cancer-free day

We had fun yesterday on our friends' sailboat on Lake George. Beautiful day, plenty of wind, great company. Nice to have something special to do on the long holiday weekend.

Among the best parts was that I don't think the word "cancer'' was uttered or any reference made to my illness all day long. These friends know my situation, asked me several times if I was comfortable and excused me from any heavy lifting and most of the other chores. But otherwise we concentrated on the water, the wind, the sun, the sails, other boats, politics, kids and other more fun things.

It got to the point that when I had the tiller for 15 or 20 minutes, with the wind and sun in my face and course to worry about keeping, that I almost completely forgot that I'm a cancer patient. At this stage, that is a great gift.

There is something about heeling over 30 degrees or so as the wind roars and you feel more like you're standing up in the cockpit rather than sitting down and being pitched into the water doesn't seem like an unlikely occurrence that concentrates the mind on the here and now. Fortunately we did have confidence, which proved to be well founded, in our skipper.

It's a very different experience from running around in my 14-foot, single-sail sunfish, where I've spent the majority of my sailing days (only one this year, unfortunately). Lake George is too big, the and weather too rough yesterday, to think it would have been much fun to have been out in a smaller boat. Sunfish (at least mine) flip over a lot, and the idea of righting the boat in such choppy water is a little intimidating.

Although I'm sure such an adventure would also have pushed other concerns to the back of my mind, where I like them to be.