Brain MRI tomorrow. Fly to Italy on Friday. Have to acknowledge the strong stench of hubris in the room in order to get past it. Actually, it is the peculiar stench of hubris + anxiety. Yes, they can coexist. The anxiety part is what keeps me from being 100% focused on trip planning, I think. Or else it’s the lack of sleep due to anxiety and anticipation of the trip. I think Dr K is imminently leaving the country too, which means even if there is something that needs doing, it won’t get done until we are both back.

I haven’t been even remotely symptomatic, but I did have a brief skin scare over the weekend which led to a visit to the dermatologist yesterday. A sort of humiliating one. Pro tip: Avid bicycling can make your skin do weird things in weird places.

Just to not leave you on that unpleasant note, here’s some encouraging graffiti I saw in the waiting room at Dr P’s last week. Sometimes the implicit needs to be made explicit.

I keep meaning to start a new post, and then life intervenes. This is good, life intervening. Except today, and for the past few days, but actually for as far back as I can remember, life includes contending with news of horrible deaths. Just in the past week: A thirteen year old girl stabbed to death in her sleep. Restaurant patrons hacked to pieces. Bombings. In this country, still more black men shot to death by police, on a daily basis. It is too much to absorb, but it is not possible to look away. It is not possible to accept it as the status quo. Because we are human.

So I have been focusing on the kids. How I can be a better, less lazy parent. (It’s easier to do that when they are in camp all day, and come home exhausted.) They are loving camp this year, even more than last. And they seem to be making real progress towards learning to swim, especially Young J, who is having fun swimming underwater to be sneaky when he plays tag with his friends, learning how to fence, and what LARPing means. Young A is in his glory, playing gaga and boating.

Last night, I needed to get sandwich ingredients for the boys’ lunches today, so I sent them around the corner with instructions and money. I waited on a bench out of sight. It was pure joy to see them succeed in their small enterprise! And to watch them carefully account for the change they brought back. (They haven’t been to the store on their own often enough yet to realize they could also buy candy…) Yet another moment I am so glad I haven’t missed.

Last week, I also heard live music – we all went to hear the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Central Park, with a Japanese pianist who has been blind since birth. We arrived too late to score seats or a bench, so we plopped ourselves down on the asphalt tiles right in front of the stage. It was uncomfortable, and having Young A sit in my lap, all forty-seven pounds of him, didn’t make it less so. But it was a beautiful night in spite of threatening rain, and the all-Beethoven program was perfect, and halfway through the first half, Young J and Young A switched places, and got sleepy, so I soon found Young J’s head nestled gently in my collarbone and I rested my head on his, and vowed I would remember that feeling as long as I get to live.

Two nights later, I was at Madison Square Garden for the first time ever, watching yet another band from the distant past, The Stone Roses, resurrect itself. It seemed as though most of the crowd was from the UK, which meant the concert had the feel of a football match. Lots of singing and rhythmic clapping, more than one usually sees at rock shows in the US.

Which reminds me. Last July, J and I and our friend T took part in the recording of a new album from a band of even longer standing, The Mekons. After the recording session, we waited with great anticipation for the result. At long last, one of the songs recorded that evening has made its way to YouTube. You can see me towards the right of the screen in some of the crowd shots (and T too, if you know him, but not much at all of J). I can also just spy in the crowd another woman who was there that night, with a scarf covering her bald head, who had the look of a chemo patient. I really hope she’s still here, getting to watch this too.

https://youtu.be/tUxm_Pd0XRw

I haven’t been back on my bike since the great big ride, in case you’ve been wondering. It has been a slow couple of weeks for exercise. We gear up now for what is coming in just over a week, our departure for Italy. I’m still in a fair amount of disbelief that we’re going. I have my next MRI scheduled for two days before the trip, which seems unfair, but I am assuming it all will turn out well. (I had a checkup with Dr P yesterday, and all of my bloodwork was fine.)

If all is not well, I will take steroids, and talk my way through Italy. Which reminds me, last week I also took the kids to Coney Island, where a fortune teller machine had the following to say to me:

I don’t think it got the memo that I’ve been off steroids for quite some time now, and nowhere near as chatty as I was then. Since the advice about not talking so much isn’t particularly accurate, I’ll assume the advice about staying home is also not right.

I almost forgot to mention another reason this post got postponed: I’m back to writing poems. I’d had a particular writing contest in mind for weeks now, and I had been assuming I’d write an essay to submit to it (they were accepting entries in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction). When I sat down to work on it, however, a poem emerged. I thought I’d write it, then move on to working on the essay. And then another poem emerged. It’s as though I had immigrated to another country and completely stopped speaking my mother tongue for decades, then one day woke up and opened my mouth and suddenly it was all I could speak. For me, translating lived experience into poems has always been a process that requires long gestation. So this week, I think I finally allowed myself to start giving birth to those poems. I wrote two, and found another I had started last November, which I completed. I submitted them two hours before the midnight deadline, which, for a procrastinator like me, was noteworthy.

This change of language in which I express myself is also timely, because in a week, I will go back to Italy after a long, long time. My words may be a little creaky at first, but I can’t wait to reinhabit my Italian persona. This time, though, it will need to coexist side-by-side with my English-speaking mom persona. (The thought of the language gymnastics makes my brain a little achy and tired in advance.) We’ll be there two weeks. At this age, the kids may pick up a fair amount of the language just by listening carefully. By the end of the trip, my modest goal for them is that they be able to order their own gelato… so that I will have more mental energy to focus on choosing mine.

All the anxiety, all of the mental and physical preparation, and whoosh – the day came and went.

Friday night, we had dinner at J’s parents house and left the kids there to spend the night. We got home around 9 pm, aiming for a 10 pm bedtime. Which we managed, pretty much, except by then we’d decided that we’d need to be up by 4:30 am. So we weren’t going to get much sleep.

We were up at 4:30 (okay, maybe it took us a few minutes longer) and got our stuff together quickly. I took my dose of Tafinlar at 5, much earlier than usual, because it has a three hour fast on either side of it, and I knew I wouldn’t want that to impede fueling up for my ride.

We took a couple of bananas (turned out they were uncomfortably ripe) and I made us each a PB&J to eat on the ride. I knew there would be breakfast at the ride, so I packed some mixed nuts and a bunch of the kids’ fruit leathers to ride with, and that was it.

Then J went out to get our bikes on the new car rack. We’d tried it out last weekend, with all four bikes, and it had gone fine. This morning, I think the nerves got to J. Once both bikes were strapped in, he was assailed by doubts, and wondered if the whole thing wasn’t too loose. I was standing there trying not to implode from stress. It got later and later. Finally, J decided the bikes were secure, and we were on our way. I kept an eye on both bikes in the rear view mirror almost the whole time.

I’d been hoping to get to the ride at 6:30. We didn’t start out until after 5:30, and it was more than an hour away. It felt good to leave the city though – whenever we cross the Triboro Bridge and head in either one of the directions that take you north, it feels exciting. (Especially if it is early enough that you don’t hit a solid wall of traffic in the Bronx!)

En route, I texted S, a friend from my early days of motherhood, who now lives upstate. We hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months. I figured she might not live too far from the finish line, and it was worth a shot to see whether she could make it. To my happy surprise, she seemed amenable to it! And J’s parents would be meeting us at the finish line too, with the boys.

But all of those happy reunions would be hours away. Little did we know how many hours. When we got to the venue we had no idea where to park – luckily spaces were available across the street, rather than at the designated event lot that was almost two miles down the road. There were waivers to sign before we could get our jerseys. We had to change into our jerseys, release the bikes from the rack, get sunblock on, and scramble over to the start. We saw breakfast laid out, and it looked lovely – quiche, Greek yogurt, fruit – but all we had time to grab was half of a giant blueberry muffin to share. Forget coffee. At least we’d eaten those bananas!

The 100 milers set off, and then the 50 milers, and then suddenly, it was our turn. We got in the very back of the chute and I’m pretty sure we were the last to start!

The moment I crossed the starting line, I got a little teary. I’d been thinking about this ride for a long time, training for it, and to cross the start line, even, was huge. I soon got over it, because we were entering the West Point military installation, and I knew I’d probably not have many other chances to see it. It’s a stunningly beautiful campus, many historic buildings, and I noticed the library as we passed (also gorgeous). Suddenly, a hill came up and smacked us in the face like a wave. It went up and up. And that was just the start of the ride!

Once we left West Point, we had a little respite, but then the hills really began (see first circle, above). We saw other riders stopped on the first big hill for photo ops, so we joined in:

None of the things I had spent so much mental energy worrying about came to pass. I didn’t fall off my bike. I didn’t have trouble starting again when we stopped on a hill. No major components fell off my bike (although a reflector attached to one pedal became very loose and rattled and drove me a little nuts). In the days before the ride, I’d been congested and worried I’d wake up the day of the ride too sick to go. But I was fine. Completely fine.

Once we’d been through the first big hill, I had a better sense of what the hills would be like. The trainer I worked with, Joanna, had advised that a good strategy for long hills was to not look up. When she said that, I imagined a big hill rising above me, like a wall. But what there really was, of course, were endless twists and turns, hills rising around and out of sight so you couldn’t predict where the top was, and if you did try to predict, you were wrong.

I suppose if I’d gone to the trouble of mounting my phone on my bike, I could have had an app tell me when the big hills were coming, but perhaps that would not have been as fun. I would have missed everything I saw. Small towns and stone walls and oddly, a solar phone charger in the middle of nowhere with an unseen person’s phone hooked up to it. Birds of prey circling as we took a rest stop, prompting us to look alive. Also, on the Storm King Highway, cars zipping around blind curves at 50 mph. (In the morning while J had been racking the bikes, our neighbor passed by walking his dogs and when we told him about the ride, he mentioned that he likes taking the Storm King Highway curves in his BMW. So I guess we’d been warned!)

Instead of looking at my phone, while I pumped hard to get up those hills, I thought of Kate, my sister in melanoma blogging, who died in April. I am profoundly sad that the advances in treatment to date fell short of what she needed. And I also thought of another friend who will soon begin immunotherapy treatment for a different type of cancer. Grief and hope in equal measures.

J rode with me, but he’s taller and stronger than I am, so what that meant was, he rode ahead and checked back every so often to make sure I was there. I sang camp songs to self-motivate. One about how the world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is to have no fear. To amuse myself, I remembered the first time the world got to see Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle, with unseen strings pulling him along, in The Muppet Movie.

At the rest stops, we gorged on strawberries and peaches and drank Gatorade and marveled at all the local people who had come out to help with the ride. We also met another rider, a woman originally from Poland, who has had cancer run rampant through her family. Her mother died of lymphoma, which seemed connected to Chernobyl. We rode together for a little while.

There were many SAG vehicles, and more than once, they seemed to be riding my tail, making me think we were the last ones out on the road. Not literally the case, of course, but we certainly took our time. The last hill was murder – on a stretch of road that was not shaded, and at high noon. J soldiered on, but I finally gave up and walked for a piece. Then a SAG wagon showed up and they refilled my almost-empty water bottle, and that gave me the push I needed.

The end of the ride was amazing, dramatic – we got to ride on a highway, with one lane blocked off for us, then up the exit ramp and back into the town of Highland Falls. The steep descent to the finish was precipitous, crazy fun. I felt as though I were playing one of the video games the kids like. I stood on my brakes at times, making them squeal and almost smelling burnt rubber. The broken pavement added to the adventure. By the time we rolled up to the finish, about five hours after we’d started, I was exhilarated and exhausted. Seeing the kids and J’s parents, with a “GREAT JOB” sign and huge smiles, made me cry all over again. We were officially photographed. S arrived and I gave her a big, sweaty hug. Then J & I got massages and ate great food and heard a good band and drank beer and wine and S & I caught up a bit at last. I even got to take a shower! And the kids bounced in a bouncy house three times the size of our apartment.

The announcer at the finish line said I was a cancer survivor. I’m sure that was meant well. It isn’t quite accurate, though – not from my standpoint. I still take medication. I am still being monitored closely with scans, and anytime something weird happens, I call the oncologist first. It may be a long time before I lay claim to the title of survivor. As Mary Elizabeth Williams‘ doctor told her, “You can call yourself a cancer survivor when you die of something else.” And don’t call me a warrior, please. I take pills and I get scans. That’s not exactly jiu-jitsu.

If I’m not a survivor, then I find what I accomplished yesterday difficult to label in an easy way. Surprise, surprise – I have always deflected easy categorization. What it was, was this: I survived a tough bike ride, one year after brain metastases and gamma knife surgery. The lungs which once had tumors in them are now free of them – thanks to cancer immunotherapy – and they helped me get up and down some brutal hills without quitting. That’s what happened yesterday.

But also – more than a hundred donors to our fundraiser showed us their love and support, and stated with their donations that they, too, hope for a future where cancer once and for all stops its ruthless march.

Although the ride is now over, fundraising continues through the summer. If you’ve been thinking of giving, you still have a chance.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I did something very unusual this afternoon, as the school year for the kids ebbed into its final hours, and then its final minutes. I had a lot of prep to do for their special last day of school dinner (their fave, a chicken & broccoli & mushroom stir fry, which requires a lot of chopping).

I had watched, earlier in the day, the beginning of the historic sit-in for gun control legislation in the House of Representatives. I was stirred by John Lewis’ words, and I sensed this was some Grade A political theater.

When it came time to chop veggies I propped my laptop on the counter, and I kept watching. To say I have been disengaged from politics in this election year is an understatement. But I cannot stand by and watch mass murder after mass murder happen on my watch. Some of the speakers today stayed on message, some of them did not. A letter from Gabby Giffords, a victim of gun violence who has started her own organization, Americans for Responsible Solutions, was read on the House floor.

By the end of the day, I wasn’t sure where the sit-in might lead, and I’ve had to stop following it closely, in favor of family time. My heart hurts, my brain is fried. And I don’t want any more bullets sprayed into any more bodies.

Tonight, John Lurie posted a new image of one of his paintings on Facebook, and it just slayed me. Such a perfect encapsulation of the current mood. Such a perfect shade of blue.

I’m pushing aside the things I need to do right now. Just for a few minutes I will enjoy the serenity of my bedroom, the door to the balcony open to birdsong.

The weekend was cuckoo bananas, wall-to-wall fun. We were catapulted into summer:

Lemonade stand:

block party, outdoor concert, Father’s Day, school picnic, bike ride:

AND to top it off, a barbecue.

I love summer. I always have. I love the heat, the humidity, the loud hum of a field full of insects… and the bright, endless sun.

It just isn’t fun for me anymore. Sometimes I dread leaving the house, when there is bright sun. And there will always be sun.

For most of my life, sun was no problem at all, it was a treat. Sunscreen applied in a perfunctory way, and bare shoulders and a pair of cheap sunglasses. I recall dragging a lounge chair out of the garage to the backyard and lying out. I cannot believe what a terrible idea that was. And yet, according to my surgeon, the damage was not done in adolescence, but earlier. All those peeling sunburns as a kid. And who knows? Maybe the UV light I logged time under as a jaundiced newborn.

I can’t really enjoy the bare shoulders anymore. I still bare them, but now there is a sense of danger. I’m exposing myself needlessly. I may as well take up smoking or chewing tobacco, when I’m out in the sun with skin exposed. When I’m walking in the city, it becomes a race from shade to shade, crossing the street at inconvenient places, just to stay out of the sun. Swimming is less fun, now that I have to wear a shirt while doing it. A shirt that feels okay in the water, but when I come out, clings to all the wrong spots, not unlike plastic wrap.

I hate the panic I’m necessarily instilling in my children about the sun. Especially the one who is paler and who freckles like I do. I hate bringing up issues of mortality while I apply sunblock to his writhing, uncooperative limbs. I hate how much good sunblock costs. How it will undoubtedly ooze from the tube or bottle I send in each kid’s backpack to summer camp, covering everything with zinc-y sludge, but only if it doesn’t get lost on the very first day of camp.

But I still love summer, and the sun. It’s just that my love has gotten more complex – fraught, tinged with resentment, concerned with the need to protect myself. I’m guarded. But I know that one day very soon, I will hit a sweet spot, I will be wearing plenty of sunscreen and a hat I don’t hate and I’ll have a summery drink in my hand and J will too, and a light breeze will caress my bare shoulders while the kids, properly sunblocked and behatted, are off playing at a distance.  Then I will have a moment of ease, and forget that that feeling used to last for three months.

Once again, I am angry, devastated, and unsettled. Once again I want to grab a thousand lawmakers and lobbyists by the lapels and demand that they back down, back off, disarm. We are a continent of lead, awash in blood. How much longer will I be able to conceal the true horror of it from my kids? If they knew what happens here every day, every hour, they would probably never sleep again.

Or would they, as we do, assimilate this somehow as part of their everyday reality? In the absence of a nationwide uprising against our current situation, this is what those of us whose lives have somehow failed to have a ragged hole cut through them in the latest outrage seem to do.

As I did, yesterday, with my family. We headed to an amusement park for the day, with J’s nephew. It was a beautiful, warm, breezy day. People had died and been injured horribly overnight, but not close to where we were, so it was possible to do such a thing.

I think that the sinister event cast a shadow over the park, or maybe it was my thought overlay, as I looked around. There were staff everywhere in orange t-shirts, but I noticed none of them seemed to be security guards, save for two guys we only saw when we were leaving. And scores and scores of families queuing up for their next go-round on the next gravity-defying experience. I noticed at a certain point that many of the rides came from Germany (which felt creepy to me), and on the haunted house ride, one of the last we rode, there was a faded banner with the name of the ride in German, “Der Rickscha,” and a pervasive smell of mold as Young A and I sat in the dark in our rickshaw, pulled by a zombie with a black bag over its head, whipped around hairpin turns to horrors that were more annoying and ridiculous (except for the blood-curdling screams, those really were awful).

There were flying swings, which are my favorite ride, but the park is crammed into such a small space, they didn’t give the feeling of soaring, and it was hard to shed the idea I might smack into sign posts or other rides. I closed my eyes for a bit, that made it better.

I rode a kiddie roller coaster with Young J and Young A, but it wasn’t quite junior enough for me. I closed my eyes there too, which helped a little, but mostly, I felt myself click into Endurance Mode, something I’ve developed for use when called every two months into the tunnel for my brain MRI. This wasn’t a medical exam, though. I had opted to do this for fun! And it wasn’t remotely fun. I was enduring it and trying to gauge how Young A was handling it. He looked terrified by the end, but perhaps not, because by evening he said it was one of the best rides he’d been on all day. He is one complicated little dude.

The best ride of the day, for me, was J and I sitting in the back of an antique car while the kids sat in front and pretended to drive. A ride that was charming and mindless and most importantly, not trying to thrill us, not even a little bit.

I wasn’t sure, when I started training for the big bike ride I have coming up, that I really needed professional help training for it. I’ve been riding for a long time, after all, and I did the Five Borough Bike Tour once, and all I did to train for that was ride the steep hills in Riverside Park in very high gear.

But guess what? It turns out that over the years, any number of fears, real or imagined ones, crept into my riding. So when a friend mentioned a trainer that she’d worked with for triathlon conditioning, I did think about it for a second. Then Thrifty Brain took over and said nah, just get the miles in. So I did that for a little while, donning my trusty 20 year old bike shorts, which now provided about the same amount of padding as a panty liner (the vestigial kind, for “light” days), a fanny pack with my necessities, and my clunky stainless steel water bottle rattling around in its cage.

And then, I saw the route profile. Which told me that riding the shortest distance of the three available wasn’t necessarily going to be the easiest. The little diagram helpfully hinted at a total elevation of “~2,379 feet” – as in, “approximate, we’re not quite sure, the last person in charge of measuring it passed out while climbing the last huge hill.” This was turning out to be more than I bargained for, and I realized if I didn’t get some solid advice, I was probably going to bomb this ride.

So I got in touch with that trainer, Joanna Paterson of Bodiesynergy. I spoke with her first on the phone and she seemed direct, professional, and very, very knowledgeable. By which I mean that she wasn’t trying to do more than I needed. She understood that I’m training for this ride for a very specific reason – because cancer immunotherapy is in part responsible for my being on the surface of the earth instead of beneath it – and she got that I wasn’t trying to turn into a triathlete. As a bonus, she is a native of New Zealand and has a great Kiwi accent.

We made a date for the park. Before that date, I needed to acquire proper biking clothes. I went to a shop in Park Slope, where I heard someone call my name. It was P, the wife of M, whom I met in my librarian job ages ago. I’d seen plenty of photos of her on Facebook. We’d never met, but she’d read my blog before, which made me feel like a minor celeb. She was lovely, and she helped me choose clothes. I began to realize something that Joanna told me more concretely at the end of our session today – that not only have I improved my skills, I’ve also started to create a community – the people riding in the park, the people who work at the bike shops. (She’s right. Last week when I went to get a ticking sound looked at at a different shop closer to my house, Ricky, the guy who rescued my ancient bike from decrepitude a couple years ago by upgrading crucial components, remembered me.)

I bought those new biking clothes about two hours before meeting Joanna for our first session. I put them on at home, feeling like a total poseur. This feeling was magnified by what happened while I was riding to the park to meet her. For the first time, EVER, I failed to check the crosswalk was totally clear before I started up from a red light, and I rolled into a pedestrian. I didn’t knock her down. She may or may not have been wearing white pants. I was mortified! I rode to the park beet red, and as soon as Joanna and I had shaken hands, I burst into tears. She handled it with aplomb, and smartly encouraged me to get off my bike until I’d collected myself.

At our first session, I learned a lot about gearing and how to not run out of gears on a hill (at least, not on the modest hill in our nearby park). I learned how to hold my line (aka not zigzag all over the road). Joanna showed me how to drink while riding (my subsequent practices on that skill, including one time when I almost knocked over another rider, left me feeling it was a bridge too far for me at this stage). And she raised my saddle to the appropriate height for someone like me, who is about 80% legs. I have such tremendous leg power while riding now, it’s pretty amazing.

Joanna gave me homework after that session – three workouts, including one of hill repeats and one of six or seven laps of the park, with the third one being my choice of the other two. A strange thing happened though – with the higher saddle, I began to dread getting on or off my bike. Towards the end of my first six-lap workout, I both fell over when stopping to get water, and somehow forgot how to stop and dismount the bike when I finished (I eventually figured it out). I’d been riding dehydrated, because I was too afraid to stop!

I decided to schedule another session with Joanna this week, to focus exclusively on starting and stopping and turning (something else I suddenly forgot how to do, after I’d fallen over that time). I was letting my fears grow gigantic, and this was not the way I wanted to go into the big ride.

Today we met in a sunny and very windy park, and Joanna drilled me on starting and stopping. She didn’t force me to change my way of pushing off, just suggested things to pay attention to when I was doing it. She did offer solid advice on downshifting before you stop, so you don’t get caught on an incline stopped in a high gear. And she made me practice turns in both directions. All throughout she encouraged me and guided me. I think we finally released all the butterflies today.

I’ve been extremely lucky through this cancer ordeal, meeting people who have a fantastically unique and adept way of tweaking my perspective. Working with Joanna is the latest example. I’m going into the big ride with a secret weapon: The Kiwi-accented voice in my head. It’s telling me to “cape piddling,” “hold your loin,” and it’s going to get me up some pretty steep hills, the steepness of which Joanna has told me not to look at as I climb, as a tactic for making it all the way up.

I’ve never been much of a long-range planner, so that last piece of advice should suit me just fine…

To donate to our fundraising effort for the Answer to Cancer bike ride, please visit our team page. Every amount helps us get to our goal. Donations can come in until September 1. Thank you so much!!

We’re less than three weeks away from the big bike ride. Last week, I hardly rode at all. But this morning, I saw how gorgeous a day it was shaping up to be, and I knew I’d need to get out there. One thing led to another, though, and I didn’t leave the house until noon. I still managed to get out and do six laps of the park (a shade over 21 miles).

I’m no longer at all intimidated by the actual riding. But getting on and off my bike (with the new seat height) continues to stress me out. Today, I noticed I was more steady when I did so, but I still get very anxious about it – enough that I find myself continuing to pedal when I really should take a break.

Obviously, being successful in the ride will mean knowing when to stop and drink and eat, not plowing through all 25 miles at once because I’m afraid of falling off my bike when I stop! I know it’s all practice, and it was reassuring to see that I was in better shape today. I’m meeting the trainer on Thursday to work some more on my starting and stopping, and see if she has any final words of wisdom for me. Just the one session I had with her so far improved my biking immeasurably.

While I was riding today, I thought about times in my life that I accomplished physical feats that I hadn’t dreamed I could, until I did. Birthing very large babies. Running a half marathon. Teaching myself to kayak better one summer, when I had unlimited access to one. Biking 42 miles through all five boroughs of New York City. And, most spectacularly and going way, way back, teaching myself at age nine or ten how to do a flip off the diving board, after watching a friend’s diving lesson, and then, after doing flips from the low dive a bunch of times, deciding I was ready to flip from the high dive. (Turns out you don’t actually stop flipping once you start, because of the laws of physics, which I had not yet learned in school. I did a massive belly flop and when I came out of the water, the lifeguard who asked if I was okay was pale under his tan.)

Nerve is a quality that cannot be underestimated. I couldn’t have done any of these things without it. But the archenemy of nerve happens to be its plural, nerves. So going into this bike ride, I’m hoping to squash the nerves, and rediscover the power of nerve. Nerve is a quality that runs through a few generations in my family. My parents had to have some nerve to leave the land of their birth, to seek better lives elsewhere. (So did my grandparents on my father’s side.) We have a lot of nerve. It has to count for something.

It is only 5:30 p.m. and I’m in bed. I do love my bed, but I’m lately unacquainted with it at this hour. Lying here as the kids watch their pre-dinner TV (currently, reality shows involving cooking and home fixer-uppering are in favor among the junior viewers of the house) reminds me of the bad old days, when I was in bed nearly 24/7, except for the middle of the night, when the steroids kept me from sleeping and I blogged furiously in the dark bathroom.

Lucky, lucky me today – J is home and can handle dinner. And I’m sacked out because I rode my bike a lot today – to the tune of 20, maybe 21 miles. This was my second “homework” assignment from the trainer I worked with a couple of weeks ago. I needed to do six or seven full laps of the park. I managed six today, leaving something yet to aspire to in the month remaining before my ride.

I confirmed today that my issues with biking have nothing to do with the actual work of pedaling – not even the hills are all that difficult anymore. My problems come from these Fears that seem to have cropped up now that I’m training for something big. Fears of falling over, crashing, failing brakes, drinking water while riding.

I didn’t even attempt to do the latter today. I was just proud I made it out at all, because it was rainy and cool and I had no idea what the weather was going to do. As my trainer suggested, I brought a snack with me. Two bananas, one tucked in each pocket of my jersey. I learned when I stopped for my break, a little past the halfway point, that bananas do not travel well in pockets! I needed the energy, so I ate them anyways. I’m not sure where I’d tuck a sandwich. Energy bars are the most ideal, packaging-wise, but so many of them seem like glorified candy bars when you read the label.

About halfway through my final lap, things started getting a little shaky. My grip on the handlebars slipped for a second and I felt like I might wipe out, even though it was just a minor wobble. I moved my head from side to side to make sure it wasn’t another dizzy spell coming on – nope. I focused on my breathing and got steady. I was almost out of water, though, and facing the last hill, I decided to stop before that and fill my water bottle.

When I met with the trainer, one of the things she did was raise my seat about an inch. I’ve noticed I am much more powerful now that I am able to fully extend my legs. However, I’m an inch higher, and still very awkward when it comes to starting and stopping. When I stopped for water, my exhaustion combined with the awkwardness led to a comical tumble. I was stopped already, and put a foot down so I could dismount, and instead the bike pulled me down to the ground. My left buttock and hand took the brunt of it, and both of those areas were padded with my recently upgraded bike clothing, so I only have a scratch on my shin and a few bruises. Miraculously, there was only one person nearby when I spilled. He asked if I was okay and I assured him I was, so he let me be. I felt like the cyclist in the opening of the Surrealist classic, Un chien andalou. (See the part starting at 2:30 in.)

I filled up my water bottle and decided to bike on the much quieter transverse road in the park for a minute, to settle my nerves before the final hill climb. After a little bit, I was feeling okay, so I went to turn around and head back to the main road. I couldn’t turn, though. I couldn’t organize myself to turn my bike! It was a little scary, suddenly not knowing how to do something that I’ve done for ages. Suddenly, riding a bike was not like riding a bike. I stopped, turned my bike around with my hands, and went on my way.

A similar thing happened about a month ago, when I first started training. I got back home after a ride, got off my bike, but couldn’t remember how to dismount. I wasn’t sure where to throw my leg in order to get off.

I mean, I’ve had brain surgery. Twice. They assured me it was safe and wouldn’t damage anything. And I haven’t noticed anything amiss, really, but this? This is new. And it sucks. Whether from cancer, treatment, or simple aging, it just sucks.

But, on balance, even with my imbalance, I’m happy today. I rode nearly the entire distance of our ride in June! I climbed hills multiple times! I spent almost two and a half hours on my bike and I can still move my limbs, sort of!

Tomorrow I’ll go to the gym and stretch everything out. Including my brain.

Making Me Understand is an occasional blog feature where I analyze, in brief or at length, what a particular work of art or artist means to me right now.

Nina Katchadourian went viral sometime in the past year or two. Maybe you’re not recalling her by name. But if I tell you that she was the face in and the brain behind these brilliant airplane Lavatory Portraits in the Flemish Style, then maybe that starts to ring a bell for you? When I learned about those, I knew I’d need to know more.

Last night, I had the chance to hear Nina present her work at the Brooklyn Museum. She was an engaging speaker as she took us through a survey of her work over 20+ years. Like her collaboration CARPARK which routed cars parking at a college to parking lots by color for one day – an aerial photo reveals what she said she unexpectedly found most delightful, the places where the system broke down, like the white car in the red lot. I’ve always been a fan of minimally confrontational public art, so this project was easy to love.

It turned out that the lavatory portraits are part of a longer series of works called Seat Assignment, which began when Nina decided that her flight from LaGuardia to Atlanta would not be time idly wasted, but time to explore the environment and make art out of it. She has been on over 180 flights since starting the project in 2010, and she is constantly adding to it. I love this commitment to not wasting a moment, even in spaces that are aggressively anti-creative ones. I also love the series Buckleheads, which shows us how to surreptitiously surveil our seat neighbors.

She spoke about another early project, Accent Elimination, that also resonated with me. In it, she and her parents (who speak heavily accented English) try to learn to speak with each others accents. She mentioned last night that she had never been able to replicate her parents’ accents, which is something I had also noticed in myself. So here my kinship with her began to deepen.

Nina has also collaborated with nature in surprising and hilarious ways. Last night, she spoke about her Mended Spiderwebs Series. I loved hearing about how the spiders rejected her contributions outright. She didn’t try to recreate the spider’s web in any authentic way – she used starched red thread. I don’t think she realized the spider would reject her work, the first time she did it. But it did, and she incorporated it into the piece. Her entire project was achieved in order to be rejected. It’s refreshing to hear about something like this, inhabiting as I do now a life in which the entire point is not to experience rejection (of my medication). Also a good reminder to stop censoring ourselves and keep working on stuff and not fear rejection (… by spiders, at the very least).

Towards the end of Nina’s presentation my jaw dropped as a moment of total coincidence happened, the way things used to line up last year when I was on Decadron and these crazy things seemed to happen all the time. This month, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Nina’s work entitled “Floater Theater” will open. This piece investigates and celebrates visual floaters, those things that float across your field of vision (which are actually little clumps of stuff on the jelly-like vitreous humour between your eye’s lens and the retina). I couldn’t believe it, because I’ve spent the past ten months worrying about crap in my vitreous and dealing with floaters (as side effect of my cancer meds). In fact, just the other day on this blog I wrote about getting the clean bill from the ophthalmologist, but I still have one floater which isn’t going away, not for a long time, and how I’ll just have to deal.

By this point I thought I was having some weird mind-meld with this artist with whom I felt so much kinship. And then she talked about a piece that is going up just a few days from now, at MassMOCA, as part of an exhibit about wonder called Explode Every Day. She’s making a film called “The Recarcassing Ceremony,” and it’s all about Playmobil figures she and her brother had as kids, and reenacts a ceremony they held to replace two figures which had drowned with two new ones. Playmobil figures are very much a part of my daily landscape. They are almost always underfoot, when they aren’t all arranged in a group for a concert or sitting on blocks that are bus seats or right on the floor outside my bedroom waiting for a train.

Following the lecture, even though a Q&A might have been fun (or deathly boring, as those things sometimes turn out), instead museum staffers dressed as flight attendants came down the aisles (the seats were arranged in two columns of four with a center aisle, reminiscent of a plane) offering us airplane items: mini bottles of water or cans of Clamato, packets of honey roasted peanuts, biscuits, lemon or lime wedges, coffee stirrers, plastic cups, and magazines. (I selected a Christie’s catalog because there were no mags.) We each had a board under our chairs that served as a tray table.

We got to work. At first I was totally, totally stumped. I didn’t need to top Nina’s brilliance, obviously, but I wanted to make something that made me happy. I tried using the lime but it wasn’t cooperating. I ate the lime, thinking the peel would be useful. It was sour, but maybe the jolt of Vitamin C was what I needed. First I opened up the peanuts and started halving them and then I found an image that would work:

The peanuts are trying to blend in, to look as impressive as these white cliffs in Brittany. They aren’t quite managing. (Because they are honey roasted peanuts. Which in my estimation is one of the worst snacks ever.)

Then I found another image and it was time for a tribute to one of my early experiences of the avant garde, the film Un chien andalou. I thought of the iconic scene with the razor blade across the eye as I tried to balance the coffee stirrer on its side on the picture which was sitting on a board on my lap.

I mean, I know it isn’t much. But then, this is Nina’s point: It doesn’t take much to look at what surrounds us in a different way. To turn something slightly, maybe only 15 degrees on its axis, and see what happens. I’m so relieved to be reminded of this.

Today is decidedly not going as planned. I was supposed to ride six or seven laps of the park on my bike today. Instead, I woke up dizzy again. I’m back in bed. It is a beautiful day, and I should be out, but I’m in bed. However, the lecture last night, and the tiny burst of creativity it brought to me, are keeping me from total despondency. Perhaps in another hour I’ll be able to prop my head up. If so, I’ll get my laptop and give that long-suffering essay another go.