Pewter angels

Someone at church gave me an angel, a little pewter baby angel with eyes closed, hands folded, bare feet sticking out the bottom of its little robe. “Oh, no,” I protested, “I am surrounded by living angels all the time.” “That’s ok,” he insisted, “here’s one more.” This person loves me, so I took the angel and put it in my pocket. Imagine. An angel in my pocket.  I rubbed it between my fingers, pondered angels for a while, and promptly lost it. Yesterday someone called me to say they’d found a little pewter angel, and was it mine? The thing haunts me!

The little baby angel unsettles me because it sends me back to when I lived with my Mixtec friends. In Ometepec, one day, a woman came to my door with a saint, a doll made up in bright paint and decked out in little rich clothes. “Do you want to rub your hands on the saint?” she asked, “for luck?”  “Oh, no,” I protested, “I talk to my Father God all the time. I have no need to handle saints.”  If she knew I had cancer, would she be back at my door now, offering me a saint to rub?

These people were just trying to be helpful. I am grateful. But I also wonder at our need as humans to find something to touch when we need luck. Things go wrong and, Mixtec or Dutch, we grab onto some…thing: a virgin, an angel, even a habit of private devotions in the morning to ward off the evils of the day. It just doesn’t work that way. As a Christian, I am not shielded from the stuff that goes wrong, even if I eat right, run two miles a day, and have my devos every morning. I am even a missionary, for goodness sake; does this not spare me? Am I not owed something? No. We bear the filth of our world in our poor breasts. We share the sufferings of Christ. We take up our cross, and this is mine.  “Oh you heavenly creatures out there with your wheels within wheels and your millions of eyes, do your thing, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll serve a living God together, and wonder at painted saints and pewter angels.”

Strands

Today the hair comes off. It has been falling out, gently at first and then in handfuls, but as long as it looked semi-normal, I wanted to feel normal for just one more day. Today it looks sickly, and leaves a trail of strands across the floor, and clings, glistening, to my sweater.  I am wearing a cap, a gangsta cap according to Elai, to keep the floor clean.  I texted Dale this morning: it’s time to bring the buzzer and pull the beautiful chemo scarf from the drawer.

My friend Cailey wrote a poem for her blog that has left an image etched behind my eyes. Part of it says: “My whole body carts untold stories like birds afraid to migrate…I am afraid if I do not walk slowly enough they will unleash--pull the blood from my veins up through strands of the hair on my head…” Somehow it has seemed to me that as the stands of hair fall from my head, they pull out my thoughts and memories with them.  Today the process brought pain.

But I cannot stop writing.  I wake up at four in the morning with words burning through the roots of my hair, and I turn the lamp on, put a pillow, a cutting board (Robert’s invention) and the laptop on my lap, and I write. Somehow the cancer has freed something in me. It’s like I’m in slow mo, so that things slow down, and I can see them more clearly. And I am freed to do other things I don’t normally do. I talk to the ball-capped woman across from me in the chemo suite waiting room: “What treatment are you in for? See, my hair is going, too.” I talk to the Cancer Society volunteer in her bright bumble-bee vest, offering drinks and coffee to all of us in armchairs with chemicals flushing our veins.  And she remembers our care-givers, too, so Robert gets coffee.  The woman’s name is Bradely, an unusual name. She, too, is an English teacher, and she spent time in Kuwait teaching in a Canadian school there. It was tough, she said. The kids were spoiled, and the parents didn’t know to discipline them, and they were mostly boys because the girls were not as worth teaching. 

Made me miss my kids at Oaxaca Christian School.  So when today I opened a big package with cards from them, saying things like: “They say that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. It’s so true! I have learned that you are simply the best and that no one can ever replace you, like no one—ever!” and “Yo, yo, yo, what’s good? Hope everything is going dope for you!” (Dope? Anyone want to translate?), it brought life back into my day. If it takes just falling strands of hair to move me to this place, then I accept.

Eyebrows

Last night I dragged Janey to a class on how to stay beautiful without eyebrows and whatnot. There were five of us around the table, each with our own private assistant, a box full of products, and a care-giver to cheer us on. The women next to me were mother and daughter, and the daughter kept reaching out to stroke her mother’s shoulder. The instructor said there is always a WOW moment in every session, and for us it was when that tiny, white-haired, wide-eyed 70 year-old mom put on mascara. Suddenly she had the thickest, longest eyelashes ever given to a woman. We just stared in admiration.

So here’s my dilemma: do I start wearing it now? Reminds me of when I stopped coloring my hair. I greyed early, and sensing our culture’s embarrassment about aging, I hid it with coloring for years. But one day I was teaching my older kids at school a unit on “the beauty myth,” the enormous pressure our society puts on women to be physically perfect, and the kids were finding examples on the internet of beauty gone wrong: a decked out five year old dying from anorexia; a model who looks like a Holocaust victim; the stats on botox shots and plastic surgery. I decided that day to go grey. I mean, it’s not an illness. And if I ever quit my dream job as a teacher and need to look younger to get a job, I can reconsider. But for now, if by going natural I could give courage to one kid, one girl, to see she was beautiful without enhancements, then so be it. This past school year one of my girls walked into the classroom made up for the first time. It was nicely done. No complaints. But she was twelve, and my heart dropped. I just wanted to say, “But Honey, you’re so beautiful!”

I have no problem with make-up. For my daughter it’s an art form. But when does the art stop and the hiding begin? I just don’t know. As for the pink box of products sitting on my dresser: Yes, I will probably use the pencil to make up eyebrows so I have something to arch in indignation or surprise. And Yes, I will probably makeover my bald head with that gorgeous artsy chemo scarf that just arrived in the mail. But as for the blush and lipsticks that could offset the color of illness, I still haven’t made up my mind. Fortunately making up a mind is hard to do, or else Maybelline would carry a product line for that too, and then where would we be? Anne

When Tornadoes Come

                                                                                                                   

The segues you don't want to hear:
     "Would you like to know your results?"
      "Maybe we'd better sit down."
      "Do you want it straight?"

They deal you the Cancer hand and you find yourself moving to Oz. But it can be something else that makes the ground shift a world under your feet. It could be losing someone.  Moving away from home. When I got to Oz, I found out my friend Donna had just been diagnosed with Cancer. I thought we would be fellow-travelers on this journey along with my friend  Bob and my friend Caroline and my friend Rebecca. But within days Donna was gone. Her family has gone to Oz.

In the chemo suite today (love that term) a lady was explaining how ever since her grandson got cancer, she just doesn't feel the same old irritation when the little things go wrong; I mean, who cares about getting cut off on the highway when your grandson has cancer. This family has moved to Oz.

My Cancer tornado moved me all over the continent before dropping me where I least expected to be right now. The scenery outside the window kept changing and changing as I went from home in Mexico to Bakersfield, Ca, for my husband's back surgery, and then drove to Texas to tell my kids the news face to face so we could process it together, then drove back to Bakersfield for more tests, and then found out unexpectedly, just checking email, that  I had one last rushed drive to make. When I looked out the window after that, I was on the ground in rural Canada.

 Looking out the big picture windows of our basement suite, it's as if I had ridden the tornado backwards and am looking out over a large corn field in Kansas. Our hosts are farmers.  There are white seagulls  diving into the dead corn field looking for food. My guess is that I get to watch that corn field grow up into something over the next 6 months while I'm here. And I like the white seagulls out there wheeling and squawling their signs of life. Come to find out, Oz can be anywhere.