Day One

I woke early, sleeping throughout the night only, I think, because I took a couple of anti-histamine last night that knocked me out. After weeks of working and worrying and just waiting, I was about to assume my new call as Minister of the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore (Universalist & Unitarian). You can guess that I'm excited.

I rose to take a brief walk in my new neighborhood, Bolton Hill. Just a few blocks from the rowhouse that will be home for the next year or so, Eutaw Place provided a very pleasant garden boulevard in which to walk. The gardens themselves provide little "events" as I walked from block to block, and the variety of shapes of gardens, the mixing of symmetrical and asymmetrical forms, the straight paths ans the "S" curves made it quite delightful.

At the top of the park is the monument to Francis Scott Key, its gilded statue towering above columns and ship and fountain and battle. What a hoot! It is the kind of installation that requires attention, If the waters were not flowing, the perspective just wouldn't work. If the flag-bearer were not so brilliantly shining, the entire piece could easily look abandoned, lost.

Still, cared for and functioning, what a heroic piece it is, the water making it even more pleasant as my walk is beginning to make me rather warm.

Walking toward home, I stop for a moment to see up close the schul which has been a marker for me when I'm trying to figure out where to turn to get home. But it isn't a synagogue any more; it is a Prince Hall Masonic Temple, acquired in the 1960s as Temple Oheb Shalom was moving to their new Walter Gropius designed facilities in Pikesville. It is an impressive Moorish-revival building with a huge dome topped by a star of David. I wonder what the interior looks like today . . .

I stop at the coffee shop a block and a half from home and have a latte while listening to NPR on my iPhone. (Oh dear, who have I become?) There are plenty of young people coming and going, and the "Do Not Park" signs in front of the cafe provide an excellent place for people to park their cars, risking tickets, as they run in to pick up a little joe.

I get home and jump into the shower, giving up on one radio that has many buttons but whose power button seems no longer to work. (I can tune the thing, though, and even set favorite channels. Just can't figure out how to turn 'em on anymore.) The warm water is slow to arrive from the basement, and I so don't want to waste that I start with a good cold shower. Of course, this means that some hot water will be filling the pipes and then cooling down as the day goes by. Ah! hot water on demand!

After some toast (homemade bread by Pat) with cottage cheese and tomato, I finally get out of the house and turn on the timer on the phone to see how long it will take to get to the church. Seventeen and a half minutes later, I arrive a little sweaty, but beaming. At long last, this new place, this new challenge, this new opportunity.

A Very Good Place to Start

Julie Andrews sang "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with "A, B, C," when you sing you begin with "do, re, mi." (Such a pretty nun!) When I began this blog, it was a way for me to be reconciled with living in the western end of the Eastern time zone. All my life, I had lived in the eastern end of the Eastern zone, and so all my life my time was shifted just a few minutes so that "true noon" happened a few minutes before noon. In Flint, "true noon" happens a half hour or so after noon on the clock. This meant the "natural" morning happened later on the clock, and while it meant that afternoons and evenings were full of sun, the start of the day has always been quite dark. And so I got up a little early to write and think and pray, and this attempt at bringing some awareness to the struggle to get up on the clock of my old home but with the sun of my new home.

What will the morning be like in Baltimore? I'm bringing that "very beginning" question to this transition.

Let's start with the length of days. On the winter solstice, Flint has 9 hours of light, from 8:02 to 5:02. In Baltimore, the day is a little longer with 9 hours and 24 minutes of light, from 7:22 to 4:38. If "true noon" happens halfway through the day, in Flint it happens at 12:32 p.m.; in Baltimore, it happens very close to noon on the clock, at 12:04 p.m.

A look at summer solstice yields the following: Flint's day is 15 hours and 22 minutes in duration, from 5:54 a.m. to 9:16 p.m. "True noon" is especially shifted due to Daylight Savings so that it occurs at 1:35 p.m. Baltimore's day is 25 minutes shorter at 14 hours and 57 minutes. "True noon" happens at about 1:07, again, largely the result of the Daylight Savings shift.

It will be interesting to see what it is like to have a little more sunlight in the morning, and a little more light in the day during the colder months. Summer will be fun shifting between my weeks in Maine and Rhode Island, and my visits back to Michigan. I'll get the light of my upbringing, and that western "deviant," and then the close-to-natural timing of my new home.

I'm looking forward to the experiment.

Melon today, and strawberries, and a tall cafe au lait.

Good morning!

Stress Tests

I am on my way to my second day of a cardiac stress test my physician requested. Yesterday was the day that the tech injected so e radioactive material into a vein, gave me a tall cup of water to drink and sat me in yet another waiting area, and then strapped me onto a very narrow bed around which a mechanized camera rotated to get good shots of my heart (while I was at rest) from many angles.

Today is the treadmill test. I used to walk a treadmill an hour a night three or four times a week when I lived next to the Boston Sports Club in Copley Square. But that was a long time (and many pounds) ago.

Right now, I just want to eat! I ate sensibly yesterday, and avoided caffeine all day. I developed a bit of a headache as the day went by (could be a virus that's going around, could be caffeine withdrawal) that persists now. I can't eat until after the test, and I've been asked to delay by blood pressure medication until after the test.

Before the test, I have one additional stressor. The Valley School is moving into our classroom wing at UU Flint today and tomorrow, and I am telling the 12-step groups that the room they've been using (and overwhelming) is now going to be an art class and cafeteria from 8 to 5 each weekday. This will mean that our lunchtime AA group and a Tuesday-Friday morning group will need to move to our larger Fellowship Hall for the next six months, and that other groups will need to pack up all their materials after each meeting. (These are not, in my mind, unreasonable requests!) But it does mean change, and people have a hard time with change.

Well, I'm off to the morning AA group, and then to the cardiac center. And then breakfast!

Cold out this morning, and a dark dark. Sunrise will happen at 7:44, says my almanac. I'll miss it today, just as I keep missing that last raking of leaves . . .

Good morning.

Year Three, Day One

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Flint called me to become their minister beginning August 16, 2005. As I begin this third year in the Midwest, I'm relieved to be on vacation (!), I'm behind (of course) in getting the yardwork done that I had planned, and haven't quite finished painting the kitchen. (So what else is new?) But I'm happy. As I sit and think about the reasons I came to Flint and what still pertains in that decision and my life, I am happy.

I had been happy in Boston, Massachusetts, too. I served the Community Church of Boston as their Leader/Minister for seven years. The work was rewarding and I was especially pleased about my public ministry through the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, GBIO. Still, I had always planned on moving away from New England to see how our liberal religion was practiced in other parts of the country, and I wanted to grow as a "parson" and as a person.

Flint is and has been a tremendous challenge for me. First, it is a much smaller city than I had imagined--smaller than Providence, smaller than Worcester where I had done my clinical pastoral educaiton, and, of course, much smaller than metropolitan Boston. I have long known that I'm a city guy; being in such a small city has been a learning experience.

Second, the culture in Flint assumes a standard family arrangement that I don't have. Rather than ask what I do for work or where I went to school, questions that seemed pretty standard openers in New England, virtually every first question I got when I moved here was, "Who is your wife, and how many children do you have?" WOW! How much do people ant me to reveal? To say simply, "I'm not married," is such a diminution of the rich relational life that I aspire to. To say, "I'm gay," is to reinforce a notion that gay guys don;t have partners and children, which is not my experience, as well as to be too candid with strangers. To say, "My husband (!) died ten years ago of AIDS," sets off a whole pile of emotions that aren't the best conversation (or relationship) starters. So I just tolerate the question and say that I live alone. And watch a sadness grow in the eyes of the inquirer.

Finally, the gay culture in Flint feels hard to build relationships within. Being the minister of the UU church means that I develop public relationships with all sorts of LGBT people, and quickly; but it also means that I can only be the part of myself which aligns with my ministerial identity. (This, of course, is NOT unique to Flint!) I've been pleased to speak to the LBGT Center at University of Michigan at Flint; happy to think with Genesee County PFLAG leaders; excited to attend Triangle Foundation events and host an appearance by a gay speaker on a national book tour. But these are not dating opportunities. I haven't discovered the places that gay men go for Salsa dancing and speaking Spanish; or the gay-friendly gym with folk that enjoy camp humor; or the circle of gay Democrats (or Greens or Libertarians or Socialists, etc.) who want to critique culture and politics in a deep way and from a point of view that celebrates our marginality and its perspective (as well as holding healthy suspicion about the role of maleness or whiteness in my own development). Gay culture seems wed to bars and private parties, and I haven't found my way in.

I don't have reference points here that shape my sense of myself the way Narragansett Bay and the Lucy Parsons Bookstore and any number of political theaters and galleries do when I am "home" in New England. I know that such reference points for me can (and will) be found. But in these first two years, I have been working--and working hard--to be present fully to Flint and to my congregation. And it has been exhausting work, this worthwhile work that I have chosen. Exhausting.

I look forward to being able to be here more simply; to begin feeling at home in this home; to be able to relax among friends; especially to be able to talk politics and culture and spirituality and camp and sexuality and desire, and, and, and . . . and not feel like a stranger in a strange land.

So I rise and watch the sun . . . and breathe.

Good morning.