Cherry pie, Mickey ears, tennis shoes.

some things from this week:

some people’s hair grows longer and longer. not val’s: the remaining stubble of her hair grows shorter and shorter. when last we saw our heroine, her hair was as short as she could get it with an unguarded electric shaver – clear down to the nubbin. remember? the hair stylist cut it, then i shaved it, then val shaved it… it’s kind of a community project, like one of those traveling dinners where you get the appetizer at one house, the salad at another, and so on down the block. in this case a whole series of us takes turns at val’s head. yesterday amber got out lather and a razor and polished val’s head clean. it’s apparent she’ll need to work on her tan line. (i’m tempted to make designs on her scalp with the sunblock.) val points out her hair is beginning to grow back in already. “what kind of second-rate chemo is this, anyway?!” she complains.

here’s a good sign: val’s tubercular coughing has reduced dramatically since chemo began three weeks ago. the poker-faced oncology nurse made pleased sounds when she heard that.

i’ll let val tell you the hairball story.

you people keep bringing us incredible food. we eat like monarchs (the royalty, not the butterfly). tonight we had marvelous carrot souffle and bean salad and cherry pie. val “trend-bucker” garrison reports that she gained three more pounds since starting chemo. apparently it suits her.

suzanne went to disneyland and brought us back mickey mouse ears. two pairs, so we won’t fight. with our names embroidered on the back, even! so we can’t fight. (the chance to holler “hey! you’re wearing my ears!” could be worth it, though.)

do you ever get halfway through a letter and realize it’s really bugging you not to use caps? I have to be inconsistent and revert to classic punctuation, here. Don’t know why. The internal editor at war with the internal texter.

Val also wants you to know she has two new pairs of tennis shoes. One white, one red. Ish. Wait, she says they are whine colored. Oh, make that wine-colored. Courtesy of our favorite Adidas divas. If you could see the state of her previous pair, bought during the Soviet era and now featuring X-treme ventilation, you would appreciate the enormity of this news.

I went to yoga twice this week. I even biked there, with my yoga mat bungeed to my bike rack. I am so Portland. And so sore. I was worried I wouldn’t fit in, but none of the cool kids with their hyperengineered cyberflax yoga garments and anodized aluminum water bottles laughed at me in my pajama sweats and IU athletics t-shirt, so I think I’ll go back. Also a friend invited us to a Buddhist Shambhala meditation center tonight, so we tried that out too. I never knew until tonight a person’s thoughts could be seriously derailed by the myopic sight of her own nose.

My new job is beginning to make sense and they tell me it won’t be long until I earn a desk of my very own. Until then I scuttle about from cubicle to cubicle when people’s backs are turned, my meager possessions clutched to my chest in a 3-ring binder.

No, really, people are very nice and lots of them are on vacation so they will never know I have been living in their cubicles, using up their sticky notes and pretending to be related to the children in their snapshots. In fact a whole pile of sweetheart library staff got together and gave us a far-reaching gift certificate to a Delivered Dish service. Their communal generosity and care warmed our spirits and will fill our bellies when we most need it.

Oy, geez, I need to go to bed. We get up oh-so-early tomorrow morning to start Val on round two of the magical medical cure. Please point your prayers and thoughts and intentions and eyelash wishes and whatever you got this direction, lighting the chemo’s way directly to that cancer so the dismantling may continue.

Thank you.

Deborah