Susan Senator

Beware of darkness
–George Harrison

Are you ready for another ride on the Susan Senator Roller Coaster? Climb aboard! We are going to go places you never dreamed of!

I now have 51 pages of my new book! 51! I mined things from past writings and updated them, shuffling them into the correct chapters, of which there are ten. This is my usual method. I start about ten different books over a period of months/years, I write articles and essays and now blog posts about the ideas, flesh them out, until the thing has baked sufficiently and has acquired its form.

I believe I now have the correct form for this project. It revealed itself to me just a few weeks ago, the day that my buddy over at Special Olympics told me he could not help me right now with my SO book. I always find that this is the way things happen to me: just when it can’t get any darker, there is light. Just when I am about to give up, whether it’s about Nat’s progress, or mastering a belly dance move, or getting just the right book idea, it comes.

There must be some sort of darkness, a void that occurs, that is a kind of letting go out of despair. That is when it happens. I am suddenly filled with renewed energy, purpose, and light. I get an idea. I see where Nat is progressing and where the knot is that needs to be worked at. I let go of something I was grasping onto too tightly. Or I feel within my muscles the way the movement is supposed to be, and then suddenly, it is easier than anything I was trying to do before.

I remember when I was just friends with Ned during our sophomore year of college when this kind of moment happened. I think it was possibly the most miraculous moment of my life, up there with conceiving the boys. I was walking away from my dorm, through Superblock, where all the High Rises are, past Class of 1920 Commons, where we always ate lunch, onto the Locust Walk bridge that leads onto the main campus, and College Green. It was mid spring, late April. I had just been talking to Ned, I forgot about what. But I remember saying to myself, and to God (I talk to myself and to God very informally, in my head): “I love Ned so much, that I am going to just take him as he is. I am going to just be happy being his friend. If we can’t be lovers, that’s okay, as long as I can just be with him.”

Ned had never had a girlfriend. He was a late bloomer. I had asked him out very early that year, while I was trimming his beard in my dorm room, and he had said, “I don’t think I’m ready for that.” His rejection totally mesmerized me. I was not at all used to that kind of response from a guy. So I pursued him relentlessly, hanging out with him all the time, teasing him, flirting with him. I could not imagine that he meant “No.” It seemed so incorrect to me. It went against all the evidence that this was a fantastic relationship. We were each other’s best friend; we loved each other’s company. We shared bowls of Rice Krispies (ah, the carb-eating days of my youth!) at 2 a.m. in his dorm room down the hall. I did not think he was gay; I knew gay. Much of our dorm (called Van Pelt House, I kid you not. Me, Lucy Van Pelt incarnate, had found a real home) was gay. Ned just seemed quiet, but was definitely giving off the straight male vibe I had become so adept at detecting. I wanted him for that whole year, like I’ve never wanted anything before.

But I got to the point where I could not hope for it anymore. I had to let it go. I was empty. I was tired. And so, as I walked towards College Green, I knew deep inside that I was going to be okay with things however they were.

And then it all changed. Ned went away for the weekend right after that, and came back with his hair cut. His long, shoulder-length, gorgeous blond hair was now short (for him). Suddenly everyone was noticing Ned. One woman in my dorm said to me, “Wow, Ned’s haircut has just made him Van Pelt’s most eligible bachelor.”

I wanted to kill her. Ned was mine. I loved him. I had from almost the moment I met him. And he loved me. I just had to wait for him. And I knew it, so I said nothing. But that night, Ned and I were studying together on my bed as always, and one of us — he thinks it was him, I think it was me — kissed the other. April 1982. The rest — which I will keep to myself — is history. And I have a master’s in that, also from Penn!

There is a kind of beauty in letting go, and in acceptance. It can fill you up, especially when love is involved. What a long, strange trip…