Daydreams & Diaries

by Taylor Black

  Taylor’s Diary

  February 20, 2001

  Well, I am now in Gainesville. So far it promises to be a pleasurable experience (much more pleasurable than Duke). Everything w/Jeff is still up in the air. He came over the night before I left ’till about 4 in the morning. He is really hot and cold and I don’t know what he wanted from me. So I suppose for now I should just put him out of my mind. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Anyway, I don’t know if I’m going home this weekend, it seems as though no one is going. So, I went to Shands today and had a consultation, MRI and a mold done. I have to go back in Thurs. for a CT scan. But my MRI had a clean scan so that’s awesome. See the things I get excited about now? Sometimes I think about my life a year ago. I was going through w/o a care in the world. It seems like a lifetime ago. Everything is so different now and everyone in my life has become something different to me.

  Taylor’s Diary

  February 21, 2001

  So I am going home this weekend (tomorrow actually) which is good because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to go for like 3 weeks. I hope there is stuff to do this weekend though you know what I was just thinking? Every day we wander the earth with billions of other people and so many different lives. It just makes you think, doesn’t it? Of the infinite possibilities and the millions of different ways people choose to live their lives. Which is the way I should choose to live mine? I suppose it’ll come along piece by piece. I think it’s just reminding yourself everyday to drop everything and look around and really notice the beauty in nature and in the world and all its people. I watched the sun shine through leaves today and it lifted me.

  Chapter Eighteen: Reefer Saneness

  I come across Taylor’s poems in her journals and in old shoe boxes now and again, and they often take me back to the last year of her life as many of them deal with her illness and her response to the cancer.

  The anticipation of disease is a bitch no one should know.

  The waiting is like a rollercoaster with the severest low.

  Day in day out the same, no news has yet been heard,

  And so the time will pass as we wait to learn the word.

  A doctor here, a hospital there, to me it’s all the same

  For now I just sit waiting for the day that I go lame.

  My body bruised and beaten will surely quit somehow,

  Until that day I’ll wait and pray for when that time is now.

  Of course that ‘now’ did come and prior to her death she did go nearly lame, but that year had its amusing moments as well, when Taylor’s siblings rallied around her and beat the system in what I like to refer to as “reefer saneness.” Marijuana, it seems, was the one thing she could count on to counteract the nausea of chemotherapy.

  Most people are too young to have heard of the classic Depression era anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness that warned of the evils of pot. That was during the time when prohibition was being repealed and booze was flowing legally once again in the United States. Marijuana was a possible competitor to booze, and the liquor lobby was successful in having pot declared an illegal narcotic. Ironically, unlike alcohol which causes nausea, the THC in marijuana has anti-nausea properties which are helpful to chemotherapy patients. The medical establishment had no trouble prescribing pot pills for Taylor to relieve her nausea, but unfortunately they were 1) Ridiculously expensive and 2) completely worthless. The secret to nausea relief was in the delivery system. Relief from chemo nausea required the express lane of the lungs, not the traffic jam on the backed up digestive system, and only smoking the pot accomplished that.

  Taylor was on court-ordered probation for the Possum Long Pot caper of the summer before and, I suppose, theoretically, a judge might have sent her to the slammer for smoking a bit of weed, but even a law-abiding high school teacher could see the folly of Florida’s marijuana laws. Yet in 2001, the progressive state of California hadn’t passed its medical marijuana statutes, and one might say that the whole nation was suffering from a bit of reefer madness in its prohibition of pot for medicinal purposes. Heck, even the ancient conservative senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, believed pot should be legalized for medical treatment.

  Taylor had just had a session of some really nasty chemotherapy at St. Mary’s in West Palm Beach and was constantly making trips from her hospital bed to the bathroom to barf in the room’s toilet, dragging her IV stand beside her. It was, as she said, “a regular barfarama.”

  “I need pot, Dad,” I remember she said to me, tears in her eyes. Vomiting was not her favorite pastime.

  “I know,” I replied, feeling totally powerless.

  “Dammit,” she cursed. “Shit!”

  Taylor was really feeling bad. It wasn’t that she was a saint and didn’t swear, she just didn’t swear around me. At least not often. “I’m sorry for swearing, Dad,” she apologized.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” I replied and gave her a hug. “Sometimes swearing is necessary.”

  And then a white knight appeared. Taylor’s sibling, who shall remain nameless due to the statute of limitations, came to visit bringing oranges, citrus spray, a small fan, and…weed.

  “Tim, guard the door,” the sibling told me. He opened the hospital room window and moved near the opening. Taylor sat in the chair, lit the pipe and exhaled the smoke out the window as the fan circulated citrus smell throughout the room. The oranges, I realized, were the “cover” fruit. Florida’s top two cash crops, pot and oranges, were involved. I suppose I could rationalize that we were doing our civic duty, but in my mind I saw Anita Bryant, who had once been the spokesperson for the orange industry, smoking a joint and that didn’t work.

  “Make sure the nurses don’t come in, Tim,” the sibling ordered me and I went out and guarded the door to the room, promising to signal with the secret family knock if a nurse neared. Meanwhile, in the hospital room, Taylor puffed away her nausea with the sibling-provided pot. For the first time in my life I was thankful for the substance abuse in the family. I wondered for a moment if my marriage might have worked with marijuana in lieu of alcohol, but I will never know. Still it was a remarkable family that could come up with pot in a tight spot, at a moment’s notice. Our folks could obtain the tokes, one might say.

  Of course outside the door standing guard, my imagination got the best of me and I envisioned a headline in the Stuart News: “Local Teacher Serves as Lookout for Pot Head Daughter.” And my mind began to write the copy in the 5 W journalistic format (who, what, when, where, and why) which I had taught my journalism students back in the ‘80s.

  But that night I truly changed my opinion on the use of marijuana for cancer patients, because I saw how pot worked for Taylor. I can hear her voice in my head now, laughing about the whole incident.

  You were so nervous, you were funny, Pops. We had everything under control. The fan, the citrus. You were dealing with professionals, Pops. There weren’t many funny times in that year, but that was one of them. There I was sticking my head out of the hospital room window, blowing pot smoke into the air. Taylor appreciated the irony of being on probation for pot. To her it was a hoot.

  I wish there had been more moments like that.

  * * *

  Looking back on that year of Taylor’s treatment, I think that radiation prolonged her life. Although it didn’t rid her of the tumor, in the end it slowed its growth and gave her perhaps a few more months. Still, at the beginning, like the eternal optimists that we had become, we thought perhaps that radiation would save her. We were wrong.

  Taylor’s Diary

  March 2, 2001

  I have started radiation. It is not a fun experience let me tell you. The first day I came home w/a headache and severe case of vomiting. After I smoked a little bit (marijuana) I was fine and able to hold down food. I am going to ask Friedman if he has any objections to that.

  Taylor’s Diary

  March 4, 2001

  I have consciously been avoiding writing in this jo
urnal. I’m not sure why; only I think it may be because I’ve entered another stage of this epiphany. I haven’t really grasped what I am supposed to have learned from this. I believe I have learned that life is a miracle, every second of it. But I don’t think I have the outlook all the time. I at least want to see it that way more days than not.

  Taylor’s Diary

  March 8, 2001

  Radiation has been wearing me down a bit. I sleep a lot and I am fatigued throughout the day when the actual radiation is taking place. I have the strange sensation and then the most horrible smell overwhelms me. It smells like burning flesh or something disgustingly similar to that. I’m going to try and get my appt. moved up to tom. because we’re gonna go home.

  Chapter Nineteen: My So-Called Life

  Watching a rerun of one of Taylor’s favorite TV programs, My So Called Life, a television show about a fifteen-year-old coping with adolescence, I was browsing through one of Taylor’s old journals and her list of New Year’s resolutions for 1998, the year she turned fifteen. After watching the program it seemed appropriate.

  I resolve to:

  stop caring what other people think

  listen to myself more than anyone else

  stop being ultra-sensitive but still sensitive

  get over my petty problems and focus on other people, not myself

  set goals and achieve them

  stick to things when I say I’ll do them

  not be such a flake

  learn self-control and will power

  not be so afraid of getting hurt

  open up more, but only to a select few, communicate more

  Looking back on her resolutions, I thought it was a good list, but of course we are humans and we are flawed, and when you are fifteen and find Erik, nothing else seems to matter. 1998 was not the year of the rat or dog, it was the Year of the Erik. Erik, Erik! He wasn’t Erik the Red, he was Erik the Loser, but he was her first real boyfriend and nothing is as blinding as one’s first infatuation, even if he has an acne problem.

  Of course at the time, like most fathers, I didn’t know the depth of her feeling for Erik the L and coming across a diary entry of July 6, 1998 I found:

  My boyfriend Erik is perhaps one of the greatest people I have met though he does have his flaws. Although I do seem to have some type of relationship phobia (I know this coming from a 15 yr. old must sound ridiculous)

  No, Taylor, I thought as I reread it: It didn’t sound ridiculous at all. It sounded human. It was honest. We have all had those feeling, honey; I wish I could have told her then. But we didn’t talk about Erik very much; Taylor was more distant at fifteen, into the world of peer pressure and, on occasion, bad choices. Erik the L was certainly a bad choice and by September he had been arrested for possession of marijuana.

  “Erik got busted for pot, Dad,” she told me one evening.

  Little did I know that for Taylor it was a preview of coming attractions in her own life.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table hiding behind a newspaper. That was one of my father’s best tactics when I was an adolescent. My father didn’t want to show the anger he felt when, as a teenager, I would say something to piss him off, like informing him I was going to skip college to go hop with the kangaroos in Australia because I didn’t want to be part of a country that was at war in Vietnam. It was calculated, of course, for I was far too big a coward to hightail it down under and wound up at the good Lutheran school, Gettysburg College. Funny, how we learn things from our parents. “That’s too bad,” I said, but I wasn’t angry, I was feeling guiltily grateful. Perhaps this was the end of the reign of Erik the L. Perhaps he would sail off to the New World and rediscover Newfoundland, Nova Scotia or a new Starbucks on South Beach.

  “Looks like I won’t be seeing him for a while,” Taylor said. She didn’t seem all that broken up about it, as I recall. I knew she was waiting for my reaction.

  Yes! I thought and, certain my smile was erased, brought down my newspaper. It was a signal; Taylor went on as if making her closing argument to a judge. If it may please my father’s court: She didn’t enter an oral argument that night, but rather wrote in her journal:

  I know Erik may sound like a lose, but he’s the farthest thing from it. He’s such a great person. I hope that when I look back on this I’ll remember all those little things that made him so noble and good.

  But within a week, Erik the L was in the past.

  * * *

  My first great love was a girl name Lynda who, I remember, had a great swimming pool. But today when I try to envision Lynda’s face, all I get is the pool. I assume she went on to marry someone and have children and so forth, but I really only remember the summer I spent in her swimming pool. Lynda the Pool, I guess, or simply Lynda the P. It was a nice, kidney shaped pool in a Philadelphia suburb and I skipped a summer typing class nearly every day to be near Lynda the P. A cool dip in a girl’s pool certainly beat the hum of an IBM Selectric typewriter. I turned out to be a pretty poor typist but it had been a good summer.

  * * *

  As the radiation progressed at Shands, Taylor turned once again to a source of comfort for her: poetry.

  Taylor’s Diary

  March 11, 2001

  Confusion.

  Chaos.

  That is all she can decipher.

  No plan of attack.

  No escape route.

  A young woman stands shell shocked not knowing which way to run.

  The world around her proceeds normally. It is only frightening to her.

  And those she drags with her.

  Once confronted by her demons all allies flee,

  Unfamiliar with her burden they know not the real weight, even the strongest of all is crushed by its massive size making any hope of her relief somewhat impossible.

  Chapter Twenty: Ebony and Ivory

  Taylor was in ninth grade at Martin County High School and was home one day after school when I walked in from my own high school. I was surprised to see her doing her homework in the living room although, of course, the television was on in the background. I asked the all-too familiar question, but got an unusual answer:

  “How was school today?”

  “I stopped a fight.” I remember she told me.

  “Really? That was good. How did you do that?”

  “Some black girls were about ready to beat up a white girl and I went over and stopped it. I went to Parker with the black kids and they knew me. All of the white kids who went to Parker get along with the black kids at high school, but the white kids who went to Palm City have problems with the black kids. How can anyone treat a person differently because of skin color? It’s stupid.”

  It wasn’t that Taylor was a civil rights leader. Obviously she was born after the Freedom Rides and the marches on Selma and Washington and she didn’t know much of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech save for the iconic phrase, but in a way in that moment, I realized for Taylor at least, Dr. King’s dream had come true because Taylor was judging people on “the content of the character” not on the color of their skin.

  All seven children in the family had attended J.D. Parker Elementary; it was certainly one thing which Pam and I agreed upon and all of the children had grown up with black friends in their lives. On the other hand, some of the kids who had gone to all-white elementary schools—some of Martin County’s were 95% + white. Students who had sat at cafeteria tables together in first and second grade and shared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Sip-ups did not fight each other when they reached high school. They may or may not have been friends, but they had a common respect for one another. There were too many PB&Js, the sticky bonds of childhood, behind them.

  I remember Taylor’s comments were a revelation to me at the time. In the 1960s I had gone to Springfield High School in suburban Philadelphia and we had perhaps four black students attending the school, two boys and two girls. The Batipps brothers were great athletes so all of the white kids
respected them, but I still heard comments in the hallways, an N-word here and there, words that too many folks still use. I had a good friend, Ron Dudley, who asked me if I wanted to invest in Cloverlay, a company set up to promote a young black fighter named Joe Frazier. The shares were $500 and I was afraid to risk my paper route money at the time for in the early sixties five hundred dollars was a tidy sum. So Ron bought two shares and after Smokin’ Joe won the heavyweight title he cashed each share in for $32,000 I think. Ron and I went down to the Nixon Theater in Philadelphia to hear some Motown groups perform before the 1965 riots and we were the only white guys in the audience. There was never any trouble, never any fear, back then as there wasn’t for Taylor.

  Racism in America was far from dead, although I like to think it was terminally ill.

  But for Taylor and the black girls at Martin County High School that day, racism stopped for a moment, when the black girls, who were the ones acting like racists in this incident, were approached by a white girl who had been their friend since kindergarten. Kids, I realized, weren’t inherently racist; they are raised that way. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Somewhere along the line we forget what Jesus taught us, or Moses or Mohammad or Buddha if you prefer. In the words of Charley Pride, a black country singer: We’re all God’s children, his next of kin…

  So, Taylor, the country hasn’t come as far as you did, but perhaps someday it will.

  Love, Dad.

  * * *

  Taylor’s radiation treatment went on for several weeks with forays back to South Florida every other weekend.

  Taylor’s Diary

  March 28, 2001

  Well, I haven’t been very adamant about writing everyday as you may have seen. Everything has been average up here in Gainesville. I found out today that I have to stay here until Apr. 16th. I am extremely anxious to go home. I mean, it’s all right up here (much preferable to Durham) but I only have been home for two consecutive weeks in the last 4 months. And Dr. Friedman wants me to go 2 Duke for a consultation after I’m done here. I’m going to try to arrange for a week @ home before going up there.