A Trip (down memory lane): Part 1

The need to escape all things New York, indeed the very island itself, grows stronger and stronger as time passes. There was a time I would laugh in the face of anyone who told me there were other places in the world to live. My one concession was the beautiful, crumbling, haunted city of New Orleans -- one of the few cities in this country I've walked through and felt the power of history in its very bones. But, leave NYC? NEVER!

Until recently. Perhaps, it's a matter of growing older. Perhaps it's a matter of job dissatisfaction. Perhaps it's a matter of wanting something slower, something more my own. Perhaps it's a matter of all of the above. I'm perfectly content now to spend weekends in Greenpoint, making our garden beautiful and cooking dinners and seeing friends, never once setting foot on the crowded, noisy, stinking island off my shore.

The Loved Ones birthday was last week and we usually celebrate occasions like birthdays and anniversaries with trips away, somewhere local. In the past, we've rented a car and headed up to Mt. Tremper, New York the home of Kate's Lazy Meadow. Kate's is a motel run by the infamous Kate Pierson of the B52's. As you can imagine, the motel is just as kooky and eclectic as its owner. Most of the decoration consists of furniture from the 50s and garden gnomes. Yes, garden gnomes. I've taken pictures of many of them. From Kate's, the Loved One and I have taken day trips into Woodstock and Hudson. We've cooked meals in our room. But, it's close to Loved One's home and I felt the need to venture away from familiar territory and someplace, dare I say, a tiny bit classier than Kate's.

After some struggles with the Loved One over the event itself -- he had just helped me configure a budget for myself and thought a taking him away was too much of a financial strain -- I convinced him that this weekend away was as much about me as it was about him. I told him he could rent the car and that seemed to calm the waters.

I thought about places close by to visit. Friends of mine very often drive to New Hope and I thought that might be a very nice, gay friendly place to spend a weekend. As a kid, my parents and I would very often take day trips to New Hope as it was only an hour and a half or so outside of Philly. New Hope was something of an artist's colony but even as a child my keen artistic eye could sense that the American "crafts" and turquoise jewelry displayed in window after window were not, in fact, art. Not compared to the basement of my home. My father, a sculptor for the US Mint, had clay pieces in various stages of completion all over his studio. He had a bust of me he had started when I was nine-years-old and, to this day, remains incomplete. He had various work and personal projects on many an easel.

I remember one day, I came home from school and had nothing much to do so I wandered down into the basement. My father was working on a coin of someone for work, perhaps it was the Statue of Liberty commemorative coin or perhaps it was an Olympic coin. Whatever the case, I decided I was going to help him out and display some of my own creativity. I took a lump of the pasty grey modeling clay and lay it on top of my father's work-in-progress, next to the picture of the original figure.

My father is very precise in his work. He goes through various research books finding images of the subject until he puts together just the right combination of images for the coin. His true artistry lies in the fact that he can see what will look good on the final product, not just in the 12" model he works on initially. My father's work is a marvel of clarity, personality and symmetry. I can always tell what work is his and what is someone else's when I look at a coin. So once he's picked his image or images, he will sketch out various ideas on paper. When he's happy with that, he will transfer the image to tracing paper and then, finally, to another kind of heavier -- almost plastic paper -- this, he lays on top of the clay so he can look at it as he's creating to make his model cohesive.

I, being nine or ten years old (and still today, a little), knew nothing about the complexities of this project. Instead, I threw a lump of clay on dad's image, took one of his tools and started sculpting away. I thought maybe if I got a lot done, dad could play games with me. Well, my intentions were good. The outcome was not. And, boy, did I catch it. It was, as I recall, a leather belt on the behind moment. Of course, I proceeded it with a string of denials, desperately trying to convince my father that I wasn't the one who perpetrated the crime.

I was a notorious liar as a child. I was curious and smart and inventive and precocious. But I was a liar. I don't know where I picked up this particular bad habit. Perhaps I so wanted to get lost in the fictional words I read about and created that the strains of reality were too much for me to handle. But lying always made it worse. And it took me a long time to learn that lesson.

So as I cried, standing in front of the portrait of whomever, steadfast in my denial, I knew that the leather belt would soon be connecting with my bare backside. As my father's hand, strong and rough, clasped around my tiny wrist and pulled me up the stairs to my bedroom, I cried a string of "no's." My mother hovered over a pot in the kitchen, unable to look. She had tried to get me to confess, to no avail and she knew the consequences of my actions. My brother, seven years older than me, looked up briefly from the television and his schoolbooks, shook his head and then went back to work.

Up another flight of stairs and into the bedroom. Pants down and "thwack." Two or three were usually more than my father could handle and I'm sure this is a case of it hurt him more than it hurt me. And I didn't stop lying.

So...hello, non sequitur, back to New Hope.

My dear friends GandA have talked with Joe and I about a day in New Hope. I have fond memories of the town: good food, a nice used book store, a fantastic ice cream parlor that mixes flavors for you, art galleries and lots of movie memorabilia. A trip to New Hope always meant something new item to fuel my Marilyn Monroe obsession (more on that some other time, perhaps). New Hope also has one of my favorite stores in the world, the NYC outpost of which has just closed, Love Saves the Day; the only place where one could buy a vintage wedding dress, an old photoplay magazine and a Han Solo frozen in carbonite figure in one stop.

After extensive online research (meaning I typed "New Hope + PA + gay-friendly bed and breakfasts" into the search engine), I came across a B&B called the Hotel Fauchere in Milford, PA. I had never heard of either the hotel or the town but after reading about both, and seeing the pictures, it seemed right somehow. I sent an email to them asking if they were available and if they were gay-friendly. I hate that it's necessary to ask, but I find it's better to do so then not to. You don't want to show up to some podunk town in the middle of nowhere to find that the only gay people were the happy ones in the 20s and 30s.

The emailed me back almost immediately saying "yes" to both questions. I added it to the list of possibilities and continued my search for other options. Google provided me with lots of research.

About an hour or so later I received another email from the Fauchere, this time from Sean Strub, the president of the hotel and its various outposts around town. He provided me with links to a LOGO review of the facilities as well as an Out Traveler review. He gave me a gay-overview of Milford and its surroundings.

Now, the Loved One and I aren't the kind of gays who want to hit the local bar, pick up a third and come back to the hotel afterwards for a wild night. But, I want to feel comfortable holding his hand at dinner or at the bar, or with his arm on my back as we walk through a store. Mr. Strub's email assured me we would feel more than welcome. So, great. I added another check next to it on my list and emailed Sean to ask if there were other things to do in the New Hope area.

He emailed back, almost immediately, to say that the town of Milford was in fact not that close to New Hope (some two miles away) but that the town was filled with antique stores, a bookstore, famous waterfalls, cafes and such. The Loved One and I love to spend the bulk of our expendable incomes on people's old shit. Not really. But we sure like to look at it. Sean's email was filled with so much excitement and love of the town and his establishment (and I had been such a pain in the ass with questions) that I booked immediately.

I was also intrigued by his offer to set us up on a tour of his business partner's llama farm. What the fuck is a llama farm?

I was going to keep the location a secret from the Loved One but I was so excited about it, I told him the very night I booked it. New adventures awaited!