Today I'm posting ten-year before-and-after profile pictures because they're a survival story, and I want people dealing with cancer to see this.
 
To see the woman standing behind the Ohia post that holds up her Hawai'i home, and maybe the post is holding her up too because she just had surgery, five thousand miles away from this place, and returned home changed, now a "survivor.”
 
And she's so grateful but the truth is, this early on, only weeks later, she has no idea if she'll actually survive, and she's so tired and even fragile, and it's her fifteen-year-old daughter taking the picture so she's trying to just be present and awake but she doesn't know who she is now or what life, if there will be life, will bring.
 
And she doesn't think in terms of ten years. She can't in that moment.
 
Ten years later her friend takes her profile picture and puts sparkles on it and sends it back to her and she uses it as her new profile picture because it's full of color and there's ink on her finger, which tells part of her story, and she's lived long enough to need reading glasses, and there, on her left wrist, are bracelets from Peru that tell the story of the documentary film she co-wrote with her best friend, who was there, ten years earlier, when she woke up in that Boston hospital bed.
 
And she knows she did exactly what she promised herself she would do on that once-upon-a-time metal table... right after she woke up from surgery in excruciating pain, struggling to breathe, and suddenly realizing she would have to relearn to breathe with less air... she FULLY LIVED.
 
Ten years later. 

​
​A moment in Longs Drugs in Hawai’i.
 
The cashier, a young woman who looked to be in her twenties, was having a hard time. I was returning something and exchanging it for something else, and she didn't know how to do that, or she entered it incorrectly in the cash register, and a big line was forming behind me.
 
I told her I'd come back another time, that it was no big deal, but she said she was already in the middle of the transaction and she would call a manager for an override. She did that, twice, but the manager didn't come, and the line was getting longer and longer (they were clearly short on cashiers), and she was getting upset.
 
The manager finally came and solved it, but she was thrown off by the big line that had formed. As I was gathering my stuff and the next person moved up to the register... an elderly man who had been waiting patiently... she said, "I'm sorry for the wait," and he said, "Oh, I don't mind. You're my favorite cashier!"
 
And she, visibly surprised, said, "Me?"
 
He said, "Yup. I always look for you. I always stand in your line."
 
And the whole thing turned around for her. In a second, just like that, like it had been scripted. I was so glad it took me a while to gather my stuff so I could witness this interaction before I walked out. A small act of kindness but it made her so happy, and there was a huge line at that point.
 
Kindness. Especially when someone's having a rough time.
 
All the difference. 

Two interactions today worth reporting.
 
An older woman wearing a small blue hat with a veil. In town, like that, wearing a hat that could have been part of a costume.
 
I had to go up to her to tell her that I loved her hat, because I did.
 
"It's a fascinator!" she said, beaming.
 
An elderly woman wearing a fancy hat that she loves around town.
 
I looked it up later. “A fascinator is no mere hat. It's an ornate headpiece, often decorated with flowers or feathers, and popular among royals."
 
Then, at Foodland.
 
A man who also appeared to be in his 80's or 90's, walking with a cane that looked to be made out of koa, buying an expensive bottle of wine. I was behind him in line. He saw me looking at the wine.
 
“Big date with my gal!" he said.
 
He seemed wildly happy.
 
Joy is everywhere. And it's not just for the under-eighty set.

A moment from today. At Foodland in Waimea, Hawai’i.

A stunning woman with wild, curly silver hair and chiseled features... a goddess... was standing next to me in the organic produce section. We were looking at each other.

"I'm admiring your hair," she said. "Really?’ I answered. “You're kidding. Because I was admiring yours."

We laughed.

"My hair used to be your exact color, when I was your age," she said.

I had to laugh to myself. When she was MY age. I don't know how old she thought I was, but I'm in my late fifties. I figured she might be ten or twelve years older than me, at most.

“I just turned 85, she said, and I'm not coloring it anymore."

(Knock me over with a feather. She was 85.)

"I'm embracing who I am," she went on. "I'm embracing the crone."

She said THAT. She's embracing the crone. This woman I'd never met.

(An admission)... just yesterday at the hair salon I said to Layne, who cuts my hair, that I have a thing about my hair someday turning gray. It's still red, but I know it won't stay red forever, and there's something about being associated with a color your entire life. The thought of losing the color feels bigger than just losing the color.

But this woman, today, with a mass of silver curly hair, once my "exact color"... owning that... was something for me to pay attention to.

I have a long way to go till I'm 85, if I make it to 85. A ways to go until I earn the rank of crone, those elders my friend Lisa Levart photographed so beautifully in her book, "Goddess On Earth," calling them crones as a title of honor.

In the meantime, maybe I'll color my hair someday, if I feel like it, when it turns gray... or silver, if I'm lucky.

But this woman wasn't any less colorful than me, and the only color was her lipstick. (Which was red –  almost the same color as mine.) Do you wonder if you could meet your later self? At a place as innocuous as the grocery store?

Ahh, this day. Still thinking about her, and the word "crone."

And the deeper meaning of color.

When you meet me I wonder if you notice that I am new. I am something other than I was, someone other than I was in this room before. The last time it was leaving. I was leaving this room and starting again – in a new place. With different colors and smells and ocean. Even a different ocean.

As a girl I sat on the beach wall above the gray/slate blue Atlantic. Cold. Enormous expanse of that color. And the jetties… unforgiving.

“Don’t go out on the jetties, Bethy!” my father warned me. “That’s where so and so drowned. You can never anticipate the undertow. Not in Boston. Not from the jetties…”

So I sat on that wall: neutral-colored, crumbling, graffiti-covered, “Dana & Dominick 4 eva,” and I watched the jetties, imagining a young person, a kid, like me, going out on a dare and getting sucked under. Instantly. Without a chance to remember or regret what they might have become had they not made that choice. Walking barefoot over sharp shells and disintegrated sea urchins, before the wave swept them away.

I knew, sitting on that wall, that I had drowned in a past life. Images of a boat with sails traveling from somewhere, Eastern Europe maybe, or Africa? I experienced that sensation of drowning, being engulfed by that gray/slate blue cold Atlantic. Quietly, with no one looking or sometimes not quietly, holding on to a piece of driftwood or the remnant of a sail, torn in the going down.

The act of going down.

Not as quick as the undertow of the jetty, but quick enough. Being engulfed, lungs filling with salt and cold, and of course, water.

That’s what I imagined at eleven or twelve, sitting on my private wall in Winthrop, wondering how long the Atlantic would let me live, would spare me that.

And then I left. To the Pacific. Turquoise, aqua, black and green sand beaches, or white – not gray. Rich, vibrant and even stronger, louder than the Atlantic. No Jetties but waves, big waves that can wash me onto the shore, on a boogie board probably meant for someone younger. But I need that ride, that thrill, for ten seconds, or thirty. Especially now. Holding my son’s hand as he instructs me on the art of staying on the wave.

“Mom! Turn around… here it comes, go! Go now mom! Don’t miss it!”

I ride in on that wave with my son and his friend Brian or Casey or Andrew. I am the mom on the boogie board, trying to eek out more time. Trying to ride over what happened. Trying to stay with my boy before the Hapuna Beach waves – angry in winter, unpredictable – before they pull us apart and I am pushing against the current to get back to my son.

“Sean! You’re too close to the rock!” I call out. But he doesn’t hear me and I am there again. A girl on a wall. Imagining going under. Salt in the lungs, water, disappearing – although this time it’s my son, not me, whom I can’t save.

But this is my fantasy, my illusion. And there he is, of course, throwing himself on the board as he and his friend Brian or Casey or Andrew try to outdo each other, to get on the wave first, to make it all the way to the sand.

This is where I was going when I was last in this room. To those waters. And I am here now…no ocean today, but again gray/slate/cold. And I am new. Different. Changed. Can you see that when you meet me? Do you know who I was before?

With that journey came new dangers, new falls, a new kind of drowning, but not one that I imagined, not even a little. Not one that my dad could have warned me about as I sat on that wall back then, contemplating my demise.

“Don’t go out on the jetties, Bethy! You’ll get sucked under…”

Not anything I could have imagined.

But here I am. Returned. New wings. My elbows are wings, you said. Yes. I can imagine that. I wear wings on my neck. A phoenix, given to me by Silvia, a survivor. A new Silvia, from this ocean.

“The phoenix rose again,” she said, when she put it in my hand. “I never take mine off,” she said.

Do you see that about me when you meet me? Maybe not. But it’s there. Under my scarf, against my neck. Ready for flight. To rise above the slate blue gray the turquoise black and green. To start again.

To be new.

(This essay was included in "An Anthology of Babes: 36 Women Give Motherhood a Voice," edited by Suzi Banks Baum)

A disturbing thing happened at dinner the other night in one of my favorite restaurants in Hawaii. I was with my closest friend, and we hadn’t seen each other in a month because I’d been traveling. We had a lot to talk about and the table we were at (a table for two in the corner) was big, and we were too far away from each other. So I moved over to her side, a bench against the wall, to sit next to her… we had our heads together and were hunkered down in a deep conversation… and a fifty-something man with a big square jaw at the table next to us, who was there with two women and a baby, took offense to us sitting together like that and ordered me to go back to my side of the table.

It was shocking. Completely out of the blue.

He actually said, “You two have no class!” and “Go back to your fucking side, that’s why they HAVE two fucking sides!” There was so much background noise no one working at the restaurant heard what was going on, and we were on our own.

I did NOT go back to my seat on the other side of the table and it looked like a blood vessel was going to burst in his forehead, he was so enraged. I looked him in the eye and was not afraid, as crazy as this situation was. I stood my ground. I realized he must have thought we were a gay couple and that this was a small taste of what homophobia feels like. It blew my mind… really caught me off-guard.

While he was yelling at us he said I was “touching” his baby’s blanket, this big old flannel thing that was spread out all the way over to where I was sitting, which was far enough away from him and his family as these tables were not close together —but I knew that blanket had nothing to do with it. When I didn’t move, he had a tantrum. He was a bully. And a homophobe.

It seemed like the women at his table agreed with him… they didn’t try to shut him up and they didn’t seem afraid of his outburst, but maybe they were victims of his bullying, too. Maybe they put on a good act so as to not rock the boat even more. Maybe this is what he does all the time, everywhere he goes. I later found out that the baby was his, and one of these women was the mother of that baby.

If we HAD been a gay couple I would have kissed my friend at that moment, as dangerous as that sounds, and risked him jumping up, but I know most of the players at the restaurant (the owner, manager, and some of the staff) and I have no doubt they would have intervened at that point. It turns out this guy is a regular at the bar, but the manager said she’d never seen him behave like that.
If we had been with men, this never would have happened. If I had moved to sit on the same side as a man, this guy wouldn’t have said a word.

A sickening thing. And a sad state of affairs. Not the world I want my kids to grow up in.

I learned something about myself that night. I wanted him, later, to say something else so I could have it out with him, once I was over the shock of what happened… a stranger demanding that I move away from my friend in a restaurant… but once I turned my back to him, he ordered another beer and gave up on us. Once he realized I wasn’t going to move, no matter how many times he said fuck and tried to bully us, that was that.

Some people later said I should have kissed her anyway, or slapped him, or insisted that the restaurant throw him out. I didn’t do any of that, but I also didn’t kowtow and return to the seat he wanted me to sit in. For me— a straight woman who had never been the target of an attack like that —the saddest thing about the whole thing was the sudden visceral understanding that my gay friends… people I love… have to deal with this sort of thing all the time.

That’s what breaks my heart. How far we still have to go.

The other thing I took away from that night: don’t move to the other side of the table or the back of the bus or the end of the line to make someone else more comfortable.

Ever.

​Stay right where you are.

(This story was published in The Manifest-Station on February, 8, 2016)