Some Fine Day

By Emery C. Walters

This is the story of how Emery Walters became whom he was supposed to be.

I knew I was male at an early age, something that was a societal no-no in the 1950s and still is in parts of the country today. Burying my male identity, I strove to be the best woman possible. But after raising my four wonderful children from two debilitating marriages, I found myself alone and nearly penniless. That was when Emery asserted his identity.

Life became better with the shift from female to male, a third marriage, and a wife who, herself, transitioned from male to female.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Dec 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781077551497

Emery C. Walters

Emery C. Walters was born Carol Forde, a name he soon knew didn’t fit the boy he was inside. Transition was unknown back then, so he married and then bore and raised four children. When his youngest child, his gay son, left home, Emery told Carol that she had to step aside, and he fully transitioned from female to male in 2001.

Book preview

Some Fine Day

We all eat lies when our hearts are hungry.

By Emery C. Walters

Copyright 2019 Emery C. Walters

ISBN 9781077551497

Cover Design: Robyn Walters

All rights reserved.

WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

Published in the United States of America.

* * * *

Some Fine Day

We all eat lies when our hearts are hungry.

By Emery C. Walters

Future Obituary

What Took Me So Long?

Part One: Baby and Toddler

But Hey, Some Background First

Ages Five to Ten: The Fun Times

Bye, Bye, Connecticut, Hello Michigan

Ugh, Grosse Ile

High School

Moving Right Along, Doing That Whole Woman Thing

Young Adultery

Mommyhood

Not So Good At It

Living with No Body

Marriages: Doing the Best ‘Woman’ I Could

Numero Uno

Remember to Breathe

And Again

And the Play Continues, or Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Generational Things, Parenting and So Forth

Divorce

Marriage Number Two: The Bill Years

Well That Was Fun, Moving Right Along, Literally

Step Aside, Nothing to See Here

The Missing Years, 1989 to 1998

Third Time Lucky: 1999

TGPlay

Meanwhile, Back in Reality

Washington State

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004, Cruising Right Along

2005

2006

2007

2008

Post Change and Revisiting the Past

Where the Fuck Is 2010 to the Present Time?

2011–2016

Current Mood: Distressed

As It Does

On Writing as a Survival Tool

Poems

Ruffled Shirt 1970

The Box 1972

Talk Amongst Myself 1976

Under the Water 1978

The Wall 1980

Yellow Wood 1988

Who Is Anna? 1990

Silver Bird Among the Crows 1996

Hidden Lake 1998

Spirit House 1998

I No Longer Need 1999

Old Woman 1999

Darkened Corner 1999

Shaman, Healer 2000

Prose

Currently Published Work

On The Place of Reading

Resolution

Afterthought Number One:

Afterthought Number Two:

Finis

Future Obituary

Emery C. Walters, nee Carol Ann Forde, died blah blah, 2076, (why not?). The death was accidental; Mr. Walters slipped on a piece of chocolate while trying to get the last sip of iced tea out of a Starbucks cup, causing him to fall onto his pirate sword and skewer himself like a barbequed chicken. He was born on April 15, 1943, in the one-time crime capital of the world, East St. Louis, Illinois, after a rushed trip with police escort to the wrong hospital. He almost ended up being born Catholic instead of Episcopalian.

No visitation or funeral will be held, as those who loved him saw him and or interacted online with him while he was alive, and besides, the pirate-themed birthday party would be too hard to beat.

Oh yeah, the female to male bit.

Emery was a writer and photographer and liked nothing more than embarrassing his friends and family in public. ‘Blabbermouth’ was one of his nicknames. He was a geocacher, trained Ninja, and a founding member of the ‘Curiosity Killed the Cat but it Hasn’t Hurt Me Too Much Yet’ club.

A survivor of many ‘oh shit’ moments, glaucoma threats, disease of the month, and a few other assorted off-to-the-hospital occasions, he finally had to succumb to the ‘everyone-dies-and-that-includes-me theory’ which seems to have turned out to be true.

He was employed over the years by a box factory, a police station, and a county government; was a volunteer probation officer, scout leader, room mother, and book stocker. He enjoyed snorkeling and hiking and hated to travel.

He was the author of many books, most of which you’ve never heard of, and producer of thousands of photos, most of which should have been deleted but weren’t. All of these can be found online (e.g., at Amazon under Emery C. Walters) or somewhere in the piles of crap on his desk, if you’re really interested. Though none of the books have been best sellers (yet), he donated many to organizations and libraries where their messages of hope, overcoming, and the fact that you never know when there’s going to be a party might reach the people who need them most.

Whew! Emery is survived by his loving and patient wife, four children and their spouses or partners, and seven grandchildren, sister and niece and nephews. There are/were many friends and young people he loved as well, too many to list, but you know who you are. There may even be great-grandchildren by now. Bear in mind that none of his biological descendants can do anything at all about carrying his genes, bwah hah hah.

I Told You I Was Sick, were his last words.

What Took Me So Long?

Several times I’ve been asked why I have not written an autobiography. The answer is that writing fiction is more fun. A second answer is, I’m boring. My wife and I are just another old boring, married retired couple, with just that one little thing that makes us different—we were both brought up in the opposite gender to what we are now. Big whoop, right?

Then we met and married and changed genders and lived happily ever after. The end.

She’s older than I am so her story starts earlier, but our lives dovetailed with each other’s at precisely the right time. How did we get from point A to B?

By long and different roads, through tangled woods with no map.

Part One: Baby and Toddler

Maybe I was a mistake; a biological mistake, like a club foot or a port wine stain. Wine, sounds good. BRB. ***

I don’t like autobiographies, they’re too boring, there’s no plot, and the ‘hero’ is so, so perfect. NOT. Mine will not be like that. If that’s what you want, close the book now, buy some coffee and go home. Go to the movies. Robin Williams could have played me in the movie adaptation of my story, the book you are holding now.

So many stories start at the beginning and go on to the end; mine has no end as yet, and I hope, won’t for a long time. Or looked at sideways, has had many endings. I was a child; I was a teenager, a young married woman, an older married-to-a-different-person woman, and then, finally, I became me. Is that six? If I were a cat, I’d have three more; unless I get perfect in some way, I’m not sure I can handle three more of me. I’m not sure I can handle this one, let alone what’s left over from the previous five.

But let’s begin.

There’s a young couple in a 1939 Mercury, let’s say, speeding toward a hospital in East Saint Louis, Illinois. I have no idea what they’d done with the prototype, I mean, their first child, but number two is on the way and apparently, I am in a hurry. A police car gives chase to the speeding car; then when he sees my mother, blowing and grimacing, and my dad for once panicky and brittle, proceeds to lead, wrongly, straight to the closest hospital. So I was almost born Catholic.

But things work out, and they made it to the hospital they wanted, the one where their doctor was waiting for them. All I know about this time was that in 1943 mothers were kept in the hospital for two weeks to recover from the birth, and that I won the most beautiful baby contest for that month. A beautiful baby girl…so they thought, but looks can be deceiving.

Hell, I knew ‘they’ were wrong before I was five—that was the soonest I could articulate it, and I’m sure it came out as an ‘oh isn’t that cute’ moment on my parents’ side.

That being said, why did I go into hiding almost immediately? I felt like I was dead inside, below the neck; I was locked into a dark coal cellar of my own making, with only shame and cold darkness outside the locked door. There was one small window way up high, that I could only reach when absolutely necessary to save my ‘house’ or body from physical harm, or to get a breath of air, to keep myself barely alive. To keep from being completely dead.

Did I try to kill myself? No, because I didn’t feel like my life belonged to me, anyhow; it belonged to my mother, with whom I was fiercely codependent. I had no innate knowledge of how to be a woman in the world, and the information on being a man was not coming in anywhere, not from any role models, not from knowing anyone else like me, not from books or looking it up in the encyclopedia, even if I had had a name for it. Any time I even hinted at it from the time I was five, I was ignored or shut down so firmly, that I knew it was wrong to mention it. Who would believe me? Nobody knew anything anyhow.

All I had was shame and confusion, and guilt, but I don’t know why. I think I knew I’d be mocked if I wore boys’ shoes or trousers with a zipper up the front. And, that also had to be shoved aside so ‘no one would know.’ Why the shame and hiding? Research has not even helped me find an answer, other than that I had to act my role as physically assigned to me at birth in order to just survive.

Up through fifth grade, I was the most popular kid in school. Then puberty hit. Luckily in high school there were other rejects, I have no idea if the boys had rejects, too, but there were three or four other female outcasts in high school. One was poor, another only had a mother, a third was horse crazy. None of us bought into the expensive clothes and hairdos and shallow conversation, nor did we attempt to join in with the popular group. We were lucky to find each other.

By then, I’d been going to church and Sunday School for ten years. All the pronouns in the Bible and at church were him, his, he; I knew they thus didn’t pertain to me as a female. That was confusing and only helped me feel worthless.

I actually heard of Multiple Personality Disorder before I ever heard of Transsexualism and wondered if that was my ‘problem’. Then, because of the male pronouns plus how men worked and had adventures and were heroes, I thought maybe I was just jealous. My sister had blond hair and blue eyes and was the smart one; maybe I was just jealous of everything. That made me ashamed as well. As adults we once shared that we both thought our parents loved the other one better, so we both suffered from that.

But Hey, Some Background First

Oh, but I was talking about my background! Well my dad had a male cousin who…never married. He had a female cousin who had a ‘live-in companion’. Yeah, right. He himself bought Mom satin nightgowns and slips every Christmas, and my mom would go in the bathroom and cry. Guess who really wore them; you think?

So here are all the actors on the stage; Dad, Mom, ancestors in the shadows, my sister and me, various aunts and uncles and cousins. In my opinion, there are two things that make you who you are: one is your family/background/environment and the other is what you brought to this planet, your own inner self, which is probably not even known to us until after it all unfolds, years later. Nonetheless, family; how did they affect me? How did I interact with them? What did they teach me? How did that play with what I brought to this planet? And when they disagree, which one do you believe in?

I think I chose the wrong one; I never validated my belief that I was not a girl but a boy; how crazy a secret was that anyhow, in 1948 when I first articulated my feelings? Of course at age five I had no concept of what that whole difference entailed, anyhow. As I got older, I got quieter, stuffed myself and that deep dark secret down into the coal cellar of my mind, and firmly locked the door. From the age of ten, I wrote, daydreamed, played pretend, and dreamed at night—as male. Exclusively. Only once did I think of myself as a girl/woman; I dreamed that I was a little black girl in a blue dress, crying in a hallway. Not until after surgery and hormones did I ever dream of myself as a female, and not very often then either. Oddly enough in my dreams I could never see what clothes I was wearing. (Note: I am 75. Last night I dreamed I was a normal, ordinary, beautiful young man, teenager, naked at the doctor’s office, no big deal, nobody cared. I lay back over some chairs as if it were the most common thing to ever happen. That feeling of wholeness that there probably isn’t even a language for, because it’s never been needed by the majority of people. I feel now that if there is indeed a spirit form of ourselves, that it was complete.) How do you make a life when you are not a whole person, but only the shadow of one?

From my dad, I learned to keep quiet; that if I bothered him, I’d be sorry. I don’t think he ever sexually abused me, but I’m not sure. Physically—yeah. Long story short; he’d hit me on the back of my left hand at dinner out of the blue for what felt like no reason—I laughed too loud or had my elbow on the table. Years later when I became a cutter, you know what I cut? The back of my left hand. Yeah…The morning after he died, I woke up feeling safe. That’s a fact; I have no explanation why. The only advice he ever gave me was, ‘Be nice, even if it hurts.’ You can translate that as ‘be a victim: don’t bother anyone; you’re only a girl’.

My mom taught me how to be—or pretend to be—a woman. I had no freaking clue. I knew I couldn’t copy my dad (that would be crazy, right? After all I was only a girl.) Anyhow I didn’t like him, did I? Hell no. He was cold, remote, busy with anything at all more important than me. Though he was a good father until…until I was about the age, three or four, he had been when his father was lost at sea. Swinging me around by my hands or building me a swing set doesn’t exactly make up for a dozen or so years of being told to pipe down, go away, and keep quiet. Being afraid of him wasn’t exactly a way for a daughter to learn how to interact with men, or for any child to learn s/he had any self-worth at all.

Nor did my sister and I bond too much for too long, unfortunately. In our shared adult past however, she has been ‘there’ for me in more ways than I can ever repay.

Ancestry shows that I am English, Welsh and German. As it is, I had an ancestor at the court of a German king; unfortunately, he was the jester. Suits me. So that’s where I got my sense of humor from.

My father emigrated from Wales and met my mother, who was at Deaconess School (whatever that was) in New York or Connecticut or wherever it was. For some reason they hit it off (he had a flivver for one thing, and I guess Mom liked the tall and moody type). Because my father was employed by United Engineers and Constructors as a de facto cost engineer, we moved a lot. We were in Illinois when I was born. When I was four months old, we moved to Colorado, then New Mexico just in time to live downwind during the atom bomb tests (that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it) and then to Texas. All I know about that time is that at one point we lived in a converted gas station, and I sat on the floor and ate bugs. Later they moved to Connecticut where we lived in three more different places. We moved on average of every two years until we got to a place I personally hated, and there we stayed for six years. Fuck me.

Ages Five to Ten: The Fun Times

My first knowledge of being male was announced when I was five years old. Picture it: Andrews Avenue, Milford, CT: 1948. I knew I was supposed to be a boy even then. I distinctly remember my fifth birthday, when my mother took me to the toy store to pick out my own gift. I had on shorts, a misbuttoned sweater, scuffed heavy brown shoes, and a big bandage around my left knee. I wanted a set of cap guns. She pointed out a set featuring Dale Evans, but I told her firmly that I was not a cowgirl, I was a cowboy. The picture later shows me grinning like a monkey, standing with my hands on my hips and my elbows out. The guns are sagging around my waist, and wrist cuffs are on my arms, and a big cowboy hat sat angled back on my head just so. The response from my parents: I got the sort of ‘oh isn’t that cute’ thing that people give kids when they don’t know what else to do and probably don’t know there is anything to do. I doubt my mother even bothered to tell my father.

I was content with being a girl child, doing girl things, most of the time…dolls were great fun, especially if you could feed one to the dog. The things I got into were certainly more indicative of a male child at the time—adventures you might say, though I lived through them. They filled my need to act, and since this was circa 1950, society was such that we kids were pretty much on our own much of the time. The thing with Milford, and the other two towns we lived in at that time, was, there was always something to do; the whole outdoors, the woods, the river or ocean, and friends all within walking distance. In 1948, I walked alone to school, at five years old. Supposedly with my sister, but not always. Maybe I was six or seven the time I almost stepped on a big snake coming home ‘the back way’, through the woods. Maybe I didn’t get kidnapped, taking a ride from a strange man when a hurricane was coming. Maybe I was so smart back then that I knew to stay away from the huge dangling jellyfish I was watching out in the sea, while still timing my retreat to dry ground above the sea wall as the tide came in. I probably haven’t been that smart since. At that time, I didn’t know I wasn’t whole, or at least, that it didn’t matter at the time.

I have symptoms of ‘covert’ sexual abuse. Unless it was my father, and I don’t think so, it may have been my cousin Ray who was a nephew of one of my parents. I have no memory of it, if indeed there was anything, but I wrote a short story about the time he stayed the night with my sister and me, ages nine and five, in the loft area of the house we lived in, in Waterford, CT. Did something happen to me? I have no idea, but Ray was later murdered, with his case profiled in a detective magazine. (Daylight Found the Bishop Bludgeoned, Front Page Detective, December, 1981.) My mother never mentioned there were allegations of homosexuality, rape, and possibly pedophilia involved.) I wrote my story with some of these issues in it, and in it, my relative was guilty. In reality, I have no idea. I’ll revisit this later with more information. (Reservations by yours truly, Boots, Dogs, and the Sea, pg. 101).

Did this contribute to my carelessness about my sexuality and sharing it with others later, as a teen? Or was it the fact that as a hidden transman, I really didn’t care what happened to my body below my neck; I lived in my head. Funny thought that, as I always pictured myself as imprisoned in a basement closet somewhere, like the coal cellar, with no way out.

So as a cowboy not a cowgirl, where was I? In the woods, falling into the river, down by the ocean watching the poisonous jelly fish and the tide coming in. What was I doing? I was floating down the river on a raft that came untied, while my girlfriend beside me screamed in fear as I paddled us to shore. I was wading out into the flooded front yard dragging the boat back up to higher ground while the rain still pissed down. I was shooting my water pistol through the open driver’s windows of cars while hiding in the bushes. I was behind the altar rail handing out carrot sticks to the other kids…see, it wasn’t all total juvenile delinquency. I was lighting all the candles in the foyer of the Catholic Church with another friend. The nun that found us was not best pleased.

I was the one falling through the ice and for some reason only one leg went through…or there would be no story to tell. I was the one late to school because of slides, snakes, and hitch-hiking. That was all lower elementary…later I was the one walking five miles home from school because of the sheer pleasure of woods, bugs, and finding my way with no path.

When not outside, I was listening to radio programs, playing with my dolls, or my older sister, except I never got to be the hero, always the side kick (which has paid off well in life for me over the years). Inside, we watched Milton Berle on the first television in town which Dad bought just because of Milton Berle (who cross dressed, remember). And Howdy Doody and whatever else came along.

In Connecticut at ages five and nine we went to the movies on Saturday, with my older sister in charge. We watched Alan Ladd and Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and, sometimes, science fiction movies. They don’t make them like they did in the fifties any more.

I started ballet as well, and credit my years of that with my not being as clumsy as I would be otherwise, and also, in Ninjutsu which I picked up later when my son came out as gay.

Bye, Bye, Connecticut, Hello Michigan

During the fifties, adults were no longer concerned with war years. History claims the important things were prosperity and compliance. Being different didn’t even seem possible, let alone desirable. Now this is based on me as a small child in a small town, with small-minded parents. Three different towns in Connecticut, two in Michigan; eight different houses, four different schools. Every two years something new. I don’t remember it bothering me until the last two, the two different houses on Grosse Ile. Grosse Ile was different: money, distance, attitude, and I was by then hitting puberty. Up until that move, I had no idea what prosperity meant or difference in economic levels; no, that’s not quite true. I knew, it just wasn’t a big issue yet. On Grosse Ile the income difference made ‘prosperity’ not only noticeable but an issue; the wrong clothes, the smaller, older house, the old furniture. Yes, I knew what fingerbowls were, but there were a lot of wealthy-type ways of doing things, and of being, of which I had knew nothing.

Compliance was also a bigger issue. In fifth grade, still in our first town in Michigan, Marine City, the only time it was a big issue for me was in ballet. We were doing minuets, and simply because my partner was taller, she was to dance the male part, in the male costume, while I got the long dress and the curled hair and girl part. I can still feel grief over that; it was just so wrong and there wasn’t anything I could have said or done about it.

What I could see of compliance, was, at puberty, having to wear the same straight or plaid pleated skirts, the same Peter Pan collared blouses, preferably from the Little Shop and not sent away for from Montgomery Ward or sewn by my mother at home (even though one did have kittens on it; yeah, you can picture that). I forgot what else I was going to say. I’m currently having a hot flash because my testosterone shot is due in two days. Yeah…fun and games. And I just realized that, if I had been snarky, I’d have called The Little Shop ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’, but I was jealous and hurt at the time, so maybe not.

Talk about compliance, both behavior and dress, and probably more grown-up ways than I can imagine even now, I wrote an essay about ‘Nonconforming to the Rules of Nonconformity’. Should have had an A on that one and I probably did. Maybe an A+, I don’t know. I did on another paper I wrote. The teacher, Mr. Kastre, said to put this on the title page; ‘(Title) for Mr. Kastre’. Mine ended up as ‘Life after Death for Mr. Kastre’. A+ material there.

Who was I then? That wild little girl who pretended all the time, in privacy being a cowboy or a boy and having real adventures, because only boys had adventures, not girls; in public a girl like any other, only more determined and more attached to her mother because without that role model, she would have no clue on how to be a female, and terrified that only a dark dank basement full of monsters, with all exits closed and locked, awaited if she did not act the part proscribed by her body.

I think I was truly happy then, until age ten/eleven and the move to Grosse Ile, but it was a happiness built on quicksand. I had not yet figured out that the phrase my father used the most then, ‘Some Fine Day’, meant probably never. And even though my first-grade teacher told my mother I had leadership qualities, I could not lead myself out of the darkness that was to come as I grew out of innocent childhood.

The first place we lived in in Michigan was Marine City: I loved it there, along the river, two different houses but both within walking distance of downtown, the river and my friends. I am still in contact with my best friend from that time, though she was highly uncomfortable the one time she met Robyn and me during our beginning transition times. I’m not sure just how much she’s changed in that attitude since then, but remember, this is a little girl who would sit naked on my bed reading comic books with me. This is the one who was screaming her little girly lungs out when I saved us from drowning in the river. This is the one who, later, I saw sitting on a float in a parade, with one knee drawn up, looking more feminine than a poster girl, something I would never be able to, or necessarily want to, emulate.

I was going into third grade when we moved to Michigan. As the schools in Connecticut had been so far ahead of the ones in Michigan, I was put into fourth grade instead, which I always think was a mistake. For the rest of your school life you are younger, smaller, less mature than all the other kids in your classes. The only time I was comfortable was in eleventh grade when I refused to take Home Economics. They would not let me take Shop, and I was put into Art class with all tenth-grade boys. Talk about feeling like I belonged! If only I hadn’t been so heavy into hiding. I wonder if any of those boys were gay?

It was only a few months before we moved, autumn of sixth grade; I was ten years old, when my puberty issues came to my awareness. I wanted to talk to someone, for someone to really see who I was, and there was nothing I could bring myself to do. I’d never heard of my feelings before in anyone else. I’d never heard of the word ‘transsexual’. When Christine Jorgensen returned to the USA in the early fifties, I heard nothing about it, but later when I did, I would have thought that it did not pertain to me, as I was already female. Can you call it denial if you don’t know that there is something to deny? Reading about it now, the fact that the news stressed her beauty and her mink coat would have also put her transition far out of the world of accessibility or ‘normality’ (ha-ha) for people like me, anyhow.

I just found my Marine City sixth grade report card. It has only the first two sessions because we moved after that. My teacher was Mr. Ferrett; he liked me best of all the kids. I got all A’s. And some of the categories we were judged in were in ‘Citizenship’; yes of course I got all ‘Satisfactory’ in these important, life-long, future-determining habits, such as keeps hands away from face, uses handkerchief, works and plays well with others, and controls speech habits. I can