Suspicious Densities and my friend Jane

Jane

Sally

I first met Jane in 1993, when she and her husband moved to Omaha. We couldn't have more different backgrounds, but we are very similar, too. She is from New York City, and comfortable with all the sophistication that implies. I am a midwestern girl, a former California hippie, and more comfortable with beer than wine.

Jane comes from a large Sicilian American emotionally expansive and expressive family of people, probably Democrats. I come from a large family too, German Anglo Saxons who while loving, are, well, quieter about it, and Republicans.

We are both decidedly right-brained, mildly dyslexic, stubborn Tauruses...both married to Gemini men. We are both writers, cooks (although she really can cook), and artists. We like to talk (and talk, and talk; her husband calls it "flappin' "). We are both tenacious, focused, and rabidly feminist... We met at a chapter meeting of the local N.O.W. chapter.

Shortly before I met Jane, her best friend, Jeanette, died, after a difficult struggle with cancer. The person Jane is has been shaped by the death of her friend. I got to know Jeanette through listening to Jane's stories. I learned to love her too. She was a May baby, like Jane and me, passionate and tenacious. While Jane mourned the loss of her friend, I mourned never having known this remarkable woman.

Jane and her husband moved away from Omaha and now live in the Washington D.C. area. While we don't talk (and talk, and talk) like we used to, we have never lost touch, and I still consider her a "best" friend.

A few years ago, she sent me a copy of a short story she wrote about her own cancer scare, called Suspicious Densities. She has since turned it into a screenplay for a short film.

This film needs to be made, and Jane needs our help to do it.  I'll let her tell you about it herself.



I am almost 60 years old, and the longer I live, the more I am touched by cancer. A step daughter who we almost lost to Leukemia, is 20 years cancer free and now has two beautiful children of her own. A friend who is going to take off a few weeks from work, after a mammogram detected the tiniest of a stage one cancer. A sister who had a lumpectomy and a few treatments and is now fine, fine, fine.

But when I was very small, before mammograms, my mother found a lump. It could have been a death sentence, or a cyst. Only major surgery determined it was a cyst. But she didn't know until she woke up from surgery.

My messages today: face life with joy, get a mammogram, a prostate exam, whatever, and help my very talented friend Jane tell her story. You won't regret it!

Poetry Girl

Last week I was glad to receive a Christmas package from my sister. I was expecting it, and I was pretty sure I knew what was in it:  Gourmet Chipotle Pepper Olive Oil and Chocolate flavored Balsamic Vinegar. Ooh! I can't wait to cook roast pork flavored with that stuff.  But this posting, as it turns out, is not about a recipe with fancy oil and vinegar.

Because inside the package was a little book I had forgotten I ever owned.

Back in 1969, a treasured friend gave me this little journal.    From the time I received it, when I was seventeen, until the summer after I turned 21, I filled those pages with poem after poem.  I also wrote down the occasional dream, or errant thought.  Except for about 5 pages, the book is completely full.

I made a frontispiece:

"Poetry is a spontaneous overflow

of powerful feeling... it is emotion

recollected in tranquility."

- William Wordsworth

Some of the poems describe my feelings about growing up, searching for God, and boyfriends... I have read through it several times and there are a couple I really like. One in particular demonstrates the germ of the spiritual journey I was to take several years later.

It's like reaching out

but no one's there

and realizing that

that's good

because it makes me

reach in

instead..."

As I read through this little book, I am glad that I had the foresight to make some little notes, "to DJ". Or, "to A.W."  However, I'm not a hundred percent sure who some of these poems reference. Who was that boy about whom I wrote,  

  "...I cried to hear you say 

you thought I didn't love you"?

That line is the very last one written in this book.  I was 21 years old and I remember that summer so well, or I thought I did anyway. That was the summer I embarked on the spiritual journey that I would walk for the next 30 years.

I am a little sad that I stopped writing down in my little book.  I know I was writing.  Somewhere in the universe there are thousands of bits of paper with my thoughts, and feelings on them. I wish I had them on a shelf in my room. During a visit to my parents' home around the time I wrote those last words  I destroyed several volumes of journals I kept while I was at college. I felt that my personal musings of that time, while meant only for my own eyes, we're too immature, too juvenile to keep;  I was a little embarrassed when I reread them. So I destroyed them.

If I could send a message back to my 21-year-old self, I would tell her to put those notebooks back on the shelf, waaay in the back. That way, when I came back to go through my parents' belongings 30 years later, after their deaths, I could collect them and put them on my own shelf.  There they could remain for my children and grandchildren to find, after I am gone, when they pick through the detritus of my own life.

My 21-year-old self, while so wise in some ways, as some of her previous poetry indicated, really had no clue, did she?