When I left, the sun had done come out, and I walked back home with my head held high.
Today I get out of bed and stare at a new day of a new life in a different time brightened by the exact same sun.
Candy-colored rays splay toward heaven.
I have retained my faith and sunny optimism despite the thunderstorms in my life.
What option do we have? Curl up and die?
I still cannot experience a sunrise without hearing my father’s voice from the pulpit.
“And God promises that with each morning sunrise, He offers mercies anew and love unfailing.”
I grab my robe from the footboard bench at the end of mybed. I pull it tightly around my body to ward off the cool desert morning and the memories.
I stare at the colors in the distance, which mirror my own life.
The black and blue of the desert floor and bruises of my youth.
The gold of the cross over my father’s head and color of Barbie’s hair.
The Technicolor light through the stained glass windows of the church and the old Hollywood movies I watched to experience a world that was not endlessly gray and drab but gloriously bright.
And then I see it, peeking over the mountains, the color that still takes my breath away.
Pink!
The color of the Barbie Dreamhouse I wanted more than the BB guns and fishing poles I was given every birthday and Christmas to make me normal like the other boys. The color of the Polo shirt I saved up to buy that my father ripped off my back and whipped me with to teach me about weakness and sin. The color of the welts that remained on my skin for weeks, the pink of his hand striking me over and over even as I prayed for forgiveness under the beating hand of God.
But more than anything, pink was the color of the Golden Girls’ house in Florida, the place that—for thirty minutes every Saturday—not only let me escape to a home filled with love, acceptance and friendship but also let me know there might one day be a home like that for me, one in which I would feel safe, one I could happily enter instead of flinching every time I opened the door.
If there were one thing that I prayed to God for, it was a pink home like that.
And that prayer came true.
Thanks to me.
So many people have wishes, but few have dreams. What’s the difference?
Dolly Parton taught me that a wish is just something you hope might happen one day, but you never put any blood, sweat and tears into making it a reality. A dream is something you work toward every single day of your life with great intention until, one day, it has become a reality.
Everyone else may wish, but I always dream.
Big!
I tiptoe to the kitchen from the principal suite—yes, I earned one big perk for finding us Zsa Zsa and putting down the lion’s share of the down payment—careful not to turn on lights. I do not wish to wake the Sleeping Beauties on this magical Monday morning. Believe me, they need their beauty sleep—and aspirin—considering the three of them went out to Hunters’ happy hour after Church of Mary. They may range in age from their mid-sixties to early eighties, but they still act like college boys.
I step on a pair of still-wet swim trunks in the middle of the narrow hallway and stifle a scream.
Barry’s briefs glow on the white tile, a tiny mankini decorated with bright yellow bananas.
He’s so predictable.
I pick them up as if they were radioactive—which they might be, considering they’re Barry’s—and start to set them on his doorknob, but there is already a ball cap with an Arizona State University Sun Devils logo hanging from it.
Let me repeat: Barry issopredictable.
I place his suit atop the hat and can’t help but wonder how Mr. ASU College Kid will react waking up next to his dream daddy attached to a sleep apnea machine.
