Saturday the 14th

As far as I can remember, and it's true I don't remember all that well, I never had a bad thing happen on a Friday the 13th, until yesterday. Yesterday I was going about my business, eating my lunch in the cafeteria at work, when my phone rang and it was the doctor I'd seen earlier in the week. She had removed a cyst from my back and now she was letting me know that the biopsy returned an unexpected result. Metatastic Melanoma. So I have cancer.

My first impulse was to anoint the chair I was sitting on "the high chair of doom". My regular high chair at the soup counter was occupied by the head of the department, who was sitting there (in my regular chair, I'll remind you) arguing with someone about something. I could tell by the tone of their voices. So I was sitting in a different chair, the first time I'd ever sat in that chair, and I can tell you right now, I am never sitting in that chair again.

My second impulse was an avalanche of associations suddenly flooding my mind - my friend who'd died of the same thing just last year and how brave she'd been, and how open to her family and friends. And then my brother's wife, who'd died of a different stage four thing two years ago, and how sad it was, and how she suffered and how she was a wonderful person and mother who left behind two children only just then verging on adolescence. And then my mother, who only this past year was taken off her last treatment for her blood cancer and was expected to die within weeks but instead she kept feeling better and better and still is. And then my uncle, my father's brother, who died at age 59, the age I am now, of colon cancer, and how everyone said he was too young, and how I've been talking for a while now about how this year (2017) I am going to be 60, and I don't care if people say 60 is the new 40, because 60 is still 60 and it's kind of old.

And then I thought about how I was always in a hurry to grow up, and how I always had an image of my mind that I was going to be a pretty cool old geezer, with a striking profile and wrinkles of experience to show for it. I am already the person I wanted to be, for the most part - nobody ever reaches their ideal self, do they, but I feel pretty close. I've done creative work that I'm happy with and proud of, mainly fiction, a few songs here and there, and some amusing illustrations for my books. I was fortunate to meet, exactly 17 years ago this weekend, my perfect partner and together we've been fortunate to have and raise a wonderful child, who is now 15 years old. And how as an older dad I always knew I'd be lucky to see him into his 30's but now I'm only hoping to see him every day for as long as I can.

So the thoughts piled on and of course they can't stop, and I never wanted to write a memoir but I do have some things that I'd like to get down, so if it's a memoir then okay. I don't know what those things are, but here I'll find out. Several years ago when my son John was a little boy, I had a particularly poignant dream. I was on the front patio of our little home in La Honda, but I was a ghost and I knew I was a ghost, and John was a grown man and he was sitting in the spot I love to sit in, where the sun hits first thing in the morning in the summer, and he had a little baby on his lap and they both were very happy and relaxed and he could see me. He knew I was there even though I was a ghost, and he looked up at me (in the direction where I was, coming in from the side driveway gate) and held up the child to introduce me and I woke up in tears but tears of joy, even though I knew that it meant I would never live to see my son become a father. And being his father is by far the best thing that ever happened in my life.

17 years ago today I drove down the coast in my black Chevy S-10 pickup truck to the San Gregorio Store. The woman I had met online and had been corresponding with called me from there and invited me down to meet in person. I was listening to a football game on the way down, it was the divisional playoff weekend and the New York Giants were demolishing the Minnesota Vikings (the final score was something like 42-0 I think) and as I pulled into Stage Road and looked at the people hanging out there I saw only one woman, and my heart leaped but my brain said, "that can't be her, she's too good looking" and anyway, she was petting a black lab and I knew she didn't have a dog. Turned out to be someone else's dog. We walked down to the beach at San Gregorio and talked and talked, is how I remember it (her version is likely very different from mine) and she came home with me to meet my own dogs (including my own black lab, Arastradero, who was at that very moment developing the cancer that would kill her only a few months later). Betsy moved in with me only a few days later, and only about six weeks later I cut short a trip to the Anza Borrego desert with my parents because I couldn't wait any longer to ask her to marry me.

I was also thinking about memoirs and the stories we tell ourselves that make up our selves, truly, and I don't want to just keep repeating the same old ones and refining them to a fine polish until they shine, for example about what a small child I was - only 60 pounds at age 12 and still only 120 pounds at age 36 - and how I was terrorized in the 7th grade by a local bully named Nick ("Fucking") Filipone, who broke both my thumbs by bending them back until they broke against the brick wall outside the Radnor Junior High School gym, and how in an email about my high school's 40th reunion I recently learned that he was already dead and it made me happy to know that. Terrible, right? But it did. And there may be a few people on this Earth who would be happy to find out they had outlived me, but there can't be many of those - an employee or two from when I was the manager of a mediocre bookstore in downtown San Francisco in the 80's perhaps, and maybe a couple of other stray associations here and there but for the most part I've been an emotionally low-impact person on the people I've known outside of my few close friends and family.

Events in life stand out like punctuation marks and you could make a list of them, a chronological set of moments with many gaps in between, just the story board bullet point items. My earliest memory (looking up into a very high closet in the house we were just moving into in Bryn Mawr), and my next earliest memory (finding our big black cat, Matthew, dead under the front porch of our house in Rosemont, very early one weekend morning before anyone else was awake. I don't know how I knew he was there - probably heard him crying as he'd just been hit by a car and crawled in there, and I crawled in after him). Or you could chart it out like biorhythms, the highs and lows of a life connected by trending lines, as if it all made sense like a visualization of sound waves, and there is the song of your life, with dynamics and meter, a musical score for an orchestra of millions filtered through the ears of one.

I remember estimating once that as a cashier I had said "thank you" to approximately four million people.

So next up is treatments and (hopefully) buying some time through discomfort and pain, but worth it. It will have to be worth it. I lived through 13 years as a zombie when I was under the influence of chronic fatigue syndrome, which caused my body to go into a sort of hibernation, and every minute of every day was a struggle to just push through it and I did, from the age of 26 to the age of 39, when another ailment (ulcerative colitis) led to being treated with Prednisone for the greater part of a year, which seems to have kicked the hell out of my beserker immune system, and the CFS symptoms went into remission, where they have mostly remained in the 20 years since, only surfacing under stress or when I get a cold or other illness. I bought time then without any treatments, since there were none and I had no health insurance for most of those years anyway.

And who would have thought I would end up as a computer programmer anyway, or even with a good job with good insurance and survivor benefits, when all I wanted to do was run a decent little bookstore and I never cared about money beyond having enough to survive. Back then, in my twenties and thirties, it never occurred to me I would own a house, or have more than a couple thousand dollars in the bank, but those things snuck up on me and I'm happy to have something to leave to my family. Hell, in my twenties and thirties I didn't think I'd have a family! I had married at 20, divorced at 22, and then saw another 5-year relationship go down the drain while I was sick with CFS. Then I was completely alone for more than 7 years before I had a brief series of lousy and short-lived relationships before I met Betsy in early 2000, and everything changed completely for me on that day, Saturday the 14th, exactly 17 years ago today.

On the other hand, what are we except the stories we tell ourselves, the same anecdotes we repeat over and over and would tell if we were still around to do so? Like the story of the time I let a tiny old woman read my palm in a square in downtown Bogota, I was going to give her some money anyway so why not let her have her fun, but she merely glanced at my palm then suddenly shouted a cry of alarm and ran away as fast as she could muster. Two years later I misled my girlfriend and myself down the wrong street just a few blocks from there where we were surrounded by 2 men and 2 boys with very long knives they held to our throats and our backs while they took all the money we had on us, but spared our passports. Was that fortunate that they spared our passports? Because with them we left Colombia for Ecuador and Peru and then returned the same way, and in each country we encountered other near-mortal threats in the most harrowing and terrifying trip of my life. Such as the time they pulled us off the bus in the middle of the night near Pasto, just me and her, a nubile nineteen year old at the time, to be stranded and surrounded by at least a dozen peasant soldier boys in the most remote location, were it not for the bus driver who bribed the soldiers to let us through, a driver who made a tidy profit from saving our meager little lives when we paid him back on returning to Bogota. And in the middle of that trip, sitting on the train in Cusco bound for Bolivia when soldiers invaded the station and began shooting the workers who had just decided to go out on strike. Or when the banker at the border of Ecuador gave us red pens to counter-sign our traveler's checks and then tore them up because we had originally signed them in blue. Or at the central bank in Bogota, where I had agreed to change a fifty dollar bill for the hotel manager only to find a machine gun suddenly at my head and the next three hours locked in interrogation because the bill of course was counterfeit, while my girlfriend was stuck out there in the bank lobby not knowing a word of Spanish or where they had taken me or if they were going to bring me back. Or the last night we were there when I decided to buy cocaine and we walked through the Carrera Septima giggling like mad with four soldiers on every corner of every block all the way back. That was pretty smart, eh?

I had lived in Bogota for a year or so previously. I left my family when I was a child of only16 and went off to college down there through an exchange program called CEUCA, sponsored by Antioch University. It was a freshman-year abroad kind of thing for me, but all my compatriots were juniors. Will I now be leaving my child when he is only 16? I hope not, but I was ready to be done with my parents at that time. They were miserable in their marriage in those days (though as of this moment, at ages 90 and 87, they've been together for nearly 68 years!), and I was suicidal and depressed throughout junior high and high school, really ever since we returned from our family's one-year in Bologna, Italy, where my father was on sabbatical writing a book, and my mother was employing her newly earned library science degree working at Johns Hopkins University there. I loved Italy and Bologna. I was 10 years old at the time and a happy little guy. I shared a room with my brother Peter and we were never closer. I made a great friend named Giorgio Fabbri and we wandered up and down practically every street in that portico'd old city. When we returned to the tony Philadelphia suburbs, it felt like being buried alive, and it didn't help that almost every one of my childhood friends decided to un-friend me, and the girls were getting precocious and I was so far behind in that.

First 11 years, pretty happy. Next 30 years, not at all. The 19 years since have been the best of my life so it's pretty much a draw at this point if you added it all up that way. I've got no complaints. On the one hand there are many things I would change about myself and my life and on the other hand I would change nothing at all because look at where it got me!

Melanoma and a history of sunburns, pale bird that I am. One time my lifelong friend Bruce Reed and I went canoeing in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was a great trip, for a while. I was probably 14 and he 16 around that time, because he drove the family's VW van. At one point we had to wade through a narrow section and when we emerged from the water we were covered in leeches. Unfortunately I'd been wearing shorts with no covering or sunscreen and on the way back developed such an extreme sunburn that I was bed-ridden for several days after, in shock and great pain. Was that my definitive melanoma moment? Because I've had lots of other sunburns. I spent all my summers as a youth (until leaving home at 16) in the hot summer sun in nothing but a bathing suit and never any sunscreen. We would sit out at the pool at the college playing Hearts for hours on end, running off occasionally to grab some small and sour green apples from the nearby trees, or running down the hill to the creek to build makeshift dams out of pebbles and rocks - with Bruce and Peter  and Anita and Conrad and others I barely remember.

Or maybe I do remember more than I think.