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.