Unearthing a life.....

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?