From: shellyr@bridge.net
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 13:46:57 +0000
Subject: ROBERTS' RULES: AUF

ROBERTS' RULES
by Shelly Roberts


AUF SWEETERVEIN.


Dear Daddy,

Well, so that time has come, has it? 

I don't even know where you are?  Stashed someplace in a little four
by four plastic box?  Scattered in the vegetable garden you loved so
much?  In a chotchke ceramic urn on your way to where ever it is your
wife is going to live now. Gone back to the ashes and dust from where
we all began. She never called to tell me.

 I wish I could have talked to you before you left, not that you'd
 remember.  But your wife took care of that a couple of years ago,
 when in our last conversation she told me that you two "didn't
 approve of THOSE kind of people!" Of which I am one.

I knew, of course, that she meant that SHE didn't.  Approve.  It
surprised me, of course.  Living where you did for so long, on the
edge of the San Francisco Bay.  I guess I stupidly assumed that there
would have been enough positive news coverage and general interest
stories on "the dreaded homosexuals" that some of it might have seeped
into her alcohol soaked brain, seeded a bit of tolerance for the
tribe, one of whose members you spawned.  Apparently it was too hard a
concept for her ladyship.  So she became your gatekeeper and defender
to keep the dangers away.  Isn't that what family is for?  I just
never figured that I would qualify as one of the dangers.

I'm so glad I took the few opportunities I could muster to crash
through the lowered guard bar to tell you that I loved you.  Though I
doubt that you remembered. Did I tell you that I talked about you
often when I was speaking.  You liked a good joke.  You'd have loved
this one, I think.  You see, I talked a lot about coming out of
closets to people who hadn't yet.  Told them there was tolerance out
there.  More than tolerance actually.  At least in the last few years,
as who I am became less a dirty joke or a perversion.

I'd say to the university crowd, or the pride gang in city after city
how good coming out felt.  And how it was addicting.  How great it
felt to stand  proud.  But also, how after I'd informed all of the
necessaries, how it got to be a kind of outting fix, and pretty soon,
how I'd seek out grocery store clerks to say "Thank you for ringing up
my cantaloupe and Purina, and, by the way, I'm a lesbian.  Then I'd
tell them that in my own family there was good news and there was bad
news.  "The bad news is," I'd tell them. "That my dad has alzheimers."
 And I'd wait a bit for the oohs and the tongue clucking tsk tsk's to
die down.  Then I'd say "But the good news is. that I can come out to
him every week."

They'd laugh, you know.  At the contrasts, I guess.  Sometimes I'd add
"Lately every day.  Or every hour." And they'd laugh again.  You would
have enjoyed it, Dad. You had such a wonderful sense of humor.  Where
I got mine from.  And I think you would have liked being an important
part of my message. I know you would have approved of my method of
delivery. (and by the way, my timing ain't so bad either, Pop.) You
always taught me that it was much easier to get people to listen to
you if you talked with humor. Well, you were right about that.

You may be gone, and your memory preceding you, but I still have mine
of you.  From when I was a small one.  When you were a labor
organizer. When you talked about good and bad, evil and power, and
doing what had to be done even if it was hard.  Even if you made
people mad.  Because doing what was right was, well, right.  It was
important, you taught, in the best possible way. By your own example.
Somewhere, in the bottom of a cardboard box, I still have the picture
of you, the newspaper shot before the war ended, yellowed years ago,
the last time I saw it, of you in Chicago, when I was still in
diapers, breaking up a German Bund meeting.  I'm a grown-up now, Dad.
But I don't ever remember that I told you that I was proud of you for
that. I am. It was doing what was right.

You'd be proud of me too.  You raised a fine upstanding citizen who
recognizes what's right and what's necessary, and who tries to do it.
With joy, and with laughter, and no small measure of the humor you
taught.

I miss you fiercely, Dad. Though with your memory gone, I had missed
you for years before you actually left. Oh, and one more thing I want
to tell  you.  I am a lesbian.

I figure it's my very last chance to come out to you and I didn't want
to miss it.

________________________
(C) 1997. Shelly Roberts. All rights reserved.
May be reprinted only in its entirety with written permission.

Shelly Roberts the author of the #1 best-selling
Roberts' Rules of Lesbian Living. (Spinsters Ink.)