I seldom complain about my hair. I’m just happy to have hair.
I’m also happy to have a fantastic hair stylist. I’ve mentioned him before on this blog. His name is Art and he has a small practice of clients he takes by referral only, and if you piss him off, he will stop taking your calls.
He’s that good.
He’s one of my favorite people, and when he says he enjoys his work because he likes working with his clients, I believe him. He’s been cutting my hair since it started to grow back, and he has managed to make me feel decent about myself through a lot of bad hair days.
The cancer books say “you may notice changes in the color or texture of your hair as it grows back after chemotherapy.” I’ve noticed that “changes” is cancerspeak for OMGWTFBBQ this sh*t is really f*cked up.
It wasn’t so much the texture of my hair that demonstrated “changes,” but the color. It was my brother who pointed it out to me. “OMG your hair. It looks exactly like happy cat,” he said. And he took me out for a cheeseburger.
It was after that that I finally took my friend’s advice and called up Art.
I know a lot of True Believers in Natural Living After Cancer frown on coloring your hair after cancer, but after doing some research, which consists mostly of the “ask your doctor” variety, I put hair color in the same category as using soap and toothpaste.
“Please make me look normal” I begged Art on our first meeting. “I look like Happy Cat.”
“Well, you can have a cheeseburger. And I can definitely make your hair look normal while it grows out.”
After I had been going to him for a few months, Art told me that chemo had turned my skin a strange orange color and that I should stop wearing orange, red, or yellow and stick to blues, cool greens, and black, which I did.
At some point, my hair grew out to a reasonable length and my conversations with Art were less about how best to look normal and more about what to do with my hair.
“I think I’d like to go blonder,” I would say. And Art would say, “That’s fine, there are a lot of hair stylists in Dallas who would be happy to dye your hair blonde, but I won’t do it.”
“How about red?”
“Honey, you already look orange. You’d look like an oompa loompa.”
This conversation has been going on for two years.
“Blonde?”
“Nope.”
Today was different.
“I think I’d like to go dark golden blonde, like J-Lo. I promise to wear makeup every day so I don’t look washed out.”
“You could totally pull that off. Let’s do it.”
It’s not drastic. He just gave me golden blonde highlights.
I know it looked good because Art was beaming at me in a way I haven’t seen him beam before.
“You look fabulous,” he told me as I pulled on my beige sweater.
“Even in a beige sweater,” I said.
“Beige should only be worn in New England. On the beach. In the summer,” he said.
“It’s okay because I have a red scarf,” I said.
“You’re learning,” said Art. “And your hair looks terrific.”
It makes a world of difference in how I feel.
Today, driving to pick the kids up from school, I pulled up at a red light next to a guy in a brand new black Corvette convertible, with the top down. The convertible driver was my age about ten years older than me, a slim guy with a greying beard and Nantucket red baseball cap.
I resisted the urge to rev the engine of my mommobile in a show of hipster irony, but the urge was there.
After we got home, I finally had the nerve to do walk over to the guys building another McMansion on my street and ask them about the house: was it sold yet (yes), for how much (they didn’t know), whether they were planning to put in a pool (no) and when they would be finished (two months).
Objectively, I know that people do not look at each other that closely. I look much the same as I did this morning, before Art did his magic. The change in my hair is subtle — I’ve gone from brown to glamorous brown.
It makes a world of difference.
I’m in Baltimore visiting my younger brother this weekend. I got here Friday night.
“What do you want to do while you are here, he emailed me before I left.
“Hang out.”
“Eat.”
“Go to the aquarium.” Baltimore is home to The National Aquarium, and I like fish.
I don’t think the term “fish nerd” has gained in currency, but it describes me accurately. I like fish. I’ve liked fish ever since my mother sent me to Marine Biology Summer Camp at the Miami Science Museum, back in the 70s when the popular conception of a typical marine biologist’s day at the office involved apricot brandy and the need for a bigger boat.
I like the smell of fish, not so much as broiling in lemon juice and dill, or shoyu and ginger in my broiler (although I do like that smell) as the smell of a low tide, of the salt spray in the air, the smell of seaweed, of a mangrove swamp. I like the way they dart around or graze. I like the way they shoal up together, or the way they lurk. Fish are beautiful, or very, very ugly, but always interesting, and the only reason I am not a marine biologist is the same reason I’m not a doctor: I am a terrible scientist.
I do like fish, though, even though I don’t spend my life studying them, and my brother’s loft apartment in downtown Baltimore is a fifteen minute walk to the aquarium. As soon as I got into town, we headed over.
It was all there: the real coral, the fake coral with the real fish, the tropical frogs hiding in their terrariums, the shark pool.
We decided that the best perk of being a James Bond villain would be living in a house with a shark pool, but that the salt spray it would throw up would mean that you couldn’t have anything else nice in the house, and it would be better to have books than sharks. Even sharks with lasers.
I decided the best part of having brothers, and going to visit them, is being able to have conversations like that.
We finished our tour of The National Aquarium with a visit to a special exhibition called “Jellyfish Invasion.”
As much as I love fish, I don’t like jellyfish.
When we lived in Tokyo, I used to take my daughter in her stroller on long walks, and one of my favorite routes took us along the shaded lanes by the canals and rivers where moon jellies would sometimes swarm up from Tokyo Bay.
I would look at them, floating in the tea-dark water, for hours while my baby slept, and then walk home in the late afternoon light which I would enjoy all the more for my venture into the shadows by where dark things dwelt.
“You really don’t like jellyfish,” said my brother.
“No, I don’t. They give me the creeps.” I did not tell him I had to walk out of the movie theater during the jellyfish scene in Finding Nemo.
Most brothers, sensing weakness, would seize on it, but not mine. He was curious.
“Giant venomous globs of snot,” he called them. “But you love gross stuff!”
It’s true. I do.
“Not jellyfish. They are creepy.”
“My search for the visceral finds its apex in primordial gobs of unintelligent goo from before the dawn of time,” I said, and he cracked up.
I really do hate jellyfish, and it’s not just that they are gross.
I hate the way they sneak up on me and sting me. They do it when I am scuba diving, swarms of tiny ones that leave a rash everywhere my wet suit isn’t. They do it when I’m playing in the waves on the beach, or floating in a calm sea under the gentle sun, in what would be the giant amniotic sac of Mother Earth, sheltering us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, at least for a few minutes, when wham, along comes a Portuguese man o’ war, or a piece of a tentacle of one. I love the ocean, but I would enjoy it much more if I didn’t know that somewhere, swarms of jellyfish are gathering, and there is an unbroken chain of water molecules connecting me to them. It’s the transitive property of touching. Six-year-old children understand this property very well.
According to marine biologists, men and women who share my passion for the ocean and its denizens, but are also good at science, jellyfish are propagating in record numbers as a direct result of slight increases in ocean temperatures.
If temperatures rise much more, I’m going to turn on the tap of my giant bathtub in my giant McMansion and jellyfish are going to flow out of the faucet into my bubble bath.
Cimate change is terrifying, but it’s a distant terror.
Jellyfish are different. I don’t care how far away they are. They can swarm in the Sea of Japan and I still feel menaced.
“You can make a difference” the wall text at the exhibition told me.
I already do what I can to reduce my carbon footprint, and so the happy feeling of self-satisfaction swept past my consciousness. But wait! There’s more!
“Don’t fertilize your lawn.”
I already knew that fertilizer run-off is a major contributor to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, but what I did not know is that the “dead” zone is actually crawling with jellyfish. Admittedly, most of it the nitrogen pollution that is causing the dead zone comes from giant agribusiness, but residential lawns are a significant factor, and I do live in the Trinity River watershed.
If I can keep the jellyfish away by planting a native lawn and fertilizing it with compost and composted manure, then so much the better.
I have a great dog. It’s true.
She’s a white German shepherd and she’s not the smartest dog in the world, but she’s funny, and she doesn’t chew stuff (much) and doesn’t bark except at squirrels, other dogs, and people whom she doesn’t recognize when they walk into my house or yard without my specifically welcoming them. I left a key in the back yard once for a friend of mine to take a look at something that was wrong with my house while I was out of town, and I’ll probably never get the whole story, but all he says is “She did her job. She is a good watchdog.”
She lets the kids sleep on her.
She lets the kids play Star Wars lightsaber battle with her and doesn’t bite the lightsaber.
She sneaks into my room and steals my fuzzy slippers and sniffs them.
I can take her on long walks by the lake because she looks scary as all get-out, and I suspect if someone tried to mess with me, she would rip out their throat. Before we got the dog, I was afraid to walk down there by myself.
When I am taking a nap in my bedroom, she curls up by the door.
I’d take her everywhere with me, but she gets carsick and that never ends well, so I find myself spending more time at home, because she makes me feel comfortable here.
She makes me feel safe.
I know a dog can’t keep my cancer from coming back, but she can make me worry less about it, which, if you reduce everything to numbers, is actually better.
Years ago, I was at an accidental house party at a friend’s apartment. It started as a Friday happy hour after work that morphed into Sunday brunch.
There were five or six of us in attendance. We were all young bucks, clever and witty, ambitious, and at the time those qualities were sufficient.
Someone (not me) was pouring coffee for everyone. “How do all you like your coffee?” he called out from the kitchen. It was a small apartment on Capitol Hill, so the rest of us were all spread out on couches and futons all over my friend’s living room, and no one had to yell, which was convenient, because none of us was feeling quite up to par.
“Just cream.” “Black.” “Plenty of sugar.”
“I like my coffee like I like my women,” said the wittiest of us. The game was to guess.
“Black and hot?” was one guess.
“Blonde and sweet?” was another.
I said, “Straight?”
The joke came up again this past weekend when drinks after dinner morphed (not unexpectedly) into good friends crashing on our living room couches.
Some things never change.
Life is good.
For those readers who don’t live in Texas, today is Texas Independence Day. It’s evidently a big deal here.
I pulled on my favorite ancient cowboy boots, stuck an invisible bandaid over my mouth to restrain my inner snarkasaur, and got my kids to school on time for the third time this week, which (I think) is a new personal best.
It’s Wednesday. It’s Chapel Day.
It’s always a good idea to stick around and go to chapel at my kids’ school. We all, especially me, need more Jesus in our lives, plus it reminds me of summer church camp, plus it’s hilariously funny more than half the time.
Today was a hilariously funny day.
Guests from Camp Lone Star, the local Lutheran sleep-away camp, were visiting to promote their camp.
Via skits.
With costumes.
My daughter, not lacking in personal Drama, was one of the lucky kids who got to be in the skit.
I didn’t realize this until she showed up wearing a Ninja Elvis costume for a dance-off with another costumed kid.
First of all, she is never, ever, no not ever, going to shake off the “Ninja Elvis” nickname.
Second of all, somewhere, somehow, I did something right, or the awesome teachers at Janie Christy School of Dance did something right. When her turn came, she busted out a move I can only describe as Thom Yorke meets Blood Elf.
Furthermore, the whole skit and skaboodle reminded me that, while Texas isn’t home, and there’s a lot I am missing by not living back home on the East Coast, this is a great place to be right here, right now.
Sometimes the little things are bigger than the big things, and while I’m still not sure the good guys won the Battle of San Jacinto, I’ll say that all things considered, Dallas is a good place to raise a family.
There’s something uniquely Texan about a school that offers a great academic education, a great Christian education, a great peer group, and lets my kid dress up as Ninja Elvis to bust some crazy dance moves on a typical Wednesday morning in March.
It’s Spring.
It’s time to start working in the garden again.
It’s not like we’ve not been busy outdoors during the six weeks that we call winter here in Dallas — a week of snow and ice notwithstanding. But the lows are in the 40s and the highs are in the 70s and, while the front yard looks decent and the side yard is mostly cleared of debris, the back yard is a mess.
Well, not such a mess. Chris and his friends have been going at it with chainsaws for six months now, so the mess that was the jungle in our creek bed is now just jungly ground cover and the scrub is now neatly stacked, drying, ready for burning. The trees I planted last September all appear to have survived.
So far so good, but the main feature of our lawn, the lawn, is about to turn into a crisis.
What once was mud and dying St Augustine grass is now winter rye grass that I seeded last fall, lush in most places but patchy where the dog dug. It’s going to turn to all mud and weeds when the weather heats up in a few weeks. I can’t just ignore it. I’ve got to do something.
The easy solution would be to put down grass, except for one thing.
The environmentally-minded people who built our house did not install an irrigation system. And then their builder put in notoriously high-water-consumption grass. According to our neighbors, the prior owner of our house kept his lawn alive with frequent shallow watering, dragging around a sprinkler that attached to his hose.
I’m not going to do that.
I’ve been looking into having a sprinkler system installed, but I’d rather have new floors installed first, and furthermore, I know, in theory, that with a moderate amount of research and some smart planting choices and occasional deep watering, I ought to be able to have a beautiful garden with a minimum of water and a minimum of maintenance effort.
At least that is what “they” tell me, “they” being the experts who write books and magazine articles and web sites on the subject of low water use landscaping.
“They” also suggest not having a lawn at all, which isn’t an option.
I could buy sod, if I had a budget for it, but then I’m back to the same problem of no sprinkler system, and the cost of a low-water-use type sod makes the gamble that it will probably die without a sprinkler system too much for me to swallow.
I’m steeling myself up for planting grass seed, either buffalo grass or zoysia, or both and letting them duel it out. I know buffalo grass is native, but zoysia is prettier.
It might not grow.
It might get trampled on — no, not might. It will get trampled on, and for a while, if I am lucky, I will have a lawn featuring footprint-shaped bare patches in kids’ sizes one and two. And I’m going to have to water the grass by hand every day for a week or six while the lawn takes, which brings me back to the whole thing about our perfect house not having a sprinkler system.
I feel like the target of an advertisement in a 1950s commercial for a sprinkler system. I mean, there’s a reason people started having them installed in the first place.
In an ideal world, I’ll create a stunning low-water-use garden that includes broad swaths of springy green turf. And eventually I will have a sprinkler system installed, which I then won’t use.
Much.
Except when it’s 110 degrees outside at 8:00 am and the garden really, really needs it in which case I will walk over to my sprinkler system and turn it on. Probably via remote control. Or even via my cell phone.
There’s something unbelievably smug and self-righteous about that whole scenario. Alas, for now, it’s not something that is going to happen, because a new sprinkler system is low down in the list of priorities for our new house.
It’ll give me something to think about, though, as I stand out in the yard for an hour every morning and evening with the hose. Most people build castles in the air. Not me. My Dallas McMansion already looks a little (too) castle-like. I build rainclouds in the air.
Jibbie is the name of a character I played Warcraft with back when I played all the time, when I was good, and when the community of Warcraft players was my community.
I first met her when we were starting a raid, a group of ten players working together to defeat the biggest, baddest monsters the game had to offer.
“Can I tell you something, Evita?” she said to me in a whisper.
“Go for it!”
“You’re my hero!”
“Aw, shucks, that’s so nice. But we haven’t even started yet.”
“I know, but you’re famous and you’re the best tank on the server, and you’re a girl! A GIRL!”
“Wow! Thanks! I don’t think I’m the best tank on the server, but I do try to be the best tank I can be — but did you ever hear about the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead? When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horribad and wiped the raid a lot. That’s me! So please temper your expectations, but I won’t let you die if I can help it.”
I was a tank, and it was my job to protect the healers. Jibbie was a priest, a healer, and she was a great player, and one of the nicest, sweetest people I have ever met. She hailed from somewhere in Alabama, I believe, from one of those communities that attracts graduate students in language and linguistics, and the way she used language was singularly wonderful.
It’s hard to distill the sweetness that was talking to Jibbie over vent, but the example that shines out the most is this one: We were running a dungeon called The Culling of Stratholme, in heroic mode. In Culling of Stratholme, the players, five of us, run around a city that has been overrun by bad guys, hunting down packs of roving demons while being attacked by hordes of the undead. Of the five players, one player, the tank (me), tries to keep the attention of the demons and hordes of undead while the DPS (damage per second) players kill off the monsters and the healer (Jibbie) keeps everyone alive. In theory the DPS is supposed to kill off the undead hordes and the tank is supposed to keep them off the healer, but the game is hard, and our gear wasn’t that great for the game content we were playing, and I died and then Jibbie died, and then everyone died, and, because we were all friends, we were laughing, which in a game famous for nerds raging at either over our nerd headphones, is a rare treat.
Instead, Jibbie said, “Evie, I’m sorry, but I had zombies all over me like flies on molasses pie.”
Zombies all over me like flies on molasses pie.
That was Jibbie.
She was one of the best.
It goes back to my premise that the best Warcraft players are the people who play all the time, and so it is surprisingly hard to find people to play with, because the best players, the people who log eight or more hours every day playing computer games, frequently lack other life skills and are therefore not so much fun to play with, despite being very good at playing computer games.
It’s the question you don’t ask: What the hell is wrong with your real life that you play Warcraft all the time? It’s taboo, because we all understand tacitly that we’re here to escape problems, and no one wants to talk about ours, and besides, why ask questions to which you don’t want to know the answer.
People wondered it about me, and my standard response was that I was stuck at home with a three-year-old and a one-year-old and “OMG my kid just brought a truckload of dirt in from the back yard and dumped it on the living room rug,” or “Why does my kid like to stomp on cherry tomatoes?” and that answered the question for most people about why I played Warcraft all the time, so they never wondered, and no one knew the reason I played Warcraft all the time was that I had cancer until someone figured it out, and then everyone knew, but by then it was almost over, and I knew I was going to make it, so I didn’t care.
I didn’t find out about Jibbie until hers got so bad that she had to stop playing. She knew about me, because I told her. “I’m going offline for several weeks,” I said.
“Oh, why?”
“Surgery. It’s a drag.”
“OMG is everything okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just another round of breast reconstruction. You know I had a bilateral mastectomy.”
Silence. Then, “R U OK?”
“Yeah, the whole treatment worked, it’s just reconstruction. I mean, it’s major surgery, but overall, good news.”
“That is a very personal thing. Thank you for confiding in me,” said Jibbie.
We played together for a very long time, then I went offline for a while, and when I came back, she wasn’t on much.
I asked our guild leader. “WTF is up with Jibbie. She should be online.” Jibbie was a very dedicated player, the kind of dedication that involves setting her alarm clock to wake her up every hour for two weeks during the seasonal events so that she could complete the necessary achievements toward earning the Violet Drake, a spectacular purple flying mount that lets you fly really fast.
“She’s doing RL stuff,” he told me. That’s Warcraft terms for real life stuff, usually good news that means “I have a job” or “I have a girlfriend” or “I have resolved my issues enough that I no longer need to play Warcraft all the time.”
Later on, I asked our guild leader, “When is Jibbie coming back?” and he said, “I’m not sure, evidently chemo is really kicking her ass.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, and I meant it, and I added Jibbie to the list of people I know who have cancer, and whom I pray for every day.
We played sometimes with someone who knew her IRL, in real life, so we got updates.
“She’s doing bettter.”
“She’s in the hospital.”
“She got a horse and isn’t playing WoW because she spends all her time riding her horse.”
“She says hi, and she loves you all and misses you.”
Then, a whisper, an ingame personal message from one person to another. “I have bad news.”
“Jibbie?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Shit.”
I flew over to Dalaran, the hub of the old expansion, now deserted except for a few players leveling new toons, and sat Evita down next to Caylee Dak, and cried for a long time.
There wasn’t anything else to do.
Jibbie was a healer and Evita was a tank, and the most important thing a tank can do is to keep the healer alive, but life isn’t a computer game. In real life, there is no run from the graveyard back to where your corpse is lying on the ground, a testament to all who see it that you played badly, that the monsters got you. Jibbie and I both got the damage over time effect that is cancer, and I could tank my own, but I couldn’t tank Jibbie’s, and it killed her. It had nothing to do with playing badly or well, because real life is not a computer game.
I didn’t even know Jibbie’s real name — I still don’t. Jibbie was enormously protective of her privacy.
Nevertheless, she was my friend, and her death hit me very hard.
The Warcraft community is a funny place. We only see snapshots of each other’s lives, but when you stand toe-to-toe fighting monsters alongside someone for a year or two, you get to know them pretty well.
I wish I’d had a chance to get to know Jibbie better. I know that for the years we played together, she made my life a much richer place. And I know she enjoyed my friendship as well, because she sent me a note once, telling me so.
That’s the kind of person she was.
She never did get her Violet Drake.
I’ve noticed something. No one trolls my blog.
Yesterday, I asked my housekeeper to cut her hours back to once a month.
Ouch.
But she knew, and I knew, and she knew I knew, and I knew she knew, that I didn’t need her, that it was a luxury, and that it wasn’t helping me. I don’t have a baby and a toddler, nor two toddlers, nor do I have cancer, nor do I have a job. My kids are both in school full time and the only reason for me to have had a housekeeper fell under the category of my not liking to do housework, and that’s not the kind of person I am.
When I told her that her job, like so many people’s jobs, was evaporating into the aether, she said she understood, and that she wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner, and she was glad because she knew it meant that I was feeling better.
What it also means is that now I’ve got to pull it together.
As awesome as my housekeeper is (and she really IS), there are things she can’t do, like figure out what on earth to do with my stuff and my husband’s stuff, and my kids’ stuff, so she makes it look tidy and waits for me to deal with it, which, in theory, I should do, but I don’t, because it looks tidy and, because I have had cancer, I have internalized The Great Truth Of Life which is that things don’t have to be perfect.
It’s like not fixing the leaky roof because you can’t do it in the rain, and when it’s not raining, the roof doesn’t leak.
Clutter.
In mathematical terms, it’s a collection of sets: old issues of The Economist and The New Yorker, and Town & Country. Kids’ schoolwork and art projects. Mostly paper, with a few other items thrown into the mix, stacked in unobtrusive places around my house. Not so many stacks, because, as I tell my children, in our family, we are neat and tidy people; I mean, I don’t have to clean the house before people come over.
Or didn’t.
Because I have had the luxury of a housekeeper.
Now it’s on my shoulders.
It’s like the last gasp of illness, the creeping fear that I can’t physically do the work of keeping my house clean. That I can’t mentally do the work of keeping my house tidy. Organized. Functional.
But I can. I mean, I think I can.
It’s raining, and the forecast is for mixed showers and sun for the next few months. I like rain, especially the gentle mist that falls right on the line between warm and cool.
It’s good for the plants, and the grasses, and it’s good for me. I like the way it falls on my skin and hair. I like the smell of it.
I like the sound of it, which is no sound, but also no sound of wind, nor birds, nor joggers nor dogs barking because most people are inside, avoiding it. Not everyone, though, and then the silence is punctuated by the hum of occasional car or truck, or bang of the trash truck standing in stark relief to the quiet whisper of the day.
I find I need a lot of white space in my life. I need a period of silence before answering a question. I need a clean kitchen in order to start breakfast, or dinner. I need a clean laundry room in order to start and finish doing the laundry.
Rain gives me that, writ large. The whole sky is white, and the bare branches of the trees, damp. stand out against it, black.
I like the clarity.
I know it’s temporary, that in a few hours, or a day, the sun will shine, the trees, already beginning to bud, will put forth their leaves to rustle in the wind, the bang of construction will begin again on the houses being built on my street, the dogs will once again stand at the fences and bark, the birds will flock and sing, but for now, for this moment, I shall enjoy the respite.
Dance with the Reaper 
