Pencils down, forks up

What a semester! I'd like to put a fork in it and call it done but the thick bits are still stewing. 

I've graded all the final exams except for one that a student had to take online, and of course it's a pain for me to write an online version of a face-to-face exam and post it to Canvas and arrange for online proctoring but it's more of a pain for the student who broke his leg very messily and is still at home recovering from surgery. So I did all the things and checked yesterday to make sure his exam was complete in Canvas but I didn't grade it, but now that I've graded all the hand-written exams (and my goodness my students wrote some great essays!), I can't get into Canvas at all because it is "currently undergoing scheduled maintenance." Did I receive an email about this scheduled maintenance? Maybe I did. I don't remember. At any rate I can't finish that last bit of grading or post the grades until the scheduled maintenance is complete so here I sit, stewing.

I've been stewing a lot lately over any number of silly little things, which is probably one reason my hair is falling out. It's probably not noticeable to anyone else, but my hair has been thinning on top since around March, due, no doubt, to stress caused by trying to live a semi-normal life while helping my son endure the throes of cancer treatment. But at least I still have hair. The chemo was making my son's hair fall out in clumps, so he finally got a buzz cut to even it out, and my husband got the same cut in sympathy, so now they have matching hair. So okay, one is more gray than the other, but you can certainly see the family forehead.

So while I'm stewing over any number of annoying little things, I have to remind myself: I still have hair, and my students wrote some wonderful essays, and the grading is nearly done. At some point scheduled maintenance will be complete. Meanwhile, I'll sit here with my fork at the ready.

A triumph of boredom

The thing no one tells you about cancer, I told my son yesterday, is that it's really boring. 

They tell us it's a journey, an unexpected adventure that might lead to new wisdom and purpose, or that it's a battle in which we might find triumph, but more often cancer is just a slog through muck that tries to enforce stasis, or an attempt to stay awake despite overwhelming fatigue, or an inability to relish things that once brought joy. Like food, for instance. When chemo destroys the taste buds, everything turns bland, and orange Gatorade can only go so far to assuage the ennui.

Mostly it's about waiting, but any cancer patient's patience can be tested when appointments require a two-hour car ride that makes you queasy, followed by various snafus and delays at the hospital so that your two-hour appointment turns into a 13-hour day, most of it deadly dull. Get a lumbar puncture and then lie flat on your back for an hour or so staring at the same old boring ceiling tiles. Sit still while chemo drugs drip, drip, drip into your blood vessels. Wait for test results, wait for answers, wait for food, and then regret it when it arrives because it tastes like sand.

So when my son's Gatorade supply ran out last night and he asked me to take a quick drive down the highway to pick up more, I suggested that he come along for the ride, just to get out of the house. Not much new to see--some new tar and chip on part of our road, a spot where milkweed is coming up on the shoulder, a view of the creek, the river, the sky. But it was better than staring at the same old boring walls in the same old boring house where nothing much ever happens. 

One day, I told him, you'll back at this time and it will be a boring blip in an otherwise exciting life. And I hope that's true. Meanwhile, there's always Gatorade.

Friday poetry challenge: reining in the nightmares

I show up at my office to find it changed, my books all gone and my art replaced by garish posters and one whole wall knocked down to expand the space and the carpet replaced by dull beige shag, and there's this woman there, young and pert with short dark hair and a bright smile, who says it's her office now. But I haven't retired yet, I insist, and I want to know where all my books and pictures have gone, not to mention the Jane Austen action figure and the Potato Head family and my stained-glass kaleidoscope, but she says she won the job in an online competition and if I have a problem with it I should take it up with HR, which I do, except when the HR director arrives she's a woman I've never seen before who can't understand why I'm upset. Yelling ensues. The argument ends when the HR director states that they had to hire this new person because she won the contest fair and square--and besides, she's so darned cute.

And that's when I wake up.

Is this my first retirement anxiety dream? Not very realistic. I mean, I'm sure some colleagues are already salivating over my lovely office, but even if the Powers That Be agreed to tear down a wall or put the carpet out of its misery, it wouldn't happen overnight--not without drastic revision to current purchasing policies. Once years ago a former colleague persuaded the PTBs that she couldn't move into a particular office unless (this is true) the doorway was moved to a different part of the wall because she didn't want to look at every dude who went in or out of the men's rest room across the hall, but I don't have the kind of clout required to move doors or walls or carpets. I doubt that anyone does.

We don't hire faculty via online contests (yet) or install them in prime offices because they're so darned cute, but any kind of faculty search would be preferable to no search at all. The PTBs have already selected replacements for my administrative roles, but my department was not permitted to replace the last couple of tenured professors who left us s0 they may be forced to replace me with an adjunct or two. Or a bot. Why not? They're hot! Suddenly I feel some doggerel coming on:

We've got
a bot.
Why not?
They're hot!
And cute
to boot.
Astute
offshoots
of bytes,
they might
delight
all night
and day
to stay--
no pay!
No play!
All work!
(A jerk.)

Now you try: rein in your nightmares by tying them up in rhyme.

What we've got here is failure to imaginate

Not a standard word, of course, and there's really no reason for imaginate to exist when imagine works perfectly well, but this morning in class I was thinking what we've got here is failure to communicate. I didn't dare quote the line because I feared that none of my students would be familiar with Cool Hand Luke--and why should they know anything about a film that came out decades before they were born?

I don't know who I represent in this scenario--the prisoner or the brutal captain--but I know I struggled to get students to imagine themselves in the starkly unfamiliar scenario presented in Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard." I had to stand there and endure the awkward silence when they refused to look up unfamiliar words or read footnotes about unfamiliar historical events, but the most awkward silence occurred when I asked them to find the first mention of the word history in the poem. I had told them that Trethewey loves to examine gaps and erasures, stories left out of received histories, and I wanted them to think about how the poem employs history itself. It's a long poem, but history first appears in the tenth line:

Yes, I was born a slave, at harvest time, 
in the Parish of Ascension; I've reached
thirty-three with the history of one younger
inscribed upon my back. 

I endured the long silence as my students stared at the text hoping someone else would find the line, and then the silence grew even more awkward when I asked what sort of history a former slave might have inscribed on his back and how we might go about studying that sort of history.

I get it: it's the wrong time of the semester to ask students to think too much. They're tired. We're all tired. But we started the semester with Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser," which took us on a guided tour of a hospital ward full of soldiers wounded in the Civil War, and I like to end the semester by taking another look at the Civil War to see if there's still anything left to learn. 

There is, but it requires some imagination. Trethewey suggests that poetry can help us understand gaps in the historical record by drawing us deeply into imagined lives, but do I really have to drag students kicking and screaming into engagement with imagination?

Some students you just can't reach--and I don't like it any more than they do.

The day you deserve

Among the bumper stickers on the battered little car in front of me was one that said Have the Day you Deserve, and I'm not sure what more a person can ask for. 

Today, apparently, I deserve to drive along a tranquil river reflecting abundant sunshine, and I deserve to enjoy the rhododendrons and azaleas that make Marietta the prettiest little town on the planet this time of year, and I deserve to walk past fragrant lilacs and see the peonies just beginning to bloom on campus, and I deserve to nab the parking closest to my office--so close, in fact, that I can look out my office window and wave to my adorable little car, not that it would notice.

I parked next to the President's residence, which still shows signs of damage from the nasty hail-and-wind storm that battered Marietta last month. All over town I see fly-by-night hail-repair services popping up, and I hear about scam artists offering great deals on repairing roofs and windows. I don't know what my colleagues did to deserved pockmarked cars, leaky roofs, or broken glass panes in the greenhouse dangling overhead like the sword of Damocles. The storm was very localized and selective, smashing holes in siding and windows all over one side of a house but sparing the others. On one street I saw three houses in a row with big blue tarps over holes in the roofs, but the next street over has none.

I missed the big storm because I was in Columbus helping my son wend his way through chemotherapy and all the indignities of cancer treatment. Not sure what any of us did to deserve cancer, but that's not how it works, is it? If the book of Job tells us anything, it insists that rewards and punishments are not equitably distributed--that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Or the hail, as the case may be.

What did we ever do to deserve cancer is just as ridiculous a question as What did we ever do to deserve peonies? Gratuitous suffering lives on the same block as gratuitous beauty. But I can't think about that this morning. Instead, I plan to accept the peonies as one small part of the day I deserve, even though I did absolutely nothing to earn it.

 

Friday poetry challenge: a shove out the door

Second-to-last Friday of the semester and my students stand ready to dash off into summer, to jobs and internships and adult responsibility, or perhaps to sleeping late, doomscrolling, and soaking in the summer sun. They stand at the threshold of something new, in a liminal space much like that described in the Anne Sexton poem we discussed on Wednesday, "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman," in which a mother addresses a daughter who stands in the passage between childhood and adolescence. 

Earlier in the semester we'd read the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, in which a mother uses the occasion of her daughter's first period to tell her a terrifying story about a village that rises up violently against a woman who bears a child out of wedlock. It's a "story to grow up on," warning the daughter that if she steps outside of bounds, the village will watch and take revenge.

Anne Sexton's poem provides a more gentle message from mother to daughter. The mother recalls her own transition to puberty, when she heard "as in a dream / the conversation of the old wives / speaking of womanhood," but she adds, "I remember that I heard nothing myself. / I was alone. / I waited like a target." She wants her daughter, on the other hand, to be wrapped in love and surrounded by supporting words. "Your bones are lovely," she says, adding, "there is nothing in your body that lies. / All that is new is telling the truth." The final stanza urges the daughter to seize the burning power of newness with a confidence set in stone.

Just before that final rousing word, though, the poet describes herself, as if in afterthought, as "an old tree in the background." When newness springs forth like a vine in a bean patch, it's easy to ignore the old tree in the background, but that's where I stand right now. My students are working hard to finish well and in a few weeks they'll scamper off to experience newness, and at that point my only job is to stand in the background stolid as an old tree and trust that we've equipped them for whatever lies ahead. 

With just a few more class sessions to prepare them for the journey, what words of wisdom might a tired old tree impart? Let's keep it brief with a little haiku:

Roots burrow deep while
limbs seek the sun: a bare tree
bursts with fresh spring leaves.

Now it's your turn: share some words of wisdom with the young folk who stand in the doorway, and give them a little push as they pass through.

A sharp wind blowing through academe; or, when chickens fly the coop

I drove through a lot of wind yesterday but saw no signs of damage at home--only because the resident chicken fancier had already done his work.

When I arrived home he was down in the meadow fiddling with the chicken run, and it wasn't until later that he told me what I'd missed: the wind had lifted the chicken run and lofted it across the meadow, leaving the chickens free to take a walk on the wild side.

I don't know which was more difficult--restoring the chicken run or retrieving all the chickens--but he got it done. Not without drama: There's this chicken the grandkids call Pineapple because they say it looks like it's wearing a Hawaiian shirt (because of course they do), and sweet little innocent Pineapple had escaped detection by hiding in the tall grass. It might have remained there all night if the guineas hadn't squawked at the hiding place, bringing it to the attention of the chicken fancier. Yes: poor Pineapple got ratted out by a pair of officious guineas.

That's the way we live these days, both at home and at work. This morning I stumbled into the never-ending discussion about the difficulty of counteracting students' reliance on AI for everything. It's clear that a sharp wind is blowing through academe upsetting all our tried-and-true methods, and many of us are running around trying to corral the chickens and restore the structures while a few wily chickens hide in the tall grass. Do we strengthen our containment structures, give the chickens a good talking-to, or import some guineas to squawk at the miscreants? 

Or is it time to declare victory and depart from the field? Retirement is just seven months away. Why can't someone else take charge of these chickens?

They look innocent, but don't be fooled.

 

Tag-team parenting, in and out of the rookery

A great blue heron soared toward a sycamore tree and landed near one of many massive nests. It poked and prodded its partner on the nest, which rose up, shook itself off, plodded out onto a limb as if to take stock of the wider world, and soared off as the returning partner settled onto the nest. Tag-team parenting: as good a way as any to get it done.

I thought we'd reached the empty nest era in our house but my husband and I have been doing some tag-team parenting of our own, taking turns dealing with our son's health problems so that we can maintain some semblance of ordinary life. He's home from the hospital once again and rejoicing in the news that the tumor has shrunk to nearly nothing, but he still needs help getting to treatments and tests and we need to be alert in case he takes a turn for the worse, as he did last week. 

Today it was my turn to soar off into the distance to see my daughter's choir concert. Two hours driving, 90 minutes of music, and two more hours driving back--but worth every minute on the road, just to fill my senses with beauty in the company of my grandkids. 

An added bonus: the performance space was five minutes away from my favorite heron rookery. Family, music, beauty, birds--food for my soul to sustain me through a busy week. 

Random bullets of Wednesday, with sighs and howls

The accreditation team has left the building. Repeat: the accreditation team has left the building. And the entire campus heaves a sigh of relief.

My last time teaching "Howl" this morning and I wonder how today's students will react. So many words! So many opportunities to take offense! Taking offense would be evidence that they've actually read it, but I suspect that "Howl" is tame by today's standards of discourse. 

I wanted to howl myself yesterday, and yet here I sit in my office quietly not howling--but I'm howling on the inside. My son was in the local emergency room yesterday (not the main one in Marietta but the branch in Belpre, which I wish I'd known before I spent so much time circling the horrible parking garage at the Marietta hospital) getting tested and pumped full of electrolytes before they sent him off (in an ambulance this time, not a helicopter) to Columbus with possible pancreatitis, which is a common side effect of one of his chemotherapy drugs with a name that sounds like asparagus but isn't. I spent some time with him in the ER (in Belpre!) before he left. My husband left this morning to be with him at The James, and I'll drive up tomorrow or Friday if he's still there. When I'm with him I think about all I'm not getting done on campus, and when I'm on campus I think about the need to be with him in Columbus. Howling on the inside wherever I am.

Meanwhile, yesterday I shot the best photo I've taken in years, entirely by accident. I stepped out of my building in the afternoon, looked up, and noticed sun shining through dogwood blossoms while storm clouds passed over. Raised my phone. One shot. There it is. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time (and sometimes every place is the wrong place)--but you won't get the shot unless you look up. 

 

Correspondence concerning "The Correspondent"

Dear old friend,

I've been wanted to send you Virginia Evans' novel The Correspondent but right now I can't seem to organize my life enough to put it in the mail, and on second thought it's the kind of book I look forward to reading again so maybe you should find your own copy. Sending you the book would be the kind of gesture that, over time, builds a friendship like ours, but you're the kind of friend who will understand that sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

How are things with you? Kind of difficult here, with frequent disruptions due to my son's health problems, although I hesitate to call them disruptions because it sounds so negative, as if I resent him for getting cancer. I would gladly take the cancer away from him if I could but since I can't, I'll drive him to Columbus for extra tests, cook the foods he likes best, clean up his vomit, and closely monitor my phone throughout an important meeting with the visiting accreditation team because my husband took our son to the emergency room while I was still barely awake this morning and I need to know what's going on. (Electrolytes are low. Maybe something more. Who can say? Nothing I can do for him at the ER so I'll keep busy here as much as possible considering multiple distractions.)

One of the things I really like about The Correspondent is how our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, deals with the distractions that interrupt a life she considers alternately mundane and miraculous. A retired attorney and judicial clerk, she devotes her life to writing letters (some by hand, some by email) four mornings each week, an ongoing "correspondence that is her manner of living." She writes letters to friends and family members; to famous people like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry; and to strangers, some of them hostile, whom she somehow manages to transform into friends over time.

But that makes the book sound too saccharine. She's a feisty old lady, revealing fragments of herself to a variety of correspondents and requiring readers to assemble the puzzle of her complex character. Her voice is, by turns, angry, prickly, condescending, sarcastic, self-righteous, cranky, curmudgeonly, conciliatory, tender, and loving, and in the end she's a character with whom I'd gladly spend more time--hence my desire to re-read the book. 

You might enjoy this book because Sybil shares our love of reading. Nearly every letter refers to some book she's reading, and her letters to famous authors reveal how reading helps her understand herself and her world. In a letter to Ann Patchett, for instance, Sybil explains why she appreciates a particular character in State of Wonder: "I saw some reflection of myself in her. The agonizing ethical questions for which the reader puts her on trial. That amazement one feels at this stage of life--a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here?"

And I see some reflection of myself in Sybil's seeing some reflection of herself in Patchett's book, making the book a Russian nesting doll of character analysis. 

Like Patchett, Evans invites readers to put her main character on trial. Sybil has always welcomed the clarity law provides; at one point she explains why she pursued a career in law at a time when the field did not always welcome women: "The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order...well, of course it's appealing. There's nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white."

But the letters reveal that nothing is quite as black and white as it appears. Feisty Sybil first resists admitting culpability for both minor blunders and major disasters, but over time the blinders come off her eyes--even as she is literally losing her eyesight. She tells various versions of the truth to different correspondents but reveals the whole truth over time only to a correspondent she calls Colt, whose identity is revealed late in the book in a tender but harrowing revelation of personal pain.

Moving toward the end of an eventful but misunderstood life, Sybil seeks connection and significance. "I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction," she admits, adding that it is

a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

She returns to this image late in the book, after her correspondence has brought together disparate people from all over the globe, people who would not have known each other except for their connection with Sybil, who has transformed these isolated nodes into a rich and thriving community, including one character to whom she reveals her shame over a long-ago tragedy, a character she tells, "it's taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that."

And that's another reason I wanted to send you this book: you have been on this road with me, have welcomed me into a comfortable space with a warm fire and a table laid, and I'd like to thank you for that before it's too late.

That's ultimately why the correspondence exists: to share the bumps in the road with someone willing to walk alongside. For Sybil, the letters she has sent out and those she receives 

are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it's a very small thing, to someone?

And that, I guess, is why I write to you and why I'd like to send you this book, to scatter puzzle pieces or chain links or dandelion seeds across the miles in hopes that some meaning will survive beyond our separate selves. If I can't send you the book right now--well, you're just the kind of correspondent who will understand.

Friday poetry challenge: mxd mssges

I'm tearing through my to-do list, prioritizing and tackling and crossing off tasks until I hit an item that stumps me: a tiny yellow sticky note that says....something? It's my handwriting for sure and I definitely recall writing this note and attaching it to my laptop so I'd be sure to attend to the matter today, but now I can't read the words or remember why they're important.

The second word is Laugh, capitalized and underlined, but the first word(s?) is (are?) Inchworm, Inc hour, Inchon, I wear, I charm, or some other incomprehensible scribble. It must have been important or I wouldn't have written it down but if the meaning doesn't come back to me soon, it's going in the trash.

For a person addicted to using words to bring order to chaos, it's a little disconcerting to leave myself commands I can't decipher. I'm happy to comply with the second part of the message--Laugh--and in fact I'm still a little tickled by what a student said in class yesterday when I asked her, during a discussion of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," what she was laughing about and she said, "I can't help it--you have an infectious laugh." What was I laughing about while discussing "Cathedral"? I don't remember, any more than I remember what that sticky note is trying to tell me. If laughter remains after language fails, then I'm definitely equipped for an eventual slide into dementia.

Well maybe I'm just tired, bone-crushingly, soul-destroyingly tired, after the ordeal of the past month, if it's been a month already, not that I can tell since the concept of time seems to have abandoned me as well. I might be able to read that note on another day when I'm well rested and refreshed, but today I'm tired of squinting at the squiggles so I think I'll put it aside and see what sort of verse such nonsense can inspire.

I found a note
from I to Me;
the content I
can clearly see,
but if they're words,
I can't discern
what they might mean.
(We live and learn.)

I know I want
to talk to Me
but Me can't cope
with squiggles. Gee,
if I and Me
part way with words
there's naught to do
but laugh. (Absurd!)

Okay, that's the best I can do under such ridiculous circumstances. Anyone else want to produce some nonsense? 

Lane change

I swung my car around a blind curve and caught sight of a new sign beside my road--One lane road ahead--but I barely had time to register the meaning before I came face-to-face with a pair of stout poles blocking my lane.

Good thing I don't take that curve at speed! Anyone swinging around there above about 20 mph is in for a rude awakening, doubly so if a car is coming the other way. Or a truck. Lots of trucks on my country road. 

There's no doubt that the road needs repair; we've seen slippage for years, but now that whole lane seems to be on the verge of sliding down into the creek. One of these days I'll come around the curve to find heavy equipment and construction workers shoring up the bank. A flagger might be a good idea, or at least a little advanced warning.

This spring we've seen more than our usual share of sudden shocks along the road, so it feels good to turn a corner and enter the reconstruction phase. My son's tumor keeps shrinking and he's even had a chance to drive his own car, which sat idle for the three weeks he was in the hospital. More chemo Friday, but so far he has tolerated the poisons pretty well. I had to pivot to Zoom teaching with help from colleagues, but this week I've gone back to face-to-face teaching without a hitch except for the occasional odd feeling that I don't belong in the classroom. I've settled in back home, reclaimed my kitchen and cooking chores, and tackled piles of claptrap to get caught up on administrative tasks.

It's shocking how much simpler life can be when I'm in my usual place. Yesterday I arrived at campus and marveled over how easy it is to get to my office: park, lock, walk. Arriving at the hospital to see my son was a complex multi-stage process every stinking day: Drive into parking garage; stop to take ticket; wind around level after level to find an open space: walk to the pedestrian bridge; walk through the scanner at the security checkpoint; walk through again because something in my purse always makes the scanner beep; walk to the welcome desk; hand over the parking ticket for validation (so I can get out for $3 a day); hand over my driver's license; tell them my son's name and room number; spell his name at least twice before they can find it in the system; get my photo taken; slap the visitor's sticker on my shirt; put away my license and parking permit--and only then am I ready to get in the elevator and go upstairs.

Well, goodbye to all that--maybe not forever, but for now. Today if the weather holds up I may even make it to a college baseball game, my first in over a month. I've had my share of sudden stops and I'm ready for some easy driving.  

 

  

 

The doctor is in (again)

Here I am back in the office again surrounded by all my books, complaining about all my meetings, engaging with my students face-to-face instead of on Zoom, with a lot more gray in my hair and eyes so tired they want to close every time I sit down, but I'm here and I'm grateful for all the people who helped me cope with being with my son in the hospital for the past three weeks, and yes my son's health is improving and he's happy to be home but he still has to travel to Columbus once or twice a week for treatments and tests for the foreseeable future but fortunately I have a semi-retired husband at home who can do the driving while I finish the semester right back here in my office, which right now is exactly the right place to be.

 

Comforts of home

After we'd left behind the vomiting and the city traffic, after we'd made the big turn toward the south into the hilly part of the state, my son sat up in the passenger's seat and said, "I'll bet we can get the Guardians' home opener on the radio."

And we did. I can't tell you how thrilled I was to be driving my son home from the hospital while listening to our baseball team on the radio, with the sun shining brightly and redbud blooming exuberantly in the surrounding woods.

At our bridge I stopped so we could listen to the creek and look up the hill at the trilliums blooming, and then we got to the house and found the resident he-man ready to haul all our stuff in from the car and then serve us lasagna and garlic bread, piping hot from the oven. And then to sleep in my own bed, rise to a pot of my favorite tea, and go for a walk amongst the spring blossoms--well, it's good to be home. I have a list as long as my arm of things I need to do before returning to campus Monday, but just for today let's just relish the comforts of home.

trillium!

Just a few trout lilies hiding amongst the ramps.

critter on a pawpaw bud

buckeye

fertile stalk of field horsetail

dutchman's breeches

a few remaining bloodroot blossoms

 

squirrel corn mingling with the dutchman's breeches

mayapple

redbud

Goodbye, Columbus (I hope)

I'm sitting alone at a four-top because there are no tables for one in the whole restaurant. Awkward. Last week my husband and I enjoyed a fabulous meal here, thanks to the generosity of friends who sent a gift card for a very nice restaurant near the hospital, but now the hubby has gone back home to prepare for this weekend's Easter services. (And how did Easter arrive already? I've missed the whole season!)

So anyway, I know there's a little bit of credit left on that gift card and it'll just go to waste if I don't use it tonight, which ought to be my final night in Columbus for (I hope) a very long time. I'm determined to use that gift card even if I have to eat alone.

How long have I been here? I have to look at a calendar: My son walked into the emergency room in Marietta on March 14 and got whisked away to The James by helicopter that night; I followed early the next morning by car. So tomorrow will be my 20th day hanging out at the hospital while my son gets poked, prodded, scanned, treated, and prepared to be released back into the wild--tomorrow.

Yes, they are letting him go home tomorrow. He's not cured--far from it. He'll have another round of chemotherapy tomorrow and then more tests, procedures, and treatments at least twice a week for months. The cancer center back home can conduct some of the tests, but he'll still make regular trips back to Columbus for treatments--a two-hour drive each way, with gas prices going crazy. But let me tell you this: it's cheaper than a helicopter.

I see how he struggles to stand up and walk across the room and I wonder whether he's well enough to go home (to our guest room because he can't live alone just yet), but the doctors are sure that he's not in danger. Three weeks ago when this all started, the tumor was squeezing his heart and blood vessels enough to constitute an emergency, and I hope I never again have to hear an ER doctor talk about the very real possibility of sudden organ failure. (They call it decompensation, which doesn't help.) 

I haven't seen my house for three weeks but my husband assures me that it's in good order. My only task for tomorrow, then, is to pack all my things, clean out the duplex, teach a class on Zoom, drop a book off at a friend's house, find some lunch, keep my son company through a chemo drip that will take more than an hour, pack up all the stuff he's gathered in his hospital room, and drive him and all our stuff home. Chemo hasn't caused serious side effects so far, but his taste buds are all out of whack and he's prone to an overwhelming tiredness, which is just the ticket for a two-hour drive. As long as I'm awake enough to drive, he can sleep as much as he wants.

But that's tomorrow. Tonight I enjoy a little private celebration at a very nice restaurant. I'll raise a glass to Columbus with gratitude to everyone who has made this stay bearable, but as good as the city has been to me, I sincerely hope I don't have to live in it again for a long time to come.

A little urban nature hike

This morning I saw a skunk, which wouldn't be surprising if I were in my own yard, where skunks often dig for grubs. But I don't expect to see a skunk waddling across the front yard of a house on a crowded street in the middle of Columbus, Ohio. A quick bit of Googling reveals the presence of several companies advertising skunk removal services in the city, so I guess they get around more than I'd expected.

I haven't spent much time outdoors in the time I've been in Columbus (Two weeks? Three? I've lost track) but I've nevertheless spotted a cormorant, a bunch of ducks and geese, a great blue heron, and, today, an adorable little snail, plus the usual robins, sparrows, and squirrels.

The snail was crawling across a bike path that runs for many miles along the Olentangy River, a lovely trail beside a beautiful river that, for much of its length, has a major highway running along its opposite bank. On the east bank, gorgeous park; on the west, busy highway. That's urban nature for you: kneeling to peer at a tiny snail to the constant accompaniment of traffic sounds.

There's not much growing in the yard at the duplex we're renting in Columbus aside from dandelions and dead-nettle. Everywhere the pear trees are blooming and blanketing my car with pollen, and at the park we saw some sort of buttercup blooming en masse. I miss my trilliums and hope I'll get back home before they're gone, but meanwhile I'm keeping a lookout for growing things wherever I go. When I'm spending my days lingering within the labyrinthine walls of a hospital and watching my son suffer through one procedure after another, it's good to be reminded that somewhere out there the world is still turning and beautiful things are still growing.

  

The white line on the other side is the highway.

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.