Dear Weekly BiWeekly Fans,
Well, another five weeks have slipped by. I had the best of intentions to stick to the schedule and get a note out on time two weeks after the September 13 WBW. Sadly, those good intentions put me straight on the road to hell.
I’d planned to declare another WBW D-Day – Discontinuation Day -- announcing that I was going to take a few gap months or maybe even a gap year between WBW postings, as I declared back in February, apparently unsuccessfully (Q.E.D.). I started up again right away when the pandemic descended, as that seemed worthwhile to write about.
And now, after a great summer (under the circumstances), I’d seen Dr. Einstein who gave me the Good Oncologist Seal of Approval the day after I shipped out the previous WBW; I’d paid my quarterly taxes, started a new writing assignment, survived the 1270 election with two of my three candidates seeking through, celebrated Elise and Aaron’s first wedding anniversary, visited ET and was that very weekend in Buck Hill for the first time since January, flying under the radar at Jean and Dan’s.
We cooked, we ate, we played tennis and Scrabble and I sorted through the contents of the final haul from my Stroudsburg storage space which I closed down (or up) that Friday afternoon. We even squeezed in a Dan-led hike 10 minutes after I arrived Friday night, one that involved bushwhacking through a bramble that embedded briars in my yoga pants, socks, sneakers, jacket that I picked at all weekend (and P.S. they do NOT come out in the wash). The day before I arrived in Buck Hill I’d had a CT Scan, the results of which weren’t yet posted but I felt great so how bad could it be?
Then, that Monday . . .
But, first, let me tell you about this past week.
Last Monday it was cold and dark and raining sideways in Hartford where I came for an hourlong in-room visit with ET (her room, not mine). It was also Columbus-hyphen-Indigenous-hyphen-People’s Day (those hyphens are just for you, A.K.) which hadn’t been top of mind for me as I dashed to the Post Office only to find it locked up. The car wash place # 2 on my list, was closed due to the weather. This inability to accomplish anything was the theme of the day. My brother Henry managed to secure a car and drove down to share the visit with ET; I dopped him and Alex off at Max Burger for lunch and went back to the townhouse to pack up, swung back to pick them up, it was all a little crazy. My car had a warning signal flashing indicating one of my tires was low, so I had Alex drop me at ET’s, swing back to the townhouse where Henry’s car was parked and then take my car to fill up the tire(s). Working this out required the same skill set necessary to win the game Cannibals and Missionaries: three cars in two places.
After the visit, Henry then drove me back to Alex’s to collect my car.
I repaired to the West Hartford Enterprise Rent-a-Car lot, where I met up with Jen Colville who had driven a rental car off the Cape. JC was my Risk Investment for the week. As such, she was fairly Low Risk as she’d been in seclusion ( a euphemism for “stuck”) for the last six months with her mother and was now on the first leg of her journey back to Amman. As she was threatening not to return until whenever, maybe June, I figured this was a good way to spend some time with her – in the car, swerving down the Saw Mill in a downpour. That was after we made a pit stop in Danbury where I saw Lisa Mann for all of five minutes, picked up the case of VRAC Macon Chardonnay that had been sitting behind the counter for a couple of weeks (four, to be precise). I also seized the moment to dash into Trader Joe’s as there was no line, and in less than 11 minutes had filled a cart with $72.00 worth of everything I needed (except the olive oil, but there was no turning back). I am so ready for Supermarket Sweep. Apparently, a new version of this show has been filmed and will premiere . . . tonight at 8 PM on ABC. I can’t wait to see if the contestants are masked.
I dropped Jen at West 79th Street, not expecting to see her again until Friday, when I’d agreed to drive her out to JFK for her 9:40 PM flight only because I couldn’t come up with a better way for her to get there and was already invested in this particular risk so the die was cast, so to speak. On Tuesday we negotiated a lend-lease of a couple of Brobdingnagian suitcases I was anxious to never see again and on Wednesday I stepped out at 1:00 PM to do a few errands (the Post Office among them) and immediately texted asking if she’d been outdoors all day because it was simply spectacular out and we should play tennis like right away.
Sure, she said. I hoofed it down to Mt. Sinai, which was one of my six intended errands, postponed the others, including (again) the USPS, ran home, changed, grabbed my bag and an apple and a Kit Kat and a water bottle and jumped in the car at 1:55 PM, thinking to myself, this is insane and will be impossible to make it all happen and I should just call it off. I had to pick Jen up across town and a mile and a half south, then turn around and drive 68 blocks up Riverside without getting pulled over for speeding (that would be four more points), find parking on a Wednesday which is the toughest day of the week for on-street parking, and then hope like hell there was an open court. Not to mention hold my own against Jennifer’s formidable slicing.
We were on the court (there was ONE open) at 2:25 PM, the car was parked legally, across the street from the entrance to bridge leading to the courts and about 10 minutes into hitting I stopped, did a mic drop with my racquet, held my hands to the sky and declared to Jen (and the other players all around) that this was the best day of my summer, if not entire life.
It really was. Sometimes things really do just work out right.
So, I promised Jen I’d feature this incident prominently in the part of the WBW that most people read before they get bored and give up. Oh, yes, we played again Friday morning, a day not as pretty as Wednesday, and we only got 50 minutes in before it started to rain hard enough to bring someone out to lock the courts up. But it was something.
And there was even a bonus to gifting her the suitcase, which I presented as a belated and anticipatory birthday present. In checking all the zippered compartments, I found the dozen pairs of socks I’d packed in this suitcase when I returned from my two months in Charleston in 2019, never found and thought I’d left in a drawer. I didn’t even discover them a year ago when Sarah packed Elise’s wedding dress carefully in this suitcase for its journey across the East River from 1270 to the Atlantic Beach Club -- along with, according to an inventory note that was still in the bag, the wedding shoes (a pair of sandals Elise bought at H&M for $3.99), her earrings and add-a-pearl necklace, corsage pins, sewing supplies and – scribbled at the bottom of the list in pencil – the wedding rings and marriage license.
Now, back to the story.
MONDRIAN AND ME
My clever brother Henry created this visual to give you an immediate clue as to what’s going on medically within. He originally scaled to actual size but you get the idea.
So yes, back to that Monday after Buck Hill – the Monday after the Sunday I called Cathy Ali on my drive home and asked her if she remembered where we were on September 27, 1985.
She didn’t, but said she had a strong sense I was going to tell her where we were. Actually I didn’t know anything beyond that we were starting our second year of b-school at UCLA, but I told her I knew where we weren’t and should have been which was the LA Coliseum for the Springsteen Born in the U.S.A. Tour concert which was being reprised on E-Street Radio as I crossed the Delaware Water Gap.
The two “shows” I crave the most on SXM Channel 20 are the ones where they play past concerts beginning to end, with the bonus that the state of Springsteen fandom is such that I can pull up set lists while I’m driving (trust me, it’s the least dangerous thing I do while driving) so I know which songs I can pass on and make phone calls. This show allows me to fantasize if I had actually not been such a laggard in discovering Springsteen’s oeuvre (it didn’t a happen until I read his memoir, or rather listened while he read it to me on Audible), how different might my life had been if I had been in the audience at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic on September 20, 1979. That’s just an example.
The other show I love is “Cover Me,” where Springsteen covers the songs of others or, better yet, others cover his. Like, it’s often the only time I understand the words. Eddie Vedder does the best versions, IMHO.
Cathy and I had a long chat, made longer by cell phone drops that she was extremely tolerant of, in a way most wouldn’t be. I proceeded to blather on about how great I felt, and was so confident that my CT scan was clean that I planned to take the next three years off from cancer everything, just pack it up and park the notion in the long-term lot and go ahead and enjoy life and such without it. Inasmuch as enjoying life is possible when one is in a continuous state of near quarantine. On and on and on. And on.
I doubt no one will be more surprised than Cathy to read here that Monday morning, Dr.Sabbatini called. At 9:00 AM. Early Monday morning calls from one’s oncologist are never a good thing. He asked if I’d seen my scan results. Nope, they hadn’t been posted yet I told him. Eventually I got my hands on the report. There it is, the last square on the picture says it all.
We ran through the options: 1) More chemo. Been there, done that. Plus, not a great idea to shoot to shit what remaining immunities I have been harboring in a pandemic. Especially one that is on the verge of a surge. 2) Radiation. That was the Miracle Cure offered me last year. There are no second acts after SBRT. And behind Door #3, there’s Doogie Howser, M.D., waiting to heal with steel. I reckon if he was 14 in 1989 that makes him . . . 45 years old by now. Though personally my first choice in surgical options would be Benjamin Franklin Pierce, M.D.
I stalled a bit on a decision. I poked around the web and asked a couple random people what they thought and called Dr. Kenney several times at 5:05 AM. In truth, I was a little concerned that if I went all in gung ho for the surgery right away it might be scheduled too soon and I would have to cancel the installation of my kitchen countertops planned for the following Friday. Hey, I have my priorities.
a week later I met with the charming Dr. Chi, who heads gyn surgery at MSK and is willing to give this option a try but not willing to go out on a limb and declare it will be an unmitigated success. It’s . . . complicated. Who knows what lies beneath? Not even all this fancy nuclear equipment can tell. I don’t know how long the surgery will be (nor do they) or if it will actually be possible to remove the target node that might have been melted by radiation into me or for that matter I only have a vague notion where all this action will take place. Somewhere south of my pancreas and east of my duodenum. Dr. Chi did impress me by sketching out a map of my insides approximating the location for me – while sitting opposite me, so for him it was upside down. Tomorrow I see a hepatobiliary surgeon (which is even harder to pronounce than Kamala) who may be assisting or take over the surgery (for those Larry David fans, remember The Foist?) and then I have a bunch of more pre-op hoops to jump through spread out throughout the week After that, it’s showtime, folks on October 28, which is almost Halloween but not quite and not really anywhere near Election Day which had been my first choice, since I would clearly not have cared if I ever came out of the anesthesia not matter the outcome in the surgery or for that matter the election.
The deciding factor was the solemn commitment of my insider MSK buddies – Doug and Nora and Evan -- to visit every day.
So for the next 10 days I will tie up loose ends and put the pedal to the metal on cleaning up the apartment and gain some weight (that’s the fun part) that I can afford to lose post-op. I moved my printer from the kitchen to right under my desk which I figure will put four or five pounds on me since I no longer have to get up and walk to 50 steps to get printouts. And I baked a cheesecake last night that I will donate half to Elise and Aaron and the other half to me. That should pack it on efficiently.
Bottom line(s): Just another thing to add to the compost heap of uncertainty that defines all our already highly uncertain existences. Pile it on. I’m not interviewing Death Doulas yet. (Any volunteers? Brent, I know you’re reading this!) This procedure might just rid me of cancer for a while and maybe I’ll be able to slog through the backlog of the New Yorker that have been piling up while I’m hanging out in the recovery room and if I’m compos mentis enough to read the New Yorker for sure I can get through Seasons One and Two of Fargo (currently I’m watching Season 2 with Jane Safer and LOVING IT) without losing my train of thought between episodes. .
BACK TO IMPORTANT THINGS: THE KITCHEN
The kitchen is now 99 44/100th finished. This project began back in March when my refrigerator broke, and just about everything that could go wrong with every part of the renovation, not the least being the arrival of the pandemic. With not inconsiderable effort (and money), I now have lovely mouse grey repainted cabinet doors, have replaced a thoroughly nonfunctional desk area with sleek new cabinetry that one day I will learn to duck under. Already three times I have seriously knocked myself silly walking into a low corner toward the door. I also located plans drawn up in 1999 but never executed to create a Garbage Garage where previously had been an ugly, non-functional radiator, replaced a greasy stove hood with the same model but new, brought in two beautiful pieces of junkyard quartz now installed at either end of the kitchen two Saturdays ago – by installed I mean I tipped one of the building porters to carry then up and drop them in place; they’re so heavy they don’t need to be secured. They represent the high-end countertop. I’m not even sure what quartz is but that’s what it says on the back. The remaining countertop is now beautiful Ikea fake concrete. That I haven’t yet ruined by scorching or melting with an impulsively placed hot saucepan or pot is a miracle. The previous countertop, oak butcherblock, was marred by decades of water sitting on it that hadn’t been mopped up quickly enough. Of consequence, and with apologies to James Baldwin, I walk around the new kitchen muttering to myself “no more water, the fire next time.” Which is so apt in so many ways I may go back and read the book or, better yet, download the audio version read by Detective Ed Green himself, Jesse L. Martin.
The quartz was a terrifying acquisition that necessitated driving through my least-favorite parts of Jersey City, out by the Pulaski Skyway on Tonnelle (or Tonnele, they can’t make up their mind how it’s spelled or pronounced) Avenue, Routes 1 and 9, and Broadway. I was all of 12 miles from 1270 Fifth but several lifetimes away. The driving was bad, but trying to figure out if the stone I picked out was the right shade of grey (trust me, there are more than 50, and a lot have a blue cast I didn’t want) – that made me crazy. I almost walked away, almost ready to ask an actual expert to make the decision for me but was by then motivated by the possibility that it could be another six months before that happened, chose two pieces, had them cut my specs (Sarah did the measuring, so I’d have someone other than myself to blame) and then had them placed in the back of my car. From there I calmed down considerably thanks to meeting Deb Jacobus (AKA Deb 1) for a quick spin through Vito’s in Hoboken (mozzarella!) and then coffee sitting on a bench in Elysian Park where our kids used to play when they were toddlers.
NEWS BRIEFS
A year ago I made a deal with a young neighbor down the hall: If he’d feed my turtle when I was out of town, I’d help him with his Common App essay when the time arrived to write it. He tended to the turtle, and this fall I made good on my end of the promise. Now this was a project – and one I hope he learned a thing or two about writing he didn’t know before. We worked over the phone three or four days a week for six weeks. I was very careful to tell him that while I had no problem ghostwriting speeches and Op Eds for CEOs of major global organizations, he was going to write this himself and I was going to push and pull him through the process of how to make what he wanted to say better.
About 387 drafts later, he is finished. I told him to read it out loud to his mother. He reported back that she cried. I’m just hoping the admissions officer who gets his file at Colgate does, too. It’s a great story, told in his voice and if nothing else he learned that the secret to writing is rewriting and that synonyms.com is a writer’s best friend.
Among other chores I attended to while in Hartford last Sunday and Monday (Hartford is an approximation; Alex’s townhouse is actually in New Britain and my mother’s current place of residence West Hartford) I had Alex pull several cartons of paper I dumped in the storage place where we dumped the furniture we didn’t know what to do with in clearing out 727. I went through and disposed of the contents of five of them – ancient tax returns, the extra 14 copies of original published articles, brochures, annual reports, and, amazing even myself (I am very hard to impress as most of you know) I stood there and admitted there was likely no way in hell I was ever going to write the book I’d outlined with my cousin Jill’s husband Will documenting cases that had been argued before him while he sat on the bench of the New York Surrogate’s Court adjudicating a New York Times Best Seller List book’s worth of controversial, or racy or bold-face-name-laden cases. We put together a proposal in 1980 while he was still a judge, thinking we couple publish it on his retirement but truthfully he was co cranky and difficult to deal with (part of what made him so loveable, I hasten to add) I walked away from the project, presenting him with a banker’s box of background material I’d accumulated. When he died, and then Jill died, there was the box. I took it, and that was six years ago.
Never one to toss a book unless it’s in truly dire condition (or written by Ayn Rand), or for that matter the makings of a book, I hauled this carton from New York to Buck Hill to Hartford, and last Monday, I threw it out without ever lifting the top. I know it’s sad to have to admit I’m never going to get around to writing about the Last Wills of the Rich and Famous or whatever, but that’s the truth.
The box went directly into recycle. Alex, bless him, kept his eyes open for shredding events – free shredding events, and took the tax stuff over this weekend to a shred fest he found in the neighborhood.
I finally moved out of the Summer Dacha (i.e., my guest bedroom) just last night. Now a week past Indigenous People’s Day weekend, it was time and there won’t be any need for a room with an air conditioner until next June. Remind me when that time comes to investigate high-quality noise-cancelling headphones that one can sleep in.
Elise and Aaron celebrated their first anniversary much more quietly than I might have envisioned a year ago. We defrosted the wedding cake topper which had been residing in Sarah’s freezer for the requisite year, then distributed pieces liberally around her building and mine, explaining the tradition of eating it on the first anniversary which definitely puzzled many. At least the old-fashioned thing of sleeping with a piece under one’s pillow the night after a wedding made some sense. As well as a mess. We were planning to dine at the restaurant where their rehearsal dinner was held, but it was too cold to eat out, as in outdoors in the extension set up in the parking lot, that night. So we ordered in Greek food and ate cake. Which was surprisingly delicious after a year in the freezer, though I shouldn’t have been surprised since I paid a bundle for it. They remain enchantedly happy with their new apartment, neighborhood and even told me, when I asked if they wanted to spend their first anniversary in a hotel they told me they consider where they live now like living in a hotel.
WISDOMS THAT HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE
There have been, over the years, random things said to me that were a wake-up call, jolting my ways of thinking about something or dealing an obstacle pushing me into a new direction and remaining in my head forever. My father was full of such wisdom, and occasionally ET too. But here are some from outside the family.
One example occurred when I was in seventh grade at The Oxford School. My English teacher was Mr. Atwood, father of my BFF Jill. Mr. Atwood was the one who told our class what a "whore" was, when we encountered this strange word in The Old Man and the Sea. Because I was friends with his daughter, the two of us were given special dispensation to tag along as mascots on the high school ski trip to Mount Snow, which was organized and chaperoned by Mr. Atwood. This was a big deal. We stayed in a ski dorm with the high school girls who as I recall shaved their legs every day. I don't remember if we were allowed to head off to the slopes by ourselves or stuck in ski school, but at one point we met up for lunch at the lodge where Mr. Atwood chose a cup of soup from the cafeteria array.
I remember watching him put a spoonful of the soup in his mouth and then a quizzical look on his face and then spitting a button out into his hand. He looked at it, we looked at it and he deposited it onto his tray. It wasn't a big button. but the thread that once held it onto a shirt was still attached. Then he stuck his spoon back into the soup and continued to eat it.
"Mr. Atwood!" I said. "How can you eat that soup that had a button in it!"
This was half a century ago, but I remember his exact response.
"Mary," he said in his stern, teacher-of-giggly-young-girls, all-powerful-being voice. "I might not have discovered the button until my last spoonful." Then he placed his spoon again in the soup and finished the entire cup.
My lesson from Mr. Atwood: So so many of life's hiccups are just buttons in the soup. Just keep on eating.
Here’s another.
When I was writing for Worth Magazine, I regularly spoke with a really sharp psychologist on the west coast named Thayer Cheatham Willis, who was herself a poor little rich girl born into the family that founded Georgia-Pacific. I was working on some story about the relationship between money and happiness, or perhaps, unhappiness. Unlike the above example the exact circumstances of this conversation are a little murky, But I do remember pushing, pushing, pushing her to tell me what the secret was to pulling out of a black hole of unhappiness. Finally, exasperated, she said to me – and there were her exact words – “Sometimes, Mary, you just have to decide you’re going to be happy.”
And last, this was more personal than general, but no less startling to me. It came two weeks ago from Dr. Chi, who because of this I now think of as Dr. Qi which is that Scrabble word Jean and I let Dan get away with all the time and shouldn’t.
In discussing the current situation with this damn node persistently popping up even after being attacked with stuff that would slay a dragon, in the course of the conversation he said, “Look, you are going to live for decades and decades, and we’ll keep treating you. You will never be cancer free but you’ll just deal with it.”
Again, this was like a blinding flash of light from above. Nobody has so directly pointed this out to me, at least not with such clarity. I’ve been so focused on the crappy numbers for five-year survival rates at Stage III and IV -- uh. like 47% or 29% or an average of four years depending which study was done when and which of my ovarian-type cancer sorority sisters are included. I’ve been missing the forest for the trees by sitting around thinking I’m just wrapping up my fourth year this December though who knows exactly when this all started anyway.
With this new lease on life I decided it would be OK to meet Jean Jarvis and Mike Selch, who had ventured to the City from LA to check up on just what was going on here (and also visit their daughter Hayley). I decided this was an opportune time to break my restaurant fast by having my first meal in a restaurant in New York City since March with them.
I actually have a bit of a tradition going of dining with Jean and Michael right before starting a new treatment. In July 2018, after the first data point on Henry’s Mondrian chart was established, they took me to Gentleman Farmer to pig out the night before my first round of chemo. They returned the first week of April a year later, right as I was getting off the chemo gravy train and into the new new thing Lynparza, the hot poly ADP-ribose polymerase inhibitor that was supposed to work but didn’t (data points #3 to #4). Last year they showed up the week of my radiation, they’re the ones I had one too many glasses of wine with in some dumpy Greek cafeteria across from Sloan Kettering before heading in for an evening hit of Chernobyl-level rays. And now . . . here they are again, kind of like a dead albatross. Oh well, we always have fun. The rain that chased me off the tennis court persisted, but we went to the Barking Dog where there was a shelter tent smack on Third Avenue complete with a heater. I had dressed for the ski slopes anyway. It was all ours for the entire lunch. Oh, how delicious was that cheeseburger? Indescribable.
I will figure out a way to arrange for white or black smoke signals – or blue or pink – following surgery. I promise there will be no gender reveal.
Cheers
mbl