Cross-posted to PTMYB and Flickr, where the photo that started it all lives. Edited slightly for content on PTMYB.
Thirteen months after I first posted this shot, I’m kicking it to the front of the line as a valentine for orionoir, who had something to say yesterday, and who used this shot (with my permission) to brilliant effect in saying it.
Unfortunately, the news is not good. For those of you not yet acquainted with him, orionoir is one of my oldest (in terms of chronology, *not* of age—o, you can stop looking cranky now 
friends on the World Wide Interwebs. Long before I was a blogger, long before I was a Flickrer, around about the time that I had kicked my business plan preparation into high gear and was spending a lot of time traveling to Vermont for pro bread baking classes, orionoir and I, as well as ‘mouse and goliard, all honed our smartass internet writer chops at Plastic.com, which, I’ll be blunt, is not what it was, now that we’ve all moved onto other things. In its day, though, Plastic was a lark, and orionoir was definitely a factor in that—although other Plasticians might disagree with me, vociferously.
I digress. orionoir has known me longer than just about anyone on the internet has known me, and thanks to some brilliant luck and timing, Lloyd and I have been fortunate enough to meet orionoir and his daughters IRL, too. He is a pip and a pixie, a kickass photographer and an absolute dreamboat of a writer. He also introduced me to my beloved friend Snow, and for that, he is so totally getting his celestial reward one day. 
Sometimes he gets stroppy, and sometimes I do, too, and we yell at each other a bit, and then settle back into our happy pattern of witty banter and unwavering support and friendship through our longest, darkest teatimes of the soul.
Three years ago, not long after I’d returned home from Arkansas, orionoir was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer. (Before I go further, I’ll add that orionoir has been very open about his illness, and I’m not betraying anything here that he hasn’t already shared himself. O, obviously if I’m wrong, you tell me and I’ll edit, sharpish.) He survived his cancer surgery, but only just barely, and two months later was told that a CT scan found cancer in his liver, and he could have anything from six to eighteen months left—but his oncologist wasn’t holding his breath for 18 months of survival. At the time, orionoir was still blogging, and he shared it all with everyone who loved him, in essays that showed his near-bottomless capacity to weather heartbreak, rage and absurdity, as well as never-ending awe at how beautiful the universe can be when it decides to play nicely with us. I cried a lot, reading those essays, and I know that I wasn’t alone.
Even as his onc told him that any treatment that they could give him would be merely palliative, O went through chemo anyway, went through it like a trooper. He got staggeringly thin, and hellishly sick, the way one does with chemo, but that never stopped him from flirting with the chemo nurse. His treatment ends, and oh, happiness, he responds well: his tumors shrink, then shrink more, his liver heals (or at least shows minimal cancer activity—apologies for my lack of fluency with the language), his hair grows back, he starts running again, he starts building stone walls and little cairns, lifting hammers, busting rocks, getting his impressive delts back. Three years after he wrote that all he wanted from life was to see his youngest child get on a school bus to kindergarten, but now would not be alive long enough to do that, he did, in fact, do just that. He saw her on the bus, he goes to parent days at her school. He’s still here.
He’s still here, and he responds well to chemo. I tell myself this when orionoir announces, with the aid of broccoli romanesco, that he just got his CT report, and, well, something’s growing. CT scan reports are, of course, not the easiest things in the world to decipher, and he still needs to meet with his onc, which won’t happen until next week. Today, though, he’s seeing his father, who is a doctor, and a stone-cold genius at deciphering stuff like this (although according to o, there are always adventures in translation).
I remind myself that it may not be as bad as it sounds. That it was very, very, very bad three years ago, and O responded better to treatment than anyone dared to hope. That I know people with recurrent and aggressive forms of cancer who have been alive for years thanks to the judicious and intelligent application of chemo treatments. That once it was a long shot for O to see Ellie go to kindergarten, but he did, and so it might not be outside of the realm of possibility that he see her off to M.I.T., or that he sees his son grow up into the heartbreaker we all know he will be, or that he sees his eldest daughter grow up into the writer, thinker, fighter and beauty who will change the world in amazing ways.
Dear friends, if you are the praying kind, please say a prayer. If you are not the praying kind, please invoke the universe, or the chaos minions, or Richard Feynman, or just a general sense of kindness and well-wishing, in the direction of eastern Connecticut, where orionoir and his family wait to see what happens next, while the rest of us, we stand by and try to remember to breathe.
(Here is orionoir’s transformation of the romanesco picture. As McBeth observes, it’s a cool way to deliver some hard news. When O gets through this, I’m totally hiring him as my flack man.
