Who Gets 1000 Wishes?

Actually living with cancer gives a person a different perspective on many things. If you’ve never had it you can be the most kind-hearted person and not really understand what it feels like unless someone tells you. So I’m going to tell you what part of that journey feels like.

You walk into the doctor’s office being your own self, with likes and dislikes, plans, preoccupations, hopes for yourself and your loved ones, a colorful history in which you had successes and failures. You’ve learned from your mistakes and you’re wiser and more mature than you’ve ever been. There are all sorts of things you’re going to do later that day, the next day, next week, next month, next year. Then you get a diagnosis of cancer and you are instantly transformed from being your own unique self to a cancer patient.

You watch people’s faces as they push most of what they know about you out of the little box they have reserved for you in their mind and replace it with “has cancer.” You go into the hospital for surgery and you’re stripped of your clothing, your wallet, and your wedding ring. Then they give you anesthesia that strips away your mind. After that more things are done to your body and your body does more things in response and none of it is what you want, it’s completely out of your hands. But the “you” inside your heart is there going, here I am.

Time passes, there are other treatments, and you feel like you don’t own your body anymore. It’s some sort of lab experiment you happen to inhabit.

The healthiest thing someone with cancer can do is to own their own body and life again. Be your own unique self, and feel like more than a patient. Not let cancer define you even if others sometimes want to do that to you.

That Facebook posting says, “A person has 1000 wishes, a cancer patient only has one: to get better! I know 97% of you won't post this as your status, but my friends will be the 3% that do, in honor of someone who has lost their life to cancer or is battling cancer right now.”

People keep posting that because they want to honor people with cancer but if you actually have cancer it’s really kind of an insult. It’s basically saying people with cancer have ceased to be complete human beings and are now only patients.

I wonder if it was written by a child, to be frank, partly because of the made-up statistic (“97%”), and partly because of the subtly coercive language which reminds me of sixth grade. You know, if you’re my friend you will do what I say.

I know my friends who have re-posted this have kind hearts. I just wanted to give you all food for thought.

My Favorite Way of Seeing Things

I love to experience new things by surprise, without any expectations fostered by friends or media sources. I prefer to let the experience wash over me unadulterated. Many people like to research in advance and plan things out to the last detail to make sure they miss nothing. While I do acknowledge that some planning is beneficial, spontaneity brings its own rewards. The happy planners have a number of terms to describe someone like me, such as “disorganized,” but I prefer to be called “ethereal.”

The most perfect example was when I saw The Wall in Washington, D.C. I was there on a business trip in the early 80’s, and I was alone. In my free time I took in some of the usual sights but one day I felt like walking without a purpose. I was right there in the heart of all the monuments and government buildings: grand, white buildings rising assertively above the traffic. They speak of victory and order.

It felt good to get away from the chaotic traffic and into a park. I didn’t know where I was but figured I could hail a cab to get back to familiar territory. Then I noticed something odd. Among all the gleaming things rising up, there was something going down, something dark. The grass was tilting down towards something that ran like a scar, black and angry, a slash through the park. I didn’t recognize at first what it was. Was the park torn apart? An excavation that collapsed? There were perhaps fifteen people looking at it. I joined them. It wasn’t until I saw the names that I suddenly recognized what I was looking at. In my defense I had been on business trips almost non-stop for the preceding three years, and had not paid much attention to the Vietnam War Memorial.


The way The Wall is situated its high gloss acts like an almost perfect mirror. The whole time you’re looking at the names, tracing them with your fingers as everyone does, you’re seeing yourself and everyone else around you, and life is going on, but the faces are sorrowful. As I turned to leave I noticed a couple of shabby men standing back from the crowd. My first thought was that they were homeless men, and they may have been, but I soon realized they were Vietnam vets who were stuck there like living ghosts.


I blundered into something a lot happier on a different business trip. I was in Memphis by myself over a weekend and ran out of things to do. I went to the zoo. They have a pretty good zoo. On the way back to the hotel I kept noticing little road signs shaped like guitars and thought, I’ll follow those strange little signs and see where they go. They led to Graceland.

There was a muddy parking lot across the street so I pulled over to get a look at it. I was never a big Elvis fan but I recognized the place. A tour bus pulled into the parking lot and a bunch of mostly middle-aged women got out and went over to what I then saw was a ticket booth. I thought, why not, and got in line with them and purchased a ticket. A guide came and put us in groups of about a dozen. My group was the second group to go in.

We were told we had to keep our voices down because Elvis’ Aunt Somebody still lived there, upstairs. So our little group walked through and looked at that house. It is one oddly decorated place. Elvis mostly lived in the basement so nobody could look in the windows at him. There’s a room with multiple televisions so he could watch everything at once. The furnishings look like a mashup between a San Francisco Gold Rush bordello, the Starship Enterprise, and the Disneyland jungle ride. I know a few incredulous “wows” escaped my lips. I had never seen pictures of it or anything. Everyone else in my group was dead silent the whole time.


When I got back to the hotel I put on the local news and saw a story about that day being the grand public opening of Graceland. There were interviews with people who had been in a lottery to get their tickets, and people who couldn’t get a reservation for several more months and were heartbroken. Apparently the people on the bus had come from Arkansas, Nebraska … they were presidents of Elvis fan clubs. So I felt like a real jerk for just waltzing right in there but there was absolutely no way I could have known. There were no signs, nothing. I guess in Memphis it was such a big deal they didn’t need signs. And I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t known what to expect from the decor. Everyone was seeing it for the first time.

I sold my ticket stub for the opening day of Graceland on Ebay last year.


I’ve seen a lot of movies the completely-unprepared way and enjoyed them more because of it. You know the beginning of Night of the Living Dead where the brother is teasing his sister about being nervous in a cemetery and draws her attention to a man walking towards them? “He’s coming to get you, Barbara!” And he is! I turned the TV on one time and saw that scene not knowing what the name of the movie was, so I was completely unprepared for what came next. Scared the life out of me.

I was on a first date in high school with a guy who took me to see a Western movie. I had no interest in seeing a Western but kept my mouth shut since I didn’t know him that well. Meanwhile I was laughing inside. From the moment it started little things made me laugh more and more. The music was completely inappropriate for a Western. I was dying. By the time we saw the jazz band sitting in the desert I realized it was meant to be a comedy. That was how I saw Blazing Saddles. If I had known going in it was meant to be funny my attitude would have been completely different: we paid money for this, now make me laugh.

New York Trip, Part 2 - Less Talk, More Action

There are times so perfect that I want to sear them into my brain in a way that transcends photography. I think, remember this forever. I had one of those moments watching Wicked on Broadway. My family was all around me, and each one of us was completely caught up in the plotline, humor, and production quality of this wonderful musical. After all the planning for the trip, and all the aggravation of traveling, this was exactly what I had been wanting. I’ve seen a lot of theatrical productions, including some on Broadway, and this was the most entertaining and best-produced play I’ve ever seen. If you can’t get to New York to see it, try to catch a touring company if they come around again.

Late the first evening of our trip a hotel employee of undetermined nationality showed up at our door with a big bag and said she was “room serve.” I told her we didn’t order room service. She said, “Pree.” I reiterated, we didn’t order room service. She said, “No, pree,” and started pushing bottles of water at me. Ah! Free bottles of water! We were very glad to have them as we wandered around the following days and always called them pree, as in, did you remember to bring pree? Many encounters later I commented that everyone we ran into was from another country, and Ian said, “They all come to America. It’s the Land of the Pree.”

Art museums … my love. We saw the Guggenheim, skipped MoMA, and had much too little time for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If we had the trip to do over again we would skip the Guggenheim and spend an entire day at the Met. The guys spent a lot of time in the armor section alone. My sons like to think of themselves as being pretty unflappable but even they said “wow” a lot. It’s the kind of place where you walk into a room full of objects that are completely familiar, for example, the wrappings and sarcophagi of Egyptian mummies, and then it washes over you that you aren’t seeing Hollywood replicas, you’re seeing the real thing. Wow.

Touring NBC with our family is a little different from the average family since three of the four of us have been involved in television production on some level, especially Ian. At one point they asked for two volunteers. One little boy spoke up and then there was dead silence. So I said I would do it, not knowing what “it” would be. They put me at an anchor desk and had me read a news report from a teleprompter, and had the kid do a weather report against a green screen. When it was over the NBC pages were remarking that people didn’t usually do such a good job. I neglected to tell them I had played a newscaster in a community theater production one time, so I knew how to do the voice. They filmed the whole thing and tried to sell it to us afterward but we didn’t buy it because I was having one of the worst hair days of my life. Later on Steve kidded me that they were going to try to find me and hire me. It works that way, right? Newscasters get hired from among the tourists? Even if it did I can hear it now: she’s got the voice down, but that hair! Oh. My. Gosh.

Our trip to the United Nations Headquarters didn’t go according to plan. We started out in high spirits, razzing Alex about having a knife in his pocket, which they confiscated. Way to go, Alex! It’s the UN! Doves of peace everywhere! UNICEF! They did give it back as we left, but they told him to stop carrying around knives. The hitch was that we were going to have to wait several hours for a tour and we couldn’t both do that and see the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So we left.

There were so many things we didn’t get a chance to do. A week is really too short. We wore our feet down to nubs trying to optimize our time, but we didn’t go to Ground Zero, spent only a few minutes shopping, didn’t get to the Empire State Building, didn’t go to the Apollo Club. As we limped through the Portland Airport Alex commented that one thing the trip had taught him was that there are a lot of other different kinds of places out there. Little fireworks went off in my head. That is exactly what I wanted the kids to see.

New York Trip, Part 1 - Then and Now

I lived in New York or its suburbs during seasons 3-6 of Mad Men. If you’ve seen the show that’s the most efficient way I can convey to you what New York was like when I was there. I was oblivious to its soap opera themes because when I arrived I was eight years old.

I flew TWA from San Francisco wearing a dress, and there was a card that read “Miss Ballou” on the back of my first class seat. They gave us all red slippers, and parfaits for dessert. I visited the pilot and got my wings. My grandmother had given me a little gold notebook in which to record my impressions and I did do that, although she may have been overly optimistic about the writing ability of an eight year old. I kept that notebook a long time. I can’t remember exactly what was in it except that it was optimistic (the things my mother encouraged me to say) and quirky (my own thoughts). It also had Dick Clark’s autograph. We encountered him on the streets of New York a couple of weeks later. All I remember about that was that he and I were both so short that I never really saw him past the other people gathered around. I just handed my little gold notebook in to the crowd and it got handed back with his autograph.

My father had been transferred to the Manhattan office of AT&T for what we thought was a six-month stint, with my mother and I joining him for the last month, July. We lived in a hotel by Lincoln Center. My mother and I spent the days going around doing New York things while my father worked. We all went to see How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying on Broadway. The World’s Fair was going on. I loved that. I remember so much of the World’s Fair. I could go on and on about that but I won’t.

During this whole experience my mother kept up a stream of low level griping about New York. It was all wrong to her. Everything about California was better. New York was dirty, crowded, and crime-ridden. People did things differently and were abrupt with you if you didn’t do it the New York way. As an adult I can’t argue with any of this except the part about everything in California being better. Some things are, some things aren’t.

One night my father came back to the hotel and told me to go ride the elevator up and down for a while so he could talk to my mother privately. In retrospect, as a parent, I wonder what they were thinking sending an eight year old to wander through the halls of a New York hotel unattended for an indefinite amount of time, but nothing bad happened.

Eventually I wandered back and saw my mother had been crying. My father tried very hard to break the news as gently as possible: he had been transferred to New York for another two or three years. This was what the crying was about? I astonished them both by saying, okay, Dad, we can do that. About five minutes later I went from perfectly fine to sobbing when a thought occurred to me. I could barely choke the word out. Mitty! My cat. I couldn’t leave him! I was assured he could come too. Then I was fine again. That’s what eight years old is like.

A New York realtor showed us various apartments but my mother would have none of it. She would NOT do laundry in the basement with everyone else. She would NOT send me to a school that didn’t even have a name, just PS Number Something. There would be no place to play. She hated everything. There were no trees in New York! In actuality the place is loaded with trees, probably more than the arid San Francisco Bay Area. But she would not. No.

That’s how we ended up living across the river in the New Jersey suburbs for two and a half years. I didn’t return until I was in my twenties.

When we’ve known a place a long time we normally say, aw, you should have seen it before, you should have seen it when it was great. But on our recent trip I repeated a different version of the geezer’s song. You should have seen it back in the 80’s when graffiti covered every surface that could be reached by ladder. When Times Square wasn’t so crowded with tourists you could barely get from one side to the next, as it is now. In those days it was empty like a Western ghost town, garbage blowing like tumbleweeds, and the only people who ventured in were dealing drugs or trading sex. You should have seen it when the subways reeked of urine and the sidewalks were covered in homeless people and you frequently found yourself in the awkward situation of stepping over some poor guy to get into a hushed restaurant where a waiter stood by to drape a napkin over your lap, returning you to a helpless, infantile state. You should have seen that. That was really something.

In the early 80’s I spent one summer installing a computer at ABC Radio Network. My coworkers and I lived in a very nice brownstone in the Upper East Side. I resided in California at the time, so this was a temporary situation. The very first day I arrived in New York I had my wallet stolen … from inside a high end Manhattan office building … by a security guard. I had been told to go straight to the office from the airport for an orientation, so I had my luggage in an office on the 58th floor. The vice president of my company asked me to come down the hall so he could show me something. It was not my office so I didn’t have a key. It was a Sunday so there was nobody there. I left my luggage in the office, crammed my purse behind a filing cabinet, and went down the hall for a few minutes. When I came back the luggage was there but I noticed later my wallet was not. In my wallet was the key to the brownstone along with the address. So the thief had taken not only all my cash and credit cards but had access to where we lived. I was absolutely terrified. Later that evening I was approached by a panhandler. In my distraught state I told him I didn’t have any spare change because my wallet with every penny I had was stolen. He offered me sympathy. The homeless guy and I stood around for a while talking about how terrible the world can be. In that moment we were simpatico, he and I.

My coworkers could get us into the brownstone but I didn’t sleep well that night. I was convinced we were going to be visited by the crook. Instead I got a phone call from him at 6 a.m. He wanted me to meet him at the office building because he was a security guard who had “found” my wallet and wanted to return it. He was very specific about where in the building I should meet him. When I got there I went straight to the security desk and asked if one of them had my wallet. They told me they had caught wind of this plot somehow, gotten my wallet from the guy and fired him. So I got my wallet back but I didn’t ever rest well because the guy had had my key and address long enough to make a copy and now he had a grudge. He never came around though.

I have another story about getting chased through the subways by a stalker but I guess that one can wait.

Apparently we have Rudolph Giuliani to thank for starting a process that turned New York around. To drop back into the city after being away for nearly thirty years was shocking in the best kind of way. In the 80’s rows and rows of burned out buildings stretched up the west side and I remember thinking, if someone had enough capital to reclaim these, entire blocks at a time, they could make such nice neighborhoods – right near Central Park, with the fine brick bones of buildings. At the time the windows were nearly all broken and most had literal smoke stains pointing toward Heaven, bearing witness that they were burned out buildings with burned out people burning little fires to cook heroin and I don’t know what else. They roasted rats to keep warm maybe. By contrast, directly across the park was the Upper East Side where apartments sold for millions. John Lennon had lived and died just a few blocks down from this.

Riding up the West Side I kept waiting for this no man’s land to start and it never did. It had been gentrified clear up to Harlem and – astonishing! – into Harlem itself. Used to be that if you were white you really didn’t want to drive in Harlem too much because if your car broke down you might not survive the experience. We hadn’t planned on spending time there but our brief cruise through Harlem revealed an artistic and cultured area of mixed races that reminded me of Oakland!

All this sprucing up has come at a cost. They say some New Yorkers are pretty bent out of shape that the city has turned into a police state. There are police and Transit Authority (they have just as much clout as the PD) everywhere you look, most of them just standing there. We saw police helicopters circling and circling, giant Mobile Command Centers, these interesting contraptions that lift the police up above the crowd in places like Times Square, and security cameras everywhere. I mean everywhere.

It’s worth it. Tourists have flooded in, $pending ca$h like fool$. The city in August is like a theme park.

There’s easily a week’s worth of activities. I could have filled two weeks. Truth be told I could fill about two months but I’m trying to be reasonable. Part two will describe some of this week’s experiences.

Remembering Michelle McCarter

I had been meaning to write about Michelle since learning of her death but I was stymied by a lack of photos. I had once had quite a few of her, but my father threw them all away, along with nearly all of my childhood memorabilia, while in a confused state after my mother died.

There were several I had taken at Camp Sierra. She and I spent a week there at sleep away camp the summer after 6^th grade. So much of that week remains vivid in my mind. I can still sing the songs we learned there. That’s where I learned how to make not only s’mores but banana boats. Banana boats are fantastic (see below!).

Michelle was a sweet kid. I can’t remember ever getting in a fight with her. She always had a calmness and poise about her that can only come from being a very well-loved child.

One of the discarded pictures had been taken by my mom when we had just gotten off the bus, returning home from camp. I’m all gangly arms and legs and a pixie haircut, laughing at something off camera, and Michelle has her hand on my shoulder and is smiling at me.

For the remainder of the summer she and I called each other every day. One day I called her and she answered before it rang because she was calling me. All I really remember about these phone calls was giggling. I don’t remember what was so hilarious. I do remember my mother rolling her eyes at me and saying, my gosh you girls are silly. We would laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe.

Michelle as a child bore a striking resemblance to the child actress Hayley Mills. Since I don’t have any pictures of Michelle, you’ll have to look at her instead. Michelle had prettier hair that went down to her waist.

This was the age of slumber parties. I remember one particular one when a bunch of us were sleeping in her octagonal living room (her house, like many in the Oakland hills, was architecturally creative), and we were playing Big Brother and the Holding Company on the stereo (Janis Joplin!) and discussing The Big One – that earthquake they’ve been threatening would destroy California all these years. She emphatically asserted she had seen a UFO.

It was also the age when little girls turned into teenagers. Michelle and I started out walking around the school playground holding hands and messing around with a Styrofoam Tippy Tub at The Hills pool. Time passed, and as we headed into Montera Junior High I saw the handwriting on the wall. I said to all my friends, promise me that when we get to Montera you won’t get all boy crazy and stupid. Promise me you’ll still be fun and do things besides think about clothes. Promise me! They all promised.

The first one to cave was Michelle. I don’t blame her though, this was something that was done to her by fate. There was a special power bestowed upon her that stripped her of any power she may have had to resist it and remain just an ordinary kid.

Michelle became absolutely gorgeous. Her appearance changed from Hayley Mills to a young Brigitte Bardot (above - again, I have no pics of Michelle but this is a very close approximation of what she looked like). It didn’t matter what she wore. I used to have a picture of her in jeans and a blue workshirt looking like a movie idol. There was another picture I took of her at the pool. She was wearing a bikini and had turned her head to talk to someone behind her. At the time I felt like I was taking a picture of a unicorn, she was so perfect.

Everyone reacted in some way to Michelle. There was a group of girls at school who threatened to “cut her tongue out and stuff her mouth with sand” because they assumed she was a snob. She was no snob. She was very politically liberal, almost leftist. Fortunately that situation was resolved in the counseling office when they got to know her better. One of the teachers clearly had a crush on Michelle – when she was in 7^th grade! If people weren’t hating her for how she looked they wanted a piece of her.

Those of us who had been her friends since before her emergence as a monarch butterfly no doubt contributed to her feeling of being set apart. We made a lot of awestruck remarks about her appearance in her presence.

She began to work it more and more, in the sense of taking it as her due that she was the sexiest thing around.

I was horribly jealous. I wasn’t so much jealous of her looks as I was jealous of all the people who were gathering around her and receiving her attention.

Michelle had been born with a hole in her heart and this was when she had open heart surgery to repair it. The operation was a success but it left her with a dramatic scar down her cleavage. I know she was self conscious about it but her beauty was so powerful it almost left us wishing we all had scars too.

As junior high wore on I aligned myself with a different set of girls. They were brainy and cynical hippies who were not afraid to still be kids. (Except Renée Auker – you have to leave “cynical” out of her description and throw in some flip flops and aerials.) We rode bikes a lot, leaving me with a legacy of powerful thigh muscles, drank Koolaid, and wrote goofy stories. Some of them will probably read this.

One day I was listening to Judy Collins’ Wildflowers album, which has a lot of sad songs on it, and I started crying over losing Michelle as a friend. I wanted to call her but I didn’t do it. Several days later I ran into her and was surprised when, without me saying a thing, she volunteered that she had been crying about how we weren’t friends anymore. Me too, I said. But we both knew it just wasn’t going to work out for us to be friends right then. Maybe in a few years.

The last time I saw Michelle I was sitting outside eating lunch on that long plaza or whatever it is at Skyline High, and Michelle came walking down the sidewalk. There were perhaps fifty kids sitting around eating lunch and every single one of them stopped chewing, stopped talking, and just watched her walk down the long path, regally and serenely.

After that I found out she had moved to Europe. I think she married an Italian man and became a journalist, but I’m not sure about this. The next thing I know for sure is that her heart gave out a couple of years ago.

I have so many questions about her. Did she have a good life? Was she loved? Did she stay beautiful? I would have loved to be her friend again now that time has diminished the importance of physical loveliness. We wouldn’t be kids again. But I bet we would have done a lot of laughing.

***************

How to make a banana boat:

Take a banana and slit the peel lengthwise. Pry it open wide enough to tuck in pieces of chocolate, e.g., Hershey bar squares, and a couple of marshmallows. Wrap it in foil and place it close enough to a campfire to melt the marshmallows and chocolate, turning as necessary. Eat the gooey marshmallow/chocolate/banana right out of the peel with a spoon.

The Problem with Christian Broadcasting

The opinions expressed on this broadcast do not necessarily reflect those of THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY


Pat Robertson recently made statements about the devastation in Haiti that implied it was God’s judgment on the people, setting off a new flurry of revulsion towards him personally, conservative Christians generally, and Christians even more generally, among the secularists. This sort of thing happens every few years. Some Christian broadcaster announces that hurricanes or AIDS or tidal waves or terrorist attacks are really God’s judgment on lawless people.

The very same broadcaster can spend the rest of his ministry years proclaiming the love of God and being listened to almost exclusively by people who already agree, but what will be repeated in lunchrooms and on barstools and on Facebook is that the Christian guy on TV says God is punishing people with an earthquake.

We all say stupid things. I’m the queen of saying stupid things, ask anybody. But since I rarely have a microphone in my face the damage is usually limited to someone’s hurt feelings. When famous Christians say stupid things on television it makes every Christian look like a hater.

I think the problem with Christian broadcasting is that it models secular broadcasting. Airtime is given to people who are famous, and who become famous through ratings. These famous Christians then feel the pull to do whatever they have to do to continue to be famous, which usually involves making grandiose statements. No press is bad press in the secular world of fame, and it appears that the longer a Christian is famous the more closely he adheres to this policy.

Attempting to maintain personal fame is in total opposition to the actual message of Christ, which is about dying to self to reveal Him.

Author Donald Miller wrote a blog about the recent Pat Robertson brouhaha. He too saw Pat Robertson pulling the focus onto himself. Here are excerpts:

“I’ve also found that the more I trust in Christ’s redemption to be sufficient, the less overtly religious I am. And, quite honestly, the more suspect overtly religious people become to me. When I’m with somebody who talks zealously about faith, about Jesus, about the Bible, after a while, I find myself wondering whether or not their faith is strong at all. For instance, if I were with somebody who kept talking about how much they loved their wife, going on loudly and profusely, intuitively I would wonder whether or not they were struggling in their marriage. I would wonder whether they were trying to convince me they loved their wife, or if they were trying to convince themselves… Faith in Christ, for me, is similar. It’s intimate. I’m more comfortable giving quiet prayers, intimate prayers…. Robertson’s loudness and shock-jock verbiage seems strange and oddly uncompassionate. It felt like he was trying to tell us how tough he was, not how compassionate God is.”

You can see the Miller blog here:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/current-events/op-ed-blog/19845-don-miller-responds-to-pat-robertson?awesm=fbshare.me_ABLut&utm_medium=fbshare.me-facebook-post&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_content=fbshare-js-large

Just as we give term limits to Presidents and Congress, we would probably be better off if we could put a shelf life on famous Christians.

So many of them start out well. James Dobson gave great parenting advice in the early days, but then he extended his influence further and further and in my opinion he needs to pipe down now. And Robertson? He should have been pulled twenty years ago.

It’s time for fresh voices with the old message.