I have ADD, OCD and HFSA

HFSA - an acronym referring to Health Food Store Anxiety, a syndrome in which a person is inundated with panic and/or new-kid-in-school nervousness upon entering a health food store; may be accompanied by a tendency to purchase the wrong product rather than ask questions of a store clerk or the inclination to say that they know what spelt flour is when, in fact, they do not. Often coincides with Farmer's Market phobia and a general discomfort in stores that smell like patchouli.

First of all, you would not believe just how incorrectly I was spelling patchouli.

Second, and more to the point, I had to run to our local health food store earlier tonight to get some milk (we're trying to go grass-fed) and I found myself tensing up at the thought of walking past the Reiki club posters and through the door. This, despite the fact that the people who work there have been mostly lovely and not in that false I have to pretend that it doesn't totally irritate me to come out from behind my clerk station to show you that what you're looking for is right in front of you way. Unless their acting skills rival my Meryl, I truly believe that they are genuinely happy to show me to the milk thistle. Still, I put the task off as long as I could.

The fact is that I enjoy health food stores. I get the same joy perusing their aisles as I do a book store (or Pottery Barn Kids). I like discovering that things like kombu and agave nectar---which sound so very much like bird food---are, in fact, edible. I revel in a giddy perplexity as I ponder what wonders a $14 vial of vanilla extract (which I've bought) could possibly hold. I like clutching a bottle of green tea moisturizer in one hand and goat's milk night cream in the other and asking myself which one will make me look like organics-advocate Alicia Silverstone faster. (Both products are in my medicine cabinet at this very moment and other than saying "whatever" in the mirror every time I see a new zit, I don't see a likeness.) So then why do I always get so nervous surrounding this errand?

The answer?

I'm not a smelly hippie. I so wish I could be but Birkenstocks only ever make my calves look fat and as much as I hope to someday schlep a Korean baby around in a hemp sling, I doubt that I'll be able to pull that off either. Corduroy never falls loosely on my Ben and Jerry-loving ass and I always forget my reusable grocery bags when I go to the store and inevitably come home with armloads of plastic. I don't teach yoga, my mom isn't an artist who taught me to play the sitar and not only is my gray not coming in, but my braid is feet short of my ass. I don't even fit it on the next tier of health food store clientele hierarchy---educated young suburbanites. A North Face jacket does not an outdoorsy person maketh. I'm not the fashionably casual mom in a pair of Keens who is raising her children on organic juice boxes. Nor am I the young professor from the local university stopping on the way home for homemade yogurt and a bushel of swiss chard. I am the awkward girl in J.Crew khakis and a Tina Fey t-shirt whose cell phone is ringing in the next aisle, drowning out the piped in prayer chimes.

To be clear, I know I'm overthinking it. Perhaps I need some Passionflower to ease my anxiety. Still, it is this insecurity---my perceived (read: made up) sense of standing creaseless in a sea of crunchy---that fuels this nervousness (which is funny since my friend Matt has on multiple occasions made me remove my shirt so he could iron it). As much as I am learning about society's seed-y (oh, go me!) underbelly, as eager as I am to avoid the hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and genetic modifications that are all too present on the shelves of supermarkets, as hungry as I am for more changes than I have already made on this front, it still feels a little bit like a farce and that I should just go back to my nachos and Chef Boyardee.

I just went to the website to check the store hours and, I kid you not, their homepage is championing the merit of daily skipping. Like to my fuckin' Lou, skipping. I just don't think we'll ever be a natural fit.

Still, I'm committed to paying attention to what I'm putting in my body, balancing my pH levels and learning what pH levels actually are. Hopefully, someday I'll have the self esteem to go in there strutting my chakras like a peacock.

It will not likely be soon:

When Dan came home tonight he noticed that I was a wearing a hand-knit wool hat that a friend gave to me and asked me if I wore it to the health food store in an effort to get my earth on.

His exact words: "Did you wear that hat to the store, you poser?"

Someone's not getting a yin yang job tonight.

Play this while you read.

It's like playing The Wizard of Oz while listening to The Wall...

A friend of mine gave me a copy of the following to read yesterday. She was trying to give me writing encouragement (and advised me to "just replace music with writing" while reading it) and while it did help in that regard, it also made me remember what it is I love about music. Anyway, in many ways, it made my day.

Karl Paulnack Welcome Address

Below is an excerpt from a welcome address given to parents of incoming students at The Boston Conservatory on September 1, 2004, by Dr. Karl Paulnack, director of the Music Division.

One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, "you're wasting your SAT scores!" On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

I don't usually listen to music while I work because the ADD won't have it, but today I did and, as expected, it dragged me all over the place; in and out of schools of thought, under the weight of emotion, through the perils of conflict resolution, into the depths and up for breath. (I couldn't stay down there so fortunately the big Broadway ballads were interspersed with lots of of jazz-handy breaks. If I want to stay down---or in, rather---Joni Mitchell is my girl.) It was nice letting the music do the driving today. It's been a while since I've visited my "invisible objects."

Try to listen to this without feeling pumped:


Idina Menzel is totally on Dan's free-cheating-pass list. Okay, she's on my list too. Her husband is Taye Diggs so I think the four of us could work something out...We're seeing her in May with the Boston Pops for my birthday. Holla.

Pointless rambling and a half-assed ending.

This is very much like when I used to title high school essays "I Hate Titles" when I couldn't come up with anything witty.

I just fucking saw fucking snow.

Fuck.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!

I'm cold.

And cranky.

And cold.

I finally got back to NH yesterday after staying an extra day in RI because the downside of chemo finally kicked in (though all is well now as far as I know). When I made it just north of Boston around 2pm, I called Dan with an idea.

"Now just think about it for a minute before you say no, but what if you left work early and met me for a 3 o'clock movie?"

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

He never gives in that easy. Word. In the five days I had been gone, Dan worked late nearly every evening so an early departure was easy enough to swing. (Plus, he's staying late tonight. He stays late a lot. It's to the point where I've said to him, "Fuck, is this a red flag and I'm missing it? Am I supposed to be checking your cell phone bills or something?") So we got our Milk Duds and popcorn (the popcorn was only a buck because of the Regal Rewards points we've racked up! Some couples earn airline miles...) and headed in to see Shutter Island on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Normally Shutter Island would be on my Don't See Unless You Want to Be Scared To Go To The Bathroom Alone At Night list but there were very few options and screw Avatar. For all the wusses like me: You can handle this movie. It's more thriller than horror; more slight hypertension than days off your life. In the end, I gave it thumbs mostly up, Dan gave it thumbs mostly down and we both agreed that in every role, Leonardo DiCaprio always seems like a boy trying to play a man. Still, a movie on a Tuesday? Beat that.

Afterwards we got burritos and headed home for Idol 2010, a season in which the mediocrity (if not terribleness) of the talent cannot be overstated. The game this season seems to be less about how American will weed out the gifted singers as much as it is how American can separate the lame from the truly dreadful. While some people participate in college basketball brackets, I do a similar thing come American Idol season. Dan runs a company-wide contest through his work where correct weekly picks of the bottom three contestants, including a guess on who will go home, earns players points as the season goes on. The person with the most points wins (as with every game ever played). My overall pick is poor man's Daughtry, Lee Dewyze (whose name Dan sings to the tune of Edelweiss). This vote is based on who I think may win versus who I want to win...Bobblesox (as Dan calls her)...maybe Siobhan. If Lee does become our next American Idol, I get 50 bonus points at the end of the season (very much like catching the golden snitch). (How 'bout how I write our American Idol as if some twenty-something singer is a national treasure akin to my Oprah?) Since I don't work for Dan's company, he always sneaks me into the competition under some male co-worker's name without his knowing. Last year I won and undoubtedly enhanced the reputation of the guy who got the credit for my AI contest championship. This year Dan put me in under his name so a victory is crucial.

I spent my first full day back writing. I worked for a couple of hours from a Starbucks in Portsmouth (if this was 1998, I'm pretty sure writing from a Starbucks would make me a real writer a la Pinocchio) before heading home for an afternoon of from-the-couch writing which I save for days of shitty weather or general fatigue. I actually fell asleep sitting up for a bit today, hands still on the keys of my laptop and everything. I was apparently typing in my dream and woke myself up by hitting the shift key.

See what I mean about pointless rambling?

None of this really matters or is of any consequence. What really matters is that there's a strange sound coming from my basement and I don't know what it is. It sounds sort of like the roar of the ocean or a fire hose or like a toilet is running (Dan---I checked). It happens every few seconds, lasts for a bit, and then stops. I have no idea what it is. At first I thought it was static-y electrical feedback and that my apartment was bugged. Except for a top-of-the-lungs Barbra Streisand singalong, I don't they got any info. I swear to God, just as I started writing this it started changing its rhythm and going faster. (It knows I'm talking about it!) Now it sounds like a monster panting after a jog around the block. The question is, should I be checking to see what it is? I'm really not the go-see-what-the-noise-in-the-basement-is type. I'm much more of the kill-me-while-I'm-defenseless-in-my-bed variety. Or, more accurately, the maybe-if-I-close-my-eyes-the-ghost-will-think-I'm-sleeping-and-go-inhabit-someone-else's-body type.

Either way, I'm not going down there...I'd like to go to the bathroom unaccompanied tonight.

(You were warned.)

Family bonding

The nausea came today. Peppermint tea and a prescribed med got her through it but a general crumminess overcame her. Fatigue was the symptom du jour and she slept for a chunk of the day. Still, she's still 300 times better than I thought she would be. She made the apple sauce for our pork chop and apple sauce (and baked potato and spinach) dinner and I was glad to finally get that recipe under my belt. Then we sat at the kitchen table for a bit while she told the kind of amazing stories from her childhood that only come out during unexpected moments of tenderness like a random Sunday night mother/daughter dinner.

Later, as she relaxed on the couch, I made a vegetable broth (in case she's resistant to eating tomorrow as her appetite was already waning today) and a giant salad (in case her appetite is just fine). Then I joined her for some tube time. We started with Step Brothers and had a few a big laughs before she dubbed it "too disturbing" and changed the channel. (File Step Brothers under Movies Not To Be Watched With One's Mother.) Then we switched to Hoarders---you wanna talk disturbing?---and ultimately landed on her favorite: "My Raymond." Now I'm watching it by myself (and, by the way, loving it) while she is fast asleep. After I finish this, I'll wake her to go up to her bedroom.

If my mom is still doing okay tomorrow then I'll probably head home. I'm missing me some Dan and it's time to recharge. I had been beginning to wonder if I had made the right decision regarding staying the weekend here. A conversation like tonight's at the table answers that question.

Um, didn't you have chemo or something?

I kick myself for not appreciating every single day of my childhood that this was the view from my bedroom window. (Usually there's only one sun...hopefully my photography skills will improve.)

Day two and other than a metallic taste in her mouth (which could be from either the chemo or the cancer), my mom is showing no big signs of illness. We even went on another walk today (though she doused herself in sunscreen and I made her wear a hat since chemo makes people more sensitive to the sun). I have read that some people don't get sick until several days after treatment but I've decided she's going to be one of the rare few who only experience mild fatigue. The oncology nurse said that if she was going to get nauseous it would likely start up in the first 24-48 hours after treatment, so hopefully she's dodging that bullet. She also said it's possible that my mom's hair will only thin versus falling out completely with the particular chemo cocktail she's on. I'm starting to wonder what will happen.

My mom is getting frustrated with the no sugar/no flour plan we have her on (I'd like to ban bread on the whole but she doesn't seem agreeable to this) and I'm not wavering. It's like dealing with a teenager. I keep thinking, "You can be mad at me if you want to be but I know what's best and I'm doing this because I love you." (I don't remember my mom saying that to me even once when I was a teen but then, as I remember it, I was the perfect child.)

So, the day was relatively normal and, dare I say, uneventful? Actually it was uneventful in terms of cancer, but in terms of life, it was great. I spent a couple of hours having birthday cake and tea with my sister and nephew tonight, a chance I don't often get. And earlier, I even went on an invigorating motorcycle ride with my dad through Tiverton, a beautiful town that sits across the river from my parents' home. My dad and I had a a cup of coffee at a sweet little spot that sits right on the river and watched the sun sparkle over the water, this time from the west. Witnessing the sun rising and falling over the same river, watching my nephew blow out my sister's birthday candles, seeing my mom enjoy a cup of green tea on her porch in the fresh spring air; tonight, I feel nothing but gratitude.

First day of spring: Drink, l'chaim, to life!

Pushing through

I didn't even look right before gassin' it through the puddle. This could have ended very badly.

So, the cars are okay, the apartment is fine and the only signs left of the lake that was our road, yard and driveway is debris that washed up, marking the high tide point. Dan and I went back on Wednesday to check on the cars and though there was still a pond in our driveway (such that we had to ask our neighbor with the high rubber boots to check our mail) I was able to charge the ol’ Subaru Outback out of the driveway so that we could return the rental car. (A Chevy with manual windows and locks, by the way. “How do you lock this thing? What do you mean I have to just push the button down?”).

When we walked into our apartment on Wednesday I was suddenly so overwhelmed by all the life-in-order tasks that needed to get done that I disappeared for 15 minutes into a silent stress attack. Our bills---stacked in scattered piles around the apartment---needed to be paid. In the rush before the evacuation I had thrown our laundry all over the bedroom and the rest of the apartment while packing my suitcase. (Most of it had been in laundry bags and baskets anyway, having not been put away in weeks.) The entire place needed a douching---floors vacuumed and washed, bathtub scrubbed, etc.---never mind that thing called spring cleaning. Plus, I knew I was heading down to RI the next day (Thursday; I am there now) so I had to organize and pack everything up once more before loading the car again. As we stood there, the smell of dampness still in the air despite the beautiful sixty-something degree day outside, I froze, unsure of where to begin and feeling just completely seized up by all that needed doing. In these moments, I can barely talk. (Dan told me later that he wanted to slap me across the face a la Cher and say, “Snap out of it!”)

And it was, of course, ultimately Dan who did get me to snap out of it. Seeing my sudden tension and unease, he said, “Let’s pretend we were never here and stay at the hotel another night.”

I hesitated, feeling like a night at home could be so productive but also disheartened that I was no longer homeless and thus could not take a day of writing outside in the sun, to be my only choice. Plus, Dan and I had both been looking forward to our rowdy St. Patrick’s Day plan of take-out and American Idol in the hotel room. It was also our last night together for an undetermined length of time since my mom started chemo today and I’ll be staying down here for a bit to see her through it. We knew we could either spend that last night together having fun or with me frantically whipping around the apartment trying to do seven things at once and ultimately failing to really complete even one.

“Come on,” Dan said. “Let’s pretend we never came home at all. We’ll have a fun night at the hotel and then I’ll get all the stuff around here done this weekend while you’re in Rhode Island. Let’s go back to our FEMA trailer and enjoy our last night together.”

And so I went with it, knowing that this was exactly the right choice to make. Though we could have probably stayed at our apartment, we shelved all that needed doing and from a bed that had been made by someone other than us, we watched TV on a set that carried all the channels we don’t have at home. Needing a break from reality, we played pretend for one more night.

And now back to reality we are.

Today was, indeed, my mom’s first day of chemotherapy. I packed a cooler of food, threw Travel Scrabble in my backpack and readied for the worst. The outcome? The best. (Well, the best as far as mestastatic lung cancer is concerned.)

The chemotherapy room had two rows of paper-lined La-Z-Boys running along each wall. It’s like a little cancer community where people sit, get their chemo administered either intravenously as my mom did or through a catheter, and hang out. My dad and I went in first while my mom had her vital signs checked. As we walked in the room, I was surprised to feel fear. There were three people already in their recliners and each one was very thin and very sickly looking. It was not the stuff of those brave women out in the world with their beautiful bald heads or colorful scarves; the image of cancer I have taken comfort in. These people were very, very ill and the fear of my mom becoming this sick made me nauseous on the spot.

And then she joined us in there and the laughing began. My dad asked my mom if she preferred a private room as one was available but, as he anticipated, my mom rather be with everyone else taking in the scene and making friends. (My dad and I both agreed we were the private room type though I can only speak for myself when I say that my desire for privacy seems to serve me less than my mom’s social nature serves her.) The woman connects with people. Within two minutes of meeting the oncology nurse, she was recounting to my mom the details of her husband’s affair, their divorce and how the kids are taking it. This nurse was lovely as were all the others we’ve met along the way. (I love nurses. If any group of people is saving this world, my money’s on them. If I could handle bodily fluids of any kind and I didn’t hate people so much, I’d almost want to be one.)

And then they hooked her up and it began. We took pictures as soon as it started. My parents on the first day of chemo. Gig with her IV drip. We cracked ourselves up. And when a nurse came and placed a large tray of delicious looking bagels and muffins in front of my mom, whom we’ve got on a torturous no sugar/no flour diet, we only laughed harder.

At one point my mom said, “This is a really great experience.”

To which my dad responded, “This isn’t Disney, it’s chemo.”

And then four hours just somehow passed. We didn’t even get a chance to read our books.

My mom felt great for the rest of the day. Like, freakishly great. They gave her a steroid to protect her from a possible allergic reaction and she attributes her zest to this. She’s a little Wonder Womanesque right now. I’m pretty sure she could lift a car. She got home and called all her friends and family and laughed about her “great experience,” we went for a nice walk in the sun, and she even handled all the requisite billing issues and phone calls that come with all this medical intervention (‘cuz who doesn’t want to call a hospital billing department on her first day of chemo?). My dad and I marveled at how a person could possibly feel that happy after her first dose of chemotherapy.

Dan and I talked tonight about how with all that you hear about chemotherapy---it’s pretty commonplace these days---you never really know exactly what the experience is. You hear about vomiting and hair loss. Low immune system and fatigue. But I’ve never heard about the experience firsthand; what it’s like that first day, how soon the symptoms start, etc. And though I had no idea what today would bring, I had not even pondered the possibility that she might come out of the hospital feeling fantastic.

The steroid will wear off though and tomorrow may be a different day. When my eldest sister was nine-months pregnant with her son and about to blow, having never been pregnant before she said that waiting for labor to start was “like waiting for a car accident.” It was imminent and it was huge, she understood, but she had no idea when it was coming.

That’s sort of how this feels now. My mom is going to get sick. You can‘t put poison in your body and avoid that. But whether it’s nausea or vomiting or headaches or mouth sores or pain that are coming, none of us know. Will she be able to eat tomorrow? Or will it be three more days until it kicks in? How heavy is the tiredness of chemo? How will it feel? If I am so consumed by all these questions, what must be going through her head? Is she going to bed tonight wondering if her body will be her own tomorrow? How strange that must be.

And how is she always laughing? At every appointment we’ve gone to, as my mom has checked in and my dad and I have taken our seats in the waiting room, he and I have shared a smile after hearing my mom erupt into laughter with whomever was manning the front desk or clerk’s window that day. It doesn’t matter the person, the setting or, apparently, the scenario, the woman can find the laughter.

No steroid could do that.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Mattie. I remembered on my own (with a little Facebook assistance, I’ll admit...and don’t pretend like you know exactly when my birthday is either), but this is the e-mail I got from Dan today:

By the way, and before you go “I know when my fucking best friend’s birthday is douche!” I wanted to let you know today is Matty’s b-day. I only tell you this because I think for the last eight years you always pop up and go “FUCK! IT’S MATT”S BIRTHDAY!” So I am only helping.

My gift to you? Permission to leave me a nice, lengthy drunken message at 3am. Please include a musical number, if possible. Happy day, love.

First of all, I'm alive.

The view from my window yesterday.



(Photo by Rich Beauchesne of Seacoast Media Group...I wonder if I need permission to use this...) The view from a photographer much closer to the action. That's our house in the background. Our apartment is in the front on the first floor. In fact, the window on the far right is our bedroom window and at this exact moment I was standing there taking pictures of this scene. (Shot through the trees, they weren't worth posting.) I swear you can almost see stalker-me standing there.

It is hard to believe, sitting outside as I did on this beautiful, sunny 50-degree day, that I was evacuated by boat from my home yesterday. After I posted about the adventure we were about to embark on---'Cuz what else does one do in times of crisis? Well, Dan booked a hotel and rented a car.---I started going through my suitcase trying to decide A) How much luggage one is allowed in a boat evacuation (Do I get a carry-on?) and B) Should I pack my cowboy boots? I fit everything---no boots but I managed a blow dryer and our tax forms (in the hope that I will get our taxes done while homeless; though I forgot about the great distraction and wonderful hotel perk that is HBO)---into a small rolling suitcase and a green North Face backpack which I shoved into two garbage bags so that my laptop wouldn't be damaged by rain (or the raft flipping).

I rarely see my neighbors but as we all stood out in the rain together like kids at the busstop waiting to be rescued , we finally introduced ourselves.

This is Alice.

(Photo by Rich Beauchesne)

I watched them put her onto the boat this way as well. (Dan joked that he opted for the over-the-shoulder fireman carry when it was his turn.) Alice and I didn't formally introduce ourselves but I always say hello to her when I see her and she pretty much never responds (which, as a measure to protect my self esteem, I tell myself is because she's a little deaf).





This was the boat (at the end of our long driveway) that came to our rescue. Our neighbor Amanda, Dan and I were on the third trip. Dan joked to his sister that we knocked over an old lady to get on. (He also said I just stood there playing my violin...He also said that we should make signs that read, "George Bush hates black people." He was on fire, you see.) The firemen (who were adorable) joked about taking us on a cruise. "If you look to your right, you'll see your next door neighbor's porch." Back at the fire department (where we were taken by ambulance after disembarking and wading through a foot of water to dry land) we heard one of the guys over the radio say, "We're gonna need bigger boots." The whole thing was pretty comical and was only made funnier today when we read that only 12 people from our street were evacuated, most of whom were from our apartment building. (Dan calls us the Exeter 12...like the Oceanic Six. A joke for the Lost fans out there.)

You know what won't be funny though? If our house gets robbed because the newspaper printed our actual address in the paper when mentioning the evacuation. I can see Home Alone's Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern rubbing their hands together now. They might as well have written, "Wanted: Burglar to rob big ol' empty 10-apartment house. Must have own canoe and clean boating record." I told Dan that I'm suing if we get robbed. (My most valuable possession? Tivo.) You know what else won't be funny? If our cars have water in their engines or float away completely.

Never let go, guys!

You can't help but have perspective on all of this, with all of the work that is still going on in New Orleans since Katrina. We were never in real danger. (I actually was thinking we should stay---"We've got a frozen lasagna in the fridge. We'll make it!"---but Dan said we'd be screwed if we lost power. He was right. Apparently I'm the go-down-with-the-ship type.) We may be homeless and carless until Friday but that's the worst of it (unless, of course, we get robbed or are cars are gone or both). We've made lemonade of all of this so far. We're playing house at a hotel that offers a fine complimentary Continental Breakfast (where you can make your own waffles!) and a USA Today is under the door every morning. We may even hit the hotel gym after work today... It's a funny little life.

The one car thing is tough but since Dan works in Portsmouth (where we're staying) we can work it out pretty easily. I'm at the Portsmouth library right now waiting to get Dan before we pick up some take-out and head "home." I've never been to this library before and it's beautiful. Today I worked outside a coffee shop in the sun for two hours. Homelessness is becoming me.

Cut to two days from now when I'm throwing mini shampoo bottles at Dan and telling him I'm not made for this kind of life.

So far though, it's just the stuff of a good story.

This is how the rest of the state sees it. (The guy is standing right in front of our house which is the "gray house" he refers to (but they don't show it at first). Later on, when they show the skate park---which is right next door and where I cruise teenage boys---and then pan to the left, our house is shown. I believe the cooking school next door---the little red building---is a cover for a money laundering operation as I've never seen or smelled any cooking going down there. The mobile home park that also got evacuated is across town.)

And some more links:

Jason Schreiber, whose photographs are featured here (you can see our house in the background here, too), is a reporter who also interviewed us (and took pics of our particular rescue which I hope to get my hands on) but we didn't make the papes. Apparently my poking my head out of the door during the interview to ask "Do I have time to pee before we're saved?" wasn't fit to print.

Another

And anotha'

That's it.

P.S. This was in Portsmouth, not Exeter, but the point is: The Wet Bandits are out there.