My Wobbly Bicycle, 54

Tonight I brought dinner to Jerry at the rehab place where he’s staying (Do you have any IDEA how badly some of our elders are fed in these places?). We watched an episode of HGTV (yes), and I cried when the man with five children whose wife had died sold his house so he could send the children to college.

Trap # 1: the word depression. It only confirms itself. At the moment, okay, instead I’ll say the atmosphere around me is blue-black, and seems like a bass cello; no, I’d say an oboe, except that I’d see Sonia the duck in Peter and the Wolf.  So like me, smiling at the duck while feeling like, well, shit.

Depression is a worthy word, though: a sinking. As if gravity has a double-hold. It takes longer to do everything, and I’m clumsy because of these weights attached to my spirit.  Okay, Jerry’s out of surgery, I got Wally-the-cat and me home, while the ambulance brought Jerry to rehab in Traverse City. He’s been there over a week now, due to come home Friday. He’s doing great, better than we would have imagined. Meanwhile, I have my six months’ oncology checkup on Friday. My poor oncologist. He does his best to save people, and what does he get for it? Fear. As if he were the Wolf in the aforementioned Prokokiev story, fangs dripping.

I’m weary. There’s been so much strain around Jerry’s surgery, getting it planned, making it happen, getting to Ann Arbor, spending the week there, then home in the snow. Bringing him food  Plus several secondary health things that have had to be dealt with, one being that I’m getting a steroid shot tomorrow for the pinched nerve (yes, that’s what it was) in my lumbar area. And it’s a week from Christmas.

Trap #2: trying to identify a reason or reasons. If I only hadn’t had to do this, or if only that hadn’t happened….Who can say? Who knows what if this, or what if that?  

I mean for the Wobbly Bicycle to be kind of philosophical, universal, thoughtful, and all I’m doing is describing how I feel. I'm wondering WHEN Plath,  Sexton, Snodgrass, Lowell--the poets that got stuck with the label "Confessional"-- actually started those poems, if they wrote anything in medias res. If they did, I'll bet they woke up the next day, wadded them up and started over, with better sense.

Shall I post this? I’ll probably regret it.  What happens is, you're down and the mechanisms you usually use to present a face to the world collapse. So you either curl up in a corner to avoid exposure, or you say more, or different, from what you meant to.  

However, Wally the Buddha cat says, “No writing is wasted.” He always says the right thing.  And Sonia the duck says, "What the quack? You want a good story without tension and worry and sadness? Not happening."

My Wobbly Bicycle, 32

Does anyone talk about POST-cancer-treatment? You step onto the moving walkway, put your head down, pass all the Stations of the Cross (to mix metaphors), and suddenly the voice-over says to watch your step, the walkway is ending. Feet flat on the dispassionate floor.

You’ve been stoic; you’ve looked for humor in all this. When it began, you girded your loins and took each day, horrible or not, as it came. Then it seemed you were to UN-gird your loins and be as normal as possible. Tired, yes, you knew that would be the case. Very tired for a long time.

But I did not expect to feel something akin to post-traumatic stress. I feel like wrapping myself in a blanket. It feels as if it’s my body more than my mind that’s reacting--but who can know the dancer from the dance? For half a year, my body’s been almost poisoned to death. It’s been hit day after day with deadly radiation. Of course I registered all this at the time, but part of me was numbed, maybe had to be numbed. Now my body’s waking up, it seems. Holy S---!

It’s been a cool spring, we haven’t been at the cottage much, but even so, I haven’t yet been swimming, and you may know what a game I’ve made in the past of getting in the water as early as possible. I love swimming. But at the moment, the idea of putting on a suit, sliding almost naked into cool water gives me the shivers. I want to sit on the end of the dock in the sun and read a book. (I’ll try to take the plunge this weekend. Water’s 72¸and I’m beginning to feel like a wimp.)

Furthermore, I’m grouchy. Something is grouchy. Irritable. I’ve had enough of stoicism. I have not a sprout of hair, yet, and won’t have enough to blow-dry for months. My long naps mean my days are incredibly short. I’m too tired, anyhow, to meander around down town or head out to my favorite hiking trails. Riding my bike is an idea I entertain but I haven’t yet pulled it (the bike, not the idea) out of the shed.

I’m tired of being looked after, being cared for—I’m basically fiercely independent. Of course, don’t misunderstand me, I still need love and caring for, and I’ve deeply, deeply appreciated it all the while. Still, I long to go off to a mountain cave and hibernate.

I start thinking, okay, I can move on. Then a couple of days ago I was reading, Jerry was watching a ball game, and I decided I wanted to pop some popcorn. We hadn’t done that in ages. So I made a big batch and ate tons of it. In the middle of the night I woke up nauseous, started vomiting and having all the other concomitant gastric miseries. Half the night. Apparently my digestive tract is still too damaged for popcorn.

It’s easy to see what’s going on. I want to be normal and am now measuring myself against that standard. It irks me when I see where I am.

Well, I can read, can’t I? I’ve finished Ali Smith’s Artful, a series of four lectures on artfulness in fiction and poetry that she gave last year at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. They’re brilliantly conceived and incredibly imaginative--a ghost story as a way to experience reading and writing with awareness. 

I read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteritge, liked it more the farther I got into it. It’s, in a way, a series of short stories but then again, not. Olive’s life and marriage thread them together. And you develop a sense of the small town in Maine. Reminds me of Kent Meyers’ wonderful Twisted Tree, organized a bit like that. I’m reading now Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (a gift). I’d read one or two of these essays before, but am enjoying them all a great deal, especially rereading the one about his Iowa workshop with Robert Lowell and John Berryman.

As for what I’m writing, I’m wondering how much this cancer thing will alight in the poems. I have a few in which it’s blatant, but mostly, lately, I find myself wanting to turn elsewhere. I am bored with illness, frankly. My hunch is that this experience, if I’m fortunate enough to survive it, will remain like a boulder in the river of my life, always, by necessity, taken into account in what gets written, even when it’s not recognizable as such.