T minus 68 hours

I check in for surgery on Monday, March 4th at 5:30am. Surgery is scheduled to start around 7:30am. Surgery may still be going as late as Midnight on the 4th.

I'll be alseep, of course, and given the twilight state, won't even realize I passed a 14 hour period out of consciousness. The person to worry about in the scenario is Scott, who is sitting out the interminable thing at the site. If you're in Indianapolis that day, bring the guy some lunch! Better, pry him out of the waiting room and make him engage with the outside world for a few minutes.

I have as many mixed feelings about that as one can mix. I can't sleep now, at home, because of the pain in my head and neck--I want to sleep badly. I'm welcoming this as a corrective. I go into the surgical plan without clear outcomes. I won't know until I'm well up just what I kept ad just what I lost. I'm prepping to accept the worse and ready to exult for the best, and perhaps I'll land in the middle and be neither morose nor obnoxiousness.

There are so many images, lines of poetry, aphorisms, voices of other people with cancer, my family, floating through my head that it's difficult to manage any one of them or pin down why it's there--

I could say those mountains have a meaning
but beyond that I could not say
to do something very common, in my own way


Teach us to care, and not to care
Teach us to sit still


a vulturous boredom pinned me to this tree
if he were I, he would do what I did


On the day my mother died she got and cleaned the baseboards in the house so that when people came over, it would look good. That's where I got it. (my mother couldn't live up to her mother, either)

And hundreds of others. The voice of my brother Matt, gone these past 8 years, on my porch in Bloomington, drunk, when I was an undergraduate:  "Don't call me Vicki Sue, Call me Fallon."  My father, a delightful fellow in so many ways, telling me I was the most selfish person he knew (had to get that from somewhere, Mr. Price....).

There's no summation to the business of life that can be neat, and no amount of tying of loose ends will create a bow in this case.