Triple Word Score

This afternoon I was playing Scrabble with my mother, as I do on many weekends. She's 86 and has dementia. Her memory and confusion problems, which started about nine years ago, can make it difficult to be around her sometimes. But she, like my father, has always been a word person -- both of them worked with foreign languages in their careers -- and Scrabble is about the best way I know to keep her anchored and engaged. She also does crossword puzzles, though she's not very good at them anymore; when she hands me an unfinished one to "take a look at it," I find myself erasing mistakes as much as filling in blanks.

Today on one of her Scrabble turns, she put down this word: GAY.

Then she said, with a hint of playfulness, "You ought to know about that!"

Heh.

I came out to my parents 15 years ago, only six months or so after coming out to myself and most of my close friends and siblings. My mother and father came a long way in the first few years, such that by the time I introduced them, in 1996, to the man I was dating and who would be my partner for eight years, it was immediately apparent that they embraced our relationship and accepted him as a family member. He was included in all family gatherings he wished to attend from that point on, no questions asked.

But with the exception of their first confused days following my coming-out to them in January 1991, never once have my parents brought up in my presence any gay topic. No news article, no question about my opinion on some antigay legislation, no feelings of their own about anything even remotely related. I don't remember them ever uttering the word "gay" around me in the last 15 years.

On a few occasions I've been at their house when a story has come on CNN about gay marriage or the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, Australia. They've listened, by my interpretation at least, in a kind of awkward silence. I have to note that I've enabled the silence at these times -- although about a year ago, during the Mardi Gras report, I decided to acknowledge the subject and made an innocuous remark about how that was supposed to be one of the biggest gay festivals in the world or something. No comment.

Strangely enough, both of them occasionally used to talk about gay people -- up until the moment I came out to them. Sometime during the year preceding my coming-out, after reading an article about a gay teacher being fired, my father said that he'd worked with gay people and they were "perfectly nice" and respectable and did a good job, and it was ridiculous to penalize them for being gay. I also remember his asking me around that same time, after I had come out to myself but not yet to him or my mother (and I'm not making this up, though it does seem to be a line from a hokey sitcom, father asking closeted gay son): "Why do gay men like Judy Garland so much?"

Ummm . . .

I actually took these moments as signs that he was ready to hear the truth about me, and they emboldened me to make the move soon thereafter. In the interest of moving this story along, and out of respect for my father's own emotional journey, let me just say that my announcement was not initially greeted, by him or my mother, with "forget your troubles, come on, get happy" abandon. But they emerged relatively quickly as supportive parents of a gay son, albeit in their don't-ask-don't-tell way.

Once during the six years my ex and I lived together -- and after my mother's dementia had begun -- I was showing my family around the upstairs floor of our house. As we passed the bedrooms, my mother asked me, "Which one is your room?"

So when she put down the word GAY on the Scrabble board today, it was a tiny moment that jolted me and then, more quietly, made me smile.

"You ought to know about that!"

Yep.