This is an excerpt of an excerpt from the 13th chapter of MysteryDates (titled Spontaneity).

 Permission not needed

There are approximately four zillion, three hundred thousand hair-trigger MysteryDates you can actualize without thinking too hard — or getting permission.

An entry-level art or home-improvement project, for example, might work even when your imagination or your partner’s is severely straight-jacketed.

Or you could…

• Arbitrarily alphabetize some list just for the heck of it.

• Assemble that emergency kit you’ve been meaning to get around to forever.

• Check your local newspaper’s community calendar for something going on right now.

• Compile an imaginary or imaginative bucket list (or use a real bucket, hot water, and soap to scrub your bathroom floor).

• Craft distorted three-dimensional papier-mâché self-portraits.

• Create your own code (digital or spy) or language.

• Delete the hundreds of emails you’ve been meaning to.

• Dine with a homeless guest or two at a fast-food joint.

• Do a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle or build your own Sudoku.

• Dumpster dive (just be sure there’s a nearby hot shower handy). 

• Explore your ancestors and your partner’s online.

• Fashion puppets out of socks and put on a show for each other about your childhoods.

• Figure out the perfect mental murders of those people you’d like see disappear (personal or political foes or just people you’ve never forgiven for real or imagined hurts or misdeeds). Extra points for never-before-tried methods.

• Give in to your inner children and build a fort out of the excess throw pillows you have lying around on beds and couches and overstuffed chairs or squashed into closets. 

• Listen to a podcast about a new government crisis.

• Make a list of all the things you can postpone doing.

• Put together a time capsule for the two of you to open in five years or 10, or never.

• Purposefully get lost.

• Select one item each from your bucket lists and do them.

• Write a letter to a vet in a war zone.

• Taste every free sample at a farmer’s market.

• Turn on your sprinklers and run through the waters (bathing suits required unless you have a tall, tall privacy fence).

• Watch cute-animal YouTube videos with a grandkid.

Or, if you have too much time on your hands, take the first of 365 consecutive daily photos of your pet.

 

This excerpt is from MysteryDates‘ tenth chapter. Quirky is its title.

From Burning Man to beer-bathing 

Finding matchless experiences or places is easy: Simply make the internet your perma-accomplice.

Day trips to unrivaled places can be magical or intriguing even if you must surrender most of your personal space to a crowd that’s bigger than you’d normally like. One example is northern Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival (which draws 70,000 people to the Black Rock Desert each year just prior to Labor Day).

Nance and I inadvertently attended its predecessor at Baker Beach in San Francisco in the mid-‘80s — a vastly tinier artistic incarnation of the 40-foot bonfire event. Our MysteryDate had been scheduled only as a casual walk on the sand, but when we stumbled onto the about-to-be blaze, we lingered — long enough, at least, to acquire a mild heat rash and a major anecdote. The “real thing,” of course, now features nudity and revelry, absurd dress and behavior, visionary artwork and mutant vehicles (otherwise known as “art cars”), and music, music, music (domestic, foreign and otherworldly). Plus lots of drugs, pharmaceutical and illicit.

Extreme weather changes are common, with dust-storms and thundershowers being the norm. Temperatures at night go below freezing; during the day, 100-degree plus is not unknown. So, I recommend participants bring everything needed to survive — food, layered clothing, shelter, tools, water. And earplugs. 

If that outdoor ritual’s too out-there for you, simply seek a level of uniqueness elsewhere. A few ideas:

• Bathe in barrel-shaped tubs filled with dark beer, a trendy restorative cure (it supposedly rejuvenates skin and nerves). If that’s not accessible down the street from you, you’ll be able to find it at spas and other health facilities in the Czech Republic.
• Watch a duel, which is still legal in Paraguay (and on stage in Hamilton). 
• Catch young girls in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania stuffing their faces because husbands rate potential brides on a scale of how chunky they are. Once they’re married, the obesity obsession continues: Appetite-enhancing drugs and wife-fattening farms are encouraged.
• The world’s largest collection of gnomes and pixie — more than 2,000 of them — is now housed at the Merry Harriers, a business at Woolfardisworthy, Bedeford, United Kingdom, a bedding plant/perennials business that contains polytunnels that cover more than 14,000 square feet. 

Don’t want to travel across a sea for an oddball MysteryDate? 

Why not create your own, then, by sitting in court at a murder trial; trying on “new vintage” items, whatever that truly is, in a vintage shop; touring, on a dark and stormy night, a lighthouse (either in search of history or light); ogling delicately at a nudie camp or beach; or finding work as extras in a movie or TV film being shot around the corner. 

Or, if you know where any eccentrics live, consider chatting with a local one.

 

This excerpt is the beginning of Romance, intimacy, sex — the second chapter of MysteryDates. 

‘Ordinary’ but memorable

I vividly remember spinning to a big band with Nancy decades ago, when time stood still for an instant and created an illusion that we were the only couple on the dance floor yet, somehow, had simultaneously left the earthly plane.

That, arguably, may have been the zenith of our 65-year romance. But we’ve had scads of other striking and tender memories. One of the simplest and best — especially since we not infrequently go big, bigger, and overboard — was a standard-issue, “ordinary” MysteryDate that I’d carefully crafted for one of my wife’s “no-big-number, no-big-deal” birthdays. 

Basically, I stuck to basics.

But I did set our dining room table with fancier dishes than we normally use (plus real-silver utensils and candles — items we hadn’t de-cobwebbed, washed, or polished in ages). And I yanked from the microwave, seconds before they burned, several of Nance’s favorite foods that I’d bought at a local supermarket. Then I dimmed the lights and made sure soft dinner-jazz streamed into the room, topping it all off with daisies plucked from our yard. Along with incense from a local boutique. 

The chow-down-at-home MysteryDate was especially delicious because I normally don’t cook and my wife had expected she’d have to do it all that night as usual — or, only slightly better, that we’d end up going to a familiar local eatery.

My brainchild certainly was better received — despite not deviating that far from our customary home dining — than if I’d muttered, “Feel like doing anything special tonight, babe?”  

The following four chapters are extracted from my VitalityPress book, The Roving I. They represent essay-columns I published under that title over an 11-year period.

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Parkinson’s can’t shake un-still photographer’s grit

It’s a paradox: Alan Babbitt doesn’t see well. But his vision is sharper than most.

The 61-year-old is succinct: “I was born with a whole bunch of eye problems, so I was wearing thick glasses from the age of 2 or 3. There’s no question — without contacts, I’d be legally blind.”

He refused to let the impairment get in his way, however. It certainly didn’t block his becoming a successful film and video producer, webmaster and award-winning photographer.

Alan’s online site clearly shows his skill. One portfolio spotlights the Santa Cruz boardwalk on a winter’s day. Another contains dramatic, artsy New York City street scenes. A third focuses on playful images. Showcased are unusual angles and perspectives, brilliant colors and poignant black-and-white shots.

His originality makes the scenically difficult look easy to capture. And he loves peppering his explanatory text with dubious puns and any remnants of humor that happen to be lying around. For example, he confesses that he once “joined a therapy group for photo addicts based on the ‘12-Stop program.’”

Unfortunately, Parkinson’s disease invaded his life five years ago “like a loud, uninvited house guest who won’t ever leave.” The physical shaking made him totally reexamine his life — and shelf his camera for a while.

Now, my friend and I sit in a quiet Thai restaurant enjoying the sunshine streaming through the windows. He beams, almost mischievously, like a kid about to let me in on a gigantic secret. “Parkinson’s adds to my vision,” he says. “Recognizing I could use the tremor freed me up like nothing else.”

I need no follow-up question; he’s on a roll.

“The disease is about losing control. Finding I could use it was empowering.

“When you first learn photography, they tell you over and over about crispness, about keeping the camera steady with a tripod. One evening in Las Vegas, where I was alone with a digital camera, I just started shooting. I was able to see right away what I got. Blurs. Streaks. And then people started reacting to it, liking it. That’s my style now — tremor-enhanced photography.”

His website contains portfolios dedicated to his innovative technique, “Movement Disorder” and “Shake Me Out to the Ball Game.”

He beams again as he chats about “crossing the border” and journeying to metaphoric “other lands” through his camera lens — speeding past his disability: “The tremor is only one kind of movement. I can shoot from a moving car and move the camera around as well. It’s sort of what I call ‘un-still photography.’”

He, too, is un-still.

Alan’s taught at the de Young Museum Art School in San Francisco, exhibited at galleries and studios, held shows at libraries here and there in California and Washington state. He’s planning an April exhibit of his photos at the public library in his hometown, Fairfax — to mark National Parkinson’s Month.

He’s also contacted the Michael J. Fox Foundation to see if they can work together. He’s donated prints to a Parkinson’s group in New York, his birth state, to be auctioned off, and to another foundation. And he recently participated in an Art for Recovery program in San Francisco featuring readings from letters exchanged by patients and medical students.

“One of the gratifying things is that people have seen the work and been inspired by what I’m doing,” he tells me. “It feels good getting those e-mails and letters. Some of them have been from photographers. And a 12-year-old girl wrote me the other day and asked to use me as the basis of a school report. That’s the kind of thing that inspires me to do more.”

Still, it can feel pretty heavy — until you fully grasp the positive attitude that gushes from the bearded, gray-haired guy with brown eyes.

There’s no doubt Alan cultivates his tendency to be upbeat, his affinity for the amusing, readily admitting he wants viewers to relish their “titters, snickers and snorts.”

“Soon after I got the diagnosis,” he recalls, “I thought of occupations that would be possible by using tremors: egg-scrambler, paint can-shaker, human vibrator. Sure, having Parkinson’s can be depressing, but humor can help fight that.”

His occasionally dark humor is quickly evident online, sprinkled between his straightforward photos and experimental tremor-shots that highlight bright streaks and patches, rings and blotches of light, geometric shapes. 

Spoofing a Viagra ad, he warns that “if feelings of giddiness…persist for more than four hours, just turn on the news for a few minutes.”

Do-Nothing Day — a full-fledged fiasco

My entire life, even as a tot, I’ve felt a compulsive need to be productive. But now, with my gray hair turning white, I’ve wanted to slow up.

Apparently, I haven’t learned how.

Years ago, my wife and I vacationed in Mexico. We arrived at our beachside hotel, unpacked, and I immediately started looking for recreational activities.

“See that thing,” she said. “It’s a hammock. Lie in it!”

I did — following her direction because I long ago discovered the key to a happy marriage is a submissive “Yes, dear.”

“What now?” I asked, squirming only slightly.

“Now you lie there and stare at the ocean or the clouds in the sky. That’s it.”

“Yes, dear.”

Within four minutes, I was uptight, upright, and looking for active recreational activities.

I evidently don’t do passive very well.

To overcome my innate obsessive-compulsiveness, a condition amplified by being a Jew trapped in a Calvinist work ethic, I resolved to pause — for 24 hours.

I therefore designated a recent Saturday as Do-Nothing Day, planning to completely veg out. I blueprinted it: Count tiny bumps in the ceiling while resting in bed. Listen to hours of soft, melodic, classic jazz. Watch lowbrow TV shows instead of anything on PBS. Eat gobs of comfort food instead of low-fat this and extra-lite that.

I intended to travel a familiar road, the one paved with good intentions: No exercise. No errands. No phone calls.  

But I failed. Utterly. Miserably. Swiftly.

Within four minutes of awakening, I was checking 13 bookmarked online news sites. Next up, stretching exercises, then the treadmill and recumbent bike. What followed — within half an hour — was making a phone call related to my chairmanship of the Quality of Life Committee in San Anselmo, California; cell-phoning my daughter in New York; calling a friend to wish her a happy birthday; walking Kismet, our dog, and picking up his poop; helping my wife unclog a filing cabinet drawer; hauling a box filled with heavy paper to our storage shed; writing a cover letter to a literary agent; and crafting this column. 

The rest of my day followed in kind, imitating most other days — crammed with limitless tasks with meaning for me even if nobody else gives a flying fig.

But come to a full stop? Impossible.

In fact, my Do-Nothing Day included some “deferred maintenance,” scrutinizing some 723 Post-its on my desk.

Years ago, I sold my Palm Pilot. I’ve never considered buying a Blackberry. Dinosaur-like stickies are what I stick to. My desk, my pockets, my mind — each is cluttered with them.

What do I scribble? Snippets of tidbits I’ve overhead. And sometimes my mind decides to become a giant sieve, with the best place for its drippings being those little yellow pieces of paper. 

Eventually, I do examine the squiggles, often actually able to decipher my handwriting. 

Here are some recent notations:

• Damn! Can’t lose weight. Why? With apologies to Will Rogers, I’ve never met a carb I didn’t like. 
• Little dark-haired girl about three in local park, obviously fighting off potential identity crisis: “I am not a sandcastle. I am not a sandcastle.”
• Don’t know why but the phrase “having some wiggle room” always makes me giggle.
• Woman overheard in front of a nearby musical hotspot while rubbing her wedding ring: “I fight with myself; why wouldn’t I fight with my partner?”
• Clean your desk!
• Most ill-defined, overused word of the decade — “organic.”
• Guy talking to two others in front of a market a couple of towns away: “He’s so dumb, he couldn’t fix a one-horse race.”
• “Hot news” a couple of months back — ‘Tanning salons cause cancer.’ Duh!
• Cull the Post-its on desk! Today!
• Would anybody define “voyeur” as “having a peek experience”? 
• The Art Deco interiors of my favorite local movie emporium still give me a kick each time I watch a film there.
• I’m such an optimist I think a bad start almost inevitably leads to a good finish.
• Decked out female with blonde bangs at a supermarket in town, talking about husband’s previous spouse: “He did that in another wifetime.”
• Would-be political candidate talking to would-be voter, sez, “I don’t have a ‘for sale’ sign on my back.”
• Handful of environmental purists irk me by acting as if they’re greener than thou.

But by far the most significant Post-it, which instantly got me to stop whipping myself for my Do-Nothing Day fiasco, was: Overheard on Town Hall lawn — “I took a lot of baby steps this week, most of them forward.” 

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‘Miracle baby’ walks, talks, inspires euphoria

The “miracle baby” turns one on March 9.

Abigail Sander’s first birthday will be a celebration of life — and scientific marvels.

Her family will also pay homage to those who survived the Holocaust, and those who didn’t.

Festivities will effervesce at a party in Brooklyn, where Abi lives with her mom and dad, Heidi and Jeremy, and laughs liberally. 

Later she’ll be the focus of another bash — in Marin County, California, where she lived nine months in utero, in the bulging surrogate belly of Heidi’s older sister, Alaina Yoakum.

How do I fit in? The sisters insist my wife and I, friends but unrelated, are part of their extended family. So, I’ll hoist the kid onto my lap at that shindig and, for the fourth time since her birth, revel in her smiles. 

“I can lose myself in just staring at her,” Heidi said recently.

I can, too. 

I know what it took for Abi to get here.

Antecedents include Heidi’s cervical cancer four years ago at age 28, a hysterectomy, freezing her eggs after Jeremy fertilized them, psychological screenings and lab tests, a costly surrogacy and expensive legal paperwork. 

For Alaina, past-40 co-owner with husband Charles of Marin Running Company in my adopted home town, San Anselmo, it wasn’t an easy pregnancy. 

Shots to prevent premature birth. Copious mood swings. Headaches. Elevated blood pressure. 

Earlier, fear for Heidi’s life hounded her parents.

Because Ivan Silverberg, the sisters’ dad, is an oncologist, and their mom, Rita Rosenbaum, an oncology nurse, they agonized during the cancer treatments. The Mill Valley duo imagined everything that could go wrong.

Thankfully, nothing did.

Rita now reminisces about “how strong Heidi was, how resilient she was, how she handled it all.”

She lauds, too, Alaina’s lovingkindness, Jeremy’s attentiveness and Charles’ support (including, for months, giving Alaina daily injections of progesterone). 

Ivan echoes that, but grumbles about being “a two-coast family” and not seeing “Abi enough, even though Heidi’s gone out of her way to get here.”  

The Brooklynites actually expect to juggle jobs, friends and calendars to bring Abigail to Marin every other month.

That’ll help the family concentrate on what’s good — and mollify Rita’s dark memories.  

Her father was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust; her mother’s family was likewise decimated.

How many died? “Too many to count,” she tells me, explaining that for her, a child of survivors, the residue was “distrust — of the world, the government, the police, neighbors and friends. I knew no matter how good everything looked today, it could be taken away tomorrow.”

But the presence of Abigail, named after two Abrahams, Rita’s and Ivan’s dads, helps her relax — as do the Yoakum daughters, Sophie and Olivia.

That pair bolstered the cheerfulness in San Francisco’s Kaiser Permanente when Abi emerged after the C-section. 

“They were so much a part of this,” recalls Rita. “They laughed, quietly, with sheer delight.”

Delight also was the operative word when Alaina, who’s “always had this incredible bond” with Heidi despite their 10-year age difference and who chats “with her almost daily by phone and online,” asked to stand in. 

Amazingly, Charles dreamt her surrogacy the night before (though his subconscious got the kid’s gender wrong).

Only one egg had to be implanted. That leaves about a dozen should Heidi someday decide she fancies a gigantic family.

For now, she has her hands full with Abi, who already has a love-filled history that, for me, began with welcome-to-the-world merrymaking at Rita and Ivan’s place in Mill Valley (where Heidi, Alaina and their brother Michael grew up).

My eyes misted while cradling her.

At the baby-naming ritual at Congregation Kol Shofar, a morning of wonder and tenderness as mother and surrogate chanted together, my tear ducts leaked freely. 

Then, when Abi hit three months, I held her for 40 straight, glorious minutes. She cooed and clutched my finger. 

I cooed back.

In October, at the Yoakums place, I again held her. She grabbed my finger as if remembering the first time.

I kvelled. 

That’s a Yiddish word that means being elated. Euphoric.

What will Abigail call Alaina? “Neither mommy nor auntie are quite right. We’ve agreed to wait and see what nickname she comes up with,” explains Heidi.

Alaina concurs. 

Abi walks now, warbles a few words, and gets ecstatic playing peek-a-boo. “She also giggles at other babies,” Heidi reports, “and she likes to look at pictures of herself in my cellphone.”  

None of that’s unusual. But some still think everything concerning the “miracle baby” is unique. 

Heidi views it differently: “Abigail is certainly a miracle for us but we feel a little uncomfortable calling her that because any baby could be given that label.”

True, but I still see Heidi being played by Natalie Portman in a short black wig, Alaina by a brunette Scarlett Johansson.

Abi, I figure, will star as the miracle kid.

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Cambodian refugee works her dream after surviving slave labor camp

Sophie Lim almost starved to death as a teenager in a slave labor camp — every day for four years in the late 1970s.

She was fed only bits of watery rice under the yoke of the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Her weight plunged to 70 pounds. 

“I was all bones and skin,” she remembers.

After being hospitalized four months, then forced to return to toiling 10 to 14 hours daily seven days a week in mud-filled rice paddies, Sophie escaped “with a delivery guy who had two oxen pulling a wagon.” 

Sighing, she tells me, “I’m lucky I survived. About 1.7 million died” — from starvation and the infamous genocidal killing fields.

We’re sitting at a table in an upscale shopping center in San Anselmo, California, soaking up sun near Sophie’s Nail Spa, a salon she owns. The Cambodian native also owns her home across the bridge in Richmond; another house in the city of Elk Grove, close to Sacramento; and two rental structures in nearby Oakland.

Regardless, the 57-year-old immigrant whose ambition, energy and hard work helped her achieve the American Dream feels compelled to work 10 to 12 hours a day. 

But that’s a long way from being awakened at 3 a.m. and made “to walk a mile or two, sometimes more” to the work fields in a country where she’d been torn from her mother and sister (her father died when she was six).

It’s also a long way from being obliged to listen nightly at 7 “to a brainwashing meeting.”

Her captors, she says, “were killing people, making them disappear, but they made it sound like they were doing good things. We knew better.”

The Khmer Rouge, Communist offshoot of the Vietnam People’s Army from North Vietnam, had galvanized a system of torture and executions that melded with widespread famine stemming from its failed attempts at agricultural reform.

The nightmare will always haunt her.

“Hundreds slept together, with only room for you and your mosquito net. You made friends with people you worked with, but mostly you didn’t trust anybody.” 

If you got sick, you first were sent to “a clinic where there was no doctor. They just gave you an IV, putting young coconut juice into your veins.”

Nowadays Sophie tries not thinking about everyone stealing food to survive — even though “if you stole and they found out, they killed you.”

Nor does she often ponder doing without: “No shoes, no toothbrush, nothing.”

But the memories spur her to give back by donating money to help Cambodia’s poor.

Often.

Sophie initially returned to Cambodia in 1999 and has visited half a dozen times since.

“I helped build a Buddhist temple, after collecting money from the Cambodian community and adding some of my own,” she tells me.

She also raised funds “to dig wells for two villages.”

Not all memories of her native land are negative. One bright spot was meeting her husband “in the street” shortly after her escape.  

A year later, they wed. 

A year after that, they came to Oakland despite neither speaking a word of English. “We learned by watching a lot of ‘Sesame Street.’” 

In 1983, at age 24, she found an assembly line job she kept for a year — until the company went bankrupt.

Three years later, she gave birth to her second son (she also has a daughter) and started cleaning houses. She did that for a decade.

Sophie and her husband had also adopted a Cambodian orphan, bringing him with them when they emigrated. 

Eventually she bought what’s now Sophie’s Nail Spa — 19 years ago.

Her life wasn’t trouble-free during that tenure, however.

Her daughter, now living in housing under the auspices of a mental-health program, was “diagnosed at age 18 with schizophrenia” in 2002. Sophie’s carpenter husband “quit his job to take care of her.” 

But he died seven years later from liver cancer — after a $300,000 transplant. Sophie carried his ashes back to Cambodia, where she built a shrine.

Today she loves it here, living and working her dream. “I’m happy a lot, laughing all the time. I’m not a grumpy person no matter what happens.”

When I ask about the government’s current anti-refugee stances, she replies, “I don’t like [it]. People should be able to come here and help people back home. There’s no place like America.”

She says it’s crucial to give refugees hope — something she’d lost repeatedly in the slave labor camp.

(From Part Two of the fantasy book,
Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates)

After brunch, Grandpa Graybeard watched the girls go star-jumping in the sky, high above the garden in the backyard of Penny’s house.

Star-jumping takes place when fairy flyers race from star to star with their wings beating triple fast. The main purpose, actually, is to learn how to jump rapidly, but another goal is to see which fairy can touch the most stars.

Lily won, but only by the length of half a wing.

When they rested, they looked at the stars and smiled. Then Lily said, “Why don’t we create some fireworks to go with the stars and some music to go with the fireworks?”

So they did.

Penny cast a spell and fireworks exploded in the sky, rainbow colors spreading out in every direction…

Afterwards, the two girls decided to go to the Unicorn Racing Championships in the next community, a place called Tututown, named for a wizard who’d invented a ballet in which every lady dancer wore a short orange lace costume called a tutu.

The one-hour show featured well-trained fairies riding unicorns bareback.

Penny wasn’t trained at all, so she could only watch, but Lily became part of the show.

Again she won (at least in her division, Girl Beginners).

That made her grin from wing to wing.

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(From Part One of the fantasy book,
Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates)

A clucking mama hen distracted Grandpa Graybeard as she strolled right past him.

Five baby chicks named Crystal, Sienna, Kyle, Mia and Henry followed her.

All six were skipping instead of waddling.

Each chick was singing jazz rather than cheeping.

They seemed so happy that the good feelings quickly spread to Grampy, Lily and Penny, and the three of them started singing along in harmony.

Only Melody, the mommy hen, wasn’t singing.

That was because she had a sore throat from clucking at her chicks all day to be less noisy and to stay in line.

Daddy Rooster hadn’t been able to help her because he’d been tied up teaching young roosters to crow better.

The chicks paid zero attention to Lily, Penny and Grampy, whom they thought of as a funny-looking trio, and just kept skipping toward the forest, where they lived in a hollow tree stump.

But one of them, Baby Henry, wandered off down the street.

The mother didn’t notice he was gone until the others had been tucked safely into their nests.

When she did discover the baby chick was missing, she started to freak out and right away went off to find him.

She left Daddy Rooster in charge.

While searching for Henry, she decided she could use all the support she could get. So she went back to the bench Lily and Penny were resting on again, this time with Grandpa Graybeard sitting right next to them, and pleaded for assistance.

“Sure,” said all three without thinking twice.

As soon as the search party stepped through a crack in the low, wooden fence by the sidewalk, they ran across a white and blue magic pony named Fifi.

“Did you see a baby chick pass by?” Penny inquired.

“I did see one that looked like a yellow puffball,” the pony replied. “It went toward Main Street and turned the corner onto Nut Boulevard. He kept on going until I couldn’t see him anymore.”

“We had better follow that trail,” Penny said to the others. “Okay,” everyone said at once.

But when they got to Nut Boulevard, they found it was empty. Lily started to cry because she was worried the chick was really lost and might never be found.

Her tears made Mama Melody weep too.

Just then, Henry, having heard his mom’s sobs, peeked out from behind a fat log where he had been hiding.

The mother hen stopped crying.

Lily stopped too.

Melody clutched her chick by the leg and whispered to him, “You really scared me. Don’t ever wander off alone again. Please.”

(From Part 2 of Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer)

Nancy survived.

So did I, although I may have felt as delicate as an eggshell back then.

A full 20 years after Nance’s diagnosis, we now focus day-to-day on the hundreds of mundane pleasures that fill the life of a post-cancer patient. We probably cram into our calendars a few too many social, cultural and civic activities. But every a.m. we make sure to say to each other, “Good morning — I love you.”

And we love basking in the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

What a relief it is.

On the 10th anniversary of the final day of Nance’s surgical, chemotherapy and radiation endurance race, we clinked glasses of Diet Pepsi and drank to each other’s good health.

Ditto, the 15th.

The 20th? Why fix what wasn’t broken?

Our toasts were inspirational milestones, two, three or four times happier than the five-year benchmark oncologists and researchers delineate as the medical goal.

Now, since the odds of Nance dying in another 20 years or so from something other than breast cancer have increased exponentially, we’ve given ourselves permission to stop holding our collective breath. We savor our joie de vivre, a palpable difference from the times we bolted from anxiety to stress and back again. And we know a positive attitude can cause an immediate reversal of discontent.

I particularly remember the chilly December day I discovered a flat on the driver’s side rear.

I cursed and called AAA.

A short time later, a lumber-hauler slid off the narrow road to our home and blocked the tow truck. I seethed, certain I’d be late to work.

After the disabled vehicle was pulled from the ditch and my nail-spiked tire changed, I drove to the San Francisco lot where I usually parked. A power company van was having trouble making a 180-degree turn. It blocked my car.

I swore again.

Yet it took only minutes — until I paid the attendant, a middle-aged woman who’d told me several weeks earlier she’d been stricken with ovarian cancer — to change my grumpy outlook with two brief sentences.

“Merry Christmas,” she volunteered. “I’m happy to be alive.”

Since then, I’ve learned to use the disease itself to brighten my demeanor.

Case in point: When someone dented my car while it was parked, I employed my new mantra, “Hey, it’s not cancer.” 

Rollercoaster… excerpts

(From Part 14 of Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer.)

During our wedding ceremony, Nancy recited these words to me:

“Is that you, Woody, with your infinite eyes, deep and loving, just as they were then, in the snow?

“Is that you, Woody, with those self-same eyes peeking now over grandpa glasses, perched on the tip of your nose?

“Is that you, Woody, with your thunderous laughter, amazed by my six-year-old clown and my ‘cast of thousands’?

“Is that you, Woody, with your critical eye, inspiring my muses, encouraging my truth? 

“Is that you, Woody, right in the ring with me, making me the best me I can be?

“Is that you, Woody, being my mother and father, sister and brother, grandma and grandpa, cousins, lover, and friend?

“Is that you, Woody, changing, and changed, changer and changee?

“Yup, that’s you, Woody!

“And this is me, in middle-age-woman makeup, standing beside you today just to tell you I love you, and I’ll be your wife.

“There, I said the ‘w’ word.”

Nance’s humor and lightness, as always, camouflaged apprehensions and doubts. Just before the ceremony she’d told a friend she was nervous about jumping with me “into a merger-matic.”

It took years, and a sprinkling of therapy, for the “w” word to fit comfortably. Then, abruptly leaping from the shadows, the “c” word kidnapped us, turning my wife into a breast-cancer patient and me into a caregiver, stuffing us both into a single rollercoaster seat.

It’s been a long and often scary ride, significantly more protracted and difficult than anticipated. Even today…we’d trade in all the lessons we’ve learned, all the affection radiated in our direction, for a guarantee no cancer will recur.

We know, however, there can be no assurances, and that we are permanently changed.

We can now offer greater understanding and kindness to each other — and to virtually everyone who touches our lives. We can now recognize it’s not crucial what gender or age someone with a life-threatening disease is, and that both designated patient and anointed caregiver require nurturing.

We can more regularly keep our priorities in order, strive for balance, unblock our spirituality and divert the million potential intrusions on our lives each week.

The day we wed, I read these vows to my wife-to-be:

“I knew you, lifetimes ago, as Nancy Falk, a cute freckle-faced teenager, with bright jade eyes and an innocent freshness possible only in those from the unspoiled Midwest. 

“I know you, now, as Nancy Fox, a lovely freckle-faced child-woman of middle years, with bright jade eyes and a rainbowed mind possible only in those who have tasted the flavors of life’s pains and pleasures.

“I will know you, through multiple tomorrows, as Nance, my wife, an elegant freckle-faced woman of timeless beauty, with bright jade eyes and an evolved soul possible only in those whose hearts have opened as exquisitely as a matured rose.

“Through all the nows and yet-to-comes, I pledge only this: to love you without reservation, as fully as the human condition will allow; to nurture our creative talents, so our individual and collective light may brighten a few shadowy corners of this dimension; and to cherish and retain, always, my glorious vision of us as soulmates, a clairvoyant insight reflecting the majesty of our spirits, our highest selves in perfect union.”

Love, we’ve told each other again and again during this ordeal and recovery, is the key to all healing. No matter what else science has figured out, it still hasn’t determined how to put that into a test tube and measure it.

Although Nance’s breast-cancer treatments activated a torrent of disagreeable side effects, they simultaneously fortified our adoration for each other. As a result of the illness, and despite occasionally waking with formless terror, we’ve re-vowed to love and support each other the way we believe soulmates must. For decades to come.

For now, we’re consumed once again — not by breast cancer or a melanoma or prostate cancer, not by thoughts of physical or mental anguish, but by a bright horizon as seen from the crest of the rollercoaster.

Each day, each month, each year gets better and better. We get closer and closer. Our lives are wrapped in more and more colors, with more texture.

 Death eventually will snag us both. But instead of waiting, we’re re-experiencing our fairy tale. One day at a time.

Once again, we’re getting the hang of living happily ever after.