The sort of item Herb Caen used to label “Only in San Francisco”: When I called to reserve a cab for Peggy last night and I gave the driver the address on Tiffany Street he said, “Is that ‘Epiphany’?”
“Tiffany,” I said, “like the jewelers.”
When I told Peg she laughed and said, “That’s the sort of thing that would sound false if you put in a short story.” Right. Like so much of what happens to us in life – really? Isn’t that just pushing it a bit, buddy?
Taking Franny to college last week would have been quite enough for one movie, or story, a truly bittersweet experience of feeling pride and a sense of accomplishment for getting her to a good college (Reed) and the dread of letting her go, of returning to the empty nest, of having days formerly built around her now rudderless. So how inappropriate, in the everything happens at once sense to get a call from Adam and John E saying they had just had their visit with the oncologist in San Francisco and Adam’s first round of chemo was scheduled for Monday.
I mean, come on, life: Choose a lane.
Fortunately I had been planning on being with him while he underwent chemotherapy and had put feelers out looking for a place. The flight attendant with the apartment on Tiffany was accommodating, as she has been since first we talked, and made haste to get her stuff out of this apartment and into her new one before I arrived Sunday. (Part of her kindness is due to having lost her husband to lung cancer four years ago.) And thanks to Irene, which cancelled all flights to the east coast anyway, Peg detoured here for a few days with me and is only now on her way to the airport and back to NY to face the empty nest without me…
The good news is that this round of chemo will probably be the only one; in what they call prophylactic treatment (which always makes Adam laugh) they gave him one cycle of carboplatin yesterday while he sat in a barcolounger in the infusion center SF General, and I sat in a vacant one across from him, answering my email. Adam has been nervous about the whole procedure, as I would be, and I think may have felt it was all a bit anticlimactic. We were out by lunch time and he was here on Tiffany in the afternoon, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and waiting for the side effects – nausea, inertia, hair loss.
In the meanwhile, I am working from my temporary outpost, catching up with Real Eats editorial (already a day behind), trying to finish a screenplay, revising a collection of stories my agent thought needed tweaking, and getting back to the Derrick Ashong project that has been in limbo since the Arab spring began, along with his new job at Al Jazeera English. The new editor at Hyperion wrote just before I came to SF wanting to know what was happening. Good question, buddy.
Peg and I went up to the Colombia Gorge after dropping Franny and took a couple of day hikes in the shadow of Mt. Hood. Though we had found what looked like a good loop in a guide book in Hood River, a park service ranger gave us an even better one when we stopped for our day pass, one that included two waterfalls and fields of wild flowers and more silence that you’ll find in heaven. Leaving the ranger station with our new directions I said, “I have always depended on the kindness of rangers.” You couldn’t put that in a story either.