Revisited

Before I go on to the Graduate school years let's go back to 1952. I was seven years old and we had just moved to California. I might just say back to California because I was born at the very tail-end of the Second World War in Oakland, California. My father had been in the Army Air Corps during the war and in the Infantry before that. He was among the first to go out into the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. In fact, he was a couple of days out from Pearl Harbor in an unarmed troop transport when Pearl was attacked. In 1952 he had just returned from Japan where he had been stationed, now in the Air Force, during the Korean Conflict. We moved with him back to California and lived in three different places that year. We lived in a motel while my parents looked for housing and then we moved to a small rental in a community called Pleasanton. It was right near a very large Air Base called Parks Air Base. It was an Air Force Hospital. It received the wounded from Korea after they stopped at another Hospital in Hawaii. Eventually we moved into our own house. My mother was a house wife and my father a Master Sargent in the Air Force. To help pay the bills my father worked a second job at the Air Base and manged the Base Bowling Alley. All these things were significant in my life, but another event happened in 1952 that was pretty important. A young ex-soldier went to Europe and had one of the most publicised series of Sex change operations ever. She came back to the U.S as Christine Jorgensen. She was all over the papers and the radio. We didn't have a television yet so I don't remember anything there, but I bet it was there also. I do remember the publicity in the papers and the painful opening up of the details of her life. Her surgeries were not like the surgery today. She was castrated and then had a penectomy. There was no reconstruction and no vaginoplasty. In a true sense I believed that she had been mutilated. As a young gender confused boy her experience was terrifying. "See what happens to Gender confused men!" It all added to the background of my long struggle with my gender issues.
Several years later there was another very significant happening. It was more personal and more terrifying. I can remember my mother in tears one night and wondering what it was all about. The next day she explained that she had found a lump on her left breast and whe was afraid it might be cancer. Cancer in the mid 1950's wasn't something that was often cured. When she came back from the Dr's office she explained that she would have to have an operation. Later she explained that they would remove her left breast if they found cancer in the lump. Parks Air Base was still a large Hospital and she went there for her surgery. I couldn't visit her there because children were limited from visiting. They had to remove my mother's breast and she was away in the Hospital a rather long time. I did all the chores in the house. I cooked and cleaned and I did the laundry. Doing the laundry in those days wasn't easy. The washing machine was a big tub with a center agitator. After the cloths had been washed and then rinsed in the tub they had to be put through a wringer to remove as much water as possible. The wringer was a contraption attached to the tub with two rollers and the cloths were squeezed between the rollers. To dry the cloths I had to hang them on the line until they were dry. I would then take them off the line and fold them. I hadn't mastered ironing and I still am prety poor at it so I was spared that.
When my mother came home she was still pretty weak so I had to continue being the "woman of the house." I really didn't mind it all that much. In fact there was a certain satisfaction to it. My mother had not only had her breast removed, but all the lymph nodes on her left side and her upper left arm. She could barely move her left arm. She had a tremendous wound on her side. Eventually she showed it to me. It was horrible. She healed though and eventually lived to be 74. She was one of the few cancer survivors of her day. There was no chemotherapy and radiation was so experimental and grossly overdone that it wasn't practical. Eventally my mother resumed her palce as the woman of the house and I went back to my normal life, if you could call it normal. My mother did struggle emotionally though. She felt less complete as a woman. There was no good plastic surgery for reconstruction. A year later I was crossdressing every night as I have already described. When my mother discovered some of my cloths and confronted me I had assumed she had also told my father. I was so humiliated, but very little came of it. I discussed that time just recently with my father and he doesn't remember it at all. Maybe my mother hadn't told him after all. I was always very close to her and we talked frequently. As I grew older the conversations got more adult. Thinking back makes me kind of nostalgic. I miss her terribly. When she died so many years later I couldn't cry. It took me all of 17 years to really allow myself to accept her death and grieve.
In school the girls were changing and beginning to develop and I so much wanted to be just like them. I on the other hand started to grow facial hair, lots of it. It was dark and covered my whole lower face. My father made me shave and I was shaving daily by the age 12. Hair grew other places also and my voice started to change. I had a wonderful high singing voice and all of a sudden I was croaking out a deep base. It was totally shattering and I made up my mind to accept it and move on. I couldn't see any acceptable way of changing things, so I made the best of it.
Back to Graduate school - Yale namely. In college, The Universiy of Rhode Island, I had been one of the smartest and on the top of the class. When I went to Yale I expected to be just average. Either Yale was over-rated or I misjudged my own capabilities. I was at the top of the heep at Yale also. My first masters degeree was Cum Laud and my second was with Honors. The system had changed by my second Masters. Both degrees were in Theology. Undregrad Philosophy and Grad Theology. Not a lot of income potential in either. Those were stormy years, both politically and personally.
My introduction to graduate school was a keg party. Religious graduate programs are called Seminary. So I went to Seminary and was greeted by an alcoholic bash. That year was pretty much an alcoholic blurr. Every evening after chapel there would be a sherry party. Sometimes the faculty would have one and at least one student would have one in their room. As the year wore on the sherry diminished in quality generally and the parties graduated into harder alcohol. I soon discovered that I had a remarkable ability to drink vast quantities. I got terrible hangovers also. I wasn't drunk on a daily basis, but it happened all too often. I also had Migrane head aches. That only lasted a few years, but they were paralysing. I had to retreat to my room and pull the drapes and sleep it away. Star Trek was on TV, the original one. I didn't watch much TV though. I had a few dates, mostly casual ones. Nothing serious or sexual. Near the end of the school year we had a Picnic. I had a date with a gorgeous girl from Albertus Magnus College just up Prospect Street in New Haven. I was excited and I liked her very much. It was our first date. That morning I sprained my right ankle so bad I had to go to the Doctor. It was a bad sprain and I had to walk on crutches. The date was a misreable failure. I was responsible totally. I was such an ass. She was very gracefull about the whole thing and I got drunk -real drunk. I was so ashamed I could never look her in the face again even though she got word to me that she still wanted to go out. As I said I was an ass and didn't take her up on the date.
Next the Summer