If it is true that life expands and contracts in response to circumstance, mine has been smaller than a breadbox these past few years. First covid banished us from the theaters and bars, removing us from collective experience for years; these past six months cancer has kept me out, just as the rest of the world was wading back in. This week, though, life expanded, if only for a moment.
I spent most of Monday getting treatment at the hospital, but before that I did get my good glasses back. The lenses had been so scratched that the world was blurry, and I assumed it was all my fault, that I had somehow done something lazy and wrong, like accidentally using sandpaper to clean them when no soft cotton cloth was available. But no! Coyote, the best optician ever, peered at them, determined the lenses to be defective, and replaced them free of charge. I’d been getting by with my old glasses, which are too big and sit heavy on my nose, but now the weight is lifted and the world is crystal clear. A metaphor? I’ll take it.
On Tuesday, I went to an actual concert – to see Sunn O))) at Thalia Hall. If you aren’t familiar, I’m not sure how to explain: Sunn O))) is a band, but it’s more accurately a somatic phenomenon, a wall of noise and drone that rumbles through your body, slow and low. It is a full-throttle aesthetic experience of dudes in hooded cloaks, clanging guitars, hypnotic lights, and so much synthetic fog that the smoke alarms kept going off. Music can trigger a whole gamut of emotional responses, but while I’ve appreciated metal shows over the years, I’m pretty much an outsider to this community and to this particular embodied experience, which punches a button in your limbic system to activate a trance state that I found deeply relaxing. You feel it in your bones and in your guts, and afterward I felt oddly cleansed, despite the layer of fog juice coating my hands and head.
Tuesday was also the day I started radiation, and I was tired and it was cold and my ankle was aching, but I still wanted to go to the show. So I took my crutch just in case we wound up having to stand for whatever period of time. But the kind staff took one look at me and whooshed us into a rickety elevator up to a seat in the balcony. Thank you Thalia Hall staff for facilitating this adventure out in the world. I didn’t get home until midnight!
The next day, Wednesday, we had soup. For those who don’t know: for the past 13 years I’ve run a community meal project called Soup & Bread. It started at the Hideout, has expanded to other cities, spawned a cookbook, went virtual in 2021, and pivoted into takeout in 2022. But December 16, 2022, was the first time we’ve gathered in person to eat soup together since March 11, 2020. That I got through the event without crying is an achievement.
I partnered with Slow Food USA, Slow Food Chicago, and folks from the Midwest Ark of Taste committee, the Chicago Honey Co-op, and Slow Food’s preSERVE Garden in North Lawndale, to put on a dinner celebrating heirloom beans, which were the focus of the Ark’s 2022 “Plant a Seed” campaign. We rounded up three fantastic chefs to provide recipes for bean soups; culinary students from Kendall College cooked them all, along with a slew of beautiful bread, which was augmented by a donation from Middlebrow, whose bakery is across the street. Sara Faddah, cohost of the podcast 77 Flavors of Chicago, led a discussion with the chefs – Abra Berens, Margaret Pak, and Alexander Roman – covering everything you might ever want to know about cooking with beans. Local Foods donated the ingredients for the soup. When the Hideout unexpectedly closed, Guild Row stepped up and donated their beautiful space. And the whole thing was a fundraiser for the North Lawndale Greening Committee and NeighborSpace, two organizations whose work building community through gardens and green spaces is invaluable to the healthy civic life of Chicago.
Phew! Just listing and linking to all these partners was exhausting – but the paragraph above is such a clear manifestation of the multitude of talent and goodwill that Soup & Bread has been lucky enough to draw on over the years. When we shut down in March 2020 I had no idea if we would come back, or in what form. Over the past almost-three years I’ve lost the sense-memory of what it feels like to engage in this practice, which an actor friend once accurately described as a piece of durational, ever-iterating performance art, bringing people together week after week to share a simple meal. It was pouring rain outside but inside it was cozy and warm, so warm that I had to take off my wooly hat and go bald in public for the first time. I felt awkward and exposed, but the self-consciousness soon gave way to just plain joy. A million thanks to everyone who came out to join us. Maybe we’ll do it again next year!
After the high of Wednesday, Thursday was of course emotionally messy and I yelled at a customer service rep because my credit card was lost in the mail, which was not my finest hour. (In my vague defense, I haven’t had a credit card in four years and I really, really needed this new one – with all its attendant baggage of guilt, bad budgeting, and debt – to come on time, which it has not.) But I rallied by the afternoon in time to go get a covid booster (finally) and go to physical therapy for my ankle. And then, after PT, I gingerly went back to circus. I still haven’t gotten back in the air, but I went to class for 90 minutes of stretching and flexibility conditioning, and hoo did I dearly need it.
Throughout chemo I consoled myself over the loss of strength and stamina with the knowledge that I could at least still do the splits. But after three months of near-inactivity and six weeks in a walking boot, I now can barely touch my toes. It seems such a small thing, but this loss has done more of a number on my vanity than my still-misshapen left breast. Even at the peak of fitness, I compensated for deficiencies of strength with clean lines and bendy legs. Lacking even that fallback brings home again just how humbling this all is, and how what I naively assumed would be a straightforward process of building back muscle looks to be more of a winding road full of dead ends and unexpected detours. Ugh. It’s another metaphor!
Still, it was soothing to be back in a familiar space with its familiar rituals, and in the company of friends with whom I can lament my shrunken adductors without shame. The value of such situational friendships – what we lose when we are cut off from them – has been analyzed, sliced, and diced in covid commentary, and I don’t have a lot to add. But during the early days of the pandemic, when everything was closed, Aloft pivoted to online classes and that reliable space, everyone doing sit-ups together on Zoom, went a long way toward keeping me tethered to my sense of self. I don’t think I was the only one.
Finally, on Friday, came a night of celebration, bundled up itself in a ritual. For the last ten (?) years, my friend Eiren and a slew of collaborators have staged a live holiday performance of Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas that fuses Jim Henson’s 1977 television special with the test of the Russell Hoban book and delivers it in one family-friendly package, sans muppets. It’s corny and touching and joyous and full of kids hopped up on candy canes. The regulars sing along sotto voce and laugh at the muppet blooper reel and choke up at the sweet Gift of the Magi moral, when Ma Otter and Emmett don’t win the Waterville talent show but realize they still have each other. It’s the best, and this year it almost didn’t happen, another casualty of the Hideout closure compounded by Eiren shattering her kneecap two months ago.
And yet. And yet. Constellation came through as an alternate – and ADA accessible – venue and Eiren got the OK from her doctors to try this crazy plan, and I bought a bunch of plastic holly from the thrift store to decorate the stage, and it all came together. Sitting in the theater Friday night, looking around at so many familiar faces, I felt the full force of what it means to be embedded in a community whose web of connection stretches across the twenty-plus years I’ve lived in Chicago. There was so much shared history in that room, full of everyone’s successes and setbacks and side roads. I held Amanda’s hand while Eiren sang from her wheelchair and marveled at the scruffy beauty of it all.
Life will shrink again in the coming weeks. The work world is grinding to a close and at least here in Chicago it is supposed to get brutally cold and snowy. Covid numbers are surging, as are cases of the flu and RSV. I’m not going anywhere for the holidays because, as noted above, I have started daily radiation treatment and between that and biweekly meetings with the PT (for my ankle) and the OT (for my chest and shoulder) the calendar is a patchwork quilt of medical appointments.
Radiation is, as everyone says, easier than chemo, if not exactly easy, but it’s been psychologically difficult. I am cancer free, they tell me. The worst part is over, even if – as my oncologist said on Monday – I’m still actually at the beginning of this new phase of the rest of my life. But lying on the table half dressed, staring at the ceiling while being prodded and poked, brings on a wash of resignation: Here we go again. First they poison you, then they cut you, then they burn you.
The plastic surgeon left my breast larger than the right so that it can shrink under radiation, something that surprised me. Lefty is still lumpy and swollen, and full of hard knot of scar tissue, and over the next four weeks I can look forward to the skin turning red, or scaly, or brown. Some people blister. Everyone says it makes you tired. I should be used to that by now, but after this week of unusual activity I can’t help but slump at the prospect of another month indoors. I console myself with thoughts of spring, with all its glorious metaphors of expansion and rebirth, and will continue to sit here and make sense of it all in the meantime.
Well I also don't know how you got through a "new normal/nothing normal" soup event without crying, as I am eyes wet and throat gurgly just after reading this. Just you, witnessing, navigating, narrating your presence, boldly bald because so darn cozy and nourishing in there, on many levels -- and vulnerable because of cancer world that is such a curve and a trial and a gaslighter, ffs--and we all have lost several layers of skin, and innocence well not innocence but certainly a measure of confidence? security? and the loss and change of body parts and life parts that we once took for granted. OY. Your writing is always so full of truth, and geez I am grateful for the words and admiring of your skills. And as the kids say, I appreciate you. Here's to rocking the new glasses and head-do, and to hats when you don't want to rock it.
Thinking of you. Sending love.