We enter Four Winds Cancer Clinic in anticipation of the news from last week’s CT- and bone scans, as well as an update to the ongoing blood marker. I’ve been feeling good, still off the painkillers and nausea meds, and only wish that in addition to good news about the tests that Dr. Sud will tell me I don’t need to take the dreaded white cell count booster shot. For readers of this blog, you will recall “Monday’s Body,” and know why.

News from that blog had already reached Jan, who greeted us with her usual smile and good cheer, and pointed out that she really liked that blog post because it was important to tell the whole story, the ups as well as the downs, of living with cancer. She turns us over to Ashley for my weigh-in and vitals as she reinforces the smile and good cheer and in minutes we are with Dr. Sud to hear the results.

My usual magical practice is to begin each new month with a personal good luck mantra drawn from British folklore and/or old Nantucket superstitions. I say with my very first breath: “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!” and then prepare myself mentally, physically, and soulfully for a month of hopeful good fortune. Today I repeated that magical practice and imagined with it a white rabbit leading me through this month, this “Big November,” the last month of my chemotherapy.

Full disclosure: I believe in magic. I believe in the persuasive power of words, stories, speeches, prayers, gospels, surra, parables, and poetry to change how we look at and understand the world, how we act in it, and how we use such understandings to promote happiness, peace, prosperity, love, and justice.

Why wouldn’t I? I earned a doctorate in rhetoric. I studied with wizened word wizards who culled their knowledge from ancient and modern texts, practices, and even the occult. I have, myself, studied the spells, er, done research from the ancients to the present on the subject of words and their relationships to what the philosopher Richard McKeon once called “thoughts, passions, and actions.” In fact, my fellow word wizard and dear friend who teaches health communication at Ithaca College, Stew Auyash and I just exchanged email this week about Jacqueline de Romilly’s classic book Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (1975), in which exists a compelling discussion of medicine, rhetoric, and magic. Not is this ancient knowledge lost on contemporary scholars who study the close relationship between diagnosis of disease and doctor-prescribed remedies as persuasive efforts designed to elicit belief as well as agreement.

Socrates may have railed against rhetoric in The Gorgias as being “akin to cookery” in relation to “medicine” but he was wrong. He also opined in The Republic that poets ought to be banned from society. There are a host of other things he was wrong about, including the idea he passed along to Aristotle about farting being responsible for death. He was wrong about that, too. Not all philosophy is truth. But as a rhetorician I would say that, wouldn’t I?  

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What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

--From “Days,” by Philip Larkin

This morning I arose early and made rich dark Sumatran coffee just as a splendid pink-and-blue-sky dawn broke over the Superstition Mountains east of here. It was pure sky poetry. I gave thanks to God for this gift of another day of cancer-free life and offered my daily prayers on behalf of others.

I then began my everyday habit of reading, writing, posting, and otherwise engaging via the Internet the world outside of my home. After awhile San joined me and later I made us a Greek omelet – spinach, feta cheese, mushrooms, a little garlic, a little oregano, lots of halved Kalamata olives – and a toasted potato bagel. After breakfast San to writing her dissertation and I completed the most ordinary of chores: folded laundry, cleaned the kitchen, wrote a letter of recommendation, and edited out of a forthcoming book chapter some inspired Beatles’ lyrics from the Sgt. Pepper’s song “A Day in the Life” that were too costly to include. By the time Nic got up – ah, I envy the ability of the young to “sleep in” – I was still contemplating this glorious ordinary day.

Another day when being “cancer free” means I am no longer “that guy” in the blue chair that everyone else worries about.

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