CNF: What the Oncologist and the Literature Professor Talk About as They Walk the Dog
by Deborah Thompson
Socks. They talk about socks, and how many times you can re-wear a pair before washing them.
They talk about the day’s Wordle word, and whether or not it was fair, and what constitutes a “foreign” word when all language spreads.
About what it really means when a dog licks your face. He might be asking you to vomit up your last meal for him.
About what the dog actually ate today and how many times he took a shit.
About the latest Supreme Court shitshow and the shits they really do give.
About the difference between a horrible person and a person who does horrible things. They disagree about whether the difference matters, or even exists.
About which word is funnier, monkeypox or chickenpox.
About how if there were a vaccine for stupidity only smart people would take it.
About America’s death drive.
About how the world will end, and how much time we’ve got left, and what to do while waiting, and whether Godot will come (he hopes) or not (she despairs).
About how her undergraduate student hinted at suicide, and how his oncology patient’s cancer recurred.
About the unfathomable blackness of black holes.
About the exact number and diameter of holes it takes to declare a pair of socks dead.
Deborah Thompson is an emeritus professor of English at Colorado State University, where she taught modern drama, cultural studies, and creative nonfiction. She has published numerous articles of critical and literary essays, including in the Bellevue Literary Review, Briar Cliff, Calyx, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Hobart, Kenyon Review Online, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Missouri Review, Passages North, Sweet, and Upstreet. She was the winner of The Missouri Review’s 2008 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in creative nonfiction and the 2010 Iowa Review contest in the nonfiction category. The latter essay, “Mishti Kukur,” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her book manuscript Pretzel, Houdini, and Olive: Essays on the Dogs in my Life won Red Hen Press’s Nonfiction book prize and was published in 2020. Her essay collection Animal Disorders was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2021. She is also the author of Dog of the Decade, a cultural studies approach to dogs and dog breeds in the U.S., which was published by McFarland Press.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “What the Oncologist and the Literature Professor Talk About as They Walk the Dog”? The first draft of this essay, written in first person, started with the sentence,’You must have the most amazing conversations,’ a student surmised upon learning that my partner is a radiation oncologist. ‘What do an MD and a PhD talk about?’ That actually happened, and she wouldn’t believe that our conversations were not as lofty as she imagined. I thought of her question when my partner and I started talking about socks and laundry on our next dog walk. I think we all live in many different registers at once, and often flip from profane to sacred to momentous to trivial within a few steps. I ended up shifting the piece to third person because it captured the way I felt when I tried to observe the conversation as an anthropologist would. Incidentally, “What the Oncologist and the Literature Professor Talk About” has now become a punchline between my partner and me. We pronounce it every time our conversations disintegrate into an absurdity of pettiness.
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