She's 19 days younger than I am. She runs an organic farm with her husband. They are fit, active, and spend the day nurturing young shoots of plants and creating food for people who need it. Theirs could not be a more exemplary, healthy, or precarious lifestyle.
Organic farming is not for the faint-hearted, as it turns out. It's not all about sitting on the patio at sunset, sipping a local varietal, and surveying the glow of the fields as they effortlessly photosynthesize into profits. It's more like looking constantly at the weather service sites, setting up endlessly more intricate fencing to keep out critters large and small, battling with water companies, filling out mountains of paperwork for loans and grants, and somehow trying to make a living in between dry lightning strikes, droughts, fires, and windstorms.
They've been doing this for years, by themselves. They get some volunteer help occasionally, but mainly it's the two of them, out in the fields, picking, planting, building, hoeing. Season after season, year after year.
In the middle of this, she gets cancer. And even though it was bad, and even though it came back, and even though she had to deal with even more paperwork and insurance claims and all the rest of the stuff , throughout it all she kept working. What was she going to do?, she asked me. The plants don't care. The seasons don't change. The markets won't wait. What's she going to do? Go inside and lie on her fainting couch while the whole precarious enterprise literally withers and dies out there?
So she didn't do that. She kept going out into the fields. Day after day. Once, she told me the nausea got bad. She took a pill, waited a half an hour, and went back out.
So, today, in my version of this story, Opera A La Carte, the beloved and beleagured opera company I've been technical director for for three decades, and now president of for four years, is putting on a fundraiser. As usual, the preplanning has been hectic, chaotic, annoying, and fraught. As usual, we desperately need the money we hope to raise. (Come join us! Mention this blog and I'll give you a very small discount. Hahaha.) As usual, tempers are frayed, and a clear plan is, well, unclear.
As they say in Shakespeare in Love:
- Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
- Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
- Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
- Hugh Fennyman: How?
- Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
That's it in a nutshell. The mystery. The imminent disaster. And we're still trying, and today is a show. I've been up since 6, dragging myself out to pick up the rental truck, supervising the umpteen millionth load in, and smelling the dust of props and costumes and set pieces that I have been washing off my hands for over half my life. Meanwhile, up at the venue, everyone is pitching in, putting together flowers and food and set decorations. It's a lot like "hey kids, let's put on a show," but we've been doing this together for absolute years, and we're kind of more like "Fuck us, I can't believe we're doing this fucking thing again." But we do, and we laugh, and we give each other shit, and... in a very wonderful and life enhancing way, we are happy.
We don't know how we're going to actually survive as a company. We have our own internal storms and predators, and the craziest random weirdness you've ever seen, besetting us on all sides. I have had more therapists and parents and well meaning friends and husbands and children and random strangers on the street asking me, over and over, why do I do this stupid thing? Why the stress? Why the long hours? Why the aggravation? And even myself, I have been threatening to quit for years, and then always say "But it's the best goddamn reality show I've ever seen."
It's what I do. Even though I'm not saving the world, or feeding it, or even doing much beside enhancing it a little tiny bit with an obscure art form...it's what I do. I go out into the fields. And I wonder how I got myself into this mess. And I curse my fate and wonder why I have to do this while I have cancer, and then I keep doing it.
Maybe it's not noble, and maybe it's not creative. As glamorous as it may sound from the outside, I'm guessing my friend spends a lot of time in her fields cursing her life, missing things like steady paychecks and art and a life without bowel consuming stress. I look at the hours I spend on budgets and board meeting documents and think, yeah... there's time I'll never see again. But it's what we do, for better or worse.
Most importantly it's what healthy people do. It's what she and I do when we're healthy, and it's what she continued to do when she was sick, and it's what I'm continuing to try to do now that I'm going through the same thing. Because what are the options? Sit around and catalog my woes all day? Let them rent the truck and get the dust on their hands while I take another pill and watch some Sponge Bob? Fuck no. I won't be stupid, I won't be crazy and lug all that shit up and down the ramp... but I'm going to show up. I'm going to lend my support, and my years of experience, and some gas money, and buy them all sandwiches.. and I'm going to do what healthy people do who are not defined by cancer.
Gonna go out into the fields. Gonna put on a show. Gonna do the thing that healthy people do, whether they like it or not.
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