Daniel Menaker's Blog, page 4

“The Cockroach of the Gardening World”

I am NOT complaining! My uncle, Frederick Engels Menaker, one of seven sons of Solomon Menaker, six of them named after radicals and utopians, left me his house and land in the Berkshires. Otherwise my family and I could never have had such a place.  Enge (“Rhymes with ‘mange,’” he liked to say) was gay and childless, to my good fortune. In many ways, he was more nearly my father than my father was.  But I remember the year he planted some of what he called “Angelica” around the house–as a ground cover, he said. It bloomed nicely in the late spring and smelled OK. But in the years since his death, it has turned into something you might see on the  SyFy channel’s Horticulture Hour, spreading everywhere, colonizing lawns, crossing the road as Caesar crossed the Tiber, choking off vegetables, overwhelming flowerbeds.  I believe another name for it, goutweed, suits it much better. Here is a wonderful jeremiad about it from a gardening site. It’s terrific writing, from the heart.

“KILL IT, KILL IT, KILL IT !!! This plant is the cockroach of the gardening world, and should never, under any circumstance, be sold in gardening outlets. I have seen tracts of beautiful woodland taken over by this monster, with all trace of native wildflowers forever eradicated. I lost a stretch of beautiful border along a brook to this pernicious beast, and I almost cried as it swallowed a lovely established bed of vinca, cimicifuga, and siberian iris. Those who are happy with it either live surrounded by concrete, or they have little else in their gardens that they care about. Be considerate of others, please and NEVER knowingly plant this thing. Petition all garden stores to stop selling it, too.”

A Post-Post

At the Southampton Writers Conference this last July, while playing pitch-and-putt golf on a small private course giving directly on the Atlantic Ocean, Billy Collins and his co-faculty members kept up the kind of banter that those of us who don’t play golf have heard about and maybe envied–a little like poker banter, of which Mr. Collins is also a master. Clubs, looking like a possible flush: “Members only.” Jacks are “Jacquelines.” Etc. On the ultra-green pitch-and-putt gem, it was “Circle of friendship” to signal that the ball of another player lay close enough to the hole to allow the player to forgo tapping it in. But the best–and most incessant–was “That’s what she said,” in response to just about anything.  “It’s a little short,” “That’s a long one,” “It’s getting hot,” “Can you move your ball,” “Well-played,” “I have to improve my approach,” and so on.

These kinds of repeated jokes have three stages. 1. They’re very funny. 2. They’re tiresome. 3. They’re very funny again.

But an equally if not more amusing verbal byplay came from the creeping group realization–and then the overemployment–of the fact that doubled nouns are spreading virally in our language. “My son has his first job. His first job-job, I should say.” “He’s a friend but not, you know, a friend-friend.”  “I like e-books OK but I still prefer book-books.”  “I’d like something to drink but not a real drink-drink.” The same three stages applied to this collective overuse, especially as it spread to adjectives, as in “This is scary enough but not quite scary-scary.” And “You’re hungry but are you hungry-hungry?”

Where did this come from, I wonder.  (That’s what she said.)

Fall Writers Speak Series UPDATE

This post is an update of my last post about the free public conversations the Stony Brook MFA program is offering in conjunction with the class I’m teaching this fall.  Dates have changed slightly.

From Stony Brook Manhattan:

This Fall’s Manhattan Writers Speak series will be an open classroom, an extension of the Monday evening course “The Uses of Affliction: Reading & Writing Illness” with Daniel Menaker and Magdalene Brandeis.  All guests and discussions will be linked around a common theme: Illness in fiction, Illness in non-fiction, Illness in the culture, and the new emerging theme of Narrative Medicine.

These free public conversations will take place at 7 o’clock at

Stony Brook Manhattan

101-113 East 27th Street, 3rd Floor

New York NY

Monday, September 23

Susan Minot, author of Evening, in conversation with Daniel Menaker

Monday, October 14

Katherine Bouton, author of Shouting Won’t Help, in conversation with Daniel Menaker

Monday, October 21

Robin Henig, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, in conversation with Daniel Menaker

Monday, October 28

Rita Charon, Executive Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, in conversation with Daniel Menaker

Monday, November 18

Fenton Johnson, author of Geography of the Heart, in conversation with Daniel Menaker

All events free and open to the public.

To RSVP, please send email to MFAManhattan@stonybrook.edu

Fall Writers Speak Series at Stony Brook Manhattan

Graves’ disease, type 2 diabetes, lung cancer. I won’t give you the full rendition of what I call an “organ recital,” but I will say I’ve fought them all so far and so far am ahead. NO BLOODY JINX, AND I MEAN IT!! So who better to co-teach this course? It looks like “special guest tbd” will be Rita Charron (that second “r” in the last name is fortunate), head of Columbia University’s new course in Narrative Medicine.

Some have bruited about that free steroids will be given to all who attend. That isn’t true. It’s free stereos.

From Stony Brook Manhattan:

This Fall’s Manhattan Writers Speak series will be an open classroom, an extension of the Monday evening course “The Uses of Affliction: Reading & Writing Illness” with Daniel Menaker and Magdalene Brandeis.  All guests and discussions will be linked around a common theme: Illness in fiction, Illness in non-fiction, Illness in the culture, and the new emerging theme of Narrative Medicine.

These free public conversations will take place at 7 o’clock at

Stony Brook Manhattan

101-113 East 27th Street, 3rd Floor

New York NY

Monday, September 23

Writing Affliction: Author Susan Minot in conversation with Daniel Menaker. (DM: This one’s about … about, um … Let me check. Oh, yeah–dementia, based partly on Minot’s wonderful novel Evening.)

Monday, October 14

Writing Affliction: Katherine Bouton, Shouting Won’t Help  (DM: About hearing loss.  Katherine is my wife.  I wanted the title to be “Say Again?” Mull it over.)

Monday, October 28 or November 4

Special Guest tbd in conversation with Daniel Menaker  (DM–see actual post, above.)

Monday, November 18

Writing Affliction: Author Fenton Johnson, Geography of the Heart in conversation with Daniel Menaker  (DM–I’ll be learning about this, too)

Not included but definite and extremely timely: Robin Marantz Henig, a highly accomplished science writer, with a riveting piece about end-of-life decisions in the New York Times Magazine recently, will also be a guest on one of the other Monday evenings in the fall.

All events free and open to the public.

To RSVP, please send email to MFAManhattan@stonybrook.edu

“My Mistake”–The Outtakes

To pre-supplement the memoir I’m going to publish in November (My Mistake; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), this blog will for the foreseeable future involve outtakes and additions to the book–more interesting about others, is my plan, than about myself.

Thomas Whiteside was a reporter for The New Yorker who wrote tirelessly about the ravages of Agent Orange–the toxic defoliant that U.S. planes dumped on Vietnam during the war in order to be able to spot guerilla troop movements and to kill crops. Whiteside had an odd kind of curiosity, the best example of which that I know involved another New Yorker writer, Maeve Brennan, who haunted the halls of the magazine well after her most productive years as the pseudonymous contributor–”The Long-Winded Lady”–to The Talk of the Town.  Ms. Brennan was homeless or nearly so, unkempt and unpredictable, and often slept in one of the magazine’s ladies’ rooms. One day, for reasons unknown to me and, apparently, Thomas Whiteside, she threw a carton of milk against the closed door of an editor named Pat Crow. The carton split open and milk splashed everywhere. As the fact-checker on one of Mr. Whiteside’s Agent Orange jeremiads, I was in his office the day of the milk bomb, and Whiteside and I were talking about the incident, how sad Ms. Brennan’s general state was.  Whiteside paused for a full minute, maybe longer, and finally said, “I wonder where she got the milk.”

In Honor of St. Patrick’s Day

“Why should you never iron a four leaf clover? You don’t want to press your luck.”  —Somebody else; not me!

Here’s a piece about conversations in Ireland, posted on The New Yorker online.

Al Capone at Laytner’s Linens (A Holiday Break from Malignancies)

ME: Here’s the receipt, and here are the lights. When you plug them in half go on and the other half don’t.

CLERK: OK, everything is in order. Now all I need is your credit card to make sure to I put the refund on it, and then your name, address, and phone number.

ME: Here’s the card. Why do you need that other information?

CLERK: Store policy.

ME: But that makes no sense–the defective lights are here, the credit card is the right one, I can show you picture ID, and I have the receipt.

CLERK: Store policy. I’m sorry.

ME: Um, OK, well, I don’t think so.

CLERK: Your name?

ME: Um …, let’s see. OK–Al Capone

CLERK (smiling): OK, Mr. Capone. May I call you Al? You can call me Betty.

ME: No, Betty. I like ‘Mr. Capone.’

CLERK: Laughing. OK, Mr. Capone–address?

ME:  One-forty-five Fake Street, District Nine, Kamchatka Island..

CLERK: Oh, my goodness, Mr Capone. That’s a bad neighborhood.

ME: Because I live there.

CLERK: Phone number. Just go ahead and make it up again.

ME: 845 seventy-twelve times pi.

CLERK:  You’re too much.

ME: Has anyone else had trouble with these lights?

CLERK: (whispers) Only about two out of every three customers who buy them.

Uh-oh–here comes the manager.  He has to approve.  I have a return for credit here, Mr. Chen.

MR. CHEN: How much?

CLERK: $12.99.

MR. CHEN: Let me see receipt…. All in order. Sorry lights don’t work, Mr. … [glances at computer screen] Kaypone.

ME: It’s ‘Ka-pone.’

Onconversations XLI

(In the CT place for my third follow-up scan after Star Wars radiation treatment a year or so ago. )

TECHNICIAN: Please take off your sweater and shirt.

ME: I’m getting to know the drill.

TECH: You don’t have anything around your neck, right?

ME: Nope. Well, nothing physical.

TECH  (laughs, half-heartedly, but then says): Yeah, I asked a guy the same question earlier this week and he said, “Nah–I left my wife at home.”

(I climb on the slab, extend my arms over my head, getting ready to ride the ferry into the doughnut hole of the CT machine.  “Don’t breathe,” the mechanical voice says, sternly, and a green, Pac-Man-esque face appears on the narrow display over my head with his mouth closed, as whatever it is whirls around me. “Breathe”–just as sternly, and the little round face appears with its mouth open, looking very cheerful. The ceiling of this room has a kind of trellis of leaves and flowers painted on it.  It’s less cheerful than bizarre.

Then, I have to go to  another building to meet the radiologist and get the test results. I am not wildly anxious, but I melt a couple mgs. of Valium in my mouth, just to take the edge off the one-hour interval. My wife joins me in the second waiting room. After a while a nurse comes in to fetch us into the examination room.)

NURSE: How do you feel?

ME: Good. Except for this pain and skin sensitivity on my back and lower chest.

NURSE: That’s the radiation. How about your weight?

ME: I’ve put on a few pounds, if anything.

NURSE: Good.

ME: A rale or two from time to time.

NURSE: The radiation. Any difficulty swallowing?

ME: A little from time to time, but no more than I’ve had for some years–a side-effect of blood-pressure medication, I’ve been told.

NURSE: Right. Heartburn?

ME: As a matter of fact. yes, a little.

NURSE: That’s the radiation.  Your last bowel movement?

(Really?)

ME: This morning.

NURSE: OK. Please get up on the scale.

(I do.)

ME: Take six pounds off–I have a lot of junk in my pockets.

NURSE: _______

NURSE: OK, it will just be a few minutes and Dr. ______ will be in to see you to discuss the scan.

(Discuss the scan? I don’t like the sound of that. A few minutes pass.)

DR (enters and says immediately, as he bustles into the room, and with out really looking at me): The scan is good.  (So much for discussion.)

ME AND MY WIFE: Great!

DR: Now about this pain …

ME: It just went away.

DR: What?

ME: It’s really strange, but the pain just disappeared.

DR (getting it, although in fact the pain really did suddenly subside): Ah, the psyche is an extremely powerful organ. But seriously, tell me about the pain.

ME: It’s not a big deal. It’s right below my ribs on the left side, and you can feel a little swelling there. The only time it really bothers me is at night.

DR: Would you lift up your T-shirt?

(I do. Doctor examines my chest and stomach.)

DR: I don’t see or feel anything.

ME: It’s there– it really is. (I try to show him.)

DR (palpating the left and right sides of my lower chest): I can’t feel anything different.

ME: It doesn’t matter to me, now that I know the scan results. Nothing matters except that. But there is swelling there. But really, never mind.

(My wife suggests some possible remedies–a pillow like the one she uses for her back and some medication that she takes. Dr. ________ is skeptical.)

DR: What we can do is try some Lidocaine patches.  I’ll give you a prescription.

ME: If I keep feeling this way, I won’t need anything.

DR: Yes–I’m very pleased too.

(I keep hoping for a truly funny or otherwise bloggable moment, but it doesn’t happen.  Unless you count the fact that on the way home, the crowded crosstown bus–creeping along 66th Street toward Central Park and then Lincoln Center, this bus which would usually drive me nuts with New Yorker-type impatience [the wheelchairs, the walkers, the cell-phone conversations, the sanitation trucks blocking the way, the bulky clothes too early for the season, and so on]–this bus seems to me all jollity and energy and, well, life.)

Onconversations XL

(With a couple of weeks to go before my next follow-up CT scan, I notice a slight swelling at the bottom of my rib cage on the left, and I have continuing pain in the middle of my back–both are sites where the stereotactic body radiation therapy beams were zapped through eight or nine months ago. The swelling is sore. I am on about four Advil/day, so this pain–which is expected and normal (if anything is normal in the cancer world)– is not severe, but the swelling is new, and I don’t like it. It feels like there’s a little cylindrical sponge under there. So I write an email about this development to my thoracic oncologist. He usually responds to emails, and I use this courtesy as sparingly as I can. I realize that it might be better to call my radiology oncologist, but sometimes when I call his number and the lovely-voiced assistant isn’t there to answer, the phone rings four or five times and then this voice comes on the phone and practically shouts out “Radiology!” The first two or maybe even three times I called that number, I thought it was a real if somewhat impatient human being. But it was Radiology’s version of an answering-machine message, and it left me a bit flummoxed. But guess what: My thoracic guy is out of the office, it seems, because I get no reply. So I call the Radiation number.)

PHONE (after four rings): Radiology!

ME: Um, hello? Oh. Yeah. Message. Well this message is for Dr. ________ This is Robert Menaker calling, You know, Dan Menaker. Robert Daniel Menaker. Well, Menaker is all I need to say, probably. Anyway, I have this sore swelling right under my rib cage and I wanted to ask Dr. ________ about it. Maybe he could call me back. (I give phone number.) Thank you.

(Later that afternoon, the thoracic guy’s nurse calls me back.)

TG’S NURSE: This is ________ from Dr. ________’s office. You emailed earlier today?

ME: Yes–thanks for calling back.

TG’S NURSE: Dr. ________ is out of town. Maybe I can help you.

ME: Well, I have this swelling at the bottom of my rib cage, and then there’s the pain in my chest and back, which I understand is normal.

TG’S NURSE: Can you describe the swelling?

ME: Yes, it’s like a little skinny mole or vole under my skin–soft and rounded.

TG’S NURSE: A mole or a what?

ME: Let’s just stick with “mole.”

TG’SNURSE: When did you notice it?

ME: A week or so ago. I finished my radiation treatments about eight months ago, and was told then that there would probably be pain, though it’s a little worse now. But it’s the swelling that’s new.

TG’S NURSE: Eight months ago?

ME: Yes–I think that’s a normal time lapse for the pain part.

TG’S NURSE: Really?

ME: Yes.

TG’S NURSE: Have you thought about calling Radoiology?

ME: Yes, I called and left a message.

TG’S NURSE: Well I know Dr. ________ will want to talk to you when he gets back, but in the meantime, I’m sure Radiology will call you back.

ME: OK, well, I’ll just wait.  I probably shouldn’t have bothered you. It’s just that their answering-machine message is sort of like a drill sergeant–a little daunting.

TG’S NURSE: What?

ME: Nothing. I’ll just wait.

(No more than half an hour later, the Radiation Oncology nurse calls me.)

RO NURSE (briskly): Is this, er, Menaker?

ME: Yes–Robert Menaker. Daniel, you know–

RO NURSE: Date of birth?

(I give it)

RO NURSE: Dr. ________ asked me to call you. What seems to be the problem?

ME: I have this new swelling right at the bottom of my rib cage, and this pain.

RO NURSE: The pain is normal–do you need anything stronger than OTC meds?

ME (tinily but still ludicrously proud of knowing what “OTC” means): No–just taking three or four Advil a day.

RO NURSE: That’s not so bad, considering how close the nodules were to the chest wall.

ME: But the swelling is new–it seems like a little soft roll under–

RO NURSE: Normal also.

ME (relieved): Really?

RRO NURSE: Yes.

ME: This late?

RO NURSE: Perfectly normal.

ME: Well, good. I mean, not good that I have the swelling, but–

RO NURSE: Yes, I know. Your next scan is on November __th.

ME: Right. Thank you.

RO NURSE: So don’t worry, OK?

ME: Easy for you to say.

RO NURSE (laughs): Right.

(The following Monday, the thoracic oncologist calls me.)

TO: So I hear you called about some swelling.

ME: Yes, but Dr. ________’s nurse got back to me and said it wasn’t anything to worry about.

TO: Right.

ME: I probably should have just called that office in the first place. But not to be a wuss or anything, but their answering-machine message is scary. Some autocrat yells out, “Radiology!”

TO (laughs hard): They’re more about protons than personality.

ME: You didn’t need to call back, but thank you.

TO: Don’t worry–I like to know what’s going on.

ME: I don’t want to be one of those patients who– Well, you know.

TO: You’re not. You’re an ideal patient.

ME (pleasantly taken aback): Really?

TO: Yes.

ME: Jeez, I’d like to put that in my blog, but how can I do it modestly?

TO: You can’t.

Onconversations XXXIX

FRIEND 1:  You know, my mother filled out all these DNR forms, but a lot of times in a hospital they don’t follow them.

ME: Doctors just take care of it all the time. They just do it.

1:  Not necessarily in hospitals. There are all these protocols and procedures.

ME: I think they just quietly usher the person out quite often.

FRIEND 2: It’s the nurses, a lot of times.  They’re the ones who make it harder. Especially if they’re very religious.

FRIEND 3:  My father died at home, and when he was going, the assistant nurse was new and she didn’t really know what she was doing. So somehow she gave him only ten percent of the morphine he should have been given.

ALL: (Groan, say “Oh, no,” then are silent, thinking of the unnecessary suffering.)

ME: I am determined to take care of this myself while I still can, or get the best, um, facilitator I can find.

2: Everybody says that, and most people end up having a harder time than they should.

3. I read somewhere–I think it was Philip Roth writing about his father–that dying is always hard work.

ME:  You know, you hear that about just about everything. Work is work, play often involves work, pets are work, kids are work, friendship is work, and you have to work on your marriage. It doesn’t seem fair that marriage is work.  Too much work. And now dying is work. Probably you have to work in Heaven too. Singing praise is probably work.  Hell might be better–you don’t really have to work on anything.

1 (looking at me, contritely): Oh, no, Dan. I hope we haven’t depressed you with all this talk.

ME: Why? Not at all. I like deathy conversations.

1: Well, you know–I was just thinking of your…situation…and I was thinking that this kind of talk might get you down, considering…you know. I’m sorry.

ME: Well, until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me at all, but now I am depressed because you thought it would depress me.

1: Well, I’m sorry.

ME: I was joking. Sort of.