I got an encouraging note from Lisa Mount, my old friend who’s using her remarkable organizational skills (any arts organizations out there that needs to be whipped into shape? This is who ya gonna call) to head up the fund-raising efforts for Jo Carson.

 Spent yesterday in Johnson City with our girl.  She’s looking better than I expected – she’s lost about 20 pounds and I thought I’d see a skeleton, but no, it ain’t that bad at all.  She’s losing muscle tone, because all she can do is lie around, but she hasn’t wasted away.  Yesterday was a good day for her – lots of company, more that just me – less pain than usual, and not so much nausea.  The hard part of all of this is that if she laughs or talks too much, she feels like puking.  But we didn’t have none of that yestiddy.  The puking, that is.  Lots of the laughing and talking.

So the medical plan from here on out is two more weeks (and maybe a day or two more) of chemo and radiation, and then she gets to take a break and recover, which I’ll wager she’ll do pretty quickly.  Then surgery, and its concomitant recovery, then another surgery and recovery.  First surgery sometime in October, probly. 

As of today, a week after I posted my blog entry and related tweet about Jo, we’ve raised more than $13k to pay for Jo’s chemo, related medical needs, and living expenses while she can’t work. Some of that comes from the many people (like me) who’ve known and worked with Jo over the years; she inspires, as you can tell, a kind of fierce affection. But a lot of it came from you; complete strangers to her who responded with gifts ranging from $5 to $500 just because I asked. I am touched and grateful and a bit overwhelmed, and, if may say, delighted that I could use this odd kind of fame I have for what seems to me to be an absolute good.

Along the way, we’ve received many stories of people’s own troubles and unmet needs, most often having to do with their health. It makes me wish I could run fundraisers for everyone; for my friend (also from those long ago days at that theater in LA) who’s in danger of  losing her home; for the people who, like Jo, can’t pay for the health care they need to save their lives. It’s daunting, and even discouraging, to contemplate how much need there is.

We’re not done yet — Jo’s still ill, and the money we’ve raised, as remarkable as it is, won’t nearly meet her needs going forward. I’ll be continuing to ask for your help, in different ways, and hopefully with some pledge premiums thrown in to sweeten the pot — I do work in public radio, after all.  Please donate however much you can, and all the money — all of it — goes directly to pay Jo’s medical and living expenses as she fights colon cancer.

But if you can’t, or prefer not to help out a total stranger, then consider looking around your own lives, finding the people you know who are in need, and help them out, anyway you can.

Below, some of the comments that have come in with donations to Jo:

Of all the random links I clicked on the Internet today, I have to say discovering your wonderful writing via Peter Sagal’s Twitter feed is by far the weirdest yet serendipitous thing to have happened. Keep fighting, stay strong and know that you have wonderful friends who love and support you. And even strangers who can’t wait to buy some of your books now.
Sending healing thoughts & prayers -
Jennifer in Atlanta

Dear Jo, Three years ago I was in a similar place, with a cancer diagnosis and no resources. As recently as yesterday, I was (though cancer-free) so poor I had to use couch cushion change to buy cat food. Today that turned around. Miracles happen, and they are called friends. Thanks for being Peter’s.

We share a name; I had to help.  And you gave us Peter Sagal.

I was touched by Peter’s post on how you’ve been such a support to him.  He then goes on to become who he is..which allows me to hear his witty Wait!Wait! show…and sometimes I laugh at something he’s said..and then maybe I give my dog a extra scritch behind the ear…and then my dog maybe goes outside feeling a little more loved…and doesn’t terrorize a squirrel.  Thank you for being part of the chain that makes this world great.  Gina

I heard about you through Peter Sagal’s twitter; with all the nonsense brought about and encouraged by technology, it was so refreshing to see someone using social media for good.  True good. I am a student in a health coverage cost battle of my own, and I wish I could donate more to your cause.  But I will forward this to my art school friends.  May you find blessings today and every day, despite pain and strife; may you find peace today and every day

Below, courtesy of the woman herself, the poem that Jo Carson read at my wedding, which, as said, became the only thing that people wanted to talk about afterwards.

From Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet:

The day I married, my mother

had one piece of wedding advice:

“Don’t make good potato salad,”

she told me, “it’s too hard to make

and you’ll have to take something

every time you get invited somewhere.

Just cook up beans; people eat them too.”

My mother was good at potato salad

and part of the memories of my childhood

have to do with endless batches made

for family get-togethers, church picnics,

Civitan suppers, Democratic party fund raisers,

whatever event called for potato salad.

I’d peel the hard boiled eggs.

My mother would pack

her big red plastic picnic bowl

high with yellow potato salad

(she used mustard)

and it would sit proud on endless tables

and come home empty.

What my mother might and could have said is

Choose carefully what you get good at

’cause you’ll spend the rest of your life doing it.

But I didn’t hear that.

I was young and anxious to please

and I knew her potato salad secrets.

And the thousand other duties

given to daughters by mothers,

and sometimes I envy those women

who get by with pots of beans.

I was thinking it would be useful, while asking you all to contribute to help save my friend Jo Carson’s life, if I could give you a sample of her writing.  And, lo and behold, she sent me a letter last night, which she has allowed me to post here.

Peter, there has been some silence on my end because I don’t know how to say thanks in a big enough way. No way is big enough to say thanks for this sort of effort and support. This is turning out to be the real lesson of this cancer trip, not an easy one for me because there has always been such a streak of cussed independence running right straight up the middle of my back. Or middle of my front. Or somewhere. I know it is there, I’m just not sure where it is. How to admit you truly need help and then, how to accept it?

Story, the sort of thing that is happening around here: An old college friend. Bob Gillooly (wonderful name, eh?) showed up, I hadn’t seen him in a long time, a mutual friend had told him I was sick and he showed up here. He said, “What can I do?” And I told him I needed help with food I could eat, food I could keep down, etc… So he’s been cooking. A couple or three times a week, and he cooks a couple of meals and some leftovers, and I have a wonderful selection of things I can maybe eat, thanks to him. He brought food yesterday, and I was really sick (radiation is turning my lower bowels, for the time being, into some less than pleasant version of crispy critters and they bite), so he was he was handing over his delivery and talking to Al, not me, and he said he’d been talking to another friend on the phone, said he told this other friend that for the first time since he retired, he felt like his skills were truly wanted and needed, and he was sure I had no idea what a service I was doing for him… This man is keeping me in food. A service I’m doing for him?

I am finding out in the most needful and urgent of ways what community might really be, and I am moved beyond words. I get that this is another version of the 100 dollar story, just so very, very much bigger. I know my job is to somehow give forward out of it, not necessarily now, not in the midst of a struggle for my life which is what a cancer fight is, but when I am able again to do so. I hope, by the time I am able, I will have some sense of what it might be and how such a wondrous obligation might work. But how do you speak of the arrival of such fierce grace without sounding like you’ve recently got religion? Now, there is a writerly problem for you. Or me. (I got it! An angel can come through the ceiling… no that’s been done.) Or back to a Wendell Barry quote you once used, about real freedom being the ability to move easy in harness: if some way with words is the harness…

So thank you. More than that. But I ain’t got all the words for it yet.

Jo

Please contribute what you can, and we’ll both try to find the words to thank you.

I’m lucky enough, via my radio show and this blog and my book, to have attracted a large group of people who like my work and enjoy hearing what I have to say. It’s an honor, and an odd responsibility… I don’t want to misuse your trust, or alienate your affection, because its what allows me to do what I enjoy doing.

But I’m doing something a little different today: I’m asking all of you to donate some money — whatever you can — to someone you don’t know. Her name is Jo Carson, and she’s a dear friend of mine. She’s a writer who has lived her whole life in Johnson City, TN, and lives there still. She was recently diagnosed with colon cancer, and like a lot of people these days — maybe you’ve heard something about this? — her health insurance is inadequate to her needs. Even as we speak, she’s become uncomfortably reliant on the generosity of friends. My purpose here is to vastly expand the number of her friends, and thus to raise some much-needed funds for her.

This is why I’m asking this of you:

Everybody can point to certain people in their life who set them on their course. A teacher, maybe an employer or mentor or friend. They appeared at your  crossroads and pointed your way.  Twenty years ago, I was working in a theater — not as a writer, but as a literary manager, a sort of editor for playwrights, even though I desperately wanted to be a playwright myself. Along with a colleague named Lisa Mount, I had discovered a wonderful new play by Jo, then mostly unknown outside of her circle of Southern writers and theater artists, and we helped arrange its successful production, and Jo and I became friends. One evening, I told her a story, a story I rarely told anyone, certainly not in any depth, about something that had happened in my family. She said to me, quite seriously, “That’s a play. You should write that play.” And I did. Which made me a playwright, which launched me on my odd peripatetic career path that led me to the radio show and here, to you.

There is a lot more Jo taught me, about the value of voices and places that are distinct to you, and the nature of friendship, and what art can and can’t do, and mainly, the ultimate value inherent in just doing the work you were put here to do. And I was honored and thrilled that Jo agreed to read some of her poetry at my wedding, which became everybody’s favorite thing about my wedding.

I have written about Jo before, in this essay and in an expanded version of that episode in my book, but I have never really talked in public about my affection for her, and the vastly important influence she had on my life. She gave me a push when I needed to start moving; she gave me confidence when I had none; she heard I had something to say before I had started speaking.

So: if you like my work, if you like what I have to say, you have Jo to thank. Please thank her by sending her some money to help her get better and get back to her work.

Donations for Jo are being collected by Alternate ROOTS, an arts organization that Jo helped found. They’ll collect the money and give 100% of it to Jo.

If you don’t feel like donating money — anything, a dollar, two, eight, twenty — to somebody you don’t know, then may I recommend buying one of her books? She’s charming and profound and funny and if you want to read the poem she read at wedding, it’s the poem about potato salad in this book.

Many thanks to all and any of you who can contribute anything.

NOTE: As our first commenter says, I really shouldn’t guarantee that your donations will be tax-deductible… that is my belief, but I’m no expert and shouldn’t make that promise. Donations to Alternate ROOTS in general are deductible, but different rules may apply in a case like this.  I have removed that sentence from the post above.

UPDATE: Lisa Mount, pal aforementioned, who’s organizing the fundraising campaign, writes this morning, 15 hours after the post and tweet pointing to it went up:

 So you’ve generated at least 75 gifts, ranging from $5 to $100.  Our total as of this minute is $9161, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to $10,000 through this facet of the campaign.  The notes that people are sending along with the gifts are wonderful – lots of “I don’t know you, but thank you for being important to Peter Sagal,” and some advice about using the Cancer Society and other mechanisms to get free meds and cheaper care.  

Thank you all… it’s a wonderful world, when we make it so.

For the lack of posting… it’s been a busy, distracting summer, and I’ve been spending far too much energy on less important things like Twitter.   I’ll start contributing again here, immediately… starting with the next post, which has a particular importance to me.