LANCE

greetings, ash wednesday.
i'm back in the fold,
back in sebastopol,
7am sunrise,
the sound of increasing traffic,
the street sweeper outside
doing its pass on south main st.
2 full days now back from Qatar,
from 21 hours of flying time enroute back
across the globe.
hopefully the 2+ week middle east
adventure will be behind me today,
the stagnet lead feeling will be vanished
from thy legular vascular blood flow.
we'll see.
yesterday Levi phoned, now back from his team camp in AlbQ
and asked what i was doing. .
i was like, bro, dude, i'm going big,
i have a bunch of threshold intervals i'm going to do,
get myself back in shape. . you know, Tour of CA,
i'm going wipp myself into shape real quick here
after a 60km+ highspeed crash in Qatar stage 2
where i would have broken some bones if my head/helmet
didn't take so much of the blow on the chip seal pavement,
and therefore had a few substandard training days the remaining
6 days i had to spend solo, like a nomad in the desert while
my teammates went to the battle field to fight the belgian warriors,
where upon, day two, i learned my father was diagnosed with an
acute form of Leukemia--his bone marrow stoped it's function, ie his blood
count and infection fighting agents were few and far between, making
his situation a leathal one if he caught something as basic as a common cold.
if you hung around him anytime in the last year you'd have noticed his
perpetual cough, in hindsite, a little infection that he simply couldn't kick.
he's doing fine, so far, though.
he's in michigan at a good cancer care facility,
with mom, and big bro doctor Trevor who flew out yesterday to be the first son in attendance.
i think backcountry Bird (aaron) will be next, maybe this weekend.
they started dad on chemo a few days ago,
put him on some anitbiotics and gave'em a couple pints of blood,
and he said he felt better than he did during the entirety the past 6 months.
so, he's positive, and a trooper. . "taking his turn" in human suffering,
as he says.
he's said, "it naurcisistic to think these things shouldn't happen to YOU" ..
we see it all around us, suffering. . or at least it is all around us, whether or
not we choose to "see" it. . why would we think/fantacize that we'd be free from it.
but any way. .
Levi was like, "what are you going to do?"
go Big is said.
"where are you"
the post office, i said.
"it's 1045, and your still going big? and you're not even ajusted to the time zone yet, and you have still open wounds on from your crash..?? i'm going easy, if you want to join me" ..
uhh, okay, your right.

no one, well, maybe a few people, really don't know what sort of support that dude has given me. how many times he's talked me down off the ledge, or told me to chill,
or told me at times, in more soft-coated ways, to get my shit together . .
people are too busy half wheeling that dude to get beneath the first layer,
which is mostly business, rightfully so.

so, i shaved my head.
to look like my dad. he shaved his yesterday in anticipationf of it falling out from the poison chemo therapy . .
the first thing Trev did when he go to the hospital
was bust out the clippers,
they debated a mohawk, but ma wasn't hip.

dad's cancer fighting season is going to be about as long as the road season this year.
hopefully by tour of Missouri he's back in the classroom with his students,
where he should be,
talking this time, not about other's, but maybe his own experience,
how he battled, and came out shinning.
in which case, in anticipation of that day,
we'll now refer to Ron Nydam as
Lance.