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Interview Highlights

On when he first watched The Quiet Man

"Gosh, I was probably 7 or 8 years old. I grew up way out in the country in Illinois, and it was very exciting in the early '80s when we got a VCR. We were not a wealthy family, we never did get cable, but we did own five video cassettes and The Quiet Man was one of them. It was my dad's favorite, and it quickly became mine. It's very nostalgic for me."

On what makes the movie different than your typical romance

"It's a rather tempestuous love story, you know, there are fists flying as equally as kisses being planted."

On how the film and John Wayne influenced him

"I was a very big fan of John Wayne as a kid, and my dad and I would watch a lot of movies on Sundays — on WGN, on television — and even though I ended up having a little more of a sense of humor than the Duke, I like to think that I sort of maintain a rugged edifice in the service of authoritarian types."

I was standing in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, where there's a full-sized Egyptian temple, called Dendur. It's housed under a glass roof ...

But here at the Met, looking for names, I suddenly saw something that made me stop short. "Oh," I thought. "This is very bad luck."

There, sitting right next to a carved Egyptian figure, an obviously important official — straight in his line of sight — was a graffito from someone named "L. Brad—" (couldn't read the rest of it) who added "of NY US." The date was 1821. The "2" doesn't look like a "2," but it is.

The man was so beautiful. He appeared to be stepping out of the ad on the side of the bus, his hair illuminated in sun. Amelia saw the little slip of paper burst from his pocket when he pulled out his keys. It flipped in the air once, twice before it caught against the cement stairs right in front of her. She quickly shut her mailbox with the very tiny key that made her feel oversized and fumbling.

Carefully, so as not to rustle it, she pushed open the heavy metal door of the apartment complex and snatched up the piece of paper between two pale fingers. She looked down the street in the direction that he had gone, but the faces, the heads, the clothing — it was already all wrong.

The paper read:

Milk
Bread
Pomelo

"This is what he needs," she said to herself, softly. She ran her thumb over the last word, smudging the pencil a little.

Pomelo? She lifted her head and said the word slowly, her mouth moving as a fish blowing bubbles, "Pomelo? Pomelo?"

She hurriedly walked three, four blocks and entered the grocery store with its frozen, scent-less air.

She stood in the entryway, the automatic doors saying whoosh, whoosh as people funneled in around her.

"Can I help you?" asked someone in an apron. She could not tell if it was a man or a woman.

"Pomelo?" she said, but it came deflated and not how she practiced.

"Pomelos. Over there," the person said, and pointed at a bin of luminous green fruit, so large and round. A bin of discarded planets, lost without their moons. Amelia needed both hands to pick one up and this made her smile. She placed it back on the pile very gently. Then she turned around and left.

In later years, during the moments of greatest darkness, she would clutch the battered list to her chest and whisper soothing words to herself, "Pomelos are real. I am real. Pomelos are real. I am real."

Says Morales: "We have been waiting for things to change, like the laws. But we realize we cannot put our lives on hold."

They are among an estimated 36,000 binational, same-sex couples in the U.S., says Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality; nearly half of them have children. A recent effort by the advocacy group and others to include spousal sponsorship language in an immigration bill being considered by the Senate failed.

That has made the Supreme Court decision all the more consequential, Ralls said.

Unless the high court strikes down DOMA, or the Senate reconsiders what to include in its immigration bill, Morales will have to leave the country when she finishes her master's in nursing program at Georgetown University. Or she could join the ranks of those in the U.S. illegally.

That's not something the couple wants. They've contemplated a move to either Peru, where Morales has family, but also would not recognize their marriage, or to a country like Canada, where their marriage would be legal under federal law.

But relocation is not something that the almost relentlessly positive couple dwells on.

"We always say that everything happens for a reason," says Costello, who teaches English as a second language to elementary school children in a suburban Washington school district. "That's kind of our motto."

Their Story

The women joke that when they met in Washington at a mutual friend's party seven years ago it was love at first sight.

"These have been the happiest years of my life," Morales said in the sun room of Kelly's parents' home, where they have been living.

Morales was working in Miami when they met, employed as a bank IT project manager and in the country on a work visa. She moved to Washington to be with Costello, obtaining a student visa that allowed her to get an undergraduate degree in nursing from Georgetown, and pursue her master's degree.

"She's my best friend, she's the love of my life," Morales says of Costello. "We knew that we were going to be together forever — always together, we could do anything, and guided by God."

The women say they are sustained in times of vulnerability, including Morales' struggle with multiple sclerosis, by family and their strong Catholic faith. They attend Mass weekly at a nearby church, and a priest gave a blessing at their wedding.

They wear matching gold St. Christopher medals on necklaces, and pray together daily.

"We understand that the Catholic Church maybe still has to change a little bit more to love everybody, like people like us," Morales says. "But we have found support from the Catholic Church. Not everybody is against gay people."

Costello, who says she has become more devout since meeting Morales, adds: "As my Dad always says, we are all God's children."

The families of both women have embraced the couple, including Kelly's 83-year-old aunt, Deirdre Krouse.

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