77

March 2, 2026

Turning 77 is a lot like turning 76, and so on back into the misty past. Some thoughtful cards and phone calls came in. Friends and family joined us for a nice dinner downtown. It was chilly but warmed up a bit, a small peek at spring. That’s all I hope for about now, every year.

A few days earlier at the Cancer Institute, Dr. B. strode in to the little office he uses for meetings, smiling, as always, and extended his hand. He turned to his flat-screen monitor. “We’re going to need a PET [positron emission tomography] scan,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

He opened my CT scan of last week, a black-and-white image of my insides, then the previous one, taken in November, then the PET scan of almost a year ago. He manipulated the three images on the screen and shifted the angles of view.

“I’m concerned about the lesion near the heart, which is—here.” He waved his hand at a shadowy patch, nearly invisible on the PET, larger in November, still larger now.

“You can see there’s an increase. So we want to stay on top of this. The PET will give us a closer look, then I’m thinking either some radiation or go back to the drug.”

If he gave me a choice it would be easy. The drug is a stew of side effects. Radiation was punishing in 2019, but lenient in 2021. Our son, Michael, the medical physicist, mentioned a new technique, SBRT (stereotactic body radiation therapy) which is more intense than conventional radiation but requires fewer doses.

The CT reports call these things “lesions” or “nodules” instead of the old-fashioned “tumors,” which for non-medical folks conveys a different impression. Lesion seems a bit gentler. The increase the doc picked up is in the range of centimeters, a centimeter being about half an inch long.

Within hours his office scheduled the PET for March 18. I’m a PET veteran, with seven behind me since late 2018. The drill is straightforward, check in at the hospital, wait 45 minutes for the radioactive tracer to flow through the body, lay on the slab under the scope for 15 minutes. The doc will get the image the same day.

We left the Institute and went shopping for a new bed for the guest room, which sits empty most of the time. No guests expected, but you never know.  

Putting a PET scan on the calendar helps your focus. We are talking again about those ideas for projects, for trips that we’ve talked about then set aside or forgotten. Suddenly the timing makes sense. We had thought about Alaska, it kept moving into the future. We’ll go, punching our tickets for another stop on the retired folks’ tourist circuit.

We talked about highway trips. The Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-mile race in Virginia is coming up in May, I’ve volunteered for years. The college class reunion in New Hampshire is in June—that’s a plane trip—followed by the Harper family reunion in Tennessee. We’re getting to be regulars there. We talked about getting to New Jersey sometime.

Eventually all the joyriding will come to an end, you hope because other things come up. We heard an old Virginia friend died a month ago. She had moved to North Carolina. For a while we’d drive up to visit. She suffered a stroke, the connection faded. We got word of a memorial service.  

The birthday evening set us off from that. We talked about good things, summer plans, kids’ accomplishments. The grandsons and the young daughters of a friend laughed and chatted. The kids’ smiles helped create joy. I guessed they wondered why they were invited to an old-guy birthday dinner.

We left the restaurant happy, anticipating great things in coming years from these young folks.

Then we moved on. The next morning, the first day of year 78, I got back to reproducing in oil paint a landscape printed on a placemat I picked up in a Saigon restaurant. The image, four farmers harvesting wheat, hints at hot, backbreaking labor in a remote Asian place. In some mysterious way it offers calm, serenity, retreat from the dark comedy of daily headlines.

The placemat reprint is unsigned. It’s marked ST25, so it’s an advertisement for a premium Vietnamese rice, which is offered everywhere in the country.

The job took about three weeks, not full time. I covered the canvas with three coats of acrylic white to create a base, then combined colors, shades of green and blue for the background mountains, then skin tones, yellow and orange mixes for the reflections of sunlight. The structures and forms were blunt and bold, no delicate strokes needed, which brings the project down to my skill level.

 I worked for a while on the sun hats, the reflection of sunlight on clothing, on the complicated color mix for the wheat. The steep slopes suggested Vietnam’s Central Highlands, but it could have been regions in neighboring countries with the same rugged terrain, farming practices, and reliance on manual labor.

I went back to Hobby Lobby a couple of times for new brushes, brush cleaner, paint, the works. This is something worthwhile, even fun, when you’re in your late seventies and waiting for a PET scan. You could call it creative, I wouldn’t go that far. Most likely it will end up on the garage wall next to the tool shelves, like much of my stuff. The next step: try again.