Speech Therapy

Radiation does sloppy work. It's not like a good union electrician, let's say, who wipes his fingerprints off the switch plate and sweeps up the flecks of plaster and bits of plastic insulation when the job is done. Therapeutic radiation more like the fireman, smashing down doors and leaving puddles where your couch used to be.
One of the things it left behind on my tongue is fibrosis-scars to you and me. The scars are stiff and inelastic and they take the place where muscle used to be. So the tongue that used to trip lightly along a lecture or a dirty joke or a sonnet is now kind of heavy, stumbling when it trips. I can hear my speech becoming thick and dull. The effect is worse in Italian than English and worst when two consonants sound right next to each other. Other people ask me to repeat myself and sometimes the sound of my own voice makes me wonder who's talking.

So now I'm getting speech therapy. The strategy is to build up the muscle in my tongue until I can crack walnuts with it and to simultanously increase its flexibility. Lingual yoga and isometrics all conducted in the private gymnasium of my very own mouth.
I met with the therapist a few days ago and we have a date for this week. I stick my tongue out at her a lot and sometimes I read poems in English and Italian. A little bit of Hoffman, a little bit of Montale. It all seems oddly invasive, as if I were discovering a sense of modesty I didn't know I had. Ashley-my therapist- did teach me one great trick; you can replace the trilled 'r' of Italian (impossible to say with a fibrotic tongue) with a 'd' spoken quickly. It wouldn't let you pass as a Roman, but in most other places, it would be just fine.
In the meantime, I'm sitting at a traffic light sticking my tongue out and down, holding for five seconds then stretching it out and up as high as it will go. I don't know if this will improve my speaking voice at all but it's bound to start some interesting conversations.

Kindling the Cat-Seventh Life

Sometime last winter a publisher agreed to republish my first novel-The Bachelor's Cat. Then a few months later, they changed their mind. I would have been disappointed but when they told me, I was so sick that I was scarcely there and books seemed about as far away as stars.

But I'm feeling better now and I'd love for the poor little Bachelor's Cat to have another life. It's already had six: the first edition, a paperback, an audio book (we called it book-on-tape back then) and a translation in spanish, german and italian. We won't count the movie rights sales, even though it was fun to fantasize about who would play which roles. So life number seven is as a Kindle book.
The Bachelor's Cat is a story about a guy who gets out of his own way and finds love. The cat in the story is an enabler, but it's really a story about our ability to step outside of our stupidest selves, go in orbit for a bit and then see things from a completely different angle.
My friend Bonnie asks me if my drive to get things published (and my mania for acorns) has something to do with immortality. I told her that it had to do with accomplishment and the sweet feeling thereof. But now I think she had it at least half-right: it has to do with mortality, tick-tock and all that.

Anyway, here's a link to The Bachelor's Cat, seventh life

I wish

There are some things, some accomplishments that I can only admire humbly from a distance. No chance that they will ever be on my list or that there completion will be nominated here. I don't mean pie-in-the-sky stuff like a Nobel Prize or meeting Terry Gross, I mean things whose beauty and elegance are within my reach. From today's Times, in a story about Theo Epstein leaving the Red Sox to take a job with the Cubs:

 Epstein left the team once before, in 2005, fleeing Fenway Park in a gorilla suit on Halloween after a tiff over his contract extension went public. 


I can hardly imagine having a contract, let alone a contract extension, but 'fleeing Fenway Park in a gorilla suit'? Ah, that's the stuff of dreams.

Nothing to it

The surgeon speaks as he walks into the room: it's just a wart, he says. Aside from the disgusting aspect of having had a wart inside your mouth (will anyone ever kiss me again? anyone who's read this blog post?)
it's a relief. What about the blood gusher? Well, the surgeon's joke is that all bleeding stops eventually, and this bleeding did too. So what was I worried about? See you in three months.

Of all the relationships in your life, the one whose diminishment you most fondly endorse is the one with your surgeon. Nice guy and all, maybe even an intellect worth your wiles, but frankly it's best to stop meeting like this and three months sounds pretty good.
Three months is a season. Nice chunka change. End of summer into Winter here in Philadelphia. Last tomatoes into ice-topped ponds. Time to do stuff. A season of writing and life-arranging, paring down if not pairing off. Time for all the Lesser Vehicle things, ticking off stuff I always wanted to get done. Then, if there's a  next season, on to the Greater Vehicle.

Acorns

The afternoon after they stopped my blood-gusher, I went in the woods and planted acorns.

Planting Acorns in memory of Harold Sills

He's dead you see and
you saved up all your supermarket coupons
and you bought an acre
at the side of the shopping mall and you figure
that you'll never be the sort of soul who puts in an autoparting parlor
or runs a store where people get their nails hammered
and instead of a florist you want a forest
all oaky hokey-dokey
right next to the Home improvement store
for squirrels.

So what you do, see, is to gather the acorns just as they ripen.
And since ripe is dead's first cousin,
you plant the acorns right away and right-
not too far from home. no surprises
no immigration, no creativity.

you got acorns with filbert worms or weevils?
Feed 'em to the pigs.
wrinkled ones, ones too dry?
throw 'em at your cousin, toss 'em in the sty.

punch holes about as deep  as your pinky is long
and look at your digit, the planting widget .
go poke for an oak, and leave a tree to grow
a century or three behind you
and every other poky, callused, outdoor jew

and say this prayer
'blessed is the acorn
that blesses me
on the forest floor
for it reminds me to serve the oaks of my children.'

In the waiting room now, there's a woman with one of those artificial larynxes and she's talking-in that machine-voiced way with a woman who's toting a harp. The harp's a pretty, wooden thing about four feet tall and after some tech talk and pleasantries (is the wood from pleasant trees? mebbe) she starts to play, softly giving voice to all of us waiting here for the news from inside ourselves.

Blood on the Porcelain

That's how my morning started, spitting blood and remembering that this whole adventure got started standing over the same sink. This time, the blood was flowing pretty freely, it hurt a little and I could feel that it was coming from the site of the surgery about ten days ago.
A few phone calls and then I was driving myself to Fox Chase with a bloody rag sticking out of my mouth,  one hand on the wheel and the other trying to stanch the bleeding. I'm imagining drivers in other cars as they look over at a traffic light and see a guy holding this large red wick in place. Anyway, as luck would have it, it was the WHYY fund drive, a very strange thing to listen to while you're trying not to gag on your own blood. If I hadn't donated just two days before, I would have felt like they were trying to tell me something. I switched stations to WRTI-it's classical music in the morning and that felt appropriately serious, the sort of sound track you'd choose if you were going to pick one for bleeding out in the front seat of your Honda.
(They were playing the overture from The Merry Widow and I'm not married. Go figger.)
An hour later, the bleeding's stopped and no one has the slightest idea about what may have caused it. I have the feeling that more tests are on the way and I'll see the surgeon again on friday. Stay tuned.

dis-connected

You lose a lot in a divorce-your family, some friends, your home, maybe even your memory, your sense of direction and your eye for the appropriate. Anyway, I had occasion to write to a friend from those married days about a professional matter. He didn't answer-no real surprise there-but I had to follow up. It turns out that he's in Sloan-Kettering being treated for leukemia. He's getting chemo-, and they're trying to kill him just a little but not too much and there he is in the perfect lonliness of dying that somehow ties you compassionately to all us other dying souls.

So here's the feeling: in a flash, I feel connected to him again and a few minutes later, I find out that my kid knew and never bothered to tell me. Orbital gravity, pulled in, held at a distance: I wonder if there's an equation that describes it, and I hope he has a window with a great view of the city as it whirls around below him.

Mere Life-the little stuff-erotica, et cetera

I always wanted to write a dirty book. The problem was that whenever I got started, about five pages into it, a novel would break out. One of my characters would have a hobby or a crisis or second thoughts. Something outside the bedroom would part the curtains or something inside the bedroom would swing them shut.
I wrote a sexy book once: it was published under the title bang-BANG and now it goes by 'Paula Sherman and the National Rifle Association', but it was really a story about gun crazies and a strong funny woman who starts a national movement based on the choice between guns and sex. ( I hear that someone just won a Nobel Prize for a similar move in Liberia.)
But it wasn't what I wanted. I even got some of the steamy scenes from an unpublished novel called The Butterfly Farmer published in a romance magazine, but that didn't do it. I wanted to write about people swept away by desire. I wanted to be in their heads and take the reader in there too. I wanted to tell sex how much I loved it.
So I finally put together Philadelphia Personal. I think I wrote the first 'grafs about ten or twelve years ago and I finished it when I was so sick from radiation that I had no sexual feelings of my own. A friend of mine-I won't tell you his name-had a contact in the industry and passed it along. It's going to be published in December by the wonderfully named Pink Flamingo Press.
And so another little item is off the list. Two or three more and then I have to face up to the Big Item, the Greater Vehicle.
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In the meantime, my kid ran a half-marathon. My darling Spencer who hated gym and the mandatory teams  in high school pushed and pounded 13 miles. I cried, of course but I really don't know why. Why does that sort of intensely solipsistic dedication move us so much? Why do we cheer everybody who slogs across the finish line? Nothing's gained, no one's life is better for it, the sum of human kindness isn't increased and still we cheer. Sure there was a charity involved, but I can't remember which one, maybe the Afterthought Foundation.

Oh, and these guys ran too. Check the sneakers of the fellow on the right.