Situational awareness gets slippery

Sometimes in the midst of waking up in the morning I can't remember where I am: in Columbus taking care of my sick son or at home tending students and chickens? I keep my eyes shut and listen for clues, reach into memory to recall which bed I crawled into last night.

Heat pump screeching to a stop? Home. Helicopters overhead? Columbus.

Warm slippers near the bed? Home. Cold floor and no slippers? Columbus.

What did I eat for supper yesterday? Homemade beef and noodles means Columbus, because chemotherapy wrecked my son's appetite and killed his taste buds so I cook what he craves, and I don't even look at the price tags when I buy the last package of stew beef at the grocery store but when the bill for a few bags of essential items tops $100, I remind myself that keeping my son nourished is worth every penny.

But if last night's supper consisted of fast food ordered at a drive-through where the attendant did not understand what I meant when I asked what non-caffeinated drinks were available and he suggested sweet tea--well, I must be at home. If suppertime falls in the middle of that long drive and I know there's nothing much to eat in the pantry, then I'll settle for a burger and fries and some lemonade, because caffeine in the evening will keep me up all night--and then I drive off into the darkness without realizing that they haven't even given me a straw.

But I sleep well enough and then wake in the morning and wonder where I am. Rooster crowing? Home. Son gagging down a thousand fat pills? Columbus. 

No sign of light peeping through the heavy curtains? Home. Streetlights making the thin white curtains glow? Columbus. 

Husband making me a nice pot of my favorite loose leaf chai? In my dreams. 

At home I miss my son and in Columbus I miss my warm house but in both places I miss my husband, since we're rarely in the same place at the same time.

I asked my son this weekend what he misses most since he started this medical sojourn, and he had to think about it. I thought he'd say friends, work, church, but no. I miss my bike, he said, and skiing. 

He returned from his ski trip to Banff in March just a few days before he was life-flighted to The James, and it's unlikely that he'll do any skiing this winter. He went for a few bike rides over the summer but not since the bone marrow transplant. The other day he walked with me to see the bison grazing on restored prairie land at Battelle Darby Creek Metropark--yes, bison thriving just outside the city!--but it was a short walk with a bench to rest on halfway through and he had to lie down when we got back to the duplex.

In Columbus. 

Empty house where my voice echoes down the hallway? Home. Duplex where I am always cold, but helping my son recover warms my heart? Columbus. 

Some days I may be confused about where I am, but knowing why I'm there makes the confusion more bearable.

 

Friday poetry challenge: Traffic jams

I made it one block from my office yesterday afternoon before things started going off the rails. By things I mean one great big tourist bus, and by going off the rails I mean stalling in the middle of a busy intersection a block from my office and not being able to move out of the way. 

So I sat through green lights, one two three four, before I found a way to ease around the bus right into oncoming traffic. Home free! But no: my interminable drive to Columbus included a long stretch locked in a line of cars crawling behind a school bus that kept stopping to offload passengers, a detour around stopped traffic on the Interstate, and a 10-mile stretch of gridlocked highway that took me 20 minutes to navigate. 

I admit that I am not a great city driver. I like to drive but city driving makes me crazy, and the constant noise hurts my brain. At the Hyatt we couldn't get away from the constant traffic sounds on the nearby highway, but I thought things would be quieter at the duplex my son is renting. So okay, very little traffic noise here, but apparently we're on the flight path for the airport so the traffic noise comes from above. I don't know how many planes and helicopters passed overhead during last night's wonderful lasagna dinner, but enough to be noticeable.

I suppose I'll get used to it. Years ago in grad school when we lived in a mobile home next to a busy railroad track, I somehow learned to sleep through the trains that sounded like they were bursting right through my bedroom door in the middle of the night. A cozy duplex in a quiet neighborhood is just what my son needs as he recovers from frequent blood tests, infusions, and physical therapy, so I'm not complaining, but I look forward to eventually saying goodbye to the city and good riddance to all the traffic. Who are all these people and where are they going in such a rush--and why can't they get out of my way? 

City cars

and city bus,

city traffic--

why such fuss?

Stop and go

and honk and weave,

go and stop

and stop. Achieve

the target,

reach the goal.

(City traffic

jams my soul.)

Now how about you? Merge into the poetry lane and make some noise.

Welcome to Nap-vember

April may be the cruelest month but November must be the tiredest. I looked out over my 11:00 class yesterday and wanted to dismiss my students to take naps, but they don't have time for naps because they have projects and papers and meetings and job interviews. And I don't have time for naps either, which is a problem since I'm still not sleeping most nights.  Okay, I sleep well enough, but I wake up at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. and can't get back to sleep. But at least I can see something beautiful outside my window when the sun comes up.

As much as the cool, damp weather makes me want to sleep all day, today is a non-napping day. I'll move from administrative claptrap to grading to teaching and then cheer on my students who are sharing their creative writing at our departmental poetry reading at noon, and then I get to drive home, check on the chickens and gather eggs, and drive to Columbus to spend the weekend with my son, lasagna in hand.

A colleague baked the lasagna, a woman who endured breast cancer treatment a few years ago and knows how important self-care can be. With no one but me at home and no energy at the end of the day, I've been avoiding cooking supper entirely. Last night I fried a few fresh eggs for supper, but one evening this week I was so exhausted at the end of the day that the only thing I could manage for supper was sliced apples dipped in peanut butter. Yes, I'm eating like a toddler, but I'm too tired to do much else--which is why I especially appreciate this gift of lasagna. It will feed me and my hungry men and it feels like love. 

What about tomorrow's classes? I won't be there, but they're covered: a colleague is proctoring an in-class essay at 9:00, and my 11:00 students will engage in an online discussion. I could have waited until tomorrow afternoon to drive to Columbus, but here's the thing: since we started this tag-team caregiving nearly three weeks ago, my husband and I haven't spent more than 30 minutes in the same county, much less the same room or the same bed. Leaving today means I can spend quality time with my husband before I forget what he looks like. 

So I will work hard and drive hard and arrive in Columbus bearing lasagna, perhaps a bit exhausted but surrounded by people I love. And tomorrow I can rest. I have a pretty long to-do list, but I intend to put the word nap right at the top. 

 

The view out my back window first thing this morning.

 

Up to my eyeballs in student drafts

At least no one's making me read Dune, I tell myself as I read my capstone students' drafts. The capstone class grounds students in a particular body of literary theory and then asks them to apply that theory to a work of their choice, and once years ago a student decided to analyze something or other about Dune, which I had read for a grad school pop culture class and loathed deeply. But I couldn't give the student helpful feedback on the basis of dimly remembered loathing, so I read it again in preparation for reading his draft. I loathed it just as much the second time through.

This time my students read a whole mess of articles about the ethics of comedy and several are examining works I know well and admire (The Importance of Being Earnest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pride and Prejudice). One is analyzing the comic distance created by the narrator's sarcasm in The Goldfinch, which I had not read before this semester. It's something like 600 pages long. Good thing I had all those spare hours while convalescing from surgery. Donna Tartt filled that long quiet week with a raucous voice telling a compelling story. I'm glad I read it, but if I'd known in advance, I could have taken that honking big book at a more leisurely pace.

My capstone students have worked their way through mastering the theoretical concepts, doing the research, writing annotated bibliographies, and writing up lit reviews and close readings, and now it's time to bring it all together into coherent drafts that I'll spend the rest of the week reading. A student emailed over the weekend and asked if it was okay if her draft was more than 3000 words long, and what could I say? Sure, she'll have to condense when she does the formal presentation, but I'd rather see a student condense a too-long paper into the most interesting elements than try to stretch a too-short paper to fill the time. 

At this point, time is at a premium. Now that the drafts are done, my students will have to transform them into presentations and then revise into scholarly articles of publishable quality, an aspiration goal that many students don't believe they'll ever reach. But some do, and even an uneven effort to reach that goal often results in really terrific papers. Which is a good thing, because I'll be spending the rest of my week reading and responding to those drafts. Rewarding, yes, but that's a lot of words requiring my full attention. 

Which is why I'm especially thankful that none of them take me back to Dune. 

 

 

Friday poetry challenge: In celebration of students

I'd like to give myself some credit for brilliant pedagogy, but really it was a last-minute attempt to fix holes in a couple of syllabi that led me to assign student presentations in all my classes this semester. At the time I had no idea how much I would need those presentations and how beautifully my students would perform.

The English capstone class, of course, always culminates in a major paper and presentation attended by the entire department, and my senior English majors are well on their way toward submitting their drafts next week so they can present their papers next month. Nothing new here.

But I don't always assign presentations in other literature classes and I've never before assigned them in the Concepts of Nature class. Nevertheless I'll be spending the next week sitting in a student desk while my students try to persuade us all to care about specific problems related to nature. 

Several factors led me to assign presentations in that class: its small size made presentations feasible; I'd dropped a major reading assignment that left a week's gap in the syllabus; and only three of the students are English majors while the rest are mostly STEM students who thought studying nature in literature would be a fun way to fulfill a General Education requirement. I wanted to challenge those students to make connections between literature and current events.

The assignment is simple: inform classmates about a specific problem related to nature and explain how two of our class readings help us understand or respond to the problem. We spent a class session researching reliable sources on their topics and another drafting thesis statements and outlines, and from what I've seen, it looks like we're going to learn an awful lot about endangered species and deforestation and microplastics in drinking water. How will they bring together serious scientific research and, perhaps, poetry? I'm looking forward to finding out. 

The African American Literature class posed a different kind of problem: a large class and too many reading assignments, with no room on the syllabus for individual presentations. So instead I put the students in pairs and assigned them to lead discussion on specific authors. They provide a little context about the author and the work, and then they have to engage their classmates in discussion of the assigned readings for at least 20 minutes. Most of them take the whole hour--and do a fabulous job. They put us in groups, assign discussion questions, or make us get up and walk around and write things on newsprint. 

Just this week a pair of students engaged the entire class in a discussion of the meaning of art. We'd read Alice Walker's essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," which examines the difficulty of finding time and space to create art under oppressive conditions. It's a serious and joyful essay and the students engaged in serious and joyful discussion. A few weeks ago when we were discussing Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, the student discussion leaders gave each group a major character in the play and then set the groups debating about which of the characters most deserved the inheritance at the center of the plot. It was a lively debate demonstrating great depth of insight and nuance.

Best of all, though, all I had to do was sit there and let it happen.

Given everything that's been happening outside of class this semester--the flooding, the surgery, the repeated trips to Columbus to tend to my cancer-ridden son--I am exhausted all the time. I reserve my best energy for teaching, but some days it's all I can do to stand there and toss out coherent questions or engaging activities. Never have I been more grateful for regular opportunities to sit and listen and observe while my students take the helm. 

And they have done well. Seeing my students grab hold of ideas and make them sing makes me even more certain that it's time to retire. I've had my chance to lead the dance; time to get out of the way and let others take over.

In the Alice Walker discussion, we came to the conclusion that the process of exercising creativity is important even if the product is overlooked or forgotten, so I'm going to engage in that process and hope that others will follow my lead:

I've had my chance to lead the dance
so now I'll step aside
to let my students join their hands
to swing and swirl and glide
through poems and stories, essays too,
debates, deliberations.
They lead so well. This dance is swell!
Come join the celebration!

Come on, now--toss down some lines in celebration of students.

Not quite up to scratch

No power in my building when I arrived this morning, no light no heat no tech, but everything in the building capable of beeping was raising a racket. I sat in my dark office resting my eyes and trying not to think about how my students were supposed to give presentations in the absence of electricity. 

But the power came back on, thankfully. Still no heat, though--that'll take some more repairs. And the classroom computer took a full eight minutes to boot up and then Canvas demanded dual authentication but I had left my phone in my office so I had to run and fetch it to make the tech work. Good thing I'd arrived at the classroom early!

No rooster crowing when I left for work this morning, which alarmed me. I'd spent much of yesterday driving to Columbus and back and so had to feel my way down to the chicken coop well after dark, but the flashlight revealed no eggs at all. Normally they lay eight to twelve eggs each day, but their first full day in the new coop resulted in six. Yesterday was the second day, and no matter how carefully I search all the nooks and crannies, I found not a single egg. And so when there was no crowing this morning, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong.

No eggs today either, and I checked in the daylight just to be sure I wasn't missing anything. The resident chicken fancier says the hens are probably just stressed out from the big move, but I don't know what I can do to calm them down since I'm not exactly a paragon of calm myself at the moment. I took some leftover pancakes down to the coop and tossed out chunks while speaking calmly to the chickens about eggs and scratch grains and nest boxes. Maybe tomorrow I'll find eggs. Or maybe they're withholding eggs until their regular minder returns from Columbus.

Where I went yesterday to meet with the medical oncologist, who confirmed that chemotherapy is not called for in my situation (hurrah!) but that I'll need to take estrogen blockers for the foreseeable future since the tumor they removed is the type that thrives on estrogen. Fine, whatever. Anything to avoid chemo. 

But the reason I was so late returning from Columbus was that every medical professional in a thirty-block radius felt the need to take a look at my rash. 

I have a rash. A very itchy, very red rash, which was of concern to the oncologists because it's located right next to my surgical incisions. Everyone wanted to see it, especially when it became clear that the rash was visible on every speck of skin that my bra had touched. Contact dermatitis, they said. Apparently I am allergic to my underwear. 

So many questions! Is it a new bra? (No.) Has it ever caused me to break out in a rash before? (No.) Have we changed laundry detergent recently? (No.) Have I changed anything about my normal household routine? (Well, I've been taking care of chickens, but how that's relevant to a bra-shaped rash is beyond me.) What a mystery!

After all the rash-related delays, I was so late getting home that I didn't even bother stopping at the pharmacy to pick up the ointment they'd prescribed, which was just as well because the pharmacy texted me this morning to say the medication is out of stock. By the time it arrives, the rash will be gone.

No light, no heat, no tech, no eggs, no crowing, no chemo, no answers, no ointment--I've got plenty of nothing, but what I have is a rash that itches so constantly that it requires every ounce of willpower I possess to prevent myself from tearing off what's left of my breasts. 

But I am calm. Breathing deeply, thinking soothing thoughts, trying not to scratch. Don't let me get hold of a garden claw.

Because I don't know enough to know what I don't know

If you can handle teaching first-year students for all those years, you can handle a few chickens, said my colleague, and I said, Sure, I'll just stand in the middle of the flock and explain the function of the semicolon. 

After successfully completing my first weekend in Columbus as official caregiver to my son, I'd been obsessing about making the shift to caregiving for chickens. I'd heard a rooster crowing as I left the house this morning and I was relieved to have aural evidence that at least one of the chickens had survived the flock's first night in the new coop. Hobbling down the hill to the coop on my bum knee isn't easy, but my primary concern about being in charge of the chickens is that something horrible will happen to them while my husband's in Columbus and it will be All My Fault.

Nothing about this situation is my fault, really. It's not my fault than my son and I both got cancer in the same year or that he needs constant caregiving as he recovers from his bone marrow transplant or that I had already submitted my retirement date before his diagnosis so that I'm committed to teaching until the beginning of December or that repeated flooding made the meadow too mushy to allow delivery of the new coop or that there was a glitch in getting the electricity hooked up so that the chickens couldn't be moved to their new digs until Sunday afternoon.

And it wasn't my fault that I was in Columbus waiting for my husband to arrive to take his caregiving shift while he was trying to encourage a few stubborn fowl beasts to make the move. Several of them resisted vociferously, including one especially obstreperous guinea. (The Especially Obstreperous Guinea: garage band or twee tavern?) And it wasn't my fault that he arrived in Columbus much later than expected so that I arrived home hours later in the pitch darkness too exhausted to check on the birds.

I took it on faith that the chickens were doing fine, but how would I know? Thanks to automatic feed-and-water systems, they don't need me to check in constantly, but I can't stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong while I'm not paying attention. Raccoons, for instance. The resident chicken fancier insists that the doorknob in the coop is set too high for raccoons to reach, but I've seen raccoons climb a birdfeeder pole and disassemble an elaborate feeder into its constituent parts, so I never underestimate the abilities of a raccoon. 

And even if the doorknob is too high for raccoons, what about bears? Bears have been sighted not 10 miles from our property, and what's to stop them from reaching the doorknob or crashing through the window? Do bears even care about chickens? Again, how would I know?

Aside from predators, I wonder what stupid thing I'll do just because I didn't grow up raising chickens as my husband did. What ignorant act could result in mass destruction of chickens and a few obstreperous guineas? I don't know enough about chickens to know how much I don't know.

Taking care of my son requires following directions: make sure he takes his umpteen bazillion pills; take his temperature, watch for alarming symptoms, and flush the central line every day; change his dressing once a week; make sure he eats properly and drinks plenty of fluids and gets a little regular exercise. And if I mess up, the nurse line at the hospital is staffed 24 hours a day with highly competent people eager to answer questions, even ignorant ones. 

Where is my 24-hour chicken help line? If such a thing exists, I wouldn't even know what to ask aside from Do these chickens look okay to you? When I finally got down to the coop after work today, I found no eggs in the nesting boxes and six eggs laid in a neat depression they'd made in the straw in one corner of the coop. How do I make them lay in the nesting boxes? Six isn't many--where are the others? Were they too stressed out to lay eggs?

I asked them nicely but they're not saying. All I hear from them is clucking and crowing and I have no way to interpret what it all means.

I love to see sunshine through the fall leaves

Running on empty

Wrote a pop quiz and forgot to take it to class and then wondered why our discussion ended with ten minutes to spare.

Showed up at a meeting an hour early and couldn't figure out why no one else was there.

Approved a bunch of minigrants but neglected to notify the recipients that their proposals had been approved.

So yeah, I realize that my brain isn't operating on all cylinders. I know I've gotten forgetful. I can clearly see the impact of dividing my attention between everything going on at work and everything else going on at home. 

And I appreciate every single person who has offered to help.

But I'm not sure anyone can do anything about my slo-mo thinking skills. 

What I really need is a good night's sleep, an absence of worry, and a week that doesn't require massive amounts of city driving. 

I'll add those things to my Christmas list. If there's another solution, I've already forgotten it.

Friday poetry challenge: Unexpected adventures--or, when the chickens come home to roost

A new chicken coop arrived on Wednesday, pulled across the meadow and placed on the waiting slab. The chickens gathered at the edge of the fence to peer at their luxurious new digs, the fowl equivalent of a Hyatt. It's sturdy and functional, custom-built from a design inspired by the chicken coop where my husband kept a flock of hundreds in his youth. We don't have a flock of hundreds but goodness our chicken population will be happy when they move to their new coop. Just a few more tweaks and they'll be coming home to roost.

Meanwhile, I'm at home in an actual Hyatt, just blocks from the hospital where our son has been languishing for three weeks. He was released today, a week earlier than expected, an excellent indication of how well he's been responding to the bone marrow transplant. He has to remain close to the hospital for at least a couple of months, but the Air B&B he rented won't be available until next week, so we're hunkering down at the Hyatt in the interim. It's a decent room with a well-equipped kitchenette, though I was too exhausted to cook anything but canned chicken soup for supper tonight.

Yes, I'm here too. He needs a trained caregiver available at all times, so my husband and I went through required training and are now considered equipped to keep him healthy between regular visits to the hospital. But we can't both be here all the time, so we'll being doing the tag-team parenting thing again: Through the week my husband will be in Columbus while I'm at home to finish up the semester, and on weekends we'll switch places. I think the next time we'll all be together in the same house will be over Thanksgiving break.

But who will take care of the chickens through the week while the resident chicken fancier is in Columbus?

That would be me.

I don't mind gathering the eggs or tossing down some scratch grains, but I mind the old chicken run, which always makes me feel as if I'm about to fall on my face or impale my eyeball on the sharp edge of a pole. What I really mind, though, is getting down the steep hill to the coop. Walking uphill doesn't hurt (much), but downhill can be a nightmare.

Someone suggested installing a zipline. Why not? Zip on down the hill to tend to the chickens, trudge back up with eggs in hand.

Frankly, given the amount of driving I've been doing this week to complete caregiver training and then retrieve my son from the hospital, I'm looking for the day when every household comes equipped with a transporter. I would even install one in the chicken coop. Beam me up, Scotty--but make it over easy. 

O give me a home says the song, but I roam
over highways, through city-snarled traffic,
to live in the Hyatt--no more country quiet--
as a dutiful health apparatchik.

Then when Sunday night comes I'll go driving back home
to a house empty of all companions--
except for the chickens, for whose needs I will quicken
my steps down the hill to their mansion.

In one home I'll be tending the chickens: unending
the need to retrieve fresh eggs daily.
In a home in Columbus I'll tend to my son, but
the stakes are quite high if I fail. We

would never have planned for a life so expand-
ed, with chickens, coops, houses, and Hyatts.
but necessity called so we promptly enrolled
in the caregiving life. (You should try it.)

Maybe not--but feel free to tell me about your unexpected adventures in living.

The old chicken run in the background, downhill from the new coop

The house in the background, uphill from the new coop

 

Piled higher and deeper

When a new magazine arrives I want to read it right now, but sometimes I have to let them pile up for later. In grad school I would ruefully watch a tower of New Yorker magazines growing ever taller while I dutifully focused on comprehensive exams and dissertation revision and oral defense, and then when it was all over, what a reward! Months of my favorite magazines awaiting my perusal. Where to start?

Now I find myself with different kinds of piles of stuff awaiting me, things I've had to postpone attending to while dealing with surgery and recovery and my son's health and my big lecture. But now that's all over and the delights I've been postponing can no longer be deferred.

Magazines aplenty, plus some books I'd like to read (for fun, not work) and some interesting puzzles. But I also have 15 boxes of my campus books downstairs, all needing to be sorted and stashed in the waiting bookshelves. 

I'm unlikely to tackle that project until I finish clearing out my campus office, a job I've whittled down to the tough stuff. On Friday I found yet another mold infestation--an old computer cord pouch that was growing its own ecosystem. I tossed the pouch in the trash and saved the cord, even though I don't know which computer it belongs to. Last week I persuaded the IT guys to come over and take away a monitor, keyboard, mouse, portal, and a nest of miscellaneous cords, but this pouch was stashed deep within the cabinet in my office, a space where I didn't expect to find mold. 

So I cleaned out that whole cabinet and found one other water-damaged item: a signed framed photograph of Don Knotts as Barney Fife, so damp it's become swollen and wavy. Only two more items remain in that cabinet: a cloth tote bag full of clean gym clothes that I'm afraid to touch in case it's covered in mold, and a row of old DVDs and videotapes about four feet long.

I don't know what to do with the DVDs and videos. I could box 'em up in five minutes flat, but then what? Many of them were for classroom use, but our classrooms are no longer equipped with VCRs and now many of them don't even have DVD players either. Because of the changing technological landscape, I own versions of A River Runs Through It on videotape, DVD, and streaming--all paid for, of course, by my own hard-earned cash.

I want to take a few of the DVDs home but most will be added to the giveaway pile, just in case someone wants to transform them into festive holiday decorations or something. I'm planning to hold Open Office days when anyone can take whatever they want: books I don't need at home, a whole shelf of old Norton anthologies, excess coffee mugs, toys, and tchotchkes, and now DVDs and videos. I'm even leaving behind some of the bird photos that have hung on the walls of my various offices for 26 years. I have duplicates at home, so maybe my birds can brighten up someone else's office.

One last big office task: the moldy chair holds a pile of moldy books that I will need to photograph and catalog so I can submit a request for replacements. Maybe a dozen books, which doesn't include the moldy paperbacks I've already thrown in the trash. These are hardbacks, some of them quite expensive, a couple of them out of print. I don't even like to look at that moldy tower of tomes, but I'll have to get my hands dirty if I want replacements. 

I'm much rather tackle the tower of magazines piled up next to the sofa at home. Here's last month's Atlantic! Time to get caught up on everything I've been missing.

 

I mean, who has room for all this stuff?

The giveaway pile. All of it.

 

Basking in the moment before getting back to the trenches

I'll admit it: I enjoyed the standing ovation. It doesn't happen often in the life of an academic, and the huge respect I bear for the people out there doing the applauding made it even more special. But it was just one high point in a day full of joyful moments.

Like when my department chair said such nice things about me during his introduction that he nearly made me cry, which was a problem because for a half hour before my talk I'd been up in my office practicing the last section over and over again, trying to find a way to get through some lines from Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons" without crying. If I'd dissolved into a sloppy puddle of tears from the very start, I would never have made it to the end.  

Or when I asked the audience questions about the opening paragraph from Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," which I'd projected on the screen, and they played along, coming up with charming and intelligent responses even though most of them had never read the story.  

Or afterward, when a former student told me I think of you literally every time I teach--and meant it.

Or when some dude who graduated 45 years ago came up after my talk and told me You've got it, and I knew what it meant.

Or much later, after I arrived home exhausted and started rooting through gift bags and discovered two of Percival Everett's books signed by the author. Yes: a wonderful colleague had taken a bunch of our students to Ohio University last week to hear a talk by Percival Everett--a talk I couldn't attend because I was recovering from surgery--and had made sure to get the author to sign two books for me. By that point I didn't bother trying not to cry. It was inevitable.

Or much much later, when a colleague from upstairs sent me a sketch he'd made of me speaking with the words from a Robinson Jeffers poem in the background: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained hearts found / The honey of peace in old poems. No livestream, no video, no official photos, but I welcome my colleague's sketch, especially since I'd been talking about our shared passion for leaving a mark on the world.

I think I did. If the crowd that showed up to hear my Best Lecture yesterday can be believed, I may have spent the past 26 years doing something worth celebrating. And now I'm getting ready to do something completely different--but first I have to get through the rest of the semester, powered by that round of applause.

Afternoons with Chester and Beverlry

Meet Chester. 

Chester is a chest. Kind of puny and unisex and hollow as a chocolate bunny.

Chester's primary quality is the ability to take all kinds of manhandling without squirming. He's not ticklish, and if you happen to sneeze straight into the void where his face ought to be, he doesn't flinch. 

This makes him a great test subject for people learning how to replace the dressing on a central line. If, for instance, you were planning to serve as the primary caregiver for a flesh-and-blood human being with no functioning immune system, you would want to practice your dressing-changing skills on someone impervious to damage. Like Chester!

Now that my husband and I both know how to change the dressing on a central line, our next lesson will be learning to flush the line daily, all in preparation for the next stage of craziness we will encounter when he finally gets released from the hospital. Our son, that is--not Chester. Chester seems perfectly happy where he is.

Also in Columbus today a receipt at a fast-food joint provided a novel spelling for my name: Beverlry. Sounds like a portmanteau of Beverly's Revelry.

We'll enjoy some Beverlry when I present Bev's Best Lecture at my retirement event tomorrow afternoon. It's Homecoming weekend so who knows who might show up? I've been waking up at 3 a.m. running through lines from my talk, which has not increased my confidence level one bit. Will I get nervous? Maybe so, but I now have a sure-fire solution: I'll just picture an audience full of Chesters. Chester can't applaud, but neither can he complain. If the Best Lecture bombs, Chester will silently sit on his hands. Except he hasn't got any hands. 

Maybe I need to forget about Chester and get some sleep, including, ideally, sleeping right through that highly active 3 a.m. hour. Pretty soon tomorrow will be here and then--let the Beverlry begin!

A lag in the system? What system?

We seem to have a lag in the system, said the librarian, and I said Me too. 

We'd been standing by the copier talking about my difficulty completing a print job. I'd sent about 30 pages to the printer earlier but only the first page printed; I sent it again, scanned in my ID, and watched the printer spit out two pages and then quit. So I complained to the nearest reference librarian, who probably didn't earn a Masters in Library Science just so he could wrangle recalcitrant printers, but his desk is right there and who else was going to help me? He launched into a long explanation of recent problems with the printers and while he was talking the printer spat out three more pages of my print job, paused, printed two more pages, paused, and went on that way until the entire job was done.

And this pretty much describes how I've been living my life lately: a bit of activity, a little rest; a little more activity, another rest. My usual frantic multitasking is impossible, so I'm focusing on putting one foot in front of another and sometimes simply standing still until I feel like moving again.

Lag in the system indeed. What system? Whoever is responsible for fair distribution of pain and suffering seems to have spilled a decade's worth on my family's heads in the past few months, so even when I'm physically present on campus, I'm mentally in Columbus with my son, who's struggling through the aftereffects of the bone marrow transplant. I ought to be spending my final semester teaching things I love and raking in the congratulations before retirement, but instead I'm struggling to pack up books in a moldy office and wondering if I'll have the strength to stand up long enough to give a talk to alumni and friends this Friday.

On the one hand, having specific goals helps keep me going, so I relish the chance to focus on introducing my students to James Baldwin or Annie Dillard. On the other hand, my brain's not functioning well enough to come up with the rest of the sentence. 

Step. Pause. Step again. Pause again. 

Step. Pause. Step.

Pause.  

Please join me in a weak and wimpy hurrah

Monday again, one week after surgery, and I'm back to the real world: get up at a civilized hour, eat breakfast, shower, wrestle into that horrible post-surgical bra that makes professional teaching clothes bunch up awkwardly, drive to town, prep, teach, grade, prep, teach, force myself to walk over to the library even though I'm so exhausted I'd really like to lie down and sleep on the cold hard floor, post grades, post attendance, send three print jobs downstairs, walk to the printer to discover one print job done and the other two missing, send them again, cross one item after another off my to-do list when I would really really really like to lie down on that comfy sofa and not get up again for a week, but then suddenly in the middle of all that effort to pretend that everything is normal and I feel fine and there's absolutely nothing wrong I get a text that tells me the pathology report has been posted to my online chart, so of course I go to my chart right away and open the report and even though I'm not a doctor and can't decode all the medical terminology I note the word negative in all the right places--no cancer in the margins of the tumor, no cancer in the lymph nodes--and I don't have the energy to jump up and down for joy but maybe I can write a single sentence, just one, and then drive home and celebrate with a nice cozy nap, if only I can stay awake long enough to drive myself home. 

Friday poetry challenge: Counting on you

In the early-morning quiet of the sleeping household, my grandson sat on the sofa working on a Sudoku puzzle while I granted myself a silent round of applause. I may be incapable of accomplishing much in my current weakened state, but by golly I can teach a ten-year-old to solve Sudoku.

They arrived yesterday, my son-in-law and the two youngest grandkids, to pay a visit and work on some projects, and they jumped right in to help make the house habitable. My son-in-law hit the ground vacuuming and then addressed a plumbing problem, and later today he'll assist with a little wiring project. The kids helped Grampa gather eggs from the hens, set the table, and chop okra for Limping Susan. Most of all, they provided a needed break in a mostly blah week. 

I feel okay, but little tasks wear me out--taking a shower this morning felt like a major endeavor. Yesterday I took my car to the dealership for scheduled maintenance just to get out of the house, assuming that loafing in the waiting room would require no more effort than loafing at home, but a television blaring Weather Panic interspersed with Screaming Political Rhetoric felt like a ball-peen hammer pounding against my head. All right, I get it, there's a storm coming, but can we all take a chill pill?

My son got through the bone marrow transplant without any immediate side effects other than drowsiness, which didn't deter him from watching the Cleveland Guardians win last night's Division Series game and force a fifth game tomorrow. Our Guardians seem to be pulling together all their strength just when it's most needed.

Which is exactly what I need to do. On Monday I'll be heading back to campus to teach and lead meetings and move toward my big retirement event next Friday, so it's time to pull up my socks and get serious about class preps, agendas, and PowerPoint slides. First, though, I've got grandkids in the house. Time to pull out the crayons and do some therapeutic coloring. 

A Sudoku-inspired poem:

To tell you why I'm feeling fine,
I'll write the reasons one to nine:
One, fresh pawpaw ice cream--sweet!
Two, my grandkids like to eat
fresh pawpaws and fresh okra too.
Three days until I'm finally through
recuperating. Four small hands

to gather eggs and help the Grands.

Five hours til my pain pills are gone. 

Six days until I see my son.

Seven crayons, colors bright.

Final exams in eight weeks--right!

Nine's the limit we can use

to fill the grid with numbers. Choose

the digits well and win the prize:

a chance to solve another. (Sigh!)

Anyone want to throw some numbers back at me? Put them in the comments.

Grampa's little helpers

Who knew I needed a mantis model?

Tucked away within the bounty of the giant gift basket my colleagues gave me last week was a kit for constructing a praying mantis, which I put together yesterday morning just to amuse myself. My fat fingers struggled to fit together the tiny wooden bits, and the instructions didn't help much. The print was so tiny that I had to take a pic with my phone and blow them up, and then they said things like "please avoid sharp, do not eat" and "fireproof, waterproof, moisture-proof, sunscreen."

But the result is an adorable little praying mantis, more fragile and less fierce than the mantis I admired not long ago in this post. Back in August I set myself up as the protector of the praying mantis, but now I'm relying on this mantis model to protect me from boredom and cheer me on in my recovery. Maybe I ought to give her a name. Suggestions?

Am I blue?

Psychologically speaking, the answer is yes, sometimes I get a little blue, and why shouldn't I? I'm recovering from surgery after a scary diagnosis, and I'm restricted to home during my fall break while the leaves are turning beautiful colors, my adorable grandkids are constantly growing taller and more delightful many miles away, and my son is undergoing unpleasant treatments in Columbus. He won't be entirely alone--my husband will be with him on Thursday for the bone marrow transplant--but I get blue when I think of my helplessness in the face of his huge challenges. But undergoing the stress of travel is inadvisable so soon after my surgery, so I stay home.

And I get blue when I think about my classes. I am completely confident that my wonderful colleagues will do a fantastic job teaching my classes for the rest of the week, but I won't be there to see how my Nature students react to Sylvia, the woodsy girl in Sara Orne Jewett's "The White Heron," and I won't get to observe my African American Lit students struggling to figure out whether they're allowed to laugh at the Battle Royal scene from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. And Gwendolyn Brooks! I know my students will enjoy discussing Gwendolyn Brooks with a bona fide published poet, but I want to hear their responses to "the mother" and "kitchenette building" and, especially, "The Lovers of the Poor":

Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor--passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is--something less than derelict or dull.

I love to see the lovely ladies of the Ladies Betterment League leaving the tenement at the end of the long poem, 

Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the leaden air.

Fun fact: when I googled to find this text, the AI preview referred to "The Lovers of the Poor" as free verse. Really? Look again, AI. You can do better. 

But I won't be able to share any fun facts with my students this week, which makes me a little blue. Metaphorically.

But am I also literally blue? Yes I am. I didn't realize how blue I was until I was washing up the other day and noticed that the blue dye that helped the surgeon to locate the lymph nodes for biopsy had not only turned my urine blue but had spread its effects all over my body. Blue arms, blue legs, blue hips and thighs and ankles, blue belly, blue back, blue blue blue. I look like a space alien or mythical monster or a sideshow freak, the Blue Hag of Borneo. I'm not allowed to shower or use deodorant for a few days and I have to wear a post-surgical bra 24 hours a day, which is less sexy than you might imagine. The post-surgery instructions tell me I'm allowed to resume sexual activities as soon as I'm comfortable, but as a scarred stinky blue woman trussed up in a surgical bra, I wonder: Did the Blue Hag of Borneo ever manage to reproduce? And how would anyone know since I just made her up?

So yes, I am a little blue, metaphorically, sometimes, and a little blue, literally, all the time. But this too shall pass. And meanwhile, look at all the free time I have for writing blog posts! That's bound to help with one kind of blues if not the other.

Greetings from the Altered States of Euphoria

The lumpectomy went well yesterday, thanks for asking, and now I have to wait a week and a half for the pathology report, which will determine "next steps," as the medical folks like to say because it sounds less threatening than the possibility of radiation and chemotherapy. My surgeon thinks it unlikely that I'll need further treatment, but it all depends on what shows up in the lymph node biopsy.

We'd driven up to Columbus Sunday afternoon so we could spend some time with my son before he entered the grueling regimen of whole-body radiation that will destroy his bone marrow this week, and we spent the night at a hotel where we'd stayed before, close enough to the fairgrounds that we could smell the horse barns while hearing trucks whizzing past on the interstate. The room was a bit tricksy: getting the door to shut and lock properly was a challenge, and someone had rigged the TV to come blaring on right in the middle of SpongeBob. But I slept well, avoided eating or drinking after midnight, and arrived at the hospital ready to get chopped.

Which was fine. I mean, I was sedated the whole time, so what do I know? I'm in no pain at all today, thanks to lots of Tylenol and Ibuprofen. They prescribed some Tramadol just in case, but so far it's been unnecessary. After previous surgeries I often tried to do too much too soon and suffered the consequences, so today I'm loafing around in my jammies and leaving more comments on blogs than I generally have time for. 

There were, however, side effects, some of which were a complete surprise. For instance, thanks to all those pain-killers, my knee doesn't hurt! And my daughter beat me at Spelling Bee! We have a friendly rivalry over several of the New York Times daily games, where we're pretty evenly matched. She's more likely to beat me at Connections and Wordle, but I almost always come out ahead on the Spelling Bee. Until yesterday, when my brain was apparently in a different place.

What shall we call that place? La-la Land, Spaced-Out Sector, The Altered States of Euphoria? I paid a lengthy and unpleasant visit to Nausea Nation, which is not uncommon after anesthesia--in fact, I'd warned everyone who would listen, including the anesthesiologist, that I often get vertigo and I'd once suffered a severe bout of vertigo after being sedated with Propofol. He gave me a little lecture (between sneezes that he blamed on asthma) about how Propofol is really the best option in this situation, and he promised to give me something to counteract the vertigo, a little Scopalomine patch on my neck.

It didn't help. In fact, the patch was so unhelpful that the recovery nurse tore it off when my vertigo kept me tied to the bed holding my head completely still to try to make the room stop spinning. They gave me a barf bag and I had some dry heaves but nothing came up, which is not surprising since by that point I hadn't eaten for more than twelve hours.

In fact all I ended up ingesting the whole day were a few dry crackers, two little bags of pretzels, and a can of ginger ale. They sent another can of ginger ale with me to get me through the drive home. We'd hoped to leave by 5 p.m. so we could listen to the Cleveland Guardians game on the radio, but I spent so much time in the Extended Recovery Unit that we watched most of the game on television. Well, I saw bits and pieces as I swung in and out of a drug-induced doze. It was close to 10 before we finally made it home, which I wish the Guardians had managed to do a few more times.

But I'm back and I feel pretty okayish, considering. Among the things I'm not allowed to do today are showering, vacuuming, lifting a laundry basket, or mowing, to which I can only say Hurrah. The discharge instructions warn me not to make any important life decisions or sign any contracts for some time after anesthesia, which is a good thing because if a hit-man had been hanging around the recovery room while I was fighting vertigo and nausea, I definitely would have put out a contract on myself just to make the room stop spinning. 

My only goal for today is to write a blog post, which I can now cross off my list. Next I'm planning to dig into the massive care package my wonderful colleagues gave me, dig out some chocolates and Sudoku puzzles, and wrap myself up in the warmth of the love I've been feeling from all my friends and readers. I appreciate every one of you, even if I'm sometimes too spaced out to say so.

Care package with everything I need, including chocolates, Goldfish crackers, and Jane Austen.

Here I am in recovery, rocking that hospital gown while the Guardians lose their game.

Friday poetry challenge: Passing the test

The whisper of pages being turned and papers shuffled, the gentle scratch of pencil on blue book--as my students write their midterm essays, the room is so hushed that the clickety clack of the computer keyboard up front sounds like a series of gunshots. So I turn off the computer and start typing on my phone, a challenge in the best of times, which this isn't.

Typing on the phone slows me down. My fingers are too fat and awkward to fly accurately across that tiny keyboard, and if I don't proofread, I end up with ridiculous spellings. Just a minute ago I typed sliws, and the other day I nearly hit Send on a text message that said I hope it all hoed well. Hoed? Goes!

But today I am even slower and less accurate than usual because I'm a little overslept. Overslept? No! I typed verklempt but autocorrect didn't like my sowlling. Spelling. Whatever.

This morning some wonderful colleagues came into my office carrying a huge gift basket, a care package to get me through my surgery and my son's bone marrow transplant next week. It's full of things I live--er, love. Like chocolates and hand lotion and puzzles and a whole stack of cards that I will enjoy reading when my eyes get a little less teary. It is good to be loved and supported by such terrific people.

But it's hard to write about it on this tiny screen. 

My nature students are writing midterm essays about the costs and benefits of being tested in the wilderness, so I think I will attempt a little test of my own: can I write a Friday poem in the time it takes them to write an essay, using only my phone? Well it's worth a try:

The pencils fly across the page

As students reach that trying stage

When midterm in-class essays test

Their progress through the wilderness

Of education. Meanwhile, I

Attempt to make my fingers fly

On tiny keyboard, mangling words

Until my message is absurd.

To pass the test, my students pay

A price: more study means less play.

I pay a toll in awkward rhymes

Composed in very trying times.

(The benefit, of course, is clear:

I get to post my poem here.)

 

A sonnet! I wasn't expecting that. Did I pass the test?

And how about you? Write a testament to your trials and leave it in the comments.

That's one way to increase cancer awareness

So I'm sitting in the waiting room in an ill-fitting beige robe, surrounded by women wearing identical ill-fitting beige robes, each carrying the same accessory--a clear plastic bag containing bra and shirt--and I'm pulling my beige robe a little tighter where it gapes open in front while trying not to notice the traffic whizzing past just outside the wall of windows, when I receive a campus email announcing an upcoming Breast Cancer Awareness Lunch. I want to send off a snarky reply pointing out that I've recently reached my lifetime quota of breast cancer awareness, that in fact I'm sitting in the freaking Stefanie Spielman Comprehensive Breast Center being comprehensively inundated with breast cancer awareness, but I decide against it. A simple no will suffice.

And so I won't have an excuse to show off my handy-dandy little card announcing that I'm radioactive. I've never before been required to carry a card explaining my radioactive state to anyone whose Geiger counter goes off in my presence, and it would be a shame to possess such a card without ever having the opportunity to use it. I'm especially fond of explaining how the doctor announced that the radioactive seed had been successfully inserted in the tumor in my breast: "Okay, she's hot!"

Come to think of it, if I do happen to set off any Geiger counters, I could forego flashing the explanatory card and just announce, "Don't worry--I'm hot!"

The tiny radioactive seed marks the tumor so that my surgeon can find it easily when she goes to yank it out next Monday. Today I spent the day in Columbus being prepared for surgery: pre-operative education, lab tests, EKG, chest x-ray, radioactive seed placement aided by ultrasound, mammogram to make sure the seed was placed properly, meeting with the radiation oncologist, and I don't remember what else. I was comprehensively cared for by a horde of medical professionals whose names I could not recall if my life depended on it. My life may depend upon their competence, but if it takes me two weeks to learn the names of a classroom full of students, I can't be expected to instantly remember the names of all the medical professionals crowding around the ultrasound room and remarking upon my hotness.

Everyone--nurses, doctors, lab techs, schedulers--keeps saying perfect, an odd word to bandy about while wrangling with the imperfections of ailing bodies. Have I stopped taking ibuprofen? Perfect. No family history of breast cancer? Perfect. Blood pressure lower than last time? Perfect. 

But I can read and I know my blood pressure wasn't perfect. I'd drive through horrible city traffic and was comprehensively stressed out, so my blood pressure was no more perfect than anything else I've experienced since radically increasing my breast cancer awareness, but if the nurse wants to apply the word perfect to the fact that I've successfully managed to don the ill-fitting beige robe, then I guess I'll accept it. 

Today's gold star goes to the phlebotomist who drew four vials of my blood before I even knew she'd stuck the needle in my arm. I generally walk away from lab work with multiple band-aids and bruises on both arms, so getting a good blood vessel in one painless stick is just short of miraculous. 

But four vials is nothing--nothing!--compared to what my son and daughter have been experiencing in a different building at the same hospital. My son will be admitted to The James Friday to begin the long process of preparing for his bone marrow transplant, and my daughter spent seven hours this morning having bone marrow harvested, though I reject the use of the word harvest to refer to my child's blood products. The advance testing process had required her to give up fifteen vials of blood at the same time, and for the past week she's had to inject herself with a drug that increased her body's production of white blood cells--and made her feel tired and achy like someone coming down with the flu. But this morning's seven-hour harvest festival produced a precious gift that will help her brother get healthy.

But first he has to get less healthy. Over the next week or so, his diseased bone marrow will be destroyed to eradicate the cancer and make room for his sister's donation. That's not a pleasant process, and for a while he'll have no functioning immune system. But then that perfect gift of healthy marrow should start making him better over the course of the next couple of months.

So right now our whole family is more aware of cancer than we've ever been, and we're trusting in the comprehensive care of a horde of medical professionals to get us through the coming challenges. If one day we get so far removed from all this pain and anguish that we can allow our comprehensive cancer awareness to lapse--well, that would be just about perfect.  

 

Brother and sister.