Could you help bring a little “magic” to the our area?

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition on February 17, 2012

Kesem.  It means magic.  For the children who attend Camp Kesem, they need miracles more than magic.
 
This free, weeklong overnight camp is run by college student volunteers every summer and serves children ages six to thirteen.  It is a chance for children to share the joys of childhood and remember to laugh and celebrate youth.  And it is a chance for them to forget.

The children who attend Camp Kesem are identified by oncologists, hospice caregivers, and grief counselors.  They share more than youth and a week of fun. They all bear the devastating mark of cancer.  The one thing that unites the children of Camp Kesem is the thing that scars them: They each have a parent who is or who was diagnosed with cancer.

I don’t want to be ugly or dark in today’s column.  You may tell me that, genetically, this is unavoidable for me, regardless of my topic.  But I think you know what I mean.  Cancer pervades us.  Sometimes it invades us or those whom we love most dearly.

Nearly 12 million people in the United States were diagnosed with, or already living with, cancer in January of 2008.  The American Cancer Society’s website defines this as cancer prevalence, which is different from cancer incidence.  The “incidence” of cancer is the new diagnoses each year.   This year, statisticians expect 1,638,910 new cases of cancer in the US.

For the children whose world is unraveled by learning their parent, their pillar, has cancer, this is likely the only incidence that matters in their world.  Mom is sick, or maybe Dad is sick - very, very sick.  There is an upheaval of priorities.  Their childhoods, their homes, and their routines – everything changes.

I was in the ninth grade when we found out that my mom had cancer of the larynx.  When I reflect now, I marvel at my parents’ fortitude.  She was only forty years old when her persistent, inexplicable cough was finally given a name and a root cause.  She had never smoked.  I can still remember my Latin teacher whispering to another teacher that my mom had cancer.  That was the first time I comprehended the gravity of cancer.

My mom is now 72 years old.  That’s not to say she hasn’t had her challenges; I think her medical charts outweigh her.  But she has survived.  Her vocal cord was removed and left her with a raspy voice and a series of tracheostomies that required suction to keep her airway clear.  She cannot raise her voice, and often claps to get our attention.  But those are minor. 

The thing that saddens me is that she lost her ability to sing.  My mother loved to sing.  Don’t tell anyone, but so do I.  Like me, she was never particularly good at it, either.  But, oh, she loved to sing.  While cooking or doing housework, she would sing the plaintive love songs of the old Hindi black and white films.  That simple joy was taken with the vocal cord.

I have only heard her wistfully mention this once.  She has seen her children graduate, marry, and have children of their own.  She has seen grandchildren graduate too.  These joys she would not be denied.  She has lived and thrived and survived.

But all are not so fortunate.  And for some who linger, the pain is excruciating and overwhelming.  For those of us who are not oncologists or research scientists, the most we can do is to pray and hope and offer comfort and support.

Many choose to assist research efforts by fundraising, and we can take heart in the advances in earlier detection as well as new treatment methods. 

But those are for the patient.  Camp Kesem serves those children who stand on the periphery of cancer, watching their parents’ lives be overtaken and swallowed up by cancer.

Begun over a decade ago at Stanford University by four college students, Camp Kesem served 37 campers in the year 2000.  “Kesem” means magic in Hebrew.  In the last decade, Camp Kesem has spread to 37 chapters in 22 states.  In 2011, nearly 1,500 campers had a chance to forget their worries and just be children.  They were served by almost one thousand student leaders on campuses across the nation.  While these college students serve, they learn to lead.  The purpose of Camp Kesem is really two-fold.

In our area, the University of Virginia, the University of Richmond, and George Washington University already offer camps.  Last year, my eldest daughter at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore helped to bring one to their campus as well.  This August, JHU students will host their first Camp Kesem.  It will serve children in Maryland, greater DC, and Virginia. 

While the camp is free and the student labor is too, there are real expenses involved with such an enterprise.  The students need to raise about $ 20,000 to run the camp.  If you are inclined to help in this endeavor, please visit www.campkesem.org/jhu to learn more or donate, and specify JHU on the form. 

Thank you so much.

Remembrances from the other earthquake zone

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend, Aug. 26, 2011

I have recently met more readers than I dared to suspect I had. Thank you for stopping me. I love meeting you, because our dialogue is so often one-sided. When you stop me at the post office, pool, grocery store, school, or even at the polling station, it leaves me ebullient. The only time I ask that you don’t stop me is if you are an officer of the law - in the line of duty.

Who can forget our earthquake last week? We lived in Northern California for nine years, and I don’t recall one. But when I was sent on a weeklong business trip from Long Island, New York, to Los Angeles, we experienced one then.


My husband, being a creature of higher intelligence, always accompanied me on business trips. We had a single toddler in tow. When he had business trips to exquisite destinations, I was always the idiot who felt compelled to stay at work. Then, I would suffer pangs of jealousy and regret as he described sunken tubs of black marble in posh hotels. I know. You didn’t think they let scientists out of the lab, right? He was serving as an expert DNA witness in court.


When I started my life of stay-at-home-dom (which equates to martyrdom for some), I longed for another such opportunity to escape, but it never seemed to appear. Or perhaps, my husband, being the creature of higher intelligence, never let on to such opportunities.


There was the one trip to Santa Barbara when the three kids and I tagged along. It was a gorgeous holiday, despite my being newly pregnant, and the youngest, a two-year-old boy, insisting on wearing a girl’s bathing suit to the beach. He was having none of this trunk exposure stuff. We acquiesced, realizing we couldn’t get to the beach otherwise. We coached our girls, then five and seven, not to hint as to gender of their sibling. We didn’t know anyone there. What would it matter?


It is the same liberating anonymity as when you go camping, know no one, and feel fine walking around with Einstein’s hairdo. Who will know? Who will care? Perhaps this is also the danger with out interactions online. It is easy to become too friendly with people we have never met – “e-quaintances,” I believe they are called. Who will know? Who will care? Trust me, someone or Someone knows and cares.


We had barely set foot on the beach, when our second daughter squealed, “Hey! Why is he wearing a girl’s bathing suit? He’s a boy!” She then dashed about, delightedly repeating this to random, arbitrary strangers. It was the nineties’ version of sending out a public tweet. She’s in college now, and surprisingly, she isn’t pursuing journalism.


When we went to rent the quadricycle, the girls were thrilled. Each child had to be helmeted, which seemed a simple enough business. The two girls donned their headgear. The man went through his entire inventory of children’s helmets, but our little XY shrieked the moment any helmet approached his head. We couldn’t get that thing near him. It was like an invisible force field around his body that inflicted pain or an electric shock every time the helmet approached him. So, he retaliated by inflicting pain on us, in the form of piercing screams and embarrassing public tantrums.


This is why I avoid any joining in of eye rolling at stores when someone’s child is having a fit. I realize that we all think we are smarter and more astute than the inept parent who doesn’t understand proper parenting techniques the way we do or did, whether we have children or not. But some kids are just different. Way different, and we need to be as thankful for them as we are for the ones who help us believe we are sane and competent.


The shrieking and body writhing never stopped until I walked, defeated, back to the hotel room with the creature still struggling, and got out his sister’s bright pink bike helmet (odd, why HAD we packed that for the trip?), and put it on him. Putting that helmet on him was like the tranquilizer dart hitting home on a charging rogue elephant. Ah, peace. All was well with the world. I trudged back to the quadricycle, fatigued and annoyed. If this was peace, it was a disgusted sort of peace.


If I recall, my husband had to do all the pedaling for the whole family. He fixed me with accusatory glares. Me, the mother of the contented boy who could finally be calmed by that glaring pink helmet. The girls were oblivious to our tension. (It’s so nice when they are young.) They gleefully enjoyed the fruits of their father’s labor and delighted in everything the beach had to offer.

Maybe that’s why this was the only business trip I was invited on as a stay-at-home mom. And maybe that’s why we never experienced earthquakes as Californians. We always seemed to have our own built-in version, right at home.

Camping is like trekking to England – Part II

Last week’s column (of course, you read it), was about how we needed every gadget under the sun to take our family tent camping in Luray last summer. Our eldest was leaving for college in a couple of weeks, and this trip was supposed to be like the “going abroad experience,” just cheaper and with more family members hanging around.

To understand the trip, you first have to analyze how we end the trip. Most people come home from an activity and unpack or just relax. Not my husband. He is one of those painfully organized people who, all the way home, is dictating the list of things that would really have improved the current experience. Don’t think that by driving separate, stuffed vehicles, you are going to escape this discussion. No. That’s why we have cell phones, or even worse, those handheld walkie-talkies that are the bane of every outing.

We have to do this on the way home, because otherwise he might forget. Never mind that our next camping trip won’t be for another four years. When it finally does happen, at least it will be more efficient.

His comments begin streaming, “We should buy a bigger shower bag. You can get them with double the insulation. We need better bungee cords to strap stuff down to the top of the car.” Or, we need to stock up on extra propane tanks. Also, there is advice on how to pack next time. “Make sure you store those picnic table clamps with the cover next time.” That was silly, how we had to waste eight minutes looking for the clamps with the tablecloth flapping our plates off. Or, he might say, “We should really buy the little shaker that combines the salt and the pepper, because that could cut down on the amount of stuff we are carrying by eliminating one shaker entirely.” There are eight of us, our dog, loads of food, tents, sleeping bags, and every gadget known to man crammed into two cars. We needed to drive both in order to haul all the specialized camping stuff. Now we need the combo shaker?

The only thing worse than getting these lists dictated to you along the way, is, God forbid, if you happen to be driving anywhere within view of a Wal-Mart or a sporting goods store. Then, we will have to stop on the way home and shop for the next, improved trip right there on the way back while the memory of what needs improvement is still raw in our minds.

The last time we had been camping, our family had had just six of us, and no dog. Immediately after that trip, we bought a ten-man tent to better accommodate us. By the time we actually opened the tent, our family had grown by 33%, not including the canine.

The ten-man tent is a bit of false advertising. It might be great for ten men, provided each one is built like a matchstick. Matchstick-Man also needs to be comfortable sleeping in an alternating head-toe pattern with the rest of the Matchstick Gang. Don’t bother mentioning foot odor, because if the Matchstick Gang has had beans and processed meat for dinner, foot odor is going to be by far the more pleasant of odors that might be wafting his way. Other issues will be far more volatile, if you get my drift. (Hopefully, when you go camping, you will not get my drift - or anyone else’s, for that matter.)

For a family of eight people, most of whom have padded proportions, however, the accommodations of the ten-man tent are a little snug. Consider that we, the padded ones, have recently been dining nonstop on hot dogs, marshmallows, and chocolate, and you will understand why the tent gets snugger as the trip goes on. By the end of our camping trip, I was beginning to wonder if our tent was missing the second level.

To my husband’s credit, he had had the sense to do a practice run on the tent in a controlled, low-pressure environment the day before. He is one of those rare individuals: prompt and organized, he thinks details through. It’s wonderful to have people like this organize an activity, unless you also happen to live with them. He had completely set up the tent in our front yard the day before our camping trip. (Fortunately, it fit there.) The younger kids, too young to be impacted by the stress of packing and preparations, squealed with delight and dashed in and out of the big, billowing tent. They reveled in its cavernous space. (Wait till we add people and pillows, Guys.)

When we rolled into the campground the next evening, the older kids spied the gigantic Yogi Bear statue (how could they not?), and looked at me and rolled their eyes. For some odd reason, I suspected they weren’t looking heavenward and thanking their lucky stars for such wonderful, family-fun loving, parents. They were praying they wouldn’t encounter anyone they knew.

As we maneuvered to our tent-site, I was relieved that my husband had taken the precautionary measure of setting up the tent at home, because we positioned our cars into the campsite just as daylight was donning her running shoes and preparing to flee. With dusk encroaching, a light but insistent drizzle began, eventually leaving us chilled-to-the-bone, even for August.

I wondered if this is what England felt like. Didn’t I say camping was almost like going to Europe?

Camping in Luray or trekking to England – just add imagination

Most people think camping gets you close to nature and your loved ones, while allowing an escape from the daily rat race. Others see it as an expression of the pioneering American spirit. Whatever the reason, hordes of us are driven to temporarily trade hearth and home for the great, paved wilderness. We are guided by the intrinsic American urge to discover and conquer, as well as by the latest GPS navigational system. We gab away on our cell phones while the kids are surrounded by the glorious sights and sounds of nature, only it can’t penetrate their iPOD-stuffed ear canals or the latest animated “classic” DVD piped out in surround sound in the back.

Don’t be fooled by these superficially sublime reasons. The real reason anyone goes camping is to gorge on ridiculous “foods” that would never, under normal circumstances, pass for a meal. Think you can get away with serving canned pork-n-beans, roasted hot dogs, and toasted marshmallows for dinner at home? I thought not. Remove access to the refrigerator and kitchen, though, and food standards vanish. As chief cook, I love losing the standards.

Last summer, before our eldest left for college, we spent four nights camping. It was supposed to be a final all-of-us-as-a-family blast. It was somewhat like sending the new graduate to England for the summer, except you just needed to add a little imagination.

My husband, who always thinks with convenience, comfort, and security in mind, suggested we rent a cabin with a kitchenette, bathroom, and climate control. If he wanted to suffer, he points out, why did he emigrate from India to the States?

Just like yours, our children are immune to parental wisdom. They can deflect and reject any advice we give. If we were smart parents, we would say the opposite of what we want the kids to do, but we’re not that smart.

“Your father thinks we ought to rent a cabin with a kitchenette at Jellystone Park in Luray,” I told them. That sealed our fate. Immediately the children turned on us, and were convinced that the only way to go camping was in tents. I must admit, that I also defected from the parental camp. (They outnumber us, plus they’ve got the cuteness factor.)

“What good is camping if we’re just going to open up a suitcase inside of a cabin,” they queried. I agreed and added, “And what’s the point of having half of our garage clogged with camping material if we don’t use it?”

I have this weird psychology. I feel we are “losing” money if we don’t use everything we have ever purchased, and this makes de-junking very difficult. Not de-junking makes finding all of our glorious purchases a challenge, too. Tent camping, in which we could employ the maximum number of gadgets that were clogging our garage, seemed to be the morally superior choice.

Want to see gadgets? Walk the camping aisle sometime. You can effectively furnish an entire household off those gadgets alone. We have so much camping stuff that we could camp out of our own garage if we ever needed, provided we could actually find the stuff in there.

We have the camp coffee percolator and the hot shower bag, which is an oversized hot-water bottle, just tougher and blacker. You leave it in a sunny spot and suspend it from a tree before use. (I hope it’s not too much of a stretch that there might be a tree or two where you are camping.) I warn you that “hot” is a relative term. If you are Inuit (notice my ethnic sensitivity precludes the use of the offensive term “Eskimo”) and don’t mind swimming with ice cubes, good. Otherwise, this “hot” means when the water hits any part of your body that you are foolish enough to expose, you will not shriek, shrivel, and die instantly. You will just shriek and shrivel. You will gasp for air. You will be glad you chose a campsite that has hot public showers, and you will stuff the black bladder back into the garage for another day…just in case.