My Wobbly Bicycle, 18

Yesterday morning we were in a snow-globe of lake-effect fluff, drifting all over. It was beautiful. To me these days, most things are, well, a revelation, meaning that being alive is—shall I say just great? That sounds so Panglossian. I mean it’s all okay, snow or sun, no joke.  It’s April 3. Melting snow is soaking some moisture down where it needs to be, after our dry, dry summer last year. The tart cherries should be good this year. And our two good friends, Myrna and Joan, from Traverse City got married in D.C. yesterday after 20 years living as a committed gay couple with no legal protections or civil recognition. A great day for them—ages 72 and 80. My daughter Kelly lives in D.C. and attended (she's in the photo), to represent us.  And I finished my 25 sessions of daily radiation yesterday. I imagine I feel better already, not having those rays daily directed straight at my digestive system. I’ve felt pretty punk most of the time, and increasingly tired. I’m taking long afternoon naps and going to bed early. Next is three weeks (3 sessions)  of “internal” radiation, to target the scar tissue around the hysterectomy surgery. Then three rounds,  three weeks apart, of chemo again.Will I be “cured?” The radiation oncologist carefully says we “hope to keep the cancer away.” This is accurate. It was always accurate even when we didn’t know it, that what we do moment-by-moment is collapse and resurrect, collapse and resurrect. We hope the balance hangs in our favor a good long while. The mind is good at ignoring, mostly, our end. But at some cost, it seems to me now. There is a “dearest freshness deep down things,” as the poet Hopkins puts it, that’s only touched when our feet are (metaphorically, at least) unshod, when they can feel the soil we come from and return to.My step-daughter Amy visited this last week. She teaches at Lane College in Eugene, Oregon, and gave up most of her spring break to be here for me and for her dad. I was too tired to do much more than take a jaunt to the local museum and go out to eat once, but it was great to have her here. She built me a little Buddha stand.Sometime I’ll write exclusively about my deep affection for both Christianity and Buddhism, how each has mattered to me. I’m steeped in both cultures. I’ve loved the images, the rituals, the glorious language of the Christian church. After my years on the cushion, those images, etc., haven’t gone away. Who would want them to? They become, shall I say, “seen through” in their provisionality. In the same way, I suspect, that St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, St. John of the Cross, and the Buddha, saw through to simply what is, was, and always will be. It’s just the plain shining, gritty truth of things, with or without my or anyone else’s smart-ass input.I just read a fine interview of Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry Magazine by my old friend Jeanne Murray Walker in Image Magazine. Wiman says, “Silence is the necessary soil for poetry, and the blight that eats into our surest words. Silence is the only sound God ever makes, and it is the often crushing condition of his absence. Every once in a while you encounter a work of art that silence has truly and permanently entered, like fallen autumn leaves that, riddled with holes, are on their way to being entirely light.”Corollary Issue: Why I Have this Cancer: Thank heaven for the researchers and curers. That’s not what I mean. I mean metaphysically why. I think of Job, who refused to ask. And I think of this, from John Donne’s Sermon CXXX:It is an execrable and damnable monosyllable,why; it exasperates God, ruins us.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 15

This week has been, well, not so easy. I had a vitrectomy (My spell-check wanted to call it a vasectomy, but no.). My eye has been a bit sore, fuzzy, and I’ll have a large gas bubble in front of my vision for the next few weeks. But it’s done! And it needed to get done now rather than later.Imagine me typing this in 18-point just so I can see it. And my face two inches from the keys.Then, radiation of my upper pelvic region, which includes my stomach, has made me nauseous and gastrically disturbed. My radiation doctor gave me Friday off because I looked so peaked, and I missed most of a long-awaited meditation retreat lying in bed instead. There was talk of lowering the area of radiation to miss my stomach, but that would be risky. But I’m happy to report that it appears we (I’m now a “we”) have come up with a cocktail of drugs that keep me feeling pretty decent.  The addition of a small amount of steroid to the mix seems to settle my stomach. I don’t question why or whether this will last; I’m just grateful. This morning, to celebrate, I came down to breakfast wearing my funny hat, made by my friend Devon.Speaking of hats, I have a bunch, plus the wig. I wear the wig out, but at home the hats are more comfortable. I think a lot these days about apparel, about hair as apparel, which it clearly is for women and also for many men. We have a way we wish the world would see us. Or, rather, the way we wish to see ourselves.I am such a poor shopper! A couple of years ago, I asked a young writer friend, Holly Wren Spalding, to shop with me. She brought a folder of magazine photos of things she said would look good on me, and she was right. She picked out what I wore to the gallery opening of Bill Allen’s and my exhibit at the Dennos Museum. I have never looked better. Well, at my age.I have an essay called "Unruffled"  about my history with clothes that just appeared in a wonderful on-line journal called Numero Cinq.This essay will appear in Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives that poet Sydney Lea, the poet laureate of Vermont, and I co-wrote. It will be out April 1 from Autumn House Books exclusively as an e-book.Here’s the editor’s lovely introduction to my essay, You can read the whole  (fairly short) piece on their site,  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/11/unruffled-essay-fleda-brown/#.UT3qoHqMKas.gmail  ************* Fleda Brown herewith offers a wonderfully smart, touching essay about girlhood, clothes and, amazingly enough, poetry! How does she rope all this together? And touching? Yes! The sweet free tomboyish little girl (of a certain era), a professor’s daughter, running free the summer long half-naked and innocent, suddenly a young lady, going to school, in dresses and appliqued sweaters, proper girl’s clothes, an awkward and constricting mask that delivers her to the agony of fashion and fitting in and the awful kindness of friends who feel sorry for her. Fleda delivers the goods, the terrible moments of humiliation, guilt and misunderstanding we all go through as children, often centered around money, precious money and small dreams that go awry, often small events in retrospect yet still capable of making you wince and yet which do not defeat you — as evidence by the delightful pun in the title.This beautiful, human, raw essay is the last installment here at Numéro Cinq of a series of essays by Contributing Editor Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, two old friends, also two poet laureates, who have been writing a book together, a call-and-response essay book as Syd likes to call it, one essay calling forth another on a similar topic. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”In fact Autumn House Books is publishing the book next month, April, as an e-book called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. Other essays from the book published here at NC include Fleda Brown’s “Books Made of Paper” and three essays by Sydney Lea “Pony and Graveyard: A Dream of the Flesh,” “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know.”*************I'll give you the link when it's available. We had such a grand time writing this book. I think you'll like it.   

My Wobbly Bicycle, 13

I’m on my back. The red laser-beams have me in their cross-hairs. I’m staring up at where four ceiling tiles have been replaced with light-permeable photographs of an autumn scene, a creek flowing around a rock, rocks on the bank with yellow leaves plastered against them, a yellow forest behind. All is in flux. Or, this too will pass. I try to think what’s meant, who chose this yellow autumn scene instead of green spring or high summer. The autumn of life, maybe. Nah.The foot-thick door is shut with only me inside. The machine circles and steadies itself before it starts up with its soft noise that says deadly radiation is penetrating at precise angles intended to avoid major organs as much as possible. Fifteen minutes, every day, five days a week, for five weeks. I calm my outrage by reminding myself why I have to do this.Did I mention that I don’t feel well? I don’t feel well. The effects of last week’s chemo are still with me—vague, sickish nausea, fatigue. I started all this with a certain bravado. I would do this well, as well as possible. But now I feel tired and sick.  My bravado has morphed into a kind of malaise. At least for now. Maybe a few days more away from chemo will help.This painting of suffering is by an 85-year-old  friend, Sally Mitchell. I think about people with chronic illnesses, and those who take care of them. The ones who day after day get up with the same aches, same nausea, same worries they went to bed with. Anyone can endure with an end in sight. But to slog on and on. People have so many ways of working with the mind, to keep from spiraling downward: “It’s God’s will,” “I’m tough and I’ll battle this thing and win,” “I’ll use my sickness to gain sympathy for others who’re sick.” The mind wants to have some control, even if it’s the control of submission.I’m grateful, I repeat, for my meditation practice. I sit every day, unless I feel too nauseous. I do this because it seems that none of us can get out of anything, anyway. We’re going to be sick, we’re going to hurt (psychologically and/or physically) and we’re going to die. I want to do those things fully, look straight into what is the case, not turn away into platitudes. It seems to me the most honor (attentiveness? recognition?)  I can give this life is to live it fully, all its seemingly dark and light corners.Oh, doesn’t that all sound great? Truthfully, I meditate partly because I’m in the habit. I slog on just like anyone else, I write what I can every day because this is what I do. I tell myself the same platitudes that everyone else does—“Come on, Fleda, make an effort to make life easier for those around you,” or “Buck up, you’ll get better later,” or “Smile and you’ll feel better.”  My wobbly bicycle stays upright by use of whatever training wheels I can think of.Bonus:  Wally's koan for today: Since birds eat worms, and you eat birds, do you eat worms?    

My Wobbly Bicycle, 11

Every week an adventure. Monday I met with the radiation team to get “mapped” for radiation, which starts a week after my next chemo. Either I still haven’t gotten used to living in the Midwest, or hospital staff everywhere are preternaturally sweet. The nurse in charge hugs me. The vile dye mixture I must drink goes down with her tender solicitations. Another dye is intravenous.Then I’m on the CT bed, my feet held slightly apart with a piece of foam and rubber banded together so they won’t move. I’m lying on a mat that, when deflated, holds my midsection in position. My hands grip two handles above my head. I am for sure locked down. I get two CT scans, one before the intravenous dye and one after. Then I’m tattooed (permanently) with three tiny dots to line up the machines each time for radiation. More than you wanted to know? More than I wanted to know, too, but now that I’m in it, I am curious at each stage.Wally does not know I’m sick. He lies across the back of the chair, a white and gray decorative throw, or sits his heavy self in my lap to be rubbed. He knows about as much about what’s going on with me as I do. Neither of us can see any evidence of illness. I do what I’m told because of the test tubes, CTs, and slides. Wally does what he’s told, more or less, because we are the keepers of the sacred Iams bag. He is a great comfort to me—he lives his life with seeming perfect aplomb within the confines allotted to him. He must stay inside, but what does “inside” mean, when there is only a picture of outside, out the window? Who knows if it exists or not? It is enough to watch it go by, like thoughts.Wally plays with his food. He lies flat on the floor and scoops one morsel of food from his bowl at a time. He scoots it a little distance so it’s necessary to capture it. He lies with his considerable ruff leaning in his water bowl. He takes a sip, looks away as if he is content never to drink again, then turns to take another sip. He is in possession of his life. He has perfect comic timing.Wally came to us, a stray, limping and not wanting to take more than a few steps before he sat down. We checked everything and determined he had arthritis.  After only a few days of a potent glucosamine mixture, he started leaping and chasing his mouse. Did he question any of that improvement?  “What improvement?” he might ask. “One day I was one way, now I’m another. So?”I  imagine this.Humans get sick. We get well. We don’t, or can’t, look back much. We have a baby—we say we remember the pain, but we don’t really. We have another, and when we’re in labor again, we say, “Oh yes, this is what it’s like. Now I remember.” Same with grief, or love. We have the words, the thoughts, the muscle responses to the thoughts of the experience but we can’t keep the experience. We only had it when we had it.I’m having this cancer when I’m having it. Here is a picture of me with recent gifts: light sword, fuzzy hat, fuzzy socks, scarf with personally inscribed poems, red prayer shawl. I am in the middle of this, in full regalia.  

My Wobbly Bicycle, 2

I’m gathering information, deciding between joining a clinical trial group or not (decided not), getting a CAT scan, looking online at wigs and caps, preparing for my 3-4 month blast of chemo and radiation, the vicious murder of all fast-growing cells in my body. In battle-mode, people say. She’s “fought” her cancer. After a long “battle” with cancer, he succumbed. I’m interested in the language. How fiercely we want to survive. Of course we do. I do. The cancer is in my lymph nodes. Not what we'd wanted to hear.I love it that my friends want to pull their light-swords and fight the universe for me. I am in complete sympathy with Thomas Hardy’s wish for a vengeful God to shake a fist at, rather than the “purblind Doomsters” who “had as readily strown / Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.”I think, though, of the effect of battle-language. As we now know, nothing gets thrown “away.” There is no “away” to throw things to. No enemy gets “destroyed.” There’s always an opposite force mounting itself in response. What gets pushed away springs back like a rubber-band. So, what language for this cancer I have? This is what I’ve come up with:You can pave over the grass, but if there’s the tiniest crack anywhere, a pale little blade will soon emerge. Life is determined to live. Life, of course, is not just the growing and developing part. The sprig that emerges is going to die when it’s finished with the other, as part of the wholeness of things. It could be that I’m finished with the other. It feels as if I’m not. There’s a great deal of life going on in me. I have a lot of work I want to do. Quoting the sage, Elvis, “a lotta, lotta livin’ to do.”  My stand-up paddleboard is waiting for me next summer. My children and grandchildren are waiting for all of us to be together at the lake again.So, as I head into chemo, my intention is to stay curious, to look for the route life is taking at the moment. Since, I’m not separate from anything, this amounts to the route life is taking in everything, in every direction. Where is it now? It’s in this keyboard, in the poem I want to get back to, in my  awareness of dearest husband downstairs answering emails, in the tick of my clock, in the warmth of my green tea. A LOT of green tea! Have you seen the statistics on how much good it does?“Route”? Another maybe misleading word. Everywhere is the route, but as each second opens itself, there’s the next coming on, and life works itself out: trunk, branches, leaves.I don’t know how to say any of this. The truth always eludes me, as soon as I think I’ve found a clever phrase to pin it down. I don’t know why I bother. But it does seem that humans keep bothering.The bothering often seems more successful in poetry than in prose. Poems know how to point toward rather than to try to articulate the truth. Poems are written—the good ones—by people who stumble in the dark, feeling their way. I’m stumbling, or as I put it last week, riding a wobbly bicycle.But I’m okay with wobbliness. Wobbliness focuses one amazingly, to stay upright. I’m sure the bicycle wants to stay upright, since it is so much fun to ride. I’m going to go with that.