No Longer Handicapped, Symptoms Return

It's time to put away the Handicapped placard that gives the sick special parking privileges. Not that I don't love special privileges, but a wise person told me once that if you pretend to a disastrous hurt, the universe will make an honest man out of you. The truth is that right now, I'm strong enough to walk, thank you. So just to avoid the yucky karma, it's time to put the blue plastic gimme card away and circle the block like everybody else. Shit.

For the last week or three, I've been having a return of the symptom that started this whole thing: a stabbing  pain in my right ear canal. It just happens from time to time, maybe twice or three times a day now. It only lasts for a few seconds and in the context of life lately, it ain't much. But it's omen-ous so I'll get it checked out at Fox Chase. In the meantime, it's still spring and it's nice to have that blue thing out of my car.

Wood Violets

When I first started walking in Carpenter's Woods, the ground near the Heyward Street entrance was covered with English Ivy. It's attractive stuff, perfect for covering university buildings or taking the place of a lawn. Unfortunately, this alien creeper has spread from gardens to forest and it's done a lot of damage.
It not only choked out all the native plants that the bugs and the birds need to live, but it climbed the trees,  eventually killing them by smothering the leaves or by making them so top-heavy that they broke. It was pretty dispiriting to watch the stuff spread deeper and deeper into the my woods knowing that in ten or twenty years or so, there would be no native forest floor.

Even the fallen leaves don't stop English Ivy.

What made it worse was that another beautiful invader, Norway Maple was crowding and shading out our native trees. We were headed for a forest that was totally lovely, completely green and thoroughly sterile.
Since none of our native bugs and worms lives on and around the new species, it wouldn't be long before the birds that live off of them would stop visiting. We're losing wildlife habitat to development all the time, how much more bitter to have forest that looks like habitat but isn't.

Then about three years ago, somebody started to pull the stuff up. Every time there was a heavy rain or a melt after a snowstorm, I'd see piles of stringy little ivy corpses piled up just off the paths in the woods. This public-service gardener picked one area to make ivy-free and steadily expanded it. I used to smile at the earnest naivete of the person who thought her hands would make a difference against this green biotsunami, but it was nice that someone took arms against a sea of tendrils.
But two years ago in spring, the cowslips came back where the ivy had been. A few young trees, poplars and cherry mostly, started to pop up. That summer there were butterflies the Azures that lived on the cherries and then we saw robins scrounging for worms.
This week, after a long rainy spring, there were wood violets just inside the entrance. Wood violets!

There's one patch in the lower right of the photo, but there were dozens more and lots of individual plants scattered where the ivy had been. A person could get sloppy with the metaphors and we have  enough allegories available to make Dante sigh, but that would be too easy. It's shirtsleeve weather, there are deep purple flowers underfoot and for the moment at least, we won.

Flinching/Not Flinching

In the early 70's there was a photographer named Ralph Eugene Meatyard. He did a lot of spooky-funny, thumb-in-your-eye photographs. Toward the end of his life-he died of cancer at 47-he chronicled his own deterioration. The word the critics used a lot was ‘unflinching’.
I’ve been doing some self-pictures here in this blog and I have to admit to a bit of queasiness. The body I’m photographing is old and it’s now kind of scrawny and ravaged. Why am I putting it out in the world-even forcing under people’s noses?
I remember reading an article about a Philly guy named Jerry Blavat. Jerry is one of those livin’ large guys who had a lot of fun with rock and roll, shot his car a couple of times and still keeps a job. I admire Jerry. What puzzled me was the photo-it showed 67 year old Jerry stripped to the waist. Is this the new normalization of old age or have we just lost some sense of when it’s time to cover up for publication? The truth is, I don’t know. I do know that when an aged Joe Louis was asked to strip down to boxing trunks for a Bert Stern photo, he refused and the resultant picture-gnarled brown fists coming out of a camel overcoat-was a better statement about the strength of old age than the photographer’s original idea.
So what am I doing here? I’m not particularly embarrassed by my wreckage but I’m afraid to be embarrassed by bad judgment, by getting the culture of cool completely wrong, by being overly-revealing. Children being easily shamed by their parent's behavior, I worry about embarrassing my kid. I’m thinking it might be time to flinch.
And as soon as I say it, I know it’s not time to flinch. This is what cancer looks like today, October 16,2010.

That thing on my chest is tape over the 'port', basically an stainless steel insert that's an access to a vein just below a layer of skin. It let's them draw blood and infuse chemo without opening a vein in the arm everytime. The tube that you see there is for the infusion of fluids to keep dehydration at bay.

It's Not Like That Anymore

Here's what I remember about the ball game: there was a moment when everything went quiet. No.42 on third base, looking runnerish, you could hear a guy clear his throat from three sections away. Full count, two on, two out, everybody inhaled and held it. Last night at the Phillies/Brewers game, there wasn't a moment of quiet, more like a constant roar, a jet engine with bad taste in music.
Here's another thing: a ticket used to be cheap, last night's was sixty bucks. So it used to be that you could go to the game anytime, any impulse. See every team in the league at least once? Sure. Leave a boring game or a rainy one and catch the ninth at your local? Why not? These days, you've got an investment in the damn thing.

Bottom of the twelfth.

But nothing's like it used to be and it's still the ballgame and it's still great. I never told you this before, but one of my thoughts when the surgeon told me that most folks in my situation die was that I was not going to see this baseball season. Too bad, the locals have the best pitching they ever had, probably the best in the league. Now I can hear you saying that pitching alone never got anybody to the World Series, but so what? A beautiful season is something to be grateful for, like that one night at the Eastman Institute with that Baryshnikov guy on stage or the sweet corn from a field south of Fulton, N.Y. Like that.
So when my friend Jim called and invited me to the game, it was a chance to peek in on a show that I never  thought I'd get to see. (Jim knew all that, but he's not the kind of guy to talk about it, just mentioned a ball game and a beer, would I mind coming out on a cool spring night?)
The omens started out bad. Lots of Pilsner at the concession stands, some Pale Ale, none of the really good local stuff. Our starting pitcher was the number five starter. We settled for Guinness cans. We settled for the starter.Then the misplays started. Our shortstop looked like he was hung over and grounders through the middle were automatic base hits. There were errors, five of them.  We took the lead, they tied. We went to two-one, they tied again. Extra innings, top of the twelfth, they score three, we don't, it's over.

But there's another view of things. Guinness in the can isn't all that bad. The moon was full and the weather was perfect, the tension was great (extra innings!). The seats were just to the first base side of home so we had as good a view of the pitchers as the batters did. The guy in front of us was wearing a Victorino jersey. Phillies' fans will recognize the name of one of our outfielders, but I think that 'victorino' obviously means 'little victory'.  Little victory? Damn right it was.
Thanks, Jim. Any time you want, just take me out to the ball game.

Little victory, folded chair, stadium beer cup

B.I.G.S.S. and B.I.H.C's

BIGGS is Before I Got Sick Syndrome. It's pronounced 'bigs'. B.I.H.C. is Before I Had Cancer and is pronounced just like you want it to be pronounced. They're crutches (one for each arm) for when you have to answer questions about yourself and you think that answers are different Before and After.
It's almost like you have to explain who you are now, or disown it a little. Hey, I may be a spavined, dewlapped, forgetful yawker of odd expectorants, but listen buddy: I used to be somebody! I was strong, I was handsome, I was smart, I gulped red wine and sipped red lips. There was life here. Understand?

Well, no they don't and they shouldn't but who can blame you for trying.
Sometimes you know who you were better than who you are now,
sometimes you're sick and bored with confronting your new reality
and sometimes it's just too damn sad.

And the only power you have over the situation is getting over it. Right. Accept it and amazing things start to happen. If you can't really accept it, at least find it funny. Maybe it will go away, maybe you will. Either way, it's just temporary and frankly it always was.

It's a BIHC: If you spilled the claret little brother, mop it up and find another.

Restoring the Strength and Resorting to Addiction

Addiction 
 

Addiction is the Messenger Cow

Thank it, Kill it, Eat it. Now

Pan-sear with Mushrooms

Deglaze with stock.

Annoint your eyes, your heart,

your cock.

It's a john-the-baptist,

A Bachelor's Cat.

Addiction tells us where we're at.

Clean your plate and wipe your chin,

When the Cow is gone, just look within. 

•   •   •

Three weeks ago, J bought me a gym membership. It was time.

About  24 years ago, I stopped smoking. I didn't leave Smokeland gracefully. In fact, I was one of the most miserable, irritable sons-of-bitches you'd ever run into in your life. I could start an argument with a collar button.It's amazing that, during the nine months of really bad withdrawal, no one shot or divorced me. One of the things that got me through was a gym on top of a high-rise in Center City Philadelphia. 

I walked there every day and for about two hours, I lifted weights and swam until I was exhausted. For those hours, and maybe one hour afterward, I didn't have that explosive, vitriolic craving for a cigarette. Maybe three hours a day: I could stand the company of the person I was without nicotine. In the way these things happen, the exertion came to be a kind of drug for me. Somewhere in the exhaustion of doing one more repetition of an exercise, one more than my body really wanted to do, my brain cracked and something wonderful leaked out. To call it substituting one addiction for another probably misses the point, but it isn't wrong either.

Short story: over all those 24 years, my self came to include this regular brain-breaking dance with the weights. Picking up heavy things until I disappeared inside the effort became my hobby, my Tao and the gym, any gym, was my dojo. Wanna know how serious I was? My six year-old daughter named her new puppy Muscular. That's serious. That's love.
Then cancer came between us. My body shrank as I starved and the weight loss was muscle as much as fat. Eventually, I couldn't lift against the weight of the cancer and because I wasn't lifting, I got even weaker.

Going back to the gym was easy. The gym, after all, is where I was supposed to be, but being there turned out to be very hard. It wasn't just that I was weak, it was that I couldn't exert myself enough to explode in the effort-all I could do was push some tiny weight around and get tired. I could do the work, but I couldn't get the buzz. 

Then sometime, maybe this week, maybe last, it turned around. I was completely inside my push on the weights and that last, muscle-tearing repetition left me flying away, muscles humming at the frequency of my self. It was just like old times.

No pictures now. I'm still pretty scary to look at, but something has shifted, some quantity has become a quality.  The weights are lighter, but the bright blue glow of that last rep is as heavy as ever. I'm very grateful.

And how ARE you?

A friend who's just lost his job and is throwing a party to celebrate writes:


So how ARE you? (I figure this will save you talking at the party…)


I'm glad he asked.

I'm sort of like a guy all dressed up in black tie, standing at the dessert table all my himself- without a sweet tooth to his name. You say that doesn't help? Okay,

I feel pretty good. I still have damage from the radio- and chemo-. My mouth is dry a lot, I'm still eating mostly mush. I get occasional sharp pains like the ones that led to the discovery of the cancer.  My tongue is swollen and I don't recognize my own voice.  I don't know for sure if i'm free of cancer because the scans show something there-could be malignant, could be scar tissue.

I can't eat regular food, can't abide wine in my mouth. I'm weak, tired and looking like the guy who could play the role of Death in the annual morality pageant.

I've got a new temporary job. The people are lovely and the task is doable. (Culture and Gastronomy: the rise of Modernism) five lectures plus a wine tasting, a beer tasting and a lecture to the faculty. It's really good to be back at that again, teaching is still my favorite thing of things.

 So I'm like a guy with a reprieve and on parole. I am enjoying 'most every day, carpaying each diem as it comes along. Not exactly well, but I think this is what happy feels like. Sort of. There's still a few wishes I'd like to have granted, but being in wish isn't the same as being in want.

The funny thing is that I've never had such a complete answer to that question in my life. Funny what cancer can do for you and by the way, now that you mention it: How are YOU?

How AM I? Sort of like this.

The Gala

There's a fringe benefit with my new job. I got to go to a black-tie bash at Bally's Casino in Atlantic City. It's a benefit for the Academy of Culinary Arts and about a million people show up, pay $200. a pop and eat and drink and dance in their fancies all night long.
My job was to hob and nob-and I did my best with swollen tongue and clenched throat. It was easier when I wasn't pretending that I could eat like a normal person and just swigged my Ensure. It's easier then to obey the rule about not talking with your mouth full, because in my condition, if you're trying to eat solid food, your mouth is never truly empty.

Aside from the students, who are just adorable and my colleagues who work so hard and with such grace, the best part of the evening was my hotel room. Good ol' 2730. It was big with windows facing the ocean and looking north along the beach toward New York. The view from the bathtub was great, the view from the living room even better (if you reversed the chairs so they were facing toward instead of away from the ocean.)
My new dream home may be an apartment in Atlantic City with a window facing east.

In fact, it was hard for me to move away from it. I checked in early figuring I could walk around, dig the boardwalk, maybe start an argument with a gull or goddamn a clam. Something salty like that. But I found I couldn't leave the room. For about two hours before and maybe three hours after, I sat and stared out the window. Even the thought of gorgeous women in evening gowns didn't break in to the trance. I remember that toward midnight, I started singing myself a song, trying to soothe something, some screaming meemee that was threatening to burst its way up from beneath the calm, I guess.

Here it is as well as I can remember it on Saturday:

Dolly Parton and her brother Martin

Just can't seem to stop from startin'

smokin' fish and catchin' joints

and winning games by elebenty points.

The case of Light was sealed air-tight

'til the boys went out of town

Still it looked all right in black and white

But it was only Warren Brown

So when I got up to test the fudge

I had to Judy up another judge.

Dolly Parton and her brother Martin

just can't seem to stop from startin'

Up one hill and down my arm

Setting fire to the Nixon's farm

Then Peter N. got drunk again

on Spanish words and wine

as he planted a crop of guinness stout

and served subpoenas to all the trout

On sixteen counts of catchin flies

and tellin debentures and swappin lies.

Dolly Parton and her brother Martin

Just can't seem to stop from startin

stealing beans from another chump

and making a fool outta Donald Trump

So when you get off the city bus

To catch the computer train

Just don't pretend to be one of us

With yer textin', stretched out brain

'cause we're all sitting at the Caribou

and the jokes and the smokes and the drink's on you.

Dolly Parton and her brother Martin

Just can't seem to stop from startin'

Like serial lovers and long-eared freaks

They'll be back at it in a coupla weeks.