Cancer Frags/Standing

Cancer Frags

Standing Around

I made use of my time, silent and invisible, lying in the midst of many people standing, for this was my condition over many days, during that time. I thought about a young man I used to see on Sundays, whose quadriplegia had laid him out for the rest of his life. His six younger brothers and sisters would wheel him in, always dressed loftily in Sunday suit and tie, long fingers and longer feet draped out ahead of him on his high-jack gurney. No matter how high they jacked him up, he was always unequivocally flat on his back, in the midst of people standing.

Now, in my porcelain room, I watched a man in a dark suit. An ordinary man of adequate manliness—his low hedge of gray hair, his conservative frames of brushed gunmetal, his tie an arrangement in maroon and gray, hand in the pocket under his three-buttoned jacket, loosed like his tie, in the awkwardly akimbo attitude that passes for casual, among some men in suits. It is a posture one strikes to avoid drips and spills, as of a backyard beer, or ice cream in summer.
He was, I then noticed, in fact enjoying an ice cream pop, although that may be too strongly expressed, for he seemed in such anxiety over how it might offend him, himself or his suit, that I don’t imagine he could have enjoyed it much, beyond perhaps the impulse to get it. I wondered about the moment of volition when such a man decides to order ice cream on a stick. The moment when he decides to treat himself to a bit of himself as a child.

The larger his mouthfuls, the closer he came to the stick in his incongruously delicate three-fingered grip, and the more he angled out, taking care to anchor his pocketed hip in the standing klatch. He was doing sort of a grown-up hokey-pokey, as though fearful of being left out, or being replaced, while he finished his treat; as though he wished not to have wanted it, he alone among the men in suits, although he had wanted it, mightily.

Then he had nothing left but a stick, and here’s when I really started to pay attention. He was about a mile away from the trash bin on which he then set his sights. Taking no time at all to ball up his stick and sticky paper, drawing his hand from his anchored pocket for balance, and no doubt also to save his place, inclining an ear with a glance back as though to give assurance of his return, he began a little diagonal sashay, led by an elbow, impossibly light of step, or so it seemed to me. One, and two, and….Well, I guess that’s it. It was closer than I’d thought. He’s already on his way back.

With no further need to hokey-pokey, he puts his whole self in, in a practiced recovery from public snacking, sliding both hands into his trouser pockets, with a hearty full-frontal chortle at some witticism he can not have heard. Yes, he’s still in the klatch; they hail his return in the manner of a fully pledged member. He doesn’t think to himself, "Why was I so worried about being left behind while I sashayed over to the trash bin?"

He doesn’t think about his sashaying doh-see-doh step. He doesn’t notice his feet at all. But I am spellbound by the blithe weightlessness with which he has lightly danced to the trash bin and back, in a couple of steps which, earlier this morning, took me more than half an hour and all my concentration, upon the concrete pilings of my legs. Does he really not know the miracle of what he has just accomplished?

My mental archives offer up a candid shot of my mother and her own mother. In an upstairs hallway of my parents’ home, my grandmother has stalled out. She is standing stock-still between the bedroom and the bathroom, her faraway eyes fixed on something deep within the outdated carpet. My mother is helping my grandmother finish her trip across the hall before she finishes her business. With pending appointments in the outside world, and having faced this custodial chore already too often, my mother has become impatient. She has become desperate.

This day I have arrived just in time to see my mother’s heart break, again, at her mother’s steady and pitiless losses to the vague decrepitude of age. The losses now seem to be cognitive as well, or so my mother’s glance toward me seems to say, in its panic and sorrow, from behind my grandmother’s familiar knee.

Perhaps a tactile reminder will stir her on her way? Finding no other effective persuasion, my mother has bent down to move manually my grandmother’s planted feet, now driving down into the floorboards, as immovable as any weight-bearing post. My mother, through veiled tears of frustration and grief, had no strength to beat back a suspicion that this inconvenient catatonia was, in part, intentional—some sort of surly truculence in my grandmother, sprung loose by her creeping Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps, or the small strokes that regularly raided her brain as she slept. It was an unworthy thought. I could see that my mother believed her thought unworthy—childish and cruel. I forgave her, as I knew she would not forgive herself, because she was exhausted, and so full of wounded love.

Today I’m thinking that I can remember how my grandmother felt. I’m thinking how unlikely it seems to me that these heavy pikes, my own familiar legs, will ever swing again under the dead weight of everything balanced above them. One nurse has thought generously to tell me that anyone who had lain abed motionless for as little as a week would have the same trouble walking (so we lose it all so quickly, then?).

So it’s not because of the cancer.

I never imagined there would be so much that is not because of the cancer.

—K.E.Watt, Brooklyn, NY

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	Cancer Frags Standing Around I made use of my time, silent and invisible, lying in the midst of many people standing, for this was my condition over many days, during that time. I thought about a young man I used to see on Sundays, whose quadriplegia had laid him out for the rest of his life. His six younger brothers and sisters would wheel him in, always dressed loftily in Sunday suit and tie, long fingers and longer feet draped out ahead of him on his high-jack gurney. No matter how high they jacked him up, he was always unequivocally flat on his back, in the midst of people standing. Now, in my porcelain room, I watched a man in a dark suit. An ordinary man of adequate manliness—his low hedge of gray hair, his conservative frames of brushed gunmetal, his tie an arrangement in maroon and gray, hand in the pocket under his three-buttoned jacket, loosed like his tie, in the awkwardly akimbo attitude that passes for casual, among some men in suits. It is a posture one strikes to avoid drips and spills, as of a backyard beer, or ice cream in summer. He was, I then noticed, in fact enjoying an ice cream pop, although that may be too strongly expressed, for he seemed in such anxiety over how it might offend him, himself or his suit, that I don’t imagine he could have enjoyed it much, beyond perhaps the impulse to get it. I wondered about the moment of volition when such a man decides to order ice cream on a stick. The moment when he decides to treat himself to a bit of himself as a child. The larger his mouthfuls, the closer he came to the stick in his incongruously delicate three-fingered grip, and the more he angled out, taking care to anchor his pocketed hip in the standing klatch. He was doing sort of a grown-up hokey-pokey, as though fearful of being left out, or being replaced, while he finished his treat; as though he wished not to have wanted it, he alone among the men in suits, although he had wanted it, mightily. Then he had nothing left but a stick, and here’s when I really started to pay attention. He was about a mile away from the trash bin on which he then set his sights. Taking no time at all to ball up his stick and sticky paper, drawing his hand from his anchored pocket for balance, and no doubt also to save his place, inclining an ear with a glance back as though to give assurance of his return, he began a little diagonal sashay, led by an elbow, impossibly light of step, or so it seemed to me. One, and two, and….Well, I guess that’s it. It was closer than I’d thought. He’s already on his way back. With no further need to hokey-pokey, he puts his whole self in, in a practiced recovery from public snacking, sliding both hands into his trouser pockets, with a hearty full-frontal chortle at some witticism he can not have heard. Yes, he’s still in the klatch; they hail his return in the manner of a fully pledged member. He doesn’t think to himself, "Why was I so worried about being left behind while I sashayed over to the trash bin?" He doesn’t think about his sashaying doh-see-doh step. He doesn’t notice his feet at all. But I am spellbound by the blithe weightlessness with which he has lightly danced to the trash bin and back, in a couple of steps which, earlier this morning, took me more than half an hour and all my concentration, upon the concrete pilings of my legs. Does he really not know the miracle of what he has just accomplished? My mental archives offer up a candid shot of my mother and her own mother. In an upstairs hallway of my parents’ home, my grandmother has stalled out. She is standing stock-still between the bedroom and the bathroom, her faraway eyes fixed on something deep within the outdated carpet. My mother is helping my grandmother finish her trip across the hall before she finishes her business. With pending appointments in the outside world, and having faced this custodial chore already too often, my mother has become impatient. She has become desperate. This day I have arrived just in time to see my mother’s heart break, again, at her mother’s steady and pitiless losses to the vague decrepitude of age. The losses now seem to be cognitive as well, or so my mother’s glance toward me seems to say, in its panic and sorrow, from behind my grandmother’s familiar knee. Perhaps a tactile reminder will stir her on her way? Finding no other effective persuasion, my mother has bent down to move manually my grandmother’s planted feet, now driving down into the floorboards, as immovable as any weight-bearing post. My mother, through veiled tears of frustration and grief, had no strength to beat back a suspicion that this inconvenient catatonia was, in part, intentional—some sort of surly truculence in my grandmother, sprung loose by her creeping Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps, or the small strokes that regularly raided her brain as she slept. It was an unworthy thought. I could see that my mother believed her thought unworthy—childish and cruel. I forgave her, as I knew she would not forgive herself, because she was exhausted, and so full of wounded love. Today I’m thinking that I can remember how my grandmother felt. I’m thinking how unlikely it seems to me that these heavy pikes, my own familiar legs, will ever swing again under the dead weight of everything balanced above them. One nurse has thought generously to tell me that anyone who had lain abed motionless for as little as a week would have the same trouble walking (so we lose it all so quickly, then?). So it’s not because of the cancer. I never imagined there would be so much that is not because of the cancer. —K.E.Watt, Brooklyn, NY © 2003, K. E. WATT. All rights reserved.
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