Happy 17th Anniversary John!

Today is John's and my 17th anniversary. Goddess it's been a long strange trip and I wouldn't change much, mostly just my own crap, John is about as perfect as he can be.
I'm posting this song because this is what he is in my life. He's always there for me no matter what I do or how stupid I can be. I think I'll light a candle today for all the lovers in the world and all those seeking love so that they might find one another.

All my Love and Lightning,
Grimm

Wedding number 1 and our first pet.

Where do I even begin when talking about the man who has changed everything in my life? I am humbled and awed by the love I receive from this man. John is everything to me.

When we met I was at a real turning point in my life. I had just about given up on myself. Nothing I did ever seemed to work out the way I wanted or needed it to, and now I was living back at my sisters’ home. In a job I hated and with no car so I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Meeting John changed much of that.

John has no idea of the impact he has on people. My sisters for example have hated EVERY person I ever brought home that was in anyway a love interest. With John they fell immediately in love. I remember Cathy asking me what my intentions were with John, as if she was protecting him from ME. I can laugh about it now but it stung a bit that my sisters had thought I was unworthy of my boyfriend. John’s Father and Brother were VERY hesitant around me and I could understand. My sisters, in fact my whole family, are very loving and accepting but his are a very different breed of people than I was used to. His father hated me like nothing else and Jim was not happy with my being in his brother’s life. He tried to hide it but it’s only recently that I have actually felt welcome and accepted by Jim and his family.

Only a few days after we had met John went away on vacation and I figured I would be fine with him gone, after all we had only just met, but I was a mess without being able to get in touch with him. I think the one point in the first few months that let me know for sure that I was deeply in love was the car accident.

I was driving a delivery truck for an auto-parts store and out on a delivery when an older man pulled into oncoming traffic and slammed into me head on. I almost went through the windshield but the only thought was to contact John, not my sisters, not Eric but John.

After some serious idiocy on the hospitals part I was released unharmed but a bit banged up. John drove the hour and a half to my sisters’ house just to spend a few minutes with me and make sure I was OK.

Eventually the driving got to us even though He bought me a car so I could drive up to him and save him the 3 hour round trip. I moved into his home above his stereo store in Shillington PA. It was a very strange experience at first as he had a water bed and I was unable to sleep on it, plus I would toss and turn all the time and literally flush John out of the bed. Eventually we got a regular mattress and solved some of that problem. I was working at Boscov’s in their auto department and looking at getting back into the Ren Faire game, when John asked me to marry him.

It was so nonchalant, that I almost missed it. He just started asking me what I wanted to do for the wedding and I asked him, “Are you asking me to marry you?” He smiled and said I thought that's where we were going with this.

So we decided we would get married one year from the day we met April 8^th 1994, but the Minister was busy that weekend so we got married on April 15^th 1995 yes we got married on Tax Day here in the USA. The wedding was wonderful and we went to Key West for our honeymoon. While we were there we picked up our first pet. While walking down a street we happened upon a little black ball of fur that had run out into the street and right up to me. I picked the puppy up and was fully enraptured by the puppy licks when John asked if we wanted one. There were 2 pups but only the brindled on was for sale. I turned to him and said I would have to think about it. John knew I had grown up in a small zoo. My sister Cathy rescued animals and nursed them back to health then kept them. We actually had well over a hundred animals at one point living inside and outside the house so he knew I was not inclined to have animals, but he also knew I missed having a dog.

Well we talked about it over dinner and decided that the puppy was ours. I named him Key Wester or Keyster for short. John instantly heard Keister and thought it was a butt joke. Let me tell you he was the best behaved puppy I ever saw. And I adored him from the first. He was a Chow/Akita mix and bright as a button. When the lady who was selling him found out we lived in PA she just gave him to us. She wanted him out of the heat of the Keys. Because we drove to Key West we didn’t have to worry about taking him on a plane and so we drove home stopping every few hours for walkies. Oh god I miss Keyster some times. He was such a great dog. He died from cancer only a year after we moved to Philly.

Yes Virginia there is such a thing as Love at First Sight.

I started to live again in my late 20’s I think I was 27 or 28 when I had my first visit to Hillside campground. I had met a few local gays through of all things bear in Canada. Hillside is a blast if very scary to someone who had had little exposure to other gay men let alone a bunch of horny half naked cruisey gay men in a place known for sex parties. I really was a novice at it all. Girl the things I saw in the first half hour there… Makes me um, nostalgic… Yeah that’s it Nostalgic.

I had been going to the Bikestop at least once a week for a few years by then and one of the great people I met was Ron, I had a crush on him because he was living the kind of life I wanted to live, Society for Creative Anachronisms, Bear club (Ron, me and a few others had started Buddy Bears which became the Delaware Valley Bears the first Bear club in Philly), and just living an open life. Well Ron didn’t feel the same for me so I moved on.

I met Jim when I was 29 and I was feeling really bad about my life, Mom was gone and my sisters and I were sharing the family house but Mom had written me out of her will when I was seeing Mary (Mom hated her with a fury unlike God had seen before) and so the house belonged to Jean and Cathy and I was feeling like a guest in the house I grew up in. Jim was living with an older lover and the situation was not good for either of them. Jim and I lied to each other about just about everything and thought the other didn’t catch on. We got an apartment in Philly and things just devolved in a few months to me feeling no KNOWING I was living a lie and Jim having such stress on him that he eventually snapped. He told me something that scared me enough that I took off and moved in with Eric’s girlfriend Stephanie. I had been working as a Psychic for the Psychic Friends Network but felt it was not going anywhere so I quit and Jim got me a job at Wawa. The Wawa job sucked rancid bat shit and after I left Jim it just got worse. I started to go to the Tom Cat cinema for cheep anonymous sex and really got into debasing myself (I did warn you I would be bearing my soul here). I eventually lost the job at Wawa when I got a terrible flu (The more I know about Congestive Heart Failure I think that’s when my condition started) and couldn’t get out of bed most days. Stephanie couldn’t afford to keep me as her housemate and eventually told me to leave. Devastated and sick I limped back to my sisters’ tail between my legs and a hole where my soul had been.

So there I was turning 30 and no one in my life, living at home and driving a delivery truck for a homophobic NAPA store. My life was complete!

But I’m nothing if not lucky. I’ve always found a way to fall into what I want even if it means going through hell first. Ron and I had remained friends, I still consider him one of my best friends even though we run in very different circles. Ron had called me up asked me if I could help with the Mr. Philadelphia Leather event at the Bikestop and I said yes because I could be at the ‘stop and not have to think about meeting anyone because I had decided that I would never find love so I might as well just drink and not get to involved with anyone but my friends. I was selling tickets to the Leather pageant when Ron came up to me and said there was this hot bear named John on the 3^rd floor asking about the Delaware valley Bears, I should answer his questions but not let anyone else near him because Ron wanted him. Ron was working a 3^rd shift job at the time and had to leave for work. I said I would and left the booth to the others. I went up to the “Top of the Stop” and saw who Ron was talking about. I looked at him and it appeared he saw me and was giving me the brush off so I left the floor and went to the basement bar called the “Pitstop”. It took me a while to get down there and I found that John had beaten me there. I had promised Ron that I would answer John’s questions and so I made my way over and introduced myself. John hadn’t seen me on the 3^rd floor after all and I felt more comfortable talking to him then. So comfortable that we eventually started kissing and I went home with him to his place in Reading PA.

I will tell you right now that there IS such a thing as “Love at first Sight”. John is everything I had been looking for, smarter than most people I had ever met, caring, compassionate, older than me, and had his head together. I still don’t understand what he sees in me, but I’m not going to over think love, that kind of thinking leads to madness. One of the funny things about our first days together is that I was monitoring a safe sex party the night after the Leather event and invited John to come along. He jumped at the chance as he had never been to one before. Before we left I said to him “Look I’m only chaperoning the first part and will want to play around myself the other half, If that’s a problem let me know and I’ll stop. I already feel something special her and don’t want to ruin it.” He made me promise the same thing even through my protestations that I “didn’t have a jealous bone in my body”. Thus our second ‘date’ was an orgy. Sure enough watching John have fun with a group of guys was a bit much for me but I kept my mouth shut because I wanted him to have fun, we weren’t a couple after all, we had only met the night before. Once my shift was over I just couldn’t bring myself to have any fun despite the attempts of the guys around me. I finally said to john that I was not interested in anyone but him and with a sigh of relief he admitted the same. We went up the stair into the ‘no sex area’ and lay down on the couch cuddling and kissing. I told him I thought I loved him right there and he said the same to me.

We talked about my moving in with him and open relationships, we decided that I couldn’t move in for 6 months and if after 1 year we felt the relationship could handle it we would open it up to others, like I said he was older and much more intelligent than anyone else I had met. 6 months to the day I had a job in Reading and I moved in and we decided to get married at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading on our 1 year anniversary.

Wow that’s a long post, More coming tomorrow.