My mother sent me this photo and a packet of childhood photos. Wasn’t I a beautiful bald baby?
I was bald for a long time. And now I will be bald again. I’m actually not that put out by it. The hair went mostly on Monday. When it started coming out in strands, I had Steve cut it. Both pairs of clippers we had were completely inadequate, so he just ended up chopping it all off with scissors. The small hairs that are left will fall out over the next week. I put on my turban and called it a day. Our niece came over later for dinner and I showed her my hat collection.
But the next day, yesterday, I went grocery shopping. And I did not feel self-conscious at all. Maybe, having my eyebrows and eyelashes, I don’t look too odd. Just a woman in a turban. Today running errands I wore one of my new hats, and everywhere I went I got compliments on the hat. People are definitely talking to me more– people behind me in line at the grocery store, clerks at Kohl’s. That is interesting. It is maybe a kind of anti-shaming: we are not going to look away or treat you like you’re invisible just because you seem to have no hair under that hat.
Yesterday morning, before we went to begin Round 2 of chemo, I took some selfies in the bathroom mirror. I have never done that before. I find the selfie-in-the-bathroom-mirror shot to be a particular kind of statement. Here I am looking at myself and inviting you to look at me at the same time. Here I am in a very private place, the bathroom, inviting you to look at me looking at myself. It’s so strange, isn’t it? But for this particular act, it seemed the right “staging.”
I am maybe more prepared for this than others. I have always been a minimalist when it comes to my hair. I hated the years I colored it– I started going gray in my 20s. I’ve never been good about getting regular haircuts. I am willing to blow dry it and comb it, but not much more in the way of styling.
And in 1996, I had my first husband shave my head down to 1/4 inch. Partly it was because that was how he wore his hair and it seemed liberating. Also, I was ending a job where I’d been miserable, in large part due to the office climate. It was an office that provided graphics projects (Educational Design) for faculty at Loyola University, and there were 5 women managers and no other staff to speak of (just my stable of student workers). For many months our staff meetings were held as we got manicures (our supervisor got wind of this and called it off). The women were very focused on female empowerment and power suits and such. I was so not into it. My position, cranking out over 200 projects a year (slide shows, PowerPoint, research displays, illustrations for publications, and any number of other things) with a few unreliable students to help, was disproportionately stressful to the other positions. I developed pretty serious tendonitis and quit. But before I left, at the encouragement of some of the hip students and just feeling a need to make a break, I shaved my head.
The first day on the bus, I was nervous and self-conscious. But a fellow passenger came up and said, “Hey, is your name Linda?” “No,” I said with a smile. “Oh, Linda wears her hair like that– I thought you might be her.” I felt instantly better. This was not so odd in Chicago. My first husband and I did agree that, because my hair is fine and had some gray, I did look just a little like a cancer patient. But by the time it was 1/2 inch it looked much better. By then I was teaching at Lake Forest College and Columbia College as an adjunct professor and no one seemed to even notice.
After I left the job, George and I went on a camping trip in Door County, and there we encountered a porcupine. He came down from a tree where he slept during the day right into the campsite and waddled off as we ate dinner. While we slept, he came around looking for salt and things to chew on. We found quills all around, and I took them back with me and made a little picture book, “Susan and the Porcupine,” about the magic connection given me by my haircut. I gave the books to my young nieces, who were a little freaked out that I looked like a boy.
After that I headed to a writer’s colony for a month in Lake Forest (where I scored the job in a real stroke of right time/right place).
One day that fall, I went into a Middle Eastern tea and spice shop in the Andersonville neighborhood. The man behind the counter said, “When I see women wearing their hair like this, it is so beautiful, I wonder why all women don’t do it.” That was the highlight of that particular experience.
Now, everyone will be telling me how good I look. And I will mostly not believe them. But that’s OK. People will be kinder, or go out of their way to help me, I expect. People will tell me their own stories. I am marked as one of the tribe. I am going to have some fun with these hats and turbans. I also have a wig that looks a lot like my “old” hair. For when I want to be incognito in airports or restaurants and such.
I have a poem in my recent book, H is for Harry, (which you can now purchase on the books page), called “My Two Husbands.” It relates some of the odd similarities between my first and second husband, and some key differences. Now I can add this– that they have both cut/shaved my hair. The first time, it was such a Romantic gesture, in the nature of Whitman’s bold self-styling. This time, it is for real. It is facing a reality. In that way the parallel seems to hold up as well.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chant our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. … Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
“Song of Myself” 
One recipe I still go back to this book for is the poached salmon. I love the preparation and it’s quick, healthy, and foolproof.
Last week I found a big piece of wild Alaska salmon at the 
Some people who know me and the blog know that for about 2 1/2 years I’ve been 
Last year Robby decided he wanted to offer one of his care package options to his friend Timmy, who is quite a low functioning guy and has not a single contact outside of prison. I said I couldn’t buy for both of them but could increase the amount and buy a single order for either one of them twice a year. The food packages provide them an option when the food being served is actually inedible or, like the Super Bowl or a birthday party, for a special occasion. And again, these orders break my heart for the poor quality of options and the prices.
In continuing to cook down the pantry, I woke up inspired. I had a head of cabbage that they were hawking at the grocery store yesterday, but what inspired me was the realization I also had some soaked beans and turnips. Turnips move slowly around here, and I had a few left from last summer’s garden in the refrigerator. I also had garden carrots and potatoes. Sounding more and more like Irish stew! And hey! It’s St. Patrick’s Day!
Here’s my version.
I was feeling so good today I rallied for a cooking adventure. It seemed like my taste buds were recovered or at least better than they have been. And I have pears.
But today I feel good and so, pear tart! 
She was a court reporter, which led to disabling pain in her back and shoulders (aggravated by serious scoliosis that had her in a brace for years of adolescence). She was suffering a flare up while I was there. This meant she spent a lot of time in bed. It was cold outside and got colder. At first she went out on her patio several times a day in a tattered thrift store fur coat to smoke. Then she gradually gave in and smoked in her room with the window open. The smoke irritated my sinuses and my chest congestion– what turned out to be the cancer symptom. I checked out two nights early and moved to a hotel.
Then, with the host with the most out in Death Valley, I got another gift. Justin, the owner and operator of The Second Wind campground/resort where we stayed, was more suited to hosting guests than anyone I’ve ever met. The guy should be running an artist’s colony like Yaddo or MacDowell. He’s a natural, and every guest is an amazing, special person. He managed to be both welcoming and also not pushy or insistent on socializing. His place, with a natural hot spring tub he also managed brilliantly, was a real oasis.
He helped us find interesting places in the area and gave us the best quirky historical guidebooks. Justin suffered from a genetic degenerative bone disease. He took over the place when his father died, and he credited “the waters” for his ability to walk– even cured his limp. His father had been a sailor, a survivor of a shipwreck who never went on any body of water again after that– and instead built a dock, a lighthouse with a working light, and a stranded shell of a boat, in the desert on the edge of a large mineral flat. Justin has kept his father’s vast “installations” of found objects as well.
There was an issue with our septic in the motor home, which didn’t surprise or put me out a bit (there was a full bathroom not far away in the tub room). He felt so bad about it, though, that at the end of our stay he left me a sizable container of green bentonite clay. You can dig it right there on the property– one of three places in the world!
After the diagnosis, when things radically reshuffled in terms of priorities and an understanding of one’s own mortality, many things seem odd. One of the things for me is the concept of “lives” in Candy Crush. Every day I start out with five lives. My online friends can also send me lives– and there I am after I’ve used my precious five lives accepting the gift of lives from others. “Liz sent you a life.” “Lydia sent you a life.” “Doug sent you a life.” Oh thank you, thank you, thank you friends.
The idea of candy crush “lives,” like, really, the idea of crushing candy, is a nice absurdity. I place it at the opposite end of the spectrum to the famous poem: “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, where she asks: “What is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”