Words from on high

I'm halfway through Kenji Yoshino's Covering at the moment. It's a well written book, a quilted blend of personal and political narratives, history and theory. A poet in his undergraduate years, Yoshino knows economy. He makes a sentence do the work that other law professors might spend a whole chapter on.

Yoshino describes how, under the stress of keeping his sexuality hidden while pursuing an academic career, he had a kind of minor emotional breakdown in front of his father. Then:

[t]hree weeks later, I came home for Christmas. My mother met me at Logan Airport, a hummingbird of love and anxiety. I was still at the slow-moving end of the animal spectrum. She didn't make me talk. "Don't think so hard," she said in Japanese. "Life is not that simple." I loved her for this.

I think of the contrast between this and the scene in Angels in America where Joe comes out to his mother over the phone, and she in turn reveals that "of course" his father never loved him. Callous in only the way hurt loved ones can be, she then hangs up.

I had a long phone conversation yesterday with my father, during which we talked about his reaction all those years ago when I came out to him over dinner. Although the impetus for this talk was less than ideal, and placed him in a somewhat defensive mood, I welcomed the opportunity to discuss this episode of my life, with the benefit of hindsight.

Each of us was ensconced in the safety of our rooms, telephones and memory providing the emotional equivalent of protective padding. My body, however, refused to acknowledge the temporal and geographical distance. My voice grew hoarse and my head began to ache, old neural and endocrinological pathways firing up again from that intensely emotional time, only six and a half years ago.

Apparently the body renews itself every seven years. It's worth revisiting memories before then.