I’ve spent a large chunk of this blog, in the past months, explaining various kinds of fear and pain. Let me try now to explain, somehow, the other end of the spectrum. Let me try to explain how good I’m feeling these days, and why I had to have a little party at my house on Saturday, with loud music and lots of drink and cars parked up and down the block.
I’m feeling very good. Frighteningly good. I have been going around laughing and looking into my friends’ eyes and telling them I love them, and so forth. I’m probably scaring people. I want to go dancing. I want to drink exotic shooters with silly names. I’m just feeling intensely alive. Life is very good, and it is of finite duration, and I am going to try not to waste it just driving back and forth through suburbia. I am still working out the implications of that. And recently, I had felt such an intense, almost physical, need to have a party that we did.
We can’t blame medication. I’m not taking any wacky drugs right now. Part of it is probably just not feeling bad any more. When you’ve been feeling as bad as I was during chemo, not feeling bad any more feels pretty damn good! But what I’ve got is more than just the opposite of feeling crappy. It’s tipped over into borderline euphoria. There is just something uniquely exhilarating about thinking you are about to be dead, but finding yourself alive, instead.
It’s Biblical. It says in Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance. Well, this is the time to dance, if I can find someone to dance with me.
It’s also like the parable of the lost coin, where the woman has ten coins and loses one, and cleans house until she finds it, and then invites all her neighbors to party with her. Only, in my case, it wasn’t a coin I had lost; it was almost my life.
I can only remember one other incident in my whole life that gave me this same sort of giddiness that not dying of cancer has given me. It was maybe twenty years ago, before kids and domesticity. Even then, John was already a poobah with the World Bank. I was accompanying him on a business trip around east Africa and southern Africa; at this point, we had flown from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Lilongwe, Malawi. We were going to rent a car and drive the long way to Blantyre, where John had World Bank business to attend to. We were going to take one day first and drive through the middle of absolutely nowhere so I could see Lake Malawi, which I had read about, and maybe go fishing there.
This was back during the reign of President-for-Life Hastings Banda, and Malawi was seriously messed up. It was one of the poorest places in the world. This is the only place I have ever seen starving children. This is the only place where you would see women dressed in shirts and skirts with Banda’s face printed all over them. And it is the only place, where, although my husband was a big shot with the World Bank, and a delegation of dignitaries had come to meet our plane and escort him through the V.I.P. lounge at the international airport, I was stopped. I was not allowed to leave the V.I.P. lounge because I was wearing a Hilary-Clinton-style linen pantsuit, with trousers, in a country where women were not allowed to wear trousers of any description. (John adds that one of his Japanese colleagues was also stopped and made to have a haircut, since his hair actually touched his shirt collar.)
You can imagine what level attitude problem I quickly developed. I am not a dress-wearing person in the most normal situations, much less when I am about to go driving through the African backcountry to a fishing spot. And never before had I personally been on the receiving end of what felt like a human-rights violation. But they told me that if I left the V.I.P. lounge in trousers, I would be arrested. Fuming and humiliated, I dug through my luggage. By the grace of God, I had a cotton skirt in my suitcase, and I put it on and was released by the very relieved local official who had detained me. This all took some time.
So I was in a floaty skirt, but still loaded for bear, a couple hours later when we wrecked our car.
We were driving along, as fast as you could go on that African dirt road, maybe 40 mph, when suddenly the road wasn’t there. A bridge was completely washed out, and utterly unmarked. We went headfirst over the edge. In the sort of superhuman-strength-moment you read about in the National Enquirer, John, who was driving, braced himself with one hand. He put his other arm out and kept my head from going through the windshield.
The car landed nose-down, in the bottom of the riverbed. The riverbed was nearly dry. I don’t remember getting out of the car. The only blood we could find anywhere was John’s, where every nail on one of my hands had dug into his outstretched arm. (He still has the scars, twenty years later.)
This was before cell phones. We were in the middle of nowhere with our car at a 90-degree angle with reality. And then, out of the maize fields a farmer and his whole extended family materialized, like a host of angels. They did not speak English. We did not speak Chichewa. But quicker than you could believe, they organized themselves into a human crane and together we bodily lifted our car up and put it back onto the road
I was in shock. I don’t remember trying to thank them; I don’t remember giving them any money. I am sure we did both. I do remember giving our only food, half a package of Romany Creams, to some of the children, and a fistfight broke out over the crumbs.
We had to turn back. We limped into the city. Miraculously, we did not run out of gas. By the time we got there it was dark. We found a room in the fancy expats’ hotel. We were ravenous; we went to the hotel restaurant to have something to eat. I don’t remember what we ate, but I bet I ordered a steak. I hope we got drunk later and had a crazy night of passion, but I don’t remember and neither does John. I remember what the restaurant looked like. And I remember laughing.
I had looked down, in that fancy restaurant, and noticed there was black grease from the car all over my only skirt.
“I messed up my skirt when we picked up the car out of the river,” I said, and that struck me as hugely funny.
I started laughing. We both started laughing. Laughing until we couldn’t breathe. Laughing until people stared and shook their heads at the loud Americans. People thought we were drunk, and we were thinking, you have no idea. We thought we were going to die, and here we are, eating a steak. We thought we were going to die, but here we are, just laughing and laughing.
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