Istanbul (Billy Collins) and Long Winter (Tim Nolan)

Seriously, who forgets to go to chemotherapy? really, this doesn't happen. Most people think about there next chemo alot, dread it, work on screwing up their courage to sit in the seat again, but they REMEMBER. I came home from Boston partly to get my chemo,.....and I forgot. I really did. So, I called the nurse and told her that I forgot to report to my chemo chair. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and then she said,"...What?" I repeated myself, although I think I had been very clear the first time. I decided to embellish just a little to fill the silence. "I just got back from Turkey and watching my son play lacrosse in Maine, and my sisters-in-law are here as my mother-in-law is very I'll, and I haven't really unpacked from either trip as things have been a bit busy at home. in fact, I'm not sure I have yet uncovered my teenager from somewhere under her piles of detritus on the third floor." And so on.
There was a longer pause.

And here I am now, sitting in my chemo chair gazing out on a gorgeous day, only a few days late. What a whirlwind the last weeks have been--full of incredible sights, sounds, sisterehood, spirituality, and sadness. Turkey was such a surprise! Gazing up at the arches in the Blue Mosque, eating pepper paste and pomegranate juice and eggplant, browsing the spice market, entranced by the whirling dervishes, and standing with Paul in spirit at Ephesis and Pergamom and Sardis and Corinth in Greece. Amazing, remarkable, renewing, restoring, and all I could have hoped for and more. Love the pilgrim thing! Really focusing on the "why" of what we were doing and seeing and being very intentional as we learned and moved from site to site made the trip feel very diffent from a vacation trip, and much better.







Also seeing the boy dressed in his Bates uniform and playing NESCAC lacrosse AND working hard and loving his first year in college has been a gift....and I am supposed to go back for one more game next Tuesday.






What about some poetry. I did send some of my trip members this poem by Billy Collins called, "Istanbul". It really captures the city's ancientness and those roman baths, I think.  Then, a little ode to spring.  Enjoy

Istanbul (Billy Collins)
Istanbul by Billy Collins

It was a pleasure to enter by a side street
in the center of the city
a bathhouse said to be 300 years old,
old enough to have opened the pores of Florence Nightingale
and soaped the musical head of Franz Liszt.

And it was a pleasure to drink
cold wine by a low wood fire
before being directed to a small room in an upper gallery,
a room with a carpet and a narrow bed
where I folded my clothes into a pile
then came back down, naked
except for a gauzy striped cloth tucked around my waist.

It was an odd and eye-opening sensation
to be led by a man with close-cropped hair
and spaces between his teeth
into a steamy marble rotunda
and to lie there alone on the smooth marble
watching the droplets fall through the beams
of natural light in the high dome
and later to hear the song I sang –
‘She Thinks I Still Care’ – echo up into the ceiling.

I felt like the last of the sultans
when the man returned and began to scrub me –
to lather and douse me, scour and shampoo me,
and splash my drenched body
with fresh warm water scooped from a marble basin.

But it was not until he sudsed me
behind my ears and between my toes
that I felt myself filling with gratitude
the way a cloud fills with rain,
the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke.

In silence I thanked the man
who scrubbed the bottoms of my feet.
I thanked the history of the Turkish bath
and the long chain of bathmen standing unshaven,
arms folded, waiting for the next customer
to come through the swinging doors of frosted glass.

I thanked everyone whose job
it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers,
and I gave general thanks that I was lying
facedown in a warm puddle of soap
and not a warm puddle of blood
in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

As one bucket after another
of warm water was poured over my lowered head,
I stopped thinking of who and what to thank
and rode out on a boat of joy,
a blue boat of marble and soap,

rode out to the entrance of the harbour
where I raised a finger of good-bye
then felt the boat begin to rise and fall
as it met the roll of the incoming waves,
bearing my body, my clean, blessed body out to sea.


Long Winter (Tim Nolan)
So much I've forgotten
the grass

the birds
the close insects

the shoot—the drip—
the spray of the sprinkler

freckles—strawberries—
the heat of the Sun

the impossible
humidity

the flush of your face
so much

the high noon
the high grass

the patio ice cubes
the barbeque

the buzz of them—
the insects

the weeds—the dear
weeds—that grow

like alien life forms—
all Dr. Suessy and odd—

here we go again¬—
we are turning around

again—this will all
happen over again—

and again—it will—