How to do the wrong thing right

“Do you have any regrets?” is always the extraordinary question everyone is taught to solemnly reflect upon as a given year closes… almost instantly followed by, “What are your resolutions?”

It’s the nutrient-free pablum we all learn to mollify said exiting year’s dastardly acts of procrastination with. On my voicemail the other day lurked a long-winded Christmas greeting from a longtime friend in New York. Fortuitously larded within his usual merry stream-of-consciousness tangents and ornamental offshoots, yet leaping out at me, sang a singularly obtuse, 100-percent-relatable question that illuminated my eardrums in near identical equivalency to, say, the flashing beacon of Rudolph’s honker. Moreover, when answering Joe’s question, I miraculously managed to circumnavigate the globe traction-free, through solid air on nothing but enchantedly inexhaustible hoof-power… though at least I was saved having to additionally haul (like a freak cherry on top!) some morbidly obese, hysterically chuckling, white-bearded lunatic puffed out in flashy/trashy neonic vermilion scraps trimmed with cottony Christmas tree fluff culled from the floor of RuPaul’s sewing room. Hence, hallucinatory dancing sugar plums be damned, kidz: With a big, jelly-belly jiggling, “Oh, no, Ho, no you diin’t!”, let’s get noses so brightly lit right to it.

Hey Howard: This whole year long through has been, like, it’s hard to put into words, but some kind of, almost, weird mirage to me. Everything about 2018 felt really extreme, but totally numb, both at the same time—you know? I dunno, Ward, I can’t explain it: Does this make any sense to you? — Joe P.

Dear Joseph: A whole lotta sense — you, too, felt it? Hmmmm. Well, fortunately, or maybe not, I can only illuminate my own mirage-esque experiences of the year, and all the yearlong through, they certainly were whoppers. Perchance, Joe, you’ll even find here an anecdotal tidbit that’ll shed light on your life-path’s betterment during this, our gratefully now waning year of 2018 which, sweet readers, shall forever go down in the calendrical annals of Howard’s own lifespan (should I live to be even a grinningly gnarled century … knock on my hickory wood walking cane!) as the definitive, monumental year of my whole life. 2018 has tallied the largest accumulative number of benchmarks in my 50-plus years’ existence. Its high watermark cannot be topped: my wedding to the love of my life, on the 25th anniversary to the day of our very first laying googly eyes upon one another; nor, conversely, can its lowest ebb be bottom-dredged deeper: my mother’s slow, agonizingly long goodbye.

For the remainder of my years, 2018 shall always be my “before-and-after” Rubicon — everybody, sooner or later, personally crosses it. It’s that year of too many drawn lines obliterated in the sand, in which too many major personal/professional/private milestones occur back, to back, to back, repeatedly, with scant time in between to digest and absorb, enjoy and/or grieve what exactly just occurred, before the next once-in-a-lifetime rogue wave rolls through, sweeping all that happened previously back out to sea in a riptide undercurrent of surrealism versus unpreparedness.

2018 started out for me, straightaway, with a January plunge off the gangplank via the unexpected, relatively sudden death of one of my longest friends — someone I’d known since way back in my teenage years in Alabama. Miraculously, Randy survived the minefield of those unnerving ’80s and ’90s obstacle-course plague years, only to be done in (ignobly and ironically) by just run-of-the-mill lung cancer, even though he never smoked. On the very heels of Randy’s memorial service, coinciding with my birthday in February, another longtime fellow Aquarian showed up to work with her clothes on backwards, leaving her car parked the wrong way (with its keys still in the ignition) in a one-way street, and unable to recognize her coworkers’ faces. Cryptically, things have only descended from there for her since. Oh, and in between, I started a New Year’s diet — yeah, me and every other gay man residing in our solar system. My laughably-lofty aspiration was simply to see a “1” as the first number on the bathroom scales come swimsuit season. Hey, we all have our fantasies, but I did choose a plan simple to remember, its instructional mantra consisted exactly of these three words: “Eat nothing white.”

In March, my mother — to the frustratedly exhausted relief of both my brother and me — finally passed peacefully away, a mere 10 months after our dad. It was merely the physical end of Mom’s very long, gut-wrenching demise through the miasma of dimentia. She hadn’t remembered I was her son for more than four years. It was Christmastime then, too, that I remember Mom last recognizing me, sort of: I’d flown home, as always, for a holiday visit, and had brought her a framed gift of her favorite old photo of her young sons. We sat shirtless on a tree stump, me holding up a fascinating insect and my brother grinning at it in diapers: “Mom, do you remember who these two little boys in this photo are?” A tiny spark lit the back of her eyes. “I think I ought to,” she smiled, fuzzily. And the spark never ignited again. This vivacious, eternally serene woman who I’d always called Mom vanished for good, to be replaced by a replicate that only breathed an imitation of life in a dead soul for four long more years afterwards.

“You boys scatter my ashes someplace pretty,” was Mom’s sole, final written request. And on her birthday in April, Wiley and I (quite illegally) followed her wishes to the letter. My mother — Nova was her lovely name — now prettily resides, among a happy chipmunks’ den, in a patch of early May apples next to a sun-dappled wishing well at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. “And what about dem apples?” phoned my flabbergasted brother to me, a month later, with the unexpected revelation of Mom’s accrued estate. An Arkansas farmgirl who never bought herself so much as a stitch of clothing new apparently sure knew the hidden beauty of investing in cheap, unglamorous, rural electric company stocks.

And thus, in serendipitous haste, suddenly followed my whirlwind summer of middle-aged marriage and an upsized lifestyle: The apartment next door to mine unexpectedly went on the market — a rare enough occurrence in my building — and before I knew it, my theoretical living space had doubled (as had my monthly HOA fees), followed by five months of hurry-up-and-wait for the city permits, to allow two units be forged into one. Basically, it amounted to the removal of a wall separating them . . . an undertaking on par with the incomplexity of purchasing, oh, The Winter Palace, fully staffed. Then with June and July came the opposing factions at work of moving out 25 years’ worth of accumulated stuff ahead of the wrecking ball, while simultaneously arranging all the flourishes for the splashiest gay wedding reception of the summer: my own.

On Saturday, 8/18/18, a refreshingly atypical August evening summer shower (Hollywood movie rain) glittered amethyst-like against the transformed The Mansion on Turtle Creek’s gleaming ballroom windows as I sliced into a five-tiered, fairytale confection weighing more than a grown man, and my beaming new spouse, who’d finally made a decent man out of me, lifted his champagne glass, took my hand into his other, and conspiratorially whispered a kernel of sage wisdom to our guests that sent the entire congregation reaching for their handkerchiefs: He said, “I was attending another wedding last week in Boston, and would like to share with you the secret to a successful marriage that the father of the groom there told me. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘You don’t marry someone that you can live with; you marry someone that you can’t live without.’”

I’m a lucky, fortunate and blessed man, bois and girlz; hence, take it from me: Never, ever believe anyone who tells you that fairytales don’t come true. They do. I’m living proof. The only hole-in-my-soul “regret” (for lack of any better word) regarding 2018 is that my mother passed just shy of getting to see her eldest, “My own happily homosexual son,” become legally hitched in all constitutional eyes of the law, and God’s, within this grand country of ours we bravely call home of the free. Mom would have so loved to have been witness to, front and center, this newly courageous, fine world, welcoming us one and all, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in mortal illness and in glowing health to 2019!

PS: I almost forgot—dear Howard here dropped 40 lbs. this year: Yeah, bitches, that’s right, I went from XL to Slim Fit M, and promptly rewarded myself with an entire new wardrobe from Sid Mashburn to ensure I, permanently, do leave something behind for 2018.

— Howard Lewis Russell

Send your questions or comments to AskHoward@dallasvoice.com!