High in the Smokies with Valerie Hoh

Dennis and Valerie, Bryson City, N.C. August 2011

Twice lately people have sent to me photographs of bears walking in their back yards—one photo accompanied by an invitation to visit Asheville. No thanks. Why don’t you come here? I said.  So a couple of weeks ago Valerie Hoh and her husband, Dennis, came to our vacation rental house in the Smoky Mountains. We’d rented a big house there for a reunion with our kids. By Monday the kids had all left. We’d rented the house for the entire week. So we invited Valerie and Dennis over—they live in Asheville—to share in the pleasure of the Smoky Mountain air and a refrigerator full of left-behind food. We’d over-shopped, of course, and everyone had arrived with treats. There were melons and

Valerie and June feeling special in Hip-Hop Wraps

peaches and tomatoes and peppers and onions and cheese, bacon and eggs. We needed help!
    For many years Valerie and Dennis lived in Key West. An artist with a head for business as well as design, Valerie operated the store Pandemonium, on Duval Street. It featured beautiful and artistic things to wear and use and live with. In the same building she opened a gallery of work by Cindy Wynn, another truly innovative artist. Wynn creates furniture out of discarded metal and steel objects. Valerie called the store/museum Reworx.  Perhaps it was ahead of its time. Reworx didn’t seem to catch on.
    In 2005 Valerie and Dennis decided that Key West had become too challenging financially, and that Asheville would be a more manageable place to live. They sold their Key West house at the height of the real estate boom, and moved to Asheville. Valerie says she hasn’t regretted the move for a single second. Of course they do spend two months in Key West each winter and that’s gotta take the sting out of spending the other 10 months in bear country. 

Flip-Flop Hip-Hopper Miguel Perez in Valerie Hoh

    Valerie is also interested in cooking, and together, in the mountains, we fashioned several divine meals. Valerie, described by our mutual friend Jon Hynes as “a sort of life coach”, is full of great information and advice on a wide variety of subjects, from food, to fabric, to finance. She is currently involved in a movement to prevent a condominium complex from being built in her neighborhood. Valerie says she is making a name for herself in Asheville as a political activist, yet another focus of her bright light. She maintains her sparkling vitality with Tai Chi as well as a daily exercises called Somatics. Dennis does a set of yoga poses and stretches each morning. They meditate daily.
     One afternoon, as we danced together, Valerie told me that in Asheville Dennis goes to a studio where he dances to the 5Rhythms, a sort of philosophy of dance and movement by Gabrielle Roth. I downloaded some 5Rhythm music onto my iPod and dance to it at the beach. When people see me gyrating to the rhythms in my head, they stare, and I tell them: "Valerie Hoh made me do it!"

Michael Keith, in Valerie Hoh, 1987. "You should be a work of art or wear one." Oscar Wilde. I married one.

Anne, in Valerie Hoh, at our wedding, 1988.

    One day Valerie wrapped a fabulous thing around my head, wearable art by Valerie Hoh. It’s called a hip-hop wrap and she says it makes you feel special to wear it. It does! I call it my “Hoh Do-Rag.” As in “Hoh does” ... and does and does! One night she wore her hip-hop wrap and I wore mine and we took photographs—for you! 
     Last night son Miguel, producer of a brand of music he calls “flip-flop hip-hop”, expertly wrapped the Valerie Do around his head as if he’d done it a thousand times before. Then he posed for my camera.
    In February, Valerie stages a show of her incredible fashions at Key West's Gardens Hotel. There is music, food and drink, and since Valerie does everything she does with drama, wit and flair, the show is a terrific event. Her devoted Key West fans show up to socialize and have a look at what new ideas Valerie has brought to life. The pieces are for sale, too. In the meantime, check out Valerie’s stuff at HohCouture.com.  Plug in iamfurniture.com to see Cindy Wynn's wild works. 
     Wondering who else has a bear in their back yard? Our great friends Eugenie and Tad Malek in Northampton, Mass.  Eugenie is a brilliant world class pianist, who I’ve had the great pleasure of knowing since my childhood.  But that’s another blog. In the meantime, I gotta say, those art-loving bears get around!

 Check out Flip-Flop Hip-Hop featuring our son Miguel here:

A Great Funeral

Our family, being Lebowskis

A few months ago, after the passing of a friend for whom there was no plan for funeral arrangements, my husband and I had the Big Talk about how we would want things to go should one of us shuffle off this mortal coil.  Between us we've endured several bouts of cancer, a heart attack and the assorted atrocities of growing older. We've seen good friends, super specimens of vitality, succumb to illnesses and death. We've been to funerals that seemed to have nothing much to do with the departed soul as we knew them. We know what we don't want to happen. So we decided we needed a plan.
     "I want a big party with lots of laughing, dancing, and fun for my send-off," I said.
     "I would like for my kids to be together, all in one place, to celebrate my life," Michael said.

The Dude (Michael), Susan (my co-conspiritor) and Walter (Rocky)

     Then, we thought: What are we waiting for? Let's do this thing now. Let's celebrate our lives with the people who mean the very most to us. Let's do it now, while we still have our dancing feet in gear. And so the Smoky Mountain family retreat was conceived.
     We decided on a rental house in Bryson City, North Carolina, a place special to Michael and me. When he was a child Michael's family vacationed in the Smoky Mountains. We'd gone there for our honeymoon. It was much easier for our kids to access Bryson City than Key West. Through VRBO (vacation rental by owner) we found a big house, on the side of a mountain, and after much investigation, found it to be the perfect setting for our party.

We love the Dude!!

     Michael's birthday is in August, and so the kids and I decided to stage a party for that, and for him. His favorite movie is The Big Lebowski. Oldest daughter Susan and I decided on a Big Lebowski-themed party, which set off weeks of hushed telephone planning sessions, and many visits to thrift shops for plaid shorts and baggy bathrobes with hanging belts. Youngest daughter Meredith created "In and Out Burger" wrappers for the hamburgers we would serve at the party. Miguel, our son, downloaded the entire musical score of the film on my iPod. On our way out the door I grabbed The Big Lebowski DVD and threw it into my suitcase. Everyone, from the Dude himself (Michael) to our 5-year-old grandson arrived packing a robe and plaid shorts. Everyone had been instructed to watch The Big Lebowski and be ready for speaking in nothing but quotes from the film.

The Dude abides

     A few days before leaving Key West for the mountains, Michael, the guy who would rather have a root canal than endure a surprise birthday party, said: "You're up to something."
   "What could we possibly be up to?" I said. "Do you imagine we would set up "Michael Keith—This is Your Life" in the heart of the Smoky Mountains?? Shut the F--- up, Donnie!" (It's a line from the movie.)

Costume for the Big Lebowski party

     By the weekend, we had assembled in that house on the mountain all four of our kids, my brother Rocky (our fifth kid), all four grandkids, and a plan for a Saturday night cook-out featuring In and Out Burgers, and music from The Big Lebowski. While Michael sat outside, innocently communing with nature, we all slipped into our Lebowski costumes. Then we hit the button on the iPod player and called Michael into the house and handed him a White Russian, the Dude's favorite drink. We got him. He was surprised. But since our guests were all family, he was not horrified, but rather, very amused. We had a ball eating, dancing, and trying to not say the F word, so integral to The Big Lebowski script, in front of the kids. Sometime in the middle of that night, while we Lebowski fans slept, some creature came onto the porch, knocked over a trash can, pawed through our greasy In and Out Burger wrappers, and apparently attempted to eat a football. The ball, which my son-in-law said was made of finest pigskin, was punctured and deflated. Wow!

Partying at our own funeral

     Now we're back home, remembering our nine days in the mountains. Many times we've gone over again and again the many events, days and nights, and funny moments we experienced on that special vacation. We've marveled at the miracle of somehow assembling each and every one of our kids and their kids together.  Michael says it was one of the best times he ever had with his kids.
     "It really was a great funeral, wasn't it?" he says.

Is This The Way To The Hemingway House?

Key West's #1 Tourist Attraction: The Ernest Hemingway Home  

It’s Hemingway Days again in Key West and you just can’t avoid thinking about Hemingway and what his celebrity has brought to our island city. Whenever we go out on our front porch we are asked by tourists for directions to Key West's number one tourist attraction. In fact, it’s just around the corner, but the appearance of locals, who might know the way to Hemingway's, is apparently irresistible and one or another in every passing pair or party pauses to ask “is this the way to the Hemingway House?”  Maybe they expect the appearance of something more spectacular, something like a Vanderbilt Mansion looming majestically above the modest tin roofs of the neighborhood’s wooden houses. The Hemingway House is surrounded by a red brick wall, its gates locked tight every day at 5 p.m. unless someone rents the grounds for a party or a wedding or something like that. I always tell tourists to look for the red brick wall.  Just about anytime you walk past the Hemingway House there is a crowd of people there, waiting to get in, or posing for photos, or jumping up for a peek over the wall after 5 p.m.   

Ernest and Pauline around the time of their marriage

    The late Jeanne Porter, who grew up on Whitehead Street, played with Hemingway's sons when she was a little girl.  One day she told us this story: The boys kept several raccoons in cages outside in the yard. The animals were named after movie stars. One day it was discovered that a raccoon named Greta Garbo had killed and was eating her cage mate, Harold Lloyd. Although disturbing Papa Hemingway when he was in his writing studio was strictly taboo, the children’s horrified screams brought him to the scene. When he saw what was happening he went into the house and returned with a shotgun. Then, in full view of the children, he wordlessly shot off the head of Greta Garbo and returned to his studio. Jeanne said they thought perhaps Papa suspected that Greta Garbo had rabies. But the episode shook her badly, so badly that she remembered it quite clearly 60 years later.

"That writer with the bullfights." The Hemingways in Pamploma, 1928

    I was in the eighth grade when I read The Old Man and the Sea and wrote an essay that made me very proud indeed. It may have been the first time I realized that a story can be much more than just a story, that a whole can be way bigger than the sum of its parts. I wanted to be a writer and understanding Hemingway’s brevity was a wonderful lesson. Many years later, when my son read The Old Man and the Sea, as a junior in college majoring in English, he was so swept away by the tale he said he wanted to get a tattoo honoring Hemingway. I told him he should maybe know a little bit more about the writer before tattooing himself for life with the image of Hemingway.  

Ernest and Pauline, Key West, 1930's

    Hemingway came to Key West with his second wife, Pauline, in search of a quiet place to write, it is said. Pauline was from Piggott, Arkansas. The house in which she grew up is also preserved as a museum, and in touring it you learn that Pauline grew up with many advantages. Her family had money. And connections. That’s how Pauline got a job with Vogue Magazine in Paris, where Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley were living, supported by Hadley’s modest inheritance. In spite of her strict Catholic upbringing, Pauline found herself hopelessly in love with Hemingway and soon became the second Mrs. Hemingway. Financially she was far better off than Hadley.  Her uncle, founder of the Richard Hudnut cosmetic brand, bought his niece and her writer husband the house in Key West as a wedding present in 1931. It cost him $8,000. It was the first house Hemingway owned. He was 32 years old.
    He did not live for long in the Key West house. In 1936, at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, he met the woman who was to become his third wife, a renowned journalist with a thirst for adventure. He divorced Pauline and married Martha Gellhorn, who writes, in her memoirs, that the great Hemingway was not much of a lover. In fact, she wrote, she was certain that in spite of his macho reputation, the only women he’d ever bedded were the four women he married.
    “I want to write a blog about why I think Hemingway was a lousy lay,” I told an artist friend the other day.
    “Of course he was,” my friend said. “He hated women.”
    So that’s the general take on Hemingway’s machismo around here. 

Peeking over the wall

    In the television series The Sopranos, young Christopher Montelsanti wants to be a writer. As he struggles over his computer, bemoaning the agony of creating enough pages to add up to something publishable, wise guy Paulie Walnuts warns him about the frustration of writing: “That writer, with the bullfights!” he says. “ He blew his own f’ing head off.”

    People touring the Hemingway House often ask the guides to show them the room where Hemingway shot himself. It happened in Idaho, not Key West. Hemingway was 61 years old, and had just complained to a close friend that as a writer, he could not retire (in fact, a rather cheering thought for me). Writers have to write and produce, no matter their age, he said. And Hemingway could write no more. It made him crazy enough to kill himself. 

Spencer Tracy and Hemingway during the filming The Old Man And the Sea, Cuba 1957. Tracy was nominated for the best actor Oscar. He lost to David Niven's performance in Separate Tables.

    The Old Man and the Sea will show at the Tropic Theater tonight. Tickets are $50 as it is a fundraiser for the local suicide hot line. The film is about a Cuban fisherman down on his luck when he hooks a giant fish that pulls him way out to sea. Hemingway was at the top of his game when he wrote Old Man, his finest work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Hemingway’s story is much bigger, but every bit as sad as the old Cuban fisherman’s. Hemingway hooked a big fish, too, the big fish of fame, and that fish pulled him far out into the sea of insanity, from which he could not return.

Coma, Part 2

My all-time favorite photo of Jen

Waking from a coma is a slow and dramatically difficult struggle. When a patient stays longer than four months in a coma, medical people start looking at the grim statistics; only 15% of them will come out again. They stop looking for the miracle of a recovery. For Jennifer, nearly five months passed before she began to signal her reawakening by frantically wiggling her left big toe.

(seated) Stacy and Jen with Sophie, top: June and Valerie

    We were alone in her hospital room the first time I saw Jennifer awake. It was a few days after her birthday. She was sleeping peacefully, and then, her eyes moved beneath their lids. “You’re dreaming,” I said. “You’re snoring a little bit, too.” And then her eyes opened and she looked directly at me.  I was so stunned I nearly fainted. I knew she’d been showing signs of consciousness, but I was not prepared for the shock of the moment when she opened her eyes and gazed into mine; they were brightly green, focused, curious. They were Jennifer’s eyes. Imagine how you might feel if a loved one had died and then, awakened from that sleep to look deeply into your eyes and your soul. What would you say? What would you do? Chills zipped up and down my arms and legs. I cried. And then she cried.
    “No, don’t cry because we’re alive and we all love you so! You’re getting better. You’re going to be all right,” I assured her in a mad jumble of works. Then I laughed, while I cried. I took her hand in mine and she squeezed it and smiled, a half smile on the left side of her mouth. It felt like she was showing off.
    “Hey, look at my hair!” She lifted her eyes to my head to examine the full mop of hair on my head. I’d been chemo bald and chemo beaten when her brain exploded, back in September. To her, I must have looked like a different person. But she seemed to recognize me. And surely, I recognized her.

Baby Sophie and Mama Jen

    Jennifer’s home now, with full-time nursing care. She’s busy with therapy and learning to do all the things people do to manage being alive. After a brain trauma the healthy brain cells learn to take over the work of the injured or destroyed brain cells. This is a miracle of nature, and no one knows how it works or how to make it work any faster or better than it does on its own. Does it matter that Jennifer is an extremely intelligent person? Maybe. Does it matter that she was in prime physical condition when it happened? Yes, surely her good health contributed to her survival.  How long will the healing take? Years, probably. But there is progress, and it’s quite remarkable. A month ago, for example, Jen could hold her neck erect, her head up, for seconds. Now she does this for minutes. She turns her head in any direction she wants. She uses sign language because she has a tracheotomy and cannot yet talk. However, she mouths words, and loves to sing along to her favorite music.

Jen with the Bunnies, Tessa and Sophie

    From my reading about recovery from brain trauma I know that every accomplishment, no matter how minute, is particularly exhausting for Jennifer. That includes receiving visitors. And so Jen pushes herself when she can, and rests often. Recovery continues, day by day.
    “Inch by inch, it’s all a cinch,” I tell her, repeating something she often told me. She smiles. She remembers.
    Yesterday I visited Jen and her wonderful nurse told me she wished she’d known Jennifer before her accident. She wanted to know more about Jen’s personality, what sort of a person she is. And so, with Jennifer nodding to confirm the finer points of my personality portrait, I told her nurse these things about Jen:

Somebody's birthday. Jen, June, Stacy, Whitney

Jen loved burgers at the (sadly defunct) Deli on Truman

    She doesn’t like strong perfume. She is allergic to eggs. She loves make-up, lipstick and clothes with just a bit of ruffle. She prefers her hair short and low maintenance. She eats like a bird. She is tall and regally trim and has always been so, built like her grandmother. She used to drink Coca-Cola, I always kept some in my house for her, but then she decided it was not good for her and quit. She is a minimalist and likes her home simple and serene. She is a poet and a writer. She is a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in New York. She grew up in New Jersey. She is a certified lifeguard. She loves to swim. She is Catholic; she prays; she goes to confession. She has two daughters, beautiful and bright and well-raised as Jen takes the job of motherhood very seriously. She is the kind of mother who gives a toddler a leaf of fragrant basil to keep her entertained while Jen cooks dinner. Six years ago she went to a monastery in Kentucky and prayed, in total silence, for a week. When an ambulance drives by she pulls off to the side of the street and says a prayer for the person being transported. She loves gardening. She loves cooking. She loves coffee. She loves apple pie. And she loves me. I know. Yesterday, she mouthed the words and told me so.



Need a little cry? Cry to the good stuff. This always works for me.

Coma, Part 1

June and Jen. Before cancer. Before coma. Spring, 2006. 

“Something terrible has happened to Jenny,” Michael said, bounding up the stairs, the ancient steps creaking beneath him. We were in Nova Scotia, on a mission to scatter my mother’s ashes in the places she’d loved growing up there. We were recovering from Mother’s death after a long and difficult illness, and from my four-month long bout of chemotherapy—two dramas that weirdly zenithed at the same time. We were stunned and weary from the rough summer. The day was overcast. I was in bed, staring out the window, gathering together the strength to face another day.
    “Something terrible has happened to Jenny,” Michael said, plopping down on the bed beside me and opening his computer. My heart slowed in that horrible thudding way it does when you hear terrible news. My mind darted desperately about, imaging what might have happened to Jennifer. I’d received an email from her a day earlier. She’d written happily, and funnily, about applying to a graduate program in creative writing. Her health was sterling, from regular swims and walks with her dog, Stella. A car wreck? No. I remembered that her husband Joe had insisted on Jennifer driving an industrial strength SUV. I thought of Jenny’s daughters, Sophie and Tessa, “the bunnies” she calls them. But it was Jenny. He said Jenny. And then he read aloud from an email from Key West in which we learned that Jennifer had collapsed at her home as a result of what appeared to be a brain bleed. She’d been flown to Miami. She was in a coma.
    It’s a silly term, best friend. But Jen and I are each others' best friend. Her daughters call us “BFFs”, best friends forever, I think that means. Recently someone asked us, “how are you two related?” Jennifer thought for a minute and answered, “We’re related . . . but not by blood.” When Jennifer took me to my chemo and radiation treatments, people thought she was my daughter. And she could be, as she is nearly twenty years younger than I.  I love her as if she were my daughter. She calls me “Mama” and I often sign off my emails to her as “your fairy godmother.” She’d even promised to take care of me when I am old.
    “That old woman there?” she’d say, laughingly imaging a time in the future. “That used to be June Keith.”
    And we’d laugh, because we always laugh. We share a sense of the absurd, of the sweet insanity of life on this earth. Jennifer knows my weaknesses and my strengths; I like to think I know hers, too. True friendship, they say, is loving another in spite of what you know about them. It’s a true friendship. 
    One day I introduced Jennifer, a uniquely intelligent person, to Joe, a man I sensed to be of the same beautiful brilliance. They fell in love. They married. They moved to a house in new town. Things changed.
    “I’m glad you two are so happy,” I teased them, “but I’ve lost my best friend!”
    It is unclear just what happened to Jennifer’s brain on that day, just as the brain’s myriad functions are largely a mystery. She was preparing dinner when she announced that she was having the worst headache of her life. She collapsed. Fortunately Joe was at home—what if he hadn’t been there when she lost consciousness? But he was there. Against all odds, Jennifer made it to Ryder Trauma Center in Miami. She survived two surgeries that night. And then, a coma.
    A person in a coma appears to be dead, but for the gentle in and out of the breath. Nothing moves. It is a state of suspended animation, a profoundly disturbing thing to witness. As she lay there, her serene beauty utterly still, I thought of a thousand conversations we’d had, the many what-if’s we’d explored together. One thing we’d never considered was this. Never anything like this.
    As the months went by, and Jennifer’s coma continued, friends urged me to come to terms with the idea of her being gone.
    “But she moves her eyes,” I said.
    “Only reflex,” people said.
    “She yawns,” I said.
    “Reflex,” I was told.
    Joe never gave up, and being a physician, a psychiatrist, he knew as well or better than any of us the gravity of the situation.  But Joe believed in Jennifer’s power to recover. If she’d given up, he said, she would have died at the beginning. She wanted to live, he told us. She was fighting to live. It might take a very long time, he said, but she would heal. She would be back, he promised.
    For months I cried at the thought of her. People wanted to know how she was. I had nothing to tell them, but that we hoped she’d regain consciousness soon. Michael and I cried together, and he always said “she was such a great mother,” and I’d admonish him to rephrase that to “she IS such a great mother.”
    We ached for Jenny’s daughters, beautiful babies we’d known since the days of their births. The bunnies.
    “They must know something we don’t,” the bunnies’ father told me one day. “They are confident she’ll get better and come home.”
    I read everything I could about comas. Everything. I learned that when a coma lasts for longer than four months, it is most likely to be permanent. Doctors and nurses I know well gently urged me to face the fact that Jennifer was gone. And so, as Jennifer’s birthday approached, I began the process of grieving the loss of her.
    And then, she woke up.

The Long and Winding Road

It’s been almost one year since I finished my fourth round of chemotherapy. Since then I’ve been feeling well. My test results are all good. Last fall, I went back to work. I even feel great at work. Clicking-my-heels-great. Staying-up-all-night-barking-at-the-full-moon-great. On December 31, 2010 I had my feeding tube removed. Happy New Year!  No more liquid diet (we called it “tube food”) for me. Back to eating solid food. My hair is chemo curly and my eyes are still blue. My husband still loves me like he used to do. I am cancer-free. And the best thing that any doctor can tell you about cancer is this: the further away you get from cancer, the closer you get to being done with it. So, I’m well on my way.
    Then I got this belly ache. In the past two months it’s been a regular event. Nothing truly awful, just a little belly ache that comes and goes. And since things seemed to be moving along more or less as well as they ever did, I figured I was all right. I didn’t worry. I just walked around saying “I have a belly ache.” Denial is not a river in Egypt, folks.
    My husband says that when old people say to each other “how’s it going?” they are really asking “are your bowels moving regularly?” When I was a kid whenever somebody didn’t feel well my Nova Scotian grandmother would ask “have you moved your bowels today?” and if you hadn’t, you were ordered to report to the bathroom and not come out until this movement had been achieved. We kids would gigglingly oblige, tickled by her very proper choice of words, and half crazy with the fear of having the dreaded enema, which was generally applied while brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles waited for news just beyond the bathroom door. Oh, the shame. No wonder I was in denial.

Depression-era photo of Gramma and her daughters, Mom (R) and Aunt Phyllis. The economy may have been sluggish, but not their colons, by God. Gramma saw to that.

    No one likes to hear they’re full of crap. When your own doctor tells you that, right to your face, it really hurts. It hurts almost as much as being full of crap, which hurts really bad. If you are one of those people who says “please, I’m eating!” when those of us in the medical field begin discussing the darker side of human physiology gone awry, this is the time for you to butt out. No pun intended. 
    As it turned out my colon was on strike, backed up so badly that my stomach wasn’t even emptying any more. The emergency room tests showed a sad and painful truth. Even a couple of shots of something really strong for pain didn’t eliminate the pain from my lack of elimination. The situation had gone on for far too long, but like I said, feeling so good in so many ways had trumped that little old belly pain for quite a while. My stomach was like a little voice moaning softly into the darkness: “what about me?” it growled. “what about how I feel?” I was ignoring that voice. Having no appetite was a good thing, too, as I’ve grown very fond of my favorite 1969-era jeans. Quit your growling, flat stomach!

The beautiful and deadly croton plant grows right here in Key West. I wonder if they have one behind the hospital emergency room? 

    My doctor finally told me, as I shivered on the rock-hard gurney in the ER, that my stomach was the size of a football. It should be the size of a baseball, at most. My daughter Susan wants fruit analogies always. So I told her that my stomach was the size of a large papaya when it should be the size of a small mango.

Croton seeds contain oil from which a potent laxative is made. Remember in John Steinbeck's East of Eden when Kate slowly poisoned Faye, the owner of the whorehouse? She used croton oil. Way too much of a good thing. Ugh. Imagine being Ex-Laxed to death . . .

    I once asked a surgeon what thing he did to his patients that he dreaded most. The naso-gastric tube, he quickly answered. The tube threads down through a nostril and into the esophagus and then down to the stomach. The tube is hooked on to a suction machine which empties the contents of the stomach with great efficiency. You’ve heard of having your stomach pumped? That’s what happened to me the other night. Like most people, the thought of the nose-hose, as the set-up is slangily referred to by medical personnel, is horrifying, about the worst atrocity imaginable. But guess what? It wasn’t that bad. True, it isn’t nice. Yes, it feels weird as hell. You should never underestimate the power of modern sedating drugs to render you remarkably tolerant to the poking probes of tubes sliding into places the good Lord never intended for them to go. Cancer survivors know this.
    It takes about an hour to empty the contents of one football-sized stomach. Then they replace all that sludge with a laxative, right down the same handy tube. The result of that laxative is a most impressive purge, the details of which I will spare you. The next morning I awakened nose-hose free, clean and warm in my cozy bed, with vaguely disgusting memories of an awfully crappy night.
    Two things you should take from my story. One: eat your fiber. Try for 25 grams a day. It ain’t as easy as you think. Look on labels. I thought a bowl of oatmeal every morning was all I needed to keep my fiber quotient up. Hell no. You need a whole lot more fiber than that. Like most parts of the human body, you can get away with abusing your colon for many, many years. But when your very tolerant body can take the abuse no longer, it rebels with pain. And that means you’re in trouble. Don’t ignore pain. It means something. Especially when it goes on and on and on. For weeks. Or months. It means you need to find out what’s wrong.
    Second: once again I have witnessed firsthand that the most merciful people on this planet are nurses and nurses assistants. In the past two years I have been through some of the most distasteful procedures imaginable, and at every event, there was a nurse, or a team of nurses and assistants, urging me through the rough patches, assuring me of my ability to cope, ignoring the distasteful by-products of my ever more tenacious grasp on life as this and all human bodies grow weary of putting up with our abuse. If you’re digging your trip on this long and winding road, don’t forget the care and maintenance of your vehicle.
    Happy trails to you.

Love on Two Wheels

Mario Sanchez's 1964 painted wood-carving: Colorful Conchtown. Notice the bike is unlocked.

I have a friend who moved to Key West based on her one-time experience, during a visit to the island several years ago, of riding a bicycle to the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center to see a performance by the Key West Symphony Orchestra: recreation and culture all together on one starry night. Life simply doesn’t get any better than that, she decided, and set her sights on a life in Paradise.
     Long before I set foot in Key West, I heard stories about the place from Ft. Lauderdale neighbors, a hard-drinking shrimper and his equally hard-drinking girlfriend. They described the rough and tumble island of Key West where a sense of community prevailed. For example, a bicycle belonged to whoever wore it between their legs at the moment. If there was a bicycle leaning against a pole, untethered, and a person drunk and tired happened by, that bike had a new owner. At least temporarily. To my own hippie-basted consciousness, that sounded reasonable. Love the one you’re with. I was interested in that kind of freedom. The promise of the endless party caught my attention, too. So, when I got the chance, I took it. I came to Key West, and found the place to be everything—and more—those shrimpers had promised.  

When we owned the streets.

    You really cannot talk about Key West life without discussing the bicycle. The bicycle is elemental to the island experience, essential to the island process, deeply rooted in island legend and lore. I did not steal my first bicycle. I bought it, from a dancer at the Esquire Lounge who’d upgraded her ride to her new boyfriend’s moped. I re-connected with my inner child on that bike, riding for hours around and around the labyrinth of Old Town streets. I wore a bikini and enjoyed my newfound breezy freedom as well as the appreciative looks and comments of my fellows on the road.
    I married a man with a red bike, and together we biked to the M&M Coffee stand every morning for breakfast, and then on to the beach, or just around and around. It seemed to me then, as I watched his long body leaning languidly into each turn, that on a bike he was no longer a man, but a fish, undulating gracefully through the rippling sunlight, sleek and beautiful as a shark. We spawned, that man and I, and our baby boy loved being our passenger in his little bicycle seat. Often he fell asleep back there, and I reached one hand back to hold his nodding head, steering us home with the other. 

Sabrina and Baby Miguel on the bike she bought for me when mine was stolen.

    We went though a few bikes back then. My girlfriend came by and asked to borrow my bike so that she could show up for a downtown date fresh and not sweaty from walking. I gave her the bike and the lock, making her promise to lock up before diving into the night’s festivities. She vowed to lock. But somewhere along the way, she was distracted from her mission of returning my bike to me, and the following day she showed up on my doorstep, hungover and apologetic.
    My brother-in-law borrowed my husband’s red bike, and lost it under similar circumstances. Who remembers the realities of chains and locks when deep in the thrall of partying in Paradise? The red bike was gone. I was working at the Miami Herald where a freelance writer showed up every day on a red bike very much like the one lost by my brother-in-law. I didn’t expect he would be willing to part with such a treasure, but I offered to buy it. He sold it to me for $25 and a big smile. My husband was thrilled. It was almost exactly the same as his stolen red bike . . .

I'm not quite ready for the Tricycle. But I like it.

    Lately, as I grow older and less slippery in the joints, I’ve considered a tricycle. I envision a broad seat, a bohemian display of plastic flowers in the basket, and myself pushing the pedals real slow, moving through the streets like a lazy snail. But when I am driving my car, and come upon such a vision, I find myself thinking “poor old thing.”        
    The woman who once owned the shop “Among the Ruins,” retired now, rides her bicycle though the streets of Key West, garbed in chic clothes and always a jaunty hat. My Nova Scotia neighbor Enid, rides her bike in a Tour de France-inspired outfit, and a helmet. She’s 84 years old and fit as a fiddle.
    So no, I won’t succumb to the tricycle just yet. But we don’t ride our bicycles anymore, either. The traffic is too dense. It’s too scary. And riding on a busy sidewalk, yelling ahead to pedestrians to move aside, goes so appallingly against the spirit of the thing. I can’t do it.

Bicycle with Baggage. Sometimes a whole life story can be told by a bike.

    My baby Conch, now a man, uses his bike almost exclusively. He rides without a helmet, and without the slow and sinuous grace of his father. He drives fast and purposefully. When I fear for his safety I remind myself of his ancestry, deeply rooted in a society of free bicycles.  He is in a bigger hurry than his father, or anyone, ever was back in the day. Nowadays, everyone is in a hurry. 
    Today our bicycles sit motionless on the front porch, posing in the tropical sun for tourists’ cameras, tethered securely, mostly retired, waiting and waiting to be taken for a ride around and around the island.