I Found My Face In The Trash

Tweedy: 'Summer Noon' + On-hold muzak at the specialist clinic

It’s rare for a tumor to be inside the knee—like, inside the actual joint—but that’s where my tumor was. It’s rare for a tumor inside the knee to be cancerous. Because cancerous and non-cancerous in-knee tumors are both so rare, not many doctors have experience distinguishing between them. One specialist referred me to another specialist (just to be safe, he said), and the second specialist referred me to a third specialist (just to be safe, he assured me). Insurance pre-approval was required, more than once, and I became far too familiar with different cancer clinics’ on-hold muzak. I did some Googling about cancerous knee tumors. Big mistake.

Even if the thing wasn’t cancer—even if it was, as more than one specialist put it to me, “just some… stuff”—the thing was growing, squishing its way into parts of the knee joint where it didn’t belong. Whenever it squished sufficiently far into the wrong place—not good. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t really stand. To get going again, I had to take hold of the joint with both hands and push the thing out. It hurt, and worse than that produced a terrifying brain signal, the neural equivalent of a gasping, screaming no no no no no NO NO NO.

Waiting. Waiting for referrals, for pre-approvals, for doctor appointments, for MRI appointments, for MRI results. I mostly succeeded in not reading any more about cancer. I worried about the tumor locking up my knee, especially when I was out in the world with my kids. I waited. I waited. I waited. I thought a lot about “Waiting Room,” the best Fugazi song (I wait I wait I wait I wait), but didn’t listen to it much.

Instead, I listened again and again to “Summer Noon,” from Sukierae, the album that Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and his son Spencer made together while Susie—Jeff’s wife, Spencer’s mom—was going through tough cancer treatments. Making music was part of how father and son had managed to sit with their cancer-inflected inability to know the future, so maybe it made sense that listening to it helped me do the same.

But why “Summer Noon,” specifically? Well, who knows? Maybe it was as simple as the fact that all this was happening during the summer. Sometimes things are very simple. Summer, “Summer Noon.” That’ll do.

It probably helped that some of the lyrics seem to gesture towards the inevitability of suffering, its guaranteed intertwinedness with all the things that make life beautiful and good. Never leave your mother’s womb, Tweedy sings, unless you want to see how hard a broken heart can swoon.

From there I kept finding fragments to latch onto. The hubbub where the pitiful congregate: that reminded me of the particular bustle of hospitals, their distinct mix of purpose and helplessness in the face of what life brings. Afterwards, I found my face in the trash: that was how I sometimes felt stepping out into the late afternoon heat, dispirited by the realization that I’d spent the day mostly inside, working on the computer. Another eight hours of the thing in my knee growing a little more, always threatening to squish into the wrong spot. Another eight hours of my life, however long my life was going to be. Gone.

Something I realized about “Summer Noon” only after hundreds of listens: it doesn’t really have choruses. The same chord pattern, bassline, and melody repeat again and again, with only slight variations. Despite this, the song doesn’t feel especially repetitive. Little additions—some keyboards, a second guitar, more snare hits pure measure, some backing vocals—make all the difference. One basic movement returns and repeats again and again, but that doesn’t stop the song from moving forward.

That summer—just last summer, in fact, though it already feels much longer ago—I sometimes got overwhelmed, almost paralyzed, by my awareness of the crisis possibly lurking inside my body. But just as often, I felt as happy as I’ve ever been, in all the cliché ways. You know: Forced by circumstance into awareness of life’s always-there fragility, our hero learned to live in the present, et cetera. But actually: Yeah. Exactly.

Eventually, it was determined that the thing in my knee—whatever it was—had to come out. Cancer or no, it was getting too big. I went under anesthesia. I woke up. I spent a few days on the couch, watching movies. I did knee exercises. The doctors looked at the squishy thing under a microscope. They sent the images to new doctors, thousands of miles away. Just to be safe, they said. In the end, it was in fact… just stuff.

More than the results, what I remember now is the waiting. Yes, I lost some minutes (okay, hours) to worry about my knee, but probably less time than usual to my old non-knee worries, and certainly fewer than usual to my phone. I played the games my kids wanted to play and didn’t protest or demur when they wanted to play again, again, again. Most days were close copies of the day before: wake up, work, pick up the kids, dinner, laundry, sleep. Wait for test results. Repeat. But every day we were all another day older. This was living, and nothing stopped it from moving forward. I thought about what I would want the rest of my life to look like if it was going to be X years long, Y years long, Z years long, and what I wanted my days to look like, given that there was ultimately no knowing. I listened to “Summer Noon” a few times every day and thought about Jeff and Spencer making it together, waiting to see what was going to happen. ✹

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