The Big E

We returned to the Big E this week.

The Big E. The Eastern States Exposition . The state fair, held yearly in Springfield, Massachusetts , is where one can watch baby chicks  hatch,  horses cantor and  both huskers and  ears of corn, husk. 

Really?  Aromatherapy can cure Lupus? Dont tell Big Pharma!

A Selfie: me with two sleeping cows

and the inevitable conclusion. 

  I love the big E , long after friends and  family have  dismissed the gluttony and  the kitsch. They view the fair as hopelessly tawdry  and vulgar , appealing to  base,  blue collar appetites . 

            I love the Big E because I view the fair as a response to all that is wrong with our  modern lives . In a world of homogenous apathy, the Big E  may be the only place on the planet where one can view the lovingly  grown,  largest gourd  in Connecticut and  vicariously  experience the honest, exuberant  joy of a 16 year –old who  won a ribbon for raising the  best groomed cow in New England.

I have no idea what she's doing but she's proud and excited!

            I have always lived in proximity to state fairs.  We visited the  Danbury State fair  yearly until someone decided Connecticut  needed a Forever 21-chocked mall     more than a tractor pull  competition, and maybe they do.  The New York State Fair  lies 5 miles from upstate medical school in Syracuse.  I couldn’t begin a year  without inspecting the  life sized butter sculpture.

It’s September 21, 2011. I stand at the portal of the Brigham and woman’s hospital, checking-in for my stem cell transplant, We are silent and grim.  There is no future, only  disease.  “You have 10 years to live,” Firsh told me four years previous, and now, with my disease  surging ahead,  six more years  on this mortal coil seems an impossibility. The admitting nurse eyes us warily.

            “ Why are you here?”

             I ignore the existential entreaty.

  “We were told to show up at 9 AM.”

            “That’s crazy. They’ll just make you sit here all day, they wont admit  you until tomorrow. Go do something fun.”

             The  Dana Farber is  110 miles from the big E.  We had to go. The unspoken message was, of, course  “You may never  see a polled Hereford (1)  again, you might as well go.”

            We had, I recall, a wonderful time. I  was the proud possessor of a  central line, an IV that runs through the chest wall directly into the heart. I spent the day trying to fool everyone I was drinking beer through the plastic straw -like attachment protruding from my shirt.  I had been given a quick lecture about immunity and my complete lack thereof.  As far as I could tell,  everything one could see, touch or eat at the Big E was on some banned list. I remember Cyn running behind me, laying down a path of Purell as If I were a  giant  snail secreting a glistening alcohol trail.

            I remember taking real inspiration form the Big E that day. I was about to have buckets of poison and, apparently a little local beer, poured directly into my heart for the next few weeks but,  in  Springfield,  life went on, oblivious to my insanely  perplexing predicament. 

            At the Big E, each New England state is given a pavilion in which to display its local  wares, foods and customs.  The Maine pavilion serves  potatoes at 6 dollars a serving, demonstrating  Maine’s two famous  exports:  starchy tubers and chutzpah.  New Hampshire’s pavilion was transformed into a big state lottery ticket store. Massachusetts was all about the chowder.   Vermont ‘s  exhibit  extolled the virtues of flannel outer ware and  maple syrup.  In our Mall -saturated world,  where one can buy the same Victoria secret  bra  from coast to coast, shopping at Vermont’s  Flannel  shop  for  comfortable  plaid work shirts was strangely liberating.

            The day passed. We drove back to Boston.  I lived.

            We returned to the Big E last week.  The cancer is gone, but the malady lingers. I have aged  far  more than 3 years over the past 36 months.  I worry my enthusiasm and life -wonder is ebbing under a constant onslaught of medication and discomfort. This year, I was less willing to  dismiss the morbidly obese, lining up to buy hamburgers  served between two doughnuts.

            I had my shopping list for this year:  A new Timex watch from the Connecticut  pavilion,  some lavender soaps  and flannel  nightshirts from the Vermont  display,

            The fair has changed.  The Timex exhibit where I stock up yearly on  cheap watches  ( three for $50) is now home to  Pez, another  Connecticut product. There may be no more useful object on the planet than a cheap, rugged wristwatch.  There may be nothing more redundant and useless than a Daffy Duck Pez dispenser, available at any  Wal-Mart  across this  monotonous. indifferent   land of ours. I feel a real sense of loss as metal watch mechanisms  are replaced by  sugar and plastic.  The soaps are gone, replaced by yet another ice cream shoppe.  I do love Ben and Jerry but I can buy a  pallet of Cherry Garcia in  Stockton, California, and yet the one  factory in Vermont that produces  little bars of lovely    lavender soap is out of business.

            I left the Big E this year  with mixed emotions. I’ll be alive next year. I just  accepted a three year commitment with U.  Conn to mentor their med students, and I intend on  shaking their hand in four years. I’m just not sure If I’ll return  to the  Big E.

The joy of life is in the unexpected, the breathtaking, the unique. My survival is no longer  breathtaking  or unexpected  but neither is the Big E.

(1)  The Polled Hereford is a hornless variant of the Hereford with the polled gene, a natural genetic mutation that was selected into a separate breed beginning in 1889The Polled Hereford breed is bred for its deep forequarters, depth and muscling, docile temperament, fast-growing calves, and good quality of beef

To. Forgive. divine

DB Sweeny is terrified.  He is going to die.  They’re all going to die. His hand twitches  as he plots his B 25’s   course over the  North Sea with a red crayon.  He glances out the window.

“That’s the third Reich we’re flying over,” He says ruefully.

Memphis Belle.   World war two melodrama about young flyboys bombing Hitler’s empire.

The cartoon representing  our Airbus 330  has just  entered European  airspace. Somewhere below, the good people of Leiden are buying herring along  the canals,  sipping  coffee, bracing for another day’s onslaught  of euro socialism and legal hashish.

Lufthansa a has done a fine job spiriting us across the  Atlantic.  Some unseen hand drew all the Business Class shades in the middle of the might, letting us sleep an extra hour or so.   Dankeshein  They are an efficient people.  They could have won WWII if they had set less exulted goals than conquering the world and exterminating its Jews. They should have settled on annexing the Sudetenland and  sending  Golda Meir hate mail.

As a child, I remember my dad forbidding us from flying to Germany on Lufthansa. “You know,” He’d say in a tone that forbade contradiction or discussion,   “ the Lufthansa  pilots   flew for the Luftwaffe, during World War Two.”

         That may have been true in 1968, when the  average ex Luftwaffe pilot was probably  married and  raising teenagers.  The average   WW II  Luftwaffe  Pilot  would be  90  this year, so I feel a little less guilt.

Point made. I am appalling old.

         As the continent scrolls by beneath,  I start performing  the ominous math.  I was born 14 years after D Day.  Fourteen years ago I was… well, I was sitting in the same office I now occupy.

         It gets worse, much worse.  I was born in a country with 49 States. When I was born, the last Civil war veteran was still alive. He was 113, true, but alive.

How did I get so  old?
         The answer is easy: I didn’t die.

         On some level, this trip to Munich, with connections to Croatia , is taking me back to my roots.  More specifically, it’s taking me to the source of my stem cells.

         Dankeshein, Deuchland.

          I imagine trying to explain to a German civilian from the 1940s  exactly what I needed from him.

         “I know we are at war, and I know your leader has some misgivings about , you know, Jews, but  it turns out we have identical bone marrow. Would you be a dear and donate a pint of your stem cells to me? Otherwise, I die. “

Which part of this request would he find the most absurd?  That he shared  a bone marrow with an American  Jewish  stranger? Or would he want to know about a procedure that kills leukemia though a technique called “ Graft Versus Host Syndrome?”  In the end, I’m sure I’d tell him it was magic.

         We land in  Dubrovnik, Croatia, to start our bike trip.   Croatia is a lovely country,  evocative of  the Northern California coast with citrus trees, high mountains, and a long, attractive coastline.  An occasional soviet era  building  appears, hinting at an ominous  communist past.

         Dubrovnik is a medieval, walled city.   It’s evocative of Venice, not surprising when one realizes they were founded and built at the same time by the same people. Then you notice things

         You notice most of the  buildings in this  600 year old city have new roofs. The Yugoslavs tried to destroy the city in 1991.  You notice a pockmarked hotel, built by the communists and abandoned after the war because,  let’s face it, you  don’t rebuild  1985 era poured cement hotels.        

         Point made: War is eternal. One can wander past the Egyptian Obelisk along  the Thames in London and see  where the German bombs left pockmarks during World War I.

         The  1991 war was a prelude to the horrors of the  Bosnian conflict ten years later.  In that conflict, the Serbs decided to exterminate the Muslim Bosnians.  Slodidan Milosevic , the Serbian  ex- communist leader, was tried for war crimes and  eventually imprisoned. I asked our Croat  Bus driver about all this. “ Too bad he died so soon,” was his reply.

         The question lingers. How many years until the Serbians and Bosnians start swapping stem cells? Perhaps that time span, between extermination camp and  stem cell donation,  should become a unit of  time. It would represent a wonderful thing, the time it takes to forgive one’s tormentors.  

         I am old, I am old, I wear my modern, biking trousers rolled.  God my legs are thin.  Off for a week  biking across Croatia.