I haven't done a poem in a long time.  Since it's another very cold and windy time in Topeka, there's not much new to report, so today seems like a good occasion to explicate a poem.  The only real news is that classes have begun again for Mohamed and a degree audit has confirmed that this is his last semester before graduation.  And we've been notified by the USCIS that Mohamed's green card application has been received and accepted.

The last two articles I published combined my love of linguistics and literature.  The longer one was an analysis of Melville's use of nominalization in his strange (and only heterosexual) novel Pierre (despite the subject, the article was somewhat light-hearted--or as much so as one can be in a discussion of Melville).  The other was a very brief explication of a sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks:

A Note on Sonnet 2 of Brooks’s THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

 

What shall I give my children? Who are poor,

Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,

Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand

No velvet and no velvety velour;

But who have begged me for a brisk contour,

Crying that they are quasi, contraband

Because unfinished, graven by a hand

Less than angelic, admirable or sure.

My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.

But I lack access to my proper stone.

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice,

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

 

The title of Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet sequence “The Children of the

Poor” enunciates the theme and variations of the poems. From the first sonnet

about people who have no children to the last about the death of a child,

Brooks contemplates the uneasy and ambivalent relationships in poor families.

A mother whose children, while making no demands for luxury, still cry

out for a sense of completion that the mother cannot give them narrates the

second sonnet. The octave focuses on the voices of the children; the sestet, in

three sentences, describes the mother’s frustration at having “mode, design,

device,” but lacking “access to my proper stone” (9, 10).

In the last four lines, the only sentence in the sestet to be longer than one

line, the narrative voice says:

 

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice,

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

 

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

 




 

 

 

The word “ratify” echoes the other legalistic language in the poem: “adjudged”

 

and “contraband.” The alliteration of the hard p in “plenitude” and “plan” (and

“proper” in the previous line) contrasts with the liquid l sound so prevalent in

the poem. But what claims the reader’s attention is something quite different

from normal prosodic considerations.

The verb “bear” is transitive. It requires an object. And so the reader

is faced here with a syntactic interpretive choice—nd finally, as for the

narrator, an unsatisfactory conclusion. If one were hearing the poem, the

next word, “Across,” would suggest a common expression—“to bear a

cross”—ut that possibility is ruled out when the listener discovers that

“Across” is one word, not two, and a preposition, not a noun. But what

is the object of “Across”? It could be the gerund “freezing,” modified by

the adjectival noun “autumn.” That leaves the reader with two adverbials

after “bear”— prepositional phrase and “everywhere”—lthough

still without a direct object.” One might also argue that “autumn” is the

object of the preposition, so that there is a shorter, temporal prepositional

phrase (“Across an autumn”), followed by a gerund (“freezing”), which

serves as the direct object, and then “everywhere,” the second adverbial,

one of place.

The problem with that reading, however, is that it violates a constitutive

rule of English grammar. In English, unlike many languages (as any teacher of

nonnative speakers will attest), native speakers do not place adverbs, however

flexible their position otherwise, between a verb and its direct object. Those

for whom English is a first language do not create sentences like “I studied

diligently the material” or “I read carefully the poem.”

Finally, therefore, none of the three readings I have suggested is satisfactory—the first because it

 

cannot be integrated into the rest of the line,

the second because it leaves the verb without an object, and the third

because it produces a sentence that is not English.

And yet that very inconclusiveness is perfectly apt for a poem whose theme

is the failure to complete. The first sonnet in the sequence ends with this

phrase: “And makes a sugar of / The malocclusions, the inconditions of love”

(13–4). Here the reader encounters a sort of “mal-conclusion,” an altogether

fitting trailing off, leaving the reader, like the children, feeling “unfinished.”

 

 

 

  

 

  

 

  
   

Relief!  The green card application is finally in the mail.  It's not unaccompanied by self-reproach, however.  Why did we wait so long to start the process?  We were married in July, so why not begin in August rather than December?  Why, once we had begun, did we proceed so slowly?  I usually pride myself on my efficiency at this sort of thing.  I've certainly filled out enough application forms in my life.  And why did I keep overlooking requirements so that each time we thought we were done, I'd discover something else that needed to be included.  And now there's the lingering suspicion that the tiniest error or omission is going to be a new roadblock, delaying action.  For every two- or three-page form, there were a dozen pages of instructions.  Could I have missed something?  The next steps are to wait for confirmation of receipt, set up an appointment for biometrics (electronic fingerprints, eye scans), hope for an interview, and then wait for the results. 

The most running around involved Mohamed's medical tests.  It took the "civil surgeon" (a term no one I know had ever heard of) two weeks to return our calls, and she was the only one in Topeka.  The trip to her office was surreal--an old house in an industrial section of north Topeka.  On the second trip, I noticed that there were only two other houses in the neighborhood, and both of them were boarded up.  Across the street was what was once, I think, a church, converted into a nightclub, but now also boarded up with the front iron grill flapping in the wind.  The office was open only by appointment.  On the first visit, the very chatty office manager had Mohamed fill out forms, which he then typed into his beloved IBM Selectric.  The doctor started the TB test, but couldn't find a vein from which to draw blood, so we had to go to a hospital for that.  Two days later, there was the 25-minute drive to the office for a 20-second confirmation that Mohamed did not indeed have TB.  Mohamed couldn't have his vaccinations until after the TB results, so a couple of days later we went to the county health agency for three immunizations.  Mohamed didn't have to wait long (45 minutes for a public agency seemed efficient to me).  When he was done, the nurse said, "You're good to go."  Mohamed asked where he paid, and that seemed to throw the office into a tizzy.  It was obviously a question they didn't hear often.  The first problem was finding the credit card machine.  Once everything was ready, the administrator asked how much he wanted to pay and was incredulous when he said, "All."  Then we had to drive home, since the civil surgeon wouldn't be in her office till two in the afternoon.   I crashed for thirty minutes, and then it was off again.  After a few more minutes of Selectric typing, the results were sealed in an envelope, which went into the application (we were given a photocopy, so there won't be any surprises), Mohamed stuck a pin into a world map, and we were on our way.

All that was left was to write three checks for the filing fees.  This should have been the easy part, if not the most pleasant.  But I dreaded it--not for the obvious reason but because my handwriting is shaky and (and I believe this is the word most often used) spidery.  It's often virtually illegible.  I had filled out the first form by hand, and when I tried to read back a series of numbers, even I couldn't read the last one.  (Luckily, all the green card forms suddenly appeared online in .pdf format, so handwriting was no longer a factor.)  All my life I've had when used to be called an Intention Tremor but is now called a Benign Essential Tremor.  My father had it too, though you couldn't mention it to him, as his coffee slopped out of the cup, because it made him angry to have it pointed out.  My hands shake--not all the time but when I intend to do something, and the more I'm aware of the intention, the more they shake.  It's extremely inconvenient and often embarrassing.  As juniors in high school, we had to serve the seniors dinner at the prom.  While the rest of my classmates were laughingly carrying several plates, it took me two hands to get one glass of water from the kitchen to the table.  Travelers' checks were a nightmare because I could never get the second signature to match the first.  After watching something on TV, I was trying to explain to Mohamed the difference between Catholic and Protestant views of communion.  As a teen-age Methodist I dreaded the once-every-three-months communion--tiny glasses of grape juice in a metal tray.  I'd get my neighbor to hold the tray so that I could use to two hands to try to extricate the glass.  Grape juice slopped everywhere, and the glass clanked against the tray.  Macedonians and Bulgarians served coffee in tiny cups that absolutely had to be filled to the brim.  I'd have to persuade them to set the cups on the table so I could try to pick them up with both hands.  The chair of the English department in Morocco was always helpful in taking them from the hosts, though at one point he told me he thought I had probably been an alcoholic who was suffering from the DTs.  Students sometimes asked me whether I had Parkinson's disease.

Handwriting, especially signing my name, was also sometimes a problem (though I actually liked writing on black/green/whiteboard in front of class).  But who writes by hand any more?  The checks I was going to write were the first checks I'd written in two months.  ATMs, EFTs--the joys of the modern electronic world.   So I hunched over the desk, shooed Mohamed away, and gathered my checkbook and pen.  In the 'pay to' box I had to write 'US Department of Homeland Security," no abbreviations allowed said the instructions.  Steadying my left (writing) hand with my right, I filled out the first line.  It wasn't beautiful, but it fit.  Three checks later, success--of a sort. 

Now it's time to relax, if a bit apprehensively, as the process unfolds, outside of our control.  Blood has been drawn, photos have been taken, and sweaty checks have been written.

It's been a busy--and hence exhausting--last few days.  Wednesday, our L.A. friend Richard, who was in Kansas City for the rollout of the new H&R Block commercials, drove to Topeka for a visit.  As I've mentioned, Richard became the star of last year's campaign for Block after answering a company e-mail asking for volunteers for their ads.  After a lot of winnowing, he ended as the primary spokesperson in a series of black and white commercials.  He hadn't told me about his new-found job, and I remember watching TV last year and suddenly there was Richard on the screen.  And once he was there, he was there often.  This year he's the focus once again.  We went to dinner at the Rowhouse, Topeka's best restaurant by far.  I usually prefer the second floor (it's in an old rowhouse, as the name suggests), despite steep and uneven stairs, as quieter.  Wednesday night there was a large and exuberant party in the next room, and then a party of three large and very loud diners was seated at the next table.  One of them complained about the portion sizes; another watched TV on his cell phone during the meal. 

The dinner was delicious.  We always get the tasting menu: amuse-bouche, salad, soup, vegetarian main dish, two other main courses, and three desserts--all moderately small but satisfying portions.  It was fun to catch up, especially learning about the making of the Block commercials (and how lucrative they were, even though they ran for only slightly more than three months).  This year's commercials debut today, so when you see them and a bow-tied main actor (and see them you will), that's Richard.  I had my three hours of alertness, but just before the dessert course, I crashed.  Still, I managed to eat the dessert, and it was great to see Richard, whom I hadn't seen in probably six years.

Thursday morning, we went for Mohamed's green card physical to the one civil surgeon in Topeka, the doctor who had been so difficult to contact.  The office was about as far from our house as possible, one of two houses remaining in what is now an industrial section of town.  We were the only clients there, and Doug, the office manager, was just as chatty in person as on the phone.  Mohamed filled out numerous forms, which he gave to Doug.  Suddenly, I heard a familiar sound from long ago: the whirr of forms being inserted into an electric typewriter.  And then the sound of the IBM Selectric.  I hadn't heard that sound in years, yet it was completely and immediately recognizable.  Doug assured us that they kept no electronic records; everything was on paper.  The house itself looked as if it hadn't been touched since about 1955.  After the accumulation of many pieces of paper, Mohamed went in for the first step of his physical: a TB test and blood work.  Unfortunately, the doctor couldn't find a vein from which to draw blood, so we had to go to the hospital for the drawing of the blood.  Later this morning, we go back for the civil surgeon who will examine the TB test.  Next week Mohamed will get three vaccinations, and once that's done, it's back to the Twilight Zone house for the final gathering of papers, which will be given to Mohamed in a sealed envelope.

Friday we had an early morning appointment at the Cancer Center in KC--just for blood work and a consultation.  I decided that there wasn't really any point in making the journey and that we could do the consultation over the phone.  Mohamed thought we ought to go.  I cleverly forgot to set the alarm, so by the time we were awake, it was late for the appointment.  I called, and the doctor promptly called back.  The good news was the echocardiogram was normal.  I had been a little apprehensive; who wants heart problems on top of cancer?  I'm going back on the Votrient, though I've decided to try taking it in the evening rather than the morning.  I'm not sure why, since the three-week break didn't affect the fatigue at all.  We set up appointments for four weeks from now during which I'll have the full battery, including full skeletal x-rays and CT scans. 

The chemo choices involve quality vs. quantity of life.  But for the moment, though the quality isn't what I had hoped for, it's certainly not terrible.  Life is diminished; there are many limitations.  But I'm not in pain.  I have a husband who loves me and for some inexplicable reason thinks that this 68-year-old body is still sexy.  He's an attentive caregiver without being intrusive--a tricky balance to achieve.  My mind still works.  Life is still as interesting and entertaining and occasionally infuriating as ever.  I still have a wonderful network of friends, also interesting and entertaining and occasionally infuriating.  I'm greedy.  If the chemo increases the quantity of life, then I'm willing to put up with the not-so-desirable side effects.  Cancer, schmancer, abi gesund.

The Arctic Vortex seems to have retreated northward after several days of extreme cold, snow, and dreary skies--days when it just seemed easier to stay inside.  The next few days, however, are going to involve venturing out.

Hanging over us for several weeks have been glitches in the green card application process.  The latest one involved Mohamed's having a physical from a "civil surgeon," only one of whom existed in Topeka.  Her office seemed, according to Google maps, to be in a residential area of North Topeka.  When we called, an answering machine gave no indication that we'd reached a medical facility, just saying we reached a certain number (different from the one we dialed) and to leave a message.  After two weeks of no returned calls, we checked the USCIS website again, and suddenly there was a new civil surgeon.  Moreover, she used to run the health center at Washburn, so we knew her and breathed a big sigh of relief that we had an alternative.  When we contacted her, the office manager said that he realized that they were "still" on the list (how could it be 'still' when they had just appeared?), but they no longer offered the service.  Finally, on Sunday afternoon, the civil surgeon called back, saying she had had the flu, and advising us to contact her office manager at a different number.  We called on Monday, got the same uninformative message, left our numbers, and heard nothing.  Ditto Tuesday morning.  By Tuesday afternoon, I had worked myself into a snit and called back ready to leave a scathing message.  Instead, I actually got the logorrhea-suffering office manager, who chattered on and on:  "Now, don't worry about bringing a pocket full of change.  We don't have any parking meters."  "Our pipes froze yesterday, and that's why I didn't return any phone calls."  "We're the only civil surgeon in the state who guarantees our work.  We have a 99.97% acceptance rate, and it was only ruined by someone who put her maiden name in the box for the married name."  But 30 minutes later, we had an appointment for tomorrow at noon, so the last step before submitting materials ought to be behind us.

Richard, a friend from Los Angeles, will be here for dinner tonight.  He was a CFO who retired several years ago, but who comes out of retirement during tax season because he loves to do taxes.  He works for H&R Block, a Kansas City company, and last year they sent around an e-mail asking for volunteers for their ad campaign.  Richard answered, was chosen, and became the "star" of the campaign, which was directed by the famous documentarian Errol Morris.  The ads were in black and white with Richard in a bowtie as papers fluttered down around him.  Morris also did this year's commercials, which will be rolled out tomorrow, and Richard is in  KC for the launch.  He's driving from the airport to visit us, and we'll take him out to Topeka's one really good restaurant.

Near the beginning of my blogging, I wrote an entry on what not to say to a person living with cancer.  For several years, there was a small and strange group of people who got together once a year or so for breakfast or dinner.  At the last (in both senses of the word) get-together, Dave, one of the group, spent the entire dinner interrupting people to enumerate his list of complaints.  On and on they went.  At the end of the meal he pulled me aside to say, "Since you're not going to be alive for my funeral, I just want you to know I've never been happier in my life."  He died last Thursday.  In what I'm sure seemed a clever idea at one point, he decided to write his own obituary in the first person: "I was taken aback when I awoke this morning to discover that I was dead."  He ended with "I just want you to know that I've never been happier in my life"--a comment which had somewhat different connotations when he was writing the obituary than when it appeared.

When the group first started, the one couple among us hosted the breakfasts.  The last time at their house, the wife made pancakes at the table, transporting the batter in a rather strange Rubbermaid tray or box rather than in a bowl, thus leaving a trail of pancake batter from the kitchen to the dining room.  When breakfast was over and we were carrying things back into the kitchen, the husband looked at the bowl rather quizzically and said, "I wonder why Jean chose this for the batter.  It's normally a litter box for the cats."  After that, the meals were held in restaurants.

Friday will mark three weeks without the Votrient.  The stomach problems, as had happened with the occasional shorter breaks, cleared up almost immediately.  But the fatigue continues--three crashes a day and not much energy during the wakeful periods.  We'll see the oncologist in  KC on Friday, get the results of the echocardiogram, and decide what to do next with the chemo.  Mohamed worries when I take a break, and after a week this time, he said, "You're feeling better.  Maybe you should start taking the Votrient again."  I understand his feelings because the chemo has been very effective over the last years.  But I held out for the full three weeks.  I'll blog again on Saturday to let you know what we decide will be the next step.

Happy New Year!

I've run the gamut, A to Z
Three cheers and dammit, C'est la vie
I got through all of last year, and I'm here
Lord knows, at least I was there, and I'm here
Look who's here, I'm still here

--Stephen Sondheim - "I'm Still Here (From ""Follies")

Last year, I made just one resolution: to be here today.  It's one of the few resolutions I've ever fulfilled, so, since I'm on a roll, I'll make the same resolution this year--to be here on January 1, 2015 to renew the resolution.

We went to KU Med yesterday for an echocardiogram.  The techs there had said it would take 45 minutes to an hour, but I got right in, and the procedure took only about 20-25 minutes.  Evidently, chemo can be hard on the heart, so this test was to see how my heart was holding out after the 2½ years of chemo.  The results will be ready in a week or so, just in time for our next meeting with Dr. Van on the 10th. 

Afterwards, we had lunch with a guy I dated for a few months in 1979, the year of Mohamed's birth.  I'd seen him once only briefly in the intervening 34 years, and after all that time, we didn't even recognize each other.  Once connected, we went to the row of restaurants on nearby 39th Street.  Most were jammed, but we found a decent Chinese restaurant, and spent the next hour or so catching up.  At some point during the meal, having missed my morning nap, I crashed.  But luckily, Mohamed was there to drive home. 

The evening was quiet.  I made it up till the ball drop in Times Square and figured that was close enough.

We both wish everyone all the best in 2014--love and peace and joy.