Just thurbing around

I found myself today in James Thurber's closet, but they wouldn't let me stay.

I'm not sure why I've never before toured the Thurber House Museum, the restored house where the humorist lived with his family while attending The Ohio State University, the house that plays a central role in the stories collected in My Life and Hard Times. I know I've visited before but the museum is open only for a few hours Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so until today I'd never set foot inside.

But this was my lucky day. My daughter arrived to keep my son company in the hospital so I felt comfortable taking a few hours off to commune with Thurber's spirit. 

Now I know I've mentioned before that the first book I ever bought with my own money was The Thurber Carnival, which I found on the Clearance table at the Little Professor Bookshop on Park Avenue in Winter Park, Florida. I paid all of four dollars--for a hardback! 

I must have been about 13, because that was the year I began earning my own money with my first job. Three days a week I would ride my bike a couple of miles to a house just off of Park Avenue to take an elderly woman for a two-hour walk around the neighborhood so that her less elderly daughter could get some time to herself. I thought the daughter was the most elegant woman I had ever met, but the mother was a piece of work: tiny and fragile-looking but tough as nails. Thanks to dementia, she had the mind of a toddler and the stubbornness to match. One time she tried to manually drag me into a church hall, insisting that they were saving a pie for her. And once the old lady soiled herself and I had to clean her up--by myself--at 13 years old.

The elegant daughter paid me five dollars every time I took the mom for a walk, and I earned every penny of it. Sometimes I would reward myself on my way home with a visit to the Little Professor, and on one of those days I splurged on Thurber.

I'd already read my school library's copy of The Thurber Carnival on a friend's recommendation, and I'd insisted on reading "The Owl in the Attic" out loud to all my buddies, some of whom found it funny. I have read pretty much everything Thurber ever wrote multiple times and I've taught "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" to students who couldn't find the comedy, but even though Thurber died the year I was born, he's never lost the ability to make me laugh.

Today I looked at the typewriter he may have used to write stories for the Columbus Dispatch; I admired signed original cartoons and hand-written letters, and I restrained myself from filching a James Thurber bobblehead. I bought a T-shirt featuring a Thurber dog reading a book, an image reproduced in statuary in the garden. And across the street I saw a unicorn in the garden, eating a rose. 

But the most surprising thing I saw was a drawing inside the closet in James Thurber's bedroom. Many visiting authors and artists have signed the walls inside the closet, including my favorite New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast, who drew what could be my next profile picture: a woman at the end of her rope who carries on despite everything. It was a shock to find myself falling to pieces in James Thurber's closet, but given the circumstances, it seemed appropriate.

A little time away from the hospital made me feel good; being surrounded by James Thurber's wit made me feel even better. But nothing made me happier than finding myself in his closet, surrounded by reminders that sometimes laughter truly is the best medicine.

A typewriter heavy enough to serve as a murder weapon, if necessary.

Would Roz Chast mind if I used this drawing as my profile picture?

A Thurber dog, reading.

The unicorn in the garden. (If you know, you know.)

 

Friday poetry challenge: Cancer-crostic

Evidence that I'm feeling more at home in my temporary digs: yesterday I drove from the hospital to our rental unit without turning on my GPS app, and then I cooked a real supper--pork tenderloin roasted with potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and herbs. A week ago I was having trouble ordering fast food at the drive-through, but yesterday I acted almost like a person with a full complement of functioning brain cells.

Evidence that I'm still a bit of a basket case: I lost my car in the parking garage. I loathe parking garages as a rule because those low ceilings feel claustrophobic and the long lines of cars weaving this way and that make me nervous--and also because I've never forgotten the trauma of slamming my car into a column in a parking garage decades ago--but I thought I'd pretty much mastered this garage. Every morning I make a mental note of where I've parked, and most afternoons I walk straight to my car. 

But not yesterday. 

I stood facing an empty spot on Level 5 and wondered why my car wasn't there, and the thought of walking all the way back to the pedestrian bridge to search for my license plate at the "Find My Car" kiosk filled me with gloom. I stood and thought and thought some more and then, on a hunch, I went one floor down and found my car at that identical spot on Level 4.

Well, at least I found it. Cherish small victories.

In trying times it's helpful to focus on little things that make me feel normal, ish. Folding laundry and putting it away in drawers instead of living out of a suitcase--normal. Cooking a simple supper instead of grabbing a can of soup or a bag of fast food--normal. Driving from Point A to Point B without requiring a robot voice to tell me where to turn--normal. Greeting the neighbor and her three-year-old daughter by name--normal.

But at the same time too many parts of these days feel hopelessly abnormal. It's not right for my son's body to be treated like a pincushion, for instance. They still haven't figured out where to put a new central line so he has IV needles installed in both arms for various purposes, and the nurses keep coming in to suck out whole tubes of blood for testing. It's not right that my big strong young man sometimes lacks the strength to hold up his head, thanks to all the poison they're pumping through those IV's to shrink the tumor. He ought to be working instead of wrestling with insurance companies and filling out short-term disability forms. Everything about this situation is wrong wrong wrong. 

But it's also temporary, an unexpected aberration from the usual course of things. I look on my own experience with cancer 17 years ago and from this distance it seems like a mere blip. I told my son that once the chemo made me so sleepy that I fell asleep sitting up while holding a whole mug of tea, with disastrous consequences for the tea, and I remind him (and myself) that this too shall pass. We'll deal with whatever comes after, but for now, we're spending some down-time in this liminal realm while holding tightly to every little scrap of normality that comes our way.

When life gets tough, the alphabet never disappoints, so let's try an acrostic poem today:

N is for normal(ish), nothing quite new; 
O's an ongoing oncology zoo.
R sends reminders of roadways and routes; 
M makes a mess of my mind, and it moots 
All we aspired to accomplish apace.  
L is lymphoma in liminal space.

Nothing's quite normal, but it could be worse:
The human condition. And thus ends my verse.

Now it's your turn: wave the alphabet like a wand to create abracadabra acrostics.

Looking up, down, and sideways

These days I seem to have a one-track mind--I think about my son's health, his treatment, his prospects, while everything else fades into the background, so that when I actually need to think about something else, it takes a minute to summon the necessary brain cells. 

I'm teaching, of course. On Monday I took my laptop to a little nook in the hospital Visitors' Lounge and taught my class in semi-privacy, which went well enough until the lights went out. I was too far away from the motion-detecting switch to make the light come on again, so for a few minutes I used my phone's flashlight to illuminate my text so I could read the juicy bits aloud to my students. Then a staff person came in to empty the trash, which restored light to the room but created a different kind of problem. 

But now we're in a rental unit with excellent wi-fi, so I'll teach my class from home (home?) this morning and go back to the hospital afterward. My husband is here for a few days so he'll be at the hospital this morning. It's possible that the next round of chemotherapy will begin today, a powerful drug with potentially dangerous side effects, so we don't want our son to be alone. Well I mean of course he's surrounded by highly competent and helpful medical people all the time, but sometimes you want to be near family.

The good news is that the treatment is working. The latest scan shows that the tumor in his chest is shrinking, taking some pressure off his heart and airways. One of these days he may be allowed to sleep lying down! But cancer treatment is not a straight, smooth path; potholes and obstacles pop up out of nowhere, like the blood clot that suddenly appeared in his leg. But we carry on, doing what we can, which often feels pretty inconsequential.

Yesterday, for instance, I changed my son's socks, the most intimate act I've performed for him in years. He's not much of a hugger but we've ramped up our hugging game considerably. On Saturday his sister came for a visit and helped him wash his hair, which wasn't easy because of the need to avoid getting the central line wet. Then yesterday the central line (in his leg because the mass in his chest squishes some blood vessels) spawned a blood clot so it was removed. Today's goal: new central line in the arm, following by infusion of a really nasty drug.

But first, says the little nagging voice at the back of my head, I have to teach my class. Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People." Why is it sometimes difficult to distinguish between good and evil? What does it even mean to be good? Discuss.

Yesterday we found a way to quiet the buzz in my head or at least mute it for a bit. We sat in comfy chairs in the big airy hospital lobby and listened to a piano player accompany an excellent violinist in lovely soothing music, including a rendition of "Ave Maria" that brought me to tears. We could look up and see the columns stretching toward the roof, hear the gentle buzz of people passing by, and lose ourselves in the music for a moment. Things are looking up, I keep telling myself, but there's still a long road ahead and we have no idea when we'll crash into the next massive pothole. 

In the lobby, looking up

Exploring the angles

This time of year I would normally go tromping in the woods to take photos of pawpaw blossoms, buckeye buds, and spring ephemerals, but instead I'm spending too much time indoors and noticing intersections of interesting shapes. One of these days I'll see trilliums again, but for now it's all about the angles.

From my son's window, I see the OSU library where I did research 30 years ago

Reflections and distortions

Columbus sunrise

Going places

Friday poetry challenge: mysteries of the human heart

When we looked into our son's heart, we couldn't agree on what it resembled. My husband said squirrel on an exercise wheel but I though jellyfish. Either way, it looked like a miracle.

They performed the echocardiogram right in his room, with the blinds pulled down and the lights dimmed to keep glare off the screen. The room was hushed as a chapel, the only sound from beeping machinery and the tap-tap of the sonographer's fingers on the keyboard. Pulsing blobs appeared on the screen, some as graceful as floating balloons while others performed a frantic tarantella. I wondered how anyone could possibly see sense in those vague shapes.

Fortunately, the cardiologist saw something more rational than squirrels or jellyfish. He saw fluid surrounding our son's heart and he immediately ordered a pericardiocentesis, a procedure to drain the fluid, to allow the heart to beat more freely before my son starts chemotherapy.

Many of the new words we're learning sound lovely as long as we don't think about what they mean. Pericardiocentesis. Sonographer. Lymphoblastic lymphoma. Sounds like poetry, but I'm not ready to write any right now. 

Okay, maybe just a haiku:

Dancing balloon or

jellyfish, squirrel on a wheel:

mystery and marvel. 

That's the best I can do right now. Anyone else want to give it a try? Describe one of life's great mysteries in seventeen(ish) syllables.

Bullet-brain; Or, my list-making mania

I keep asking my son if there's anything I can do for him, and this morning I told him it's perfectly fine if the answer is Go away and leave me alone. Sometimes the sick guy needs company and sometimes he doesn't. But I'm here for the duration with little ability to make him better, so instead I'm making lists.

What I need from campus:

• permission to teach my class online for, possibly, the rest of the semester
• a webcam
• my Norton Anthology of American Lit, which has been slowly disintegrating since last year but I didn't buy a new copy since this is the last time I'm teaching the class
• the exams my students will take in my absence on Friday (so I can grade them)

What I need from home:

• more clothes because I packed stupidly and I'm already running out of clean underwear
• the book that should have arrived in the mail yesterday
• the mail, because how will I pay the bills if I don't see them?
• assurance that the house is surviving without us and that any dead mice have been properly disposed of

What I need in Columbus:

• a place to stay for, maybe, a month
• a visit with my former student who's letting me do laundry at her house
• an excursion up Pierogi Mountain
• better weather so I can go outside and touch grass once in a while

What this ordeal has already revealed to me:

• I have the best colleagues on the planet
• my night vision, barely passable at home where I know the roads, is worthless on unfamiliar city streets, especially when wet roads reflect all the lights
• it really is worth paying a little extra to stay in a hotel that doesn't trigger my gag reflex

Things that have made me feel like crying:

• a visit from my son's pastor, who knows the right words 
• smiles from my English Department colleagues who crashed my class this morning so they could wave at the camera and wish me luck (Best. Colleagues. Ever.)
• a text from a relative offering my son financial support when we don't even know what the bills are going to look like after the insurance company does its part
• a few quiet moments in the chapel holding my husband's hand

Things I need to stop doing if I'm going to stay sane:

• seeking info about T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma from Dr. Google, who doesn't have my best interests at heart
• recalling all the horrors of chemotherapy treatment and side effects
• compulsively making lists as if they're going to accomplish anything to help

I guess I'd better go ahead and check that one off my list.

  

Weather and elevators and worst-case scenarios

Yesterday at The James--and everyone calls it The James because the full name is a bit unwieldy--The Arthur G. James Cancer Center. Who wants to say cancer all day long, and who is this James dude anyway? I looked him up: Arthur G. James spent 35 years raising money to fund a cancer hospital at The Ohio State University and was surprised when his name was plastered all over the front of the building. He was a small-town Ohio kid who eventually served as president of the American Cancer Society and, in 1987, was inducted into Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Local boy makes good, and it's a good thing he did because now his hospital is in charge of my son's health.

So anyway: yesterday we were sitting in the Terrace Cafe on the second flood and watching through the windows as workers in parkas stacked up chairs and tables to take them to safety in advance of an impending winter storm, and I was suddenly thankful for people who see a storm coming and know how to prepare for the worst.

Today's weather is not the worst I've experienced but it was strange to see snow blowing on magnolia blossoms and painful to feel the bitterly cold wind whistling through the parking garage. The view from my son's 18th-story room has veered sharply all day between sunshine and snow, sometimes both at the same time.

And speaking of worst-case scenarios, you know you've entered an alternate reality when the doctors tell you lymphoma is the best-case scenario. We're still awaiting results of tests, but everyone is thrilled to be leaning toward lymphoma because it can be treated, and while the treatment isn't fun, it can be quick and effective.

Nobody's naming the worst-case scenario, and who can blame them?

Tests continue at their own peculiar pace, hours of blank nothingness and then suddenly the room is full of people who need something right now. Lots of waiting and boredom tinged with terror. No one is sleeping well. 

I've been distracting myself with a book, Still Life by Sarah Winman, which is simultaneously a paean to impermanence and a celebration of the joys of human connection. But now the book is done and I need another, or maybe a magazine full of frivolous and unmemorable articles, because otherwise I will be forced to read the academic journal article I so foolishly agreed to review last week when the topic seemed fascinating.

I had to leave the nothing-happening room on the 18th floor and take a walk for a while, ostensibly to scope out a good quiet location where I can teach my class via Zoom tomorrow morning. Helpful colleagues covered my class yesterday, but my students have an exam on Friday so I'd like to make sure they're ready to roll. Besides, this is my final opportunity to teach Faulkner's "Barn Burning" and I wouldn't miss it for the world. 

The sky was clear and blue when I left the 18th floor but by the time I got down to 2 the entire outdoors had disappeared within a solid block of gray and snow was blowing in every direction. The elevator took the scenic route, stopping at least half a dozen times on the way down, which sparked a few light comments from passengers. Mostly people don't look too closely at each other in the elevators for fear of bumping up against a raw nerve. The elevator descends with a muted whoosh that whispers cancer cancer cancer cancer.

On the second floor I walked around a bit and grinned again on seeing the Chlapaty Terrace, which transported me back to my campus office just upstairs from the Chlapaty Cafe. The dude gets around, or I guess his money does.

Everywhere at The James I see scarlet and gray colors and buckeye motifs representing The Ohio State University, and it's possible to sit down and take a selfie alongside a statue of Brutus the Buckeye. Eventually I may give it a try.  

Today, though, I sat near a window where a sudden ray of sun warmed my legs. Blue sky again, and a pair of Canada geese flying low just above the level of the traffic lights outside, looking out of place in the city. Of course the Olentangy River is just a few blocks away so the presence of waterfowl shouldn't be surprising, but for a moment I hope I'll flying through this city just as quickly as those geese.

But soon I have to go back up to 18 to see what's happening, or not happening, as the case may be. I'll look out the window and marvel at the blowing snow, thankful for the people ready to cope with every possibly scenario. I'm hoping for the best-case scenario but if the weather shifts, I trust that Arthur's people will know what to do.