Christmas was magical. Certainly for me, almost by definition, since I expected to be dead or seriously dying by now. But everybody had a great time. Kim came over to help us celebrate. The kids made ravioli for Christmas Eve dinner, assuring one more generation knows and loves the quirky recipe that came in 1902 with the Italian side of my Mom’s family from the farming village of Pianozza in northern Italy. Christmas morning Molly made pancakes, sausage, and applesauce, dinner was a beautifully spiced pot roast. Awesome. Reminded me of the three-ring circus that the holidays were when I was growing up.
Winter holidays at the Pompton Lakes cottage were a mixed bag of traditions, improvisations, logistical nightmares, and general hilarity. The living room was smaller than the average bedroom in houses built in the 1980s. But into that room we crammed a Christmas tree (invariably the largest one my father could hide from my mother until time to set up), the only television, the only record player, all family and guests, plus drinks and food. There was an ancient German blown-glass ornament that my Dad’s father gave to my Mom. For some reason, she would hang it from the low ceiling entry to the dining room. And then, every time anybody produced a ball, a dart gun, or water pistol she would shriek “NOT NEAR THE GRAPES”! It became our favorite chant for the holidays. I wish I’d gotten a tattoo before my Mom died… .
Throughout the holiday season—which we stretched out to encompass my birthday on 12 January—we packed into the living room. Given small space and numerous relatives, we formalized a system of visits. Christmas Eve we went in to Union City, to the 27th Street row house my Mom grew up in. There, depending on the year, there could be the resident families, us, and other expats in from the suburbs, plus the next door neighbor (who still resided there some years ago when Molly and I visited the neighborhood). I would guess a typical Christmas Eve saw 2 dozen people cooking, arguing, conversing, drinking, and smoking. Essentially 100% of the adults were heavy smokers, and the airflow in a narrow city house was not particularly active. Sports were on TV in both main floor apartments (hard to believe they could cut one floor of a townhouse into two apartments), and alcohol flowed like…uh…alcohol. The Germans stayed away from the kitchen in favor of the Italians—we weren’t the slickest family in North Jersey, but when it came to food we weren’t idiots. Grandpa demanded we kids run his empty longnecks out into the stairwell and trade them for full, cool Knickerbockers. One of the cousins (still alive and retired in Florida) worked for an airline and received a smoked turkey as her annual bonus. This bird was eaten mostly as appetizer, along with a salad of shrimp and elbow macaroni in a mayonnaise dressing, followed by ravioli and then an unsmoked turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, and gravy. People ate ravenously. Mostly because they wanted to get to the espresso and after dinner drinks. Debbie the Irish Setter—nobody ever explained how they ended up with an active sporting dog in a city apartment, especially since nobody in the family was particularly fond of dogs—hunted scraps all evening. Eventually, as the adults approached too-drunk-to-drive, we packed up presents and leftovers for the trip back out to Pompton.
Next morning, we did family presents and breakfast at home. Then we went out to my father’s family in Dumont and nearby Haworth. These visits started out rather small and quiet in a garden apartment until my Aunt Helen (Dad’s sister) had her 4 kids and they moved into a big house in Dumont a short walk from the Haworth house that Dad’s father still occupied. Then things achieved a fair portion of the craziness dealt with the evening before in Union City. In Dumont they had a roaring fireplace, color TV sets, and a large area of dining and sitting room decorated in pristine, bright white. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??? Depending on how many of Uncle Tony’s relatives came out to visit, there would be anywhere from 7 to a dozen children running rampant. Carrying grape juice, coke, oily appetizers, etc. In a house decorated in pure bright white! Aunt Helen had the Zen of the holidays, though. She’d slurp a Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and hope somebody else would pull and carve the turkey at suppertime. Her strategy worked great. We invariably had a great time, and after the two days of running parties, we kids were exhausted. I’m sure my parents were thoroughly hungover.
Everybody in our house was arc-welded to the education system. Both parents were teachers (except a number of years when my Mom was in business) and we were in school. So we all had the week off between Christmas and New Years. Dad was Department Head of English and Sociology, and was regular drinking buddies with 10 or 15 colleagues (including, for some reason, several defrocked priests. As a lapsed Catholic, Dad had an odd penchant for hiring same), all of whom, along with a few former students, stopped by to visit. Then my high school and later college friends, and then my sister’s, and then my brother’s, also came by. The teeny tiny kitchen produced snacks and appetizers like a James Beard catering operation.
Mom and Dad did a rotating New Year’s Eve party with other teachers. When they did it at our place, it required every square centimeter of open floor space to pack them all in. By the time I was in high school, my brother and sister and I served as caterers and waitstaff, since the kitchen was the only place left with room to breathe. I remember the year one teacher came without his wife, who sent him with huge trays of ham spread on toast that needed to be reheated in the oven. The guy was really proud of those canapés. Couldn’t talk about anything else. As we pulled them from the oven, I slipped and dumped one of the trays all over my shoes. We quickly swabbed down shoes, the floor, and the oven and dumped the evidence. Then we served the remaining toasts. The guy noticed instantly that we were missing half the toasts. We told him “they were so good, man, that we couldn’t help ourselves. We ate them while we were heating them up”. It is perhaps a measure of his alcohol consumption that he bought the story without a question.
And that last anecdote points the way to another rule I’ve had to add to my how-to book of life. It is simply this: “Roll With It”. When things happening are beyond your control, or have no easy fix, or maybe no fix at all, your best bet is to simply relax and let real life wash over and through you.
Of course, this new rule sits side-by-side with the other Zen acceptance aphorism, Live ‘em While You Got ‘em Because They Are Not Forever.
I have managed to learn a lot about myself as an outcome of my cancer and its treatment. Growing while dying, I am learning, is not only possible. It is necessary if I am going to survive for the maximum lifetime available. There is no sense trudging to death. I’d like to leave a better world behind me, maybe with just a little perspective arising from the debris of life associated with cancer.
So. I love you all. I miss you all. And I commend carefully managed acceptance of experience to you as one more tool to help keep your life running with the key in the ignition and a case of beer on the back seat. Rock and Roll, everyone!!!
PS--here's a photo from Beth of Christmas at the Pompton cottage:
Well, it’s been typical of the past couple of years. Saturday night I posted that chirpy, happy blog entry. Sunday night I was in the hospital with serious, dangerous pneumonia. This was a particularly difficult episode. Poor Cathy and the kids had just driven up from Atlanta after celebrating Colin’s graduation from Georgia Tech. The Emergency Room and hospital in general were backed up. We spent 14 hours in ER before getting a room. By that time I had thoroughly shit and pissed myself and had to be wiped down by morose technicians.
It took several days of high-power antibiotics to get the infection of both lungs under control. Then, out of the blue, my blood pressure spiked at stroke levels and I had to spend another day in hospital. Thursday they let me out, but only because Cathy is trained to administer the intravenous antibiotics. Which admittedly come with awesome technology. A little pressurized ball of meds screws into the port access (the “port” is the permanent needle embedded in a blood vessel at my heart. It’s a dangerous bit of infrastructure to fuck with, as any infectious organisms introduced are mainlined into heart and lungs). It empties itself automatically in about half an hour. Very simple, robust, and ingenious. Hopefully the week’s worth of biocides (plus an additional oral antibiotic) will keep me relatively healthy for a while. In any case, I’m finally home and getting warmed up for Christmas.
This is my time of year. With the fabulous Thanksgiving as a massively wonderful gift from all involved (thank you SO MUCH again everybody), Christmas is next. Of course, not only am I unable to do brick and mortar shopping, I was too sick right through the critical online ordering time. Basically, my gift to family and friends this year is pretty much confined to still being alive. Beth and Maggie made the Italian holiday bread, panettone-pan dulce, including the fussy task of candying the orange peel by hand. They did a hell of a job. Everyone who’s tasted it declares it phenomenal.
BTW, I use a grossly enriched version of the austere recipe my Mom recorded by following one of the Tanta’s (we called all the Aunties by the German descriptor, including the Italian ones responsible for the pannettone) around while she made it one year long ago. It goes something like this: mix 5 pounds of flour with 2 cups of sugar (preferably demerara, raw or if necessary light brown plus some white), salt, and yeast. Make a well. Break 10 eggs into the well. Heat about half a liter of milk and a pound of unsalted butter in the microwave. Being careful not to cook the eggs (maybe pour the milk and butter around the outside of the well), add the milk and butter. Mix and knead thoroughly. Note that this should be a soft but not sticky dough. You may need to add up to another half liter or so of milk. This can be warm, it doesn't need to be hot. Add the extra as early in the agglomeration process as possible to make its incorporation easier. The kneading is tedious and needs strong arms. Or you can do it 3 batches with a big-ass stand mixer. Let rise double in a warm spot covered with plastic wrap and towels. Cut home-candied orange peel (cook the peels of a couple of oranges, including the white pith, in a cup of water and a couple cups of sugar spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice until soft) and dried cherries into bits. Knead the fruit in THOROUGHLY. Apportion the bread among about 10 pans (or flowerpots, or pie tins, or whatever you like). Rise double. Bake at 350 F until internal temperature reaches 200 F. Cool upside down on racks to maintain top crust. Wrap tightly when cool in foil and seal in ziplocs. Serve toasted with a load of unsalted butter.
With that said, I’m gonna be brief this week. You’re all busy, and I’m still very tired and weak from the hospital. I will give you a bit of my usual gratuitous and unnecessary advice, in keeping with the fact that every week I survive I feel a little wiser and much older. So: 1) touch somebody every day. Just reach out. You’ve got email, a cell phone, texting ability, social media. Don’t worry that they might not want to hear from you. Maybe they don’t. You’ll never know until you try. And the odds are, they will. And for god's sake don't worry about the "security" of your email. You're not Sony. North Korea is not trying to hack your gmail account. 2) Live ‘em while you got ‘em. They are absolutely, unequivocally NOT forever!
I love you. I thank you. I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year, and a joyful Channukah.
2014. A year that reminded us of a couple of universal imperatives: 1 peace is a really good thing sociologically, environmentally, and economically, and 2 public health is a field of endeavor to which we should pay more…much more…attention.
OK. I hear your gears turning, attempting to winkle out [a British idiom based on the harvest of periwinkle snails from jetties and intertidal rocks, said snails are boiled and eaten hot with dipping sauces, a treat for visitors to the eternally chilly and windy UK coast, although David McCallum on NCIS contends his parents had to hold him down and physically force the little snails down his gullet] just why a sort of mediocre ecologist with a spotty academic record and compulsive interest in over turning rocks, especially in the intertidal zone of the nearest estuary, should be pontificating on matters of such weighty importance.
The answer, of course, is that said ecologist is also driven to compulsive pontification. And his ongoing trench war with various cancers gives him, he believes, a license to pontificate, sort of equivalent to Legislative approval of the Executive’s power to wage war. What this means in the short haul, of course, is that you are stuck with my pontificatory (actual word?) musings regarding the interface of science and sociology.
So, with licensure (actual word?) established, let’s rock!
But before we get to the larger, more important world, let’s do a quick review of my private, as opposed to public, health. In general, here inside my cancer-stricken anatomy, things aren’t too bad. I still have plenty of pain, and lack energy and ability to get around without stumbling and stopping every half dozen slow paces to catch my breath. On the other hand, I DO manage to catch my breath. This is a sign that the chemotherapy continues to function as intended. The tumor tissue in my lungs has been beaten back sufficiently that I am not wheezing, accumulating fluids, or struggling to get enough oxygen for my physiology to function. These are all good signs.
On the other other hand (see paragraph immediately about for initial “other”), all is not roses and chocolate dipped cherries. I’m having trouble generating the energy needed to do even the minimalist Christmas shopping I need to do (and which I love to do, the problem is that physically I just have trouble keeping functional long enough to get it done. On the other other other hand (I promise, that’s the last one of these sick little grammar jokes I’ll subject you to), Beth and Maggie have been here all week babysitting me while Cathy and the kids went to Atlanta to watch Colin graduate. In fact, due to Cathy’s astute attention and Beth’s and Maggie’s computer skills, I did get to watch the JumboTron pic of Colin receiving his diploma. Presumably. At Rutgers, we got empty tubes which allowed the administration to hold up our actual graduation until we paid our library and campus parking fines (I SWEAR). Actually, I skipped my mid-term graduation, so it wasn’t an issue for me. Pretty sure I have the diploma somewhere. Which is odd, because I’m also pretty sure I carried library and campus parking fines. Oh well. Institutions have their own pace and personality. Rutgers was slow and sloppy. Which is why it was such a perfect fit for me!
Anyway. Let’s give a quick once-over to matters of public health and global politics. Based on stories culled from this week’s Washington Post (print edition), we find:
• Ebola, in its vicious swath carved across the chronically impoverished landscapes of West Africa, caused the collapse of the fragile health infrastructure (such as it was) in the affected nations. This means that the thousands being killed by Ebola each multiplied its impact such that malaria, a true scourge in the region, plus sleeping sickness, dengue fever, schistosomiasis, and other massive health threats were released from any ability of the medical system to constrain their impacts. West Africa is now officially more of a mess than it was prior to the Ebola outbreak, which is rather stunning giving how fucked up said health care systems were in the first place
• There is a real crisis brewing in the global microbiological fauna. Drug-resistant microbes are universally present, and the proportion of the microbial ecosystem that is drug resistant increases constantly. A British-sponsored report by Rand and KPMG estimates 2 million drug-resistant cases and 23,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Projecting that estimate across nations including China, India, Indonesia, Australia, and other populous places that need big-time food inputs, where such inputs are generated with the assistance of prophylactic antibiotics is a frightening exercise. Our children are going to live in a world where an infection is a very dangerous thing. A quick rinse and a band-aid are not going to be enough. And current research suggests that we can’t drug our way out of this. Antibiotic resistance is very difficult to constrain. At some point in the coming decades, this will be an issue of life-and-death importance.
• Finally, for the lighter side of things, let’s look at world peace. China, which finds the Nobel Peace Prize to be bigoted against Chinese patriots, issues an alternative, the Confucius Peace Prize. To compound the comedy, the winner this year is Fidel Castro! Man, sometimes you can’t make stuff up to compete with the real world.
Well, that’s a wrap for this week, everybody. I’m still alive, still marginally functional, still love you all and I feel your thoughts on my behalf. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to complete some rudimentary Christmas shopping—we’ll see. Check back to this time and space next week for your update.
And remember. Use ‘em while you got ‘em. Because they are definitely not forever. My love to each and every one of you!!!
Ah, the end of the year. Time for comforting, oddball, humorous, enumeration and commentary on twelve month’s worth of human endeavor. Been a strange and busy year here on earth, under the watchful eye of Santa and his elven spies determining who is “good” and who is not.
This year, we (that is, “we” as society—although it’s difficult to see a single “society” in a social structure that ranges from gleeful murder of relatives for sport in the impoverished Muslim Middle East to massive investment in the structure of subatomic particles in wealthy Europe, although the shocking racial disparities plaguing the U.S. revealed by recent reporting regarding murder and incarceration of unarmed civilians on the streets should give us some pause) asked Questions—big questions, maybe the biggest and most important ever asked. Do comets, billions of year-old remnants of the formation of the solar system, carry the chemistry of life? Can we, technically, make our way to Mars, most likely sister planet to earth in terms of potential for supporting or having supported life? What the hell is Pluto, a planet-ish object at the outer edge of the solar system (seems like something with the potential for a Star Trek/Star Wars plot involving a fake planet watching over the colony seeded on the third stone from the sun). Such questions are good for those of us with serious individual problems, like terminal illness. It gives us some perspective for our life and death. If we’ve left a fingerprint on things, it means we don’t “die” when our body does. Our contributions continue, we’re part of a human race moving forward. We’re more than the mass of carbon and energy comprising our corpus.
But let’s start at the small end of things. This week has been a strange one here in Cancer Land (trademark, copyright). I spent Monday having a chemotherapy infusion. Felt ok afterward—a good sign, since I really like to stay out of the hospital as much as possible. My red blood cell count was nominally low, so the docs and nurses had me back on Thursday for a couple units of whole blood. Which, for some reason, collapsed the copacetic comfort I’d been feeling all week. Thursday night I spent nauseous and vomiting. Friday I felt like hell. The nurse arrived Friday evening to sort out access to my circulatory system, and made some suggestions for improving my physical comfort. Finally Friday night I got some good sleep, and today, Saturday, I’m feeling better. Should be able to eat and drink today, important functions for a declining physiology.
At the start of this year, I didn’t expect to live to see the end of it. So it’s a tribute to the medical system that bought me another holiday season (at what I’m sure was an extravagant cost financially and technologically). For all the hassle, pain, drugs, and emotional turmoil, I’m still glad to be here. So that’s a plus. A little more time to watch my kids grow up, do a little writing, get some cut paper art pieces done (I’m working on a nice one as we “speak”). In other words, a little more life before things close out when the cancer finally overcomes the best medical responses available.
So, back to the big picture. Of course, it only took about 15 minutes for someone to spot a “large monastery-like building” on the surface of the comet when the photos started to come back (http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/575052/20141206/rosetta-comet-67p-alien-building-ufo-enthusiast.htm). Personally, it seems like an odd place to locate a monastery, but not a whole hell of a lot odder (more odd?) than the montane highlands of Tibet, which are ripe (rife?) with monasteries. According to the LA Times article about the Pluto probe (http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pluto-new-horizons-hibernation-nasa-20141205-story.html) the resolution of its cameras will allow things like monasteries to be imaged. Which is good. Now we can tell if quirky religious institutions are universal or not. Seems like an important question, no?
Or at least an interesting one. A final note regarding things here on earth. I was reminded today by good friends visiting Miami to kick off the holidays that a Cuban seafood place called Malaga, located near the intersection of 8th and 8th (740 SW 8th Street, I believe) has been excellent every time I’ve been there. The Sangria is fresh and tart, and they’ll bring the snapper to your table for approval before frying it for you with fragrant spices. Of course, the last time I was there personally was in…probably…oh, say, 1985. But a quick check of the reviews under “Cuban Seafood” in local papers and web sites suggest that their standards have not slipped.
This coming week, Cathy, Molly and Jesse converge on Atlanta for Colin’s graduation from Georgia Tech. Beth and Maggie will be coming out from California to baby sit me, with initial assistance from Jesse who will hang around a couple extra days due to his back-breaking work and school schedule. Personally, I’ll have my butt parked in my hospital style bed, doing some internet shopping, reading and writing, art work, etc. Have a great kick-off to the holidays, everyone. Family, friends, food, drink and ritual—those are the truly important things in life. Take it from someone who’s learning the hard way. I love you all. Talk to you next week!
Oh yeah. PS: Live 'em while you got 'em. Because they are NOT forever. Far from being useless, day-to-day celebration is good for the soul. And orchestration of such celebration is a critically important component of the holidays in which we ground much of our yearly investment of time, money, energy, humor, and love. So rock on all. It's that time of year again!
