The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [51]
“This is my last day here.” My third repetition.
“I’m very well aware of that.”
Oh, silly me. Then, when it was actually time to leave, to leave the bardo of the hospice and go back to the other bardos that I think of as my life, I said, “I’m leaving in the morning. Is there anything you would like to say?”
“Yes, there is.”
“What is that?”
“I would like you to do something about the weather.”
Happily Ever After
Steve Silberman
Here’s a love story so classic, so storybook, it could only lead to marriage. And who would stand in the way of something so wholesome? Who, indeed! Here’s how Steven Silberman and his now-husband Keith, with the help of Buddhist practice, persevered in the face of prejudice until they could finally live as they wanted—as a happily married couple.
On a hazy August afternoon in 2001, I knelt on one knee and asked my beloved, “Will you marry me?” We were standing on a breakwater in front of a weathered house on Cape Cod that my family had been renting for nearly forty years. Keith looked tenderly at me with his big blue eyes. “Of course I will,” he said, and we both burst into tears.
Though we didn’t know it, my mother, father, and sister were watching this drama unfold with their faces pressed against the window. After being my best friend for seven years, Keith—a blond, soft-spoken young science teacher from the Midwest—was already treasured as a welcome addition to my hyperverbal East Coast Jewish family. The next morning, my mother filled a flowery hatbox lid with sand from “our” beach and spelled out Happiness is Steve and Keith! on top in plastic letters, like a pre-wedding cake.
We figured we would host a ceremony for our friends and families in San Francisco, where we live, the following summer. We knew we wouldn’t have any of the rights and benefits of other wedded couples, because marriage between same-sex partners wasn’t yet legal. But we wanted to celebrate the truth of what we had found together in the presence of everyone we knew.
Keith and I weren’t planning on starting a gay marriage revolution, outraging the religious right, or even committing a noble act of civil disobedience. We just loved each other a lot. We grew up in the same culture as everyone else, in which the fairy tales of childhood end with the phrase “and they lived happily ever after.” Trying to live happily ever after just seemed like the next step of our deepening commitment to one another.
Even my future father-in-law, Kent, who was a church-going Republican mayor of a small town in Illinois, seemed to understand. The first time I met him, he took me aside and said, “I know you are very special to Keith, so that means you are very special to us.” There was such simple, human, Midwestern forthrightness in that statement. No banner waving, no Biblical injunctions, no soap-boxing. Just a clear and compassionate message: We love our son, and we trust his ability to make the most personal decision of all.
A month after our engagement, our plans changed unexpectedly when my mother looked across the Hudson River one morning and saw an airplane explode into the World Trade Center. Suddenly asking all our friends to fly out to the West Coast didn’t seem like a good idea. We decided to wait another year.
Keith and I had our ceremony in 2003 at Greens Restaurant, where I had waited tables as a Zen student in the ’80s. Our officiant was a gnostic Jewish Buddhist cancer survivor named Judith, and our recessional music was Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia.” We vowed to love, honor, and cherish one another, and exchanged rings inscribed with a line by Walt Whitman: “Every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you.” Then we threw a big party.
The only person to talk politics that day was my father, Donald, a college professor and lifelong advocate for social justice. My coming out in high school had been tough for him to accept, but he went on to become a champion for equality in the American Federation of Teachers. He gave the fight