Presents
Thomas Johnson
He was younger than you by a year when we met, but we loved each other the same as you and I do. His capacious mind was more terrestrial than your encyclopedic brain, and his svelte farm-boy body resembled more an angelic visitation than does your perfect statuesque form. In no other souls have I discovered greater profundities. You came to me because at sixteen you needed a teacher to help you navigate through the world of higher education, as well as the uncharted complexities of Asperger’s Syndrome not yet diagnosed. Like you, he came to me because he needed a teacher. Traversing the world of high school had turned into a crisis-- something about a speech he had to write that day, an indication of the fact that he would never graduate without the tender loving care of his own private tutor. Ultimately, like you, he came to the resolution that he needed a father and that I was it. It is hard to measure the range of intellect and heart required to fulfill the needs of a peerless Virgo or Pisces coming of age and aching for love at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.
I don’t know if anyone could have sacrificed enough for long enough to supply either one of you with all you needed. Almost immediately in each case I came to understand that the best that I could hope for was to love you enough to enable you to survive the coming of age and, with any luck, arrive at your majority ready for life and able to write a page. I was fully aware of the challenges and dangers of such an undertaking—the fainting and clinical depression, potential comas, drug reactions, e coli infection, broken bones, warts, allergies, radical social and intellectual convolutions, love-crazed suitors, fatal attractions, a broken heart or two, and horrific tears.
By age fifteen the farm-boy was already twice a runaway, like you an adopted orphan only self-declared; like you he had already begun his lifelong struggle with bouts of inexorably sinking depression periodically descending into insanity that requires treatment by hospitalization and administration of psychotropic medications. In both cases I invoked a rule that the relationship and friendship be terminated when you reached twenty-one. I had my reasons. In the farm-boy’s case I was confronted within a matter of days with the situation that I had fallen deeply in love and was maturing in that love with each passing day. And so, I had to ask myself, how long can a body endure such enthralling passion unrequited? Rephrasing the question brought me to the tipping-point: How long before my power to love is depleted from the pain? Every year, every passing day for five years, proved the rule necessary and valid: The age of tutelage passes, and blessings meant to be received must be given away. With him, unlike with you, the rule has held by mutual consent, for over thirty years now. With you, I had the advantage of prior knowledge of the terrible misfortune of unrequited love, and I was proactive in determining to avoid it, so I managed to not fall in love with you while I was getting intimate with that busy mind and great soul you have.
Since it was his eighteenth birthday and he knew I liked to look at him, the farm-boy told me that he would sit a spell in my hardwood rocker and let me look. And it was okay with him some months later for us to sleep together in the same bed because a pouring rain and a soaked distributor in his 1968 International truck which I had given him for graduation meant he was stuck at my house for the remainder of the night. And even though we both understood no sexual intimacy or touching would ever occur between us, his Virgo heart was touched when his friend innocently asked me in his presence what gift I most would treasure in this life to come and I answered truthfully “A kiss from this one!”—so tenderly moved he promised me then and there: “You will get your kiss!” (A kiss that never came, and likely never will.) Many times before his twenty-first birthday I tried to effect a separation then termination of the bond, but he refused, said it was not okay, said he couldn’t and wouldn’t allow it; so when I finally ended it by moving away without saying goodbye, I know he was crushed, and only years later did he decide on the basis of his religious beliefs that it was meet and right we never communicate again.
The sorrow attendant to implementation of the “age twenty-one” rule is offset by the gifts presented in the ordeal. Like that promised kiss. Like Jonathan’s presentation of himself to David in the Book of Samuel . . . and the kisses exchanged in their farewell. One Sunday in July, a month before we slept in the same bed together, the farm-boy telephones me to say only “I love you!” before hanging up. The following Saturday afternoon he comes over to my place to spend some hours with me alone before our Saturday friends would likely gather; while I am alone in the kitchen pouring beer over a ham I am roasting in the oven, approaching from the interior rooms of the secluded house the farm-boy walks into the kitchen completely naked. (Something I had never seen before.) He waited in silence for me to notice and receive this holy presentation of his naked self. The hours flew by. As presents go, I’ll rate that nude presented in July as equal to a promised kiss, and as presentations go I say the farm-boy is unsurpassed and, as yet, unequalled.
On your twenty-first birthday at last you said to me: “You can hug me.” As sacred presents go, your infrequent embraces are okay. But Christmas is near, and soon you will be thirty-two.
Actually, Thomas Penn Johnson lived in Fort Myers, Florida 1983 - 2023, and the addressee of this epistolary personal essay also lived in Fort Myers. Thomas Penn Johnson currently resides in Winston-Salem, North Carolina--the ancestral home of his maternal grandmother. In 2024 he published a full-length play entitled "AMIAS."