To Honor Kokopelli

Back when I was in medical school my parents returned from a trip out west with a gift for me. On my own trips I am wracked with guilt as I shop at the airport Discovery Channel store for a stupid stuffed animal remembering all the lovely jewelry and clothing my parents brought home from their trips. On this particular trip the gift was a pair of earrings. They were a little unusual in that one was an image of the Native American deity, Kokopelli, and the other was the inverse, the square of silver from which it was cut.

I loved those earrings and wore them often. Everyone else loved them too and I got many compliments. I knew I should put those little rubber things over the ends of the loops. They did not have clasps, just silver wire and were in danger of falling out each time I wore them. I had lots of earrings like that and I have indeed lost some but it never mattered much because then my earrings were cheap ones I had bought myself. When I was a girl my mother hadn’t really come around to the idea of earrings being a suitable gift. She wasn’t allowed to pierce her ears as a girl (only prostitutes did that) and never did. I wasn’t allowed to have mine pierced until I was 16; obviously she had gotten beyond the prostitute thing. Ooh what a rebel I was in college then, to pierce another hole into my ear lobe with a needle dipped in a candle flame and shoved through my lobe into the cut half of a potato. Remember that was in the 80’s and tongue piercing wasn’t a Bat Mitzvah gift yet.

Needless to say I lost one of the earrings and I ached with the disappointment of losing something truly valuable. I was rotating at the hospital and had some hope that a kind soul would turn it in. Who was I kidding? Lots of people had multiple piercings and the image of Kokopelli would have made a wonderful addition to the parades of earrings people had running up the sides of their ears. I kept the remaining earring in the hopes of finding its mate in a forgotten coat pocket.

Later that year I had the opportunity to do one of my medical school rotations on the Navajo/Hopi reservation in Arizona. In a nutshell, I hated it. It was cold and I was underdressed for eight full weeks. My fellow classmate and I were terminally bored. There was nothing to do. We were quite bitter about this because other students who had been on the rotation talked about it as if they had gone to Mecca. They had us believing that we would be invited to the doctors’ home regularly, that we would be invited on scenic hikes every weekend, that we would have wonderful cultural experiences. Perhaps after their experience with those students the local docs were less inclined to invite more students to their houses. It also turns out those students had a car.

My classmate and I sat on our cold tushies most nights without enough to do. I missed my fiancé terribly. The docs didn’t seem terribly committed to the Navajo and Hopi and the Native Americans seemed not to care too much about them in return. They cared even less about us two. Why would they take any interest in a couple of white chicks assuaging their white guilt? It turns out the Navajo culture is extremely reserved and it is rude to look a stranger in the eye. I quickly realized my hopes of gibbering fluently in Navajo by the end of the rotation were blown away like the grains of red dust that blew under our screen door every morning. In addition to hating that red dust which also blew into my eyes, hair and nose, I grew to hate the image of Kokopelli. It was everywhere, a ubiquitous symbol of the Southwest. It was on jewelry but also on every chotcka you could buy at a souvenir stand. And those seemed to be spaced about every 15 feet. It seemed demeaning to me to put the image of a revered deity on a coffee mug and it came to represent everything I saw as wrong with reservation life. Well, you can buy coffee mugs with Jesus, the Star of David and “allah is great” on them too. What did I expect?

My fellow classmate and I bonded over the experience. She was the first deeply religious person I’d met who didn’t give me the creepy crawlies, probably because her faith was genuine. We had a lot of discussions about religion among other things and are friends to this day. Now hey, I loved ya girlfriend, but I wanted to be on that plane home more than I wanted to breathe.

Eventually we made our escape. My fiancé who greeted me with roses is now my husband. I won’t say our early married life was terribly difficult but we had a few obstacles to overcome. Our first child was diagnosed with autism and my husband was diagnosed with lymphoma just six weeks before our second son was born. It turned out after a lengthy workup to be an indolent form of the disease that just sits there for the most part. I hated St. Louis. There was no winter to speak of and summer was like living on the sun but with more humidity. And let’s just say, in case any of my old attendings are reading, that my allergy training program was “difficult.”

I felt just slightly beat up when we left St. Louis for Rochester and my first job as an allergist. After moving in to our new house I noticed the weathervane over the garage for the first time. It was an image of Kokopelli. What the hell was he doing there? Within a year of moving in I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One day, looking out the window and feeling sorry for myself I noticed the weathervane again and another notion came to me. I think that little guy is mad at me. Then I remembered the earring. I still had the lone one. I am not a superstitious person but the idea occurred to me that it was lonely for its mate. To follow this twisted logic to its natural conclusion would lead one to believe that Kokopelli felt disrespected and perhaps I could make amends by restoring the two mirror images of each other.

I thought that was a cute idea for a while. Then as I waited to find out whether the cancer was back I took the lone earring to a jeweler and explained what I wanted. He told me he could do it but it would cost me more in labor than the silver was worth for him to special order such a small quantity of silver. That was fine.

The earring was made, the two were reunited. I wore them almost constantly. No, it didn’t prevent another recurrence of the cancer. In fact, not too long after the new earring came loose from its clasp and I just managed to catch it before it was lost too. Since then I’ve had yet another recurrence, the worst yet.

Then I began to think about whether this deity really had it in for me. You see at heart I’m a “glass half full” kind of gal. My mother once said when I was little that if I was put at Christmas time in a room full of horseshit I’d be happy because somewhere in there was sure to be a pony. Maybe Kokopelli has been protecting me all this time. Maybe I’ve been lucky. No I’m not kidding. Look, my husband could have had the stage four lymphoma they thought he had. My kids have autism but they are very high functioning and adorable. I’ve had ovarian cancer on and off for five years and I am still alive.

Earlier this week I had another clasp put on the earring and I am wearing them now. Tomorrow I go down to Sloan Kettering. I had a CT scan done last week and we will find out if the new drug is working. I guess I will find out whether Kokopelli feels honored or not.

Dr. Bif