Subtle rushes of air layer in the room, in the hallways, with the quiet humming of the lights, the machines for recording vitals, the helicopter whirs beyond the white window screen barely disguising the rooflines.

The second longest time I’ve stayed in a hospital.  The first longest — the mastectomy and the reconstruction.  Two years ago now?  Three?

I’ll tell you a not-so-secret.  I have a cousin, Jenny.  Here we are, pre-drama, with my mom fresh from the prairie.

Sweet and button-nosed as a child, everything about Jenny, was always lovable, from the way her whole kid body scrunched around her smile to the way she braided you friendship barrettes with long ribbons of your favorite colors as a surprise. Once upon a time, Jenny roller-skated over a trash can lid on her sidewalk in Plano, Texas and broke her collar bone on the sort of sweltering afternoon that lays in wait in glints in overturned trashcan lids.  Her collar bone.  Maybe her arm.  Maybe I’m converging two incidents into one.  I thought it was some real-life fabulousness that could only happen to my real-life Jenny, like when Pollyanna fell out of a tree and the whole town came to pet her cheeks and feed her ice cream.

Though I doubt little Jenny saw it that way at all.  Jenny’s cast was pink in my imagination (and quite possibly in life because, of course it was).  Everyone in two hemispheres took time to find a jot of pink space for their well-wishes. The cast smelled like Fritos and socks, I was told, when it finally cracked open, but lets say it smelled like vanilla cupcakes breathing Jenny’s name.  The not-so-secret was I wanted a broken collarbone-arm too. And not for the perks. For the drama.  For the writerly details. Even then.

Right over the trashcan lid and foom!  Crash!  

I wanted the detail of that trashcan lid, especially.  I’ve borrowed it in another short story since, in fact.  I wasn’t there when it happened.  I’m sure I was a good five hours south in San Antonio with thumbs cramping against a game controller at the Atari, the white elastic-hemmed bubble shorts I’d sewn for myself deposited with me on the deep-pile carpet like a merengue.  But I listened to every retelling over the phone while mom wound her finger in the coiled cord. The pixelated River Raid plane refilled along the solid, blue stripe of a bank. Blip, blip, blip.

“Well, bless her sweet little heart,” mom intoned softly as she lowered to the hissing cushion of the breakfast bar. (Another great detail in this story: Jenny always called my mom, her Aunt Donna, Aunt Donut.)  Phone cord unwrapping, wrapping, unwrapping.  “I wonder why someone would leave a lid out like that with children playing around?”

The shade of pink gauze.  The painful angle of the collarbone break, small as a chopstick under her button-down shirt collar.  Metallic thread woven into the seersucker fabric.  The clatter of the lid against the wheels.  Tiny, wet wads of tissues in Jenny’s fists.

I thought of these details at 1 a.m. when I grabbed my camera and filmed a few seconds of the analog clock over the dry erase board with the nurses’ names, my toes peaking out from the slots in something the nurses called “ted” socks, a styrofoam cup on a tray.

Maybe another not-so-secret — my favorite children’s movie, as in one I’d loved from childhood, was The Aristocrats.  It’s the only children’s movie I can think of that features, at one point, a thoroughly inebriated goose — Uncle Waldo — because he was “marinated” for dinner in Paris before waddling off.

I want to write here that on September 29, I was thoroughly marinated for dinner, roller-skated over a trashcan lid, and broke my femur.  These dramatic details weave nicely together, no?  And I like the story.  It’s just about how I picture the real one.  I was leaving the chemo lounge when the periphery of my vision combed together in neat angles of color that shifted and twinkled (ooh la la!), the command center in my brain, busy framing the order, “push the door open,” spit out this on invisible ticker tape instead, “hgslksjfioew,” so that my entire body protested by crumpling my weight on one knee that beat the tile floor in a single, downward strike.  Foom!  Crash!  

What’s your name?

Do you know where you are?

Uncle Waldo, I wanted to answer, and I was actually beginning to think of how to shape a wide, drunken grin, but none of it happened.  My head nodded back and forth.  My hands were wrapped in other people’s hands.  My breathing pushed out in loud, regular intervals that tugged at my chest.

Later, my nurse Margaret — you may remember her as the one who shot a six-foot-snake and posed with it in a selfie — would say over the phone, “Honey, if only I’d a been there I would have been the only thing coming between you and that floor. I tell you what.”

I tried the Uncle Waldo grin, but then … no.  Oh, no, no.  I could only cringe up as tightly as I could tense myself, stretch my neck, grimace.  The moment someone tried to move me to sit up in a wheel chair, scoot me a little on the tiles to see what was possible, it was as if every Jenny button nose from here on back into eternity went out in a poof.

My right hip, pelvis, femur, and knee had been compromised already by cancer along with metastasis in the brain and liver.  Thus, chemo.  Immunotherapy had run its course with me, apparently.  So when everyone asks me how I could possibly break the biggest bone in my body in one drop, well, that’s how — the whole incident triggered by a seizure that I’d had a few of, actually, and just hadn’t realized that’s what they were.  The perfect storm of broken bones.

The details go fuzzy for a couple of days, but here are some important ones:  I rode in an ambulance! The urban San Antonio streets squared off behind heavily screened, gray rectangles of windows, and I stared up through swags of wires wondering if this was indeed San Antonio or if this was Tulsa, where I’d lived for many years, because the view between the two looked so much alike from the gurney.  I was told I rode two ambulances and was moved from one hospital to another.  I vaguely remember a faux window in the first hospital with a golden-lit giraffe as if I was on safari with Hemingway and admiring the vista while in agony. Otherwise, my story has one room, one ambulance ride.  There may have been an EMT talking to me the whole time, or he may have sat quietly with his hand on the gurney rail on the turns.  I may have held my breath.  Everything I was wearing except for my ballet flats and my headscarf was cut off me.  Someone had tried to talk me into saving the cardigan I’d pulled on in the chemo lounge by sitting up enough to slip it out from behind my back.

“It’s okay,” I said.  “Cut it.  Cut. It.”

Know I loved that cardigan.

My family who could make it on short notice all converged on my hospital room, and I did feel like Pollyanna — an alternate universe, bald Pollyanna who’d had her clothes cut off, clung to the blue paper sock of a vomit bag she missed every, single, time, and spoke in the thoroughly pain-pill marinaded slur of Uncle Waldo.

I had to wait two days for surgery on the leg to implant a metal rod and nails in place of the femur.  In my mind, this was what was happening:

But, no.

Not even this was happening:

It took us all awhile to process there’d be no cast.  The walker, the wheelchair, the physical therapy, yes.  Cast?  No.  Everything is fortified on the inside now.  And apparently it was a little grizzly.  During the surgery, I had two packs of a transfusion.  A few days later, I’d have two more.

The first night nurse I remember being assigned is Barbara, her tightly coiled hair the same olive tone as her skin, glasses reflecting the monitor lights.  This was her first stay in San Antonio so far.  She was a traveling nurse, unattached to any one location, moving from hospital to hospital where needed.

“I like it,” she said everything in near monotone, “I really do.” A little drag on her syllables to convey sincerity.

“Do you get to go wherever you want?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes.  I enjoy it,” she said as she wound a blood-pressure cuff on my arm.  “Seeing things I’d never seen before.”  With a flick of her finger on the thermometer, she deposited the sleeve in the nearby trashcan and added, “You are just so sweet and lovely.  Always a smile on that face no matter what.  I tell you, I so admire you.”  She said it every time she came in.

I had a feeling people weren’t always kind to Barbara, someone on the margins of the hospital, from here and not here, full of details that few are probably patient enough to listen to.  But listen.  Always listen.  Stories are packed away in there.  And what if you are the only one who’ll ever unpack them?

Then when it was just me and insomnia at one a.m. in the hospital recording my toes and the arrows to the bed controls and the curtain dragged across the doorway, I was also texting Andrea about Frida Kahlo.  Andy wondered if someone had brought me my paints and canvases yet.

Andy makes an exquisite Frida, in case you were wondering about that detail.

We’ve had a few running plans over the last twenty years.  One, ending up in the same nursing home (which evolved into ending up in the same Mad Max motorcycle Vuvalini) and the other, returning to Spain where we’d spent a summer as roommates.  So this one a.m. text marveled at how much fun it’s going to be to travel back to Spain since I have a metal rod in my leg, worse perhaps than when we had to finally check Andy’s Spanish sword she’d purchased, hand-forged in Toledo, while traveling home.

“You might have to ride in steerage,” Andy texted back.

I smiled as I sat my phone down.

Around two-thirty a.m., Barbara was back with the rolling cart for vitals.  “How’s your pain?  It’s time for more meds if we need it,” she asked as she tapped the small rolling cart monitor.

“Oh that’d be great,” I said.  If there’s a no-miss detail in this story, it’s that breaking one’s femur and having it replaced with a metal rod and nails ranks as the most excruciating pain I’ve ever experienced.  And I think I have a fairly good tolerance for pain, actually.  I am Monty Python’s “just a flesh wound” most the time.  Well, no more.

Tossing back pills in a little plastic cup, reaching for the water to wash it down, I was thinking of Nurse Barbara, her details, her stories, wondering if her travel nurse experience is a modern equivalent of the men who’d travel from construction job to construction job in the Great Depression, leaving families like so many held pins across the map of the U.S.  See, that’s the thing with details.  They bump up against other details, unpack in slightly different but no less dramatic directions.  The modern traveling nurse with the only obligation to the patients like me they eventually leave behind in sterile hospital rooms.

“I’m going to remember you,” Barbara said with her finger bobbing in front of her chin, in the frame of her curls.

“Well, know that I truly appreciate your very thorough care and kindness,” I said.

And suddenly there was a twinge in my ribs at the detail of Barbara, of the other nurses and doctors, of my sisters and mom taking turns spending the night in the barely-lounging guest chair by the windows that molded one into the sort of zigzag block a toddler stuffs in a shape sorter, of my girls sitting carefully on the bed and kissing my cheeks goodbye when they’d leave, of Joe talking me through a seizure in whispers, of my dad bringing me extra cups of Raisin Bran and milk in the mornings, of mom arranging my sheets around me, of colleagues sending well-wishes and offers of help with my classes, of Hannah’s dance team rallying to support her with rides and family meals and help with her weekly dance team preparations, of Chloe’s teacher arranging to meet with her after her cafeteria breakfast to keep her caught up on homework despite the chaos of home, of my friend Maia who made sure Chloe had some Girl Scout fun on a Sunday afternoon when they’d met for crafts, of friends and family and strangers alike coming together to set up meal deliveries, housekeeping, arranging Cynthia-sitting shifts for home and hospital, of handwritten prayers, cards, notes, texts, email messages, donations, arriving with affirmations and hope and well-wishes that, let me assure you, if you ever thought weren’t enough or weren’t helpful, please know they couldn’t have been more so.  These details are the most important ones of this story, and they’re all still lining up, the ones I sift in my fingers and wonder in dramatic Jane Austen fashion, how can I endeavor to deserve these blessings?  

Now I’m home, like Jeff in Rear Window, all the curtains crisscrossing my own rear windows open wide to the sunlight. The details I can see now, the aged oak branches parting ways to patches of blue sky and light, the occasional neighborhood walker pumping arms around the street corner, the neat circle of a beach hat shading the woman’s face.  That was me once.  Now I have a wheelchair and a walking frame beside my bed and a small table my dad had made me with wooden inlay, stacked with my computer, iPad, sketchbook, folded reading glasses, my phone.

“Where are some binoculars?” I asked Joe.

“I’ll get them for you,” he said without giving it a thought, though I was joking.

And when I asked him to zip to Target for me and get some decent lounging pajamas, he came home with a size 14 girls Cinderella pajama set.  Dreams dashed.

I first met George about eight years ago when my daughter Hannah started taking guitar lessons from George.  Though her interests migrated to dance instead, George has remained my pal.

He showed up with his guitar to play for me while I was recovering from a double mastectomy and tripped on my IV.  I told him he was like the guitarist in Airplane.

Doors will open at 5:30 and the concert ends at 9:30.  My sisters are planning refreshments and a silent auction to take place at the concert site beginning at 5:30 with results announced mid-way through the evening.  Here are some of the great auction items they’ve lined up so far:

Signed Danny Green Spurs Jersey, valued at $600.

One night for two with breakfast at the Eilan Resort, valued at $400.

Dallas Cowboys vs. Cincinnati Bengals, two tickets to a field suite ELS3.  Includes food and beverages.  Oct 9, 3:25 p.m., A T & T Stadium in Dallas. Valued at $1300.

Dine out in style at FEAST restaurant in the King William District.  Valued at $60.

Head to New Braunfels for some retro movie fun at the Stars and Stripes Drive-In.  Includes four family four-packs.

Riverwalk dining at Biga on the Banks.  Dinner for two plus parking.  Valued at $150.

More silent auction items to come!  Email me at cynthia@cynthiahawkins.net if you’d like to be added to the official invite list.  The concert hall only has a capacity of 150 people.  Would love to see you there for all the fun!

Further Instructions:

Industrial Coffee Table

I used a traditional yellow pine picnic table that had been sitting in the back yard.  I simply took the top off of the supports, cleaned and lightly sanded the surface so some of the old paint layers were still there.  I checked with the manufacturer to ensure that this is untreated wood.  Treated wood would have arsenic in it and would not be environmentally safe furniture for indoors, let alone to eat on.  I gave it a final clean-off with Simple Green to cut through any remaining layers of grime from being stored outdoors so long.

My goal was to create a rustic “barn-wood” appearance out of the planks, so I lightly brushed on different colors of chalk paint I had handy, in blues and varying shades of grays, concentrating colors on separate planks (though a little blending adds to the barn-wood aesthetic — so if it happens, it happens).

After the newest paint layers dried, I used a rotary sander to reveal some patches and stretches of bare wood, particularly around the ends, corners, and edges — thinning the paint layers just a little in the center.  Chalk paint stands up pretty well to sanding, I’ve found, so have at it.

Next step for that cohesive barn-wood look: a water based stain.  I ended up using Minwax Natural, concentrating on the bare wood and wiping it off the paint quickly so the paint colors didn’t become too saturated with the golden hue.

Final touches.  You could easily skip these last steps, but I love obsessing over the minute details, the depth and shading.  I used a soft furniture wax all over and buffed it off. I could be persuaded that one is better than the next, but I’ve found all of the clear soft furniture waxes to be similar, so I tend to go for the cheapest.  The one I used came from Michael’s: ArtMinds Clear Wax.

After buffing, I applied Amy Howard’s Dark Antique Wax more strategically to corners, edges, and up and down the planks on which I wanted to bring out the darker colors to contrast with the lighter planks.  Howard’s is the first Dark Antique Wax I’ve tried.  A little pricey, but it goes a long way and is easy to control.  I also splurged on the Amy Howard waxing brush.

AND I splurged on Amy Howard’s Dust of Ages, which is basically a can of dust you pay for.  Using this makes me feel like a sucker, but, I have to say, it compliments the dark antique wax nicely, offsets the wax’s amber tint with a little gray, and brings out a lot of texture.

I’d found a schematic for an industrial coffee table base made out of pipes and pipe fittings that I passed on to Joe to adapt to my new coffee table top. Our top is a different size than the one used on the Sadler House blog, but it’s easy to make the adjustments to suit.  We used the flange fittings at the base of the legs instead of the end caps.

Industrial End Table

For the matching side table, we used the remaining bench-seat wood.  My dad dismantled and cut the bench wood in half and then squared the ends.  Unlike the picnic table top that was already useable once detached, dad had to brace the bench wood planks to join them into a single table top.  We wanted the side table to sit higher, so we modified the original industrial base schematic to accommodate a 33” square table top that would be 26” in height.  The refinishing of the wood was exactly the same process as it was for the coffee table.

Instructions for Ottoman Cover

• measure the width and length of the top of the ottoman
• piece together enough remnant fabric to match that measurement plus 2″ added to both width and length for seam allowance — remember, in fact, to account for at least an inch seam for the fabric you’re piecing together as well
• sew your pieced-together fabric with the right sides of materials together
• measure the end your ottoman, then the side — height and width
• for the ends and sides I over-shot the length by a good deal so I had some leeway when it came to staple-gunning the fabric in place on the underside — at least leave 5″ plus that 2″ seam allowance for where you will sew it to the “ottoman top” piece
• once you have your ends and sides ready to go, pin, right side fabric together, to the coordinating sides of the “ottoman top” piece and sew
• the finished result will look like that “collapsed box top”
• cover the ottoman with it to test for accuracy of coverage
• if all is well with the fit, sew the flaps together, edges of right-side fabric facing, to create the ottoman corners
• slip the fabric “box” over the ottoman
• if you do not want tufted buttons, turn your ottoman over, pull the fabric taut over the underside of the ottoman frame, and staple the fabric in place all around
• I trimmed the excess fabric off of my ottoman after stapling fabric

Instructions for Tufted Buttons

• you will need waxed upholstery thread, a covered button kit, and upholstery needles ( I purchased mine on Amazon, but they have these supplies at most craft and/or fabric stores)
• determine how many buttons you want on the ottoman top
• I went with 6 because I’d added decorative stitching intersecting the fabric strips, and I thought it’d look best to stick with the number of intersections created
• you may want to mark the spot for button placement with chalk because you’ll be flipping your ottoman while working with each button
• follow directions on your button covering kit (super easy!) to prep the buttons — tip: a thinner fabric works best
• thread upholstery needle with a generous stretch of thread and insert needle into first button location
• VERY IMPORTANT — hold one of the threads so you only pull the other thread through
• poking the upholstery needle through faux leather, I had to use something to push the need through — I pressed it down with a hammer head
• thread through the button
• rethread the needle
• send the needle through the same spot to secure the button
• use a strip of cotton batting, muslin, or a 4″ X 2″ rectangle of remnant fabric to place underneath the first knot you tie in the wax thread on the underside of the ottoman — be sure to pull as hard as you can to sink the button on the surface
• NOTE: if you want to deeply sink the button and produce that lovely puckered fabric effect, you’ll have to cut holes in the original top/foam the size of the button — some go all the way through the foam with those holes — on other projects, I’ve just created a dent about half of the depth of the foam
• some upholsterers staple gun the threads on the underside to the wood frame on the underside — I’ve used both methods and, so far, haven’t seen a visible difference on the surface
• tie the upholstery thread multiple times to secure
• repeat for all buttons

My first week of radiation treatment for brain metastasis, my sisters did something incredible, wondrous, moving, amazing for me, and then so many incredible, wondrous, moving, amazing people have followed suit.  They started a Go Fund Me:  Cynthia’s Battle With Cancer.  Our little family is astounded by this amazing outpouring of support.  Endless thanks to everyone!

Our semester at UTSA begins in just two weeks, and I’m all set to roll out the Creative Writing Program’s brand new core course: Introduction to the Creative Literary Arts.  One component of the class is exploring creativity itself, what it is, what sparks it, how it arches across the arts, what artists add to the community. This was pretty much one of my Ph.D field exam subjects as well, so I feel right at home with the class already. And in preparing for it, I’ve spent a good deal of the summer pondering the origins of my own creativity.

Grandpa had been a phenomenal self-taught chef and an accomplished woodworker with, eventually, a shop that spanned a good portion of his Missouri basement.  Every room in my house has one of his creations with his name gracefully etched on the underside — end tables, recipe boxes, sewing cabinets, lazy susans, decorative easels.  Sometimes my finger will rest on one of his table edges as I pass, and I’ll remember something specific about him, like the time he called me after I’d moved to New York.

“Are there any hillbilly’s up there?” he’d asked.

“There’s at least one up here now,” I’d answered.

And it was the first time I can remember him ever laughing that hard at any of my jokes.

He made two full-sized functioning easels that I know of, one for me and one for my uncle. Besides painting, Uncle Dickie sculpts what Grandpa had then called “critters,” and it was the uniqueness of each one of those creations, those little expressive figurines that seemed to have tiptoed out of fairytales you never knew existed, sitting on Grandpa’s shelf that had imparted the lesson as Grandpa and I stood there admiring them.  Here’s Uncle Dickie with some of his work:

Art can’t be limited by what you think it should be. 

It’s mostly thanks to Grandpa Cole and Uncle Dickie, I think, that I love repurposing things and refinishing furniture, in particular. Remember the North by Northwest panels I made during my last crafty binge?

This summer, I’ve been working on an end table my sister Alicia gave me years ago, thinking I’d know what to do with it.  I sanded the finish a little, added a black glaze, painted the drawer face, added knobs. Everything about it, a happy accident of a sander and brush. When I carried the finished table into the house, I hummed the Superman theme song until its ball-and-claw feet met the wood floor.

Then there’s the desk Joe found curbside in a yard sale, existing as the shabby little desk everyone thought it was, with a little glimmer of the desk Joe and I thought it could be calling me to unfold some dollars in the homeowner’s hands and heft it into the back of my 4 Runner.

But, of course, this desk was ready to surprise me with what it wanted to be as I sanded off its paint and straightened its drawer mechanics and tested out this color and that and tried on new nickel pulls I’d painted with black Rustoleum. It wanted to be glamorous.

That stool, by the way, was one of grandpa’s square end tables.  He’d always made more than enough copies of every piece he’d forged so that everyone in the family could have their pick.  Somehow, we ended up with three of these and no more room to use them as they’d been intended to be used.  I asked my dad, a wood-working hobbyist in his own right who’d once loved talking shop with his father-in-law, if he could transform it into a stool I could upholster the top of.

Dad also built a new center drawer with a front that flips down on specialty hinges so that Hannah, for whom the desk was intended, could use her laptop on the flattened drawer and leave the desktop itself free for books and such as she did her homework.

Then there’s one of grandpa’s magazine tables that has sat in my garage for the last year waiting to find use again. I refinished this one with the likes of an old library card on its side. I don’t think he would ever have checked a Jane Austen title out of a library.  Maybe a French cookbook or the like.  But I signed his name in homage anyway.

As I was working on that desk, Hannah had come out with my Nikon to take photos. And you know I’ve been preoccupied with a big project when Firecracker dresses herself and “combs” her own hair and runs out to the garage to play Joe’s drums on a whim as I work. But when she saw Hannah earnestly snapping photos, she stood in the way.

The result is a bit Mary Ellen Mark, no? That look on Firecracker’s face, that look only a sibling can shape for another sibling, one that says, “I’m in your way, and I am relishing every second of it.” Afterward, when Hannah and I looked through her photos, we liked this one the best.  It was the most unexpected, the one least limited by what she’d thought she wanted to photograph. “The most creative,” Hannah said.

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For the six years I’d lived in San Antonio as a kid before moving back as an adult, this place was my hang out for every school function and birthday party, as I informed just about everyone within arm’s-length at Firecracker’s own party: “And it looks exactly the same! I mean the carpet and everything!”

I’d sent Hannah, fourteen, off with her cousin to scope out the arcade. They came back almost immediately.

“It’s all old stuff,” they informed me.

“Like, what old stuff?”

“Ms. Pac-Man.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s the best!”  It probably still has my initials on the leaderboard from 1983.  I have officially become that old person who goes on all the time about the way things were and delights in the few things that are exactly the same.

I didn’t roller skate at the party, but I really, really wanted to as I watched the kids wobble their way around and around through the lens of my camera while I leaned to the half wall on the carpet side. I really wanted to. I once owned jeans with roller skates embossed on the back pockets.  I had a golden rope belt that buckled when two little golden roller skates clamped together over my jeans button.  I wore white boot skates with pink iridescent stoppers.  And I had dreams. Dreams!

Last spring, when I’d sat in the middle of a group praying at a women’s retreat and one of them reached to touch my wrist and gently said, “God wants you to know you might have given up on your dreams a long time ago, but He hasn’t,” I am, like, ninety-nine point eight percent sure God meant my roller skating dream.

My kid sister Alicia and I would have our dad move the cars from the garage while we turned the radio to an oldies rockabilly station. Then we’d skate in graceful, glorious circles around the oil stains, executing turns, maneuvering backwards, all in the hopes that the thankless, weary talent scout that surely combed the grid of our neighborhood in search of the new “It” girls would spot us.  A car would rattle around the street corner, and I’d say, “Is that the scout? Quick! Arabesque!”

I didn’t skate at Firecracker’s party, but I did take her back the next day.  She’d grown fairly agile on her roller-clad feet, so I thought the chances of her making me fall were now minimal enough.  While I’d worn my lovely new wig to the party, as I do most of the time anymore, I had this fear that if I fell, it’d flop off vaudevillian style, so on day two I wore my fedora fitted with an inner band that keeps it in place. So there I was in my fedora, my Admiral Twin Drive-In shirt, and cuffed jeans, asking for two skate rentals at the glass window in the skating rink entryway with Firecracker already yanking on the second door before being buzzed in.  The clerk looked at me without looking at me, sort of looking behind me, or off to the side, and I made a point to catch her eye.

“And parents get in free, right?” I asked her, thinking maybe she was uncomfortably trying to decide if I was a parent or a weirdo in a fedora.

I suppose it was both, but nonetheless, she finally said, “Just so you know, sometimes they’ll ask on the intercom for all hats to be removed from the skate area.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh!  But mine’s for chemo-”

“I get it,” she whispered.

There’s some movie I’m not remembering right now (is it Terms of Endearment?) in which a woman whispers “cancer” every time she says it. I don’t have cancer, by the way. I’m declaring it right here and now. I don’t have cancer.  Say it with me: “No more!”  It was removed last surgery, and now I’m on chemo because my oncologist is a torturer. That’s all.  At any rate, it amuses me when people think it’s a secret because I tell the internet about it all the time.  I’ve gotten better, though, about not blurting it out to random people I pass in the grocery aisles.

Back to the story.  In order for me to skate with hat firmly affixed, the clerk shuffled off to the DJ booth where she stood on toes to tell him not to make that usual request because of special circumstances.  They were being as discreet about it as anyone can be in a DJ huddle, but I walked past with Firecracker, our skates in hand, and waved at the DJ booth.

“Hello!” I loudly called out to them. “I’m the chemo lady who’s going to leave her hat on!” And we kept walking in search of an empty bench where we could swap out our shoes for skates.

I’ll tell you something.  Just because you may have been a supreme skater at age nine does not mean that as an adult you will magically be able to skate again.  I spent an hour hugging the half wall while Firecracker lapped me. I got mad at her just like I used to get mad at my little friends when I was her age.

“Stop!  Wait for me!  You’re not waiting for me!”

Whoosh.

You learn a lot of things while hugging the skating rink half-wall.

You learn there’s always that one guy in a track suit and his own skates who waits for the “fast round” before rolling over the lip of the wood floor to skate so fast his gold chain flaps behind him.  You learn there’s always that one preteen in all black, pretending not to notice how his nonchalant slump at the DJ booth, where he’s requesting Slayer for the fifteenth time that hour, trips every small child that tries to clomp around him.  You learn there’s that one mom in hot-rolled hair and a push-up bra who does not want a bald lady in a fedora clinging to a wall to be in the background of a photo she’s snapping of her kid clinging to the wall just inches away.  You learn they created “advanced backward skate time” for the sole purpose of driving everyone except the track suit man off the rink and over to the snack shack to buy hotdogs that curve out of their buns like a shredded tire tread in a heat wave.  You learn the carpet smells funny.  You learn draping yourself over a wall looks a lot like failure, so you straighten up and skate like a lame camel in a trot to Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.”

And you know what?  It took maybe three times around the rink before I was skating with ease.  I caught up with Firecracker, and I did this thing I do when confronted with something from my youth, this mental trick in which I try to imagine little me seeing present me, little me trying to decide what she thinks. Little me would have thought this woman gliding (finally!) past her had a friendly smile, a cute kid, a cool hat, and a sense of fearlessness she wished she had. Not bad at all.

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After seeing their drawings the first time, I’d enlisted the help of some friends to put together the Big Box of Art Supply Fun to send them as a thank you.  Inside: a scissor caddy, charcoal vines, pads of drawing paper, sketching pencils, erasers, sharpeners, colored pencils, markers, pastels, and a how-to draw flowers book.

They were thrilled!  And I was thrilled.  My bummer day was entirely swallowed up by all the mutual good will you can still manage to find zigzagging across the globe like one of Indiana Jones’ planes trailing a red line across a map.  Special thanks to my Bad *$$ Unicorn crew for helping me spread some cheer (and art!): Dennis and Donna Bechhold, Alicia Van Buren, Pat Gavisk, R. Flowers Rivera, & Quenby Moone.

This was supposed to be our celebration. Though while the cancer I’d experienced was stubborn, I am infinitely more stubborn. I told my oncologist to plan my chemo schedule around our trip.  We still had something to celebrate, after all.  This recurrence was tiny, even tinier than the previous masses, in fact. It hadn’t spread. It was found and dispatched quickly, and here I am.  My oncologist warned me, though, when I asked her if this trip was feasible, that I’d be extremely fatigued and would have to pace myself, take lots of naps, and stay out of the sun.  This is me parasailing in Florida:

But we’ll get back to that. First, I have to tell you about the no good, very bad start to our vacation.  Day one seemed to be a good enough beginning as we stayed the night in New Orleans’ French Quarter, even though my hair had started coming out in fistfuls. I’d joked that I was like a dandelion in the wind.

And then my Facebook friend from high school, Amy, had this to say about dandelions:

“In their puff-ball state they are actually quite beautiful, billions of seeds blow off in the faintest of breezes and multiply and become thousands of radiant golden flowers. ingenious. Representative of rebirth, growth, survival and strength. Dandelions also have quite a few great medicinal properties too!”

Perfectly eloquent analysis. I’ll take it!

Day two, however, our 24th wedding anniversary, I might add, involved Joe making the rest of the drive to Destin while slowly coming to the realization that he had food poisoning. After he parked the car in the condo garage, he was done. Laid out on the bed in a cold sweat done.  But it was four o’clock. The sun was still glancing off the waves we could see from our balcony, and the girls were suiting up for their first sprint to the beach.

So I had to follow, chase the Firecracker in the waves, clean them up afterward, and take them shopping for a week’s worth of groceries. As our cart grew heavier with all the necessities and a couple of body boards, I strained to steer it down the next aisle, then the next, while sending Hannah out on solo missions. “We forgot mayo! Go get the mayo!”  All the while, a child, somewhere in the Winn-Dixie, was making the loudest, most ear-splitting protests I have ever heard. No joke. Ever.  Even Firecracker plugged her ears. The sound reverberated down every single aisle. There was no escape.

We approached the check-out where the wailing child and her mother had also situated themselves.  A crowd had formed around them.  One woman rushed past us and paused to say, “I have just got to see this kid!”  An excess of grocery employees clustered around as well, everyone standing just a little ways back as if they’d found a snapping alligator.

“I feel so sorry for that kid and her mother,” I whispered to Hannah.

Something had pushed this child to the brink, and having just heaved our extra-full cart down crowded, florescent-lit aisles, I understood completely.  The child’s wailing was the sound I was making on the inside.

“I’m the baby!” she screamed. “I get what I want!  Why won’t you give me what I want?”

Her mom simply stood there, paying for her groceries, then stoically guided the girl out to the parking lot where her wailing finally began to lessen.

Then our clerk rang up our grand total.  I swiped the Visa gift card we’d been so graciously given for just this occasion, and the clerk blinked at me.  “Two-twenty remaining,” she said.

“Oh, okay!” I thought she meant remaining on the card.

She blinked again.  “Two-twenty remaining.”

“Oh, you mean that I owe?” Confused, I slid the card through again. The card should have more than covered the groceries.

“Still two-hundred twenty remaining.”

So I gave up and put it on another credit card.

Back at the condo, Joe did some frantic investigating and learned someone had hacked the gift card.

Dear person/s who purchased $435 worth of goods from a California Wal-Mart with a gift card meant for a cancer survivor’s family:

I spent three hours cursing you with things like having your ears sprout unalterable boomboxes blaring Pat Boone’s metal album that only you can hear, nonstop, but now I’ve forgiven you because it’s bad for my zen-thing to harbor resentment.

Sincerely,

The person crushing your pea head from afar between my thumb and forefinger for eternity

Since Joe was still too sick for the big anniversary dinner out that we’d planned, I made our dinner around 8 p.m., cleaned it up, got the girls off to bed, and then stood in the bathroom with the hair clippers I’d packed just in case.  Last time I shaved my head, Joe actually did it.  We had fun carving a mohawk, requested by my students at the time, and snapping pictures.

We owned that moment, in other words.  Not illness.  Not chemo.  But here I was in a quiet Florida condo bathroom leaning over a trash bag I’d spread out and zipping the razor through my hair, solo, on our anniversary.  At first, there’s something hugely satisfying about shaving one’s head.  You’re doing something few people would willingly do.  You’re doing something drastic, eschewing conventions of “beauty.”  There’s a lot of power in each pass of the clippers.  But then, when all my hair was in a pile and I raised my chin to check my reflection, the utter sadness of it all kicked in.

I stepped out to show Joe, who was sprawled across the sofa talking to someone on his cellphone.  ADT.  A burglar alarm was blaring back at our house.  Police were checking it out.  Now that we’re home, I can confirm it had been a false alarm.  Nothing broken; nothing gone.  But in the condo that night, I was thinking, what now?!  

After struggling with the sliding door to the balcony, telling Joe over and over, “no, I’m fine, I’m just going out here, alone,” I sat in the dark on the porch, breathing in the ocean air, listening to the tree frogs squawk like wind-up toys and the white noise of the waves beyond the dunes.  You know those scenes in Hitchcock’s Rear Window when the directorial eye moves from window to window and you see little bits of the lives unfolding in each one?

If you’d panned around the condo balconies that night, you would have seen groups of people enjoying a late dinner, a couple toasting, some kids up past their bedtimes, a mom hanging beach towels to dry on the porch rail, and a bald lady sitting in a patio chair with her legs crossed and her eyes closed.

Meditation, as you might remember, was something I explored during my first chemo treatment that had helped tremendously. Since then, I’ve taken group meditation sessions and read Pema Chödrön’s meditation primers, moving from the guided meditations that once got me started to doing my own thing. For me, anyway, meditation and prayer are the same, or the “listening” side of praying.  And I always begin with trying to imagine myself in my ideal place for the purpose — the beach.  Then I try to quiet all my thoughts, which that night included: The oncologist was right! I can’t do all of this! 

Then after awhile, after a lot of listening, it occurred to me — I had done all of it.  And I was just fine. Tired like any normal person would be but fine. Then I opened my eyes, and there in front of me, of course, was the gorgeous view of the beach. I was here. I made it.

I was so grateful for that bad day, because that was the day that taught me that I was not as limited as I’d thought I’d been, that I could enjoy the rest of the week just as I would have had I not been on chemo, that my bald head isn’t a sign of sickness but a sign of healing, that I’d made it to my ideal place with my family and I should soak it in. Every minute.

That next morning, I awoke early and went for a walk on the beach, nothing covering my head despite my discomfort with it.  Usually, if I’m embarrassed about anything, one of my kid’s in a meltdown when they were toddlers, for example, something spilled on my pants, a bald head, I look down and pretend I’m the only person in the world.  No one sees me.  No one judges me.  But that morning, I greeted everyone I passed in the sand with a bright, “Good morning!”

And I was just fine.

So I thought of another thing I was afraid of: heights.  My friend Margaret can tell you how I once cowered on hands and knees about twenty feet back from the cliffs on Inishmore, Ireland while she threw her apple core over the edge and made my stomach flop.

This is a serious fear, in other words.  When I came across a coupon in a tourist booklet for parasailing, I knew I’d be doing it because suddenly I was in the business of conquering things, bad days, cancer, chemo side-effects, worst fears.  A fear of heights happens to be a fear of Hannah’s as well, so, being my kid, she was up for the challenge.

We slipped into our harnesses and sat at the end of the little boat bobbing in the Gulf until the boat hands let out the slack and the wind lifted us up. The waves became little squiggles under our feet. The metal clips of the harness squeaked in the gusts. I loosened my white-knuckle grip on the harness straps and held my hands out. Fearless.

Most of us never want our vacations to end.  Most of us grow sad on that last night. That’s normal.  But on top of that normal reaction, I was thinking, right when I get back, I’ll have to go in for round two of chemo.  I almost regretted scheduling our vacation at the beginning of chemo rather than the end, because now, this time, I really, really never wanted my vacation to end. I spent my last night in Destin the way I’d spent that first night, in the dark on the balcony, listening to the waves, turning bad fortune to good fortune.  I thought, eyes closed, the breeze kicking up, the surf roaring, what are the good things about going back for Chemo Monday?  I’ll have the lessons learned from this experience to power me through the remaining fifteen weeks of treatment, for one thing.  I’ll have the wind in my hands and the sun across my face and everything else retreating really small beneath me.

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