A Review of My Year, With Images
Christmas 2007
A visit home to New Jersey
Visited the family in New Jersey and hung out in New York
with my sister Ruth and my twin nieces Jessica and Rebecca – went to see Altar
Boyz at New World Stages – the girls were sick with the flu and miserable but
we made it through the show and found refuge in a late night pizza joint in
Midtown. Hanging out with my nephews Tommy and Joey, and their parents, my sister
Sue and brother-in-law Tom. There was a memorably wonderful feast at a seafood
restaurant in Hoboken. Mom and Dad and Ruth and the girls also joined me for
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a William Finn musical
on Broadway in New York.. David Harris and I went to see Spring Awakening.
January 2008:
A Krotchko reunion in Colorado
Ruth and her girls flew to Denver, and we all had a reunion
with the Colroado Krotchko clan: Aunt Helga Krotchko, Ann Best, partner Joe,
daughter Christina, (Jessica was in England), cousin Gary and his family Pam,
Mike and Erica; in Vail we visited MaryAnn Z and shot the potato gun into the
cold night air, later skiing and snowboarding on the slopes of Aspen with
MaryAnn’s son Zach, who was a classmate of Jessica and Rebecca back in Scotch
Plains, NJ. Maryann was working at Vail while Zach was sailing off cliffs in
Aspen with his ski team.
February – March 2008:
Mayflower Gulch, the perfect Cross Country stroll
Whether it was a weekend retreat in Winter Park with the
Friday Night Boys Club, a cross-country ski adventure in Mayflower Gulch, or
skiing and snowboarding at Arapahoe Basin, my Colorado buddies and I made the
most of one of the finest winters to be had anywhere on the planet, right in
Denver’s back yard, Summit County and the rest of the mountain wonderland we
refer to as The Western slope.
My buddy Galen Oellig and I took a group from the Gay and
Lesbian Sierra Club to the top of Mount Quandary, a Fourteener with impressive
winter views and winter winds. On the way we met Horton, the Quandary dog, a
canine boddhisattva that goes up the mountain everyday of the year with a party
of his choosing. Following a conversation with Ryan Warner, host of KCFR’s
Colorado Matters, Horton and his humble owner became the subject of a Colorado Public Radio feature story.
March 2008
WUMP stands for Wilderness Upgrade for Medical
Professionals, a course offered by the Flagstaff Field Institute in partnership with the Wilderness Medicine Institute (WMI) of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). I traveled to Flagstaff,
Arizona for this 5-day adventure on the grounds of the Museum of Northern Arizona with a couple of other hardy doctors and a
whole bunch of nurses, paramedics, and EMT’s – all of whom proved to be
energetic and a lot of fun. And you want good people around when you are practicing
how to manage seizures and spurting carotid arteries in the snow.
April 2008
A more permanent position at Denver Health, and a new
practice in Five Points
Five Points is the inner city neighborhood where I do my
outpatient clinical practice at Eastside Neighborhood Health Center. I ended up there, and am still doing
acute care on the main campus of Denver Health, after accepting an offer of a
permanent job with Denver Health, where I have been employed since November
2006. My patients are what you could sum up as “the underserved” and include
many members of the African American and Latino and new immigrant communities.
I am speaking Spanish on the job, albeit imperfectly, almost every single day.
May 2008
A Family meeting
Another margarita-soaked Cinco de Mayo
I made my first visit ever to Kansas City, Missouri where I
represented Denver Health at the National Conference of Special Constituencies
(May 1-4), an annual meeting sponsored by the American Association of Family
Physicians to hear from the “special constituencies” within its ranks – these
include women, minorities, foreign grads and members of the GLBT community. It
was a great opportunity for me to network with my peers and learn about how
policy is imagined and proposed in a parliamentary format.
Another Cinco de Mayo, another party hosted by the Friday
Night boys at Joe Klein’s house (where I live) - another night of messy
margaritas and the most shameless appropriation of Mexican culture for at least
a 2 block radius around our house on Capitol Hill in Denver.
June
Goodbye Julius
Gay Pride in Denver
Julius (pronounced YOU – lee – us) Pawelke was a high school
junior exchange student from Germany who spent ten months with Tony Smith and
Jim Peterson while attending school in the Denver County Public School system.
This was Jim and Tony’s first adventure in parenting, and as one of their
friends I got to see Julius frequently and watch him mature, learn English, and
experience. Julius said goodbye to us in June.
Gay Pride was the biggest ever in Denver this year, a sign of the times – despite many
setbacks, we are more visible and better understood than ever before. Plus,
everybody in Denver knows we throw the best street parties!
July
Cherry Creek Arts Festival
Close Guantanamo Bay
Mike and John tie the knot
Over the July 4th weekend, I wandered the streets of Denver’s posh commercial district making change for vendors as a volunteer at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. Joe Klein, my housemate, oversees the finances for this annual event, a really large job that involves recruitment of everyone he knows, and the establishment of a secret underground bunker!.
A critical Supreme Court decision in June set the stage for a sustained national effort, organized by Amnesty International USA to send citizens to visit every member of Congress and petition them to close of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba where hundreds of detainees in the “war on terror” have been held without charge or trial for years. David Alan Harris and I spent many hours arming ourselves with facts and arguments, and then we visited the offices of our two Colorado senators, Wayne Allard [R] and Ken Salazar [D] to make the Amnesty case. While we didn’t get to meet the senators directly we had lively conversations with their staff and even got invited back a second time to Allard’s office for a video conference with his staff in Washington. It was an invigorating exercise in citizenship, and David’s impassioned testimony about the power of reconciliation in Africa was particularly memorable. At this writing, despite more court decisions and overtures from Portugal to accept prisoners who cannot be repatriated to their own countries, the Bush Administration remains intransigent and Guantanamo is still open.
The GLS (Gay and Lesbian Sierrans), an activity section of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club to which I belong, participates in a trail maintenance service project with the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to maintaining the wilderness integrity of the alpine tundra surrounding Colorado’s highest mountains. I led a group of nine guys to the Capitol Peak Wilderness for a 5-day trail maintenance project. As usual the views and the wildflowers were spectacular.
My friends John Zentgraf and Mike Bode got married on July
26 at Whatley Chapel, on the campus of Johnson and Wales University in Denver. It
was a radical act of love played out in a church whose denomination – Episcopal
- is experiencing deep rifts over homosexuality. So it was a big deal, and then
again. I felt the Holy Spirit all around us on that beautiful afternoon,
blessing this union. Hundreds of friends and family gathered for a wonderful
reception afterwards.
August 2008
SCUBA certification,
My Dad rehabs from a hip replacement
Happy 50th Ann and Dave!
This was the year I learned to SCUBA dive, in preparation
for a vacation in Hawaii in September, with Jim Peterson and Tony Smith, and
Chris Cowlishaw. Justin Steigerwalt was our excellent instructor and Underwater
Phantaseas was our venue. I did my first open water dive in the murky waters of
the Aurora Reservoir. Excellent!
In mid-August I returned to Jersey to check on my Dad who
was undergoing a particularly challenging rehab and recovery process from hip
replacement surgery in July. It was a great chance to reconnect with the
family. As luck would have it, my sister Ruth hosted a big summertime party at
her house in Scotch Plains, featuring entrertainment from her main man Steve Indelicato
and his awesome band. Finally, a long lost friend appeared in town, Kathy
Hogan, form Australia, touring the US with her partner. Ruth and I worked with
Kathy at the Frost Valley YMCA camp in New York state umpteen summers ago – we
were all counselors and very young – what a thrill to be reunited after all
that time and re-visit that very special time in our lives!
And speaking of magical summer days, let me tell you, the
Democratic National Convention August 25 – 29 in Denver was pretty amazing. It
was like having a street party downtown all week long, although critics would
justifiably recall the heavy
police and paramilitary presence on the streets, the clash with protesters at
the Civic Center, and the creation of isolated protest zones well out of sight
of the Convention Center. It all culminated in Barack Obama’s dramatic
acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium, attended by some 70,000 people. I
missed the stadium event, but had a chance to witness and march in the large
anti-war protest that put the week’s events in perspective with a much needed
reality check.
At the end of August, my parents, Ann and Dave Krotchko,
passed their 50th wedding anniversary, mostly not celebrating it as
Dad’s hip replacement and the attendant struggles of rehab overshadowed
everything. But we all remember and honor them for their remarkable story of
love and commitment which is still being lived out beautifully after all these
years.
September 2008
My colleagues in the Adult Urgent Care Clinic at Denver
Health
I spent a day with the people I work with at the Adult
Urgent Care Clinic at Denver Health Medical Center, at an annual retreat. It
was a nice opportunity to get to know some of the people I am working
alongside, week in and week out, and I snapped a few pix.
And later that month, I joined 11 friends in Kauai, Hawaii, at a house we rented out for 10 days. Located on the northern shore of the island, just a few miles from Hanalei, we enjoyed beachfront views of magnificent coastline and easy access to everything we wanted to do. Highlights included hiking on the Kalalau trail to Hanakapiai Falls and hiking along the rim of Waimea Canyon; two days of scuba diving (Phantom Five), kayaking, surfing, and guided tours of two national botanical gardens, the Limahuli Garden and Preserve and the Allerton Garden. Best of all was the birthday dinner we had at Tahiti Nui in Hanalei, where we ate and drank into the night, were serenaded by musicians and hula dancers, and were completely spoiled by our waitress xx who, above and beyond the call of duty, baked cupcakes for us! We would heartily recommend Tahiti Nui to anybody looking for some local flavor and a big helping of real Hawaiian hospitality.
October 2008
GLS does Beer Bust at The Wrangler, Jim and Tony, married in
California, and Halloween with Harry and company, a bit Pottered …
Our Gay and Lesbian Sierran group got in on some action at
one of our local bars, the Wrangler, which has a beer bust every Sunday –
different nonprofit groups can supply the person-power for filling and emptying
pitchers and take home a cut of the proceeds for their group – we had a busy
busy day pouring with about 30 volunteers and ended up with a nice take at the
end of the day.
A week later, on October 11, James Peterson and Tony Smith
were formally married in a double wedding with Tony’s
Uncle Alberto and his partner Brian at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. This occurred, of course, just 3 weeks before same-sex marriages
were outlawed by Proposition 8 in California (see below). The following
weekend, I gathered with many many friends and relatives of Jim and Tony at the
Denver home of Dave Symonds and Q xx who hosted a wedding reception for the
couple. I cannot forget standing on the porch, on that beautiful autumn night,
listening to Jim and Tony recite their wedding vows to each other.
Halloween night saw this correspondent sagging underneath a
pound of red hair and makeup, in drag, as Professor Sybil Trelawney, one of the
characters from the expansive universe of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter saga. I
joined several friends from the Friday Night Boys Club to participate in this
ensemble costume which imcluded other luminaries from the Hogwarts world,
including Harry and Ron, Lord Voldemort, Hagrid, Lucius and Draco Malfoy, Dumbledore,
Professor McGonnagal (JMK imperiously feminine in a magnificent grey-haired
bun) and – an especial treat for everyone – Moaning Myrtle interpreted
flamboyantly by she-who-shall-not-be-dissed - Fabulous!
November 2008
We celebrate the Day of the Dead
Obama beats McCain – Yes We Can You Betcha!
Prop 8 passes in California – déjà vu all over again and
Denver comes out for a National Day of Protest
I kicked off the heady month of November with a Day of the
Dead party at our house – the biggest one I have hosted (about 40 people in
attendance) after starting this new tradition 3 years ago with an altar and
some homemade clay figures. In the Mexican tradition, you invite the spirits of
the departed to return to your home by setting out all kinds of enticements
from the world of earthly pleasures (including, according to one of my guests,
tequila and cigarettes). The spirits return, reminding us of the fundamental
truth that life and death exist in a scary, funny, glorious continuum. For me,
the Day of the Dead altar frames a computer screen broadcasting images and
brief profiles of members of the GLBT/queer community who have died and whose
lives were remarkable. It is an act of memory for a community that has
forgotten a little too much of where it came from, and this is the direction I
will probably take this celebration further in the future.
How to summarize the overlong, overexpensive 2008
presidential camapaign? Thank God it’s over! Memorable moments include packed
crowds at Hamburger Mary’s for the presidential and especially vice
presidential candidate debates, and the brilliant satirical impersonation of
Sarah Palin by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live skits. Somewhere in between the
world’s financial markets imploded and $700 billion of taxpayer money got
pledged to bail out Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions. Gas prices
plummeted and then CEO’s from the so-called Big Three automakers came to
Washington in their corporate jets to get their piece of the corporate welfare
pie. Don’t say “socialism” – that’s a dirty word we reserve to torpedo any
government intervention to guarantee Americans basic healthcare security.
Just to add insult to injury – and it was a bruising year
for just about anybody out there -
there was the passage of Prop 8 in California, which outlawed the
continuation of civil same-sex marriages. We may thank our conservative and
religious colleagues on the right for engineering this coup – and especially
the Mormons, who bankrolled the Prop 8 campaign to the tune of some $20 million
or more. Having met many, many gay Mormons estranged from their families and
their communities over the homo issue, and knowing the Mormon tradition itself
comes out of stories of persecution and social disapproval, I found this
particular chapter ironically tragic, (and deadeningly predictable). It is, for our community,
a temporary setback - fundamental civil rights will prevail. Yes we can you
betcha!
In Denver, about a thousand people gathered at the steps of
the Denver City and County Building for a national Day of Protest against Prop
8, coordinated across the country, on November 15. It was a large gathering for
Denver, spirited and peaceful,
with many fine speakers and music, culminating in a march down the 16th
Street mall. We had not only all of our queer brothers and sisters across the
country coming together in solidarity, but many many straight people too –
friends and family. Very inspiring stuff!
December 2008
A hike up Square Top …it’s wintertime again!
More reunions in New Jersey
Babies on the way!
Suddenly in the midst of a busy year and a busy month the
wilderness presents itself, adorned in its everyday majesty, and you just have
to go. Erich Fowler and I did a
day hike to Square Top Mountain, above Guanella Pass in Summit County, on a
cold, sunny, windy day in December, trekking (lightly) across undisturbed snowy
tundra amidst some of the most wonderful mountain scenery Colorado has to
offer. I saw a snowshoe hare! It’s funny how a little detour like this from the
road your life is on suddenly becomes so special, so memorable – the decision
to participate so spontaneous, so arbitrary. We create our greatest holidays
out of thin air. Very thin air in this case! Check out the images.
And at the end of December, a visit back to the old
homestead in New Jersey. My sister Sue and her husband Tom are expecting their
third child in the New Year, sometime in May. They have had two boys, Tommy and
Joey, but the new arrival we now know will be a girl so this is something extra
special! And my brother Mike and his wife Candy, who live in South Carolina,
are also expecting. They have three boys - David, Caden, and Trevor - so we
will see if they too buck the trend and end up with a girl. Ruth’s girls,
Rebecca and Jessica are starting to think about college – they headed off to
Frost valley for a weekend of fun in the snow while I was there. And Jessica
will soon be heading to Washington DC to attend the inauguration of President
Barack Obama – the end result of special academic achievements she made in 2008
– what a thrill, and we are all really proud of her. My brother-in-spirit (if
not brother-in-law) Steve Indelicato spent some quality time with our family,
always a trial by fire when it comes to pinochle and politics, and gave out
copies of a very special cookbook
he cooked up this year, honoring his family and loved ones for whom food is a
particularly meaningful tradition.
My Dad is working out at a fitness center now (gasp!), and
continues to recover nicely from his hip surgery in July. I had him and my Mom
out in Manhattan on December 28 to see Patti Lupone in the musical Gypsy on
Broadway, which was, of course, phenomenal, and after that we converged with my
sister, my cousin Ann Marie Best, and Ann’s daughters Jessica and Christina,
(and Tommy Larmore) - at a little
restaurant on 9th and 47th called Pietrasanta. Over
glasses of sangria and plates of wonderful northern Italian pastas and other
fares, we had yet another joyful family gathering. What a treat for us all to
be together. After dinner my Dad insisted on walking back to Penn Station to
take the train back to Jersey with Mom. “I’m not an invalid!” he fumed after we
repeatedly insisted on driving him there or calling a cab, and he did end up
walking, slowly but mostly pain free and with a renewed vigor we have not seen
in years. Despite many trials he is physically better after surgery, and
mentally and spiritually is sharp as ever. My Mom, too – Dad has said
repeatedly that without her he never could have made it through his surgery and
rehab – it’s undeniably true, and Mom’s steadfast support of everyone in the
family through thick and through thin is unique among all the women I have ever
met – together my parents have packed another big adventure under their belts and
are the better for it, as individuals, as a couple, and as the heads of our
ever-expanding family. And did I mention Aunt Anna Martin? She is spry, full of
smiles, going to her Senior Center programs twice a week, and knows how to wear
a holiday ensemble. It was many many years when we couldn’t have imagined Aunt
Anna looking as great as she does, so it’s another blessing to count and be
exceedingly grateful for.
And so, my family heads into the New Year full of optimism and hope, filled also with a love of life and the world that is the inspiration to go go forward, try harder, give more, and live better. That is the spirit with which I approach 2009 and it is the spirit I wish for everyone reading this, in abundance. Happy New Year!
Hi John,
After I emailed you I looked at your Treelights blog. Glad to read that you had a fun time in NJ with your family. I remember your nieces Jessica and Rebecca toddling down 18th Street, ~12 years ago. They must have been 2 or 3.
Josie turns 8 on Monday.
Tempus fugit don't it.
-j
Posted by: James Rozzelle | January 10, 2009 at 04:08 PM