Two and a half years ago, on Labour day weekend, my roomate’s friend James came to visit. Just a year before James had beaten cancer which, just a year or two earlier, had taken his father. We had a great weekend - went to a Wolf Parade show at a little Kalamazoo, MI bar, threw a guitar off the roof one night… repeatedly, and made the long drive up into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to go camping on Lake Superior.
On the way up we stopped for ice cream at a used car lot, drank Jack Daniels and ate fatty American treats to refresh our thirst.
I fell asleep some time after crossing the Mackinac Bridge - the one that was on my drivers license that traverses the straight between Lakes Michigan and Huron - and woke up as we drove through an immense cemetery full of a perfect grid of white headstones. I rubbed my eyes and, as they focused, I saw that it was just a clear cut full of sun-bleached stumps. There was something sad about the similarity. It was as though they had been planted in that perfect grid just so that they would look orderly when dead. They had perfectly scribed epitaphs on their sawed tops - decades of rings that told a story about each and every year that protected their core until it didn’t matter anymore. If we’d stopped the car we could have read about years of flood, years of drought, years of disease.
It got me thinking about James. We didn’t talk about, or even mention, cancer for the entire four days. I wondered if, on the inside, James had layers of rings in there somewhere that told the story.
In the end, it didn’t matter. We didn’t talk about his growth rings. Instead, we drank around the fire until it was a good idea to jump over it naked while others spat JD on the flame, and then slept and repeated. But I still wondered about his rings.
When Jess’ sister, Leila, decided to shave her head for cancer awareness recently, it automatically made me think of that weekend with James and the tree grave yard. And, because of that, it seemed like a cool thing to try to help her with.
Leila is shaving her head with Balding For Dollars on May 9th in order to raise money for families dealing with childhood Cancer… as a way of easing the severity of the growth rings that they will inevitably add.
Jess put a website together for her, and I made some videos to help her tell her story. If you feel compelled, please engage.
