Hansel and Gretel

Countdown 4: Hansel and Gretel.

Four. A number you can break in two. This was supposed to be countdown # 6, an easy one because 6 means man, and what ails him. Six could be the number for our Age, because though we look bright and shiny on some of our Northern Members, some of our Southern Members have cancerous lesions that ooze and threaten death to us all. Cancer plagues us--our bodies and our politics. But with my new treatment I am very glad to be halfway through today. So countdown number 4, a number you can break in two parts that contradict each other.

Of course the sickness that comes to an English teacher would have to be full of paradox and contradiction. What would I have done with just a simple broken back? No, that story of bolts and screws and slipping levers had to be Robert’s. So I get the silent, insidious monster called the Emperor of Maladies (no kidding here, the book by this title with its soulless crab on the cover sat innocently on my classroom shelf, unread, for a year, until I had Robert drag it up here to Canada so I could read it. Haven’t tackled it yet, though; it repels me). It all reeks of irony. I get the fairy-tale sickness.

Fairy tales. Had to make it to familiar ground here. Are you surprised? My children would not be. They cut their teeth on Cinderella and St George and the Dragon, really the only two tales out there, according to G.K. Chesteron, all the rest being variations on two themes.

But today’s fairy tale is a dark one, Hansel and Gretel, definitely not my favorite, but still true with those lost kids wondering in the woods. I have this image in my mind of little Hansel holding out a withered bone through the slats of his cage to the Wicked Witch. He's eight, and he's trying to trick her. She's in control, but she doesn't get it. She is like my cancer. I'm trapped in a cage of treatments, six slats, six chemo treatments, but I'm holding out this bone to Cancer: Come. Drink up. Let it kill you slowly. Let it wither away your haunches and shrivel your miserable hide.

Hansel and Gretel is an old, old story. It puts right on stage the fact that innocent people get abandoned in deadly battles with malicious monsters, and they have to buck up and fight back. They might not have many options, but they can stick that bone through the cage. Their wit and courage matters. In the face of faceless monsters like cancer, I need to know that any courage I can muster matters, and that the Witch can be tricked at her own game. Greedy as she is, she can't resist the poison coursing through veins toward her, and she just might shrink or even die. Else I will.

No one misses the irony that it's doctors slowly poisoning me to cure me. I drink the same potion that the Witch snatches from my veins, and it fills the caverns of my body with wails of mourning. No one misses the irony that we have created a giant, efficient Gingerbread-House-Making-Machine that feeds us cancer. We have placed the Witch in our midst and housed her. But I have this on my side, that I can take the cancer and shape it with my mind into whatever I will: a witch, a dragon, a monster, a cell. I can make a story. My daughter told me she started out her college paper with  G. K. Chesterton's quip,  "I had always felt life first as a story." This makes sense out of things for me. I'm glad she and I, mother and daughter, share this story gene. I suspect we all do. And I have this on my side, too. I know-no matter WHAT happens--who wins.