Two lives intertwined now severed

I lost a friend the other day. Well I lost a facebook friend, a person with whom I have had a long history though we have never met face to face that I can recall. It could have happened sometime in the early part when we were both students at Culver Military Academy, we were after all in the same class though in different military units. Culver is what defines our relationship and dominates our past. For me it was a time of learning about other lifestyles, specifically those of those more privileged lifestyles than mine. I learned about segregation and how difficult it is to become integrated once the barriers are firmly in place. It was strangely enough for me the birth of my liberalism.

I was an outsider in a school of sons of wealth and power with a few military families thrown in for good measure. Oh I was a white anglo saxon protestant and from a professional middle class family, but I did not take to the lifestyle. Having three sisters and no brothers, I found myself without an understanding of how to relate to all of these men. Though large in stature I was hardly athletic and this was a school  that valued athleticism. It also valued military order something that I did not take well to also. In my year and a half I rose to no status beyond my presence. While others became full members of their military units I was never passed into the basic ranks. Even while there I was outside looking in.

My friend was quite the opposite. He was an up and rising part of the military system, a First Sergeant of his Company who would go on to be a Company Commander.  Though we never met or talked other than through an exchange of emails in the days leading up to our 50th class reunion there were intriguing similarities and again divergent paths. For it seems that somewhere after High School, and I think a stint in the US Navy after college, my friend made the transition from male to female. It was as she that we first really connected and though I would have loved to have discussed the details of the transition, the how and when, it never happened we simply discussed that which held us together our mutual history as Culver alumni.

It does turn out that the Culver dream cadet did share some of my reservations about the system saying that she felt like a trustee in a prison at times especially in her senior year when duty called to lead by example and also to report from time to time on the behavior of others. Culver is a better place now she informed me, and though I would like to believe that, the pain of the place lingers even now 52 years after I left.

But the strange thing is that pull of the elephant in our living space. I, too, have felt the pangs of sexual doubts. Gender dysphoria is the other thing that we have, or had, in common. I have astounded at least one potential mate by scoring higher on a femininity scale than she. It is probably right that my first wife once declared that she should have been a man, a sentiment with which I could agree, because I always felt like I was the better mother. But while my friend for her reasons made the change and more dramatically given her history, I continued on despite my occasional forays into investigation and discussion, in  the end I think my feeling that the world didn't need another 200 pound drag queen did the trick. My friend was lucky, she was slight of build and perhaps that military bearing helped her to soldier on through what had to be some tough times.

I we will never know, she passed away quietly on the way to an airport. She has flown home. In retrospect I should have gone to the reunion.