Nice guys finish nasty

When I got my cancer diagnosis, one of my first—and most urgent—impulses was to crawl into the aptly named crawl space in our apartment and drag out the cardboard carton that holds all my old journals. I know there's some vile, hateful stuff in there, and I don't want my kids or Other to read it when I'm gone. But the carton was underneath other cartons behind a door that was blocked by Other's computer table, and I never had the time or strength or privacy to act on that impulse. But it has weighed on my mind ever since. Interestingly, my friend K had that exact same impulse when she got her diagnosis of uterine cancer. Only her stuff was more accessible, so she actually got started right away. 

With the prospect of my daughter C's return—with her mountains of bedding—for summer vacation, plus a promise from me that I would winnow down whatever was there, I finally got Other to move the computer table and empty out that corner of the storage space. We jettisoned boxes of children's books, old clothing, spare kitchen tiles from a floor we no longer have, 25-year-old cans of house paint. And we found two boxes of my old writing—journalism school projects, short stories and diaries. I've squirreled them under my desk for the time being as I slowly make my way through them. There's a lot of wince-worthy stuff, but there are also pearls of wisdom and some nice crisp writing.

One pearl of wisdom: Back in the late '70s when Other and I lived in the heart of Greenwich Village, our neighbors across the hall were a couple about our age. He was a long-haired, soft-bodied nerdy guy with "a little flatulence problem," as he (accurately) informed us. She was a high-strung, self-dramatizing actress with an eating disorder and what would now be termed environmental sensitivities, which together required her to constantly buy and retire expensive clothes, sometimes to the benefit of my closet. We weren't fond of them—especially after they asked us to pet-sit their dozens of gerbils, leaving us with a stinking cage and instructions to keep it clean—but we socialized from time to time. 

He was the kind of guy who had an invisible KICK ME sign plastered to his back. And he told me something interesting that I wrote down then and that still strikes me as true: He said wimps are the most dangerous fighters because they get beaten up so often that they abandon any notion of fair play and immediately go for the balls. I've known a lot of sweet-on-the-surface, nasty-underneath folks, and coming across that note in my journal reminds me why they might be that way.