“What do you think of this?” she asked.

I had my head down trying to sort out what seemed like a byzantine list of options. To assemble my custom burger, I had to choose from five different categories of exotic ingredients. I was overwhelmed on page two of a four page menu.

 “It’s a lot to read,” I mumbled.

“Not the menu,” she barked, “This. What do you think of this?”

I looked up. She was nodding her head and waving her large hand with glittering fingernails toward my son and his boyfriend. She pointed directly at each of them in response to my blank expression. “This,” she repeated, “What do you think of this?”

The waitress was about my age and six feet tall. She was a powerful mix of broad shoulders, pink sequined sweater, bejeweled cropped jeans, an Adam’s apple and impossibly high heels. Her sassy tone barely masked an intense weariness of stupid people. She was staring at me, waiting.

We were at a diner that called itself the “Gayest Place to Eat” in our city. My sister found it on the internet and thought it would be fun for us to have lunch there. So here we were, my sister and I sitting on one side of the booth and my son and his boyfriend on the other. We had been laughing over the menu, teasing my son that he should order the “gayest” drink or the “gayest” appetizer. All four of us were trying to outdo one another in creating the perfect combination of entrée, side and cocktail from the endless flow charts. We had been oblivious to the waitress until now.

Although she had startled me, I knew by this point that she was not asking about the menu. But I didn’t have a ready answer to her question. No one had asked me this before. My son came out at the end of his freshman year of college. He is a very verbal person and we are close to him, so there was no long, drawn out secret and reveal. He talked to us a few months after he knew and we shared in many early and ongoing conversations; listening as he worked through his own understanding and self awareness.

I confess my initial reaction was not tidy. I was a liberal parent forced to apply her declared values in an actual and not theoretical situation. No one rehearses for this. He told me at 10:00 p.m. one night. I said a bunch of ridiculous things (“Will you still bring someone home for Christmas?”) and left on an airplane the next morning. I flew three hours in a daze and then sat in a parking lot for three more hours. I catalogued all the narratives that might be shifting, all past and future decisions, calculating exponential loss and fear and worry.

Then I thought of my son. Was he any different than he had been at 9:59 pm? Was his future any less dazzling? I could see him in my mind, the delightful boy he was and the amazing man he was becoming. His story, the one he would write on his own, was just getting interesting. My part in his story had evolved into a more supporting role, but the script to our relationship hadn’t changed. In fifteen hours I had moved through a million possible scenarios and ended up the same proud mom of the same great, gay kid.  

The waitress was still looking at me expectantly. I thought later of all the things I should have said: clever things, Eleanor Roosevelt things, enlightened-earth-mother things. But this whole reverie was happening in seconds and too soon after my menu confusion. So I blurted out: “I think it is wonderful.” She made a “humph” sound and glared sternly at the boys. “You are young, pretty and lucky. You have no idea what it was like” and walked away.

This was good because I really had no idea what I was going to order.   

This weekend I brought a friend from the little town where I live to visit New York and stay with my very dear friend in Brooklyn, and we had a nice time enjoying the fruits of the city. We ate foods we can’t get in our town, went to a great old movie, walked around Prospect Park, and drank good margaritas. It was nice! We kept noticing how, unlike in our town, New Yorkers do tend to look pretty great as adults. Our town does not have an overwhelming number of great-looking grown-ups in it.

But something odd happened to us as our train got closer and closer to home. My friend and I grasped one another’s hands as we sailed past the farms and hills outside our town. Horses! Donkeys! Mules! Cows! Look at that old old train car in that field! Look at the way the sunlight falls on that farmhouse! We’ll be home so soon!

Both of us had spent the previous decade in the big cities of our childhood dreams, on opposite coasts, living out the fantasy of life in public, dating artists and writers and musicians, coming home—if at all—at dawn after deciding on a whim to be out all night. We met people and threw them away, or were thrown away ourselves, for no reason at all. We bitched about everything because in an environment of maximum density, we could always find some pleasure more refined than the last.

Over a lunch of omelets in a diner near the train station, we tried to come up with ways to describe our love of small-town life. Would it be possible to communicate why it’s so great to someone who can’t imagine leaving the city, someone much like ourselves less than a year ago? That is, you wouldn’t want to convince them to leave, but just to respect your enjoyment of something else. Certainly most small-town people can imagine New York being right for someone else. Can city folk imagine what we love?

It most closely reminded me of a time when a woman who lived in my building in Brooklyn told me, over our ritual weekly glass of bourbon, that she was in love with a man. Oh please, I said. A month before she’d picked up some cokehead lawyer to screw her in the ass after a gallery opening. Tell me about this “love.” Well, they’d met at a wedding, and he asked to see her again after sharing a dance. He got reservations at a nice restaurant, where they talked and ate and had good wine. He took her home and didn’t kiss her yet, but invited her to breakfast the next day before he flew back across the country, and they did kiss, and now she’s in love and going to move to marry him. I couldn’t see it. She might as well have been speaking random syllables for all I understood. That is really weird, I said.

Our small town, my friend and I decided, is like having some new boyfriend who’s really dependable and likes your company and is fun to be around but gives you space without being creepy or passive-aggressive about it. And when you try to explain your love to people who’ve known you and the kinds of guys you go for, it just sounds way too healthy and sane to hold any interest.

Many years later, the whole hero topic is complicated. I realize that even extraordinary humans are a blend of good and bad. They save the world by day but by night, life goes on: bills, bad relationships, wrong turns, mental illness, real stakes and deadly fires. I see with adult eyes that the lives of my idols were difficult and full of hard choices. This jaded perspective is exacerbated by the flag-waving, yellow-ribbon casting of all soldiers, regardless of their actual duty or performance, as national heroes. Why does putting on a uniform make you great? It all feels diluted. I try to convince myself that there are also daily moments of valor like letting another car merge or offering to split the last snickers bar. But the child I was, who hid imaginary Jews from imaginary Nazis in her imaginary annex, would scoff at this definition as well. Not being a jerk doesn’t make you a hero either.

This week my sister called and told me a hero story. She is a family practitioner who works at an urgent care clinic. She also works for Doctors without Borders and has expertise in tropic medicine and underserved populations. When she is abroad, she rides around in dugout canoes and sets protocol for cholera epidemics. When she is home, she gives people Tylenol and tells them that the virus will run its course in five to seven days.

Several weeks ago one of her colleagues saw a ten-year old boy with an ear ache. He had a ordinary ear infection and was prescribed an antibiotic. A few days ago he and his parents were back, now seeing my sister. A teacher had noticed redness on the boy’s face near the ear. My sister asked if he had completed his medication. “No,” the mom said, “he didn’t want to take it.” When my sister examined the ear, she realized that the infection had developed into a condition uncommon in countries with widespread immunization and antibiotic programs. She called an EENT doctor and suggested he see the boy that day. She was told to give him more amoxicillin and make an appointment. She called the ER and was grilled on what she had done or not done, what she knew and what she didn’t. Finally, my sister lost her formidable Sicilian temper and bullied an ER doctor into meeting the boy and his parents at the hospital as quickly as it took to drive there.

The next day my sister received an email. The boy did indeed have the rare infection, which had progressed into a brain abscess so severe, they had to perform emergency surgery. Had he not been treated immediately, the boy might have died within hours.

I cannot stop thinking about this story. It has all the elements that intrigued me as a kid. My sister risked her reputation and within her own context, fought ferociously for what she knew to be true. She did not give up. She advocated for someone unable to advocate for themselves. She saved a life. She was rather nonplussed about the whole thing afterwards. Her nurses told her later that most doctors would have inadvertently sent the boy home. Why didn’t she? My grown up cynicism recedes as I add an inspiring epilogue. Heroes simply do what needs to be done when no one else will do it. There, my teacher will love it.

Next year that same little boy will be in sixth grade. My guess is that if asked to write a paper on “heroes,” he will choose firemen, his grandma or Jesus. He won’t realize that this homework opportunity is possible because a feisty doctor would not take no for answer. He will just shrug at the instructions and get to work.  

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about being 35. I had all these things I wanted to do with my body and brain. I wanted to fuck around and not care what anyone thought, and I wanted to be at the height of my intellectual control. I wanted to have answers for questions, and for people to take me seriously when I delivered my thoughts. I planned to spend my 20′s doing what I had to in order to ensure that, by my mid-30′s, I was undeniably well-informed, sexually experienced, and pulling back against the overeager narcissism of youth. I wouldn’t need validation anymore because I would be a complete person without neediness. I would exude competence.

In my 20′s, I fantasized about being 45. When I met women in their mid-40′s, they seemed so blissful. They often acknowledged my emotional opacity and said that it was OK; eventually it will be much safer to have feelings. Someday it wouldn’t be impossible to recognize good people, and that I’d learn, over the coming decades, what it feels like to be treated with dignity and care. In my 40′s, I might lose some of my rough, prickly shell. I decided that in my 30′s, I’d do what I had to do to learn how to relate to other people with trust and honesty.

In my 30′s now, I envy my friends who are 55. They are empresses who tilt their heads and say, “I think that’s right,” in order to agree. They get sad, even in public, and instead of everyone telling them to toughen up, we all cry along. When a 55-year-old cries, she cries with authority. No one accuses a 50-something woman of being needy, or just wanting attention, or trying to be sexy, because a woman of that age simply has needs, demands attention, and, often by not trying at all, is sexy, in a way that does not require physical intercourse to prove. Best of all, they don’t require intercourse anymore.

That was the part of the Roseanne Barr article that made me so envious. I knew there would come a time in my life when sex stopped being appealing just because it was a big mysterious realm of private experience that I didn’t yet have. What I didn’t realize is that one can have satisfied all one’s curiosity and interest in physical sex, while still feeling a zombie-like compulsion to make it happen, or at least to be thinking of ways that one might potentially try to make it happen. Maybe I thought that it only happened to men. I still have at least 20 years ahead of me before I get any relief. Horrible.

On fulfilling the fantasies of my youth, I am doing a pretty good job. I’ve become almost exactly what I thought I would be when I was a teenager thinking about my mid-30′s self, and, in preparation for having a full emotional life in my 40′s, I’m experimenting with having feelings occasionally, and taking much better notes about interpersonal relationships and how they work. Maybe in ten years, I’ll be eyeing those 65-year-olds with squinty-eyed jealousy.

1. Why, just today (and continuing as I write), a car has been parked right outside our apartment with the driver’s side door ajar and a man sleeping (resting? on the nod?) in the passenger seat. The seat is reclined, and I’ve checked a few times to make sure that he’s alive, confirmed by his occasional change of position.

2. Aggro Boy. On random evenings and days, our next door neighbor loudly and violently spews forth vitriol and all manner of cursing at the TV or radio. T. has surmised he has a gambling problem because this usually occurs in the evenings when a big game is going on. He got a new housemate about a year ago, a woman in her late-40′s or early 50′s with a blonde Hopey* haircut who seems nice and reasonable and non-aggro (and is cool enough to ride her bike everywhere), and since she moved in the outbursts have subsided quite a bit, but on Scrabble nights she must go out because we hear bickering and a river of insults you wouldn’t believe. When I first moved in there were a couple of times that I almost called the cops in fear for my life, but then I got used to it.

3. Active prostitution. It seems, as of late, that our street has become a nice place to meet and service a john. The Ladies of the Evening congregate on the corners of the Busy Avenue that is at the end of our little street, and they bring their clients to the nooks and crannies of our driveways to do their business. Sometimes they just do it in the road, and I know this because one must take care to step over used condoms and latex gloves as one unlocks the door to one’s car. T. was accosted one evening while walking home from parking the car on the Busy Avenue by one particularly aggressive ho. You’ll be happy to know, as I was, that that’s just not his style.

4. Crazy-ass driving. One night at about 4 in the morning as we slumbered peacefully in our beds, we were awakened by the unmistakable sound of a car crashing in close proximity to our apartment. All the little Who’s of LC Court came streaming out of their apartments and houses, and what we found was this: an overturned pickup truck , which must’ve been careening down the street at such a velocity that there was no where to go but up – and then down again. Several cars in its path had their sides and rear-ends bashed in. The driver was nowhere to be found. Our first concern was for the driver’s well-being, but it slowly dawned on us that he must have fled the scene.

The paramedics arrived and began asking around as to where the driver was. One man vehemently denied knowing what had happened, but as he opened his mouth to speak, the paramedic stepped back as if he had just opened the door to a hot oven. It was clear that this guy was so drunk that that fumes preceded him, and the paramedic was heard to exclaim “borracho” to the guy, who was feebly trying to make the excuse that it was his friend’s truck, and that he hadn’t been driving it. We were one of the lucky ones whose car was miraculously missed by the careening borracho-mobile, but I feel sorry for those who weren’t so lucky.

5. Crazy-ass neighbors. There’s this one lady who lives in a funky house a few addresses down from us. She has all manner of junk and potted succulents on her cluttered front porch; among the junk and overgrown weeds, there was a mattress balanced on its end and leaned against the columns for about six months. She has a homemade sign tacked up on the front horizontal beam of the porch roof stating that all activity in and around her front yard will be videotaped. God knows how much I wanted that rotting mattress.

Her favorite pastime is making sure that people don’t park blocking her driveway, or anywhere near it. She has extended the red zone for the fire hydrant in front of her house to about double the length that it legally needs to be, so that the entire parking area is off-limits, and she will call parking enforcement on anybody who even parks near the red zone or her driveway. There is probably not one person on this street who has not been ticketed by this shrew of a woman, and I fantasize about the day her house catches on fire and we call the parking enforcement instead of the fire department.

6. (N)KOTB. The kids on the block – and when I say kids, I mean guys in their late teens or early 20′s – play football in the middle of the street, usually in the late afternoon-early evening. You can hear their happy hoots and hollers, their high-top sneakers stomping as they run down the asphalt, and the sound of a football bouncing off the hoods of parked cars. Why, even we have a football-shaped dent in the front driver-side panel of our otherwise un-dinged automobile, and we have a good idea where it came from.

Now, the Husband leans more toward the fist-shaking and yelling “goddamn kids!”, but I have to admit that I have conflicted feelings about this. I mean, on the one hand, yes, it’s annoying that we have this damage to our car, and it seems like they have little regard for where the football flies and what it hits, but on the other hand, these guys are obviously not in a gang, they’re not tagging, or shooting or raping or pillaging, and they’re not being shot at either. They’re just doing their thing, which would be better done in a wide open space like a park, but then the nearest park to us has enough gang activity and shootings that it’s overall a better thing that they’re playing on our street, so I keep my fist-shaking to myself on this one.

7. That pesky poo. What’s that smell? Is that dog shit? Did I just step in it? One of our neighbors used to send his dogs out to do their business unsupervised, and they would invariably choose our front area to drop a load, until the day that I got fed up and shoveled the offending dog-logs onto his front steps. Except, I got the wrong house. So his neighbor came out yelling that he was innocent and and I felt like a total jerk. So then I had to go back and un-shovel the shit and throw it away, and then go to the correct door and tell the guy that he needs to take responsibility for his dogs. That, miraculously, cleared up the problem for a good long time, but of course it doesn’t account for the other neighborhood dogs and roving packs of strays. But you do what you can.

8. Cat Factory. I’m convinced that our neighborhood has been populated from the offspring of the cats owned by one neighbor in particular, who told me one day as I crouched to pet the cats congregated in his driveway that he was sad because, apparently, someone stole the kittens that had just been born a few weeks ago, and now he was going to have to wait until the mother cat had her next litter.

9. Untalented neighbor. On occasional afternoons, nights, and sometimes even mornings, a cacophony of singing comes bellowing forth from the apartment building on the corner southwest from us. This guy, (and, I imagine, his stoner friends) like to play and sing along to whatever classic-rock top-40 hit they’ve slapped on the turntable. He’s always just a little off-key (okay, more than just a little) and out of time, and the sound is surprisingly loud and clear – so clear that I feel as though I’m sitting in his living room with him, a thought which makes me want to take a shower. To his credit, he’s introduced himself to me and he’s a nice guy, and one day he was playing X-Ray Spex, which ratcheted him up a notch in my book.

10. Yappy dogs. Why do people get dogs if they’re going to leave them alone all day? In the yard? Tied up? Why?

11. And, last but not least, Parking like an Asshole. Why must you take up two parking spaces, neighbor? What is your f#$*ing problem, that you can’t be considerate and pull up all the way? Are we not in the same boat? Do we not all drive around and around, searching in vain for a parking spot on the good side?

I could go on, but then none of you would ever visit us. The invitation’s open – come on down! It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood – won’t you be mine?

*Love & Rockets graphic novel reference