Unearthing a life.....

Needless to say, I have NOT heard a peep out of my biopsy surgeon, telephonic or otherwise. I would write it off as his being too busy at his profession, saving lives, etc., EXCEPT for the fact that Otis has not called me either. And Otis is not in the business of saving lives. Or is he?

Wednesday morning I called this Super Fine Service Lawn Maintainance Company to arrange for having them take over my mowing and edging duties. The lady that answered allowed as how Otis was out at the dump with his pickup, but she would have him phone me when he returned. She may also have slipped in the phrase "right now he's busy with his day job." I didn't want to hear that so my mind tried - unsuccessfully - to block it out.

Maybe Otis has a day job as a thorasic surgeon? I'm sure I don't know, but there are the beginnings of a pattern forming here. Both Dr. Adams and Otis would do well to take heed of that line of poetry ---

I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep....

Otis has gone for 52 hours without returning my call. Earlier this morning I called Rodgers Landscaping & Lawns. That lady promised that her representative would phone me this afternoon. So now its a race to the finish line between Otis of Super Fine and the unnamed gentleman from Rodgers Landscaping. In the meanwhile, I have the rattiest looking lawn and yard in the immediate neighborhood. And no specific diagnosis for my cancer.

What's a person to do when the Angel of Death bursts through the door and points his boney finger ... out the window ... at the birdfeeder? "Pay him no mind," I whisper in Allie's ear. "He appears to have forgotten his glasses."
"How do you know it is a him?" asks Allie. "That long hair and big white dress looks like girl stuff. I can not look at that girl stuff."

Am I about to launch into a philosopical diatribe about death? Possibly (if I could gather together some coherent thoughts and stand them in some sort of logical progression). What I am actually doing is BIDING MY TIME. Waiting - all day - for a promised phone call from Dr. Adams, during which I expect to become endowed with some actual factual information about the currently nameless cancer inhabiting my chest. It is 2:25 pm and the phone has not rung. Now it is 2:26 pm.

I had always assumed that there was a certain sense of medical urgency that attached itself to any suspicion of cancer. I was wrong about that. Stand back and wait is the protocol as I am experiencing it. If Bookworm had not snapped her wet towel on a few butts, I would likely still be waiting another week to get the biopsy that I did get - thanks to her - eight days ago. Now it is 2:34.

So you get to Charon, you pay your fare, and he begins to pole the boat across the dark, misty waters towards the Underworld. Does he get you fifty feet from shore, then lay down his pole and announce, "We have to drift aimlessly now for eight days ... then we can go another fifty feet." Does he say that? I don't think so. Now it is 2:40.

I have had some occasional thoughts about death lately. NOT my own! Just general review of past impressions. And what occurred to me was that most of our cultural symbols about death are of quasi-beings who stand external to us. The Angel of Death, the Grim Reaper, etc.,. And, in the aftermath of the hippie years, I recollect some writer going on about 'My Death'. Paraphrasing: "My Death is always there standing just behind my left shoulder. When my time comes, My Death will reach up and touch me on that shoulder and I will go with him. Until such time as he chooses to do that, there is nothing in the world that I need fear."

That may have been one of the opening raindrops of the New Age deluge.

It is 3:00 pm. I am also waiting for daughter Kelly to arrive .... Saturday afternoon. She was going to come last weekend, but her plane broke down on the runway and the later flight cut too deeply into her visiting time, so she re-sheduled. And now the race is on! Which will get to me first: Dr. Adams' phonecall, or my daughter Kelly?

That's an old photo of Allie and I posted above .... I think he looks like a Pokemon creature with electical powers.

Granted, Mother's day is a bit off yet, but writers in search of titles must grab any reasonable straw that floats by. Or, in this case, the first straw that floats by.

I was thinking of the process that put me here on this happy earth and the women who went through the pains of childbirth to form my paternal line. There have been a number of them that I've become acquainted with during my genealogical researches:

Olive Newsome ... back in pre-Revolutionary times.

Nancy Abernathy ... who nurtured the line from South Carolina to Tennessee to Missouri.

Margaret McDaniel ... mothering the line from Missouri to Kansas.

Rachel Barnes ... from Kansas to Oregon to Washington.

Galena Belle Gilbert ... a California girl transplanted to a Washington hard-scrabble homestead.

Lucile Roach ... also known to me as 'Mom'.

Grandma Lena was probably the 'woman of influence' in my very early years. From what I have gleaned from old tales, my Mom was not noticeably ready for full time motherhood when I was born in 1934. I understand that my parents received several sets of dishes as wedding presents. The number 6 sticks in my mind. When all the dishes in the house were dirty, grandmothers Lena and Katie would converge on the place and get them all clean and back into the cupboards.

Grandma Lena lived just across a small empty lot from my Dad's house. She was the close-at-hand grandma. There have also been hints that she did not totally approve of Dad's choice of mate. So she had a tendency to step in and fill the gaps when it came to child rearing.

Whenever conversation drifted around to these times, Mom would roll her eyes and say, "Oh, she had you kids trained alright. Every morning you were over there lined up like hungry birds on her doorstep ... while she spooned in the cod liver oil and gave you your jelly glasses of orange juice."

According to Uncle Don, Grandma Lena would not suffer any alcohol on the place. A regular Carrie Nation. The boys would hide jugs of cider and grape juice in hopes that it would ferment. "I think she could smell it turn," claims Don, "because she always found it and dumped it before we could get a swig."

Many of my early memories ate connected to Grandma Lena: the sound of the butter churn and the taste of fresh buttermilk; The Guiding Light and Stella Dallas on the radio; the smell of dill in her garden; the sight of headless chickens flopping helter-skelter behind the woodshed; gathering big wire baskets of eggs from under raucous hens; the taste of dill pickles stolen from her crock.

I have no such homespun memories of my Mom from those times. Only memories of traveling the backroads in the Chevy while she ran Dad's trap lines during the days ... shooting caught coyotes and the occasional badger and lashing them to the fenders and bumpers. It only just occured to me that we must have been a strange sight driving home through Othello. Kids on the inside, varmints on the outside. A strange sight nowadays, but probably unremarkable back then in the mid '30's.

I believe this photo was taken about 1972. Decades before I would even dream of coming down with cancer ... before Kelly would even dream of ever being a Vice-Superintendent of schools ... before Erin would even dream of becoming a community college Registrar.

That's the odd thing about the Dreamtime (the Aussie aboriginal concept?) ... very little can be anticipated. You go where the gods take you. Or you go on walkabout.

My life has been an amazing walkabout. It has not been the fulfillment of my dreams because I would never have chanced to dream the routes I have ended up traveling. I would never have dreamed up the beloved circle of friends that now surround me. I would never have dreamed up the great love that I am receiving from my daughters. I would never have dreamed a model for the marvelous wife who has nurtured and partnered me down all the strange trails we've come upon these past forty years.

My family of origin is not very tight, but the news of my diagnosis has spread to all my far-flung siblings and they have raised their heads and looked westward to Puget Sound. Do they hear mortality calling? I am the oldest child and it wouldn't surprise me if they saw me as a barrier between themselves and death. I can assure you that I keep a sharp eye on Uncles Don and Archie. They are the lone survivors of the previous generation and I have been using them as danger markers.

Don is eighty-seven and Arch is ninety-two and I would be damned disappointed to be the one to throw the proper progression of funerals out of order. So 'cronking', or otherwise 'buying the farm' is not a treatment option. I have a responsibility to see Allie graduate from high school ... to see Jessica either ride in competition, or play jazz clarinet ... etc, etc, etc.

I now have a Thursday 10:00 am appointment with Dr. Adams to get an explanation of the biopsy / pathology reports. The proposed treatment plan will maybe not be revealed till next Monday. At which point the Battle will Commence!

Bookworm and I were looking forward to having Kelly with us last weekend (back row right in above photo), but here plane broke down on the runway and she had to reshedule for this coming weekend. It will be a pleasure and a relief to have her near me for a few days.

Daughter Erin drove up from Vancouver, WA, to stand vigil with Kay during my biopsy way back there on Tuesday. Jessica had to stay home with friends as she had a concert that night .... and is holding down First Chair for clarinet. Erin was sporting an attractive 'bobbed' hair style as she had just donated ten inches of hair to a cancer-related charity (at least I think that was what it was). It is always best to set aside an occasional monent to brag about children and grandchildren.

I haven't posted any Allie stories recently. He is being somewhat cautious about talking with me. He does not wish to hear anything about any 'wrongness' going on with me. So he's turned more of his attention toward his grandmother (Bookworm). Yesterday afternoon he and I did develop our version of a current kid's movie ad playing on TV (where the orange T-Rex is trying to get at the little boy standing in a room corner). I do the evil master's line "Why haven't you eaten the boy?" and Allie tucks his elbows in and drops his voice way down low and answers "Because my head is big and my arms are little."

Daughter Kelly will be coming tomorrow and staying a couple of days. I look forward to that.

A great number of people (with a slightly higher fame level than I) have written books about their stuggles with cancer. So far I have not detected anything interesting going on in that regard. Unless, of course, I were to write a book titled 'Lost & Gone Forever in a Vast Jungle of Medical Limbo'.

I do not expect I'll be writing a book. While at the ocean, I was looking out the dining area picture window and thinking, This may be the last time I see this view and the ocean. I should be seeing things with new eyes. Richer colors. Hidden meanings peeping out.

Well -- that was a total wash. Nothing looked any different than it ever had. Which leads me to suspect that even cancer autobiographers get a tad bit carried away with their literary license.

I was definitely not up to my usual photo-snapping snuff this year. I took maybe thirty pix and scrapped most of them as atrocious. I even forgot to grab a shot of the Spinach Enchilada and Spanish Rice night three dinner that Bookworm (ClearCreekGirl) prepared with minimal help from me. I was plating the rice when I should have been grabbing my camera.


A colorful panful of squash and tomato being cooked up for Steve and Katy's first night dinner.




"Rubbed' chicken breast on a bed of purple potatoes, garnished with squash and tomato.....

The lung biopsy has come and gone. The relatively short initial 'probe' (involving a cut in the throat and a bit of exploration down into the darker regions) produced evidence of cancer. It will be another week before we find out exactly which form of cancer and what the treatment options are.

This is like some crazy game where you follow one clue after another, which only gets you to a next clue and never to the doorprize. Frankly, I don't quite know what to think of this all. I'm not worried or afraid or depressed ..... nothing about my life is different except for the shortness of breath and getting tired rather quickly. So for the time being I shall have to go on being me .... until such time as maybe a severe pain make me double over .... then I'll be a bit shorter.

Speaking of shorter! I have lived my entire life in the belief that I grew to the height of 5 foot 10-1/2 inches and more or less remained there. When I took the physical that started this weird journey, the nurse ushered me onto the scale, said "Stand up straight, please!", and announced "5 foot 8 inches". I protested, but she was adamant. When I checked into the hospital another nurse led me through the same exercise. I explained how the prior nurse had robbed me of 2-1/2 inches. This one said "We'll just compromise and call it 5 foot 9 inches." But I'll bet she wrote 5' 8" on the chart.

I'm left wondering if being squashed down 2 & 1/2 inches could account for the portliness that has acrued to my beltline the past few years.

The trip out to the ocean was most enjoyable. I wasn't able to get out on the beach and fly any of my kites. Pretty much house-bound. But being stuck in a huge suite of rooms with ClearCreekGirl and four fine friends, all cooking industriously for three days (and on the fourth day there were leftovers), AND with three big picture windows aimed at the beach .... that is a fine thing indeed. They all took good care of me. I did produce our one organized breakfast - of scrambled eggs, pork link sausages, and waffles .... something I can do wham-bam with no recipes and little moving around.

I did make it out into the parking lot on one occasion as I tried to get a photo of an eagle that was in the area (best shot shown above). I read a good, thick junk thriller novel, and proved myself the all-out worst player at Tripoley. But it was still me - FossilGuy - getting up an hour earlier than anyone else and getting the coffee pot going. A man's gotta hang onto his identity!

I wish I had time to collect my thoughts on last weekend's ocean trip, but for the time being, you will have to refer to Kay's Blog for that. I will say that I managed to suck them all in with a long rambling shaggy dog story (stolen from Tom Waits and gussied up for my use.

Time is exceedingly short as I'm going in to the hospital tomorrow morning for the lung biopsy. Daughter Erin is here today (and tomorrow) and brought some photos of her daughter Michal. I couldn't resist posting this one. She was told that it was New Zealand tradition to kiss the first fish she caught there.

I took this shot in May of 1989. I had leased twenty acres here in the summer of 1988 ... for $500 per year .... for the purpose of digging fossils .... and maybe a bit for the purpose of becoming famous bone diggers. Neil and Rosie and I dug here for seven years -- until the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting at the U of W in the Fall of 1994. By the time we loaded Neil's old wheelbarrow back into his truck for the last time, we had carefully dug out some 500 cubic yards of three million year old stream sediments, creating a considerable hole in the ground. A really, really big hole. One paleontologist wrote and informed us that out 500 cubic yard estimate had to be way off. "That, my friends, is fifty large dump trucks fully loaded," he wrote. I wrote back and said "That's right! And every shovelful was double screened and hand-picked." And I sent him a couple photos of the final hole. He didn't write back.

When Neil and I were kids living on the Milwaukee Railroad down at Smyrna, we excavated a series of square holes in the ground ... with short connecting passages, and roofed the lot over with old boards and 'grain doors' (grain doors were door-sized rough board structures used in box cars to block the car doors and keep wheat, etc. inside). A by-product of our excavations was a plentiful supply of dirt clods. And as brothers are wont to do from time to time, we warred on each other with these handy missiles. The battle would usually stop when one or the other of us (more often me) would catch a dirt clod in the forehead and go temporarily blind from a spray of dirt to the eyeballs.

So, after forty years of pretty much ignoring each other while we divorced wives and raised families, we finally redeveloped a close relationship learning the joys of photography. Odd that, after a couple of years of burning up film, we regressed right back to digging square holes in the ground with little connecting passages. I wonder if this is meaningful?

Probably not.

Being self-sufficient is a hard habit to break

Like Charlton Heston, I want to say "I'll give up my frying pan when they pry my cold, dead fingers off the handle!" That's what I'd like to say and that's how I feel. And if someone were to ask "How's that working for you?", I'd have to reply "Not worth a shit!".

Today I had to enlist the aid of Allie's mom Angela (and her spacious hatchback) to go out to Macy's Furniture and load up a large box containing a somewhat disassembled red leather reclining armchair. For Kay's office in Tracyton. The man at the loading dock and I managed to lift and shove the boxed item into her car. I left well behind Angela and expected her to get to Tracyton ahead of me. But I got there and there was no Angela.

My plan was that Angela and I (and Kay) would unpack it and carry the parts upstairs and then I would do the assembly. I knew that would leave me gasping for air, but ... whadaya gonna do?

About ten minutes later Angie and Allie pull into the driveway and right behind her is her boyfriend Charlie. They did the lifting and lugging and some assembly required. After they left I set to the task of slicing up the big cardboard box with my box knife. Half way through, I had to give it up because I was gasping for air. This was reality impinging on my delusionary work ethic.

I am definitely getting a little wrankly around the edges.

The wrack and ruin approach to junk disposal. Just pile it all up in an obscure exterior corner of the house and let the elements go to work on it. After a year or two or three, it begins to have 'character'. What we have here are the remains of an old wooden bird-feeder (that didn't work out too well because it had a copious platform where the local squirrels took up residence and kept all the birds away). The chunk of deteriorating tree trunk and the eye-bolt were part of our former dog Dakota's 'anchor system'. And the years just keep coming like soldier ants on the march .... taking a bite here and a bite there ... and we grow imperceptibly lighter.

So .... around noon yesterday I dropped by Harrison Hospital and found my friend Mike's wife and one of their sons and I sat it out with them. About 1:20, a buzzer went off in Lidia's purse and she rushed off down the hall. Twenty minutes later she came back with the 'news' ..... they had gone down Mike's throat and collected some samples and now he was resting in Recovery. And that meant that they had found cancer and didn't have to proceed with the more invasive part of the biopsy process. What's next for him? I don't know yet, but I will be looking in on him come the end of the week.

Later that evening, it occured to me that I ought to call our mutual friend Jack and let him know how Mike's biopsy went. His wife answered when I dialed and handed off the phone to Jack.

"Yah!"

"Hey, Jack, I went over to Harrison this afternoon and sat with Lidia and they found cancer on the first part of the biopsy and sent him off to Recovery."

"Who is this?"

"Morgan!"

"Oh. I didn't recognize your voice."

"Yah, my voice has been trying to sneak away from me."

"Well damn, Jimmie! I hear you're right behind him."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"From Mike. As soon as he hung up last night he called me and says "You'll never guess....""

"Yah, I'm going in on the 20th....."

"Don't sweat that shit, Jimmie! I went through it five years ago and look at me!"

"You had lung cancer? I thought you had a heart attack."

"Hell no! They whacked two lobes off my right lung and that was it. No chemo, no nothin'."

The conversation wandered on through all of Jack's recalled details, doctor comparisons, etc.,. Mike's first sign of trouble was a severe cough that refused to go away; but, like me, Jack woke up one morning and found he couldn't take a good, deep breath.

The image that comes to mind is Bergman's Death figure leading a line of pipefitter apprentices along the skyline. I wonder if that line includes my first wife's first husband(?). What tangled webs we weave .... a combination of poor sense of direction and inadvertent drunkenness?

How often, when you gaze out into a field, or a pasture, or a barren wasteland, do you see four cows all facing in one direction? What are the chances of that? A thousand to one? Three to one?

I have no idea. But being as how I took this shot of one of the windchimes slowly disintegrating under the eaves of our back porch ... and published it here ... I thought it would be nice if I could somehow weave it into the fabric of this posting. So I strong-armed it into the position of being symbolic of "So what are the chances of that?"

Last evening I got a phone call from an old shipyard friend (Mike). He and I had been apprentices together in the Pipe Shop at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. A dozen years later, we both managed to get transferred to the Design Division where greasy coveralls became a rare item of required dress. We were both 'drafted' into a small select group of engineers and technicians that took on the Navy's SUBSAFE portion of the shipyard's first submarine overhaul (this was after we lost the Thresher and the Scorpion and SUBSAFE was a systems upgrading to hopefully prevent future similar losses of subs and men).

Anyway, Mike called to tell me that he had received word that one of our old supervisors had died this past weekend. And then he made the mistake of saying "And how are you?"

Ha! I 'had' him! Bombshell time!

"Not so good, Mike," I responded. "I'm scheduled for a lung biopsy on the 20th."

"Oh, really!" he came back. "I'm scheduled for a lung biopsy tomorrow morning at 9:30."

Damn! I had him in a one-up corner and he escaped!

"So who's doing yours?" he asks.

"A Dr. Adams."

"Oh, he's doing mine too."

Turns our Mike is getting the same thing I am ... first down the throat, and if nothing is found, then in through the chest with the camera thingie. The only difference we came up with was that he initially went to the doctor because of a cough and I went because of a shortness of breath.

So what are the chances of that? Given our background, about the same chance as seeing four cows facing in one direction when a coyote trots into view.

'Tough old guy with a heart the size of Montana' ... circa 1938

It is snowing outside. So far none of it is sticking.

Just before the biopsy, we will be going out to the ocean for our annual long, long weekend of cooking up a storm with two other couples (NoApology's parents and another couple). I fear I will have to retire as one of the main chefs and I will probably have to curtail my kite flying, but I'm just damn glad to be going at all.

Today is pajama day at Brownsville Elementary and tomorrow is grandson Allie's 7th birthday so he wanted to have cupcakes at school to celebrate. Earlier, we were walking up to the school bus stop (he in his Superman PJs) and he asked about the cupcakes. I said that his Mom would be bringing them by the school later in the morning. He looked down at the sidewalk and with a sigh, said "Oh, my dear god!"

I know he loves his Mom above all others .... but he doesn't really seem to trust her to get with the program when it comes to the scheduled events of his life out in the world.