A Visitor in the Night

      I have lived on this mountain for almost half a century. I recognize many animals by sound, not only by their howls and yips, but also by their step. I know the click of deer hooves and the heavy step of a bear. I know when a skunk is pattering across the deck and when it's a chipmunk, a squirrel, or a fox. So the other night when I heard a footstep I didn't recognize, I opened the back door and turned on the porch light to investigate.

      No one was there, of course. Whatever it was scampered off as soon as I opened the door. Nonetheless, I stood in the doorway and waited. And waited, listening, though there was no sound.

      Suddenly a little inquisitive head with large sharply pointed ears, popped over the step. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and I didn't know what he was.

      He was charcoal-tan and had darling dark eyes and pointy ears, big for his face, like a bat's. He was bigger but thinner than a squirrel, not as large as a raccoon. "Who are you?" I asked him, quietly, curiously. He stared at me without answering. "I don't know who you are," I said. "Who are you?"

       I waited. He waited. I waited. Then he turned tail and scurried off the porch and across the yard, switching behind him a beautiful, bushy tail, longer than the rest of his body, its black and white rings identifying him unmistakably as a ringtail cat.

      I was so honored! In all these fifty years I have only seen one other ringtail cat, not only because they're nocturnal but because they're supposedly shy of humans. And here was one, visiting me on my doorstep.

      I understand that miners in the old days used to tame them and keep them as mousers. That might be a good idea, except that I also understand that one of their defenses is to release a very foul-smelling secretion. Apparently they are also good acrobats and can even do cartwheels. I'd like to see that! They are related not to cats but to raccoons. If you want to know more about ringtail cats, Google "The cutest US mammal you've probably never seen," a blog post by Lisa Feldkamp. The photo above is also from her blog (Cool Green Science). I was too interested in communicating with my ringtail visitor to think about taking a picture.

Aniin, Habari, Buna

      The title of this post is "hello" in Ojibwe, Swahili, and Rumanian. If you like, I could say "hello" to you in Hindi, Inuktitut, and Serbian, too, and, in fact, in 69 other languages. I could ask you your name in all those languages, and I could say goodbye to you. In other words, I have learned how to say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye" in 75 of the world's languages.

      I have my granddaughter to thank for this. She set me this task for my 75x75 project (doing 75 things of 75 repetitions each before my 75th birthday in July. See thingstodoinmy75th year.blogspot.com). I loved doing this project! I loved her for giving it to me. Learning these phrases took me all around the world, looking for which of the world's 6500 languages to learn, so I got a little geography lesson along with glimpses into the languages themselves, in all their varieties. Oh, wonderful, wonderful world!

     I started on July 21 with languages that would be easy for me: Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. My method was to find five languages at a time with YouTube clips showing me how to pronounce them, then make a print-out of the three phrases in the five languages with my own pronunciation designations under the correct spellings. When I had memorized those, I made flash cards of them, which I took on my daily walks. The bulk of cards grew slowly. Sometimes I would get languages mixed up, but repetition did wonders. The earlier languages I learned that I had thought so difficult – Basque, Welsh, Estonian – were soon as comfortable on my tongue as French and German. Now Tamil is as easily said as Hebrew, and Togalog as Korean.

      Near duplicate phrases were common. "Name" is "ingoa" in Maori, "igoa" in Samoan, and "inoa" in Hawaiian. Some variation of "salam" for "hello" is frequent in Near Eastern languages, and a lot of languages use "ciao" for "goodbye." The Chinese, Vietnamese, and Xhosa say "Goodbye" with a version of "bye-bye."
      My favorite way to ask "What is your name?" is in Somali, with the visually unpronounceable "Magacaagu muxuu xahay," actually pronounced as a wonderfully rhythmic "MAH-ga HAH-ga HREE-a-hay."

      My favorite way of greeting someone is in Ojibwe: "Aniin" (Ah-NEEN), which means, "I see your light." My least favorite way of saying goodbye is in Balinese, when one is supposed to say, "Om, shanti, shanti, shanti, om." "Say it three times," emphasized the man on YouTube. It's very respectful, but I wonder if teen-agers in Bali haven't found a way to say, "Bye" or "See ya" in Balinese.

      In some languages "hello" and "goodbye" are accompanied by important gestures – putting the hands together, as in prayer, and bowing, with a different  depth of the bow and position of the hands (at the heart, the chin, the mouth, the forehead) for different relationships. In Maori, there is a different greeting for one female, one male, two females, two males, a mixed group, etc. I decided it was enough to memorize just one way of greeting someone. 

      Sitting next to two girls learning American Sign Language in a cafe one day, I asked them to teach me my phrases in ASL. When I learned that my Uber driver in Tacoma was from Samoa, I asked him to teach me how Samoans say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye." I loved learning how to pronounce the click in Xhosa, a language of South Africa, and was disappointed that none of the words I learned had the "X" (click sound) in them, so I always pronounce the language name before saying the phrases, just so I can click.

      The most fun moment during all the months of learning languages was when I was reading The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason, a novel set in British Burma in the nineteenth century. When the protagonist arrives in Burma, he meets a woman to whom he says, "Minglaba. Shih nah meh be lou kor d'le?" And I could read it! He said, "Hello. What's your name?"

      The last word I learned was "Dapabachjennja" (duh-buh-puh CHEN ya), Belorussian for "goodbye," with which I finished the task! Dapabachjennja!
      Now the task is not to forget all I've learned before my birthday. At the party I'll have the flash cards on a board. Guests can choose one and at some time during the party approach me and ask me to say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye" in that language. I could do it today!

      Here are the 75 languages.

American Sign Language      Hindi
Arabic                                    Hungarian
Azerbaijani                            Icelandic
Balinese                                 Inuktitut
Basque                                   Irish
Belorussian                            Italian
Bengali (Bangladesh)            Japanese
Bulgarian                               Khmer
Burmese                                Kinyarwanda
Catalan                                  Korean
Chinese                                 Kurmanji (Kurds)
Chiwewa (Zambia, et al.)     Latin
Croatian                                Latvian
Czech                                   Lithuanian
Danish                                 Luxembourgish
Dutch                                   Mam (a Mayan language)
Dzongkha (Bhutan)             Maori (native, New Zealand)
Estonian                              Marshallese (of the Marshall Islands)
Farsi (Persian)                     Mongolian
Finnish                                 Nepali
French                                 Norwegian
German                               Ojibwe
Greek                                  Old English
Hawaiian                             Pashto (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran)
Hebrew                                Polish
                               
Portuguese                          Tamil (Sri Lanka, Malaysia)
Punjabi (Pakistan, India)    Telugu (India)
Rumanian                            Thai
Russian                               Togalog (Filipino)
Samoan                               Turkish
Sanskrit                               Urdu (Pakistan)
Serbian                               Vietnamese
Sinhala (Sri Lanka)             Welsh
Somali                                 Xhosa (of South Africa)
Spanish                               Yiddish
Sumerian                             Yoruba (Nigeria, et al)
Swahili                                Zulu
Swedish                              

                             
                       
                         
                         
                     
                 
   
               
             
               
               
         
           
           
         
           
           
     
           


   

When a Doctor Gives Good News

     An oncologist, I see now, is a doctor who studies test results and then determines what treatment the patient should undergo – which chemo to put together in a package, how long chemo should last, whether immune therapy would work better. The oncologist's interaction with the patient can be minimal. The patient is just the physical representation of what's on the charts. It's what's on the charts that is important.

      A doctor who cares is special.

     Dr. Sander, Mike's oncologist, is that kind. The first time we met her, to learn how she wanted to treat the return of Mike's esophageal cancer (thought eradicated four years ago), she strode briskly into the room (on time) and shook hands with each of us (Mike, his daughter Allegra, and I). She is very pretty – slim and lithe, with long black hair and snappy black eyes – and she speaks with a delightful tinge of a European accent. (She is from Belgrade.) She told us she had come to Medford from Portland and that though she liked it here, she missed the more active night life in Portland. I imagined her at a bar with four or five other brilliant people, each a professional in a particular field. Among them, she  just happened to have chosen medicine as her field. No big deal.

      She took as much time as necessary to tell us what she knew, why she was prescribing a certain chemo package, and what the possible side effects would be, speaking directly, not sugar-coating the news, speaking fast but not hurriedly. She made sure to answer all our questions before she strode again from the room.

      Mike does chemo four hours a day twice a month. Side effects have been minimal (say I) – a sensitivity to cold that makes his fingers tingle, occasional mouth sores. I usually keep him company during those boring hours in a chair with chemicals dripping into his body. We work New York Times crossword puzzles. I read Moby Dick to him. We talk about wedding plans. We resolutely describe a future.

      Last Tuesday Mike, his daughter Zoey, and I met with Dr. Sander to find out if the chemo was working The three of us were in the examination room, tense, talking about anything except what was before us. Every time I had thought about this day, I had shoved the thought aside. It would be what it would be.

      The door opened briskly, and Dr. Sander strode in, smiling broadly and saying, even before she sat down, "It's good news. I am so happy."

     And she was happy. She smiled and smiled. She read all the statistics – how much each of the two tumors had shrunk, what the blood cell counts were – "All good," she kept saying; "it's all good." She smiled and smiled. She looked radiantly happy that Mike was getting better. We were smiling, too.

      Dr. Sander shook hands with each of us as she left, still beaming. She told Zoey to be sure to let her sister know the good news. (She remembered Allegra!) I told her she was leaving a room full of smiling people. She shot me a smile as she opened the door.

      The chemo is working. Onward! More shrinking, more pushing the cancer back to a pinprick. More wedding plans, more thoughts about a future. I look like Dr. Sander these days: radiant with relief and happiness.

Skiing through the government shutdown

      Last week I went skiing in the Cascades east of the Rogue Valley, where there are many good trails for cross-country skiing. You just park in the sno-park and take off on your skis.

      I went with the Grants Pass Nordic Club, a group I ski with every weekend we have good snow, which hasn't been often enough these last few years. But the snow on the Big Mac Trail to Summit Shelter was deep enough, with a good layer of new snow, and the weather was cold enough without being biting cold, and there was no wind. The road at the beginning had at last been closed to vehicles (it had been open in December for Christmas tree cutting), and what had been an icy, hard-packed hill a few weeks earlier was now a smooth skiers' route. At the top of the road we turned onto a trail through the forest, where the snow lay heavy on fir branches. We skied in silence past big trunks, dark in the white snow. There were icy spots under the trees, where the snow was thinner, but on the way back down the hill to the sno-park after lunch at the shelter, the warmer temperatures had softened the ice without making the snow too heavy. All in all, it was a terrific day's ski.

      There was only one downer, and that was the United States government, or, let me be specific, the United States president, who has proudly taken responsibility for shutting down the government. All the bathrooms on National Forest Service sno-parks, for instance, were closed. The bathrooms at Fish Lake, where we stopped on the way up the mountain, were closed, and the bathrooms at the sno-park to Summit Shelter were closed. To take care of the situation, we bought some food at the store/restaurant at Fish Lake and asked for the key to their bathroom. So we were all right. But at the end of the day, when we skied back to the sno-park, the parking lot was full of cars, mostly families taking their children sledding. Great fun. But what did they do when those kids asked to go to the bathroom?

      National Forest Service bathrooms are closed, and Crater Lake National Park is closed. Restoration work and fuels reduction on public lands are suspended, but BLM and Forest Service timber sales continue without a backward glance at all the public services no longer available. What kind of prioritizing is that?

      I don't want a wall on the Mexican border. I think it's an inappropriate and unnecessary expenditure and would be a symbol of much that I don't want this country to represent. I don't want a president who disdains the American public so much he is "proud" to shut down the government and make us pay the consequences. May the trash and the feces that built up in the national parks that weren't yet closed come showering down on his head.

A Great Start to the New Year

      The biggest news of the new year is that I'm getting married.

      "What?! Diana Coogle is getting married?!"

       Yes, indeed. After hiking many trails together – on Corsica, in the Italian Dolomites, in the Applegate, the Siskiyou Mountains, the Cascades –

after paddling seas and exploring foreign countries –

Mike and I think it's time we walked down the aisle together, too (picture pending). And so we have announced our engagement.

      Suddenly I'm thinking about things like wedding dresses, wedding flowers, wedding dinner. I walked into a bridal shop yesterday, tentatively, a little self-consciously. The saleswoman said, "May I help you?" and I said, awkwardly, "Well, I'm getting married." She and her customers, a older woman with two younger women, looked amused. One doesn't expect a 74-year-old woman to ask for a bridal gown. Miss Habersham, trying it again.

      After so many years as a single woman – proudly single, I might add; upholding the role of the happy spinster – I am suddenly joining the marrieds. "Why are you getting married?" people ask. "Why not continue as you are?" since we'll be essentially continuing as we are, living arrangements and all, anyway?

      Because there is something about the public statement – "You and no other" – that is meaningful. There is something about the wedding ceremony that solidifies what we feel for each other. There is a celebration of love and a community acknowledgement that doesn't come otherwise. There are vows I want to make. And, of course, there is a grand party.

      I am honored by the enthusiastic responses and congratulations of family and friends. My sisters are beside themselves with excitement. So many people have promised to come to the wedding. As for Mike and me, we are sailing in the clouds.

      It is a big move for me. I'm crossing borders:

Marriage is a foreign country 

which I'll enter in May.

I don't cross the border

as a refugee

fleeing loneliness and unhappiness

in my home country

or as an emigrant

leaving one country

in hopes of a better life

in the other.

I've got my passport

(the passport is love)

not a limited-stay visa

to see how I like things

but permanent residency

in the new country

promising joy

just like in the old country.