When I was six years old, my favorite TV shows were westerns. If there was a shootout in the mountains or the canyons, I imagined myself in the scene while I secured my safety by ducking behind a chair or wedging myself under a couch cushion in my living room. My parents thought my playing was so cute they gave me a red cowgirl skirt and vest trimmed with blue and silver rickrack, a red cowgirl hat and a gold-colored cap gun with a holster. I had everything I needed, except a horse: a girl horse, I decided.

I started nagging my parents for one. My poor parents probably wondered what planet I dropped from, thinking a horse could live in a New York City apartment. The day I saw a few empty brown paper grocery bags sitting on the kitchen table, I decided to take matters into my own hands. There was my horse’s head. I grabbed the shortest one, ran to my room and laid it on my wood floor.

After I smoothed out the wrinkles as best I could, I got my red Crayola and set to work: triangle ears, egg-shaped eyes with long lashes, big dots for nostrils, a wide smile, a long curly mane. I took out the balled-up socks from my drawer and stuffed them into the bag. Those weren’t enough to fill it, so I stuffed in my parents’ socks until her head was properly puffed out. My pink toy broom was just the right height for me to ride on. I stuck the broom handle into the bag, then got the Scotch tape from my father’s desk. I wound the tape around the bottom of the bag and the broom handle until the bag stayed put. I named her Red. We were an adventurous duo.

There was a blue chenille cover on the couch. The flat weaves became rivulets where I panned for gold, using my mother’s sieve, while Red grazed on the protruding pile. Traveling long and hard, we ran low on rations. Red carefully climbed the rows of hills formed by that pile as we searched for a town where we could replenish our supplies. There were days when I was in countless gunfights. To be prepared, I would take all my mother’s scarves so that when I was shot, each hit plunging me to the floor, I was ready with something to stop the bleeding while I hobbled to safety on Red. On gunfight days, when my mother got me ready for bed, she pulled scarves from my polo shirt like a magician performing a magic trick.

When I Google “Just not my bag, man. It’s just not,” I get Erik Bledsoe’s 1994 interview of novelist Harry Crews. Crews is referring to the use of the word “disdain,” a word he claims he would never use in a discussion of postmodernism; not that postmodernism isn’t his bag, but that using the word “disdain” is not his bag. “Not that ‘disdain’ is too strong a word,” Crews explains to Bledsoe, but that the word itself is just not his bag.

After hippies were done being hip by dint of investing new meaning into phrases and usages such as “I’m hip man, I’m hip,” – meaning not only that you claimed to understand something that was being said, but also that you were probably wearing some tight-kneed bell bottom pants or maybe blue velveteen tight-kneed pants. Maybe you were also about to hand the person next to you a joint you’d just toked on – the sharing as much a part of the ritual as the rolling paper and breath holding. A ring of smokers, smoldering.

But this is all observed behavior: the observer being female, the rest of the action or most of it belonging to whatever males were dominating the room.  Women in the counterculture were pretty much underlings.

I had a girlfriend, raised in San Francisco, who talked like that. She’d say, “Just not my bag, man,” looking right at me, drawing in a breath of smoke from a long skinny cigarette. “Are you hip?” And I’d just stare at her. She was an intellectual from a good high school, Jewish and smart. I was the farther north, Catholic version of her: I liked words like nifty, psychedelic, and groovy. Groovy was a dancing, sensual kind of word. A cut-loose-to-the-music-and-rock-and-roll, feel-good word; unapologetic, unpretentious, not beatnik dark but flower-power hopeful. That was my bag.

We crawl into town in our old Oldsmobile – forest green, rusty and dented, it’s ready for the salvage yard. Fabric from the ceiling liner hangs in stringy clumps like Spanish moss. Springs erupt from the torn seats. It’s the fall of 1960, we’re in another new town, and my new sixth grade starts in two days. I’ve already lived in Connecticut, California, Hawaii, Florida, and three different cities in Virginia. Now we’re in Newport, Rhode Island.

Mom is driving, because my father is already at sea. She refused to live on the Navy base and rented a house, sight unseen, before we left Virginia. She wants us to have “the New England Experience.” At the local school, she insists that I be in a class of kids from Newport, rather than the class of Navy kids.

The next day she drives my brothers and me to school. When we’re two blocks away, I say, “Mom, let me out here. I’ll walk. I don’t want anyone to see me in this car.” She laughs and pulls over.

A new leaf, I think. I’m going to be “normal.” I won’t be Marti anymore; Marti is a boy’s name. This year, I’ll be Ellen, my first name.

I don’t know if we’re really poor, or if it just feels that way to me. But this I do know: I have only three outfits to wear to school. One is an olive-green corduroy jumper that I wear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with blouses of different colors and matching belts. My two other outfits are for Tuesdays and Thursdays. By switching off in this manner, I hope that nobody will notice how few clothes I have.

When spring arrives, my friend Caryn buys a camel-colored, soft leather purse with a long shoulder strap. It’s expensive, definitely not something in my family’s budget. Soon, four or five other girls have one.

I’m desperate for one, too. I want it with a passion. I imbue it with magical powers. With it, my life will be easier. I won’t perspire. My old clothes won’t look so bad. My pimples will be invisible. I will be thin and beautiful. I want one so badly, I finally beg my mother, a thing I rarely do. And to my utter amazement, she takes me to the store to look at it.

When she buys it for me, I’m euphoric.

I spend all evening putting my essentials inside: Kleenex, Kotex, pencils, pens, ChapStick, and most important, my red leather wallet filled with school pictures of my friends from every place I’ve lived. I look at them whenever I’m lonely.

The next morning on the way to school, I walk from my house to pick up Caryn, my new purse hanging from my shoulder. She comes out her front door with her purse on her shoulder, and on the way, we’re joined by Nancy with her purse.

For one brief moment, I feel like I belong.

This past spring I was shocked by a diagnosis of a very aggressive form of breast cancer. Although I discovered the lump early, at stage 1, this “triple negative” cancer was so fast-growing that my lumpectomy would be followed by chemotherapy and radiation. The prospect of chemotherapy and its horrendous side effects frightened me.

On the day of my first treatment, as my wife and I were walking across the medical clinic parking lot, our 25-year-old granddaughter strolled up. She gave me a long, loving hug and handed me a brand new gym bag. “For your chemo,” she said.

The pink bag was covered with images of kittens and rainbows, two of my favorite things. My granddaughter and her husband had certainly done their research about chemo treatments. The bag contained a soft, fuzzy blanket, a pillow with the logo “You Got This,” a bag of Jolly Rancher hard candies, a bottle of Biotene dry mouth rinse, several lovely bandanas, packets of moisturizer, a Sonic gift card for the slushies I’d need to cool my mouth, and many other items that chemo patients find useful.

But the bag’s contents didn’t end with the helpful items. My granddaughter had included notes of love and encouragement, words of wisdom and hope, from many family members. From my sister-in-law: “No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities.” From my daughter: a beautiful picture of a butterfly and flower and the note “Thank you for being you.”  From my niece: “You are an example of strength; you never let adversity stand in your way.” From another granddaughter: “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you think, and loved more than you’ll ever know.”

 I now approach the end of my chemo treatments and prepare for the radiation phase. Over these past months I have managed to face  baldness, skin rashes, mouth sores, headaches, back pain, and more with courage and hope. The whole cycle of chemotherapy has been bearable because I have my bag filled with the best gift anyone could hope for – unconditional love.