51/2 Hours

As a side benefit of being flat-lined last week, I have a new treatment plan. I can tell it’s gentler. Although I have no sensation In my mouth today, just a tingling numbness, so that my taste buds taste exactly three things: pickles, tomato soup, and cinnamon gum, at least there is no longer that epic Star Wars battle clashing in my stomach: Cramp! No, uncramp! No, cramp! No, uncramp! Du du du dú du, dúdududú! (Hear the theme?). My mind is clear, my white blood count is not crashing (yet), and those little white steroid pills that control ugly side effects have the added plus of making me feel like Dr. Dolittle’s guinea pig when he found the hand dryer. (“That feels GOOD!”) I asked Dr. Blue-and-Brown if I was going to get fat. He said no, three days of the pills wouldn’t do it. Whew.  

Another side benefit is that I get 5½ hours in the chemo chair every three weeks. That’s a lot of hours in a chemo chair. When we went in for this treatment on Tuesday, we didn’t know we were going to be there for 5 ½ hours. Robert, my empathetic (not) care-giver, lasted about ten minutes before he had to get up and go for a walk. He found Best Buy, and Beattie’s, and the Timmy’s down the street. Went out to lunch with friend Greg, helped him fix a sewer system, and brought me back half his salad. So am I bitter? Nope. I had 5/12 hours to talk to Bradely about her teaching in Kuwait, and to Jamie about getting called James or Jimmy (so no more whining about being called Annnnn), and in between all that, I got to start a really good book called Heretics and Heroes by Thomas Cahill.

I have to back up here. See, for a few months I’ve been pondering Plato. Yeah, I know. I’d been realizing that my own personal apologetic, what persuades me that God is out there, is that I am convinced that what I experience here in this life is a shadow of something bigger. I protest, like the little boy in Princess Bride, that despite all appearances that it’s a losing battle, “you’re messing up the story, now get it RIGHT!” To quote Elai, quoting C. S. Lewis on a college paper: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we are made for another world.”

That’s Plato! He said that all we can really know of what’s out there is shadows of things we cannot see, shadows cast by a low fire on a cave wall that surrounds us. Lewis called it Shadowlands and wrote (breathe deep now; it’s long):“The world as it is now is, a world of spoiled goodness, a world of decay, is withstood, and understood, only by those with an unfathomably wild sense of the anticipation of soon sure redemption…These secret facts inform our every attempt to explain (or explain away) the universe and our place in its shadowlands. The stubborn rumors of a Lost Eden, and a Passage to Eternity that no civilization has been able entirely to dismiss or disavow in all the millennia that we have traversed the earth, are, in the end, the truest estimation of our predicament, and of our destiny.”

There, wasn’t that good? So we seem to sense life as a story, a good story, and someone called this sensing we do the Gospel of Homesickness. We are always trying to get back. We just want more.  “The sky has holes, and the light shone through…waiting to one day reach up and tear the sky away.”  Ah, Caijo, tornado riders that we are. You and I know this gospel.

So I open Cahill on the first page and find these words: “His nickname is Plato.” (If you come to visit me get ready, because I read you the whole first four paragraphs!) My 5 ½ hours fly by.  I want to tell you all about Plato, but I have run out of room. And I never even got to Occam’s Razor.