My First Bear

I love the autumn. Everything about it – the coolness, the color, the coming of winter. I love the way that the chill moves you indoors and redirects you toward the home and safety and warmth. I love the memories of autumn, of Halloweens and Thanksgivings, of midterms long since taken, of turkey comas and the first Christmas carol on the radio.

And I love the memory of Roland.

It’s been a quarter century since we last saw each other. He was my first bear, and definitely one of the great loves of my youth. I don’t even really remember the first time we met. But I remember his presence that I still sense almost 25 years later. I didn’t know when we met that he was going to be the first major loss of my life, but when he let himself slip off a bridge into the flooded Kankakee River, he took my belief in youth and infinity with him.

Roland was immensely talented. He was a musician and true Renaissance man. Reared in the Nazirene Church, he earned his musical chops at the organ of low church and eventually went to Olivet. He hated Nazirenes. In their typical myopia, they completely missed his beauty. They completely missed who he was. He found a home in the Episcopal Church, but never really got over the wounds of his Nazirene history.

I was immediately entranced by him. He was, after all, my first bear. Bearded and shaggy, he had soft chocolate eyes and a wonderful belly. While the seeds of my bear fetish certainly predated him, he was the one who brought it to life.

And he was amazing.

He lived in a place I considered magic. It was remote and far away from campus – a place I desperately wanted to escape. His home was quirky and artistic and full of unique things like finches named Winken, Blinken, and Nod. He raised beautiful Arabian horses and loved to ride in the woods behind his old stone house. It was just the type of hiding place I needed. Everything was delicious and interesting. And I loved him and wanted him.

Our relationship didn’t really last long, just that autumn. But I can remember so many details. It was my first real move out and away from what I knew to who I am. I remember doing very ordinary things with him – cleaning horse stalls and canning tomatoes. We sat on his bed and drank scotch and I pretended to be sophisticated. I didn’t know it, but I was handsome then – I look at the pictures now and wish I had seen it. But with Rolland all I wanted to do was be beautiful and grown up and have it last forever.

And then he died. I was at my grandparent’s house when a friend called and told me that he had committed suicide. November 20, 1985. I remember not even being able to react because I couldn’t explain to my family who this man was and even more importantly who he was to me. It would have been too risky, a blackjack player’s tell that tips off the dealer that he’s way over 21 and should have held on the last card. It was Thanksgiving break so I didn’t go to his funeral. That was it. No closure, no grief space, just move on.

I interpreted his death as the ultimate morality tale. It confirmed what every Nazirene knows at his core: faggoty sin such as Roland’s is tragically fatal. The wages of sin is death. I didn’t know then that after taxes it’s more of just a tired feeling. I took a good long look at the broad road I was on and recoiled in terror.

It took me decades to not be afraid.

I see now that his death wasn’t the result of any Nazirene voodoo but he was sensitive and depressed and damaged by the people and superstitions that damaged us all. I also see that I was sensitive and depressed and damaged and let the theological inventions of a sub sect of a sub sect paralyze me into anesthetizing a part of myself, cryogenically freezing my identity until I was able to find a cure and thaw out.

I believe that there will be a giant reckoning. On one side of the balance will be the good works of the Nazirenes: feeding some hungry and clothing some naked. On the other will be an enormous heap, osmium dense and amorphous, representing all of the shards of God’s image that have been destroyed by their tiny theology. These are shards of creativity and humor and fun and beauty and humanness, real people not just “souls” to be saved.

It is years later, Roland, and I still think of you. My first, beautiful bear.