Brown Days

Some days, of course, 
feel sort of Brown. 
Then I feel slow 
and low, 
low 
down

(From "My Many Colored Days," by Dr. Seuss)


PS: Regarding my last post, the disease was pernicious anemia. The food was raw liver, which contains a lot of Vitamin B12.

The amazing woman who defied death

My father told this story several times when I was growing up. He was fascinated by it, and I was too (and so, I realize, he and I did have some common ground, after all. Not a lot. But some.)

As a child, I absorbed the whole story completely, including my own embellishments. It became so ingrained in my mind, that I never considered some of it might be myth.

In fact, I still don't know.

The story:

A woman became ill and sought treatment from her physician. He gave her bad news.  "You're sick, and there's no cure. You have six months."

The woman rolled with the punch. (Death? Ah, well.) "There's a certain food that I love," she told the doctor. "You can only get it in Europe. So I'm going there, and I'm going to eat as much of it as I want. Goodbye!"

"Goodbye," said the doctor.

And off she went. 

Six months later, she showed up at the doctor's office once again. "It's been six months," she singsonged. "And here I still am. You were wrong."

But the doctor knew he hadn't been wrong. The woman should have died. He was on the brink of something big. 

"What did you do during the past six months?" he demanded. "What did you eat, what did you drink? Tell me everything."

And so she did, and sure enough, it was the special food - the food she had craved - that saved her. 

After that, people who got the disease had to eat a lot of the special food, and some of them hated it, but it saved them too. Later, scientists figured out the exact ingredient that provided the cure, and they made medicine out of it, and that was that. People still get the disease, but it's no longer fatal. 

Was it pure coincidence, or was the woman brilliantly intuitive? That's what I wondered as a child. That's what I wonder now, too.

I like to think that the woman had some sort of inner knowledge, some incredibly exact intuition about herself, and that she craved the special food because she needed the special food, and by letting her intuition lead her, by doing what she wanted, by fulfilling her lifelong dream, she defied an early death.

After I grew up, I sat down with my father and asked him about the story.  It was basically true, he said, though of course the conversation between the woman and her doctor was likely not so cavalier. My father provided some clarifying details about the disease and the special food.

Through research, I was able to confirm some of the story. Yes, the disease used to be fatal. And yes, somehow it was discovered that the special food cured it, and yes, people with the disease had to eat the food, lots of it, in order to survive -- but now there's medicine and so the disease can be managed and people don't die from it anymore. (I'll reveal the disease and the cure in my next post.)

But as for the mysterious, intuitive woman? I can't find anything about her. For my father, who now mutters in a wheelchair in a nursing home, the woman is long gone.

Wouldn't it be great if he could cure his senility by doing the exact thing he wanted to do?

"I'm back," he'd say. "That was terrible."

"Tell me about the woman," I'd say. "Was she real?"

The wisdom of undoing

We're at the beach for Thanksgiving. It's morning, and my daughters, Anna and Clara, run across the sand with their cousin, back and forth, back and forth, playing a made-up game. It has a random name, so random that I can't remember it now.

While they run, I squat next to William, my toddler. He has found a bottle cap, and he uses it to scoop up sand. Then he hands the full bottle cap to me. I take the bottle cap and pour the sand out, then hand it back. We repeat this and repeat it, and then I get the idea to make a pile out of the sand he gives me, instead of just scattering it any old where. This way, we can be productive, we can build something together, create something. This will be good for us, I think to myself -- because sometimes (lots of times) I get distracted around him, this third baby. He doesn't get the single-minded focus that a first baby gets, or even the trying-really-hard-to-be-single-minded-focus that a second baby gets. He's stuck with third-baby-fragmented attention. But right now, in this instant of teamwork, we'll fix that.

I take the bottle cap as he hands it to me, and pour the sand in one spot, and hand it back, and he fills it and gives it back to me, and I pour it in the same spot, and little by little we create a pile. I am proud. Such a good mother.

And then William destroys the pile with one swipe of his fickle little hand. Down it goes, and he fills the bottle cap again and hands it to me.

So I just pour it randomly, the way I was before, and I think about how this 20-month-old understands - so much better than I do - how important it is to enjoy the journey itself.

List in Progress: Books I love

FICTION

Adult 

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
Room, Emma Donoghue
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

Early Leaving, Judy Goldman

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon

Stones from the River, Ursula Hegi
Never Let Me Go, Kazau Ishiguru

Long Way Down, Nick Hornby
She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Schriver

Digging to America, Anne Tyler

Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler

The Ten Year Nap, Meg Wollitzer

Young Adult

I am the Cheese, Robert Cormier
Silent to the Bone, E.L. Konigsburg

Slumming, Kristen D. Randle
The Way I Live Now, Meg Rosoff

When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
Stuck in Neutral, Terry Trueman

Middle Grade

Ramona the Pest (and all the Ramona books), Beverly Cleary

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone (plus the next six), J.K. Rowling

Laura's Luck, Marilyn Sachs

Board Books

But Not the Hippopotamus, Sandra Boynton

The Going to Bed Book, Sandra Boynton

Jamberry, Bruce Degan

NONFICTION

Memoirs / Autobiographical / Biographical

Expecting Adam, Martha Beck

Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott
Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean
The Upstairs Room, Johanna Reiss
Maus (Graphic memoir), Art Spiegelman

Everything Else

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Siblings Without Rivalry, Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Anger, Thich Nhat Hanh

The Happiest Baby on the Block, Harvey Karp

The Happiest Toddler on the Block, Harvey Karp

Thank you, Elana Johnson, for being human

Thank you, Elana Johnson, for saying that it's normal and human and okay to fall into the dark trench.

Trenches, being trenches, are easy to fall into. Even when you think you're on level ground, walking along, sunny sunny sunny, it can happen without much warning (especially if you're prone to falling). Walk, walk, walk, stumble, OOPS, whoa, slide, CRAP! Here again, in the dark, in the trench, where the sun won't shine.

But look! There's the path out. Yes, it's uphill, but it's there. Thank you (Elana) for helping us see the path out of the dark place.

And, not to push the analogy or anything (pushpushpush) but I assume the more practice one has walking on sunny level ground, the better one gets at noticing the slightly downward sloping that can signify a trench, and the better one gets at turning a slightly different way in order to avoid it.

Man takes pregnancy test, miracle occurs

Last week, a man found an unused pregnancy test in his medicine cabinet. He assumed - apparently correctly - that his ex-girlfriend had left it there.

It was his now, not hers. Finders, keepers, keepers, finders. So he peed on it, of course. Why not?.

The test was positive.

The man told his friend, who created a rage comic about the incident and posted it on Reddit.  (Don't worry, I didn't know what a rage comic was either. Luckily, Gawker - who reported on the story - provides edification.)

Instead of laughs, the rage comic generated alarm. "If this is true, you should check yourself for testicular cancer," commented a concerned reader. "Seriously. Google it."

The man saw a physician, and sure enough, tests revealed testicular cancer. For the science behind the story, read this ABC News piece . The quick summary is that testicular cancer can (but certainly does not always) cause an increase in the hormone HCG - which is the same hormone responsible for that miraculous second line on a pregnancy stick test.

Hopefully, the man will be just fine. Testicular cancer has a high cure rate, and his was caught early.

But....what a story!* It's so preposterous that, as fiction, it would suck. I mean, think of all the things that had to happen. The ex-girlfriend had to leave a pregnancy test behind. The man had to find it - not before the cancer was too tiny to be detected, and not after the cancer had progressed too far. The man had to have a whim, an odd one (who among the y-chromosome-holders thinks to pee on a pregnancy stick? Who thinks that?). Then he had to follow through on the whim. (And who does that?)

Then he had to tell a friend - not just any friend, but a friend who is hooked into social media. And then the friend had to post the news on a high traffic site, in such a format that people actually looked at it. And then one of the readers had to have the wits to know (or to Google and discover) that elevated HCG can be a sign of testicular cancer, and they had to care enough to post a comment.

Part of me wants to believe that this wasn't just an incredible sequencing of multiple synchronicities, but that intuition and unconscious knowledge were also involved. Perhaps the girlfriend sensed the cancer without even realizing it and left the pregnancy test behind accidentally-on-purpose, having once upon a time learned the thing about HCG. Perhaps the tidbit from that long ago biology lesson had rested itself within a deep fold of her brain, so deeply that she didn't remember it on any kind of conscious level, so deeply that when she left her boyfriend, her residual love for him caused her to overlook the pregnancy test, knowing - unconsciously - that he was the type to experiment with it rather than to throw it away.

Perhaps it was nothing to do with her. Maybe the man was the one who had the long ago biology lesson, with that one interesting piece of education burrowing itself into his brain, then disappearing forever, but not really forever.

Or maybe it was all just pure blind luck, no intuition or tiny embedded memories involved.

Or maybe it was God. Though this raises a disturbing question -- why this man? People get cancer every day, people find out about it too late every day, without being saved by a preposterous story - so why is this guy so special that God does all this flukey stuff to save him? Or, put a better way, why doesn't God do this for everyone? Isn't s/he supposed to be fair? (Actually, whoever said God was fair?).

Me, I'm leaning toward the synchronicity combined with intuition / burrowed memories theory.

But whatever the reason this happened - and we'll never know - there's no doubt we are witnessing a miracle here. A modern life miracle!

And so, there is hope for everything and everyone.


*NOTE: Reporters should leave the man and his friend alone. I know it's a great story -- but it's out now, and people know all they need to know, and you're not going to get any more information by badgering them. Nor do we deserve any more information than what we already have. Give the man his privacy, please, and have a little respect for what he's going through. As the rage comic creator puts it in a Reddit comment, "He is already stressed about the cancer itself as it is, and the reporters asking him questions about it just adds tremendously to it, and we just want to be left in peace so we can get him through this smoothly." 

Yes, I'm jealous of agented writers

And yes, I'm ashamed of that. Because of course I wish I was envy-free, that my words of congratulations were always backed up by one hundred percent pure happiness for the successes of others, a billowy white flower in my hand, no dirt on the stem, no dirt at all.

This is part of what makes querying hard; it's not only the punch of the rejection -- it's the fact that, along with absorbing that punch, you have to confront the dirt within your soul, the parts of your personality that you thought you had conquered long ago, but which you now realize you'll never conquer. Anger, bitterness, schadenfreude, envy.

"Really?" you ask yourself, as you hold your hands back from typing a blog post raging about the wording of an agent's rejection ("'Just didn't connect?' Could you not simply say 'Didn't connect?' Why have the 'just?' Do you really think it lessens the blow? 'Oh, it's not my fault, not little ol' mine... I just didn't connect!'"). You hold yourself back from typing that, and then you stare at your own hands and turn away from them, disgusted.

"Really?" you ask yourself. "Are you really that kind of person now?"

No wonder so many aspiring authors won't acknowledge their negative feelings, not even to themselves. Who wants to admit that they're ugly, dirty?

But I can't not admit it. Maybe because my ugly, dirty side is uglier and dirtier than other people's. Or maybe it's simply because I tend to admit things.

In any case, here's the truth: When I read online self-congratulatory comments from random people, such as, "I'm happy to say that I've just signed with the fabulous Dreama Gent. I could not be more thrilled!" I sometimes get a churning, sick kind of feeling. I feel jealous. And forlorn and abandoned and victimized -- or at least, part of me does. Why not me? I think to myself. I'm a good writer, too. Why not ME?

Two things give me hope. First, if I know the person - even just a little, even if only through their blog posts - if I have any inkling of their journey whatsoever - then part of me (a huge part) is truly happy for them and the envy is milder, less bitter. (For example, if this writer got an agent, I'd be filled with joy.) This shows me that I'm not a total sociopath.

And the second thing that gives me hope is the fickle realization (fickle because sometimes I can grasp it, and sometimes I can't) that the envy (and rage and bitterness, etc) are not actually ugly feelings, no more than the dirt on the stem of the billowing white flower is ugly. In fact, in its own dirty way, dirt is beautiful, right? All grainy and springy and fresh, the way it is.

We have these feelings, and we're beautifully human, so that means the feelings themselves are beautifully human. A=B, A=C, so therefore B=C.

And if we want to get all spiritual about it - and, hey, I do - God is within us, and God is within our feelings, and so...these feelings are divine*. Or, at least, the acknowledgement of the feelings is divine. The stuff that we can learn from them is divine.

As to what exactly that "stuff" is....well, I'm guess I'm still figuring that out. And that's divine too.


*A+B+C = A+B+C. Or let's just call it the square root of pi.