If you’re the mayor of Greenport, NY and you find you have some drug dealing and use in your community, you call the Guardian Angels, of course. Greenport is way out beyond the vineyards, almost at the tip of the North Fork of Long Island. It’s a quaint, coastal village. Once a whaling village, it’s now all about tourism and fishing. But there have been complaints of rising crime.

Has bucolic Greenport become a hotbed & breakfast of lawlessness? Well, there have been marijuana sales reported. In the open air. What’s next? Hookers by the carousel? Greenport’s mayor isn’t going to wait to find out. He’s asking for help, and Curtis Sliwa is answering the call. Look forward to seeing red berets patrolling outside craft and antique shops soon.

The Guardian Angels rose to public prominence in New York during the late seventies and eighties, when crime in major cities was out of control. They rode the subways and patrolled neighborhoods and overall people didn’t seem to mind. That was the period when products such as bulletproof fur coats were hitting the market. New York is much safer now, Suffolk County, where Greenport is located is safer still. Nassau and Suffolk County, taken together, rate as the safest metropolitan area in the US. Greenport is even farther removed from anything resembling mean streets. And still, the mayor and some of the citizens want to invite the Guardian Angels in to keep an eye on things - and on them, presumably. If you’re going to watch a neighborhood, you’re going to watch the whole thing, right?

Southold Police Chief Carlisle Cochran said he would welcome a professional and organized group to help keep an eye on the streets of Greenport, and that he is “looking forward to creating a liaison between the Angels and the police department” to augment the police officers already there and better protect the residents.

“Extra sets of eyes, handled in a professional way, is a good thing,” Cochran said. “There’s only so many
police officers [in the town], we can’t be everywhere all the time.”

If they’re going to be there, they should at least get some additional training before going in, though. For all the current troubles, there’s probably not enough action to keep these hardened street vigilantes occupied. To make optimal use of their time, the Angels should send in a team that’s prepared to authenticate the provenance of antiques and collectibles. You pay for a signed Louis Comfort Tiffany and it turns out to be a fake….now that’s a crime.

I’ve made up my mind to take a day trip out there. The sight of the Guardian Angels guarding the crosswalks of this village is something I want to see for myself. Maybe once they get Greenport straightened out they could take on Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There’s often only one traffic cop to control the potential jaywalking situation for the whole village of Stockbridge. They clearly need help up there, just in case something gets out of control.

I haven’t been posting as much, lately, and I really thank the people who have been following my “stuff” and have checked in. My routine now is pretty much this: go in for treatment, come right home unless there’s a blood test or appointment, have lunch, sit like a lump for several hours. Radiation fatigue is cumulative and I’m accumulating it. Even my brain goes on strike for a few hours. I don’t think the heat and humidity is helping a lot. Tomorrow is the last treatment, though, at least for now. I’m hoping to get my energy back at least to the rather unimpressive level it’s normally at. I’m no dynamo, but it should get better than this. Of course, a lot depends on how I take to whatever the maintenance program turns out to be. I’m hoping that whatever it is, I can work around it.

Originally they said it would be twenty treatments and now it’s reduced to eighteen. Other people who share the waiting room are congratulating me on getting through early. I find I’m not as excited as they are, although I’m happy to be done. For one thing, aside from the fatigue, it hasn’t been that bad. The whole staff is incredible in the way that they make each patient feel comfortable and cared for. The radiation itself doesn’t have any discomfort connected with it. Now that it’s over, though, I’m integrating the fact that it’s only radiation that’s over. The doctor kind of brought that home in the last examination. Of course, you go in for a follow up. I have an appointment for late next month. He casually said that they’d evaluate whether I’d need more radiation at that point. I’m thinking, “Whoa! I’ll be back at work by then. I have this life and these obligations. When my time-out is over, it’s over.” Only it’s not up to me anymore. The other thing he said that didn’t cheer me up was that it was good that they were able to keep it to eighteen sessions because that would make it less problematic if I ever had to have the Total Skin Electron Beam Therapy. OK, I knew that was something that was held in reserve, but in my mind it was no longer a consideration at all.

We’re a sorry lot right now. My daughter said she’s tired of being pregnant. She wishes the baby was ready to be born. It’s a normal enough way to feel in the last few weeks. The thing is, she’s in the first trimester. That’s the sleepy trimester, though, so it’s understandable. You always feel like a nap would be a great thing. My daughter is used to a high energy kind of life, running from one activity to another. Now, she’s got about an ounce worth of baby who’s using up the limited supply of oxygen in midsummer air and she’s got a good sized catalog to finish, her steady freelance work and her eleven year old daughter home from school. She’s used to being equal to it all and now she’s not. I know how she feels.

My mother’s transition remains the toughest, though. I see where this is going and it’s no place good. She’s bored, and eventually that might mean bored to death in the literal sense. For much of the last year my daughter took her places whenever she could. Now she can’t, at least not nearly as much. That’s not really a temporary situation. When the catalog is done and work slows down, there’ll just be a small window of time before there’s a baby. She still thinks of herself as having lots of friends. She doesn’t. She has two who are mobile and they’re in their eighties, just as she is. Most of the others have either moved away or moved into a stage of life where they can’t be responsible for a contemporary who needs assistance at every step. She doesn’t really realize that about her condition. She offers to come along to the doctor to help me and occasionally still floats the idea of driving, if only down to the store. She forgets that someone has to get her in and out of the seatbelt, open and close the car door and help her in and out of the car and the house as well. In her mind, she’s still able to breeze in and out. When we realized we had to insist she stop driving we envisioned putting aside some money for cabs, so she could still have some freedom. As it turns out, that’s out of the question. She needs too much physical help and has too little memory to be going anywhere on her own, even in a cab.

We tried a senior citizens’s group and she did try, but she really didn’t like it. I don’t think she has enough short term memory to make new friends. She can’t remember anything she’s told, so how’s she going to get acquainted with someone new? On the other hand, we checked out social model adult daycare and she’s not ready for that either. We haven’t got any answers and are just taking this a day at a time for the moment.

I know all this sounds like a lot of gloom. We’re really not gloomy. We’re going along pretty well. We’re just working on getting our minds around these ever-changing situations. I somehow thought that middle age would be a more settled time than youth. It isn’t, at least for us. I realize now that life is just one continuous transition.

Today was the half-way through radiation visit to the dermatologist. At last, some appreciation. He seems pleased with the way things are going. Size isn’t everything, according to him. The “big thing” has lost a lot of its mass. That’s a good thing. And, while early on everything seemed fine with my lymph nodes, by the time this show was on the road there were two enlarged ones. He can’t feel one of them at all anymore and the other is much smaller. Nothing definite has been decided about maintenance. Any way you look at it, it looks like that’s going to involve some kind of medication with side effects that sound problematic. I guess there’s no point in worrying too much about that just yet.

The septic tank got cleaned out at just over double what we’d figured it would cost. Sounds about right. Still, we learned that ours is a fiberglass tank, which is a good thing. It means it’s ok that we chose to have it cleaned out rather than replace it. Or something. Some people fantasize about yachts and villas. I fantasize about living in a condo. Home ownership is the pits if you’re not rich or handy. Renting is not an answer, at least in this area. So what it amounts to is that these days, when I fantasize, I fantasize about a compromise.

Here’s what I love about the internets: almost everything. When I was getting settled into my blogger blog, I was clicking on that Next Blog thing and came across Stef Zucconi’s Famous for 15 Megapixels. I blogrolled it right away. Stef and I don’t have a lot in common. He’s younger and he’s a Londoner and his life is clearly a world apart from mine. I rarely fail to find it interesting, though. It’s well written and Stef’s takes on things always seem worth reading to me. My other blog gradually got very political, although that was not really my original intent. I started this one for the personal stuff and blogrolled Stef’s blog here, too.

After reading his latest post, I was wandering through his blogroll and found eggsbaconchipsandbeans. This is one of the truly great blogs. It’s by a Russell Davies and he devotedly, lovingly and enthusiastically reviews cafes and their eggs, bacon, chips and beans wherever he can. With pictures. And intense appreciation for detail. Talk about opening up the world. Sure, I’ve heard of beans and toast. Never seen them, but I think they’ve come up in Agatha Christie novels and may have been mentioned somewhere in an article about the Beatles I once read. And every schoolchild knows that what we in the USA call French Fries are chips in the UK. And what we call chips are crisps. I knew all that. I’m not totally without sophistication when it comes to international cuisine. But I was ignorant of eggs, bacon, chips and beans as a meal.

I could talk to you about knishes, pizza or egg creams all night, but where I come from, the way you eat eggs is with your choice of meat- bacon, ham, sausage or Canadian bacon - hash browns or homefries and toast. You may choose to forgo the meat and the occasional maverick will have steak and eggs. Eggs themselves can be done any style. The menu tells you so. Usually, though, they’re ordered sunnyside up, over easy or scrambled. That’s the way we do it in the metroplitan area of NY. The way you eat beans is with franks. Eggs and beans never meet at all. So this was truly educational. It’s the next best thing to being there.

This is the kind of thing that the internet does so well. You can pick up travel guides and learn about four and five star restaurants and you might be alerted to small cafes along the way, as a matter of necessity and budget. Magazines will report on all the foodie trends. It takes the internet to get comprehensive coverage of a single basic breakfast.

Yesterday went downhill fast, or so it seemed. Tuesday’s the day to meet with the radiologist/oncologist so he can see how I’m doing. Once again, he was less than pleased. He felt that the “big thing”, which is a tumor-like mass of tissue on what was once my waist hadn’t shrunk. At about the halfway mark, that wasn’t good. Now it had shrunk in diameter, but I could see it didn’t look like something that was halfway gone. He said maybe they’d have to add more sessions of radiation and I should talk to the dermatologist about other treatments for it. A few extra radiation sessions certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I was just generally bummed about the whole idea that maybe the radiation wasn’t working. In addition to that, two new spots popped up over the weekend, just outside the area of radiation. I hit them with cortisone cream as soon at they appeared and they’ve retreated considerably but it’s another thing to take up with the dermatologist. Good thing I’m seeing him tomorrow.

After treatment it was bloodwork day, so I went off and got that done, and then sort of limped home. To find the basement under water. We’d just been deciding whether to save up a bit and replace our thirty-something year old septic system or just to have it cleaned out thoroughly. The cleaning would cost at least a quarter of what replacement would cost, so it wasn’t a no brainer, even though we didn’t have the money to replace everything at hand. Until yesterday. After some phone consultations with other family members, we arranged for cleaning. No time for saving, or to have someone start a replacement job.

At dinner, my mother looked up and, appropos of nothing, asked, “Have I been going to work?” and then, “I’m confused. Do I still work?” Not in years and years. That’s one of those uh-oh moments. It’s qualitatively different from asking me a few times daily if I’m going to work today, and having me explain, each time, that I’m home for several weeks. Those are the short term memory issues. Remembering her own retirement is another kettle of braincells altogether.

Later on I noticed that the “big thing” that the doctor was unhappy with had changed color. It was distinctly darker and redder than earlier in the day. That doesn’t sound so good, but it seemed to mean it had ratcheted up its response to radiation, so I was not unhappy to see it. This morning, I got up and it had shrunk by a visible percentage overnight, as if in response to the doctor’s disapproval.

Now it’s time to see what today might hold.

Last night I was wandering around awake for a few hours. I think I’m sort of getting back on track. But it seemed like a good idea to do something mindless. Anything requiring thought really wasn’t an option. So I decided to see what Google Earth was all about. I’ve been kind of seeing posts about it out of the corner of my mind’s eye recently. My attention was on other things and I didn’t think much about it until I happened on a blog post late last night. I visited the site and it did sound kind of intriguing. I don’t have any important uses for it, so I downloaded the free version. If you r computer has the requirements, you’ve got to get it. It’s fantastic. My favorite part is the way you “fly” from one location to another. I just took a flight across the Atlantic. Last night I zoomed in on the precise club that my son’s band was playing in, in Raleigh, North Carolina. I also learned that the people who are in my old house put in a pool.

There is no privacy anymore. The whole world can see your backyard. Not much you can do about it, but keep it in mind. With the free version you can’t really go as far as to see people. You can see cars, though, but no detail. I don’t know if the paid versions will show a lot more. Maybe. Anyway, since it’s here, you might as well play. And keep covered up in the backyard. Just in case.

All of life’s a circle, they say. When you’re a baby you need naps, often don’t sleep through the night and any little discomfort makes sleep impossible to come by until exhaustion overwhelms everything else. Well, in middle age - here we are again. I would have been a world class sleeper from my youth until about age forty or so, if only they’d given out prizes for it. I could sleep through anything. Somewhere along the line, like many women in my age group, I lost the ability to sleep through the night. At about the same time, I developed the propensity to doze off in the early part of the afternoon. It’s unfortunate that I’m almost never in a convenient situation for a nap at that time. I’m usually at my desk at work on weekdays or out in the car doing errands on the weekend. Normally, I get up a few times a night, but it’s brief. I’m still great at going to sleep. It’s staying there that’s become a problem. Tonight, I’m uncomfortable. Not miserable, nor in any real pain. Just uncomfortable and sleep is eluding me altogether.

I’ve completed seven full days of radiation, which makes me about a third of the way through. I think things are going according to plan. I see the radiologist/oncologist once a week, on Tuesday. He wasn’t thrilled this first time, because he felt that my clothes were irritating the only seriously raised area that I’ve got. It’s in a very inconvenient place. Right on the side of where my waist used to be. I made some adjustments. I pulled out a bunch of pairs of soft baggy pants that I never wear but haven’t thrown out either. I put my jeans away for the duration. I even ordered three dresses. To the best of my recollection, I haven’t worn a dress since my granddaughter’s christening, which was just over eleven years ago. I’ve had pants outfits for any weddings I’ve attended in the interim. I wasn’t even sure what size dress to order, but to tell the truth, shopping and trying things on kind of wears me out right now, and anyway, there’s not a lot of choices left in the stores when it comes to summer clothes. I definitely don’t have the kind of energy it takes to search out clearance racks in store after store. So, I found three on the internet and measured myself to pick a size. We’ll see how that worked out in a couple of days. All of them look casual, comfy and roomy enough not to bother the sensitive spot. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get used to dresses. Not to the point of wearing them during seasons that require pantyhose, though. I’m not going back there for anything.

I think the kinder, gentler treatment is paying off already, though. The area in question is shrinking in diameter, at least. However, it was perfectly well expected that it would get a little uncomfortable before it gets better. It has and I can’t find a position to sleep in for long. So here I sit. Not sleeping because of a minor discomfort. That never would have happened when I was thirty-five.

I got to talking to a woman as we both waited for radiation treatment today. I see her there most every day. You can tell she’s been through chemo by the head covering she wears every day. Every situation has its own chitchat. The small talk in this waiting room usually starts with asking how many treatments a person has, what point they’re at in treatment and whether there has been or will be chemo or surgery. It’s a given that everyone has some sort of cancer, but it seems to be left to the individual to volunteer what type they have. That’s a question that’s rarely asked.

It turns out this woman has lung cancer, and had a tumor in her brain as well. Surgery, chemo and radiation seem to be holding the brain tumor at bay, but the lung has another spot. Her doctor isn’t recommending surgery for that. He’s concerned about her ability to withstand the recovery, given all she’s already been through and apparently the type she has will come back even after surgery. She’s going to get this radiation and if that doesn’t work, then more chemo. She’s on oral chemo now. Then she’ll see. She might opt for surgery later on anyway.

It would be understandable if the picture you have in your mind now is of an almost skeletal, frail looking person, but that’s not the case. She looks healthy, except for the telltale headscarf. She must be at least fifty and her face is relatively unlined. Her color is good. Her expression is pleasant. She told me that most of her family is living with her at the moment. It’s not unlike my own, including a sister and adult children. They’re helping to pay the mortgage. She would have lost the house otherwise. She’s on SSI, which pays her $900 dollars a month. Out of that, she has to give $200 to Medicaid. She wishes she could work, even part time. She says she thinks it would help her mental state. She used to work eighty hours a week at two jobs when she was well. You could see that she raised her kids mostly on her own. I asked, given her work history, why she wasn’t getting SSD, which pays more, but the reason is simple. She’d make too much money to get Medicaid and not enough to pay for medical insurance. There’s a two year wait to get Medicare when you’re on SSD and even then, it might not cover everything. She can’t afford a high enough income to live on. Now that’s a system for you.

As matter of factly as you might say that you hope to work at a job for a given number of years or discuss any other practicality, she said, “I just want five more years. My youngest son will be twenty-five then. I think that’s old enough so he’d be OK, don’t you?” She said this with no hint of self-pity, or even sadness. I hope she gets a lot more than that. I hope she gets to see her grandchildren grow up.

Today was nothing like yesterday. I can’t exactly figure it out. I went for treatment - same time every day. Tuesday is my day to meet with the radiologist/oncologist, and then off for blood tests, which are both once a week deals. Yesterday I went straight home and collapsed. Today, I had to drive several extra miles to the lab for the bloodwork. I got home a lot later. I rested for a short time and felt fine. Did laundry, made dinner, cleaned it all up, even heaved some stuff around in the basement. I guess the current plan is to do things when I can and not count on being able to do things at a particular time. That way, anything that gets accomplished is gravy.

As a direct result of this intermittent exhaution, I’m experiencing something very novel in a good way. Too bad it’s temporary. It’s the odd sensation of not being in a hurry. As I was driving the ten miles or so to the lab, I didn’t feel the need to pass any but the very slowest moving vehicles. I didn’t check the clock much. It didn’t matter what time it was. This was going to take as long as it was going to take and no one was really expecting me to show up for duty at a specific time. The knot in my stomach that tells me I’m cutting things close was conspicuous by its absence. I could get used to this, but I’d better not.

It’s not like vacation. My vacations are usually a source of stress just as much as enjoyment. That week off here and there seems too precious to waste even a minute of it. There’s always a backlog of tasks and then you want to fit in some fun. Fun becomes an item to be checked off just like everything else. No, this is entirely different. Not knowing ahead of time how I’m going to be feeling, that half a day of free time that’s left over after treatment doesn’t loom as something that must be filled in a particular way. I can’t plan to cram it full because that would probably be counterproductive. It’s not about goofing off either. If I can get something done, I will. It’s just an absence of pressure.

Since getting used to it would just lead to a nasty readjustment to the real world in a few weeks, I’m going to try to savor it instead.

Oh…this is going to be a bumpy ride. This fatigue thing..kicking my butt. I hope it’s not like this every day, but today I didn’t do a thing except go to treatment and come home. I was down for the count until 7 PM. I’d been home since about noon. I’m going to have to make some mental adjustments about just what I can do during this time. Take-out food is looming large in the immediate future, too. I just wish there were more kinds of it readily available.