July 10, 2023

If you’re in Philadelphia, you want to see the Museum of Art, with the Rocky statue at the foot of the stairs. Whether you do or don’t get there, you then want to see the Phillies. If the Phils aren’t in town, you head for Wilmington, Del., to root for the single-A Blue Rocks. They weren’t, so we did.

Philly isn’t loved by everyone, but it has everything, beginning with its heritage as the birthplace of the American nation. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell downtown remind all of us of those sublime moments of 1776.

Boston had the cataclysmic preliminaries: the Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill. But it was in Philadelphia’s State House that the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775 to start a year of agonized debate. In June 1776 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a resolution of independence. Then the giants emerged: Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, who created the Declaration. The vote was July 4, the document was signed in early August.

We have distant connections in Philly going back a couple of generations. Our son Michael landed there for graduate school, and stayed and married Caroline, who grew up in nearby King of Prussia. They settled near Chadd’s Ford, halfway between the downtowns of Philly and Wilmington, and not far from Brandywine Creek, where the British routed Washington’s colonials in September 1777. In December the colonials set up their winter camp at Valley Forge.

So there’s all that. Anyway, we settled into our seats at Frawley Stadium, a block or so from the Delaware River. The park was more than two-thirds full, a decent Friday-night crowd. The traffic on an elevated stretch of I-95 slogged past beyond the outfield. A group of kids sang the national anthem. The Blue Rocks, a Washington Nationals farm club, took the field against the Brooklyn, N.Y., Cyclones, a New York Mets affiliate. The Cyclones were leading the division at 9-3, the Blue Rocks in the middle of the pack at 4-8.

Michael had bought tickets for front-row seats behind home plate, which at a Phils’ game would go for $1,889 each. For the Blue Rocks game they were $17.

The game moved along briskly, thanks to the new timing rule for pitchers and weak hitting by both teams. In the third inning the Rocks pushed across a run. They held on, 1-0, making some sterling defensive plays. In the top of the ninth, with the fans holding their breath, they got two outs. Then a Cyclone singled. Then a base on balls. Then—a long fly ball.

We watched. The home-plate umpire waved his finger in a circle. Three-run homer. The place fell silent. The Rocks pitcher kicked the mound. The manager pulled him. In the bottom of the ninth the Rocks got a walk, then a single. Then a strikeout. A failed double steal got to two outs. A strikeout ended the game. We didn’t stay for the fireworks.

As we trudged toward the gate I looked back at the brilliant green field. The clean sharp lines of the basepaths, the perfectly cut batters’ circle, told stories of baseball here and everywhere, single-A to the big leagues. These young guys have skills. More than that they have hope. Every fan in the park knew that if the Blue Rocks played even a last-place major league team they’d lose 15-0. The big leaguers would batter the single-A pitchers for a dozen homers, maybe more.

But the kids still have their hopes. Sure, many of the folks at our game would have gone to watch the Phillies that evening if they were at their magnificent home, Citizens Bank Park, just up I-95. The Blue Rocks were a fill-in. But everyone got caught up in the modest thrills of the place, the team of young dreamers, who shuffled off the field while the Cyclones exchanged high-fives. They’ll be back at it tomorrow. In baseball there’s always tomorrow.

We’ve watched dozens of single-A games over the years, cheering for the Potomac Nationals, the P-Nats, at their scruffy field in Woodbridge, Va. A few years ago then-Nationals superstar Bryce Harper, now a Phillie, did a recuperation stint with the P-Nats, the place was packed, the fans screaming. Then a Fourth of July game was delayed for an hour by fog, which meant the fireworks didn’t go off until midnight.

Within a year the owners, in a snit with the county government over funding repairs to the stadium, moved the team to Fredericksburg.

It’s a little quieter in Greenville, S.C., where the Red Sox farm club, the Greenville Drive—named by an awkward association with the big BMW plant nearby, is the only game in town. Their park, Fluor Field, has a replica of Fenway Park’s high left-field wall, the Green Monster. Church and civic groups organize outings to the games. As at all minor league parks, team PR people stage silly contests for kids between innings, and toss teeshirts to the crowd.

At Frawley I read the teams’ rosters: Pineda, Frizzell, Sanchez, Mackenzie, Fox, Kendall, Consuegra, Stuart, from all over America. The Cyclones’ coaches wore the New York Mets logo on their sleeves, reminding the guys what they’re shooting for, the big leagues, the reason they’re playing, riding buses for long hours to away games, staying in downscale hotels.

For sure, some of the magic of the minor leagues has to do with ticket prices, which are a fraction of the price of an upper-deck seat at Citizens Bank or any other big-league park. Still, the game is baseball. The main attraction is the source of all that hope and spunk, the players, some still in their teens, who trot onto the field to the ear-splitting din of pop music and fire the ball around the infield.

The pitcher warms up, the ball thwacks in the catcher’s glove. The batters connect, the sharp crack of bat on ball resounds. Foul balls drift into the crowd, kids and grownups scramble for them, just as they do at Citizens Bank. In the field the players lean forward in their defensive stances. The old guys in the stands somehow feel young again.

Decades ago my grandfather took me to a New York Yankees game. It was 1962, the year after Roger Maris broke the home-run record. He was in Yankee Stadium’s short right field. A batter hit a long fly ball to right. Maris crouched, hands on knees. We watched him watch the ball. A superb fielder, he knew it was heading for the seats behind him.

Maris didn’t waste any motion looking up or leaping pointlessly as the ball landed far back in the crowd. He stared ahead, no doubt thinking about his next turn at bat. He was a star—intense, focused, graceful, from a small town, like many of the Rocks and Cyclones. They all hope to be like Roger Maris—to excel, to make the fans roar with joy, as they watch those young guys, on a hot night in Wilmington, and all over America.

July 3, 2023

Rain crashed down as we were northbound to Pikeville, in east-central Tennessee. A dark sky boiled overhead, lightening flickered on the horizon, thunder rolled. We crawled into town through the deluge, plowing through water as it surged in a flood along U.S. 127, which splits the six-mile-wide Sequatchie Valley. We ducked into a Stop ‘N Go for shelter, then found the Piggly Wiggly for groceries.

The Cumberland Plateau rises just west of town. It faces a long steep cliff to the east called Walden Ridge. The monster rock walls that border the valley stretch north and south for a hundred miles into blue haze. Awesome country.

The drive from Franklin County (last week’s post) felt like a safari. This part of the state is too rugged, too thickly forested, for any decent-sized settlement. Tiny places, Pelham, Coalmont, Gruetli-Lager, show up along the quiet highways then disappear in a couple of breaths. Here and there people are mowing or plowing. They look up as we pass, surprised to see an out-of-state car. Yet the county newspaper reports a schedule of July Fourth parades and fireworks, testament to enduring community life.

This trip, directly across one-fourth of the state, was a first for us. Years ago, coming from Nashville, we’d take I-40 to Crossville then south on 127. Sometimes we’d get off 40 at Lebanon and use U.S. 70 through Liberty, Smithville, and Sparta, then pick up TN 111 through Spencer. The country route became a twisting descent before breaking free on top of the Plateau, then down, down.

Pikeville, county seat of Bledsoe County, is the closest place with a traffic light (one) to Fall Creek Falls State Park, our destination. Long ago, Sandy had family, an aunt and uncle, who lived just outside town. They farmed 130 acres, raised cattle and chickens and grew and canned vegetables that helped them get through the winter. We’d drive out on weekends, eat big farm dinners, sit on the porch and visit, and stare out at the lush fields. As shadows lengthened towards evening the cattle would move slowly from the north end of the pasture to the south, as if to watch the sunset.

The farm they owned is perched in the center of the valley, the Sequatchie River runs along the western property line. The farm nestles on a hillside that forms the main pasture.  Although their place is only five miles east of town on a one-lane road, the view of the soaring deep-green cliffs of the Ridge and the Plateau made the farm seem a kind of Shangri-La. And for us it really was.

They sold the farm when it got to be too much and moved to a comfortable house in town. Soon after we moved to Virginia, and returned less often. Then they were gone. The memories remain.

Fall Creek Falls is a mountain-woodland gem 20 miles northwest of Pikeville. We headed to the park on our first morning in town, climbing back up the Plateau on a hair-raising local road. We took a chance on shortcuts that wound through deep country past signs of the grim side of rural life: rusting mobile homes and pickups, weed-overgrown fields, crumbling barns. The shortcuts turned into lonely backcountry byways, first settled by the folks who moved in behind the departing Cherokees 200 or so years ago.

The park eventually showed up at the end of a short spur off U.S. 30, a quality road we should have taken. At the Nature Center I tiptoed across a suspended, wobbling footbridge thirty feet above Cane Creek Falls, which descends 85 feet to the creek. I could feel the cool draft rising from the rushing water. The park’s main attraction is Fall Creek Falls, the highest free-falling waterfall east of the Mississippi, dropping 256 feet from a rocky cliff.

We gawked at the falls. I climbed down the half-mile trail to the base, a rock-choked series of steep switchbacks. The temperature dropped suddenly near the bottom.  The falls rain down in a majestic, cooling mist. A few folks shucked their shoes and waded close to the cascading water. I watched, thinking about it—but turned back to the trail.

We recalled a decades-earlier visit to the park, a picnic-plus-family reunion, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Some of the Michigan clan showed up, along with cousins and their kids from Knoxville, a few from Dayton. Once or twice we brought Nashville friends to sample Sequatchie Valley hospitality.

Our Pikeville rental came with odd but fortuitous connections that seem mystifying, which makes them more real. The owner had a few years ago purchased the house, on the next block, that Sandy’s aunt and uncle owned in their last years. We walked past it, recognizing the pretty stone facade, the spacious yard. Nothing had changed since I last visited in 2008.

 A woman sitting on the front porch of the house next door called to us. Sandy walked over and chatted, the woman turned out to be Sandy’s cousin’s grandmother. Only in small-town Southland.

We walked the three blocks into the center of town, called, as if by a law of nature, the “historic district.” It was Monday, most of the shops and both of the restaurants were closed. We got ice cream at the ice cream emporium/coffee bar. We sat in a booth and enjoyed our cones, the only customers. Part of the place was a used bookstore piled high with donated hardcovers and stacks of CDs and DVDs.

The most direct route home would be north on 127 to Crossville, then I-40 to Asheville, then south. Instead we drove back on 30 eastbound, up Walden Ridge to Dayton, heading to I-75. The highway runs down the main street of that bustling little place, made immortal by the 1925 Scopes trial.

To reprise just a bit, in The State of Tennessee vs. John Scopes, high-school teacher Scopes (actually a substitute teacher) was accused of violating a state law against teaching the theory of evolution. Later reports revealed that the town decided to put Scopes on trial hoping to generate publicity. The plan succeeded, reporters came from far and wide. Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken gave the case a jolt by calling it the “Monkey Trial.”

Famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, a professed agnostic, assisted Scopes’ defense, three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan helped the prosecution.

The trial featured Darrow cross-examining Bryan, who complained that evolution taught that human beings were descended “not even from American monkeys but from old-world monkeys.” The jury deliberated nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. The verdict later was overturned on a technicality: at the time Tennessee judges could not impose fines more than $50. Bryan died five days after the trial ended.

I parked in front of the courthouse and walked a bit. The sidewalk is engraved with a timeline of the history of the city from 1925 to the present. I read the historic markers and looked at the statues of Bryan and Darrow on the courthouse lawn. The place still gets its publicity. We got back on the road and said so long. Next time at the Falls, I’ll jump in the water.

June 26, 2023

The fastest routes from Greenville S.C., to Franklin County, Tenn., about six hours, are all interstate. You go either north, through Asheville and west past Knoxville, then southwest to I-24, or south through Atlanta, then northwest to Tennessee. The only direct east-west route is across winding state roads. We tried that once, tramping through the wilderness, South Carolina to Georgia then North Carolina to Tennessee just above Chattanooga.

The southern interstate route is about 40 miles shorter. We got lucky through Atlanta, navigating the beltway under 50 mph, but always moving. We broke free of the commuter slog and headed for the northern Georgia peaks, then past the Chickamauga battlefield.

Our mission was a memorial service for a departed cousin. She had lived in Michigan for many years but was determined to return to her parents’ resting place in Franklin County. It had been years since Sandy saw her, but we knew we would be there, for the husband and son, for all who loved her.

Lookout Mountain looms over Chattanooga just west and south of I-24. The wide Tennessee River rolls by the city. There’s an odd stretch where the highway leaves Tennessee and briefly reenters Georgia. It then crosses spectacular Nickajack Lake, which is a broad place on the Tennessee as it winds up from Alabama. The terrain grows rugged across this remote, majestic corner of the state. The highway then starts a seven-mile rise around hair-raising turns into Monteagle.

Monteagle isn’t much of a place. It was a way station along the Trail of Tears, the route taken in the late 1830s through 1850 by thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and other native peoples from their Southeast homelands to Oklahoma. The Trail ordeal, ordered by Andrew Jackson, is an indelible stain on American history. You can see markers of it here and there.

The town unfolds along U.S. 41A, which then transits small Tennessee communities north to Nashville and on into Kentucky. The Monteagle stretch accommodates the Smokehouse Lodge, a Piggly Wiggly grocery, the Dixie Lee Diner, and fast food clustered along the I-24 exit. Further east, but inclining north is Clifftops, an upscale gated community and the usual mix of rural Southern businesses, construction, cement mixing, auto repair, and so on.

Six miles in you stumble on Sewanee, the lovely 13,000-acre campus of the University of the South. Regional Episcopalian leaders established the school in 1857 as a “Southern” alternative to Northern institutions and Northern values, as North-South acrimony neared its explosion four years later.

For decades after the war the school was tainted by its early entanglement with the Confederacy and the Lost Cause and dubbed “The University of the Old South.” Today Sewanee has rejected the ugly connections. In 2017 the school initiated the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, intended as a clear-eyed look the school’s history. From 2020-2022 a Black man, Robert Brigety II, served as chancellor, until his appointment as ambassador to South Africa.

Institutions create their history as they shape their future. Meanwhile the place has some magic for us, beyond history, beyond the graceful Gothic architecture, rolling forest, and the 60-foot white cross perched on a mountainside that honors Franklin County’s veterans. The place isn’t just an ivory tower for tweedy academics.

Sewanee looms over Cowan, where Sandy grew up at the base of Sewanee Mountain. She went to Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro, but when home used the Sewanee university library.  She came with friends to swim in Lake Cheston, a pretty five-acre pond hidden in woods on campus property but shared by Sewanee preppies and town kids alike.

We drove to the lake along a wooded gravel road past farmland and pastures and walked the footpath along the sand beach. The woodland reflected in the water, which shimmered in the afternoon heat. A few kids splashed near shore, students were setting up a picnic. She glanced around the place where she had swum fifty or so years ago. I proposed an early morning dip, she declined.

We headed back to the main campus, past gorgeous but understated homes half-hidden by dense woods. Students stirred about, a music festival was getting underway amid the stone towers, past All Saints Chapel, Saint Luke’s Chapel, and Bishop’s Commons. Students hiked or cycled by, kids who had not yet been born when we first walked the Commons, gawking at the rough-hewn beauty.

We got breakfast the next morning at the Dixie Lee, done over as a step back to the 1950s, and took a quick spin through Tracy City, a spot on the map in nearby Grundy County. I reported here in October 2021 that Grundy had the lowest rate of covid vaccinations of children in the country. Not everything about small towns is wonderful.

In Cowan we visited the couple who had purchased the home Sandy grew up in. They showed us the lovely upgrades to the place they had completed over the past 35 years. I vaguely recognized the kitchen, the placement of the wood stove, the bedroom I had slept in eons ago.

The memorial service brought together cousins, uncles, aunts, friends. Some were local, others had trekked from Michigan. Some were young and moving forward in life, others, like me, were at the story-telling, reminiscing stage. At the cemetery, in the hot Tennessee sun, we prayed and dropped pale roses on the grave, hugged, waved, and drifted away. I looked up at the green sweep of the mountains and saw the Sewanee cross, ten miles away, gleaming in the high sun.                

June 19, 2023

We parked and headed for the entrance to massive Riverside High School, then to the cafeteria. The grandsons ran ahead, looking forward to the cereal and fruit juice.

The county school system offers free breakfast and lunch for students at the high school even through summer break. My grandsons like going for the fun stuff. The hot-food lines were crammed with sausages and biscuits and other things that kids don’t want. But the place was nearly empty. Before we left I saw one other adult, one other child. An excess of good intentions? Maybe the crowd gets there later. If not, all that food would have to be thrown out.

After eating we strolled down the school’s main corridors. We looked in wonder at a twelve-foot-high trophy case crammed with silver cups and plaques celebrating sports championships going back years. The three-story-high ceiling is highlighted by the Stars and Stripes and the flags of many nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa suspended from rafters. I blinked. In the first row hangs the flag of North Korea.

North Korea?  The flags of Russia and China also were displayed, along with a few others of politically repressive states, Cuba, Turkey, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. Russia and China I could get, they’re major powers. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are non-democracies, but important players in world affairs. Again, I wondered: why North Korea?

We all know about North Korea: Kim Jong Un, political paranoia and isolation, summary executions, massive prison camps and armed forces, regional bullying, nuclear saber-rattling.

The BBC reported last week that North Korea’s chronic food shortage now may be the worst since the famine of the late 1990s. The country sealed its borders in January 2020 at the start of the pandemic, stopped importing grain from China, and halted purchases of fertilizer and farm machinery. Food markets are nearly empty. Starvation is becoming common.

Meanwhile the regime test-launched 63 ballistic missiles last year, at an estimated cost of $500 million, BBC says, enough to make up for the country’s annual grain shortfall.

The Brits say the intelligence on North Korea’s current internal conditions is provided by a South Korean organization, Daily NK, which maintains a network of anonymous sources, ordinary North Koreans who are brave enough to be interviewed. Their answers are relayed in multiple installments to avoid detection. Responses that could reveal identities are not published.

The sources report, among other things, that the government has passed a law against using words associated with the South Korean dialect.

The logic of the Riverside flag selection escaped me. A United Nations-like potpourri of color to spruce up the hallway? A testimonial to the breadth of the social-studies curriculum?

I sent an email to the school principal, writing, “North Korea is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship that forbids all freedom of expression, prevents its citizens from leaving the country, imprisons thousands of its citizens under brutal conditions. The North Korean government has threatened to use nuclear weapons to attack its neighbors and the United States.

“Displaying the North Korean flag creates the impression that North Korea, like other nations whose flags are shown, is just another member of the ‘world community.’ That is tragically untrue. I urge you to direct your staff to remove the North Korean flag from the hallway display.”

Within hours, she wrote back: “Thank you for reaching out. The flags that are hanging in our school represent a country where a student is from. We have students attending Riverside from all over the world. We have a few flags hanging where those nations restrict freedoms and are anti-American but its where our students are from and we want our students to feel welcome at RHS.”

Am I just being a grump? Is my complaining about the North Korean flag hanging in the main corridor of the local high school like an old guy yelling “Get off my lawn” at neighborhood kids? I don’t have kids in the school. Is this none of my business? While the principal was polite, she probably thought exactly that.

Parsing the rough phrasing of her email, I guessed she dashed it off in thirty seconds and didn’t look back. It’s summer break, but a principal of a large, prestigious high school is busy year-round. She didn’t need the extra chore of responding to, or even reading, a cranky email from me.

But then. We can be sure that if the North Korean students at Riverside High are refugees or escapees, they would have reason to fear for their lives if they returned to their native land.

The flag (any flag) symbolizes the political traditions and ideals of the nation, not individuals who happen to be natives. Americans raise the Stars and Stripes on Independence Day to express love and support for their country, not to identify themselves as Americans (even non-Americans wave the U.S. flag).

 Does the North Korean flag hanging from the rafters at Riverside help North Korean students and their families feel welcome? More likely it inspires fear.

I didn’t respond to the principal’s email. The flags in the school hallway may mean different things to different observers. Some may see “diversity” without political overtones. Nothing wrong with that. And then, we’re all tired of politics, in this era of Republican attacks on school officials. But the flag of North Korea as a beacon of diversity? I get a different message.

June 12, 2023

Before we left home for my appointment I walked behind the house and looked at the garden and the lawn. More weeds had shown up, thanks to the hot South Carolina sun. As we putter up the block we see “Congratulations Graduate!” signs in front yards. People are stirring about at their lawn chores. They wave, I wave back.

We headed to East Greenville, made the right turn onto Commonwealth Drive then onto International. The street is lined with beautiful landscaping, enormous shade trees, and modern medical office buildings, clinics, and one of the Bon Secours hospitals. We pull into the lot, which is bordered by a garden and a shrine to the patients.   

Everyone is friendly at the Institute. Cordiality, concern, sympathy are part of the mission. Patients wait maybe ten minutes at most for their labs, the phlebotomists get them right in. “Right arm or left?” they ask, followed by, “Band-aid or wrap?” Then back to the waiting area outside the oncology offices.

Promptly, or nearly promptly, a nurse calls the patient in and does the usual weigh-in (although you can decline it), blood pressure, and temp check. “Any falls?” she asks.

The six months of immunotherapy sessions have become a ritual. I show up, give blood. The lab checks the blood and, for most visits, sends the data to the physician-assistant. She looks at the numbers, some are always little high, others a little low. She asks me how I’m feeling. “You need to hydrate better,” she says. “Sixty to eighty ounces per day.” She then gives the pharmacy the go-ahead to mix the drug.

Last Thursday we went straight to the treatment room.

Dr. B. usually is on time. His appointments are scheduled for 15 minutes, but he’s always with us longer. He’s a young, good-looking guy with a lyrical South Georgia drawl, and he knows cancer, the big four therapies, radiation, chemo, surgery, and the newer drugs, but also the complex gene science that controls our lives. After my December 2020 operation he sent my tissue to Foundation One, the Boston lab that studies cancer at the cellular level. He wanted to know that much about my insides.

That’s where he was last week. He called up the new CT scan on the computer monitor, peered at it, and sat back. “You’ve got me stumped, Ed. I looked at these again last night.” He leaned forward and drew his hand across the shadows on the screen. “This is where we are. There’s some growth. But I don’t think we need to move to something stronger yet.”

I mentioned that the scan report showed a change in the liver tumor from millimeters to centimeters. “No, that’s wrong,” he said. He scratched out “CM” on my copy and wrote “MM” next to the number. “It’s a typo. I don’t know how they did that.” We let out our breath.

He got to his feet and turned to a white board and scrawled “Erdafitinib.” It’s a drug identified by Foundation One thought to benefit my er—situation. The disease has something to do with the mutation of a gene, dubbed FGFR3, that creates a protein used in cell functions. Mutation of the gene can cause cancer cells to multiply.

“If we decide that Keytruda isn’t working, we could go to Erdafitinib. It’s a chemo drug, taken in pill form. But it brings some toxicity—side effects—nausea, abdominal pain, others,” he said, still upbeat, smiling.

I like to think I was done with that.

The doc took his seat and leaned back, his hands behind his head. He asked about the Murph workout I did at Crossfit last week, how I broke up the sets. Then he moved on. “You’re tolerating Keytruda so well, I’m inclined to go a little longer. I’m not ready to say it’s not effective. You’ve got three more sessions, right?

“Let’s finish those. We may get you a few more, then another CT. Then we’ll make a decision. We’ve looked at your liver, no problems. Stay active. Keep doing everything you’re doing.”

I headed down the hall for immunotherapy session number eight. A decision, a path forward is what matters. The real start of decline in cancer, any cancer, is in your head: uncertainty, ambiguity, which creates the second stage, depression, followed by despair.

A smiling nurse, Becky, met me outside the treatment room. I walked with her past the other patients, some looking at their phones or sleeping, some with that blasted look of “what the heck is going on?” They’re the ones on the serious drugs, the major-league toxic medicines that kill healthy cells along with cancer, wrecking the body to save it. The room was nearly full.

“Looks like you’re busy,” I said.

“Always,” she answered.

Becky pointed at a Laz-Z-Boy next to an older lady. I sat, she inserted my IV. We waited 15 or 20 minutes while the pharmacists brewed the drug.

She picked up the plastic bag with the drug and hooked me up. The stuff flowed, I sipped water. The young chaplain, making his rounds, stopped by and exchanged pleasantries, asking if anything was new. I told him where I stood, he scribbled on his clipboard. He moved on to the lady on my left and chatted with her for a while. I was out of there in under an hour.

We headed home, into the minor-league rush hour traffic this minor-league city produces, past the lovely shade trees. We steered past pretty subdivisions and thick green pastures. As I drove, I wondered how many times I had visited the Cancer Institute. I had been seeing the doc now for two and a half years. For a couple of months he passed me to Dr. Z, the radiation oncologist, who pitched me back after radiation.

Then I thought of other things, the trip to Tennessee next month, the good, loving people around us, the cosmic events that create history, the blessings and tragedies we live through. The world creaked forward.