Category Archives: Personal

In and Out Buddha

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"Yield to the Present" road sign at Spirit Rock Meditation Center

When I mentioned my plan to go to Spirit Rock, the Buddhist Meditation Center in West Marin, my friends Tom and Martha were skeptical. They’re religious historians, and disdain any post-Reformation spiritual trends. Buddhism has a couple of millennia on Martin Luther, but the American secularized version favored at Spirit Rock does not pass muster with Tom and Martha. What could I say as they pressed me further on why I wanted to go? That I had too much time on my hands since leaving my part-time job? That it was none of their business?

In truth, the credo of good deeds and potlucks from my Unitarian upbringing left me hungering for spiritual sustenance. But someone who couldn’t cut it as even a lapsed secular humanist was unlikely to embrace the rigors of faith endorsed by Tom and Martha. I was too ashamed to admit that my quest for enlightenment would undoubtedly follow along the lines of someone trying to lose weight without giving up junk food.

“Why do you care?” I snapped at my interrogators, before adding more softly, “Maybe I’ve been too lonely since working less.”

“You can feel lonely at work, too,” retorted Martha. “Besides, it’s dilettantism. Just a bunch of rich, middle-aged, white people who aren’t really serious, cherry-picking what they like.”

“But I’m a dilettante!” I exclaimed.

It’s true. Ever since a substitute teacher in 8th grade read our lifelines and declared me a jack of all trades but master of none, I’ve accepted this as my destiny. Go figure: I reject the notion of an omnipotent deity manipulating our fates like a master puppeteer. But I’ve let myself be defined by some poor per-diem woman who probably just couldn’t find the real teacher’s lesson plan for the day.

As lesson plans for life go, Buddhism has never particularly appealed to me. I’m suspicious of too much serenity. It makes me think that people are trying to hide something, like murderous rage. Besides, before encountering the Marin style of fitting in a trip to Spirit Rock the way you might fit in a workout or a manicure, my only brush with Buddhism was through a friend’s wife, who shaved her head and turned their house into an ashram before divorcing him.

It seemed pretty unlikely that I’d upend my marriage just by attending an introductory talk at Spirit Rock by cofounder Jack Kornfield. He’s the same guy who wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, so I figured he had a knack for integrating spiritual and domestic demands. Besides, my husband and I had long pushed our daughters to take advantage of teachers with great reputations regardless of subject matter. Kornfield and his cofounder, Sylvia Boorstein, weren’t getting any younger. What was I waiting for? My husband urged me to go, promising he’d still love me even if I shaved my head

So one evening, fortified by a dinner of Cherry Garcia smothered with fudge sauce, I finally went to find enlightenment. Or at least the in-and-out kind a dabbling dilettante might sample.

A diamond-shaped yellow traffic sign declaring “Yield to the Present” signaled that I had arrived. Not at enlightenment, but at a field overflowing with Priuses sporting “Coexist” bumper stickers. Volunteers in flowing natural fiber garments and hemp-soled sandals greeted me serenely. The night sky was vast overhead. I felt connected and sheltered under its starry expanse. Might I feel the same inside the meditation hall?

The cavernous but low-ceilinged room was filled with people who sat eyes closed on folding chairs. Middle-aged dilettantes might be doctrinally flexible, but not flexible enough to assume the lotus position on floor cushions in front of the dais upon which Jack Kornfield perched.

Jack led the meditation. We sat quietly, breathing in, breathing out. I don’t remember what he said, just that the evening cradled me like a lullaby. I left feeling sated, not just with Ben & Jerry’s, but with an unusual fullness and depth of compassion.

Two days later I returned to hear Sylvia Boorstein talk about the Buddha’s Words on Kindness, or Metta Sutta. Afraid I might be required to surrender my irreverence, I sat near the exit in case I needed to make a quick getaway. Still, Kindness sounded innocuous enough, and Sylvia, ample-bosomed and smiling warmly, looked like everybody’s favorite grandmother. She noted in her talk that judgment tightens the mind when we get too caught up in the imperative of being right. The idea of a clear mind and open heart sounded tempting, and I began to be lulled into something resembling bliss.

My reverie ended abruptly when Sylvia got to the part of the Metta Sutta that counsels not doing “the slightest thing that the wise would later reprove.” Suddenly I felt the imperative to argue. Seriously? Not the slightest thing? As a psychotherapist, I spend countless hours trying to help perfectionists recover from such expectations. “To live beyond reproach sets an impossibly high standard,” I tell them, “not to mention making one insufferable.”

My wariness deepened when Sylvia described with a hint of fond reproval her pet terrier, who growls if aroused. As I thought about my clients who endanger themselves by ignoring their instinct to protest, I, too, felt my hackles prickle, a low rumble grow in the back of my throat. You want us to be perfect passive zombies! I almost shouted. Meanwhile, Sylvia explained how she’s learned to override her own “Grrr” response by simply choosing not to get agitated.

By this time I was pretty agitated myself, straining to prove Sylvia wrong without coming across as abrasive or challenging. I wanted to unseat the teacher without anyone noticing.

Her further words of wisdom escaped me, so intent was I on formulating the perfect Buddhist riposte. Something like, I wonder if we might welcome the ‘Grrr’ as a call to something that warrants our attention. We mustn’t ignore the warning, but perhaps we could quell the yapping.

Irreproachable! I congratulated myself, summoning the courage to raise my hand so I could share my brilliance. I imagined Sylvia admiringly incorporating my wisdom into her future talks. “A wonderful example of Beginner’s Mind!” she’d say about her new star student.

But then the imperative to speak up was supplanted by the imperative to shut up. All I could imagine was Sylvia’s pitying smile for the unenlightened newcomer who had stumbled like a half-wit into the circle of wisdom and kindness.

My mind was clouded, my heart tightened with judgment.

Grrr.

 

Best Laid Plans

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Water spill

I sit down to write after watering and fertilizing the droopy, yellowing plants. I have been in a bit of a drought myself lately, but rain is in the offing, and today is the day I have promised myself to move from avoidance to the keyboard. I have deliberately left the Internet off so I won’t be tempted to fall down the rabbit hole of email, Facebook, and depressing headlines. I have put five discs in the CD player, hoping to feed myself with music instead of the crackers and tea I obsessively consume to fuel my procrastination and self-doubt. I have set the kitchen timer for just an hour, following the advice of a writing teacher: “Under-commit, over-achieve.”

On my way to the computer, I see that water is streaming from the saucer of the pot I have just doused. It pools on the oak surface before cascading down the bookcase, onto the books and framed pictures— Ally’s 18th birthday party, the professional shots of my daughters at their most beautiful. Only the photo of them as little girls in the bath together remains dry.

Shit. If I catch the spill now, I can prevent the rot and warp of delay. So I mop it up hastily, removing a few books, swiping at the glass protecting my daughters, hoping the water has not seeped into too many hidden places.

Fetching another towel for a final sopping up around the edges, I am tempted to throw in the towel on the morning’s writing. I try to convince myself that the rot and warp of delay, the seeping into hidden places, is the fertilizer of writing. Which it is. But it is also the avoidance that takes me too often into a parched landscape where nothing grows.

So I write this before the timer rings.

*

Anybody else have days like this? Anybody not have days like this? How do you recover?

 

Line a Day for Five Years

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One Line a Day, Five-Year Memory Book

Of the many kindnesses bestowed on me during my cancer detour last year, one stands out. My friend Mary, also a therapist who aspires to write, brought me a small aqua book with “ONE LINE A DAY” embossed in gold letters on the cover.

“This way you won’t be overwhelmed by the blank page,” Mary said.

We had often commiserated over our tortured relationship with writing: our avoidance of it, the ways in which life intervenes, how hard it is to find just the right groove between feelings so raw they burn a hole through the page and one’s psyche versus feelings so repressed our attempts to capture them in words are devoid of life. We shared feelings of fraudulence, futility, fatigue. We knew the misery and mercy of dinner to be shopped for and prepared, the wish to turn off the computer and drown ourselves in West Wing reruns. We knew how to rally one another, to persevere with a slim thread of belief in our own gifts and dreams because the other believed so whole-heartedly in them.

“Just one line a day,” Mary continued. “Anyone can do that.”

But what jumped out at me was the volume’s subtitle: “A FIVE-YEAR MEMORY BOOK.”

Five years! If Mary believed I had this kind of time ahead of me, I could begin to retrieve myself from the choking fear that cancer evokes of being dead and buried.

Since then I’ve written every evening in my aqua book. Mostly just mundane stuff—how my neuropathy rated on a scale of 1-5; Obama’s poll numbers; the little things I’d accomplished (or not) that day. There really wasn’t enough space to go any further than that. But restriction brings freedom, as my yoga teacher always reminds us when she urges us to open up a little more space by breathing through a constricted pose. The same is true of writing—being confined to a line a day freed up space to write more than I’ve written in a long while. The foreshortened time cancer threatened also brought an urgency that freed my mind from neurotic clutter.

And so I have lived, a line a day, breathing in each new morning, writing it out each night. “Five Years” permitted me to envision a future I feared I might not have.

Last night I closed out Year One. Tonight I begin in the second spot on the page for October 29.

Year Two. And then more to come. What a gift.

 

Awaiting Hurricane Chemo

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Hurricane looming

 

Last year at this time, as Hurricane Sandy was barreling down on the East Coast, I was preparing for my own storm–chemotherapy for a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer (I’m fine now, unlike a lot of people whose lives were devastated by Sandy.) Here’s what I wrote a year ago, complete with topical references to the news and the upcoming presidential election:

 

I know my own storm is looming, and the warnings are dire—fatigue, nausea, hair loss, risk of infection and permanent neuropathy. But I don’t yet feel it in my gut. I’ve been hiking and working, grocery shopping, trying new recipes with complex ingredients, phone banking, seeing comedy. Surely the warnings don’t apply to me in my bubble of near-normal on such a beautiful day. How can the storm hit when the skies are so blue? People must be exaggerating; I’ll be able to ride it out more or less intact. I don’t want to evacuate my current life. The Mayor of Atlantic City is most welcome to tell me it’s safe to stay put.

But instead here comes Chris Christie shouting at me to stop being an idiot: “Don’t be stupid, take it seriously, quit working, eat organic, give up refined sugar and flour!” (Actually, I’d be really surprised if Chris Christie chided me about my diet.) Why can’t he let me linger with my illusions?

It’s not like I’m completely unprepared. I’ve been half-heartedly stockpiling guided imagery CDs, cancer-fighting recipes, baldness disguises. But I feel like Mitt Romney with his canned goods as I collect my little bottles of hand sanitizer in a hapless gesture against the onslaught.

Will I be flattened? Will the storm pass through me with only minor damage and disruptions? Like East Coasters preparing their kids for blackouts by saying how fun it will be–“Just like camping!”— I’m telling myself that sitting in Kaiser’s 5th floor infusion center for hours will be just like giving blood, such a good chance to catch up on my reading! But even camping and no-school days and New Yorkers get old fast. Besides, what if the damage is extensive? Will it take me months, even years, to dig out? Will I be one of the fatalities, if not in the literal sense, with a life so changed it will feel like I’ve lost everything? Will my inner and outer resources hold, especially once the initial crisis has turned into one long tiresome trudge? What if I can’t rebuild?

The storm is coming, but I don’t want to think about it just yet. Standing here now, before it hits, I can’t believe I’ll lose the sun, the warmth, this lovely day, even for a moment.

 

The Stranger-Danger Generation Goes Couchsurfing

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dog on couch

Beware of men with cute dogs and couches!

My wonderful writing group, The Write on, Mamas!, performed at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl last weekend. Our theme was “Let Go Or Be Dragged.” As the mother of 20-somethings, I have a lot of experience with this. I read this piece (originally published in the now-defunct Underwired Magazine). What have you needed to let go of to avoid being dragged?

*

My daughter Ally is studying in Spain for the year, meaning she occasionally attends classes in between jetting around the continent. Recently she emailed that she and her friend Amy were off to Belgium, where they planned to save money by couchsurfing.

Parents lucky enough to dwell in a state of ignorant bliss might not know about couchsurfing. It’s no longer a euphemism for being one step away from living on the streets, but a new social networking sensation among the young. When Millennials tire of tweeting about revolution, they log on and find people willing to put them up for free anywhere in the world.

Ally was excited because a 41-year-old man had offered to host them.

I curbed my impulse to scream at her before alerting the State Department. Instead, I did what any normal mother would do: Googled “couchsurfing,” and immediately clicked on the “bad experiences” link.

First up was a Facebook page subtitled “The Dark Side.” It read like a plot-pitch competition for the sequel to Taken, a movie about college girls in a Paris nightclub who are picked up by cute guys. “Picked up” as in kidnapped, since it turns out the cute guys are really working for Albanian sex traffickers. Luckily, one of the abductees has Liam Neeson for a father; a former CIA operative who proves to all that he is not so much paranoid as prescient. And pretty skilled in dirty tricks.

Ally’s mother and father, alas, are not so skilled. Like a lot of parents these days, our talents consist of hovering and fretting about our children’s happiness. We belong to the generation that wouldn’t let kids play in the woods lest they stumble into the creek or an outpost of perverts. Our preschoolers’ circle time featured picture books about green, red, and yellow lights to inoculate them against stranger danger.

So like all good parents, my husband and I drilled Ally to run away from the hypothetical nice man with a litter of puppies in the back of his van. No, she declared, she would never go see the puppies, no matter how cute he said they were!

“How about a man who wanted to show you a litter of kittens?” I quizzed.

“What would be wrong with kittens?” Ally asked, perplexed.

Having reached the limits of generalized thinking rather quickly, it seemed pointless to expand the horizon of potential danger to include 41-year-old men with couches.

Particularly to a five-year-old.

Now the Stranger Danger Generation is all grown up. And going couchsurfing. Who says irony is dead?

I clicked out of the “Dark Side” and went directly to the source: www.couchsurfing.org. True, this is a bit like relying on Big Pharma for advertising failed drug trials, but what’s a mother to do?

Couchsurfing International’s motto is “creating a better world, one couch at a time.” The website* features a large map festooned with pushpins, creating the impression that you can track your far-flung child the way politicians track every last voter in every last precinct. “The World is Smaller than You Think,” proclaims a headline. This subliminal leap to Disney’s “It’s a small world, after all” induced a nostalgic trance, and I felt myself being lulled into a more trusting state. No matter that predators are equally skilled in setting up their prey.

As I read further under “Safety isn’t one-size-fits-all,” I encountered the same conversation about stranger danger that I had attempted years earlier. It wasn’t so much about puppies and kittens as checking references, trusting your gut, paying attention to the internal red, yellow, and green lights. This time, the target audience had the cognitive skills to make such assessments.

I recalled a service trip to Mexico Ally had made a few years earlier with a church group. Before our teenagers embarked, the minister tried to assuage parents’ anxiety about drug violence. “The world is a risky place,” she said. “I worry each time my own children travel to faraway countries. But then I realize that the far greater risk comes from never leaving home.”

Now as then—as with every stage of parenting–I had to swallow hard and trust in the universe and Ally’s judgment. From crib death to solid food to sleepovers to dating to driving to leaving home—couchsurfing was just one more thing on the list of stuff I couldn’t control.

Ally returned from Belgium an ecstatic and avowed couchsurfer. Their host had taken them ice skating, handed over the keys to his apartment, and prepared a feast of mussel stew.

Thank you, universe, for taking care of my daughter.

And thank you, kind stranger, for making her feel at home.

_______

* The website has changed since I wrote this a couple of years ago, so you won’t find the same verbiage or graphics anymore.

 

Head Trip

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wig heads

In September 2012, I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer. Treatment was successful, and I am happy to report that I am cancer-free and doing well. I wrote for a private circle of friends and family about my experiences at the time, and am now sharing some of my musings here. 

*

My husband and I spent the first night of our honeymoon 27 years ago in a beautiful bed and breakfast overlooking Napa Valley. It was high on a hill, had a fabulous hot tub, and served scrumptious banana bread for breakfast. The owners, however, made us very nervous—their bookshelves were filled with far-right Christian literature and books favorable to the Third Reich. When we opened the closet in our room, a Styrofoam lady’s head jabbed with a hat pin fell out.

I thought of that head when I went to check out the free wig program at the American Cancer Society. The office was abrim with white Styrofoam heads, all with blank eyes and wigs that looked like wigs. Another layer of pretending to have the same life I’ve always had fell away as I surveyed my options. Exactly one wig matched my hair color, even sort of resembling its texture and style.

Everything I’ve read since googling “Chemo hair loss” has advised not to wait till my hair starts to fall out. One site was especially helpful in propelling me into action. It essentially said, “You will lose your hair. Don’t waste any time in denial, hoping you won’t.” Being proactive gives you a sense of control, not to mention an actual hair color and style to approximate. At least I hoped to match my current look—the photos of henna’d scalps or jaunty stories about women with cancer trying out fun new colors and styles left me cold, even with my still-full head of hair.

Before my Google search, my research had consisted of reading strong, sexy, savvy stories in More Magazine. Fortuitously, given my recent initiation into the cancer club, there was a personal essay by Jenny Allen called The Cat on My Head, about her headgear choices during chemo.

Allen’s tale was truly hair-raising. First, there were the prices–$5,000-$6,000 for a human hair wig, though she guiltily settled for one that cost only $900, made from the hair of exploited women from India. In Allen’s world, synthetic wigs didn’t even merit consideration. Although the wig looked great, Allen didn’t like it. Instead she proudly chose fabulous scarves after stashing her wig in the back of a dresser drawer.

This story depressed me more than my diagnosis, more than leaving the hospital after surgery with a catheter. Luckily, my friend who was a few months ahead of me in the chemo circuit told me that her wig cost $150, and that synthetic wigs are now considered preferable and easier to manage than those made from human hair.

So that’s how I ended up at the Cancer Society, where cheerful volunteers stood ready to hand out free wigs without so much as demanding a doctor’s note to verify that I did indeed have cancer rather than a Halloween party to attend!

The volunteer and I quickly agreed on the one wig that sort of matched my hair color and style. As a person who has always been hair-illiterate—I sleep on it wet and barely know how to use a blow dryer—I didn’t even realize I had a style. But I quickly saw that even a bad hair day on a person who favors $20 cuts from non-English-speakers is more stylish than what awaited me. I stuffed my real hair into what looked like a very short stocking, joking that I could use the hairnet for bank robberies, too.

“Everyone says that,” remarked the Cancer Society volunteer.

Great. I am not just losing my reproductive organs and my hair, but apparently all claims to cleverness and originality.

My wig, despite More Magazine’s clever title, did not look like a cat on my head. It looked like a rabid squirrel pelt, if the squirrel happened to be dirty blonde going gray right before meeting its demise. The wig sat awkwardly and hung limply. Worse, I realized that I would soon have bangs, because that’s what hides the mesh nylon edges. I don’t want bangs—it reminds me of a childhood under my mother’s sewing shears as she tried to turn me into Julie Andrews. I don’t want cancer, either. But I don’t have a choice. I guess I’ll give this pelt a try.

The volunteer gave me a wire stand instead of one of the Styrofoam heads. She must have heard about my honeymoon.

*

After a visit to a stylist and lots of practice, I became quite fond of my wig. As one friend put it, “It just looks like you finally learned to use a blow dryer.” Here I am in my wig,  three months after completing chemo: 

wig

And here I am back in my own hair now, a mass of grey curls:

post chemo hair

 

 

 

Losing the Crazy

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bathroom scaleCancer has touched a lot of things in my life, but not my obsession with food and weight. I used to keep a lid on these neuroses more, trying hard not to ruin my daughters. But when the girls reached the truly crucial ages of 10 and 13, I blew it all up by joining Weight Watchers, sacrificing their health for my own as I tracked points and talked incessantly about food and weight. I managed to lose 25 pounds and have kept most of it off most of the past 11 years. Every New Year’s our family has a ritual of writing out our hopes for the coming year and the high and low points of the year just passed. For years my daughters’ “Low” lists were topped by “Mommy talking about points,” until they grew old enough to rebel against the ritual altogether.

But inadvertent ruination of one’s children is not my focus here. I just want to set the scene for my first reaction upon learning I had uterine cancer. Thinking initially it was the “No big deal” kind requiring just a hysterectomy with maybe a dollop of radiation, my only concern was how long I’d be laid low by surgery. “Three weeks’ recovery from a hysterectomy,” replied the doctor.

“Oh, shit! I won’t be able to hike for three weeks! I’ll gain weight!” was my only thought. (I had just spent the entire summer losing 9 pounds acquired during a month-long vacation and several late-night, at-home rendezvous with open bags of chocolate chips.)

By the next day, I knew I had the bigger-deal kind of uterine cancer. As I shared my diagnosis and crazy initial reaction with my friend Ruth, she said, “No, you’ll be getting chemo—you’ll lose weight.”

“Oh, good!” I thought.

You need to fast 24 hours before surgery, so when I stepped on the Kaiser scale the morning of my hysterectomy, the number for once did not lead me to ponder how much heavier street clothes are than nightgowns. Or whether that second helping of cake was really such a good idea. In fact, the surgeon told my husband that the procedure had taken longer than usual because it was difficult to maneuver given that “she’s so thin.”

So thin! Could I get that in writing? Could cancer be worth the steep admission price?

It’s one thing to lose the weight, quite another to lose the crazy.

*

In September 2012, I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer. Treatment was successful, and I am happy to report that I am cancer-free and doing well. By the way, I gained five pounds during the course of chemo . . . 

 

All Aboard!

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High speed train

According to congressional Republicans and right-wing media, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a “train wreck.” Nonsense. What’s really going on is that hyper-partisans determined to thwart President Obama have been busy since the law’s inception laying dynamite on the tracks. Now they’re even threatening to blow up the government and the economy if they don’t get their way! These saboteurs hope to derail a reform that will make better and more affordable health care insurance available to almost all Americans, including 25-30 million who are currently uninsured.

So don’t trust the wannabe train wreckers for accurate information. Here are some highlights of what Obamacare actually provides:

  • Young adults can stay on their parents’ plans until age 26
  • Insurers can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, dump patients, or charge women higher premiums than men
  • Free screening tests, immunizations, and preventive care
  • Elimination of yearly caps and lifetime limits on insurance coverage
  • Closing the “doughnut hole” that leaves seniors on the hook for prescription drug costs
  • Making sure at least four out of five of your healthcare dollars go to ensuring your health, not insurance companies’ administrative costs or profits
  • Tax credits for small businesses providing coverage for their employees
  • Expansion of Medicaid for people making up to 133% more than the poverty level
  • Subsidies to make healthcare insurance affordable for low- and middle-income earners
  • Health exchanges in each state to make comparison shopping easier and to create large risk pools, thereby lowering the cost for those now at the mercy of buying individual or family plans on the open market

Obamacare will NOT force you to give up your current insurance policy, drive up medical costs, increase the deficit, put bureaucrats in charge of your healthcare decisions, or take away your freedom.

It WILL, however, make you free from anxiety should you get sick, have an accident, or lose or change jobs. Because Obamacare brings almost everyone under the protection of insurance, it also eliminates exorbitant costs of sole-resort, emergency-room care for the uninsured.

Let’s stop in their tracks those laying dynamite on the tracks. All aboard for affordable healthcare for all!

*

Obamacare goes into effect January 1, 2014. (Some key provisions are already bringing relief to millions!) Health care exchanges open October 1, 2013, with the enrollment period lasting through March 31, 2014. 

For more information about Obamacare, the exchanges, how to sign up, costs, and your eligibility for subsidies, go to:

Contact your elective representatives to urge them to support Obamacare: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Suggested reading for more in-depth understanding:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/your-money/health-insurance/a-guide-to-the-new-health-insurance-exchanges.html?_r=0&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1380564316-6/3NmZyBAPPxs2/tTVLb/w

http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/node/3747

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114870/obamacare-exchanges-start-tuesday-oct-1-heres-why-theyre-worth-it

 

Bucket List

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Bucket

A speaker I once heard said, “The key to happiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.”

I thought about this a lot after I was diagnosed last year with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer. Suddenly I knew I wanted the life I already have–just more of it.

Right before they wheeled me away for a full hysterectomy, I turned to my husband, Jonathan. I expected to wake up from surgery, but you never know.

“I don’t really have a bucket list,” I told Jonathan, “Because I’ve already had everything I’ve ever wanted—this great life with you, our girls. . . ” I did not add that the things I still longed for were beyond my control—seeing our daughters settle into adulthood, spoiling our future grandchildren with too much chocolate.

Almost a year before my cancer diagnosis, Jonathan and I had stood in line at the Marsh Theater Box Office to pick up our tickets for Marga Gomez’s solo comedy show, “Not Getting Any Younger.” The woman in front of us had the bloat and stubbled hair of someone for whom chemo has nothing left to offer. She lived in the neighborhood, and had just spontaneously dropped by to see if she could catch the show.

“I’m afraid we’re all sold out,” the man behind the ticket counter told her. “But our run has been extended, so you should come back!”

“I’m not sure my run will be extended,” the woman replied.

“Hang on,” said the man, waving her to the side, then disappearing for a moment. He came back and fetched our tickets from the Will Call box, and we went to find our seats in the tiny, crammed theater.

Just before the show began, someone came in and set up a folding chair on the edge of the stage. The woman whose run was up sat down.

I watched her almost as much as I watched the show. She, like all of us, nearly fell out of her chair laughing as Marga Gomez switched from character to character chronicling the vagaries of aging.

Sometimes it seems unimaginative how little I thirst after adventure. But looking at the woman whose bloated face was beaming, I realized that I’d want to be like her if I knew I had limited time. Not off climbing peaks or having peak experiences in foreign lands. But to be right in my own neighborhood, among friends and loved ones, laughing my ass off.

*

I’m fine now, no longer contemplating a limited engagement. What would you want if you knew time was running out?

 

 

 

 

Ending Summer

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Ally and Me

“This has been the summer of my dreams,” I say to my daughter Ally.

“That’s pathetic,” she replies.

Maybe. But it’s true. In the three months Ally’s been home between graduating from college and leaving for a job teaching English in Spain, we’ve been each other’s best companion. Long walks, picking blackberries, lattes, massages, cooking side by side, a mani-pedi to mark the dwindling days of flip-flops and of our time together. We’ve even managed some good conversations until I inevitably mess up with questions like, “What if you fall in love and decide to stay in Spain forever?“

I dreamed of such a summer four years earlier, in the fleeting weeks between high school and college. But back then my dream was Ally’s nightmare. So she stayed out late with friends, sleeping in till the coast was clear from my incessant offers of ensnaring lattes.

Four years away have allowed Ally to come back not only with a college degree, but with an independent identity that makes our bond less threatening. Free lattes? Bring them on!

Our first separation was a dress rehearsal. This time’s for real. Ally’s going off to adulthood, not college.

Songs from Fiddler on the Roof keep coursing through my mind:

“Is this the little girl I carried?”

”May the Lord protect and defend you.”

Mostly I feel like Tevye on the station platform, seeing Hodel off to Siberia. I know it’s not as dramatic as “God alone knows when we shall see each other again.”  For one thing, the shtetl lacked Skype. But the pang still runs deep.

The day of Ally’s departure arrives. She navigates the ticket counter, hoping the agent will turn a blind eye to her bag’s extra weight. It’s hard to move abroad for under 50 pounds. The agent waves Ally through, and we sit awhile, steeling ourselves for goodbye. I repeat something I heard on the radio, about imagining someone you sorely miss in the next room. “I’m going to think of you in the next room,” I say as we hug. To distract ourselves, we search out one last latte. It helps wash away the lump in my throat.

Last free latte!

Last free latte–at least for awhile!

I watch as Ally goes through security. It’s hard to see through the plate glass that separates us. Between the throng of travelers and the reflections of people waving goodbye, I soon lose track of her. Suddenly I feel the same panic that overwhelmed me when Ally was three, and we lost her in a museum. As my husband and I frantically searched the nearby exhibits, I glanced from the balcony into the lobby. There was Ally, calmly talking to a guard, unaware that she was lost.

She’ll be fine now, too.

I hope I can say the same for myself.