Last week, SuperRealtor™sent me the number of yet another pool builder. I met with him this morning — and older guy with longish hair and a very bushy beard, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I love Hawaiian shirts on men.
He was totally different from Genius Pool Guy, who is a designer for Fancy Pool Company. Genius Pool Guy is an artist. Pool Guy #2 builds pools. Just him and his crew. Most of what he does is building pools and spas for gyms and other commercial uses.
He came over this morning. He’s a nice guy — and not in the slick salesman way, although of course he wants the business. He’s just a really nice guy. A nice guy who knows his stuff about swimming pools, evidently.
He told me all about his past life — as a naval aviator, and a member of a rock band that played South Florida and Las Vegas. He admired Chris’s dead deer head on the wall above our fireplace, as well as the story about it, which is that Chris went hunting once and fired one shot. Not a lot of people see the humor in this, but Pool Guy #2 did.
My favorite thing about this morning’s meeting was talking about how to best achieve a “natural look” for our pool, a job best accomplished by installing boulders. “I’m not sure how we’re going to get boulders down into our creek,” I said. He looked at me. “They’ll roll.”
We talked about all the pool companies in Dallas. He asked who else had given me bids. I told him about the first guy who said, “Mrs. Rose, you seem like a nice lady but you are crazy if you think you can put a pool in this yard.” — He knows his stuff, and he cherry-picks his clients. We talked about the Really Huge Pool Company with the Fabulous Brochure — That brochure is full of inconsistencies. And they’re not going to be able to give your pool the attention it will need. He’s right — they haven’t even had time to bid on the project. I told him I’d met with Genius Pool Guy from Fancy Pool Company. They do build a beautiful pool. I like that Pool Guy #2 was gracious about his only competition. It made me want to work with him.
Pool Guy #2 went to give me a business card but realized that he didn’t have one. That’s cool with me — I don’t always carry cards either. Instead, he pulled out a small 3×4 picture of himself, the kind of picture that actors and models carry. I knew I had seem him somewhere before! He told me all about his other job, a short-term annual gig that keeps him busy in November and December.
Around this time, my son wandered back downstairs. He had been down in the kitchen earlier, cleaning it. Now, he wanted to be part of the pool planning process.
I asked my son, “Do you remember last night when we told you the truth about Santa Claus? How we make the choice to still believe in him, but we also have to work to make him real?”
His eyes got all big. Yes.
“Mr. McD, who is a pool builder during most of the year, is one of the people who works the hardest. Do you know who he is at Christmas time? Can you tell by looking?”
My son’s jaw dropped.
I’m not sure who is eventually going to build my pool, but I do know that I am done looking at vendors. Both builders are outstanding, with solid references and a good mesh with who we are and what we want. We need to look at plans and numbers before we make any decisions. I know which one my son is rooting for.
We’ve already told the kids that we’re getting a pool for Christmas. Wouldn’t it be awesome if Santa built it?
So much better than my boob in a sun shirt.
This morning we met with Pool Guy, whom I will call Genius Pool Guy from now on.
His back of the envelope estimate for the awesome pool we want was (barely) within our budget constraints. He’s going to come back in a couple of weeks with a firm proposal. We talked about timing. It looks like we will be finished around Valentine’s Day.
He said our yard had some challenges, which gave us some great opportunities to do some interesting things. In this case, it’s not just doublespeak: we have a good setting for waterfalls and negative edges and so forth, since our yard is a super steep hill.
The next step is to look at 3D modeling and rendering of the design he is cooking up for us. The timing on the second visit is a little tricky because we have to make sure not to schedule it for when I will be in Houston getting the very final last work done on my breast reconstruction: nipple tattoos.
There was a point not too long ago at which I would have imagined myself being all “Woo hooooooo nipple tattoos!” but instead I am all “Woo hooooooooo pool.”
The whole issue of me in a bathing suit is a non issue. The mere fact that it’s not an issue is amazing, exactly the way a negative edge on a pool is breathtakingly beautiful.
I haven’t written here in a while. I don’t feel like dwelling on cancer.
Instead, I have been dwelling — some might say obsessing — on the idea of putting a swimming pool in my back yard. If you follow this blog, you will see that there is a new header for the project. As a side note, it’s nifty that I can brag in a public forum about how awesome our house is without worrying that I am coming off like a jerk — one the one hand, great house, and on the other hand, bad cancer. The scales of life don’t remotely balance, and if I’m incredibly lucky, which I am, it is because I am alive. The house is 99% frosting on the lucky cake and 1% our hard work.
As I have mentioned on this blog, we live on a creek. Our yard is a giant steep hill with stone terraces, and underneath the hill is solid rock — either an engineering challenge or an engineering nightmare. Or you could say, as the first pool guy to look at our property last summer did, “Mrs. Rose, this is a beautiful yard and you seem like a very nice lady, but you are crazy if you think you can put a pool here.”
I emailed my wonderful real estate agent about the pool project — I don’t like to buy bathmats without consulting her — and she emailed me back with the name of her pool company and then called to tell me to go for it, and to go big or bust.
Pool Company is sending out Pool Guy, their “challenge accepted” pool expert, a landscape architect/pool design professional who has been winning awards since before he could shave. The meeting is on Monday. I’m hopeful.
It’s going to be expensive. We’re going to fund it with a combination of financial trickery and carving the rest out of our food and household budget. What’s not to like about rice and beans? I can do it if I cook a lot of vegetables from scratch.
Why am I doing this? For beauty. For wellness. For peace of mind and stress reduction, and because our yard is interesting, but not useful, and I want it to fulfill its potential. Because I can. Because I want to. Because I want to live well.
I know I can do this. I’m good at managing projects. I’m persistent. I can work with people and keep on a budget and figure stuff out.
This pool is going to cost as much as cancer did. It’s going to be difficult. Sometimes, it will seem impossible, but it won’t be. I’m going to have to work with professionals who know much more than I do, and figure out how and when to trust them and how and when to back off and look for someone else who might know more, or know different. It’s going to be a work of equal artistry and science.
When it’s done, my life will have an entirely new dimension. I’ll find beauty in the simplest things. The whole idea of quiet time at home will be even more wonderful. The pool will nourish my inner life.
I can do this. I already have.
I cribbed this picture of Howard University med school students from the internet.
I’m upset about the whole tragedy swirling around the death of that kid in Florida, Trayvon Martin, and the acquittal of his killer. I think everyone is upset about it, even people who feel that justice was served.
Here’s who I keep thinking about. My doctor. No, not that one, although this does seem like one of those fixed pivotal points in our culture. My other doctor, the one who sang Happy Birthday to me on what we all thought would be my last one. The one who was the principal investigator on the study that discovered the cure for my cancer.
My Doctor. He’s my favorite person in the entire world who is not married to me or related by blood.
I just keep thinking, What if it had been my beloved doctor who went for a walk in the Florida rain that fateful night? I picture him with a bullet in his chest, dying in pain on the ground in the mud. On the surface, there isn’t much of a difference between My Doctor and Trayvon Martin, if all you see is a black guy walking.
It would have been a terrible tragedy, a great man — a good man — taken from this world too soon. Also, I’d be dead.
I’m a bit loth to even write about it, and here’s why. Anyone who knows anything about breast cancer research and has followed my case knows immediately who my doctor is, now. I feel that I might have stomped all over his privacy to write about how I feel about him. It’s not my story to tell — but there you go. I told it anyway.
The next time you see a black man walking around, or hear about a black man walking around, or picture in your mind the image of a black man walking around, I hope the image of my wonderful doctor is the first one to pop into your head.
There goes a guy who saves lives for a living, is what I hope you think. Why not? He could be.
Gotterung is the screen name of a friend of Chris’s and mine, a holy priest in the World of Warcraft. He’s the reason we play: in 2006, he called up Chris and convinced him to try the game out. We played together for a while, but he wound up closing his account because he couldn’t find a balance between his home life and his work life and his gaming life.
The term in we use is “wife aggro.” She never could see how spending time playing games with friends was the same as spending time with friends.
Gotterung killed himself last week. He woke his wife up in the middle of the night, said some stuff, and blew his brains out.
It’s hard to know how to handle it when someone who has been your best friend since you were 12 does something like that.
I keep looking for him.
I’ve been on a low-level character, my warlock, whom I rolled ages ago, at Gotterung’s suggestion. I’ve been running around getting flight points (we did that, got them all at crazy low levels; it came in handy later) and re-running the instances we ran together. I remember all the drops. I remember how everyone on our server thought I was some leet player because I always had all the best gear, the whole time I was leveling, and it was always enchanted. Gotterung did that for me, when I was learning the game and he was a more experienced player. If I was ever any good, it was because I had Gotterung in my corner.
I don’t need him any more. I have all the flight points and I’ve run all the dungeons and I’ve done all the quests. I can buy my own gear now, and I can enchant it myself.
I still need him, even though I have all the flight points and all the titles and all the achievements and all the fat, fat loot.
I have his account now; well, Chris does. Somewhere, on a slip of paper, we have his login information. He insisted we take it, the last time we saw him. “I’m never going to play again,” he said.
It’s easy to look back and see what we didn’t, what we couldn’t, maybe what we didn’t want to.
I wonder if he had been able to play with us more, if we’d been able to spend more time with him over the years, if he would still be alive.
I keep looking for Gotterung. If I can find him, maybe he’ll accept my rez and heal himself back up to full, to start the fight again. He never could accept the idea that he was too low, or too under geared, for a fight. He would never give up. If anything, that’s what got him in the end.
He’s playing a different game now. I know someday, after a while, I’ll find out where he’s hanging out. He’ll be there, waiting, to explain how the new game works, and twink me out with gear and enchants again so that I can be the best. It’s going to be epic.
I was reading over this blog. There are a lot of typos and mistakes, although I did proofread it (sort of).
I’m going to leave them alone, for now. I don’t feel like fixing them, but more, it says a great deal about how difficult life has been for me, especially in terms of mental focus. It’s getting a lot better, but things are still more difficult for me than you might think.
In addition, I do not think the errors in this blog detract from its message and purpose. They’re like the scars on my body which do not detract from my beauty.
I got the image from Wikipedia.
The cicadas have begin creeping from their underground burrows. This brood of cicadas last emerged in 1996. I remember. It was a glorious summer, as all summers are, and we spent our weekends outdoors, hiking and canoeing, cooking food on the grill, or just walking through the neighborhoods of Washington, DC, where Chris and I were living at that time. The sound of cicadas was everywhere. We were young and newly in love, and we had just gotten married. We made guesses about the future
I’m glad we didn’t know that cancer would find us.
The cicadas are out again, “our” cicadas. I won’t hear them this year. Cicadas do live in Texas, but they don’t swarm in the billions the way East Coast cicadas do, although we do have plenty of cicada killers flying around.
I miss a lot of things about living back East, including the sound of cicadas.
I wonder where I’ll be in another 17 years. I hope I’ll find out.
Scott brings up a good point, which is that’s quite nasty, and beneath me, to bring up some of the less than ideal aspects of Angelina Jolie’s personal life when discussing her medical choice.
He’s right. It is. That’s why I did it.
I brought it up not only because I couldn’t resist the cheap shot, but to shine a spotlight into that dark and nasty corner of our minds. We all do it, not all of us all the time, but we do it.
A good friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer about a year after I was. I remember her weeping in my arms, asking, “What did I do to deserve this? What sin have I committed? What wrong did I do?” I assured her that she hadn’t done anything, but I don’t think she believed me.
It’s human nature. The idea that terrible things can happen to us, for no reason at all, is so terrifying that we create all sorts of structures and superstitions to create a false sense of causality around random events.
“Does it run in your family?” people always ask me. What they are really saying is, “How can I be sure that what happened to you won’t happen to me?” and the answer, which I put into words more often than I should is that it could happen, so do what you know to do and examine your breasts and get a regular mammogram.
Breast cancer is easier than other cancers because we’re blameless. It’s not like skin cancer, “Didn’t you wear sunscreen?” or lung cancer, “So, do you smoke,” or, worst of all, oral cancer from chewing tobacco.
I can’t get the thought of one kid out of my memory.
The only place in the hospital with no privacy is the pre-op room where all the beds are lined up in a row, with curtains between them. They bring in patients like an assembly line. First, the consent paperwork team comes through. Then the chaplain comes to pray, then your medical team comes, and then the IV team comes through, and I don’t remember what comes next because with the IV comes the first round of anesthesia. I think they think that the anesthesia blocks your memory of the whole thing, which is why they don’t take more precautions to keep you from hearing all the details of other people’s medical cases.
Once — and I can’t remember which surgery — I was in the assembly line next to a 22-year-old guy who has having facial reconstruction after surgery for oral cancer. His doctor and consent team were explaining the procedure — they were going to take a couple of ribs to rebuild his lower jaw. I could hear the medical team clearly — and believe me, when someone is explaining something like that four feet away, your ears perk up, but I couldn’t understand what the guy was saying, probably because, at the time, he was missing a lot of his lower jaw. It was mumbly, and I think he was supplementing with a note pad. I could tell he was crying, and then I heard a member of his team say, strongly, “No, don’t feel like that. This isn’t your fault. A lot of people use chewing tobacco. You didn’t do anything to deserve this. The important thing to think about is that you are going to be well again.” Then my IV team came and zonked me out. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the kid with half his face missing, because I am morbid like that, but I never did. I hope he’s doing okay now. Most of all, I hope he’s gotten past the feeling that he somehow deserved it.
We can talk a lot about risk reduction and strategies for keeping ourselves safe, and a healthy lifestyle and making good choices, and all of those are good practices, but that doesn’t mean that bad stuff won’t happen. Sometimes there is a correlation between our actions and choices and the stuff that can happen to us. Sometimes there isn’t.
Either way, I think it’s critical to separate making good choices from blaming people for bad ones, and above all, it’s critical to recognize that sometimes, there isn’t any correlation at all between things that are absolutely not connected.
We all want to find order and meaning in our lives. The idea that ill fortune can fall on us at any time is frightening. But looking for an explanation, any explanation, for why one person gets cancer and another person doesn’t is about as asinine as blaming beautiful, strong Angelina’s tough decision on the ill-fated and over-publicized circumstances of her romance.
Angelina Jolie published an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times discussing her medical choice to have a preventative bilateral mastectomy to reduce her risk of developing breast cancer. Evidently she carries one of the two genes known to greatly increase the chances of a woman (or man) developing breast and ovarian cancer, and she did not want to die from breast cancer and leave her children motherless, a loss she could understand because her own mother died after a ten-year battle with the disease.
Good for her. That’s a brave choice, not least because her body is her art.
It’s obvious what I would have to say about her decision: to put life and motherhood ahead of anything else; to seek out information and act on it; and (perhaps most difficult) to go public with the most private of choices. I think she’s awesome on all counts.
I wonder how many children will grow to adulthood with living mothers because of her op-ed. I would have gone to see her next movie anyway (I was already a fan) but I’ll definitely enjoy it more for her having taken this very public stance.
I also wonder whether Jennifer Aniston is sitting around in the privacy of her own house enjoying a cup of coffee that tastes just a little bit better than usual this morning. We’ll never know. There’s no way to know. I certainly don’t want to know. It’s a horrible thought, and by all accounts, Jennifer Aniston is a lovely person who would never think such a thing. In fact, you might think I deserve having had breast cancer for thinking it, which leads to. . .
What I really wonder is this: On the rare occasions where I have unequivocally found myself out of favor with people, I wonder, are they thinking that kind of mean-spirited thought about me? Sometimes, I think they might be. I get a glimmer. It’s a sucker punch in the gut, ugh, followed my the most blissful wave of self-righteousness because I know I’m better than that.
Props to you, Ms. Jolie.
I got a surprise package in the mail this afternoon. It was a giant bottle of Joy eau de parfum.
I love Joy. It’s been my favorite perfume since I got a bottle of it as a college graduation gift in 1990. My grandmother Bessie, my mother’s mother, wore it, so it reminds me of her, plus I love it for its own sake.
I also love the friend who sent it to me. We’ve been friends for aeons — since before my marriage. We’ve been friends for 20 years during which we have stayed more or less in touch. After I finished having cancer, during the months (years?) when I didn’t talk, not to anyone, not at all, for over a year, she forgave me for my silence, and yet she holds me accountable for it.
She sent me Joy.
Why did she send me a surprise bottle of perfume? I don’t like the answer. It’s because she is sick. I don’t know how sick she is, although I know the name of her disease and I know that her prognosis is not good.
She recently wrote, “I’m only beginning to understand what you went through,” which may explain why she chose this week to send me a bottle of Joy.
I immediately opened it up and sprayed it on. I haven’t had Joy in forever — I gave away all of my perfume when I was going through chemotherapy and radiation. I sprayed it on and breathed deep and with the heady fragrance came a rush of memories, so many, many memories.
Joy is the fragrance of my life.
The smell of it brought back the memory of who I used to be, before I got cancer, before I found out that what was wrong with me was cancer, and I cried. I cried for the loss of who I was, and I cried for my friend. My wonderful, zany, crazy, unpredictable friend who is suffering so bravely and doing everything she can to cope with an illness so horrid that I can’t bear to think about it, and the best way she has found to cope with it is to send me a bottle of Joy.
Dance with the Reaper 