Dumb luck

Lucky guy, the aide said as he handed my son a chicken salad sandwich and a bag of chips. 

Lucky? A luckier person would have avoided lymphoma entirely, but I guess luck is relative. If you get out of bed just after 4 a.m., eat a quick breakfast and then vomit it all back up again before being driven two hours to the James cancer hospital, and if you survive the first two (of four) annoying procedures before 11 a.m., and if you then realize that you're feeling a bit peckish and ask the aide for a bite to eat before starting chemotherapy, and if the aide then delivers a chicken salad sandwich and your favorite brand of chips, that's some kind of luck! We have to take our victories where we find them.

In the four months since my son was diagnosed I have been lucky enough to avoid driving duty on four-procedure days, but yesterday I drew the short straw. Blood work, chest x-ray, two kinds of chemo, lumbar puncture--a scenic tour of hospital procedure rooms and a very long day. 

Twice my husband has been the designated driver on multi-procedure days that have stretched beyond twelve hours, but then he is also better equipped to entertain himself for long periods at the hospital. By the time he's ready to leave, he will know the personal history of everyone in the waiting room and will have stories to share about their interesting lives. 

I have a different method of surviving long hours of waiting: I mentally wrap myself up in a warm cocoon sequestered from the hospital milieu. Sure, I'm up for a conversation with my son and I'll ask for his help on whatever crossword puzzle questions fall within his areas of expertise (like what's on the flag of Mali or which U.S. state capital has the second-smallest population), but mostly I retreat and try to be anywhere but where I am. On good days I can read a book or article or draft a blog post on my phone even though I can't even see the letters on that tiny keyboard, or I'll play some mindless game that makes my eyes so blurry that I can't read road signs on the drive home.

It's hard to wrap myself in a warm cocoon, though, in those frigid hospital rooms. When we arrived before 8 a.m. yesterday the outdoor temperature was already close to 80 with humidity to match, but I carried a thick sweater because I knew where we were going. The aide who provided the lucky sandwich also gave my son one of those wonderful warm blankets, but no one ever offers me a warm blanket. 

Of course I'm not the patient, the person whose suffering is the center of everyone's attention, but that doesn't mean I'm not miserable. His illness shrouds my every thought, especially when he e gets coughing fits so severe that each cough feels like a dagger stabbing me in the heart, but I'm the healthy one in the room, the one who doesn't have to choke down a dozen pills a day or inject himself with medications that seem to make him sicker or shuffle through a growing pile of medical bills. Lucky me!

I try to hide my misery so I can be helpful to the sick guy; I count my blessings to counter the nagging malaise, but every blessing comes shrouded with a but. I found a great parking space--but it was in a hospital parking garage that fills me with dread. I remembered to put barf bags in my car--but I'm living a life that necessitates barf bags in my car. The treatment is allegedly eliminating every sign of lymphoma--but the side effects make me want to lash out at whoever is hurting my kid.

So I guess I'm lucky, ish, but I won't feel really lucky until we can banish the word lymphoma from our family's vocabulary. Meanwhile, I could really use a warm blanket.

She who dithers, withers

That's comedy gold, my colleague said, causing an instant shift in my perspective: instead of agonizing over an ethical dilemma posed by repeated encounters with an extremely annoying person, why not perform some literary alchemy and turn it into a funny story?

And so I did. Words and sentences flowed easily off my pen (er, keyboard), and afterward I sought feedback from trusted readers, including the colleague whose words had inspired me to stop griping and start writing. It healed something in me, she said, which is exactly what a writer wants to hear, but now I face an even bigger dilemma: what do I do with it?

Outlets for subtle comic essays of around 2000 words are limited, and the main character in mine would be instantly recognizable to those in the know so I would have to use a pseudonym. And so a piece of writing that made me feel energized more than anything else I've written all year sits languishing in a file folder as I dither. 

Dithering seems to be what I do these days. I've been dithering over small decisions, like whether to replace my hefty leather tote before the fraying straps fail and spill all my precious stuff all over the floor, which would no doubt happen at the least convenient time, like while I'm walking through the security scanner at the hospital with my son or while I'm waiting in the checkout lane at the grocery store with a long line of customers behind me, and if I do replace my everyday handbag, should I go for something more compact or stick with a bag that can hold a Norton anthology, a laptop computer, and three stacks of student papers? 

I looked at purses. I priced purses. I thought about buying a purse, but they're such a commitment! I understand that some people have a whole wardrobe of handbags to suit different occasions, but I've never been that person: I buy a bag and I stick with it until it falls to pieces, and while I'm trying to postpone the purse-apocalypse, I dither. 

But I also dither over big decisions, like whether to get a knee replacement this summer or wait until next year, whether to get surgery under my current health insurance plan or wait and see what Medicare can do for me, and then of course I got a cortisone shot as a stopgap and now my knee doesn't hurt at all and part of me hopes it will keep not hurting forever while the more rational part of me knows that the pain will return eventually and it will be even worse so why not fix it before it starts torturing me again? 

So I was leaning toward getting the new knee this summer until I realized that I can't drive my son to chemotherapy while recovering from knee surgery and we really don't need two semi-incapacitated people in my house, so maybe next year would be better. And now I've dithered about it so long that I can't possibly schedule surgery to recover in time for the fall semester. Dither long enough and the decisions make themselves. Options get limited. Possibilities dissolve into the ether.

Well I bought a new purse and I'm determined to get a new knee next spring, so now I need to stop dithering over where to send that funny story. I felt good about performing a feat of literary alchemy, but leaving it languishing in a file folder is an ideal way to turn comedy gold into lead. 

Hovering over the SEND key

How all occasions do inform against me, hollers Hamlet in agonizing indecision, but he was merely contemplating violent revenge over his father's murder. He never had to contend with a recalcitrant refrigerator. 

It's not even my refrigerator! It's the fridge in our Center for Teaching Excellence, and it's suddenly not cool. Granted, nowhere around here is cool today--we're immersed in the kind of humid heat wave that wraps us in thick damp layers of sticky insulation and then squeezes hard so that we can hardly breathe, but indoors, everything is cool. 

Except the fridge. It's downright warm inside, even though the lights are on and it's still humming like a functioning refrigerator. All the cakes in the freezer have thawed, and don't even get me started about why we constantly have five to seven sheet cakes in the freezer. Our work/study student has been busy this morning distributing the cakes to other campus departments before they start to rot (the cakes--not the departments), although those grocery-store cakes are pumped so full of preservatives that I doubt that they'll ever rot. This morning I threw away the remains of a cake that had been sitting out on the table for at least two weeks. Not a sign of rot anywhere.

So anyway: I arrived on campus this morning in despair over the state of my summer writing projects but determined to make measurable progress, only to be derailed by a fridge willing to hum but not cool. I have submitted a ticket to the appropriate department, which wonders whether we can make do with a mini-fridge. Given the number of food-related events we host in the Center, no. We need a fridge! But I need to write! And somebody locked the door to the Writing Wednesday classroom! And I don't have the key! And I'm fielding texts and emails related to the difficulty of replacing a 17-year-old fridge on short notice! And I'm not getting anything done!

Well, I'm getting a few things done--mostly the kinds of things that made Hamlet wonder What is a man / if his chief good and market of his time / be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more!

I need to put profound insights into winged words and send them off to journals to enlighten curious minds, but instead I'm haggling over refrigerators. This essay in this to-do folder, the one I've been fiddling with for two or possibly three summers, I've trimmed it down to a reasonable length, tightened the prose, eliminated excessive quotations, researched a journal that might be a good fit, written a cover letter, and attached the file to the email--why can't I go ahead and hit SEND and be done with it? I do not know / why I yet live to say 'This thing's to do', and yet my finger hovers over the mouse, unwilling to take the final step.

If Hamlet can work himself up into a froth of anger that leads to action, then maybe I can too. O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth, hollers Hamlet, but he says this in Act 4 of a five-act play, so he still has to wade through some stuff. 

I'll fetch the key. I'll deal with the fridge. I'll wrestle with a laptop that was allegedly fixed last week, although the fix required deleting all my browsing history, passwords, and settings. I'll send a student forth bearing cakes. And I swear, by all the poison poured into all the ears on all the stages on the planet, that before I leave campus today I'll hit that SEND key and boldly slash that task from my to-do list. 

The rest is silence.

A front-row seat for the summer show

It happens like clockwork every year: the minute the bottlebrush buckeye starts blooming,  hummingbird moths show up. Where do they hide the rest of the year? No idea, but suddenly, there they are.

I remember the first time I ever saw those chunky critters that looked like flying shrimp hovering among tall wildflowers near the parking area at Marie Desonier State Nature Preserve, where my daughter and I went on a hike during the weeks before she started her freshman year of college. I remember wondering what they were and how I might go about seeing them more often. Turns out all I needed to do was to plant a bottlebrush buckeye, which I did ten years ago, using money some people had given in memory of my mother.

They showed up this week after only a few of the buckeye's flowers had started blooming, but each day brings more blooms and so many pollinators that you can hear the buzzing before you see a single bee or butterfly or hummingbird. Today I ventured out in soul-crushing heat and humidity to find three zebra swallowtails fluttering around various areas of the bush, which seems too big to qualify as a bush anymore, towering high overhead and filling in a hefty chunk of yard. Two of the swallowtails got into some sort of skirmish until one flew off into the distance. I reminded them that it's a big bush with plenty of blooms to go around, but they weren't listening.

I'd like to go out and look again to see what else might show up, but it's stinking hot outside, with the sort of humidity that makes you want to plunge into a glacial pool. Instead, I'll wait until the sun goes down so I can watch the next big event: the firefly show, just outside our front window. There's no chance of getting any decent photos, so all I can do is sit here and watch.

Friday poetry challenge: No exit from Escher's stairs

This morning I turned a page in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker and saw myself--my job, my office, my life, plus a handy reply for the colleague who keeps begging me to please please please change my mind about retiring in December. 

It was already a better-than-average issue, featuring Simon Rich's delightful retelling of "The Pied Piper," Amanda Petrusich's gripping exploration of the power of grief, and Julian Lucas's long profile of Colson Whitehead, which made me even more eager to take delivery of his new novel. There's even a short story by Ben Lerner that didn't instantly repulse me--a real accomplishment.

But then in the middle of the not-horrible Lerner story I ran into Chris Gural's cartoon titled "M.C. Escher's Lab Rats" (view it here). Made my day, my week, maybe my year.

I suspect that I'm not the only academic who feels like one of those rats scrambling through an impossible Escher staircase that lures us toward some longed-for apotheosis only to flip us on our heads at the base of yet another set of steps. There's no way out, no way up, no way around, just an endless climb that can't be distinguished from descent, while everyone acts as if the futility is perfectly normal.

Well I need to get out of this rat race. I'm only staying on until December because of health insurance, and then I'm outta here. People keep asking why I want to retire or begging me to stay, which is flattering except I just can't. I could blame the wonky knee that makes standing in front of a class painful and, sometimes, dangerous, or I could blame ever-shifting college policies, enrollment issues, and rampant AI infestation, or I could mention a desire to spend more time with my grandkids while they still like me, but really it comes down to this: I'm tired of living as one of Escher's lab rats, especially when the maze has no end so there's no opportunity to find the cheese.

I don't know what happens when you combine doggerel with ekphrasis, but maybe it's time we found out:

Step up, step down,
go this way round
and through that door
that's on the floor--
up to the attic.
No one is static
but always moves
up well-worn grooves
in stairs that climb
to nowhere. I'm
a rat that wants
to leave the haunts
of Escher's stairs.
But exit--where?

It's not pretty, but if's Friday so it's time to sling some rhymes. Who's next?

Typing with my eyes shut

I wrote 1000 words with my eyes shut this morning because (1) I was having trouble keeping them open and (2) I didn't want to abandon the one colleague who showed up for Writing Wednesday. She had just been telling me how writing in the presence of other people helps keep her on task and focused, and normally I would agree but seriously, I had almost no sleep last night and it was very hard to think or speak or put any kind of prose down on the page, so I decided to stop fighting and just close my eyes and type. It wasn't pretty:

I think of my eight-grade typing teaching, mr who? Who would walk around the room slowly calling out letters—a,s, d, f, j, k, l, sem—and we had tofollow along on those big bulky manual typewriters that took the force of ajackhammer to press down the keys throgouthly. I never again used a manual typewriter afer that class but it ws a good way to learn and strengthen findgers at the same time. 

See? Barely readable. Reminds me of what Truman Capote (I think?) supposedly said about Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "That's not writing--that's typing."

With my eyes shut I can type really quickly but can't reliably back up and revise, and I don't even bother trying to find the number keys so I tend to spell out numbers. It's an effective way to disempower that annoying internal editor, but at some point I have to open my eyes and re-engage the internal editor to try to beat the words into some semblance of sense. 

Why didn't I get any sleep last night? Long story involving my son's ongoing battle with chemotherapy side effects, a story involving more vomit than you'd really care to read about plus rampant feelings of helplessness, but the result is that he's back in the hospital to get some fluids and tests and heavy-duty nausea medications so he can get back on his feet before the next round of chemotherapy (Friday!). He's too sick to drive himself so my husband and I had to tag-team the commute, but fortunately he's in the local hospital instead of two hours away. I dropped by to see him today around noon. He ate a little bag of chips and about three bites out of a sandwich, which is more than I've seen him eat all week. 

So yeah, a little too much on my mind to be able to sleep, but I had to go to campus this morning because the only IT guy who's not on vacation this week had agreed to meet me in my office at 8 to convince my college laptop that I am indeed authorized to access college resources like the printer network and Teams, so I had to get up and get to town just a few hours after I'd finally drifted off to sleep. This is the second time this summer that my college laptop has decided that I'm no longer an employee. Next time it happens, I'll just agree and walk out the door.

Mr. IT got my laptop functioning again (six months until retirement...please let it survive that long!) so I had no good excuse to avoid Writing Wednesday, where I let gravity grab hold of my eyelids and wrote 1000 words about writing, and typing, and that annoyingly arrogant grad-school student who lost an entire term paper he'd been writing in a departmental computer lab after an explosion at a tobacco warehouse nearby caused a power outage, back in the era of big floppy disks and tiny clunky monitors and (maybe this is the most bizarre part) tobacco warehouses located within a few blocks of an R1 university. I wouldn't want to be the person staring at a blank keyboard where a paper used to be, but then again, he ended up with a great story. Imagine asking a professor for an extension because spontaneous combustion at a tobacco warehouse destroyed your paper.

He was typing with his eyes wide open, which is what I'm doing right now, which is why most of the words are spelled correctly and make some modicum of sense. I'm glad I stuck it out at Writing Wednesday and got some words down on paper (er, screen), words that I might find some use for at some point in the future. First, though, I need a nap.

The view from a waiting room at the local hospital. Not inspiring but what did you expect?

 

Trying not to take this weather personally

Why do I struggle to sleep during a power outage? The house is quiet, eerily quiet, with a thick curtain of darkness blocking out the world, but my mind stays alert, aware that something is wrong: 

What time is it now? The juice is supposed to return around midnight. Sure feels like midnight, but how would I know? 

Thirsty. Where's that flashlight? Oops, can't run the water with the pump dead, and can't open the fridge lest the outage last longer than expected. Wait, here's a can of ginger ale on the counter. Would warm ginger ale help me sleep? What if it makes me want to pee? Can't flush the toilets with no power to the well pump. 

Why can't I sleep?

Next day I kept asking people at church what they thought of the storm and they all said "What storm?" Apparently it was highly localized, bringing sudden hail, rain, wind, and thunder to our small corner of the county while skirting the rest. By next morning crews had removed fallen trees and limbs from several areas of our road, but I saw little sign of damage elsewhere.

The storm lasted ten minutes at most but left us in the dark for six hours, much of which I spent wondering why I couldn't sleep. And then the power came on and we suddenly became aware of just how many little lights surround us every day, how many common noises provide the soundtrack of our lives. The clock came on, the fan started moving air around, and I soon settled into blissful sleep.