the hidden 87%

Last fall I ran into my favorite classics and religion student, Castor, in the campus café.

(NOTE: All the students are my favorite.)

Castor and I chatted, but they were clearly with a professor I didn’t immediately recognize.

And then I did. We’re Facebook friends. But his photos are superheros or some such, so I could I have known.

We laughed, introducing ourselves.

And then he said, “I know everything about you!”

He was joking, of course.

Although, it’s true that I have intentionally used Facebook to practice capturing a moment in tight prose. I’m a collector of folksy anecdotes, and this works for me.

(If I’d been born a few decades earlier, I might have become like that woman, affectionately know by only me as the Queen of the Non Sequitur, who used to have a column in our local paper.)

But, actually. No. I share about 13% of my life. More or less. On any given day.

Today I happened across a good example.

On this day in 2018, I posted the following story about a forest bath with my ex-husband, who, at that time, was just a few years out from renal cancer:

This morning Ross and I went out to Point D for what we call, post-cancer, with a half-chuckle, a “forest bath,” which, ostensibly, is supposed to help with anxiety.

My soft warm hat is missing, so I wore my itchy pink pussy hat, the one I made for the march last year.

We were climbing the first big hill when we passed three older folks, speaking an Asian language I couldn’t identify. In an adorable accent, the woman pulling up the rear said, “I like your hat!”

Poor Ross.

“She didn’t say anything about my hat.”

Later we passed a family with a boy, about ten, and a happy dog. The mom’s eyes lit up, “I LOVE your hat!”

When they were out of earshot, I heard Ross mutter behind me, “Mmmm-HMMM!” Then, after a moment, “That makes two. Maybe I should walk in front so they see mine.”

He does have an excellent hat. Seth gave it to him for Christmas.

“It’s a good hat, Ross. It’s just that mine is a symbol of the resistance!”

No one else mentioned my hat, but everyone else we encountered was under the age of forty or so.

Next time you see him, tell Ross his hat looks great. And the next time we go out for a “forest bath,” I’ll consider my headgear a little more carefully.

What I didn’t happen to mention that day was that he was feeling ill, weak. He vomited under a tree, and then I found him a spot to lie down while I went to fetch the car.

The park is closed to vehicles in the morning, but fortunately, by the time I’d run back to the parking lot, they were just opening the gates.

I had been feeling a smidge punky myself. I didn’t realize I was carrying around a lotta blood clots in my lungs, two quite large, and some dead tissue, to boot.

And I ran to the car. My thinking was that, by God, I was not dragging our children through another damned medical emergency.

Seven days later I was in the hospital.

Which I did share on social media, astonished and quite jolly about being not-dead.

And then, because I was housebound for weeks, I had time to make myself a new pussy hat from soft, lovely yarn, thinking I’d be marching again.

My friend Linda offered to rent a wheelchair so I could join her. But my doctor pal suggested that might not be a good idea, since, if I needed medical attention, an ambulance would have trouble getting through the crowd.

(And I laughed at the time, unable to process that this was my life now.)

But I don’t think I reported that bit on social media, either. The wheelchair? Maybe I did? I can’t remember.

Some friends, I’ve found, leak out more truth concerning their lives than others. I “know” people on social media, people I have never met, but I like them. Something about their presence seems authentic. But I don’t assume I actually know them. I figure they, too have an 87%, the stories not told.

Finally, if you happen to run into Ross anytime soon, here’s a picture of his spiffy Outdoor Research Yukon dealio: