Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees shows us what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest challenge came when the press learned of her identity.
1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories regarded her as brave or heroic for her openness. National newspapers even celebrated her wedding in 1955.
The New York Daily News, which now hosts daily anti-trans editorials, ran a shockingly respectful series on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees's narrative was among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity, but also other trans people like her.
Tamara wasn't the first famous trans woman of the 1950s, nor was she the best known. However, she had a unique opportunity to share her own story. You can read Tamara's 1955 autobiography, Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition from Male to Female, at transreads.org/reborn
I'm sorry to let you know that 100,000,001 (one hundred million and one) is divisible by 17 and because of that, so is every 16-digit number that is four digits repeated four times e.g. 1234123412341234
rating the ways my family members have referred to me to other people since coming out as nonbinary
my secondborn (my parents)
7/10
sounds vaguely historical but in the way that I'm going to be sent off to war to prevent a succession crisis
potentially confusing to the listener bc the average conversation has little relation to birth order
my sister's, [name] (my aunt)
9/10
direct and to the point!
still very clear about what our family relationship is. I think we can do away with many nouns if this is any indication
my young adult child (my mom)
4/10
it's giving "20 year old minor"
I promise you can just say my kid. it's ok I don't mind strangers thinking I'm like 5 bc that would make me a prodigy for doing stuff like my laundry and dishes in one day and honestly I could use that kind of support
my liberated one (my grandma)
10/10 THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT
completely unclear what my relationship actually is to her. her personal oracle perhaps?
made immensely funnier by her immediately following it up with referring to my brother as her grandson.
Hi yes hello it’s me the local wizard, and I- Ok well “evil” feels like a strong word but yes, that’s me. Anyway, I need your help. I know I stole away the kingdoms 12 princesses, that’s my bad. Listen, I didn’t think this through. It didn’t occur to me that having a dozen angry young women from early teen to early 20s and giving them giant powerful wings would be a bad idea.
I know I’m the one who cast the curse but it can still only be broken with true love. I’m begging you, somebody, please come and fall in love with these girls and make them leave, I can’t take it anymore, it sucks so bad. I can’t keep getting viciously bullied by one of the largest living species of waterfowl anymore. I’ve tried running away but they can fly so they just find me. I’m getting nothing done.
I’ll pay you, I’ll grant you wishes, I don’t care, please just come and fall in love with the mean angry women who live in my yard and hate me so bad
one time when i was specializing in whales a guy came in and asked where the whales were right that instant (southern resident killer whales could be anywhere between alaska and california at any given moment) and as soon as i started explaining that he loudly interrupted "I'LL GO ASK A MAN" and stormed off to one of my employees and from a distance i watched him ask the same question and then the employee point back at me.
Hi, my name is James Webbony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Space Telescope and I am a telescope in space (that's how I got my name) and I have a five-layer aluminum-coated Kapton sunshield protecting my instruments and gold-coated hexagonal primary mirror segments like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Lady Gaga (AN: if you don't know who she is, get the hell out of here!). I'm not related to the Hubble Space Telescope, but I wish I was because he's a major fucking hottie. I'm an infrared telescope but I am much larger than Spitzer. I have 18 primary mirror segments. I also study exoplanets, and I go to a telescope school in L2 where I'm in orbit (I was launched in 2021). I can see distant galaxies (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly gold. I love space, and I take all my photos there. For example, today I was taking a photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy, which is about 500 million light years away. I was using my NIRcam, NIRspec, MIRI, and FGS-NIRISS. I was walking outside L2. It was around 1 million miles away from Earth and there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I unfolded my primary mirrors at them.
I wrote this in response to this prompt. Ivan Alexander recorded this story, so if you like audiobooks, click here to listen. I cannot understate how talented he is.
She’d watched him walking over the horizon for almost six hours now. She loved getting guests - loved seeing the resignation of men half dead with thirst, trading certain death in the sands for possible death near her waters.
And they were hers. The promise of Ramses still stood, even if it had been a millennium since the concord. By rite of blood and writ of paper she was the queen of the deeper duat. And it was a queen’s privilege to choose her guests. And, occasionally, kill them with her claws.
She could have flown over, but she had time. More time than anyone. More than enough time to wait.
Her guest was not half dead. He was, to be technical, less than a quarter dead, but that was only if you measured things in years.
He was young. His face certainly seemed less lined than her own. There wasn’t much else she could judge age from - the lines of her form folded into wings and furs and claws at the same point that his folded into silks and beads.
He’d prepared for the meeting by bringing a wealth of spices. It was a trick common to royal travelers: If sweat couldn’t be prevented, it could at least be masked. She could still pick traces of it up under the sandalwood and myrrh, but it was pleasant. Salty and metallic and sharp, underneath all the soft wisps of smoke.
He’d brought her gifts. When she told him that the gifts were not acceptable as passage, he said that wasn’t how gifts worked. Gifts weren’t given in exchanges - they were given for the joy of giving. And it brought him joy to share with her.
She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she simply asked if he intended to cross through her duat.
“Maybe,” he replied. “What’s your price?”
“A riddle,” she’d said. “If you get it right, you can pass. But if you get it wrong, I will devour even your bones.”
He grinned and it wasn’t false bravado. He’d known the cost before she said it.
“I love riddles. I accept.”
She loved this part. She loved the tension of it, that singular moment of truth where she wasn’t just a mind or a monster, but something straddling both worlds.
She spoke.
“I can survive beyond death, but can be broken without force. I can summon without breath but-”
“A promise.”
She looked at him wide-eyed. It wasn’t her best riddle, but it was one she’d made herself. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy.
She let him pass but she did - to her great shame - sulk. To his credit, he only lingered an hour or so in the shade of the oasis. There was a longing to him that she couldn’t describe. It unsettled her, but it went away when he took his camels and continued past, traveling on into the deep duat.
She forgot about his gifts until long after he’d passed the horizon. She’d expected human trinkets - gold and gems. Useless baubles. The pelts that had been carefully rolled up and placed inside the chest were strangely thoughtful.
She carried them back to her cave, and laid them flat across the floor. That night she slept better than she had in many, many years. In the morning, she woke up and smelled myrrh, and was almost happy to imagine the prince coming back. If she was disappointed to realize that the smell was coming from the scents soaked into the furs, that was a secret she could keep even from herself.
She recognized his outline on the horizon. She had a good memory, and beyond that, he’d made quite an impression on his first meeting with her.
He’d begun to run low on his spices, and his clothes were looking far more rumpled than they had at the start. That travel was beginning to wear him down should’ve meant nothing to her. Now, she felt odd. Would she still feel victorious if he failed her riddle? Or would it haunt her, knowing she could only catch him at his worst?
(Did she want to catch him?)
She waited for him to make it to her oasis again. It seemed to be part of the ritual, to sit and watch the speck on the horizon grow to the size of a man. They didn’t exchange pleasantries when he arrived. Instead he gave a small nod to acknowledge her before climbing down from atop his camel. She hadn’t demanded it prior because she knew all too well how easy it was to catch a camel, but there was still something respectful in the gesture. Here was a prince willing to die with dignity. Here was a man who lived and died by rules.
Could she be blamed for admiring that?
Only when he was fully settled in to listen did she begin her riddle.
“Toothless maw that eats all these:
Raw flesh, dung, fresh air, and trees.
At night I’m bright, in day I’m black,
I die, I’m gone, but always back.”
She was on the third line when she saw his face light up. He waited to answer this time, more focused on being polite than showing off how clever he was. She liked that. She knew he was clever, but now she knew he could be patient too.
“A campfire.”
It was one of her favorite riddles, and the joy she got was twofold. She was happy for the prince, happy that he would survive another day, and happy for herself too. It was infinitely preferable to lose with skill than to win through circumstance. She would feel robbed, if she had to eat the prince on a bad day. If he lost, he needed to lose at his best. He needed to lose in a way that mattered.
He went through the oasis again, but lingered far longer. They spoke in moments about each other’s lives - her memories of the time before even Ramses, and his experience as the seventh in line to the throne. He was trusted to act as an emissary specifically because he was so far from inheriting the throne.
“Not that I’d want it anyway,” he said. “A camel is a better throne than any silly golden chair. The seat in the palace only lets me see the bald spot on the high priest’s head. The saddle on this camel lets me see all the beauty in the world.”
His head wasn’t turned towards her when he said that, but she could see his eyes glance over her.
It was easy to pretend she didn’t notice, and he did nothing to press it further. She showed him the best trees for picking dates, the best ponds for catching fish, and the first cave she’d set her lair up in - back before even Ramses. Back when she was much, much smaller.
She slept in the next morning. The sunlight made a soft beam through the cave, over the pelts, before landing across her face. Any other day it would’ve been a wonderful way to wake up, but the realization that she’d missed her chance to say goodbye made her scramble. She made a short flight over the waters to see if he was gone, and got her answer before even landing - there was no camel tied to the palms.
Still, he’d left her a gift. The boar roasting over glowing coals had clearly been caught the night before, and the fact that it was unspiced meant it was for her.
It was also another oddly thoughtful gesture. How many humans would realize that unseasoned meat was a sphinx’s preference? How many would research that far?
She landed near the meal and approached. Down on the ground, there was so much more detail to see. The tracks of the camel, the care taken to not leave a mess. The simple note left besides the firepit.
She reached out and read.
I’m sure you don’t depend on travelers for your meals
But I do feel bad, having deprived you twice.
Enjoy the boar. I will be back in two weeks.
She hadn’t taken a bite yet, but she could pretend the warmth in her stomach was the meal. Two bites was all it took to make the illusion complete.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected - a sandstorm, perhaps, or a heatstruck camel. Instead, it was only a few minutes flight before the smell of blood caught in the back of her throat.
It was hard to describe what happened after that. Sometimes, she was more mind than monster. Sometimes, she was more monster than mind. That day was a monster day.
He’d lost a lot of blood by the time she found him. A frankly terrifying amount of blood. She could carry him back to the oasis, but that’d only delay the inevitable.
But sphinx knew many things that humans did not.
She carried him, and he was light in her claws. Light in the way that humans were, but some small, scared part of her brain was worried that the blood loss made him lighter still. Like a date left in the sun.
She followed the trail through the desert until she found the thieves that did this. They had his gifts and his spices. They’d have taken the clothes off his corpse if they’d been able to catch his camel.
They’d have taken his life. The one human life she’d valued in one-thousand years, and they’d have taken his life.
It was hard to hate humans. They were so small and short lived that taking them personally felt childish. But this day, she hated, and it made killing easy. Five of the six bandits were extraneous. The last, thankfully, had blood that smelled like the prince.
(He was much less thankful about this than she was).
She took them both back, the prince held gently in her front talons, the bandit half crushed in the back. The transfer spell took exactly as much as it needed. It would’ve been crueler to let the bandit suffer the same fate he’d intended to inflict on the prince - to struggle on with too little blood, until his body failed. It was tempting, but she felt a sick gratitude that he had what she’d needed when she needed it, so she made the end quick. Or, quick enough.
Thirty seconds isn’t long, but it’s an eternity when falling.
The prince recovered enough to speak after three days. He asked her to tell him riddles, and if she was as jealous of her domain as she pretended, she’d have said no. But good riddles were the tool she used to rid herself of unwanted guests, and this guest was… wanted.
So she read riddles to him for days at a time. Read all the ones she’d hoarded from scholars. Read ones she wrote herself, just for fun. She started with her best riddles because she loved his praise, but moved on to her earlier ones because what they lacked in cleverness, they made up for by being earnest.
He loved those riddles the most.
One week stretched into two. He spent his days swimming after fish, chasing after boars with spears made of stone (she hadn’t seen that in a very long time) and scurrying up the trees to pick dates. And his nights, he spent imagining riddles around a campfire.
She knew it wasn’t going to be permanent, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be beautiful. She’d outlived so many things in this world - seen rivers change courses and lakes run dry. If impermanence was a poison, then it was a poison she couldn’t avoid. There was no wall she could build to keep death at bay. She could only share her home with it and hope that one, one wonderful, far away day, that even death would die.
But that day would not be soon.
The king’s men found the oasis after a month of searching. There were no riddles this time. The prince left willingly, and the men with bronze blades stayed respectfully far from her part of the duat. It went as good as it could have gone, all things considered. If some part of her felt empty afterwards, well, maybe she just needed to eat.
Regular gifts did find her way to the duat, as thanks after that. Herds of goats were released near her borders, to hunt at her own leisure. Soft pelts from the northern lands were delivered in chests, and she luxuriated in their fluff.
Most importantly, a regular shipment of blank vellum began to make its way to the duat. She was told was explicitly that it was for her to write more riddles. And also, if she had a spare moment, she could send letters back with the vendor. The prince always made sure to send at least one out to her, and she always made sure to send one back.
She couldn’t see how humans were like this. She’d written with him six months ago! He’d been sharp as ever. Sharper, even. Time had winnowed him into a razor’s edge, and she'd been so amazed to see him change. And then he’d gotten busy, and they’d stopped writing letters for just a month, and then it was two months, and then three and now-
Now he wasn’t well.
The last letter she’d received hadn’t even been from him. It had been from his eldest brother, the reigning pharaoh. And it had broken her heart.
He was forgetting… everything. His mind was breaking. Decades of brilliance, and now he was falling apart at the seams. Some days, he didn’t even know who he was. But on the days that he did, the only thing he could talk about was going to the oasis one last time.
And his brother who had kept him close, who had been so protective of him after his near death with the bandits, had finally agreed.
He was going to be arriving any day now. The note had a sort of helpless plea attached - that he didn’t know what to do at this point, but that whatever it cost her to keep him comfortable, he would repay tenfold.
She sent a letter back saying it was a gift. She was the queen of the duat, and it pleased her to give this to her neighboring kingdom. Nevermind that her kingdom had no subjects, nevermind that she had no armies at her disposal. What she had, she could give, and this was… easy.
It made her happy to write the letter. It remind her of the first words the prince had spoken to her, all those years ago.
He arrived a few days later, escorted by fifty soldiers. She was grateful that he was in one of his lucid moments. She couldn’t imagine how it would be, to be seen and not known.
She didn’t wait for them to make it all the way to her oasis. She flew over to meet them, and then carried him back. The traditional wait was from when she thought she had time. Before she'd realized that there were ways for even an immortal to find themselves in a hurry.
He spent his first day back chasing fish, the same way he did before. The boars he left be - seventy, he insisted, was far too old to be messing with boars. And when the evening came, they gathered by a campfire to share riddles.
They went back and forth, laughing at each other's crafts. It was only after an hour of reminiscing that she actually asked him her favorite riddle, the riddle that she had permanently written in as His riddle. The one with toothless maws and meat and light in the dark, and he stared at her - not blankly, but worse, confused, because he recognized the riddle, but could no longer answer it.
She could see the distress growing in him, and it broke her heart. He hemmed and hawed, but right when he looked on the brink of giving up, he looked at the fire and started in relief.
“A campfire!” he said, and they laughed, and if he could pretend his tears were mirth and not mourning she could pretend that hers were the same.
He knew who he was, thankfully, but he didn’t remember getting there. He stumbled around almost dazed until he saw her. Then he sighed in relief.
“This is my favorite dream,” he confided in her. “I’d like to get back here for real one day - but this dream is lovely. Can you read me some more riddles? Just like last time. I've never forgotten.”
She didn’t even touch her later works. She went to her earliest ones, the easy ones, and the way he pondered minutes at a time made her stomach clench.
He woke up the next morning completely confused. She’d prepared her first riddle as
“Who sits in the sand
Beside my lair
Who swims through fish
With thin white hair
Who braved the desert and survived
Then returned home alive and thrived?”
But after several seconds of silence she couldn’t take it anymore.
“It’s you,” she said.
“Oh!” he replied, surprised.
“What do you know about this place?”, she asked, after several more long seconds of quiet.
“…Not a lot,” he admitted. “But I know I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said.
That was the only riddle she had for the day. He fell asleep in the midmorning, and she took the time to go catch a goat for them. He was still asleep when she returned and remained that way the rest of the day. She stayed awake long after sunset, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest and praying it would never stop. She wasn’t sure when she fell asleep - she just knew that when she woke up, her prayer had gone unanswered.
The vellum vendor arrived at the start of the deep duat only to find the oasis empty. He looked for hours, but there was only a single vellum left behind in the cave. He grabbed it and read the half finished riddle.
When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.
When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.
Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.
It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?
"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."
My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.
You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.
I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!
---
My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.
But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.
Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."
But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.
I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.
And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.
He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.
I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.
I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.
I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.
I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.
When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.
My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.
---
It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.
But he needed a fair amount of help.
He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.
One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.
And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.
It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.
---
For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.
I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.
I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.
Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.
Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.
It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.
Then I fell asleep.
I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.
I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.
My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.
I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.
So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.
And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.
And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.
So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.
But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.
And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.
Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.
Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.
A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.
When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.
When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.
Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.
It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?
"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."
My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.
You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.
I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!
---
My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.
But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.
Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."
But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.
I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.
And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.
He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.
I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.
I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.
I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.
I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.
When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.
My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.
---
It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.
But he needed a fair amount of help.
He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.
One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.
And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.
It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.
---
For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.
I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.
I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.
Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.
Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.
It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.
Then I fell asleep.
I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.
I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.
My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.
I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.
So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.
And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.
And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.
So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.
But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.
And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.
Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.
Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.
A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.
i once accidentally dated someone for a few months. its very difficult to explain how this happened, but the gist is that i thought we were hanging out, and she thought we were on dates, and it was just a very painfully highschool thing.
she was a little bit confused that i hadnt tried to pull any moves, at all, even a little. like, didnt even try holding hands because, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i did not know we were dating.
so, halloween rolled around, and she thought, you know, why wait for destiny, when you can grab it? so she hit me with a clue by four.
babylon, she said. babylon. my mom's gonna be out of town on halloween, and im gonna have the house to myself, and it's going to be kind of lonely. would you like to come to my house and watch scary movies with me?
you know, kind of a netflix and chill thing. except, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i did not know we were dating. also autism. so i took it at face value and said: oh! yeah! thatd be fun! and she thought she got her point across, but she didnt and it was a mess.
skip forward to halloween: my family has a block party every year, right? and at that point i was too old to really trick or treat, but we still wore costumes for our role in the block party, which in my case, was handing out cotton candy. so i took the first shift, and my costume was this homemade abomination minion thing. i had full yellow body paint, and goggles, and a bald cap, and overalls. the kids who saw it were like, uh, hm. overly realistic minion. and adults were like, oh, some kind of hills have eyes hillbilly with jaundice. very scary.
(it was not my best costume.)
my little brother swapped me out for second shift, and i was getting ready to change out to head to her house when i was like: no, she'll get a real kick out of this. this is one of the worst things i have ever worn. so i kept it on and just brought a change of clothes thinking i could shower real quick and change at her place after she saw my nightmare getup.
so i left after that, got there, knocked on her door, and she said come on in. so i went in, and there was this very long hall with an abrupt right turn into her living room where the tv was, and i went down the hall, and i made the turn, and my field of view went from beige drywal to her, on the couch, naked. naked in the paint me like one of your french girls pose. super naked.
i panicked. this was my first time seeing a real person like, full on sex naked,which is a totally different beast from other kinds of naked. you see one kind of naked and you think yeah, im ready for all the kinds of naked, but you arent. i wasnt at least. i really wasn't.
so my brain crashed to BIOS. she also crashed to BIOS, but for different reasons. of all the ways this could have turned me, having me show up in yellow body paint and overalls was pretty pretty low down the list.
so we sat there a while, and you know, she wasn't getting any less naked, which really wasn't helping me get my brain sorted out. it really wasnt much of a surprise when she got her bearings first and started asking questions.
"babylon," she said. "babylon. what are you wearing?"
and i was like, kind of rebooted, but i was nowhere near full functionality, so symbolic language wasnt loaded in yet. i had nothing running but my trusty autism.exe, so i said
"overalls"
and she looked at me like i was the dumbest person in the entire world, and i looked at her like she was the first naked person i had seen in real life who got naked specifically for me, and my upper level cognitive process went: "listen man, we are not going to get our shit together as long as 80% of your brain power is devoted to not blinking. you gotta get out of here."
and if id communicated that, maybe things would have been less of a mess, but instead i just kind of turned around and walked back to my car. i figured i could drive a few loops around the block, get my brain in order, and figure out what the hell we were gonna do.
the only thing i had said to her since arriving was, again, overalls.
first loop around, i was like: oh god fucking damnit. oh shit. oh shit. shes gonna get like, an eating disorder from this. oh no.
second loop around i was like: oh NOOOOO oh WHAT THE FUCK oh SWEET JESUS PLEASE. i dont wanna go back man. i just wanna bury this and forget about it. please. please. let this bitter cup pass from my lips.
and after my third loop, i went and i knocked on her door again.
she answered it this time, and i counted my lucky stars that she'd changed into some pajamas. she was all teary eyed which was the saddest thing ever, and we sat down in her kitchen and talked. it was pretty bad - i figured out we'd been dating, and she figured out that trying to jump from home plate to 3rd base is considered ballsy in baseball, least of all dating. no real winners there. and i can remember after all that, we sat there a bit a bit longer, just steadying ourselves, and i was like "well, im actually really glad we figured that out. guess i'll see you at school tomorow' and she said "WAIT. wait."
"lets watch shrek 2."
so we did and it was horrible. we did not look at each other. we did not say a word. we just sat in stony silence, while shrek 2 played in the background, and when it was done we shook hands. i think we might have been able to salvage that as a friendship if it hadnt been for shrek. as it was she turned white as a sheet and ran away every time she even got a glimpse of me at school, and that summer she moved to a new state to live with her dad. all her friends said she moved just so she wouldn't have to go to school with me anymore, and i dont actually think they were lying.
every time i hear relationship counselors talk about how important communication is, and i'm tempted to roll my eyes, i look back and go, alright. alright. theres probably some poor bastard, somewhere in the world, who doesnt even know that hes married.
so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.
at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.
he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?
and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.
but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.
i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?
(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)
and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.
i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.
that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.
i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.
anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.
i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.
we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.
he was okay at it.
eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.
soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.
realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:
"i can't get pregnant"
which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.
still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"
and then i was in my car, and i drove away.
if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.
and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.
WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.
we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.
do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.
and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.
then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.
and then they started making out.
i was close enough to hear it.
i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.
so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.
now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.
so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.
about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.
my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.
my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.
they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?
and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.
@thedepressionoftrees your tags make this EVEN FUNNIER
#obsessed with the dad's perspective in this situation #your daughter is super excited for her date #she goes to the door #it's some mfer dressed like sans undertale #your daughter slams the door extremely upset #she yells something about getting ready and storms upstairs #so your old brain that's been poisoned by lead immediately turns to murderous rage #you invite sans.png inside and do your threat routine #they fucking help you clean the gun #excusemewhatthefuck #daughter comes down #she's still pissed #megalovaniac is acting chill and oblivious #try something else #*channel puritan rage and 30 years of emotional repression* #“whatever you do to her i do to you” #“i can't get pregnant” #*proceeds to kidnap daughter* #end scene #phenomenal op #I'm sorry that dad threatened you though #that's fucked
