July 24, 1982 (Day Six), Part 3
Apr. 1st, 2026 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3Bleached bluewhite sky and blast-furnace dry. Lots of Houston sun.
I take the left, not knowing where I am but liking the sense of a built-up area in that direction. Another twenty minutes’ walking takes me past a grocery store parking lot and a post office and a couple of strip malls. The second one has a multiplex movie house showing Tron, Grease II, and Author! Author!; after a few moments’ consideration, I go on in and buy myself a ticket for the afternoon showing of Author! Author! and get myself a small buttered popcorn.
* * *
When the movie lets out, I ask the ticket seller if there are any pay phones around, and she points me to one in a corner of the carpeted lobby. In my wallet I find the folded slip with emergency contact numbers on it, and sure enough, I have a phone number for the Harrisons, former students from my dad’s days as a college professor. My parents had said if anything goes wrong, I could contact them.
Pickup on the third ring. “Hi, is this Melinda Harrison? I’m Derek Turner. I don’t know if you remember me... oh, you do? Oh, they told you I’d be here in town for awhile...”
“No, nothing’s wrong... I’m out on a day pass, I just felt like a change of scenery... I was wondering if maybe you and Reggie would have any interest in having dinner together somewhere, if you knew a place around here...”
Melinda suggests I come eat dinner with them at their home, and when I ask about directions for getting there, says Reggie will come pick me up. She recognizes the movie theatre and knows where it is.
Reggie pulls into the parking lot. I doubt I would have recognized him if I’d just run into him out of context, but when he gets out of the silver Datsun and looks around for someone who might be waiting, and waves at me, he looks familiar although we haven’t seen each other in many years. Curly dark hair, copper-colored wireframe glasses over a short wide nose. I walk over and we shake hands. I get in on the passenger’s side.
“Well...how have you been doing?”, he asks me. And once I hear his voice, it’s him.
“A mixed bag, I suppose, but overall mostly positive. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the last couple years, and I’m much happier and more confident than I was before. I spent years worrying that there was something different about me that was like defective and pathetic. Or if I stopped thinking so, it meant I was in denial that I was different, and then it would keep smacking me in the face, you know, other people would react in ways that showed they saw me as different, ...and maybe pathetic and all that. I’ve come around to thinking I’m different and proud of my differences, and so I’m not running away from it or worrying about it any more, and when people act like that, I know it’s because they don’t know any better. I don’t deserve it but it isn’t personal either, it’s a kind of prejudice that some people have.”
“Wow, that sounds really heavy. I’m glad for you if that has made you happy, and I have to say, you do sound a lot more confident than I remember you.”
“I’m here in a program that may help me get a handle on how to communicate better and be less isolated in the world. I guess my folks probably told you something about that?”
“They did say you were here in town to be in some kind of program, yeah. I’m not sure I understood what it was all about.”
I’m probably dispensing more of me that I have any right to assume he asked for. Okay, definitely doing that, even though it’s Reggie, and I just fell into talking to him easily because he has always been comfortable to talk to, he was a good listener when I was nine. But I also have reasons. I’ve never been good at small talk when there’s real stuff that’s right there on everybody’s mind, that everyone knows about, or at least knows enough about that it’s defining their perceptions. It was probably explained to the Harrisons as ‘Derek is going into a drug rehab facility’, so I don’t have a lot of reason to act self-conscious about the whole business of working on myself.
After a handful of suburban turns, we pull into a driveway and I follow Reggie into the one-story orange-bricked house.
“Hi, Derek”, Melinda greets me. A Dorothy Hamill sort of haircut, perky little face. She says, “Yes, of course I remember you! We sat on the couch when your dad hosted a Physics Department party, and you told me all about your Ralph Vaughan Williams album that you’d just gotten.”
“Yeah... I’ve still got it, in my record collection at home. Been played about a zillion times but not too many scratches. I’ve taken pretty good care of my records. That would have been around fifth grade. And a couple years later, you two came to visit us in New Mexico, too, and we went hiking.”
“Oh, yes, and I got lost! I thought all of you were on up ahead of me and somehow I got ahead of you instead, and I kept trying to catch up.”
Melinda begins fixing onion burgers. Formica countertop, some bowls and cutting boards. I offer to help, which at first she turns down, but when I offer more specifically to slice the onions, she passes me a knife and wooden cutting board.
“So”, I ask, “what do you folks do nowadays? Did you stick with physics?”
“We did... in fact, I’m working in the aerospace industry here. And Reggie is on faculty at the university with a research grant. Things have worked out pretty well for us.”
She slices up jalapeño peppers to put on our burgers and we all sit around the table, eating burgers with salsa and chips.
As Melinda dips her tortilla chip into the salsa, she comments, “I remember when Edward, Dr. Turner — your dad, I mean — was having trouble getting the stores in Valdosta to put salsa on the shelf. They said nobody would buy it — Mexican food wasn’t something that people in Georgia knew about back then — and he talked this one store into putting out a row of it as long as he promised he’d buy the whole crate if nobody else bought any. Then he told all of us who were taking his classes... he’d gotten us all hooked on chips and salsa by then... he told us to go in and buy some so they’d see there would be a demand for it, you know? So when he goes there, he says to the guy, ‘Hey, I thought you were going to put out some of that salsa!’ and the grocery guy says, ‘I did’, and he goes over there and they’re all gone. By the end of the summer, they were keeping four rows of the stuff.”
“Oh yeah, that totally sounds like him.”
“Your parents are good people. They have their own quirky way of doing things, for sure, but they were always kind to us.”
“They are good people”, I agree. “I think parenting is complicated, and I don’t always get to see them at their best. I inherited the quirky, like I said in the car”, I say, making eye contact with Reggie, “and maybe some of that is more than they ever bargained for, but they’ve always been on my side, at least as far as they could figure where my side was.”
Melinda says, “It’s good that you can see that it’s difficult on their end. Kids can miss that sometimes, a lot of the time, and don’t have much patience for when parents are struggling with how to do what’s best.”
“My dad loves me very much, but he just can’t let go of the steering wheel. He does it with Jan, too. I don’t think he’s trying to control us on purpose. In fact I don’t think he even knows he’s doing it. The problem is...he’s always thought farther ahead, on a curve of events he can forecast, than we have. Plans we could make, things we could consider. I think he sees it as making sure we see all that stuff so we can make choices, but, you know, framing someone’s options is a form of control. Now with my mom, it’s different. She wants us to be in charge of our lives. But she doesn’t see any reason why it should be at all complicated. So she gets impatient when things don’t work out. She was pushed, so pushing is loving. Be who you need to be, figure it out, do it and quit whining. I end up with her telling me to grow up and him wanting to look over my shoulder and take care of me and micromanage, and we all get very frustrated sometimes.”
Reggie comments, “It’s so easy to look at how your parents do things and tell yourself ‘I am never going to make that mistake’, and then you have kids of your own and go, ‘Oh, now I get it’.”
I nod. Rest my chin in the palm of my hand. “One thing I eventually realized is how my dad, by being so opinionated and so emphatic about his opinions, shoved me in the direction of having to set my own priorities. By him emphasizing everything that he thinks about anything, he ends up emphasizing nothing”, I say, doing my own emphasizing with chops of my hands. “It’s like he’ll say, ‘The Ormandy recording of Lohengrin is absolutely the best performance of Wagner ever recorded’ and he’ll make it sound just as important and serious as ‘A good person makes every effort to keep any promises they have made’ or ‘Freedom is worth dying for., I’m exaggerating a little, but seriously, every opinion of his gets emphasis.”
I pause for a moment. Neither Reggie nor Melinda says anything, although Melinda looks like she might be formulating something to say.
I continue, “When I was little he always swooped in and took care of me, defending me against the school people and also saying in various ways that you can’t be excellent but also not be any different, or else excellent doesn’t mean anything. It’s not that I don’t feel cared about and loved, I do. But I have to figure things out for myself now.”
I get nods on that one.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I take the left, not knowing where I am but liking the sense of a built-up area in that direction. Another twenty minutes’ walking takes me past a grocery store parking lot and a post office and a couple of strip malls. The second one has a multiplex movie house showing Tron, Grease II, and Author! Author!; after a few moments’ consideration, I go on in and buy myself a ticket for the afternoon showing of Author! Author! and get myself a small buttered popcorn.
* * *
When the movie lets out, I ask the ticket seller if there are any pay phones around, and she points me to one in a corner of the carpeted lobby. In my wallet I find the folded slip with emergency contact numbers on it, and sure enough, I have a phone number for the Harrisons, former students from my dad’s days as a college professor. My parents had said if anything goes wrong, I could contact them.
Pickup on the third ring. “Hi, is this Melinda Harrison? I’m Derek Turner. I don’t know if you remember me... oh, you do? Oh, they told you I’d be here in town for awhile...”
“No, nothing’s wrong... I’m out on a day pass, I just felt like a change of scenery... I was wondering if maybe you and Reggie would have any interest in having dinner together somewhere, if you knew a place around here...”
Melinda suggests I come eat dinner with them at their home, and when I ask about directions for getting there, says Reggie will come pick me up. She recognizes the movie theatre and knows where it is.
Reggie pulls into the parking lot. I doubt I would have recognized him if I’d just run into him out of context, but when he gets out of the silver Datsun and looks around for someone who might be waiting, and waves at me, he looks familiar although we haven’t seen each other in many years. Curly dark hair, copper-colored wireframe glasses over a short wide nose. I walk over and we shake hands. I get in on the passenger’s side.
“Well...how have you been doing?”, he asks me. And once I hear his voice, it’s him.
“A mixed bag, I suppose, but overall mostly positive. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the last couple years, and I’m much happier and more confident than I was before. I spent years worrying that there was something different about me that was like defective and pathetic. Or if I stopped thinking so, it meant I was in denial that I was different, and then it would keep smacking me in the face, you know, other people would react in ways that showed they saw me as different, ...and maybe pathetic and all that. I’ve come around to thinking I’m different and proud of my differences, and so I’m not running away from it or worrying about it any more, and when people act like that, I know it’s because they don’t know any better. I don’t deserve it but it isn’t personal either, it’s a kind of prejudice that some people have.”
“Wow, that sounds really heavy. I’m glad for you if that has made you happy, and I have to say, you do sound a lot more confident than I remember you.”
“I’m here in a program that may help me get a handle on how to communicate better and be less isolated in the world. I guess my folks probably told you something about that?”
“They did say you were here in town to be in some kind of program, yeah. I’m not sure I understood what it was all about.”
I’m probably dispensing more of me that I have any right to assume he asked for. Okay, definitely doing that, even though it’s Reggie, and I just fell into talking to him easily because he has always been comfortable to talk to, he was a good listener when I was nine. But I also have reasons. I’ve never been good at small talk when there’s real stuff that’s right there on everybody’s mind, that everyone knows about, or at least knows enough about that it’s defining their perceptions. It was probably explained to the Harrisons as ‘Derek is going into a drug rehab facility’, so I don’t have a lot of reason to act self-conscious about the whole business of working on myself.
After a handful of suburban turns, we pull into a driveway and I follow Reggie into the one-story orange-bricked house.
“Hi, Derek”, Melinda greets me. A Dorothy Hamill sort of haircut, perky little face. She says, “Yes, of course I remember you! We sat on the couch when your dad hosted a Physics Department party, and you told me all about your Ralph Vaughan Williams album that you’d just gotten.”
“Yeah... I’ve still got it, in my record collection at home. Been played about a zillion times but not too many scratches. I’ve taken pretty good care of my records. That would have been around fifth grade. And a couple years later, you two came to visit us in New Mexico, too, and we went hiking.”
“Oh, yes, and I got lost! I thought all of you were on up ahead of me and somehow I got ahead of you instead, and I kept trying to catch up.”
Melinda begins fixing onion burgers. Formica countertop, some bowls and cutting boards. I offer to help, which at first she turns down, but when I offer more specifically to slice the onions, she passes me a knife and wooden cutting board.
“So”, I ask, “what do you folks do nowadays? Did you stick with physics?”
“We did... in fact, I’m working in the aerospace industry here. And Reggie is on faculty at the university with a research grant. Things have worked out pretty well for us.”
She slices up jalapeño peppers to put on our burgers and we all sit around the table, eating burgers with salsa and chips.
As Melinda dips her tortilla chip into the salsa, she comments, “I remember when Edward, Dr. Turner — your dad, I mean — was having trouble getting the stores in Valdosta to put salsa on the shelf. They said nobody would buy it — Mexican food wasn’t something that people in Georgia knew about back then — and he talked this one store into putting out a row of it as long as he promised he’d buy the whole crate if nobody else bought any. Then he told all of us who were taking his classes... he’d gotten us all hooked on chips and salsa by then... he told us to go in and buy some so they’d see there would be a demand for it, you know? So when he goes there, he says to the guy, ‘Hey, I thought you were going to put out some of that salsa!’ and the grocery guy says, ‘I did’, and he goes over there and they’re all gone. By the end of the summer, they were keeping four rows of the stuff.”
“Oh yeah, that totally sounds like him.”
“Your parents are good people. They have their own quirky way of doing things, for sure, but they were always kind to us.”
“They are good people”, I agree. “I think parenting is complicated, and I don’t always get to see them at their best. I inherited the quirky, like I said in the car”, I say, making eye contact with Reggie, “and maybe some of that is more than they ever bargained for, but they’ve always been on my side, at least as far as they could figure where my side was.”
Melinda says, “It’s good that you can see that it’s difficult on their end. Kids can miss that sometimes, a lot of the time, and don’t have much patience for when parents are struggling with how to do what’s best.”
“My dad loves me very much, but he just can’t let go of the steering wheel. He does it with Jan, too. I don’t think he’s trying to control us on purpose. In fact I don’t think he even knows he’s doing it. The problem is...he’s always thought farther ahead, on a curve of events he can forecast, than we have. Plans we could make, things we could consider. I think he sees it as making sure we see all that stuff so we can make choices, but, you know, framing someone’s options is a form of control. Now with my mom, it’s different. She wants us to be in charge of our lives. But she doesn’t see any reason why it should be at all complicated. So she gets impatient when things don’t work out. She was pushed, so pushing is loving. Be who you need to be, figure it out, do it and quit whining. I end up with her telling me to grow up and him wanting to look over my shoulder and take care of me and micromanage, and we all get very frustrated sometimes.”
Reggie comments, “It’s so easy to look at how your parents do things and tell yourself ‘I am never going to make that mistake’, and then you have kids of your own and go, ‘Oh, now I get it’.”
I nod. Rest my chin in the palm of my hand. “One thing I eventually realized is how my dad, by being so opinionated and so emphatic about his opinions, shoved me in the direction of having to set my own priorities. By him emphasizing everything that he thinks about anything, he ends up emphasizing nothing”, I say, doing my own emphasizing with chops of my hands. “It’s like he’ll say, ‘The Ormandy recording of Lohengrin is absolutely the best performance of Wagner ever recorded’ and he’ll make it sound just as important and serious as ‘A good person makes every effort to keep any promises they have made’ or ‘Freedom is worth dying for., I’m exaggerating a little, but seriously, every opinion of his gets emphasis.”
I pause for a moment. Neither Reggie nor Melinda says anything, although Melinda looks like she might be formulating something to say.
I continue, “When I was little he always swooped in and took care of me, defending me against the school people and also saying in various ways that you can’t be excellent but also not be any different, or else excellent doesn’t mean anything. It’s not that I don’t feel cared about and loved, I do. But I have to figure things out for myself now.”
I get nods on that one.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
