Changes Ancient and Modern

This is an extract from A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale Ch. 36 Changes Ancient and Modern that is not yet ready for posting, but I considered it to be capable of standing alone as a solo tale perhaps of interest to those who have no interest in the GOM tales.

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“You’re supposed to be a clever girl, Jane. What do you make of David coming out as Stephanie? Bit of a shock that wasn’t it.” A number of the women at the hair and beauty salon were nodding in agreement with Clarice concerning the surprising event.

Beatrix added, “What I find a little galling is she is so good looking she doesn’t need the services of a place like this. Not fair that.”

There was almost total agreement with that, but Ellery said in disagreement, “She may not need the services of a place like this, but that doesn’t mean she won’t enjoy them.” There were nods of agreement.

Margaret who was not quite seventy said, “I don’t get it, Jane. At the age of twenty-two with no warning or prior indication at all after finishing university she comes back home to live wearing a rather spectacularly filled out frock announcing she is now Stephanie and she is no longer a work in progress. When she came home last summer it was David who came home not Stephanie, and none had even a hint of suspicion of any changes, so it’s all happened in the last year, three at most. Though I got the impression from Penny that it came as a complete surprise to her and Ian when she came home that they now had a daughter not a son. Naturally and properly enough they are completely supportive and are saying little if anything about it. Ian telt John Stephanie was his child and since she was a girl he’d decided it was all best left to her mum. Penny telt me that it was up to Stephanie to explain or not to whoever she chose and she wasn’t going to risk losing her daughter by telling tales out of turn, which I considered to be right and proper.”

There was a murmur of agreement with that before Margaret continued. “Stephanie is good friends with my granddaughters, three of whom went to school with David, and they all come round at least once a week. The girls say they’re just socialising and after a cup of tea, but the truth is they’re decent well reared girls who are checking up that the old folks are still breathing and not in need of anything, just like we did decades ago.” There was a ripple of laughter at that as most of the older women had younger relatives who did the same. “I like Steph, and if I hadn’t known her family since I went to school with all four of her grandparents there’s no way I would have suspected she ever was anything but a pleasant young woman. I know David was never a womaniser, but he was a perfectly normal boy and then young man who had his share of girlfriends. He went out with my granddaughter Amy for a while when they were fifteen or sixteen. Then this overnight change happened and it just doesn’t make sense. You’d think there would have been some indication David was different.”

“Aye,” agreed Clarice. “I can’t help but wonder what Harriet and Sam Shaw make of it.”

“I don’t know about Harriet or Samantha,” Beatrix said, “but I do know Elle was impressed that after finishing her education Stephanie returned home to start a play group and early years classes at the library rather than going elsewhere to earn a lot more money. Elle telt me she achieved as highly as any can at the university and gave up a certainty of a high salary to gamble that folk here would put their hands in their pockets to support her in return for her looking after and educating their little ones. I know none has ever considered it before, but we’d never manage to provide early years education any other way, so we need to support her because we need what she is offering. There’re any number of young women and girls too who would regard the opportunity to help, even if only part time, as a career opportunity, something to put on their CV, though mayhap many would prefer to stay here.

“It may well be that we need to support any of our young men who may be interested in her too. She is one of us and we need to ensure she remains one of us and stays in Bearthwaite. If she wants to live and work here as a married woman with a family we need to enable that, so we don’t need or want any of our young men worried about what their mates will say if they take up with her. So, Girls, we need to lean on them and lean hard as to how they should react to her. In short the same as they do to any other young, single woman. Agreed? Better still if we can get her set up with one of the local single parents struggling to rear kids. There are any number of them both men and women.” There were nods and expressions of agreement all around. “Anyone know where her interests lie?”

“The girls tell me she is only interested in men and has gone out with a few outsiders for a drink of a weekend night from time to time,” Margaret replied immediately understanding Beatrix. “There is no indication that she’s interested in women. I think your right, Beatrix. We really don’t want her taking up with an outsider and then moving away, so I suggest we put the word out and start doing the necessary. Changing the subject, but still considering Stephanie, Elle suggested a while back that she and Sasha would match any funding that we raised to employ her and if necessary fund converting an old building for her to use rather than the library which isn’t really big enough, so let’s get to it regarding raising funds too.”

Julie said, “I heard that too. My Stan knows Elle’s old man Sasha well, he has done for years, and he said that was the way Sasha would do it. We’d have to make the effort to raise money before he’d give us any. Stan says Sasha has more money than you can dream about and he’s a very charitable man, but he’s selective about where he gives it and he likes to see evidence that folk are doing what they can for themselves. We all know that he funded the Green Dragon extensions and refurbishments for the entire village to enjoy and avoid the risk of a chain brewery turning the place into something we wouldn’t like. Stan says that Sasha, Pete and Gustav are as thick as thieves now the brewery is a going concern providing jobs for locals. I reckon that those story tellers that meet at the Dragon are like the local mafia. Still why should we worry; they’re on our side because we feed ’em and sleep with ’em.” There was a great deal of laughter at that, but all present understood. Men were men and completely inexplicable to any woman, but these were their men they were talking about, and every last one of them was a decent human being, the young, the old and all those in between too.

The women all came from the village of Bearthwaite, which was an isolated, tightly knit community perhaps typically forty miles from any of the local centres of population that offered major retail opportunities, and they were out enjoying their recently instituted two monthly girls’ day at one of the local towns courtesy of the double decker bus Alf had recently bought and made road legal on behalf of the village which now owned it as a community resource like the library. Today they were in Carlisle, and shopping, lunch, hair, nails and gossip were the order of the day before returning home to dress up and spend a pleasant Saturday evening in the best room of the Green Dragon whilst their menfolk drank and swapped tales, lies and probably subversive thoughts too before doing war on each other with dominoes. Even Ellery the village hairdresser was with them. The women ranged in age from single in their late teens to grandmothers in their sixties, a few were their with their daughters, and Margaret was there with one of her daughters and two of her granddaughters.

They all looked to Jane who was an academic in her middle forties who had moved into the village twelve years before when she had married Arnold, who’d been a bitter and acrimoniously divorced local builder with custody of his six children. Her love had returned Arnie, as he was generally known, back to the well balanced family man he’d been before Chelsea, the girl he’d married from outside, had shewn her true colours and run off with an outsider leaving him with the children. How Jane had reached through to Arnie whose hard shell due to his emotional crippling by Chelsea had rendered him unapproachable to any, including his children, had been a subject of much hopeful speculation at the time to the Bearthwaite womenfolk who had effectively been looking after and seeing to the mothering needs of his children. It had been immediately noticed by those Bearthwaite womenfolk that Jane looked after Arnie’s children like a mother should and the children had started to call her Mum from the beginning.

Other Bearthwaite mothers had soon heard tales from their children that indicated Jane’s children had rapidly started to forget Chelsea and that the village children, who’d not liked Chelsea, too considered Jane to be their friends’ mother. The mothers had been led to believe that Chelsea had hit her children a lot, but now they had mum who was far more free with her kisses than her scoldings and she’d never smacked them. That their children liked Auntie Jane, as they referred to her as, in accordance with local usage that indicated their total acceptance of her, and spent far more time with Arnie’s children at their house than they had before Chelsea had left had meant Jane had been well thought of right from the beginning, the main reason being she lived by the unwritten codes of Bearthwaite folk, in particular those of that applied to Bearthwaite womenfolk and especially those that involved motherhood. Of most note was that Jane like all the other Bearthwaite mothers thought nothing of feeding a couple of dozen children at no notice at all who just turned up with her own at meal time, though properly she insisted on informing their mothers as to their whereabouts. In short she was a one of their own, a Bearthwaite woman, wife and mother who like a number of them was looking forward to becoming a grandmother in the not too far distant future.

Many of the womenfolk of Bearthwaite were puzzled by events concerning Stephanie, though certainly not concerned by them, for it was known by all that Harriet, the popular adopted daughter of Gladys and Pete Maxwell the licencees of the Green Dragon who lived with her Bavarian fiancé Gustav at the Dragon was trans. The young couple who were in the process of arranging their wedding, a matter that most of the village were involved in, were fully approved as adoptive parents by the agency, though still waiting for appropriate children to adopt. There was for the village children an air of expectation and excitement concerning the matter. Perhaps more to the point the village adults approved of the young couple’s decision to adopt trans children who’d been rejected by their families and they were aware that the national umbrella organisation all adoption agencies registered with had flagged the couple’s application and it was purely a matter of time before children with the needs they could so easily meet were identified.

Too, Samantha Shaw, who had earned her living as a welder for British Gas, but who now with her husband Gee farmed the valley head and did jobbing engineering work, often with Alf her mentor from childhood, was trans too, and she like Harriet was accepted as a local woman by their community for exactly the same reasons that any woman was; she lived by the unwritten codes of the Bearthwaite womenfolk. That Sam and Gee had registered with the same umbrella adoption agency as Harriet and Gustav to adopt trans children reviled and rejected by their families was regarded as recognition that not only was Samantha one of their own, but so was Gee. Bearthwaite was a community that only cared about matters that truly mattered: folk who cared about about folk who cared.

Jane laughed and said, “I’m not sure what perfectly normal means when applied to folk, and it’s said the only constant in life is change.” She’d said that to give herself a few moments more to decide how to express her thoughts. “Since time immemorial it has always been considered by some that moments and events of change are magical. The turning of night into day and that of day into night, dawn and dusk, the gloaming. The day length changes, the sun return at the winter solstice and all hallows eve at the summer solstice, even the equinoxes were considered special, though less so. Even the tide’s changes were so considered.”

The women were puzzled as to the relevance of what Jane was saying, but she was a professor and head of the chemistry department at a north eastern university. She was also a kind and generous woman who’d always been active in social matters in the village and she played a major rôle in the village during the recent and ongoing Covid events. As such she was accorded a great deal of respect and had been accepted as one of themselves since her arrival at Bearthwaite a dozen years ago.

“Strange is it not that modern day scientists have come to regard such events and their concomitant energy changes as deep problems? To a scientist deep means subject matter so complex it is of potentially Nobel prize winning nature. The details concerning phase changes like solids turning to liquid or liquids to gas, and of course the reversals of those changes are still almost a complete mystery to us. Similarly with the allotropic changes of, to name but a few, sulphur, iron and tin. That’s where elements change their structure usually due to temperature and pressure changes. The most dramatic and though probably unknown to you is perhaps the most easily understood. Graphite and diamond are both just carbon in different forms. Graphite is a dirty, messy, black substance used as a lubricant on its own and in grease by engineers like Alf. Diamond is a clean sparkly crystal that every female is more than familiar with. Both are effectively purified soot or coal and given the right conditions we can turn one into the other. Industrial diamonds are used for cutting and polishing and have been manufactured from carbon on a vast scale for a few decades.” Jane had a moue of distaste on her face before she continued, “I hate to tell you this, Girls, but diamonds can be burnt as fuel just like coal. I know the thought of that is painful to contemplate, but it is true.”

“Too, there is a huge branch of science that overlaps many disciplines and mathematics too that is often referred to by the media as chaos theory which can be viewed as essentially the study of changes. Some of what little knowledge we have is ancient, but much has only relatively recently been discovered. An example easily understood of that is iron which when it becomes hot enough will no longer be attracted to a magnet. For centuries blacksmiths have regarded the change from magnetic to non magnetic that occurs when steel, which is mostly iron with a little bit of carbon added, is almost white hot to be a significant matter for the heat treatment and forge welding of the steel. Steel can be heat treated to be a hard cutting material like a good kitchen knife, or a soft easily shaped material. It can only be forge welded by a blacksmith when it is very hot and so soft it is almost liquid. Folk like Simon, Alf and Samantha are very familiar with these matters. However, though those facts have been known for centuries, perhaps millennia, it is only relatively recently that studies have understood the change is due to a matter of an internal rearrangement of the crystalline structure of the steel. Possibly the only person we know who would understand that sort of thing is Bertie.” Bertie was one of Alf’s grandsons who worked with him and had a first class honours degree in mechanical engineering.

“However, back to the matter at hand. Nowadays, the matter of male and female is considered by the open minded to be a very broad multi dimensional continuum, a multi dimensional spectrum if you like, rather than two points at the opposite ends of a single dimensional line. However, the question I would love to have answered is at what point, and why, does a person of one apparent gender or perhaps that’s better expressed as one apparent identity, wherever they are on that multi dimensional spectrum, make the decision that they are in the wrong body, or indeed that they are in the right one? I’m asking what is the trigger mechanism that brings about that magical transformation? I know the matter is much more complicated than that, but you have to start somewhere. I am sure I’m not the only one who would like to know. I also suspect the matter to be deep, very, very deep.

“There is a phenomenon called super heating. There are many other phenomena associated with changes of many kinds, but super heating may be familiar to you. It occurs when, for example water, is heated slowly without any mechanical vibrations and it reaches a temperature above the boiling point at that particular pressure. By rights it should have turned to steam, but presumably there has been no initiating event to cause the transition. The change can happen when a superheated liquid is removed from a microwave and the action of doing so causes the liquid to almost explosively boil and instantly change to steam in the vapour phase. Some very unpleasant scalding accidents have happened as a result.” Many of her listeners were familiar with the event and were nodding. “Yet if the microwave is turned off before the explosion and the liquid is left undisturbed it will simply cool to below its boiling point never having turned to steam. You can check with one of those point and click infrared thermometers that it was indeed above the point at which it should have boiled. You can get one off Ebay for less than forty quid [$50].

“Similarly lakes can become supercooled due to a slow temperature drop in the air above them taking the water down to a temperature below its freezing point whilst still remaining liquid. Such lakes have been observed to instantly freeze to a depth of several inches [20-30cm], and again point and click infrared thermometers confirmed the water was well below its freezing point before it suddenly changed state. This phenomenon has been seen to freeze herds of drinking deer in place with tragic results. I’ve seen photographs and videos of such events.

“The reason I mention the last two phenomena is because to me they sound to be not so different from some of the more extreme transition experiences of some of my trans friends at the university. Most happened slowly over time, but some were almost explosive events with difficult to cope with or even tragic consequences. I conclude that like many other changes they are natural events, variable in their details, sometimes beautiful to watch, sometimes hard to accept, sometimes dangerous or even tragic, but naytheless always magical. I admit I am a romantic, but too I believe that life is easier, though perhaps not better, if you focus on the better aspects of all events.”

“So what are you saying, Jane? That David becoming Stephanie was nothing more than a natural event that was overdue to happen, and David always was Stephanie but an event hadn’t happened that would initiate the change? And had there been no such event David would never have become Stephanie?”

Jane took her time answering Clarice, but eventually replied, “I can no more speak for Stephanie than any can for someone else, but I suppose I am saying that it’s possible.” There was stunned silence when Jane finished by saying, “You can decide for yourselves who is the lucky one Stephanie or I, for I was never sure what I was and it took me three decades to decide I was female and not male, though my transition was certainly a magical and explosive event in comparison.”