I went back to work today after a mental health day. It was much needed as the day before ended with my supervisor’s supervisor, someone I once liked a lot, telling me about yet again someone else complaining about me. This time it was deflected.

I’m sure the supervisor’s supervisor has been running interference on my behalf and things might be a lot worse if the supervisor’s supervisor was not doing just that. But it will remain unsaid. I did have the paranoid feeling that today could be the day. The first half was filled with that feeling. The second half, not so much, and the second half is more like a quarter than a half.

Today is my sister’s birthday! She’s made it to 7 decades. She’s something else, my sister. Never had a cross word with her, bruised feelings but nothing worse than that. Relatives have actually come out and said they wish they could have a bond like the bond I have with my sister. All it takes really, is calling on weekends for 35 years.

She’s an influence on my musical taste much like my brothers were. And she also went out of her way to make sure I was alright. I visited her quite a few times when she lived in New Hampshire. I would catch a bus from the Port Authority in midtown Manhattan and ride up to New England.

One time, as we stopped at a bus station for a few minutes, and I got out to stretch my legs where I was met by an armed forces recruiter who asked me if I was ‘So & so’. I told him I wasn’t but he didn’t believe me. I guess ‘So & so’ was supposed to be on the bus but never turned up so he figured I must have been him.

My sister took time off from work so we could do things, go to the beach in Maine, and go see a movie in Brattleboro, Vermont. Then she would drive me back to NJ, me being the DJ picking out songs that I thought she would like, songs that we both heard growing up courtesy of our brothers.

She was also the first one in my family to ask if I was gay. I was gay at the time but in a closet and also in high school. I explained that I didn’t have a girlfriend since I was bussed to an all-boys Catholic high school. I guess that might have eased her worried mind.

Years later after high school, I met her boyfriend, soon to be husband and he told her I was gay. It was obvious to him, but everyone else in that house on Riverview Avenue was in denial and just did not want to know.

Eventually, a couple of years later, my sister and brother-in-law and some of their friends went to a gay bar in Brattleboro where I mainly remember dancing to Erasure singing ‘Respect’. Now I take time off from work when my sister flies in, we go down the shore and I’m still picking songs for my sister to sing along to.

70 years!