Once again I was reading Sally Swift (Heath and Ron) and one of her past posts inspired me to write here. Sally maybe you are my muse. Come sit near by and scratch my head softly. Apologies ahead of time. This seems a bit truncated to me but I wanted to express exactly what came up after reading Sally's post and here it is.

  I was cleaning out a box in the basement recently and came across an old birthday card with a picture of Kim Novak on it. Inside it said from one sex symbol to another. Tame stuff huh? Well not really. So many things in life are about context and if the context is a birthday card from 1982 written by a long dead friend and class mate...from the extremely christian college you attended... well boys even refering light heartedly to one another as a sex symbol was at the least gutsy.
  When I opened the card I had forgotten who it was from and wondered why I was keeping it. I have lived a wandering life and something as small as a card from all those years ago is a surprising find. Beneath the printed sentiment it said, "Happy Birthday, Pall."
  Pall is best seen counterposed against another college hallmate, John. John arrived a year after Pall and I, having transfered from another extremely christian college in Oklahoma. John was the poster child for christianity; madras shirts, sandy blonde hair, khaki pants, preppy, pretty (but not too) he had even lost a brother tragically in child hood. John was engaging, funny extroverted, social. Everybody on campus thought John was a pretty good fellow. We spent a lot of time together and because then as now everybody tells me everything I got to know him quite well.
  Pall like John was from Upstate New York. Any resemblance stopped there. Pall was the perfect anti-WASP. Black hair, dark skin, brown almost black eyes and a largish Lebanese nose inherited from his absent (Oh Scandal!) father assured that he stood out from the mostly lilly white crowd at our little school. He wore a leather jacket. And listened to secular music. Yes right there in his dorm room like there was nothing wrong with it he listened to U2. He said that in an interview that the lead singer professed to be Christian. Well you know what so did Dolly Parton and then she made a movie where she played an actual whore and didn't have the good grace to die at the end or anything! And if you really love the lord wouldn't you spell your name right? Let's just say that in a world where appearences matter Pall was greatly in need of the grace that the good chrisitians around him so obviously provided. No one ever really said anything bad about him directly but in the heavily christened confines of this Springfield, Mo. college no one ever said ANYTHING directly especially something that didn't smack of forgiveness and understanding.
  The year John arrived Pall was on a different floor and no longer across the hall but we both wrote for the school newspaper and stayed in touch. John and I became relatively close, both part of a strange group that looking back had one thing in common. John was always fun but had a sometimes dark side that was visible once you got close. He once accidentally revealed that he was skimming off the top when he ordered pizza and counting himself out when he divided up the check. For all of his outer appearance of wholsome sanctity he went to a clearing in the woods and sunbathed naked and then of course told the inner circle about his embarassing sunburn. Little flashes of violence and malevolence would show through then be extinguished by the waspy white smile.
  The inner circle... what can I say? So much context to be aware of here that I'm not sure I can do it justice. Eric: blonde, cute and a little flashy in a Chess King kind of way, had a girlfriend who went to school in town as well that had come from out east with him. They were such good chrisitians that they would take fellatio to the brink but stop before Eric's orgasm because that would be a sin. Eric would then come in and beat off in front of his room mate who would be kicked out later that year when caught having sex with another male student from his hometown of Peoria. (Funny I thought that if it played in Peoria it would play anywhere) It looks like Eric wasn't the only one to bring his lover with him to school. Kurt, we schooled him in talking without a lisp so he wouldn't sound so queer. He actually admitted to having sex with men in the past! Thank god he found salvation- people who were having that kind of sex were reaping the vengence of the lord with that new disease. It was like the old testament all over again. What exciting times we lived in to once again have such a visible reminder of the lords wrath. Stephen was a foriegner all the way from Canada. He could be forgiven for his effeminate ways- He's Canadian not g- you know- like that... So my second and last year was full of confession from these misplaced misfits. They were all fooling around and confessing to each other (but don't tell anyone else they wouldn't understand) and me. And me. Well I didn't fool around or confess. I was a  religious skeptic- at best I wanted to believe but never quite could. On the other hand I figured that coming here was an agreement of sorts and that it was just not kosher to say one thing and do another. That and coming from small town America I didn't really get the whole gay thing yet, but that is a whole 'nother story.
  John- he had a different way of looking at it all together. John it seems believed that if you show the proper remorse and "put it under the blood" (The blood of Jesus will wash away your sins) that there was enough forgiveness to get you by at least until the next time you got a hankerin for the other staff of life. John was a hell of a confessor he would tell you his sins, who he sinned with, how good they sinned, who that person had sinned with. I think maybe all that confessing got him so worked up that he and whoever he was confessing with might have ended up doing just a little more sinning to top the whole thing off. He told me about he and Eric (Whatever religious inhibitions Eric's girlfriend had about "completing the task" did not hold John back). He talked about fooling around with a seventeen year old camper at the church camp he was a counselor at that summer. Old John he was a talker.
  I didn't go back for a third year. It took me a long time to sort out all the mixed messages and my skeptisism developed into rationalism and god bless all of them that I left behind may they find peace in whatever form they need. I kept in touch for a while with some of them before drifting off into my own idea of life and finally figured out that gay thing (Yeah!) I wonder where they all are sometimes. I know John is pastoring in Syracuse or was ten years ago. And Pall, well there's the real end to this story.
  The year after I left I got a call from my friend Dave. He was on the hall with Pall and I the first year. Pall had borrowed a car to run to the hardware store. When they found it in an abandoned lot the gas tank was empty and a garden hose from the hardware store had been duct-taped from the muffler to the window. Pall left a note and enough money to get the car cleaned up. See, Pall was gay too. He wasn't fooling around and then seeking forgiveness: his was a daily struggle with what he thought, what he had been told, was a sin. He couldn't live with his sin. He couldn't wash away who he was in the blood of Jesus and then sin again. It's funny how loved Pall was-at his funeral.

And sometimes I still get choked up when I see the cover of U2's Joshua Tree or an old birthday card in the basement.