Comments about cancer can be weird

Sometimes people mean well when they learn about my cancer history, but still, they can say the darndest things.

There's no reason to bring it up to most people, but sometimes it just happens. I was subbing in a doubles game last week and didn't really know the people. We got to talking afterwards and I said I was on my way to have a tooth pulled, and the reason for the tooth's bad shape was the prednisone, and the prednisone was from Graft vs. Host Disease, which was from the transplant, which was because I had leukemia. Long story as short as I could make it.

Today I played in a round robin with one of the guys from that group, who is a fine fellow (and a good player) but kind of an odd duck. He said he had been thinking about me, and I thought that was nice, and then he said he wanted to talk to me about screen savers. He asked if I had a 15-inch screen because he knew of places on the Internet to get beautiful screen savers.

This was before we played. Afterwards he said, "When you've faced the grim reaper, you could use some beautiful pictures to look at."

I said I was happy with the photo that I took of the beach at Wellfleet. He kept talking about calming pictures of waterfalls. I said really, I was all set.

He seemed taken aback, but then so was I.