Live 2 Learn

Photo by  SHILWANT roy  on  Unsplash July 20, 1969 I remember it well. I arrived at Mississippi State University the day before the landing and moon walk. Earlier that year, in May my father had died leaving me parentless after my mother's death eighteen months earlier. In the Fall of 1968 I applied and was accepted into a program for high school students between the junior and senior years of high school. The program was called Special Program for Academically Talented Students (SPATS) and we participants were able to take college courses for credit to give us a head start when we enrolled after graduation. Because of Daddy's death I was allowed to attend starting in July violating a major SPATS requirement of attending both Summer terms. The advisor/counselor for the program called me and suggested that he "boil down" the orientation I would miss in early June. He told me to NEVER tell any of my professors or fellow students that I was a SPATS (you can pr...

Fall of 1990, in the isolation wing of St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania I am holding the hand of a twenty-four-year-old man, Joey, as he faced death in less than twenty-four hours.  He had asked me to pray for him but my reluctance to pray aloud and my overwhelming emotions at the moment silenced me. I didn’t know Joey that well, and I was not an AIDS-Buddy for anyone let alone Joey whom I had met two months before that night. I had attended several funerals or memorial services since moving to Allentown to work for Air Products and Chemicals. Some of the services were for people I had met briefly or knew through my volunteer work teaching a workshop called “ Eroticizing Safer Sex for Gay Men .” I was at some funerals for men I had never met but attended because their family was not attending, or they had lost all their friends out of fear of contagion or association or through death. I was under constant pressure from friends who were Gay activists or from lea...

One of my favorite perquisites of working for a large company resulted from serving on a Community Affairs Committee for AMD .  AMD at that time had a solid reputation in all the communities in which we operated as a company that “gave back ” to the community.  We had a team of professionals who received and evaluated requests for money and in-kind donations as well as volunteers and that team made choices and recommended to a group of executives (including me) how AMD should respond.  The professionals serving on this team were so good that we as a committee mostly just rubber stamped their recommendations.  Another of our duties as committee members was to represent AMD in photo ops with the non-profits we supported so I have numerous photos of me handing a huge oversized check to some executive director or board chairperson.  In the photo shown here Karin Dicks one of the professionals I was talking about and I flank Father Jaime Case, then the Executive Di...

            I was in the fourth grade when I had my first identifiable sexual feelings.  I didn't call them sexual feelings then.  Actually, when I begged God's forgiveness that night (because I was certain that anything that felt good was bad) I remember describing it as "a tingling in the bottom of my stomach, like the time I broke into the elementary school - bad and wonderful at the same time."  I wasn't a juvenile delinquent or anything just a kid who was easily influenced by my peers.  Four of us broke into the elementary school and our vandalism was to write (in easily erasable chalk) "Zorro was here!" on several classroom chalk boards. Fear, tingling, sexual - whatever I was feeling I liked it.              It was 1962.  My sister and her friends were giggling about a packet that had come in the mail from the Fabian Fan Club. They were getting ready for my Moth...

I grew up in Magnolia, Mississippi and I wasn't aware as a child but I was spoiled.  The third child, the baby, and the only boy.  My father's father had been the only son in his family of 10 kids so the continuation of the Gardner name fell on his shoulders.  My father had three brothers and two sisters but one of his brothers, Uncle Paul never had children, one of his brothers Uncle Preacher had three girls and his baby brother, Uncle Roy had two boys.  We three boys now owned that burden of carrying on the name so we got special treatment and besides, we were growing up in the fifties when all males were enjoying a lot of male privileges. When I think back on my childhood a certain birthday present stands out as illustrative of my treatment in the family. Eight years old I remember vividly riding in the middle of the front seat of our car. I was sitting on the lowered armrest between Mother and Daddy with my sisters Joy and Jinya Lea in the bac...

 Summer after 4th grade, I was a Cub Scout and four of us were chosen to sit at the Pike Theatre in uniform all day on Saturday to collect money for the Will Rogers Institute.  Right after the previews, a film about the Will Rogers Institute would play followed by the lights coming up and our walking around with buckets to collect donations. Aunt Alice Gwin managed the theater - she wasn't really my aunt but the aunt of my cousin so we all called her "Aunt Alice." We decided to camp out in my log cabin that night.  My log cabin was a birthday gift to which I devoted an entire Blog . Teddy, Dan, and Bob joined me in this adventure (their names have been changed for reasons that will become clear later). The night started in a pretty standard fashion with everyone telling ghost stories.  There were the standards - the hook, about a parking couple hearing a radio story in which an escaped murderer had a hook for a right hand.  After hearing a noise they d...

Summer 1960, I was eight years old when my Father decided to take me to his fishing camp at Lake Mary, Mississippi. I guess he couldn’t get any of his friends to go with him that weekend because he ended up with Mr. Bill Lacy who was eighty and me in a boat fishing for white perch. I vaguely remember spending the night in the exotic camp – well exotic to an 8-year-old – and how cool it was to be “roughing it.” The camp had been built on stilts to protect it from periodic floods but years before after the floods were controlled a “ground floor” was added. The camp had all the comforts of home – more-or-less. The three of us must have made quite a sight on the Lake that Saturday morning. Mr. Bill was a little shaky and so Daddy had to bait his hook for him. I was squeamish about touching the live minnows we used for bait. Since my “weak stomach” was well known by then it only took a couple of loud gags to convince Daddy that he should bait my hooks also! The fish were biting like cra...

In 2014, the woman who helped raise me, Mrs. Auline Scott died and was buried in Pike County, Mississippi.  I was honored to be one of her pall bearers at the funeral and then even more highly honored when the local paper asked me to write a tribute for Black History Month because they had chosen her to be the person in the spotlight.  A year later I still grieve her loss as do her children and frankly anyone who knew her.  I posted a photo of us when I was about two years old and it got more likes than any other Facebook post I've done - not because of me but because of so many people affirming her power in their lives.  I was asked to reproduce the article I wrote and it follows below the photos... Black History Month – Auline Scott Bill Gardner Black History Month according to Wikipedia is, “an annual observance for remembrance of important people and events in the history of the African diaspora.”   Traditionally this newspaper...

On September 24, 2013 in San Jose, California, a Deputy County Commissioner for Santa Clara County named Loune Philavane said, "By the authority vested in me by the State of California, I now pronounce you legally married spouses."  We stood on the opposite side of a Plexiglas divider with a circular arrangement of holes at head level to allow us to hear MS Philavane when she spoke the vows we repeated.  People were all over the place in the Courthouse at windows just like ours getting copies of their birth certificates, or copies of some family member's death certificates or like us, getting married.  How did we get here and why such a pedestrian setting for what is typically reserved for much pomp and circumstance, and why were we alone with no friends or family to witness our nuptials? We're Gay, that's why.  We live in Texas.   Texas citizens decided several years ago (80% to 20%) that our relationship has "no standing" and that the State and non...

Carroll Case (a renowned Mississippi artist & author) posted a request on Facebook for people's memories of the day President Kennedy was assassinated. "I am working on a project and need your help. PLEASE send me an e-mail at carrollcaseart@gmail.com and tell me where you were when you heard about the assassination of President Kennedy. If you were not born before 1963, please relate what your parents told you about where they were. Thanks!" Since this year is the 50th Anniversary of the assassination I thought he might be putting a book together with some people's stories and his illustrations. After sending my story he posted: "OK so your wondering why I wanted your Kennedy memories.....let me just say this Mark your calendar for November 22 Friday 7pm at the store front theatre , State street, mcComb ms. For an event you will not soon forget. Lots more info to follow.....cc" I can't imagine what he is up to but I am going to try to t...