May 2005 Archives

"Well, as the natives would say, it's nice to have saw you." This was my mother's habitual sign off phrase in conversing with the people of our small, edge-of-desert town. I asked my father why she said it, and he explained my mother's disdain for the uneducated townspeople. Something along the lines of Marian the Librarian's impatience with the nonreaders of Balzac in "The Music Man's" River City. I recall peering up at my mother as she nervously jerked her conversations to this close. I knew she wanted something from the people she talked to this way. Mr. Lamb, who owned a small market. Hal, the pharmacist. Elsie, the dentist's wife.

The town's sidewalks stretched all the way from the single-story shops to the high curb. Winter rain raced down the pavement from the mountains and into picturesque open storm sewers made of granite rocks cemented into deep V-shaped ditches. There were few people in our town, but the sidewalks along San Gorgonio Boulevard felt more open than empty. Birds twittered downtown. Occasional cars passed. And if, on the way out of the post office, my mother stopped to talk to someone, it was like two characters on an empty stage with no audience.

Almost no audience. I was there, sensing her nervous unease without understanding it. I could also detect the general difference between my mother with her jagged, jokey banter and the people she talked to on the street. The others stood still as trees, their small-town day advancing like the sun. My mother's day was urgently elsewhere. When she slammed the door of the station wagon, I sensed my mother's foot on the accelerator. The town's sparse, slow-moving traffic glided along the wide 25-mile per hour streets. A single traffic light did not appear until the late 1950s. The driving should have been leisurely and Zen-like. But my mother jerked her foot on and off the gas, speeding and slowing, engine revving and idling. Town journeys had this anxious, finger-drumming staccato quality. Nothing constant or continuous. My mother, and her car, anxiously jerked from one moment to the next.

Our town had two small markets, and my mother loudly proclaimed her support of one and contempt for the other. The other, being banned, fascinated me. Why couldn't we shop at Pickett's Market, I continually asked. Because we don't go there, my mother told me. I pressed my father for information. He sighed. My mother was convinced that the elder Mrs. Pickett had attempted to shortchange her, years ago. That's why we shopped at Lamb's Market, a dusty, dark and invariably empty market just up the street from Pickett's. This position seemed increasingly untenable when that younger generation of Pickett's opened the town's first modern supermarket, complete with parking lot. Adding to the awkwardness, the Picketts lived not far away. Mickey Pickett was my brother's friend. I occasionally tagged along to visit the Picketts' house and see what boy things we could do in their backyard. The Picketts had a good climbing tree. And an excellent pile of old lumber, discarded bottles and other home-project detritus that was good for inspecting and, when the coast was clear, smashing.

Sometimes I had dinner with the Picketts. Mrs. Pickett warned about the Catholics. She probably had equally dire warnings about the Jews, but never in my presence. If John F. Kennedy was elected, she said, within six months either the new president would visit the pope, or the pope would visit the president. You could count on it. I tried to imagine the two of them, the pope and the president. I saw them standing together, as my mother did with passersby on the sidewalk. It was unclear what they might say, or if they said anything at all. Apparently, their sheer conjunction mattered.

If my mother and father agreed about anything regarding Mrs. Pickett, it was that she eavesdropped on the party line. Before the town acquired conventional phone lines, neighbors shared one connection, a party line. Callers would pick up the phone to dial and, instead of a busy tone, hear neighbors chatting. Most would hang up and wait for silence. Mrs. Pickett, according to my parents, would listen in. Like the meeting with the pope, it was impossible to grasp the significance of this story. Nothing I heard about Mrs. Pickett stirred me. But my parents' mutterings about her left me uneasy, and on visits to Mrs. Pickett's house, I kept my distance.

My parents had built an isolated house in the desert, just outside of town. A dirt road led from our house, across chaparral-covered fields, to a spot where the pavement and the town, began. I was always leery of the dirt road, for it seemed part of the menacing desert with its scaly, skittering creatures. One of the latter appeared at the edge of the road, as I made my morning trek to the school bus stop. Something that glided, cold and sinuous, in S-loops across the road grader's hard adobe tracks. I was making tracks of my own, before I even summoned the word "sidewinder," greasewood blurring beside me, pounding my short legs toward the pavement. Even on the pavement, I was so terrified that the rattlesnake was chasing me, that I threw my books to one side. Halfway up the street I began yelling. No, I was crying. Mrs. Pickett ran across her lawn in a housedress, then into the middle of the street, arms outstretched. She bent to my height with her open arms. I ran into her embrace, wailing. She held me in the middle of the street. Snakes were very slow, she told me. Together, we retrieved my books and lunch pail. The latter had burst open, a waxed-paper sandwich lying among the ants. She reassembled my lunch, took my hand and, without another word, walked me to the bus stop. Fortunately, I was the first kid there. As the others appeared, shoving and milling, she stood to one side. I said nothing more to her that day, or she to me. As the bus drove away, Mrs. Pickett gave only the smallest wave.

After my shooting, I spent six months in a Los Angeles hospital, and many people sent me letters, including Mrs. Pickett. She asked how I was and offered to visit me. Which meant driving 80 miles each way. I never answered her letter. I recall being mildly annoyed by her solicitous offer. In retrospect, I did not understand the supreme value of kindness and its scarcity in this world. I was still taking cues from my parents, the wrong cues. Mrs. Pickett's letter remains lodged in my brain. Even then, I must have known that it wasn't nice to ignore her. But I was angry. I was angrier than I knew.

The day Joey Fiedler beat me up I was in the fifth grade and had just stepped off the afternoon school bus. I can't recall the nature of our dispute, but I do recall apologizing. I am very sorry, I said. I also recall being puzzled as the words emerged from my mouth. Somehow, I had thought this was the thing to do. We stood on Alessandro Street, the school bus stop, so familiar, and now utterly changed. I was bleeding somewhere, probably from my nose. I was mostly bleeding humiliation. Our fight hadn't amounted to much. I was so unprepared that I could barely imitate what I had seen in movies. You squeezed each hand into a fist and thrust at your opponent. I tried this, feeling the doom and futility, and still surprised as Joey's fists sailed through the air space between mine. At the sight of blood, he must have had the sense to stop. Joey's father was an orderly at a psychiatric hospital miles away. My father, a doctor, told me this. In retrospect, class tensions may have nudged Joey and me toward our afterschool appointment with destiny.

I felt like apologizing for everything in those days. My parents' crumbling marriage. My inadequacies on the street corner and on the playing field. Sports was a source of constant humiliation. Little League tryouts had hit me at nine years old as hard as Joey did at 11. I'd done my best to prepare. All the boys in my classes were talking about it. I had gone home from school and more or less demanded that my father instruct me in the ways of baseball. Somberly, the two of us walked across the desert fields surrounding our isolated home. Mountains towered over us, one of them blocking Palm Springs to the east. My father sighed, shoved his glasses back up his nose, and prepared to hurl a practice pitch my way.

There was a right way and a wrong way to hold a bat, and I could not recall which was which. My own sense of uncertainty compounded with my father's. His was not a baseball expression. It was the tense and harried look of a man in suit pants asked to do one more impossible thing in a day that was already too long. Worse, it was vulnerable, resigned. I knew now that my father did not know how to play baseball. He did not even hold the ball, let alone throw it, in the accustomed way. He squeezed it like an offending tumor and didn't so much pitch it, as expel it.

As the underhand ball sailed toward me, I stiffened and tried a fierce swing. Bat and ball missed each other several times. Finally, they connected. My one ball sailed toward my father's two. He moved one hand to protect himself, now revealed as a sports-illiterate. I didn't care that he was a German Jewish doctor transplanted to a harsh, rocky land, where he had as much chance of thriving as an edelweiss in a sand dune. I had contempt for him. Boys were readying for Little League tryouts with varying degrees of cocky confidence. Their fathers had something mine didn't.

Two years later, standing on the street corner and apologizing to Joey Fiedler, who reacted with 11-year-old contempt, I was really apologizing for failure. And hoping that with this apology, life would somehow give me a break. Now I know that it is the father's job to teach young men to defend themselves. And not against fists and baseballs, but against loss of confidence. I wish my father had walked me into the desert that afternoon and proudly stated that he did not know how to play baseball but would find someone who did. And together, my father and his friend would show me how to play the game. In every sense of the word.

On the day of my Little League tryouts, I had a baseball glove on and stood in the outfield for my ball-catching audition. I recall that the hardball terrified me with its fierce speed and lethal potential, so different from the fat softballs I had encountered in grade school. I stumbled in trying to pick up the ball hurtling at me across the playing field dirt. The ground proved to be dustier and to contain more gravel than I had expected. Worse, I fell down on the ground before what seemed like thousands of people. Which probably amounted to 40 parents and kids seated in splintery wooden stands. In 12 more years I would find myself in a similar posture on the pavement of a Berkeley Street, a bullet in my spinal cord. I didn't know then how to get up from such a lowly and debased posture. And years later I still don't. But this has been my life. I know more now than I did then. And sometimes, more is enough.

Ah, Europe. The trip of your dreams. Seven days and six nights. 17 days and 16 nights. Four knights and one castle. Buy your ticket and go.

I've been having trouble planning my European holiday. This is the sort of trouble that people aspire to. It's like the trials of finding a suitable butler. Or choosing the right sort of upholstery for your Rolls. In the 1970s, as a newly disabled young man, I created a second life in Britain, not to mention a new family and new set of friends. Family and friends have shifted in terms of generation, but they're mostly still there. And for the second year in a row, I'm setting off for a visit, a mix of traveling alone and with my wife. So where's the trouble in such an idyll?

It's my own ambivalence. This resides in my lower back. My left shoulder. My butt. The effort involved in pulling myself up the banister of my cousin's house in Gloucestershire, the ache of crutching across her kitchen, the constant dependency on others to make tea, hand me the newspaper, help me stand up from a low chair, all this is beginning to feel like too much. My body saying no to the rigors of travel. A disabled person, at least one who has been physically limited for a long stretch, instinctively senses his lack of reserves. He knows when not to push it.

Yet travel pushes me. It pushes me to wake up early, be packed and prepared, have documents in hand and do whatever is required, such as spending hours airborne in an orthopedically compromising position. To take risks and test my neuromuscular limits, even though the test results may look somber. I think of my father's cousins, in London, German Jews who jaunted off in search of sun, and brought bits of sun back in paintings and pictures. In the winter, in the dark, cold days, you could gaze at a cliff-hanging fishing village south of Naples on their wall and imagine being warm and eating garlicky things with wine and gusto. They planned their trips carefully, many months in advance, with meticulous German precision. Greece. Southern France. The Dolomites. Spain. Until in Corfu, one of them had a stroke, and everything turned into Greek doctors, a foreign hospital, and an early flight home. One trip too far, one airport too many. I may expire that way myself.

While my body resists this looming trip to Europe, my mind is all for it. The trip is already taking over. Raised without a lot of feminine nurturing, it's not natural for me to sooth and comfort myself. Yet, on a trip like this, such self-mothering is required. For my body, it means survival. So I'll find relief. There must be a swimming pool somewhere in eastern Gloucestershire. I'm already making inquiries. My cousin and I are discussing what to do about stairs. I'm thinking about ease and convenience and softness.

I'm also rethinking the entire trip. I'm not a tourist anymore. People are now at the center of my travels. I long less for new things than for new perspectives on old relationships. But I do long for theater. I'll see a few plays. Aside from that, I've set myself up for three weeks in Britain, idle, unstructured, purposeless. It's summertime in California, and Marlou and I could be driving to the beach and having just as much fun. I've got corn to tend, carrots to thin, zucchini to weed and lettuce to defend against snails. I'll miss the garden. This trip is beginning to feel like all lot of work.

I'm planning a trip, but beneath the surface of the itinerary, there's another trip. There is the thing that happens when we don't have a lot of plans. That dangerous thing. The thing produced by idle minds. This might be my last trip to Britain. The nail on the traveling coffin. Or maybe these trips will start happening more often. I'm open. Just when my body seems to be closing. I am traveling to find out why I'm traveling. And when I find out, next time will I stay home?

In the 1970s, in the years when I was adjusting from bounding athleticism to stumbling paralysis, Americans decided to get down. Down to business, down to earth…no one could say. But they were descending. They were dropping into conversation nooks. When people dropped in, folks would drop down a couple of steps to sit and converse hearthside in cozy, living room depressions. On the face of it, this made a lot of sense. I would probably have installed a conversation pit, if I could have afforded one. But I spent most of the 1970s reeling from loss of body. And loss of that sense of forward direction we so glibly term career path.

I dropped in on my wife's cousin in suburban Washington, DC, recently. I had only met them briefly. But there I was, arriving for a visit, descending from the hydraulic lift of a Super Shuttle van, suitcase in tow, for a two-night stay. Marlou's cousins emptied their nest years ago, with kids now in their late 30s. There was lots of guest space. And the most logical space for me was downstairs in a sunken conversation nook. The built-in couch would convert to a narrow bed.

Watch out for anything that leads downward. Things below tend to be old, morbid and familiar. I thanked the cousins, surveyed the nook and went about unpacking various night things. Including twin plastic urinals, my nightly companions for 37 years. I sat down to undress. Down and down. Tired after an all-day flight, I wasn't in form quadriplegia-wise. The bed was too low, and too soft. It didn't have the height to allow me to safely bend and reach my socks, shoes, slide off my trousers. The thing was so low that I couldn't stand up. I was down for the night. Well, so what? I'd get undressed, one way or another, haul myself into bed and forget about it. The undressing took 45 minutes of thrashing, turning, and accusing myself of the most horrible things. Lack of foresight. Lack of saying what I needed. Lack of control over circumstance.

I hadn't done this sort of thing in years, sleeping on a stranger's couch. At home in California, my bed is the right height, and a wheelchair conveys my one-handed self handily about. But not here. Once I had pried off the final sock and rotated myself onto the ledge-bed, I asked myself some logical questions. When had I become this weak? This helpless? If things were this bad at age 58, how were things going to be at 68?

I'd kept the cousins up late talking into the wee California hours, heading for bed after midnight their time, 9 p.m. mine. I lay there at 2 a.m. exhausted at the prospect of being exhausted the next day. Something was wrong. I was cold. No wonder there was a spare blanket set beside the bed. Unfortunately, it was just out of quadriplegic reach. I sat up, turned on the light and stared into the night. I thought of getting dressed again but estimated that would take an hour. Or two. Besides, I had split open my one nonparalyzed index finger in the course of undressing. The finger had left bloody splotches on my thigh. I seized the crutch and shoved the rubber tip at my new fleece jacket, sitting on top of the suitcase. It was a perfect match, the synthetic rubber tip and the synthetic fleece fabric seizing each other like landsmen. I dropped the jacket on top of the blanket. Now I was warm. My paralyzed arm kept rolling off the narrow cot, but eventually I gave up thinking about it and slept.

In the morning, my urinals were full, and I was getting paranoid about the bathroom. I yelled upstairs to the cousins. Theirs was a big house, and they were a full floor above me. I yelled again. I gave up. There was a phone beside the bed. Why not just call them? Because you can't call your own number, can you? My cell phone wasn't working in this part of the Virginia countryside. It was 9 a.m., 6 a.m. on the West Coast. What was there to do but call my wife and ask her to call her cousins, upstairs?

Bob came downstairs. It was embarrassing, but there was no choice: I had to ask him to empty my urinals. Nancy made a spectacular breakfast. They offered to take me on a tour of various sites. The Baltimore and Ohio Canal, with all its old locks and towpaths, not to mention the Potomac River itself. All were within easy reach. In fact, wheelchair range. In the afternoon we walked, and rolled, down to the river. I was so tired that once or twice on the way, I dozed off and drove my wheelchair into the curb. Never mind. They proved to be wonderful people. Open hearted. Part of my recently extended family. Nancy was full of apologies for the downstairs bed. And for once I knew that there was nothing to apologize for. Nothing to regret. I had broken free of the ever so convenient, wheelchair-accessible rut of my life. I had met new people and sought their help, having no choice. And we were already growing used to each other. At dusk, Bob made martinis. We talked and talked. I was a traveler.

There's a definite coffin-like, sarcophagus quality to them. And at the same time they are what they are, botanical blank slates, empty, raised garden beds. Ready for planting. Ready for me. I wasn't quite ready for them.

Dutifully, I headed for the Palo Alto organic garden shop I frequented years ago. It has moved across the street, its hippie roots absent in the spacious brick quarters and the surprisingly high prices. $4.25 for a single sunflower seedling in a plastic pot? Absolutely. They are nonprofit, Common Ground. I am a nonprofit too. That's our common ground. Besides, what the hell, maybe it really does matter if you give money to people with aspirations to reduce the chemical impact, human footprint and general swath cut by homo sapiens as we wander about the land.

So there they were, new nursery plants, in the back of my wheelchair van, headed for my wheelchair-ramp-equipped apartment, which is now adjacent to two large wheelchair-height planter boxes. My wife set the plants on the boxes, then went about helping me. I bristled. This was going to be my domain. I surveyed my planter-box kingdom, determining the general plan. Height. One had to remember the height of various plants. I hadn't thought about this sort of thing in 12 years. The last time I'd had a disabled garden, I hadn't been in a wheelchair, and the raised beds were half the height of these. I'd spend many lonely hours sitting in folding chairs and crutching about, as I tended to the tomatoes and corn and lettuce. The more the plants thrived, my marriage withered.

Which, of course was then, and this was now. Marlou got the message quickly enough…let her second husband fumble about in his quadriparetic way with the sunflowers. And, surprise, my second wife seemed to understand. This wasn't about efficiency. One-handed, wheelchair-mechanized agriculture is a low-productivity endeavor. So, okay, in the 12 years since I had last hoed and raked and shoveled, muscles and nerves and joints had realigned. I couldn't really reach the far side of one gardening bed and, no, I didn't want Marlou reaching for me. But I did possess a hoe, which, without a word, she placed next to my wheelchair. This annoyed me, in the way a surgeon might be offended if he didn't get a chance to say "scalpel," like in the movies, and the damn thing just appeared on his instrument tray.

Well, the hoe wasn't quite the right instrument for digging, but like so many things in a disabled life, it would do. I carved out enough earth to insert the first sunflower plant, then with the hole almost out of reach, had to more or less hurl the plant into place. I maneuvered it upright with the hoe and then tamped the earth into place. One down, four to go. I had bought five seedlings, because…well, because of nothing. I'd come from work, a half-day meeting, and stopped in at the garden shop, tired and impatient. A warm spring day, the first, really, all year, and local gardeners had ravaged the plant stock. There were just odds and ends left. Two sunflowers of one type, and two of another variety, and one of another. It was all terribly inconsistent, unplanned and, yet, at home and facing the expanse of empty planter, I saw a solution. Plant the odd lone plant in the middle, then put two of one variety next to it, two of the others next to them. Thus, gardening. Improvisation. Symmetry redefined. Symmetry abandoned.

Still, despite the joy in this long-awaited moment, the incredible apartment birth of a wheelchair garden, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Garden Grows in Menlo, I kept thinking of the past. The wife who was either absent or wouldn't listen…or the husband who was passive and wouldn't speak up. And, of course, the body that had declined so much. Which was why I decided that planting five sunflowers was enough. Yes, there was a big flat full of lettuce plants and basil, tomatoes and squash waiting to go into the ground. But I was waiting to go inside. I'd had enough. And I still had to exercise, to have Marlou strap my leg onto a stationary bicycle and pedal my way to cardiovascular health.

While she strapped, I talked. I told her it was a bittersweet experience, this reencounter with gardening, tinged with loss and regret. And she began to talk, for the first time in days, about frustrations in her life. So we had this. A marriage. My body was failing, and time was passing, and it wasn't entirely clear how long it would take to plant the rest of the vegetables. But late in life, I was acquiring sense. Or maybe I was acquiring life. I began my half-hour on the exercycle, thinking of next steps. The eggplant. I promised my landlord I would grow one for him. And for Marlou, who likes eggplant too. For I felt like I'd walked into a clearing in a dark forest, after a long and futile journey, only to discover there was an open sunlit place. And that a relationship, and life itself, isn't just an ordeal. And through the strangest of circumstances, a landless, single quadriplegic in an apartment can end up coupled, rooted and growing.

Westbound and windowless, I read short stories and once glanced at the United Airlines map, trying to deduce where we might be. We might be anywhere. We might be anything. Airline travel makes me nervous. It also makes me sad. At least it did on this particular occasion, such was my exhaustion and physical achiness after sleeping on four beds in five days. And not sleeping nearly enough. And being older. It all hit me on the airplane flight, how difficult travel has become for my aging, quadriplegic body. When it was time to wedge myself up and out of my coach seat and head for the rest room, the Chinese passenger by the window had to push me from behind while the woman across the aisle yanked me toward the vertical. I'm not certain if I could have stood up on my own. It has come to this.

Maybe I travel to come home, to come down to earth. I've hit the road, and now the road is hitting me. I invariably wonder why I went wherever I went. Or even if I went. And if my shoulder and lower back really hurt this much all the time. Yes, it's a melancholy moment, time to take stock, assess and decide.

At Dulles Airport I decided on the turkey with provolone and spinach panini instead of United Airlines' coach entrée. Once on board, I couldn't resist the coach entrée, wretched as it was. For it was free, wasn't it? And what is there to do for six hours without even a plexiglas view of clouds or Iowa? So, in addition to being cramped and achy and despairing, I was also shot full of peas and overly hydrated turkey. We human beings find distraction in anything.

Of course, flying is all about distraction. You are trapped, after all, and the people providing service seem trapped too. Yes, they bring you meals, drinks and advice on when to raise or lower the window shade. But they also have this fierce undertone of keep away from me. Things aren't exactly relaxed in the post 9/11 airline world. And, of course, they're not terribly pleasant at the airports either.

Dulles. It's hard not to be excited by the airfoil sweep of the graceful terminal, even as one grasps that the romantic 60s design has given way to something much grimmer. The outlying buildings are still reached by the trademark mobile lounges, which have morphed into big inter-terminal buses with the same old 70s lunar-rover design. But the actual terminal buildings are dull, ordinary and look a bit worn. Like America these days, sliding from democratic idealist to butt-kicking resource grabber.

"Is it like this every day?" I asked the security guy who had just frisked me and gone over my wheelchair and battery charger with a series of explosive-detection swabs. Being in a wheelchair, the security people had shunted me to a special line reserved for airline crews. Still, the crush of Alitalia, Aeroflot and Austrian Airways flight attendants had ground the inspection process to a virtual halt. Too many airlines begin with "A"…that must be it. Maybe there was a separate line for the "B" and "C" airlines.

I snuck a close-up, wheelchair-level view of the Austrian flight attendants removing their red belts and determined that they were mostly authentically svelte, these young women of the air. And how foolish of their airline not to realize the danger posed by this particular fashion accessory, red buckle and all. Periodically, one of the Transportation Safety Administration guys would wander up and down the line asking who had to get to which flight. Remarkable, how a nation so supposedly keen on small government and private-sector everything would rush to protect its airports by bloating a vast new federal agency into life. Good to see we're stripping down those Austrian flight attendants, too.

I was very early for my flight, though disabled passenger can never really be too early. So I had time to cruise the hallways, roll my chair on an electric walkway, multiplying speed with speed, and buy unnecessary food. I knew it was an hour of aimless freedom before the long, achy confinement to an airline seat. And I braced myself for complications at the other end. I braced myself even more in the boarding lounge where, no, the agent couldn't give me a better seat. Or give me much help in protecting my wheelchair.

Couldn't I talk to a couple of the baggage guys before they spirited my wheelchair away? The agent patiently listened to my plea, that if I could just have a couple of private words with the people who at the airplane door who hand me my crutch, then stash my wheelchair in the plane's baggage compartment, well maybe things wouldn't go so badly at the other end. She didn't seem to quite understand. Moments later, she was arguing with another agent about who should complete the electric wheelchair tag. As for the other agent, he was the one who followed me to the airplane door. Would he like me to show him how to disengage the wheels so the thing could be rolled like a push wheelchair? No, he said. He would prefer to sit down in the chair and drive it.

At San Francisco Airport, it took forever for the chair to appear at the plane. I sat in the first-class section watching the cleaning crew ready the interior for the next flight, to Reno. The waiting flight attendant suggested that I might join her in Nevada. It sounded like a good idea. I smiled. Whenever the wheelchair arrives, I said, could someone give me a hand reattaching the battery connections? Oh, no problem, she said. I could tell that she'd never dealt with an electric wheelchair. But in her naïve way she'd stumbled into a commitment. And I would hold her do it.

When the chair arrived, dead as a doornail, she tried to help with the connections. But the battery box, massive and inches off the floor, proved impossible. In the end, the pilot for the Reno flight called in a couple of mechanics. It took them 45 minutes to get the thing rolling. Naturally, I'd missed my van ride home. I sat outside for half an hour, occasionally borrowing people's cell phones to call SuperShuttle. My own had gone dead. I had gone dead too, arriving at home after midnight, 3 a.m. East Coast time.