My Wobbly Bicycle, 153

1. Well, I just haven’t. I haven’t posted in a long while. There’s been a great deal of caretaking around here, although Jerry does everything he can. Yesterday I saw him dragging the dirty clothes basket along behind his walker, making for the laundry room.

2. Have I lost focus? Once I wrote about cancer, but that subject, thank whatever-gods-may-be, is worn out for the time being. I have thought if I use what precious writing energy I have on a post, I won’t have anything left for the poems and essays.

 Yes, but of course energy begets energy. And when has not having anything to say stopped the words? They come out ahead of consciousness, sometimes. They know what they want even when “I” don’t. Aging. Aging and the writer. That subject should keep me busy for a long while. Today the subject is caretaking. There are probably two dozen good blogs about caretaking out there. And books. You don’t need to bother with this blog. However, I hope you do. Breathes there a caretaker with soul so dead that he or she doesn’t sometimes flare with internal anger, doesn’t watch others head out on mountain biking trips and feel jealous? Who doesn’t fantasize living alone, eating toast over the sink instead of bothering to get out breakfast stuff? Who doesn’t stare long minutes out the window at the turning trees? There’s no point in trying to balance that with heart-warming tales of the blessings of sharing hard times, of having a long-time mate that you love, no matter what. The deepening of tenderness and closeness when it’s down to brass tacks. No sense balancing at all. It’s not one or the other, but both.(Above poem is my 100-year-old father's favorite. Thought you might enjoy it.) Things have turned mysterious. First there was Jerry’s hip replacement, then it failed, then it was replaced again. For a short time there was no pain. In the last couple of weeks there is a lot of pain in the area of the sacrum. He’s had steroid injections. No help from that yet. We don’t know exactly what’s pressing on what, but after two major back surgeries, plus the hip surgeries, is there any wonder something’s pressing on something that it shouldn’t be. Can this be remedied? I don’t even know what we’ll have for lunch, much less what will transpire tomorrow. Meanwhile, Jerry’s just celebrated his 78^th birthday. We’ve had to give up our Alaska cruise, which was to be our present to each other. Note to reader: buy trip insurance (we did). We drove up the peninsula to look at trees and gorgeous water, the way old people do, and stopped for lunch along the way. My sister and brother in law picked up dinner for the four of us and brought it to our place. My children and grandchildren travel all over the place. Kelly’s family was in Croatia this spring. Scott’s in Italy right now. Interestingly, I have always been pretty content with a computer, paper, pen, trees, crickets, and water to swim in. I prefer our lake but I can make do with the Y.  There are all sorts of explorations, both interior and exterior. I lean toward the interior, anyhow. The interior has its own cathedrals and canals. In less than two weeks, I’ll have arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus that has tormented me for almost six months (took a while to diagnose).  I’ll be glad to get it fixed, but there’s Jerry, unable to help while I’m hobbling or whatever I’ll be. I mention this because this is how it is when you get old—people’s ailments don’t conveniently take turns. They sometimes come on simultaneously. Meanwhile, I’ve written a couple of essays I’m happy with this year, and more poems, good and bad, than I usually admit to. I tend to pretend I’m a total wuss as a writer. It seems to be my way of clearing the decks for the next thing. AND, the book I wrote with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, has just come out in paperback from Green Writers Press in Vermont. It has a great cover and a new chapter on politics. It’s gotten great response from people who’ve gotten hold of it. I ought to have a book launch!  This needs to be another blog post—the need to publicize when you get older and basically all you want to do is write. 

My Wobbly Bicycle, 53

 “Many years later I understood that because of the privations and the poverty of their lives, Russians in general liked to entertain themselves with misery: they played with it like children, and they were rarely ashamed to be wretched.” That’s from Maksim Gorky’s Childhood, that has just come out in a new translation. This is from the end of Chapter X.  He goes on:

“In the endless tedium of daily life, grief becomes a holiday; a fire’s an entertaining show. On a blank face, even a scratch is a beauty mark.”

Gorky’s childhood was full of yelling, abandonment, drunkenness, beatings and more beatings, and all manner of deprivation. I was reading this last week when Jerry was in the University of Michigan Hospital—(so was I, since I was staying at the hotel inside the hospital).  I was walking down corridors, looking in rooms where people lay alone or with an occasional visitor, and hooked up like Medusa to a tangle of tubes. Others sitting up in bed, surrounded by family, all watching TV and laughing together as if they were having a regular night.  All varieties.

Then I started a new biography of Mozart and made note of these words: “Mozart avoided the noisy and empty fireworks that spoil so many of the violin works of the period. He thought them silly. He said he was ‘no great lover of difficulties for their own sake.’”

I was thinking of how we respond to both our own pain and that of others. Sometimes it seems we’re in love with difficulty for its own sake. Makes a good story afterward. The large scar, the almost-dying, the awful pain.  But that’s when things turn out well. No one falls in love with serious, terrible difficulty.

I have no inclination to talk about last year’s chemo and radiation. I’d just as soon leave it in the past.But each week when I think what to write here, and every time I start a new poem, I’m on the lookout for the glitch, the place where there’s not smooth sailing, where there’s something to work with. Tension. You should see the line of staples down Jerry’s back! But hooray, it looks as if he’s going to be a lot better, the nerves having much more room to breathe. Rising action, climax, denouement.

I’m willing to suspend a good ending, if the details are so intriguing that I’m caught in them, living the uncertainty. I’m willing to lose myself in a character, to see deep into the life, into its inherent ambiguities. But even then I notice there’s always some sort of tension and release, and I suspect that’s because existence itself breathes in and breathes out.  Creation and destruction are not exactly twin poles; they’re simultaneous actions. When the breath sucks in, the abdomen and lungs expand.   When the breath goes out, the ribs and abdomen pull inward.  

I wrote my dissertation a million years ago on the American man of letters, William Dean Howells. I traced patterns of imagery (yes,that long ago!) in four of his best-known novels. I was interested in how a consummate realist uses images. Do they remain realistic? When do they lift off and become metaphor? I found that Howells’ images alternated in an almost regular pattern from the concrete to the metaphorical/symbolic.  (If you want further explanation, I’m likely to lend you my dissertation, so don’t ask!).

In Neurosurgery A corridor where Jerry was, there was in one room a bald woman who just lay there, no visitors that I ever saw.  She didn’t appear to move all day. I looked in as I passed one evening and saw the nurse feeding her. I will never forget the expression on the nurse’s face. She didn’t know anyone was watching. Her face was so full of compassion and tenderness. She could have stuffed food in the woman’s mouth and daydreamed at the same time, or stared out the window. But she was giving that woman all the love she could in that moment.  An absolutely bedrock realistic scene that for me lifted off into a wordless beauty.

That is difficulty and what it can draw forth. That is drama and passion. That is poetry and religion.  That draws forth all the words in the world and stops all words in their tracks.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 50

I could change the name of my blog to Doctors, Ad Seriatim. I’m posting this early because today we're heading downstate, to Ann Arbor, having a pre-op consultation for Jerry’s very-big-deal back surgery on Dec. 3. He’ll be in the hospital for about a week, rehab after that. About six months’ recovery time. Another winter of hunkering down and getting better.

How will this be for us, after last winter? A friend wrote to say how glad she was to see that I feel like relegating cancer to a much lesser position in my posts. The last two, it’s hardly been there. True. I think about it less. Partly, that’s because it’s an integral part of my system, now. You don’t describe how it is brushing your teeth because you do it every day, and unless you find you have a loose tooth, it’s not worth mentioning.

Coming back from chemo and radiation is not unlike returning to the world after, say, a year in a monastery. The world seems fast and energetic. I didn’t realize how small it had grown last winter. I seemed to still DO things—wrote this blog, wrote commentaries for IPR radio, wrote some poems, had a book launch party, spent time with people as often as I could. Nonetheless, my mind was turned in on itself, the way the sick do, gathering its forces to keep on keeping on. 

These days I tire easily. I get overwhelmed even by being in a big store, shelves and shelves of stuff, mental noise.  It’s an interesting quality of tired. Not the old “I’m bushed” kind, the body feeling a bit deliciously tired, worn out from activity. It feels kind of chemical, I’ll call it that for lack of a better description. It feels like a deep inability in the bones to muster the basic elements of aliveness. Maybe it’ll always be this way. My body had a mega-whammy of abuse. Probably I’ll get some better, maybe a lot. Sometimes I’m discouraged, sometimes not.

And I still have pain and weakness in my left hip from some overuse that must have occurred last summer, still trying to improve this with physical therapy.

So now we plunge back into the fray, negotiating the giant U. of Michigan Medical Center and all that implies. Jerry worries how this will be for me. What about him? Last year was difficult for him, too, as you can imagine, and now he’s in for it again, though different.  But it'll all be okay. It'll be okay even when it's not. It's being alive.

 And who can do more than one thing at a time? First this thing, then the next. That’s how it goes. Trouble only feels Huge if I start adding into the mix a bunch of projections and concepts about it. And when I do that, it’s only a problem if I begin blaming myself for doing it!

One-thing-after-the-other is a gift Trouble gives, it looks like. Not as in balancing the scales, not as in “Something good always comes out of it.” There's not a sunny “side” to illness and pain, period. But I see there’s a recalibration, a slowing down, a reconsideration made possible by the slowing down:  What am I, anyway? And—the old question—What am I doing with my one precious life? which maybe ought to be amended to Am I even noticing my one precious life?

I picked out a poem from No Need of Sympathy that seems to be about noticing, both the tangible and the intangible:    

Birdhouse

Remember the year we had bluebirds there?

How they came back the next year, poked their noses

in and changed their minds? After that it was all swallows,

after we knew to clean out the twigs to get the house

ready for renters. Swallows or wrens. Oh, they might

have been wrens, sometimes. They might have been

wrens all along, but I like the word swallow. I think

they were swallows. That tiny slender trilling down

the scale. Wrens sound like their bodies, compact

and insistent. It was good to have either,

and their chicks. Especially their chicks, evident

only by the to-and-fro of the mothers, their fierce

judgments. It was good to have that life greet us

at the corner of the house. Bluebirds, we felt blessed.

They let us know who was in charge: blast, blast, chitter.

Also the color, the royal robes.  But the swallows,

the way they swooped in and out! Who doesn’t love

the word swooped? When they were crossing

to the trees beyond our drive, remember how we’d sit

in our kitchen chairs by the glass doors? It was so

peaceful to watch  that industry, that tiny hope

carrying on, not caring a whit about us.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 49

I am supremely glad to have Keats’ letters. Hemingway’s. Even T. S. Eliot’s. Soon there’ll be no letters from writers to illuminate their work, their thoughts about it and about other writers, and their lives. Saul Bellow’s letters were published a couple of years ago, William Styron’s last year. Maybe the dying gasps.  

I was reading a book review by Mason Currey in the NY Times. He’s more concerned with what the dearth of letter-writing is doing, not to its faithful followers and researchers, but to creative writing itself. He says “Letters were not only a way to stay in touch with colleagues or test out ideas and themes on the page, but also a valuable method of easing into and out of a state of mind where they could pursue more daunting and in-depth writing.”

I think lately the blog is covering some of the same territory. Emails aren’t. I use emails for transactions, mostly.  I even use them to invite people for dinner! What I like about email, being somewhat of a hermit myself, is that it requires less in the way of human connection. It allows me to do a lot of work, make a lot of plans, without having to exchange pleasantries to do it. Is that mean of me? I don’t think so. It protects me from trivia overload. I like very much spending time with people, I hasten to say, but I need space between those times.

As for this blog, I suspected even before I started writing it, that it would be JUST the medium for me, that it would allow me to do what Currey says in his NYT piece—ease in and out of the state of mind where I need to tackle more daunting material. It revs the engine and keeps it idling.

I often tell students that they need to cut the first stanza, or the first few paragraphs, from their work. “That’s just you, warming up,” I tell them. “It’s served its purpose. Now you can get rid of it.”  I don’t want to denigrate the blog to that extent, but writing it does provide a place to put some of the material my head’s swimming with that doesn’t belong in the more formal expressions of poetry or the developed essay.

Granted, letters from one writer to another are more intimate and often more revealing than these bloggy Letters to the World, which, interesting enough, is how Emily Dickinson begins one of her typically intimate poems. (“This is my letter to the world.”)  If you know you’re being read by a lot of people, many of whom you don’t know, you change registers. You’re on stage. This is the loss from the lack of letter-writing. What we gain is “letters” from a whole lot of quite good writers that we might never have gotten to read in our lifetime.

A lot of the best writers I know don’t want anything to do with a blog. Some, like Albert Goldbarth,  hole up, refusing to use a computer at all.  But some are writing blogs. Some of what’s out there is crap, but this is true of what’s in the bookstore, too. You have to sort for yourself.

The risk, for me, of blogging—and I’m sure I share this with other writer-bloggers—is that I’ll get too dependent on instant gratification. Write and “publish” every week. And the time I take to blog I could be using to buckle down to the hard stuff that won’t see the light of day for some time, if ever.

The advantage--another one--is that I am less likely to lose a sense of audience. I don’t think I keep audience in my conscious mind while I’m working, but I need to feel the breath of living beings just outside the perimeter.

Nothing mattered more to my writing life than this blog during my chemo and radiation this year. There are so many therapeutic reasons, of course, why that might have been true, but beyond that, actually the cancer was just another subject, one of burning interest to me. How is that different from what I’ve been doing all my writing life—coming to whatever burning interest presented itself to see how it might work itself out in words?

That it wanted to express itself in the prose of a blog might have been a measure of how prosaic it all felt, at the moment. The Treatment Mill causes the mind to slog through sucking mud, nothing of the lyric in it. After the fact, the lyric, the music, may have permission to return.  

My “Papers” are housed at the University of Delaware. What about these blog posts? What shall we do with them?  They’re my rapid-fire thoughts, as polished as a letter I might send to someone, another writer, whose own work I respect enough to want to express myself with care, even if more fleetingly than in the poems and essays.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 47

Some people have told me that the poems in my new book, No Need of Sympathy, feel like premonitions. Did something in me know, when  I wrote those poems, that I was in danger already? But consider how much poetry is about love and death. Okay, I’m not dead. But the very word cancer sounds the echo of mortality.

All thoughts, all images, if you stay with them long enough, hit bedrock. Love and death. We're drawn to bedrock. We almost can’t help ourselves from slowing down or stopping at a car crash, even when we can be of no use there. We’re looking for something we probably won’t find until the moment of our own death. A clarity, a sense of what this life is, at its root.

Love: the same. We start a poem by loving a leaf, or a vase, or a moment, an emotion of the moment. But, oh, what if we can't hold on to it? The more love, the more awareness of what its absence feels like. If we stay with the beloved without flinching, it leads us to where love and loss, love and death, are interchangeable. Don’t ask me what that means. It just feels that way.

I was looking through my book to see which poems might ring as premonitions. I don’t know. . . How about “I Take the Boys Up the Eiffel Tower”? In the midst of this excitement, getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looking over all of Paris, the thought of death takes center stage. The leap from the Towers, the moving far from the details of life we’ve held dear, the death of the bees, the polar bears, my fear of falling at Niagara Falls. We’re all suspended, swaying, if we pay attention.

If we could see time, supposedlyit would look like a tesseract, beams slidingalong vectors, sideways and inside,difficult as the leap outfrom the Trade Center Towers—you only get there by releasing a death-holdon the last frame you’ve got.                              We are on the wayup, late in the day, sun stripingthe cross-girders, the boys and Ion the second-level elevator to the top,crammed in like cattle. The higher we getthe more time’s suspended, something to dowith Einstein, something to do with distancesqueezing out details that have meanteverything to us. The bees, for example:what if we kill them off? And what ifthere’s nothing left for polar bearsto sit on?               I tell the boys about Niagara Falls,about sitting on the stone wall, my barelittle legs, knit cap, water pouring and tearingbelow. “What happened?” they wantto know. “I didn’t fall, of course,” I say,not remembering, really, onlythe photograph.               The rooftops of Paris fan outbelow. “A giant spider web,” say the boys.Spiders, too, they’ll be gone.Meanwhile, they go on stringingwebs while our sky disappears behindthreads of lights, wind swayingthe platform. The boy’s eyes get allfar away, as if the body could be emptiedenough to forget to die, or, at leastto fly through itself, god-speed.

[The top image, by the way, is a tesseract].

Is this a bleak poem? Is Keats’s sonnet, “When I Have Fears” bleak? It seems to me that the only way a poem can qualify as bleak is when it doesn’t touch bottom, when it doesn’t reach the place where love and death merge in some sort of glorious jazz, some bow scraping across catgut, some brush-stroke made of a perfect balance of pushing and pulling.

Paradox is the only way there is to speak of anything real, it seems. Not this, not this, but something that requires the two.

Of course. Those of us who write poems are fervently hoping for the tone, the language, the pull toward death and the pull toward life to be in perfect balance to sound the music of the spheres. It’s what we do, all of us in our own way, with our own art, in this precious time we have before our own personal gravitational collapse.

●

Another note: If you go to The Writers Handful,  you can read a brief interview with me by the wonderful short story writer and essayist, Patricia Ann McNair. Her award-winning collection, Temple of Air, is breathtakingly good reading and her website is full of good stuff.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 45

The hair thing.  I can pinch my “bangs” between thumb and forefinger. At the back, hair’s about twice as long. I try a hairbrush and see a slight difference. Not much, but it’s coming along. It feels like healing. That’s the wonderful thing about hair. The more of it, the better I am. From the front, it’s cute, but from the sides and back—of course I stand with a mirror and study it—it’s still plastered to my head in a way that isn’t flattering.

[None of MY hair in these photos. They're all from the book launch. I wanted you to see them.]

Upside: my hair may grow slowly, but it’s thick, as thick as it always was, it seems. It’s steely gray, coming to a point of gray at the front, whiter on the sides. Patchwork. The lower back is darker gray, the crown and upper back is lighter gray. As it gets longer, the unevenness doesn’t seem so radical.

Now that I can see the crown, the cowlick, and the growth pattern, I can see I’ve been parting it the best way all along. Some beauticians have said the part should naturally fall on the right, but they were wrong.

I do not tire of this analysis. A once-in-a-lifetime (one fervently hopes) chance to see what’s under there, like tracing my own development, hairless baby to eventual full  head.

I’m tired of the wig, but when I look at me without it, I’m not yet happy with what I see. Too severe, too wild.

It seems as if I’m slowly watching myself come back together. I am having cataract surgery tomorrow. When you’ve had surgery for detached retina and a vitrectomy, the lens of the eye develops a cataract very quickly. My right eye is all foggy. When this surgery is over, it’ll be as clear and see as well as in its original state, before nearsightedness set in.

Eventually we’ll all be in our original state, if you want to go that far! Dust to dust. I’ll settle for the original I can imagine, being what’s called well, all systems working.

All systems working: I’m planning to go to the Writers’ Convention in Seattle in February. I’ve chosen to work with two MFA students this year in the Rainier Writing Program that I teach in. And I just launched my new book. No Need of Sympathy (BOA Editions). The party at Brilliant Books in Traverse City was spectacular. The owner, Peter Makin, always makes book launches an event. He’d gotten a cake (pictured), an exact replica of my book cover.  Jim Crockett, retired from Northwest Michigan College,  played guitar and sang. Jennifer Steinorth, who’s currently studying in the Warren Wilson MFA program, introduced me. I cried of course when I looked out at so many people who’ve supported me, brought me food, sent me cards and gifts, through my chemo and radiation. I feel surrounded by love, and simultaneously intensely aware of those who have to endure this godawful treatment with few friends and not-enough love.

I’m pretty public. I was Delaware’s state poet laureate for seven years and am still in contact with many Delaware friends; I comment on poetry monthly for Interlochen Public Radio; I write a monthly poetry column for the Record-Eagle newspaper;  I teach in the Rainier program; I give poetry readings.  So when trouble comes, there are people aware of it. There are friends.

It was once otherwise. When my children were small, my marriage was falling apart, and I wasn’t yet teaching. my life was constricted, isolated. Lonely as hell.  There’ve been other times, later, when I’ve been lonely as hell. I honestly do think, as Hilary Clinton wrote, it does take a village. It takes a village to raise children without trapping them within your own narrow prejudices; it takes a village to disperse some of the fear and anguish of a terrible diagnosis. To let some others help you carry it.

Most likely this is why I’ve loved writing this blog so much through all of this. You’re my village.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 43

BOA Editions asked me to write a short interview with myself about No Need of Sympathy, to use as they considered book design and marketing. I invited myself to my study, where we talked over a cup of tea.  We both are drinking green tea these days, for the antidioxants.

Fleda: Thank you so much for consenting to this interview. I'd like to begin with the title of your new book.  You took your title from a Robert Creeley quotation, “Poetry stands in no need of sympathy, or even goodwill. One acts from bottom, the root is the purpose quite beyond any kindness.” Besides the obvious reference to poetry, I can’t help but note that you’ve just finished chemo and radiation for a serious cancer. Are the poems in this collection in some way a reflection of that?

Self: As you may know, I’d finished this book before I knew I had cancer, but it’s interesting that “sympathy” works on the level of poetry and of personal distress. There are some poems that refer directly to poetry, but no, what I wanted, what I always want, is for the poems to reach “bottom” where the question of sympathy or lack of it is no longer an issue. To reach the place where we just SEE what is—cancer or anything else might come to mind—and that’s completely enough.  There are poems about my father, my sister, my grandchildren, a chipmunk, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, a giant puffball, child labor, Memorial Day. They’re all over the map, really. But I think they’re held together by the intent to see clearly, to get to the root.

Fleda:  Science and modern physics seems to come into your poems frequently, even the ones that focus on family. And there is a Buddhist overtone. How do you reconcile those points of view?

Self: Buddhist thought and the most contemporary of scientific thought are really one and the same. Just like you and me. Western culture has taken a long time to see what was understood by others 2500 years ago—that there is nothing solid, that at the root, reality is in constant flux, and what we believe is “true” is our own projection. And of course this is what poetry has been doing forever—at least some of it—uprooting what we thought we knew, pointing us toward what can’t ever be exactly pinned down. So in poems like “The Purpose of Poetry,” “The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower”—my goodness, almost any one I turn to—I’m unseating what has seemed to be the case.

Fleda: Speaking of family, you have a sonnet sequence, each of ten grandchildren represented by one sonnet. Was this hard to write, to avoid sentimentality, or to figure what to say about each one so that they’d seem balanced?

Self: It WAS hard to write. I gradually eased them into their present sonnet form from a looser construction. They are as much about the grandmother, of course, since the grandchildren are seen through her eyes. The interesting part is that some are her natural grandchildren, some are step-grandchildren, and so she needs to acknowledge some difference, her own feelings of difference. I rewrote several of them over and over to get the right balance of honesty and care for the delicate feelings of those who have physical/emotional struggles. And her own struggles! The grandmother has her own background out of which all this has emerged. She’s learning and shifting all the while.

Fleda: We’ve followed your father, the death of your mother, your retarded brother, even your grandparents, through most of your previous collections. Do you find any shift in this one, any difference in your approach in your poems?

Self: So glad you've followed my poems! I think—who knows, but this is how it feels to me—that the poems that originate with family stories have gotten more deeply embedded in the culture, the world, the network of science and thought that support those stories. The stories are true, of course, but they suggest a lot more than their origin to me. My mind is seeing them as a kernel in the middle of a complex of things. There’s “Building a Cathedral,” that originated with the story of my father figuring how to get the cup to rotate in the microwave and stop with the handle pointed outward. That gets embedded in the building of cathedrals, his two “sweeties” and how he copes with that, his Windsor clock, “Waiting for Godot,” my grandmother’s rooster she made out of seeds in the last years of her life. And more. I am just ranging the territory that the original incident brings up.

Fleda: You have a number of poems that deal with social issues as well—Americans bursting down the doors of Pakistanis, inequality of wealth, poor young men being seduced into being soldiers, relationship therapy, child labor, and so on. Was it hard for you to combine these poems with the others and keep a cohesive collection?

Self: They seemed to me to naturally fall into place. After all, family issues are also political issues, and how things work scientifically is only a larger view of how they work close-up. I hope the collection is like a microscope that zooms in and out, sees the world writ large as well as the fine print, but it’s all one experience of being alive.

Fleda: Is there a consistent tone that you feel as you read through your own collection?

Self: The quotations that begin each section are meant to suggest that. Yes, I think of these poems as explorations into the nature of what’s real and what matters. There are no answers, but the questions are the crucial part. The line from Jane Hirshfield is what I mean: “Art, by its very existence, undoes the idea that there can be only one description of the real, some single and simple truth on whose surface we may thoughtlessly walk.” So, if I had to pick a “tone,” it would be curiosity, combined with deep love of being alive. Those may be one and the same.  Another allusion to our own relationship, yes?

My Wobbly Bicycle, 42

My last swim was at 7:15 p.m. last Thursday, Sept 19^th, water temp. 68, air 70. It was such a beautiful evening that even though I’d taken a fairly long walk with my uncle that afternoon, I decided to swim. It was supposed to rain on Friday, and I had to pack up and leave, anyway.

It’s easier to leave in bad weather. It did rain. But it’s no fun to go in and out to the car with coolers, blender, food processor, boxes of food, clothes, clothes on hangers, my 10 lb. weights, lawn chairs to repair over the winter, wicker rocking chair to take to the re-weaver, computer, printer—pretty much like a real move.

Too much, maybe—walking, swimming, and packing up, carrying stuff out and then up stairs into our house—I’m having  arthritic-type stiffness and pains in my hips and knees. A new thing for me. Every shift of my body, every pain, I register in a new way—what does it mean? My oncologist told me that most cancer recurrences reveal themselves in symptoms, not in scans and exams.  My first exam after chemo, by the way, was Friday afternoon. All’s well, but I expected as much. It’s too soon, probably, for trouble. It would take a while for a stray cancer cell to begin to do its dirty work.

But I’m not thinking much about this. I’m living my life, as instructed by my oncologist. As far as the hip and knee pain, my guess is my body’s been generally damaged by the abuse of chemo and radiation, and it may be effectively “older” than it was.  And then, I AM older. I had a birthday this summer.

My oncologist says you measure success of treatment in two ways: (1) look in the mirror; and (2) birthdays.

I seem to have matured (not the same as birthdays) during this last year. I feel more settled in my skin, less apologetic (to me) for being myself and not the magically wonderful person I had aspired to be. There’s no time left for illusion. If I’m to live this life, I'd like it to be THIS life, not  one I invent in my head.

And who is this “myself”? That identity transpires moment-by-moment, but on the whole, I see that my dedication to writing has taken on more of a spiritual dimension, or, rather, I guess I'm more clear about that dimension.  I dislike the word spiritual. No one knows what it means. What I mean is that I seem have a new and intimate kinship with my forebears in this practice of writing, and—in a way I can’t fully understand—I'm more sure that this reaching into the inarticulate and trying, daily, to say what can’t exactly be said is noble, soul-saving and soul-wrenching work, not to be apologized for, taken lightly, or distorted by a lust for fame.  

It is as crucial as—and maybe identical to—the nun’s prayer, the priest’s vow.

Your next question, if you know me at all, might be “How does your Buddhist practice fit into this?” I started the practice, as do most people, because I was anxious and going through a difficult stretch. I wanted some peace, meaning at that time, I suppose, escape. It didn’t take long for me to see that the escape route is into, not out of.  I meditate daily because I see for myself that this practice just plain works over the long haul. It appears that the more a person's awake to how things actually are, the more true the life, and the words, can be.

I’m deeply grateful to my Buddhist teachers, past and present, and want to be helpful to them, but the role of lay or ordained  teacher doesn’t seem to be my bent.  When I was a teenager, I thought for a while I wanted to be a minister. What I wanted, it seems—looking at it from this distance—was to be intimate with what’s real. And then somehow speak that intimacy.  Looks as if I’m the same person I’ve always been.  Or, I’m like a snowball, getting fatter with my past clinging to me as I roll downhill.

Roll? A subtle Wobbly Bicycle allusion?

Next week: An interview with myself about my new book of poems!

My Wobbly Bicycle, 35

We’ve called our cottage “Brown’s Health Farm,” but this last week’s been mostly cold and rainy, not great for the usual swimming, kayaking, biking, walking—and my daughter Kelly and family are here, all six of them. The boys went out fishing early yesterday—the best day, supposedly some sun coming—but the sky opened up and they sat for a while under the Ellsworth Bridge and then the Central Lake bridge before heading home, soaked. They did catch some pike and gar, pretty big, and threw them back. My grandson Noah would rather fish than breathe. If there are fish to be caught, he catches them. Here he is with the biggest sunfish I’ve ever seen.

We have a tradition of swimming across the lake and back every summer. Our lake is seven miles long but our cottage is at the narrowest point, ¼ mile across. In the old days, one could swim across without a guardian. Now the big boats necessitate a couple of kayaks or canoes, one on either side. I’m always one of the swimmers, but not this year. The water’s cold from so much rain and I’m not sure I have that much strength yet. With only Kelly’s family here at the moment, it was a small crossing, but we did uphold the tradition, plus the cherry pie afterward. Josh wore my hilarious, ruffled cancer swim cap.

Being in this normal life, with its usual frustrations and joys, is a bit hard after this winter. I go along playing jacks with my granddaughter Abby, building a fire, planning how to feed this brood, and I forget the cancer for a while. When it comes back to me, it's a surprise all over again, a sinking. A gloom settles in and only gradually moves to the back shelf of my mind.

Everything’s the same here, as it has been at our cottage for 95 years. But nothing is the same because there never was a “same.” Everything’s been shifting all along. It’s so interesting to me that the ghosts of my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, are floating all over the place. There’s running water now, but there’s also in my mind the well, the pump. There’s the old dock on sawhorses as well as the new, wide one on metal brackets. There’s the old kitchen with the washtubs and the new one with a double sink. The old life is simultaneous with the new one in my mind, one as real as the other and both of them speaking in some way to each other.

The mind makes the world. So what will my grandchildren see? I think more about my mortality, of course, of what they’ll remember, how my ghost might be a benefit to them in some way, as my Grandmother Brown’s been for me.  Her ashes are still here, but it’s her living presence in my mind that matters. I can almost hear her voice.

I never forget how incredibly fortunate I am to have my childhood intact in these woods, in this cottage. There’s a Spanish word, querencia, I found in Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise by Kirkpatrick Sale (I highly recommend). According to Sale, it means much more than “love of home.” It means “a deep, quiet sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place of the earth, its diurnal and seasonal patterns, its fruits and scents, its history and its part in your history and your family’s.” When you’re there, your soul gives a sigh of recognition and relaxation. Your compass points directly down. Columbus didn’t have that, apparently. He spent his life wandering. I do have it. This is my place. When I’m here, my body’s perfectly aligned with the universe.

Oddly, even though I have those sinking times, at the same time I feel a part of an ongoing movement, generation to generation and shifting of one tradition into another, a sense of being relaxed into that movement and content to have/have had my part in it. My hunch is, I still have a number of good years. I could be wrong. But it feels as if my absence will be more like another shifting of things, like getting electric lights in place of the old kerosene lamps. Eventually the cottage will need to be torn down and another one built. Eventually all this will be forgotten. But it will still be there, simultaneous with the new, in some way I can’t understand with my mind, in the way everything is here at the same time, influencing and informing what we call the present.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 34

I hope to have some sort of focus, an organizing principle for each blog post. Sometimes during the week I take a few photos I’m pretty sure I’ll use. Sometimes something has happened that I know I’ll want to talk about. And do you want more cancer-recovery reports? How much of that do you want? People read this blog for different reasons. Sometimes, like today, I don’t have a clue what I’ll write until I sit down to do it.

Writing is writing, as I’ve said many times before. No matter what we say, poem or prose, we always sense a lurking audience. We know what we’ve been praised for in the past, and we’re likely to lean in that direction. But then we have this internal rudder we hope is still stronger than that. It’s like sailing. Ah ha! I get to use one of my photos. This is my sister Michelle on the boat our father built for her when she was 12 because she was afraid of his big boats, the way they lurched and leaned. He figured she would respond better to one she could manage herself. This one has a cute little lateen sail—you just hold the line in your hand and let the sail out and pull it in that way. The boat’s been newly refurbished this year.

What sailing has to do with writing this blog: I’ll try not to turn this into a silly allegory. There’s the wind, which we can’t control. We have to attend to it in exquisite detail. We don’t want to miss a gust coming or fail to anticipate a shift. We head into the wind as closely as we can without luffing the sail. We have this object, this boat we want to move forward, but the moving forward is only a game. If we thought we needed to GET somewhere, we’d buy a monster motor. What we really want is to use our wits and attentiveness to move through the water as efficiently as possible. It’s the art we’re concerned with.

We’re not doing the moving. But we’re not passive either. We’re using what comes up the best we can. We’re both working and having a good time. When a big wind catches our sail and the center board's humming, we’re flying almost out of control, but not quite. Not unlike my experience of writing poems or essays or blog posts. I can hope for that kind of wind, that kind of attentiveness.

This week I saw the radiation oncologist for the LAST time, it is fervently hoped. All’s well. He confirmed what my regular oncologist said—it would be very bad news indeed if the cancer returned. The visit and his words left my heart, for lack of a better metaphor, in a sinking dark place, but that’s no more permanent than anything is. Frankly, the feeling in my gut is no different from the times that I’ve had other disappointments, big blows to my ego. There’s a deep sense of terror, if I let myself acknowledge it. If I examine it closely, I see that it’s my very self that feels at stake. Then gradually that feeling lightens and dissipates and I feel cheerful again.

What is this “self” that needs protection? What is it made of? Where did it come from? Where will it go? I can no more “protect” it than I can direct the wind to blow the way I want. But, meanwhile, I can have a heck of a good time, in concert with it.

This other photo I wanted to show you is of me and my two sisters. We have spring and summer birthdays, and we tend to celebrate them on one day close to my birthday in July. My sister Melinda, three years younger than I, is lucky to be alive. She had a brain tumor and stroke nine years ago and has had multiple serious health problems ever since. She’s using a walker. So each year there’s a poignancy, this year more so since my cancer.

Someone interviewed me for a story on me and my cancer for the local newspaper. She asked me what good has come out of all this. I thought of how we tend to want to balance the scales—well, this bad thing happened but I gained this good thing. I didn’t know how to answer. Things are, finally, just what they are. Is the cancer “bad”? Remember the story of the Chinese farmer I told a few weeks ago? (MWB #28). How do we know what’s “good” or “bad.” Our sight is short, our awareness limited. The wind (Ruach/Spirit/Holy Spirit) bloweth where it listeth.