War fused us.
Vietnam left you leery of spider holes;
Chad left me mourning a midnight escape.
But poets don’t thrive in fear and regret.
Weapons in words and hope we shape.
When You’re An Outlier
Often the word “outlier” is used in cancer treatment to describe a patient who beats the odds and lives longer than expected. Those outliers celebrate their status. But an outlier can also refer to someone whose response to treatment is not consistent with the bell curve of a normal distribution. I was diagnosed in 2020 with cancer of the tongue and lymph nodes. I underwent a brutal surgery, losing more than half of my tongue. This was followed by 33 targeted radiation treatments that left me a shell of my former self.
The Bunny on Wilton Drive
A sculptor shares his Thunder Bunny.
The Blueness of it hints of hidden graces.
Pedestrians pass it daily, hardly looking,
And to them, it seems ever the same fixture.
When A Government Totters
In the middle of an exam, my Chadian students suddenly stood up and fled my classroom. A minute before, they had seen through the glass-less window that a crowd had run from the central market in Baibokoum. No one knew why so many were running. But days before the word on the street was that rebels in Chad’s capital had …
Our Tax Dollars Pay Your Salary
Two Americans were asking for a meeting with me. They had traveled from Alabama to Washington to lobby for more assistance to Lebanon, the country from which their fathers had fled to begin lives in the U.S.A. I was the desk officer for Lebanon at the State Department. It was a fraught time with American hostages still being held. The …
Get That Man a Chair
In 1995 at the G-7 Summit in Halifax (Canada), Secretary of State Warren Christopher was meeting with the Japanese finance minister. Somehow the official notetaker did not show up, and I, lingering at the site as the control officer for U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, got pulled into the meeting to take notes. When I entered, the two delegations were …
Punching at Destiny: The Uneven Path Forward
When I was a sophomore in high school, I was cast in a production of the musical play, Guys & Dolls. I was Gambler #3 and I had only one line to deliver. During a game of craps, I was supposed to get into a tussle with Gambler #6, yell “You cheated!” and slug him. When we rehearsed the play, I was confident I could make it look like my fist was making contact with his face. The director had said that I was supposed to swing my arm as if to hit his face but position my back so that the audience wouldn’t see my hand sliding just beyond his right cheek.
Improbably Grateful
In 1995 the doctors told me I would probably be dead of AIDS by April 1997. I had retired early from the U.S. Foreign Service, and AIDS patients were dying rapidly. There was no effective treatment for AIDS or HIV. It was a grim time, and I had no reason to think I would be any different than the hordes of patients who had already succumbed, who were deprived of a normal life span and the opportunity to grow old.
One April Day
One of the great mysteries that mesmerized me as a child was wading through the ocean. Have you done that? Sure., ‘course you have. But that wasn’t the mystery: the intrigue was encountering those pools within the ocean, those places where the water was so much warmer. You’d move from a chilly wave into a space where the water seemed warm, heated even, by comparison with where you had been. And I’d stand in that pool and wonder how this one place, this point in the middle of the expanse of water cloaking the earth—how it could be different, so pleasant to stand in.
Alan used to say it was warmer ‘cause someone had just pissed there; and he’d swim away, laughing and pointing and calling me a “piss-o-phile.” But what a wonderful feeling it was. Knowing how cold the ocean was, and yet, here seemed a place set aside for someone to inhabit, someone to be warm, just standing.
Resilience
In the summer of 2020, I was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue and lymph nodes. In October I had surgery, removing more than half of my tongue and taking nerves from my arm to reconstruct a new tongue. From November 2020 through January 2021, I endured 33 targeted radiation treatments. I feel very different after this painful reordering of my …