Category: Prose

I played the cello in my childhood. I chose it over the violin or  viola because it was bigger and bolder, and had a voice that more resembled mine. I sometimes regretted that decision when I found myself lugging my cello to school and back during Montana winters. Mostly though, I loved my cello, the mellow sound it made when I accidentally played it correctly, and the way it felt to play a tune with the other people in the orchestra. I thank my mother for tolerating the squeaks I undoubtedly produced, and for renting my instrument, something I took for granted when it was likely a hardship for her.

In seventh grade, when I went to school at Centennial Junior High in Boulder, Colorado, the orchestra teacher was Mrs. Ford. I loved her, and she inspired me to want to practice. We lived on my mother’s family’s farm at the time. My mother was in her “season of loss,” that stage in life when one seems to be losing everything. She had recently lost her mother, then her job, and now was taking care of her sister, Cynthia, who was dying of breast cancer in a nearby  care facility.

We lived in what one of my classmates described in a hushed voice as a “shack,” as she asked her mother with urgency to please come pick her up. In truth, it was an old dairy barn, a little worse for the wear, which my uncle Neil had repurposed as his home away from home. It had a rudimentary kitchen, a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. It smelled of my uncle’s cigars, was filthy, rodent infested, and a definite step down from the big house that we had lived in Billings, Montana on Clark Street. Even so, I didn’t think it was all that bad.

With no job, and no house, my mother still rented my cello, and finally, I was getting tolerably good at playing it. Mrs. Ford had moved me into second chair. Gretchen, the first chair cellist was definitely better than I was, but she had been taking private lessons since the second grade. I still felt that I could catch her, so every day, I closed myself into the bedroom of the dairy barn and practiced diligently.

My mother was collecting unemployment at the time, and to fulfill the requirements for receiving it, she had to apply for three jobs per week. Given her situation with her sister, she really did not want to find a job right away, and if she did find a job, it needed to be close enough to Boulder that she could be near her sister. With a Ph.D. in English, the availability of college-level teaching jobs in the area were sparse anyway, and so she ended up applying for jobs that she was over-qualified for, which included one temporary job teaching at the Secondary School in Idaho Springs. To her chagrin, she was offered the job, and had to take it. The job would start after Christmas.

In the meantime, my aunt Cynthia had passed away. It didn’t make sense to stay on the farm and to commute to Idaho Springs, especially during the winter. And so, we moved, and I had to say good-bye to my beloved music teacher, Mrs. Ford, the bright spot of 7th grade. When I arrived at my new school, the one where my mother was teaching, we learned that they did not have an orchestra. My mother felt terrible, and offered me the choice of continuing the cello with private lessons, but I declined, knowing that without a Mrs Ford, or a first chair dangling in front of me, without the satisfaction of playing in an orchestra, I would lose interest very quickly.

After a few years, I lost my desire to ever return to the cello, and when I was in college, where I studied some music theory, I came to wish that instead I had played the piano, an instrument that one could not easily carry from place to place, and that had an even bigger and deeper voice than a cello. The piano was a perfect instrument that embodied and illustrated all of music theory. It was a stringed instrument and a percussion instrument all-in-one.

And so it was that I came to purchase an upright grand piano the moment my son was old enough, and had exhibited the slightest musical talent and inclination.  At first, he was excited about piano lessons, and then he realized it was going to require some work, and then I managed to convince him that learning to play the piano was as important as learning to swim, or to breathe. He was getting pretty good around the time that his beloved piano teacher, his Mrs. Ford, passed away somewhat suddenly. I never could get him to go back to lessons after that. It made him too sad.

Our piano, a 1908 Mason and Hamlin piano with a lovely curly Mahogany case, and real ivory keys, sits squarely in the middle of our house, where it has sat untuned, and not played for the past five or more years. It is a beautiful piece of furniture. I now realize, in my own season of loss, that I did not buy the piano for him, but for myself. On a recent visit with my sister-in-law, Valeriya, a piano teacher, I casually mentioned that one of the things I was planning for my new year and my new life as an unemployed person was to learn to play the piano. She sprung into action. Within minutes I was laden with the instructional tools that I would need to teach myself the piano. She assured me that I could do it.

I began my self-teaching two weeks ago, and have made excellent progress. I eagerly await the arrival of the piano tuner because I know I will sound even better with a tuned piano. The most important thing that I have discovered since starting to learn the piano is that with a piano, you can be your own orchestra, and that you are always  sitting in first chair, no matter how poorly you play!

Yesterday, a famous American writer died at the age of 88. She was the mother of a good friend of mine. I met her once at his house, and we had a nice conversation. I didn’t know her well, although I would have loved to have. She reminded me of my mother. They both were/are (my mother is still alive) two years apart in age, both writers, both accomplished, both brilliant, both overly critical of other people, both justifiably angry about the lot that women in this country, and in the world have been cast. They both fought in their own ways to bring about social and cultural change.  They both loved cats. They both loved their children.

When I read in the Times that my friend’s mother had died, I cried like a baby, not because I mourn her specific loss, although her passing is a great loss, but because she represents my mother, and all of our mothers. Everybody’s mother dies. I cried for the sorrow that my friend and his sisters must be feeling about the loss of their mother. I cried for the inevitable loss of my mother, the death of my husband’s mother earlier this year, and the death of the numerous mothers of my various friends over the last few  years.

One of the privileges of having survived into middle age is that we get the honor of entering into what I have started to call the “season of loss.” For some people, it begins in their forties, and for others their fifties. For the truly unfortunate, it can span decades. A lucky few don’t enter it until later in life. It depends to some degree upon how old your parents were when they had you, and on the genetics of your family. I remember my mother’s season of loss. She was in her forties and fifties, during which time she lost her true love in a car accident, the woman I am named after, her mother to old age, two of her sisters–one to breast cancer and the other to a probable suicide, a brother to emphysema, and a number of close friends, mostly to cancer.

The season of loss is something that nobody is properly prepared for even though every single person who lives beyond a certain age will experience it. Nobody’s friends, parents, spouses, or children will live forever. Everybody  will die, and, in fact, is in the process of dying with each living, breathing moment. Knowing this brings little comfort. There is no preparation. The season of loss is an experience, a developmental stage, if you will, of mid-life. One can no more prepare for it than one can prepare for the vicissitudes of parenthood, or the ritual transformation that marriage brings to a relationship.

Although I mourn the loss of all of our mothers, I find solace in the thought that the season of loss is our rite of passage into an “age of wisdom,” a time in our lives when we know with certainty that we are mortal, that our time on this beautiful planet with our beautiful people is finite. With this knowledge, perhaps we can make better choices, do more meaningful things, enjoy ourselves a bit more, worry a little less about things that don’t matter.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, Chapter I.

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The clouds hung heavily upon us as we made the trip across the river to the election night party. I was already feeling gloomy, as just the day before, I had received a lay-off notice from my employer. Our whole research team was getting axed—we had until the end of the year to find something new inside the company. The radio blasted the bad news that was sweeping the country from East to West; Trump and his man, Pence, were winning. It seemed impossible. Already depressed, we climbed the stairs to the party, which turned out to be a wake, a sorrowful celebration of the previous eight years. A celebration of a dark-skinned man full of light and hope, now replaced by a light-skinned man full of darkness and greed. A pall of disbelief and grief settled across the subdued chatter. The newscasters sounded less chipper than usual. Thus ended 2016, setting the tone for the long winter months and endless year to come.

By January, I had landed another job within the company. The hiring manager had been effusive with praise about my qualifications. In fact, she wanted to put me in for a promotion right away. It was going to be wonderful. I was moving to a group that needed me, and valued the kind of work I did, or so I was led to believe.  We walked in the woman’s march, and I was feeling a renewed hope, in spite of the election loss.

By March, my new boss had lost her enthusiasm for me. I wasn’t going to make her look good. In fact, my incessant probing around the lack of quality of the research she had paid too much for was wearing thin on her. She suggested that I had an attitude problem, that I was arrogant, that perhaps I should start looking for a new job. She said that I was “not a good fit,” code for “I don’t like you.” She had said the same thing to a couple other of my colleagues, so I took solace in the fact that I was not alone.

For the next couple of months, I made an effort to be less arrogant, to pretend that the research we were doing was valuable; it was not meaningful. I tried vainly to carve a path of my own, putting forth research proposals that went unread, or at least unanswered.  My career was wasting away before my eyes, and I could not have cared less. I skated along for the next couple of months doing almost nothing, knowing that my time there was almost up. Time to move on to the next chapter.

In June, I always give myself a mammogram for my birthday, and 2017 was no different. It wasn’t even different that I had to go for the follow-up ultrasound; I usually have to do that. When they said they wanted to do a biopsy I got worried, and when the next day, the doctor called to tell me that I had breast cancer, I was shocked, horrified, devastated. The words, “You have invasive breast cancer,” reverberated for days before I would learn that I had “the good kind.” It had been caught early, and was treatable.

I never would have guessed that getting cancer would have been one of the best things to have happened to me in 2017.  Work was a shit-show, domestic and global politics were (and continue to be) a disaster, my mother-in-law was dying (and has since died), my own mother was in severe physical and mental decline, climate change has wrought havoc on the planet, and more immediately to our house in the form of a UPS truck crashing into it during one of the numerous ice storms we endured. After all that we had already sustained, getting news that I had “curable” breast cancer was relatively good news.

One of the truly good things that happened during 2017 was that Ken, my husband, was awarded an endowed professorship at Princeton. With all that was going on in our lives, it was uncertain whether we would/should/could go up until the day that we departed. My breast cancer was diagnosed in mid-July. I had surgery at the end of July, and because I qualified for brachytherapy, a much shorter stint of radiation therapy, I did that, wrapping up my treatment before mid-August when we left. I had sailed through, almost entirely unscathed, and in record time. No chemo, something else to be grateful about.

My psyche was intact. And then came the news that my mother had taken a serious fall, breaking her pelvis in four places. We all (including her) felt certain that the end was near. We loaded up our car, and set off on our journey eastward, which included several unplanned days in Denver to visit her.

We arrived in New Jersey at the end of August, and less than a week after arriving I boarded a plane back to Denver to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. All of the siblings were able to make it. We celebrated with her as well as humanly possible at the rehab center where she stayed for many weeks before her release. I planned to return again in a few weeks, wanting to give respite to my sister, Liz, who has had the stressful and lonely job of primary caregiver, but the bad ju-ju of 2017 had still not been entirely spent. On the plane trip from Denver back to New Jersey, my breast swelled up like a balloon, and felt like the weight of a bowling ball on my frontside. I wound up admitted to the hospital for an anti-biotic resistant post-surgical infection. This was far worse to deal with than the cancer, oddly. I was flattened for two months by the sequential anti-biotic treatments, and experienced anxiety and depression like I have never experienced before.

The bright side of having to deal with these health issues, is that it forced me to give up thoughts of returning to work right away, or ever, for that matter. I was able to spend time unwinding, reading, doing yoga and barre, cooking, building this web site, writing, and taking long walks and bike rides with my husband and daughter. We explored New Jersey, and learned to love it, in spite of ourselves. Living in Princeton was like living inside a snow-globe, its own perfect little world without poverty, hunger, or ugliness of any kind. I could almost forget that Donald Trump had been elected President…almost. I was able to fully recover from all that had been 2017.

And just before 2017 came to an end, we left our Princeton bubble, and took the journey of a lifetime back to our Portland home, a story for another day. I ended the year feeling blessed in every way. Both my mental and physical health have recovered. I quit my job, and am ready to begin the next chapter. I am not afraid of you, 2018.