Someday I'll fly away...leave all this to yesterday...

Memory is an odd creature.
In her oft-read-by-high-school-juniors poems, Emily Dickinson called hope "the thing with feathers." Right now, for me, memory is that thing instead...a hopeful, hollow-boned creature with wings and the improbable ability to fashion a nest from string, straw, hair.
During the heart-stopping events of the past few weeks, my memory has flown away. Someone--I can't remember who, natch--told me that cancer turns memory into Swiss cheese, internally loaded with odd and irregular pits and holes. So true. In my mind, minor details from recent weeks replay in sharp focus, while entire conversations, hours, even days are completely absent, as if zombie memory-snatchers have deleted them from my hard drive.
(Transcript of actual conversation between Kevyn and Old Friend:
Kevyn:"You say visited me in the hospital?"
Kevyn's friend: "Yes." (clears throat.) "Twice."
Kevyn (in a very small voice): "Oh.")
Of course, I can blame the anaesthesia during surgery for fogging up my window. Ditto the pain and painkillers immediately following my big date with the scalpel. But I think the pressure of those bizarre, upside-down days between diagnosis and surgery also played havoc with my memory cells.
I can't remember much from that time period. I got my diagnosis on May 21 and had my surgery on June 2. In the elapsing time, I know I placed phone calls to deliver the news in person to my sister, my parents, my old college pal. I told my my kids, my stepchildren, my boss. Where was I when I dialed those digits or spoke the words? Did I deliver my news dispassionately, like I was reading from a script or with my voice shaking or accompanied by huge racking sobs? Did I lead up to the newsflash in slow and subtle ways, or blurt "I have breast cancer!"
In most cases, I'm not sure.
Days before surgery, my husband and I met with a plastic surgeon to discuss my reconstruction options. The doctor, reassuring and experienced, explained what he could do for me--what he could fashion from what would be left. During that extensive meeting, I made the choice about what I wanted for my breast--what it would look like, how it would be fashioned. I remember that both my husband and I felt comfortable with that decision.
Later, I could not recall why I had chosen the option that I'd picked. (This is why it is good to be married to a detail-oriented, note-taking man.)
When I went back to the plastic surgeon's office for my first post-surgical follow-up visit, I was struck by the impressively decorated waiting room--sleek furniture, recessed lighting, gorgeous artwork. The office was striking and memorable, in stark contrast to the typical doctor's waiting room.
And I had zero memory of ever being there before. Zero.
It's as if my memory has been exiled.
The only thing that's odder than what I've lost is what I've retained, what has floated to the surface of the muckpond that is my memory, the odd memory fragment that comes and perches, birdlike, on my mental window sill.
For some reason, such a fragment is a minor passage from a book I read a few years ago, to prepare for an interview with its author. It was an excellent biography of naturalist and bird-painter John James Audubon, "Under a Wild Sky," by Minnesota writer William Souder.
In telling Audubon's tale, Souder examines and explains assumptions about the natural world at the time Audubon began his work. Souder shows that there were misconceptions about natural history that seem hilarious to us today.
For example, the concept that birds migrated had not yet been put forth. In Audubon's day, there was no understanding that these tiny winged creatures annually made transcontinental pilgrimages. Even scientists of the day were puzzled by what happened to birds in the fall. Because so many birds nest around water, there was a well-regarded theory that birds somehow became amphibious enough to spend winters on the bottoms of lakes and rivers, only to re-emerge and reporduce in the spring.
Seriously, stop for a minute and really contemplate the concept of migration. Birds of a feather flock together--and fly hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. How do they know when to go? Where to go? What relentless clock and map sends them on their way--and then brings them back? How does one generation of bird get that information from the previous one?
Today, high tech radio devices allow birdologists--or whatever they're called-- to track them and study them. Species by species, it's no mystery where they go. But how those teeny bird brains know all that they know--that's beyond us, really. And if we can't truly understand how bird memory works, I guess it should be no surprise that human memory is even more mysterious.
Right now, in my dreams I'm like a bird, migrating for the first time--on the wing, still in flight. It's as if it is autumn and I'm forced to take to the sky. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what it will be like when I get where I'm going. I fear I won't be able to find my way back home, to my precious nesting ground.
I'm soaring low over the river, my flyway.
As I have recovered at home in these past few weeks, I have spent many solitary hours propped quietly against the pillows on my bed. I have gone still to listen and have heard my own voice--the one that I've too often been too busy/noisy to hear. That voice speaks haltingly, shyly, as wary as a cornered wild creature. As I sit in silence and wait, I hear the airplanes scraping against the sky over my house and I hear the rhythmic chirp of birds who live in the trees outside my room. I think of their patterns of flight and gather my strength to go to that unknown distant place...and then to return home.