Three Sips to the Future
My meeting of no great importance was canceled. Thinking I would be gone my wife was out with her friends. So I walked through the light rain around the corner to the pub. The pub has been there longer than I have been here, years and years. I walked past the new suchi place, the taco place that took over the sandwich shop, and the even newer Greek take-out kitchen.
As I walked through the mist I carried a knot in my chest. After forty years as a therapist I knew this was not a heart problem, not indigestion, not even just a hunger pang. Just plain old anxiety. I don’t carry that often, but I have been for a while.
The pub is almost the kind of place where everybody knows your name, except it is more like the place Yogi Berra didn’t go to, the place that is so crowded no one goes there any more. There are few regulars at the bar because the bar fills up with different people very quickly every night. Tonight, just before six o’clock, twenty-two of the twenty-four seats were taken. I grabbed one of the open ones and ordered a Guinness.
Three sips of that sweet, smooth black liquid and the knot melted away. The world was good again. The future may not look bright, but it certainly looks do-able. What was I so worried about?
Sure, I have cancer. And yes, even though I had surgery two weeks ago that removed hopefully all of it, it didn’t really remove all of it, they don’t think. So, I still have cancer, and I now have a big scar. Don’t mind the scar.
With the help of the Guinness I could realize that I have probably had some abnormal cells reproducing themselves in my body for seven years. I still feel the same, except that I am seven years older and I can’t move as fast, especially to my left. I have an excellent treatment team at one of the best cancer treatment centers in the world. It helps to know that so many people ride their bikes over a hundred miles every summer to help me get newer, better, treatments.
What I have figured out, from skipping all around the Internet, is that I probably have a 75–80% chance of living a good quality life for the next three to eighteen years, unless some new information or event arises that changes that. There may be some difficult times along the way when I get nauseous or lose my hair so something, but that has not yet been determined. Even that would just be temporary. So why do I carry that knot around?
How different is that from the people around me? The two guys next to me are probably less than half my age. They are watching the TV and talking about their fantasy quarterbacks. The older people sitting on the other side of the horseshoe consist of two couples, the only two women at the bar, and men who look more tired and gaunt than I do. I think. But that’s because there is no mirror behind them to show me what I look like. Few people get to this age without some pesky mutations. Unlike Barbara Ehrenreich, I am very willing to accept a medicalized life, at least for a while, and hopefully, quite a while.
After a few more sips the haddock-of-the-day arrives. I am ready to relax and read about Trump, and how his lawyers are trying to figure out ways to answer some questions from Mueller. They must realize that Mueller already has the answers, and Trump doesn’t. But why get upset again? I can just look at the TV, and hope that Chris Sale can go six or seven innings on Saturday and thereby bring the hope of another duck-boat parade in Boston this year. Meaningless, but fun, and thus life continues in the slower lane.
I am going to post this on my blog entitled Choosing Our Future, but there are many things we don’t get to choose.
To close, I offer this musical counter-point to the above message: Whistling in the Dark.
