August 2005 Archives

It was sometime in the spring, gazing out my apartment window, that my old man's fancy turned to thoughts of raised beds. In the olden days when I was married the first time and living in an in-laws-financed starter home, which proved to be a finisher home...having now abandoned further thoughts of house ownership in the Bay Area...I had a garden. It was behind the garage in that, my first, and only, house. In three raised beds, I cranked out an abundance of tomatoes, lettuce, corn and odd yuppie salad greens. I spent hours out there alone, sitting on a low stool, sometimes standing. All that garden solitude had much to do with the poor state of my marriage and the robustness of my body. So this spring, with these conditions symmetrically reversed, I had a chat with my landlord, who surrendered a portion of lawn that had died in one California's droughts, and with help from a carpenter friend, I was back in agricultural business.

Of course, being in a wheelchair these days, the beds are more than raised. They are elevated, twice as high as their predecessors, and working on them involves more wheelchair maneuvering, less bending and standing. There's still plenty that's enlivening about growing your own lettuce. I calm myself by watering the seedlings, removing the weeds, tying the tomato vines to their poles. But the almost compulsive energy that made me build these raised beds in the first place has oddly vanished.

True, I've got plans. Cover crop in the autumn. Potatoes in January. Spinach by March. And then there are the gophers. They appeared one day quite unexpectedly, in the manner of all plagues. Having little sense of zoning or property rights, they had the wisdom to burrow from the adjoining lot's empty space behind a senior center, under the fence and into my corn patch. I saw the furrows and door mounds that signal their construction and felt a momentary sense of defeat. But then I sprang into quadriplegic action. That is to say, my wife and I did. And my carpenter friend. With a garden hose, we washed open the holes, dumped poison underground, sealed up the holes and went about our lives. I purchased two battery-powered ultrasonic guaranteed-to-drive-away-gophers beeping devices. I'm not obsessing.

Of course, it's hard to say if the gophers have actually been driven away or found greener pastures. The latter may now be over the back fence, where the senior center has recently installed raised beds not unlike my own. One of their personal volunteers wanders by my garden on a daily basis. I've urged him to get the center to build beds like my own, to make gardening more accessible to the senior masses. He assured me that he would pass on the word. And it appears that he has. An aerial view would reveal a procession of raised beds nominally separated by a fence. I'm not quite sure how the idea spread from one property to the next. Or even if it's an idea. Raising things to eat from the earth must be in our bones. It's more like a primal headline. RAISED BEDS--QUICKLY SPREADS. In a way, there's more pleasure from the spread of the beds than the actual beds.

There's a problem with NASA's shuttle missions. And with its Mars missions. And all its missions. Simply put, they are the wrong missions. The right missions, as any California fifth-grader knows, get launched like this.

...3-2-1, and it's lift off for Mission Santa Barbara.

Don't tell me you haven't thought of it. Thousands of tons of adobe headed for low-earth orbit. Extending the boundaries of Franciscan space.

Because you're tired of hearing about those loose tiles. All missions have loose tiles. Check out the roof at San Juan Capistrano. Talk to the swallows.

Also, you're tired of those outfits. They haven't progressed much from the Buck Rogers era and make anyone look like the Pillsbury dough boy. You're ready for spacemen in cassocks. You're also ready for a space vehicle with courtyards and Moorish fountains.

You're ready for all this, because flying hardware has lost its luster. Smart bombs. Satellites. Missile defense shields. They are all crashing from the skies, bleeding blood and dollars into the sands of Iraq and God knows where next. Which makes the Spanish Modern Mission, well you know, mission-critical.

I've outgrown summer boys' camp, but not an annual end-of-summer trek to a national men's conference in the Midwest. This event defines my Septembers, not to mention the rising anticipation in August, preceded by July registration, and the year-long reading and thinking about what transpires at a woodsy, lakeside YMCA camp. As for exactly what transpires, let's say that about 110 middle-aged liberal guys get together and discuss issues. Let's not say too much about the effects of leaders who have faced themselves before facing their audiences. But we can say that it's an intense week in a heightened atmosphere and that I pick up this and that about myths and come out a little more aware that I am living one of my own.

The camp in the woods isn't much on disabled access, although I get by. There's a ramp up to the cafeteria, an incline into the meeting lodge. And a threshold that an electric wheelchair on steroids can jump on its way to the room where I am always stashed. #4. With a door so heavy that it takes a year's physical therapy to prepare for it. A low bunk bed cot where I spread out my sleeping bag. And, formerly, a sink. Over the years, this sink has inexplicably disappeared. Now there's a piece of plywood under the still-in-place mirror. It's a quiet room in the campground's quietest lodge, where the leaders recover from their sessions, sleeping in rooms just like mine.

After a four-hour flight and a two-hour bus ride to get there, I see the familiar faces with considerable joy. I'm usually the last to climb off the bus and, damn it, if the bus driver and guys who know me and guys who don't, haven't reassembled my electric wheelchair and restored it to me, intact, from the baggage hold where it's been bouncing for 100 freeway miles. Everyone has gotten older in the year. Which is why there are some faces I instantly recognize and some I don't. But everyone recognizes me. I'm the guy in the wheelchair. I'm also the guy they stride across the cafeteria to hug. I'm the guy who cannot take this in with unalloyed joy. I'm the guy who feels the warmth of true greetings with a mixture of pleasure and pain. And yet I come here knowing that if there was ever an exuberance zone, this is it. And we're not talking anything frothy. High spirits, sure-footed and life-earned, have a place here.

Which may explain why, and how, I drag my quadriplegic self out of a sleeping bag early enough to make it to the 6:30 a.m. group singing session. Or I try to. Unless I've had a bad night. Like last year. The first night. In retrospect, I'd arrived with some baggage, as they say. There was something faintly churning within my introverted soul. I can't recall what. But I'd just gotten married, and it was time now to get real, my wife and I. And in this midst of things, there I was emerging from the opening night's meeting in the lodge with thoughts of sleep. Getting my room arranged in the familiar way, getting into bed and positioning the wheelchair as bedside table. The latter being in short supply, but absolutely necessary. For at night aside from sleeping, I also pee. From a weakened bladder with diminished capacity. Which means either getting up and down all night or using a plastic urinal. Guess which I choose.

So, on my first night, I had retired to my solitary room, hooked my good arm under my bad leg and hauled the limb into the sleeping bag and positioned myself for sleep. Which hadn't come after an hour. Or even after two. What had come was an impressive quantity of urine. My body had filled one plastic container and, within a couple of hours, was working on the next. When these rooms were equipped with sinks, it would have been a simple matter to rise and empty the contents. But now this was way too complicated, requiring hooking the plastic handle of the urinal over my authentically quadriplegic right wrist while I steered the electric wheelchair with my left hand. Something to do in the morning. For this was sleep time. Or soon would be surely. I had perched the full urinal on the cushion of my electric wheelchair, now functioning as a tabletop. Which a more practical, grounded individual might have determined was unsound as a practice. The proof of which came in a whooshing, watery sound. The splash and, yes, the scent of my full urinal tilting its heaviness forward, spilling its contents off the wheelchair and onto bed and floor. I'd had a couple of celebratory espressos earlier that day at the airport. And now I could smell them permeating the room.

Well, I had a towel. I placed it on the floor and on the bed and soaked up what I could. I even rolled back and forth over the towel with my wheelchair tires, hoping to squeeze as much urine as possible out of the carpet. It was 2:30 a.m. My sleeping bag was soaked. When I had done what I could, I crawled back into the dampness and slept for a couple of hours. At least I didn't have a roommate. No one had to know about this but me. And, of course, the familiar girl in the cafeteria who next morning said that, yes, she would be happy to run my sleeping bag through the washing machine. Which took care of much of the problem. But not exactly all. For the body's fluid byproduct, mixed with coffee's aromatics, linger and grow insidious. The room smelled bad the next day. And by the next evening, with primitive forces working their way through the proceedings, a.k.a., the hand of God, I was assigned a roommate.

He was a farmer. Literally. Unmarried but hardly unlettered. Someone had convinced him that a men's conference in the upper Great Lakes was just for him. And the conference coordinator had decided that he was just for me, in the lower bunk bed just across the way. I was mortified. The room's scent had progressed from uriney to acrid. I had the window wide open. Now I would have to do the same with myself. Wide open and full disclosure. I told him about the spilled urinal, half hoping this might drive him out the door to a more comfortable spot in the forest. He shrugged at the news. He told me that it was really hard raising pigs, the price of pork being unreliable. And he was glad to be included in the men's conference. He had driven for hours across three states. In the morning, with both urinals filled again, he gallantly offered to carry them down the hall to the toilets. I thanked him for sparing me this tricky and embarrassing task. I didn't like the idea of rolling down the hall with visible bottles of urine. Too revealing, in the way hospitals strip their inhabitants of all privacy. Too shaming.

Though I did reveal my urinal spillage in one of those public sharing moments that seem to be a fixture of certain confabs. No one said much of anything by way of response. Which is odd for a collection of highly verbal people. Making me think that I had either grossed out my conference brethren. Or, more likely, failed to tell them about the depth of my reaction. Whatever. I had said what I could. And on the final day, after almost a week there, I had to admit that the room was smelling even worse than I'd expected. And that it would continue smelling that way until someone complained. Or did something. Such as shampoo the carpets. Which, may or may not have happened in the past year. Though I wonder, because in my mind the room is always readying itself for September when I return. It will either smell or it won't. But I will be there.