My first true opportunity to start over came in 1978.
I started seventh grade at the Rockland Country Day School. Friends of my parents had noticed that I wasn’t meeting my potential in parochial school and cobbled together a scholarship for me to attend a private school in Congers, New York, about a thirty-minute bus ride away from our home in Nyack. A scholarship was the only way I could have ever attended that year—my father was in his eighth year of heart attacks and surgeries and had recently been forced to retire (at age 35!) with nary a pension nor insurance benefits.
RCDS gave me new friends—aside from Champ Knecht, I never got along very well with my classmates at Saint Ann’s and didn’t miss them when I left—and new academic opportunities. I first fell in love with foreign languages at RCDS, and I studied Latin for four years and French for six. (When I graduated in 1984, my Latin teacher, Mrs. McPartland, recalled how I had burst into her classroom in seventh grade and boldly announced myself: My name is Brian Watson, and I just transferred here from Saint Ann’s! And people were still surprised when my little diva self came out in 1987!)
The resets seemed to follow thick and fast after that.
My realization that I found other men emotionally and sexually attractive arrived in 1979.
My father’s death in 1980 pushed my mother to remarry—with four kids and no source of income, who could have blamed her—and move (from Nyack to West Nyack, so I stayed at RCDS).
My biology teacher at RCDS, Mr. Haitsma, encouraged me and two classmates to take AP Science classes at Columbia University in 1982. I was more interested in riding the subway to places further south in Manhattan, between Port Authority 41st Street and Times Square, after classes, however. My sexual education kicked into high gear in places my height (I was 6' 6" at 16) let me walk into, including bookstores, quarter peeps, and go-go joints.
I started my first year at Williams College in 1984. The equidistance from Manhattan and Boston isolated me, unknowingly, from the rapidly increasing HIV/AIDS cases.
Williams hired Dr. Eleanor Harz Jorden away from Cornell in 1985, and I took my Japanese classes under her and her amazing professors, Drs. Yamada and Konomi, as she revised her textbooks. The Japanese language changed my life because…
In 1988, I moved to Japan.
My ten years in Japan changed everything. I became a teacher, a public speaker, a writer, a project manager, a translator and an interpreter, and, most shocking (to me) of all the changes? I became popular. (Cue the Wicked soundtrack.)
And in the middle of all of that tumult, both emotionally and chronologically, came the one change I never saw coming: my heart found a home.
As I wrote on Facebook yesterday,
Hiro and I met by accident thirty-one years ago today. When he was the only person who arrived for what I had planned to be a group outing in Asakusa, I pinched myself. We had met on a dial-up BBS earlier that year, chatted (a lot), and traded phone numbers, but I had failed in every attempt to meet him for months. Until that Tuesday.
I had been in Japan for five years at that point. And frankly, I was wary of love. My relationship track record was pretty darn poor. I had thrown someone out of my apartment and had been let's-just-be-friended more times than I could count. (Thankfully, most of those men are *still* my friends.)
When Hiro stood before me, tall and lank in a pea coat, with a smile giving his eyes the brightest glow, I suddenly had a satori experience (that Zen moment when enlightenment arrives). And by the date's prolonged end—I kept suggesting more things to do to make the most of our time together, and we ended up eating dinner twice—I was terrified. How could I be in love with someone I had just met? What should I do?
Thankfully, I did something I had very little practice at: I kept my cool. Our second date was Friday, November 26th, and our third date? Friday, December 3rd. And it was *that* night, as we sat in a rented car in a Chichibu field, waiting for the dead battery to revivify, that we decided we could tell other people we were a couple.
Hiro found my biggest reset button and pushed it (metaphorically, of course!).
This past week prompted a reset, too. Late in the afternoon on Tuesday, November 19th, a powerful windstorm—labeled a bomb cyclone by the local meteorological drama queens—slammed into Western Washington.
I knew we would lose power as I listened to the wind. For the first time in memory, I could hear the wind coming from afar. It grew in volume before rattling our windows at its crescendo. I ran downstairs to power down my computers. Hiro rushed to get rice into the cooker (too late, sadly—we lost power in the middle of the cooking cycle), and I listened as neighborhood transformers started to explode.
Trees were falling—two across the street from us came down—and the snagged power and transmission lines, once severed, caused the transformers to go.
It’s funny the little things you miss when you have no power. We have a Japanese toilet, complete with a seat warmer (dubbed a tushy toaster by Hiro). As the house grew colder (our furnace has an electric starter), it was rather rude to take my seat on the now-cold throne.
I also realized how addicted I had become to my (power) recliner. With enough candles, I could keep reading Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant… and Completely Over It by Lester Fabian Brathwaite—all of the essays were beautiful in their authenticity, and I nodded in understanding through all but one of them—but I missed being able to lean back as I read.
Wednesday night, a friend with power took us in and let us shower (we had gas and, therefore, hot water, but without heat in the house, I worried we’d catch colds). Thursday, I could get some writing done at the Renton Library (but it was too crowded to let me work on anything confidential).
Friday morning, Hiro had an appointment to see an eye surgeon in Bellevue. His optometrist noted he had a developing cataract in his right eye, and the surgeon was supposed to walk us through the prep for surgery. We were late getting there (by eleven minutes) because the highways were jammed, and the surface roads I took were riddled with unpowered intersections (and drivers who know zero, zip, zilch about four-way stop procedures).
The surgeon’s nurse (thank you, Luke!) smuggled Hiro in for preliminary testing and dilated his eyes. In the week since we saw the optometrist, Hiro’s vision seemed (to me) to have gotten worse. When the surgeon finally saw us, she concluded that both of Hiro’s eyes needed surgery. We’ll talk to a scheduler during the week after Thanksgiving and see the surgeon once more for a more accurate vision prescription (and, therefore, her recommendations for replacement lenses) in mid-December.
According to the surgeon, it is becoming increasingly common for people in their forties and fifties to be diagnosed with cataracts.
The news was not particularly upsetting for Hiro—he has one of the calmest personalities—but I decided to treat him to a late lunch at Kōhaku, a Japanese restaurant in Bellevue specializing in tempura served over a bowl of rice, a dish called tendon in Japanese.
Very few places serve tendon here, and Hiro was delighted. But the real surprise was arriving back home to a warm, lit home. Our power had been restored while we were out.
One writing update: an essay I wrote on my history with hugs has been accepted by
. I am working through some tenderly suggested edits and hope to share the finished piece with you all before long.
Origin picture (and story) is awesome. Glad you found each other and happy that your home is unscathed.
"And in the middle of all of that tumult, both emotionally and chronologically, came the one change I never saw coming: my heart found a home." -- I love this line, Brian. Speaking of tenderness, it's so touching that your parents' friends took it upon themselves to find you your intellectual home all those years ago.