Margotlog: Friends with Cancer

Margotlog: Friends with Cancer

     We are not supposed to be brought low by our friends' illnesses, or that was the message I received as a kid. Maybe I was simply a hedonistic type, skipping rope and running up and down the enormous block from King Street to Meeting Street along the bulk of what we called "The Old Citadel." This was Charleston, South Carolina in the days before home airconditioning. During the summer, our parents often took us to the movies, within walking distance, since we lived at the King Street end of The Old Citadel, and the movie theaters were maybe five blocks down King Street -- the Gloria Theater being the one I remember most. Glimmering stars shone down from a large replica of dark sky above our heads.

     Entering the air-conditioned cool and walking the dark sloping ramp to find seats, we settled in to be transported to other realms, other eras. There was a bio-pic of Chopin, played by a pale though not haggard young man, with a mess of curly, dark hair. Several times the camera focused on his hands traversing the piano keys. Finally, the keys were splashed with red blood. Our mother explained that he had tuberculosis, and was hemmoraghing, or spitting up blood. The music he played even as his blood stained the white keys was so delicious, so rampant with fury and passion that I was completely mesmerized.

     After that, for weeks, months, maybe years, my sister and I played at romantic dying in our parents' big bed. She was Violetta from Verdi's "La Traviata." Then I was Mimi from "La Boheme." Snuggling in our mother's fleecy pink bed jacket, we sang lustily as the maid, (aka the healthy sister) brought us glasses of lemonade and a cookie or two to assauge the illness. There was something remarkably lifelike about this play-acting, especially for me. I had periodic bouts with tonsillitus--high fevers and very sore throats, which sent me to bed while penicillin worked its cure. 

     Dying in almost all 19th-century opera occurs not so much to young men, but to beautiful young women. Sometimes like Mimi, the dying damsel is simply pathetic; other times as with Violetta, her illness is a kind of plague brought on by her all too "free and easy" lifestyle, depriving her of a chance to redeem herself except through dying. I have no doubt that enough beautiful young women died of TB during the 19th century to make these scenarios all too realistic. I also sometimes include the great poet Keats in these remembered scenarios, though my sister and I had never heard of him. But now, his poem "Bright Star/ would I were steadfast as thou art," says so much about the 19th-century's scourge of TB and the need to make it poetic.

     Now, the plague is cancer. We live longer, giving those mutations that cause cancer (along with environmental plagues) time to do their horrible work. Right now, I have three friends with cancer, one for the first time. For another, the scourge has recurred. This will be her fourth bout with cancer. And for the third, a man, the cancer occurred perhaps eight years ago, and he has been very lucky to have extremely good care at Boston's Mass General as part of a study, which I believe involves a new concoction of drugs as well as blood transfusions.

     I bow my head to their courage. Sometimes after talking to them, I am so subdued that I need to be quiet, drifting up and down stairs, a bit like walking a prayer. Prayer offers up a supplication to the great powers of faith, hope, and charity which the weakness of my soul, and the absolute incomprehensibility of their suffering require that I petition. Now, outside my window, it is a beautiful morning. I am happy to report that many houses along our block no longer use herbicides and pesticides on their lawns. Yes, our climate is warming, but so, perhaps are our hearts, transformed by awareness of how depredations to our environment bring on slow-or-fast moving catastrophe.

     This, in itself, is worth a prayer of thanksgiving and for me, at least, a determination to continue to support the work to free our world from cancinogens with which we have polluted our air, water, and soil. In the names of my friends, and of the increased number of birds in my backyard--I offer my sorrow and my attempts to do what I can. Yesterday, I saw for the second time this spring, a humming bird at my sweet water feeder. For their lives, and those of my friends, for myself, my neighbors, my family--I offer up a prayer of muted hope.

Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth

Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth

In the midst of a Florence spring, it's easy to be reminded of what price beauty. The trees at the interchange where I crossed from the old city into a quieter more modern area glowed with rich green. The sky every day for a week was blue as Mary's cloak. My one evening alone, walking along an embankment above the Arno, watching the water twine and flow, three mallards took flight. I could have been on a Minnesota lake.

Many of our Minnesota lakes and streams are polluted by chemicals sprayed to engender huge harvests. Many farmers want nothing to do with "buffers" of plants that will absorb and neutralize these chemicals. I can almost hear the argument: "We have big machines that till and harvest. We need all the space we can get." It's the soy and corn, Dummie. And voracious farming practices that want "carpet crops" with no true dirt around the borders, dirt that if left alone, could absorb much of the polluting run-off.

Italians don't talk much about farm pollution. Their brand of "showing off" doesn't mean so much controlling nature, as sashaying with speed or beauty--beauty as a form of parading the human/divine, Venus on her speeding shell, her nakedness a form of glorious identity, her ropes of golden hair another form of pasta. To eat is to be beautiful. To walk arm-in-arm through the family crowds is to carry your soul-food on either side of you.

Yes, I had lovely things to eat, especially at Omero's in a tiny hamlet high above the Arno called Arcetri. Far enough above the city that only a few lights glimmered here and there, but close enough to perceive the tops of hills still catching the sun, and the dells turning blue in the twilight.

I didn't like what the new steward of the Uffizi has done with the paintings. All the Michaelangelos downstairs in dungeon rooms with black walls. (But isn't that to protect the surfaces? No, says my snide friend, not much impressed with curators. It's because "black" is trendy.) I missed associations from years before. No longer does Venus on her half shell speed forward across a gallery toward a Netherlander image of piety, the donors tiny at the bottom. The Netherlanders now have a whole wall to themselves. And they're rather staid and boring, while poor Venus has no one to counteract her insouscient freedom and beauty.

Thank heavens no one has tampered with the wildly inventive Uffizi ceilings--those cornucopia of satyrs, angels, griffins, plinths, vessels--so complex and unpredictable that the neck and brain tire together and return the eyes to the floor.

I ate at least one, sometimes two gelatos a day, with pistachio and lemon or pink as cotton candy atop deep licorice, every combination an experiment, some better than others. I found one museum I'd never visited before, dedicated to Galileo, right behind the Uffizi, and so if you've goofed your entry time, as I did, and have time to kill, it's so easy to climb the stairs as models of the sky change around you, globe after globe after globe. Sky and earth, stars and planets. At the end I was no better informed than before as to what precisely he, the great sky-gazer, discovered or predicted, but I saw many many "mock-ups" of solar systems, a few that almost looked like they belonged to us.