I missed winter last year.
I missed Christmas in NY for the first time in my life.
I arrived at the butt crack of Buddha, just hours before hundreds of people would not be able to arrive at all.
A major snowstorm was on its way.
It will be a white Christmas.
Welcome to NY.
~~
My dad is a creature of extreme habit - almost obsessively, compulsively so.
He buys things in ridiculous bulk and replaces every napkin and tissue box even before the box is empty. The gas tanks in the cars are always full. My sister and mom don’t even really know how to pump gas or what a gas-light looks like. He fills up ketchup bottles and dishwashing detergent as soon as there is any sign of slight usage. He buys enough bagels, donuts and croissants on a Sunday morning to feed all of Manhattan and the boroughs. They are never even eaten, not one, but because we, as individual family members, may have eaten one in the past, or commented that we liked a certain sesame or shmear, he continues to get them…en masse.
The cupboards, although not bear, resemble normal cupboards with one or two of the same cans of soup or squeeze bottles of mustard. But it is not normal for us.
The supplies are disappearing, and so is my dad.
He is weak. He can’t shovel or run the snow-blower. He can barely move from the chair to the couch. He sleeps all day and barely eats or drinks. He doesn’t sit at the dining room or kitchen table anymore for meals. He’s dehydrated -body, muscles and soul atrophied. You see him want, try to stick to any of his routines. One routine he’s still sticking too, smoking. Let him enjoy it if he must.
He goes outside to try and shovel but comes back in and sits. He resigns himself to have help. In quiet, angry epitaphs he whispers under his breath.
The things my dad used to do.
We see him let go, like sand between the small nooks between your fingers.
Now you see him. Then you don’t.
I see myself in him. I see all of us, so stubborn and uncomfortable in asking for help with anything.
I’m dreaming of a….
Everything looked so beautiful, but felt so sad.
~~
When I'm in LA, I talk to my mother everyday. I hear things. I know she is sad. She is scared.
But until you see it, you don’t ever really know.
Until you are there, you will never truly experience.
Cancer is a disease that eats away at the heart and soul of a family, not just the diagnosed.
I remember talking to my friends in LA after 9/11. I wondered what their experience could have possibly been 3000 miles away when I was working uptown, just a few miles away from the towers.
I picked up a Dunkin Donuts coffee, had a fight with my boyfriend, dashed to my long-term temp job at an investment bank, ordered breakfast for my boss, borrowed a nail file and filed my nails at my friend’s desk. I picked up breakfast from the lobby, jumped in the elevator just as a couple of bankers were talking about the first tower being hit with an airplane. Whatever, was what I thought. It didn’t even register in my head.
Minutiae.
We were released from our jobs. My secretary friend with the nail file and I, ran back to my apartment, the one I was sharing with my sister in Chelsea. My friend lived in Brooklyn and couldn’t get home. She wouldn’t get home to Brooklyn for hours. And even then she would have to walk part of the way.
The bright stainless blue sky and crisp ripening fall air became littered with dark plumes of smoke, fright, anger, tears, questions, shock.
My sister came home. My dad was driving uptown from the financial district. Wasn’t anywhere near. My mother and older sister were in Toronto for the film festival. They were fine and driving back from Canada. My friend who worked in tower b was late for work because there was a game on television the night before. He got drunk. Was hung over. He called me to apologize for not calling me on my birthday the week before. My boyfriend came home. We ate macaroni and cheese and watched the television. That night, we walked the streets. The sounds of that siren, never ending, always etched in my memory, still sounding. No one was out, the sky was red. Downtown was glowing.
Minutiae.
What were you doing?
I don’t mean to bring the vibe down even more. There is nothing like Cancer and 9/11 talk to really get a party started. And don’t get me started on the economy!
9/11 was a tragic example of something that happened to everyone. Some were closer than I. But the ripples of emotion moved throughout the world and through all of our own individual pairs of eyes, a different set of emotions existed within all of us, reacting to the collective event in our own personal and intimate ways.
We all have our own personal 9/11’s. For me and my family, it’s Cancer. The terrorists are still foreign, scary, uninvited and ruthless. And I know we’re not the only ones. Cancer affects hundreds of thousands of millions of people.
Crying, silence, anger, the list of possible emotions to attach are endless.
~~
My older sis, Karin and I, rallied. We layered - her, the way of a real New Yorker in winter, I the way of a person who forgot how fucking cold it can get on the east coast. I put garbage bags on my feet and stuck them in my waterproof boots with the hole at the base of the ankle. I threw on a wool sweater over my long-sleeve thermal over my t-shirt over my tank-top. I wore two pairs of pants, two pairs of gloves and a hat, a big, wool one with a little cotton ball at the top of it.
Karin wrestled with shoveling the back, side and front walkway.
I took on the behemoth of a drive-way after borrowing the neighbors shovel that looked like one Charlie Brown might have used to shovel his snow storms.
Where does the snow go? How did my dad do it all these years. Where are we supposed to put all this stuff?
We both wore our iPod shuffles and got to work before the snow froze.
Even at different ends of the house, I felt connected to my sister. I would look over to her, a little face peeking from beneath a blob of clothing floating amidst a white haze. She would shovel for a bit then fall back into the fluffy pile behind her and make a snow angel. She’d laugh. I love seeing her laugh. Mostly, she’s rather stoic and consistent with showing little emotion. But when she smiles, she beams. I see me in her.
I held the shovel over my head horizontally and danced around like I was at a club.
Karin and I sliced and devoured every flake that formed its way into 6-inch sheet cakes on our property. It took us hours, but we shoveled our way back into something real that we could see again, something that wasn’t erased into white. We dug to what was underneath, what we remembered.
I sweat a lot for those few hours and worked muscles I didn’t even know I had.
My dad did not have the strength.
I don’t ever remember feeling stronger…
And more scared.