Summer reading

This isn’t a list of the books I intend to read this summer, although I am compiling one. It is about the book launch this past Wednesday for my book of Poetry called “Given Time. a mother-daughter cancer memoir. (You can order through finishinglinepress.com, amazon, or other online providers.)

Over 50 people gathered at the Avon Public Library to hear me read seven poems from this collection. As I stated at the outset, the concept for the book is in two parts. The first part is about my mother‘s breast cancer. She was diagnosed at the age of 43 in 1971 and died at the age of 50 seven years later. Her funeral was on my 30th birthday.

The second part deals with my breast cancer diagnosed in December 2022 on the heels of Covid. It was detected on a routine mammogram and surprised the heck out of me. By that point I had assumed that I had escaped the diagnosis that killed my mother. I ended up with a lumpectomy on each of my two breasts, which did not get clean margins so they had to go in and do a second surgery. Then a full body scan to determine if there had been any spread, which led to a lung biopsy. Thank goodness I don’t have lung cancer. Then radiation.

All of which is to say there were lots of tests, biopsies and surgeries and through it all my daughters and one of my dear friends were there with me every step of the way. They came to doctor visits, they drove me to the hospital, they sat in the waiting room, and as I read my poems from my new book, I reflected on the fact that my mother went through breast cancer, diagnosis, and surgery alone. I didn’t learn of her diagnosis until she had already had a full mastectomy on her left side. My book begins with my learning of her breast cancer when I was a student, oblivious to anyone or anything except myself in Berkeley, California.

After I graduated, I took a job in Manhattan to be close to my mother, who lived in New Jersey, where I was raised, and over the next seven years we traveled twice to Europe and lived our lives together to the fullest, knowing that we might have limited time.

Our trip to Madrid and Majorca

My poem “Linked by Strands of Pink” is in part an homage to my mother‘s knitting skills, as she was a master at needlecraft. For those who don’t know, when you knit a patterned sweater, rather than cutting off one color and tying on another, you hold the first color loosely behind the work and then pick it up when you need it. Therefore, each part of the pattern is linked to the one before it. This is a powerful metaphor for our lives.

Linked by Strands of Pink

Like tree roots stretch, seek each other

beneath the earth, lie dormant, then link

to support the seedlings as they emerge,

when it appears the stump is dead,

smoothed by weather and the years,

its rings grown faint and indecipherable,

our roots lay quiescent in the years

since you’ve been dead, no shoots,

no hint of green, tendrils linked by memory

of laughter, travel to foreign cities,

kittens in the baskets, our fashioning of flowered

sundresses, picnics with martinis in thermos bottles.

Then a link we had dismissed, a link

like an unexpected shoot, composed

of cells and vessels, long underground.

We are linked by strands of pink,

the blood that coursed through

your veins and then through mine.

The doctors say I’m just unlucky—

no reason to think my diagnosis

is related to yours forty years before.

But I know that like I learned from you

to carry yarn beneath my knitting, to hold

the strand waiting to link up with a swan

or heart, waiting, holding on with proper

tension—not too tight, not too loose--

I know we’re linked by strands of pink.

I also stated at the book reading that my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. I was raised as a Witness from the age of 10 to when I stopped attending at the age of 17. This could have made a rift between my mother and me that might have been irreparable, but like the famous “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” rule we decided to live our lives without recriminations, exhortations or explanations about religion or the lack of it. For this, I am profoundly grateful.

One of the people at the reading asked me about my process and how I got my ideas for writing. I said that I am not a disciplined writer who writes each morning at 6am. I wait for divine inspiration which so far has not failed me. This surprised some of my friends, and I admit I surprised myself, but I think it’s true that for me my ideas often come almost unbidden. If I sit and try to think of what I want to write about, I’m often stuck, but if I just wait, something always appears.

Another person asked if after writing this book I felt closer to my mother. I do, although I think that’s partly a function of aging, I believe that the veil between us and people we have loved who are no longer with us thins, just like our thinning hair and skin. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of aging. I think my mother would be proud of this book and I know she would be proud to see that all three of her granddaughters were there. Her two great granddaughters were there and her first grandson to be born in September of this year was there in utero.

I am profoundly grateful for the support of the Avon public library and reaffirmed my commitment to offer some poetry programming there in the fall. A number of people at the reading were not poets, of which I was aware, and therefore, I spent some time explaining the poetic choices that I had made in my work, particularly the nature of a call and response collection, where the poems in the first part about my mother‘s cancer called up either a line an image or a sensory detail that I picked up in the second part about my cancer as the response.

This reminded me that appreciation of poetry goes far beyond what some of us learned in high school, where our teachers were perhaps afraid of poetry or only knew the classical canon or were determined to have us decode poems into rhyme and meter. Poetry above all should be inspiring and beg to be read again and again. It’s not an assignment.

Thank you to the 50 people who pre-ordered my book back in March and waited patiently for it to arrive, and also to the 50 people who came to the Avon public library to hear me read.

As I signed books at the reading, I inscribed “Time Passes. Connections Endure,” which is the theme of my book. I thought this was unique until I saw a photo from Chautauqua that said “All passes Art Alone Endures.” Synchronicity?

Tell me about any synchronicity in your life that you cannot explain by logic. And thank you for clicking “Like.” It’s lovely to be connected in that way.