Free Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors by Evan Handler Page A

reexamine their life choices and belief systems.  One of the key theories put forth by Carl and Stephanie Simonton in
Getting Well Again
, and later by Dr. Bernie Siegel in his book
Love, Medicine and Miracles
, is the idea of “taking responsibility for one’s illness.”  Each of their books, as well as many others’, speaks at great length about lives lived out of sync with an individual’s true desires, and how easily we can come to accept roles for ourselves that are not necessarily of our own choosing.  The books recommend adopting an attitude toward illness as one of being presented with an opportunity.  The reader is encouraged to view the illness as a message to be heeded, a state of dis-ease in the body, and to strive to break free of commitments and responsibilities that are causing feelings of despair and hopelessness.  A great deal of space in these books is devoted to what might make up the curriculum for a basic assertiveness-training seminar.
    I have no idea what caused me to develop leukemia.  My own intuition tells me that growing up three miles from a nuclear power plant is probably not the best way to avoid health problems.  Nor would I recommend the game my brother and sister and I used to play every Tuesday evening in the summers.  That was the night when, in the humid, glowing, sunset swelter, The Fog Man made his rounds.
    The Fog Man wasn’t a man at all.  Or, while there was a man involved, he wasn’t the object of our interest.  What captivated us was the small green tractor-like vehicle with the engine that revved like machine-gun fire.  Each Tuesday evening, after the sun had set but before darkness fell, the sputtering of the engine would build as The Fog Man approached.  His tractor moved slowly along the side of the winding road, while the elevated chute protruding from the right back side of the rumbling machine spewed insecticide in billowing plumes up into the shrubs and trees.
    We would wait, listening for The Fog Man’s call.  When we heard him rounding the bend, his truck whining higher as it struggled to climb the hill, we would sneak out one of the seven back doors of the house we’d dubbed “Somanydoors.”  Hiding in the bushes, we would watch as The Fog Man pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of the road and, slowing down for his pass by the homes of the subscribers to his service, blasted the moist, white smoke from the asshole of his engine.  We would pull our T-shirts over our mouths and noses, and, giggling and shrieking, we would run and play in the mist.  We would follow him down the road, from house to house, trying to get as close to the thickest meat of the fog as we could without actually shoving our faces into the chute itself.  We would become lost in the clouds, hearing each other’s laughter but unable to locate one another with our eyes, until we escaped, choking on the sweet fumes, spent and out of breath.  We would collapse on top of each other, bragging about our bravery, and vowing ever more daring stunts for the next week, when The Fog Man would return.
    Seventeen years later, in the midst of my treatments, I celebrated a birthday with a small group of friends who had all grown up within a few miles of each other in the lower Hudson Valley.  In the group of six men and women, all under the age of thirty, three of them had been treated for some form of cancer.  I myself was aware of two other young people living in the same area who had been or were currently ill.  Since none of these cancers were “related” in terms of their location in the body, this shocking outcropping would never be classified as a cancer “cluster,” and so, never investigated.
    Of course, even if there were a clear, documentable cause for these illnesses, there would still be the question of why these particular people became ill when so many were exposed to the same environmental factors.  What Drs. Simonton and Siegel were offering was a sense of power and