Survival skills

Red-bellied woodpeckers keep visiting the feeder out front this morning, one plump and another a little skinnier. Before swooping down to peck at seeds, they perch first in a nearby maple tree that still holds on to a few bright yellow leaves. Up the hill oak saplings hold tight to brown-orange leaves, but all the other trees stand naked, ready for winter.

I'll let the sun come up a little higher before I venture out on a walk this morning. It's cold out there! I know 30 degrees is mild compared to what we might see in a few weeks, but if I wait an hour or two, I won't have to bundle up quite so much. I haven't walked much this week, thanks to persistent shortness of breath plus too many afternoon meetings, but this morning I feel good and strong and ready to put my feet through their paces--a little later.

I did take an unusual walk last night: one lap around the track at the college's Relay for Life, the Survivor's Lap they call it. I walked alongside a gentleman who was diagnosed with stage III malignant melanoma nine years ago and a two-year-old girl who has been battling cancer most of her life. I was the featured speaker for the event, which made me more nervous than any other talk I've ever delivered. There's nothing particularly intimidating about an audience of students, faculty, and staff, but instead of babbling about my area of academic expertise, I talked about an experience that defies my expertise and requires me to admit limitations. "Tell us about your journey" was the only guidance the organizers gave me, so I told them about my journey, and then I set out on a short journey around the track. I survived.

This morning my woodpeckers show how to survive the chill by filling themselves with black oil sunflower seed, while maple trees demonstrate a different approach to survival: drop everything and go dormant. I think I'll survive the winter by walking--alongside anyone else I can persuade to join me on my journey.

Friday poetry challenge: found poetry

Two events this week have made me think about the future of written communication. First, the college e-mail server was out of commission for nearly 36 hours, leading to widespread panic among people incapable of imagining other methods of communicating; and second, I read A Wild Perfection: Selected Letters of James Wright, which offers a reminder of the depth and breadth of information that ordinary people once regularly conveyed by means of letters. I love the way the poet's voice comes through in even the most mundane passages, transforming ordinary events into luminous lyrical moments.

Collections of letters provide a quirky but compelling glimpse into the lives of long-dead authors, but what will happen in the future when the written letter disappears and scholars are left with scattered e-mail messages, Twitter feeds, and Facebook status lines--some corrupted, some deleted, some lost in internet limbo? Ye shall know me by my bytes.

Which is not to say that electronic communication is worthless. Indeed, tweets and e-mails may acquire a poetic compression of expression, as in this brief excerpt from an e-mail message:

Cold enough here
for a cold-weather coat,
which is what I didn't take
when I walked the dog past hail
in those small vales and gullies
in the park beside the library.

Or this brief but colorful Facebook status line:

Sun streaming
through yellow leaves
and the scent
of autumn.

--Both borrowed from private or public messages and simply formatted to look like poetry.

Today's challenge: manipulate a passage from an electronic message to make visible the poetry hiding within the bytes.

Best. (Unwanted.) Excuse. Ever.

After all my griping about stupid excuses yesterday, I found myself this morning whining about my inability to form coherent sentences after 2 in the afternoon. "I have the same problem," said a colleague, "but at least you have a good excuse."

I can't count the number of times I've heard this in the past few months. Friends, colleagues, and even students have been eager to let me off the hook for any number of things--can't stay awake for evening meetings, can't remember to send a birthday card (to my brother! on his 50th birthday!), can't get papers graded as quickly as I used to--because cancer treatment has taken over my life.

I appreciate the fact that lots of people are cutting me some slack, but really: I'm tired of having the world's best excuse. I don't like being the person from whom not much can be expected, and I fear that I'll have trouble shaking off that label. Please, may I have my real life back?

Maybe eBay is the answer: "For sale: one all-purpose excuse, slightly used. One size fits all. Comes with bonus sack of sympathy and get-out-of-jail-free card."

I'll have to list the side effects in very small print, though, or no one will ever take that excuse off my hands.

Worst. Excuse. Ever.

First thing this morning a student walked in my office (proof positive that he knows how to find me!) and demanded an extension on a paper due today. Why? Because the college's e-mail server was down all day yesterday so he couldn't revise his paper.

Now I had e-mailed extensive comments on all these drafts last Friday so students could work on them over the weekend, but when I asked him why he hadn't looked at my comments before yesterday, he said, "Because I didn't know the e-mail would go down."

When I pointed out that, despite the lack of e-mail, we still had access to the internet, the library research databases, and that old-fashioned tried-and-true telephone, he said, "I didn't know how to reach you."

And when I pointed out that three of his classmates facing the same dilemma had actually walked to my office to ask me to print out copies of their drafts with my comments inserted, which I was happy to do, he gave me an excuse that ranks right up there with the worst ever: "I'm a lot busier than other people in the class."

And then when he pugnaciously demanded to know what I plan to do about the situation, I said, "If you don't turn in your paper, I plan to give you a 0. What do you plan to do about it?"

I probably should have told him that I'm a lot busier than other people in the class...way too busy to respond to such ridiculous demands.

Instant Tranquility Kit

Yesterday's mail brought me an Instant Tranquility Kit, including a tea bag, an origami crane, a picture of a Japanese tea house, and a piece of sashimi.

Of course it's not real sashimi. Only a fool would send real sashimi parcel post. Besides, sashimi is strictly off limits for anyone with a weakened immune system.

This is a piece of plastic wind-up sashimi on wheels, perhaps the finest piece of plastic wind-up sashimi on wheels I have ever encountered. Wind it up and it goes whirling around the way real sashimi never does. In fact, if a piece of real sashimi moved so much as a muscle, you'd hear me screaming in Schenectady.

So this morning while the entire campus is in a tizzy over the temporary intransigence of our malfunctioning e-mail server, I am sitting in my office, drinking tea, gazing at a Japanese tea house in the company of an origami crane, and watching a piece of plastic wind-up sashimi skitter around on the desk top, and I am content.

Playing possum

I would be significantly more alert today if my dog were a better communicator--or if I had a handy phrase book to help translate her urgent messages.

All dogs, of course, occasionally feel the need to convey urgent messages in the middle of the night. Since Hopeful lives outdoors, her communiques generally involve interlopers: deer chomping on the sweet potatoes, raccoons ravaging the corn. She'll bark for a little while until the threat dissipates, and then she'll stop. It's easy to ignore that kind of message.

Last night, though, she didn't stop--and she had help, too. Her best dogfriend, Duke, was over for a visit, and even though he's a gimpy old gentleman incapable of pursuing whatever is causing the disturbance, he does like to get his barks in. Late last night (or early this morning) Hopeful and Duke set up a message relay team: we could hear Hopeful's high-pitched yaps in the distance and Duke's deep growly rowlfs right outside our bedroom window.

And they just wouldn't quit.

It's probably nothing, we agreed. Probably just some dumb critter causing all this ruckus. Unlikely to be a human intruder way down by the creek, right? Probably nothing.

But they just kept barking.

Finally, the hubby threw on some clothes, grabbed a flashlight, and wandered out to see why the dogs were dialling 911. Down by the creek he found Hopeful barking her fool head off at what at first appeared to be an inert lump of road kill.

On closer inspection it turned out to be a possum...playing possum.

Garry grabbed a stick and flicked the possum into the creek, where it emerged from its stupor just long enough to hustle back onto dry land--and then it curled up again and played dead. He tried to convince Hopeful that the possum posed no real threat to anyone, but it's difficult to deter a dog on a mission, no matter how foolhardy that mission might be.

Hopeful kept barking. Duke kept relaying Hopeful's message right into our bedroom window. And the possum kept playing possum.

I envied the possum's ability to disregard the dogs' messages, and I really wanted to emulate the possum's ability to assume a slumber so deep it resembled death. But instead of playing possum, I just had to lie there and listen while the dogs told me all about it.

And now I'm telling you. Mission accomplished.

Raising an eyebrow

After my penultimate round of chemotherapy, I am pleased to report that I still have eyebrows. They're faint and vestigial, a mere shadow of the bushy Cindy Crawford brows I brought into the world, but if the need should arise to raise an eyebrow today, I am equipped to do so.

I still have a little hair on my arms too but not on my legs. I wonder why? Eyebrows and arms: aside from that, I'm as bald as a newborn baby's butt. My fingernails haven't fallen off but they've developed ridges and they look bruised, as if they've been attacked by a mad hammerer.

My final round of chemotherapy is scheduled for Nov. 24, so I'll feel rotten on Thanksgiving but I'll be overflowing with thankfulness for finally being done with treatment. Today I feel okay. Everything tastes like metal and I have to stop to catch my breath when I walk across the room, but that's pretty normal. Normal for now, anyway.

My doctor tells me that cancer patients generally take six to nine months to get back to normal after chemotherapy, or back to whatever counts as normal by then. So now I'm looking forward to a whole new type of normal, the New New Normal. It'll be a whole new life and I'm ready for it, even if it requires me to raise an eyebrow.