Something Right
Monday. Dinner at the sushi restaurant at the bottom of my hill last night. I learned one of the waitresses - young, maybe twenty, twenty-five - has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will be undergoing chemo. Bam! Just like that. I have too many friends who've had breast cancer (and, knock on wood, have survived very nicely, thank you), but this is the second thirty year old or younger woman I know well enough to say hello to who's been diagnosed with this cancer. At my age you expect, well, you don't expect, but you understand bad news, particularly when you've been diagnosed with cancer yourself, but these women seem awfully young.
Did they just not talk about it when I was a kid? Traditionally cancer is something you didn't talk about except in the very immediate family, certainly that was true for my parents generation, less true for mine and less still, I suspect, for generations following. I talk about all kinds of things more than I should and for this I pay a certain price, but still, this is damned young to have your nose pressed up flat against the black glass just when you've gotten your feet on the ground.
Oh, and I drank more sake than a sane man should. A reaction, perhaps, to the news. When I got home I downloaded a bunch of songs from iTunes and ordered a bunch of books from Amazon which I recalled, wondering exactly how many songs and how many books, this morning in the bath. Silly man.
Tuesday. Off to Seattle tomorrow. I am doing laundry this evening. I am packing. I am running late, but not all that late. I will undoubtedly forget something and I have no idea which route I'll take up the coast. Maybe that means I'm doing something right.
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