The Olympics came and went, August came and went and now, if I’m not careful, September will come and go, too.
My lackadaisical attitude hit right after my last blog posting. I’d been in a bit of a funk, the kind where you have all these different directions you could go but none of them are completely where you want to go. Instead of going anywhere, you decide to go nowhere. You come to a dead stop like slamming on the brakes in the middle of the road even though there’s no car in front of you.
Some of you know what I mean.
August required some Brothers Johnson to help me get the funk outta my face. Snoop Dog wouldn’t do. And to help this process along, I did what any self-respecting, mature woman of 47 would do: I ran away from home.
Running Away From Home
When I was 14 years old, my father, Lou, took a stand against my late night talks on the phone with my then boyfriend. Remember the kitchen wall phone with the long, winding cord that you could twirl around your fingers as you talked? I would sit on the steps leading down to the basement with the door between the kitchen and the basement partially closed so I could giggle in private. Exercising his patriarchal rights, Lou took away my phone privileges. In an act of teenage defiance, I hopped a bus from Saginaw to Flint. 45 miles away, learning the hard way that $10 dollars doesn’t go very far when you have to buy a $4.50 bus ticket. I was gone for what felt like an entire week but was really only three days. I chose Flint because I had a friend who lived there and it felt brave to my 14-year old self.
Flint, Michael Moore’s Flint of Roger & Me, is not a place people run to but away from. No one runs to Saginaw either but at least Saginaw had one thing going for it – it wasn’t Flint. I was taking a stand (so was Lou), fed up (so was Lou), and I meant to take drastic measures (again, Lou).
Running away from home when you’re 14 is eye-opening. Running away when you’re 47 is just another charge on the credit card in San Antonio which is where I ran to. My tastes and my friends have changed, but my lifelong desire not to be stifled has not.
I sent a text to Hook the next day just in case he hadn’t realized I wasn’t there anymore. Poor Lou agonized over my absence. Hook probably didn’t notice until I didn’t show up for dinner … the next day.
After getting our lives back in order, Hook’s and mine, I realized that I hadn’t taken a break. Oh sure, we’d spent weeks and half weeks on and off in Port Aransas but that was more for Hook’s decompression. Beach or no beach, I still worked doing my virtual recruiting and career coaching.
Within a three-month period, we went from planning a life overseas to planning to save Hook’s life to redesigning what our new, temporary lives would be. In a bad case situation, it’s the best of circumstances. No sane person could ask for more and that’s not just a repressed Pollyanna talking. We really couldn’t ask for things to be better.
But the summer came and went and I missed it somehow and then Hook said something he shouldn’t have said (what husband doesn’t?) so I waited until he left for work one Friday morning, just like I’d waited for Lou to leave that morning back in 1979, and I packed a bag and ran away.
And it felt great. Just like it had before. And this time I could drive myself, so there.
I know most women, if presented with the right amount of alcohol in small intervals, would admit to the secret desire to walk onto a train, hop in a car, get on a plane and just go. No note, no call. Nothing to anyone. Ppfft. Figure it out for yourself.
And What Does Any of This Have To Do With Being Down Under?
Well everything actually. One of the allures of Australia, and one of the reasons we are still determined to get there, is that Aussies have this knack for going with the flow. It’s different than say with the French who pretend to care only about wine and taking it easy but who are closet tight asses and whose weather can really suck. Or even the Mexicans who claim to live on a mañana schedule in siesta time which feels great initially but the flow still needs to flow at some point and the whole mañana thing eventually gets on your nerves.
We chose A
ustralia because it is on the other side of the world with an 11-hour difference, sometimes 12 depending on how we are monkeying with our clocks. When Americans are sleeping, Australians are awake. When we’re working, they’re dreaming. People in Perth have the Outback in their backyard and they rest against the Indian Ocean. We here in Austin have some incredible parks and Lady Bird Lake. I love Austin but there’s just no comparison to the beauty of Australia.
One of the gift books I’d received, Mutant Message Down Under, was written by Marlo Morgan, an American woman who takes a four month walkabout in the Australian Outback. There was some controversy surrounding the book because the author wrote it as fiction but then later said it was non-fiction but then changed her mind again and said it was fiction. Fiction schmiction. That woman did a walkabout and she convinced wellness gurus Og Mandino, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and Wayne Dyer to write praises for her book. Then Harper Collins turned around and published a million copies.
Here’s what we know: there was a woman, there was an Outback, she walked. And I want to walk, too, in the Outback in 2013; we think/hope/are planning. “We,” remember? Everything is ‘we’ now.
The Super Hook Update
Hook has passed through six weeks of intravenous chemo and is now onto daily radiation with chemo pills as a chaser. The radiation with chemo sandwich will continue through the rest of September and the first week of October. Then his body will take a rest from all the drugs with surgery planned for November.
Hook is doing great, a teensy tiny bit on the tired side, but otherwise great. Or “Super!” as one of our nurse practitioner/advisors/doctor’s assistants (I have no clue what she is) says to us every, single time we meet. “Do you feel tired or do you feel super?”
You cannot ask Hook if he feels tired because his automatic answer is, “Tired? Well, yes, yes I do feel a little tired.” And then I have to butt in with, “No, he’s not tired. He sleeps a little more in the morning but his energy is the same. He’s still swimming and bugging and fishing.”
“Super!” Our assistant doctor-like person says. She is who the doctors have us meet with so we’ll feel like we’re meeting with them. We only actually get to see the doctor every third visit. Do they really think we can’t tell the difference? Our person is bubbly but annoying, perky but forgetful, genuinely nice but eternally distracted so much so that I want to punch her in the face before her mouth ever opens to save us both the hassle of conversing.
But I keep my hands to myself, screaming only in my head, when our practitioner/advisor forgets to tell us what we really need to know or says things like, “I just can’t keep all these prescriptions straight.” And how does she think we do it? Or, she forgets to set up a “very important appointment” that is so important she cannot tell us why it’s important or who it is going to be with. “It just is. Trust me.” S
uper!
You should have seen Hook’s oncologist and radiologist fist-bumping him after the first set of test results came in. That’s how excited they were that the chemo was killing off what it was supposed to, and the radiation was not burning a hole in his skin.
The doctors exclude me from their excitement; they do not raise their closed fists to me because we are not on the same team. I am on a maybe-surgery-won’t-be-necessary team, and they are on a he’s-almost-ready-to-be-cut-open team. I’d have a little more faith in the process, in the medical system, if it seemed everyone was reading from the same game play. But we meet and re-meet and discuss and re-discuss and have the same conversations over and over and over again that it takes everything in me not to punch them all in the face and say, SUPER. But I don’t. I am antsy but quiet; stoic with a wide-eyed hysterical look which I’m quite certain doesn’t look super.
2013 Australia Plans
Our plans are still on for Oz-land in 2013, so much so that Hook will meet with an academic guest from Curtin University of Technology this month. The Curtin contact will be in Dallas and a connection to a connection to a connection was made and viola, they will stop in Austin to meet.
Why It’s All Going to Work Out
Four months ago, when Hook and I received the soap opera-like phone call about his diagnosis from a nurse who couldn’t answer any of our questions, we sat down side-by-side and scrolled through websites together to read what we could about pancreatic cancer, the stages, and the possible outcomes.
My first thought after reading was, Okay. This is going to be okay. Hook read the same sites and thought, I have six months.
We communicate like all married couples communicate– we don’t– and our initial reactions to the situation were comical: Hook wanted to update beneficiaries; I wanted to update our plane tickets.
We did update the beneficiaries and we cancelled the plane tickets but only because I didn’t listen to my instinct, and my instinct is this: The only thing that’s ever going to kill Hook is me.
It’s all super! And I am keeping the funk outta of our face(s).
Writings By Rosemary 
Peace and love from East Austin.