This just in: Tiff's out of surgery, at home, and recovering amazingly well. We may have to put one of those traffic-cone-dog-collar thingies on her to slow her down a bit. Her lymph nodes didn't show any cancer so it looks like we were able to suppress the mammary insurrection before it spread. She looks great; turns out having small boobs can be a blessing. If she'd been a D cup she'd probably have trouble not walking in circles now. Friday we go to her follow up appointment and boobs-r-us to pick up the robo-hooter. faster! stronger! better! Turns out they don't make any falsies that are also a bottle opener or even a change purse. I thought maybe I'd finally get out of carrying Tiff's I.D. and money around. After that, we head to the beach for some continued recovery and good times.


The last week has been a hectic and high-mileage affair. I flew to Kentucky with Stella while Tiff finished up at her job and then met up with us for the drive down to Atlanta for surgery. Some notes from the road for interested parties...

Watching Stella push her own stroller through the airport while screaming "Push! Push!" cracked me up. Seeing her do it while using Tiffany's "business walk" made it even better. I discovered that pointing a toddler the wrong direction on a moving sidewalk works well as a good pre-flight work-out. The other passengers enjoyed Stella enthusiastically saying "Hi people!" and "Bye people!" as they boarded and exited.

Our travel plans inadvertently lead us through Lexington, Indiana, and Georgia where we were able to see so many of our friends and family. It felt like we were just collecting good vibes from the moment we got here. A heartfelt thanks to everyone; the love we've been shown this week was a salvation and an immeasurable blessing. Our phones were dinging with so many well-wishing texts that it sounded like we were hanging out in some kind of Las Vegas for gerbils.

Tiff spent her last day before surgery walking around Atlanta, flashing the landmarks and wandering through the park topless while her friend Brandi photographed the last ride of the left boob. It was the irreverent, give-fate-the-finger, kind of day we needed. It was also fun to see a vanload of teenage boys nearly break their necks trying to figure out if they really saw a topless woman hanging upside down in a tulip poplar tree. Women, hear me now: use your hooters. Stop strapping them down and hiding them away. They are the spring flowers of femininity and will fade soon enough. (sorry, I get worked up about boobs these days)

Riding home from the hospital around sunset we saw the full moon rising on the horizon. Corny but true; it was large, round, and pink, a cosmic nipple waxing perky in the cool evening air.

Again thanks to everybody who was rooting for Tiff, we could feel it and I think it made all the difference in the world. Love from here, right back atcha.

some random thoughts about crabs.
(still curable, by the way, talk to your doctor)

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (T.S. Elliot)

astrology is what it is. too ludicrous to take seriously one minute, too uncannily accurate the next. i ignored it all together until i realized that most of my close friends were born within a few weeks of each other, all cancers.

tiff and i were biking along in the increasingly frequent sunshine last night, spending our daylights savings and talking, of course, about cancer. how one day, for reasons known only to itself, a single cell blinks, says "i'm different now" and goes on to evangelize it's progeny in the merits of growth..

there are so many moments where, instantly and irrevocably, everything changes. this singular novelty seems to typify cancer both astrologically and histologically. my summer-born friends all appear to have entered the world with an immutable and persuasive uniqueness.

cancer and its aftershocks are unexpected and unwelcome in our life. i feel as if we have come unstitched from the well-worn and comfortable quilt that was our life. conversely, we have both awakened from the long afternoon nap of habit and begun to remember the amazement of being in love, the wonderful privilege of parenting, the pleasure of good work, and the daily wonders that we'd accidentally learned to take for granted.

as a doctor i hereby prescribe everyone 24 hours of cancer. tomorrow you will be miraculously and completely cured. today, however, you have a shining golden ticket to be honest about your priorities and revel in the small wonders that cross your path.

even now it lies there, lurking at me...the largest turd ever produced by a non-elephant toddler, blocking our only toilet, refusing to be swept away to the land of poo and out of my life forever. when i pictured being a father i saw long walks in the woods, talking about the miracles of nature and the fantastic imaginings of human thought. i didn't so much see myself tending a crock pot and flipping diapers-fillings into the pooper. turdomegaly is a terrible disease in children. for all the child-rearing paraphernalia we DO have, we seem to lack a plunger.
pawsing for thought

Stella with her eyes on the prize.
I'd been wondering what this blog was gonna be about know that we've sold our trailer and settled down for the short term. Looks like it's gonna be about cancer for a while.

Cancer is the process of unregulated cell growth. Like suburban sprawl, a tumor represents unplanned expansion, and much to our surprise we recently found a fully formed subdivision in Tiffany's left breast. In the span of one week we went from saying "let's get this checked out" to talking about a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, multiple reconstruction surgeries, and 24-hour round the clock "three's company" reruns. Honestly, they haven't mentioned the reruns yet, but I figure it's the only form of torture left, so it's bound to come up eventually.
I've always had a love/hate relationship with doctoring but right now I'm thankful to have so many smart doctor-friends who are helping us understand what's going on and what to do about it. It's turned out to be an unexpected blessing to have friends that we can call and say "tell me about fake nipples..." This weekend we're working hard to learn all we can. We know the left boob is a goner now that it's turned against us. (this aggression will not stand, man) We're trying to learn about the value of doing a bilateral mastectomy, chemo, hormone therapy and all the weirdness of reconstructive boobage. It's overwhelming and confusing.

I want to state for the record that I'm married to the bravest person I've ever met. This no idle distinction when you're in the running against my friend Barry. Tiffany's first question about replacement was "can you get fake boobs that come with tassels?". The truth is, dark humor is serving us very well and I'm a little glad there hasn't been anyone around to witness the new heights in inappropriateness that we've achieved.
The support from our friends and family has been the most amazing thing that's happened to us in a long time and we really feel blessed to have the people in our lives that we do. Cheers to Brittany for letting us know that she was taking a shot of Jager for tiff's boob. Cheers to Ryan for painting his body pink only to find out that oil-based paint burns a little. Cheers to Barry for saying the right thing at the right time. Cheers to the Berkeley family for trying to fly here at a moments notice. Cheers to the friends who have cried with us a little and our sweet Oregon neighbors who have shown us so much love. We're definitely gonna be all-right.

A big question these days is "what is healthy?" Is it being cancer free? Is it chemotherapy? Is it having a plastic bag of silicon implanted in your chest? Is it radiation? It's hard to know right now.

We're lucky to have planned this next month for a long vacation back east with our friends and family. I don't know about chemo, but time and love are definitely key parts of the cure.


(looking back over this post, the pictures seem a little out of place with the topic. but they were all taken yesterday while we were out on an epic walk trying to sort some of this out. secondly, what's a good picture for talking cancer?)

what do yo get if you cross Lassie with a cantaloupe?

a melon-collie baby...

yesterday i sold the airstream. the silver train-car that sheltered us from kentucky to oregon and was our home for almost a year, the place my where my daughter learned to walk, a small constant space with ever-changing uncertainties outside it's door.

two years ago we decided to move to oregon. tiff had a job that promised a place to park our trailer and i figured i could find work. it took us a year to get out of lexington. many thanks to our friends who spent a year leaving parties at our house with more than they'd brought. thank god that two close friends bought new houses; our bedroom is set up at cousin sam's house and set up so exactly that it makes me feel like a historical figure visiting my own museum when i go there. almost as soon as we got the house empty and rented, tiff's job evaporated like pee on a woodstove (only a stink left in the air). so there we were, trailered up and no place to go. i got a job by phone, and i gotta tell you a speaker-phone interview with five people you've never met is a weird thing. it's hard to charm a disembodied collective of strangers. the trip across the country was stunningly awesome, unhurried and unplanned. we slipped into the province of thought native to all travelers where coincidence is a companion and schedules laughably inconsequential. that is, until we rolled into corvallis got out some maps and realized that there wasn't really any place to park a trailer around here. the trailer became a classroom for some tricky life lessons. how to live in a trailer park, how to exist with a wife, child, and two dogs in 74 sq feet of space, and how beer helps you accept the teaching that life lessons have to offer. finally the rain came and the trailer became an uncomfortable ark barely afloat in our sea of discontent. times were bad then and there's no more to say about that. we left the trailer with a small sense of defeat and a large sense of relief; our health and happiness had begun to suffer. happily ensconced in our 450 sq foot palace, dry, and with so much room to stretch out, i'm not sorry to see the trailer go but i'm very thankful that it got me from there to here.

i punched my ticket on a one way silver train
too damn tired of being the same
i'm going to wash my sins in the oregon rain
and maybe then i'll come home again

women i've loved:

i used to live with memory
but i knew she'd never change
i started hanging out with luck
but she was never true
i flirted with destiny night and day
but i knew her mind was made
i fell in love with tomorrow
but she wasn't what i thought
i had a threesome with here and now
but there wasn't a future in it
i moved in with apathy
but she never cared about me
i hooked up with hope
but she was just a tease
i fell in love with truth
but she was too hard too handle
i've got a crush on coincidence
but she's hard to understand
my heart was made for love
but i've got more lovers than i need