with the far-off music of the Olde Country.
I do not know what people see when they look at me now, but I suspect offhand that they do not see a fabulous knockout; what they see, if anything, is a tired-looking older woman with high-tech hearing aids. People who don’t know me often guess, upon meeting me, that I’m a teacher of some kind or a minister. When they learn my history, they don’t throw up their hands in amazement and shout, No! No! But you’re so gorgeous! It can’t be!
Usually people nod kindly at me and say something that reflects their utter lack of surprise, like Is that the fact.
It used to be that this hurt my feelings. I wanted to be beautiful, and I wanted to be thin, and I wanted my appearance—my ability to slay—to argue for the fact of my womanhood. I wanted my outsides to provide the most persuasive rhetorical case for my insides.
Now, I don’t care quite so much, and not only because I know my heart makes a better case for my identity than a little button nose. It’s also because my womanhood can’t be taken away from me anymore—not by the heartless, not by someone’s clever gender theory, not even by the mirror. After sixty years, time has caught up with me, even though when I first popped out of the box, I spent several years as a little cupcake. Oh, what fun that was while it lasted.
The question that remains for me, though, is: What does it mean to be a woman who had a boyhood? Is boyhood even the right word for it? How were the lessons of masculinity taught to me, and what aspects of those lessons still remain in my heart, all these many years later?
We had cats back in the day, including one my sister named Ba-boing!, which one morning was run over by a school bus that I then had to climb aboard. My mother, standing in the veterinarian’s office later, was asked what the cat’s name was, and there, with the dead thing in her arms, my dignified, sorrowful mother had to speak the words of truth:
“Ba-boing!” said she.
But I have been drawn to dogs above all, perhaps because my own personality is fundamentally canine. I am happiest when I am with those whom I love, preferably by a warm fire. If you lost something, I would try to bring it back to you.
If you and I were ever to part, I would be grief-stricken. If we were to meet again, I would be overjoyed and stunned—I never thought I’d see you again! I can’t believe you’re back! This is fantastic!
The saddest moment of any day is the moment my wife turns her light off on her side of the bed, and I feel crushed: The day is over! There is no more fun to be had. It’s all finished!
This is when Deirdre just smiles and says, We’ll do more things together tomorrow, Jenny. There are many more days for us ahead.
I lay my head down on my pillow, unconvinced. I never want this life to be over. I want to live forever and spend each day making sure you understand the depth of the love I have for you. I sleep with one eye open, just in case anything comes creeping for us as we dream. Even now I can hear Sandy Flash’s laughter, echoing through the summer night.
You wanted to see Ba-boing!, sir, and now you have seen him.
* * *
October 1, 1970, was a Thursday. It was unusual for us to do anything on a school night, but my father felt that the occasion called for the unusual. And so Lloyd Goodyear and my father and I went in to Philadelphia to see the final game played in Connie Mack Stadium, Phillies versus Expos.
The park had been there, on the corner of 21st Street and Lehigh, for over sixty years. It had originally been built for the Philadelphia Athletics, but the Phillies moved in after the A’s decamped for Kansas City in 1955. It was an old-school ballpark with wooden seats and a strange corner tower that looked as if it would have been more at home on the roof of the Addams Family mansion. Now it was a rattrap with a losing team in a bad neighborhood. By the next year, the Phils would move over to the new Veterans Stadium in South Philly.
My father and I had gone to many games