Reflections through fog

I’d been warned of  “chemo brain,” and laughed at the times I’d gone back downstairs again, forgetting what I’d gone upstairs to bring. But yesterday was the first day I lived the whole day in a fog. Hours…missing. We’d gotten up at 4 to slip across the border, mix up the cars, and start toward Chicago. I’d downloaded podcasts I really wanted to listen to, and the very first (was it?) called 4 am a magical, haunting hour, with songs sung about it and ghost stories launched, but as the miles swept under the wheels, I was gone, hearing only pieces, snippets, like flashes of scenery through the car window. One podcast described how a man used the camera on his phone to record one second of every day of his life for four years, creating a 24 minute video. He makes a living, now, developing the app. He says you can actually watch the time of your life go by, catch its thread. Like watching flashes of scenery through the car window.

He says that you can watch yourself change. That you are always surprised how different you are now than you were four years ago, and that no one ever believes how much you could ever change in just four years. Of course not. You didn’t have the experience back then to understand. We are all bad at predictions.

…And sometime later I woke at the end of a description of the end of WW1, the speaker claiming that the Allies had pushed out the final days, the final weeks, demanding more clarification of terms, more time, so that Germany would lose just a few more thousand men, each day, and sink just a little bit lower before the guns stopped. And he read how Hitler burned from the shame at quitting, at ending the slaughter of thousands of men, each day, and wrote in his book, and dreamed of yet more war. Ten million men was not enough lost for anyone. Numbers like that mean nothing. It’s only a father, a brother, a son that have meaning. And those were gone…in a shuffling of territories, a maze of secret treaties and power struggles. And what do I know of all the reasons, except that someone said there would be wars and rumors of wars, and ten million lost is nothing. We never learn until we learn too late.

…And next I heard, (was it next?) bright and flushed with wonder, a voice describing microscopic dark matter, the world beneath the scope that is another form of life no one has tagged or understood, and how this could unlock cancer and who knows what, forever. The hope. You could hear the hope. And the scientist on this podcast believed, believed  that man could solve anything…given time enough. Given time.  And in the evening, still trying to dispel the fog in my brain, trying to wake, I opened my historical fiction novel about the Hundred Year War, and read and re-read, the scenes of crossbow quarries thumping into flesh, of horses and axes smashing, and it seemed to me that the scenery outside the car window merely changes in technology--never plot--because we live in this paradox: that the world ever changes, and we grow, and we learn to count the cost of war (the Greeks called Peace an interruption toWar), but the road stays the same. And even if cancer gets defeated in the long run after bouts with chemo fog, there’s still the other side: a Hitler dreaming of a war after the war to end all wars, leaving sixty million dead. Whose dream is this? What dream is ours? What dreams may come?

I write this on July 4th. Today I celebrate this country. 

Here there is freedom, and there is slavery. There is beauty, and there is corruption. There is discovery, and there is violence. I give thanks for today's treasure when I find it. The only thing I know about tomorrow is that we're all bad at predictions.