What's a Story Worth?

Every Monday morning, before I’ve even donned my walking shoes, I check my email and find a question for me to answer. It’s a gift my son gave me for Christmas, and he week he asked a question through a website called Storyworth that I'm to answer about my childhood and other things.. When I’ve answered all the questions, my children get a keepsake book.

Now I’m guessing, that since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and had recently completed more than a year-and-a-half of chemo/radiation/targeted therapy, that he thought I might die with stories in my head that were still left to be told. It was touching beyond measure, as my kids, historically, have rolled their eyes at my stories. I wondered at the time if he really wanted to know these answers, but I took the gift into my heart as it was intended and starting writing.

The answers, I was told, could be short — a paragraph, really — and when I read that, I thought, well, if it’s a story there must be more to it than a single paragraph. (And I thought, too, that the creators of this website didn’t know me at all! But on that first Monday after Christmas, I got my first question and began to ponder. “What is one of your favorite children’s stories.” A lot. Just one story? How could I narrow a childhood of reading into just one story? But as I perused my mind and my library, I kept coming back to the Illustrated Treasure of Children’s Literature.

Here is what I wrote ( it’s not ONE story, but several):

When I was a child and before I was in school, our library at home was quite limited, as was the town library, which was in a room above the Fire Department (if you can imagine that.) I can still remember walking up the creaky stairs to the library room, watching the dust filter through the windows. Out the window to my left was Pop B’s office, and in front, the Post Office. But you didn’t want to be up there when the fire alarm blared! I remember those details but not particular books I checked out. In the school library, I remember a book called “Little White Dove,” which was the imagined story of what had happened to Virginia Dare. Her life fascinated me as a young girl — does still — and I liked the book a lot. 

But I suppose some favorites came much earlier, from a book I have on my bookshelf today called “Better Homes & Gardens Story Book.”

I’m sure B must have gotten this as part of her subscription to Better Homes & Gardens magazine. Somehow it ended up as mine, which was rare for this third child! I remember this was my first exposure to Beatrix Potter’s “Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and grumpy old Mr. McGregor. It was filled with poetry, something I loved as a child, and one of my favorites was called The Goops. “The Goops they lick their fingers and the Goops they lick their knives; They spill their broth no the tablecloth. Oh, they lead disgusting lives! The Goops they talk while eating, and loud and fast they chew; And that is why I’m glad that I am not a Goop — are you?

That would make me giggle, because we were all Goops as children of course! I used to read that one to you.

The stories of Uncle Remus drew me, too, but though they are based on old slave tales, they where written by a white man writing in dialect. ( At Carolina I wrote a paper on “Jack Tales,” and interviewed my boyfriend’s maid, who learned the stories about Uncle Remus from her grandmother, who had likely been a slave. I recorded her and I think that recording ended up in the Southern Collection at the Wilson Library at UNC.) The stories carry universal messages, the language is not appropriate for today’s child.

I loved the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote one called The Swing, which I loved to do in my grandparents back yard, and The Land of Counterpane, which was about a boy who was stuck in bed because he was sick and learned to create a whole story with the toys he played with on his bedcovers. And my favorite is probably My Shadow, which is can recite by heart. “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me. And what can be the use of him ( I would say ‘her’) is more than I can see….”

 But the question asks for just one story. (You know I don’t follow the rules!)

The one that keeps coming back to me is from another anthology that I read all the time as a child called The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature. Again, we didn’t have a lot of books in the library, but at home we had this book. You may remember it, because I read from it when you were younger, before we started reading books together like Old Yeller and Harry Potter. 

It’s a fairy tale from Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote all the great fairy tales, many of which are dark. The Emperor’s New Clothes (so much like today’s Trump), Little Mermaid, Princess & the Pea, The Ugly Duckling. He also wrote The Little Match Girl. It has never been made into a Disney movie for reasons that will become apparent. 

It’s the story of a child of poverty who has to sell matches on the street to make any sort of living at all. And on New Year’s Eve, when no one has bought any of her matches, she is cold and hungry and searching for warmth. 

As I child, I could not imagine this life, no more than I could imagine being a princess, but this one drew me more for some reason. I did know children who I never thought of as poor, but who wore the same clothes to school every day and never had new shoes. They would grow out of their clothes but never had clothes that fit. I never asked my parents why this was so.
In the Little Match Girl story, cold and hungry, she walks through the streets and watches the windows of the houses she passes. There, she sees people celebrating the New Year with goose, bright fires in fireplaces, family all around. But as she walks, she grows even colder and sits in a corner shielded from the wind and starts striking matches for warmth.

And with every match she strikes a new image of warmth embraces her. She imagines sitting in front of a warm stove until the match fades out. She strikes another: a table set with pretty china and her own roast goose; another brings a Christmas tree, filled with candles (no electricity when it was written); and then her grandmother, who was the only person who had ever been kind to her. And in trying to keep that image alive, she strikes all the matches she has in her possession until she had no more. 

The story says her grandmother had never looked more beautiful as she lifted the child up and took her through the stars at the end.

I think it was lost on me that she died in the end! But it’s the story of the warmth memories bring that drew me to her, I think.

So it seems an appropriate story to start this thing off. 

I guess, through The Little Match Girl, I learned early in my life that stories can be beautiful and sad and uplifting, all at the same time. And that is so true with life, right? You both have been through joy and beauty and great sadness all at once, as have I, many many times. As your mother, I wish I could shield you from the sadness, but my job is not to shield you but to offer comfort, when the challenge comes. I hope I have done that, at least to this point. And not caused you too much pain as you try to sort it all out.

This is an amazing gift. In the writing, I’ve learned a good bit about myself just now. I look forward to the next question. (I didn’t peek, though they said I could.) 

Every week since, then (well, ok, I skipped a couple of weeks) I’ve written stories about my grandparents, what my mother was like as a young woman, how I go to school, the friends I’ve had since before kindergarten. Stories about travels I’ve taken, organizations I’ve belonged to — it turns out the Tar Heel Girls State, class of 1974, was a very progressive group — my first job and given awkward advice about relationships. I’ve written about inventions that have most changed my daily life (the smart phone was first, chemotherapy advances, second.), and shared the fact that my preferred way to travel is by country road. And the question of where I went on vacation as a child? My response to my children was: I wrote a book about that! But as it turns out, the book was about how other families spent their vacations, so there is a whole ‘nother story about our own.

I have always felt I knew the worth of a story, and I’ve told many. But it turns out, the worth of stories prompted by my children are turning into the most worthy of all to me. In these months since Christmas, I’ve mined my own history like no time before, sorting through scrapbooks and scripts of plays I was in, Playbills I’ve kept (I had no idea I’d actually seen Michael Crawford live in a production in London in 1975, though I remember the runway in The Rocky Horror Picture Show too vividly.) I’ve read letters and political platforms that supported rape crisis centers and mental health programs in every county, and statewide recycling. —from that Girl’s State trip —when nobody in eastern N.C. had heard a thing about recycling.

As I said in that first entry: Stories can be beautiful and sad and uplifting, sometimes all at once. Stories can be simple and complex at once, too. And funny and heartbreaking. All of that, all at the same time. And that’s remarkable, when you think about it.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a podcast hosted by author Kelly Corrigan, much of it about the power of story: why we tell them and why we need them. In her conversations with authors from around the country, the same theme keeps coming through: Stories show us the truth of our lives in ways living through them doesn’t necessarily reveal. And it’s in the retelling of our own stories that discover things about ourselves that we didn’t really know in the moment.

So get out that and tell your story, folks. Your family will thank you. And it’s so worth it.

The Devil You Know: Chemo Camp, Part 3

The camp counselors in charge of my life right now kept telling me I’d be in for it when the Red Devil made its introduction. I’d read about the drugs they would pump into my body every two weeks, like clockwork, for two months. (The Red Devil is one of two). And even that first time when the nurse brought out the giant vials I thought, well now, they aren’t so red after all. Not blood red anyway, but a brighter pink than I expected. 

I don’t know what I was thinking. A lighter pink might mean a softer blow? Yes, I lost my hair, but I kept my pace that first couple of infusions, resting when my body said to, pushing forward when it felt like I could. I sat for those two hours crunching on cherry popsicles (which I hate) and talking to my sister and my friend AB about everything except all that redness flowing into my veins. 

I would not be outdone by this. I had bandanas! I had special chemo scarves! I’ve had what has felt like a sky filled with cumulus clouds full of witnesses praying for me! And one of my first “counselors” was Joy! 

But it didn’t take long to learn there is not much joy in the actual treatment for breast cancer. There is an overwhelming sense that a stranger has moved into your house, uninvited, and you have no way to evict. You must trust other strangers you’ve only just met to rid your home of this intruder. It may be a complex mission but it’s not complicated, you remind yourself. They do this every day, like the people you hire to do all sorts of things you aren’t personally trained to do yourself. Like roofers and electricians and carpenters and such. And though you  might be “one in eight” in the statistics, you are one among dozens they will see in a day’s time who might be getting some version of the cocktail they are giving, to shed you of this unwanted thing.

And though you might be one among almost 270,000 women who will be diagnosed just this year with invasive breast cancer — 15 percent of whom will have the triple negative kind like you — that’s not really a very large number in the scheme of things. But then, you are that one, in eight, that it’s happening to. 

So that’s what I scrape the skies about in the middle of the night — at 2 and 3 and 4 am, when I can’t sleep. I lie in the dark, praying — even when I don’t feel like it — for myself and my doctors nurses and all the people I know in this world who are hurting — way too many —  and the millions I don’t know but who are as well. Like the young nurse in scrubs in the waiting room at the cancer center last week — younger than my daughter — but already wearing a wig — herself one in eight among her own peer group.

Back in June, they signed me up for four doses of this Red Devil — Adriamycin — which a nurse told me just this week gets that name because it takes you to hell and back before it makes you well. Joy first called it that as she was plying me with popsicles. (Adriamycin can cause mouth sores, so they try to keep your mouth as cold as possible in the 10 minutes or so that it’s actually being pushed into your veins.) It’s so toxic, apparently, that there is a lifetime maximum on the number of doses patients can have. 

After the second dose, all that redness started seeping out, my skin erupting in ways I’d not seen since acne days, a painful and unsightly rash that looks like measles, creeping across my back and chest and arms. A constant dry cough took over at night, so neither I nor my husband could sleep. By day, fatigue set in that wasn’t curable by an afternoon nap.  (I’m on my third dose of Prednisone for the rash, and the number of pills I take morning and night for various things when I barely took more than vitamins three months ago is embarrassing.)

All this time, I’ve been trying to work, at a slower pace, surely, but work. When it’s all over, I want to add the moniker “cancer survivor” to my list, along with grandmother, writer, yeast roll maker, left-hander and dog nose kisser — way at the end, not the first thing to define me, but one small thing among many that make me into me.

Keeping it to just a small thing has proven harder to do this summer than I thought. Two months in, I’m weary. I long to have a Friday night out with friends or spend a weekend at the beach or visit my mother. But in recent days, I’m pinned to the corner chair in my sunroom trying to concentrate on a book because I have little energy for anything else. 

Which is why on Monday of this week, I was back at the cancer center, trying to get someone to hear my weariness, to help me out of it, if that was possible. To find some way to stop the cough and the sore throat and the fatigue so I could actually sleep for several hours in a row.

The young nurse sat across from me, handing me Kleenexes, as I listed my laments. If I could sleep, we agreed, the world would look a little brighter. 

“You’ve gotten through the worst part,” she said. The worst? But I have another 12-week stay at chemo camp before my mother can retrieve me. “A lot of people don’t have as much trouble with this next round,” she assured me.

Even though I am indeed a crybaby, I lied, telling her through my tears that I am not really like that. Except it wasn’t a full-one lie, just a tiny one, as I have kept my counsel, proudly so, throughout much of this ordeal. 

“It’s ok,” she said. “You have a safe place here.”

In that room with her I did feel safe. I changed the subject from myself to my son and his wife, whose first baby was due that day. I wanted to be well enough, I told her, to meet the newest member of our family without a thought of this damn disease that’s stolen my summer. I want to be there for my grandson, Henry, and for my daughter, who will have her own daughter in January. 

“Right now you have to take care of yourself,” she said to me. “But keep your eyes on the goal.” 

“They are my goal,” I said back.

Leave it up to me to make a cancer nurse cry. 

She has a six-month-old daughter — Grace — my daughter-in-law’s name. During our conversation, she thought about own mother and baby, and for a small moment imagined what it might feel like if her mother had cancer like me. 

As we both dried our tears, I searched for her name, but her ID was upside down.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Hope” she said. “It’s Hope.”

Of course. Of course.

And so, there was God was again, stepping into my eighth week of chemo, with Joy and Hope, and I learned about Grace. (I promise, I’m not making this up.)  Too serendipitous to be coincidental, at least in my thinking. 

I’m sleeping well now, and my cough is almost gone and I’m feeling so more like myself than I have in weeks. Next week I’ll start my new camp session — two new drugs that will do other crazy things to my body — but I do so feeling renewed, somewhat, and ready for the onslaught. 

And for today. It’s before dawn on August 10, and today is BIG. Sometime today, I hope to finally meet our newest family member, who has taken its own sweet time getting here. We don’t know yet if we’ll be greeting a baby boy or girl — yesterday I bought both blue and pink bows for my son’s mailbox — but it doesn’t matter. Born in the middle of what has felt like a stolen summer, this new baby offers it back. And no devil, red or not, can steal it away again.

Dear Chick

August 1, 2019

Dear Chick:

I remember the day, almost 30 years ago, when I wheeled my grocery cart around Food Lion in search on one last thing to fill my growing boy’s Easter basket. My offering of jelly beans and Peeps seemed rather paltry. I needed something large that would stand out.

And there you were, your black eyes staring at me, yellow arms outstretched, your orange beak almost shouting at me: Take me! Take me!

The boy didn’t yet have a favorite friend, but he had a yellow blanket he loved, and so I thought you’d match each other well. Off we headed to the register, Jelly Beans and your soft yellow torso in tow.

Morning came, and the kids saddled up to the kitchen table to  check out their loot. Your boy, who always left his candy in his basket for months until the magic beans melted together, plucked you up like he might a new puppy, and in this mother’s eye, rarely let you go. As he grew, though he didn’t take you to school (he tried), you sat with him on car trips, always, snuggled up with him each night for a story, hid in the caverns of that yellow blanket — it’s folds and you lit by a flashlight  — long after you both were supposed to be asleep.

Once, you must have hurt yourself somehow, because you and the boy came downstairs to show me your arms, now guarded by green Ninja Turtle Bandaids, carefully placed. I wish I could remember the conversation, but it’s very possible (and likely) that he had identical ones on his knees. 

In time, the boy wore the blanket to shreds, but you could still be seen holding fort beneath the windows left in the yellow threads by his nurturing hands. You were a team, the little yellow Chicky and the boy.

Until one day, while the boy was on a father/son trip with his dad, I found you abandoned on the bed. I couldn’t imagine he would have left you on purpose, but he was now in first or second grade, and maybe boys of that age didn’t want to be seen snuggling up to what others might see as a stuffed toy, in the middle of a cabin filled with boys and dads. That weekend I do remember, because the boy came down with a high fever and had to come home, and when we placed him on the bed, he searched until he found you, carefully tucking you under his arm, a place you had long-since molded to fit. And there you stayed for a really long time.

On another day, we visited the boy’s grandmother, who had a dog fond of chewing things. The boy had left you on his bed while he ate his breakfast, and upon return, found pieces of your face scattered about the room, your beak torn away. I thought he might be inconsolable, but he picked you up and loved you all the same. (A dog lover all his life, he did not, however, ever like that dog again.)

And so the boy grew up and moved away to college. The blanket was long gone, except for a tiny corner of silk and yarn and a single band of silk, salvaged by me because I couldn’t bear to throw it out. But you, you sat on his bed for the long-haul, beak-less but waiting for him whenever he came home. I know his love for you never wavered, though it may have waned in those years. Yet you were patient, somehow knowing that one day you might be needed again.

I thought about that, too, as I moved around his room, cleaning out, changing it from boy’s room to college kid’s and beyond. I sat you on his bookshelf, then on his chest, trying to find the perfect spot for you to stand sentry. I brought you out on his wedding day, wrapping what was left of the ribbon from his blanket around your neck to remind him that he might be grown, he would always be our boy.

This year, spring came, our man was about to become a Dad. I knew he needed something special to show him just how great a dad he would be, so I plucked you up, studying your whole body for the holes that might need stitching, the stuffing that might need replacing, and when I found more wounds than a box full of Ninja Turtle Band-aids could heal, I searched Esty for a shop that might care for you as I would. I found a woman who through her description promised care for you in her healing as much as our whole family did.

So Chicky, I bundled you up with a prayer and a picture of what you looked like at your most loved (but with your beak), and she set to work. You arrived safe at home a few weeks later, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, your new beak smiling as if you were chirping, Thank you! Thank you!

I found a box and put the picture of you and the boy and your Band-aids inside, wrapping you up with a special note. And on Father’s Day, I put you back in the boy’s arms, ready for your new work to begin.

Now you sit in the crib where in just a few short days, a new baby will be joining you. We don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet, but I’m certain that as he or she grows, they will reach for you and will feel all the love poured into you by that boy rushing out to greet you, dear Chick. You. And you will pour all the love you’ve been holding in your heart right back out, and a new story will begin.

You have an important job, watching out for this new child growing up in our family. It is my hope that one day, the boy will find you under covers lit by a flashlight long after you and your new owner are supposed to be asleep, and he’ll crawl inside with the two of you, to see what the story is all about. 

With much love, Sooze