Homo - Sexual

the mess kit and the canteen

My coming out stories are often the tiniest of events, embedded in my memory bank and good for a few pages here and there, sometimes there’s enough for an entire chapter. These stories chart my course.

My very first public coming out occurred in second grade. It was January, a new year had just begun. Mrs. Miller, my teacher at Ebony Heights Elementary in Brownsville — at the tip of South Texas just across the border with Mexico — invited us to bring our favorite Christmas present to “Show and Tell.” 

I did not have to think twice about that one. I would be taking the army mess kit and canteen that had been under the tree for me on Christmas morning of 1958.

“No gun, no helmet. And no dolls.” I had been very specific with my mother, whom I knew would be passing the word along to Santa.  The canteen and mess kit were all I wanted. I had learned of them watching 1950s era World War II movies.

The mess kit — a portable cooking pan designed with a handle to hold over a fire was a wonderfully novel idea to me. Not only that, the kit came with eating utensils. These items were a must-have!

When it was my turn for Show and Tell, I stood in front of my second-grade peers wearing a grassy green dress with a waist, white collar, and puffy short sleeves. The outfit was topped off with a light sweater, beige in color, and the perfect cover up for those ridiculous girly puff sleeves. I arranged my presents on a table Mrs. Miller had set up for us at the front of the classroom to display our goods.  

I stood behind the small wooden table facing my classmates. Words came out of my mouth, hesitantly. I had practiced, but just briefly, in front of my dresser mirror that morning. “And here’s, uh, the mess kit,” I said, holding it up for everyone in the class to see and then bringing it down in front of me and disassembling it into its two primary parts.  

“Here’s the pan for cooking,” I explained to my classmates with growing confidence. “It has a handle to hold it over the fire with. The other part is another pan.” I paused and took a short breath. “It doesn’t have a handle, so you use it as a plate. The spoon and the fork are kept in the pan.” Then I noticed the canteen, which I picked up off the display table.

“And this is the canteen. For water,” I said haltingly at the end of my presentation. The sound of silence in the classroom played havoc with my young and fragile nervous system.  The other girls in my class had shown off their dolls and other girly sort of stuff to some chatter. The boys had bragged about their guns and holsters and their BB rifles. I just wanted to share how cool it would be to eat and cook out on the range.

The class was collectively speechless. No questions, even with a prompt from Mrs. Miller, who otherwise kept quiet, except for a “Thank you, Kay.” Additionally, she apparently felt the need to raise a red flag and reached out to my mother, also an elementary school teacher.

Maybe it was the following day, or a week later, it doesn’t really matter because the two eventually had a “conference” at our house one afternoon when school was over. Mrs. Miller called to ask for directions. When she hung up, my mother strongly suggested I go outside in the backyard. My guess is that she didn’t want me to hear a word that was uttered.

There was a swing set in the backyard with one swing absent and a slide attached to one side of the frame. I plopped myself into the solo swing, which gave me an unobstructed view into the kitchen, where I glimpsed Mrs. Miller and my mother through the sliding glass door. 

But by the time my butt and body settled into the swing, the two teachers had disappeared. They weren’t in our galley kitchen or sitting at the rattan table where my sister and I ate meals, so I presumed they were closeted in the living room. 

My young mind wondered, but not for long. Then, with some certainty, I figured the teacher’s conference was about the canteen and the mess kit, which led me to be concerned that I might get in trouble. But for what? After all, the mess kit and canteen had been under the Christmas tree, delivered by Santa. Why get in trouble for that? 

My sister, who attended Sunnyside, a nearby private nursery school, had been dropped off by a neighbor before Mrs. Miller arrived and was inside the house somewhere, probably the third bedroom — our playroom filled with board games, a radio, record player, and romance comic books I lifted from the magazine rack at my grandfather’s grocery store.

After Mrs. Miller left, my mother began fixing dinner — probably arranging fish sticks from the freezer on a well-used cookie sheet then sliding them into the oven and pouring spinach from the can into the pan. She did not say a word from that day forward about the conversation with Mrs. Miller. And I never got into trouble over the mess kit and canteen.

My mother finally divulged the content of the parent-teacher conference decades later when I was an adult. I had an inkling. Of course I did! I had been mulling it over occasionally, especially during those latter years of the 1970s, as I began to rather unconsciously come out of the closet.

When my mother did reveal Mrs. Miller’s observations almost 20 years later, it was in that time period when she was still drinking, and prone to sharing all sorts of information with me. Good time to be asking questions, at least in some cases.

At the time, I was married to a man, which most likely lent comfort to my mother — Mozelle was her name — who assumed I had fully grown out of my tomboy phase and into the hetero she had hoped for.

So at this juncture, she was more than willing to tell me the story because at the time she thought she had been correct — had got it right — that I would shed my homo tendencies and follow the straight and narrow.  She had no idea that my marriage was on a downhill slope, and my closet door was not closed any more. I kept that info submerged.

But at my urging, Mozelle finally passed along an update about the parent-teacher conference, divulging details during one of my visits when she was living on South Padre Island off the south Texas coast. We were finishing dinner at Blackbeard’s, sitting at a small square table on a well-worn wooden deck that rounded the backside of the restaurant, facing the beach. 

Mozelle flipped through her mental filing cabinet of recollections as she took a long drag off her cigarette, a filtered Kent, the brand she had smoked since I was in high school.  

“To answer your question,” my mother began as she recalled memories, “let me just say that yes, Mrs. Miller mentioned the canteen and mess kit you took for Show and Tell.” Mozelle turned her head up towards the blue sky and blew a soft cloud of smoke into the air.

I shook my head gently, a slight smile on my lips, that my mother had carried this story with her for so long and never pulled it out, shamed me for it.  I was very grateful for that.  There was enough quiet family drama as it was.

“She was concerned.” Mother was matter-of-fact in her recollection. She took a delicate swallow of her second drink, something with vodka in it.

“About what? She was concerned about what exactly?” I pulled a cigarette out of a Marlboro Lights pack, put it between my lips, and lit a match.  

“She thought you might be… a homosexual.” My mother paused before saying the homo word as she turned her head to stare off into the waves, washing up, washing out. Cleansing. Eternally.   

“So, what did you say?” I was both humored and offended.

“Well, I told her I didn’t think there was anything to worry about.” Mozelle looked at me and smiled sweetly, her lips wearing an earthy reddish color. “You would grow out of it, I said.” 

“What did she say to that?” I thought I would pursue this line of conversation as long as possible.

“Oh, Kay! I don’t remember.” Mozelle was done. The way she enunciated my name was the clue.

How did your coming out journey shape you?