Furball is sleeping. totally zonked, kaput, out of it. His little paws lie limply on his chest and his back legs sprawl as his little head falls back, mouth slightly open in a happy catty grin.
I feel quite guilty that he is confined to just one room all day - I can leave my office and walk around if I want to - so this evening I closed off a couple of rooms and let him have the run of the apartment. And he ran. From one end to the other making halloween cat pounces at the shadows and flinging himself up the screen door in search of kitty heaven or nirvana as he swarmed the heights.
He yelled challenges through the back screen door at pumpkin cat, who stopped by for dinner, and hissed and chattered his way across the room bouncing like an animated cotton puff now left, now right now run at the person's feet, jump up and bite the hand that feeds and smack wildly with both paws on the way down.
If he wasn't a cat I would think he had a strong strain of Jack Russel pumping through his heart!. Straight up into the air, turning coming down to face the other way! Hurray! All the judges turn up nines for the catersault of the year. Race round the edges of the room, under over, weave in and out and pause to tear the pages out of Oprah magazine 'cause maybe you can eat it...bleckk no way.
Run up the strange one's tree again up to the face and yowl your fishy breath right into her nostrils...Yes! Now chew the fingers, run up the arm, butt heads and rush off into space landing feet away on back legs only waving two front paws, all claws extended, windmills by the laughing pixie face as he falls over backward.
And I, I laughed until my stomach ached, laughed until the tears clogged my throat and turned guffaws to squeaks, laughed until my knees gave way and i subsided to the floor, unmuscled, undone by this impudent scrap that spied me on the floor and rushed right over me with just a pause to squawk into one ear.
When I could stand again, I declared a curfew and with nicely ladened plate enticed our hero back into his bathroom; as he rushed to dine I hop skip jumped myself out of the room and closed the door, residual tremors stirring up the aches my laughter left along my flanks.
I haven't heard a peep since. Not a squeak or squawk or yowl or miaou, and when I looked, I saw him. Fast asleep.
Three days have sauntered by and in the fourth I find myself a speeding bullet trying to rebuild the things I deconstructed in my leisure time. Energy is rushing, somersaulting through the pathways cleared and rearranged, the hidden seen again, things lost I had not missed restored and gleaming with the secrets they have gathered while I was out of touch.
Strange surgery, this throwing out of excess, unused or barely broken. A tiny voice says pass it on to someone, another voice says why? It had a good life. Was well used and cherished while it served its purpose. Let it go. Let yourself go free of all these sticky things that cluster close against you creating moments in the past that make you prisoner.
Now there’s a truth I do not want to face! How much I tie me down to moments so stale a scavenger would pass them by as having no more flavour. The photographs of me, of others burned somewhere in memory of times gone by, or if Time has siphoned off the pictures nestled in my brain, well does it matter if I throw out the things I have forgotten?
Letting go is so much work. The fingers are so stubborn, holding fast to shapes no longer valid, words lost in years of air between then and now, diluted like the bones of Caesar, mere molecules I breathe to keep the furnace flaming at the center of my life.
So much soot, this pointless baggage that I cherish. Ill-burning coal that makes more smoke than heat, yet as I strip me down again to basics I see my mother’s face as she says it might be useful someday, my voice sounds cold, my words unkindly echo in my soul when I say but not to me.
I like the bare bones gleaming in the half light as I wander through my days and nights. I love the feeling of unfettered; the thought that I can fit my life into a bag and go, although I do build stacks of books each place I pause then leave them and replace them, eternal friends with words and meanings to explore from every perspective as I move and change. Learning to let go.
The newspaper seller gets older
every year, cheeks more grizzled
step less spry as he
dashes into traffic
dispensing papers,
giving change
to anxious drivers
and if you see him
at a slow time
he justs sits
gazing to a middle distance
all unknown to me
long stare looking back
perhaps, at all the years
behind him. papers sold and
secrets told like to a hairdresser
unthinking information passing
with a familiar face and smile.
Saw him today, while I was
driving. He looked up and then away
he knows my car, knows I don't buy
the paper, not from him.
He looked so tired, this Sunday
worker who is always there
a signpost in so many lives
that one day will be gone,
years behind us all have
eaten up our lives, bites taken
daily from our immortality
bringing us our future.
not a thought, not a concept or an idea. Not even a mild conjecture on the state of the world, just a vast echoing nothing that sits in the center of my living room twiddling its thumbs and singing if I am nothing why is there an I around? And there's the problem. Descartes says "I think, therefore I am" so if I do not think does that erase me altogether? Do I vanish and leave nothing in the world for all those thoughtless moments? Does the world vanish leaving me suspended in some alternate reality that is nothing and thus not real?And how do I know I think? Is the voice in my head my thoughts? My mother says she thinks in ticker tapes of words streaming from a typewriter; I hear voices, see pictures, smell scents or see jags of lightening stutter through the blackness of my sleep but I am not at all sure I think. So I am not sure I exist. I am, in fact, sure of nothing. So nothing exists and in the sheer weight of its existence creates the Universe.
A friend suggested the other day that I could write about anything and make it interesting. I chose, instead, to write of nothing. I sit zazen and once as the group chanted, each of us reading phonetic Japanese we did not understand in a monotone, all the voices wove together into a wordless chord of harmony that resonated with such beauty that I knew for once that I was part of something so far removed from the boundary of my skin that all I thought important was just echoes of nothing important. Nothing is important. Three words that say so little and so much.
miss a few weeks blogging and when you come back the whole site looks different!~
I kind of wiped myself out doing too much and then I moved - not far, just from top floor to ground level, swapping my fifteen stairs for two,but it entailed a shift of dsl service and phone service which left me bereft and unconnected for the first time in a while.
So Christmas Day, Boxing day and, indeed, my birthday have all come and gone in a flurry of food and wrapping paper and I stopped turning vegetarian for a few days seduced by the scents of clove studded hams and the sly succulence of perfectly roasted pork, the spicy tang of jug and doved peas all the yummies that heave their way onto the tables at this time of year....
Since I stopped chemo my hair has started to grow in again and the steroid chipmunk cheeks are going back to normal although I feel far from normal - no doubt a combination of getting over chemo, radiation effects and a total change of diet.
Much of my life is still in boxes because one handed unpacking has its challenges - in five days I have only emptied eighteen of twenty five boxes - I did manage to assemble three of my bookcases but the futon frame is going to be more than I can handle.
I wake in the mornings, live and breathe and have my being. I am a lucky woman in so many ways - I have found a physio therapist who does acupuncture and a service where you can hire drivers who drive you around in your own car and I discovered that although I really missed my sister - I sent her home for the holidays - I have not become totally dependent.
Yes I can lead a functional life with half of me ignoring any and all instructions being issued from my bombarded brain, it ain't always easy but no one ever promised life was easy did they?
It's ten p.m. and time to head off to keep the people company till dawn. On the schedule for tonight: a feature on acupuncture;poetry and music music music oh yeah I have a couple of movie reviews and my weekly comments on stupid things drivers do. Just a tiny slice of moon tonight and not much wind so the Sahara dust has cast a haze across the island. Makes my eyes itch! A quick splash of rose water and I am out of here.
It is dark when I leave for work All the leaves, the grass, the bougainvillea are grey and silver silhouettes against the inky dark of sky and the bustle of the day has given way to voices of the night, frogs whistling, dogs barking, the feral cats yowling in their hunt for territory, food or love.
People shelter in their houses, flesh and bone nuts in shells of wood, of concrete pushing back the night with gleams of yellow from the windows, electricity replacing fire for comfort, a shield against the dark.
And it is dark. The night surrounds me herding me towards my car and cover for even when the moon is full, folds of shadow, shades of grey, remake the world I walk and know to an alien landscape full of ripples, rhythms I am unaware of; a very different drum from daylight’s heavy syncopation, night is the hiss of brushes on the skins, the heartbeat of the bongo as I head out to the highway.
Frequently the road is mine for about three miles; uneven pools of gold from headlights not quite aligned trace the way ahead, coaxing me into the unknown that is everybody’s future and I skim through this unfamiliar world from Maynard’s to Astoria, all turned foreign by the dark, and watch for people walking on the verges of the road. Then when traffic fills the space with me I turn my eyes from too bright lights that blind me to everything and scurry through the back roads to the station.
I walk into the building. Dark and full of discord as the sounds of BBS and Faith, both at the same time, pour from a radio, the phone, to let me know we are on air. The studio awaits, pitch black, for me to make a world of company and conversation to counterpoint the music that is our trademark, adding live human voice to the mix, a chatty creature full of bits of nonsense, random thoughts and observations, moments I have lived through, seen or heard and choose to share as I reach out in friendship seeking friendship in return.
I become a voice, invisible yet present in the night. A voice that says” how are you?”, “how was your week?” Take a breath, bring those shoulders down, they don’t belong up by your ears, a voice that scolds bad drivers, makes suggestions, shatters into laughter when something unexpected happens with a song. And I am just a voice, my hair is not too short, too grey, I’m not too tall, too thin, too heavy not the wrong age, wrong colour not even the wrong gender, just a voice that talks to you and tells you that the night will pass, so will the pain, uncertainty and pleasure and I always keep my promise to be with you until morning.
I used to wear my hair long enough to sit on then, one day exhausted by the heat, by the sheer weight of it, I had it all cut off. Such freedom! I ran into someone in the supermarket who had seen me just the day before and she said 'Did you cut your hair?" I said, rather snidely, "No, I had someone else do it for me. Why?". I did think of saying no I tried this new shampoo and it shrank but that would have been pushing the envelope too hard back then, Now, I'd say it. The hair was almost four feet shorter, what did she think happened?
But that's just it. People frequently don't think. They open up their mouths, pick up their pen, sit at a keyboard and just let loose. I'd do it more myself probably, but years working in the various media train you to consider every word before committing to it. So if I insult you, I most likely meant to. Really.
This place is the exception. In the blog section I am writing for my own amusement, I sort my thoughts, my days, my worries and my woes to give myself persective. Long distance view of bajanblue and all her convoluted mutterings; my alter ego speaking to me, myself, and I to see if anyone of us, of me, has any sense to make today. Sometimes it helps.
I make decisions, according to others, very quickly. Not entirely true. I consider several courses of action all the time. Explore what paths I might want to take, what goals I have, so when asked will you do X I can say yes or no because I have already seen the possibilities. Have thought the what ifs through.
I am not always happy with the results of my decisions, but who is? I live my life dancing from one stepping stone to another, touching down and taking off; life is so brief a moment, if we blink we miss it. Much like British summers I have known. Let them put on my tombstone ~Rest, at last ~ not ~She had regrets~. Some things I have left undone and feel no need to do; some things I will not do again, waterskiing for one, parachute jumping, for another.
Reading this back I realise I am once again 'in process'. Exploring something myself has not yet confided to me. I know the patterns that I take along my journey when a diversion is coming due.
Wonder what it will be this time.
And that's the thing. Survival. What we are designed to do but I look around and see the puzzlement in the eyes of people who have known me for years. They have seen me happy, sad, sulky, crazed, delighted, ecstatic but they have never seen me surviving. They did not realise that when they say 'you have to take care of yourself' it means I will stop taking care of them. And I die a little from the unwanted inevitable guilt I feel when I do not cook for my mother or miss doing the things that have become "my job". Shit, I cannot even drive! I have to be really careful cooking for me!
So to me, and everyone trying to wrap themselves around something so big it seems endless, many things do heal, and we are endlessly adaptable creatures. I found that if I put my palms together and open them slowly leaving the hands touching along the little fingers I can still cup water in my hands to rinse my face in the morning.
Apparently two hands can do what one cannot. And this turned into something about me again but I am what I know, what I live with, the only thing I can write about truthfully. I just hope some of the feelings were about you
I will add to this, with luck I will keep within 4000 words!
My appointment yesterday gave me across the board clean results on all my tests. No signs of infection nothing. However, there is a lot of excitement over the chest film, which shows, as I told them it would, a healthy looking mass in my right lung. The one i had surgery on about twenty years ago.
So now there are more tests being talked about and surgery and... and... and..
And I think it is stupid. If the three aliens in my head originated in my lung so what? I did not go to the doctor with chest pains, shortness of breath coughing, respiratory distress. I went with numbness and rapidly decreasing function on my left side.
We found a cause, two 'peas' and an 'almond' in my head, Said 'almond' lodged in the brain stem so it actually doesn't make much difference if it is cancer or not, it is problematic by virtue of its position.
Frankly I do not care if they find a name for it - just call it george and kill it (Hmm, george was the first major relationship of my life- residual hostility thirty years later!)
From my point of view to chase after the lung for a couple of weeks guarantees further loss of function on my rapidly failing left side and invites permanent damage in a highly sensitive important area of my brain.
Perhaps whatever is helping me with my breathing can be identified, What if it is exactky what I think it is? The same annoying, benigh fungal spore thing i had in my twenties, slow growing and perfectly able to wait until AFTER we fix my head. And anyway, even if the lung thing is the worst thing in the world it is not actually causing me any discomfort while the 'nut' in my head is!
Can we say priorities here? And it is my health, my body, my head and it should be MY bloody priorities!
I am really quite pissed off right now. I have been face to face with the reality that I am not immortal for weeks (well, actually I knew that already but I like the phrase!)and actively working to embrace what is happening (completely true) and the doctors want more tests so they can put 'a name' to the visitors in my head? If a large animal was chewing off their leg in the dark would they actually care if it was a lion or a bobcat?
Something is chewing up my functions in the dark of my brainstem. Surgery is not really an option. Chemo requires identifying the cells so zap the sucker with radiotherapy. Then we ask for identification.
Six weeks ago my world was turned upside down, again. Over the course of about four days I discovered my cancer had spread to my bones, my boss fired me and both I and my sister fell. I cracked all the ribs on my left side which was a darn sight better than shattering my right thigh which is now an ongoing risk, and my sis, coming to help me, broke her ankle.
We have been two physically challenged women in one house dependent on others for transportation instead of the freedom to pop into the car and let the road take us and although I have been functioning it has been minimal.
I did go through another fifteen radio therapy treatments and got myself off the morphine they put me on to quiet the screaming in my bones but my world was tumbling completely out of control so I gave in and planned my funeral. I also planned my birthday party for December 21st 2009 and now I am organizing all the stuff I have written over the last year into a book proposal, designing a query letter and seeking an agent to shop my book around.
I walk a little more unsteadily and I am loading up on alternative treatments that do not strike me as being more likely to kill me than my current dis-ease. Asparagus, honey and cinnamon and shitake mushrooms won't do me much harm and if they don't help, well neither did chemo!
I have always believed that the human organism is infinitely adaptable but I also believed that I had enough to deal with. Seems I was right -and wrong - again!
is the one you do yourself! About two years or so ago I decided to give my hair the freedom to be the colour I basically gave it when I electrocuted myself.
I used to wear my hair waist length and longer; which meant for school it had to be 'up'. Which in its turn meant I had several of those most dangerous implements - hairpins - available to me at all times. Now hairpins become dangerous only when one is sitting doing nothing much, waiting to leave for school and suddenly see movement out of the corner of one unengaged eye. Closer scrutiny reveals a pair of long antennae coming out of an electrical outlet. A cockroach!
It was the work of half a breath to pull a hairpin from my neatly secured hair and shove it into the outlet with the firm intention of winkling out the roach and disposing of it. To bad I didn't pause for thought. Electricity slammed through me, stopping my heart while the hairpin jumped back and sank itself into my wrist. CPR and artificial respiration applied immediately can counteract electrocution and as my mother, who walked into the room just in time to see her daughter flung across the room by alternating current, knew what to do and what she was doing. My heart beat again. The hairpin shaped burn on my right wrist has faded almost completely over the intervening years.
Over the next several weeks I shed a lot of my hair; the regrowth was various shades of white and grey. Sheer trauma when one is twelve so I entered the fascinating world of hair colour. In my lifetime I have been a blonde, a brunette, a red head, bald, striped, blue, chestnut, brown and once an inadvertent green. So two years ago I tired of the eternal struggle against roots and the time spent steeping in chemicals and decided to go au naturel once more.
At the time my hair was jawlength so I had it taken off down to the scalp to start completely fresh. In NY I had a great haircutter. Unfortunately coming home deprived me of his services and not even I am profligate enough to fly to NY every six weeks for a haircut. I don't like flying that much! To my dismay I found hairdressers here do cuts based on the colour of one's hair and despite the verbal suggestions and even the pictures I took in to communicate my preferences I kept coming out with helmet haircuts I associate with little old ladies and lavender sachets. You can see them any Sunday in the churches here.
Finally I bought a set of clippers and now I simply shear off my hair when it starts to annoy me. Of course it is never that simple, but I have perfected a techinique of using the largest clipping comb and going over my head front to back, side to side, top to bottom until both arms are shaking with the strain and everything but the two cowlicks on the top of my head at the back seems to be a uniform length.
Of course by then, my hair is far shorter than I like it and it will be two weeks before I am happy with my 'do' but on the other hand I don't have to look at it much and it certainly shows off my collection of earrings, as long as I remember to wear a pair or four.
One interesting side effect is that complete strangers want to stroke your head, and sometimes do so without asking . I just wish I could figure out why the comb that is the biggest and says 1 inch on it doesn't leave me with hair one inch long . That's what I thought it would do. And then those cute little angled combs to do around the ears cut so much shorter which creates another set of issues.
I have always admired hairdressers/barbers. A good haircut can transform a face, directing attention to or from the features as needed, giving drama to eyes or the curve of the jaw. A bad haircut is very depressing. I am sitting here right now with a haircut, neither bad or good. Plain, utilitarian and in two weeks I will love it. And it is kind of fun to stroke it!
It has been a while since I have written here because I kept waiting for the news to get better.
It got worse instead. The doctors do not expect me to get better and even my immense faith and desire and intention to heal is rocked by the fact that my cancer has spread to my bones. I certainly do things thoroughly, lungs, brain and bones. For almost the first time in my life I wish I was a little less efficient getting things done!
I do believe in miracles but see no particular reason I should be in line for one, I am a grasshopper girl. Froth and whirl and pretty words with a hug and a kiss on the cheek as I dance off to the next moment leaving nothing behind but a smile.
I don't feel like writing now but so many of you have walked beside me lending strength and love this last year that I wanted to touch base. I will be back (of course) and wish us all peace.
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