by Bruce Feiler
I’ve been quite proud of my hands-off attitude over the years, but this year I realized I might have to change my policy. The girls were quite excited by all the effort put into Mommy’s appearance and managed to get their own nails done, too, at the Dashing Diva up the street. They were even jazzed to see Daddy in his “tup-xedo.” But as I was leaving for the event, they announced: “Next year we’re going to get Gala Dresses, too!” Uh-oh. The Domino Theory is back—and this time it seems to be working.
The big picture. As you can see, cancer is not linear. Our lives rock unaccountably—and unpredictably—among moments of hardship, stress, joy, pride, laughter, and exhaustion. There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do. Someone asked me recently whether the “up days” of chemo, following the “down days,” suddenly seem beautiful and full of hope. Maybe, but I’m usually too busy unclogging the sink.
In that regard, we are very grateful for the many hours, afternoons, and weekends that our families and friends have spent helping us endure, and enjoy, this time. A special thank-you to the Class of 1983 at the Savannah Country Day School for taking time out of our reunion to send such robust best wishes. And our warmest embrace to all those who have sent nourishment, diversion, cards, and prayers. We have composed thank-you notes many times over in our heads. Please bear with our bad manners and know that we feel your support.
After five months, I have (mostly) accepted that I cannot anticipate or design how I will feel on any given day. One of my mottoes has become: “No excuses. No apologies. No planning.” If someone makes me a giant bowl of chicken soup with matzah balls and I have a sudden craving for marinated artichokes and Milk Duds, I go with my craving. If someone flies in from Kazakhstan and cancels a lunch date with Mayor Bloomberg to come for a visit and I need a nap, I take the nap. I only wish selfishness was more fun!
As we head into the holiday season, the one list we know that is longer than ever is the one that contains all the things for which we are thankful. And if we’ve learned anything during this process, it’s to take a moment to share that list with those who are on it. Recently I was speaking to a friend who had lost her father before her first birthday. The one thing she most missed from her father, she told me, was letters directly from him. My friend’s older sister had received some, but she had not, because she was only a baby. My friend shared with me that every year she takes time to write a letter directly to each of her children telling them how much she loves them.
I can think of no better holiday wish from us to you. So in this season of anxiety and hope, may your home be filled with health, your lists with joy, and your letters with love.
And please, take a walk for me.
Love,
.14.
BEN
Tend Your Tadpoles
FOR AS LONG AS I can remember, I kept an inventory in my head. I never gave it a name. I never wrote it down. The list contained the names of people who would come to my side in the case of an emergency, no matter the circumstances, no questions asked. If I got into trouble, I would just call one of these people and he (or she) would hop on a plane, or bail me out, or write the check, or hold my hand. And every time I made the list one name was at its top.
He was the friend who was always there, back before the memories begin. He was the friend who lived around the corner, who sat next to me at lunch, who assured me that some girl really did like me. He was the friend who traded his (forbidden) Rice Krispies treat for my (boring) Milano cookie, who helped make that epic Hot Wheels track that looped, Evel Knievel–like, down the stairs, around his mother’s antique breakfront, and over the toilet. The thing really could have been in The Guinness Book of World Records if the dog hadn’t knocked it over.
He was the friend whose birthday I never forget and whose childhood phone number I still remember. Who always looks eight to me, no matter the pounds, the gray hair, or the teenagers of his own.
He’s the friend I have nothing in common with except that we grew up together.
Yet sure enough, when I got sick, he was the friend I had to call. And in that way you’re always connected to that friend, even when you can’t explain it; he was the friend that on the weekend when I was at my lowest—my birthday in the hospital—he was also at his bottom. His high school sweetheart, his wife of twenty years, the mother of his two children, sat him down and announced, “I’m leaving you.”
He was the friend who then didn’t tell me for six months because he didn’t want to worry me.
THIS IS WHAT BEN Edwards wrote in my second-grade yearbook:
Bruce, Have a happy safe summer! I might come down to the beach to see you!!!!! You are very nice and kind. Love, Ben
The next year he added my nickname but cut out the love.
Tweddy Bear, I like you! Ben
The year after that he was downright cool.
Have a nice time at the beach. Ben
Not a single exclamation mark!
His school photos during those years show far less change. He always had the freckled cheeks, the innocent eyes, and the thin, straight hair with a gaping cowlick over his forehead. With his boy-next-door shirts and all-American style he could have stepped from the pages of a comic book. He was the Archie of our class.
Ben’s small-town values were hard earned. His father, an obstetrician and gynecologist, was raised in Claxton, Georgia, home of the infamous boxed fruitcake more loved in truck stops than in restaurants. Its population in the year we were born was 2,672. Ben’s mother was from nearby Brooklet, whose population was one-fifth that. I asked Ben whether his father had ever adapted to city life after moving to Savannah.
“I think Dad is still more of a country person,” he said. “His favorite pastime is working in the yard. He’s not into city-ish things like Starbucks, museums, and dining spots. He’d just as soon have fried chicken at the deli. He doesn’t drink. He always goes to church. Heck, he wanted to own a gas station until Granny made him go to med school.”
Dr. Edwards was deeply loving as a father. “To this day,” Ben said, “he puts his arm around me. I put my arm around him, and we lie in bed watching TV.”
But he could also be strict. “I remember once when Joe was sixteen,” Ben said, referring to his older brother. “We were in the den, Dad came home one Friday night and asked Joe to take out the trash. Joe said, ‘Okay, I’ll get it.’ Twenty minutes later, Dad came back and asked him again. ‘Dad, I told you I’ll get it,’ Joe said. Twenty minutes later, Dad came back again. ‘Son, take out the trash now or I’m going to spank you.’ Joe stood up and said, ‘Dad, I’m bigger than you are. You’re going to spank me?’
“Dad grabbed him by the shirt and said, ‘Son, let me tell you one damn thing. You may be taller than me, but I will always have enough in my pocket to pay somebody to spank you, so I suggest you take the trash out.’ Then he turned and walked away. Joe stood there for a second, then looked at me. ‘I’m going to take the trash out.’”
Unlike his father, Ben was always attracted to city pleasures. Food, wine, nightlife, the annual Vegas weekend. He followed his father into medical school, then moved with his wife to Memphis and San Diego. But he couldn’t resist the extended family and sweet-tea lifestyle of the South.
“I think there’s a genuine goodness that runs through people here,” he said. “I’m not saying people in the North don’t have it. But you sit in a bar in California, and people are nice, but not genuinely nice. You sit in a bar in Georgia, and that person will end up going out with you that night, or giving you a ride somewhere, or inviting you over the next day for a barbecue.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Things just move slower,” he said. “You don’t have as many people trying to…win.”
“Unless it’s football,” I said.
“In which case you better win!” he said.
I told him that one of the most moving things about getting sick was how Savannah had rallied. Our classmates, parents, even onetime s
ocialites who ignored me as a child, suddenly formed a scrum and tried to lift my entire family from afar.
“It’s the Southern thing,” Ben said. “Loyalty. Honesty. Friendship.”
And these are the qualities I wanted Ben to impart to my girls. He would convey the importance of being from a place. How you carry that place with you wherever you go. How you keep coming back to it time and again no matter how long you live. “This is where your daddy came from,” he would tell the girls. “This is where you come from, too.”
Ben would teach them how to remember.
Our friendship started when we were five. “My earliest memory of you,” Ben said, “is our holding hands, walking into kindergarten.” He remembered our touch football games in the backyard and the time I defended him in fifth grade when he believed that Sharon Stubbs had a crush on him, but Charles Schwarz said she didn’t and told Ben to be mean to her.
But his most vivid recollection was the most touching.
“In the fourth grade, we used to lay down on the carpet and read,” he said. “One time, I was picking my nose and putting it into my mouth. Everybody was making fun of me, but you didn’t break a sweat. You said, ‘Ben, everybody is watching you pick your nose.’ I looked up and everybody was pointing and laughing. The next two weeks, everyone made fun of me, but you didn’t say a word.”
“Thirty-five years later, this is what you remember!?”
“Your best friend was picking his nose and putting boogers in his mouth, and it didn’t change anything with you. It comes back to loyalty.”
I asked him why he thought we were friends. “It starts off with proximity,” he said. “Then, as we went along, we had similar interests, but we weren’t into one-upmanship. You were obviously more artistic with plays and things like that, while I was always better than you in sports. But whatever you did, I did. And whatever I did, you did. Even if we didn’t want to do it.”
But for all our similarities, we had one gaping difference, and after race, it was the biggest one you could have in the South at that time.
Ben was Christian. I was Jewish.
In our talk, Ben alluded to it several times. My family ate different foods because we were Jewish. We lit candles and drank wine on Friday nights because we were Jewish.
Yet this difference was the source of our most powerful bonding experience: Every December I went to his house and helped decorate their Christmas tree. I loved the ritual of it, the colored lights and angels, the feeling of being included. When Ben’s mother wrote me after I got cancer, she began with a beautiful thought: “When I see Ben, I think of you. You two were a great team.” It ended with a question: “Do you remember helping us decorate our Christmas tree?”
Unlike some Jews, we didn’t have a Christmas tree growing up; Linda and I don’t have one today. But in a small way, my experience with the Edwardses’ tinsel helped prepare me for the interfaith world I would later enter. Ben believes it shaped his life in even bigger ways.
“If you asked me what I think are my good traits,” Ben said, “I would say first, hanging out with people who are different from me. I’m not saying I was perfect, or when I was in college I didn’t chime in when people were making fun of others, just so I could be part of the crowd. But I have always been very accepting of diversity. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, Jewish, Christian, gay, lesbian, transvestite.”
“Where did you learn that?”
He didn’t pause. “The exposure to your family. I’m not giving you the whole credit, but I think you deserve a lot. Because your family was vastly different from mine. The principles were the same, but the underlying cultures were totally different. The Pop-Tarts versus the Milano cookies. The fun house versus the more serious, more artistic, more save-the-world house.
“You told me once I was your baseline American boy,” he continued. “I went to college. I got a job. I married my high school sweetheart—” He caught himself.
“And now I’m getting divorced. I guess I am fitting the pattern!
“But seriously,” he continued. “Y’all aren’t. None of your family is what I would consider Southern normalcy. But that diversity changed me and subtly became my baseline for what is American today.”
Ben then shared a story I had never heard before. After high school, Ben went to the University of Georgia and joined a fraternity. In his sophomore year, he and his fraternity brothers were talking about rushes. “I was sitting with two guys I had known for a year, and someone made the comment, ‘Oh, but he’s Jewish. Do we really want a bunch of them in the fraternity?’ And maybe I was naive, but I had never heard anybody say something derogatory like that. ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘Oh, you know, they’re not like us,’ the guy said. And I just ripped his head open. ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘Name me your Jewish friends.’
“We voted the guy into our fraternity.”
BEN’S LOST YEAR BEGAN some months before mine, when his cousin Raul called him one day at work. Raul had grown up three doors down from me on Lee Boulevard, and his son, then thirteen, had an unusual growth in his leg. Ben, a bone radiologist, looked at the MRI. “Holy crap!” he thought. “This is an osteosarcoma. It’s probably the only one in my entire life I will ever see.”
“And what was the next beat in your mind?” I asked.
“He’s going to die.”
Over the next year, as “Little Raul” went through treatment and surgery, the community that later rallied around me rallied first around him. They catered meals. They decorated his house at Christmas. The entire seventh-grade class of boys shaved their heads in his honor.
Then, just as Little Raul was recovering, Ben got a similar call from me.
I asked him what he thought when he heard my diagnosis. He stammered for a second. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “How does such badness happen to such good people. You get tired of it. When I biopsy patients, I can tell you whether it’s going to be malignant just by how nice the person is. The nicer they are, the more malignant it’s going to be. The pieces-of-dirt jerks could have the nastiest-looking lesion, and it will be an infection. A sweet little lady, she’ll have pancreatic cancer. It’s a running joke in the CAT scan department.”
“And in that call, did you have the next beat?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I thought, ‘Shit, my best friend’s going to die.’”
“So it’s twenty years from now,” I said, “my daughters come to see you. They say, ‘Nobody knew our daddy longer than you.’ Where would you take them?”
“That’s hard,” Ben said, “because every place I can think of someone else would already have thought of.” He mentioned Tybee Island and our school. “In the end, I think I would take them to that nasty creek behind your house where we used to catch tadpoles.”
“The canal!” I said. “I haven’t thought about that place in years.”
The Hampstead Canal wasn’t much of a canal at all; it was more of a drainage ditch filled with the lowest forms of life—algae, tadpoles, adolescent boys. It wasn’t six feet wide, but to us it was the Amazon. One spring we started corralling tadpoles and trying to raise them into frogs. We put them in a plastic tub in our garage. They would sprout limbs and become vaguely frog-ish before stinking up the house so badly they had to be let loose.
“So what could Eden and Tybee possibly learn from the canal?” I asked.
“It’s where we came from,” he said. “It was a skanky and disgusting place. We never should have been there. Yet it’s where we learned to be ourselves. It was home.”
As he spoke I realized that Ben, that friend I barely knew, that friend I rarely saw, that friend who had prompted me to make that list of people I would call in an emergency only because I needed a way to name his role in my life, had hit on one of the deepest truths of all.
He was my tadpole.
He was that friend who was there at the beginning, who regardless of what had happened in between, returned at a moment
of possible ending to remind me where we both started: two squiggly boys in a drainage ditch trying to cultivate arms and legs to hop off into the world.
And what I discovered in talking to Ben is what I learned time and again during my “Lost Year”: As important as place is to my identity, I hadn’t fully mined the roots of my geography; as vital as people are to my life, I hadn’t truly plumbed the depths of my lineage. I hadn’t read my grandfather’s memoirs, delved into my father’s past, or quizzed my friends about the headwaters of their lives. I had been content with the half-known and the unsaid.
I had avoided the canal.
And only by plunging into my past did I discover all the nourishment that was floating in the water. As my girls liked to sing when they crossed the low bridge to Tybee Island, “And you’ll always know your neighbor / And you’ll always know your pal / If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal.”
Navigate the canal.
Tend your tadpoles.
You never know when you might need a pal.
.15.
BE A COLLECTOR
THE DIBNER LIBRARY OF THE History of Science and Technology is tucked in a remote corner of the ground floor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. I walk past a display of Julia Child’s kitchen and an exhibition of illustrated Bibles, enter a small antechamber, lock my bag in a cubby, and go through a glass door.
Inside is a modest reading room, with six tables and lamps. On the wall hangs a portrait of Eli Whitney, the young Yale graduate who moved to Savannah in 1783 and invented the cotton gin. I am here to examine the collection of another Yale graduate with ties to Savannah.
