June 29, 2023

If this were a movie, the next scene would be you, picking up the phone. Your nails are clean in my imagination, short, neatly trimmed. No sparkly acrylics for you. In a year, the world will have changed, and not even I will be able to get away with that anymore. If this were a movie, even then, we couldn't get away with your coat collar turned up in the desert in 2023. It'll have to be a hoodie. Big, oversized, gender neutral. From the back, washed out by the sun, you could be anyone.

"How long will it be until you find me again?" My voice is clear, with my heavy enunciation, and you recognize it instantly, but there's a lot more static than you're used to pumped through that little silver cord, when you're paying cash for the call, they want to make sure you know it's still connected.

"I thought the amount of time between you finding me and the game being over would be much shorter."
Lucky you, even through the static you hear that breath move over my bottom lip, picture my chest rise and fall, and every other noise in the world becomes inconsequential. Even your own breath, even your heart beating.

"I don't know what you want from me.
Tell me what you dream."

I wonder what to write and if I'll want to anymore. 

One of the things, very hard to do, is to create something when you feel you're using both hands to grip the rocks, to stop from falling.

This time I'm not so brave.  This time I'm not ambivalent.  The cancer pains demand attention.

And so I'm calling in the sledgehammer.

Not Home Depot,

Genentech.  I used to pass their offices on the way to SFO when I was a traveler,

In the part of my life where I didn't worry about such things.

Other people's problems

Weren't mine.

I got off the plane, dug out my passport and paperwork.

Went up to the cop behind the glass in Yerevan.  In Shanghai.  At Heathrow.  JFK.  Charles De Gaulle.

Whatever it's called in Auckland.

I got the life I wanted.  I'll never lean back in the Laz-E-Boy and wish I had done more traveling.

I'll never wish I had spent more time at the office.

I'll never wish I had learned electronics.

I'll never feel I can be fooled by technology,

The whizzy Apple crap that gets advertised down your throat at Christmas.

I got everything I wished for, while I was wishing.

My advice for my children and grandchild - don't let this happen to you.

Getting everything is a curse.  I was 43 years old when I stood on the South Pole.

And I had no dreams beyond that.

Things went off the rails, as you know.

I don't need anyone's forgiveness.  I will face the fire myself,

Not because I have to.  Not out of obligation.

Because being seriously ill takes a toll on everyone else. 

The tyranny of the well-wishers. 

----

An old friend came to visit.  We were in grammar school together.  Chicago suburbs.

He became a physician. 

We spent a week together.  We talked about our lives, and our pasts.  Sr. Mary Emmeric in 7th grade English class.

Mary Schwellenbach.  Joyce Murphy.  Girls we we too shy to ask to prom.  Our children and grandchildren.

Inevitably, our chosen careers.

At one point, drinking on the deck of the El Tovar I told him I thought the unspoken worst thing about having cancer is how uncomfortable it makes everyone else.

He nodded.  I gave him a bourbon.  Michters.  He was drinking boilermakers.  I was drinking Dr. Pepper.

Do I remember laying on the hillside in your back yard, heads downhill, watching the clouds while the blood rushed to our heads?

Things you do in 5th grade,

You may remember as a senior citizen.

I did remember that.  And my Springer Spaniel who thought it was great we were on the grass with him.

We had time,  then.  Entire human lives to be lived.  All that pain.  All that work.

In between, joy and achievement.

Gotta have both.  Nobody told us that.

He saw the future in  the clouds. 

I saw altitude.  I saw the planet circling a star. 

---

Ok.  Time to go.  I have my pillow.  I have my computer.  A book on quantum computing I won't read.

I'll be filled with chemicals.

It's all we humans know how to do to stop someone like me from dying next month.

I'm sitting here, listening to Marshall Crenshaw.  It was good to live in a world full of ghosts and UFOs and bigfoots

and Marshall Crenshaw tunes.