free-falling, mouth open

I did not want to be that person who thinks that getting cancer made colors seem brighter, that life is now more precious and fleeting and all that. I dunno; I guess I like to think that colors have always seemed pretty bright to me. I feel like I've done a durn good job of savoring life, feeling grateful, crying and laughing easily and genuinely at hellos, goodbyes, and here-we-are-all-together moments. I've been really, really good at that, so much more often than not, and I want to give my earlier self props for being so good and grateful. I secretly would like an existential badge, if they give those out.

I especially don't want to give "cancer" credit for making me enjoy life more. I feel stubborn about that. It's like when you lose a great tree from a tremendous windstorm that tears through your yard, and then afterwards you hate to admit that the extra light on the garden is kind of nice. You want to be upset about the tree.

No, that's not quite right.

It's more like getting cancer peels off a layer of something -- maybe it metaphorically takes your clothes off. I think that's it. So hot feels hotter (think metal bench in August) and cold feels colder, and everything is more pointedly itself. Maybe this is what people at nudist colonies are after -- that sense of "I'm awake now!" you must get when you walk naked into a room full of people.

Whatever it is like, I have ended up acutely, intensely, naked-on-a-hot-bench aware of the passing of time. Time seems absurdly fast and life almost comically short. I feel like that guy at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he is just getting more and more wide-eyed as he careens through space and time, wrinkling before our eyes. Whether I die at 60 or at 90, I cannot imagine thinking this was any other than a ridiculously fast free-fall -- like that other guy, the one who stepped away from his balloon, 24 miles up, and fell toward Earth at 800 miles an hour. Except in emotional time you don't have a spacesuit, and your cheeks are flapping against the air and you are leaving a trail of saliva as you fall.

Which actually happened to me once on the Hellevator ride at Six Flags, where they lift you straight up and then drop you down suddenly. I came off that thing with a line of saliva UP the entire length of my face, and all I had done was open my mouth as we dropped three stories.

Anyway. I am having more free fall, saliva-up-the-face moments as time goes by. It's good and it's hot and it's sometimes freezing cold. It's all over the place, like this post. I am not complaining; just trying to report out.

An example of this merging of the sublime and the ridiculous I am experiencing: Laura bought me a new pair of knee socks when she was out the other day. I hadn't known I'd needed knee socks, but it turns out they were JUST the thing.

Note that I still can't resist the temptation to pick up a little piece of schmootz on the floor in the midst of dancing. Dang! I am so far from enlightenment, and there is so little time.

might as well let it all hang out

In a few weeks, I'll be "3 years out" from my diagnosis. I guess that's good. People seem to think it's good.

It doesn't feel like I've gotten nearly far enough. It's like you're on a swampy hike you didn't want to go on, didn't pack right for, and are kind of tired and want to go home from. Supposedly, five years beyond your diagnosis, you make your way out of the swamp, you're in the clear, and there is a....here I must pause. Most people might be able to end that sentence with "there is a big party awaiting you" or "they give you a nice, cold beer." Neither of those sounds like my style of celebrating, but it kind of deflates the sentence to say "you make your way out of the swamp and...you have a nice supper with your family."

In one way or another, the possibility of my cancer recurring is on my mind just about all the time. It's like it's tucked in one of those ridiculously shallow pockets they put on women's pants, and it falls out when I'm just walking around. I bend over -- over and over again -- to pick it back up.

It pains me that this is true, and it makes me wince to admit it here. But if I'm in the business of telling my truth, which would seem key to the promise-to-self in "writing therapy," I feel like I should come clean about the impact cancer has had on me.

It is for me what we call in the therapy biz a "narcissistic wound" to have been so changed by cancer (a narcissistic wound means "a blow to my ego," but the clinical term somehow sounds both more self-deprecating and self-inflating at the same time, which is a neat trick -- rarely, I will note, used by therapists when speaking of themselves). I didn't want to be one of those people who thought about their cancer so much. I guess there must be a part of me that thinks it is...narcissistic to do so. Gee, I'm practically talking myself into getting some therapy.

I was "compartmentalizing" (it's just going to be one of those posts, it seems) pretty well until the BRCA2 gene showed up this spring. I was going along assuming that I had had double my statistical share of lightning strikes to the noggin: the cancer in the first place, and then the more unusual, more aggressive "triple negative" nature of my tumor. My karmic dues were kind of paid up, is what I was thinking.

But then in March, when genetic testing showed a little broken bit, a tiny flaw in my otherwise pretty well-woven genetic vest, things changed. You wear clothes, right? All it takes is one broken thread and you've got a problem. Somewhere along the line, genetic stitch number 6141 hit a snag, "resulting in premature truncation of the BRCA2 protein at amino acid position 2003." About 5% of breast cancer patients have this broken thread in their genetic fabric. 

So I've become a little spooked; like that guy in South Carolina who's been hit by lightning a few times. You start to wonder if Zeus is taking aim at you with a thunderbolt when you're out and about in the weather of life. Maybe that's narcissistic, too, but there it is. Clearly I've got too much stuff in that damned pocket.

I'm okay. I'm changed. I just fell into a ditch on the hike, type of thing. Remember the hike? When I crawled out of the ditch, something about my path had been altered.

I have too much to say about all of this to cram it into one post. But I might as well tell you where I'm really at, since the funky gene means I'm on this hike for good.

pep rallies and other signs of fall

Back in the day, you could tell that autumn had arrived for real when the canada geese flew due south  in a honking V formation. They're all discombobulated now, of course. Though there are some traditionalist geese who still buy into the migration, a lot of them insist that the ritual is negotiable. It seems to take them a long time to get their goose act together. You can see raggedy formations flying in wide circles, landing often to check their glitchy GPS, or looping back because someone thinks they might have left the teakettle on. You can hear the traditionalist geese arguing with the golfcourse-potato geese -- who just don't wanna. I feel bad for the whole disoriented canada geese family, but you just can't count on them anymore to tell you when it's fall, and that's the bottom line.

Instead I focus on more reliable signs of fall: apples, pears, maple leaves in the cat food. There's a gradual shift toward stocking up on food in general when fall arrives in earnest -- some mammalian instinct that leads me to make large batches of applesauce, pesto, granola.

And there's butternut squash in the fall, of course. Here's today's pick of our massive butternut squash litter. I have half a mind to give this one a name, like I did for Sam the Carrot, a gigantic garden carrot I carried to school for a couple of weeks in second grade, until mom sat me down and told me it was time to add Sam -- by then all floppy and aggrieved looking -- to some soup.

(You see the problems that can arise when I get attached. I wish I could say I've worked all that through. I mean, I'm over Sam. But I can get mightily attached to things that are crazy evidence of the crazy beauty of this crazy life.)

If you've ever worked in a school, you know that Reunion or Homecoming is a sign of fall, too. The rituals around Homecoming are at least as reliable, and a heck of a lot louder and honking as the geese. It's happening at Porter's this weekend, just down the street from me, and it's happening at Fieldston, Laura's school in the Big City.
This morning she sent me a video clip of her fall ritual, and I sent her a clip of mine. We are having different kinds of pep rallies, as you can see, but we're both enjoying the crazy beauty of this crazy life.

exactly what I need

This is exactly what I need to have happen right now. That's what this psychologist tells himself when something in his life goes awry. In his own example, it was the waiting room toilet overflowing with bad stuff, seeping beyond the tiny bathroom into where a family was waiting for their therapy session.

Okay, it was only an individual therapy session. I added the family bit. Because that's an even more interesting picture, isn't it? What a mess that would be, with the whole, already kind of stressed out family not sure what to do, while the therapist tries to maintain unconditional positive regard for everyone, including the schmuck that clogged his toilet. I wonder which families "make progress" after that adventure, and which families are moved that much closer to throwing in the towel. It'd be a good sign, wouldn't it? To be in a family that drove home kind of happy about being grossed out together.

Anyway: "This is exactly what I need to have happen right now." Telling yourself that shifts the mind from resistant mode into accepting mode, is the idea.

I've tried it several times, and it actually has helped a bit, especially for things like butternut squash soup spilling in the fridge. With larger things -- like feeling at sea in my life, which I sort of have for the past few weeks -- it's a little trickier. The very nature of feeling "at sea" involves forgetting big truths like you are always exactly where you are in order to learn exactly what you are supposed to learn.

This sea's waters are not rough or threatening. Hardly. I'm just bobbing along thinking a paddle would be really, really handy. But even if I had a paddle, I'm not quite sure which way to shore, it's so foggy.

There are long moments when I can hang onto the idea that bobbing along in the fog is exactly what I need to do right now. This bobbing is precisely what I need to help me tune in to my heart, my intuition, my...truth.

And then there are much longer moments when I have just been feeling fogged in. I'm not sure where I want to move in my work, in my writing, in my use of this evaporative thing called time.

My questions are gigantic, and they're magnified by the fog.

What am I meant to want, and what do I think I'm supposed to want? And then what do I actually want?

See that? Where you had to read those questions a second time? That's the fog I'm talking about. And I'm not done! There is no done to this.

When do I feel most alive? If I figure that out, am I supposed to move towards it? How?
Why do I need to move at all? Why can't I just enjoy bobbing? 
Where is the knot that fastens the leash on my peace of mind, and how did it get there? How do I untie it?
How am I meant to live?

When I try to listen to my intuition as closely as I can, it stops talking. Intuition might be like the blind spot right in the center of the eye, where there aren't any rods or cones, and the optic nerve goes toward the brain. If you look straight at something and don't move your eyes, it disappears. I know it doesn't seem like that, but it's true and I don't have time to go into the science of it, people!

Maybe intuition works like the blind spot. When you are at sea, you have to sit side by side with your intuition, not directly in front of it, in order to hear its whispered directions toward shore.

true love exists and we can be good

Y has a thing about needles. She always has. Over the course of 22 years, she's moved beyond visible freak out in the doctor's office to simply cutting off the circulation in a companion's hand, but still, her needle issue remains. So when she decided to get a tattoo, I knew she had been doing some serious thinking. It turns out that she had -- for a couple of years. She knew the design: one of my dad's painting seals, the vermillion-colored signatures that appear on every traditional Chinese painting. She knew the placement: the inside of her right wrist.

She called early this summer to ask if I would be willing to hold her left hand while she got the tattoo, because she imagined it would smart to get all that needling done.

I heard myself say into the phone, "Maybe I'll get one with you." "Really?" she asked. "Mom's going to get one, too," I heard her tell her sister. "Okay," said T. "I will, too."

It took a lot of planning, working with the seals, photoshopping them into the tidy, tattooable form you see here. We talked and talked, because that's what we do, about which of his many seals to get. Also, Y was worried that T and I hadn't taken years to agonize about it, since she had, so we needed to talk about that.

Because for Y, the tattoo was filled with meaning. For her, she said, the tattoo would be a reminder that true love exists, and that such love was embodied by my parents. Also, she says, the seal is a visible reminder that we are capable of being as good as they were.

For me, it meant a road trip with my daughters and an investment in a fun memory. My tattoo would be a visible reminder that we are capable of fun road trips.

My friend Phuc Tran is a tattoo artist up in Portland, Maine. He is the one who so kindly offered to tattoo nipples for me when mine were lost in the collision with breast cancer. Phuc was the only one we wanted to shepherd us through this experience.

Y was anxious -- had probably been anxious about this for two years, because that's what she does when there is a needle on the horizon, however distant. T volunteered to go first so that Y could see the process from start to finish. Here you can see T lying on the table, having a grand old time getting a tattoo on her ankle.

Seemed like a piece of cake. Y went next, as Phuc suggested it would be good to get hers over with.

The next time I support Y through a painful experience like that, I expect there to be a baby at the end of it. She had a very hard time, with terrible pain.

Poor kid, I thought. Can't take pain. I took another sip of my chai.

Then it was my turn. I hopped cheerfully onto the table and let Phuc shave my hairless ankle.

Well. Hats off to all those people who get more than one tattoo; that's all I can say. It's like, "Tattoo me once, shame on...me. Tattoo me twice, and...you can't tattoo me twice." Isn't that how George Bush put it? First thing he and I agree upon.

But T! What a hero! What a faker! Only when I was getting tattooed did T let on that it had hurt her something fierce. "Really hurts, doesn't it, mom?!" she asked as my eyes bugged out of my head and my jaw unhinged in silent alarm.

T hadn't wanted Y to be any more scared than she already was. She protected her sister by being as calm as possible.

T showed us both that true love exists; that we can be good. And now we have the tattoos to remind us whenever we forget.

it's probably not about the cat

Laura has not been home for two weeks and yesterday I almost got a kitten. Coincidence? My beloved sister Ellen thinks not.

In order to get anything done in life, we've all learned to compartmentalize kittens. It's easy, in general. But if you see one, if it's looking right at you, you have to actively resist the impulse to take it home. Kittens hypnotize you -- you can see them trying. For the vulnerable human, it's like that resisting the impulse to scream thing I wrote about, but more intense.

So when I got an email from someone searching for a home for these abandoned kittens, an impulse began, like a little itchy rash. Which is actually one of the many symptoms I get when I am around cats. But that's beside the point.

The one I'm not going to get, not going to get, Not Going to Get is the one with the white forehead. Yani is thinking of the name Luna, for the moon on her forehead. We would call her Lulu.

Our current Zen Master cat, Juni, could train this new kitten, I'm thinking. Juni would be so happy to have a kitten to take care of! She would take Lulu around the yard, model caution around cars, show her that trees make so much better scratching posts than furniture. Lulu would nestle in the curl of Juni's warm body at night. She would only kill birds under extreme duress. She would be just like Juni, only 14 years younger.

These are the fantasies of the kitten trance I am was in. I did not at any moment in time think it was, in fact, a good idea to get a kitten. But I sent an email saying we were interested in the one that so obviously wants to be our cat. And Yani and I drove off in the general direction of New Britain, where the kitten Sirens were singing.

I said to Yani, "If I could figure out a way of getting the feeling I am looking for, I could resist this kitten impulse." She said, What about a bird? Well, the pet store is right next to the hardware store we were standing in. Let's go see if I have a feeling when I check out the birds. Maybe I am just looking for a feeling.

It was more of a gruesome fantasy than a feeling that came over me as I watched the birds flitter about in their cages: Juni may be a Zen Master, but she can't resist finch tartare. Plus the birds actually seemed to be saying, please don't take me home. Just get me outta here.

We looked at rats, hamsters, mice, gerbils: No way; what's with the tail; hi there, but no; and no thanks, respectively. Yani suggested I might like the hermit crab and tapped on the glass to get its "attention." Har har.

Laura gets home tonight and I'm hoping she can talk me off the Lulu ledge, though in truth talking people into things is more of Laura's thing. She is, after all, the one who followed the sign to "free kittens" and surprised the family with Juni so many years ago.

This morning the kittens' foster dad is down to one kitten: It's Lulu. Could I decide by the end of the day, he asks.

Getting a pet is never just about the pet. I know that. So I'm trying to figure out what it is about, right here, right now. By the end of the day.

Could someone please tie me to the mast?

there's a sweet spot to anonymity, too

As we had long been preparing for, Laura has been staying in New York on weekdays for the past two months or so. We've been doing well with this, all in all. I am holding down the homestead and raising my butternut squash crop. She is out there running a huge school. I am making motor sounds while playing with a balsa wood airplane, and she is running the control tower at JFK. We each have our gifts.

Grocery shopping has been one of the biggest structural changes: I shop for one during the week and for two on the weekends. It takes concentration -- like going from base 10 to the binary system and then back again in arithmetic. Not my strong point. I will say that there has been some overage of romaine and a few emergency banana smoothies.

There are other adjustments: I've taken over the household jobs that once were Laura's, of course. Actually, in some cases I'm foregoing the task altogether. I'm not drinking coffee during the week anymore, since Laura is the one who makes it. When I do have coffee on the weekends (because suddenly there is some), it is like a shot of adrenaline straight up. Coffee is fabulous, wondrous stuff on Saturdays and Sundays.

What is the dog's problem? I wondered early on, before realizing that someone with opposable thumbs maybe should feed him. And I am still trying to figure out if there is a solution to the problem of my side of the sheets being ready for washing when her side is still plenty crisp. I'm not happy with either the over- or the under-laundering solution.

I'm sorry to see Laura drive off on Sunday, but I can get on a chair and stand on my tiptoes and see Friday coming over the horizon, so it's okay. When school started, though, a new feeling took me by surprise. I began to feel like I am missing out on the fun. Cool things happen at school.

One of Laura's advisees, 14-year-old Max, for example, wrote a short piece of music in his music composition course last spring. The teacher asked the Manhattan String Quartet to perform all the students' compositions, and you can hear them by putting sq2012ecfs into your browser. This kind of thing, you've gotta admit, is extremely cool. This is run-of-the-mill cool at Fieldston.

But it's not just happenings and the creative vibe of a school that I am missing. When Laura was at Porter's, my identity was enhanced by being connected to her. Students and faculty would wave to me and greet me because I was the missus of someone well loved in that community. As her tenure there recedes below the opposite horizon of time, I am increasingly anonymous -- just another middle-aged walker passing campus, dragging her starving dog. Students used to greet me with friendly recognition, and now they generally don't see me at all. It's a little bit sad that students no longer care if I see them go behind the AT&T building to smoke. It used to make them nervous, and that was kind of fun.

And since I'm not around Fieldston's campus, I'm anonymous there, too. I don't get the radiant heat that comes with being the principal's spouse. I miss basking in that warmth.

Also there is this: in my profession you make an explicit agreement to keep relationships with clients private. When I run into clients outside the office, I give them a wide berth so they don't need to decide whether to acknowledge me or not. It adds another layer of anonymity.

It's not a problem yet, but I'm tracking this new feeling within me. I think even the hermit up there in the cave kind of liked being known as a hermit. Even the hermit -- who cherished all that alone time -- didn't want to be completely anonymous.