A litany of thanks

Yesterday I promised to update a Thanksgiving newspaper column published 15 years ago. How much has changed since 1994? How much has stayed the same? Here is my attempt to tackle that question.

What am I thankful for this year?

I'm thankful that the boy who held my hand to cross the street 15 years ago now has hands much bigger than mine, hands that can carry heavy loads and reach over my head to retrieve things from the highest shelves. I'm thankful for his dry wit, for the way he loves to play with words, for his assistance at his sister's wedding, where his calm competence helped me keep my cool. He doesn't fall off his bike these days but he has faced some challenges in his progress toward becoming a pilot, and I'm thankful that he keeps getting back on the bike--er, plane.

I'm thankful for a daughter who's still singing all the time and who loves teaching others to develop their musical gifts. I'm thankful that she can bake an excellent custard pie, a skill I've never quite mastered. I'm thankful for the color and energy she brings into my life, and I'm thankful for how beautifully she and her husband are establishing their own home.

I'm thankful for a wonderful son-in-law who knows how to listen and how to encourage. I'm thankful that he understands so many mysteries, like electricity and car repair and how to fix a string of Christmas lights, and that he has great patience with those of us who don't. I'm thankful for the joy he spreads through music and laughter, and I'm thankful for how perfect a match he is for my daughter. And his hair. Let's not overlook that marvelous curly hair.

I'm thankful for a husband whose broad shoulders still carry so many burdens, even though those burdens have changed over the years. This year I'm especially thankful for those 21 lovely loaves of challah bread he baked for our daughter's wedding reception and the lovely words he shared during the service, and I'm thankful for the way he has carried me through five months of cancer treatments. I'm thankful that he fills the birdfeeders, chops wood to heat the house, grows the world's greatest tomatoes, fixes instant mashed potatoes when that's all my stomach can handle. I'm thankful for his calm assurance that we'll get through this trial, that there are happier times coming soon.

I'm thankful for my Hopeful hound, who is willing to accompany me anytime I'm ready to walk, regardless of the weather. I'm thankful for the gleeful way she bounds across the meadow after rabbits or squirrels or even deer, and I'm thankful that she doesn't often drag home the carcasses.

I'm thankful (still) for family and friends, who have stepped up to the plate in amazing ways this year to help us celebrate our daughter's wedding and help me struggle through my battle with cancer. I'm thankful for distant friends who send encouraging words and put up with my griping when I'm feeling low, and I'm thankful for local friends who bring noodles and key lime pie, who drive me to appointments, who cover my classes when I can't get to campus. I'm thankful for a terrific team of doctors and nurses doing everything in their power to help me heal, and I'm thankful for a great mechanic who assures me that my Volvo will run for a million miles or more and makes me want to keep driving long into the future.

I'm thankful for the strength to keep on teaching through treatment, for the ability to read and write and speak coherently most of the time, for the freedom to rest when I'm weak and to walk up the big horrible hill when my strength returns.

I'm still thankful for water and apples and hot soup on a cold day, but I gave up on fast food ages ago and I'm thankful that I haven't needed blood-pressure pills for almost two years now. I'm still thankful for umbrellas and streetlights, although I treasure the darkness and quiet of our rural road, where the dark sky glimmers with sparkly stars while great horned owls hoot in the woods.

These days we rarely find dolls in the bathtub or Legos on the floor, but I'm thankful for a future that might include grandchildren who will bring the best kind of noise and disorder into my home. I'm thankful for a whole mess of nephews and nieces, all growing into fine young men and women who offer hope for an exciting future.

I'm thankful that yesterday when I wanted to locate a newspaper column I wrote 15 years ago, I knew exactly which closet to look in and exactly which box to open. Chemotherapy may have sapped my energy and addled my mind, but it hasn't made me forget what's really important.

And for that I am thankful.

A Thanksgiving blast from the past

Fifteen years ago when I was a journalist, I cranked out a quick and simple Thanksgiving column that garnered a lot of comments. Many readers told me that they served that column at Thanksgiving dinner along with the turkey and stuffing. It's a little sappy and undoubtedly outdated, but I'm reprinting it here today to give us all something to think about before we get too busy basting turkeys. Tomorrow I'll try to provide an update: 15 years later, how many of these things am I still thankful for? What am I thankful for today that wouldn't have even entered my mind back then? Meanwhile, you can work on your own list.

It's called "Small Blessings, Big Thanks," and it was published on Nov. 17, 1994.

What am I thankful for this year?

I'm thankful for a son who can tie his shoes all by himself, fold his shirts and put away his socks, fall off his bike and get right back on. I'm thankful for the pictures he colors of smiling people and their cheerful pets.

I'm thankful that he's big enough to go to school but small enough to hold my hand to cross the street.

I'm thankful for a daughter who can keep a secret, read to her brother, paint the world in bright, sparkling colors. I'm thankful for all the questions she asks that I don't know how to answer; I'm thankful that she never seems to stop singing.

I'm thankful for a husband who knows how to iron, who puts up with all my crazy projects, whose broad shoulders carry burdens for so many people, even me. I'm thankful for his strong hands that can tickle a child or tickle the ivories with equal abandon.

I'm thankful for music, for laughter, for silly stories and whispers in the dark; and I'm thankful for tears and regrets, for second chances and learning experiences.

I'm thankful for grandmas and grampas, aunts and uncles, and cousins; I'm thankful for a new nephew after a long wait. I'm thankful for strong marriages and faithful friends.

I'm thankful for colleagues who laugh and neighbors who don't complain. I'm thankful for every encouraging word and for strength to stand under criticism.

I'm thankful for water, for apples, for hot soup on a cold day. I'm thankful for church suppers, picnics in the park, two Big Macs for two bucks.

I'm thankful for two eyes that keep on seeing, two hands that keep on typing, two feet that keep on walking even after I drop large heavy objects on them. I'm thankful for a mind that keeps on thinking, most of the time.

I'm thankful for streetlights and sidewalks, umbrellas, snow boots, and sleds; for tents and campfires and marshmallows, for crickets chirping in the night.

I'm thankful for dolls in the bathtub and Legos on the floor. I'm thankful for letters from family, for photogaphs and videos. I'm thankful for memories.

What am I thankful for this year? A little bit of everything.

Celebratory, sort of

I had thought today's chemotherapy session would be a little different since it was my final session, the turning point toward whatever comes after the New Normal. The only difference, though, was that the cancer center was overbooked with cancer patients eager to get their treatments done before the holidays, so everything took longer than usual. As much as I appreciate the fine people who work at the cancer center, I was not thrilled about being there from 8:40 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon. At one point I was so annoyed with the persistent mindless yammering from the television in the waiting room that I told the woman at the desk that I would continue my waiting downstairs next to the soothing sound of the fountain. When the nurse needed me, she could just come down and find me. It was either that or tear the television off the wall and toss it out the window.

I asked my oncologist what comes next after chemotherapy, and he said, "We watch you." He's not talking about installing video cameras all over my house, either: I'll need periodic blood tests and CAT scans to make sure the cancer isn't coming back or spreading, and next week I'll start a few sessions of brachytherapy, which involves the insertion of high-intensity radioactive pellets near the place where the cancer was found--and if you think I'm going into all the gory details, you've got another think coming.

This morning I'm trying to work up the energy to celebrate the end of chemotherapy, but I'm still too doped up on drugs to manage much besides an occasional weak smile. Tomorrow my daughter and son-in-law will arrive and start putting together our Thanksgiving feast, and that will be something to celebrate--if I can stay awake. But even if I follow the usual pattern of dozing off at random the first few days after chemo, at least I can comfort my self with the knowledge that this is the last time I'll suffer that side effect.

Assuming that the cancer stays away.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble celebrating: it feels like tremendous hubris to hoist the "Mission Accomplished" banner when I don't know whether the war is really over. I can celebrate the end of this particular prolonged battle, but the war itself--who knows when it will end?

With a click, with a pop--phone'll jingle, door'll knock...

You know you're a basket case when you burst into tears on hearing a song you don't even like--and you can't quite figure out why. That was me today as I turned the home stretch on my route around the loop.

It was a gorgeous day for a walk but all morning long I kept making excuses to stay inside. First it was cold and then I had to catch up on all that ironing and then I had to clean up my chutney-making mess and then I couldn't walk out in the middle of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," but finally I couldn't put it off any more. I knew my friend Joy was out in San Diego walking 20 miles a day for three days to raise money for breast cancer research (read about it here), and I told myself, "If Joy can walk 60 miles, surely I can walk a mere six."

So I set out off down along the creek and up the big horrible hill, and I made it halfway up before I heard the first gunshots. Great: this weekend begins youth deer-hunting season, when the woods around my house are crawling with juveniles carrying guns. Most of the six-mile route wends its way through those woods, and the first shots came from pretty close by. A good excuse to turn around, especially when I was having trouble making it up the hill anyway...but I thought of Joy and kept going.

After each round of chemotherapy, it takes me about ten days to two weeks before I can even make it up that hill, and by the time I manage to walk the whole loop, I'm ready for another round of drugs. For months the story of my life has been three steps forward, two steps back, which makes it hard to feel as if I'm getting anywhere. Sure, I can walk the loop today, but Tuesday I'll have chemo again and then it'll be days before I can get all the way down my driveway. That doesn't feel much like progress.

But I kept moving forward nevertheless, and before long I came down the hill at the far end of the ridge to the sound of more gunshots, this time farther away. Then I walked the flats along the creek and soon reached a wide curve where the road goes slightly uphill while bending around a bluff. As I lumbered slowly toward the curve, Hopeful stopped in the middle of the road and looked back at me as if to say, "Come on, let's see what's around this corner!" I responded to her curious look with a bit of the song "Something's Coming" from West Side Story:

Around the corner
or whistling down the river--
come on, deliver
to me....

Now anyone who knows me well is wondering, "Singing? Out loud? In public? Who are you and what have you done with Bev?"

I don't sing in public, even if no one is listening except my dog.

I especially don't sing what may well be the most unsingable song ever written, with its odd syncopation and impossible range and silly lyrics.

But there I was, singing this unsingable song out loud in the middle of hunter-infested woods while my dog peered at me...and then I couldn't sing anymore because I was crying.

What happened to the Bev who could control her emotions, who didn't feel the need to burst into tears at the first hint of some sappy song? Drugged into paralysis, I suspect, while this emotional basket-case goes wandering around the countryside singing to her dog and bursting into tears just because a song expresses some hope for a surprising but wonderful future. Let's just not think about the gunshots that destroy that hope in West Side Story, okay? Let's just focus on the joy of endless opportunity the song celebrates.

The air is hummin' and something great is comin', but if I don't pull myself together, I'll never be able to see it with my eyes all misty.

Sick of cranberry from a can?

As I chopped apples and grated ginger this morning for my annual batch of cranberry chutney, I thought once again of the time a few years ago when we went to a relative's house for Thanksgiving and s/he warned us in advance, "Don't bring that cranberry stuff. Nobody likes it."

It's undeniably true that people accustomed to eating cranberry sauce straight from the can find my cranberry chutney shocking, but some acquired tastes are well worth acquiring. I've made this chutney every year for at least two decades now and if some Thanksgiving visitors don't like it, that just leaves more for the rest of us--and you too, provided you're willing to put it all together:

Bev's Cranberry Chutney

Peel and chop four tart apples (preferably Granny Smith). Slice one medium yellow onion quite thin. Put apples and onion in large saucepan with one cup cider vinegar and one cup dark brown sugar. Simmer gently 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, zest two oranges and squeeze out the juice. Add orange juice and zest to saucepan along with 1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, 1/2 teaspoon salt, one cup raisins or dried currants, and one pound fresh cranberries (not frozen). Cover and cook until cranberries burst, about 10 minutes. Cool and chill at least 24 hours.

Now my whole house smells like all those delicious ingredients simmering...I could just about live on the aroma alone.

Friday poetry challenge: put it in park

So I'm sitting in my Volvo in a busy grocery-store parking lot on a damp, cold, gray afternoon, and my car won't start. I turn the key: nothing. Not so much as a click. Oops, looks like I left the lights on...and the radio...and the seat-warmers. Okay, I've grown accustomed to being pretty stupid in the afternoon, but this is ridiculous. Now I'm sitting in the dark in a car with no lights or heat or power and I don't even have the energy to call AAA. Tell you what: I'll just sit back and let the car make the call.

Yes: for a few hours yesterday afternoon, both my car and I were suffering from dead batteries. But this is not the first time I have resembled my car; in fact, people are always commenting about how well my car suits me. "It looks like an English professor's car," they say. It's not at all flashy, just stodgy and dependable, kind of battered and showing some signs of age, but it just keeps running (except when some idiot overtaxes the system and pulls the plug). More than any other car I've ever owned, this car seems like an extension of myself:

My car 'n' me
we both agree
it's time to take a nap;
we're sitting still
without the will
to make those spark-plugs zap.

My jumper cables
are not able
to set the gears in motion,
so we'll just park
without a spark,
avoiding all commotion.

Thanks to the efforts of a spouse who knows how to replace a battery, my car and I are both functioning properly today--a little slow, a little sluggish, but still puttering along.

And poetrying along too. Your challenge today is to write verse of any sort about a time when you've been stuck in park--with or without a car.

Multimedia musings

I'm teaching creative nonfiction next semester (hurrah!) and some time ago I decided to bring that class into the 21st century by requiring students to produce a multimedia essay. Now I have to figure out what that means and how it will work, and I need help.

Nonfiction writing abounds beyond paper publication--on blogs, in radio essays, in live performance--so I want my students to create essays employing some medium beyond print, but I don't want to put too many restrictions on their creations or teach them all some specific technology that will soon be obsolete. Let them go with what they know: pair their wonderful words with photographs and hyperlinks on a web page, for instance, or produce a radio essay accompanied by appropriate sounds.

The multimedia essay will be due fairly late in the semester, and I wonder whether I ought to allow them to re-purpose an essay written earlier or insist that they write something new. (That will depend partly on how the schedule looks, and I'm not ready to make that call yet.) I also want them to present their multimedia essays to their peers, perhaps in an evening event open to the public. Food will be involved, of course.

I realize, though, that I'll need to show students some examples demonstrating how outstanding writing can be combined effectively with other media; I have a few examples in mind, but I'd like more variety, so I welcome suggestions. I also welcome suggestions from anyone who has tried this kind of assignment before. What sorts of problems might arise? What gripes might I hear? How in the world will I grade the finished product?

Writing in this medium is a two-way street. I've done my part: now it's up to you.

Malicious menu

Evidence that chemotherapy has disabled my taste buds:
1. I over-season the sweet and sour cabbage because I can't taste the vinegar.
2. Sausage pizza has no detectable flavor.
3. Texture is the only real difference between butter and peanut butter.

Foods that still taste good anyway:
1. Chocolate.
2. Ginger ale. (Or ginger anything.)
3. Key lime yogurt.
4. Pineapple.

Foods I normally love that now make me want to spit them out:
1. Cheese.
2. Swiss chard.
3. Mandarin oranges.
4. Chicken soup.

Foods I don't ever want to see again after I'm done with chemotherapy:
1. Plain mashed potatoes. (Especially in the middle of the night.)
2. Scrambled eggs.
3. Dry toast.

Foods I'd like to gorge on after my digestive system figures out how to function again:
1. Salad.
2. Sushi.
3. Jalapeno poppers.
4. Cheesecake.

Evidence that God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life.
1. I'm still eating.
2. Did I mention chocolate?

Sweet (gum) dreams

On the way home from church this morning I turned to my husband totally out of the blue and blurted out, "I want a sweet gum tree."

At that point any normal husband would have pointed out that we already have more than enough trees and that even if we could afford to buy a new tree, we have no real need for a tree that will drop annoying pods all over the place. But who ever said my husband was normal?

"Why do you want a sweet gum tree?" he asked.

"I like the shape of the leaves," I said, "and they turn a really pretty red in the fall."

Neither of those are particularly good reasons to invest the kind of time and money required to plant a new tree, but nevertheless he nodded and admitted that he has always appreciated the stately shape of the sweet gum--but where would we put it?

At that point he steered the Volvo right off the driveway and took a wide, meandering loop around the meadow so we could visualize the effect of a mature sweet gum tree near the bluff or in front of the apartment or on the slope above the garden. "It won't matter if pods fall here," he pointed out, "because they'll just blend in with all the other falling stuff."

It was for moments like this, I think, that I married the guy--so that one day when I shared a sweet-gum dream, he would find a way to make it grow.

Survival skills

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

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

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

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

Friday poetry challenge: found poetry

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

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

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

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

Or this brief but colorful Facebook status line:

Sun streaming
through yellow leaves
and the scent
of autumn.

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

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

Best. (Unwanted.) Excuse. Ever.

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

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

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

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

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

Worst. Excuse. Ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instant Tranquility Kit

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

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

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

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

Playing possum

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

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

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

And they just wouldn't quit.

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

But they just kept barking.

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

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

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

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

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

And now I'm telling you. Mission accomplished.

Raising an eyebrow

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

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

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

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

Friday poetry challenge: advice for writers

Today Bardiac offers up A Poem for Grading (read it here), quite appropriate considering that my primary task today and tomorrow is to respond to eight more freshman drafts, a dozen honors humor theory papers, and 24 postcolonial essays. I'm thinking about making it more interesting by writing all my comments on papers in verse.

A quatrain on comma splices:

To join complete sentences
requires strong glue.
Semicolons work wonders,
but commas won't do.

A little moody blues:

When you write about conditions contrary to fact
Oh, when you write about conditions contrary to fact
Yes, when you write about conditions contrary to fact
If I were you, dude,
I'd choose the subjunctive mood.

A transitional haiku:

Wide chasms between
paragraphs? Build a bridge to
keep me from falling.

Now it's your turn: verse of any kind providing advice to writers of any kind.

Stephen King Out-Thurbers Thurber

Stephen King in the New Yorker? The Nov. 2 issue features his story "Premium Harmony," which is simply a hoot from beginning to end. The story contains significant echoes of "A Couple of Hamburgers," the James Thurber story in which an unhappy couple rehashes one old tired argument after another during a road trip through Connecticut. King's story includes more serious disaster but still remains more lighthearted and even gleeful than Thurber's bitter tale. And King's metaphors are fresh and telling:

"He sometimes thinks marriage is like a football game and he's quarterbacking the underdog team. He has to pick his spots. Make short passes."

"Now they argue quite a lot. It's really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray thinks, like a dog track. When they argue, they're like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don't see it. You see the rabbit."

The scenery in King's story is provided by a small Maine town suffering from economic decline, but, like Thurber's story, the entire plot takes place first within a car and then within a small, struggling business. Thurber breaks his story up by taking his couple inside a diner in search of a couple of hamburgers, but the change in location only pushes the eternal argument underground, where it festers for a while before breaking out again back in the car.

King similarly breaks up the road trip with a visit to a small business, and, as in Thurber's story, the husband's appetite is assuaged while the wife's most definitely is not. Thurber ends the story with the wife's self-satisfied knowledge that she will soon win a small victory that will cause pain for both of them, while King's story ends with a scene evoking pain and suffering but also suffused with radiant joy.

James Thurber's writing once defined what was meant by a typical New Yorker story, ranging from the madcap adventure to the gently nostalgic memoir to the sour anatomy of the failing relationship that we see in "A Couple of Hamburgers." Stephen King's thrillers seem as far from typical New Yorker fiction as any prose could possibly be; nevertheless, with "Premium Harmony," King evokes the madcap end of Thurber's range, joyously transforming one of Thurber's bitter relationship tales into raucous good fun. Thurber must be rolling over in his grave--rolling on the floor laughing, that is.

Snow birds but no snow (yet)

Juncoes have arrived!

Yes, my eagle-eyed daughter spotted the first of the snow-loving birds yesterday. They generally arrive closer to Thanksgiving, so I suppose this means we can expect an early winter and a harsh one. And sure enough, my daughter lives just over two miles north of here and she drove through snow to get here yesterday. None here so far, but when juncoes arrive, snow is not far behind.

I suppose this puts a little extra urgency into my Winter Preparation To-Do List.

Home office help

Here I am responding to student drafts in my elegant home office. My adorable daughter stopped by to help...by making a warm winter hat.

Make "make it work" work

Not long ago I observed a speech class in which a problem with a video camera delayed the start of speeches, but instead of running around trying to fix the problem, the professor sat on the sidelines smiling while the students figured it out. "They know they're responsible for getting the camera set up," she explained, "So they just have to make it work."

What a brilliant idea. I borrowed this approach during my freshman composition class's midterm essay exam. I allowed students to bring laptops to class if they wanted to write their essays that way, but I warned them that I had to have their essays in my possession before I left the class. They could hand me a hard copy or e-mail an electronic copy, but either way, a late paper would be an instant F.

As time was running out, a few students found that they were unable to connect to the wireless network to send me their essays. In the past I might have offered to run around trying to figure out their technological difficulties for them, but not this time. Instead, I followed my colleague's example: I stayed in my seat smiling and said, "Make it work." They did.

Now two of my classes are preparing to give oral presentations in the next couple of weeks, and again, I adopt my colleague's approach: I'm happy to show you how to use the classroom technology and let you in the room to practice your presentation, but when it comes down to the wire, it's up to you to make it work--or have a Plan B in reserve just in case.

It's remarkable how freeing this attitude is...but why did it take me so long to figure out how to make "make it work" work?

Thoughts while scraping frost off windows

Daylight! When was the last time I drove to work in the light? Gotta love that time change. Except soon I'll be driving home in the dark.

Better get a new tiny flashlight for my keyring. Tough to walk up the driveway from the garage in the dark.

Better practice parking the Volvo in the garage. I'll need to work on making that tight turn.

Better make sure the hubby's stuff isn't scattered all over my side of the garage. That's what I get for not parking in there all summer long.

Gloves. Must find gloves. And my winter coat--where is it? Did I have it cleaned after last winter? Probably smells like a wet dog. Better check.

Cold car, cold seat, cold fingers--but thank heaven for seat-warmers!

Nothin' for nobody

When our daughter was an infant, we lived in a trailer park tucked behind the seminary where my husband was studying. In that block of decaying trailers constantly threatening to collapse into piles of scrap metal, a group of seminary students and their spouses formed a supportive community--sharing meals, offering rides, gathering on Saturday morning to clear out a clogged septic line. We all helped each other because we all knew how desperately we needed help.

One morning I was in the kitchen eating breakfast when I heard the garbage truck lumbering up the street. My husband had already left for class, so I grabbed our one big bag of trash and prepared to sprint to the curb barefoot and in my PJ's. But when I opened the door, I saw a neighbor walking past, a tall, rangy fellow with an air of the apocalyptic. I called out and asked him to carry my trash to the curb, and he turned to me with fire in his eyes, pointed a long, bony finger in my face, and said, "You never do nothin' for nobody--but I'll do this for you."

It felt like a slap in the face--and two decades later, it still stings. I never do nothin' for nobody? It wasn't true then and I know it's not true now. There are certainly thing I won't do for anybody. Don't ask me to buy a raffle ticket, for instance, no matter how good the cause: I'd rather make a donation and avoid the suspense. And don't ask me to bake a pie for your bake sale. I'll bake cookies or fudge or banana nut bread, but I don't do pies--not for you, not for nobody.

Other than that, I've always tried to be helpful, and I've always hated asking for help. Asking for help means admitting that I need help, and that's a bit daunting--even now, when I really can't get by without a little help from my friends. Worse, though, than asking for help is asking and being refused, which makes those words ring in my ears: "You never do nothin' for nobody!"

It's still not true. I've always tried to help my colleagues whenever I can, from covering their classes when they're absent to covering their butts when they screw up (one of the unwritten duties of a department chair). Even so, this semester as I've struggled to keep teaching through treatment, I've been reluctant to ask for too much help, and I've tried to spread the joy around so I'm not relying too heavily on any one person.

I've gotten rides from a variety of friends, former students, and college staff members, and so far I've asked three different colleagues to cover classes for me. All except one were happy to do so, but naturally I obsess over the one who said no (for a very good reason!). And this week I've been flummoxed in my attempt to find a ride home from chemotherapy next Wednesday. Everyone is really, really busy, which I understand, but each refusal makes it that much harder to ask someone else.

Maybe I'll just walk home. It's only 17 miles. I've walked that far before. Once or twice. Okay, twice--long before chemotherapy became a normal part of my life. How hard could it be?

It could be really, really hard, especially now that the weather has turned cold and wet. I guess I'd better keep asking for help and keep hoping I won't hear that apocalyptic voice crying in the wilderness: "You never do nothin' for nobody--but I'll do this for you."

A radical sleep-ectomy

Lately I'm spending way too much time either trying to stay awake or trying to sleep. I wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and can't get back to sleep, and I try not to get up but I'm bursting with energy that can't be contained under the covers so eventually I get up and get to work, and I keep working steadily until the middle of the afternoon, when it feels as if someone has pulled the plug.

All I want to do then is take a nap, but sleeping during the day means I won't sleep at night...but not sleeping during the day means I spend the evening fighting to keep my eyes open and eventually losing the battle way too early. If I could stay awake past 9., maybe I'd be able to sleep past 4.

And the time change tonight will only make it worse. I've been awake since 3 this morning and up since around 4:30 (on Saturday! for no good reason!) , and now I'm ready to collapse, but if I give in and drift off too early I'll be awake at 2. This afternoon I downed a few cups of strong black tea just to help me resist a nap, but now it's not even 9:00 and I'm inventing meaningless tasks just to maintain alertness. If I try to read, I'll fall asleep. If I try to write, my syntax stumbles and my brain cells respond with resonant snores. I can fold laundry, but that takes me pretty close to the bed, which looks pretty inviting right now. So I wander around aimlessly taking up mindless tasks and trying to keep my eyes open when all I really want to do is sleep.

Funny, but when I signed all those consent forms at the hospital, I don't recall agreeing to a radical sleep-ectomy. Whom shall I sue?

Friday poetry challenge: Fright Night

When we lived in the middle of town, I used to distribute pencils on Halloween. I know that makes me sound like a total crank, but the kids loved 'em! I would hold out a mug full of brand-new pencils decorated with various sports or movie logos, and they would agonize over which to choose: Browns or Bengals, Ariel or Belle? I never heard one complaint.

No one comes to our door since we moved to the woods, and I don't blame them. It's hard to trick-or-treat on a dark country road where you have to walk a quarter mile between houses, and our driveway is treacherous enough in broad daylight--I'd hate to stumble through the potholes in the dark while wearing a flimsy plastic mask and a cape, especially with coyotes yipping in the distance.

So there will be no trick-or-treat at our house tonight, but I do plan to dress up today as the scariest monster I know:

When strangers, impressed by my glamour,
Request my profession, I stammer,
"I'm an English profess-
Or." They blanch and confess,
"I guess I'd better watch my grammar!"

That's right, folks, I'm armed with a semicolon and I know how to use it!

Ooh, scary.

Now it's your turn: if you're planning to frighten anyone today or to be frightened, put it into verse and share it with the rest of us.

Morbid math

Yesterday I encountered a disconcerting factoid and I sincerely hope someone can convince me that it's a load of hooey. "The change in body composition that is brought on by chemotherapy is normally seen as part of the normal aging process," says this article, but "Unfortunately, in terms of body composition, a woman going through chemotherapy ages 10 years in the course of a year."

Let's do the math: my odds of being alive in five years are slightly better than 50/50, so I'm undergoing chemotherapy in hopes of beating the odds, but if I'm still alive and kicking five years from now, chemotherapy will make my body feel 10 years older than that, which means my body will be ready for retirement while I'm still working to pay off my medical bills. And if chemo adds five more years of life but then subtracts 10, what do I do with the resulting negative number?

Something is wrong here...but it's hard to see the flaws in the math when you're stuck inside the equation.

Leaf me alone!

First thing this morning as I walked across campus, a burst of wind blew a billow of yellow leaves down from the trees and sent them scurrying along the flagstones. My colleague remarked on the beauty of the scene but I said, "Mark my words: the leaf-blowers will be out in force this morning." And now there they are all over the mall making their infernal racket, a noise so annoying that the employees operating the leaf-blowers wear ear-plugs.

But what about the passers-by? Who will protect my ears from all those mechanical decibels?

The noise, though, is not the only thing I find annoying about leaf-blowers. I could harp on how much healthier we would all be if we raked or swept leaves the old-fashioned way, or I could point out the leaf-blowers' reliance on fossil fuels, or I could gripe about the leaf-blowers' assault on the aesthetic experience associated with autumn leaves.

But what really burns my biscuits is the way leaf-blowers blow leaf mold into the air we all have to breathe. Leaf mold belongs on the ground, not in my airways, but all it takes to spark a nasty allergy attack is a little dampness, a pile of leaves, and a brigade of diligent leaf-blowers.

They always make me want to cover my ears and grumble, those mechanical menaces, but maybe a better plan would be to simply refuse to breathe in close proximity to leaf-blowers. That's right: if you don't shut that thing off, I'll hold my breath until I turn blue!

King of the Hill (of beans)

Every once in a while I start to worry about whether kids these days are developing the skills they'll need to succeed in adult life. Sure, they may have mastered World of Warcraft, but have they learned all the best ways to cheat at Monopoly? Can they catch a fish, sketch a bush, sew a trousseau for a Barbie doll? Do they know how to fling a soybean adroitly enough to hit another kid on the back of the neck?

I'll admit that I was generally better at dodging soybeans than at flinging them, and I wasn't particularly good at dodging them either. For a few years in my misspent youth, I waited every morning at a rural school bus stop on the edge of a soybean field that was annually transformed into a battle zone in the ongoing Soybean Wars. A properly flung soybean can sting and even raise a welt, so a kid equipped with a handful of soybeans and a lot of practice could become King of the Bus Stop.

How well do soybean-throwing skills transfer into other contexts? With their penchant for precision, practice, and ruthlessness, those kids could now be ruling worlds much bigger than our rural bus stop.

I've never been very good at catching fish, but I spent enough time fishing in my youth to now consider myself exempt from ever baiting a hook. Likewise Monopoly: you can't spend an entire summer playing the game without mastering all the winning moves, legal or otherwise. And the hours I spent designing and sewing clothes for my dolls were ideal training for clothing my children--until they moved beyond the "little doll" stage and demanded real clothes, like from a store.

These days I don't use my doll-clothes-designing or soybean-dodging skills much, and I worry about whether these skills are being passed on or whether they'll die out. Will future generations of children know how to improvise clothes or weapons from whatever materials come to hand (old curtains, worn pillowcases, sticks, stones, soybeans), or will their creativity be confined within the clickable world? If no child ever again flings a soybean, I worry that some essential experience will be eternally lost.

But then again, maybe that loss won't amount to a hill of beans.

Wind me up!

If some toy company ever decides to market a Cancer Bev Action Figure, I hope they install a perpetual motion machine to keep it running, because those little wind-up motors poop out a little too quickly.

After a week of solitary sedentary clicking, I was really excited about returning to the classroom this morning. My first indication that this would be more challenging than I had expected came when I walked up the stairs to my first class. I just don't have the stamina for stairs these days, you know? But the elevator in that building is so slow that I have never once seen anyone using it.

I was on fire in my first class, strong and alert and full of vigor--until I wasn't. The spring wound down about 40 minutes into class, but I kept babbling for another five or six minutes until I realized that I wasn't getting anywhere.

But then I had another class--fortunately, one I can teach sitting down. I did what I could and then put my students to work, first individually and then in groups. I suppose they learned what they needed to learn, but I also learned an important lesson about my limitations: no matter how much I would prefer to be SuperProfessor, right I'm just a wind-up doll with a defective spring.

From positive thinking to critical thinking

On visiting a megachurch devoted to the Me-First mania of the Name-It-And-Claim-It prosperity gospel, Barbara Ehrenreich found the church's conception of God sadly diminished: "Gone is the mystery and awe; he has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction--that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes--you have granted humans omnipotence."

Ehrenreich's critique occurs in her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. With wit supported by solid evidence, Ehrenreich examines churches that employ positive thinking to promote greed rather than good, corporations that rely on motivational speakers to transform employees into mindless drones willing to turn a blind eye to injustice, and financial institutions so devoted to optimism that they ignore warning signs of disaster--leading, in part, to financial messes like the one we've been experiencing for the past year.

It's a large topic and Ehrenreich makes some large claims, including the sweeping assertion that much illness in the United States before the twentieth century can be blamed on the prevalence of Calvinism, a complex doctrine she describes with little nuance or sophistication. She is at her best, though, skewering the words and deeds of evangelists of positive thinking, from motivational speakers to prosperity preachers to corporate managers, whose doctrines place the blame for any misfortune firmly at the feet of the victim. For instance, Ehrenreich quotes motivational author and speaker Rhonda Byrne's responding to mass devastation by stating that "disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are 'on the same frequency as the event.'"

I'm sure Barbara Ehrenreich has never met a colleague of mine who insists that "if you think you have good luck, then you will." I have never considered myself particularly lucky, so the fact that I have cancer while my lucky colleague does not provides anecdotal evidence supporting his claim. If only I'd devoted more time to thinking that I have good luck, maybe that nasty carcinoma would have left me alone! My fault entirely.

In fact, Ehrenreich is at her most devastating in the chapter detailing her own struggle with breast cancer more than a decade ago. While researching her condition and treatment options, Ehrenreich felt increasingly isolated. "No one among the bloggers and book writers seemed to share my sense of outrage over the disease and the available treatments," she explains; moreover, when she expressed her anger among groups of cancer patients, she was reviled for failing to focus on the positive.

"Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease: the diagnosis may be disastrous, but there are those cunning pink rhinestone angel pins to buy," she adds. Assailed by pink ribbons, pink pajamas, pink teddy bears, and relentlessly cheery rhetoric, Ehrenreich rails against the tendency of the breast-cancer culture to infantilize women. She describes a tote bag full of items to help women fight cancer, including hand lotion, a pink satin pillowcase, and crayons. "Possibly the idea was that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind for enduring the prolonged and toxic treatments," writes Ehrenreich, but "Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars."

If positive thinking is the problem, the solution, insists, Ehrenreich, is not negative thinking but critical thinking: the ability to look at the real world armed with a skeptical eye and the full use of the intellect, to be enriched by the wisdom of others without buying into mindless groupthink. Devotees of positive thinking spend too much time immersed within their own heads, she claims, and too little working to change those nasty negative aspects of life that result in injustice. She ends with a call to action: "The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world. Build up the levees, get food to the hungry, find the cure, strengthen the 'first responders'! We will not succeed in all these things, certainly not all at once, but--if I may end with my own personal secret of happiness--we can have a good time trying."

Literally literary

I'm a bit befuddled, metaphysically and scientifically and philosophically and poetically, by a statement I encountered while doing research for my MLA paper. In "Wright's Lyricism" (Southern Review 1991), Nathan A. Scott says this about James Wright's poem "A Blessing": "in this moment in which the frontier line between nature and the human order is wholly transcended the spirit of the visitor literally flowers."

He is referring to the final lines of the poem:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Now let's just ignore Scott's overlooking that small but important word "if," and let's not be distracted by the fact that a body from which the "I" has "stepped out" is what we call a corpse. What I can't get past is Scott's assertion that in this poem, "the spirit of the visitor literally flowers."

We've all heard of or perhaps experienced a metaphorical flowering of the spirit, but if a spirit flowered--literally--right in front of me, I do not know how I would recognize the phenomenon. What does a literally flowering spirit look like? What, for that matter, does a literal spirit look like? How is it possible to say that a literal flowering is occuring in an entity that we cannot see or touch or even clearly define?

Marianne Moore wants poets to create "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," but Nathan Scott wants to plant a literal garden in which metaphysical entities flower. I'd like to get my hands on some of those seeds.

Friday poetry challenge: plunging into the abyss

Just for fun, I've been trying to pinpoint the most boring moment in what may well have been the most boring week of my life. Since last Friday afternoon, I have left the house only to go on solitary walks or, once, to pay a brief visit to the cancer center. Except for my radiation guru, a nurse, and a few strangers in the waiting room, the only human being I've encountered face-to-face all week has been my husband, who is not boring but is often quite busy. I've worn virtually the same boring clothes every day, eaten the same boring leftovers, and puttered through the same boring afternoons, but without a doubt, the most boring moment of the week, the veritable abyss of boredom, occurred when I forgot to take any reading material along to the cancer center:

Reading the Room

Exam table, chairs, and a small rolling stool--
but no book.
Cabinets, drawers, a neat counter and sink--
but no book.
A colorful torso, plastic organs exposed--
but no book.
Time magazine dating from 2008--
but no book.
Time ticking on with sublime unconcern--
but no book.
Darkness, soft breaths, and somnolent snores--
but still no book.

Can anyone possibly write anything more boring than that? Give it a try: verse in any form describing your abyss of boredom.

Feeling the heat

The morning cup of tea is generally a soothing ritual, gently easing me out of lingering drowsiness and into the waking world. This morning, on the other hand, my tea jerked me to alertness: one sip and my lips started to tingle and burn.

It wasn't the tea--a harmless infusion of Moroccan Mint--and it wasn't the temperature. It was the mug.

Why would a mug make my lips burn? For the same reason our house smells piquant and my husband's hands are dangerous: yesterday we transformed a pile of hot peppers into a hot pepper sauce that suffused the entire house with a wonderfully hot tangy fruity smell that could make your eyes water if you got too close.

My husband prepped all the peppers (wearing gloves, which didn't prevent his hands from burning and spreading the burn everywhere they wandered) and washed up afterward, dumping some other dishes in with the peppery pots. Everything that came into contact with that dishwater still simmers with the heat of habaneros.

I supervised the process in between online teaching tasks, tasting the concoction and telling him when to add more salt, more vinegar, a dash of sugar. The result is an amazingly lethal but delicious hot sauce...and hot hands and a hot mug and who knows what else?

We made enough hot sauce to last for months, so even on the coldest, bleakest days of winter, long after the pepper taste has faded from my tea mug, we'll still be feeling the heat.

The electronic garden

I was out in the meadow admiring the play of wind through the leaves of the sycamore trees along the creek, but I was haunted by a feeling of deja vu. The subtly shifting shapes and colors, the random movements of leaves in the wind created a familiar picture: it looked like something I'd seen recently, something I'd encountered often, something quite close by.

It looked like a screen-saver.

When wind moving through sycamore leaves starts looking like a screen-saver, it's time to close the laptop.

I'll admit that my laptop computer has been spending way too much time on my lap this week. I've been following online discussions, posting electronic assignments, and commenting on students' work, which involves a lot of sitting and clicking, sitting and clicking, sitting and clicking in front of the screen. As much as I enjoy the insights my students bring to online activities, the whole click-wait-type-wait-repeat routine is just boring. It's much more fun to wander around engaging a room full of students in discussion of interesting literature--to watch the ideas waft through the room like a breeze--than to sit on the sofa going click-wait-type-wait repeat all morning long.

After lunch, laptop fatigue finally sent me outside the house, where I hoped the perfect fall weather would blow the cobwebs out of my brain. I walked by the creek, looked at the fall leaves, watched a red-tailed hawk wheeling above the meadow, and then noticed the sycamore leaves shimmering in the gentle wind, reminding me of a screen-saver and taking my thoughts back to my laptop computer.

If I can't escape the machine in the garden, perhaps I'll move the garden inside the machine. I'll catch that image and imprison it in prose so it can linger inside my laptop long after the last leaf has fallen.

Yawn

Is it possible to write about boredom without being boring?

The careful writer knows that boredom is both friend and enemy. A reader bored with life seeks refuge in a book--but a reader finding boredom in a book tosses the book aside and returns to real life.

The writer sifts and sorts the material of everyday life to engage the mind of this easily distracted reader, gliding past the dull spots or transforming them into epic drama as Joyce did in Ulysses. If the mere act of walking down the street can evoke the terrors of Scylla and Charybdis, then boredom has been banned from the book.

Nevertheless boredom is a common experience, filling huge chunks of anyone's ordinary life but falling quickly out of memory. Over time, boredom becomes a blank, leaving no apparent mark on the mind.

How can I turn that blank into something memorable? How can I recreate for readers the experience of boredom without violating the essence of boredom? Let's face it: if I can succeed in making boredom interesting, then it's just not boring anymore.

So is it possible to write about boring without being interesting?

The early bird catches the call

The phone started ringing at 6 a.m. today and rang six times before 7--but that's better than yesterday, when the calls started at 5 and kept on into midmorning. With all kinds of germs invading the county schools, the resident substitute teacher is in high demand. If my husband could clone himself, he could teach in eight classrooms this morning--but he'll have his hands full filling just one.

Sometimes he gets no sub calls for days or weeks at a time, and then we have weeks like this, when the calls start in the evening and continue early the next morning. Fortunately, most of the schools in the county now use automated calls and there's no need to be polite to the robo-voice that interrupts your dreams at 5 a.m. But my husband is always polite, even when he's talking to a machine. It would never occur to him to drag a caller into whatever nightmare the call might have interrupted. That's what makes him a better person than I am...and that's why he's in charge of answering the phone when it rings at 5 a.m.

Taste of summer in the middle of fall

We went out to the garden yesterday afternoon to pick peppers and dig sweet potatoes in advance of last night's frosty weather, and we discovered a last lonely watermelon hiding amongst the sweet potato vines. It was small but sturdy and ripe and delicious, so we enjoyed a taste of summer in the midst of autumn chill.

This has been without a doubt the most productive garden we've ever grown. The remaining plants look pretty droopy right now, but the peppers are still flowering and would continue to produce if the weather would let them, and we still have plenty of beets and other root crops in the ground. They don't mind a little frost, but we'll need to pull them before the first hard freeze. The okra and tomato plants have withered and the zucchini onslaught is, thankfully, thoroughly done, but we still have some cabbages and brussels sprouts out there, although the sprouts seem a bit puny.

Today I'll roast some sweet potatoes alongside a pork loin and serve it with watermelon on the side. It's an unconventional menu, but the watermelon will allow us to carry a bit of summer's sunshine into the autumn chill.

Solitary confinement or protective custody?

Because my immune system is hobbling around on crutches just at the moment when all kinds of nasty germs are aggressively invading the area, I've been working on a plan to stay away from campus all week. I have three goals:

1. Stay healthy. (Or at least avoid getting more unhealthy.)
2. Provide meaningful learning experiences for students in all three classes.
3. Keep up with paperwork associated with grading and advising.

This is actually a pretty good week to try this kind of experiment: no exams, no papers, no drafts due--just a handful of homework assignments. I had already arranged online activities for my Monday and Tuesday classes (to allow me time to recover from Friday's chemotherapy), so I just need to arrange meaningful activities for two classes on Wednesday, one on Thursday, and two on Friday. I've got plans in place now for all but three class sessions, so I'm well on the way.

To achieve goal 3, I'll need to retrieve a book and advising folders from my office as well as whatever mail might have piled up in my box. I'll be in town for a doctor's appointment Tuesday afternoon, and one of my colleagues has already agreed to collect the things I need from my office and meet me in the parking lot to hand them over.

As to staying healthy, the key will be simply staying home. Until my white blood cells get back on their feet, I'll be pursuing the pleasures of solitude--for my own protection, of course.

Interesting timing, since this week my postcolonial class will be considering the fine line between protection and imprisonment in Salman Rushdie's Shame. Hey, maybe that could be Friday's online discussion topic...by then I'll be ready to break out of this joint.

I hate the word "relatable"

Suppose I relate to my brother, to whom I am related by blood, a tale about one of our relations with whom we have had a sometimes rocky relationship. Would it be accurate to call that story "relatable"?

I don't know. In fact I'm not entirely certain what "relatable" is supposed to mean, despite the number of times I see it in student papers. Lately my freshman writers have been evaluating the credibility of essays they've read, and no matter how often I urge them to consider the author's credentials, the presence of bias, the essay's tone, and the reliability of evidence, a handful of students insist on basing their critiques entirely on whether they find the essay "relatable."

Now there are many types of relationships we can have with a piece of writing: we can find it amusing, engaging, annoying, intriguing; an essay might challenge us to stretch our thinking skills or send us digging in the dictionary. But that's not the kind of relationship my students are talking about. When I press them to explain what they mean by "relatable," they mean the essay deals with familiar ideas and uses accessible language. In other words, they apply their term of highest praise only to writing that feels comfy as an old sofa.

But if they value only writing that reinforces what they already know, why bother paying all that money to go to college? I wish I could find a way to convey to my students the passion for engaging with unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable ideas, the joy of encountering words and sentences that make them re-read and re-think and reach for the dictionary--and then find ways to adapt those new ideas and words within their own writing.

That's the kind of reading I could relate to. But please don't ask me to call it "relatable."

Friday poetry challenge: seize the day

I've been reading Omar Khayyam this week (or Edward Fitzgerald channeling Omar Khayyam) and noticing how well his carpe diem attitude describes my daily life. I mean, just look at his most memorable lines:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Make a few minor substitutions and here's my day in a nutshell:

An iPod singing verses in my ear,
An IV drip, hospital food--and there
I sit absorbing chemotherapy.
O, cancer center! Let me out of here!

It's just uncanny how presciently Fitzgerald/Khayyam described my mundane activities! Perhaps yours too. Today's challenge: take a passage from a well-known poem and alter it to describe an ordinary day in your life. Are you regretting The Doughnut Not Taken? Stopping to Buy Buds on a Snowy Evening? Raking Whitman's Leaves off Grass? Tell all about it--in verse.

Publication and progress

This morning I accomplished something I haven't even attempted since July: I submitted an essay to a publication. It wasn't a long researched essay and it wasn't a peer-reviewed academic journal, but still: I sent some writing out there into the real world and now all I have to do is wait.

One of my great frustrations this semester has been my inability to make progress on some major writing and research projects. I've gathered all kinds of great material and I've put together extensive notes, some drafts of essays that just need to be revised and sent out, and even some finished conference papers that need to be expanded before they can be submitted to journals, but until this week, I haven't made one iota of progress on any of it since I sent a revised article to an academic journal in July. Information and ideas have continued to flow in, but with no output, the pipes get clogged.

I've got to get my writing and research back on track, but cancer treatment slows me down so much that I quail before the bigger projects. So this week I've tackled some small ones. The short essay I sent out today has been lingering in my "in progress" file for months awaiting just a final tweaking. If it gets accepted it won't count for much on my vita, but sending it out made me feel as if I'm still part of the publishing world.

And also this week I've been doing some research toward the paper I'll present at MLA in December, and I've been mulling over ideas even when I don't have the energy to write them down. I could easily back out of my panel if I wanted to, but giving a paper at MLA is a goal beckoning me forward to the time when I can go back to being just an academic instead of an academic battling cancer.

I have two more small projects in my "in progress" file and I hope to tackle them next week, provided I don't get steamrollered by side effects of tomorrow's chemotherapy. My oncologist says that chemotherapy causes my body to try to flush all those chemicals out of my system, so now I'm doing some intensive writing therapy to flush some essays out of my files. Both treatments make immense demands on my body and mind, but both also lead to progress toward important goals. The progress may be small and slow and difficult, but it's important to feel as if I'm finally getting somewhere.

And when I get there, you'd better believe I'll put it in writing.

Bravo for BRAvo

A bra made of pop-top tabs looked like chain mail and one covered with pennies looked like armor. A bra called "Safety Ore Bust" was made of hard hats, while a bra made of glass was called "Fragile--Handle with Care."

The BRAvo art challenge (read about it here) inspired creative people to pursue a safety theme, encouraging women to protect their, um, assets. Another common theme was hope--for a cure for breast cancer or for survival for sufferers. Bras were decorated in memory of women who had died of the disease or in honor of others who survive. An animal-print bra embellished with dog bones was titled "Fetch a Cure," and a bra covered with pink Hershey's Kisses was called "Kisses for the Cure." An elaborate feathered bra surmounted by a delicate stuffed doll was called "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" and accompanied by the Emily Dickinson poem.

The decorated bras at the BRAvo opening were impressive, but I was even more impressed by the number of people who came out on a rainy Friday night to look at bras, listen to terrific music, eat good food (including a bra-shaped cake!), and raise money for breast cancer research. My cancer-kicking posse was out in force, including the physician's assistant whose insistence that I get further testing probably saved my life and my cheerful oncologist and his lovely wife, the creative mind behind "Mind Your Melons." Friends and colleagues and cancer survivors crowded the gallery, while presiding over the event was my former student, Joy Frank-Collins, whose inspiration brought all these people together to gawk at bras both bizarre and beautiful.

Cancer is an ugly disease, but when the desire for a cure brings together so many talented people devoted to hope and safety--well, it's a thing of beauty.

Nearly normal

The weather has turned nippy and damp this morning, but yesterday was probably the last warm afternoon of the season, with clear blue skies and just a flutter of wind--a perfect day for an afternoon walk. I've made it all the way up the big horrible hill twice this week, so I thought it might be time to walk the loop, a feat I haven't attempted since my surgery in June. Could I manage six miles of hilly terrain? That's what we set out to see.

The last time I walked the loop was the week before my daughter's wedding, when she and two of her bridesmaids joined me and Hopeful on the trek. This time my husband walked with me, and I was glad for the company because several times I might have turned around if he hadn't been there to encourage me. The uphills are still difficult, but once past those parts I did fine--and once you get past a certain point, there's nothing to do but just keep walking. So that's what we did. All the way around. Woo-hoo!

I feel almost sort of nearly normal today, but my next chemotherapy treatment is scheduled for Friday, so I'll get a few more chances to walk before entering into awfulness and then it may be weeks before I'm strong enough to get up that hill again. Still, it's good to know that the hill can be conquered. It stands there like a beacon, a challenge, a promise that one day life will be normal again.

For now, thought, I'll accept almost sort of nearly normal.

Chicken run

Why did the chicken cross the road, race across the meadow, run into the bushes, and finally dash up the creek?

To get away from the Hopeful hound, of course. A more interesting question, though, is what the chicken was doing in the road to begin with.

It started with a box. Hopeful and I were out on a walk yesterday morning when we encountered a broken cardboard box in the middle of the road, just where a box with a few feathers in the bottom ought not to be. That's odd, I thought, but I shoved it over to the shoulder and walked on.

We crossed the county road bridge and started up the hill, a quiet quarter-mile stretch of road with no houses or other buildings in sight--but the quiet was shattered by the squawking of a chicken that came running out of the bushes, crossed the road, and dashed down into the meadow toward the creek, with Hopeful in close pursuit. I tried to make her stop, but nothing I can say to my dog is nearly as interesting as a chicken fleeing into the bushes.

The squawking stopped and Hopeful immediately returned to my side, a few white feathers sticking out of the side of her mouth. I saw no other sign of the chicken.

Well, that's over, I thought--until another chicken burst out of the bushes just ahead and went running down toward the same meadow. This time I managed to keep Hopeful by my side. She seemed a little annoyed by the feathers stuck in her mouth, but I wasn't about to help her extract them.

As we walked on up the hill, I wondered whether I ought to do something about the chickens. A few of our neighbors keep chickens, but these didn't look like lowly laying hens. They looked like show chickens, like some child's precious 4-H project--certainly not the sort of chicken you expect to see wandering along country roads. I wondered whether I ought to conduct a daring chicken rescue.

But how? I'm just strong enough right now to walk up the big horrible hill, but running cross-country after swiftly-moving chickens isn't my area of expertise. Do I have what it takes to chase chickens through the bracken?

And suppose I caught them--then what? How would I carry two big angry chickens a half mile back to the house with Hopeful's help?

And then where would I put them to keep them safe while seeking their owner? Suppose I managed to stash two panicky chickens in the garage: when my husband came back from the Farmers' Market and stopped to unload his gear into the garage, the chickens would come bursting out at him, making their escape to freedom much like those chickens following Mel Gibson in the movie Chicken Run.

I would have to put a sign on the garage door: "Beware of Chickens." It would almost be worth the effort just to see my husband's face.

But first I would have to catch the chickens, and that would mean making sure Hopeful didn't catch them first. The dog stayed near my side until I turned around and started coming back down the hill, and then she dashed off ahead toward the place where we had last seen the second chicken. I called and whistled and brandished a doggy treat, but nothing I could do would deter her from pursuing that second chicken.

By the time I caught up with her, the chicken was up to its knees (do chickens have knees?) in the creek, dashing frantically upstream with Hopeful in close pursuit. I called and whistled to no avail. Dog and chicken squawked, barked, and splashed right out of my sight.

I turned for home. Hopeful followed about 20 minutes later. I interrogated her about the chickens, but her lips were sealed, with not a feather in evidence. Do I really want to know what happened to the chickens, or would I prefer ignorance?

Am I my chicken's keeper?

Or when it comes to running after panicky poultry, am I just a little too chicken?

Keeping the story straight

Last night at the BRAvo show, my oncologist commented on how hard he works to keep his patients' stories straight. My ears perked up at this, because much of my scholarly research and writing has focused on the power of narrative to bring a measure of healing to communities torn asunder. I look at Holocaust literature, postcolonial literature, African-American literature--literature produced by peoples violently disconnected from family, place, or heritage--and I examine the stories these communities construct to restore connection to a shattered past.

Now I wonder: how much does cancer treatment consist of helping patients pick up the pieces of their shattered life stories and reassemble them in a meaningful manner? The cancer story is a genre unto itself, thriving online and in popular books and magazines, and I know that writing about my experience with cancer helps me make sense of a senseless situation. I don't have much control over what's going on in my body these days, but at least I can contain my cancer within a box of words.

So I know that turning cancer into a coherent narrative is an important element in my healing, but now I wonder what role doctors play in helping patients understand and assemble their new stories. A cancer diagnosis introduces a new plot twist, violently cutting narrative threads and bringing the ending into question, but one thing I really appreciate about the cancer center is that they don't view patients as bundles of symptoms to be processed through the system as quickly as possible but rather as whole people whose diseases present not just intellectual challenges but visceral and emotional and spiritual tests as well. Doctors who see their patients as complex stories rather than disconnected symptoms and who work hard to keep those stories straight could provide the impetus the patient needs to assemble a new and meaningful story in the midst of incomprehensible disease and discomfort.

Besides, I've always been a sucker for a good story...doctors who care about my story make me want to hang around to see how the story ends.

Friday poetry challenge: just testing

I'd rather take a test myself than watch a room full of students struggle with a test I've written:

Susurration of
pencils on paper. Eyeballs
roaming. Answers--where?

On the other hand, some tests I force myself to take even though the process is painful:

Needles stick, blood flows.
I await results. Brief pain
brings lasting relief.

Now it's your turn: verse of any kind about testing situations.

They're playing our song!

Some students make me laugh and some make me cry and some make me very, very proud to have played any part in their education. This week a former student made me do all three at once.

Two weeks ago I challenged readers to write a theme song for my cancer-kicking posse (read it here), and Joy Frank-Collins wrote some terrific lyrics. Now those lyrics have been set to music. You can hear a demo track by visiting Joy's MySpace page and clicking on "Kicking Cancer's Butt."

Tomorrow night Joy will preside over opening night of the BRAvo project, for which more than 60 artsy-craftsy folk have submitted decorated bras that will be displayed at a local art gallery and then auctioned off to raise money for breast cancer research (read about it here). I've seen a few of the submissions, including a watermelon-themed bra titled "Mind Your Melons" and bras decorated with buttons, feather, pennies, and other materials both exotic and ordinary.

Some people fight cancer with drugs and some with money, some with hot-glue guns and feathers and some by writing songs. I'm just proud to know someone who can do it all at once.

Hats off!

Yesterday while walking in the woods far from prying eyes, I took off my hat and let the wind whip through my hair--er, stubble. It felt great.

For six weeks now I've been covering my bald head with a hat or scarf pretty much all the time--on cold nights I even wear a soft cap to bed. Today I'm wearing a lovely scarf an old friend brought back from Turkey years ago; yesterday I wore a silk scarf a colleague recently brought back from China, and last week I wore a fall-color scarf another old friend brought back from Japan two decades ago. The world comes together to cover my head.

The campus seems comfortable with my colorful scarves, but I still get a few funny looks when I'm out in the community. On Monday I made the mistake of walking into Wal-Mart while crowned with a brilliant purple scarf. You know you're in trouble when Wal-Mart shoppers treat you like a sideshow freak.

At the cancer center last week I saw a beautiful bald woman, tall and lean as a runway model and elegant too, and I admired her ability to boldly walk around without a hair on her head, but I'm just not comfortable exposing my baldness to the world. It feels naked and it looks--well, with my short stubble next to my husband's tight curls, we could easily be mistaken for Velcro.

But yesterday I sweated pretty hard walking halfway up the big horrible hill and then I wanted to cool down a bit, so I doffed my cap. No one was there to see except Hopeful, and she didn't flinch. The sun and warm wind felt refreshing, and my head felt free.

But that doesn't mean I'll be exposing my stubble to the world anytime soon. It's one thing to feel free and naked while walking in the woods and another thing entirely in Wal-Mart. I wouldn't want to risk getting arrested for indecent exposure!

Mid-class epiphanies

Some disconcerting epiphanies struck while my students were working on their midterm exam this morning:

I've asked them to answer a question to which I don't have a good answer myself.

The total number of points available on the midterm is 101 and not 100 as I'd intended.

I really don't have a good remedy for wandering eyes.

Midterm today, midterm Thursday, midterm Friday, plus the big pile of essays from last Friday's class...what have I done to myself?

These pants looked black this morning! Why are they suddenly navy blue?

The only show in town

A commenter on this morning's post wants to know how I learned to know my birds, which is a good question without an easy answer. The short answer is this: when birds are your primary source of entertainment, you learn birds. But how?

Five years ago when we moved out to the woods, I was pretty ignorant about birds. I knew robins, of course, and the more common colorful birds like bluejays and cardinals, but not much else. Our housewarming party was visited by a brilliant little yellow bird and a blue one that certainly wasn't a bluejay, but they didn't have an invitation and no one knew their names.

One day soon after that I was in the bedroom ironing, my least favorite household chore, and I suddenly realized that if I put a birdfeeder outside the bedroom window, I'd have something to look at while ironing. I recalled that there was an old feeder out in the shed somewhere, so I found it, filled it, and hung it just outside the window. In the time it took me to walk back inside and look out the window, half a dozen goldfinches were perched on it.

I was hooked.

We started shopping for more feeders and set up a feeding station within easy view of our big front window. Our house is located in an ideal situation for birdwatching, providing a welcoming environment to a variety of different types of birds: halfway up a hillside, with woods, open fields, and a creek nearby. Despite this, we really hadn't seen many species before we put up feeders. The feeders flushed the birds out of hiding and brought them into plain view.

Identifying them became the next challenge. We keep bird books near the front window, and at first we would set small challenges for ourselves: okay, here are three smallish birds with gray on their backs, but how are they different? The tufted one is a titmouse, the gray-blue one a nuthatch, the tiny one with black flashes a chickadee. Next, what about all those little brown birds? It took a while, but soon we easily recognized the more common visitors.

But we also had help--and a little luck. The first time my colleague from the biology department came out for a visit, we were walking in the upper meadow when we happened upon a pair of shy indigo buntings making a nest, a sight we'd certainly never seen before and may never see again. Then on the way back down the hill her ears perked up and a huge smile broke out. "Orioles!" she said, scanning the tops of the tall sycamores along the creek to find the flash of orange and black. She recalled as a child spending hours on end trying to track down the source of the oriole's rare and lovely call, but she hadn't heard one in decades. We felt blessed.

Five years later, we're still learning. I only recently figured out how to spot the phoebes, which suggests that either they haven't visited the feeders in the past or else I just confused them with titmice. (There's a titmouse perched on a houseplant on the porch not two feet from my face right now, looking in the window as if trying to identify what it sees. Are they as curious about us as we are about them?) I still can't reliably distinguish the sparrows of various species, especially the females, which all look like pretty much the same little brown bird. And sometimes a migrating bird will stop by, challenging us to reach for the bird book again.

But it really comes back to my first answer: we live in the woods without television and with very bad radio reception; for entertainment, we have birds, butterflies, wildflowers, trees, and sometimes small woodland creatures. When birds are the only show in town, you learn birds.

Just don't ask me to identify the stars of any of the new fall television shows. I'm not familiar with their plumage.

Saturday morning census

At first light I saw four chickadees at the big feeder and two female goldfinches on the thistle sock. Then a pair of titmice and some nuthatches. More finches. Two chickadees. A pair of plump phoebes. Another nuthatch. Two chickadees, then three, then two finches on the thistle sock and one at the feeder.

A female cardinal arrives--the first bigger bird. Four female goldfinches. (I guess the males are sleeping in while the females catch the worm, or the thistle seed as the case may be.) Mr. Cardinal arrives along with another nuthatch, a few more finches, a titmouse.

Ooh, a big beautiful red-bellied woodpecker perches, barred back looking elegant next to the muted plumage of the titmice. Now two female cardinals and a mourning dove, a pair of chickadees, half a dozen goldfinches. Looks like the males have finally dragged themselves out of bed--er, nest.

Two nuthatches, three chickadees, a titmouse and a mourning dove compose a study in gray and white at the big feeder while the brighter goldfinches attack the thistle sock. Here's Mrs. Cardinal again looking prim and matronly but for the orange lipstick. Six finches now crowd the thistle sock, one more at the big feeder.

Everyone clears out for a moment and then a male cardinal arrives, then a phoebe, a nuthatch, three or four chickadees moving too quickly to count. A mourning dove pecks at the ground beneath the feeders. Another male cardinal arrives but the first one chases him away. The air is perfectly still and quiet as the sun climbs higher above the ridge.

A pair of titmice and some goldfinches show up, plus a big fat mourning dove. A solitary goldfinch sits at the end of the bar looking very pleased with himself. A titmouse grabs a sunflower seed from the feeder and then perches on the bar to pound the seed open. Then they're all gone again, leaving the feeder abandoned.

It won't stay that way long. They'll be back--along with bluejays, downy and hairy woodpeckers, various sparrows, purple finches, the occasional flicker or bunting. Soon we'll start seeing juncos again. (Which makes me wonder: when did the towhees leave?) The hummingbirds are gone for the winter, but as long as the birdseed lasts, there's never a dull moment at the feeders.

Friday poetry challenge: warning signs

Word just in that the University of Florida's emergency preparedness web site includes procedures for surviving a zombie attack (read it here). This calls for poetry:

If his eyeballs are staring, some bloodstains he's wearing,
And he looks like he's one hurting hombre,
Call the health center, please, and report this disease,
For your roommate just might be a zombie.

Now it's your turn: verse in any form providing procedures for surviving unusual plagues or pestilences.

Bulldog tough?

On my bulletin board hangs a pink card featuring a drawing of a feisty-looking bulldog and the following message: "Tina was so tough, her poodle skirt had a bulldog on it."

If I had a poodle skirt I'd put a bulldog on it, but that doesn't mean I'm succeeding at being that tough. My toughness has definitely been tested this week and pushed to the breaking point a few times, but somehow I'm still standing.

Make that sitting. As much as I prefer to wander about and wave my arms while teaching, I've been doing a lot of sitting down in class lately. I try to reserve all my energy for mental alertness, but even there I wonder whether I'm slipping. I occasionally lose track of what I'm saying in the middle of a sentence, but that's nothing new--I've been experiencing occasional mental slippage for years. I just don't have any way to gauge whether the slippage is turning into a landslide.

This week I've employed several new techniques for reserving energy: taking the world's slowest elevators even to go up one floor, resting my eyes while my students do group work, parking in the handicapped spot near my office. I felt a little guilty about using my temporary handicapped permit to fill a space that someone else might really need, but if the inability to walk across the room without pausing to catch my breath is not a disability, what is?

And this week at my darkest moments I've wondered whether I'm crazy to keep teaching through treatment. Wouldn't I be doing everyone a big favor if I spent the next few months sitting at home looking at birds and going slowly but inexorably insane?

Last night--or early this morning, if you want to get technical about it--I was sitting in the dark eating instant mashed potatoes (because that's what I can eat right now, even though it belongs in the same food group as wallpaper paste) and wondering whether I can finish the task I've tackled. I know I'm tough, but am I tough enough?

The mashed potatoes must have helped, though, because I woke up this morning sore and stiff but energetic, ready to take on the new day. This would be the perfect day to wear that bulldog skirt, as long as the bulldog doesn't mind a little nap in the middle of the afternoon.