100 years of climbing and looking for treasure...

See, the thing about writing meaningful   blog entries is that then you expect yourself (and imagine others expecting it FROM you) to come up with something equally deep the next time.

Well, give up that hope.  But in the midst of my cleaning (it's what my wife wanted for mother's day) I will take this moment to share that my cat is playing with the broom and generally getting in the way (I knew we should have just gotten a dog).

To share that I'm driving to West Acton MA to see my Mom today.  With my daughter. 

To share that I'm reading 100 year of Solitude right now.  GG Marquez.  Odd book, but good
Kathy's friend Lisa just sent her Wild by Cheryl Strayed.  It's about hiking the PCT.  I'll prob. read that next.

I've recently started listening to Band of Horses, and while I don't love everything about them and worship every song (come to think of it, I don't really do that with anyone these days), it sets me to thinking about all the things that lay undiscovered out there.  Oh, I love some of their songs.  Meant to say that.

Anyway, this is why I get library paralysis.  I KNOW there are books out there like Lonesome Dove and Pillars of the Earth- just stone cold classics, that I am not aware of.  And I want each book I read to be that good.  So when I find books that are just so/so, I always want more.  And that's me in a nutshell- never satisfied.

So so leads me to another short report.  In the last week I have spoken to TWO different customers in french.  En Francais!  Sure, I was only muttering "Hello, how are you?  Do you speak English?" but you go right ahead make a cold-call to someone in Quebec, and see how much French you remember!  :)  Then see how proud you are of yourself when you eventually can converse- no matter how short the sentences.  Yeah- that's how I'm feeling.  Multilingual, baby!

Rode the whole way to the top of the Metal Tower climb at Lynn Woods last Wednesday.  Maybe not a major achievement for myself 10 years ago, but it was pretty tough this time, and last time I rode up there I walked 3/4 of the way, so...  I'll tell ya, though- when I reached the top the whole top half of my body felt like it had been pierced by needles!  I was like, "really?  You're going to start sweating NOW?  Could've used that about 5 mins. ago!".

On those rides I always think of brilliant things I want to write on here.  But of course, they're gone now.

Too busy.  Too busy.  I should carry a notebook.

All Those Wasted Hours

All my life, I've tried to see bad things coming, as a way of preparing myself.

This is perhaps because of a rather large surprise I got when I was three, but my skills of anticipation were really quite rudimentary then.

I've tried to sharpen them quite a bit since.  You can call it worse case scenario.  Call it a negative disposition.  Or call it preparing yourself.  But the idea has always been the same:  by worrying about things (and let's face it, that's what I'm really talking about) I hoped to make them less painful if they happened.

Here's the thing though.  If they DIDN'T happen, I spent all my time poisoning perfectly good times for no reason at all.  And if they DID, I was never prepared anyway.

This has somehow never really gotten through to me until now.  How could I be that stupid, you may ask?  Don't I have a master's degree?  Haven't I seen counselors off and on for years?  All I can reply is that you can be very aware or skilled or whatever in one direction, and completely blind in another.  The windshield is not the same as the car's blind spot.

Kathy's sickness taught me this lesson like being punched in the chest by a welterweight boxer (no, I don't know what that means, I just like the sound of the word).  We've talked about this- how she and I both worried for years that we had some deadly serious illness, only to realize  it was all in our heads.

But you know what?  When it was confirmed to be real, all those years of worrying helped not an ounce.  Not a breath.  I was as shocked and hurt and afraid as if I'd never even considered disease before.  All those late nights laying on my back staring at the ceiling:  worthless.  Not figuratively but quite literally of no worth to me at all.  The biggest shock of my life and my worry hadn't helped me in any way.



Which brings us to The Bible.  Luke 12:^"Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?"  It is so true.  And this is most certainly a pot calling a kettle black, a wolf calling a bear a wild animal.  I don't want to preach.

But if I could only pass along one thing from what Kath and thus I have gone through since February, it would be this.  Don't waste your hours  thinking about what might happen.  It'll happen alright, whether you anticipate it or not.  And sometimes it will be good.  Unfortunately, you'll likely overlook those times, because it's human nature to take it for granted when things are hapy.  But sometimes it will be bad, really bad.  And please trust me:  when that horrible moment comes, you will not wish you had worried more.  But you might get the smallest bit of conciliation knowing that you were truly happy in the days before and didn't waste them with worry.

Don't take that last paragraph wrong.  It is necessarily an edit of my life right now.  Things truly are not as dark as all that.  But the intent is true.  The lesson I've learned is real.  Enjoy the heck out of life right now.  Don't worry about what might go wrong.  Let it surprise you like a wave on the ocean.  Because guess what?  It will anyway.

Empathy

This is from Steve Garro.  It is not my writing.  I've done a little editing, but not much. -RK

"Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge," says educator Bill Bullard. "It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is "empathy", for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound, purpose‐larger‐than‐the‐self kind of understanding." 

I got it from my great friend/photog Dawn Kish  and it just stuck for me. My world in my previous life was one where I was guilty of just thinking of myself (largely as a survival instinct - nobody really raised me from 12yrs on - Mom split, Dad was courting my step-monster who never liked me) and I just basically walked through this world as if it was all a big soap opera where I was the star & everybody else were just talking heads/bit actors. I think many do.

There are a lot of things about the old Steve that died on Oct 5th, 2005 that were just as good gone. That's a hard pill to learn to swallow. Now I'm not the flashy, tough, looked-up-to racer guy/endurance "star"/sportsmodel. I'm that cripple guy hugging the side of the street to get good crutch placement just gimping along & trying not to spill his coffee. People who don't know me think I'm just some kind of 'tard or a "worthless cripple" without ever seeing under the exterior. I loath the fact that used to be me sometimes.

Now, I've met guys who have climbed Kilimanjaro on a handcycle, guys who rode around the globe on one, climbed El Cap with arms alone, have several friends with head injuries really struggling but are pulling it off under extreme duress while still being themselves, talked to MS kids, helped people get off the sidewalk for the first time in 20yrs, lots of that. and you know what? Behind the peepers they are still humans along on the same fucked up ride on a tiny dustspeck as me, and everyone else.

I learned that if someone is leading a life different then yours, then that does not mean it can be a life without merit or happiness. I learned that there is my mind; and there is the thing we thing of as "reality", and that sometimes you have to step back from your perceived "reality" and let your mind determine right from wrong or to think in ways that may cause us to squirm a little. Lastly, it carries over to building, and I have said this before, you have to build people THEIR bike, not YOUR bike in their size. That is substituting *opinion* {how you think their bike should be} to *empathy* {how their bike should be} by being empathetic to the nuances of fit, use and intent to make what will be the best for that client..

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Therapy 2: Scared But Needed

I am scared sh*tless.  I'm sorry to be so coarse, but I'd be sorry if I wasn't.  I'm trying to describe the emotion and get the poison out.

You deserve to know.  Some of you.  Who are a part of my day-to-day life.  But it's so hard to tell you.  Hard to realize myself, but as I said, I'm a little more knowledgeable about cancer now.  But to see your faces after I tell you.  When you're struggling to come up with a response to "my wife has breast cancer".  Maybe you're thinking "thank God it's the cute, pink cancer" or more likely, "oh, my, what do I say to show I care?".  I'll be honest- I'm not looking at your faces.  I just want to get through the moment.  because it hurts.  It hurts to have to try to explain to you that it will be alright.  That I really think things are going to be ok.

I look forward to the day of surgery.  The day they get this thing (these things?) out of her.  Yeah.  They found another one.  But it's tiny and may or may not be cancerous.  And they swear it didn't come from the first one.  That it's been there all along and they didn't see it because they hadn't checked the other breast.  But she had an MRI, and they found #2.  And did a biopsy of it, just to be sure.  One way or the other.

And that scares me to hear.  Yeah, maybe I'm a negative person.  I expect the worst.  It's a coping mechanism to try to prepare yourself for the worst so that even if it happens you can be prepared.  But I'm ruing the day I became that way now!

However, as my wife was good enough to point out to me- she is in fact alive and well and feeling some fear of her own.  Maybe because SHE'S THE ONE WITH CANCER.  The one facing surgery.  Possible chemo.  And I'm ashamed it took her telling me for me to realize that's scary stuff.

And I need to figure out how to put on my big girl pants and be there for her and Lucy at the same time.  People (many) have said that I need to be Kath's tower of strength.  Yeah, only here's the thing- I don't feel like a tower of anything except maybe Jello.  Coincidentally God is described in the Psalms as just such a strong tower.  Something to think about.

So I need to turn over a new leaf.  Somehow set aside some of my fear for my own damn self and be there for her when she needs me.  Time to step up.

However, and here's where I turn a big corner:  while I do that, I need an outlet for my feelings and this is it.  This is where I plan to stow away my feelings of fear, inadequacy, and heart-gripping panic.  I hope and pray it will turn out to be a story of redemption and happy endings.  But I just don't know.  And that is the thing that is killing me:  I just get no guarantees.  No 100%.

I keep saying to Kath, to others, to myself:  be here NOW.  Right now we're ok.  Today everything is alright.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Seriously, who does?  'Cause I'd love to hear from them.  But whether the best or the worst or something in between is on the way, I've learned something:  I need to live this time the best I can.

Therapy 1: The Day Of The First Appointments

Here's the thing that I can't bring myself to say.  My wife has breast cancer.  On one hand, I can't believe it.  Of course.  Who could?  But on the other, negative side of my personality I feel like I've been waiting for this my whole life.

I can't exactly say I'm an emotional wreck.  At first I was a bit.  All I could picture was bringing up our daughter alone and talking to her about how much her mother loved her.  Even writing that sentence brings me almost to the edge of tears.

But if I am a wreck, it is in my absolute emotional inconsistency.  One moment I'm all confidence.  C'mon- you heard the doctors.  And they're recognized cancer experts!  Everyone around says this guy is the best surgeon there is.  It's Mass-fucking-General for crying out loud.

Then literally the  next moment I can be cowering in a corner, afraid even to utter the "C" word.  Shuddering as I stutter out words like "Chemotherapy" and "Lymph Nodes".  Maybe partly because I know the effect they'll have on people.  Because so recently they had that effect on me.  Not quite so much now, though.  It seems with repetition, the human mind really can get used to most any new reality.  It's sick, in a way but we- humans I mean- could perhaps not cope without it. 

Today we talked to two oncologists, a radiologist, and a genetic therapist.  They thought we'd like it better if we talked to everyone in one day.  Maybe.  We learned that her cancer is invasive- meaning not contained in the breast "sack" it started in.  That it could have the ability to spread  (shudder...)  And we learned its size (not the smallest, but certainly not the biggest).

But we also heard today that the blood test that would show if it spread to the liver came back negative (which is a good thing) and that a chest X-ray to see if it had spread to her lungs was also negative.  So that's two worries off the table.  The genetic abnormality test, along with an MRI of both breasts (that's coming Monday), and then actual surgery and analysis of the tumor/lump, and the lymph node test (to show that it's not spreading) would eliminate a whole lot more.

These doctors are good at telling it like it is.  To some that might hurt or sting a little but to me it feels like they're telling me the truth, rather than giving me some candy-coated well-wishing bullshit.  I'm very afraid of people withholding the truth from us because they know the news is bad.  Don't get me wrong- I'm scared to death of the bad news.  I just hate the idea that others would know it and not tell us.  My own mental issue- disregard.

Also, why do I feel better knowing these facts than before we knew if this lump was even cancerous?  That goes against all sense.  I still feel that freezing iron hand gripping my heart from time to time (as I described 3 paragraphs back) but not quite as often as during that 5 days of unsureness.

This is perhaps because I am realizing that breast cancer is not in fact a death sentence.  I really thought that over the weekend.  I couldn't even think about it, because I assumed if the biopsy came back 'yes' then a long slow inevitable decline began.  Everything I heard today seems to contradict that.  I hope with all my soul I"m not wrong. I pray with everything in me that I won't regret writing those words.

But I don't think I will have to. In my small, tentative ways, with the friendlier doctors, I tried to bring up this fear, this point of view.  It was regarded with tender laughter.  No, things aren't like when we grew up, one person said.  For a quick example, the surgeon told us that back 15 years ago or so, they'd simply take a sampling of lymph nodes under your arm during surgery and your arm would swell up (that's part of what the lymph nodes do- drain fluid from your arms) and they'd see if they found any cancer cells.  Now they put a dye in the breast and pinpoint the exact lymph node that the breast "drains to" for lack of a better term.  And your arms don't swell so often.  And it's a more accurate test of whether disease has spread.


I'm posting this days later because I didn't want anyone to find out this way.  I hope you don't.  I hope Kathy and/or myself have told you.  I hope I'm not violating her trust to post this.  But she's already put it out there on her own blog.  So I think I'm ok on that score.  Still, my apologies if I've shocked you with this news. 

Erosion of the Memory

When I was much younger, I wrote a little essay once about wave breakers.  It went something like this:  we need protection to keep our morals from eroding away, like a beach needs breakers.

From Rivendell.

I remember where I got the inspiration to write that.

Another memory:  I'm standing at a fence, feeling some sort of adolescent sorrow.  The fence is at the edge of a sand and clay cliff that would look at the wave breaker spot if it wasn't for the trees that separate the two.  Who knows what I was feeling, and it doesn't even matter.  It had something to do with a girl (and at that time, she would've been a girl- not a woman) who had gone home early from camp that year and it must have been powerful for me to remember it at all.

And so I went and gazed wistfully (or the best I could muster at that age) out at Lake Erie.  All was forlorn.  I would never love again!


As that evening grew darker, I went back inside, to the ping pong tables and small snack shop of the Rec Hall of the camp I was attending.

All that is, however, only setting.  Because with the passing of time, that building has been torn down, as the sandy cliff beneath it was worn away by the lake it bordered.  And so, we can probably assume that the cliffside fence- or at least the piece of ground on which I stood back then- is also left only in memory.

It's an odd feeling.  Here's another example.

All my childhood I remember an old drive-in movie screen.  It sat next to a road we often took to New Castle.  A hill sloped down from the screen, and I remember it being covered with scraggly weeds... for years.

I visited my old hometown probably ten years ago now.  That hillside is gone.  Not only is there something built there, they have literally re-shaped the entire landscape.  The screen and weeds have been replaced by a Super WalMart and some chain restaraunt, and the weedy hillside by a gigantic Sears store.  We all know about this.  It has happened in numerous places all over (although I do wonder about the animals that lived on that weedy hillside, but that's for another time).

My point is this:  the displacement that this leaves us feeling.    I clearly remember that cliff, that movie screen.  And yet, not only are they changed, but they are in fact gone.

This hits on what it means when you are told at your grandmother's funeral that 'she will always be with you if you keep her in your heart'.  We've all heard it but to what extent is that actually true?  If you can remember them nearly perfectly, does that mean they are able to be recreated?  What if I was a painter and could represent these places visually rather than with words?  Would that make them any more real?  Or if I could find old photographs with these things in the background?

Forgive me my rampant philosophizing, but what I'm trying to ask is this:  Are our ideas what truly make up reality?  To use a computer metaphor, is reality hardware, or a sort of software that simply runs on the physical world around us?  Is something only truly gone if it is forgotten?  And in that sense, is this some sort of conversion of matter?  Like water into steam?  Something visible into something harder to see?