Three of my father's sisters, all by now in their seventies or eighties, live within twenty-five miles of my mother, and when I visit my mother, I call on these aunts. When I was in Texas last summer, I telephoned the eldest, who lives in a small town seven miles from my mother's, to see if she would be receiving. When she agreed that that afternoon would be good, I called her sister who lives about a block from her and set a time a couple of hours later. Then I called the third aunt, who lives about fifteen miles farther away, and set a later time.

When I arrived at Aunt Lillian's house, she welcomed me warmly and proceeded to make coffee. While doing so, she mentioned that she wanted to give my sister Becky a magnificent cut glass bowl that had been residing in state on her dinner table all my life. I was flabbergasted. I managed to mumble something to the effect that perhaps one of her daughters, granddaughters, or great-granddaughters might like it, but she responded that they wouldn't appreciate it. Not wanting to argue with her, I allowed I was sure my sister would appreciate it and changed the subject, hoping she would forget about it. She then asked if I were going to visit her sisters, and when I told her Id scheduled them all for the afternoon, she suggested that she invite Lucille to join us for coffee. I was pleased because this indicated that they were on speaking terms that week, they having fought like only siblings can fight for seventy-odd years. So she invited Lucille over and we had a pleasant little afternoon tea.

When I mentioned to them that it was near time to depart for my visit to the third sister, Aunt Lillian stepped into the pantry and produced a box just the right size for the bowl, complete with the necessary packing materials all ready to go. She emptied the fruit out of the bowl and packed it while we stood there, the three of us said our goodbyes, and I went to Aunt Sara's for yet more coffee.

When I returned to my mother's, I brought out the bowl for my sister and learned the rest of the story. The bowl had been given to Lillian as a wedding present in 1924 by her brother, shortly before he was shot to death in a dispute over territorial rights to a local belle. No charges were ever filed because my uncle had asked on his deathbed that none be since he was, after all, poaching. In Texas, especially in those days, district attorneys did not normally interfere in family matters unless it was requested. The assailant, by the way, made good some years later by getting my father a job with the oil company during the depression. But back to the bowl.

The bowl, as I have said, had been sitting on Aunt Lillian's dining table for over half a century, gathering accolades. My mother was especially fond of it and was unable to pass it without giving it a thump. One day last spring, Lillian had offered it to my mother, who had immediately refused it on the grounds that it ought to go to one of my aunt's sisters. Lillian had told her what she told me, that they wouldn't appreciate it, but she had also told my mother a bit more. She mentioned that her sister Lucille, who had been standing right there when she had wrapped up the bowl for me to take to Becky and who was on an extremely limited budget, had asked for the bowl, saying that she could get a thousand dollars for it. Now my mother has to live around both of these women, and she quickly realized that she didn't dare take the bowl, however much she wanted it. So she suggested as possible recipients either of my aunt's daughters, who live in other parts of the state, or, deviously, her own daughter, safely a thousand miles away in Denver. And Lillian, crafty old soul that she is, must have plotted for the rest of the spring to stage the transfer to get the maximum pleasure from it, to not only give the bowl away in front of Lillian but also to give it to someone who patently did not deserve it.

The final twist, of course, is that, while I am not fond of cut glass, the damn thing is exquisite...and valuable, and what I got out of my role as inadvertent actor in my aunt's little drama was several of cups of Maxwell House.

Late note: It turns out that there was even more to this story than I knew at the time. (See "Auntie Revisited - 20 April 2002" in Downstairs Journal 2002)

My favorite Freudian slip occurred when I'd been at Oracle for about a year. I was not officially "out" at Oracle, although I certainly could have been had I been so inclined. The high tech industry was a business leader in recognizing that there are a lot of very bright gays out there and that what they're screwing after they've put in their richly productive twelve hour days doesn't really matter. It could be sheep, for all Oracle cared. Oracle was also one of the very first companies to offer same-sex domestic partner spousal benefits. Oracle had an enormous gay population and many participated in the affinity group Oracle Lambda, which was very aggressive to the point of leaning on HR to let them plaster the campus with information booths, posters, and sections of the Names Project AIDS quilts during Gay Pride Week. They also had très gai lunches on and off campus on alternate Wednesdays, and their own company email group. I had been there several years before I decided that it was hypocritical of me not to add my name to the email group list even though I never went to the lunches because they conflicted with the San Mateo Farmers Market and I do have my priorities.

In the beginning, though, I kept a low profile, partly because that's just my nature and partly because the cubicle opposite mine was occupied by one of the previous year's college graduate hires, a hockey jock named Dave who lacked some social skills and who shortly before I started work at Oracle was the subject of a complaint to HR about his loud and continual homophobic commentary and offensive language. HR had convinced him that his choice was to continue this behavior or to remain an Oracle employee, so after I had been there a couple of weeks, he had delicately quizzed me about my marital status and current girlfriends. My answers to these questions left open the very real possibility that I was gay, and so for a couple of months there were continual subtle digs, none of which by itself being sufficient or unambiguous enough to make an issue of.

Then, one Sunday, the Purchasing and Inventory teams had a paintball war in the Santa Cruz hills. I participated in this event to show that I was a team player and also to get to know more of the developers, who were my primary source of information. Besides, I had read about this silly sport and thought it might be fun to try it. You could bring a non-Oracle friend, so I brought my then boyfriend, who was an all-round jock and who absolutely no one would identify as queer. Bob was quite an aggressive player and was the only player on either side who captured the enemy's flag twice. Unfortunately, his aggression exposed him to enemy fire, and he got shot a lot. When you get shot, you have to go to the communal "jail" and wait for a few minutes before you get to be a new man. While you're in jail, you naturally talk about how you got there. "Whaddya in for?" Bob reported to me that most of the guys in jail from the other team had one thing in common, they had been shot by "that gray-haired guy". (I was, in fact, older than many of their parents.)

Well hey, I'm from Texas. I may be old, slow, and going deaf and blind, but if I can see it, I can shoot it...even with a paintball gun. The weapons training I had in the Army was merely finishing school; I grew up with guns and was a teenager before I could outshoot my mother...and looking back at it, she may have let me win. In any case, I was picking the other team members off like jackrabbits before they finally realized that their primary objective was to shoot that gray-haired guy first and then get on with their game. I got a lot of recognition for my marksmanship in the subsequent weeks at the office, but there were more immediate results.

My demonstrating this manly ability turned homophobic Dave's head around so quickly and completely that by the end of the day he was literally hanging around me like a friendly puppy, the insolent sneer having been transmogrified into worshipful admiration. This behavior continued at the office, and I would not have been surprised to have received an invitation to go fag-bashing with him.

The purpose of this long digression is to explain why it took a little while for a general feeling to develop at Oracle that Louis just had to be gay even though he didn't make an issue of it. What really helped them come to this understanding, of course, was my having to fend off all those European single women who couldn't help notice my wit, charm, kindness, and, in the gym, ripped abs. Not to mention the marksmanship.

But one evening I was working late and a Project Manager for one of the products I dealt with dropped by my cube to help me download a version of some development software that would limp along well enough for me to at least start writing the documentation. George was twenty-some years younger than I, brilliant, quite a jock, and a kind and decent gentleman. He was sitting at a keyboard connected to a Unix machine and wanted to type the command to move to my home directory. Instead of typing "home lbryan/" he accidentally typed "homo lbryan/" and became flustered and actually blushed. Luckily, that command was nearly his last required action, and he left moments later. After about a minute I had my Treppenwitz, which the French call l'esprit d'escalier (the rejoinder you thought of too late to utter when it would have been appropriate), so I emailed him a message telling him that that was the first time I had ever seen a Freudian slip.

This morning I was innocently eating my cereal when my eye alit on the following paragraph printed on the milk carton:

[First ellipsis mine, second theirs]

"...all Berkeley Farms dairy cows are raised on the finest farms in the rolling hills of Marin and Sonoma Counties and the lush San Joaquin Valley...supervised closely by ranch personnel and dairy nutritionists who make sure they're comfortable, well-fed, and in top condition."

Supervised? Supervised closely?? Supervised closely by ranch personnel??? What are "ranch personnel" doing on a dairy farm? And is it really proper to describe an area in which virtually every drop of water has to be piped in from the Sierra Nevada as "lush"?

Setting the above questions aside, if I were not facing a deadline Thursday, I'd develop the above paragraph, describing more fully the duties of the ranch supervisory personnel, dairy nutritionists, aerobics instructors, and stress management counselors.

I remember the good old days when ranch personnel, in their colorful and fragrant costumes, were more focused on supervisory issues like the spring roundup for branding and castration.

"Git along, little dogie! You comfortable now?"

While I was in London in May of 1998, I tuned in the BBC and caught the following tale.

A minor British actor found himself rather drunk at a party in conversation with a woman who looked very familiar but whose name he couldn't recall. Being British, he of course couldn't just admit that he didn't remember her name, and he sensed that she was somehow important and that he ought to know who she was, so he kept up the conversation hoping she'd drop some hint that would remind him. The conversation went on and on while he uttered inanities, desperately praying for a clue.

Then, through the alcohol fog, it came to him. Her mother. There was something about her mother that was significant. So, frantically he asked, "And so, uh, how's your mother?"

She had clearly long since realized that he didn't know who she was and had been stringing him along for the sheer pleasure of watching him squirm, but she obviously recognized that here was an opportunity not to be missed. So she responded, "Oh fine, fine. She's still the Queen."

It was Princess Anne.