Comfort

The tickets had been intended for others. Others with schedules so full that they were obliged to reject the gift of a free night at the concert hall from the business where my father worked. Others, I speculated, with inviolate veins and scalps full of keratin-rich hair.

I was in the living room when Dad called over his lunch break with the news that he’d come into possession of some tickets and would Mom and I like to join him that evening. I had curled up on the couch hours earlier with a book that I hadn’t opened. All morning, snow-roofed homes and weighted branches had steeped in the weak sunlight. Cars, leprous with winter salt, drove down our slushy suburban street. A little snow had fallen, halfhearted flakes that rather accentuated the dinginess of the day than purified it.

“We’d love for you to come, but don’t feel like you have to,” Mom had said, cupping her palm over the phone receiver and studying my reaction. 

I hadn’t been anywhere but the house and the chemo ward for weeks. I decided to go.

----

Hours later, I stood in my bedroom, gazing at my reflection in the mirror. I struggled to extinguish the self-pity that kept swelling in my chest at the sight of my wasted frame swallowed up in the tailored black dress, my head so obviously naked beneath the hug of the small knit hat.

Already, before it had begun, my evening was being spoiled by my vanity. It was not so much that I felt ugly, although that was part of it. Even more, I felt conspicuous. I imagined the world pulling away from me, watching with mingled pity and curiosity to see how I conducted myself.

Of course I recognized the narcissism of this feeling, and would try to talk myself out of it. I didn’t really look so very ill. I was at the high point of my treatment cycle, which consisted of one week of daily hours-long stints in the chemo ward with a needle in my vein and then two weeks of recovery. Tonight was the tail end of my second week of rest, and so I found it relatively easy to feign a state of normality. As for the hairlessness—well, it was winter in Michigan, and unlikely that anyone would look twice at a hatted head, certainly not long enough to pick up on the traces of affliction that I imagined to be so emblazoned on my person. And even if someone were to infer my disease, their flicker of interest would soon expire. Perversely enough, this bothered me as well: that my trial, so crushingly significant to me, was of such negligible weight to the rest of the world.

I was ready as I would ever be, attended by the mental and physical dis-ease that I was beginning to assume an inescapable aspect of my illness. I left that room hoping only for distraction from it.

---

My parents were dressed up and conjuring a Sunday aroma of peppermint and leather in the kitchen. The large un-curtained window held our reflection tenderly as we huddled for a moment, ascertaining the whereabouts of the tickets and car keys, slipping gloves over fingers and shrugging on coats and purse straps. Dad had started the car early, and it was a smoldering cloud of vapor in the gloaming as we hurried through the frosty air and ducked inside.

After I’d settled into the back seat, I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window.

The sight of the sky kindled inside me a flame that fed off the air in my lungs, leaving me breathless. It evoked the idea of the deep sea. Inhospitable realms, both: lungbreaking, immense; dark, yet strangely lit; replete with matter, yet insinuating a fearsome emptiness. I looked at the waxing moon, the glinting stars, the tattered pennants of the clouds. And while my mind buckled beneath the vastnesses shoving their way in, while the seeming absence of heart within them froze mine, yet there was something in me that also felt a kinship. The phrase shaped itself in my mind: Deep calls to deep. I heard Modest Mouse singing about my blood being just like the Atlantic, about the oceans in our bodies. I believed what the Preacher said when he declared that God put eternity into man’s heart, and my spine tingled at that idea from Job: These are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of Him. As my mind started to whirl with associations, Dad pulled the car into reverse and I reeled myself in.

Everyone feels like you do about the sky, about the sea, I thought to myself, grimly rebuffing the mystery, allowing it to curdle in my brain. Everyone feels their affliction is exceptional.

---

We arrived early, managing to secure a parking space within reasonable distance of the building downtown. I had to focus on keeping my footing on the crusted sidewalks, and so was not afflicted further by the beauty of the night and what it taught me of my own vanity. Nor did I have much occasion to dwell on my illness as I made my way through the crush of humanity in the yellow foyer, absorbed as I was by the twinkling chandeliers and opulent wall hangings. And the people: milling and laughing and exclaiming, dazzlingly appareled and perfumed, and consolingly human with their Midwest-flavored speech and finger-greased tickets. I had not been in a crowd like this for months, and the sound and energy of it enfolded me in an almost tangible embrace, melting the chill of my moment in the driveway and filling me with a sense of partaking. The happy echoing hall, generating a warmth that transcended the physical, lifted my heart to almost giddy heights, so that I looked with loving wonder at the faces around me. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps my suffering might be, in a way heretofore unseen, self-inflicted. I had kept so much alone lately.

My parents and I scouted our seats, and I trained my gaze on the stage, its gleaming surface graced with a concert grand and a cello. Leafing through the program, I studied the biographies of the featured musicians until the lights dimmed and a hush descended. 

A woman stepped onstage and seated herself on the piano bench. After her, a man sat behind his cello and took up his bow. The audience waited as the artists matched their instruments.

A final set of lights dimmed, and a fresh beam, the spotlight, flooded the center stage. The concert began.

At first, I was carried away by the technical expertise this couple displayed. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, to be in their bodies devotedly obeying the music even as they masterfully created it. But as the night wore on, I ceased to notice the artists or their instruments at all. The music lifted me right out of my cancer-ridden body, out of that roomful of shimmering ambience and warm humanity. My body became all ear, and that ear became all heart, and that heart filled and flooded with music that was, in Rilke’s words, “the transformation of feelings into audible landscape.” The music was speaking to me in a twofold language: the universal tongue of humanity, and the special dialect of my own soul.

The concert is linked in my mind with the sight of the cold dark sky from the car window. Here, too, I felt piercingly alone, yet not in a way I would describe as lonely. I was keenly aware of the pulsing current of my own buried life. The Atlantic in my blood. The eternity in my heart. The imago dei stamped on my very DNA.

I had a sense that my presence there, complexly enthralled at that specific moment of layered experience, was itself an active part of what was happening. That idea led to another: that the concert might be, similarly, an active participant in an even greater occurrence. And so forth, widening ever outward, the universe all happening and creating and being created into something at this time inscrutable, yet already poignant and crackling with import.

---

I pressed my face to the car window the whole ride home, watching city lights and shadows blur beneath the clear raised eyebrow of the moon, feeling deliciously lightheaded. The comfort this world had to offer me was no anesthetic, nor was it the placebo I had begun to suspect. Quite simply, it was the Self taking its rightful place in the universe: exquisitely affirmed, and happily forgotten.

The ridged pink scar setting permanently into the skin above my umbilicus, the bandage in the crook of my arm, my naked scalp, the knowledge of approaching weeks of nausea and fatigue—all of that was still there. But the spell of preoccupation it had cast over my life was broken. 

I returned home, a healthy invalid.

November run

First runner's high since cancer.  That euphoric feeling that on this night is full lungs and pearly moonlight and crisp air and houses soft in the gloaming.  My elongated silhouette rounding the corner of little Elmwood Lake while the waves toss their moonlit hats. 

 I am running before the Lord in the land of the living. 

And yes, I am feeling God's pleasure.

meetingplace

I had just seated myself at the corner table in Barnes & Noble, the only table that isn't overshadowed by the lamps that dangle just at forehead level and are easily forgotten until one stands suddenly and remembers, too late to prevent the pain and humiliation of knocking one's forehead against their mellow light.  My sister sat across from me with a stack of magazines, and we had divided a slice of red velvet cheesecake equally between us to enjoy while we perused our reading material in a shared, delicious silence.  I pulled a chair from the table adjacent and placed my stack of books there in order to clear some table space for my coffee, cake, and Joan Didion's Blue Nights. 

I was just reading her fragmented discussion of "the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event" (for example, the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair) when an elderly gentleman commandeers the table beside ours.  He has carefully parted white hair and a tanned face, round and wrinkled.  I notice him immediately because, in stooping to place his coffee and rice crispy bar on the table, he forgets the lamp that hangs above him and whacks his head on it as he straightens up. 

Having been in his shoes often enough myself, I grin at him as he ruefully heaves himself onto the bench on the other side of the table.  "Do you want your chair back?" I then ask, remembering that I've stolen it. 

"Oh no,  no thank you.  You just keep it for your books," he assures me kindly, and rises to his feet--again knocking his head against the lamp and wincing, making some remark as to the inconvenience of their placement to which I agree, both of us laughing politely. 

He begins to stride away, and then turns and asks, "Will you girls guard my coffee for a moment?"  

"With our lives," we solemnly promise, and he nods cheerfully and leaves the cafe. 

Olivia and I exchange endeared smiles in his absence, and take small bites of our cheesecake.  He returns with a James Patterson novel.

"Ah, thank you!  Still here!"  This time as he sits he is cautious to avoid the light fixture.  We banter briefly about the food and coffee, and he asks us if we are college students.  Our conversation turns to our work, where it is revealed that he lives near the place we are employed.

"Have you always lived here, in Michigan?" I ask, hungry as always for glimpses into the stories of the strangers I encounter. 

"Nope.  I'm from Colorado. I moved here years ago."  He grinned.  "For a girl, of course.  My wife and I got married here, and I've taught high school for years over at Covenant Christian."

"Oh, our mom went there!" Olivia chimes in.  "Did you know her?  Tammie Pols."

He leans back and blinks, a smile slowly creeping over his face.  "Tammie Pols!  Why sure, I knew Tammie!  I lived right across the street from her folks, on Curtis.  She was friends with my girls--Laura and Beth.  She was quite a character.  Used to come right up into our kitchen and open the fridge door and ask what we had for her.  So!  You are Tammie's girls!  Huh!"

We all beam at each other, shaking our heads in delight, exclaiming the usual things one exclaims in such situations about the smallness of the world and what a coincidence and really how very neat. 

Of course, after such a connection had been established, we could hardly just go back to our books.  We tried for a moment.  I read another sentence, but my thoughts kept settling delightedly on the serendipity of the moment before, and when I glanced back over at the man he was looking at me. 

"You know," he said, "Your mom's sister--Julie, right?--she is the one that went to cosmetology school, didn't she?"

I nod, and he laughs.  "I remember one time sending my son, Evan, over there to get a haircut--you know, so she could have some practice, maybe earn some money.  Well, he comes back and he's got this baseball hat pulled over his forehead."

Olivia and I start to laugh.  "Oh no!"

Our friend's eyes are twinkling.  "His mother wasn't there yet, and I ask him, I says, 'So Evan, how'd it turn out?'  Your mom will remember Evan.  He was always very dramatic as a boy; still is, actually.  He took that hat and swept it off his head like this and says, 'Not very good!'  Well, he had really straight hair, and Julie had cut it so that it stuck straight out.  It might have looked good on someone with different hair, but it looked awful on him.  But I had to be his dad, so I told him, 'Son, it looks fine.'  And he says, 'No it don't!  I'm not going to school!  I'm wearing my hat!'  Well, of course he couldn't do that, and the kids probably made fun of him, you know how kids are.  But I had to act like it was all right, of course."

We chuckle with him and promise to remind Aunt Julie of the incident.  "How old was your son at the time?" I ask.

"Oh, he was about yay high--probably seven or eight.  He was a funny kid.  Yep, he's had a lot of trouble lately.  He had a real good job down in Indiana, but got a staph infection in his leg and he didn't treat it.  It turned into MRSA.  He didn't want to go to the hospital, but they told him that if he didn't he would die, his son would not see him again."

"Oh dear!  Is he okay?"

"Yes. Yes, they had to cut out a big chunk from his bottom, but he is okay.  Lost his job, though. They got rid of his department.  He's been good to me.  I see him pretty often, give him a little sermon every few months--can't do it too often, or he'll think every time he sees me I'm going to preach at him."  The man laughs the same way he had when he bumped his head a second time on those lights.  "You know, a few of my kids gave us some trouble, but most of them are living good lives now.  My wife, she died when she was fourty-four.  And I remarried--years later--and got three more kids.  Went through that whole teenager phase twice!  But they are good to me, and I never think of them like they're not mine.  I live in a condo now, my wife and I, and they'll come over and help us move the furniture in and out.  They are good kids."

The stories keep coming, and Olivia and I listen eagerly, amazed at how much he remembers of our own family.  One time he was installing some insulation up in the attic of our Opa's house.  He cut a hole in the wall, and discovered an old metal bed up there in the attic.  "Somehow your grandpa got it out of there--not sure how.  I wonder what they did with that thing.  It was pretty neat."  He paused, then asked, "So, how are your grandparents these days?" 

We flounder a moment, then explain that Opa had passed away six years ago of congestive heart failure. "Oma's doing really well, though," we tell him. "Walking every day, still in that house."

"Really?  Oh."  He is quiet a moment.  "That's what my first wife had.  She was diagnosed six years before she died, and they told us she wouldn't live long.  Good for your grandma, though!" He nods.  "My wife now, she works at a candy shop.  Boy is that good candy!"

Olivia and I exchange a look, saying over each other, "We should go there!" "We'd better not go there!" and then laughing in agreement with both sentiments.  He laughs, too.

"I know.  I work out, and it's so hard, and then I go and eat all these sweet things.  And I wonder why on earth I did that for, when I just worked out so hard!"

"You look like you're in good shape to me," I assure him, and he does: robust, healthy color in his cheeks, that distinguished white hair and those bright blue eyes.  I am quickly growing very fond of him.

"I feel good," he says, shrugging.  "Probably am a bit overweight.  Used to be I was really tall.  And thin, as thin as you girls.  But I'm 75 now, and I get tired quickly.  I just retired this year.  My wife convinced me to."

"How are you liking retired life?" I ask him.

He smiles.  "Well, I like sleeping in, and I couldn't keep doing all those late nights anymore.  But I do get to thinking when I go to bed, you know, what am I doing with my life now?  I miss the kids, too.  So I've started applying around for part-time teaching jobs to do, to fill my time with.  Hopefully I'll find something eventually." 

We express our agreement in these hopes.  After a moment, he begins to stack his napkins on his plate.  I notice that his hands are trembling quite distractingly, and he seems a bit flustered.  He smiles at us, though, and says, "Well, you give my best to your mom and grandma and Julie!"

"It was such a delight to meet you!" I say, beaming at him, and feeling as I do so a strong tenderness welling in my heart, a gush of goodwill towards this stranger who knew the strangers that my childhood mother and aunt are to me.

 I anxiously wonder if I ought to remind him about those lamps as he stands, but he manages to avoid them again, and I feel relieved.  Somehow it would have bothered me to have watched him hit his head again, as it bothered me to see how his fingers were shaking as he gathered his things from the table. 

"It was nice to meet you both," he is saying as he prepares to leave.  "Have a good evening!"

"Thanks--you too!" my sister and I chime.  He walks off the scene, and Olivia and I look at each other as the loud silence of the bustling cafe replaces his garrulous presence.  We both exchange cheerful observations on what an unexpectedly charming afternoon it had been, and then return to our books. 

As I pick up reading about inadequate precipitating events, I feel a keen sense of time and place, of having arrived at a significant meeting between the two, stumbled into some providential appointment.

Thanksgiving approaches, and family is on my mind.  You might call it an inadequate event to have precipitated the glowing intimation of God's providence and faithfulness that I felt as I gulped the last of my coffee, but its influence on my heart was nevertheless undeniable, and a cause for gratitude.