The Easter Bunny and Sex Education

Easter has always been a big deal in my wife’s household.  When my step-daughter was small, the Easter Bunny would always hide eggs, candy and prizes all over the back yard (there were even biscuits for the dogs to hunt out) and would leave a poem containing clues for where to search.  (The Easter poem tradition continues today for Kristi and her husband.)

When Kristi was about seven years old, a relative on her father’s side of the family died just before Easter.  She wasn’t really familiar with death, except for the death of one of her mother’s dogs.  Marianne worried about how Kristi would take the news, so she got all serious at dinnertime and announced that she had some bad news.

Obviously anticipating the worst news she could imagine, Kristi became all teary and sobbed, “You mean the Easter Bunny died?!”

*

But not much more than a year later, she was all grown up and already a cynic.  I no longer remember what bad news prompted Marianne to sit the kid down and say, “I have to tell you something.”

Kristi sighed, rolled her eyes and with obvious boredom asked,  “Okay, so who died?”

*

When she was about eight or nine, we came home from shopping to find a message on the answering machine.  It was one of Kristi’s school friends.

“Kristi, guess what!” the girl gushed.  “I got…I got…a B-R-A-W!”

*

And then there was Sex Ed.  We must have done something right because she grew up unembarrassed by the subject and felt she could ask us pretty much anything (not that she always did.)  As a freshman at Bishop O’Dowd High School, she had to take a one-semester course called “Christian Sexuality.”  The course not only covered pretty detailed and graphic mechanics, but also morals, responsibility, caring and family values.

(This is an aside, but I have to give a nod to the teacher, Fr. Malo, one of the priests from the Order of Saint Basil, the Catholic order that runs the school.  One of his lessons was about love and loss and showing your loved ones – right now – how much you love them.  He had the students take four small slips of paper and write on each the name of a person they loved.  They then laid out the papers on their desk and, very slowly, Fr. Malo walked up and down the rows randomly taking one paper from each student’s desk.

(He explained to the students that that person had just died unexpectedly and asked them how they felt about it and what they would do or say if they could roll back time.  And then he repeated the process, taking one more name away from each student.

(Kristi had written the names of her dad, her mom, me and her Uncle Dale.  By the end of the hour, she relayed to us, the entire class was in tears and all of them vowed to go home and tell their loved ones how much they were loved.)

But back to sex.  Show-off that she was as the result of being an only child of liberal parents, she was the first to volunteer when Fr. Malo asked who would like to put the condom on the banana to show the rest of the class how it was done.

By liberal “parents,” I mean her mother and me.  Even to her father, she referred to us as her “parents.”  At about age 12, in the perverse way that kids have, she asked her father what a “virgin” was.  “Uh…I think that means a young girl,” he stammered, and she found the story hilarious when she relayed it to us.

*

When she was 15, I bought her what I hoped was her first pack of condoms.  Her mother and I decided it would be more appropriate coming from me, so I grabbed a pack at the store (skipping over the “extra large” and the “Ribbed – For Her Pleasure” in favor of plain old Trojans), sat down with her in her bedroom, reminded her gently about pregnancy and STDs and said as long as she was careful and discrete, her mother and I would never ask her any questions.

*

Years later, she told us that every time she used one, she was careful to buy another one to replace it with just in case we were snooping through her purse to count the missing condoms.  Well, at least she was using them.  Usually.

“Now, Kris,” I said in mock disappointment.  “You know we always said that as long as you didn’t go off the deep end, we wouldn’t snoop or ask any questions.”

“Yeah, I know.  But you also said I should be careful.”

*

When she was a senior, her mother and I were joking a bit about sex when Kristi suddenly announced, “I haven’t had sex in more than six months.”

I told you the kid was perverse.  She loved saying things just to see what the reaction would be.  But Marianne and I both bit our lips and didn’t pursue it at the time.  But a couple of weeks later, immediately after her graduation, I took her out rowing on a nearby lake.

“So,” I began.  “About this lost virginity of yours.”

“What do you want to know?” she offered simply.

“No, baby.  I don’t want to ask you anything.  I want to know if there’s anything you want to ask me.  Sex can be pretty complicated and confusing, and we’ve always told you we’ll be here for you.”

*

And then there was the story I call “Robbie and The Hooters,” as if they were a doo-wop group.

Kristi had a friend named, of course, Robbie, with whom she spent a fair amount of time talking on the telephone.  Like all hormonal teenaged boys, he was obsessed with breasts – only they talk about it with girls today, unlike when I was that age.

Kristi found it quite amusing.  “And Robbie’s all ‘Dude, if I had me a pair of hooters, I’d just be playing with them all the time.’ “

“Well, that just goes to show how immature boys are at that age,” I said, slowly setting her up.  “When he gets older he’ll learn that boobs aren’t the most important thing in the world.”

“Okay, Mister Smart-Ass,” she challenged.  “And just what is?”

“Pussy,” I said simply.

“Oh, Steve, you’re disgusting.”

“Well, it’s your own fault,” Marianne laughed.  “You had to ask!”

*

When she was in college, she and most of her friends managed to find a purveyor of fake drivers licences so they could go bar hopping on the weekends.  One evening a nice-looking girl kept following her around and hitting on her.  Kristi kept drifting off into the crowd to try to escape, but the girl kept following, asking questions and making conversation and subtle suggestions.

Now, the kid is not homophobic, but she was beginning to get uncomfortable from the unwanted attention.  Eventually, she made her way back to the bar – followed, of course – and ordered some exotic cocktail or other.

“Ummm, that looks good,” cooed the stranger.

“Well it doesn’t taste like pussy, you carpet muncher!” Kristi snapped before storming out.

*

Saving the best for last, we move back to middle school again, and first to an out-of-town soccer tournament where one of the teams was from the California town of Clovis.  I nudged Kristi in the ribs and pointed to the word “Clovis” on the back of one of the girls’ jerseys and we both burst out laughing, to the total confusion of the other parents.

It seems that earlier that year, her class had had the one- or two-hour course on sex education, complete with movie which the parents were invited to preview before it was shown to the kids.  I found it pretty bland, compared with the information she’d already gotten at home.  Years before, we had bought an illustrated book that promoted itself as appropriate for her age group and, instead of reading it to her, or giving it to her to read, we asked her to read it to us.

But even after the book and the middle-school sex-ed class, she was still a little confused about the anatomy thing.

“Steve, what do they call that really sensitive little spot that a woman has?” she asked one day.  “Is that a clovis?”

So no wonder that the soccer moms thought we’d lost our minds laughing uproariously at the name of a team’s home town.

(P.S. to the marriage story)

The story of our marriage ceremony didn’t really do justice to Chuck, and newspaper obituaries are such fleeting things that I thought a little less transitory memorial was in order for the kindest, gentlest person I’ve known.

I’ll rush through the historical details so I can get to the good stuff.  

Chuck was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but for most of his career only served in an associate role at various churches.  His first love was social justice, which led him to his master’s in social work and a variety of positions with mental health counseling agencies and elder-care agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As the long-time executive director of San Leandro Community Counseling (a precursor to the successful Davis Street Foundation in San Leandro), where I first met him, he invented a novel way to leverage talent.  SLCC had been founded as a drug counseling agency during the 1960s, when Great Society and, later, Revenue Sharing money flowed freely.  A decade later, however, public funds began drying up and the agency began having trouble meeting its payroll.  At the same time, students pursuing a counseling degree were hard put to find someone to supervise them during the hundreds of hours of (unpaid) internship they were required to put in.

Chuck put the two problems together to form a solution.  A paid staff of five experienced counselors would oversee an intern staff of some twenty degree candidates who would do the actual counseling.  It was a four-to-one return on our money.

Chuck also marched with Cesar Chavez, was detained by the KBG for attempting to smuggle Bibles into the Soviet Union and worked extensively for the inclusion of LGBT clergy into the Presbyterian Church.

***

Enough bio.  Now for the stories.

At age 60, Chuck finally decided to come out as a gay man.  In typical Chuck fashion, he threw himself a birthday party, the invitation to which ran to two typewritten pages.  “I hope that none of my friends will think the less of me because I’m gay,” he wrote.  

At the party, I turned to a table-mate and quipped, “Ah, Chuck will do anything to get attention.  He’ll turn 60.  He’ll turn gay...”

To Chuck himself, I said (and I was not the only one), “Chuck, how goddamned stupid do you think we are?  Everybody knows and nobody cares.”

***

Chuck died about three weeks after performing his last wedding, for my step-daughter, Kristi.  At the reception, he told me he had booked a flight to France to see his friends there one last time.  “If I have to say goodbye to them, I want to do it in person,” he said.

But he came home weak and was almost immediately hospitalized.  He knew he was dying, and he called my office.  Damnit, I wasn’t there, but he spoke to Marianne and told her his plans.

“I think they’re going to let me go home tomorrow, and I want to have a potluck party for all of my close friends.  I know you’re going to miss me, and I want to tell everybody not to.  It’s going to be okay, and you shouldn’t spend any time grieving.”

Chuck died the next morning, his last thoughts having been for the welfare of his friends, and not for himself.

If I am reborn, I don’t want to come back as a white cow.  I want to come back as Chuck McLain.

(How we were tossed out of Notre Dame cathedral and into the snow.)

When we decided to get married, I knew there was only one person to perform the ceremony.  My long-time friend Chuck, a social services administrator who was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, had married most of his large circle of friends, and almost all of their children.  There was no question: only Chuck would do.

Chuck would be happy to perform the marriage.  Just name the date.  Anytime other than the last three weeks in February, when he would be skiing in France.  Unless, of course, we wanted to join him in France and be married there…

How can you turn down an offer like that?  To be married in Paris!  We projected the cost and determined that to fly to Paris and stay for ten days would probably cost less than what we would spend on the entire production here:  renting a site, inviting all the friends,  relatives, in-laws and ex-in-laws, and providing dinners, Champagne and lodgings for dozens of people.

So it would be Paris.  But when?  Chuck was going skiing in the French Alps and would be in Paris only on February 13, 14 and 15.  Stupidly (not realizing the impossibility of obtaining dinner reservations at a decent restaurant on February 14), I told him, “Hey: there’s no question.  If those are our only choices, it has to be Valentine’s Day.”

The next question was where to do the ceremony.  I  hadn’t been to Europe in years, but I had spent several weeks in Paris on a couple of occasions.  I knew the centre ville.  There is a little park right on the point of the Isle de la Cité where I used to dangle my legs over the rock parapet late at night after dinner and toss my cigarettes into the Seine to see whether they would flow to the left or the right, and, being alone, look jealously at the Parisian lovers alongside me and above me on the quais.  There are the Luxembourg Gardens, where a starving Hemingway claimed to catch pigeons for dinner when the police weren’t looking.

Both were ideal locations–in the summer or fall.  But in February there are no flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens, the city’s fountains are frozen solid and the chill factor on the point of Cité approaches 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

My indoor location preferences were Ste. Chapelle, a marvellous little jewel-box chapel from the 13th Century, St. Severin, an ancient stone church directly across the Seine from Notre Dame, with modern, abstract, stained-glass windows, and, of course, Notre Dame de Paris.

Chuck’s Parisian friends Georges and Christine (who were to be the witnesses at our wedding), started calling around.  They couldn’t reach St. Severin.  Ste. Chapelle reported that we could have the wedding there, but they wouldn’t close the chapel for us.  We would have to put up with tourists and their cameras.  But the priest who answered the phone at Notre Dame gave us the green light.

Unfortunately, Christine forgot to ask his name.

The six of us showed up at Notre Dame at 7:00 p.m.: Marianne, my soon-to-be-step-daughter Kristi, myself, Chuck, Georges and Christine.  Marianne had a bouquet of roses courtesy of Christine.  We took pictures outside the cathedral: Chuck, Kristi, Marianne and her roses, and me.

Inside the cathedral, Chuck looked for an empty side chapel.  He found one which held a floor lamp.  He opened the wrought-iron gate, the rest of us filed in, and Chuck began the ceremony.  As I remember, he had reached the point at which he said, “Kristin has written something special she would like to read at this joyous occasion.”  And then the troubles began.

Someone on the other side of the wrought-iron gate complained.  A crowd gathered.  This was a sacrilege and we shouldn’t be here.  Chuck, who stood about six-foot-four, but who was* generally the most accommodating of persons, summoned up his deepest voice to intone, “This is a solemn occasion.  Would you please leave us in peace?  We won’t be long.”

Someone in the crowd summoned a church official, who arrived accompanied by a pair of Notre Dame policemen.  Who would imagine that a cathedral would have its own police force?  This is highly unusual, the official kept repeating.  Highly unusual.

Chuck was arguing that such a sacred rite was not sacrilegious to the cathedral.

Marianne was making that groaning noise that means, “how did I let myself get into this?”

Kristi was rolling her eyes as only a ten-year-old girl can.

Christine, who should have been explaining that she had obtained permission, was silent, hiding behind her husband.

I was thinking, just skip the ceremony, Chuck.  Say the pronouncement and let’s get out of here.

“I have many friends in the reformed churches,” the official was saying.  “I would never try to perform a Catholic ceremony in one of their churches.  This is highly unusual.  Highly unusual.”

With Chuck unwilling to give up the personalized ceremony he had written and the church official equally determined to prevent the ceremony from proceeding, it soon became obvious that we would not be married in Notre Dame.  We were unceremoniously escorted out.  Chuck later had his ceremony back in our apartment, where the wedding music playing on the radio was from Bizet’s Carmen:  “If you don’t love me, I love you.  And if I love you, watch out!”

People say to us, “You were married in Paris?  On Valentine’s Day?  How romantic!”

Marianne makes that same little groaning noise.  Kristi, now almost 30, rolls her eyes.  I say, “Well…there’s a story goes with that.”

__________

* Chuck died of pancreatic cancer in 2005.  Just like Chuck, who always looked 20 years younger than his real age,  he lost not a single hair during his chemotherapy.  He had performed more than 400 marriage ceremonies during his long career (he didn’t start counting until he’d been at it for several years, and so could never give an exact count.)  His very last ceremony was for my beautiful step-daughter, Kristi.  I cried all the way through his memorial service.  Requiescat in pace, my great and good friend.