Composing a Further Life

together.” Before I left Newark, I invited Dan and his granddaughter out to brunch and sat quietly as he tried to get beyond her teenage moodiness and encouraged her to engage with school.
    Dan is still attempting to put it together. He still has not found the kind of mentor he was looking for but has begun to work with a life coach. He has had a number of training jobs, but the pattern of turnover in the industry continues, so the jobs that come and go don’t fit his model of a career. “After I got laid off the last time, I looked around and I realized that at sixty-three I better try for retirement. A friend of mine was teaching autistic kids down here, and I looked in and said, ‘Do you need any assistance with these kids? Could you use a musician?’ I thought I’d probably just go down there, and we could sing. The first year it didn’t work very well, because I didn’t know how to get across to them or which songs would work. Then my sister gave me a book of songs for kids that were about that age, and as I got into it, it got to be kind of an interesting problem to look at and try to work with. Then I started bringing some of the other kids in there, and when you put the other kids in, the autistic kids would come along, and after they had seen what could happen, I could do the same songs with them even if the others weren’t there. As I began to work more and more on this, I got into it. So I got to know a couple of the other teachers, and they’re kind of fun. So I do this thing, and it’s gotten bigger, and now I have all the third graders.
    “Again, I’m not getting paid. I thought I should figure out something to do and maybe go back into the school system, where I could do something for money, but part of me wants to be able to say, ‘Can’t come in today.’ And I don’t want to have to answer to anybody’s ‘Are you teaching the curriculum?’ Or parents who stand there and say, ‘You know, my little girl really needs … whatever.’ But the worst thing is filling out those god-awful forms. I don’t think anybody has ever really calculated how awful the education system has got about filling out forms.”
    Dan was obviously enjoying his teaching, but money remained a concern. “I think in retiring you really want to do something for money because if you don’t do it for money you don’t value yourself. I’ve sometimes given people voice lessons for free, and they don’t listen to you. If they’re paying you ninety dollars an hour, they listen. Same thing with massage, you give somebody a free massage, it’s all right, but if you charge them—”
    “That’s what my husband is always telling me,” I said, “stop doing things for free because people don’t listen. They don’t bother to learn from you.”
    “They don’t care. I mean obviously, if it’s free it’s not worth much. It’s valueless by definition.”
    I asked Dan whether he had picked up any more work singing in churches. “No,” he said. “The thing about the church—When I was first with Paul, we were looking around for a church, and they got so obviously nervous that we would join them. I do not understand, but if you don’t want me, then you don’t get me singing solos every day. I’m not going to force myself on you. If you don’t want my gayness—and it isn’t that I’m hypergay, you know what I mean? I’ll work in the school for nothing but … Never mind. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes I don’t. I guess a couple of things I have learned in my life, and one thing is, if people don’t respect you, you don’t need to give it away for nothing.
    “So, the religion thing. Religion was very important to me early on, and it’s still kind of there. It’s like we’re spiritual but nonchurchgoers. I meditate every day. When my mother was still alive, she kept lobbying for me to get back into the church, but she didn’t push it.”
    Dan went on to talk about the importance of having friends, which is an issue for many older adults, and he began speaking about losing friends to AIDS. “You need friends that you can move on with. It happens to us all in the gay community and particularly in San Francisco. There’ve been I don’t know how many out of my phone book from the first few years. I’ve never figured out quite why it was so virulent in the beginning, but I think that the virus must have been nastier then than it is now, because it doesn’t seem to hit people as hard