Dear People at Tropicana

Dear People at Tropicana:
Could you please let me know how I can contact the very person who designed the new caps that are shaped like tiny oranges? Thank you in advance.

paula chu, Farmington CT

Dear Ms. Chu:
Thank you for contacting Tropicana. Please let me know the nature of your concern regarding the new caps on some of our products.

Dear Jill:
Thank you for getting back to me. You're worried that I swallowed a cap? It's nothing like that. I simply want to tell the person who designed the clever new cap that I so appreciate that extra bit of creativity. Someone thought of it, and I would love to write a brief note of positive feedback to that individual. Is there any way I could have the contact information for that person? Thanks so much!

Dear Ms. Chu:
Thank you again for your inquiry. Such decisions are made by teams of product design personnel at Tropicana, and as such there is not an individual responsible for the new caps. We are pleased that you like them, and I will be sure to send along your feedback to the design team. Thank you for your interest in Tropicana and its products.

Dear Jill:
I am so grateful for your patience with me. But I find it hard to believe that a team of people came up with the idea of an orange-shaped cap for your orange juice containers. I see instead some man or woman who thought of it, perhaps while pouring his or her morning juice, holding the ordinary cap in hand and having a little vitamin C-induced brainstorm. I would like to thank that individual. Could you ask the "team" to please direct my feedback to the individual whose idea it was originally?

Here is what I would like to say to that person:  Thank you for the cute little new orange-shaped caps on the half gallon orange juice containers. It's brilliant! I love that there is no "need" for this clever idea; it is just a wink to the world. I get it. Thank you. Here is a wink in return.

Dear Ms. Chu:
Thank you for your most recent email. Tropicana is pleased that you have been enjoying the new caps. I do apologize if my initial response seemed unduly cautious. We often receive feedback from customers that have a concern underneath, and my intent is to direct feedback along the proper channels. We hope you and your family continue to enjoy Tropicana products.


Dear Jill:
I would not expect you to remember me, but I wrote to Tropicana several months ago to throw happy confetti in the general direction of the person who designed the dimpled, orange-shaped cap on the orange juice containers. I was forlorn to see while shopping this week that Tropicana has gone back to the regular caps! What happened? I thought it was such a great idea.

Dear Ms. Chu:
Thank you for your interest in Tropicana and its products. The rounded caps were discontinued as a result of safety concerns. While no injuries occurred, there was a concern that the caps might appeal to small children, posing a potential hazard.
We hope you and your family continue to enjoy Tropicana products.


Dear Jill:
I realize that mine may be a voice in the consumer wilderness, but please convey to the individual  that designed the short-lived, dimpled, orange-shaped cap, that I'm sorry that we seem unable to cope with bright, rounded caps on our orange juice containers. It was a very creative idea, and made my o.j. pouring ritual a bit more delightful. I hope the designer is not discouraged and continues to think outside the box, as it were. Thank you, Jill, for your efficiency and patience as go-between in my little conversation with Tropicana. We will try to continue to enjoy Tropicana products, though I confess already I'm enjoying them -- I'm sorry, Jill -- just a little bit less.

letter composer

     Some of you know that a few weeks ago I launched a lead balloon called The Letter Composer. Go ahead; check it out. Because it features some of my dad's painting, it's a pretty site. And it's so quiet, too, because you're the only one there.
     Eh, that's not quite true. A number of "unique visitors" have gone onto the site, I am told by Google Analytics. I like that: unique visitors. Everyone is special. They spend a bit of time at thelettercomposer.com, looking around, going through the drawers, taking a couple of mints from the coffee table. Then they wander back to eBay, or Facebook, or Amazon.
     I've helped lots of people write this and that over the years, and letters are my favorite assignment. When I'm in session with a client who needs to write a letter, I have to bite my knuckle so I don't volunteer to write it for them. I put on my compassionate face and leave it there nodding encouragingly, but in truth my mind has wandered away and is scribbling the perfect letter.
     So I wanted to see if I could actually do it and get paid. It appears not. Oh! Sure. I could charge a lot less. Sure. But my time is worth a lot to me, and so is a good letter. I want to have a conversation with the person about the letter they need, and I want the process itself to be useful, meaningful. I don't want to write thank you letters for ten bucks a pop.
     One person hired me early on. The assignment was too tragic, too personal to tell here. The situation was so sad that I felt rotten charging for my time. She liked the letter, but what could save that impossible situation? 
     Yesterday, after my little advertisement appeared on "The Stranger's Slog" site (slog.thestranger.com/blogs/slog, where it will have an expensive five-day heyday), I got a second inquiry.
     Google analytics tells me this one came from someone in Egypt. His (this I know by the name) letter request was simple: "my aim is to thankfull my teachers and my class mattes my you know teach is like a second father when look the respect because every time or every day he teaches as what we don,t know he told as whats good and whats bad and Iwanna thankfull the lady that is prepared to correct our writting and our mistakess and Iam saying to thank you madam."
     The form asks for more information about the requested letter, and his response was:  "madam if I ask you some question do you know how to curre some diseas"
     The form asks: "How long would you like this letter to be?" The answer: "one days or two days."
     I wrote back a kind letter welcoming his inquiry, asking for clarification on his letter needs, and explaining how payment works. I haven't heard from him again, and didn't expect to. But now I am left feeling worried about this guy in Egypt who is suffering some kind of disease. He wants to thank his teacher, someone who has been like a second father. I got attached just reading his trampled little inquiry.
     Anyway, I'm not sure what's going to happen with thelettercomposer.com. I've got that egg of a project (with no one to fertilize it) and this dead phoenix of a blog. That's two dead birds more than I want. They start to smell.
     And then I found myself wondering if they are supposed to join together somehow -- the egg and the bird. Maybe they just smell dead.
     So tonight I am wondering, dear followers, if you would be interested in occasionally reading the letters that I write for myself. The ones I would share are not so much the personal letters I send. They'd be the ones I send to the World-At-Large -- hoping to make it a bit more of a World-at-Small, I suppose.
     I am thinking of a letter I once wrote to the Boroleum factory on Fisher's Island. Boroleum is a fabulous product for "nasal soreness," made more fabulous by the instructions on the tube which used to say, "place product well up into the nose." I just loved that. Don't hold back! Get it well up into the nose. A few years ago, the tubes stopped giving those bracing instructions, advising instead to place the product at the outer edge of the nostrils. I wrote to the factory to object to their succumbing to pressure from their party-pooper legal advisors -- all of whom (I would bet you anything) place Boroleum well up into their noses in the privacy of their own homes.
     It had to be said. I got a nice letter back, too, explaining the company's fears about Boroleum users misinterpreting the instructions and disaster ensuing if, say, someone tried to cram the tube itself well up into the nose. There was a nice postscript, though, from the woman who wrote to me. In the corner of the page, outside the typed official response, she confessed in pencil: "P.S. My family and I continue to put Boroleum well up into our noses." It was so good of her to come clean like that, even in pencil.
     I invite you to comment (or send me an email: paula@paulachu.com) about this idea of posting my strange letters now and then. If you don't think that would make for a good blog-rebirth, say so. Don't hold back. Place your feedback well up into my nose. 

By the time I get to Phoenix, I'll be a booby

Tao Te Chu shouldn't be a breast cancer blog anymore. Sure, all the descriptors still hold: I'm still introverted, still concave-chested, still got my little shadow of breast cancer following me around. But I don't want the shadow to define me; it comes and goes, like any shadow, depending on where I stand in relation to the light. Sometimes I can't even find it for long moments at a time.

And I don't think readers need to keep hearing about it. It's me again: Still in remission! Still think about it! Still run into people who give me grisly accounts of their sister's death by breast cancer! Kvetch, kvetch.

I need to let the phoenix die so it can come back anew. Right now, I know, I know. The blog looks pretty dead, a pile of ashes in a raggedy birdy mess of a nest. But if I'm very still and very quiet, I sometimes see a twig move here, a feather appear there. I am getting the sense that my blog's rebirth won't be the glorious Feng Wen phoenix of Chinese lore -- wings spread in an iridescent spectacle of power and renewal. I see it as maybe more like a blue-footed booby.

lost donkey, not coming back

You know the saying: when God wants to make a poor man happy, He has him lose his donkey, and then find it again.
Tonight I feel like I have lost my donkey for good.

Not long ago, Skinner's auction house had their semi-annual Asian Art sale. It's a very big deal, with bidders calling in from all over the world. My siblings and I sold off a good portion of my father's stunning, irreplaceable collection of Chinese art. Deciding to sell the art he had collected over the years was a tough call; agonizing, actually. None of us wanted to take care of the collection in the way it merited, but then again, we knew that my dad would have wanted us to keep it for posterity. This piece sell for million someday! Keep for grandchildren.

We did not keep for grandchildren. Or more accurately, we sold so we could send grandchildren to college. Above is a large, beautiful painting of donkeys by Huang Zhou. This was one of my mom's favorite paintings; donkeys were her spirit animal. Mom always thought that her body was a donkey in its willfullness and laziness. She'd often dream about trying to get donkeys to cross a bridge, to leave a fenced area, to climb over a hill.

We have a video of Skinner's auctioning off these donkeys in rapid-fire bidding. Let's start the bidding at 8,000. Do I hear 8,000? 8,000. 10,000? We have 10,000. Do I hear 15,000? The gentleman in the back; thank you. 15,000. And on up to $23,000. The donkeys are gone in under a minute, and I will never see them again, except for here, this crummy shot of them hanging in my parents' hallway.

This week we sold my parents' condo, and the last of the boxes migrated to my beloved brother Lee's garage. I took home the box of art materials that sat on my dad's painting desk. Tonight I began to make my way through these treasures. I am a grieving child tonight.

Here is a box of some of my dad's chops, signature seals with bright vermillion ink pressed into the carved end.

And here is the carved end of one of those beautiful chops. I see the Chu character in there, but there are other things I can't read -- sometimes it is "man from northern China," or "father of four," or "little frog." Things like that. Just writing those things here makes me cry.

I know I am very, very lucky to have a significant collection of my dad's paintings on the walls of my home. I know my beloved siblings feel the same way. But as his treasures scatter, and I send a packet of paintbrushes to one student of my dad's, an ink grinding stone to another, I feel only grief.

I feel like my dad is disappearing from the world. I feel like he should be famous, that his art should hang everywhere, that everyone should recognize his work at a glance, like I do. I feel like everyone should walk around missing him, missing him, missing him.

still with the weak chi

I went to a new acupuncturist this afternoon: Dr. Gao, the Real McCoy. That's what his sign should say.

I've been bothered by chemo-exacerbated arthritis in my hands, and I don't want to get steroid shots or have surgery unless I really have to. Dr. Gao did the usual Chinese medicine things: he spent a long time listening to my pulses, checking out my tongue, then rechecking it awhile later. He seemed kind of fascinated by my dry lips, and mentioned them a few times in our two hours together. Your lip dry, he says. Most people don't point out anything about my lips, ever.

He says my system is depleted. All of this he tells me in very broken English, which makes my heart pump with warmth. I just love a good Pekingese-filtered English, and I begin to fall into a mirroring cadence, too.

He goes to move my boots under the table. "I get, I get," I say as he says, "I get, I get." He gets.

He looks at my intake form. "You have the cancer."

"Yes. Bress. Lass year. I lose both bress. I had the chemo, too," I say.

"Aiya, the chemo is bad-very-bad," he says. "Bad for body."

I can't give one of my standard responses, like "True, but it sure as heck beats the alternative," because I know he wouldn't follow me through that sentence. I say, "The chemo was bad for my body."

He puts a bunch of needles in my hands, plus several on my face and scalp. He connects some of the needles to a machine that sends electrical pulses my way, and my hands twitch while I rest. Dr. Gao's hands are warm and dry, and are shaped like my dad's. I resist the impulse to ask him if I could just hold his hand for a minute, or maybe just look at it closely, smell it. I'll bet there's some garlic within it, just under the skin.

He tells me I should not do detox. Too deplete. Detox only have excess chi. You have deficient. Need protein. Need get a stronger.

I just want to hear him talk. I want to hear the broken sentences. They are like protein to my heart.

Your mama American? Waah! You look Chinese! I think you not 55. I think you young. You just deficient in body. Chi stagnant. I think maybe body missing part cut off. Herb maybe help.

I am taking all this in. He is hurting my hand, actually, pushing my tender joints with his strong, brown, dry thumbs. He presses hard where my joint is swollen, and I try to be stoic. I call on the Lamaze breathing techniques. He is both brutal and tender with my hand. He wants me rest hand, get a strong, too. Then he asks with concern, "You do hand job?"

No, I tell him. I don't really use my hands very much in my work. But somehow the question? Little bit break spell.

bad mall moment

What a mistake. When T'ai went to the mall to get a quick haircut today, I tagged along thinking what the heck.
Was everyone there? Were you all there? I'm guessing you were, but I couldn't have found you if I tried. The crowd was just too massive. Did they add a new holiday? Is there something coming up that I should know about?
At one point I was walking alongside a man and his three-year-old. We were all moving slowly, like so much cattle. The man's wife must have been well ahead of us in the herd. When she started to gain too much ground, the man said to the child, "Shout for Mommy."
"MOMMY!" the kid shouted, with impressive force.
"Louder," ordered the dad.
"MOMMY!!" the kid shouted. This was loud, like you'd shout on a remote Kansas farm when there's a twister coming and the kid and her dog still haven't come home.
"Louder," said the dad.
"MOMMY!!!!!" the kid shrieked. People threw smoothies into the air, The Gap's windows rattled, and every woman who had ever had a child turned her head -- except for Mommy.
"Ach, Jeez," the dad scoffed. "Never mind."
That wasn't the bad mall moment, though it will stick with me for awhile. No, the bad mall moment came when I tried on a couple of sweaters.
Last winter I had the bald head to distract the eye. It's like those perception tests where you tell people to focus on the basketball being tossed around and while they're doing that, half of all viewers fail to see that a gorilla is walking through the scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vFAQC7FvKc Last year, my head was the basketball (in more ways than one) and my concave chest was the gorilla that you could easily miss. 
Now all I have is this freaking gorilla suit. 
Sweaters (other than the heavy winter ones) and shirts are cut not just to make room for breasts, but to point a tiny neon arrow toward them. Trying on a simple sweater in the dressing room was both depressing and comical. I don't know how to describe how it looked, but it felt like being caught in the rain in a thin t-shirt, in a bad way. Only without nipples or breasts. Or rain. It just felt like being caught.
Suddenly I was not looking forward to spring, which I think may be a sign of insanity at this point.
I know! I know! No one is looking. That helps the head, but not, well, the ego. Tell a 55-year-old woman "No one looks at you anyway," and, though true, it is not much comfort.
I got kind of choked up on the way home, and talked to newly-shorn T'ai about today's dressing room failure and the likely wardrobe malfunctions in all my tomorrows. He held my hand. 
"That stinks, Mom," he said. And somehow I felt comforted. It turns out that when my heart is comforted, my ego pipes down.
That's a good thing, because the gorilla suit is here to stay, for as long as I am. I just need to figure out how to love it.

in some important ways

In some important ways, it's easier to be the driver. You know how aware you are of the stopped car in front of you; you've got it all under control. You see the black ice. You've already spotted the pedestrian. The passenger has to decide what to point out, and usually waits until she can't stand the suspense anymore -- this may be a matter of a second, but still, it's stressful.

And if the passenger is generally a more cautious driver herself, well, she might occasionally, reflexively, grab the armrest when the other person is at the wheel. The passenger's right foot may press the floor. Since the driver generally does have everything under control after all, the passenger has learned how to pretend she was going to shift toward the armrest anyway. She was going to take that sharp, deep breath. Ahhhh, that air feels good.

Laura is leaving her job in June and is going to work on her own. You know her. Laura, the major breadwinner in the house. The one who actually receives a paycheck at the same time each month.

The one whose job has provided us with healthcare.

I'm sure Laura, who is driving along singing "Ohh, Freedom! Ohh, Freedom!" at the top of her lungs, sees the nails scattered across the pavement, the flock of geese waddling through the traffic, and the mattress that just flew out of the car up ahead. But I, strapped into the passenger seat and nervously humming "buddy, can you spare a dime," am quietly gripping the armrest and taking lots of sharp, deep breaths.

It's not just money I'm worried about. I'm sure she'll find coaching and consulting gigs, and I'm sure we'll learn how to live without a paycheck. Hey! I was going to take that sharp breath anyway.

But the search for healthcare on our own has brought up old, dark, sad feelings for me. When Laura called USAA to inquire about their insurance (she qualifies because her dad was in the Air Force), she explained our relationship and my health situation.

Their response was, "Ma'am, we wouldn't touch paula until 10 years after the end of her treatment."

You know, you feel pretty vulnerable after a cancer diagnosis. Sort of forever, somewhere inside. The idea that this insurance company would rather insure a 65-year-old me than a 55-year-old-possibly-with-a-target-on-my-back me is hard to take in.

The dark feelings were right under the surface. How could I possibly have demonstrated more of a commitment to beating the cancer, beyond sacrificing both breasts? Did it matter to the insurance company that my nodes were clear? If that doesn't matter to them, does it matter to my prognosis? Why wouldn't the insurance company bet on me?  It stings that they bet on the cancer instead.

So we have some things to figure out, and you know how I feel about incomplete puzzles, incomplete anything. But I feel like I owe it to Laura to be as supportive as possible as she makes this long-awaited change in her life. If I decided I wanted to open up a practice on the moon, she would be supportive of me. She'd have her doubts, but she'd want me to have what I wanted. She'd also know I could charge a gazillion dollars for ten minutes of therapy to anyone who showed up in my office on the moon. She believes in me.

And the truth is, Laura has had to sit in the passenger seat, gripping the armrest, while I steer as carefully as I can through the creepy villages of Cancerland. It's been hard on her. I really do think that in some ways, it's harder for the families of people with cancer than for the cancer patient herself. Not in all ways, but in some really important ways.

It's Laura's turn to drive.