February 2006 Archives
We met where disabled people tend to meet, at the elevator. Both of us had just stepped off the same subway train, having reached the end of the line, the Milbrae line, of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. A beautiful day, unaccountably sunny, the sort of day that buoys one's optimism after short cold days and long expensive nights. Our latest utility bill topped $200 for the month of February. But never mind that, and where was I? Oh, Milbrae, at the BART station. I was waiting for the elevator with a woman in a beautiful paisley turban, and attractive dress covering a rather large body. With her attire and her regal bearing, she cut quite a figure, a sort of middle-aged African-American queen. We make small talk. Both of us were changing to the suburban trains. She was headed for Stanford Hospital. And, gosh, she sure did hurt today. I said nothing. The elevator doors opened. We chatted about the vagaries of ground transportation in Palo Alto. She recommended the shuttle buses which frequently run between the suburban train station and the Stanford Hospital. Gosh, she said, holding her hip, but she sure did hurt today.
Because I am in a wheelchair, something excuses me from an automatic response to such a remark. I decide to exempt myself, because I had a mother who was inclined to oy vey about her life. Give me the feeling that I was more or less responsible for her many sadnesses. So, I've been there, and I've done that, and it's unfortunate that this woman has her aches and pains, but so do I. We make our way together to the Caltrain elevator, and descend to the southbound platform. It's sunny there, too. She sits on the bench, and the man beside her says he is on his way home from Thailand. The Milbrae station serves San Francisco International Airport. The man adds that it's too bad about his pension. United Airlines is in bankruptcy and slithering out of its retirement obligations.
Hmmph, says the woman. I don't see the problem, she adds. A person's been working for decades, they've got time to get their house in order. No handouts, she says. I stare northward up the tracks. What is this country coming to? A person's employment includes a certain compensation, one part of which is the pension plan. It's not a giveaway, not a gift, and nothing remotely like welfare. But this woman has a Calvinist bug up her ass, and she is insistent. People shouldn't have their hands out all the time. People should take care of themselves. God bless America.
When the train arrives, I roll my wheelchair onto the disabled access icon painted on the floor. I smile at her. This is our goodbye and, nutty or not, she deserves some mild attention. We all do. "This is where I'm supposed to be," I tell her. "More visible to the conductor, I suppose."
"We'll see," she says.
The train rumbles in, dust flying, brakes screeching. The woman slowly gets to her feet. She is ponderous, and she walks bent over with a cane. Soon she is pointing the cane, shaking it at a young conductor, who is also black. She is telling him that the train is not in position. She wants to use the wheelchair lift. And the car with the wheelchair lift is a considerable distance away. She has been waiting, as I have, by the blue wheelchair logo on the platform. She waits here, the door opens there, and there's only one solution. The train will have to pull up.
I chortle. At first, the conductor does too. This woman thinks the train is like a bus. It isn't. For the train to "pull up," all the doors have to close, and the conductor has to have a radio conversation with the engineer in the cab.
"Are you crazy?" The conductor stares at her, and she stares at him. Two black people, the approximate ages of mother and son. Neither has to worry about being politically correct. Both let fly. She tells him that she doesn't want any attitude. He can just put his attitude away. She wants the train to pull up, to stop where she is on the platform, open its doors and lower its lift.
The conductor tells her to wait for the next train, if she doesn't like this one. She tells him that she's never heard anyone so rude. He rolls his eyes. She waddles to the disabled car, the lift descends, and she ascends like a deus ex machina. The conductor is still muttering about her halfway to Menlo Park. She is still glaring at him. Neither will give an inch. Neither has to.
We had a great time in that place, I tell my sister, hoping she won't ask "what place," but she does. And the place and its location, look and minibar contents are etched forever in my brain, but the name is not. I cannot remember the hotel. I will try for hours, but it has drained, disappeared and faded from my memory. What memory? I am pushing 60, pushing it rather too hard, it appears. For as I push it, it pushes back. And there is a little too much familiar stuff, too many things recently seen, done and noted that elude recollection. Older people chuckle at this sort of thing. Memory loss is the gentlest of the many torments of aging, I believe. Much harsher to lose one's sight, give up the ability to drive, grow deaf, cease walking or find workings of one's alimentary canal on public display. No, forgetting the name of a weekend hotel is not the worst of matters. But it does suggest the rest.
Not that the rest isn't already here. Take my iPod. No, don't take it, for I love it, I use it. It has become my constant companion. But we have a rather shallow relationship, the iPod and I. As devices go, its design is utter simplicity, a matter of sliding and twiddling a single control. Nor are there terribly complex feats to accomplish. The iPod is either on or it is off. It is either playing something or not. And one either downloads a podcast or one doesn't. And when one doesn't, and one can't seem to learn how, and one purchases a book called "IPod for Dummies" without reading it, because the thing still seems too complicated, one has to ask very seriously if one isn't possibly getting older.
The whole matter takes on another dimension in a wheelchair. On Sunday mornings, suburban Menlo Park is the scene of an outdoor market, a block long procession of lettuce vendors, flower hawkers, olive oil purveyors, citrus baggers, and so on. I have a way of rolling my wheelchair up and down the stalls, eyeing this, occasionally buying that. I like the idea. The outdoor market is, after all, the quintessential village experience. People gather there not just to transact, but to exchange...the pleasantries, updates, observations and greetings that weave the social fabric. I often run into someone I know. And this reassures me, makes me feel that even without children and immediate family at hand, I have a place in some assemblage of humans. My home. My town. My market.
Menlo Park historically was a mature community. In the Bay Area, at one point it had the oldest average age per capita. It was, simply put, a senior city. Silicon Valley seemed to change all that. Menlo Park became an executive city. Children wandered the sidewalks, mothers flocked to supermarkets, everyone started to jog and restaurant cafés flourished in all weather. With the collapse of Silicon Valley, and the passage of more than five years, the town has begun to age once again. During the winter, the al fresco cafés either roll their tables inside or roll their propane heaters outside. There are not so many stroller traffic jams on the sidewalks. And the Sunday morning market is all a blaze with gray hair. And since I fit right in, in terms of age, there's no easy, simple reason for for what happens to me there on a regular basis.
Would I like a pound of mushrooms? A man with a straw hat and scraggly beard displays a plastic bag a full of the very shiitakes we discussed moments ago. That will cost you two dollars, he says. We both know the mushrooms cost four dollars. Which explains why I have extracted four one-dollar bills from my wallet and now have them sitting on my lap, right next to the glowing wheelchair battery indicator. Thank you, I say, sheepishly. I hit the joystick and roll off. I'm embarrassed. The man is doing something very nice, or thinks he is doing something very nice, and with customers crowded around his stall, I don't want to point out the 50% discrepancy. He is giving me a break. A price break, one that I have not sought and do not need. I'm certain this has to do with my being in a wheelchair. I am Menlo Park's Tiny Tim. I buy my lettuce, mutter God bless us every one, and make my neuromuscular way to the next stall. The lettuce lady has just given me an unannounced and unexpected free pound of French carrots. I thank her profusely. I do not know what is French about them, and I would not even know they were carrots if she hadn't insisted that the elongated yellow, rather than orange, roots were something very special. I am very special, that is what she is telling me with her free pound of vegetables. God bless us every one.
Because everyone else in the market is old, or relatively old, I cannot attribute my special status to age. And, frankly, I wonder if a younger person in a wheelchair would roll home with five free grapefruit, along with his tangerines. I am old and crippled. Aging and rolling. Hell-bent and wheelchair-bound. And somehow it is this combination that has made me the town's paralytic mascot. I don't understand it, but I don't wholly reject it. My status is as unwanted as it is inevitable. It has arrived like age itself. A very mixed bag. But thank God for the mixture. Neither disability nor age amount to an unalloyed curse. There are unexpected surprises. So, sir, enjoy the rutabagas. And won't you have these Chinese radishes on us?
"Stupid," I said as my paralyzed right hand slipped off the bathroom towel rack. I often perch the hand there as I attend to business at the sink or the toilet. The gripless fingers can be expected to slide, having lost the ability to hook, grasp, pinch or anything -- almost four decades ago. "Stupid," I say, the spastic fingers slipping off the chromium. If on some inchoate level I didn't blame myself for my own loss, I would get angry at neurology, fate, my life. And at moments, I manage to see things that way, and accept that I am not at peace, in fact, at war with the world, and, yes, even bitter. The latter is the most frightening specter...hooked, bent, wizened and dried up. The bitter cripple has the fated caricature quality of Dickens. I don't want to go there. But life takes me there on a regular basis. It's the inner Quasimodo. It's me, at least partly.
As is the fear. I find it everywhere. Fear that I will, like my father and his sister and his brother, develop a brain tumor, and sooner rather than later. Fear that I will lose the ability to walk, my balance waning as it is. Fear that I will stop driving, prematurely, and my world will shrink to the two blocks around my home. Fear that I will stop taking chances in life. Fear that I am empty inside, that my so-called imagination does not exist. Fear that I will never make it to Zion Canyon, Vienna or Baltimore.
"Don't get in an auto accident," says my neurologist, chuckling. He is a Chinese guy about my age. His English isn't so great, and I'm certain he has been through a thing or two. It's the way he laughs about my cervical vertebra breaking for the second time, against an air bag, that suggests a rich life experience. Not to mention a sort of grand view of things, seeing beyond the moment, knowing that spinal cords come and go and so do lives and so do civilizations...and that China was, for 18 of the last 20 centuries, the world's largest economy. Don't get in on a accident. Ha ha. Nothing personal. But having survived Mao tse Tung, world champion of mass murder and author of the Little Red Book celebrated at Berkeley rallies I attended in the 1960s, anyway, having gone through all that...the Chinese of my generation must have a certain perspective.
I get to have a perspective, too. I decided that this morning when my brother sent me an e-mail essay on contemporary terrorism. Or, more exactly, the political uses of terror. It's, by far, the most effective election tool, better than any get-out-the-vote or believe-in-my-TV-ads campaign ever mounted. It's timeless. It's with us constantly. It's tiring, and it makes me yawn. Which is what I need to remember. That I can be scared, but I resist being terrified. I know about terror. Terror comes when you wake up. In the moment of crisis, you do what you have to do. It's afterward, when the mind is safe to wander over the dire possibilities, that terror happens. When a plane hits your building, the glassy, sacrosanct tower we Americans aspire to, you either die or try to get out. And if you find yourself having to choose between incineration and jumping out of an 80 story window, something makes you decide. Even on the way down, the rushing air must feel blessedly cool, and there may be the thought that the bottom something, an awning, the roof of a car, will save you. It's only the survivors, those who get out and reflect about what might have happened, or those of us who watch on television, who can succumb to terror. Otherwise, we succumb to life.
Which I ought to know, having come so close to succumbing on a Berkeley street. Lying paralyzed in an ambulance, spinal fluid draining down my nose, what was there to do but breathe and hang on? The terror came in the hospital. I didn't sleep for a week. Or so it seemed. So, yes, I've got my self-blaming neuroses, my fears of death and disease, but I'm ahead in the terror department. I'm terror hardened, one might say. Terror is a force, I know this. And terror is always at work in the world, whether it's driving millions of African peasants across the wastes of Darfur, or driving Americans to give their idiot president just a little more power.
Knowing a bit of terror -- and injured or not, as a soft American, I have only known a bit -- spawns a certain discernment. Instinctively, I know the uses and abuses of fear. I may forget what I know, and do so on a regular basis, but it generally comes back to me. I know that a leader says something along the lines of "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" or "we will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the trenches...." Which is what George Bush does not do. And it is why he evokes such extraordinary hatred in such a large, but not quite large enough, portion of the American population. People hate having their fear manipulated. They react instinctively.
Reacting instinctively can also get you in lots of trouble. These are fearful times, it's true. Change is always scary. And yet change is what the quadriplegic experience is all about. And those of us who know this have to share what we know. In a word, we have to lead. Even if "leading" simply means setting an example. Because if we don't lead, we're going to be led. That's where we are. It's where America is. And it's where I need to be. When I'm not worried about the next spinal cord injury or brain tumor.
