The next morning we hopped onto a plane and flew to Key West to celebrate our honeymoon at an all-male, all-gay, all-clothing optional resort, where we spent our days lounging naked by the pool and our nights pounding one another into the mattress in smoking hot passion over and over again. Neither one of us ever seemed to be able to get enough of the other man’s body, finding something new to lick, to taste, to tease every time we got naked together.
Over the years that followed, we laughed, we cried, we argued, we consoled one another. We traveled the world, we had good times and bad. In other words, we lived life, and we did it together. Our bond only grew stronger the longer we were together. Anytime we were kept apart because one had to travel and the other couldn’t get away, we each missed the other terribly and couldn’t wait to get back together.
Before I end this story, there is one last thing to recount. Our very first spring together, we made the drive to Vermont, where Kyle worked with my father on producing a year’s supply of maple syrup. The two men worked like dogs. Every night Kyle crawled into bed and absolutely collapsed, physically exhausted. But the very next morning, he was up again at first light and was right back to work. Everyone who tasted the syrup that year thought it was one of the best seasons for syrup in a number of years. Back home, Kyle told me that he was more proud of those comments than he was of just about anything else in the rest of his life.
When I pressed him to explain, he told me that he had never made something tangible with his hands like the two of them had that week. He told me that while he used his hands and his mind to save lives and mend broken bodies, this just felt different, and that somehow this connected him with the land, with history, and inserted him more fully into my family than any other way he knew how. And it was good.
When we drove back to New York, Kyle slept most of the way because he was absolutely worn out. Going back to work a twelve-hour day in the ER seemed like a luxury, according to Kyle after his first day back at the hospital. On the drive home, our car had been loaded with maple syrup, enough to hold us over the next year and enough to give away some to friends.
By that point I knew Kyle pretty well, so it was crystal clear to me that he was blown away that my father had even gone so far as to have special labels printed for the syrup containers that explained it was the product of the two of them working together. I was proud because he was proud. Those simple words on those plastic bottles were very important to both of us for quite different reasons. Several of his co-workers reported to me later that Kyle had been so excited as he gave a small bottle to every one of the folks in the ER. I wish I could have been there to see it, but through their reporting, it was as if I had been there.
Life was good for little squirrels with big nuts, and while it had been a hard climb to get up the big tree, the view from up top was spectacular and worth every bit of effort required to get there.
About the Author
MICHAEL MURPHY is somewhere between eighteen and eighty-eight—the number varies from day to day depending on his mood and his energy level. He first thought about writing when he was very young, but put the idea aside in order to celebrate his fifth birthday and then forgot about it for a year or two. Periodically he toyed with the idea but each time rejected it as pure folly. It wasn’t until he was an old man of twelve that he wrote his first book. A long dry spell followed before he wrote his next book. Whenever he needs a laugh he looks at those early writings. He has written science fiction and romance, and he has collaborated on one nonfiction history book.
He and his partner have traveled extensively, trying to cover as much of the world as possible. When not traveling, they live in Washington, DC, with their best friend, a throwaway dog they adopted many years ago. To pay the bills, Michael is Director of Information Technology for a national organization based in Washington, DC. All in all he’d rather be writing full-time but hasn’t yet figured out how to make that a viable option.
