#1 in LGBTQ || When Johnny and Jason, the high school football team's two star players, come out on social media as gay lovers, all hell breaks loose in the small Appalachian town of Kenton. Their lives, and those of some of their teammates who come...
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PHOTO above - Central Park and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
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New York City October 2016
From my perch atop the lofty rock formation in Central Park, I look out at the East Meadow football fields below me and watch a group of guys playing touch football on the one closest by. The huge old trees and lower growth all around are just about shouting in their vivid autumn colors, and the sky is a cloudless blue as the sun beats down in its Indian summer glory on this unusually warm and dreamy Saturday afternoon in late October.
How I miss the hills of southeast Ohio today! They'd be magnificent in their rolling color as far as the eye could see, and I'd definitely be up there on Spirit Rock gazing out at them if fate hadn't stepped in to rock the hell out of my world in that hot midsummer week last year, now fifteen months ago.
The fall foliage would be at its peak now and the Kenton area filled with tourists, visitors from the flatlands upstate and in neighboring Indiana who come to see the endless hills in all their painted glory. But I'd have the best view of all in the Jacey cupid's heart as my eyes would be following the timber cut up and down the hills as it makes its way toward Athens. They'd stop a moment and strain to catch a glimpse of the blue Ohio River far off in the distance, and those elusive hills of West Virginia on the other side.
But instead I'm here on top of these rocks in the very center of Manhattan, a place so utterly different from where I grew up. New York is one of the biggest and most exciting cities in the world, and here I am living out what I sometimes think can only be a dream. It's not anything I ever wanted, and I never would've imagined a life like this. It's totally fucking amazing and it took a whole shitload of what had to be miracles to make it happen.
The East Meadow is as big as a city block with several full-sized football fields on it. Dudes are running all over it shouting, grunting, hooting as they play ball. On the far side straight ahead is a low stone wall under the tall old trees, a wide city sidewalk on the other side of it, and then what I can only think of as the endless parade of Fifth Avenue with its downtown-rushing traffic and surging crowds of residents and tourists on foot.
I live in the big apartment building right across the avenue, there at the corner of East 97th Street. From here I can see my windows up on the fifteenth floor. It never ceases to amaze me that I live up so high and in such an expensive apartment here in New York's tony Upper East Side.
I can see the meadow down here from up in the apartment and the bigger North Meadow right behind me, and the tennis courts and reservoir south across the 97th Street transverse road that cuts through the park to the West Side. In fact, I can see the whole park from up there, an endless sea of trees, twenty thousand of them, like a mini wilderness in the midst of the big city. It's not the endless mountains back home, but at least I can look out my windows and see a forest, even if it is surrounded by the battalions of skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side.
