Kaleidoscope

There's a journal called Kaleidoscope. No, it's not about looking at mirrored patterns in an altered state of consciousness. It's actually about "Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts". Issue #63 just showed up today and it has this poem:

Bijou the poodle

  -for hs

Bijou the poodle

Pulls Hal the poet

Through the streets

Around the edge

Of Carpenter’s Woods.

Poetical Hal has Parkinson’s and

Bijou has a lust for bikers and runners

That’s not completely wholesome.

Hal can’t let Bijou run loose

In the deep of the woods

And Hal is too kind

to keep Bijou inside.

So, lunging at joggers and jerking on leads

Hal and Bijou whirl on,

Leashed together for blocks and blocks

In orbit around the beautiful woods

And each other.

Because Hal (the poet) and

Bijou (the poodle)

Are both remarkably strong and

Each unwilling to give up

The sweet gyration of

Sliding over the ground

That passes beneath all six of their feet.

--published in Kaleidoscope, 2011

I wrote this BIHC, and sent it off sometime in the middle of treatment. Today, when I read it in the magazine-a lovely glossy, by the way- I wondered who, exactly, I was writing about. Was it the poet hs or me? Whoever I was thinking about, I wish man and dog a good long spell of orbiting some earthy spot between them.

Killers

A few years back, when I was just starting to write fiction, there was a columnist at a local weekly who wrote angry, vengeful bits of cultural criticism. He seemed to find a way to hate everything and he seemed to enjoy taking on things like The Philadelphia Orchestra or a local shelter for the homeless that most people found admirable. He even wrote a column once in which he savaged the simpering little puke-suckers who liked his column.
I started writing a story that was narrated in that insufferable voice, less creepy than Humbert Humbert, but more dangerous. The story turned into a novel that we'll call Killers. I've never been able to sell Killers. I'd like to think it's because the subject matter is off-limits to most commercial publishers, but perhaps I misjudge its quality as a story.
This week, it was published as an e-book on

http://www.smashwords.com.

You can find it there-or on kindle and the other e-publishers. I'd like to give you all a copy as a thank-you for bearing with me. The coupon code that makes it free is  XH92P.
I hope you like it.

Vietnam?

This visiting professor business is improving. Last season it was New Jersey, next month it's Vietnam. This gig happened because my old boss from the end of my teaching career is now the dean of the hospitality management school at Hoa Sen University in Saigon. They needed someone to teach the young hospitality professionals about wine and beer and I was invited.
•   •
This has all the makings of an adventure. Consider:
I've never even been on mainland Asia before
When I chanted "Hell no, we won't go." I was talking about this place
The food
I'll be with an old friend whose company I admire in a setting where we are both strangers
There will be students with a world view totally different from mine and
I'll have the job of explaining my world to them.

I should be trembling with excitement and I'm not. Instead, I'm happy-just happy, filled with a pleasant, warm anticipation. I knew about this last week and I didn't rush to tell you about it. What's up?

I think the cancer changed me. When I was given the gift of knowing that all that matters is what's happening now, I gave up my fear of dying, I also gave up the wild excitement of anticipation. I'm not there now: maybe I'll be there later, maybe I won't.

In the meantime, there's a dog to walk and I've got to pack.

You say hyperplasia, I say po tah toe

It took us twelve days to get together to discuss the results, but John Ridge wastes no time on his way in the room. "It's not malignant. It's a hyperplasia." (Incidentally, if you're going to deliver life-or-death sort of news, this is one of the humane ways to do it.)  I get it, but how bad is that?
It turns out that on the scale of Good Cells Gone Bad, hyperplasia is still the kid who steals a pack of gum from the candy store. The medical advice? Slap the little bastard before he turns to robbing banks armed with a sub-machine gun and accompanied by a gang of meth-crazed buddies.
Fair enough. How do we do that? Well, it involves General Anaesthesia (I know him when he was a Captain). The mouth will be a little messed up afterward, so we schedule the surgery for the end of August, after I get back from Viet Nam.

New York Again

We're waiting for yet another biopsy report so it seems only right that we go to New York for a few days. I remind J on the way up about the Titans. No, not the short-lived New York football team, the legendary giants who were children of a union between the Uranus and Mother Earth. J, ever obstetrical, wonders about the details of conception and parturition, but I bring her back to the metaphorical way of thinking. You see the Titans gained strength when they touched the earth and I've held the suspicion/superstition that New Yorkers do the same. Time to go be in places with names like SoHo and Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights.

It's warm and the streets are crowded and lively. We let our feelings turn to putty and offer them up to be manipulated. We see the German Expressionist show at MoMA and despair for humanity, we have a beer in a bar on Grand Street and feel like there's hope. I buy a pair of travelers' chopsticks. J looks at shoes. I take pictures of the Spring Street Natural and the Riviera to send, uncaptioned, to Jeff Smith. 
I'm eating now, able to chew up lots of things and so I eat sushi and brioche and bone marrow and pizza and oxtails and soup dumplings and fried anchovies. J tells me that I'm still painfully skinny.  “Bones” she says as she presses her hand to my chest.For her sake, I have an extra Guinness or two but I'm mostly just happy to be able to taste and chew and swallow. It's hard to care about skinny, I tell her, when back in January, we were thinking about dead.

Chemo Brain

Some days when I walk Lola in Carpenter's Woods, we meet Jake. He's a yellow Lab whose bounciness is about the same as Lola's. His parent is this lovely creature who might be, if paganism hadn't been eclipsed by the monotheists, a wood sprite. We talk. I mention my kayak-building. She says she's never been to the Pine Barrens. I'm shocked. I urge her to go there before the pterodactyls become extinct and the giant turtles shrink to mere dinner plate size.
Where should she go? Oh shit. I can't remember the name of the place. I give her my email and by the time she gets in touch, the name comes back to me.

•   •   •

forgetting Bel Haven Paddle Sports

the name of that kayak rental in the pines
the one where we go all the time,
the one with the cute little whatchamacallit,
yeah, that one.
its name has gone skittering off someplace
into the deeper woods to beat wings with
the date of the battle of mukden and
the name of the girl who taught me how
to eat hardshell crabs with a hammer.
in fact, that memory’s very being now resembles
that orange butterfly, you know the one-
that’s named for euclid’s something or other?

i know the kayak rental name is right there,
hiding behind the perfect, polished recollection of
all nine cru beaujolais villages
a memory standing in place
with its own nemmo-sign
since, oh, 1975
and the starting lineup of the ‘55 Dodgers
and the address of Ebinger’s bakery
whose last crumb was brushed away thirty years ago.

no matter.
when i go off the trail to find that name,
(murky water paddle daughter shoulda oughter?)
when i go off the trail to find that name,
i’m immune to the poison ivy
and the nits of gnats
and the scratches of lying wineberry.
it only takes two steps, three at the most
and i am in the siren sunshine of the
Bright Indefinite Orchard
picking paunchy fruit from a thousand trees
that i never could have seen
from spots
along the well-remembered, foot-polished trail.

Dr. Ridge Takes a Snip

It's biopsy time again.
Dr. Ridge is tall and gaunt. He eclipses the hall light when he stands in doorways. He trims his white beard to a stubble and, even though he heard the message about making small talk with patients, he doesn't believe really believe it. He is economical with his words, downright parsimonious with gestures. He's come to symbolize for me, the starkness and the beauty of my little encounter with death.
He starts out our meeting with the snotscope. In case you've forgotten, the snotscope is a length of garden hose with an old Ray-O-Vac flashlight attached. He snakes it up my nostril and down my throat for the eighth or tenth or twentieth time since I've known him. The sense of being invaded by the housewares and garden section at Lowe's is both undiminished and every bit as pleasant as it always was.
"Say 'E'." he says
"Say 'mama'."
"Say 'I have no fucking dignity, I'm a series of tubes'."
Okay, maybe he didn't say that last one, maybe he just signed it.
"Don't bite me." he says again as he pushes my tongue around with a shoehorn.
"Breathe through your nose." he tells me as I gag.
The site of the cancer looks pretty good he says.

We're getting along really well here and the nurse hands him a syringe with needle. The growth in my mouth, he says, probably hasn't sprouted much in the way of nerves just yet, but this may burn a little. A small pinch is more like it, kind of like finding a piece of shell in the middle of your crab cake.  A few seconds later, he's used a little snipper to remove a pinhead's worth of white tissue and we're done.

The results will be back in a week, he says. No, wait. Not a week, I'll be away, twelve days.
Well, can someone call me?
Nope.
"I like to look in a patient's eyes when I'm giving them results so that I know they understand the significance of the results."
And what, praytell gentle doctor, might the results be? Is this just a papilloma?
"That's what we're trying to find out."
What else could it be?
"Could be cancer." His eyebrows twitch up a little.