A Fourth of July sonnet by e. e. cummings, one which is particularly appropriate given the rhetoric of the current campaign season:

          "next to of course god america i
          love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
          say can you see by the dawn's early my
          country 'tis of centuries come and go
          and are no more what of it we should worry
          in every language even deafanddumb
          thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
          by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
          why talk of beauty what could be more beauti-
          ful than these heroic happy dead
          who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
          they dd not stop to think they died instead
          then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

          He spoke.  And drank rapidly a glass of water.

I suppose the cliches are more nuanced (i.e., tweaked to appeal to whatever focus group is being addressed) now, but the nearly ninety year old poem is unfortunately still relevant.

Last year on the Fourth, I was counting down the 46 days till the removal of the confining abduction brace.  Believe me: I counted every day.  And when I was just a week or so from the end, the surgeon called and postponed our appointment for five or six days.  It was discouraging to have to reset the counter backward, but shortly after the Fourth I finally got my own small independence day when the brace came off, and I could actually, among other things, take a shower. 

We took Kimber to the vet on Monday.  The growth turned out to be simply a fatty tumor, which the vet removed.  He stitched Kimber up, and she was home by 5--without even a cone on her head.  She was very groggy the first night, especially after I gave her a doggy tranquilizer because, like so many animals, she's frightened by the fireworks.  She looked (and probably would have sounded) like Deputy Dawg.  Yesterday she was much livelier, though once she took the tranquilizer, she was, well, tranquil for the rest of the evening.  This morning she seemed back to old self; she ran for the first time, chasing a rabbit (which escaped under the fence).   Today will be one more day of fireworks, so one more day when she gets a pill or two to keep her calm.

My own health remains stable.  I still crash twice a day, but that's predictable and manageable.  My G-I problems seem to have shifted, however.  Now, by late afternoon or early evening, I have terrible cramps, and they make the thought of dinner completely unattractive.  Mohamed often runs out to bring me sushi, the one dinner that is light enough, that seems healthful (that English teacher pickiness again), and that doesn't seem to upset my stomach.  Man cannot live by sushi alone, but I'm making an effort, it seems.  The last week I've been taking a Percocet in the afternoon, and that helps.  For the last few months I've taken a Percocet every morning, but rarely another one.  I don't know why I've resisted.  As an old hippie, I liked to brag that I had never met a drug I didn't like, and you'd think that I might have realized that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the pill and the energy and lack of pain that mark my mornings and make them the best times of the day (the pill as well as having slept through the night).  It's true that Percocet is addictive, but, as the physician assistant said none-too-tactfully, "We don't have to worry about that in your case."  I see the oncologist for the full battery of tests next at the end of the month.  My oncologist, btw, looks just like the doctor in the Nexium commercial (tagline: "you wouldn't want your physician trying to do your job") who is inexpertly using a jackhammer.  I have a feeling Dr. Van wouldn't be great with a jackhammer either.

I have been saddened this week, however, by the news that someone who was like family--no, who was family (sometimes the distinction between simile and metaphor does make a difference)--during the entire decade of the 70s but whom, as circumstances changed, I haven't seen since 1980, has been diagnosed with cancer of the brain--inoperable, untreatable, and advanced.  I don't have the imagination to visualize Billie, her husband, and their three kids as anything other than the way I last saw them--a young, lively, smart, and funny family even though I know that the "kids" are now in their 40s (at least) with children of their own.  A few days ago, Billie began taking a shower, thinking possibly about the family vacation that was about to start, and then collapsed.  A few days and many tests later, she got the diagnosis and is now in hospice.  She had been kept up-to-date about my condition, and then--how quickly the wheel turns--she is the one who is in our thoughts.  "Choose life" goes the proverb, and indeed we must as long as we have the independence, physical and mental, to profit from it.  As Eliot (T. S.) reminds us, "We who were living are all dying / With a little patience."  So it becomes even more imperative to choose life while we can and, in my favorite quote, this from another Eliot (George), " have patience with the makeshift of human understanding" as we do so.