Report from the 2017 Brain Tumor Walk

Cindy, volunteer at Honor and Celebrate, posing in front of the message canvas

  
  People have rapt, confiding expressions on their faces when they stand in front of a canvas, Sharpie in hand, and write messages to certain someones who will never read them, because they've died.  Seen from my perch in the Honor and Celebrate tent, they stand quietly, letting the busy world fade, then their lips begin to move, then their hands.

• I love you mamma
• For my husband Patrick — Happy Anniversary
• If all you can do is crawl, start crawling  —from a fellow human
• JEAN LEWIS
• Memories of Maria, a thoughtful and decent person

    Many returned their Sharpies without meeting my eyes and walked away quickly.

Student volunteers from UC Davis
who set up the message canvas

    The message canvas would have been unusable without help from two young UC Davis students.  After my first attempt to set it up, it was too low and sagged badly in the middle.  They raised and pulled it taut with twine looped around the top bar of the tent.  Then one of them wrote: Remember Monica, Our Angel.

    Cindy was the other volunteer at Honor and Celebrate.  She had successful brain surgery for a benign tumor in the '90s, and has been intending to come to the Walk every year since.  But something always came up.  We were lucky she made it this time, because she had a deft touch in setting out the Sharpies, and fluffing the paper roses we used for the Remembrance Ceremony.

    Around forty of us gathered by the tent at 9.  We passed out kleenex, and paper roses, then Rev. Will Hocker from UCSF led us in a reading of Epitaph by Merrit Malloy:

    When I die
    Give what left of me away
    To children
    And old men that wait to die.

    And if you need to cry,
    Cry for your brother
    Walking the street beside you.
    And when you need me
    Put your arms
    Around anyone
    And give them
    What you need to give to me.

    I want to leave you something.
    Something better
    Than words
    Or Sounds.

    Look for me
    In the people I've known
    Or loved.
    And if you cannot give me away
    At least let me live on in your eyes
    And not in your mind.

    You can love me most
    By letting
    Hands touch hands
    By letting bodies touch bodies,
    And by letting go
    Of children
    That need to be free.

    Love doesn't die.
    People do.
    So, when all that's left of me
    Is love,
    Give me away.

    Painfully beautiful, like the setting — spectacular clear vistas, but chilly, and breezy enough for we hearing impaireds to lose some of the Reverend's words, and to not be able to fully appreciate the acoustic guitar accompaniment.  

   After the ceremony, a survivor told an inspiring story from the main stage, about how she married and had a child after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Then the walkers started off in the direction of the Golden Gate, encouraged by a troupe of taiko drummers.

    Unlike on previous years,  when the walkers returned, they did not hear a speaker from the research community telling of

Suzy on left

promising new treatments in the pipeline.  But we did have a good band, who played a hot version of "Got my Mojo Working" by Muddy Waters. One couple even braved the cold and got up and danced. 

 

  The wife of the harp player told me she'd always been active raising money for medical charities, but never imagined needing help herself.  That changed when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  She said this with a bright, friendly smile, the way many people tell you their truths at these events.

    My old friend Oded Angel, he of the fateful New Years Day bike ride, came at noon to help us pack .  He was a welcome sight.  For me and many other volunteers, the day had started at 6:30 am with a couple of hours of hard and inglorious physical labor, carrying heavy boxes from a U-Haul, unfolding tables and chairs. 

By mid-day I'd started to fade.  Oded helped until we were packed up, then biked off to visit his sister in San Francisco.  Before he left, he said he was glad to come to honor my wife.  Simple words, meant a lot. Like the simple words Sharpied on the canvas.

∏-Rats of Crissy Fields
Team Jolly Roger, a tradition at the Walk

    Jenifer let me take that canvas home, and I unrolled it on my living room floor and wondered what the writers would want me do with their messages, so private and so public.  Can't keep them forever, my clutter problem is already unmanageable.  So maybe sharing a few more is best.
   
• Miss you daddy! Every day since May 11, 2011 -- your little baby girl
• Our dearest love, Suzi -- Team Shine a light by the Bay
• The Jolly Rogers, YO HO" (Team members names in interlocking hearts)
• Friends of mine touched by Brain Tumors — Dennis, Kathryn, Sirus, Wasina

P.S.,

    If too much upbeat cancer talk brings you down, or you find yourself wishing that the '!' would suddenly disappear from the world's keyboards, you might appreciate this poem.  If this were a radio show, it would be dedicated to all the cancer patients who didn't make it.

Picture This


by Carol Teltschick

On your TV 
After the evening news
The name of every person 
who died from cancer today

A photo of each face


How they looked before, and after,
The list of treatments that did not save them

We could observe a moment of silence 
for each of these people
after our dinner

We could give them that
If only it wouldn’t take 
the whole damn night


(Cancer kills more than 1500 people a day in the U.S. alone)

WTF means What's to fear?! There's a place for poetry in the 24 × 7 news cycle?! — short podcast review

𝓓𝓲𝓪𝓻𝔂 𝓸𝓯 𝓪 𝓟𝓸𝓭𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓽 𝓙𝓾𝓷𝓴𝓲𝓮

NPR/To the Best of our Knowledge celebrates National Poetry Month ⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️☆

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.

Also a poem by William Carlos William, MD,

including these famous  lines:

It is difficult / to get the news from poetry / 

yet men die miserably every day / for lack /

of what is found there.

Dr. Williams was a general practicioner, with much

experience in the miserable deaths department. 

   Quon Barry woke up on Nov. 9 to "a world I never imagined," and she didn't like the changes.  Could acclaimed poets, such as Quon, do anything to help? Say by writing poems that responded to current disasters?  And so she launched Asphodel.info, taking the name from the William Carlos William poem with the famous lines about the difficult necessity of getting news from poetry.

    Asphodel.info publishes one poem a week, by an acclaimed poet, on a topic in the news — news defined broadly to include stuff like the first robin in spring.  She's optimistic about finding an audience because she says we live in an age of "the democratization of poetry" — poetry defined broadly as "compressed, charged" language, encompassing advertising and Twitter.  And she succeeded in getting NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast (TTBOOK) to air the first 5 poems in April to celebrate National Poetry Month.

    The 1st April poem called Inaugural, by Quon, focuses on one particular change to her strange new post-Nov 9. world: she now calls herself a refugee. She actually looks to the future with hope:

    …Once, I got on a plane,

    I left, it was done, I became me, I did not suffer in the way

    of such suffering, but I am a refugee from a war

    this country conducted. May this be the dawn

    of an era in which we do not have to live a particular life

    in order to respect it. …

   The 2nd poem is Brush with Cymbals (WARNING: may contain symbols, and play with words) by Fady Joudah, MD.  Like Barry Quon, Dr. Joudah is a refugee, a Palestinian exiled from Israel in 1948.  The poem is a one way conversation with his adopted country, and to me has strong echoes of Allen Ginsberg's America.  Brush with Cymbals begins with:

   

    America, I’m downloading your heart,

    your giga, and my CPU 

    is slow…I will have your corazòn

    when I’m in the dirt

And of course America beings with the immortal lines:

    America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

    America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

    The NPR podcast includes an 18 minute interview with Dr. Joudah, interesting enough to merit a replay or two.  He tells us that being a doctor is like being poet, he manages uncertainty in both roles; that being ill is like being a refugee, because you're exiled from your body; that in classical Arabic poetry, the last letter in the rhyme word is the first letter of the next line; that the key to being a translator, as in his translation of the famed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, is to place himself in delusional state where he can convey what cannot be measured.  His thoughts on how the Palestinians are seen in America?  He uses a medical metaphor, triage: there is a hierarchy of suffering, and exile matters less than holocaust.

    Next up, Ode To the Dead of Bowling Green by Nick Lantz. As in the Bowling Green Massacre, the fiction invented by Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway to justify the fiction that the travel ban her boss proposed did not target Muslims.  Poets and politician both play with words to pry them free them from their literal meanings. Nick's ode is a poet's meditation on the Trump team's playfulness:

    … When I say clock tower,

    I mean the problem of evil—to wit, a man in a suit

    who says immigrants but means slaves, a man in a suit

    who says choice but means your children will barely

    know how to read …

    …When I say hope, I’m asking

    how a poem can hope to shame a man pressing

    a torch into a pile of books in the town square.

    Nick Lantz teaches college in Texas, and the "clock tower" references a real massacre, at the University of Texas in 1966.

    A pedestrian almost gets killed by car, and walks away oblivious but unharmed.  This is news?  WTF!!  And indeed, the next poem WTF by Laura Kasischke, is about a young lady, wearing air buds and a t-shirt sporting those 3 fateful letters, stepping into traffic in traffic without looking even one way. Kasischke braked in time to reinvent the t-shirt's meaning:

    … I know what this stands for.  I've

    texted it to friends.  I've

    said it, outright, in public …

    what I read, instead, seeing

    her t-shirt's three

    letters through my windshield

    this afternoon is

    What's to Fear?    

    Larger significance, if any?  That the next generation, each and every one madly in love with their smart phones, is on a collision course with physical reality?  That America stepped into bad traffic Nov. 8, and our luck could run out at any moment?   Dear diary, you decide.

    The last April poem is November Eyes on Main Street by Richard Blanco.  He had a moment of fame on January 21, 2012, when he read his poem One Today at Obama's 2nd inauguration.  That poem talked of weaving diverse strands of the American experience, and ended with us looking up together at "hope — a new constellation."  He's in a different mood now. Of all these Asphodel poems, his is the one that says the divisions are stark, raw, and he offers no band-aids. Here he is, avoiding the eyes of the grocery checker on November 9:

    …Paper or plastic she asks me,

    but it doesn’t matter. What matters is this:

    she’s been to my barbque’s, I’ve donated

    to her son’s football league, we’ve shoveled

    each other’s driveways, we send each other

    Christmas cards. She knows I’m Latino and

    gay, yet suddenly I don’t know who she is

    as I read the button on her polyester vest:

    Trump/Pence: Make America Great Again.

    She doesn’t know me either. We manage

    smiles as she hands me my change, but

    our locked eyes say, nothing.…

    

   It is what it is.