Resonance
When we were kids, the street our house was on was a gravel road maintained by the county. The county kind of forgot about us, so it wasn’t really maintained all that well, and there would be these series of bumps, like a cheese grater, that would form on sections of the road. Not car-breaking bumps — just a gentle bum bum bum bum as you drove over them.
If your dad was in a good mood, he’d go a little faster so you and your sister could hum along to the rhythm. And you would beg for this. The vibration and the humming along was a purely childlike joy. Dad loved to make us laugh even at the cost of some minor damage to a car. It was even more fun from the back of the bright green dune buggy my grandpa had built from a kit. We come from a long line of adults who never fully lose childhood joy.
Eventually the city took over maintenance of the road. Then they paved it. Now it’s a perfectly smooth road that the adult me genuinely appreciates.
Get Christine Peterson’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I was thinking about that road today because I’ve recently hit a series of bumps — unexpected, not catastrophic, but not nothing either. My first instinct was to be very adult about it. Protect the body. Go slow. Do some investigation. See if there’s a way to avoid the bumps altogether.
I’ve been through a couple of different therapies already. Now I’m switching again, this time because the last one wasn’t really working at all. This new therapy is actual old school chemo — the kind people picture when they picture chemo. GI disruption, hair loss, metallic taste. Everything I’d managed to sidestep until now. It’s designed to knock back as much cancer as possible before my stem cell transplant this summer. It’s also going to knock back some of the relative good health I’ve been feeling for the past month. And depending on how my body responds, the transplant timeline may shift a little. Turns out I have some opinions about bumps.
And then I remembered the two kids begging to go faster.
So: bumps.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The bumps on that road were only fun because someone was driving a little faster than he probably should have, and two kids in the back were humming along at full volume. The bumps didn’t change. The experience of them did.
I’m going to hum along with the bumps.
