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How a politically active gay writer / poet / found-object sculptor (dog walker / French tutor / apartment painter / cat sitter / waiter / bartender, etc.) became an inadvertent grandperson, is a story that continues to surprise me.
Not the least because it is my own — and that of what we three like still to call our Alternative Family Structure, although it has expanded over the years to take on tribal characteristics. It all began one day in 1984 when, unlocking the door to my studio apartment, I looked down into the eyes of my four-year-old neighbor, Samantha Rosenberg. And for lack of any better explanation, I fell in love.
Samantha lived across the hall with Nancy, her recently divorced mother. She had dismounted from her pink tricycle (the building had a long hallway, ideal for an Upper East Side kid to play in on her own), and she tugged at my trouser leg. She asked for some help opening her apartment door.
And the rest was history — our own annals, the story of three people who raised each other into adulthood and beyond. When I talk about this (and I do), I like to make it clear that Sammy is an old soul —wise in ways that continue to astound her mother and me. And in the telling, I think perhaps she was never more far-seeing than that day in the hall when she decided her mother could probably use some help.
And that she, Samantha, could work with me. She saw that I had possibilities.
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We started slowly.
I changed lightbulbs and painted the bathroom (a somewhat startling faux-finished green marbling that brought me several commissions over the following years). My fondness for my power drill and WD-40 earned me nickname “Tool,” which we used interchangeably with Samantha’s seventh-grade decision that I was her “Alternative Father Figure” aka “AFF.” Samantha became, for reasons on which we’ve never been completely clear, “Lamb Dancer,” and later, as her passion for 19th-century Russian novelists developed, “The Princess Samnitsky.”
Nancy, in addition to her Ivy League credentials and career in the financial services sector, was something of an after-hours hot ticket, so she rounded out our list of soubriquets with “Doll.” Our special names and special language evolved over the course of years, as did our family. Samantha’s father remarried and started a new family — never abandoning his first-born, but leaving Nancy and me as primary on-site parenting units for the amazing Samnitsky.
And amazing she was. Precocious and inquisitive, nothing was too much for our curly-haired marvel. Sammy was terrific at math and soon took over deciding how much money could be spent on what at the grocery store. She loved French and rapidly became fluent — and my years in Paris studying the development of the 17th-century psychological novel and teaching about Emily Dickinson could finally be put to use.
Most of all, she and I shared a love of words. I am a writer, and I taught her what I knew about how to write. For someone who had always thought he would be a teacher, I had been given my own school.
Homework became an organizing event, and we were often joined after school by Sammy’s friends. By the time Sammy was in high school, I had graduated from the Swedish Institute and had my own massage therapy practice, so I could be around, sometimes annoyingly, pretty much full-time.
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I somehow survived the epidemic.
In that process, Sammy became an unofficial member of ACT UP — and her mother and I remain convinced that her early exposure to how public action can force government to act (and react) better was a contributing factor to both her firm moral compass and her commitment to a career in public service. We three grew into a functioning family unit.
Sammy had a dramatic and very scary emergency appendectomy. Nancy moved into a high-pressure job involving a lot of travel. As a result, during the week I was the parental figure of last resort, following up on school assignments and working with a network of neighbors and building-employees in our 17-story vertical village to make sure that Sammy could never get away with much.
Not that she was ever particularly good at breaking the rules — whatever minor infraction she committed, from cutting class to sneaking a cigarette, she somehow was immediately apprehended. With success as a career criminal denied, years of our shared crush on Chris Noth in TV’s Law & Order indicated that some form of law enforcement would be a better way to go. And off in that direction she went — after law school, a successful stint as an assistant district attorney in Queens, then moving on to be the chief of staff for a Democratic New York State Assembly member and now lawyering at a high level for New York StateOur Alternative Family Structure has evolved and expanded.
Shortly after Sammy left for college, Nancy met Joe, and they married. I met Brad, and we didn’t. Samantha met the incredibly wonderful Jonathan.
Nancy and I met his parents. Everyone fell in love with everyone else. And then I, as the resident gentile, insisted on the religious wedding, which I got to give — and in true found-object style, made the chuppah out of crutches, chopsticks and pull tabs, all collected from the streets of New York.
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Which brings us to the recurring astonishment of our continuing saga: Thirty-whatever years on, with countless stories to recount about the joys and challenges of being Samantha’s AFF, the politically active gay writer / poet / sculptor (dog walker / French tutor / apartment painter / cat sitter / waiter / bartender, etc.) is now a grandperson.
It took some effort, but I’ve adjusted to the idea that Samantha and I were both old enough for this to happen (and in gay years, I’m about 90). I’ve embraced my new status with passion. Moses Robert Darche has entered our lives and changed everything. He is a miracle.
Moses is also the best friend of my redoubtable canine companion, Emily Dickinson Gaynor. And I am putty in their collective tiny paws and hands.
I wrote a poem, “Meeting Moses,” about the first time I held my grandchild. And another. And then another. Which became my first book of poetry, Everything Becomes a Poem. It is dedicated to Moses in the hopes that, in the years to come when I am no longer a physical presence, I will be something more than a collection of amusing anecdotes about that man from across the hall who helped to raise his mother. And in the meantime, I am that pony-tailed old guy with a small dog (who thinks she’s a wolf), who gets to push the stroller home from daycare and tries not to talk too much about how brilliant his grandson is.
Inadvertent grandpersonhood? I highly recommend it.
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Originally Published on OTV Magazine
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