Sid’s twenty-third radiation treatment took place on the fall equinox—a day when he’d seen fire and he’d seen rain…and hurricanes and heat waves and cold snaps and boring gray season-less in-between days that were neither warm enough to feel like summer nor chilly enough to feel like fall. Days when the leaves had either turned color a few days early or were already a few days late, either disappointingly dull or as bright as those in Sid’s increasingly hallucinogenic imagination.

Today was like most days in Sid’s life since he’d been diagnosed: perfect. After getting up at dawn, he’d watched the sky dissolve through a slowly shifting spectrum of oranges, purples, blues, and pinks as he sat on the porch, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, waiting for his oldest granddaughter, Courtney, and her roommate, “Sistah,” to pick him up in Sistah’s 1996 Cabriolet and take him to the cancer center. They’d promised to put the top down.

When Sid walked out the front door (wearing a hoodie his wife had made him take even though it was supposed to reach seventy-five degrees), the girls were leaning against the car, slightly slouched.

Both dressed like twenty-first-century privileged vagabonds by way of Dickens. Black sneakers. Skinny jeans with hand-knitted socks. Old sweaters with sleeves rolled up. Embroidered skirts over the leggings. Brown hair cropped short in front with streaks of bright aqua. Matching bright-aqua lipstick. They even had tiny, matching yin-yang tattoos on their left shoulders, which were always exposed, regardless of the weather.

Courtney had given Sistah her nickname freshman year when she walked into the dorm room they’d been randomly assigned, took one look at her new roommate, and blurted the name out. She might as well have been looking at her identical twin, only a foot shorter.

They’d been inseparable ever since. Day and night. Sid, who considered every new arrival in his life an opportunity for Perry-Mason-worthy cross-examination, had yet to interrogate them as to what they did during the latter, but, as Courtney had warned Sistah, it was only a matter of time.

Sid had quickly forgotten that Sistah wasn’t part of the family. Sometimes when he called Courtney, he’d tease her, “Oh, sorry, Court, meant to call Sistah.”

“Shiddy….” Courtney would answer, using the name she’d assigned him as a toddler.

“Just kidding,” Sid would relent. Even though he usually wasn’t.

In person he always tried to pay a little more attention to his “real” granddaughter. But it was a struggle.

While they did look a lot alike on the surface, if you scratched the surface on Courtney, you’d discover a fairly clearheaded, rational person who could behave in relatively predictable ways. Scratch Sistah’s surface and you never knew what you’d get. She’d spontaneously dance whenever she heard music or take off at top speed like a three-year-old, even when she had nowhere to go. Often, in class, she’d ask questions that would subtly undermine the discussion. Not on purpose. Just because she’d been thinking about something and the thought came out of her mouth, and the connection to the conversation, while tenuous, was just enough for everyone to lose their focus while they tried to understand what she was saying.

When Sid got down to the car, Courtney climbed into the back, and he got into the passenger side, barely closing the door before Sistah bucked away from the curb.

“Always good to try first gear before going into third,” Sid remarked mildly. Sistah just looked at him and grinned. He grinned back. It was going to be a fun day for all of them. Although in very different ways.

A few minutes later, as they passed the five-mile marker on the expressway, Sid reached a milestone of his own.

Sistah was playing the highway like a native. Of someplace. Music—Leonard Cohen in deference to Sid’s age—at full volume, all of them singing along…Everybody knows…Sid shamelessly committed to showing his age, the “kids” equally committed to showing that they didn’t believe in generation gaps.

Halfway through the last chorus, Sid’s scalp suddenly started itching as badly as any case of poison ivy he’d ever had. The urge to scratch was overwhelming. He resisted as long as he could—not wanting to claw open the still-surreal line of stitches on the top of his head. But as Sistah belatedly started signaling to cut across three lanes to the exit, all of them laughing as if they were stoned—Sid was…he always did a little tincture before radiation—he instinctively swept his right hand over his scalp and came away with a big-time clump of hair. He threw it in the air. Went at it again. Another clump. Again. Another clump. “Yes!” he yelled, lifting his left hand to give Sistah a high-five as Courtney closed her eyes until her friend had both hands back on the wheel.

Sid smoothed his hands back across his newly bald head like a ’70s greaser. But instead of reveling in the thick, black locks of an oversexed adolescent, he slowly released the rest of his scalp’s earthly coil. It was very liberating.

Then he turned to high-five Courtney in the back seat. But she’d lowered her head to try to keep him from seeing the tears streaming down her face…a few strands of Sid’s flyaway hair plastered against her cheek.

David Blistein spent several decades working at and then owning a regional advertising agency after graduating from Amherst College in 1974. Since then, he’s written nonfiction books including: David’s Inferno (a memoir of depression), Grover Cleveland Again ( co-written with Ken Burns), Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned our World (co-written with Dr. John Halpern); Waking the Dead (a self-published collection of stories), and Our America (co-written with Susanna Steisel and Ken Burns). He has also been a writer on several PBS documentaries including: Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, and The Mayo Clinic. He is currently writing a series of three films on mental health for PBS. The first, Youth Mental Illness: Hiding in Plain Sight was broadcast in June 2022. David live in Vermont where he’s been married for 44 years, a father for 43, and a grandfather for 11. In addition to writing, playing squash, and biking, he has spent the last 15+ years working as a Guardian ad Litem—a volunteer advocate for children in the Vermont Family Court System. See www.davidblistein.com