a horse of a different color
Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night, wrote "a horse of the same color," meaning the same matter rather than a different one. But by the mid-1800s, the phrase was used to point out difference rather than likeness.
The horse of a different color was also the horse who drew the carriage containing Dorothy and friends as they entered Emerald City in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. The horse would change its color from time to time, and apparently four horses were used to create the effect, because it took too long to completely scrub one horse and then re-color it for the scene. The APSCA would not allow the horses to be dyed with chemicals, so they were painted with lemon, cherry and grape flavored powdered gelatin to create the colors. Apparently the horses tried to lick their own coats between takes--which if you think about what gelatin is, makes the whole thing surreal and a little revolting, given a horse's predilection for grass and grain.
Of course, a horse of a different color is an idiom, too--something completely different, or separate, especially in comparison to something else. As in, I thought I ordered chicken, but they brought shrimp, which is a horse of a different color. Or, I thought I understood what having cancer was like, but then I started chemo, and that is a horse of a different color.
I met Gail at the very first metastatic support group I attended and I almost didn't go back. She was furious. She raged about the poison they were pumping in our bodies. She was nearly sick unto death of being sick unto death. She scared me. She was my future but I didn't know that as well then. I think I probably thought, oh, well, now. I mean, none of us would be here without pharmaceuticals, would we? I didn't know what it was like to lay on the cold bathroom floor in the night while my family slept, throwing up over and over again, head spinning, weeping in some unholy mix of nausea and fear and dread that this is now it. This is now the price of admission.
Gail was a complete love, as it turns out--furious and calling it like it was and did not have anything but curse words for anyone trying to paint a pink, self-empowerment journey onto the anguish of losing the things she loved most--her family, her family, her family. She smoked until the end--defiantly, tan, her nails done--she called you sweetheart and honey and it felt like recognition, it felt like home. I owe Gail an apology for whatever stupid thing I thought when she expressed her holy anger. I owe her an apology for seeing her as stranger when she was family. I confessed this to the group the other day--for of course, Gail died--and they teased me, telling me she is laughing at me somewhere.
These days are all horses of a different color for all of us, I know. We have taken to getting up at 7:30, 8 am. Why not? We have no commute to beat, no school, no camp, no places to be, no people to see. It's harder to measure out the days and nights, and June drifted into July. I don't like that much free-floating time. I need markers to set off my Tuesdays from Saturdays and I am trying to frame my time differently these days so the summer doesn't float away. Now I have chemo every three weeks, which takes me out for the count for four or five days every twenty-one days already--the endless float.
I sleep the dissatisfied sleep of the sick person--never enough, always easy to fall back into resting position. The boys snuggle in to me when I appear--they completely accept where I am, tucking into my body, reading, playing their games at my side. My older children come by and sit on the back porch and front porch, telling me their stories, listening to mine. My mother comes for coffee most mornings--I try to make pancakes for my dad and mom once a week--if I am up to it. We are trying out different recipes--buttermilk, granola, cornmeal, pumpkin.
Friends drop off dinner twice a week and I'm so grateful. Delicious Asian shredded pork for tortillas with tangy slaw, Mexican food from the place down the street--grilled corn tortillas with beans and chicken, homemade barbequed chicken hot off the grill. My children devour the food--sometimes me too. I'm so relieved not to have to think about that meal that evening.
And then a tiny miracle. Without going into too much science (remember me? I asked out of how many when they said stage four)--it turns out that a biopsy from weeks ago turned up a particular genetic mutation that is rare at this stage. There is an FDA approved medicine we can try using in an off-label way once the cancer mutates around the chemo I am currently one. Will it work? Don't know. What would it mean if it worked? Maybe another year? Maybe more time for someone to figure out the next thing? This is the whack-a-mole stage of cancer--it turns out there actually are many, many more stages to cancer than four. But it was a nice little piece of good news, of a sort--like a popsicle after a hard bike ride. Even if the mutation doesn't turn into time (the magic equation, I suppose, with a nod to your willingness to pay whatever the price of admission is), I think my doctor has an extra reason to pay attention to my case. I told him I would edit his case report and hopefully can sneak in a little poetry.
And in the bigger world. I feel the despair and angst and anger and violence and peace and guilt and denial all tapping at the window. I look outside and see my pretty signs in my pretty, pretty yard: black lives matter sign, a gay pride flag, horses of a different color poster--virtue signaling, one child might say. Signaling alliance, another child might say. I read and read and read--isn't that what I always do? Reading is the key that unlocks the world for me--always has been--but what does it mean to weep for my sins from the cold floor of the bathroom while the poison courses through me? I can't imagine something much more ineffectual. I talk with the youngest kids and I see how time works for them--it did for me too, once, in that way where history is forever ago, and death even farther away. Slavery was a closed book--something that happened in a distant past. Like King Arthur. Or the Holocaust. All just: long ago. When people were different? Maybe. That's what I told myself or what was told to me and I believed it, until reading, and teachers, and experience opened my eyes and I learned, in whatever ways I could, that history was now, that the web of history is the same web we have built the foundation of the right now on.
And the mother in me. Imagining my every-woman-name being called as my child's breath was taken away from him. Is it maudlin? Is it excusable for me to ache with that referred pain? And the flitting bird of anxiety when I myself cannot get enough oxygen--and I'm not in danger, just flirting with the idea of being in danger, and it's a threat unlike pain because it cannot be negotiated. You cannot escape by losing consciousness, because that path does not come back.
I want to believe in words because I am so tired and I don't know what to do and being sick myself is no kind of excuse for not paying attention. I know how to vote. I know how to argue. I know how to listen. I know how to read. I don't know what to say but that won't stop me from saying, apologizing, shifting, relearning, saying again. And I can only do that by engaging in profound listening--to the swirl of words available right now: in poems, in books, in articles, sometimes in the most surprising places, in music, in video.
"The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed"--Joel Thompson, composer--Eugene Rogers director of choirs at University of Michigan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNXoqNuLRQ
The horse of a different color was also the horse who drew the carriage containing Dorothy and friends as they entered Emerald City in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. The horse would change its color from time to time, and apparently four horses were used to create the effect, because it took too long to completely scrub one horse and then re-color it for the scene. The APSCA would not allow the horses to be dyed with chemicals, so they were painted with lemon, cherry and grape flavored powdered gelatin to create the colors. Apparently the horses tried to lick their own coats between takes--which if you think about what gelatin is, makes the whole thing surreal and a little revolting, given a horse's predilection for grass and grain.
Of course, a horse of a different color is an idiom, too--something completely different, or separate, especially in comparison to something else. As in, I thought I ordered chicken, but they brought shrimp, which is a horse of a different color. Or, I thought I understood what having cancer was like, but then I started chemo, and that is a horse of a different color.
I met Gail at the very first metastatic support group I attended and I almost didn't go back. She was furious. She raged about the poison they were pumping in our bodies. She was nearly sick unto death of being sick unto death. She scared me. She was my future but I didn't know that as well then. I think I probably thought, oh, well, now. I mean, none of us would be here without pharmaceuticals, would we? I didn't know what it was like to lay on the cold bathroom floor in the night while my family slept, throwing up over and over again, head spinning, weeping in some unholy mix of nausea and fear and dread that this is now it. This is now the price of admission.
Gail was a complete love, as it turns out--furious and calling it like it was and did not have anything but curse words for anyone trying to paint a pink, self-empowerment journey onto the anguish of losing the things she loved most--her family, her family, her family. She smoked until the end--defiantly, tan, her nails done--she called you sweetheart and honey and it felt like recognition, it felt like home. I owe Gail an apology for whatever stupid thing I thought when she expressed her holy anger. I owe her an apology for seeing her as stranger when she was family. I confessed this to the group the other day--for of course, Gail died--and they teased me, telling me she is laughing at me somewhere.
These days are all horses of a different color for all of us, I know. We have taken to getting up at 7:30, 8 am. Why not? We have no commute to beat, no school, no camp, no places to be, no people to see. It's harder to measure out the days and nights, and June drifted into July. I don't like that much free-floating time. I need markers to set off my Tuesdays from Saturdays and I am trying to frame my time differently these days so the summer doesn't float away. Now I have chemo every three weeks, which takes me out for the count for four or five days every twenty-one days already--the endless float.
I sleep the dissatisfied sleep of the sick person--never enough, always easy to fall back into resting position. The boys snuggle in to me when I appear--they completely accept where I am, tucking into my body, reading, playing their games at my side. My older children come by and sit on the back porch and front porch, telling me their stories, listening to mine. My mother comes for coffee most mornings--I try to make pancakes for my dad and mom once a week--if I am up to it. We are trying out different recipes--buttermilk, granola, cornmeal, pumpkin.
Friends drop off dinner twice a week and I'm so grateful. Delicious Asian shredded pork for tortillas with tangy slaw, Mexican food from the place down the street--grilled corn tortillas with beans and chicken, homemade barbequed chicken hot off the grill. My children devour the food--sometimes me too. I'm so relieved not to have to think about that meal that evening.
And then a tiny miracle. Without going into too much science (remember me? I asked out of how many when they said stage four)--it turns out that a biopsy from weeks ago turned up a particular genetic mutation that is rare at this stage. There is an FDA approved medicine we can try using in an off-label way once the cancer mutates around the chemo I am currently one. Will it work? Don't know. What would it mean if it worked? Maybe another year? Maybe more time for someone to figure out the next thing? This is the whack-a-mole stage of cancer--it turns out there actually are many, many more stages to cancer than four. But it was a nice little piece of good news, of a sort--like a popsicle after a hard bike ride. Even if the mutation doesn't turn into time (the magic equation, I suppose, with a nod to your willingness to pay whatever the price of admission is), I think my doctor has an extra reason to pay attention to my case. I told him I would edit his case report and hopefully can sneak in a little poetry.
And in the bigger world. I feel the despair and angst and anger and violence and peace and guilt and denial all tapping at the window. I look outside and see my pretty signs in my pretty, pretty yard: black lives matter sign, a gay pride flag, horses of a different color poster--virtue signaling, one child might say. Signaling alliance, another child might say. I read and read and read--isn't that what I always do? Reading is the key that unlocks the world for me--always has been--but what does it mean to weep for my sins from the cold floor of the bathroom while the poison courses through me? I can't imagine something much more ineffectual. I talk with the youngest kids and I see how time works for them--it did for me too, once, in that way where history is forever ago, and death even farther away. Slavery was a closed book--something that happened in a distant past. Like King Arthur. Or the Holocaust. All just: long ago. When people were different? Maybe. That's what I told myself or what was told to me and I believed it, until reading, and teachers, and experience opened my eyes and I learned, in whatever ways I could, that history was now, that the web of history is the same web we have built the foundation of the right now on.
And the mother in me. Imagining my every-woman-name being called as my child's breath was taken away from him. Is it maudlin? Is it excusable for me to ache with that referred pain? And the flitting bird of anxiety when I myself cannot get enough oxygen--and I'm not in danger, just flirting with the idea of being in danger, and it's a threat unlike pain because it cannot be negotiated. You cannot escape by losing consciousness, because that path does not come back.
I want to believe in words because I am so tired and I don't know what to do and being sick myself is no kind of excuse for not paying attention. I know how to vote. I know how to argue. I know how to listen. I know how to read. I don't know what to say but that won't stop me from saying, apologizing, shifting, relearning, saying again. And I can only do that by engaging in profound listening--to the swirl of words available right now: in poems, in books, in articles, sometimes in the most surprising places, in music, in video.
"The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed"--Joel Thompson, composer--Eugene Rogers director of choirs at University of Michigan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNXoqNuLRQ
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