I resemble a fictional character

---

Partner and I ride the Providence trolley to work in the morning. He takes the trolley all the way to his office; I get off before him, on Wickenden Street, and walk about 15 minutes to my office.

But we’re almost always together on the trolley. The drivers and the other passengers know us as a duo, and are always confused when they see us once in a while by ourselves, one without the other.

A while back, Partner was riding by himself one morning when another passenger leaned forward and asked in a whisper where I was. “He’s at the doctor,” Partner said.

“I just wondered,” she said. “You know, I’ve been reading this book – ‘Joyland,’ by Stephen King – and it’s just amazing how much he looks like one of the characters.”

So Partner comes home and repeats this story to me, and I’m glowing with excitement. I’m someone’s idea of a literary character! Here, let me think: a nice kindly older man, with a sweet expression!

I sent for a copy of “Joyland,” and read it with some interest.

Well, kids, let me disabuse you first of all: this book is not Stephen King’s best work. It’s a murder mystery, with a supernatural overlay (of course). There’s a murder, and an obvious suspect. Naturally the murderer is not the obvious suspect.

But I didn’t care so much about the plot. I only wanted to find the character Trolley Passenger thinks I resemble.

I certainly don’t remind her of the narrator; he’s twenty-one years old, six feet four, and never really described physically. Nor am I his friend Tom, who’s the same age and described as “stocky.” Reader, I am not stocky.

Here are the only two physical descriptions that might fit:

Description One: “Out in front stood a tightly-muscled guy in faded jeans, balding suede boots splotched with grease, and a strap-style tee shirt. He wore a derby hat tilted on his coal-black hair. A filterless cigarette was parked behind one ear. He looked like a cartoon carnival barker from an old-time newspaper strip.”

Description Two: “He was tall and amazingly thin, dressed in a black suit that made him look more like an undertaker than a man who owned an amusement park. His face was long, pale, covered with bumps and moles. Shaving must have been a torture for him, but he had a clean one. Ebony hair that had surely come out of a bottle was swept back from his deeply lined brow.”

I’m assuming (because I’m thin, and wear a trilby)  that I remind her of Description One. How flattering! Especially since (spoiler alert!) I turn out to be the killer!

Unless she thinks I look like Description Two. In which case, to hell with her.

But I’m flattered.

(But really? Coal-black hair? Tightly-muscled? She needs to get a life.)

---

Costa Concordia

---

Apollonia, that sweet elfin little thing, was complaining about some situation in her life the other day. “You know what it’s like?” she said. “The Costa Concordia.”

“The cruise ship?”

“Yeah. Think about it. You’re sailing along, enjoying yourself. People are waving at you from shore, so you bring the ship in a little closer to say hello. It’s a nice sunny day, and everyone’s happy. Ciao! Ciao! And then –“ She clapped her hands. “Boom! On the rocks. And the ship tips over on its side. All hands lost.”

We both brooded on this for a while. “Well, it’s not as if they couldn’t have done something about it,” I said. “The captain knew he was too close to shore. He was tempting fate.”

“That just makes it worse. You know you’re tempting fate, but for a long time nothing bad happens. You convince yourself that nothing bad can happen, or it would have happened already, right?”

I hate to admit it, but Apollonia has stumbled on something profound here.

We bumble through life like the idiot captain of the Costa Concordia, steering our ship without a care in the world, as if nothing terrible could ever happen to us. Ciao! Ciao! And then BOOM!

Look at this stupid cancer. It’s probably been growing inside me for a year or more; I only just noticed the problem in May or June, as a sore throat that didn’t get better. I thought nothing of it. I steered right toward the rocks without seeing them.

Not to be a fatalist, kids, but life is full of nasty surprises. Be watchful, be wary.

And don’t sail too close to shore if you can help it.

---

Sub specie aeternitatis

---

Being ill (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson) concentrates the mind wonderfully. You find yourself thinking about all kinds of things very differently.

 

 

Priorities, for example. What’s important? Is my job important? Earning a salary, yes of course it’s important to me, I need food and lodging and all kinds of incidentals. But am I making a difference in the world, or bettering the human race, by working at my job? Hmm. Probably not.

 

 

How about the things I do every day? The little tasks I undertake in my job (which can be very petty). The back-and-forth at home: clean this, put that away, arrange this. Important? No. But I do them anyway.

 

 

I am reluctant to waste time, but now I have time on my hands, and it makes me thoughtful about all kinds of things. History is suddenly very appealing to me. So is children’s literature, which seems to me to be more immediate and more important than sober grown-up literature (except for poetry).  And suddenly I’m listening to music again, and it’s very satisfying.

 

 

Maybe just thinking is important. Maybe just writing this stupid blog is important. Maybe talking to people is important.  Maybe love is important.

 

 

I have lived in Providence for over thirty-five years, and I love every dreary block and corner of it. But I looked up at the skyline the other day, and thought: it’s just a city. There have been hundreds of thousands of cities in the history of the world; most of them have tumbled into dust and are forgotten now. This one will be forgotten too, someday.

 

 

Sub specie aeternitatis means “under the aspect of eternity.” It indicates looking at something from outside of time, without regard to the present moment or its little difficulties.

 

 

As Partner and I are fond of quoting to one another in moments of acceptance: “In a hundred years, all new people.”

 

 

And in a thousand years, probably mostly new cities and mostly new national borders and probably also some pretty wild new seacoasts.

 

 

In ten thousand years, all new countries, and possibly people with gills and flippers.

 

 

Makes you a little vertiginous, doesn’t it?

 

 

Here’s one of my favorite quotes about the advance of time in a single person’s life, from the end of the last book of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”:

 

 

This is a very long quote, but a very good one. Please bear with me.

 

 

There came over me a feeling of profound fatigue at the realization that all this long stretch of time not only had been uninterruptedly lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, my very self, but also that I must, every minute of my life, keep it closely by me, that it upheld me, that I was perched on its dizzying summit, that I could not move without carrying it about with me.

 

I now understood why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, whom, as I looked at him sitting in a chair, I marveled to find him shewing his age so little, although he had so many more years than I beneath him, as soon as he rose and tried to stand erect, had tottered on trembling limbs  . . . and had wavered as he made his way across the difficult summit of his eighty-three years, as if men were perched on giant stilts, sometimes taller than church spires, constantly growing and finally rendering their progress so difficult and perilous that they suddenly fall. I was alarmed that mine were already so tall beneath my feet; it did not seem as if I should have the strength to carry much longer attached to me that past which already extended so far down and which I was bearing so painfully within me! . . . .

 

 

 

We are all on stilts, which grow higher and higher, “sometimes taller than church spires. “

 

 

We might fall suddenly.

 

 

But the view is spectacular.

---

 

Tremor and confusion

---

My right hand has been shaking a lot lately. I took some of my student employees out for lunch recently – at a very nice restaurant! – and halfway through the appetizer, the fork flew right out of my right hand. “It’s fine,” I told them. “”See? If we get thrown out of here, it’ll be my fault, not yours.”

I made light of it for their sake, but it keeps happening. It happened twice last week: things just flew out of my right hand.

Naturally, my thoughts take the gloomiest possible courses. Now that I actually have something serious, I think of the most horrible things. . Multiple sclerosis? It usually happens to younger people. Parkinson’s disease? Oh yes: I’m in the age group, and I drool, and I tremble. (One of the other symptoms of Parkinson’s is “confusion,” which sounds very funny, but which is very sobering to me, because I’m far more confused now than I used to be.) Essential tremor? Maybe. It does happen when I’m stressed or tired. But sometimes it happens whenever it wants to happen.

I have a regular non-cancer-related doctor’s appointment in December. I’m sure he’s tired of hearing me whine about all of the things I think I might have, but this he’s gonna hear about.

When I was in the Peace Corps, I had a friend who had MS. She went into tremors occasionally, but she was funny about it. “I’m demyelinating!” she’d yell, and sit and tremble for a while.

Long story short: she got better. Her MS (thank god) got better, as sometimes happens.

What do I have? Possibly nothing.

But probably I need to be tested.

At my advanced age, you never know.

---

Studying calculus at an advanced age

---

A friend of mine on Facebook mentioned Coursera recently. I respect his opinions, so I went to check it out.

It’s for real. It’s a website where you can find college-level courses offered for free. Really.

Okay. So I never took calculus in high school or college, and I saw that that Coursera was offering “Calculus 101.”

What could it hurt? It’s an online course. It must be very gentle, right?

Brother, was I wrong.

This is a complete thorough-going college-level course in calculus, with lectures, and homework, and quizzes, and a textbook (all free).

I’m barely through with the first week, and I’m already terrified.

I haven’t felt this way since high school.

Calculus turns out to be demanding and difficult, which is not good for my ossifying over-fifty brain.

Every evening I resolve to quit the course, and every evening I try again.

Now: can someone tell me: how do you multiply square roots? I’ve forgotten.

And I need to know by next Friday’s quiz.

---

A long career and a happy one

---

Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times solicits questions from her readers. She posts them, asks her readers to send in responses, and then weaves the whole thing into a column two weeks later.

A recent question went something like this: “I’m around thirty, and I’m very happy with what I’m doing. All my friends are looking for newer, higher-level positions, and are telling me that I’m crazy for wanting to stay put. Question: am I doing the wrong thing?”

This is an excellent question to put to someone like me, who’s been with his current employer since 1987, and has held his current position since 1999.

Answer: why not stay in your current job, if you’re happy?

But this is what will really happen if (like me) you stick with one job for the long haul:

For a while, while you’re new, you’ll see your contemporaries come and go. Some will stick around, but most will move on. (I’m assuming you’re under forty. If you’re over forty and starting a new job, probably you have different ideas. But read on.)

After about ten years, you’ll become part of the wallpaper: no one will notice you. You’re now a drone. No one will worry too much about offending you, because – why would they? You’re not gonna quit. (This can be a difficult phase. You will have the sense that people are looking down on you. And you know what? Some of them will look down on you. You are now, to use another Lucy Kellaway term, a “bumbler.”)

Then, around twenty years into your tenure, you will begin to notice that people are giving you a kind of peculiar respect. You’ve been there since forever, and everyone knows that. You can make things happen. You know who to talk to, and whom to call. You have faced a variety of crises, and not a single one of them came close to killing you.

Your personal appearance will be a little weathered, probably. But you will go on and on. Sto lat, as they say on your birthday in Poland: “a hundred years.”

And now, the last verse of a poem by Elinor Wylie (d. 1929):

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile.

---

Beard

---

Well, we have our first cancer-related casualty: my poor little beard.

 

 

It was such a helpless little thing, like a baby possum clinging to my face. Regardez:

 

My radiation oncologist warned me that my beard would probably go thin on one side, given that they’d be pumping all kinds of protons and neutrons and gamma radiation into my left tonsil. “Probably,:” he said,” you should shave your beard off now. It’ll look irregular after a little while.”

 

 

Pooh, I though.

 

 

Then, last week, I was stroking my beard while watching TV, and I looked down, and found that I’d yanked five or six white hairs right out of my chin without even trying.

 

 

Dearie me!

 

 

Beard loss speeded up after that. I could pull out a few dozen hairs at a time by the weekend. The beard looked okay on the right-hand side of my chin, but on the left, it was sort of a hair archipelago, like a map of Polynesia.

 

 

Finally, on Tuesday morning, I looked in the mirror and covered the right side of my chin with my hand. “No beard,” I said. Then I covered the left-hand side. “Beard,” I said. I continued this (idiotically) for about ten seconds, swapping sides. “Beard. No beard. Beard. No beard. Beard . . . “

 

 

No Beard won the contest. I attacked my chin with a regular razor and finished up with my rotary. And now I look something like this:

 

 

 

Am I not striking?

 

 

Only three-and-a-half weeks of radiation therapy to go.

 

 

And, frankly, if that’s the worst of it, I’m a lucky lucky boy.

---

 

The hundred-and-eight sorrows

---

I am not a Buddhist really. (Just ask Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse about that, and he’ll agree.) But I know some Buddhist doctrine, and it has actually helped me stumble through life.

How many different ways to suffer are there, do you think?

There are exactly one hundred and eight.

There are six senses in the Buddhist world view: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, and (the one we Westerners forget) the mind. Suffering can enter through all six of these.

What enters? The six stimuli: things we like, things we dislike, things we don’t care about, things that bring us joy, things that bring us suffering, things that make us feel nothing at all. Things we like may be bad for us (like alcohol). Things we dislike (like bitter medicine) may make us suffer, though they’re good for us physically. Things we don’t care about may be vitally important, but we don’t realize it. Joy is wonderful but it never lasts, and its departure causes suffering. Unhappiness is suffering itself. Indifference can lead to suffering later, through regret.

Six senses x six stimuli = 36.

All six stimuli can be past (remembering the six stimuli), present (experiencing them in the moment), or future (anticipating them).

36 x the three time periods of past / present / future = 108.

These are the hundred-and-eight sorrows.

In some Buddhist practices, there are commemorations of the number 108: 108 prostrations before the Lord Buddha, 108 circumambulations of his statue. Sometimes they ring a bell 108 times at the New Year.

Try this exercise: think of something you do, something you love or hate or don’t care about in the least. It will be one of the hundred-and-eight.

 

 

How about smoking? I smoked for fourteen years. I liked the way it tasted back them.

 

 

So: (sensation: taste) x (stimulus: liking) x (time: past).

 

 

And now I have throat cancer, almost certainly as a result of those fourteen years of smoking. (See also karma.)

 

 

The one-hundred-and-eight sorrows go on and on, endlessly, so long as there’s a single unenlightened being in the entire universe.

 

 

We need to realize them, and name them, and let them go.

 

 

Then we can move on to whatever comes next.

---

Counting coins

---

My bank, TDBank, is very good. Its rates are low, and its staff members are invariably friendly. (It’s one of the main reasons I transferred my account over from the expensive unfriendly Citizens Bank a few years ago.) Also, TDBank has many hidden advantages. For example: its foreign exchange rates are very low (perhaps because it’s based in Canada).

Also: it has a coin-counting machine in its lobby.

This is a huge advantage for people like me who hoard coins. I learned the habit from my parents, who hoarded them also; in my childhood, we spent many happy evenings counting and rolling coins.

But rolling coins is tedious. It’s so much easier to feed them into a coin-counting machine and take the resulting calculation to the cashier and get your money. (Every bit of it, mind you, not like CoinStar, which keeps 10% or more of it as a “fee.”)

The TDBank machine is set up for children. There’s an animated character on the viewscreen named “Penny,” who talks you through the whole process. “My goodness,” she says periodically, “you sure have saved up a lot of money!”

This is a little annoying, but there you are.

The other day, when I was running some coins through the machine, Penny stopped suddenly. “You’ve save up so much money,” she said, “that I’ve filled up my coin sack! An attendant will come help you shortly.”

And an attendant did. As she finished up, she turned to me and said (I thought): “Just touch your nose and you’ll resume.”

I thought she was joking, or that I’d misheard. So I touched my nose.

The attendant grimaced and pointed to the viewscreen. “Her nose,” she said. “Touch her nose.”

Ah. It all made sense suddenly.

Am I not a stupid funny old man?

---

Journeys

---

I wrote recently about my distaste for the word “battle” as used to describe a person’s life with cancer. There are obvious similarities: yes, I suppose you could say we’re fighting for our lives. But – um – does that mean that dying is the same as losing the battle? I’d rather think not.

 

 

I’ve decided that it’s more like a journey. You’ve left your humdrum normal life, and you’ve set sail on unknown dangerous seas. Nothing is familiar anymore. It’s scary, kids.

 

 

You have a goal: getting rid of the cancer. It’s possible. Other people have done it. You’re not completely alone: you have friends and supporters, and if you’re lucky (as I am), you also have a partner who loves you. You have doctors who help you chart your course. (My hematologist even has someone in her office who’s the “navigator” – planning treatment schedules, coordinating with other doctors’ offices, etc.)

 

 

Journeys have all kinds of endings, don’t they?

 

 

–         You make it to the end of the journey, but it’s not quite what you thought it would be. You don’t suddenly win the game. You realize, after what you’ve gone through, that you can never be sure of “tomorrow” again. You completed one journey, but now it turns out (in case you didn’t know) that life is just one damned journey after another.

–         You run into unexpected complications. You get nasty side effects. You catch a random virus from a stranger who sneezes on the back of your neck while you’re on the bus. Suddenly your seven-week journey is a ten-week journey, or a three-month journey.

–         You decide not to take the journey after all, or you begin and decide to turn back. What happens then? I suppose you hope for a miracle to pick you up and drop you at the finish line: you pray, or just dumbly hope, for an Act of God. (For me, this is a non-starter. God is not going to cook up any Acts of God for me, especially after the way I’ve talked about him.)

 

 

Journeys are strange and unpredictable. You do your very best, with the help you’re given, to make your way through unfamiliar and changing terrain. And you realize that you’re not really in control much of the time; it’s just out of your hands. Sometimes the end of the journey is way beyond any horizon you can imagine.

 

 

So get off your ass and pick up that One Ring and take it to Mount Doom.

 

 

Even if you don’t know the way.

---