One guy was a plumber and the other a package delivery person, and damned if they weren't both sitting there, each in his van, each only about one street away from the other.  Okay, separated by one hour.  There is that.  But if one is looking for conspiracies, the sense of being watched, surveilled actually, trust me, there is abundant evidence.  Yes, yes, it was lunch hour, and it was cold, and it is not summer time and the livin' is not easy.  Such are conditions in this, Read more [...]

One is out there, on the primal edge, legs pounding away on the 8:30 morning exercycle to nowhere.  The bicycle may be stationary, but the blood supply isn't.  In the California December exertion is all that makes this possible for your typical quadriplegic...actually a quadriparetic, the distinction all the more critical when the afflicted person is working an exercise machine with his legs.  Yes, it is the blood flow that counteracts the cold flow, vis-à-vis night temperatures in Read more [...]

At Marlou's yahrzeit my brother and my cousin both recalled how she had encouraged their kids to travel abroad.  Marlou was a devotee of the American Field Service, a redoubtable organization that arranges international family stays with students in their third year of secondary school.  These stories acquired magnitude with the passing of their principal character.  For this was what was left, a human's impact on the world.  It was never intended, this effect, just given.  Read more [...]

The 8:39 from Menlo Park pulls into the San Francisco Caltrain station amid a flurry of apologies from the conductor for the morning train's ten-minute tardiness.  I have barely noticed, delighting more in the sense of flying along, more or less nonstop up the Peninsula.  Leaving Burlingame speechless and San Carlos stunned as the northbound rush-hour passengers flash by on the way to more important places.  At San Francisco my personal bladder conditions are so favorable that I head Read more [...]

Is it a certain capacity for illusion that gets knocked out of the disabled psyche?  Taking off from Phoenix airport, gazing down on the half-filled lagoons of some half-completed and possibly half-abandoned resort development, I shake my head in something between disbelief and sadness.  For at several thousand feet the puny oval of ponds, some filled and some empty, Polynesian palm trees planted at their sides...the whole thing shrinking in pathetic scale as the plane climbs and the brown Read more [...]

Death by cold or cold as death itself, such are my coastal Californian intimations.  We have had some frosty mornings here, and if my reaction seems overblown...well, try experiencing such weather changes from within the positively operatic world of quadriplegia.Menchu has helped me dress.  She has fed me a bran muffin.  We have discoursed upon her days as a nanny and caregiver.  And now there is nothing for it but to charge once more into the exercise breach, dear neuromuscular Read more [...]