Ports and Payots

I have to keep reminding myself that my neighbor is sick.

He has cancer. It's a cancer that he has been battling and which initially gets knocked back by the medicines his care team offers; but then the disease becomes smarter and stealthier and the medicines need tweaking so that they can once again sneak up on it by surprise and trounce it into a prolonged chokehold.  

I wonder how my neighbor, who is the same age as my father (a survivor of the same cancer, thanks be to God) keeps the faith in a situation where either the cancer or the treatment has to win and there isn't an odds maker in Vegas that would be able to give you a smidgen of reassurance which'd make you want to take the action on this. 

Today, I was pulling dead flowers out of my front garden when he came driving up in his car, fresh from a two hour treatment, zipping up his Patriots windbreaker over top of a gleaming white gauze pad which sits over top of the port in his chest. The port, for those of you who haven't taken Cancer 101, is where the chemo goes in. 

Chuckling, he flipped back his ball cap to show me and my other neighbor, both of us outside on a good weather day for yard work, how he had just become a new member of the 'bald head club', popular with guys of a certain age on our street. He explained how his hair was tumbling out, not by choice, and how he was in style now; his normally thick and healthy white follicles gone in favor of a shiny baby pink crown which he kept touching, self-consciously.

He speaks, we laugh, we listen. His countenance is so jolly it shames me. It shames me because today is my first full day off the couch since September 8. I've been sick myself, but with something that I will eventually overcome. It just takes me a while because I am compromised in multiple ways these days...and I'm a bit of a dweller...and I'm completely strung out on anxiety. But alas, I am me. 

As I sprawled out on my living room couch this past month, watching the best and brightest days of Autumn pass me by sunrise after sunset like my Fiddler on the Roof record stuck in a bad groove, I have been watching my neighbor in his Patriots windbreaker maneuver his lawn tractor, week after week, cutting and bagging his leaves and grass. From my vantage point I spy him carefully assembling his Halloween decorations, filling his birdfeeder, and piloting his car on daily errands with his wife. But me? I mostly sat, ordering things online that I don't require but which amuse me during my prolonged downtime: new storm cloud colored walking sneakers; a vintage oxblood Aigner leather clutch that reminds me of 8th grade; and clearance priced tank tops from Duluth Trading Company for next summer or southern travel, because, heavy on the spandex, they girdle my middle aged belly better than any other brand at the moment. Even deeply discounted they are too expensive but I don't care. As our left side couch cushion becomes permanently imprinted with my ass, an extra few dollars to cradle my guts seems inconsequential. 

But every package that arrives is proof that I cannot drive, cannot shop in a store like other normal (albeit masked because of the pandemic) folks, cannot walk without assistance, all due to an unforeseen complication from a recent medical procedure. The typical high that one might get from the receipt of a package has, for me, turned into more of an exercise in despair; and all the while I convalesce I repeatedly spot the neighbor, far sicker than I, going about his business.

His hair immediately brings to mind my Aunt and her fight with multiple myeloma which, I am sorry to say, she did not win. Let me just pause to affirm that "sorry to say" sounds like the weakest, most inept way to convey how the hole that she has left in our collective family's heart and lives has changed us all, and not for the better but I don't know how else to impart it properly without taking thirty paragraphs to do so. 

My Aunt Rene (pronounced REE KNEE) lost her hair in the same way that my neighbor is losing his, from treatments which were meant to kill the rapidly growing cancer cells that ailed her, but which also killed the rapidly growing hair on her head and caused her confused scalp to sigh and willingly release all of her long gray-streaked locks in clumps. Rene used to have a particular way of tucking her hair behind her ears. Having had surgeries as a little girl in the 1950s, she had small patches of scar tissue both in front of and behind her ears and I don't know if was purely habit or a purposeful move for vanity's sake, but she used to leave a wisp of hair in front of each ear as she tucked the majority of her tresses behind her for an easy, casual look. As her hair started falling out, those wide front of the ear pieces, almost like the side locks on the most devout of Jews, stayed stubborn and strong, while she started finding their wooly sisters and brothers on her pillowcase, on the back of the couch, and blocking the drain of the bathtub. She called me the day of our family reunion and asked me to bring down clippers and a scarf. I knew what was coming, and I did what she asked. 

That day I shaved her head. As our family gathered and milled about outdoors, we sat on my Uncle's couch and I tried my best to make her comfortable by telling her things like how perfectly her noggin was shaped and how she absolutely did not need to cover it with a scratchy wig or some sort of soft bandana, and how it looked nothing like Darth Vader's dome when we got that spooky peek of his giant, soft, peachy head sans-helmet in one of the Star Wars movies. She giggled wearily and played along, as we both tried to make one another feel less awkward about the fact that I was shearing off the last pieces of her pre-cancer identity. Upon finishing, I flicked hair off the couch onto the floor where someone would sweep it up later and as she rummaged her hands about her head, we looked at each other with a sense of relief. However, the humid August air hung with an atmosphere of collective sadness for having shared the experience. Eventually, the hair went in the trash. The more that I think about it now, I wish we'd saved it, like the soft precious pieces folded away in our baby books. 

Anyway, today's experience got me blogging again. I hadn't the energy nor the enthusiasm for it in the last 6 weeks but seeing my neighbor up close sparked something in me and I swear as I hacked at and pulled the dead grass from the ground level of my stella d'oro day lilies, I felt just like I was pulling hair from the scalp of the earth. I could hear my Aunt whispering, in my ear, with my hair style so similar to hers; a big hunk of silvery gray hanging down in front as I pulled my garden gloves off and tucked the rest of my very long argentate fall behind my shoulders, "you'd better start to write again."

And I did.  

 "Payot": Hebrew word for sideburns.  

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