When your schedule isn't exactly pressing, odd how the smallest things can press. Take the autumn visit of the Menlo Park Chorus to the local Veterans Administration hospital. And, let us note, to be not only politically correct but vaguely up to speed in this, our changing world, we are talking Veterans Affairs. Which, when you think about it, is infinitely more apt. But never mind. It is looming over us, this event, even on the very day of its occurrence, this Sunday. Which begins with coffee, Read more [...]

Having squandered the day on trivia, at two in the afternoon I roll my wheelchair to a warm and favorable spot in between cars, hit the tilt control and recline into the sun. After all there is now a pleasant little heat trap between Jane's car and mine. Why not take advantage of it? And so I do, the October sky rotating above me until the branches of the tree in my backyard come into view. There is a scraggly quality to the leaves and bark. I don't know what sort of tree it is. And I've only seen Read more [...]

Life is a dream, which is not exactly a patentable idea...everyone from Pedro Calderón on having made exactly the same point...in this our modern world. Still, here it is merging, nightmare and daytime reality, albeit mildly, in the form of Interstate 280 northbound. Baby, you can drive my car...now echoing from my Beatles youth. As we descend. That is the thing, the way highways have of dipping, turning from flat to downhill. And I admit to a certain problem here. This is the stuff of dreams, Read more [...]

It's one of those times when everything seems if not exactly stuck, then static. Something should be happening, moving. But it isn't. Unless you count my car. My Dodge Grand Caravan, to be exact. And what is more exciting than a caravan? Think tents and camels, sand and scimitars, not to mention samovars. Everything adventurous and limitless and moving across empty wastes that don't feel like empty wastes. No, they are a medium, those sand dunes. And it's all about what's over the next one. All Read more [...]

So, there I was one temperate California morning, possibly in our so-called winter. And as is my wont, rolling about my apartment at 6:30 AM naked. Not that anyone would ever know, I tell myself. So who cares, I also tell myself. Nothing particularly odd about being naked at that hour of the morning. The only oddity having to do with my open-door policy. The only way to get a good flow of ventilation in this apartment is to open both doors, back and front. And so it came to pass, as described in Read more [...]

In my able-bodied youth, an era I no longer fully recall, the very thought of being in a wheelchair must have seemed horrifying. In fact, any bodily affliction would have frightened me. The sense of being constrained, trapped, reduced...none of this fit with the jumpy youth that I was. Suffice it to say that to me there was such a thing as being "trapped in a wheelchair." More than that, and I can almost recall this, anyone who lived with a serious and obvious physical disability seemed to be forever Read more [...]