Bogumil Pacak-Gamalski

Let’s talk again, Babycake. This time in English. Not that it does make a difference for you now. You know every language now, and you always knew the language of Love. Without uttering a single word. When I looked at you, it felt like looking at an open book of Petrarch sonnets of love.  When I inhaled the sweet scent of your body, it was like smelling a meadow full of honeysuckles.

Tears, bitter tears fall in a bitter rain,

And my heart trembles with a storm of sighs

When on your beauty bend my burning eyes,

For whose sole sake the world seems flat and vain.[1]

But, as Polish is my language of first words, English is yours. So, let’s talk again, Babycake. I am so used to calling you by that name, it seems so natural. Do you remember when and how you become my Babycake? It brings such a sweet smile to my lips. Of course, Armistead Maupin and his “Tales of the City”! The year was 1994, PBS played it on TV in US and Canada. And we watched it in a cozy apartment on Howard Avenue in Burnaby glued to TV, crying like every other gay man in North America. Mouse used it all the time speaking to Mona or Mary Ann. 1994 – our first year in our first own apartment  At that time there was hardly any serious movie, let alone a long series on every TV screen in Canada and USA about us – the Queer community. With wonderful, amazing Gloria Dukakis as one of the leading characters[2]. It could be hardly called a literary phenomenon, Maupin was not a genius – but it was a series that changed a lot. The viewership was massive. It seemed that entire young North America watched it with us, regardless of sexual orientation. And every one cried, of course. For my generation, it was the same tear-jerker as Segal’s “Love Story”[3] with Ali MacGrow and Ryan O’Neal, which I watched twice in a movie theater twenty years earlier. Of course, the entire theatre cried and everybody inside was in their early twenties. Ah, to be young and romantic …. That movie gave us a famous fraze: ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’. It does mean it. I never was, you never were. I never will. Not for our love.

In 2014, on the first anniversary of our formal wedding (over twenty years after our love was born), I wrote :

To John – my dearest husband on our first formal Anniversary

(unfinished, on May 19, 2014)

Hold me, hold me tight

as the river of nights flows by

Hold me don’t let go

even when I do you wrong

As I bare my soul and cry

do not leave do not run

For this moment when it comes

for the day wet and cold

for the barren night of black

/ gold

for the poem with wrong

/rhymes

I will stay even if you go

Although the thought of the promise alluded to the idea that one day you might live, not to the possibility of your death before mine, I kept it nonetheless.  I did stay, Babycake. I will.

I have spent the past few days and nights in and out of the Emergency Department at our hospital in Dartmouth. One of the nights I came home, to our bed. Not even a full three hours to get some rest, told them I will be back in the morning.

I saw you there, in our bedroom, we talked – remember? You were sad, you begged me to be careful, to look after myself. It made me almost angry, I replied: how can you ask me that? I am coming to you Babycake, I want to be with you, to touch you again, to feel you! I am not leaving, I’m coming to you! You told me that you are with me but you don’t want me to leave this reality yet, that I still have to take you to some trails, some towns, you smiled and said that you will even go with me to some sunny beaches on the ocean, lakes. And I promised you again. I stayed. Forgive me for that short argument. I was tired, and couldn’t see clearly.  I will ‘hold the fort’. Our fort. The Fort of Our Love. Forgive me the tears as I write it – yes, you were right, when you said many years ago that I am a sentimental fool. A sucker for melodrama, LOL. But I will keep you for your word: you can’t ever say that you don’t want to go to the beach today. Remember.

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_{[1] Petrarch, Sonnet XV; trans. by Joseph Auslander}

_{[2] TV mini-series based on A. Maupin trilogy by the same title. Aired on Channel4 in the UK in 1993 and by PBS in North America in 1994. It received the highest-ever viewership in the history of PBS at that time.}

_{[3] 1970 movie directed by Arthur Hiller}