Walt

The year before Anna and I were to marry, a good friend - Ryan Lessmann - had the wisdom and care enough to recommend one book to me - a book to "prepare us" for the venture of covenant. "You should read Walter Wangerin's book," Ryan said to me. And then he went on to suggest that me - as a writer - somehow reminded Ryan of Walter Wanger, Jr. It was a compliment I didn't know was ludicrous and too gracious until well down the road.

Well, I'll let you see for yourself how ridiculous this claim was ... briefly.

Walter Wangerin, Jr. has been battling cancer for the last couple of years, and during this storming season, he's been plowing through it in the best way he knows how: writing. Occasionally, he offers up some of his thoughts and letters to a wider community. The following is the most recent of those letters.

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August 10, 2007

Gentle souls and merciful spirits all:

Time used to tumble for me. Like the mountain stream that breaks at the big rocks, spouts and plunges at speed from crags to canyons. Time was narrow and very fast.

Now Time has slowed to a stately progression. I measure it in day/feet--feet per day. For there are fewer days left to me and heavier feet for the passage. Slowth: it requires enormous patience. Slowth: a damming of anxiety. The consequence of a body restrained, slower than an infant's crawl. My motion by disease reduced to the child's eternal wait for good things far away.

On the other hand, slowth's no trouble at all. Where once Time tumbled, now Time has widened. Like the river that covers a broad plain. And the patience I thought was severity has become my benefaction.

I don't look forward so much any more, dashing to grasp the future. I look left and right. I've the Time, you see, to scrutinize all that is. And what is companions me. The trees can't move. Well, then: let me abide by them a while. My toes, my roots. A good rain can linger almost forever.

The shorter my "Time," the vaster my scope.

Oh, my beautiful granddaughter! What you are right now doesn't need a future to give it purpose or to make the present girl a better one. You are! You are, you are--and for me it is enough. Sure, you may marry. Will be there to kiss you? Right now I don't know. But now I don't beg for that particular piece of future, nor do I bargain for it. Child, you are! And I am. And I have the Time to let the whole of you fill the whole of my knowing.

This, girl: just this. Tip of my finger to the tip of yours. It is altogether enough.

Let me illustrate the pragmatic benefits of patience.

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For years before cancer broke the speed of my Time and spread its silver motion as far as the horizons, I never took my socks off. Well, not my right sock. Under the nail of the great toe concealed was a fungus that blackened the length and breadth of it. I'd heard somewhere that rubbing petroleum jelly into the nail could kill the fungus and return the toe to its former health--and me to my former purity.

I tried the trick. Fairly often at first, sitting on the side of my bed, my right ankles upon my left knee. But then Time caught me up and rushed me straightway into my days. Narrow spout, hurtling stream, my paper boat breathless upon the waters, now! I had no Time or leisure to attend to the toe. Years, I said: black as compost.

But cancer cut the speed, enforced a more casual floating, and opened an eternity between my shower and my breakfast. If I could take interest in the motion of the sunrise, well, I could in my person mimic that solar motion--just as interesting--and rub the petroleum jelly slowly, deeply into the nail.

And I know you know how slowly the nail on your great toe grows. In a few weeks I noticed that the fungus, like a black window shade, was rising. The long morning of the black sun!

And it has arisen. And every Time I trim the nail, I razor away another slice of black.

Cancer has cured me.

Soon I'll remove that sock too.

Surely it's high Time--isn't it?--that we pay as much attention to the blessings of a long affliction as we do to the pain for which we curse it. Please: it's not a man's peculiar interpretation or a woman's particular gift for longsuffering patience which enables each to live the sickness better than another does. It's a faith available to everyone. (Though there always is a learning curve.)

Pay attention!

In Lakota: wachin ksapa yo!--whose meaning is closer to "Be attentive" than to something we do sporadically. It's a continual manner of being.

For the footfall of an ant may be as thunderous as a maverick at full gallop, and as meaningful as the sky.

Rather than drowning awareness, or drugging it, or shrouding ourselves in pity or persistent sorrow, consider companionship: the tree that waits upon our slowth in order to befriend us. The wren who, quick as she is, follows ever her singular path and by her repetitions sticks in the same places in Time. The child whose entire life it caught up in a minute as long as a lifetime.

The toenail healed in Slow Time. The fullness of experience between the shower and a cup of coffee.

Walt