April 4, 2013 – Lovely County Citizen – Page
The Village Writing School Make up your mind Does every adage, every bit of homespun wisdom, have an equal and opposite adage? “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but “out of sight is out of mind.” “There’s no place like home,” but “you can’t go home again.” “Birds of a feather flock together,” but “opposites attract.” “Look before you leap, but “he who hesitates is lost.” I discovered my personal pair of equal but opposite adages while applying a friend’s senior lifestyle advice. She had been downsizing passionately, implementing practicality with Feng Shui. Inspired by her zeal to “simplify, simplify” like Thoreau, I swore to cull some of the stuff I’ve accumulated since moving to Holiday Island half a decade ago. I was culling at a pretty good clip. The donate and dump piles on the floor were swelling, as the towering stacks on the closet shelves were thinning. This “giving up of stuff” is kind of fun, I thought, as I imagined the delight for the lucky shopper finding my Peruvian Connection sweater at the Doggy Shop. As I reached farther into the closet, my fingers touched something distinctly silky in the pile of otherwise fluffy items. I wriggled it loose. For a nanosecond I didn’t recognize it. Then, the words “cancer turban” tolled in my head like a church bell at a funeral. I opened the headcover and folded inside was the rest of my cancer head turbans. Poring over the collection like a scrapbook, I kept repeating the organizer’s adage: If you haven’t worn it in a year, you don’t need it. I hadn’t worn these in six years, so it’s the donation pile for them.
But wait. They’re “user specific.” A healthy shopper wouldn’t likely buy these. They need a home with someone who’s lost their hair to chemo. I sat on the bed with this pile of fabric and sorted through it. Why had I chosen these turbans over wigs anyway? There are so many cute hairpieces and so many opportunities to look like someone I’d never been. But when the scalp after chemo is as smooth as a cue ball, wigs slip. I envisioned myself bending over to adjust my shoe and my wig plopping at my feet, or leaning back as I reached up for a can of peas from the top shelf at Wal-Mart, my wig sliding off and dropping into the aisle, where it promptly gets tangled in the wheel of a shopper’s cart. Those little scalp socks are no solution either, since the nubbies of new hair growing in become scratchy in the sock, and summer heat isn’t friendly toward a scalp wrap. So, for me, turbans were a logical choice. Besides, turbans are chic. Liz Taylor oozed glamour in hers. Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice? Sophisticated. Seductive. Joan Crawford, Faye Dunaway, Joan Collins. Even Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City II. Turbans were haut on all of them. Why not me too? Six years later, here I am fumbling with an it’s-a-girl pink turban with ties of Monet colored pastels. A baby blue turban with an optional band made of three strips of ivory, blue, and peach, all braided together. Here is my crimson turban for days when I was whip-the-world high on steroids. For really
Wayne Newman and I bought a house in Holiday Island in 2006, four months after honeymooning in Eureka Springs. Our plan was to work another year or two and retire here. But God had different plans: esophageal cancer for me just six months after our wedding. When Wayne said “I do,” he never imagined “for poorer” and “in sickness” were coming so soon. I didn’t want to take treatment, but Wayne encouraged me. Each day for six weeks he rose at 4:30 AM to drive me from Coppell to Dallas for radiation. Then he’d drive me home and go to work for eight to ten hours. Six years later, he is still gracefully and patiently dealing with the residual effects of radiation and my inability to eat. This piece is dedicated to you, Wayne. Thank you for teaching me the meaning of love and commitment.
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To support our local emerging writers, the Lovely County Citizen is providing space each week to showcase a student of The Village Writing School. For more information, email alisontaylorbrown@me.com
This Week’s Writer: Dot Newman
let-me-at-‘em days, it has an attachable band of red, black, pink, and green florals. For panache ala Lena Horne, the crimson, scarlet, pink splashed turban. For sultry nights, a solid black silky number with long ties I could drape over a shoulder, ending in black and white eyelash ribbons, sparkly and flirty. What part of me forgot that chemo and radiation make you look as if you died last year and have been exhumed? Besides, the commonalities between Liz Taylor and me stop at our gender and the turbans. But I’m a girly girl determined to go out being girly, even if turbans are nicknamed “man repellers.” My turbans sit in my lap like color photos of dear old friends. I have a strange attachment to these turbans, similar to what a middle-aged man might have toward his high school letter jacket. These turbans covered me in the agony of the battle, and they covered me in the joy of victory. However, as I lay them fondly on the donate pile, an opposite adage pops into my head: the minute you get rid of it you’ll need it again. There’s my answer, in a contradictory adage. That’s why I’ve kept them so long. As insurance I wouldn’t need them again. That, and the practical knowledge that women with cancer don’t shop thrift stores for cancer turbans. My turbans will dry rot in some bin marked “10 cents an item.” One of these I’d paid nearly fifty dollars for, in my interminable vanity. ••• As I write this, I’m thinking to myself, you’ve already lived a year longer than the best odds anyone gave you for beating esophageal cancer. These colorful and girly warrior helmets need a new soldier to love them like I did. I won’t donate them, knowing they’ll just mold or dry rot. Instead I’ll keep them until someone calls to say “I want them.” Or until someone I know needs
Free Verse Ann Carter is a Carroll County native with roots back seven generations. She has an MFA in poetry from U of A, and lives in Eureka Springs, where her book of poems, Sweetness, is available at Prospect Gallery and Studio 62.
Ann Carter
Mississippi River Evening (Vicksburg Bluffs, September) As I face this potential ocean Lit by the low sun’s coral rush, I remember Debussy’s Beau Soir, His quiet lamentation: “For we are going as the river goes, It to the sea, we to the grave.” There is no music here, And I’m in no hurry To drop to black To be proof of his art song— Even when these bright colors Of sky and water fine tune A grief that in the falling dusk Makes all my plain petitions rise Briefly as burning paper, To scatter to ash on the cleft Of this beautiful evening.
them. Or until I need them again. But I’d rather give them a new home and take my chances on that. If you’d love my turbans or know someone who’d love them, email me at dnewman612@gmail.com.