Cancer/writing Journal #98

 

Charlie Schaefer

July, 2023

 

                                                   100 miles per hour.

As part of cancer therapy, I receive Vitamin C infusion treatments every three weeks or so, often at the same time as another cancer patient, a middle aged woman.  The treatments go for something over three hours which provides plenty of time to talk.  And talk we do; on all sorts of things.  Cancer health tips of course but also current and past relationships, what’s gone wrong in each of our lives, what’s gone right.  We are friends.

I forget what prompted me but a while back I asked her if she had ever been in a car going 100 mph.  Her answer, “Yes”.  I asked her if she had ever driven 100 mph.  Her answer, again, “Yes”.  I didn’t pursue it.  I didn’t need to.  The “Yes” provided a sufficient sense of the times.  Youthful exuberance; caught up in thrilling moments of wild, transgressive, foolish daring.   Maybe, probably, alchohol or drugs messing with the teenage brain.  More surprising in a girl rather than a boy but surely not without precedent.

You would never guess it of her now.  Subaru-driving middle class respectability.  Excitement arising from word of a new health food restaurant opening up rather than driving way too fast for conditions.  The Subaru could probably get up to 100 without much strain but would not approve. All of that was over forty years ago.

I have never driven 100 mph.  I doubt that I have been in a car going 100 mph although, while hitchhiking, a friend of mine and I were once picked up by a couple of fellows who had been drinking and who might have gone 100.  More likely in the 90s.  They picked us up in Kentucky and upon learning that we were headed to Florida, thought that Florida and palm trees would be fun.  I heard some murmuring that they had earlier been in a bar fight and thought that they might have hurt someone.  Considering that some distance between them and the local cops would be a good idea.  Anyway, we barreled through the South on two lane highways, passing cars, with oncoming traffic getting the bejesus scared out of them.  Scared out of us too.  I remember putting my chances of survival at around 50%.  We made it to Florida in unusually good time, the fellows pretty well sobered up by then, the high spirits drained out, the palm trees a disappointment.

But I digress.  During my prime driving 100 mph years, my mother was a student and we did not have a car.   All I could drive was a bike.  I did take steep hills a little faster than maybe I should have which is pretty mild as far as misspent youth goes.  Do I regret not having a youth more misspent?  Nah. It was OK.  And I do drive cars pretty fast now.  Never 100 mph of course but vigorously.  My sister once characterized my driving as “Like a bat out of Hell.”   She was surely wrong about that.  In no way does my driving resemble a bat departing Hell.  She got cautious in her advancing years and mistook brisk for reckless.  But I can scoot right along.  I am a late blooming speeder.

This is what I wrote for my writing group. It was well received by the group although, I think I have mentioned, they are generous with their praise. I have also submitted it to the local arts and entertainment newspaper. Don't know if it is the sort of thing they would be interested in. I am letting them decide that.