Today is the “big day” on Capitol Hill. Brent Kavanaugh will have to answer to and about the allegations made against him. Several women have alleged that he at best, acted in an aggressive and sexualized manner towards them. At worst, he was/is a sexual predator.

Since Mark was killed, I boomerang between days and weeks where life seems like it’s returned to “normal.” I go off and do one of my various freelance activities, or I’m working on one of the one or two articles I turn and get paid for by the auto trade magazine I’ve written for since the summer of 2015. The activity allows me to push aside the pain that comes with losing someone central to my life.

Inevitably, something becomes a trigger, and I can go from “nearly normal,” to freefalling into an angry funk. When this occurs, it’s hard to want to care about anything for a day, or longer. I’m angry at the woman who hit and killed my son. I’m angry at people who seem to be so self-centered and oblivious about others and their pain. I’m sick of thinking about how I’m going to scrounge up some additional income, and a host of other emotions related to grief and loss. This week, it was something that someone who I thought had my back, said. This person once again indicated what an absolute shit they are and have been since Mark’s death upended my life and Mary’s. But it’s always about them and always has been. I must remind myself of that and breathe.

Last night, I returned from the private school where I’ve been tutoring since September, 2017. The impressive campus, replete with a mansion is 10 minutes away. “Falling” into my role as a tutor makes me realize that I’ve always had a knack for this. At least the skills I’ve been cultivating since my reinvention in 2004-2005 are transferable to tutoring and even substitute teaching. Who knows—perhaps I’ll spend time getting yet another certification tacked onto my resume? Medicare, a teaching certificate, and another possible certification to teach defensive driving courses could be my ticket to retirement riches. Maybe I won’t need to pick up bottles on the side of the road after leaving the workforce when I’m 75 or 80.

There are family members who have abandoned Mary and me. Yet, the two of us continue drawing upon a reserve of resilience we didn’t know we had. We move through the landscape of grief and mourning the only way we know how. Neither one of us are perfect and we’ve both acknowledged this to each other numerous times over the past 20 months. Yet, here we are, our unit of three reduced to two. We’re still standing, we’ve launched a foundation in Mark’s memory and we’ll be holding our fourth board meeting on Sunday. Two friends who have been there since Mark’s death have come along side of us to support us in a board capacity, and we’ll continue working in a tangible way, making a difference in Mark’s memory, and championing the causes he cared about: the environment, promoting social justice, as well as involving under-served populations directly in renewing their communities.

In July, Mary and I celebrated 36 years of marriage. We’ve actually been together for longer than that. We weathered some pretty difficult terrain in Indiana, early on in our marriage. At the time, we were duped into sitting under a racist, who excused his own son’s sexual predation. But we had the inner strength to call “bullshit” on something that many others didn’t and we left while others similar to us remained. We also did this without family nearby, offering support or validation.

Mary is the kind of partner that every man should have the privilege of spending their lives with. I don’t know how she’s been able to go back to work and deal with the never-ending barrage of tasks that she’s required to perform. This after enduring grief that only a mother knows. She’s also served as the administratrix of Mark’s estate. Grieving and the subsequent mourning that follows the death of an adult child who you loved more than life itself seems more than enough, without having to deal with the stress of maintaining the tenuous economic hold that most Americans have, while staying afloat in these days of corporate capitalism run amok.

We were supposed to go to the Finger Lakes Region and wine country for our anniversary. Instead, SI Joint Dysfunction found me on my back and out of commission. I know she was disappointed, but we got through July and early-August together. We did make it to Cape Cod for a wonderful weekend, spending it with one of Mark’s Brown MFA colleagues and friend, and her family. Maybe next year we’ll make it to upstate New York.

I’m not sure why, but while Mark was on the road, five weeks before he was hit and killed in Florida’s Panhandle region, I emailed him about something that had happened at the University of Maine at Orono when I was a freshman. It happened a few doors down from the dorm room I was living in, at Gannett Hall. It was supposed to be a “quiet dorm,” at least my section of the first floor. I chose the location because I was intent on studying, and playing baseball.

Gannett Hall, in the fall of 1980, could have been used as the set for Animal House. Students were drinking and out-of-control all hours of the day and night. My first weekend, I was forced to lie awake until three in the morning, while on the other side of my wall, a drunken party was taking place, replete with blasting music, yelling, and the sound of breaking glass.

A month into my freshman term, the door across the hall on the bathroom got torn off the hinges during Parents Weekend. When I went out into the hall on Saturday before the door got ripped from its moorings, the father of a student, drunk off his ass told me to “fuck off” when I asked a hall mate if he could turn his music down.

During the first week of school, this happened. I related it in an email to Mark on December 3, 2016:

I hated my time at UMO. The administration totally sucked. I think I told you about my roommate leaving school because a girl was basically gang-raped outside our door, just down the hall. They called it a “gang bang,” but what kind of guy participates in this? I remember telling the guy next door how I thought it was bullshit, and he basically called me a “fag,” because somehow, not participating in the public humiliation of a female made me less of a man. Just one memory of the school and I don’t think things are much better up there. Sorry to digress.

The administration were all weasels, trying to get me and my roommate to make our roommate seem like he was “mentally unstable.” It’s a long story, but something I haven’t forgotten (obviously).

I’ve never forgotten that incident. The sounds, the guys coming out and laughing, and then hearing the young woman leaving, having to make the catwalk past a bunch of drunken predators, telling them all to “fuck off.”

She was a year older than I was. She came from a small town similar to where I grew up in Lisbon Falls. A young man from her high school played on my intramural basketball team. Weeks later, while the story was circulating across the campus, he told me she was academically-gifted. She left UMO at the end of the semester. I don’t know what happened to her. I never forgot her and I wished somehow I could have done more, but I honestly didn’t know what to do.

Mark responded to my email with this:

I don’t think you’ve ever told me about your roommate leaving school. If you did I might not have been as receptive to the story as I am now. A lot of who I am today obviously stems from how you raised me and I think you did a good job teaching me to respect women. I still think I have room to grow and learn. One area where I would like to grow is being a better ally for women, minorities, and LGBTQ people. I think a good way to be an ally is to talk to other men about ways they can be better allies. I guess my point about all this is that I would like to hear more about this experience at UMO and have it lead to more conversations about our role as men in current society. 

I loved my son. I still love him, but that love hurts too much sometimes. I also recognize, in light of how society still holds regressive views about women and sexual violence towards them, we need young men like Mark, who respected women and was open to being an ally and supportive as a partner. If he were still alive, I know I’d be having conversations with him. He’d probably be joining actions in Providence, showing support for Dr. Kristen Blasey Ford and the other women.

Mark knew I wasn’t a perfect father, that I was flawed. He loved me anyways. However, the young man he became, and the way he lived right up to his last breath on earth validated that I was a father who was always there for him and that I loved him unconditionally.

What happened the fall of 1980 in Gannett Hall also traumatized one of my two roommates.

Bob D. was a redhead, who had been raised by his widowed father an  island off the Maine coast near Mount Desert Island. His dad was a caretaker of an estate. Looking back, I recognize that he was most likely homeschooled, or had elements of non-traditional education.

I remember he was an outdoors-ey type, with a set of the Foxfire books, an axe, and was going to major in forestry—that was until he found out what college was really like for a sensitive, committed young man who didn’t think it was okay to sexualize women.

Rumors were everywhere that there was going to be freshmen hazing. I know this really weighed on Bob’s mind. Unlike Bob, I was figuring out how I’d adapt and fight off the attackers, if necessary. I’m guessing my other roommate, also named Jim (who was the son of an Irish cop, from Jamaica Plain) was thinking the same.

Then, a week following the “Gannett Janet” incident happened, Bob had a meltdown in our room. He grabbed his axe and said, “I’m ready if anyone comes through that door.” Jim and I had to calm him down. This happened Saturday night/early Sunday morning.

By Sunday afternoon, Bob had packed up his stuff, and he left school after a mere two weeks. Nothing Jim and I could say to him would convince him otherwise.

Bob went back home. His father wrote a scathing letter to the president, and Jim and I got hauled into one of the administrative offices to “give our side of the story.”

I remember basically being pissed and telling them to figure it out on their own. I was angry that a quality human being was forced out of the college he had been looking forward to attending. I was also anti-authoritarian enough to not be cowed by administrative types. To Jim’s credit, he also wasn’t willing to help these assholes paper over the seriousness of what had happened.

I don’t know what happened to Bob. Maybe he attended school somewhere else, Perhaps he took over from his father and is now a caretaker of some palatial estate, I don’t know. I also wonder about Janet.

All of this was prompted after experiencing the back-and-forth related to today’s hearing, and the statements coming from Donald Trump, Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, and others.

UMO wasn’t a pleasant experience for me. I thought it mostly had to do with a combination of my baseball career coming to an end, being in love, and also, the pull of religion taking me in a different direction. It might have been partly due to those things that I left after three semesters. I now realize that the culture of drunken young men, seeing women as nothing else but a means to their own violent, sadistic sexual fantasies, factored into my decision to leave the school in the spring of 1982. I’m sure things like this are still going on at Orono and that the administration continues to turn a blind eye to it.

I’m sure some will accuse me of “virtue signaling” with this post, or worse. I am not. I’m simply relating some of my own experiences with men, and how they act towards women.

Honestly, often, I’m ashamed to be a white man. I’m old enough to know that the Brett Kavanaughs of the world get free passes for their behavior, while men who don’t come from privilege end up behind bars. I saw this firsthand when I worked at a prison in Indiana.

I’m also of an age to know that things have shifted. Since I’ve been in the workforce, sexual harassment training has become mandatory. Certain behaviors are no longer tolerated in the workplace. I also know that men like McConnell, Graham, Trump, and older ones like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, come from a time that seems prehistoric, even to me, someone who is halfway to a century.

None of us know how today’s hearing will go. I fear that even in the aftermath of #metoo, things haven’t changed enough. Too many men are only intent on preserving their weakening hold on power, privilege, and to a time when women weren’t respected, and having the courage to come forth with an allegation, even 30 years later, gets treated different than when men do the same.