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LGBT Senior Featured Essay: Only Friends, by Rick Rose
Only Friends
By Rick RoseThere is a word I do not use.
Acquaintance. I have tried it on, the way you try on a coat that belongs to someone else. It never fits. The seams are wrong. The sleeves are too short. I set it down and walk away.
My coat is nothing like that one.
When you are a friend, you are a friend for life. That’s simply how it works.
I have been thinking lately about what friendship actually is. Not the greeting-card version. Not the social media version, where the word gets cheapened into a like, a follow, a digital wave across a crowded room. I mean the real thing. The kind that leaves a mark.
A patch.
Every person who has mattered to me has sewn one onto me. Some patches are worn soft now, faded and frayed by the circumstances and beauty of a relationship, the colors gentled by time. Some are so vivid and present I can feel them against my skin on any given day with any unplanned movement.
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LGBT Senior Featured Essay: A Rose By Any Other Name, by Rick Rose
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET
By Rick RoseShakespeare knew something about names. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet argues that a name is just a label — that the thing itself is what matters.
Names matter enormously. They stick. They follow you into every room, every relationship, every first impression for the rest of your life. And the decision to give someone a name — that tiny human with no say in the matter — is one of the most consequential decisions a parent will ever make.
No pressure.
Certainly, popular names have their appeal and are easy. The Jennifers. The Michaels. The Emmas and the Liams. Share the name with me, and I will often know your age. These are safely field-tested, tried and true so much that they recycle and resurface every few generations. But there’s another school of thought — that a name should feel like your name. Something that landed in your gut and felt true.
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LGBT Senior’s Featured Essay: A Win-Win, by Rick Rose
Winner Winner
By Sup. Rick Rose
The headlines came in fast Tuesday night. Winners and losers. Who’s up, who’s down. The tallies rolled in across Dane County — this one wins, that one loses, on to the next race.
I was on that list. After four years serving District 16 as County Board Supervisor, the voters chose someone new. In the language of election night, I lost.
But that framing is wrong.
Democracy isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s a hand-off of trust. The people weigh in, they make a choice, and then something remarkable hopefully happens — the person leaving makes room, and the person arriving steps up. That’s not defeat. That’s the whole point.
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Rick Rose Featured Essay: Taking Stock of Privilage
The following is reprinted with permission from Rick Rose Essays
Taking Stock of Privilege
There is a moment when abundance stops feeling normal and starts feeling like something worth examining. I have three toilets in a home I live in alone. I have two heated garage parking spots and one car. I have a dishwasher, an air fryer, a microwave, three electric blankets for my European feather bed and favorite chairs – one of which is a 240-hand massage chair, something most people will never sit in in a lifetime.
I have 1,800 square feet of living space, three storage closets stuffed full of things I mostly see on holidays – if I even remember to pull them out. I have two walk-in closets and a foyer closet. On a cold morning, my biggest decision is which hoodie in which color, with or without pockets. And on a hot evening, which length of short and what feel of fabric do I choose.
And yet everything that actually matters to me fits in two shoeboxes.
Letters. Notes. Photographs. Small trinkets from people I love and people who have loved me.
No brand name. No price tag. Nothing you could shop for. Just proof that I was known by someone, and that I knew them back. That is the inventory that never lies.
And somewhere between those two shoeboxes chosen from the hundred pairs of shoes I have collected is the question I think about more and more – what is the quiet weight of having too much? It’s time I let that thought lead my ways.