Dana Jennings on cancer:

For seven weeks, my only goal was to recover from surgery. My days were measured in naps and in languid laps around the block, in Percocets and the draining of my catheter. The world’s worries were not my worries. If I couldn’t see it out my bedroom window, it didn’t concern me.

And because I was recovering from cancer surgery, and because I already knew that I would need additional treatment once I healed from the operation, I reveled in the most minute of details: the black pads of my dog’s feet as smooth as a baseball glove, the wet-cellar smell of a vintage science fiction paperback, fireflies winking and waning at dusk.

Pierced by a keen sense of my own mortality, I was much more interested in discerning the small miracles embedded in each moment than I was in catching the 9:03 Midtown Direct to Penn Station. And there was a part of me that was disappointed when the time came to once again catch that city-bound train.