Category Archives: Columns

Column: The Cancer Bell Tolls

by Woody

For Whom the Cancer Bell Tolls

 

            While the order of stanzas often changes, the message in a poem by Martin Niemöller, a prominent Protestant pastor who spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps, remains constant and tragic:

 

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Socialist.

 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Jew.

 

Then they came for me –

And there was no one left to speak for me.

 

Eight decades after Niemöller penned these powerful words they have taken on new meaning to me. Personal meaning. About another heinous killer.

 

First cancer came for my young children’s beloved daycare provider, Jeannie.

 

Then cancer came for my dearest friend, Karen.

 

Then cancer came for Eric. And Louise. And Keith.

 

After gallant battles by each, and despite everything modern medicine could throw at it, this Gestapo of a disease unmercifully claimed all of their lives.

 

Then cancer came yet again and again, for my dad just over a year ago and two months later for my eldest brother. Surgery and radiation and chemotherapy – and let’s be honest, luck and god’s grace, too – saved their lives.

 

Then cancer came for me. Last Dec. 17, my wonderful dermatologist, Dr. Jill Mines, took a biopsy from a crack in my lip that stubbornly wouldn’t heal. The lab results came back positive for squamous cell carcinoma in situ: skin cancer.

 

A few weeks later Dr. Arthur Flynn, a talented plastic surgeon, sliced a wedge out of my right lower lip. For a while I looked like a bass that lost a battle with a barbed fishing lure. But the painful pout was a small price to pay because the new biopsy margins came back clear. Translation: The doc got it all.

 

Cancer is not only frightening, it is frighteningly common. To give you an idea, two out of five Californians will be diagnosed with some form of the disease in their lifetime. In other words, the cancer club is about as exclusive as Sam’s Club.

 

The good news is the American Cancer Society is making an impact through groundbreaking research to prevent, diagnose, treat and cure cancer. In fact, its annual Relays For Life raise funds that help save 400 birthdays each day.

 

The Relay For Life of Ventura will be held next Saturday (May 18) beginning at 10 a.m. and feature a festival of food trucks so even if you are not participating directly, you should drop by.

 

(Other upcoming local Relays For Life include: Ojai’s Nordhoff High, June 1; Westlake’s Oaks Christian School, June 8; Hueneme High, June 22; Fillmore’s Harmony Community Center, July 12; and Carpinteria’s Linden Field, July 20.)

 

After long successful runs at Ventura High and then Buena High’s football stadiums, this year’s Ventura event – under the guidance of new tireless chairperson Patty Abou-Samra – is moving to the San Buenaventura State Beach. It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful setting.

 

Actually, in a manner, this coastal site will become even more breathtaking with the sight of 1,500 members on 65 relay teams as they walk for 24 hours around the clock and around a circular 400-meter path outlined in chalk on the grass field. Their shared purpose is to raise funds, raise awareness, raise hope.

 

Raising more goose bumps than a Pacific sunset does will be the nighttime Luminaria Ceremony where hundreds of candles outlining the walking path’s perimeter will be lit, each flame representing a loved one’s life prematurely extinguished by cancer.

 

John Donne, a 17 th century English poet, wrote these immortal words that inspired no less than Ernest Hemingway: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

 

When I look in the bathroom mirror a slight scar on my lip reminds me for whom cancer’s bell tolls; it may toll for thou, too; or surely for someone thou’st knows or loves.

*

— Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at woodywriter@gmail.com

 

Column: “Poem” is now Wood Chips

by Woody

From Lovely “Poem” to Wood Chips

One hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in American poetry:

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.

The other morning I looked out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into wood chips and trucked away.

It was like seeing a theatrical street version of Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book “The Giving Tree” starring two workmen in white hard hats and optic-yellow vests.

Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs were not used to build a house for the grown boy; its trunk not crafted into a boat to sail the seas. When the workmen’s work was finished, there was not even a stump left to sit and rest upon.

An arborist could tell you what type of tree this was, but I cannot. Were I to venture a guess, wise readers would surely point out my ignorance. No matter. What is important is it was majestic, perhaps 70 feet tall and leafy with a trunk I could not reach my arms around.

Something else important: the tree had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa, cracking and raising a section of sidewalk. And if it toppled, it would fall across a busy street. Too large to be braced or straightened, the tree was a danger that surely needed to come down.

And so at 9 a.m., a whining chain saw turned an overcast morning tenfold gloomier. Standing in the basket of a gargantuan cherry-picker, a workman cut off the large branches one by one by one as he hydraulically rose higher and higher and higher.

Far below, the felled branches were cut into manageable lengths and fed into a wood chipper that roared like a jet engine. Lines of a “poem” went in, mulch came out.

And then the tall, barren trunk came down, made not into lumber for a home or boat, but into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.

From start to finish, what took decades and decades to become living poetry was eliminated in less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.

It was not my tree, not in my yard, and yet it was mine and yours because trees are for all of us to enjoy. Trees are one of nature’s Hallmark cards — an ironic thought since some trees literally become greeting cards. Or, more irony here, newsprint.

Kilmer again: A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.

No more birds will nest in the lovely tree I used to see out my kitchen window looking east, the sun rising above it in the late spring mornings.

The melancholy event gave me pause to think about a handful of memorable trees in my life: The evergreen beside the driveway of my first boyhood home that my two older brothers and I attempted blind shots over during games of H-O-R-S-E. The sturdy buckeye near a swimming hole that we swung from on a rope. The apple tree I picked snacks off on a shortcut home from school. The orange tree my two then-young kids and I planted. The giant redwoods we saw, in awe, as a family. And on and on.

I think “poems” fill all our lives more than we generally realize. We draw trees in kindergarten and climb trees as older kids and hopefully at least once plant a tree, for as the Greek proverb states: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Kilmer once more:

Afterward, this columnist fool walked over to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below the ground and covered with dirt.

I may be overestimating by half, but I like to think this tree had sprouted in 1913, the same year as “Trees” came into being.

*
(Published 5-4-13 in Ventura County Star)

Column: Sibling revelry

by Woody

Hardship Proves To Be A Gift

In the Easter morning video the girl, almost 6, benevolently leaves the easy-to-see colored eggs for her 3-year-old brother to collect. When he has difficulty finding some of them, she guides him with hints and sometimes a pointing finger. In the end, his basket has the bulk of the bounty compared to hers.

In many ways, the scene encapsulates the two decades that have followed: the big sister has always looked out for her little brother, even after he literally became bigger at 6-foot-3. Indeed, it is often the case even after we become adults that we remain locked in our childhood roles among family.

A week ago, a crisis struck. Let’s just say the bottom fell out of an Easter basket, spilling and breaking the dyed eggs. The girl, now a young woman, phoned from 2,200 miles away; “distraught” falls far shy in describing her emotional state.

It is times like this that a daughter needs her mother. However, because the latter was in a deadline vise at her work, the girl insisted she could manage and that Mom stay home.

Similarly, the daughter demanded that her dad also remain at home to help care for his own father – her beloved “Gramps” – who had just undergone knee replacement surgery. Briefly, the roles had been turned upside-down as the grown son became the father and the father became the son.

Lastly, the girl’s younger brother could surely not fly out to be by her side because he was physically and mentally exhausted, having arrived home the night before the crisis struck after traveling for 20 hours across 12 time zones following a five-week sojourn halfway around the globe.

While the parents discussed matters, the son went on-line at 10 p.m. and booked himself a flight; the last-minute ransom pricing causing him no pause. “She needs me,” he said simply, emphatically, as he hurriedly packed. In bed at midnight, he rose at 3 a.m. to make his 6:15 a.m. flight. Upon landing three time zones east he took a long bus ride and then a short taxi trip to her doorstep at 6 p.m.

To this sentimental fool it brought to mind the closing scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life” when Harry, a Navy pilot and war hero, leaves in the middle of a banquet where President Truman is presenting him with the Congressional Medal of Honor to fly through a blizzard from New York to Bedford Falls because his big brother George is in a crisis.

Despite the three-years age difference, it is not rare for people being introduced to the sister and brother to inquire if they are twins. Beyond appearance, they have always shared a twin-like bond. But perhaps never were they closer than during this tribulation.

“He’s the best gift you and Mom ever gave me,” the daughter said on the phone the night he arrived.

Over the next seven days, the brother proved to be penicillin for the ailment. He tackled the crisis head-on, providing leadership and labor, wisdom and support, loving words and a shoulder to cry on, all on his own, all on little sleep.

Sometimes the son becomes the father; certainly the young man became a man, period. Or, as the girl noted: “I have always been the big sister, but this week he has become my big brother.”

Asked how he was holding up midway through his rescue mission, the son quoted former Navy Seal Eric Greitens, who wrote in his best-selling book “The Heart and the Fist”: “When a task is necessary, its difficulty is irrelevant.”

When his sister needed help, everything else was irrelevant.

“She’s the best gift you ever gave me,” the son said, repeating what his big sis had said of him only days earlier – words that are the best gift a parent could ever hear.

And so in many ways, like a favorite old Easter morning video, I cherish the crisis that has now passed. Indeed, to other parents I wish them their own gift-wrapped hardship if it will reinforce their kids’ sibling bonds.

— Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star. You can contact him at WoodyWriter@gmail.com or through his website at www.WoodyWoodburn.com

 

 

 

Column: A Kind Word Lifts Spirits

by Woody

A Kind Word Can Lift Low Spirits

*  *  *

“We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.”

                                                                                     – Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

*

Given a quarter-full glass, or three-quarters empty depending on one’s perspective, my mindset is usually, “That’s a lot to drink because that’s a big glass.”

The other day, however, I saw that glass as 75 percent empty – and dirty and cracked. Some cranky e-mails about a column had me feeling low. Then a note from another reader lifted my fallen spirits and brought to mind the poem “On Friendship” by my hero Coach John Wooden:

At times when I am feeling low, / I hear from a friend and then

My worries start to go away / And I am on the mend

No matter what the doctors say – / And their studies never end

The best cure of all, when spirits fall, / Is a kind word from a friend

My cure came from a friend I have never met. Jon Gold, a Los Angeles sportswriter who grew up in Thousand Oaks, wrote me succinctly but with kindness in abundance: “I became a writer because I got to read you write like this when I was 10.”

His words were penicillin for what ailed me. That I somehow inspired someone even a small fraction of the way Jim Murray made me want to become a writer is as nice a compliment as I have ever received.

Jon’s note did something more – it reminded me of this wisdom from Russian screenwriter Sonya Levien: “Good intentions are not enough; they’ve never put an onion in the soup yet.”

How many times have I failed to put an onion in the soup; thought about sending a kind note but not followed up in deed? Thankfully, I have not faltered completely in letting those who have changed my life know it. I wrote to my first newspaper boss last year; my sixth-grade teacher before that; Jim Murray and Coach Wooden before their deaths.

My two adult kids, on the other hand, are chef-like at putting onions in the soup. This very week my daughter wrote a two-page letter to one of her favorite university professors, thanking him for his past and present mentorship. She has similarly written notes of gratitude to numerous other teachers, colleagues, friends.

My son also regularly puts pen to paper to express thanks to professors, mentors, coaches and friends who have influenced his life’s journey. Just recently he mailed a card, albeit three years belatedly, to someone he met only once.

Unfortunately it was returned as undeliverable. However, he was able to locate the person on-line at her new place of employment and resent it. It began: “Dear Liz Williams, I don’t know if you remember me, but I want to thank you for changing my life. . . .”

He proceeded to explain how she had been instrumental in his taking his first humanitarian trip to Africa – Mali – a momentous event that opened his eyes and heart, opened doors, and inspired him to return to Africa – Ghana – as well as make a four-week goodwill visit to Sri Lanka.

My son concluded: “I apologize for getting caught up in other things and not telling you all this sooner – it is one of the lessons from Mali that I have had to re-learn looking back. This long-overdue thanks is to let you know that you have taught me the greatest lesson of all: that we can profoundly change the lives of anyone we come in contact with, and while we may not always know if we do, I wanted you to know that in this case you have made a world of difference.”

Not surprisingly, his thoughtful words were as welcomed as Jon Gold’s were to me. “Thank you for reaching out!” Liz wrote back. “Wow, I am truly overwhelmed by the kindness of your words. It made my day (maybe even my year) . . .”

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to put an onion in the soup and write a long-overdue note of gratitude to my favorite college professor, Mr. Ridland.

— Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star. You can contact him at WoodyWriter@gmail.com or through his website at www.WoodyWoodburn.com