Triple Play

1. Just 'Cause I'm Morbid Doesn't Mean I'm Sick
I've heard from a few people, worried about me because I haven't blogged lately and because I talk about my demise in a recent post. I'm fine. I have a routine oncology appointment May 2, and will report on that. I'm going to be a keynote presenter at a conference in Iowa City on Friday. I went to step aerobics tonight and was my usual clumsy self, but didn't fall. One time I fell backwards when I was sitting down and using one of those colored elastic stretcher things. They're dangerous.

2. What Price Friendship
In case anyone wondered, I've figured it out. It's the difference between the cost of a house in Wrigleyville and one in Andersonville (2 miles north). We have been looking at condos and houses because L and I are going to live together full time, after four years of marriage. He still has his house in Gary, though he stays in my condo most of the time. My condo is big but there's no room for his furniture there, or for an office for him. We're planning to sell his house and find a place where we can both have offices, as well as a guest room. A few weeks ago we paid earnest money on a brick farmhouse around the corner. It's very close to B and S; some time ago S and I vowed to stay in the neighborhood. They live down the alley from us now. We found out today that it would cost, roughly, half the selling price to rehab the place properly. So we threw in the towel. We have to have vintage (or else I'll be depressed) and we have to have outdoor space for L. There's tons of vintage north of us, but I promised S. And so we keep looking. My parents chose their neighbors when we moved into a new house in the 1960s. The three families bought the land together and drew straws to see who would be in the middle. We were, with the W---s on one side, and the S---s on the other. The families are still friends.

L and I realize that in most of the world, my condo would house 30 people. I said this to my visiting friend D, and he said: I'm glad you said it because I don't like to criticize my friends. Later he sent me an email in French that said, Property is theft.

3. 85 Years
This year again I didn't go to the homeland (Texas) for Passover. Sunday was my mother-in-law's 85th birthday so we sojourned with her in Litchfield, IL, tripling the Jewish population there for two days. L's kids came from Indianapolis: daughter, son and his wife and stepdaughter. They're all Christian. I led a short seder Saturday night for us. A friend of L's mother's came, too. I used the 1923 Union (Reform) haggadahs on hand, published the same year that L's mother was born. It didn't mention the 10 plagues. I think this is because the plagues seemed too magical to the logical Reform rabbis who felt the need oh-so-strongly back then to differentiate themselves from the superstitious Orthodox. At the seder on Saturday L asked the group: [Cancer Bitch], my mother and I are the least religious people here. Why do you think we wanted to have the seder? Our stepgranddaughter, aged 7, said: Because you're Jew-iss? L said he likes Passover because of the focus on liberation, and the way that you can make analogies with other freedom struggles. I said I like that aspect and also I like to think that people for thousands of years were observing the holiday just like we are. More or less. I'd pointed out that the haggadah was male-centric and had been published only three years after women got the vote. We had our granddaughter open the door for Elijah and look for the afikomen. If I had it to do over, I would have used a simple haggadah written for children, without verbs that end in "eth" and without so much God. In Houston I use an amalgam of texts. Sometimes we just go with the The Telling haggadah, which is egalitarian and progressive and quotes Emma Goldman. How many haggadahs can say that?

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The Fifth Question

The Four Questions are asked on Passover, beginning with, Why is this night different from all other nights? which is also the punchline of a joke about Sir Lancelot.

The fifth question is how and why we celebrate the holiday if we do not believe in the historicity of it, that we were slaves in Egypt, and if we do not believe in a diety; if we do not put any credence in the central covenant we read about on Passover, the covenant with God—that He told Abraham I will make your people slaves but after 400 years I will liberate them and they will be a great nation. That as the result of the torture of the tribe, they will emerge a cohesive group and they will have a land of their own. This is the same lesson that some people draw from the Holocaust: The Jews were tortured and burned in Europe and now they emerge, liberated with a land of their own.

It has been said that modern Jewish practice is ancestor worship. We put on this ritual and set this table and bake this kugel because bubbe did it. We take a little bit of the tam, the taste, of the holiday and swish it in our mouths a bit, and wait for the memories to blossom, Proust-like. Proust was Jewish but I don’t know where his Jewishness lay. Or half-Jewishness. The New York Times years ago had an article about Passover macaroons, quoted a Jewish baker saying the canned ones set off Proustian associations.

I always wanted a seder where people argued and discussed and we did both tonight. But we did not get to the answer to the central questions: What does this mean? Why are we here? What do we do about the readings that we don’t like? Why is the father so harsh when he tells his child that he wouldn’t be taken out of Egypt because he doesn’t consider himself part of the tribe? We laugh at him and then we turn the page.

The story is true, says the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, even if it didn’t happen, just as great literature is true. The exodus is one of our central myths. Our daily prayers (if we were to say them) mention being taken out of Egypt. I have read more than a dozen haggadahs that try to make the story and the holiday relevant. If you do not believe, you have to think your way around so much. You have to change the donne’ of every haggadah and say, There is a story that our people have told, and it is not historic. Yet it has great meaning for our people and it has mythic structure. You have to qualify everything.

And after you’ve qualified everything, you say, This is a holiday in my bones and blood, its cadences are driven into me. And that’s why I’m here. And while I’m here on a purely emotional level, that is the reason for my return, I want to get some intellectual and moral sustenance. But all that is so much work. But to not do that is to be reduced to the level of a child absorbing a fairy tale without question, because it’s so familiar.

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Chemo..

...is not as bad as advertised, said the legendary journalist Harry Golden Jr., back in the late '80s. I interviewed him for a magazine profile when he was dying of cancer. Of the throat? The magazine soon died, too. He was still working as a beat reporter in Harold Washington's City Hall. Working for the Sun-Times. Dean of the City Hall newsroom. His editor told me he never complained about his medical treatment, never let it interfere. My story was nominated for a journalism award and I invited him to go to the awards dinner with me, but he died before we could. He was that close to death. He was small with sharp features and laughed like this: hahhahhhahahahahhahahhahahahha.

So far I will have to say the same. For today at least. Chemo began with the installation of a port below my collarbone, in the jugular vein. It's an underground tube with a hole so that I won't have to be stuck time and again by the nurses. I hope it's the right choice. L has a friend at work who had trouble with her port. I wanted one because Cancer Vixen's drawing hand started getting numb from the chemo needles. And when I was in the hospital for surgery I had an IV in my hand and it hurt during and for two weeks after. I learned from a nurse that after constantly poking the inside of the elbow you might have no good veins left. So I hope this port is a port for the good.

Yesterday when a hospital person called to tell me to fast for 12 hours and such, I told her I wanted an attending ("real") doctor to do the surgery. She said to tell the people today. I did and they said, This is the first we've heard of it, we don't know if we can do it, the doctors spend a lot of time supervising... But I got a real doctor, a very nice one who rattled off information but had time to listen, too. When I thanked him for making the time, he demurred, that that's what he does. For the first time in Fancy Hospital, I encountered no apprentices! It was liberating! I realized I should have told the nurse who made the appointment for me that I wanted a real live doctor. What a crazy world when it's an imposition to get senior staff to do the work.

In the prep room there was a fake skylight on the ceiling, lit with a photograph of cherry blossoms. The little rooms to left and right had different photos. A nice touch.

The doctor said it would be like dental work, where you don't feel pain but you feel pressure. I felt nothing. Or don't remember feeling anything. It was quite Proustian--awake and dreaming at the same time--I remember talking about numbers in dreams. The nurse said I also talked about flying in dreams. That sounded right.

Next was the recovery room, where I recovered quickly and ate last night's leftovers from Red Light with alacrity. Green beans, basmati brown rice, kung pao tofu.

Then we were off to the 21st floor for the chemo. I thought it would be a room with three to five lounge chairs and ladies in varying stages of side effects. And then one day we would find out melodramatically why one person never came back. Instead, I was in a private room with a regular exam bed and a rocking chair, and the nurse gave me Ativan and some anti-nausea through the IV and then she "pushed in" the medicine, as she said, the Adriamycin in a syringe attached to the tube attached to the needle in the port. I couldn't feel much. I could see the Adriamaycin, which is red. Then more saline. Then it was over, after maybe 30 minutes.

We left with three prescriptions for pills to fight nausea. L and I picked them up later at the drug store. Two medicines are mandatory. One is optional. I asked the pharmacist if he knew anyone who went on chemo and didn't get nausea, and he just looked at me haplessly.

But I am hoping. I had some Indonesian ginger chews sent by a friend in Oakland and I am wearing the anti-motion-sickness wristband my sister sent me.

My sister also sent herself. She arrived yesterday afternoon and we sat around then walked around the neighborhood, finding a few crocuses. I showed her three-flat graystones that cost $1 million. Prices in Houston are much more modest. We had dinner with L's daughter for her birthday. It was the first time my step-daughter met her step-aunt.

My sister drove a borrowed car from the suburbs to pick me up this morning and we got to the Fancy Hospital parking lot in good time. She stayed with me as much as she was allowed to. She is very easy. I haven't spent much time with her alone, for years and years. She is cheerful, easily amused, calm and not irritable. She's a learning disabilities diagnostitian in a school and we talked about special ed and autistic kids. She's taking a class so she had to finish a paper for it, and fly home tomorrow to hand it in. We also talked about my mother, and about my sister's plans to hold both Passover seders at her house, for the first time ever. When my father was alive, he and I led the seders, using some feminist material I'd found in Ms.magazine. After he died in 1991, I led at least one family seder in Houston by myself every year, adding new tricks, checking out new haggadahs. I always thought the seders there couldn't go on without me. I think my constituents likened me to Castro. It seemed I would always be there, and never name a successor. This year I'm not going home; seems like too much coming on the heels of chemo. I will be a participant and not a leader in two seders here. We will see how it goes. I did warn my friend B that I would try to wrest control of the seder from him.

When I went to the Oriental Institute last week with a friend, I saw a display that said that there is no proof that the Jews were ever slaves in Egypt. Even the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary says it ain't necessarily so. Ah, well. Then we can universalize the slavery experience. Or treat it as metaphor.

Meanwhile I keep asking myself if I'm nauseated. Like poking at a bruise and seeing if it really hurts. Right now, I'm OK. Let's hope.

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