Different

"I have long been, and may always be, a confirmed bachelor. But like other people who say that, I am not gay.

I did meet one gay fellow quite a while back. It was 1954 when I met him, an affable fellow named Pitt. He wore bright clothes but that didn't send me any signal that he was gay. To my ears he had no special way of speaking and there was nothing immediately gay about him. I would venture to say if I hadn't accidentally found out through a misunderstanding one day, while we were standing next to each other at the men's room urinals, I would never have found out.

'I can't believe it,' I told him quite frankly. 'Why don't you like girls at all?'

'I like girls, Sampson,' the gay said simply, no less visibly masculine than myself. 'It's not a matter of liking or not liking someone, and it's not a matter of picking who you're going to sleep with. People are just born the way they are, and it doesn't make them all the same if they share one common thing between them.'

He went on to say, as I tapped the water out, 'You and me may be more alike than me and any gay man. We both have sisters named Stephanie, we both have brothers that we're competitive with in our lives, and we both love to just sit and talk about the good ol' days, the 1920s. Why should the one thing that's different about us keep us from being good friends?'

It really made me think, and it hurt—the idea that I, like everyone else in the world, picked one different thing like religion, skin color, or sexual orientation to get all worked up about when in a lot of ways all of us are like one another. From that day on whenever I meet someone new, even if they don't look like me or might seem a little strange at first glance, I put on a big smile and say, 'Hi, there, neighbor! I'm Sampson L. Hartwig. Maybe we're a little different, but maybe we'll find out we're a lot a like, too!'

I might as well mention that me and the gay fellow Pitt didn't see each other after another week or so, when I found out the biker gang I had joined with him was all gay. Only when one of them named Peter couldn't keep the secret any more did Pitt tell me the truth, that they were all hoping I would 'come around' once I got used to wearing the leather. It's just another thing that's different, yeah, but it looked awful painful in all those videos we watched, so I found another crew to ride with."

State Fair
"When I was a boy, every year Dad would take Goose, Stephanie and I to the State Fair. Mom would never come, on account of her belief that the State Fair was the devil's yard sale. So once every fall, Dad would pile all of us kids into the family... (9/30/02)

Game Show
"At one time in my youth I was lucky enough to go on that game show, Twenty-One—that's the show famous for all the cheating, where they gave the contestants the answers. Well, Sampson L. Hartwig didn't get any answers, I'll tell you that much. It... (9/16/02)

Sweet Punch
"In my early military days, we had a green recruit in our battalion we called 'Sweet Punch.' The name may sound silly, but I guarantee you Sweet Punch was no laughing matter. There was nothing Sweet Punch wasn't scared of. Or is that a... (9/2/02)