The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

OCTOBER 21. ALL HER LIFE

130 a sympathy vote. I have been teaching college for 21 years and still I get insecure. And of course I still make mistakes. After the ceremony I went to teach a class at Brain Trust University and we went off on a tangent about which ethnic groups worry a lot and a student got lost in the muddle. I was leading the way on the tangent. In a distinguished manner, of course. OCTOBER 21. ALL HER LIFE My mother came in last weekend to Cancer Bitch World hq. My mother would have flown in for every chemo treatment, but I wouldn’t let her. I asked if she would help me with my clutter, and she agreed. So we spent most of Saturday and Sunday going through photos. We filled some albums and threw a lot of pictures away. We pasted some pictures in my baby book, which she’d apparently lost interest in after my first full sentence. She’s been diligent about collecting pictures in albums, though—I don’t mean to imply that she ever lost interest in recording moments of my life. My mother didn’t fill this book, I think because she put photos of my first birthday party in an album, followed by other family photos. Most of us don’t think to take one photo from each event or year or decade and paste it into a baby or any other kind of book. But what if we did? What if every New Year’s Eve we printed out a couple of representative photos from our desktops and put them in a book, a book with a finite number of bound pages? Is that too frightening to contemplate? My baby book is called “All Her Life.” When you get to the end, you’re daid. Or sitting in the nursing home, with no one thinking to take your picture or record your first dentures , your first wheelchair, your last meal cooked for yourself, your last wisp of short-term memory. NOVEMBER 26. LOSING DAYS AND YEARS Once I asked an E. B. White scholar why White’s essay, “Once More to the Lake,” is so much anthologized and taught, and he answered: Because it’s the best essay in the English language. Or something to that effect. Which may be why I’m calling it to mind. I guess a great piece ...