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    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Old Stuff

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch
    The Amazon Trail: Old Stuff

    All the words, all the tchotchkes, give me delight. Lately, though, this materialistic gay American has reached a time of appreciating what I have rather than collecting more …

    I spend too much time and space collecting die-cast toy vehicles, especially Matchbox, a few Dinkys and other locally hard-to-find brands. I’m no expert, am not a vehicle fanatic, I drive a seventeen-year-old Toyota, but the allure of these tiny replicas of vans, utility trucks, and homely cars, many bunged up and from garage sales, most covered with months of dust, bring me a ridiculous amount of pleasure.

    I love old stuff and old places. Nostalgia informs much of my work. My favorite school of art, photorealism, often portrays abandoned Esso gas stations, weathered clapboard houses, or bright-colored luncheonettes in the Bronx. Richard Estes and Ralph Goings capture Americana minutely. Among photographers, I can peruse books by, David Plowden, Bernice Abbott, and William Eggleston for hours.

    Jump to buttons. I don’t have a clue why buttons fascinate me. I’m far from a seamstress. But did you ever look at buttons, really look? The designs, especially from days of yore, can be intricate, unique, even genuine art. They sport an infinity of colors and sizes, signify rank, brand, and fashion styles. I have jars full of the things, but I’m pressed for time to let them cascade from my hands into treasure piles and may give them up. Some day.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Covid 19 Pioneer

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch
    The Amazon Trail: Covid 19 Pioneer

    As a seasoned Polio Pioneer, sixty-odd years later, it strikes me as funny that I felt a little proud, just as I had in grade school, to be part of this mass health effort. There’s a bond now, between my neighbors and myself, that we went through the unknown together, that we believed in the science and the medicine and did our patriotic duty to keep America safe.

    Now that President Biden and Vice President Harris are in office, I’ve been able to have my first Covid 19 vaccine shot. It was no big deal. I went to our county fairgrounds expecting to be injected through my car window, the way I was tested. I thank my lucky stars the test was negative. I’m grateful to the medical profession that persisted in making tests and vaccines available despite the disinformation and profiteering of our former leaders.

    Turned out, the vaccines were administered in the same exhibit building that’s used for our winter farmers’ market, a very familiar and reassuring space. The six-foot tables that usually serve to display crafts or local mushrooms and goat cheeses, were now place markers.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: All Along the Watchtower

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch
    The Amazon Trail: All Along the Watchtower

    When it’s dangerous to represent the citizens who elected you—we need to pay attention. We need to acknowledge that anti-democratic power is quietly accruing and will lash out; will harm rather than protect this too-trusting nation.

    Oh, hell, what can I say at a time like this? Did we think they’d simply go away?

    When angry white criminals occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon back on January 2, 2016 and the seven miscreants were charged with federal conspiracy and weapons violations only to go scot free;

    When, in the 1980s and 1990s angry white Christians organized to legalize discrimination against their scapegoats-of-the-day, gays, in order to build a vast political machine;

    When a woman was killed by a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia;

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: But …

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch
    The Amazon Trail

    But…

    The year 2020 wasn’t a total bust except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who should not have died or have been permanently harmed by Covid 19. In the U.S., many lay those deaths and disablements at the hands of the greedy, power hungry 2020 administration and its followers.

    Personally, I’ve been taking inventory of the bad and the good with my sweetheart, and finding some surprises.

    Yes, over seventy-four million Americans voted to keep the traitorous officials in office, but eighty-one million plus voted to restore our democracy.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: One Dog at a Time

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch

    I can’t save our democracy, but I can do a little good in the world. We are adopting a dog who needs a home.

    It’s been five years, seven months since our dog Bea died and we’re finally ready and able. I inherited her at age six. I lost her to my sweetheart soon thereafter, as those two bonded immediately. When they were together, Bea would growl to keep me away.

    We would not have brought another animal into the house in any case. Our cat Bolo had health problems. We, and the Vet, feared the stress might kill her. Bolo took her only pet status as her due. I lasted three weeks after she died and started looking.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Nah, We Ain’t No Sissies

    Guest Column
    The Amazon Trail: Nah, We Ain’t No Sissies
    By Lee Lynch

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    I have been resting. A strange activity for me, but I had no choice. I was so worn out, I remember promising myself that I would never hurry again as long as I lived. The first two of six weeks I mostly slept, or lay unmoving beside my sweetheart. Awake, I read thrillers, and when those books didn’t ease my mental and emotional exhaustion, in desperation I read Ann Rule, the master of true crime.

    So many people are afflicted or have died from what my sweetheart coined trump flu; so many people have died or lost their homes to the fires around us; so many people are suffering under the current administration; so many people are fighting the loss of democracy in the United States; so many people are victims of blatant and insidious racism—I feel like a sissy to have needed rest.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Tabloid Edition

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    The Amazon Trail: Tabloid Edition
    By Lee Lynch

    Bath Door Balks at Booting Hostage
    Hostage Trapped for NINETY-MINUTES
    Suspect Subdued with Electrical Weapon 

    A woman in a remote town in Oregon suffered a harrowing ninety minutes before her rescue by three brave public servants.

    The woman, who wishes to remain unnamed for “professional” reasons, reports pounding on the hollow core washroom door and adjacent walls for at least three minutes to alert her Lesbian “wife” about the ongoing crime.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: What Is Lesbian Literature?

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    The Amazon Trail: What Is Lesbian Literature?
    By Lee Lynch

    “… when teachers, editors, agents and awards administrators, among others, hold mainstream writing as the standard, and all but ignore books with an exclusively lesbian focus, they lead us away from serious, in depth examination of our lesbian selves.”

    It’s nice that some non-gay writers include us in their stories. I’m thinking of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder detective novels in which he has an amusing lesbian friend who is a dog groomer. Very respectful and matter-of-fact that she’s a dyke. But that doesn’t make the novels lesbian any more than the presence of Robert B. Parker’s gay male bartender and strongman in his Spenser series makes the books gay male.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Not a Creature Was Stirring, Not Even a Mouse

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch
    The Amazon Trail

    “Not a Creature Was Stirring, Not Even a Mouse.”

    That was true when we brought home our Christmas tree back in 2009 and a poor dead mouse fell onto our living room floor. We’ve made do with a little artificial tree ever since. But this year we’re going all Santa Claus and supporting the local 4H Club which is selling trees at the fairgrounds.

    Christmas is such a multi-featured concept. As an atheist, I celebrate for the sake of lighting the darkness. As a feminist, I’m aware of the pre-Christian pagan winter rituals that make sense to me: Yule logs. The tree itself. Gifting one another. Celebrations to liven up the doldrums of winter.

    Here in our community, the clubhouse is already decorated, thanks to volunteers who might be teens—not seniors—with their mirthful high energy. Some years a local choral group in red bow ties comes to serenade our holiday potluck. Not everyone is up to decorating, but if they have an extra fifteen dollars they’ll hire a handyperson to string outdoor lights. Every year there’s a light show as we walk our mile of roads, calling out good wishes, and swaddled, like our neighbors, in layers that protect us from the ocean winds.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Going to the Doctor’s

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    The Amazon Trail: Going to the Doctor’s
    By Lee Lynch

    “Visiting the doctor doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom,” said my sweetheart. “We can make it fun.”

    Remember the all-powerful, usually white male doctors of childhood? From the waiting room you could hear kids scream. Vaccines were terrifying. You had to undress. Sometimes my mother would take me for a milkshake afterward, yet, to this day, my blood pressure is higher (and I always weigh more) in the examining room.

    I was seeing a hand surgeon for a left thumb brace to balance the one I wear on the right. I have Eaton stage III thumb CMC arthritis bilaterally, etc., blah, blah, blah, blah. Which means arthritis with a capital “A.”

    As with most things in our rural area, the surgeon is located a bit over an hour from our home, but, oh, the hills and valleys we pass! Someday, we agreed, we would explore them. It’s hard to pry us from our cozy nest on weekends, but until my sweetheart is hired for a so-far elusive new job, she’s free. A lightbulb went on for her: why not explore those hills and valleys on the way to the doctor’s?

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    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Witch Spittle

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch

    Oh, yes, we had fun this year decorating for Halloween. For a couple of hours, I didn’t once think about the ghouls in D.C.

    We don’t get trick or treaters here, but we have a lively neighborhood of adults from 55 to 95, ourselves included, who get a kick out of holiday trappings. Our plastic Frankenstein mat screeches bloody murder when we open or close the garage door. Half the time we scare—and laugh—ourselves silly.

    It had been many full moons since we last dragged out our spooky paraphernalia. My sweetheart exhumed it from the treasure chest that is our garage and instructed me to decide what should go where. Me? Organize? The prospect was scarier than an army of menacing phantoms.

    I somehow coped.

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: There Is No Place Like Home

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    By Lee Lynch

    I was recently contemplating my shoes, which, along with clothes and boxes of books, are the only closeted things in our home.

    That morning I’d noticed my sweetheart had attached a magnet depicting Dorothy’s ruby shoes to our back door. Now, I’m as big a fan of The Wizard of Oz as the next gay person, but those shoes were never particularly significant to me. Which might be because, as a little kid, I read and reread the 1903 edition of The Wizard of Oz handed down to me from my considerably older brother and, perhaps, from my father before him. The inscription from Grandma and Grandpa Lynch is: “To read on train to North Dakota. March, 1939.”

  • Columns,  Lee Lynch's Amazon Trail,  LGBTSR,  Uncategorized

    Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: What?


    By Lee Lynch
    The Amazon Trail

    Photo by Sue Hardesty

    When I first put in the hearing aids, I felt a giant exhalation of tension. Though I knew of my relatively modest hearing loss, I was unaware what a strain it put not just on my marriage and public life, but on my mind and body.

    Grandpa Lynch, a retired Railroad Engineer, had big clunky hearing aids. Grandma Lynch needed a pair, though her family said she could hear perfectly well when she wanted to. There was definitely hearing loss on my mother’s side, but her parents couldn’t have afforded hearing aids if they’d wanted them, which they didn’t any more than Grandma Lynch did.

    Shame was attached to the very idea of needing such devices. Do people reject hearing aids out of pride? Vanity? Was it the stigma of disability? Maybe back then the new-fangled things weren’t very effective. Probably they were uncomfortable.