It's National Poetry Month.
Poetry, you will recall, is what you compose if you are a truly exceptional writer and have inherited a lot of money. Or at least have a day job. Try to tell your mortgage company you're a poet.
Anyway, I was reminded of this while thinking about the first line of T.S. Eliot's long, famous, and generally impenetrable masterwork, "The Waste Land," the twentieth century's signature song of universal despair. Upbeat it's not.
The first line, of course, is: "April is the cruelest month."
Why was I thinking about it?
Talk about cruel! And this was just the first day! Then there's the month's midpoint, the day that cinches April at the waist and squeezes each of us like a bag of potatoes tied in the middle. I refer, of course, to April 15th, the day that is proof that Uncle Sam has no sense of humor whatsoever: Tax Day.
You'd think that would be enough cruelty for one month, wouldn't you? But nooo... For some of us, it got worse.
Did you see that guy walking around town last week with the shopping bag over his head and the squinty little cut-out eyes? That was me. No, I wasn't half a year behind on marking Halloween, though I'm behind on most things. I was hiding. And not from the tax man, either.
I was hiding from...everyone.
Some years ago, I helped a famous dermatologist write a book. A couple of weeks ago, concerned about some crusty spots on my face, I called in a few chips and visited her clinic in Seattle. She slung me into an examination room and peered at me through what, I swear, were space goggles. They made her already beautiful eyes absolutely enormous. And as I sat there thinking inappropriate thoughts, she made soft sounds: "Umm. Umm." Now in a more intimate setting, this would be, perhaps, a good thing. In a doctor's office, it generally isn't.
Finally, she straightened, whipped off the goggles, and shrugged a professional shrug.
"You're old," she said.
This is not nice. This is not friendly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You're so old that there was no sunblock when you were a kid. Did you go to the beach a lot?"
"Um, yes."
"Uh-huh. Your face is covered with pre-cancerous lesions. We call them 'age spots.'"
April is the cruelest month...
This is where the brown shopping bag comes in. Turns out that what they do to treat the results of all that sunburn is...I am not making this up...burning you all over again. With a laser. This experience is a lot like sticking your head in the oven with the setting on "broil." And then, just a few days later, your face starts falling off in chunks. Big purple burned spots slough off slabs of flesh. It's like being a leper. Disgusted, my partner Susan made me sleep in the guest room. I didn't argue; I was bleeding on the pillow anyway. Last week a dead seal washed up on the beach opposite our house and as many as ten bald eagles showed up at a time to pick the carcass clean. I thought about laying down on the sand and letting them clean me up, too.
April is the cruelest month...
Call me crazy (everyone else does) but doesn't it seem to you just a teeny bit odd that the way they cure sunburn damage is to burn your face off? I mean think about that: Where's the logic? Better yet, where's my lawyer?
April is the cruelest month...
And here's the worst part: when the burning sensation recedes and the old, pre-cancerous, "age spots" fall off...I'm still stuck with the same old face! Where's the justice in that?
April is the cruelest month...
Oh yeah, and I had a birthday. I'm even older now.
Talk about cruel.
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