these are the good old days. . .

January 1, 2013 

Two o’clock in the morning.

All is quiet – the right time for taking stock. My parents are here,  fast asleep having brought in this New Year with the fireworks we’ve been saving for a special occasion and, for good luck, my husband designated as the ‘first-footer’ after midnight.

It is a relief to shut the door against a year that started ominously, cancer interrupting our lives in ways we hadn’t planned.  When I heard it got me, I cried as though I had just found out someone dear to me had died. At first inconsolable, I assumed those big fat tears flowed from the fear of a disease that has no cure. Fourteen months later, I know my sorrow was more about wondering how to proceed without the woman I used to be. In my mind’s eye, I can still see her shadow,  standing up and walking out of the hospital, right after the nice Breast Cancer Navigator delivered the news, frightening us even as she stressed that what we were hearing was definitely not a death sentence. Definitely not. 

Nonetheless, I heard a crack that morning – the sound, I suppose, of a life altered, leaving me wondering how I might respond to Muriel Rukeyser‘s question: 

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

I wonder is it because the cancer is invisible, like the actor who, having exited the stage, falls silent and slips behind the scenes until the encore?  Or is it the treatment that belies its smugness, mine so cleverly concealed in 1,825 innocent-looking pills that I have promised to consume over the next five years? Whatever it is, I have found that people I don’t know very well know how to avert their eyes from mine to avoid talking about it. It is easy enough to avoid, I suppose – my listlessness, the invisible gnawing dread, the brief but boiling hot flashes of a chemical menopause, aching joints, nausea, and fatigue all swoop below the radar in a way that a head made vulnerable and bald by chemotherapy cannot.  

What had I expected? The details of my pathology report on a perpetual crawl across the bottom of the CNN screen so no one would forget about me? My name spelled out in neon pink across the front of a Safeway store in October? Maybe a little. But more than that, I craved good old-fashioned sympathy, long phone conversations into the night, and endless cups of tea. I did not want to be told I was in other people’s prayers or that cancer was part of God’s plan for me or that there must have been something I did or didn’t do that contributed to the cancer that was crashing in on us and turning everything upside down, inside out.

I wanted home. I wanted my mother. I wanted to hear the colloquialisms from rainy, rural South Derry, phrases that don’t belong in the  predictably sunny desert southwest of the United States. Home brings the language I know and love, like the words of a childhood neighbor leaping from a Facebook message the other day and straight into my heart,  “It must be so difficult to cope with that burden when you are so far from your mammy. I’m sure she is all you want at the minute, as always, when trouble visits your door.” 

When trouble visits your door … I had not heard that phrase in years. In an instant, I was 12 years old once again, in the house where I grew up, stretched out on the good settee, an Enid Blyton adventure distracting me from the blistering chicken pox my mother soothed with Calamine-soaked cotton wool.

For me and the woman I used to be, cancer became the scariest thing in my life, because, like every scary thing that actually happens, it had never crossed my mind. Not once. 

Stop, now. Stop. It’s time for Auld Lang Syne. For the good old days. It’s time for these days. 

My mother has taught my daughter how to make fruit scones and Pavlova and a good cup of tea, and my daughter has taught my mother how to ‘like’ things on Facebook without typing “grandma likes this.”   My father has been up at the “scrake of dawn” every day, seeking out things to fix, a few small repairs to make our lives a little easier. With what appears to be the energy of a man of 35, he has been up on our roof fixing the gutters, then down again cleaning windows and shining them with newspaper until they sparkle, hanging pictures and cabinets, tightening things that are loose, weeding, planting, and on and on …   

Like me, my dad is a creature of habit. He reads the paper every day, chortling at Andy Capp’s mishaps and frowning over the crossword and Sudoku.  Like me, my dad is  drawn to things that are old, things with a good story behind them. And, he can carry a tune. He has always been enthralled by old clocks and their inner workings. I remember he would sometimes set all the clocks in our house to chime at the same time, my favorite the old Regulator with its stolid, steady tick-tock and its rich chime on the hour and the half-hour.

He never bought a Grandfather Clock, but has always regretted not buying the one he spotted while we were on summer holiday in Scotland in the early 1970s. Buying it would have meant dipping into the emergency fund for something that wasn’t an emergency. That wouldn’t fly. 

By coincidence, when my husband and I took a trip to Colorado some years ago, we passed on a Regulator clock in an antique shop in Ouray. I don’t remember why, but I know we regretted it. So it was a  lovely turn of fate that earlier today, my father spied a Regulator clock in an antique store in Scottsdale. Not to miss out again, he didn’t even ask how much it was. He had it wrapped up for me two minutes before the store closed.

I can hear it now, its soft tick-tock marking this magic time, these moments between the old and new year that find me recalling Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders.  For Kooser, life is “. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …”

Shifting my gaze to the road ahead,  I am with Mr. Kooser:

… there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.

These are the good old days. Happy New Year to you and yours.