Beyond Moonstone and Broken Stone

I didn't tell you the whole story.

Back in South County, along the coast of Rhode Island. The day that I stood on the seaweed and garbage-strewn edge of a chewed-away beach. Sizing it up. Whole chunks devoured. Agape, I stood surveying a wounded shoreline, gnashed and sliced with mechanical precision, a chainsaw steel-toothed-blade slashing. Here you are Lil Rhody: a newly chiseled ribbon of beachfront.

That's what she said to me, Hurricane Sandy, as she flossed her choppers. I listened further. My ears buzzed with the saw's vibration. A tinnitus. Hiss. (I wondered if her steely jaw hurt as much as mine did after a night of vigorous grinding.)

Now exposed a foot or more above the shiny, sabulous floor are three concrete septic tanks. Now an orange net of fencing assuredly tells visitors to not climb wood stairs, to not roam wood decks. We don't know what's safe. We don't know what might give under foot. Or what might topple overhead. And who knows, in this cycle of storms, how long it will take before we are able to tend to this beach's wounds.

Sandy's hiss lingered. Driving Rhode Island's roads I had noticed how all the trees, with the exception of evergreens, in the area and around the state had been prematurely shorn bare. Another reminder that our fall has not been like ordinary falls past. None of the seasons, truly, have been like those past, and there has been, undeniably, altered weather patterns throughout the year, a change in our climate, and I feel the loss. The resulting melancholy that grips me has become inescapable.

*   *   *

Out there, where the continent ends, a mob of seagulls swarmed above the churning waters, in search of... Something. Food. Companionship. Entertainment. They jostled above the smooth-stoned jetty, eyed its pummeling by the wildly relentless surf. They squawked discordantly, and hustled easily through knotty wind, steeling crab-scrap from one another. Scrap is plenty and they are a greedy lot. They are no better than ambulance-chasing lawyers, they are opportunists. (This explains their longevity, as well their repulsiveness.) Go away, you opportunistic kleptomaniacs!

Why are seagulls called seagulls when they are not confined to the sea? In fact, they do not venture far out above the ocean, and very often, they are found inland: at freshwater lakes, in the parking lots of football stadiums or theaters, or at big-boxed shopping centers that sadly occupy corner lots of every other town in America.

*   *   *

But before I'd reached the beach in South County, before stopping by at the Shopping Center in Westerly that I manage, before assessing the damage to a pylon sign, I had visited my dermatologist, Dr. Kirk in East Greenwich. There, I had the angry, seething mole—a mole that had for many summer nights kept me awake, this, the mole from which I could not vacation, a mole that had burrowed into the fold of my right armpit and maddened my mental health—excised, as well as another bothered mole that had, like any good, large-pawed mole, dug itself a home and taken a seat on the backside of the equator of my body. The waistline is not a sitting or nesting area. It is too heavily trafficked by garments of the day and evening. There, fine silks, cashmeres and cottons carouse, and stumble, get caught, on anything in their way. They do not appreciate this. Neither does the no-sitting area. So there, they are hewn down like all the trees or tree limbs that fell just days before. Or like any tree that does not bear good fruit. They are hewn almost precisely like trees, only on a smaller, more sterile scale: a numbing agent applied to the area via syringe not only numbs the mole and its underlying/surrounding skin, but also puffs it up into a small mound so that the now protruding and exposed bugger may be sliced from its nest by a hand-held straight edge blade. It is more efficient, in fact, than cutting the tree, as no stump remains, no inviting perch or tunnel.

Sea of Unease

             “This is not good,” I tell my husband. We're in bed. From the house in which we will soon slumber, or try to, we can hear the ocean stirring. It pounds against, and gnaws at, one of the most exquisite islands in the Atlantic. I have been searching for suspicious moles, moles that eat away bodies, since the morning of my physical. I've stretched out my naked right arm and, with my iPhone, taken a picture of what I consider to be a particularly suspect mole, centered, and burrowed deeply along the outer ridge of my armpit, and I am comparing it to the onerous looking moles of the online medical journals that I’ve culled from the Internet with my laptop. Mine is an old, curmudgeon of a mole. At one time it was a pageant-worthy beauty mark, whether adorned by a simple black camisole or a paisley silk sheath. It was a freckle at birth.

Now, it is swelled in various shades above the skin where it meets a charbroiled crescendo; it seems as maddened as a volcano on the verge of blowing, like the sick, angry moles I see on the vast Internet: multilayered and gibbous, some with dry, crusty patches, areas that look like burnt chicken skin, or tiny clusters of flying fish roe. I am jumping from website-to-website for evidence that will justify my fears, and with each hit my anxiety balloons. I see more: cancerous black lesions with uneven borders, red and blue-gray blemishes that indicate malignancy. The photos I’ve taken just won’t do so I tuck my head into my armpit, even though it’s nearly impossible for me to get a decent view of the mole from this angle (or any angle for that matter), and stretch the skin around the dark nub. Michael pulls his book away from his face and gives me a look. What am I doing? I know that he thinks I’m loopy. But this doesn’t prevent me from searching, armpit and Internet, even as I become aware of the increasing anxiety that will keep me from a solid night’s sleep.

“This is bad,” I say to Michael, as if he has not heard my first complaint. “Does this not look like melanoma to you? And why is my doctor concerned about this one?” I point to the dark nebula. “This one looks like all the others. Should I be worried about the others?”

I know Michael wants to say, Yes, you should be worried about the others, just as you worry about everything else. Yes, worry, dammit! Worry and then shut up. But he doesn't say this. He tells me simply to have it removed when we return home. We are on vacation, after all. But I take Worry with me wherever I go.

Instantly I want to shout, Easy for you to say, you're not the one with all the raging moles! Instead I say nothing and he tells me to stop reading about melanoma. I think about my father, my brother-in-law, and one of my closest friends, all of whom I’d lost to cancer in short time. I think about my sister whom had layers of squamous cell carcinoma shaved off her nose. She is in the clear now. It was just last September when my now annoyed and fatigued husband spent three hours on the operating table having his prostate removed. (How in the world could I have wished to utter, Easy for you to say?) Cancer. I’ve become hyper-vigilant. It is quiet, quiet, and we can hear the sea, in and out, and the constant wind gusts, and we can smell the mist from the ocean that comes up in squalls, over the dunes, into the hollow and through the house. We are on the eastern side of the island and the beach is a walk away over the dunes. A large, gentle pond sits on the other side of the sandy, rosa rugosa-lined path that divides house from water. I could be anywhere, though. Anywhere, and I would still tend to Worry.

Earlier in the day, we had taken the high-speed ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket with our two teens. We’d come to visit and relax with my in-laws who own a small home in Quidnet. My father-in-law met us at the wharf where the ferry pulls in. It’s a lovely area of the harbor, trimmed with grey wooden docks, shingled structures and bricked and cobblestoned roads which spill into the island’s historic downtown, where, by way of special zoning bylaws, no large restaurant franchise or retail chain can be found with the exception of a Ralph Lauren store, which Lauren acquired at a cost of more than six million dollars prior to the passing of the bylaw. It all seems so quaint and pristine, so very removed from the rest of the world and all its commercial trappings and corruption. Madras-clad, Sperry-footed people strolling the streets, no hurry, no worry, no mission other than to pass the moment blithely. During one of our previous trips to Nantucket I had read that the island’s early settlers, the Wampanaug Indians, referred to this golden bib of land as a Place of Peace, or in their own language, canopache. To the native peoples, this island was also removed from the world, a faraway place, and so they named it Nantucket, meaning, in their native tongue, faraway land. And it occurs to me now, as I stretch out my armpit mole that the only thing that seems faraway to me is my ability to relax.

We loaded our bags in my father-in-law’s black Range Rover and he drove us out beyond the slick cobblestone, alongside lush, undulating pastures, and pretty ponds dotting the salty landscape, east, down Polpice Road and out to Quidnet, where we quickly changed into our bathing suits and charged back out to the island’s south side, to the narrow strand of beach known as Nobadeer.

But even on Nobadeer’s ribbon of packed, turbinado sugar-like sand that falls out into the wide-open Atlantic, into the blue, blue horizon, I was too anxious to relax.  On the shore I wondered how this fine-grained land must have looked when it first rose from thawing ice sheets, when it was nothing but sandur, an outwash plain from Earth’s last glacial period, separated from Cape Cod’s mainland by the icy retreat; how pristine it must have been! Pristine it still is, in many ways, and even more so during the off seasons, fall through spring, when the island’s population is one-fifth of what it is during the summertime.

Yet, it is not entirely unsullied. It overpopulates in the summer months, especially during the time when we are here—the days that flank both sides of the 4^th of July—with a noticeable accrual of noise and litter, especially downtown. This summer, it may be even more populated due, in part, to being recently named the best island in the world by National Geographic. But even with its quaint village, and remarkable landscape, its dramatic drops from highland to sea, it’s hard to imagine that Nantucket would be more beautiful than, say, Bora Bora (though I’ve never been to a land that faraway).

Just above Nobadeer’s dunes is Nantucket Memorial Airport, and early afternoon during the week of July 4^th planes descended above heads every ten minutes or so. Later afternoon, the same planes took off with such reverberating thrust that we could not hear one another speak across a beach blanket.

On this island, a place where money is no object, where waterfront is often reserved for the rich, I peered out at the sea before me, at the narrow shoreline, at Max and Lulu on their boogie boards searching for the big wave to Bliss, and then turned back behind me to view the shedding dunes that make clear this earth is still undergoing a glacial warming. Nobadeer slowly erodes, I am told, by ten feet per year—which, to me, hardly seems slow. What was once a wide swath of silky sand is now this narrow strip of beachfront. One can still maneuver a car along the edge of the sandy fraying ribbon just above the high water mark, but it is tricky and, at times, hazardous. There are no lifeguards, no restrooms, nor any facilities, for that matter, at Nobadeer. Summer residents drive out to the beach in SUVs or Jeeps packed with provisions for the day. They open the backs of their vehicles, tailgate style, set up tents and tables and large, colorful beach umbrellas, and spread their feast across the sea-green tablecloth.

Nantucket style—as if there were never meant to be a care in the world.

I sat in a canvas chair by the water at low tide until tall, foamy swells began to wash in and overtake my canvas nest, and observed the busy airport. How long would it be before the constant process of the wearing away of expensive soil and pebble cut into the airport proper and all the turbinado sugar washed out to sea? It appeared that there was hardly a hundred yards from rolling tide to runway. Let's see, ten feet per year, a hundred yards, in roughly thirty years there would be no more fine dining at Nobadeer.

Already, a good portion of Nantucket's seashore had been closed to protect the nesting piping plovers, so access to the ocean was restricted. If you are on Nantucket in the summertime you may not be happy about this, especially if you’re a big beachgoer and the island is swollen with company. Or, you may be elated and thankful for the efforts of conservationists. I was happy that we’d found a beach where the piping plovers do not nest, where we could gather with our hosts and new friends, and watch the children surf and in the rough littoral, and literal, tumble of the breakers, and rake up smooth, white shells. This was a place where the sun stayed pasted in the sky all day and I could simply be there, without obligation, except to sit in a low chair, half-way under a beach umbrella, book bag at my side, consuming food and drink enough to last us a week. Soon, though—maybe it was the pulsing heat—my attention to the distance from shore to airstrip, the sloughing of the beach and dunes, and the private jets and puddle jumpers descending above our sunburnt heads faded, and in a seamless shift I found myself hyper-focused on the itchy, dry, raised mole perched at the nape of my right armpit, above the grooves and swells of axillary folds; it was the nub that was sure to keep me from vacationing. Had it changed over the years? I wasn’t sure. Why didn't I know this? The more I inspected it, the more uglier, angrier looking, it grew. This was not the mole that my general practitioner tapped with her index finger and insisted—as she did the day before we left for Nantucket—must come out. That mole, what she called “irritated and suspicious looking,” floats atop the soft, creamy skin of my upper abdomen and is part of a constellation of small, chocolaty moles that, together, if closely observed, resemble the inverse image of the Little Dipper. That little nebula hardly looks suspect to me.

“She’s wrong about this,” I say to Michael. I’m irritated. “The sick one, the angry one is this one!” I shove my iPhone before his face so he can bear witness to the gruesome, pixelated details of my monster mole, the one that’s infiltrated my body.

“You’ve got to stop thinking like this,” he sighs. “Let’s get some sleep, please.”

The ocean stirs a savory potion, and I want to gulp it down, I want it to magically quell my nerves, to melt the stone in my chest, to make worries go Poof! But I torment myself with Worry into the wee hours before I'm finally lulled to a half-sleep by the salty elixir.

It is like this for the next week. We are on Nantucket, then the Cape. The mole stays angry, I double up on sunblock and get little sleep. A rock stays lodged in my chest. I know it's bad. I wonder if my GP should be the one to disturb the suspicious mole and the hostile armpit mole; mining them from my body. (Where are all the mined moles stored?) There had been a prior excavation—neighboring moles had merged just above the belly button. Moles that merge are always suspect and they are excised with little inquest. In the case of my conjoined moles, former constituents of the abdominal constellation, a half-inch core of skin, fat and tissue to which the moles were attached was cut out with a sharp knife by a Boston dermatologist, who dropped the gory specimen in a liquid preservative housed in a glass jar and jiggled it before me, like I was a spectator at an old wild west hanging. I later learned that the procedure was unnecessary as the mole cluster was determined to be benign. Yet, I was glad for the news, even the cutting, despite the fact that now set at a 45 degree angle a few inches above my navel is a one-inch scar that looks like the fossil of a centipede. I do not wish to have my torso marred by ghostly arthropods.

But I worry.

I say nothing to anyone but my poor, patient husband. I am disgusted with myself. I should be happy, carefree, grateful for the opportunity to be vacationing with Michael’s extended family, all of whom generously host our Cape Cod and Island excursions (of which, otherwise, we couldn’t afford). I resolve to find easy moments with family, and I do: warm, sea-salty moments that are sprinkled, no, flooded with lively, fresh seafood dinners, quiet walks on the bay, excited faces on the little Boston Whaler that takes us out to the little barrier island of Sandy Neck. I am able to shave layers of weighty anguish off the rock. The sky is blue, the weather temperate, and in the late evening the empyrean vault sparkles with amazing firework. All is well until I go to bed. There, I tell myself I am eroding. Like Nantucket’s ecosystem, my body is bearing its fragility. I am aging, deteriorating, and well, something is bound to go seriously wrong with this body. Can't we reasonably expect this?

Back home, where there is no ocean to see or smell for miles, I unpack my suitcase and empty the contents of my book bag. Tucked inside the bag's zippered pocket I find two well-preserved seashells that I'd plucked from the shoreline of Nobadeer. They are large, beautiful shells that look like marble or limestone spiral igloos, not the common mermaid's slipper found on Nantucket's beaches. These shells had once protected muculent inhabitants: snails of deep water—the moon snail. He burrows, too, into mud bottoms, searches for prey, clasps a clam with his gelatinous foot and bores a hole through his prey’s armor with his toothy, chitinous tongue, an acid-tipped killer drill. Even soldier crabs run from the moon snail.

But the shells’ inhabitants are gone, dead, their flesh devoured by other sea creatures, their armament souvenirs. Nothing is immune. I place them on my writing desk.

Monday morning I call my dermatologist's office and beg for an immediate appointment. I have a seething mole, I tell the receptionist. The offender should be extracted at once. I have another, less benign looking mole that my GP, with whom I don’t agree, wants removed from its cosmic configuration. The receptionist slides me into an 8:30 a.m. opening on Tuesday. She'd prefer, I'm quite certain, to slide me into a psychiatrist's schedule. I would not argue this. I try to remember when I'd last seen my dermatologist (or psychiatrist). Why had she not noticed the armpit mole? Or had she?

It was this time last year, late July, early August, that I observed my children digging trenches in tidal flats at the tip of Sandy Neck—a Cape Cod barrier beach—constructing hermit crab hotels designed for the protection of vulnerable crustaceans. This, they did, despite the shifting tide which would soon send these crabs scattering beyond the hotel, abandoning their fabricated home. They knew then, too, that as the crabs grew larger, they would eventually toss their borrowed shells in search of roomier ones. The borrowed and discarded shells were small, tiny snail shells, not at all like the heavy shells of deep seas (yet, as my moon snail shells reveal, weighty armor does not insure defense). Watching the kids attempting to offer the crabs a safe harbor reminded me that they would soon shed their own shells. It could be this very summer. Soon, they’ll traverse a world foreign and potentially dangerous, treading further into the deep sea. To where will they retract when threatened? Do they possess the moon snail’s killer instinct? Should they be fearful? Do they sense my fear? I try, I try hard, to keep Worry at bay. I wish them not to be frightened, only aware.

Tuesday morning Dr. Kirk circles the innocent abdominal speckle with a purple indelible marker, writes "2 x 3" above it and takes a photo. She does the same with another in the constellation. With her magnifier, she zooms in on the mad, bulging blot

that now spits from the ridge at the nape of my armpit. This one looks...hmm, she says, as the magnifier scans the surrounding skin, fine. Given my skin's pigmentation, she explains to me.

It is as if she has waved smelling salts beneath my nose. Fine? Fine! I breathe again. I am lucky. (But acutely aware that luck is the card not dealt to all, reserved for no one, and the game invariably changes, so I do not apologize for being an alarmist. I have lost my father, my dear brother-in-law, and one of my closest friends to cancer, all within short time.) Nevertheless, I explain, I would like it removed before it is un-fine. It has been bothersome and prone to snags. This is fine, too, she tells me, but today is not her surgery day.

The others, she points out, are on watch. Should these change, darken, enlarge, action will be necessary. In three months I will return to her office. It will mark one full year from my first skin scan. (Skinscan, I later discover, is an Apple application for the monitoring and analysis of moles. I don’t download the app.) At that time, and though she thinks it’s harmless, Dr. Kirk will remove the underarm mole at my command, along with another mole she’s deemed odd; she’ll hew them down like cleaved trees that do not bear good fruit, slicing them from where they’re rooted with a hand-held straight edge blade. Later she’ll tell me that the mole that kept me up for nights on end is normal. No sign of cancer. The other odd one, she’ll say, is atypical, which means I’m oddly fine for the time being.

“The internet is the worst thing to ever happen to doctors,” she tells me.

“And to patients,” I concur.

I thank Dr. Kirk for her support. I call my GP and cancel the procedure. The rock in my chest is a pebble, my face pink with embarrassment. Unlike the moon snail, I have no knack for slaying. Beneath my pale outer covering is only accumulated fear and worry. It feels counterintuitive, yet I know I must do this, I clearly sense it, I must shed fears, let them loose in my Sea of Unease, expose this timorous being to the elements, the rough seas, the cold winds atop ice-capped mountains, or to things like jets and puddle jumpers that I no longer board, or zip lines, any lines, the aging lines, rimples and knots of my body, all conditions approached with trepidation. Yet, the instinct is to flee.

Here is the rub. I cannot flee. Can anyone? Not even to faraway lands or islands where money is no object. It’s futile. Danger and risk are not unique to the mainland. I can only be aware. Watch the coastline and all things that sail on the horizon, listen to the ebb and flow of its waters and their simple message. Don’t make more of it. You just get in the current and float—you’ll drift right back in round the other side, I was told just days prior, as I stood on the beach of Sandy Neck’s duck-bill tip, fretting about my flimsy aquatic abilities. “Oh, yes, it looks so easy,” I’d replied, while surveying the cold current running a hook around the shoreline. And as I gazed out as a crow flies, into the bay’s channel, drifting peacefully in the horseshoe flow were my two children and Michael, coasting along, round to the other side.

Every Pile is Atomic

Never mind metals, this is an atomic pile, capable of splitting into fragments that release hundreds of millions of energy volts:

The tallest one in the back row would be Max.

A sweeter pile since taking it all at this past long, hot weekend's soccer tournament (yes, for this is why the Suburban Soliloquist packed--whilst sipping a glass of white with KW). Their energy, though nearly exhausted at the final, earned them the championship. And it was, overall, you might say, I high voltage weekend.

This is another atomic pile:

An atom-smashing force. But in case you are not familiar with the muse, a secret: she is one combustible chain reaction of I-don't-know-whats mingled with when-to-expects?, and often the encounters are altogether foreign, alien (except in controlled environments having limited variables and distinct parameters--or is it perimeters?). Nevertheless, she's highly efficient.

It could be said that most teams, most relationships, no matter the sort, are atomic piles if carefully built and efficient in the maintenance, control and expenditure of energy.

Spent is how the Suburban Soliloquist felt upon returning from the dramatic collection and subsequent fission of boys in colorful uniforms skirring across the turf fields of central Connecticut. Which is why she appears here, today, with little news other than that of piles. Laundry, dishes, bills, emails, appointments, etc., all of which are slowly being dismantled or dispersed, or, um, better yet, delegated.

And here—not to be outdone by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, atomic piles expert extraordinaire—is John Hodgman, the marshmallow wrapped in hugs (aha, that's an atomic pile), sharing some universal truths.

On atomic piles and alien encounters...
(It's well worth the eighteen minutes of energy you are about to expend.)

Make of that what you will, but take note of alien encounters and piling atoms about you.

Friday Night Frolic - Winterlust

I was born in a cloud... 

Now I am falling. I want you to catch me.

Look up and you'll see me.You know you can hear me.

The world is so loud. Keep falling. I'll find you.

~Kate Bush, Snowflake

It is probably never wise to start a post off with at the risk of..., but, while we're talking about authenticity and, to some degree, baring soul (and as a follow up to this post), I'll risk baring this: I finally—this week, in good ole Beantown—took part in one of the dreaded "oscopies." Not fishing for congratulatory remarks, I'm a big girl (oh, am I?), yes, I am, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Especially those things I don't like. And fear. Such as balancing my checkbook, cleaning out the refrigerator, and, well, getting poked and prodded.

Wednesday, in Boston, it was a grey morning and a balmy 52 degrees. Dr. Bliss dropped by the holding area to say hello, review my records and recite a litany of complications. I read the paperwork! I wanted to tell him. But I didn't. I let him go on. After all, he is Dr. Bliss. Oh, Dr. Bliss, you're so very kind and attentive. (She thinks, and he is) I'm sure this procedure will be like having a cupcake for breakfast. What, shouldn't everyone start their day with a cupcake? There are certainly no complications with cupcakes. Cupcakes are not complicated. They are sweet and harmless (like you, Dr. Bliss). Lest one chokes on one, of course. But really, how would one choke on a cupcake?

There was a moment, a look between us, I felt for sure he'd read my mind. Look, how could I not be thinking about food? And choking? I hadn't eaten in days (alright, hours), and I was about to be wheeled into the tricked out room for an endoscopy.

After Dr. Bliss fluttered away the nurse returned to check my IV and seize my book. A book, you brought a book to your endoscopic procedure? (She said, in not so many words, after I had refused her magazine offering.) She smiled smugly, and I knew that she had heard my meditation on cupcakes. Moments later I was trundled toward the surgical room, where the hard stuff was administered and where all my worries fell away...

Yesterday, yet another mild day in New England, I spent the better (or worse) part of the day in bed, and then, late afternoon at my desk trying to compose a Frolic. But in my still loopy and confused state, not having altogether shaken off the previous day's midazolam and fentanyl cocktail, all I managed to do was watch video loops of snow falling and winterscape screen savers on YouTube while shaking my daughter's snow globe. Something was wrong.

Maybe it was the narcotics.

Or an obscure compulsion (fueled by narcotics?) to expunge all thoughts of Wednesday's stressful scoping by way of alternate, yet still dreamy, optics.

We have no snow. And in the winter months, it is not the waning sunlight that disturbs my circadian rhythm. It is snow deficiency. This winter, in this bend of Rhode Island, we've seen a total accumulation of a mere half foot of snow, which came to us in a weekend whirl and remained only long enough for my daughter and I to leave a pair of skinny ski tracks along our whitened streets during one afternoon. But it was a glorious afternoon. Outside, everything sang. The snow-covered woodpile, the twisting brittle grape vine (which, no matter how invasive, I will not cut—its summer canopy is simply gorgeous), the birdhouse, the stream beyond, and the shallow woods beyond the stream. It was an avalanche of song, it was shimmerglisten harmony, stellatundra chorus, a sorbet deluge of melody, terrablizza, spangladasha!*  The next day, as temperatures rose and the dang sun blistered, frost began to pool and trickle down storm drains.

How does one find oneself in the wintertime without a snowy foil shading earth's face? (This is not how New England works!) The starkness of undressed trees and woodland and field, at times, seems unbearable. Where are the tracks laid?  There is a crevasse in my soul that longs to be filled, as it rightly should this time of year, with the song of snow.

So what I did, at day's end, at wits end, at the edge of pharmaceutical fuliginousness, was what any decent New England girl would do, I sought the highest counsel: I went to mystical royalty. I went to Kate.

Her eminence, Kate Bush. With her 2011 concept album, 50 Words for Snow—which has been described as "elegantly loony"—she proffers an opulent and moody compilation that conjures what, this season, has become a winter phantom.

From the L.A. Times:

[...] Bush grounds her songs in the permafrost of winter, with her piano work sounding like the first stirrings after a cold snap. “Among Angels” could be the soundtrack for plants stretching toward the new spring sun, but as much as it’s connected to the natural world, the song twinkles with something more ethereal. “I can see angels standing around you,” Bush sings in her windblown soprano, “they shimmer like mirrors in summer.”

Bush's inspiration for the album is rooted in Eskimo lexicon myth: Eskimos have fifty words for snow. But they don't. Bush, nevertheless, brilliantly bangs out her own neologisms de neige in the same seductive voice of yesteryear—her misty highs and lows blanketing the soul with icy wonder dust. 

From NPR:

The opening and closing cuts invoke a chill as they dwell on the ephemeral nature of the life cycle. "Snowflake," which features the choirboy pipes of Bush's 12-year-old son Bertie, gives voice to the melting consciousness of the natural world itself; "Among Angels" reads like the sweetest kind of suicide note. In between there are imagined couplings – with a gender-bending snowman in "Misty," and with a lover found and lost through many reincarnations (and played with brio by Elton John) in "Snowed In At Wheeler Street." The bounding "Wild Man" chases a yeti.

50 Words is an enchanting (if, at times, creepy) collection where each song builds on the other. It contains seven songs only, but their depth and breadth (the longest song is 11:08 minutes, the shortest, 6:48) are stunning. Listen. Worries fall away...

And then, there will be cupcakes, iced, this evening. And tomorrow, for breakfast—should there be any leftovers.

___________________________________________________

* Italicized modifiers courtesy Kate Bush, 50 Words for  Snow.

Brushing Up

From Max's Art Journal

Yesterday I saw the GI specialist in Boston. Months of pain has held me hostage from feeling well, and emotionally, it's taken its toll. My refusal to undergo the usual diagnostic course of action (you know, the 50+ poke and scope plan) has been unproductive, I know, and it's time to take a deep breath and say, Fuck it. Alright, already, I'll book it! Let's start with something light, though, shall we? Like the endoscopy? Can we start there, please?

I'm a terrible patient. Fortunately, my mother-in-law introduced me to a doctor who is remarkably patient. Still, I'm not a pretty sight in the doctor's office. When Doc told me blood had to be drawn I nearly cowered in the corner, and I was glad M-I-L had left the room by then. And when we talked procedures, I think the good doctor understood that he was going to have to hold my hand. I know this is a teaching hospital, but no fellows! I said. I am paying for him, after all.

Anyway, what I'm doing here today, on this little blog, is taking a break from the penciled notes and sketches I've been making in my lined notepad (where I'm making progress, my friends!). The flip side of the front durable-covered, college-ruled pad has two columns. One lists Parts of Speech, and the other, Punctuation. At the very bottom is a list of Figures of Speech. And why I hadn't noticed this until today I do not know. 

Except to say...

Punctuation: apostrophe ('), colon (:), comma (,), period (.), exclamation point (!). You see what caught my eye? No, not the period (.). I've no longer any use for them... No, it was one particular punctation: colon (:). Colon: COLON! 

I'm searching for the metaphor under Figures of Speech. (:) When perhaps, I should be looking for a simile? (:)

A brush is like a pen is like a pencil is like a scope: All tools of the trade. (:)

(Natchez Steam Colliope--Sugar Blues)

Friday Night Frolic - The Bad Wife

[source]

His lower abdomen is punctured with tiny holes for the trocars, blown up with CO₂ 

and the wall is illuminated. 
She walks the city streets in Boston. Back Bay and Beacon Hill. He is in able hands.
There is nothing else to be done.
Three hours in the OR and three more in recovery. A stroll in the Public Garden.
The Swan Boats have been stored for the season. Still, the city's oasis sings botanic.
A poke in Shreve, Crump and Low. Too sparkly.
Lunch at Figs. Crinkled spinach, bacon and Parmesan salad. She eats
the very last dark leaf.
A massage. Soft tissue, she says. Stares from the headrest at the mossy green carpet.
What are they cutting now?
Isabelle's Curly Cakes on Charles Street: They make a
damn good cupcake.
It is, after all, owned by renowned chef Todd English. (As is Figs.) At four bucks
a pop every morsel is savored.
The surgeon calls and says he'd been looking for her in the family
waiting area, expected her to be there.
I'm around the corner, she says. Oh, well, says the surgeon, he's going to be fine.
She repeats it. Collapses, shutters inward relief.
She goes to the waiting room. The attendant says the surgeon was looking
for her. He seemed disappointed, she says.
Thanks, she thinks, I'm the bad wife.
No one misses the Chief.
They let her run up to recovery—only on Ellison do they allow that, the attendant says.
She sees him on the gurney.
Bloated and wired with input and output, says he's happy to see her.
Boy, am I happy to see you. 
She collapses again. Smiles and says, the surgeon says you won't remember anything in
recovery. You remember the surgeon seeing you in recovery?
I do, he says.
Her hair is greasy with healing oils. She hopes he doesn't notice.
His head is wrapped in a cream colored blanket and he looks like an old Babushka.
She leaves him, again, to rest.
There is nothing else to be done.
Has dinner at PF Chang's—no Todd English at PF Chang's. Returns to the hospital.
Tubes and drains and Foley catheter. Instructions and prescriptions and precautions.
Call if this. Don't worry if that. He'll go home tomorrow.
The whole damn summer into fall. This'd better be the end of it, she thinks.
It's fall. Fall is not decay. Fall is renewal. Renewal.
There is nothing else to be done.
She drives him home the next day. Box of cupcakes on the backseat.



Kate Fenner, the Canadian musician with the rich and sultry voice, began her singer/songwriter career in the 1980's with the alternative rock band Bourbon Tabernacle Choir. Since the disbanding of BTC in the mid 1990's she has recorded two solo albums and several others with Chris Brown, with whom she founded BTC. 

Fenner's last solo recording (January, 2007), Magnet, produced by Brown, includes this beautiful duet with Brown:  



More from Magnet can be heard here.

And from her days with Bourbon Tabernacle Choir:



According to her website, Fenner and Brown are currently working on their own renewed collaboration—an album with an unscheduled release date. One never knows what's around the corner.

Medicine is Not a Pure Science

"I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it."

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Nor is it a perfect art.

Because I don't want to write about ruptured ovarian cysts or appendicitis, or the fact that modern medicine still doesn't have ALL the answers, I'm going to offer this, which has been posted to the Great Internet for you to view through your super-smart, hi-tech phone or gaming device or laptop or maybe even your TV or some other souped-up thingamajig:

Vincent van Gogh - Saint Rémy, June-July 1889. Oil on canvas.

We live in two worlds now. The touch, see, feel real world, and the virtual world of floating ephemera.

Isn't it incredible that in today's far far advanced and highly invested world of technology—a world built of tangible hardware, computers, routers, towers, cables, satellites, and a vast and not so tangible infrastructure of protocols, signals, foreign languages, nodes, interconnected networks and other things that I will never understand—where at the touch of a small screen one is easily transported to a world wide web enabling access to nearly anything the heart desires, that such a world, a magical world, can exist while scientists around the real world still have not found a cure for cancer or other persistent disease and illness?

How is this possible? How is it that medicine has advanced as it has in the past half century or so, but we are still unable to fully understand the human body? Why don't we know why we have an appendix? We know it has no discernable function. We know it looks like a witch's mangy finger. But what's it doing in the human body? And why can no diagnostic instrument see mine? Why can't we walk into a box, have the body scanned, and walk out with a full diagnosis and remedy for the ailment? Is it funding? Where does all the money go? Is there more money invested in the tech industry rather than life science and research? Are people getting tired of donating to life science and cancer research, seeing little return on their investment?

It's infuriating. It's not all true though, at least not based on what I found here, reprinted from Nature Biotechnology. So medicine doesn't move as quickly as the virtual world (though I bet it moves quicker than my bowels). This, I understand. But medicine has made giant leaps as technology has advanced, so what I don't understand is how we can all talk to each other like this, how we can connect and maneuver and solve problems in this virtual world, while scientific and cancer research seems to make little headway.

And in the case of  women, medical advancement seems much slower. (Every time I have that annual mammogram I think, If I were a man there'd be an easier—less painful—way than this.)

But I'm no expert. I'll tell you where I put my money (the little I have), though: medical research. And if I had to give up the internet in order for us to find a cure for cancer and other ghastly illnesses of the world, then I'd do it. Hell, I'd cut off my left ear.

I miss my dad. And Rich.

(All right, well, I guess I wrote just a little about the things I didn't want to write about. My apologies if this post seems a bit disjointed—I'm on a teensy-weensy bit of painkiller medication. Nothing serious, just the damn cyst. Or appendicitis. Who knows?)

"Friday Night Frolic" - Canonical Babbling in Beantown

Operating Room Manager screen at Tufts Medical Center

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over 

to the enemy of our imagination. 

~Christian Nevell Bovee

I  know. I haven't been writing or making rounds. I've been AWOL. (Anxious Woman Of Late) See, my imagination tends to grab me by the neck and shove me toward worse case scenarios. Especially when it comes to health. Some years ago, I saw an ENT specialist who began our session by asking about my family medical history. I told him that there had been migraines, high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer. I told him my father had just died. Humph, the doctor said as he needled a scope through my nostril, you never know what's going to happen, you could get out of this chair, walk out the door and have a pulmonary embolism. That happened to a friend of mine about six months ago.

This is not welcome news to a pathophobiac.

And so a couple of days ago, when Little Miss Lulu—whose fear sensors are spindly stubs next to my yard long bobbing antennae—went into surgery for the very first time in her young life, I was in panic mode. What worried me wasn't so much the surgery as the anesthesia. She'd never had general anesthesia, and in my anxious mind, this is where potential waits for just about anything to go wrong. (Of course it's not the only opportunity for things to go awry—it can go topsy-turvy at any time, anywhere. Oh so horribly wrong!) Surgery is like slicing a wedge of Brie cheese, but anesthesia? That's more like baking a cheese souffle, it's a potent cocktail of carefully measured ingredients that requires close monitoring and a tender touch.

Above, on that nifty waiting room flat screen monitor, in forest green is my daughter—patient number 35628—in OR 03 at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center. The screen is updated in real time through pre-op, surgery start, estimated finish, and recovery, including the location of each procedure. Sitting before that monitor I felt as if I were in a train terminal watching the split-flap display of arrivals and departures. Boarding track 6. Departing track 11. On time. Delayed.

We were just a few blocks away from Boston's South Station, and as that thought crossed along the troubled tracks of my my mind, I heard the whistle and chug of a passing train, and recalled the many times Lu and I had taken the commuter rail into Beantown. Appointments with a pediatric OB/GYN. Meetings with the Chief of urology. Listening, with earplugs inserted, to the clanging and buzzing of a the great MRI machine that seemed to swallow my daughter whole. (And for reasons less ominous, as well, like seeing Blue Man Group at the Charles Playhouse, roaming through the masterpiece-lined corridors of the MFA, shopping along Newbury, traveling through simulated space and sea at the Museum of Science.)

And then, an announcement: Attention residents. Instead of the ordinary Wednesday rounds meeting, all residents will meet in the Chapel to mourn and memorialize the loss of all the children who've passed.

Omens loom in the boat shaped hospital that fits snuggly in the maze that is Tufts.

I took notes. I scribbled down the only question Lu asked the surgeon before being wheeled away. When can I eat again after surgery? I noted how the surgeon had answered our queries, and how Lu had watched the anesthesiologist carefully insert the IV, and tape it down against her skinny arm. And how my imagination had abruptly taken me hostage. There! There's the culprit! IVs gone bad. Cellulitis. Infection. Sepsis. Air bubble. Embolism!

The girl was calm as a conductor. I stroked her hair, and fought to keep my fears invisible. But inside, I was Woody-Allen-neurotic. Pacing, and scratching my head, and talking nonsense. Here, a list of all the things that can go wrong. Review the list. Worry.

And even though I'm fully aware of the risks as being slight (my daughter generally in excellent health), I am fully aware of the risks. I've signed the paperwork. I'm also, for the most part, reasonable, but I've known cases in which ordinary procedures proved catastrophic. It's a benign cyst, the doctor says with authority. It's a textbook procedure. The norm is that she goes in and comes out perfectly fine. Better, in fact. The norm.

I wish I could be as blissfully ignorant as my eleven year old daughter who hasn't yet been acquainted with medical complications.

I love you, Mama, she said as they whisked her away to a sterile, well-lit theatre for which I had no ticket. I wouldn't hear the music or the actor's scripted lines. I wouldn't see the curtain open or close. I didn't know which scene was being played out. All I knew was that patient 35628 was in OR 03. Had she been anesthetized correctly? Was she tolerating it well? Were they ad-libbing? Had she been shivved and sewed up? How loud was the music and how funny were the jokes? 

I took more notes. And though my daughter's malady was not nearly as grave as others, I was beginning to feel like the mother in Lorrie Moore's startling "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" (scroll past intro for full text).

Everything will be just fine. A textbook case.

The medical personnel at Tufts are sweet, attentive and empathetic, but I still wanted to get out of the building that housed the theatre.

When Lu woke in recovery the first thing she asked of the nurse was, Can you wheel me down to the Cafeteria?

No matter where we travel it's all about the food. We like to ramble off the worn tourist's path for the true flavor of a place. During each trip to the city, we took advantage of Tufts locale at the edge of Chinatown, and had some fine dim sum and barbecue duck in Chinatown's restaurants, pomelos and mangosteens from street vendors, and dense, bean-paste Mooncakes from the pastry shop.

Now, in the hospital's PACU, Lulu was ready for toast. That was a good sign.

A few hours later, I helped Lu into a wheelchair and slowly strolled her out of post-op. Pausing at the nurses station where an OR Manager monitor glowed in the shadows of early evening, I looked up and saw that number 35628 was off the board. Off the board! I shifted the wheelchair toward the exit and slid out the heavy double doors with Lulu.

The show was over. No ad-libbing. My girl was cyst-free and safe, and the enemy had let me loose.

And then, a fleeting thought: the children who hadn't made it. This was Children's Floating Hospital at Tufts, after all. Not all the children leave on wheelchairs, and I felt a pall of cloudy sadness as I pushed Lu into the wide elevator. But I was so grateful that my little girl was on her way home. A textbook case. The norm. Just as the doctor had said.

Now what was all that worry about?



The Tallest Man on Earth is Swedish singer/songwriter Kristian Matsson, who has a habit of sweeping away uneasiness.