WHO AM I? WHERE AM I? CAN I WALK?

A FALL INTO GRACE, NOT FROM IT

(Above: An X-ray of my broken shoulder taken at The Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou’s emergency room in the early morning hours of May 1 after I had arrived in an ambulance.)

During my last four months in London and my two in Paris as I began this late-life spiritual and cultural pilgrimage, a new construct within which to live my life, I would joke (but not really be joking) that I woke up each morning and asked myself the three questions in the title above. If I knew the answers to the first two and “yes” was the answer to the third, then everything else was gravy. There was lots of gravy but the richest roux was the gratitude I felt waking up each morning on such a pilgrimage to ask myself those questions.

And then everything changed. In a second. The very last one as I was winding up the first half year of my newly constructed life.

Feeling jaunty and alive and blessed and as close to happy as i have felt in a long time, i was about to walk down some steep Metro steps in Paris on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées with a much-too-heavy suitcase to head out to Orly. I was thinking about my upcoming itinerary for the next few months which included NYC and Santa Fe and San Francisco and New Orleans and Mississippi and Asheville and Provincetown before heading back to London for six months and Paris for two. Suddenly - in a flash of dread and panic - I fell all the way down the stairs. At least i think i did. i don’t remember the impact that left my nose and forehead and right leg bloodied. I do remember screaming but nothing else until I saw the faces of the many concerned people gathered protectively around a bloodied me and heard and saw the flashing blue lights of an ambulance as the medical workers put me on a gurney. Another scream issued from me - more dread, more panic - when they moved my right shoulder to do so. Delirious with trauma and the shock at how quickly life can change, i was being hauled to a hospital as the latest bit of damaged cargo in need of care. Two young paramedics - cutting my pants leg to get to my profusely bleeding knee where there was a deep gash - asked me if I knew who I was and where I was. As I saw the horror of the gash, I not only wondered where i was but also if i were going to be able to walk.

They repeated their questions: “Who are you? Where are you?” I knew my name but for the first time in my life I did not know my story. I could tell i was in a city. But which one? And what was the context other than being inside an ambulance for my being there? I looked out the window at the glare of the Champs-Élysées garishly glowering back a me, a blur that blended with my own. I guessed Paris but paired it with a question mark. I could not tell them why i was there when they pressed me as they went through the rote rituals of their job focusing on the injuries without judging the judgement of the injured while eliciting information.

This is what I could elicit from myself in those first few moments. I found the two young men working on me attractive so i knew i was gay. And i knew i wrote and posted a lot on social media and if i could scroll my accounts and read my narrative i would know my story because i still could not recall the last six months. i asked for my phone and began to scroll. I read the words i had written, and found myself. i learned in those first few moments that at my essence i am a gay writer. And the way to find myself is through my writing, the way i construct words to construct a life, to reconstruct it. I am doing it now.

There were many decisions to make in the following hours as i moved forward around this sharp curve i had not seen coming but i truly believe was always there waiting for me to get to it at that precise moment at the very end of these remarkable last first six months of my pilgrimage; i could choose to step away from the pilgrimage on account of this occurrence that was awaiting me to complete it or i could more deeply engage with the pilgrimage itself. i think all pilgrimages have crucibles. This one came early on mine. A crossroads in a Paris metro station. At the crux of it is another question: Would I have still set out on this pilgrimage six months ago in London and Paris if I had known at the end of that time i would fall and shatter my shoulder? This one word is now a part of my story as i more deeply find myself: Yes. Yes, i would.

I will write more fully about that night in the emergency room and the importance of my family and their concern and love for me and my love for them and the aforementioned decisions in the book i plan to write about this continuing chapter in my life. But right now a few days later here I sit in a cafe in NewYork writing this column with one finger of my left hand pecking at my computer keyboard as my other hand is immobilized in a complicated sling because one of those decisions was to carry on and fold all this into the unfolding. I have honored the pilgrimage by continuing on its path although i am a bit more broken and in need of a kind a healing i wasn’t expecting. Months ago in London i had been walking down the street one day and felt an epiphanic profound feeling of being healed. i know now as profound as it felt, it was only a hint of what was needed because of what was in store for me, a signal of hope that healing is possible. i am holding on to that - especially when i arrive in Santa Fe as i have planned to have the shoulder surgery there next week that The Great Cartographer had already mapped out for me as i continue to hone my awareness of The Sacred Incongruity that lies incarnate at the bloody heart of all spiritual practices. i am quite literally shattered. Read that X-ray. But I am not shattered. Read this column.

Before i broke my shoulder, i had made plans to see my friend Ed Gavagan and his wife for lunch while i was here in New York. They had been a cubistic aspect already mindfully placed in how i am now beginning to perceive this fractured portrait of my life since that Cartographer sometimes picks up a paint brush to take a break from the painstaking practice of mapping out existence one human at a time. Some are painted with more realism. My realty is more cubistically understood. This is some of what i wrote about that lunch when i returned to telling my story on social media:

“My friend Ed Gavagan asked me to have lunch at his loft in Soho without knowing about my broken shoulder and sutured knee. Ed did a remarkable TED talk and Moth performance about what he learned from being viciously mugged one early morning after closing the bar he once owned. Stabbed repeatedly and beaten and left for dead in a gang initiation of some sort. The senselessness of evil which this good man - one of the best i have ever known I told his wife when she joined us from the bedroom where she was resting - made sense of once he survived the attack as well as the long rehab that followed. His wife was resting because she has Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. This was a put-it-all-in-perspective lunch. i was given permission to write about it and will more fully in my upcoming book, but i will say this: i started this morning in immense pain unable to dry myself from the shower. i managed to lie soaking wet on my bed waiting moaningly for the water to evaporate even though the pain would not. a baptism of elemental human suffering but nothing compared to what Ed and his wife have and are experiencing. There were lots of welling eyes and hearts at the lunch table, a baptism of grace, an acknowledged one, a prayer pried of amen so we could be each other's. after lunch Ed dressed my knee wound for me. ‘i've waited 38 years to lower my pants for you,’ i told him, ‘but i never fantasized it this way.’ we laughed. it felt good to laugh, the kind of laugh that didn't have the pain pried from it. There is our fantasy and then there is God's.”

After lunch, i took a walk - even more grateful that i am still able to do so with my wounded knee - and mindfully - grateful too i did not suffer a brain injury - observed the path i took. I smiled at these three messages i noticed on a wall in Soho i passed a couple of blocks from Ed’s place - THE WORLD IS WAITING FOR YOU, HEALED TOMORROW, SWEET REHAB.

And a final thing today as i write this first column after my fall by pecking it out with one finger on my good hand. i gave up trying to capitalize all the i’s it takes to write a personal column and there is even a spiritual lesson in that: less self-importance in the i of me yet more mindfulness in the significance of its need to be downsized, smaller, simpler, not the norm.

Who am i? A writer.

Where am i? On a pilgrimage.

Can i walk? Yes.

Healing is the gravy.

Onward.

With gratitude.

Ever onward …