Works factory floor

But it was too little too late, and the 1951 merger with Baldwin could do nothing to save it. The firm simply couldn’t compete with big diesel-electric locomotive builders like Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), Alco, and General Electric Infrastructure (GE). Sadly, in 1956, LBH closed its locomotive operations.

Despite this rich railroading history, what I remember most about growing up in a rural train town like Wapakoneta are the train whistles. Someplace in the back of my mind, from the time of my earliest years, I can still hear the shrill steam whistles. And from my early childhood, I can remember wanting to be at the tracks when the trains passed to see whether they were being pulled by a steam or diesel locomotive.

Lima Loco diesel, still operating freight runs in 2016

I was reminded of this when I was stationed in Germany for more than a year with the Army. I traveled a great deal by train at the time, and it wasn’t unusual then, in the early 1970s, for the German railroads to still use steam for switching and freight operations. It was exciting to see those heavy-breathing steam locomotives chug through, steaming, smoking and pulling with all their might.

But the most vivid memory I have of growing up in a train town is of the mourning doppler howl of the powerful diesels passing through, pulling seemingly never-ending formations of boxcars, flatcars and tankers. It always seemed especially poignant at night, lying in my bed in my parents’ home, and hearing it in the distance, as if in a dream. Or sitting after dark with my friend Mark on the roof of the shelter house in the park, smoking pilfered cigarettes and fantasizing about being on the lam, destination unknown. It was the background tune for our casual discussions of stories like Hemingway’s Nick Adams series or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Now when I go back to Wapakoneta for visits, I stay in a tiny house known as the Moonflower Inn. One of the things I love about the place is that it is close enough to the tracks for me to hear the train whistles at night. It’s nostalgic yet comforting, like being back in my warm bed at my family home.

Indeed, wherever I travel, no matter how far, the sound of a diesel locomotive horn is always sure to carry me away, to take me back home to Wapakoneta.  

THIS IS WHERE I’VE BEEN…AND WHERE I WAS BORN

 Hopefully, some of you will have noticed that I’ve been missing in action for a while.  There’s a good reason for it. I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new anthology of non-fiction stories (some people would call them memoir essays, but in the end, memoirs are just stories you don’t make up).

For anybody who’s not a regular reader of this blog, let me tell you what to the regular readers is already obvious. I’m from a small town in the US Midwest called Wapakoneta. Despite having been an expatriate former journalist living in South America for the past fifty years, I’ve written a great deal about the people, idiosyncrasies and history of Midwestern smalltown life. The stories I tell appeal (I’m told) to anyone brought up in smalltown America, and most especially to people of my own generation and the generation after. In other words, boomers and Gen Xers. But they are also apparently appealing to anyone interested in how folks lived before the Internet, before cellphones, before social media and even before television. Those are quite often the memories I relive and share with anyone willing to listen.

You needn’t remind me that, as I mention in one of the stories in this new book, I can write authoritatively about all of this because I am “older than dirt.” I cop to it and have even embraced it in my latest writing. Although I do recall what it felt like when I was one of the youngest foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires back in the seventies, and when I was the youngest general news editor in any newspaper in that city (which boasted a dozen daily and evening papers back then, plus a number of weeklies).

I guess nearly everyone would like to be young again. But as a writer, I’d only like to be young again if I were to know everything I know now. It’s not that I don’t still wrestle with doubts the way I always have. But my doubts now are experienced and educated doubts, not the scary existential and ignorance-based doubts of my youth as a guy who didn’t know nearly enough in jobs where you really had to know a lot.  

Anyway, mine, in general, is literature of broad appeal. But I also have specifically written a great deal about my town as sharing these common qualities of the Midwest, but also as being its unique Midwestern self. To start with, a town with a name no one will confuse with any other. Not a Springfield (there are thirty-five towns with that name in the US, plus the one on The Simpsons), a Lebanon (thirty-five), an Arlington (thirty-eight), a Centerville (thirty-eight), a Clinton (thirty-nine), a Franklin (forty-five), or a Washington (ninety-one), but Wapakoneta.

If you say you’re from Wapakoneta, some people might not know the name—"Wapaka-whosis?”—but surely no one will ask you “Which one?” And a lot more people know the name now than did when I was a kid growing up—even my ophthalmologist (a private pilot and aerospace buff) in Patagonia knows it—because Wapakoneta native son Neil Armstrong put us on the map. You would practically have to be a hermit, or never have opened a history book, not to know that Neil was the first person to ever set foot on the surface of the moon back in July of 1969. So, Moon Town is my town. Still, he’s not the only local boy (or girl) of certain widespread renown, even if he is indeed, and by far, the most famous.

But that’s not all that makes Wapakoneta unique. Like each person, each town has a story all its own. A story that usually includes beauty marks and ugly warts, proud moments and others you’d like to forget, moments of outright joy and contented happiness, and moments of tears and tragedy. 

In my latest book, A Place Called Wapakoneta, I strive to capture this essence. Sometimes the task is a little like trying to bottle lightning, but you go at it little by little, memory by memory, quirk by wonderful quirk in order to paint a portrait of a town and a story that you’ve never stopped loving, beauty marks, warts and all.

 This book could be loosely described as “a sequel” to my first two—The Rock Garden and Other Stories, and, Visions of What Used To Be—but is, by far, the biggest anthology yet. It contains a total of twenty-five non-fiction stories in a two hundred-fifty-page-plus book. And each story is accompanied by a related photo depicting the town and its history. The book also includes related portraits of other towns, specifically, Lima and Saint Marys, Ohio.

 The e-book and hard-cover editions are already on Amazon for pre-ordering (with deliveries scheduled for the first week of August). The paperback will go live on Amazon as of Sunday, July 28, the official launch date for this new book. 

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003ZWKVEK

From a Place Called Wapakoneta will also be available for purchase at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta as of the first week of August. And I will be holding a book-signing event there in September. Check with the RAC for details.

I only hope all of you enjoy reading this book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and that you too will feel the emotions and identification with it that I have in attempting, from my own point of view, to set part of my home town’s story down in order to share it with others, and to keep these memories alive after I’m gone. Because the only true history we have is the one those who lived it can share with us. The rest is pure revisionism.

     

BOWSHER UNIQUE – UNIT OF MEASURE FOR SINGULARITY

When I was a kid, and my mother would see my little brother and me trying to lasso each other with a jump rope, she would warn us that we should stop before we ended up “like that poor little Bowsher kid.” Everybody knew who Jim was in school, whether they actually knew him or not, because he was “the one-eyed kid,” and there weren’t all that many of his kind in town.

Jim Bowsher - Photo by Scott Bruno

Jim and I weren’t friends as kids. In fact, as I wrote in my book about him entitled The Rock Garden and Other Stories, I don’t think we ever spoke a word to each other throughout grade school, junior high or high school. That wouldn’t have been strange in a big city, but in a town of fewer than ten thousand souls, and we being only a grade apart, that sort of distance was an oddity. 

The fact is, we didn’t meet until ten years ago, when we were both in our mid-sixties. It wasn’t a chance meeting. It was carefully planned by a mutual friend, Victoria Smith, who had long insisted that Jim and I “just had to meet each other.” She more or less trapped us both into dinner at her place, without telling either of us that the other would be there. 

Well, the connection was immediate, and the two of us ended up keeping poor Vicki up until 4am, sitting at her kitchen table trying not to doze off, while Jim and I continued to drink wine and talk endlessly. When I finally glanced at my watch and said I had to go because I had a breakfast date at eight o’clock, ever-enthusiastic Jim said, “Great! So we have another four hours!”

Ever since then, we have been close friends. We’ve only grown closer over this last decade and have often regretted that we wasted so much time getting to know each other, because we could have been life-long friends from the outset. But like so many other things, that’s just life and its random nature, I guess.

Anyway, Jim once told me the story of how he had lost the eye. It hadn’t been a jump rope and he hadn’t been trying to lasso another kid. But it had indeed been with a rope with which he was trying to lasso a tree. By a quirk of fate, the end of the rope snapped him in his right eye and basically destroyed the lens.

Right to left, Larry Street, Jim Bowsher and Dan Newland
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch

Jim said he didn’t realize how bad it was until his dad got home from work and looked at the eye. He said “When I saw his expression, I knew it was bad.” Jim told me that what hurt him most wasn’t the injury, but the sadness he saw in his father’s face. He felt as if he’d somehow let his dad down and wished he could make it up to him.

The doctor who tended Jim’s wound took it on himself to explain the situation to him. It was a lot for a little boy to take in. He would, the doctor said, never see out of that eye again. The doctor looked very sad, and wanting to buck him up, the precocious little six-year-old with the big vocabulary said, “Well, I guess that’s just one more thing that will make me unique.”

Jim left us yesterday at 6pm after a long struggle with cancer. I’ve thought a lot about him lately. One of my thoughts last night after I heard the news was of what I would say if someone were to ask me what Jim was like. I came to the conclusion that the word little boy Jim had used to describe himself to the doctor was perfect. Jim, I would have to say, wasn’t like anything or anyone. Jim was unique. He was a guy with a different vision, a singular path, and the stubborn grit and optimism to forge it daily, without doubt or pause.

Anyone who has ever heard Jim’s name—and, incredibly, people have heard of him around the world—immediately associates it with his incredible Rock Garden and Temple of Tolerance. This is a work of such extraordinary size and topographical profile that an Air Force fighter pilot out of Wright Patterson Air Base in Dayton once showed up at Jim’s door after overflying it and recording the coordinates. He told Jim he just had to come and see for himself what sort of amazing thing Jim had in his backyard. That said, however, this monumental permanent art installation is merely a symbol of Jim’s real work.

According to Jim, it was first manifested in him as a vision, which only he would have had the enthusiasm and wherewithal to materialize. Jim built his monument to tolerance and its surrounding Rock Garden for children, but especially for wayward teens and pre-teens. This was to be their safe place, where violence, racism, drugs and religious intolerance were the only things not tolerated, where they could avoid the bad influences of the surrounding world, seek sanctuary from often troubled home lives and be free from bullying and lack of understanding. No matter how busy Jim was pursuing his own goals, he was always there for them. And not just in the yard, but also in society, where he coached them in baseball, spoke at their schools, accompanied many of them to juvenile court, counseled their parents and even found many of them jobs and homes as they reached the appropriate ages.

Jim involved “his” kids, encouraging them to take part in the construction of the garden and temple. He explained to them that if you built something, it became, in a sense, yours. He inspired in them a vision of the future when, as often successful adults and parents, they would return to the garden with their families and would be able to proudly say, “I helped build this.” He taught them the value of hard work, of creation, of belonging to a team, yet of being your own person, unassailable individuals capable of resisting peer pressure, and of pursuing their dreams.

In that sense, Jim was a constant mentor, and he had the good luck to live long enough to see the fruit of his gargantuan efforts to make his world a better place than he’d found it. In recent years the Rock Garden has been visited regularly by people in whose childhood lives he made a difference—a couple of generations of them, in fact. To a man and woman, they are eternally grateful for the part he played in their lives, for often pulling them back from the brink. In fact, one such man, a one-time troubled boy whose life he had changed, was with Jim’s wife, Kazuko, by his bed when he took his last breath.

That in itself could have been the sole focus of his life’s work, but it wasn’t. Jim’s boundless energy and curiosity made him a collector of people’s stories from the time he was nine, when, for the first time, he started visiting senior living facilities and interviewing the elderly, as a means of compiling the real history of our town and the surrounding area, not the one told in textbooks. He was an avid historical researcher, an expert on Wapakoneta history back to long before local native tribes had ever seen a European.

Besides getting the skinny on every major personality in our town’s history, Jim also spent a great part of his youth traveling on the cheap and seeking out the writers and other major figures that he had most admired. When Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out in his kitchen, one of the few things pinned with magnets to his refrigerator door not to be spoiled by the blood spatter was a haiku that Jim had sent him, after having met him personally and befriended him in New York City.  He also tracked down Eudora Welty, collared her in her front yard and talked her into letting him into her home for a two-hour interview.

And then too, Jim had one of the last interviews ever recorded with Isaac Asimov. As a result, he ended up inheriting Asimov’s 1924-model manual typewriter, on which he himself would write for many years.

Jim owned Trotsky’s ink well. The story of how he got it is fascinating, but suffice it to say that he lifted it from the then-abandoned house in Mexico where the political ideologue had had his office in exile—the very office where an assassin murdered Trotsky with an ice axe. He once, too, proudly showed me a t-shirt that he’d had with him when he met Nelson Mandela in Manhattan. He had handed Mandela the t-shirt and a red marker and told him, “I’m not as interested in having your autograph as in asking you to write the one word that you think is the most important in the English language.” Without hesitation, Mandela printed “Freedom!” in huge letters on the fabric.

And these are just a few of his traveler’s anecdotes.

The Rock Garden has been visited by numerous celebrities whom Jim consistently treated with the same humanity and self-confidence that he would have any other visitor. One was Johnny Depp, who decided to go and meet Jim personally after a bitter telephone argument they had over how Depp should play his future role as John Dillinger. Jim had told a colleague of Depp’s to tell Johnny not to go making a hero out of a coldblooded killer like Dillinger, whose henchmen had murdered the sheriff in nearby Lima, Ohio when they broke the bank robber out of the county jail in the nineteen-thirties. After his visit to the Temple of Tolerance, Depp left thinking of Jim as a friend.

Nor was Jim’s social work confined to helping wayward kids. He also worked in prisons helping career criminals—including a few death-row murderers—to tell their life stories. Jim had an at times infuriating empathy with and sympathy for these men whom society had locked away. But Jim had the advantage of having collected their childhoods on paper, and while he couldn’t condone their horrific acts, he knew that in nine out of ten cases, what they’d done was the direct result of the trauma they had suffered as children.

Jim gained unsought recognition for his incredible efforts on a local, state and national level. One he could be truly proud of was his Jefferson Award. For the past fifty years, the Jefferson Award has been granted to not only renowned national figures, but also to unsung heroes whose works “have represented the good that is happening all around us, in every community across the nation.”   

Jim was an extraordinary public speaker and shared all of these stories and more with his audiences, ever seeking to help people focus on how we are all connected in the fabric of humanity, and how love and empathy are the only emotions capable of saving us.

Last November was the last time I saw Jim in person. He, some mutual friends and I had spent a lot of time together during my stay in Wapakoneta, but it was time to journey back to my home in Patagonia. That last evening, four of us, Jim, Mark Gallimore, Mary Jo Knoch and I, met at the now-iconic La Grande Pizza.

The choice was no coincidence. The building occupied by the pizzeria for the past half-century was built under contract for my grandfather in 1945, and, from 1946 until 1969, housed the Teddy Bear soda fountain and grill, a business first owned by my father and two of his brothers and later by just my father and mother. In his eclectic collection of objects with stories behind them that Jim had in his incredible museum of a house, there was a chrome and leather counter stool that had once formed part of the Teddy Bear décor. So we both—along with a couple of generations of other Wapak folks who had grown up in the forties, fifties and sixties—had an intimate connection with the place.

That night, we enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. We had a great time despite the fact that Jim was already visibly ill. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from our formative years in this town where we had all grown up.  Eventually, however, it was time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them. There is a lack of certainty, a sense of hope without expectation.

Outside in the street, we all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you next time.”

When I hugged Jim, I couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. I said, “Jim, it’s been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”

Jim said, “I’ll be here.”

I believed him.

Sorry you couldn’t keep that promise, my friend. But, hopeful agnostic that I am, just let me say, perhaps I’ll see you on the other side.

 

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX…OR DIDN’T

 As a writer and long-time journalist, I’m one of those guys who, when faced with a hole in my knowledge, I try to find out everything I can to squelch my ignorance. That means I spend an inordinate amount of time digging around in reference material of all sorts. It also means I used to squander many an hour in libraries or rooting around in whatever musty reference books and sundry printed materials I could lay hands on. But that was admittedly a restrictive activity, simply because, back then, learning everything you always wanted to know about a random topic could have ended up consuming most of the rest of your adult life, to the detriment of all the other random topics of which you might have hoped to glean a measure of knowledge.

Still, it had the virtue of one’s having to exert tremendous effort in the search for knowledge (meaning objective facts), which made you appreciate it all the more once you had it. And it also meant you would probably remember it a lot longer than today, precisely because of the effort you had to make.

In recent years—since the nineties, which, to someone like me, born slightly less than halfway through the previous century, seems like “only yesterday”—I’ve learned a whole new way to do research. Despite being rather an “old dog” by the time the Internet appeared on the scene, I didn’t consider myself above learning new tricks. And almost by accident, I found myself being something of a pioneer, within my limited circle, of the “working at home” culture of the Internet Era.

I’ve been doing precisely that since 1995, when dial-up Internet connections first appeared in Patagonia, a region to which I had moved less than two years before that. In doing so, I came face to face with a self-fulfilling prophecy that I myself had made nearly a decade before, when, writing a communications sidebar to a cover story that Apertura magazine of Buenos Aires published on “The Future”, I said that, in the not so distant future, guys like me, who made their living researching and writing, would be able to do both from the comfort of their own home, even if they lived in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains, in one of the most remote places on earth.

At the time I wrote it, I still lived in a mid-town apartment in Buenos Aires, and it had seemed like a pipe-dream. I mean, I didn’t doubt that it would happen eventually—just not in my lifetime. But suddenly, there I was, a decade later, in my mid-forties, in my Internet-based studio—in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains, in the remote Argentine Patagonia—researching, writing and translating for a variety of clients scattered everywhere from Buenos Aires to Miami, from Madrid to New York, and from Houston to Patagonia. And although, in the beginning, even people in the US had qualms about doing business through the World Wide Web, I hung in there and convinced them there was no need for my presence in big-city offices, or for material to travel by snail mail, or for us to use faxes and teletypes when the Internet could do it all.

What it meant for me personally, was that I had gone from being a stodgy old-school newsman whose manual typewriter they had practically had to pry out of my cold, dead hands, to being among the earliest advocates of the Internet, as much more than a clever novelty—as, indeed, an incredibly useful tool for communication and research.

I was just thinking about that again today when, in some reading I was doing, I came across some information about a French actress who said she identified as “sapiosexual”.  Well, I was stumped. I mean, although I am a very open-minded and liberal person, as someone who grew up in rural Ohio in an era when sexual orientations were obtusely considered to be two—please check one box only, M or F—and anyone who complained about it was sent to therapy, if not to jail, I’ve had to practice to be able to memorize and pronounce the initials LGBTQ. And while I’m a great believer in people doing whatever they want to with their bodies, and particularly with their genitalia, as long as their partners are willing, as long as there’s no pedophilia or unwilling subjugation involved, and as long as I don’t have to watch, it’s okay with me—although watching’s okay too, if that’s what turns you on—I have to admit that a lot of definitions of distinct sexualities have escaped me entirely.

Indeed, I had no idea how many were escaping me until I decided to quickly research sapiosexuality. Looking the term up, I immediately came up with numerous explanations. The best definition was, in short, being sexually or erotically aroused by intelligence, no matter what the physical sex of the other person was. I actually found that a pretty cool idea. A sort of highly cultivated sexual orientation. I mean, I’m far too intellectually inferior and hopelessly hetero for it to be an appealing idea to me personally, but I thought, hey, good for them, these “sapios”! Brains turn them on.

Then, of course, seeking an objective definition, I also read that some sexuality snobs said that while sapiosexuality might be a preference, it certainly wasn’t an orientation. I thought, now wait a minute, why not? What was that saying? That the brain is the most powerful sex organ? In fact, it is the master sex organ because without it, all sexual activity would be moot. So why not be sexually oriented toward intelligence?

These can be put down to the kind of rhetorical questions that assail an experienced editorial writer, I suppose. But that wasn’t the only thing I had to ponder, because I was floored by the brand new (for me) discovery that, besides the handful of sexual orientations about which I’d already reduced my ignorance, another couple of scores existed as well!

It was my own fault. This was what I got for looking up a new term. Start pulling on a loose thread, and the whole shebang came unraveled. How the heck many sexualities can there be, you ask? ¨

Here’s a little sampling. 

Allosexual: As far as I can tell, most of us are this. It means, simply, someone who experiences sexual attraction, period. Doesn’t everybody, you ask? No. Allosexuality is the opposite of Asexuality, and one helps define the other. Someone asexual either has very reduced sexual response, or simply doesn’t experience sexual attraction of any kind. That, however, doesn’t necessarily keep asexuals from feeling romantic attraction to specific people of both (all) sexes. And as such, they may even engage in sexual activity—presumably without really being into it. 

Androsexual means being attracted to all things male and masculine. That seems pretty straightforward, like a me Tarzan, you Jane, kind of thing, but it’s not that simple. It has to do with being attracted to anyone who identifies as being male or masculine—regardless of biology, anatomy or whatever sex was assigned to the object of that attraction on his or her birth certificate.

Then there’s Aromantic (as opposed to “a romantic”), which simply means people, regardless of sex or gender, who experience little or no romantic attraction to anybody. But that definition says nothing about their possibly of still having a strong sex drive and taking part in “unromantic” sex. Or maybe they just end up being Autosexual, which sounds an awful lot like what we used to call “self-abuse”, but apparently isn’t, because (it says here), “someone’s desire to engage in sexual behavior such as masturbation doesn’t determine whether they’re autosexual…” So, wait, I’m confused. If that doesn’t define autosexual, what does?

Now, an Autoromantic is a whole other ball of wax. These are individuals who are attracted to themselves. Autoromantics apparently find themselves experiencing relationships they have with themselves as romantic. Not sure how that works, but it would be worthwhile asking somebody if that’s like the amorous relationship former President Donald Trump has with himself. 

And those are just the ones on the A-list!

Later, we have the Bicurious (people who might ask themselves what their sexuality really is and, as a result, explore bisexual relationships), Bisexual (somebody who is sexually, romantically or emotionally attracted to people of more than one sexual orientation or to different genders—in other words, Bicurious folks who have made up their minds), and Biromantics (individuals who become romantically but not necessarily sexually attracted to people of more than one gender—which kind of sounds to me like a bicurious introvert, but hey, that’s not a scientific explanation, just my own speculation).

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was a gender non-conformity trailblazer.
Openly bisexual, she would occasionally dress in clothing considered
 stereotypically male, as in this family photo, in which she (center)
 is dressed in a men’s suit with her hair pulled back.  Her artwork
also reflected her thoughts surrounding identity,
gender and sexuality.

Then, there are the Closeted—as the term suggests, people who are “in the closet”, or in other words, individuals who keep their sexual identity, attractions, or gender expressions secret from the public. Some “closet whatevers” may only keep their secrets in certain publics, where they are afraid of being rejected, targeted or discriminated against, but will reveal their proclivities in “friendly” surroundings. Now, the opposite of Closeted is
Coming Out, or in other words, making the decision to reveal, or even advertise, one’s sexual identity, proclivity or gender. I’ve known quite a few outed people and have talked to them about it enough to know that it often comes after a long process (frequently years) of indecision, guilt, social ostracism and general suffering. Which is why I’ve always held those who come out in high esteem for the courage and self-acceptance that it requires. Now, things get complicated with the term Cupiosexual. These are asexual individuals who may not experience sexual attraction per se, but who still have a desire to take part in sexual behavior, or even in a sexual relationship. (Hey, don’t look at me; I have no idea how this works).

Next on the list are Demisexuals and Demiromantics. These are very similar terms in that they refer to having a sexual and/or romantic attraction only under specific circumstances. This would apply, for instance, to people who need to build a romantic or emotional bond before feeling sexual attraction. I think this must apply to quite a number of people I know.

Then there are also people who just kind of go with the flow. They are aptly described as Fluid, which has almost nothing to do with wetness as such, but rather, is a description of people who take it for granted that sexual behavior, sexual attraction, or sexuality in general can change in accordance with the times and the circumstances. Someone with fluid sexuality will embrace shifts in their attractions and behavior in keeping with the circumstances they happen to be living, or simply over the course of time.

I finally hit on one I knew—or thought I did—when I came to Gay on the list. As most of us know, gay individuals (a term that achieved popularity in the sixties) are ones who feel sexually, romantically and emotionally attracted to people of their own sex. This is sometimes so strong that a gay friend of mine once told me, when I mentioned common everyday marriage to him, that he couldn’t help me, since he had never been able to understand hetero (we’ll get to that in a minute) relationships.

I also got into a discussion with another gay friend once when I talked about “gay people” meaning both men and women. He laughed derisively and said, “Wow, Caveman, you’ve gotta get out more! Only men are gay. Women are lesbians.” Typical of my intellectual arrogance, I pressed the point, saying that wasn’t true. That, in fact, the “gay community”, as conceived of in the sixties, included both male and female “homosexuals”. That really cracked him up. He said he wouldn’t know. He’d have to get out his “gay history book” for that one.

Well, I have to say, if you’re reading this, pal, the accepted definition of Gay, according to the list I’m quoting from, stands for both males and females. But the list concedes that “some gay-identified women prefer the term ‘lesbian’, while others might prefer ‘’queer’ or ‘gay’. And, okay, to your point, it also says, “It’s also best to ask which word or term someone uses to describe themselves.” Also, I guess your crack about the “gay history book” wasn’t far off, since the report also says, “The fields of medicine and psychology previously referred to this sexual orientation as homosexual. “Homosexual” is now viewed as an outdated and offensive term and shouldn’t be used to refer to LGBTQIA+ people. (Oh man, more initials to memorize)!

Graysexual: Right, that’s not a misprint. It’s a term to describe a “gray area” (which, out of longstanding habit, I would spell as “grey area”) on the sexuality index. It is reserved for people who may not be overly sexually attracted to anybody, but who also don’t identify as asexual/aromantic. They may experience a certain level of sexual attraction or desire, but not as intensely or frequently as those who identify as completely beyond asexuality.  Similarly, someone Grayromantic might feel the occasional romantic twinge, but not as strongly or as often as someone beyond the bounds of aromanticality.

Gynesexual, as should be clear from the prefix, is all about being attracted to women, females and all things feminine. As with Androsexuality (see above) Gynesexuality isn’t just about guys who like girls. The term specifically includes those who identify as women, females or feminine, regardless of questions of biology, anatomy or birth-certificate sex.

I found familiar territory when I got to Heterosexual. But by the time I got to this term that describes Me, I would have almost modified it with “boring”, as in Boring Heterosexual. As most of you know, the term describes people who are sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to people of the opposite gender (although I have to admit, I’m getting pretty confused about what “opposite” means). This heading is more commonly known as “Straight”. But that doesn’t take into account that trans-gender people (someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth) can also be heterosexual, as can cisgender folks (someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth), which is pretty much the majority of people. People like us aren’t included in the initials LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex—a general term to describe people born with sexual characteristics that are not typically male or female, including sex chromosomes, external genitalia, or an internal reproductive system—and Asexual), with the plus being added, I presume, to symbolize “whatever else might crop up in the future.”

And the list goes on:

Labidoist Asexual (people who are ostensibly asexual but who have sexual cravings satisfied by other means, such as masturbation), Monosexual (typically, those who feel attracted only to people of one gender—meaning people who are exclusively heterosexual, gay or lesbian), Non-Labidoist Asexuals (people with no sexual attraction or sex drive at all), Omnisexuals (people with an indiscriminate sexual appetite that spans the entire spectrum of sexual possibilities), and similarly, Pansexuals/Panromantics (people who can feel sexual, romantic or emotional attraction to anyone, regardless of their gender, sex or sexual orientation).

Which leads us to Polysexuality (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual and queer people, among others). Passing is when a person of any other sexuality is assumed to be hetero or cisgender.  Queer is a term we heteros were told we weren’t allowed to use anymore because it was insulting to homosexual folks. This makes it a lesser cousin to the N-word, which some African Americans use pretty regularly in vernacular conversation, but which is vile and discriminatory when it issues from the lips of a white person. In the case of sexuality, it is the Q in LBGTQIA+, and is a term used in that community to describe anyone who is not strictly hetero. It’s a word given to grey areas that don’t fit neatly into the gay, lesbian or bisexual categories. As such, it has no dependence on sex, sexuality or gender. There is also, however, another Q—namely, Questioning. This describes the process of becoming “curious” about exploring nuances in one’s sexuality. And it also applies to people who are currently exploring their sexuality or gender. 

Sex-Averse is not so much a choice of sexuality as exactly the opposite—people in the “asexual” classification who are utterly disinterested in or even violently opposed to sex and sexual behavior and activity in general. Sex-Favorable is the term reserved for usually asexual people who can, in certain situations, be positive toward or even favorable to sex. Then there is Sex-Indifferent, in other words, asexual-leaning people who are, nevertheless, indifferent to or neutral to sex or sexual behavior issues. Sex-Repulsed, meanwhile, is, as the name implies, the term that describes asexuals who are, directly opposed to and repelled by anything to do with sex. Skoliosexuality is the word for those who are attracted to others who do not identify as cis-gender—for instance, non-binary, genderqueer, and transgender individuals. Spectrasexuals are sexually or romantically attracted to people of multiple or varied sexual and gender persuasions, but not necessarily to all of them.

From what we’ve seen in the contents of this list, it would appear that the only way to quickly differentiate in polite conversation between the sexual majority and others would be by describing them as either “straight” or “queer”.

But in the end, why describe, classify, or pigeonhole others at all? Why not just accept everyone as another human being like you or me, with all of our doubts, dichotomies, preferences, proclivities, quirks and idiosyncrasies? But in the end, nevertheless, all children of the Earth, just seeking to get through this life the best way we know how. What business is it of mine what lifestyle you embrace? What business is it or yours whom I fall in love with, or what we do behind closed doors to express it, and in the intimacy of private lives?