Happy Sunday Here: No Real Reason!

We should be freaked out.

But we just aren't!

Last time I wrote, we were pretty much absolutely gonna get that scan going. Or not. :)

As of today, we are MAYBE PROBABLY going to call Wake Forest Big Oncologist on Tuesday and at least make sure we are on their radar and they haven't forgotten about us. (Why haven't they scheduled a scan?)

Or not.

Meanwhile, we are laughing more than we've ever laughed in our lives. Why? I don't know! It's not due to some Hallmark Emo Reason like "Oh, every day the grass is beautiful, for we knoweth not the future!" Really, it's not like that. WE are not like that. But for unknown reasons, we have been laughing a ridiculous amount, and adoring our time together, just being lazy.

"I love our lazy days together," he said to me on Saturday. "And I want you to know that you are so much fun to live with."

Wow. Note to self: memorize THAT line for life. Well, yeah, I GUESS so! Husband of the year for saying THAT.

Okay, but now, not to contradict myself, and say something intense, I did receive a poem this week that moved me to the soles of my feet--no--actually, to the sole of my soul, and I want to show it to you. It was a birthday gift poem to me from my beloved Anna, luminous, love-illuminati grandmother to about fifty amazing young people, and unofficial fairy godmother to me (as I hope to be for young people, all my life, if I can follow her example).

Is this post inchoate so far? I hope so. Because life is.

And also isn't.

This poem, while being about birthdays, is also about, oh....terminal illnesses, say the scholars, and candles on the night of one's passing as well as on one's birthday, and things that really matter. It even happens to have the phrase "well scans" in it--just a synchronicity, but....a synchronicity that speaks.

I'm not saying I understand this poem. At all! And if you get frustrated by things you don't understand, then take a deep breath before reading this poem.

It will work you over.

But the last line is worth your trouble. I promise. I can't get it out of my mind.

Here you go. It's called "The Only Card I Got on My Birthday Was From An Insurance Man":

"On upland farms into abandoned wells
On a line meridian high
state by state my birthday star comes on
and peers, my birthday night,
and in my eyes it stands while past its light
the world and I turn, just and far, till
every well scans over the year like spokes
of a wheel returning the long soft look of the sky.

Star in a well, dark message: when I die,
my glance drawn over galaxies,
all through one night let a candle nurse the dark
to mark this instant of what I was,
this once--not putting my hand out
blessing for business' sake any frail markers
of human years: we want real friends or none;
what's genuine will accompany every man.

Who travel these lonely wells can drink that star."
---William Stafford