Has anyone ever used something that was yours without permission? What happened? I lived in Detroit. And when I moved there, it was a beautiful little neighborhood and a lot of city workers worked in my neighborhood. Policemen, firemen, people who worked for the city. Well, then they took the ban off that, that you had to live in Detroit to work in Detroit, and they moved out into the suburbs and overnight, it seemed, in the span of a year, our neighborhood went from nice, hard-working, family-orientated neighborhood to renters and squatters, and we had a succession of people living next door to us. And I went to my mother's for the weekend, and when I came home, none of my children's things were in the yard. Their bikes were gone, their pool was gone, everything was gone. And it wasn't far. It was right next door, set up in their yard. So I had to go over, and I started emptying the pool to take it down and bring it back. I brought the bikes back. I never said a word to the mother, I just went and got it, and she's like, "What are you doing with my stuff?!" And I told her it's my stuff, and if she had a problem with it, we could call the cops and get them involved. Well, ironically she didn't want to do that. Hmm. I got my stuff, and we had to go retrieve it several times over the, the next course of the next two years. After that, I moved out of Detroit and moved into a little bitty cowtown. Best move I ever made for my children.

I was adopted. So my blood family are people that I've really never met. I did locate and find out who my biological mother was and talked to my biological aunt, and since then my biological mother has passed away, so I never got a chance to meet her. I know that there are a couple of -- I have a couple of half brothers out there and I don't really know how to contact them, or how to get ahold of them, or even if I should, because I was adopted -- I was put up for adoption when I was an infant. My biological mother was not married, and I believe that she went into that with the understanding that this was a totally confidential thing, that that was not -- you know, that she was not -- it was not an open adoption, and I feel bad violating her wishes and her rights to look up family members or instigate too much. Now, my, my cousin came off totally from the opposite perspective when I was talking with her. She was very upset that this was not public information and that she found out -- we found out through 23andMe. And when we looked at how closely related we were, it was like, "This has gotta be." I had at some point in the past, gotten some non-identifying information from the court, and when she told her family story, um, her mother was one of four sisters, as was my biological mother. And when we started connecting all the dots, it was very clear that she was my cousin and that this one particular sister was my biological mother. And -- but they had -- they denied it. They, they -- her mother, her own mother, my biological aunt denied it. And I think it was just back in those days, it was the 50s and I think those secrets, they expected to keep those secrets forever. They promised they wouldn't tell, wouldn't tell the story and they wouldn't, wouldn't betray that confidence, and I had a hard time with, um, with my cousin, 'cause I accepted that and respected that, but she had a hard time realizing there was another family member that her family never told her about. So, um, since then, I think that's sort of lifted away, and I don't talk to her…

There have been times where my parents, um, would not let me hang out with certain friends. I think it was like when I was in maybe 10th grade or 9th grade, and everybody was having boyfriends, and it was all the -- it was cool to be dating, right? And my parents didn't want me to date anybody. And I come from a pretty conservative culture, so, um, it was like the norm not to have a boyfriend. So, two of my best friends had boyfriends, and they were like texting them, you know, um, on the down-low, kinda like keeping it a secret from their parents. But then it kind of got exposed, they got caught, and my parents got to know and my parents called their parents. And like, it was a whole mess between the parents. But then my two friends, even though we were pretty young, they -- I mean, they were annoyed understandably, but they were also kind of understanding that this was not me that was like, calling up their parents, but it was my parents.  And I think them being able to make that distinction really helped me a lot at the time. Of course like, they didn't talk to me for, for like a good two weeks or so after that incident. And it was not just one isolated incident, too. It was like multiple incidents where my parents were being like super overbearing and calling them up and like trying to record our conversations, like my conversations with my friends. Trying to like, intimidate them. I dunno. I really don't know what the purpose of that was. 'Cause either way, I had a boyfriend, and I think I was like, driven to do that even more 'cause my parents, like, put their best effort for me not to have a boyfriend. It was ridiculous, actually. But I guess it's like -- it's a good experience, um, so that I know what to do and what not to do with my own kids if I ever have any.

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. But what I want to say about roommates was that I had the same roommate for 16 years, and then I married her. Or so, that's what some people in our family thought because um, you know, a lot of the time when you are queer or gay or whatnot, you have to stay closeted to some or all of the people you know for some or all time. And, [laughs,] I, I didn't outright lie to some people, but also didn't outright say anything to a lot of people for a lot of the years that I was with my wife because, well, I was kind of in denial for the first literally seven, eight, solid years. But then I admitted it, eight years in, and you know, we told our daughter and she said, "Yeah, of course, I know." [Laughs.] And I guess a lot of people probably did know, but didn't say anything back to us. But yeah, my grandma... The first time I ever said anything about being gay, or being with the person I had showed up to her house with for the past 16 years on Sundays, um, is our invitation to our little reception because we had went down to the courthouse and got married! [Laughs.] A year after -- a year and a day after it was legal nationwide, we went to the courthouse in downtown Detroit and got married in a private little -- we didn't do the bulk -- 'cause they have like a bulk ceremony too, where they marry a bunch of people at once. But we did the little thing in the little chapel with the lady. We had a very nice lovely chaplain, or whatever she was. And we came with my stepdad, her mom, my best friend, our daughter, and then our friend, and we all went downtown Detroit to the big courthouse, got married there and then we walked over and, you know, forgive me if you were a Lafayette [Coney Island] loyalist, but we went to, um, American -- that's what it's called, the one next to it? American Coney Island? Yeah, we went to that one and had some coney dogs and whatnot. Because you know, when in Detroit. Um, and that was our fun little wedding…

So, I was at work hosting probably what will be my last birthday party that I host there, unless I come back for a break. And the first birthday party that I hosted that night, it wasn't going that well because the fire alarm got pulled. And there was just some air of sadness to the party. Like, I couldn't figure out what it was, but I was trying to smile and make everything be perfect. But clearly because of the whole fire alarm thing, it wasn't going to be. And at the end of the party, I offered to help the birthday boy's father carry some bags out to his car 'cause that's just something that I do for all the parties that I host. So, this time the dad said, “Yes,” when normally the parents say no. So I was carrying all the gifts out to the car, and the birthday boy's dad said, "Thank you for making this the most special birthday party ever." And I said, "I'm just trying to do my job. I'm sorry about the whole fire alarm thing." And he says, "I don't really think you get it. My son was a twin, and his brother unexpectedly died. And this is his first birthday by himself." And the thing that made it really special is, apparently, the boy's twin brother had the same name that I do. And the dad said that me being there made it feel like his son who had passed on was with them. And even though I really didn't do anything at all to make this party as special as it was for them, it was just like my existence and my presence and trying to bring light into it without knowing the good that I was doing that made it extra special. And, I mean, that party did not give me a tip, but I feel like the impact that I was able to have on that family was just as important, if not more important, than any extra five dollars could've gotten me. So, yeah, sometimes you impact people in ways that you can never expect.

My son really likes airplanes and trains and history, and we had hoped to go to the Milwaukee Public Museum -- the Public Museum -- because it's closing for relocation. And then we had also hoped to go to the Illinois Railway Museum. We ended up not being able to do any of that. And it's a really good thing that we didn't go, because as you know, the historic floods happened in Milwaukee and Chicago. So if we had gone -- if things had not hindered us from going -- like, my, my son got injured, so he couldn't hold the camera. So we, we ended up not going 'cause he would wanna film these places that we were gonna go, so we ended up not going ‘cause he can't hold the camera. His, his hand got injured. But it's a good thing we didn't go, because the historic floods hit Milwaukee and Chicago, and we saw on the news where they were. And that's -- those are the roads, the 41 and 43 in Illinois and over there in Milwaukee, we would have been driving right through the floods and the rain. And it's really dangerous driving through a storm and driving through floods. So -- and my car might have gotten stalled and that would be very bad if I'm so far away from home and I need auto repair because we don't live there. There's nobody we can really call for help, and how would we get to hotels and everything? So it, it ended up -- it was bad for my son. He had nine stitches. Um, so it -- and he's kind of worried about it 'cause, you know, stitches make you look like Frankenstein. But at least it wasn't his writing hand, so he can still write with his writing hand. But that's what prevented us from going, and that's what prevented us from being caught in a storm.

Eventually, one of the girls that lived on our floor -- the, the floors were divided at that time. We had girl floors and boy floors, and there were sister floors and brother floors. So one of the girls on my floor, she was real nice, but she didn't do too well at school so she had to drop out for a while. So, her roommate had a room to herself, and I desperately wanted to get rid of my secretive, moody roommate. I went down and talked to this girl and asked if I could move in with her, and she said, "Sure!" So I did. I moved out and moved in with [Name], so, ha! And [Name] and I hit it off. We had so much in common. We became good friends very fast. We spent a lot of time talking instead of studying. We would lay in bed at night and just talk and talk. She -- we both had loft beds. So we had boosted both of our beds up and we had room underneath for a couch and then our desks. We had our -- and our room was very cute. So, we just -- we had so much in common. Our dads had similar jobs. We both had older sisters that were the same age. We had lots of memories that were, were similar. And we liked the same, same kinds of things. We were both business majors, and we both loved movies, and we liked certain bands. We liked Journey and Boston, Van Halen, all those old bands from the eighties. And, um, we both loved to just do silly stuff. Like, we liked having fun. We, we would go just do, like, goofy things in the cafeteria.And one night we decided we were gonna go steal all the light bulbs from a room in our brother floor. Some boys -- we knew that they never locked their door, so we went down there and we stole all their light bulbs and we brought ‘em back to our room. And we were just laughing hysterically. We thought it was so funny. So then we locked our door and we went out for the evening and somehow, those boys figured out that it was us! And they, they somehow got into our room. We never did find out how they did it. But they…

So we've never -- my whole family, we've never been to Europe on vacation before. So that's where we wanted to go, vacation to Europe. And obviously, one week in Europe is -- like, people think that's, um -- like people told me, like, gave me feedback, like "Ah, that's kind of short. There's so much to see in Europe, even just if you're going to one country." Well, because we've never been to Europe and because we're on such limited time, my parents decided to go one country a day. Can you believe that? One country -- so basically, we travel by night, fly by night, and then explore like a tourist during the day. I was like, can you believe this? This -- it's the craziest thing ever. That's not even as crazy as it gets. That's just, that's just the itinerary that's crazy. What actually happened is even crazier.  So, our first stop was in London, and we were supposed to spend a day there in London and then the next day fly to Greece. So -- heh, yeah, imagine. One day in London. So we were flying to London and midway through our flight, we didn't know what was happening, but apparently our pilot rerouted our flight to the Netherlands. Why is that? Again, we didn't know. We were on the flight, there was no Wi-Fi. Just, we didn't know. Like no one told us. Right? So we end up in the Netherlands like, "What is going on?" And no one tells us anything. We don't get a refund. Uh, Delta doesn't give us the next flight to, to London, like nothing happens. They just drop us off and leave. Like, no refund, nothing. And we're like, "What's going on?"  Apparently, the London airport caught on fire. Yeah, it's just -- like, something happened in the airport where it caught on fire, so all the flights that were supposed to go to London, they were rerouted to Paris. Okay, wait, Paris? Why are we not in Paris, then? Well, there was a guy that had a heart attack on our flight, and because of that, the ambulances wouldn't be able to get there in time because everyone's, everyone's going to Paris, so the ambulance would just -- wouldn't be able to get there. So that's why they routed us to the Netherlands where it's less crowded. Crazy, right? Like, oh my gosh,…