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Archive for November, 2013

For the Week of November 24th: We All Have Food Stories

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It’s at dinnertime the stories come, abruptly,

as they sit down to food predictable as ritual.

Pink lady peas, tomatoes red as fat hearts

sliced thin on a plate, cornbread hot, yellow

clay made edible. The aunts hand the dishes

and tell of people who’ve shadowed them, pesky

terrors, ageing reflections that peer back

in the glass when they stand to wash up at the sink.

(“At Deep Midnight,” by Minnie Bruce Pratt. In Walking Back Up Depot Street, 1999) –

“We all have food stories,” said Marcus Samuelson, chef and owner of New York’s Aquavit, in an 2009 NPR Thanksgiving day broadcast.  “So much of cooking is where you want to go in memory,” he remarked, adding that he was baking his mother’s apple cake for his Thanksgiving dinner.

It’s true, isn’t it?  Whether you’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving or Hanukkah next week, families and friends will gather together to share in meals; traditional foods will be prepared; stories will be told.  This year, although we’ll be celebrating with four other friends, I’ll prepare two traditional dishes to contribute to the meal, both from recipes I’ve used since I was young and newly married. One, a candied yams recipe from my mother (although I now reduce the brown sugar substantially), and the other, a broccoli soufflé, following instructions on a worn and stained 3 x 5 notecard, copied from my mother-in-law’s recipe, her little tips on preparation noted in parentheses.

Take some flour. Oh, I don’t know, 

like two-three cups, and you cut

in the butter… 


You cut up some apples. Not those

stupid sweet ones. Apples for the cake, 

they have to have some bite, you know? 

A little sour in the sweet, like love. 

You slice them into little moons.

No, no! Like half or crescent

moons. You aren’t listening. 

 (“My Mother Gives Me Her Recipe” by Marge Piercy.  In:  Colors Passing Through Us, 2003)

Missing from our Thanksgiving will be my daughters and their children—they each live in different countries—my parents, who died several years ago, and the forty or fifty relatives who once gathered together for Thanksgiving dinners all the years of my youth.  I still remember the crispness and color of those Northern Californian autumns, games of softball and touch football outdoors before the meal, the smell of roasting turkey in the kitchen and finally, the tables laden with food.  There were cousins’ tables, defined by age, and the adult table.  I remember how thrilled I was to “graduate” to the adult table when I began high school, for there I heard the family stories, told and re-told each year by my father and his brothers.  Even though I still feel a sense of longing for those Thanksgivings of the past, the stories linger, carried in memory and ignited by the comfort of the food and tradition that marked those family celebrations.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on…

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women…

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks…

(“Perhaps the World Ends Here,” by Joy Harjo, In:  The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, 1994)

Holiday celebrations, the food and traditions that accompany them, are rich in memories and in story.  What are some of yours?  Whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or Hanukkah, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks.  I wish you a very happy, storied holiday.

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For the Week of November 17, 2013: The Comfort of Four-Legged Friends

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 17, 2013 | 2 Comments »

The way the dog trots out the front door

every morning

without a hat or an umbrella

without any money

or the keys to her doghouse

never fails to fill the saucer of my heart

with milky admiration… 

(From:  “Dharma,” by Billy Collins, in Sailing Around the Room, Random House, 2002.)

I’m a dog lover and owner of an aging canine companion, a toy poodle-terrier mix.  Kramer isn’t my usual “kind” of dog –I prefer larger, calmer types–but we acquired him in the second year of his life from a dying aunt, and now, at fourteen, he has my heart.  Despite his excitability and hopelessly neurotic behavior, Kramer has been at my side through cancer, heart failure, surgery and recovery, attentive to my every mood and eternally vigilant, a pint-sized protector who barks loudly when strangers come to the door.  We have established a strong and enduring bond.

And we’re not alone.  We humans have real emotional connections with our pets, whether canine, feline, equine or a variety of other classes.  They are companions, ever appreciative of our attention, sources of comfort when we’re feeling blue or under the weather, playmates and guardians.  Pets, as Florence Nightingale, the pioneer of modern nursing, observed over a century ago, are “excellent companion (s) for the sick…”

Today, Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT), an approach used to achieve therapeutic goals through interaction between patients and trained animals is widely practiced.  AAT provides comfort, assistance, and companionship for people dealing with conditions such as chronic or grave illnesses, grief, depression or disability.  ATT is also utilized in a variety of settings– hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, mental institutions, or the home.  According to the American Humane Society, Animal-Assisted Therapy has been shown to help children who have experienced abuse or neglect, patients undergoing chemotherapy or other difficult medical treatments, and veterans and their families who are struggling with the effects of wartime military service.

Kramer’s elder canine companion, our West Highland terrier, was a trained therapy dog.  Unlike  Kramer, Winston was calm, steady and loyal, content to lie at our feet as we worked or read.  His temperament made him a likely candidate for therapy dog training, and during his middle years, he and my husband visited children in hospitals.  Winston was happy to climb upon a bed, given permission, and lie quietly by a sick child, content to have his ears rubbed or his back stroked, seemingly oblivious to the happy smile on a child’s face, because when it was time to move on to another patient, he obediently marched along, tail held proudly as if he knew the importance of his role, and patiently repeated the process without complaint.

Winston died at seventeen, kept alive for an additional couple of years, we believe, by the younger Kramer and his relentless enthusiasm.  Yet in Winston’s final days, Kramer stood vigil, unusually quiet, seemingly aware of the gravity of Winston’s condition.  In the days after Winston’s death, he retreated to the place where Winston had spent his last days, lying quietly in the shade under the deck.  He stayed there for a week, coming out only in the evening when we called him in.  Faithful to his older companion to the end, he mourned his loss as deeply as we did.

Is it any wonder we become so attached to our pets?  Or that they offer us solace and comfort in difficult times?  Or that so many poets and essayists alike have written with affection about their pets?

I ran across a dim photograph of him the other day, going through some old things. He’s been dead twenty-five years. His name was Rex (my two brothers and I named him when we were in our early teens) and he was a bull terrier. “An American bull terrier,” we used to say, proudly; none of your English bulls. He had one brindle eye that sometimes made him look like a clown and sometimes reminded you of a politician with derby hat and cigar. The rest of him was white except for a brindle saddle that always seemed to be slipping off and a brindle stocking on a hind leg. Nevertheless, there was nobility about him. He was big and muscular and beautifully made. He never lost his dignity even when trying to accomplish the extravagant tasks my brothers and myself used to set for him… (From: “Snapshot of a Dog,” by James Thurber, The New Yorker, 1999.)

Take time, this week, to remember and write about a pet, whether from your childhood or the present.  How has the animal endeared himself to you?  When has a pet been a source of comfort to you or to someone in your family?  How has a pet played a healing role in your life?  What stories about your pet’s uniqueness come to mind?

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit…  Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world…

And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness—his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world.  Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased.  it is no small gift.  …What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass?  What would this world be like without dogs?  (From Dog Songs: Poems, by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press, 2013.)

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For the Week of November 11, 2013: The Moment Just Before

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He opens the door

            and walks in,

his face and white coat

stiff with starch,

 

holds my hand, and

he says,

“I’m afraid.

 

I am afraid

you have cancer…”

From: “Diagnosis,” by Majid Mohiuddin, in The Cancer Poetry Project)

“Write about the moment when the doctor said, “Cancer.”  It’s usually the very first prompt I offer in a new series of my “writing through cancer” workshops.  That moment of confirmation, the seconds in which a physician delivers the words that will, in an instant, change your life forever, is something everyone in the group shares, an event that evokes strong emotions as it gets written about and described.

Writing that is most healing has some particular characteristics, as psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleagues have noted, among them, writing that is concrete, vivid, and gives detailed descriptions of trauma, distress and emotion.  When I ask group members to return to that first moment they hear the word, “cancer.” No one ever responds to this prompt with generalities.  And when they read what they’ve written aloud, it’s often emotional, as they remember their doctor’s words, “I’m sorry; you have cancer.”

While those words, “you have cancer,” are unfamiliar and terrifying to us, to the doctor, they are words delivered many times, to many people.  How difficult must it be to be the physician who delivers those words to a patient?  Not once, but so many times throughout one’s medical career?

The door seems impenetrable.

Today is arduous.

I have seen patients with cancers of pancreas,

Gastric, cervix, colon—all unresectable…

Why is it so difficult to enter this room?

(From:  “The Door,” by David H. Huffman, MD, in The Cancer Poetry Project)

This past weekend, I led an all-day writing workshop for faculty, alumni and students of the Stanford University Medical School in Palo Alto.  It’s a series I’ve led since 2005, as part of the Literature and Humanities program in the medical school.  One of the several exercises I offered to the group on Saturday began with a reading of a personal essay, “The Before,” written by Jennifer Frank, MD and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  In it, Frank offers her readers a rare—and poignant–glimpse into the doctor’s mind as she prepares to call a patient with the diagnosis no one wants to hear.

This is the before.  A moment suspended like a bubble floating on a warm summer breeze gently but inevitably toward the ground.  I feel the pop coming, an implosion of the very center of your life.  Anticipating what this moment would hold, I nevertheless hoped for something different.  To be able to eagerly dial your number and shout out the good news to you in a breathless rush.  “It’s not what we thought.  It’s not cancer.”

Instead I take a deep breath, pressing each number slowly, cautiously, drawing out the moment before the burst.  The burst of your plans and your dreams and your future.  I stall for time, asking if this is a good time, are you alone, do you have a pen and paper? …

I want to be straightforward but not blunt.  I want to be compassionate but remain professional.  I slow myself down, remind myself that the words I’m about to say are ones that I’ve said before, many times, but that the words I’m about to say are also ones you’ve never heard before… (In:  “A Piece of My Mind,” JAMA, March 7, 2012, v.307. no.9).

It’s difficult, when we are the patients, the ones receiving the diagnosis, to understand what is felt by the person delivering the bad news.  We may never completely understand what is behind the doctor’s mask, yet we need the practiced and steadfast hand of a professional to guide us through the upheaval, and help us find our way through a regimen of treatments.  “All I can offer is my hand,” Frank concludes, “…to hold you up, prevent you from going under until the sea calms and the path clears.”

“Write about the moments just before you had to deliver bad news to a patient or someone close to you,” I said to the group after we read Frank’s essay aloud.  “Write about how you felt and what was going through your mind.”  Everyone went to work, heads bowed, pens moving quickly across the page or fingers flying over keyboards.  Twenty minutes later, I invited everyone to read aloud.  It was a humbling experience.   While I know well the emotions in the narratives of cancer patients and survivors, those expressed in this group’s narratives were no less powerful.  Their stories and poems offered a glimpse behind the mask, a reminder of what it is to be human, to care, to feel, no matter whether patient or physician.  As Huffman expresses in “The Door,”

…I can only be forthright and compassionate. 

Why is it so difficult to enter this room?

Maybe someday I will be in that bed.

I hope that if that time comes

My doctor will be as truthful and considerate.

But if she hesitates at the door…

I will understand.

This week, write about that moment, the one just before you hear the words “you have cancer.”  Remember, if you can, what you were feeling, where you were sitting or standing, what you remember about your doctor’s voice, eyes, face.  Then write about that same moment again, only this time, shift the point of view.  Put yourself in your doctor’s shoes and write from her or his perspective.  Become the one who must deliver the bad news, this diagnosis, to you.  What the doctor might have seen as she or he looked at you or heard when you came to the telephone?  What might she or he have felt?  Write in as much detail as you can.  When you finish, compare both.  What happened in each?  Did anything change in the way you think about that moment? Did you discover any new insights or understanding?  What was it like to write from the doctor’s point of view?

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For the Week of November 3, 2013: Searching for Home

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , poetry and healing, , , on November 3, 2013 | 2 Comments »

I guess I have to begin by admitting

I’m thankful today I don’t reside in a country

My country has chosen to liberate, -

(From:  “Thanksgiving Letter from Harry” by Carl Dennis, in:  Unknown Friends, Penguin Press, 2007).

I returned to San Diego Monday afternoon, my feelings mixed, yet happy to settle into my space, surrounded by my own things, nap in my bed, and be in my house after nearly a month away.  Yet I was nostalgic, missing the enthusiastic greeting “Gramma!” I heard as my grandchildren, sleepy and smiling, opened the bedroom door to crawl under the covers with me every morning.  I was both grateful to be home and yet, reluctant to immerse myself in what had been so routine before I left:  a busy teaching schedule, errands to run, even my regular habit of tuning in, morning and evening, to the national news.  I resisted listening to the political circus in Washington, reports from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran that only spoke of ongoing violence and warfare, things happening in a troubled world that I’d left behind for the weeks I was in Okinawa.  I missed the sense of family—of the home that family offers, the laughter and delight of extended time with Nathan and Emily, the quiet graciousness of Claire’s Okinawan friends, the beauty of the island’s coastline, and, perhaps the more peaceful existence on an island once so brutally devastated by war.

My sense of “home” has changed over these past many years.  I left the United States in the sixties with my first husband to go to Canada.  It was a self-imposed exile, a kind of protest against the Vietnam War that mobilized so many in my generation.  We never imagined we would stay longer than three or four years at most, but it was twenty-three years later when I returned to California.  I was like a homing pigeon flying west, back the place I was born, to California, the place I’d always called “home.”  What I discovered, like so many emigrants before me, was that “home” no longer existed in the ways I had imagined it.   It—and I—had changed, and the very things that drew me back to the West were now elusive.

 “Goethe once wrote that all writers are homesick, that all writers are really searching for home.  Being a writer is being on a constant search for where you belong.”  It “comes out of a place of memory, not geography.” — Mary Morris, “Looking for Home”

Where I belong.  I admit it:  I don’t have the same sense of belonging to California that I once had.  But it’s not only years living out of one’s native country that changes things, even a brief time away, like the month I’ve just had, can shift your perspective for a time.  But the longer times, the years spent in different places, can change you in ways you aren’t even aware of.  For all the years I lived in Canada, I’d clung so tenaciously to a golden dream of California, the one harbored in my imagination, that I didn’t notice how Canada had quietly wrapped itself around my heart.  The people, culture, and experiences of the twenty-three years I lived there had defined me in ways that weren’t apparent until I attempted that return to my childhood home.  Canada was as much a part of me as California had been for the first twenty-three years of my life.  I just hadn’t realized how much until I’d left it.

You want to get a good look at yourself.  You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly.  The outer clothing falls from you.  You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet.  You remove your underwear.  At a loss, you examine the mirror.  There you are, you are not there.

–Mark Strand, “In the Privacy of the Home”

Now, these many years later, I am grateful my daughters have lived in other places in the world, as much as I hate the distance between us.  They are international citizens in a world that demands we not isolate ourselves nor see our country as somehow superior to others.  Each time I travel to spend time with them, I remember how young and naïve I was in those first years being in Canada, how lonely and overwhelmed I felt at first, but how, in the end, I became a better person, more accepting and my life enriched from the experience living in another country.  In truth, I still struggle to define California and San Diego, the place I live now, as home.  And I still search for that sense of belonging, of identity with a place that I once knew.  Even now, I hope to find it.

Yet Thomas Wolfe’s words play in my mind.  “You can’t go home again.”  And the truth is that even if we’ve never left a place, the events of our lives sometimes make us feel as if we’re suddenly strangers to it.  Cancer can have that effect; job loss, divorce, other difficult life events can too.  You cross the boundary into a strange, new territory, one in which the customs, the nuances are unfamiliar.  The world you now inhabit requires you learn how to navigate it, and yet, you long for home, for the feeling of belonging, for the life, the place you once knew by heart.  Only in returning to the life you once had before do you discover that you aren’t “at home” as you once were.

Home.  It’s a topic rich with memories, experiences, and stories.  Explore what “home” means to you.  Have you ever felt “of a place” and yet estranged from it at the same time?  Has cancer or other difficult life events changed your definition of home?  Write about leaving or returning to the place you call “home.”

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