Yesterday marked a massive change in our lives as my husband had his first dose of chemo plus immunotherapy for stage 2 lung cancer.
It has been a really nasty shock, only finally diagnosed after months of doctors who assumed it was not cancer because of how it presented.
It is treatable and, after 12 weeks of this (4 treatments, 3 weeks apart) we hope surgery will remove whatever is left.
But our lives are now the predictable round of appointments and warnings, stocking our apartment with every possible medical need, and just trying not to panic. Which wouldn’t do us any good anyway.
There’s not much to add, but we have been getting a lot of support from friends and colleagues, some of whom have survived cancer and are sharing helpful tips to manage the effects of treatment.
We were to speak at a travel conference in Ireland — gone. Also postponed, we hope, are trips to England and France also planned for this fall. Everything is now wait and see.
Ironically, the NYT, where Jose works as a freelance photo editor after 31 years on staff, published this story two days ago — about the rise in this exact lung cancer showing up among non-smokers like him.
He is being his usual calm, upbeat self — and we’re very lucky his first treatment went 100% smoothly. Our small local hospital is affiiliated with a much larger regional chain so it has the intimacy of a place we already know well, 11 minutes north of us, but a larger network.
I hadn’t been in “the city”, as we call it, in ages. Months?
I generally don’t go in in summer because it can be hot, humid and smelly.
But I’ve decided that every Thursday is my day to escape the boring suburbs. I love our apartment and town but there is very little to do and NYC has, obviously, thousands of options.
I drove in and parked at my favorite garage (yes!), where 5.5 hours was a crazy-low $35. That can be the cost of one hour, and this one is on Jane Street, in one of the city’s nicest neighborhoods, the West Village.
I had an 11:00 a.m. ($24) ticket for the Whitney Museum, a block north — but stopped for an iced tea and cookie at Maman, a gorgeous cafe right on the corner. The people watching alone is great!
The Whitney is quickly becoming my second favorite museum (after the Neue Galerie): full of light, outdoor seating. enormous galleries, friendly staff. I went to see a show by Amy Sherald, best known now for her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama, which is also on display. The show is fantastic and gives much to think about: monumental portraits of Black Americans, everyday people in everyday situations: two women in bathing suits, a couple standing by their car outside their house — and a few wholly unexpected, like two men kissing in a replica of a famous photo of a white sailor kissing a woman. A short film explains her process and her inspirations.
There’s also a show using pieces from their vast collection, a great mix — an Alice Neel portrait of Andy Warhol, a classic Hopper streetscape, a huge Rothko. Delicious!
Enjoyed a very good lunch at the museum restaurant (more people-watching!) then walked northeast a few blocks to one of my favorite stores, Casa Magazines. Ooooooooohhhhhh. I always spend $140 and stagger away laden with glossies of all sorts, including a few I’ve never read before. The store is tiny and jammed to the rafters with every conceivable magazine. There are so very few places like this now, even in New York — 2,500 publications!
Stopped by a local drugstore and — it being an upscale neighborhood — I stocked up on Roger & Gallet soap (my favorite scent), and cologne, Marvis toothpaste and a few sundries. Then, bathroom?!!!! Turns out the corner deli is where everyone sent me. Bought a juice and enjoyed the shade of Abingdon Park.
The drive home took 90 minutes (twice the usual in rush-hour traffic) but worth every minute.
I even got two compliments on my outfit — a rust-colored maxi-dress, brown Birks Madrids, a brown and white check cotton gingham tote and the best earrings ever — which Jose bought for me, the solar system! In descending order, tiny replicas of every planet, even Saturn with its rings!
I never get compliments out here because we all live in our damn cars and there’s no street life or interaction. I really miss city life and energy.
I came home so energized and so so so grateful I could simply walk the six blocks between the museum and the store.
This is the most difficult July post ever — and I will have to bite my tongue because of the current political climate.
First, a nod to my native country.
I spent the first 30 years of my life in Canada — and will never not be grateful for the excellent public and affordable educations I had in my hometown of Toronto. To enter our best university (Oh, I know McGill tries!) you don’t have to have an SAT score or found an orphanage or write some plaintive essay and play accordion backwards…The arms race to get into an Ivy League school, even a top tier, are scary to me. To get into U of T, I needed a specific graduating average. That’s it. And it allowed me entry to its two best colleges, Trinity and Victoria (like Oxford and Cambridge the university is divided into smaller colleges.) My education was rigorous. I cried in my French professor’s office after being told I had arrived with very poor high school preparation. Zut! Yet I went on to win a journalism fellowship in Paris three years after graduation and a job at the Montreal Gazette with my fluency.
I still remember one of the exam questions from my political science class — Why is the German Democratic Republic neither German, Democratic or a Republic?
It was not, at all, a warm, nurturing environment! My profs felt distant and uninterested in anyone but grad students. But life is tough anyway, so it was good prep emotionally and intellectually. I then freelanced full-time for several years, never fearing medical bankruptcy thanks to Canada’s universal healthcare. I took safe public transit everywhere or rode my bike.
But, to be honest, I longed to flee. I found Toronto boring and housing, even in the mid 1980s, was already out of reach for someone who wanted to buy property and maybe put down roots. Wages were low and taxes high. People in power in my industry clung to their jobs, literally, for decades — so there wasn’t much upward mobility.
I tried Montreal for 18 months, and I love to go back and visit, but it wasn’t a good fit for me at all — long, brutal winter, insanely high taxes, a lot of crime. Nope.
I moved to small town New Hampshire to follow my then boyfriend, later husband, now ex, for his medical residency at Dartmouth. I was very lucky to get a green card as the then unmarried child of a U.S. citizen, my mother. Half of my family are American, and some highly accomplished — a Chicago developer who created the North American building, a city landmark, an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, California farming cousins who flew their own Cessna. Who were these people? I wanted to better understand them and their country,
It was a huge thrill to move south — and I was terrified! Not of guns, but entering a nation 10 times larger than Canada.
How could I ever hope to make any mark?
But I have. I joke I’ve clawed my way to the bottom of the middle. I’ve had a great career, a lovely second husband, a town I really enjoy. It’s worked out for me, and I appreciate that.
The staggering beauty of Big Sur, Calfornia
But now, in a week I really want to celebrate the best of both countries, I can’t.
I just can’t get teary-eyed over a place now thrilled, thrilled, to create an alligator-infested concentration camp. It sickens me. The “Big Beautiful Bill’ stripping healthcare from millions? Nauseating.
So I won’t wax poetic this year about that “shining city on a hill”, that “sweet land of liberty.” I mourn the loss of a clear shared vision of what the U.S., at its best, might be, or become. I despair at the utter impotence of the Democratic party.
Yet…
I wish Canadians a belated Happy Canada Day!
I wish Americans a return to sanity and compassion.
Broadside 
