December 21, 2020

I shaved my mustache and goatee on Wednesday, the day before going to the hospital. It was mostly gray, and I didn’t want to look like an old coot bewildered by the techno-world of modern medicine. I sat down next to Sandy and Marie, we watched TV for an hour or so. They never noticed the fuzz was gone.

To keep my head straight for the procedure I brought along Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, her prize-winning biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years. Their lives, together and separately, define both deep personal suffering and private nobility, so profound as to be difficult for us, today, to understand or appreciate. When I feel sorry for myself I recall the depth of the courage and character of these two singular people, who together endured the lifelong scourge of debilitating disease and personal grief, while leading  the nation through vast, cataclysmic tragedies.

I saw the OR for a few minutes, then went to sleep. I woke up in recovery, the way it’s supposed to work. I added another five hours of sleep. They trucked me upstairs and it was dinnertime, but not for me—clear liquids only. From my fourth-floor window the sun had faded, traffic crawled through Greenville’s downtown, crowds were building, even in this covid season, Christmas lights glowed. We did our shopping early, picked out games and toys for the grandsons. They’re counting the days.

The docs and nurses have been kind, taking care to explain to me what’s going on. The lead surgeon crafted a Christmas card with photo he took himself, a pretty sunset. “Thank you for letting me care for you,” he wrote.

He brought his team by the room, they’ll babysit me for the rest of my time here. He explained that the diaphragm was a challenge but they dealt with it. Something about air and fluid in the chest cavity. They resolved it, so far, with a rubber tube that wraps around the lung to drain the fluid into a box next to the bed. All the doctors, at least a half-dozen, inspected my incision. “Looks great,” they all said. I’ll see the lead surgeon after New Year’s. “We’ll decide on next steps then,” he said with a wave.

Sandy and Marie have been up to the room separately, complying with covid restrictions. The other kids, friends, and siblings all have called. I’ve gotten used to the IV—one of the nurses explained I’m low on potassium and magnesium. The chest tube under the left arm and the IV in the right wrist make moving complicated. I have a battery-powered box in my pocket wired to sensors that monitor heart functions. I’m not going anywhere.

We got in to see the pastor of the downtown parish a week ago to get his pre-surgery blessing, Walking back to the car afterward, we noticed young parents standing around waiting for the parish school to release their kids. None—meaning none—wore masks. Fast forward, the pandemic is in the thoracic/cancer ward. “We don’t have any techs tonight,” the nurse assigned to my room said calmly. “Covid.” That meant that she and a couple of other nurses are handling all the tech chores, taking vitals, administering meds, helping with bathroom trips, among other things, on top of their nursing duties. “It’s been a tough year,” the nurse said.

The X-ray tech comes in about 4:00 AM to get chest shots because the doctors want to see them when they arrive about 6:00 AM. Specialists on the treatment team stop by, inspecting the chest-tube connection and firing questions. Things slow down. I’m getting through Kearns-Goodwin, but slowly. The shortened visiting hours and the limited staffing mean longer quiet stretches. I like quiet. Hospital quiet is different. The staff is trying to cover all the room calls, the patients are sleeping or calling. I wonder what they’re thinking.

They’re thinking the same thing as me: when am I getting out of here? Yesterday morning a doctor told me they put my chest tube back on “suction”; it wasn’t pulling enough fluid. “That’s normal,” she said. But it’s a step back. They work hard at bucking us up. With all of us wired, they know what’s going on. But only to a point. Since I’ve been here no one has gone home.

I like the way the doctors come in early to ask how I’m feeling and tell me what’s going to happen next. But not always everything. They know that beyond the surgery, the chemo, the radiation, cancer is a mystery. A young oncologist visited me the morning after the procedure. This tumor, or carcinoma, was caused by the previous one, she said. Could it come back, I asked. It’s always possible, she said. Cancer does that.

The latest: I’m getting real food, chicken, mashed potatoes, the works. I’m not ready, but the thought is nice. The doctors explain my problems with plenty of detail, even if I have to ask for more. But we’re getting there. Yesterday my grandson turned seven, a gala affair, another one I missed. And Friday is Christmas. I plan on being home, as the song goes. Good thoughts.

December 14, 2020

The Christmas season is lurching, slouching forward, mostly about online shopping and warnings to stay home. For the first couple of Sundays in the new town we attended Mass, now we watch it on the computer. The pandemic and the Republican perp walk continue.

Yet we encounter good people. The Postal Service employees at our post office were friendly and helpful. So were the folks at the local public library branch, although reserving, borrowing, and returning books is “online”: apparently no human touches anything. I asked a question; from behind a plexiglass screen the librarian jotted a note and passed it to me at the end of a stick.

We are, all of us, living in a state of wonder, bewildered by the chaos of American life. We await the Season of Hope and Peace while facing the pandemic and hearing the Lear-like ranting of the disturbed man in the White House. Yet the vaccine is coming, so is the inauguration.

The headlines of these December days bring both nightmares and dreams. In a strange way they bring me back to State of Wonder, a sublime novel by Ann Patchett, published a few years back. For sure, state of wonder defines us all right now.

Patchett writes of a professional woman, a physician with a Ph.D. who travels to the Amazon rainforest to investigate the death of a colleague who visited a primitive jungle research site funded by their employer, a big pharmaceutical company. When she arrives the physician encounters an eccentric, intimidating 73-year-old woman who is under contract to the company to lead a medical research team, but has cut off communication. The physician is traumatized by the terrifying environment, the insects, the snakes, the infections and diseases. The woman research leader admits she lied about the colleague’s death. He had disappeared, she didn’t bother to investigate. 

The physician had quit practicing medicine years earlier after injuring an infant while performing a cesarean section, and fled to the anonymous bureaucracy of research. Stranded in the jungle, she performs a C-section on a native woman, saving her baby. In time, she adapts. She continues to care for the natives, confronts her nightmares, and rebuilds her life. She overcomes the hostility of the research leader, who finally begs her not to leave. For the rest, read the book.

Sure it’s fiction, the writer’s art. But the luminescence of Patchett’s prose dragged me back to the here and now, as we face both tragedy and redemption. I thought about Pachett’s odd mix of characters: the spiritually wounded doctor, the befuddled researchers, idle hangers-on, jungle tribesmen and women, the domineering leader who traffics in bluster and fakery.

My book club talked about the story in our “online” meeting. Our moderator asked probing questions. We wondered about this or that character, the symbolism of this detail or that one. Pachett’s reviewers have dabbled in the idea that she was rewriting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and sure, I could see that, to a point. Conrad, still a cryptic figure in literature, is praised for finding in the wilderness of the upper Congo a metaphor for European imperialism with its legacy of racism, slave trafficking, and exploitation. Other critics blasted him for language that sounded racist.

The jungle as setting and as metaphor, after all, simmers with ambiguity. What does the Amazon interior or the deep Congo mean to any of us, here in Trump’s America? Which really is the wilderness? We can pontificate about the opaque (for me) allegiances of the Trump cult. Why is the so-called “base” in its most extreme factions willing to shoot people who didn’t vote for their hero? Those folks aren’t just from the swing states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. They’re from all over.  Where do those delusions come from? Who knows? You may live in a big coastal “blue” city or region and don’t know anyone who voted for Trump. But maybe you’re closer to wilderness than you think.

It’s a struggle to break free of such cosmic thoughts. Patchett told a story of persons: the emotionally wounded physician, the domineering research leader, the vacuous young couple who act as the leader’s agents, the research team members happy to be along the ride on the company’s dime, the intimidating natives. Patchett devotes pages to all of them, shaping them, sharpening them as human beings with personalities, priorities, values, faults and failings. The story gets complicated, more complicated, maybe, than it should be. But then, for all that writing, all that work, her story comes to life.

It comes to life because she creates individual human persons, not an epic of factions and caricatures. In today’s America we’re drawn to see each other as a cutout of a stereotype: you’re with me or against me. Perhaps that’s what Trump and his cult, a babbling mass of prejudices and lies, have created.

But after all, it’s Christmas, the time of peace and joy. Time to throw all that out. Stereotypes only exist in people’s heads. Patchett—and other wise souls like her—convey the abiding truth that every human person, while he or she may blunder through life, making lousy career or political choices, is unique, and to be unique means capable of love, faith, hope. She reminds that our political opinions (and our literary opinions) don’t make us human. The headlines may have the power to shape lives as absurd, foolish, inhumane. But the tragedies of this time will pass away. We can rebuild from this moment. Time to start.

December 7, 2020

Paris Mountain State Park encompasses more than 1,500 acres on the fringe of Greenville County, S.C. It’s a pretty place, where the gentle hills of the city become less gentle closer to the steeper, rockier Blue Ridge foothills a little further north. Beyond Table Rock and Jones Gap State Parks you’re in real mountains, then suddenly in North Carolina, a little west of Asheville. Even here in the city, from the busy street where we live, we can see the misty, pale-blue, rounded peaks. Farther off and fainter still are the Great Smokies along the Tennessee-North Carolina line, which tower above South Carolina’s modest heights.

I bought the all-state parks pass to stay on the even keel provided by the Virginia trails for the past 12 or so years. Next to the Shenandoahs and Massanuttens in Virginia, Paris Mountain is the junior entry. Like state parks anywhere, it offers picnic tables, campsites, cabins, and a small lake for fishing and swimming. Unlike the steep mountain trails of Virginia that can break the bones and spirits of the toughest runners, the woodsy paths here are mostly soft and sloping, manicured for casual hikers, families, scout groups, and so on. The evil rocks of the Shenandoahs have petered out. By Alabama trails are carpeted with pine needles.

Still—Paris Mountain is good enough. These trails offer respite, solace, the spiritual sustenance found in the beauty of nature, of God’s handiwork. Now, in early December as the leaves carpet the trails, the silence of early weekday morning renews and refreshes the soul. It’s what we seek. The state parks extend from around here west to the long, steep climbs and grades in Georgia, then southeast to the swampy Low Country along South Carolina’s gold coast.

It’s been over a year since I started falling behind the neighborhood running group on our Saturday runs, wheezing and coughing, forming a one-man back of the pack. The guys generally were still at Starbucks when I got there 20 minutes after they arrived. That was OK because I always finished the course. That’s the value in these things, finishing the course. So within a week of landing in Greenville I started my slow-motion sprint on trails that wind through forest over mostly rolling terrain for a couple, three, four, six miles. I jogged through the creeks, across the rough bridges, up the carefully plowed switchbacks.   

Being early at Paris Mountain avoids the tourists. So, having got through my MRI Wednesday I made a point of getting out there first thing Thursday morning. It was chilly for these parts, under 30F, but I’ve done 30F and below many times. I parked and trotted along a short spur to the Mountain Creek trail, which leads in about two miles to the Sulphur Springs trail. Sulphur Springs winds up toward the park’s high point for another two miles, then to an intersection leading to the Brissy Mountain, Kanuga, Pipsissewa, and North Lake trails.

The North Lake trail takes you past the lake, set against the highest point in the county, especially beautiful. You can take any of those routes to get back or stick with Sulphur Springs, which means easing down a slippery, rocky slope to a rushing stream.

I stuck with Sulphur Springs, not that it mattered much. I tried to stay at a running pace, but more and more often it was a hike.  My mind was on the MRI and Friday’s meeting with the surgical oncologist.

The doc met us in a treatment room at his office and advised I’m going to the OR in two weeks. He said he couldn’t tell from the MRI whether the tumor (first time any of the medical folks here used the term) was laying flat against the ribs or not. If it is, he could “peel” it away; if it’s extending between them, that’s a different story. He said he’d scoop out what he could. Then I’ll be back to radiation or chemo or both.

As the Verne Gosdin tune goes, “This ain’t my first rodeo.” The first was December 4, 2018, two years ago to the day.  For that one the doc, at Virginia Hospital Center, was a cardiovascular surgeon, not a surgical oncologist. He jumped on the problem, took out part of it, and advised I’d need further treatment. That’s where we went.

So—one of those things. Modern medicine does amazing things, although the costs also are amazing. But in the long run—we’re all in for the long run—it’s a holding action. I like the line in “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” the Steve Martin-John Candy comedy: “Go with the flow, like a twig on the shoulder of a mighty stream.” After the doc meeting we left a copy of our health-care power of attorney and Advanced Medical Directive. Just in case.

We drove downtown and walked up Main Street, packed with shoppers. We gawked at the decorations and picked up a few things. The temperature eased up a bit, back to South Carolina normal. I took a picture of Sandy next to the giant tree in front of M. Judson Booksellers, a classic old-fashioned bookstore. We hitched up our masks and went inside. It was quiet, a few non-online shoppers wandered among the shelves. I got a cup of coffee and sprawled in a big chair and watched the browsers and listened to the taped Christmas tunes.

Last year, pre-covid, we walked the same streets and listened to the carolers and the local string assembly fill downtown with joyful holiday sounds. We smile now, hearing the grandkids wonder about Santa’s arrival. Millions still are suffering, but Christmas is lifting spirits. Ours, too. We strung lights along the apartment deck railing and, for the first time in three years, put up a tree. The apartment complex is awarding prizes ($50 off next month’s rent!) for the best-decorated front door. I’ll start on our door tomorrow.

Novemeber 30, 2020

We wrestled with being thankful this year, like everyone else. To be living and breathing are enough in this year of holocaust. So many lives lost, so many families devastated, so many still at risk. Can’t the rest of us just wear the darn masks?

But then, Americans cleansed the nation of the Trump infection, although the scars remain. Biden seeks healing and unity. But the Trump cult remains, not only, as the liberals believe, in isolated rural places and depressed factory towns, but wherever greed or bigotry or ignorance animate American minds. The deranged post-election lawsuits frame Trumpism for posterity. Healing, unity? Somehow, up to all of us, but beyond my time.

Yet the vaccine is coming. Hope is in sight, arriving, we hear, by next spring. That was enough for thanksgiving worldwide and on this American Thanksgiving. The millions who gambled and crowded together this weekend may get lucky, or may not. A vaccine by next spring doesn’t help today’s victims. The virus is still spreading and killing.  

We looked forward to spending the day with our daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons, confident we’re following the guidance. We’ve worn masks and stayed away from others. At the nearly empty Bi-Lo, a woman behind us in the checkout line, keeping her distance, heard Sandy say we’re new here. “I’m from West Virginia,” she said. “I like it here, more opportunity, and good for the kids.” Good thoughts.

That afternoon, Wednesday, we drove around exploring neighborhoods. This city has at least two historic districts, both filled with massive colonials and graceful antebellum places, some showing off those blue “Hate Has No Home Here” and Biden-Harris signs. That kind of thing.  We’re not in the market for a quaint old place, even nestled among tall oaks with those cute gas-fired porchlights or wraparound porches. We killed about an hour cruising and learned a bit more about this town.

Mail is starting to arrive at the new address. We found a primary-care doctor who takes our insurance, always an ordeal. We got library cards and checked books out. I got through John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, my one sampling of the avalanche of What the Hell Were Trump Voters Thinking literature of the past four years.

We’ve chased the rental company with phone calls (not the local rental office, but the real estate mega-conglomerate in Miami) over the multiple letters about our renters’ insurance. Never does a human pick up. The future-home conundrum nags us, we’ve got the apartment for six months. Whoops—now five months.

The home-search project is moving slowly. One month gone but no progress on the problem, which according to the retired-folks magazines is supposed to be an adventure, an investment of faith and hope. But the two-bedroomer is OK. The boys spent Saturday night with us. They ate pizza and ice cream and watched a movie. Good times.

We find faith and hope all around us. We stumbled onto Thanksgiving numbed by the statistics of death and suffering, yet lifted up by joy. Doctors, nurses, EMTs, nursing home and assisted living caregivers, police officers, teachers, local public health officials are confronting the pandemic relentlessly, saving lives, becoming casualties themselves. Early this month thousands of polling-place workers, ballot counters, state election officials nationwide persevered against pressures from Trump cultists to overturn the people’s will. They defied the pressure and counted the votes. They now go back to their daily lives among the rest of us, their courage and sacrifice largely unrecognized.

So thinking of all of them, we said thanks. In our new life, in this corner of a state I never imagined I would live, I’m buttressed by the support—the kindness—we’ve received from the physicians and their staffs at PRISMA Health in Greenville. My doctor in Virginia, who managed my recovery over two years, looked over my late-October CT scan and, hearing we’re moving here, called a colleague at PRISMA, who swept away the hurdles to getting care in a strange place. He looked at the scan, understood the problem, arranged my appointments, set me straight. I’m looking at more treatment. We’ll get it done.

So we’re grateful for these and other blessings. We’re reminded every day that prayer matters, that faith sustains and strengthens and consoles us. We’ve dodged the covid bullet so far but know others who are suffering. The new year offers more hope. We’ll be OK. So we’re giving thanks. Every day.

November 23, 2020

The week of waiting began with the biopsy: the drive in predawn darkness to the hospital on the far side of town, the hike down long corridors to radiology, the usual prep work. The doc looked into the holding pen—what I call it—introduced himself, and ducked out. Then 30 minutes of sedation, an hour of recovery, and out of there, a bandage on the small hole in my chest. Seemed like old times.

We weren’t happy, mid-week, to see a local news report that Greenville County leads the state in new covid cases. Everywhere, businesses have posted signs either requiring or requesting people wear masks. And everywhere they stroll in without them. That’s one notion of personal freedom: put others at risk. But I recall it took a while for the mask habit to catch on in Virginia. So things take longer to sink in down here.

That’s unfair, maybe. But there it is. We’re finding that “upstate” South Carolina has its quirks. Our daughter Marie, always alert for new adventures in nature, last Saturday led us with the grandkids to the Pacolate Nature Preserve, a quiet stretch of woods somewhere between the east outskirts of Spartanburg and the swollen, sullen Pacolet River. The trail wound maybe a mile to the steep riverbank then ended abruptly. The brown rapids thundered by feet from the slippery, mud-coated trail. Although it was Saturday, we saw not another soul. Scratch that—in some underbrush I spotted a rusted iron cross engraved: “Jesse Gates, August 22, 1973-July 18, 2018.” A memorial, or a grave? So no hikers, but maybe one soul. Why was it there? I thought of James Dickey’s “Deliverance.” Except the river in the 1972 film looked cleaner.

Anyway, back in Greenville we’re staying positive. We drove the six miles from our apartment, rented for six months, over to Paris Mountain State Park, a pretty place crisscrossed with hiking trails, and bought the state park pass, half price for seniors. Although the next morning was cold, I went back and ran a few miles, trying to preserve the ritual I followed for many years, when we lived midway between Prince William and Fountainhead parks. Those trails became second nature. Here, I’m a newbie. The chill seemed sharper, more penetrating here than I recall in Virginia. But then I’m another winter older.

We’ve walked the attractive, upbeat downtown, set off beautifully by tall elms and maples, sidling away from the unmasked crowds, and driven around nearby neighborhoods, gawking at homes for sale. The hard core still show their Trump signs and banners, although definitely fewer than last week. Meanwhile, the pandemic hammers the state. The appointed Trump-to-the-bone governor, McMaster, pitches the “personal responsibility” mantra, scrounging for the redneck vote, I guess. Plenty of ‘em around here, even in church, maybe especially in church. 

These three Sundays we’ve been to St. Mary’s, the traditional parish downtown. Mass is in the church and an auditorium, where the chairs are well-spaced, almost everyone wears masks. But with covid still spreading, we’ll watch the live-stream at home.

With the “immune-suppressed” millstone around our necks, we’ve holed up in the apartment the past few days. I moved into our first house in April 1978, we got married in August. So the strictures of apartment living: paying rent, calling a maintenance guy, watching our noise, all are new. The place is wedged at the intersection of two four-lane thoroughfares. We got lucky, though, our cubbyhole is buffered from traffic noise by thick woods. We’ve squeezed the contents of a five-bedroom house into this two-bedroom apartment by using the second bedroom as our storage unit. The spare furniture and the rest of the stuff we couldn’t part with are stacked in boxes, nearly ceiling-high. Sometimes we open the door and peek in, wondering where it all came from.

So we’ve been three weeks here at Beacon Ridge apartments, a unit of PRG Real Estate, which is headquartered in Miami. (Why do I keep calling it “Bacon Ridge? My younger grandson likes it.) It’s really not all that cozy, the electric heat is less efficient and more expensive than gas, which we enjoyed all those years in Woodbridge. I like not having to have to walk the length of the house to find a tool or a book. The tools and books I kept are buried in the box room.

We appreciate the pluses. We hear no next-door neighbors partying and yelling at their kids, no teenagers drag-racing up the street. We don’t miss the lines of parked cars of renters crowding the street or the odd collections of furniture and yard tools accumulating on neighbors’ porches.

Yet I miss knowing every inch of our old home. We miss the little Salvadoran girls who lived next door running over and yelling “hi!” and the crowd of kids, who moved in recently, biking and skateboarding up and down the block. They were giving the neighborhood some life, the way we did when we moved in with our kids all those years ago.

Here at Beacon Ridge we seldom see anyone. I’ve spotted a few people hurrying to their cars, heading to work, I guess. Occasionally, someone is out getting his or her ration of fresh air. Plenty of parking spaces are vacant; the institution—er, complex—may not be fully rented. Most of the time the place is silent. The maintenance guy, Josh, scoots around in his golf cart. The first week we were here the manager, her face fully masked, ran out to shoo my grandsons away from the pool area. With good reason, I’m sure.

We’re in an apartment complex ghetto, bounded by Haywood Pointe Apartments to the north (I wonder why the “e?”) and Caledon Court Apartments to the west; close to the interstate and downtown, and close to the kids out in the burbs. We’re ten minutes from the Cancer Center. We’re in a practical place, where we need to be. We’ve got a wood-burning fireplace, but no frills, you can tell from the beige walls and carpet. Everything works, except the refrigerator, which seems to freeze everything. Josh has been by to look at it. We’ll call him again. We’ve got six months.