A Walk From The Park; A Walk From The Diagnosis...

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…(Sorry this is late today, but my new granddaughter was born on Thursday and we just moved the newly expanded family home this afternoon!)

As I noted in the previous post, I was late putting this up because we hosted the grandchildren for a night in order to give my son and daughter-in-law a night without those very same kidlings!

The oldest is Noah, who at 19 months is both a wonder and a joy.

Today, he also caused me to ponder my life after my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis.

It’s very close to 365 days since she got the news that the biopsy showed cancer in both the ducts and the nodes, so cancer is much on my mind lately. Alternately, I forget that it ever happened.

That’s why Noah gave me an insight today. I put him in the red and blue plastic wagon we got specifically to tote him around in our neighborhood. We set off for the park at the end of the street and after we arrived and he refused to go down the slide more than once and seemed terrified of being in the swing; we got ready to go home.

That was when he decided he was going to push the wagon.

At first I figured that was fine. He’d lose interest and I’d pop him back in and we nip on home for a cookie and a glass of water. But he didn’t lose interest. Despite running the wagon smack into sticks, curbs, sandbags, the edges of the sidewalk and bumps in the road, he kept going.

Now let me point out that a 19 month old’s stride is about the length of my FOOT. Where it takes ten minutes for me to walk to the park in a few hundred strides.

I’m sure I don’t have to give you the stopwatch numbers for you to imagine how long it took us to get back home. Oh, and we had to stop along the way and pick up a couple of interesting rocks, some sticks and a couple hundred seed pods from some nearby overhanging tree. The seed pods were scooped including mud and pebbles as well as the pods and artfully deposited in the boot of the wagon.

Once home and doing some thinking to prepare for this week’s post, the trip from the park abruptly illuminated my personal trip from that original cancer diagnosis to today. Lest you think this places me in the spotlight to show me doing something wonderful, let me pop that notion with a red hot needle.

I’m not Noah on that journey.

I am, (SURPRISE!) me.

Unlike Noah, I was not patient and interested in everything around me. Unlike Noah, I was not open to the possibilities of the JOURNEY. Unlike Noah, I did not find joy in the things along the trail. I didn’t marvel at the sticks, I didn’t find unexpected, absorbing beauty in simple things laying in my path. I just worried about getting THERE.

How much did I miss? Would I have found someone who would have broken the “deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience”, or would I have actually met people along the way who would have changed my experience? I’ll never know because I was too busy rushing to the end.

I just wanted to get from the park home immediately.

So if you’re rushing along in a hurry to get home, may I suggest taking a few moments to scoop up some of those red seeds laying on the sidewalk?

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEc4slBKg4jHnjTlQ7-Thrj6IbCI7psxrNCvVI12bczyywyjnMMiHfkPb9AeTr4nMgXDXVOcHLb2Bh8i5g1Xzt_J70f7uMVd6KjXTZWOuXsM8wK6e73mGETpq5oS0hEffVRranhoQSGOM/s320/don't_litter.JPG