Three months before I turned 62, on April 19, I was applying for Social Security benefits when I learned that my husband, who lives with his older daughter in Virginia, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Since then he had the surgery, and I spent last weekend at Johns Hopkins Hospital with him as he recuperated. We are waiting anxiously for the pathology report ("What's it called again, that report?" we all kept asking each other last weekend, and once this week he called it a postmortem, which slip I like to think means "death of the damned tumor.") Until the pathology report, well, life is kind of on hold, isn't it?
But meanwhile, my son is graduating from Harvard at the end of the month, and not to be overshadowed by her younger brother, my daughter is getting married two weeks later, in Illinois.
So, without the cancer, we were already looking at an action packed summer.
To add a little spin to an already wildly spinning meaning of life, I nearly overturned my car on the idyllic sounding but truly evil Baltimore Washington Parkway on the way home. I swerved the car back and forth four times before I was able to get it back under control.
Needless to say, life has taken on a different perspective.
And yet, and yet, life continues to be chock full of stupid stuff. Pay the bills, of course, is number one. And mow the lawn, not entirely so it will look pretty, but in an effort to beat back the weeds wherein grow snakes and seedlings of water oaks, which creep into your yard when you are not looking. They also grow -- fast -- next to any tree or shrub that you actually enjoy looking at, so another hated chore is cutting back the damned water oaks.
Then there is politics. After last weekend, I really don't give a damn about Mark Sanford and all the fools that continue to be sucked in by the paranoia and manipulations of the radicals that are currently running this country. Cut my social security, and while you're at it, take my medicare. You've already assured that that scary future in which there is more poverty and illness and ignorance is here to stay. I don't have time to dwell on it because I sure can't change it.
And humming through our existence is money. Not having enough of course, but the fact that everyone wants a piece of whatever you have. This week I wrote a snarky comment on what was supposed to be a "50-State Survey" from the usually wonderful and heroic ACLU that of course became a fund-raising letter. I even yelled at someone from some children's cancer fund who refused to believe that I just couldn't afford to contribute.
MSNBC sells liberal defenses of the incessant attacks on Obama, and then spends about a third of the time selling products. If you're going to get sick these days, you'd damn well better be able to afford it. And if you can't afford to give your kids a nutritional lunch don't bother the likes of Paul Ryan. Because damn it, it's his money. And make sure you ask your doctor for that little blue pill, so you can have hours of sex. Or still that restless leg, so you don't have to god-forbid walk anywhere.
And the FBI wants you to know that they have their eyes on you, just in case you were thinking of copying that DVD you like so much.
It's indeed all about the money. And the stupid stuff.
Water the plants. Dust the furniture where it can't be ignored anymore, even by me. Get ready for the next leg of my three-legged travels.
For days after I got back from Baltimore, my life was filled with all the stupid stuff I had to keep doing. And the humming of capitalism controlling the whole thing.
When it is really my three-legged travels that are important: the drawing together of family, the sickness and the health, the ceremony of commencing, with hope, into the future, the being together with love.
