24 Hour Party People

On milestones.

I talked to an old friend the other day, actually my oldest friend—the best man at my wedding, someone I’ve known since fifth grade. We’d grown apart since before the pandemic, and it’d been years since we last spoke. I can’t remember why, and the fact that I can’t means it’s probably my fault. But some cheeky texts got us talking again, and then, finally, a phone call. He’d fallen on hard times but was turning a corner. I’d fallen on hard times but was turning a corner. When we were 11, we’d huddle around his multidisc CD stereo and blast “When It’s Love” off Van Halen’s OU812.

Twelve or so hours earlier, my dog Marshall got sick. We’d been to dog beach—his favorite place ever, going back to when I first got him. Back then, in San Francisco, the spot was Fort Funston, a cliffside beach that stretched south from the city along PCH. When we’d take him there, he’d pursue his two favorite activities: provoking other dogs into chasing him, and rolling around in dead things. A seal carcass, a decomposing seagull—we’d catch him rolling and run over to shoo him away, but it was always too late: The dead thing would imbue him with a dark energy, and he’d bounce up as if jolted, eyes wild, smelling of putrescence, then fly off in a new direction, looking for something to chase him.  

But that’s in the past—Marshall’s 19^th birthday was last week. He’s lost a step or two, but he still loves dead and otherwise rotten stuff, and must have gotten into some of it during this most recent beach trip, something even a dog’s stomach couldn’t handle, because his started gurgling in the middle of the night, like a science experiment. He whimpered, wandered in circles, threw up. I held him and rocked him and cried, because these days, when something like this happens at his age, I worry it might be the end. I stayed up with him, gave him pain medication, stroked his head as he stared off into the distance. Eventually he drank some water and started to relax, and so did I, and we both fell asleep. The next day he was fine.

I told my friend about the cancer, the whole story—the initial twinge of pain, my trip to the ER, taking morphine and other hard drugs for the first time since getting sober. I told him about our miscarriage, about our subsequent pregnancy, the timing of the various bits of news. It was like a stand-up being told they had 10 minutes to fill instead of their usual 40—what were the most important beats to hit? It was hard enough just getting on the phone for the first time in all these years; I didn’t want to dominate the entire conversation.

You know what else is happening? It’s spring, which means my garden is fully planted—four tomatoes, two cucumbers, three different kinds of beans, a pepper plant, spaghetti squash, some broccoli, a blueberry bush, several different herbs. On most days, I’ll take our daughter out there and we’ll walk around and have a conversation about how each plant is doing. See the nectarines, just starting to bud? See how the squash is shooting out vines to climb up its trellis? Someone recently told me this presages longevity, the gardening thing. My daughter likes the feel of leaves in her hands, will grab and scrunch and tear them. She’ll be starting solid foods soon, and when she does the nectarines should be ready. Can babies have nectarines? One more thing I need to look up.

At some point, talking to my friend, I realized: Oh shit, all of this happened exactly one year ago. Here I was pushing the stroller around our neighborhood, explaining it all the morning after staying up all night worrying about Marshall. And it hit me that it’d been one year since my diagnosis, one year since I went into that ER, one year since all of it, or some of it, or the start of one piece of it. 

“Damn,” I said.

“Damn,” my friend said.

They couldn’t tell us much at that point, I explained. There were masses, several of them, the composition and severity TBD. A couple days later one of the oncologists used the word “aggressive.”

“I can’t imagine how you went through all that,” my friend said.

I told him, and I’m sorry for the cliché, that the only option was to take it one day at a time.

The day Marshall got sick—it was our daughter’s first day at the beach, the first time her feet ever touched the pacific ocean. The water was cold and she didn’t seem to care for it, but she did enjoy lying on the blanket in the shade, cooing and cackling with mommy as daddy ran the dogs back and forth. What’s hard to wrap my head around is that last October, when I wrote a post just like the one you’re reading, about millstones, about gardening, our daughter wasn’t here. But also, she was: her soul, or whatever you choose to call this light that is now fully turned on, beaming back at us, smiling constantly, laughing constantly, reaching for the leaves on the nectarine tree, reaching for everything, really, a toy, the dogs’ hair, our faces, eager to touch and feel everything—this person who has appeared, slowly and then all at once, she was already there, somehow. It’s like Joe says: “The first time I saw you, I felt like I’d seen you before.”

In AA we mark milestones with chips, little flimsy tokens. Stay sober thirty days? Great, take a chip. Sixty days? Fantastic, here’s a chip. Ninety? Now you’re cooking, here’s a chip. Certainly there’s significance to each milestone. Ninety days shows a level of commitment; six months and you’ve maybe learned a few things. A year? That’s huge. Two, three…you get the idea. I have a whole stack of chips in a drawer somewhere, everyone I’ve ever been given, except one. That’d be the 24-hour chip I received on my first day sober, given to me by a total stranger, from his own pocket, the chip he'd carried around with him for who knows how long, just so he could someday give it to someone like me, without even knowing whether I’d make it another 24 hours. I imagine he could have given that chip to any number of newcomers at any number of meetings, but he gave it to me. Turns out I’d make it seven years and counting. 

But that chip’s not in the drawer. It was stolen one night when our car was broken into, because for some dumb reason I stored it in a bag of change we used for parking meters. I’d trade all my other chips to get that one back. 24 hours. I tell folks all the time: It’s the only chip that matters.  

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