I celebrated a birthday at the beginning of this week. I think I can safely refer to myself as being in my “mid-forties” for one more year. The next time candles grace a cake for me, however, I’ll have shifted firmly to the “late-forties” category.
That’s okay. More than okay, actually. Being a breast cancer patient has given me a whole new perspective on aging. Growing older–having the chance to grow older–sounds pretty darn good. Aging has its challenges to be sure; even before I was ill, it had started taking me longer to recover from strenuous hikes, or late nights with friends, than it did ten or even five years ago. But given the various losses of mobility, energy, and dignity I’ve recently endured–and survived–I know I can cope with growing old. (And in the meantime, I better understand why old-timers sometimes feel cranky.)
Though I suppose any vintage hat that has retained attitude and elegance could serve to underscore the merits of aging, I thought this one especially apt: a gray felt cloche topped by a feather detail. It appears sedate at first, but a closer look at the crown reveals a colorful medley of pink, green, and black-and-white feathers underneath fine netting. The gray brim of the hat is ringed by a satin ribbon that might, in its youth, have been bright pink, but has since faded to a lovely mauve. A round rhinestone accent, though darkened a bit by time, adds sass and sparkle.
The hat is tagged as an “Evelyn Varon Exclusive.” According to Brenda Grantland in a comment on the Collectors Weekly website, Varon was a “French milliner whose designs were so popular that they were copied in the U.S. A March 11, 1914 issue of the Evening Post Page of Wanamaker News reports that the store was offering copies of hats designed by Parisian milliners Suzanne Talbot, Evelyn Varon, Jeanne Duc, Caroline Reboux and Paul Poiret.” Grantland also claims that Varon designed costumes for the original Broadway version of Pins and Needles, but I haven’t been able to verify that claim.
In any case, it’s fun to embrace a little touch of 1914 Paris right here in 2016 Virginia. Ooh la la!
Heads Up!
All photographs by Laura Wade Photography.
∼ Beautiful, quirky vintage hats make me happy. The “Heads Up!” series is a reminder to keep my (currently bald) head up, to pay attention to the good in the world, and to encourage myself and others facing a tough road that it’s possible to find the fun in even the most challenging circumstances. ∼
The book is subtitled “Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar,” but to label Tiny Beautiful Things as merely a collection of advice columns does not do justice to its beauty or wisdom. Strayed turns the conventions of advice columns upside down and taps into her own memories and experiences in her responses, doing “something brilliantly counter-intuitive,” as noted by the Public’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis,” using self-revealing stories of her own life for generous purposes.” Strayed’s luminous and powerful responses to what are often heart-wrenching letters are some of the most lucid, honest, moving essays I have ever read.
My heart buoys and breaks over different matters these days, but Strayed’s words still speak to me. Gauging by the shared laughter and the unmistakable sounds of whole-audience-weeping in the theatre, they speak to many. (When the lights came up, Steve turned to me, both of us still wiping our eyes, and he said, “You didn’t warn me!”) It was a powerful performance.
And this, in response to a professor and class who asked Sugar’s advice to graduating college students: “Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.” (133)
There’s an article that’s made its way around the internet about the 
I’m looking forward to experiencing that revelation again, whenever it finally arrives. I know it might be a while. Until then, I try to remember what my friend Sarah said when I shared my frustrations with her about my lack of productivity, my inability to do all the things I need and want to do.
Still, as surgery looms on the horizon, I’ve grown more aware of how the language of aggression, while ostensibly empowering, also pits one against one’s own body in some curious and distressing ways. My sister-in-law Lisa, a survivor, mentioned her discomfort with this language shortly after I was diagnosed. Susan Sontag, in a 1978 essay entitled “Illness as Metaphor,” describes the dilemma: “The controlling metaphors in descriptions of cancer are, in fact, drawn…from the language of warfare; every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology. Thus, cancer cells do not simply multiply; they are ‘invasive’” (714). The language surrounding treatment has a similar inflection: chemotherapy is “chemical warfare, using poisons” that aim to “kill” (715).
The main reason I resist is that none of us knows the future. That’s a fundamental truth. It isn’t that I don’t want to be healthy and cured—of course I do! But it feels like tempting fate to declare certainty in relation to a particular outcome; I don’t and can’t make predictions. I can only know the present.
If this is my life (and it is) and if my life (like all our lives) is finite, and if I don’t know its deadline (and none of us does), then how do I want to spend it? Waiting and wishing for a different kind of life, a different kind of day, a “better” one in some projected future? Or do I find a way to accept where I am in the present, since that’s all any of us really knows or has?
Kushner’s work is embedded in the Jewish faith, though his lessons are broadly applicable, drawing equally upon everyday people’s stories as well as religious texts and history for illustration. I’m a spiritual seeker who does not identify solely or specifically with any single faith tradition at this point in my life, though I feel there is something larger and greater than individual human desires, and I tend to imagine the sacred, in the broadest terms, as the realization of the combined forces of love and compassion in the world. So much of Kushner’s understanding of who and what “God” is (and isn’t) resonates with me, given that one of his truths is “God is Not a Man Who Lives in the Sky.” He writes, “To me, God is like love, affecting all people but affecting each one differently, according to who he or she is. God is like courage, a single trait that manifests itself differently as it is filtered through the lives and souls of specific individuals” (29). Love and courage: both profoundly human and deeply sacred.
In the later chapter on doubt and anger, Kushner explores another theme close to my heart, especially at this juncture in my life. I have always been a bit allergic to certainty, and he actively embraces the idea that we should raise questions, “admit our anger” when it arises, and affirm a “readiness to live with doubt.” To do otherwise means we’re avoiding truth and minimizing the complexity of any genuine relationship: “Accepting anger, ours and that of people close to us, has to be part of any honest relationship” (130), writes Kushner, and it’s only through acknowledging that the tough stuff is equally as valid as the good that we can love–that we can be fully present in any capacity, I would add–with our whole hearts.
Still Life, Beyond Cancer 