491 days, 5 hours, 35 minutes, 47 seconds

Spend spend spend spend spend. A hat, two scarves, three pairs of long velvet gloves, two pins, two polyester cowl-neck tops for around the house. All of it just to compensate.

491 days, 5 hours, 52 minutes, 12 seconds

So she said she wanted a green hat, and this is definitely green. More hippie than retro. Someone's sewed buttons along one side in an interesting pattern, where other hats have feathers or flowers. Mostly small shirt buttons. Mostly ivory with thick green wool thread, but other colors as well. The street vendor insists the hat is new.

Her mother had no pattern for those charms.

Her hand so bad today she can barely clasp a button. And one fell off of a blouse last. It was the top button, so it barely matters.

493 days, 7 hours, 39 minutes, 52 seconds

Months ago now, when Hillary threw her hat into the ring, she called for a cap on spending in Iraq. But that's all semantics. And she's starting to look more closely at Obama now.

495 days, 1 hours, 16 minutes, 9 seconds

Back from dinner, they stop in the drugstore for Saltines – the one thing she's convinced is helping ward off the expected nausea. She tells him Saltines, warm diet Coke, and sucking on lemons is all that's ever worked for her. Then he, not she, mentions the lemon law.

495 days, 22 hours, 53 minutes, 28 seconds

Speaking of hats again – once again last night, the Mets honored those who died on 9/11 by wearing caps honoring the New York City Police Department, New York City Fire Department, New York City Fire Department Paramedics, New York State Courts, Port Authority Police Department, and the Office of Emergency Management. Each cap will be signed by the player or coach who wore it, then sold at a charity auction. They won again, at home, against the Braves.

495 days, 23 hours, 23 minutes, 14 seconds

Yesterday was 9/11. A Tuesday, as it was that first year, but hot and humid, with thunderstorms, not the crisp clear fall day it was six years ago. The next year, not even recalling the date, she'd been walking the city with her camera, realized she left her battery charger upstate, and headed down to J&R. At first she didn't understand the crowds of people. Then she wandered among them, circling the site twice, before she began to focus on half-dead flowers stuck in the fence, most with notes. The next year there was nothing to photograph. And it's all old hat now.

496 days, 0 hours, 23 minutes, 59 seconds

A St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, a NY Yankees baseball cap, a red hunter's cap, a burnt orange Texas Longhorns baseball cap, a white ski cap, a fisherman's hat, a black beret, a bandana, a military insignia hat, a light-blue canouflge. James Madison, 50, alternately dubbed The Hat Bandit and The Mad Hatter, had a clean-shaven head. The hats protected his identity when he robbed 19 banks in ten months. But finally New Jersey police caught up to him.

496 days, 13 hours, 48 minutes, 21 seconds

Set the clock ahead. Please set the clock ahead. George Bush is no longer president. Soldiers are still being killed in Iraq, but that no longer interests him. Medicare no longer interests him. Very little interests him. He no longer goes to church. He stands in front of a mom and pop drugstore, one of the few ones left in a small Texas town, trying to guess at the number of jellybeans in a huge jar.

496 days, 20 hours, 59 minutes, 51 seconds

On www.whitehousekids.gov she finds The White House issued a math challenge for kids in elementary school:

How many Marbles?

* What is the smallest number of marbles when: grouping the marbles by fours leaves 2 extra marbles, grouping by fives leaves 1 extra, and there are more than 10 marbles in the collection?

Contest problems and answers are provided by David Rock at Columbus State College and Doug Brumbaugh at the University of Central Florida.

496 days, 21 hours, 8 minutes, 9.2 seconds

Doling out the pills once a week. She thought it would be like playing with marbles: you go here, you go here, you go here. All the different colors. But now there are too many pills to count. They all seem to look alike. A bottle falls from her hand. A tray tips. She has a mini seizure. None of the pills are working. She's down on her hands and knees on the patterned tiles of the kitchen floor, trying to salvage what she can, figure out what's missing. Might as well stay here.

497 days, 11 hours, 42 minutes, 32 seconds

Transformations. Or transformers. On his birthday weekend, while he was in Rhode Island with family, the lights in her study blew out. Lights on Transformers. Because she can't tolerate the heat. His gift to her. And so she's managed in poor light, one week, two weeks, straining at the keyboard, putting on hat after hat, expensive hats, cheap hats, hats she's transformed with pins, trying to transform herself. She thinks of those cars that transform into robots. They came out long after her childhood. And she never had need of them. It's taken her this long to be able to write about any of this. Even during the day her eyes strain. In the middle of chemo her glasses break. God knows what these new medications are doing to her. She doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to see. She wants to put a hat on her head, cover her eyes, transform sickness or shame into dignity. Fashion, she calls it. But there's never been a mirror in her bedroom.

499 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 14 seconds

Peacock feathers. Her mother wasn't the sort to wear any feathers, but she remembers this full-feathered hat in shades of mauve and purple that someone (probably her aunt) convinced her mother to spend a lot of money for. She doesn't recall her mother ever wearing it. She thinks to ask her father where it is now, then realizes she wouldn't have nerve to wear it either.

500 days, 1 hours, 41 minutes, 1.3 seconds

She' s dreaming her hair came back. Two long thick clumps at the base of her skull, some frizzy curls on the top. Then her father calls.

500 days, 11 hours, 25 minutes, 45 seconds

The 500 mark. This used to mean something. She forgets what.

500 days, 12 hours, 4 minutes, 45.7 seconds

She remembers the regulation white camp hat, and her mother sewing those little plastic charms all over it. You could get a child's handful for a quarter from the machine at the Food Fair. She always loved charms. She never had charm.

500 days, 13 hours, 10 minutes, 27 seconds

Seventy miles south-east of Dallas. Four days. Six thousand people. An ugly butt-crack contest. A spam eating contest. A mudpit belly buster. A mattress-chunk contest where two men drink a 12-pack of beer, get into a pickup, drive, climb into the truck-bed and toss the mattress as far as they can. This disturbs the neighbors.

500 days, 13 hours, 18 minutes, 29.6 seconds

Redneck: a member of the white rural labouring class of the southern States; one whose attitudes are considered characteristic of this class; freq., a reactionary. Originally, and still often, derogatory, but now also used with more sympathy for the aspirations of the rural American.

501 days, 1 hours, 4 minutes, 57 seconds

Scarves in the hatbox. Rash.

501 days, 20 hours, 7 minutes, 41 seconds

Man leads normal life with tiny brain, the headline from July 22nd read. Forty-four years old, married with two children, an IQ of 75. As an infant he'd had fluid in his skull. There was little more than a thin sheet of brain tissue. The whole brain was like those shrunken skulls boys tormented girls with in second grade. And yet, doctors say, the brain somehow adapts. If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side, said a doctor not involved in the case. The brain is very plastic.

501 days, 20 hours, 48 minutes, 22 seconds

The MRI confirms that the stereotactic lesion's shrunk, leaving swelling all around it. And here she's cutting back on steroids, her hand bad again. But she hasn't spoken to the real doctor yet.

Meanwhile, the Rings of Saturn paperweight arrived yesterday. Nowhere near as nice as others in the celestial series. It looks like a top, and seems as unstable as she's been feeling. Topsy Turvy. It needs a stand to stand. The vacant white rings on this particular piece are heavily flecked with gold, so the swelling both stands out and fills in. Silence is golden. So is Hell paved over. It all depends on the angle. She feels like she walks at an angle. Falls at an angle. She'd expected, no, wanted, just emptiness.

From the story card: Saturn's light rings are composed of ice chunks and rocks ranging in size from as small as a dust particle to as large as a car. Rocks in her head. Rocks banging together like lobster claws. Tired and seeing double. Some artist's vision. And last fall, when maybe all this was maturing in her body, she lost her three color gold wedding ring, only to find it days later tangled in the bedsheets.