A couple of milestones: on Wednesday, the blog went over 1000 pageviews (1036 as of this morning).  I realize that isn't exactly "going viral," but it feels rewarding all the same.

At then, last night, I actually slept on my left side for a few minutes.  What?  For the first two months after my surgery, I couldn't sleep in any position except on my back.  It wasn't hard not to roll over because I simply couldn't.  After a few months, my right thigh and hip were strong enough so that I could sleep on my right side, though it wasn't always comfortable.  But because all of the muscles in my leg had had to be reattached by hand to the titanium and plastic femur and ball joint, Dr. Templeton, the surgeon, said there would be too much strain for me to lie on the left side.  You can't imagine how much I wanted to roll over when I knew I couldn't.  But it wasn't a possibility because there was no muscle memory left, so it would have taken a conscious effort, and I had an image of all the muscles going SPROING and pulling loose.  I realize that was ridiculous, but still...  At the last visit, however, Dr. Templeton said that the muscles were reattaching themselves naturally (a good sign), and I could try it.  When I did, it took some effort, and then I had forgotten that my left shoulder is also weak, and so it hurt.  (Mohamed's image was of my weakened scapula shattering.)  But sometime in the night, I thought it through, put a pillow between my legs for support, eased myself over, found a suitable position for my shoulder, and fell asleep.  It wasn't quite the reward I had hoped for, but it felt like another small victory.

My friend Carol (in an earlier post, I said that she had 'complained' about not being mentioned yet, to which she gently suggested that perhaps 'noted' would be a more accurate verb) asked yesterday whether I ever felt guilty about having cancer.  I think that I missed the guilt gene.  I believe in heredity, environment, and chance--and the greatest of these is chance.  Both of my parents died of cancer, my father at 67; both my grandfathers died at 67 or 68.  So the gene pool wasn't promising.  I used to think that when I turned 68, it would be a difficult year psychologically.  Now I think I should be so lucky.  But I also recalled the story of a student I had the first year I taught at Washburn and his wife, Lee.  I helped the husband get a teaching assistantship at OU, but in the first year that the couple moved there, Lee got muscular dystrophy.  She lived much longer than is normal with the disease, gradually losing her independence, her ability to move, to swallow, to speak understandably.  She outlived her two cats, Franny and Zooey, that the nursing home in a small town near Topeka allowed to stay with her.  I used to visit her, though not as often as I should have (a small sign of guilt feelings after all).  It was so difficult: what could I say?  I just got back from Paris?  I'd seen a great new movie or eaten at a wonderful new restaurant?  Lee believed in karma and positive thinking, and so for all those years that she hung on, she thought that had she just been stronger or believed more fervently she would have overcome the MD or even not gotten it at all.  Her belief seemed to be an additional and very unncessary cruelty.  So no.  No guilt.

Sometimes I think I should've called this blog Bed, Bath, and Beyond, though I suppose that's already taken.  There's plenty of beyond in my life--venturing out for meals, shopping (we picked out new tiles for the two bathrooms yesterday), visiting friends.  But bed and bath seem to be important markers of my day.  I've always liked a good siesta, but it wasn't as if I had to have one; now, when it's one o'clock or so my mind and body shut down for an hour or two.  And waking up, which has never been a struggle (I've never hit the snooze button in my life) becomes a long, slow slog.

Since, except for Mohamed, I don't really have any family, this is a time when friends are more important than ever and when friends have been unfailingly supportive.  Friends in Kansas City made my nine-day stay at KU Med full of good companionship and often good humor (at least as much as I could muster).  Jeanne, whom I've known for over forty years, flew to Topeka from Hawaii shortly after I got home.  American friends who live in Paris came shortly afterwards.  More friends came from California and Oregon. 

One thing that occurred to me in those first days was that there were a number of very important friends--not just casual friends but some of the most important people in my life--with whom the friendship was on "hiatus."  These were people whom I had shared years, decades even, with.  People whom I had loved.  And yet for some reason, our relationship had gone silent; sometimes 'hiatus' was an appropriate word, but sometimes, too, 'rupture' would have been more honest.  It had been easy to tell myself that I was a loyal friend who was still in contact with undergraduate and graduate friends, with students and colleagues from all the countries where I had taught, so that attrition in the number of friends was natural and inevitable.  But these weren't just any friends, and whatever the cause of the silence, it wasn't a good sign of my character that I let it persist, and not with just one or two people, but with five or six.  A few keystrokes, and the friendships were rekindled.  The conversations resumed.  Memories resurfaced.  There were new events and experiences to catch up on, but characters remained the same.  Loyal friends were still loyal.  Witty friends were still witty.  Conservative <shudder> friends were still conservative.  And all of them were still friends.

Whether face-to-face in visits to scenic Topeka or on the phone or via e-mail, whether friendships that date from the '60s or are more recent, whether close or thousands of miles away, friends have been the happiest of all my moments 'beyond' bed and bath.

A couple of days ago, a long-time friend and colleague sent me a link http://nyti.ms/GAb5MV to a New York Times essay about well-constructed sentences as mini-narratives.  The next day the latest New York Review of Books arrived with a review by Ian Buruma of Tony Judt's last (in both senses) book.  I mentioned Judt in an earlier post as someone who, as he lay dying of ALS, was imprisoned in his own body.  Whenever I felt sorry for myself during the seven weeks I had to wear the abduction brace, I thought of Judt and reminded myself that I didn't have it so bad.  I started eagerly reading Buruma's review, but was stopped short by the second sentence, a mini-narrative gone badly awry:  "We even know from his last book, a brilliant compilation of his ideas on history and politics, distilled just before his untimely death from a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder, that he had wanted to write a history of trains."  Even Buruma nods, to slightly alter Horace.

I often say that the most compelling opening I ever got in a student essay--not a sentence, but the intro to a sentence (and a mini-narrative)--came from a developmental English student many years ago.  His introductory essay began, "The first time I was up for murder one . . ." 

When I tell people how long I taught, one reaction is often "You must've seen a lot changes in students' writing."  I think they expect me to launch into a lament about a decline in abilities.  I would argue, however, that writing has improved over the last 45 years and that much of the improvement has to do with technology. 

1.  I spent the first thirty years of my career correcting 'writting,' 'simular,' 'definate,' 'existance,' etc., thousands of times.  And then, almost overnight it seemed, I never had to make those corrections again--a small point perhaps, but a very nice relief.

2.  There was a time when everyone talked about the "death of writing," supposedly replaced by oral communication.  But now, all the students are very used to writing: texting, IM-ing, blogging, posting on Facebook, e-mailing.  More writing doesn't necessarily equal better writing, but certainly students, like the rest of us, have acquired the habit of writing and know there's nothing to be frightened of.

3.  When I began teaching freshman comp. in 1966 (as distant as the Crimean War, it seems), we used to ask students to write 250-300 words.  They wrote in bluebooks with small pages and wide line spacing.  An essay of 300 words could easily cover six pages and look fully developed.  Now everyone "types" his/her essay, and 300 words is barely one page.  No one writes themes that short.  Again, more isn't necessarily better, but there's a good chance that ideas really are more fully worked through.  And just visually, the student has a clearer sense of the proportion that ideas occupy.

4.  Students are much more willing to revise.  In the BC (before computer) era, revision was an ordeal and usually meant changing a comma to a semi-colon or taking the extra 't' out of 'writting.'  Now it's easy to rearrange paragraphs, to cut or add sentences, to make serious revisions.

There is a negative consequence of this new age: although plagiarism has always been around, it has, at least in my experience, increased dramatically.  I had students who left the URL on their papers.  I had many students who didn't bother to change the font of what they pasted in or, if there were links in the copied matter, didn't notice that the links printed out in blue.  Of course, if it is easier for the students to plagiarize, it is easier for the profs to find the copied work, though this isn't much consolation.  One student, sobbing over her F, assured me that although I had found her copied work, she didn't know that she was cheating.  Her justification might have been more convincing had she not copied her work from a site called echeat.com. 

Plagiarism is always discouraging for teachers, whether it's easy to prove or not.  What finally worked for me was suggested by a book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational.  For the last two years that I taught, all students had to append a handwritten statement, signed and dated, swearing that the work was their own and that all sources had been accurately acknowledged.  It's perhaps irrational that someone who had  no qualms about plagiarism would suddenly be ashamed to write this statement, but having to do so almost eliminated the problem.

I realize that this posting has nothing to do with the ostensible topic of my blog.  One thought led to another, one sentence to a subsequent sentence, and this is where I ended up.  And where I'll end.

Yesterday we made the rainy drive to the KU cancer center in Kansas City.  As I've said, it's an attractive facility, as cheerful as a cancer center can be.  For those of you who used H & R Block (or the procrastinators who are planning to) for tax preparations, it is the Bloch family (they changed the last letter for business) who not only were the primary donors to the new wing of the Nelson-Atkins, but gave $30M for the cancer center, so thanks for your contribution.  As you get off the elevators from the parking garage to the main floor, there's Missys' [sic] Boutique.  It's always open, but we've never seen any customers.  We were tempted yesterday, but the idea of souvenirs from a cancer center seemed finally too bizarre.  There's an information center and a free library (limit two) in case you've forgotten reading material. 

First, a phlebotogist (his name tag designation) drew blood, and then we had a forty-minute wait.  Reading matter wasn't necessary, as the waiting room was soon enlivened by a character straight from Flannery O'Connor and her husband, who wisely said nothing and buried his head in a magazine.  The wife had no-nonsense, short, steel gray hair, steel rimmed glasses, and either a prominent but very saggy bosom (Mohamed's opinion) or a large stomach (my judgment).  She began talking immediately to anyone who would listen, cataloguing her ailments and treatments in graphic detail.  Almost everyone in her section of the waiting room (and it became her section the moment she arrived) tried to stare at the floor, but she was undeterred.  She finally settled on one elderly woman, asking personal questions:  "And just how many toes did you lose?"  The woman answered very softly, but to no avail since her answers were repeated.  "Four of them, eh?  I've had trouble with my feet ever since I was a child," and with that she segued into yet another of her problems.  The many disappointments with her treatment arose from greedy doctors who treat Medicare patients more carelessly than people with supplemental insurance.  This analysis led to a list of the sales tax rates in every county in the metro area on both the Kansas and Missouri sides, the government taking her money but giving her unequal treatment.  In my mind, I ticked off the "Santorum supporter" box but couldn't stop listening.  The forty minutes passed quickly; she was still talking when we were called to the appointment with the oncologist.

All the bloodwork was normal, and there haven't been any new problems.  I got an A for the tests.  Dr. Heins was pleased with everything she saw, and the next (and full series) tests were scheduled for the last day of April, when I'll also get the shot to strengthen the bones which has now been reduced to once every three months.  Sometimes doctors start sentences that they probably wish they hadn't.  Every morning I take a pain killer--just one a day.  I needed the prescription refilled, and the doctor said I could take four to six a day.  I said, "But aren't they awfully addictive?"  And the doctor began her reply and then couldn't stop it with, "Well, in your situation we don't really have to worry about long-term addiction."  I seem to have changed from my long ago and often chemically altered hippie years.  I love to tell stories about those days, and I often include a line like "I never met a chemical I didn't like."  Age (and the number of pills I take) seems to have changed that attitude.  Plus, maybe I'm just proud of toughing it out, especially when the "it" is more discomfort than real pain.

The only down note was that I've lost six pounds since the last visit.  I don't see it myself.  But Mohamed is worried and will redouble his efforts at increasing my caloric intake.  It certainly makes it easy to justify eating whatever I want--and that's a good thing.

Some random thoughts early on a Sunday morning:  My visit to the cardiologist went well on Thursday.  One of the side effects of the chemo is that it raises blood pressure rather dramatically, so I've been taking three different meds to control the hypertension.  Thursday, the reading was so low that the cardiologist said I could stop taking one of the pills.  This was good news because at this point, any reduction in meds is psychologically a boost.  On second thought, though, I realized that it was the oncologist, not the radiologist, who had prescribed the meds, so I'm waiting till my Tuesday appointment with the doctor in KC to make the change.

The regular schedule with the oncologist had been one appointment every month.  For two months, he'd simply do bloodwork, I'd get the expensive bone-strengthening shot, and we'd have a consultation.  The third month, I'd have the full battery of tests (CT scan, full-body x-rays, and bloodwork) in addition to the shot and consult.  Now, though, we're down to two visits in three months and one shot every third month.  This Tuesday's visit will be fairly short, since it's just drawing the blood and then meeting with Dr. Van.  If we meet with his assistant (Dr. Heins) instead, everything will go quickly, since she is always on time (and we like her very much).  Dr. Van, however, is always running an hour late, so the afternoon will be longer.

Strange factoid:  last night, we watched "We Bought a Zoo," a feel-good movie (bad omen #1) that did not have one unpredictable moment in the entire two hours.  All was predictable not because there was any recognizable human (or animal, for that matter) behavior, but because it ticked every formulaic box.  I'm convinced that the more often a movie touts that it is based on a true story, the less likely it is to be credible on its own.  The based-on-a-true-story gambit is an old one.  One of the many purposes of the introduction to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is to add another layer of fiction by assuring an audience potentially skeptical of a fictive "romance" that the story is based on actual events.  Nabokov brilliantly satirizes this American habit in his intro to Lolita.  But, as so often, I digress.  What was strange was that about two-thirds of the way through the movie, which is set in California, when Matt Damon goes to Home Depot to buy supplies, there is a close-up of his swiping his credit or debit card.  And the card is from Topeka's own bank Capitol Federal Savings.  The name and the logo are clearly visible. 

I finally finished a very long slog through the gay novelist David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk.  It was one of Amazon's "Howard, we have a recommendation for you" choices, so I had downloaded it on my Kindle.  Although the subject matter (also based on a true story and real characters--will I never learn?) sounded interesting, it was 500 pages of the "unlived life."  Henry James is a master of that theme.  David Leavitt is not Henry James.  Now, after a number of reactions to my post debating burial vs. cremation, I've begun Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death Revisited.  I remembered that it was her book (plus Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One) that were so shocking about the funeral business sixty years ago.  Mitford updated her book in 1995, so it's already somewhat outdated, but it seems still applicable, and the first pages have made me laugh outloud.  "Trenchant" might be a good word to describe her wit.

And now it's time for "Up" with Chris Hayes, my favorite show of the week.

Morning, y'all.  I'm about to have me some cheesy grits.  Shouldn't some advisor have told Mitt that he'd eaten grits many times; he'd just called them polenta?  After five years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent in running for President, do you think when he's alone in the dark night of his soul, he admits to himself that people just don't like him very much?

In the last few days, a mutual friend put me back in touch with someone whom I knew years ago, who also was diagnosed with cancer (lung cancer in her case), and who had included an entry about it on her blog.  In reading the blog and in a subsequent e-mail, two of her reactions resonated with me.  First was her admission that when she heard the diagnosis and in subsequent weeks, she didn't feel any hope--and she felt guilty about that because she believed in the efficacy of thinking hopefully.  Fortunately for her, the surgery to remove the cancer was successful, and she is now cancer-free, though the next years will involve constant monitoring and thus a nagging worry. 

As for her, hope isn't a feeling I experienced--or still do.  But unlike her, I don't feel guilty or worry about my reaction.  That doesn't mean that I feel despair.  It's just that I'm not very good at looking ahead (or maybe it's my low EQ).  It is what it is (and que sera sera)--amazing how often I fall back on cliches.  Whatever chemical or biological reactions are taking place inside me are, in the long run, outside my control.  And in the short run, I just continue to take the chemo and others meds and then it's one day at a time.  I don't go to the oncologist full of trepidation or full of hope that some sort of miracle is taking place.  I'm tired of taking all the meds and the side effects that follow; I'm tired of all the small discomforts.  But I'm thankful for Mohamed and his love, for all the friends that support me, for all the interesting books and people in the world that amaze, amuse, and infuriate me.  And as for tomorrow, well, tomorrow's another day.  There seems to be an endless supply of cliches to fall back on.

The second connection I felt with my rediscovered friend is more symbolic.  At one point, she wondered aloud where they were going to put the hospital bed and was disappointed when her husband said he'd been wondering the same thing.  When I came home from the hospital, we brought the bed from the guest room downstairs and re-arranged the TV room to accommodate it.  Until I could manage the stairs, it was where I slept, and even afterwards, I often took naps there.  But I learned to manage the stairs after a few days, and I no longer take my afternoon naps downstairs, so there is really no need for the bed.  It would be nice to put the furniture back in order.  We don't do it, though, because the unspoken thought is that at some point, it's going to become necessary again.  So, too, we've got a lot of medical equipment in a room upstairs: an oversized walker (for the seven weeks that I wore the brace, I couldn't fit in a normal walker), a commode, and other once useful devices.  Like the bed, they remain in place, tacit symbols of the future.

This afternoon I have an appointment with the cardiologist.  I've almost forgotten that 18 months ago I had a heart attack.  That bit of medical history is lost among other concerns.  I always thought of myself as healthy, and then I turned 65 and my body revolted.  Damn!

Some thoughts on blogging:  It's now been about two months since I started blogging.  So far, I've had over 800 pageviews, which seems a pretty good number to me.  I've tried to add a counter to the page, but blogspot (which is free) doesn't seem to support that.  Sometimes I feel guilty that I haven't added pictures or videos or links just to make the blog more visually appealing, but it's really the narrative (and the many digressions, as indicated by my love of parentheses) that interests me and, I hope, my readers.

A number of people have indicated that they've tried to become followers, but have been unable to do so.  I have no idea why this is so, since in the settings, there are no restrictions on who can follow.  So, too, some people have tried to comment, gotten messages that their comments are accepted, and then never seen them appear.  They just seem to disappear into cyberspace.  I did change the setting there to accept even anonymous comments.  I don't know whether this will change anything or not.  A lot of people have sent their comments via e-mail, which is even better, since the messages are likely to be longer and more personal.

I've tried to find a rhythm of a post every three days or so.  I don't want the entries to be so frequent that reading them seems like an obligation, but also I don't want them to be so infrequent that readers forget about the blog.  It's hard, too, to limit the length of the posts.  I like to write (and talk--no surprise there), but I don't want to get carried away with myself.

The hardest part of doing the blog is having a precise sense of the audience.  In part, with many exceptions, I don't know who's reading the blog.  Friends that I thought would don't seem to be reading it (but I can't very well ask someone whether s/he's following it; it would sound as if I were trying to shame them), while there have many old friends and colleagues with whom I've been able to re-establish contact.  But writing a blog is very different from writing an e-mail with a specific reader in mind.  For one thing, it's public, so chronicles of personal quirks, which I often think make for funny reading, are ruled out.  And then lots of people who read the blog are also friends who already know much of what I recount. 

Tone is tricky too.  I think I can avoid being maudlin, and I don't want to be complain too much.  I'd like to be funnier..  I worry most about being too teachy (more so than being preachy); 45 years of being a prof makes me just want to explain and explicate.  I don't think doing the blog is therapeutic exactly, as a couple of readers have suggested.  More likely, it just lets me slip back into the role that I filled so happily for all those years.  Of all that I've written, the entry about Mohamed and what he means to me certainly got the most responses, all of them very touching.

I've resisted joining Facebook; I think I'm too obsessive to be able to restrain myself from spending way too much time there.  And I've resisted Twitter, since limiting myself to 140 characters would be too frustrating.  But blogging is very satisfying.  Thanks to all of you who've been keeping up and sending me good thoughts.

Cancer, shmancer, abi gesund.  I can still say that, though I know there'll be a moment when I'm not so casual about it.  For the moment, I feel as if I'm in, as I said, a holding pattern or, to borrow a religious metaphor (not fair, I know, for an atheist) limbo.  All of the discomforts that I've complained about come from the consequences of what happened before I started the chemo (the problems with the left shoulder because the cancer had destroyed a large part of the scapula, but with chemo, radiation, and therapy, that seems to have stabilized, and the problems with the right leg, but now I have a titanium and plastic femur and ball joint, so there's just the stiffness and the inability to perform certain actions) or from the side effects of the medicine: fatigue, elevated blood pressure, and diarrhea.  I've gotten better at powering through the fatigue; instead of three naps a day, I'm down to one 90-minute sleep in the afternoon.  I take three medications to keep the blood pressure in check, and they seem to work, though of course they have their own side effects.  The diarrhea is the most debilitating.  There are days when I don't feel as if I can leave the house, and I never leave without a supply of Imodium (with its own side effects).  But it's embarrassing to write about and not all that pleasant, I"m sure, to read about.

Other than those problems, I feel pretty good, haven't changed too much physically, and am cheerful.  As one of my friends from California asked yesterday, "Are you sure you're really sick?"   And sometimes I'm not.  A month or so ago, I asked the doctor whether I could take a break from the chemo just to give my system a rest.  I was thinking of a month or so but asked more modestly for a two-week break.  The doctor looked horrified.  "The most we ever allow is three days," he said, "and then only if the patient just can't support the chemo."  So much for that idea!  I may feel like a walking bundle of chemicals, but the chemo is obviously doing what it's supposed to, and I know that I'm very lucky that it is and that I can take it orally.

Still, for someone who's always thought of himself as energetic and adventurous, the limitations are frustrating.  I've cried only once in all of this ("shed a tear," as my mother would've said, not sobbed).  I was watching a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations," this one set in Paris.  I've spent so much time in France and feel so at home there that the thought that I'd never go back again caused some tears to trickle down my face.  I know: many people save up for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris, so I really have nothing to complain about. 

The days here in limbo have settled into a routine.  I don't get bored, and the days don't seem long.  But I do feel as if, since I still have my health, and abi gesund, I should be doing something more important or creative or meaningful.  I don't know what that would be or where I'd get the energy to do it.  What I'd really like is totally irrational--not only to do, but to know: I'd like to know where on the trajectory, the arc of this disease I am.  I count the months.  Everyone of us is on the same trajectory, and almost none of us knows where we are.  So I know my question is unanswerable.  As Eliot said, "We're all dying . . . with a little patience."  But I'm not very patient--in this case, not for death, of course, but just for a sense of my place on the arc.  If I knew, would I do?  I don't know.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I had noticed I make little groaning sounds when performing several activities.  In The New Yorker that came Saturday, there's a cartoon of an older man entering a room and announcing to his wife, "I've decided to start groaning every time I have to move my body a little bit."  Coincidence?  Or just great (old) minds thinking (and groaning) alike?

Cancer, shmancer--that's probably easier to say now that I'm in some sort of holding pattern than it was immediately after the diagnosis (and surgery) and than it will perhaps be later.  Other than the emotional reaction, I was also faced initially with practical decisions, and given the prognosis, they seemed imperatives.  Even now, I can't help counting.  The average prognosis for stage four kidney cancer is 10-11 months, and that seemed especially short since the cancer had metastasized at least six months before I got an accurate diagnosis last April.  Dr. Van, the renal oncologist, didn't bring a prognosis up, but I thought it would be strange not to ask.  And, of course, by that time, I'm found the same information on all the sites (Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, NIH, kidneycancer.org, etc.--the Net is a mixed blessing) that I'd looked at before it became too discouraging to continue.

Task number one was to bring my will up to date.  My closest relatives are cousins, but because my father was the youngest of seven and I wasn't born till my mother was nearly 40, my cousins were 15 or so years older than I, and I never knew them very well.  I know that there were eight of them, that one died years ago, and that one is still living.  About the other six, I have no idea.  There is one in particular that I could imagine suddenly appearing to make a claim.  She's a creepy born again Christian whom I haven't seen in many years.  She once told me that as a gay atheist, I was doubly damned, but that she sat up nights weeping and praying over me.  (I assume by now she's realized the futility of that and caught up on her sleep.)  She also told me that she never put a cake in the oven without praying that it would turn out.  I can see her now: Tebowing in front of the oven as her red velvet cake bakes.  On the one hand, I wondered which got more fervent prayers: my "soul" or her cake.  More seriously, I thought that if I were a god and "let" thousands of children a day, their bodies often covered with flies, starve, I'd be (al)mightily insulted that she thought we shared the same nutritional priorities.  Our relationship never improved.  (I see that "our" is ambiguous; I meant my cousin's and mine, but it's equally true of her god and me.)  At my mother's funeral, my cousin caused a scene because the funeral director put my partner, rather than her, in the lead car to the cemetery.  Several years later, since I was her only cousin and her parents had died, I wrote suggesting a truce.  She wrote back that, of course she had forgiven me because she was a Christian and that's what Christians do, but she was surprised that as a non-Christian, I even understood forgiveness.  She added a P.S. saying that her mother had lent my mother (they were sisters) a watercolor she had done and would I please return it.  So much for that attempt.  At any rate, the will was duly made current.

I also needed to redo the durable power of attorney and powers of health care decisions.  I didn't (and don't) think it's fair to ask Mohamed to make those kinds of powerfully emotional choices.  I've known my lawyer (both professionally and somewhat socially) for three decades, so I gave him those powers.  He knows me well enough to know what I would want but isn't emotionally invested.

Finally, the lawyer gave me a thick binder in which to keep all these documents.  The last section consisted of pages and pages of questions about funeral and burial/cremation arrangements.  What I'd really like is what, I've discovered, is now called a "green funeral."   My Whitmanesque side likes the notion of returning to the earth: "When I die / Look for me under your boot soles."  I don't see any reason to be embalmed.  It (like cremation) is prohibited for Muslims and for Orthodox Jews, as are fancy coffins.  Shrouds do for Muslims, plain pine boxes for strictly observant Jews.  America is one of the few countries where embalming is routine.  In Europe, for example, you have to be gravely important to be embalmed.  But the idea of Mohamed trying to convince a funeral director to skip embalming and choosing the very plainest and cheapest coffin available seemed like asking a lot.  So I left the burial option unchecked and went for cremation.  I suppose Washburn would frown on my ashes being scattered around Morgan Hall.

So all that is taken care of.  Some of it might be easier if gays could get married.  We've thought about going to Iowa, my home state, where gay marriage is legal, but of course it would have no consequences in Kansas or nationally.  Symbolic gestures are rich, but their resonance doesn't extend to the courts.

Cancer/shmancer (part deux).  I woke up this morning to find an e-mail from one of my oldest and best friends "complaining" that while I had mentioned other friends in the blog, she had yet to make an appearance.  (Here you go, CALM.)  One question she asked was whether in the daily routine some things had become less important; "stupid politics" was one of her examples.  But for me, at least, the answer is no.  This isn't an original thought, but I don't think a cancer diagnosis changed me; it simply made me more like what I already was.  Politics does seem vastly more stupid this year than most, but I can't stop myself from watching the infuriating debates, discussions, and analyses by politicans and pundits.  (No more so than I can stop my rising blood pressure when I hear "pundants" or designers talking about their "ascetic" or the constant use of "very unique.") 

I was awake for about 15 minutes this morning before I had a blood pressure surge.  The two-hour topic today on "Morning Joe" was education, and the first two interviewees were Michelle Rhee (not a fan here) and Gov. Chris Christie (ditto).  There was nothing surprising in their talking points: unions are bad, charter schools are good, and we need more evaluation of schools and teachers.  Wrong, questionable, and wrong.  If there were two words over the last decade that almost make me glad I'm not still teaching, they'd be assessment and rubric.  No matter what idea came up in discussions of, say, revamping the general education program, someone was bound to say, "But how can we assess that?"  And if the assessment wasn't "objective" and couldn't be tied to a rubric, the idea would die.  Perhaps that's why the various committees on general education are now in their sixth year.

Luckily, "Morning Joe" later had some really solid guests and a smart discussion.  One of the most valuable voices on education is Diane Ravitch, whose two-part series in the last two issues of the New York Review of Books gives just a brief suggestion of her take on what works and what doesn't in American education.  The last issue also contains a beautiful reminiscence by the widow of the historian Tony Judt, who died in 2010 of ALS.  During the seven weeks I was in the abduction brace, when it cut into my skin, when I couldn't take it off so that Mohamed had to wipe me down every day, when one of the happiest moments of the day was just before sleep when Mohamed would loosen it just enough so that I could breathe comfortably, and when I sometimes thought that I really couldn't do it any longer, I'd remember Judt, writing (dictating, really) his last thoughtful essays on memory as he wasted away.  And thinking of him and his courage, I'd have tell myself that there were a lot worse situations than an awkward brace.

This isn't at all what I planned to write about when I started the post.  Nor did I expect to look up and see snow falling for only the second time this winter.  The first snow of the year always, but especially this year, makes me think of Frost's poem "The Onset."  The speaker says, "I almost stumble looking up and round, / As one who overtaken by the end / Gives up his errand, and lets death descend / Upon him where he is, with nothing done / To evil, no important triumph won, / More than if life had never been begun."  The second (and last) stanza seems to console us, since "winter death has never tried / The earth but it has failed," yet the consolation evaporates more quickly than the snow as what's left behind by the disappearing snow (compared to a snake) is nothing white (here, as so often in Frost, a sign of death) except a birch (the natural world), a clump of houses (the social world), and a church (the spiritual world).  There's nothing to be frightened of.

Next time I'll stay more focused.