Osso Bucco

Tom made Osso Bucco for dinner a couple of weeks ago. Italian for a ‘bone with a hole’, this recipe calls for a slice of veal shank that gets simmered in broth and rosemary, thyme, bay leaves, clove and vegetables for 60 to 90 minutes. When it is served the Osso Bucco is falling-off-the-bone tender and delicious. The other advantage of this recipe is that when the meal is complete, a beautiful bone is left for the dog. We finished the meal in 40 minutes. Flash has worked on the bone for days. Tom and I sit and watch him try to chew on the inside of the circle. It provides hours of entertainment for all three of us. I know what you’re thinking: “these two are easily entertained.” Yes, we are.

There is something “old world” about this recipe. It takes time to cook, it makes the whole house smell delicious and you can’t eat it while standing over the sink. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the modern day shortcuts in the kitchen. Without them I’d weigh 80 pounds. But there is also a benefit from the

old recipes. Isn’t there? Am I just being sentimental? At one point in my past, when I had two legs to stand on, I made apple pies from scratch. Piecrust is a tricky endeavor, but when done well it’s a delight.

Flash just showed up to remind me that this piece is not about recipes, it’s about bones. The kind your dog will love.

Band Uniform

I did all four years of my secondary education at Coachella Valley High School, where the mascot was the C.V. Arab. Therefore our band uniforms were appropriate to the Arab culture. I'm not sure it was a uniform that any authentic Arab would recognize; they were more like your Hollywood version of an Arab. The uniform began at the top with a dark green felt fez. In Arabic it's known as a tarboosh. With a tassel attached to the top and hanging down the side, picture Matt Groening’s Akbar and Jeff. (That's probably why I turned out gay-- I was made to dress like Akbar and Jeff during my formative years.) Our shirts were made of gold satin with full sleeves and over that we wore a green felt vest. We wore green wool pants that were gathered in at the ankle. Picture Barbara Eden in I dream of Jeannie. The gold satin cummerbund helped tie the outfit together. My feet were big enough that the toes curled up of their own accord without any help from the costume designer.

The real miracle here was that they dressed three dozen of us in these costumes and put us on a hot street in the Coachella Valley carrying drums and tubas… and most of us survived. I suppose that all of this was good preparation for my years in the theater. I could say to the director in any given play ‘you want me to wear that?’ Sure, no problem.

Brokenhearted

I fell in love in my mid-30s and I fell hard. His name was Jay. We met quite by accident and ended up talking most of the evening. He was from out of town and living in my area because IBM sent him there to close down a local facility. The circumstances of his work assignment should have been a warning to me, but you know what they say-love is blind and a little bit stupid. He stayed over that night and for several nights thereafter. Over the next few weeks, we went for long drives and sang in the car. He cooked for me and bought me flowers.

I took him to my grandmother’s funeral where he met all the family. He interacted with my little niece and nephew with grace and charm. He talked with my parents in a way that put his higher education at Cornell to good use. We were both working more than full time, but we spent nearly every night together; he almost never went to the little apartment he had rented nearby. He flew to his home in the Bay Area and rented a truck to bring some of his things back down south. He brought his bed, which he said was more comfortable than mine so we put my mattress in the garage. He brought his big rocking chair, and we settled in to my place like a couple of honeymooners.

One morning I woke up and found him sitting quietly in the rocking chair. I kissed the top of his head and asked ‘is something wrong?’ He said no. That night when I got home his belongings were gone. My mattress was back on the bed. His clothes, rocking chair, brush and comb all gone. I called him at his old apartment and he said he just needed some air. I didn’t understand, I peppered him with questions. Air? Was I smothering you? He said he didn’t know; he just needed some time.

If you want to drive someone crazy don’t give him the complete story. Just give him enigmatic explanations like ‘I need some air’. Well, it drove me a little crazy. I started driving 20 minutes to his apartment at 10 PM at night and sitting in the parking lot trying to watch people coming and going. I knew what grief and depression could do to a person, my life became a prime example. I became sleepless and restless. I cried at unexpected times. I was brokenhearted.

After a month he told me the truth. He had left his lover in the Bay area and eventually came to doubt his decision. I was still a wreck. Over the next few months, through long talks with my friends and my therapist and a lot of rigorous exercise, I made a slow, deliberate climb back into mental health.

This is a dark story in my life that I have resisted retelling. But with time comes perspective. Six months after my fiasco with Jay, I learned that my friend Tom had become single again. I called him and made a date for lunch. As it turned out my heart had been broken… I like to think of it as broken open, to be ready for the love of my life.

My First Home (with a little help from my friends)

In the early 1980s I ventured to purchase my first home. It was a two-bedroom condo under construction. Set up into a hillside, it had a lovely view of the Conejo Valley and the builders promised it would be completed by June. But by the Fourth of July it was still nothing more than 2x4’s. I would go by every couple of weeks and supervise, but that didn’t seem to speed the process at all. After Thanksgiving I learned that construction had stopped because of a lawsuit. Evidently my two-story unit had emerged into the view shed of the homes on the hill behind me. It seemed that my lovely view of the Conejo Valley used to be theirs. In any event I left the builders and the homeowners to sort out this issue without me.

Come spring, the construction started again. And about 11 months after I opened escrow my lovely condo was almost ready for me. The sales office informed me that they would need $5000 in closing costs before I could move in. I said to them “And you are telling me about the closing costs now, after 11 months?” I had never purchased a home before; I was a real estate virgin. So these closing costs came as something of a surprise. I was as likely to come up with $5000, as I was to produce a Polaroid picture of the baby Jesus in the manger. I was very upset to think that a year of hoping and waiting would produce nothing but disappointment.

When I shared my distress with some of my friends at work, they said, “let us help”. So I borrowed $1000 each from five of my colleagues. They were so good about it, I told them I could pay them back with $35 a month. They smiled and said, “Take your time”.

Two years later I sold the condo for a nifty profit. (Oh the beauty of Southern California real estate in the good times.) I was able to pay off my colleagues, and put a down payment with Tom on our new home in Ventura. These friends and colleagues have a special place of honor in my memory. I hope you each have known such friendship in your life too.

Seventh-grade Friends

Beginning seventh-grade made me more than a little nervous. It was in seventh grade that young people in our community first changed clothes for P.E. and showered afterward. In retrospect I was making a mountain out of a molehill, or was it vice versa? As with many young people that age I was insecure about my naked self. I had an ectomorphic frame (tall and skinny) and I had no idea how my personal physical dimensions measured up to my peers. Once we all got in the changing room I undressed so quickly and avoided looking at others I was still pretty ill informed.

The changing room was not the only place I should have been worried about. I had experienced a growth spurt that made it difficult for me to place one large foot in front of the other without tripping. Expecting me to run and throw a ball simultaneously was beyond optimistic.

In 7^th grade, we also began moving to different rooms for different classes. So in the course of a single day we changed classrooms, changed teachers, changed clothes. It was a lot of change for a young person. Fortunately I moved to the seventh grade with a band of friends, loyal stalwarts. When I think back I realize I made a lot of difficult transitions, and good friends had eased the way. We expect a lot of our friends and my friends have come through, overlooking my weaknesses and walking shoulder to shoulder through the transitions.

The Dream

I had a dream one night while I was in high school. In the dream, my dear friend died in a motorcycle accident. I woke up in the morning and I was still crying. My pillow was soaked with tears. The dream was so real I sat in bed that morning trying to figure out if he was really dead or not. It wasn’t until I was at school later in the day and I saw him in the flesh that I could relax and let go of the dream.

The dream made me painfully conscious that I was in love with him. He was a fabulous young man, intelligent and athletic and funny. But he liked girls. I had listened to him for hours while he mooned over girls in our class. I could never tell him the true nature of my affection. So I loved him in silence, and dreamed my tragedy in private.

As I reflected on this private, personal memory, I thought about all the high school students today who are secretly in love with someone of the same gender. One of the most important tasks of adolescence is learning to fall in love. And yet for gay and lesbian youth, there are very few safe places to talk about it. Should they go to a teacher or parent? And what if at 16 years of age, this young person gets rejected, ridiculed or kicked out of their home? Could any of us have survived that?

There’s been a lot of media attention to bullying in high school. I believe it is time for parents and teachers to do the hard work of creating safe places for coming out. That means teachers and administrators saying publicly ‘our gay and lesbian students have a right to fair and kind treatment by everyone’. What a world of difference that would have made for me and the tender sprigs of love that I was learning to nurture.

Skip

Some people say there is no love as pure and generous as the love between our dogs and us. When I first met Tom he was cohabiting with a dog named Skip, a terrier of mixed ancestry who Tom adopted from the humane society. Skip tipped the scales at 15 pounds and was just tall enough to scavenge for snacks left on the coffee table.

Skip wasn’t sure about me at first. I seemed to be moving in without spending that required time in the pound. He looked at me as if to ask, “Do you have all your shots?” When I sat next to Tom on the couch Skip would bare his teeth at me and growl… grrr. But with time and cookies and walks, we won each other over.

I disrupted their idyllic life when we moved to Ventura, then we moved to that awful little two bedroom apartment in San Diego, and finally to a home that was worthy of Skip’s lineage. By the time we moved downtown Skip was getting pretty old. Cataracts obstructed his eyesight; his gait was uneven and wobbly. But then I was in the early stages of MS so my gait wasn’t all that commendable. I had a walker and found that the easiest way for me to take him outside was to put him on the shelf in my walker and push him in front of me. After a while, he began to lose his orientation and just wandered around the apartment bumping into the walls like the pinball Wizard.

It was hard for us to know if he was suffering. It sometimes took him a long time to stand up. And he would stop and stare, for many minutes at a time, as if in a trance. Tom and I had long talks about Skip’s quality of life. He had been such a vivacious and adventurous little dog; the contrast with this lame, old Skip was disturbing.

We took him to the vet early one morning.The Doctor met us at the door and ushered us to an examining room. He was very kind and reassured us. “ It won’t take long and it won’t hurt him”. It was just one injection and his breathing stopped. The tears ran down our cheeks and we sobbed out loud. The vet left us alone in the room with Skip while we cried. We hugged him and kissed him goodbye and hugged each other. Is it their innocence and loyalty that makes their passing so painful?

We wrapped Skip in a big beach towel, and carried him out through the waiting room, now filled with people and their dogs, cats and birds. They all silently watched our solemn procession go by.

We placed Skip on the back seat of the Volvo and began our funeral cortege through the places he had lived and loved. San Diego, (Beverly Hills, he liked the window shopping there), Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Santa Barbara and finally back to the humane society, where he started.

A month later his ashes came back to us in a wooden box, and it sits now on a shelf in our home, next to his picture and some of his teeth. It remains a wonder to me that such a little fellow like Skip could have such a big heart, and could so effectively fool us. All the while we thought we were taking care of him he was actually taking care of us.