C’est Levee
So you think about things in their macro and micro perspective and as I mentioned the other day everything can only be known in contrasts. So when I lay in bed and rode the earthquake at the hotel in SF and then fielded the call from my doctor an hour later saying there was a problem with my mammo – suddenly carrying the cross of New Orleans, the daunting job of finishing the LaLa, the soul ache of divorcing a man I spent a third of my life with, the heart ache of having been involved with a man I clearly now know I don’t know, of the complete and utter loss of a little boy who took my breath away everytime I held him my arms – it all came clear to me today when I walked into Ochsner’s Breast Center and sat in chairs with a lot of women with frightened looks on their faces that they, like I, had probably gotten up that morning and taken a shower and didn’t put on lotion and each had looked down at their breasts and thought – I kind of like my breasts – so as I sat in one of the new fangled waiting room cubicles (possibly some new thing where as not to group too many of you where you have to look at each other) with an attractive woman in her mid 40s with her hair neatly pulled back in a pony tail – we were both clutching the hospital gown which naturally didn’t cover our breasts – through the speakers came the 8th Barbra Streisand song since I had walked in the place and I looked at the woman and said – what’s with the Streisand marathon? – she smiled thinly – and I thought what if – what if the diagnosis today for me had not been benign – what if the next few years were about sitting in rooms like that wearing hospital gowns (an inside joke), with other women who shared illness in common, listening to Babs sing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”
There was a time when we were down and out
There was a place when we were starting over
We let the bough break
We let the heartache in
Who’s sorry now
And the doctor called me in a dark, wood panelled room and said “you are not normal but that might be normal for you” – and I said, with a haughty laugh, that’s a relief! Asymmetrical massing while the rest of the female population is symmetrical and for one week I was wondering if my will was in order or if I had to throw out all my pretty bras.
Down at the pool later with L and her son the J-man – I tried to coax him into the water which felt lush and cool against my skin – I had a deep deep jones for W and missed his body in the pool and his goggles with the tags that stick out on each side like some gila monster – I missed his loving arms and voice – and I missed the height, depth and breadth my soul can reach when feeling out of sight and the greatest casualty of all is the loss of our love – because we were linked – he was my love child. The J-man called me Ocho and remembered seeing Cars and I opened my arms to him as I heard someone call Sophie across the pool to a little girl with big red floatees on her arms and again the water felt lush and cool against my skin.
I am not normal, nor am I living in normal times, in a normal city, with a normal mayor, with normal friends, and a normal past, and possibly – oh god I hope – not a normal future. But all of these abnormal things today seem sweeter than they have ever seemed. C’est Levee!