October 2006 Archives

Hard to say what drives me to volunteer for our local high school's annual Challenge Day. On the surface, the daylong event is one of those team-building, hysteria-generating experiences corporate sales departments sponsor. Let's get geared up and wound up, so we can get someone goosed up to, you know, buy stuff. In the high school version, kids -- freshman, in this case -- gather in a gymnasium for several hours of yelling and running around, interspersed with discussions of sadness and loss and interpersonal cruelty and bias. As the day wears on, and we adult volunteers wear out, kids are supposed to open up, get real and get their painful truths out. By way of role models, two facilitators talk about their childhood losses.

One describes a slow death by cancer, the withering away of a mother, while the other talks about finding his father glassy eyed in front of a television, dead of a heart attack. Two hip, black thirtysomething leaders walking around a gym with wireless microphones, their stories echoing off the cold bricks, and this is why God created extroverts. Challenge Day. What's the challenge? On this particular day, with Marlou beginning chemotherapy, the challenge is for both of us to get through the day. The additional challenge, trying to look like something of an authority figure, while racing around a high school gymnasium in an electric wheelchair, gamely taking part in organizational-development antics, that was purely coincidental. Marlou didn't have cancer when I signed up for this. I could have unsigned, of course, but we have a sense, the two of us, that the game must go on. Otherwise, the two of us will spend far too much time considering the game itself, particularly its worth. A little community activity never hurt anyone.

Plus a little reminder that there's loss and fear and, yes, the specter of death, elsewhere. Take the five kids I had in my group. Actually, I would take any of them or all of them home, forever, I think. In practice, this would be unwise. The kids would be domiciled like Cinderella, sleeping in corners, always getting second-best, particularly when it comes to attention. For attention around our home is riveted on the website of the National Cancer Institute, the sounds coming from Marlou's strap-on chemotherapy pump, not to mention the bed where the device spends the night between us, like an infant swaddled in Velcro and wedged against its parents. The thing is quiet enough, sounding like a very slow windshield wiper. But I hate to think of what it is pumping. Something so toxic that, in the event of a leak from the clear plastic hose connected to Marlou's arm, the offending fluid is supposed to be mopped up, and the mop discarded. If the stuff gets on the sheets, wash the sheets, then wash the washing machine. Unless you decide to throw the sheets away, which is offered as a serious alternative.

But the whole thing is a serious alternative. It's chemical war with collateral damage. The hope, of course, is that the damage is only temporary. An airborne strike based on faulty intelligence, but it's the best the medical commanders have to offer. As for Challenge Day, all I can offer is myself, backed by a serious commitment to staying awake. Actually, I seem to be sleeping pretty well, but I need more rest than ever. Thing is, this morning, I have to be awake for the kids. They are awake for me. All of them, all five, look at me with big, expectant eyes. They think I am an adult. So, why disappoint them?

The group get started even before it's a group. The Challenge Day leaders have matched everyone up with a one-on-one exercise that involves knee touching and soul baring. My partner is an enormous black kid who says he wants to play for the NFL someday and, fearing that large black kids have an innate propensity to shoot you in the spinal cord, we have a few privately tense moments. Until he starts talking about shooting, and not mine, but his cousin's. The cousin was driving a date home, parking in front of a girl's house, which is not exactly an unknown practice. Although it's different when a teenaged rival drives up seconds later and blasts three bullets into the back of your head. Which, this big aspiring NFL player has not forgotten, and is telling me teary eyed and shaking. Which opens all pathways to the heart between us, and by the end of the exercise, we are both Challenge Day converts, and I would do anything for Nathaniel, and he would probably do the same for me. And when it comes time to assign small groups, with members chosen in a fast-paced lottery system, it seems both suspicious and inevitable that Nathaniel is in my group.

As for the group, well we carry on in a similar vein. Surprisingly, all five kids are capable of true openness. Our exercise involves making painful revelations in front of not just one, but five others. And damned if the kids don't come across. One dreads the holidays' painful reminders of her absent, deadbeat father. Another fears that she will never have a true friend and is no longer loved by her parents. One has a father dying of cancer, one's best friend just committed suicide, Nathaniel has the cousin's shooting. And then there's me. I tell them about Marlou. All five kids give me a hug. And I'm thinking that, okay, if each had his own corner and rolled up his sleeping bag each morning, maybe we could work it out.

During the lunch break, I roll outside. It's a surprisingly sunny, considering that the gym has been amazingly cold. The women serving lunch include two volunteers from the Menlo Park Chorus. Both women ask about Marlou. One offers me her bag of Fritos. She tells me that she can't eat corn chips, that even when tortilla strips are sitting in her pantry their trans fat transubstantiates into personal fat. I thank her and eat the entire bag. I also have a chocolate chip cookie. Not to mention a Subway sandwich. I've got work to do.

After Challenge Day, my challenge is to go home. I'm afraid of finding Marlou looking drawn and pained. I dawdle on the campus, saying hello to people I know. I get a latte. I drift homewards where I check my e-mail, then my watch. Marlou should be home by now. Things have gone an hour or two longer than scheduled. Marlou phones from the Safeway. She's picking up antinausea pills, along with something for dinner. She seems sober and subdued. After dinner, she stretches out and falls into a sleep so deep that I cannot rouse her to ask about the pump. She did say something about holding on her stomach at night, but the thing has rolled to one side, and it's not even night. And I worry about the pump and its position and everything else, but worry is futile, and always has been. Besides we've passed the worst challenge of this day, our Challenge Day, and the challenge of sleep will have to be enough.

I have a friend who is a train buff, a veteran of the passenger rail business, and a veteran organizer of family ride trains. Which is fine, though his daughter says she really wanted to ride horses and spent much of her childhood trapped behind sealed Amtrak windows, staring wistfully at corrals and stables. The trains never stopped, she recalls, and that's all she really wanted to do. Get off and get on a horse. Which proves that one man's idyllic childhood is another's disappointing youth. And a nightmare and an old gray mare have more in common than you think.

Don't think too much when it comes to horses. They will come to you. Horses came to me in the form of Aunt Eva and Uncle Jim. They were in the horse business and, and doubtless, thought a lot about the subject. I thought about the horses too, mostly how scary they were, being much larger than those I'd seen on television. Once aboard, although the correct word is probably "mounted," the horses seemed even bigger, certainly higher. This was because a visit to Aunt Eva and Uncle Jim always included a horse ride. It was one of those experiences that one pretends to eagerly anticipate while inwardly cringing. It didn't do well to reveal a fear of horses. The old West. The posses. The cowboys and the chases and the tying up in front of the saloon, it was all about horses. Sensible boys leapt at the chance to say they had leapt on a horse.

Of course, there wasn't much leaping involved. When I was eight or nine years old, getting on a horse meant walking up some wooden steps, standing on a large stump and being hoisted into the saddle by one of Uncle Jim's ranch hands. Ranch hands? Well, the hands belonged to various men with names like Diego, who worked and, if I recall correctly, slept in the horse barn. Ranch hands? My great aunt and uncle operated their horse-ride business at the Ranch Club in Palm Springs. If this begins to explain anything to you, it didn't to me. The Ranch Club was inexplicable. It consisted of tennis courts, swimming pools, bars, restaurants and other mysteries. I knew what a club was...an eight-year-old wasn't a retard. A club was something you joined, attended meetings at, and not something shrouded in mystery and palm trees, with a boardwalk and stables sticking out of one end, the great aunt and uncle end.

Not only were horses massive things, so was their support system. Inside the stables, enormous leather saddles hung off the walls. The blankets that went underneath them seemed almost as heavy. Diego and has compatriots went about their blanketing and saddling in Spanish, kicking up dust and horse dung in the process, spurs jangling. Yes, they had spurs on their boots and, yes, they had real embossed boots. I never doubted that they were authentic cowboys. I knew that the movie westerns occurred in another place, and supposedly another time, but the whole thing was blurred in my mind by visits to the Ranch Club. Horses, cowboys and boardwalks, mixed with the fear of riding, made the experience real enough to me.

Aunt Eva managed the business end of the stables. She was the one who greeted the public, explained the rules, scheduled the rides and, of course, collected the money. Her hair was cut in a no-nonsense, almost Buster Brown, style and her face was tanned and creased from years in the sun. She had no visible interest in horses and only a mild curiosity about the paying public. She collected autographs from the movie stars who rented horses for themselves and their children, lining the dusty office with photos and scribbled signatures, her artifacts peeling and disintegrating in the desert air. Aunt Eva would gladly have dispensed with horses, actors and children, if she could have found a few patient adults willing to discourse on her favorite topics. One of these was the immoral attire of Palm Springs tourists. Young women were always seeking to ride horses in bathing suits or something close, exposing "their breasties," as Aunt Eva described this. Born in Kansas, with a worldview well formed before the First World War, her standards for horseback riding were set in concrete. Occasionally, irate customers wandered into the barn and sought out Uncle Jim. Aunt Eva sometimes reported their quarrels to me, but she was never apologetic, only temporarily subdued, and only for a few days.

Her other favorite topic was Philippine hands-only surgeons. She would go on at length about Arigo, Surgeon of the Rusty Knife. The book bearing this title was never far from her side. I listened to her stories of how this man in the Philippines, equipped only with an old and unsterilized blade, whipped people open, reached inside and yanked out this or that diseased organ. The part I liked best about Arigo's knife was the rust. Several things I had were rusting, including my bicycle, and I knew that all this required some attention, some remedial action, such as applications of oil. But this guy Arigo could have cared less. I knew that my father had to walk around hospitals in green pajamas keeping his doctor's hands in the air, but not Arigo. No washing up, no oiling anything, just grab it and fix it. Aunt Eva knew enough to avoid the discussion of Philippines surgery in my father's presence. So did I. The two of us discussed the bloody, dirty-handed operations on our own, before or after horseback riding.

My brother and I were usually hauled atop horses at the same time, and we set out, led by one of Diego's crew, into the Lower Sonoran sagebrush and cactus. The trail was well-worn, with horse droppings desiccated in the desert heat and pounded into a sort of mat. The horses were not only high, but tossing and pitching like the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria all rolled into one. I got somewhat used to these motions, but never wholly comfortable. The height, combined with the weird rocking, never felt natural to me. I could not understand why people ever used horses as transportation. They seemed to go as much sideways and up-and-down as forward. I was proud of my ability to endure the experience, to be able to say I'd gotten on and off a horse. Secretly I wanted the ride over.

The trail wound through scrub desert east of Palm Springs until the Ranch Club faded out of sight. This was a fateful point, like losing sight of land as a ship heads out to sea. My parents were no longer in hailing distance. The Mexican man leading the horses did not seem to understand me. For once, I wasn't arguing with my brother. I held onto the horn of the saddle, tossing and bouncing, until everything stopped. We had not reached a destination, but we had achieved the trail's finish. The chain-link fence at the end of the Palm Springs Airport runway. With the occasional DC-6 sputtering out of the hot skies, the horse ride began to feel silly.

Slowly, the trail leader turned the herd around, pointing back to the stables. Instantly, as though by the flick of a switch, the horses jerked into life, trotting back to their feed. On the homeward journey, I was moving at twice the previous clip, feeling dangerously flung around -- a prelude to the train trips I would take decades later under similar conditions of fear. In fact, everything about the Palm Springs trips heralded the future. While my friend's daughter was staring wistfully from trains at horses, was I clairvoyantly staring from horses at trains? Is the present always preparing for the future? Where is Arigo with his bare surgical hands and oxidizing, antibacterial knife, now that Marlou needs him? What happens when I need him?

Consider that at the very moment when the World Series was underway, and most people in America were thinking about grand slams and lesser slams, which some of us confuse with slam dunks, I was busy slamming into our refrigerator. My own slamming trajectory began at a local supermarket. Trader Joe's. Where I trade frequently. Often because I need to get out of the house and have acquired a least a nodding acquaintance with everyone who works there. And because the retail experience distracts me from the two tubes currently projecting from Marlou's arm, I/O ports for the looming chemotherapy. Because I'd rather chitchat with the woman preparing samples of Trader Joe's risotto, even suggesting that the store's dried Italian mushrooms might go just splendidly with the dish and -- there is more -- even having a housewifely conversation with a matron shopper over the merits of yogurt. Anything but worry about the effects of the anti-cancer napalm Marlou is about to blast into her bloodstream. Which, once the necessary foodstuffs have been acquired and I am wending my way home, probably linger in my thoughts more than I realize. I roll through our apartment door laden with a shopping bag full of heavy jugs and bottles and, finding Marlou asleep, head for the kitchen.

Marlou needs to sleep, and may or may not need the food I buy for her, but I need to shop, and fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and now I gotta get this heavy bag off my fucking lap. Simple enough under normal circumstances, but my circumstances are never normal. I load up at Trader Joe's the way a 747 loads up with fuel. After take off, if something goes a little wrong and you want to land, too bad. This is kind of a one-way trip, your pilot is thinking, knowing that he could dump fuel or fly around for hours burning it up, but there's no way you and the fuel tanks and the baggage and those itsy-bitsy Jim Beam bottles and seat backs and tray tables and kosher meals and everything else on board, are going to land. It's all too heavy. So is the bag from Trader Joe's. With the wife burning up pharmaceuticals with an afternoon sleep the way that 747 burns fuel, there's no one to help with the unloading process. You've taken off, the Trader Joe's runway is behind you, and you're not going to land this wheelchair until you jettison the load.

Actually, you're going to dismantle the load. That's because foresight, vision and general long-range planning serve the quadriplegic well. At this very moment, grocery cargo on lap, you know what to do. Roll to the refrigerator, open the door, and transfer heavy items, one at a time, from the bag to the shelf. Starting with the Garden Patch spicy vegetable cocktail, which the chemically altered wife prefers over the infinitely more expensive Japanese gourmet vegetable blend you purchased the other day. Yes, this is a minor sore point, and we let it go. That's because we have more important things to let go of, the heavy ones, the ones on the lap, the ones already on a refrigerator-shelf trajectory.

The battle-hardened quadriplegic has acquired certain combat skills, not the least of which involves the one-armed and one-legged manipulation of the wheelchair footrests. It's a matter of bending and balancing, keeping one mental eye on the shopping bag, the other on the floor, while catching one footrest with the back of the heel, doing a little neuromuscular fancy footwork, as it were. The latter involves inducing just the slightest of spasms in the paralyzed leg, and timing the neurological jerk with a left hook from the left leg, so that both legs are in the air just long enough to kick the underside of the right foot rest. So that both legs bend and descend to the floor. And having folded the footrests out of the way, the feet drop floorwards quite naturally. Which means that you can roll up to the refrigerator, get quite close, bracing your feet on the floor while you bend forward with the heavy bottles, beginning with the Garden Patch, which you now maneuver up and out of the bag. Well, you try to. It's too heavy. Problem is, it's got to go. Because you've got to go to the bathroom. And the bag has to get off the lap. And the mass in the bag is pressing on the mass in the bladder. And since E = MC x 2, mass is nothing to screw with.

Fortunately, years of physical therapy have prepared you for this moment. You've got a fair low back extension, one reasonably intact left bicep, so you go for it, lifting and straining. The Garden Patch ascends, straight and gradual, like the space shuttle. Your arm ascends with it, of course, and now the whole upper-body-vegetable-juice unit leans toward the refrigerator shelf. While everything launches forward. Blasts onward and actually into the open refrigerator, causing an actual metal rattling of the wire shelves, a general crunching and a wild banging sound as the refrigerator door is crashed against the wall. Crash is the operative word. You know what's happened. In leaning forward, you have forgotten to turn off the wheelchair, and your left forearm, heavily loaded with vegetable juices, has gotten jammed against the joystick, lurching you not only forward, but up and over the lowest refrigerator shelf and inside the thing. A situation so ridiculous that it must be undone immediately. Simple enough, for all you have to do is hit the joystick in the opposite direction. Although, being deeply addled, you forget to turn down the speed, so the wheelchair, with all its heavy lead batteries, steel and other weight, whips backward. But now, with the footrests bent up, there is a notch on the underside of each one, a space into which things wedge and hook. Things like parts of the refrigerator's interior, which after rocketing backwards, have been pried loose by the wheelchair notch and come ripping free. This makes an awful sound. And now, lying before me on the kitchen floor, is a surprisingly large piece of white plastic, with a gaping hole in the refrigerator itself. Somehow, though confined to a wheelchair -- or because of it -- I have destroyed a major appliance. I stare at the hole in the refrigerator. A yellow sheet of fiberglass insulation is protruding, like flesh through a wound. The refrigerator's tubes and innards are exposed. It is unseemly, even obscene, like discovering your parents naked in the midst of foreplay.

Everything is coming apart in my life. I have a go at snapping the plastic back in place, but I can't even understand how it fits or where it fits and, besides, the thing is bent beyond recognition. I jam the fiberglass back into the refrigerator door and manage to get it closed. Outside, our four-year-old neighbor is walking by with his trick-or-treat costume. I regret not having kids. I regret buying a two-month commuter train ticket which, with Marlou sick, has barely been used. I regret not having a four-year-old in the house. Although, life is revealing to me, that I am the four-year-old. Marlou takes care of me. And I allow it. And this is as far as I've been able to come in one lifetime. Which is okay. For these days I know that one lifetime is enough.

I have wasted my morning. Yes, I have exercised, been to Walgreens, surfed the web and waited for the cable guy to reinstall something or other. And although these things have been done, the real thing, the work thing, has slipped through my fingers like mercury. Though not as shiny or as interesting. Even less interesting than the plans announced by the cable guy: the upstairs TV requires an entire new line. Meanwhile, Marlou is at Stanford Hospital this morning getting some sort of line herself. It is equivalent to the gas tank opening of a car. A PIC line, peripherally inserted catheter, a permanent portal for bloodstream access. For the next six months of infusion, which is a lovely word when you think about it. And what is there to do these days but think about everything? Anyway, Marlou has now been readied for months of infusing/injecting cancer-fighting chemicals. And the only question is...what is the question? After all, the catheter in the arm makes complete sense, and it comes as no surprise. Better than being jabbed repeatedly by medical personnel on the hunt for good veins. And a better way to get chemotherapy to where the action is. The cardiac action. Think you know something about IV drug use...mainlining? Top this: the PIC line goes directly to the heart.

And, yes, everything goes to the heart right now The catheter is what it is. A tool of chemotherapy, proof this is really happening. Thousands, perhaps millions of people have been through this. We all get sick. We all face death. And what is this cancer experience except an intensification of everyday reality? Our flesh is weak. Our days are numbered. So sit down and take a number. We'll be right with you. After checking to see if your number matches ours.

I have work to do. The simplest of tasks. The rewriting of a website, a routine endeavor, well-managed, with the objectives clear and articulated. I did some work on it yesterday. I can't get started today. Instead, I've made two trips downtown. I purchased some nonessential cashews at Walgreens. I got some milk. Had sushi with a friend. Waste of time.

Unless you consider that I ran into Arnie and Katie at the market. I was buying milk, and, okay, buying time, and there they were. They are always in our home, though they haven't been inside for a couple of weeks. They hugged me by the bananas. I provided a discourse on the virtues of India relish, leading them down an aisle to the display, where they made their own display...of affection, both hugging me goodbye...that other kind of infusion that goes straight to the heart. Mainlining. As for the milk, well, you never know what you'll find in the dairy case. In this case, a certain community figure. She's someone I've been more or less stalking for months, in the sense of nonprofit development. She just happens to be someone who knows someone. And I've got a plan for our suburb, and she's the one to talk to, and there she was, at long last, handing me some low-fat cottage cheese. We had a chat. Send me an e-mail, she said, scurrying off.

Bringing one back to work, way back, to its essential definition. Maybe my attention wandered a bit in college physics, but I got the basic idea about work. Moving things. Overcoming inertia. Dealing with mass. And when you consider that everything is moving these days, direction uncertain, one supermarket-aisle infusion combined with one chat with a community leader, not to mention another blog entry, that will have to count as work.

These days are about broccoli cheddar soup. Or is it cheddar broccoli soup? One doesn't know. Two don't know either. Three might, but Marlou and I are too busy to find out. I am into soup, but she is in the soup, so to speak, and cheddar broccoli is looking pretty good. That's because with chemotherapy the oddest conditions prevail. Forget the high fiber, low fat, healthy diet stuff. Chemotherapy is all about abnormal chemicals pursuing abnormal cells. Kind of like the Sharks versus the Jets, if you're old enough to remember West Side Story. If you're not, try to envision a Russian Jewish choreographer's version of gangs in the streets, which is about 98% ballet slippers, 2% knives, and about as ersatz as you can get, but very serious. So, imagine a bunch of juvenile-delinquent members of Actors Equity dancing through your lower digestive tract. That's chemotherapy. Fiber is irritating, high-fat is soothing. Thus, a broccoli cheddar soup. Light, of course, on the broccoli. In fact, the broccoli will probably have to be puréed. No, thrashed and stamped by bare feet. Several of the neighbors have already volunteered.

So why do my thoughts run to soup? Well, a homebody person will tell you that soup is soothing. Things are cooked down, their essence rendered, warmed, melded with other things, producing a chorus of tastes, all accepted, all wanted, all welcome. Like a good mother. Having not had much of the latter, at least in any conventional sense, I have become a soup cooker in my adulthood. When the next source of income seems too uncertain, my health looks shakey, or I just know that the San Andreas fault is itching for action, I make soup. My repertoire is rather slim, and, no, I don't make recipes. That's why God invented cookbooks.

Did God invent chemotherapy? Hard to say, and even if it was easy to say, this issue is too complex for the average suburban person. Is God toxic? Does God have side effects? Is God covered by Blue Shield? These are questions that would occupy the typical divinity student for a good stretch of time. But not me. I've got soup to make.

One of the interesting things about soup is that its preparation is more or less industrial. Growing up in the 1950s, I used to pore over a one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia of Industry. Hoover Dam. Detroit assembly lines. Hollywood soundstages. The book had a chapter on each. And, sadly, industry has gone the way of all things...virtual, freeze dried and from Safeway. But homemade soup's chopping, dicing, sautéing, measuring, stirring and combining constitutes the modern assembly line. Home biochemistry on an industrial scale. Which is why one needs to cook on the same scale. You don't set up repetitive processes, and dismantle them, all to produce some low quantity of output. You want high-volume, high output, high-efficiency. In short, you want soup. Lots of it. And where does the soup go? Well, if you're on chemotherapy, it heads straight for the angrier parts of the lower intestinal tract. The parts where the ballet hoodlums are kicking at the mucous membranes and trying to stir up a rumble. Rumbling intestines are best soothed by soup. Broccoli cheddar. Everyone knows this. This is what Marlou needs. I am on the case.

Where else does the soup go? The freezer. The wife, the one who is about to benefit from this custom, handmade dinner product, is very concerned about freezer capacity. She is also mildly horrified at the sizable cauldrons of boiling, bubbling, popping and thickening potage that occasionally appear in the kitchen. (I was about to say "her kitchen," but strategically decided against it.) Regarding the slow cooker's soup frothing a scant centimeter below the rim, the wifely suggestion that the crockpot is "too full"...well, the remark has been heard and acknowledged. Is the freezer too full? Is God in the freezer? The devil is in the details.

The devil is also in the liver. That's where Marlou's latest PET scan turned up cancer cells. Not a growth, really, just some cells. And that's why there's broccoli in the broccoli cheddar soup. Broccoli goes after cancer cells with a search-and-destroy fervor. In this regard, soup and chemotherapy form a sort of partnership. That's why you want a lot of soup and a lot of chemo. Home cooking, homespun philosophy, homeboys rumbling with cancer cells in your liver. Kicking butt. Knowing full well that if I was a cancer cell, I would head straight for the nearest liver. That's because liver is unpopular. Liver smothered in onions? No way. You'd have to smother me in onions first. Whereas soup smothers us in love -- and that's the real cancer fighter. Light on the pepper.

If autumn is cancer season, it is also opera season, so why not combine the two?

This appears to be my wife's general MO. And in this regard, she puts her money where her mouth is. Or, more precisely, the mouths of miscellaneous sopranos, baritones, basses and others, with her annual gift to the Opera Guild. Which explains why we are seated in the opera house on a Sunday afternoon watching a dress rehearsal of Fidelio. What is a dress rehearsal? What is Fidelio? These questions linger in the air for three hours or so and go largely unanswered. Still, the experience is diverting. It's a bit like being invited to a party, only to find that the builders have arrived first and are having a go at the walls.

Remember that we are in San Francisco, which is in California, a region known for a particularly nasal American accent. But in the opera house, where all the lights are up, and people with headsets are running up and down the aisles, the voices are British, German, French and only now and then American. These voices come booming out of a public address system, which apparently overrides the wireless private address systems used by the lighting guys, the stage crew guys, the sound quality guys and these other guys with laptop computers who are scattered around what would otherwise be the audience, heads down, staring at their screens and not looking very happy.

The Brits are in control. First of all, they have taken over the entire stalls, a.k.a., orchestra level, wisely sending the invited Opera Guild donors to the balconies upstairs. Downstairs is now theirs, and it is also mine, and Marlou's too, because no one can be bothered to pull out balcony seats to make room for my wheelchair. So here we are, at the back of the house, watching things unfold. They are not unfolding well. Fidelio is having considerable trouble leaping from the dungeon, putatively a high moment of drama near the end of the opera. The Brits understand the problem. Fidelio's chances of leaping anywhere, or even achieving the appearance of leaping, are slim. That's because Fidelio isn't. The soprano playing her (disguised as him) weighs a good 20 stone, just short of 300 pounds. Which explains why instead of leaping from the dungeon, Fidelio is going to be pushed. A hydraulic stage lift is supposed to eject her/him to the surface, where the opera's dénouement plays out. Fidelio is already played out. She has tried this stage lift thing several times and doesn't trust it. Actually, the stage itself descends while she appears to rise through an aperture which looks big, but is apparently not big enough. She is arguing in German to the British stage director who is clearly listening in English. This part isn't going over the PA system, which disappoints me.

Did I mention that Fidelio has a stunning score? This is most apparent when one shuts one's eyes, which owing to the duration of the rehearsal process, occurs naturally and with increasing frequency as the afternoon wears on. It's break time now, and the conductor Donald Runnicles is telling the orchestra that he knows the union rules. They can only play for another 20 minutes. Then they go into either over time or overdrive or hyperspace, I can't hear which. I'd like to go down and talk to Runnicles, who is wearing a golf shirt and looks like a friendly guy. I would like to talk to him about important matters in which we share a common interest. As a Brit, he has had the time and opportunity to research Indian restaurants in San Francisco. And although the standard of local curries has risen in the last decade, a specialist like Runnicles -- Don -- could only help restauranteurs get closer to the London level. Which I think would be a much better use of his time and baton, because I am hungry and losing interest in how Fidelio makes it out of the dungeon.

Of course, the show must go on, and go on it does. Those of us downstairs get a sports-style replay of the dungeon action, several times. Meanwhile, there are complaints about the arriving cavalry. Their offstage horns trumpet a favorable turn in European history and the promise of the end, not only of tyranny, but of the opera itself. We run through the offstage horns a few times, until the volume is sufficient. Fidelio successfully pops out of imprisonment, only to be greeted by the chorus and, in the end, the audience most of whom are applauding, unseen, from the balcony. It's all over. I go in search of a cappuccino, clearly a fool's errand, for this is a rehearsal and all the lobbies and foyers are dark as night. Which doesn't explain why all the stage technicians have their own little cups of Starbucks. There must be a source nearby.

Back to normal. At last, things are getting back to normal. I finished part of a project, revised copy for my congregation's newsletter and just overstuffed our slow cooker with enough vegetables to get much of Croatia through the coming winter. Normal.

What I really mean is that elements of routine have fallen back into place. And surely the rest will follow. The things we count on for a safe feeling of continuity are headed back my way. Our way. Surely.

When you take in the look in my wife's eyes, the faraway look, you know that none of this is true. Marlou may catch a similar gaze from me. Every moment, every move, even the smallest decision, all seem charged with mortality. Which isn't normal. Which heralds the end to normal. Forget normal, because normal has forgotten me. Where did normal go? It probably went shopping. It's probably checking out the price of Dijon mustard at Trader Joe's. It's busy. Busy keeping busy, being occupied, keeping up the pretense that with constant activity in a recognizable pattern, each day can be made convincingly like its predecessor, suggesting the stretching of time on and on in such a way as to reassure one of life's permanence.

Normal had a lot to do with keeping up certain appearances. One is my sense of indomitability. This isn't a sense that I have cultivated -- it has cultivated me. But these days, people close to me now know I have limits, and I have come to accept their knowledge as my own. I'm also coming to accept the notion that Marlou will recover, things will work out, and I do not need to brace myself for the worst. In fact, I believe increasingly that I have already weathered the worst in my life. It came early and was protracted. And now I'm here. Married, among other things.

Not that the other things occupy me much these days. I feel right inside marriage. These looks we exchange, Marlou and I, feel poignant. So does the fact, the important marital fact, that I need to do what I need to do. My own life, my own humor, my own escape, they are all part of the marital tension. An interplay, not to mention a battleground, that reminds us we are petty, pouting creatures with egos and short-term memories. Who often think less about the big questions than the little ones, such as the quality of the household chocolate.

"Normal" included a routine that, in many ways, one wants to forget. Our political gulf seemed enormous, for example, and doubtless it still is. The routine emergence of conservative versus liberal responses to life sparked frequent hurt feelings and clashes. The potential is still there, but neither of us has energy. These differences aren't going anywhere, and they can wait. Much of what was normal now seems petty. Which is to say that taking chances now seems more normal than back in the normal days. I feel sadder but wiser. I feel period.

Surgical wounds have a way of getting infected in the same way that vegetable garden furrows sprout weeds. So while my wife was sounding the medical alarm, I was trying to mute it. But who knows anything about anything, and so there we were on a Monday back at our favorite medical center learning that, yes, this was one weedy incision, and here's what you do. First, you extract the staples as you would from any cardboard box, and then you reach inside. "Inside" is a considerable reach, if you want to know. Even if you don't want to know, there's a rich lesson in subcutaneous anatomy available to anyone, in their own home. It's not on TV and, yes, you can try this on your own. The surgeon will show you how. Just rip that gaping wound open, insert your trusty Q-tip a good half inch down into the excavation, swab about like an old sea salt on a splintering deck, then splash a bucket or so of hydrogen peroxide, all bubbling and frothing, into the morass, stuff the sucker full of gauze, and have lunch. Light on the mayo.

If you doubted that there were boundary problems in your life, run through the wound-cleaning scenario one more time. This was what my wife was supposed to do, and did do, in her off moments at home in the shower. Wound, schmound. The surgeon said she'd done an excellent job. I hadn't done such an excellent job of hearing that 10 out of 15 examined lymph nodes around her colon had tested positive for cancer. Marlou, in fact, did better. Actually, in the moment, we both did what we could. I told her I was with her. 100%. All the way. And then we got in my disabled van and drove home. At home, the in-laws were packing for departure, and we were all floating last-minute plans. Eat at this restaurant at 6 p.m. No, that restaurant at 6:30 p.m. I'll get Marlou's antibiotics at Safeway, no Walgreens. In the midst of which, I wandered out to my daily endorphin-pumping, spirit-calming go at one of my exercise machines. The rowing one. It's a familiar routine. Sit down on the sliding seat, lift one leg, then the other, into the stirrups. Then row, row, row your boat across the carport. And it was, I believe, this body-stirring activity that broke down that other boundary, the one we impose between our public and private selves. And with less than 25% of my rowing complete, I found myself frozen in terror. Of what? The dark fear. Whatever it is. Abandonment? That seems to be the closest identifiable emotion.

So, there I was, in mid-row, abandoning the exercise option for the day. I hung forward on the seat, trying to catch my breath. Calm my spirit. Find my center. But no go. Everything was falling apart, and I was falling apart, and within minutes we were supposed to have dinner, the wife, the in-laws and me. And there was no more rowing, and there wasn't even enough solid emotional ground to sit up, let alone, stand up. All of it purely, totally illusory, and utterly real. Demon possession, the ancients would have said. A standard diagnostic code in an era when a Blue Shield was an armament with a certain level of copper. And a landlord was more like a Baron, and less like Tom, our occasional collector of rent, perennial protector of the home place, repairer, grounds maintainer, 24-hour surveillance manager. Who now came wandering out to the carport for his 6 p.m. checkup. I asked him to lend me a hand. What hand, and in what form, I couldn't begin to imagine. But I was stuck, in a manner of speaking, on the rowing machine. And I wasn't getting out of this situation alone, it seemed. No, I didn't want to. Enough of the alone thing.

What could he do, Tom asked. I asked myself the same question. Well, grab here, and I'll push there. This was a vague instruction, and it doomed itself to failure, but no matter. I leaned this way, Tom pulled that way, and a comical tug-of-war began working itself out. My father-in-law walked out to his car, loading bags in the trunk. Now Marlou came out, wondering what was taking so long. Overtired, I said. This explanation fooled no one, of course, and by the time I had gotten myself lifted to my feet, swiveled imperfectly onto my wheelchair and faced the world, the world was facing me. In the form of the wife, and the in-laws, everyone in agreement as to the evening's disposition. Marlou's parents were going. I leapt to my quadriplegic feet, insisting that I was dinner-ready, but it was too late. Everyone said goodbye to the parents, off to the airport hotel. Marlou and I headed inside. I stretched out on the bed.

It was on Wednesday morning, during a routine eye exam, that my worst mental oddities revealed themselves. A medical assistant was dilating my pupils, testing me for glaucoma, refraction, macular degeneration, when it hit me. I have fucked up. I have destroyed my vision. I am 60 years old, and what do I have to show for it? Nothing, but this bad vision, and an end-of-the-road life. Nothing more was to be done. I would never do anything, write anything or accomplish anything of note. I was about to hear about my retinal failure, and this would be my fault. The ophthalmologist said my retina was fine. He would be seeing me in another year, or even two. I opted for one year. You never know about retinas.

Just down the hall, around the corner from the clinic's eye center, there's a patient library. Incredibly, in this age of budget cuts, there's even a nurse librarian. I rolled up to her desk and asked a few questions. Groups for couples facing cancer. Classes in exercise, nutrition, stress reduction. She began rifling through files and checking bulletin boards. With Stanford University across the street, San Francisco 30 miles to the north, the area has more cancer groups and classes and centers and advisers than, perhaps, any other place on earth. The nurse said she would make a copy of some phone numbers. American Cancer Society Stanford Hospital. Center for Living with Dying. The latter being sufficient to tip me over the teary edge. So that I was crying just enough to drive my wheelchair in a corner. Where the nurse put a hand on my shoulder, asked if my wife's diagnosis was recent. While a touring group of Japanese doctors looked on. And the nurse-librarian completed her copying, and I thanked her and left.

Which adds up to a grand total of two breakdowns in two days. Which leads one to certain critical questions. Such as what is breaking down? And why not let it break, anyway? Nothing there but the Maginot Line of emotional defenses, all of them phony. None of them needed. For what's wrong with fearing loss? Especially since one has been through a few already. And nothing is certain. And never has been. And my death by spilkes has long been predicted by many, not to mention my ever perilous neuromuscular state. Which is enough to make a person do exactly what he's always done. And not be surprised if his wife feels very much the same. And live more. And worry less. At least for the next couple of hours.

Almost by definition, a crisis is temporary. And mine, or ours, is on the wane. Marlou's scar is healing, she is eating more and more of her regular foods, and except for doctor visits and the specter of chemotherapy looming in a month, something like a pattern is returning. Now, I have things to do. The problem is that I've had things to do for a long time. Some of these things were hanging over me before our August vacation. It's now October. We had two weeks by the sea, followed by my 10 days journeying from Seattle to St. Paul and back to San Francisco, and here I am. Ready for action. Or am I?

I have, for the first time in years, a high-tech client. I owe them some work. Actually I also owe work to my former non-tech client, the local high school foundation. Then there are the causes. The City Council election. The save the local movie theater effort. The build the Performing Arts Center effort. Plus Amtrak. It's all looming, and it makes me freeze in my tracks, immobilized. But why? After all, it was making me freeze before Marlou's cancer. Something is going on here, something that has to do with digging in one's heels, balking at action and going on what amounts to a strike.

Why strike? Well, the best and most convincing example has to do with the slavery principle. If one is used to lashing oneself like one of Pharaoh's overseers, the slave within is going to rebel. The antidote, the only one these days, is gentleness, indulgence. This is the last thing that occurs to me, but the first thing to remember. It is, after all, the only way to nurture anybody.

There's also the general sense of futility that goes with facing mortality, age, the big defeats. And yet I seem to have faced these already. So, what's to worry? The Zen of action. Do things just to do them and be conscious of doing them. Then do something else. Is that Zen? I don't know. And, frankly, I'm too lazy to research the matter. Whether or not it's Zen, it will have to do. As for the causes, these really consist of tasks. One after the next. None is very difficult. None is very important. Nothing is very important right now. Nothing except life and its moment-to-moment experience. Lighten up. That is the message.

Marlou and her visiting parents have set off via rental car to the Bay Area town of Alviso. Both the town and the action of going there can only be deemed quixotic. Downright eccentric. The sort of thing I would do. Except I'm not doing it. Marlou is, and with her parents, yet. Cancer, the specter of death proliferating in unwanted cells, turns things upside down. Thus, in my mind, the trip to Alviso.

I commend this trip to anyone. I've not been there myself, though I have been there many times. The trains north pass through Alviso, rocket through it more exactly. The first time I saw Alviso, it saw me first. I was dying, in a manner of speaking, having lost a prospective job before I even had it, something that is possible, even likely, in the flimflam world of Silicon Valley. I hadn't slept in an anxious 24 hours and was embarking on my first overnight train trip to Seattle. The train was making a railside tour of the auto body shops, parking lots and barrios of Santa Clara, interspersed with glimpses of landfills and golf courses. And there it was, a field of boats lying on their sides. Being in a state of exhaustion, and half expecting to see the worst at any moment, this scene of tipped-over boats set off several alarms. Boat death. Boat abandonment. Who knows? Whatever, this was not supposed to be, and yet it was, wooden masts protruding through weeds, complete with all the nautical touches of lights and wind socks hanging off the cross pieces. Now part of a hull, paint peeling, tilting through the grasses. Even rudders stuck out of the grasses, cockeyed.

And then I saw it, the sparkling bay, the sun descending over San Francisco 50 miles to the north. And then things came into focus, that these were not fields but tidal ditches, and with the water low the boats moored there had listed at various angles into the mud. A temporary situation, one that would be righted as soon as the tidal waters lifted all boats, to quote the economists. Seconds later the train blasted past two large clapboard buildings, each housing a restaurant, an old, weathered restaurant, each of them, with neon signs proclaiming "seafood." Across the street, and there is essentially only one street in Alviso, Victorian houses stared at the train tracks.

Just beyond Alviso, the trains sail into a strange swampland, half natural, half exotic in terms of flora. For this is the end of the Bay, the appropriate place for swamps and grasses. Although not these grasses, which actually belong elsewhere. Not to quibble. They're convincing enough, tall razor grasses, prostrating themselves like thousands of movie extras when the wind blows. A true swamp, where things plop and bubble, field rats and bay shrimp talk to each other, and rot and salt compete for attention. A place where things are filtered and cleaned and renewed. Thus, though it is a stretch, a place to take your cancer on a Saturday afternoon.

Being at the end of the Bay and at the mouth of big creeks that drain from the hills, Alviso floods every winter. The little town is surrounded by dikes. And when the floods come, the place is surrounded by TV crews. Reporters too young to know a flood from an ostrich stand in the rain and intone about the drama of the rising waters. Of course, not watching television, I never actually see this. But I get reports. What I really know is that Alviso is hard to get to, at the tail end of everything, old and forgotten and too hopeless to even warrant efforts at improvement. It's a place you go to when there's nowhere else to go. Or it's a place you go when you know what really matters. What matters is to be beside the Bay, where the waters glisten and the boats plop over and nothing is pretty and everything is beautiful. My wife is beautiful. I'm glad she's there.

Cancer. My wife has it, or had it, is fighting it or has fought it. Cancer is cells gone awry. Or is it life gone awry? Whatever one can say of it, cancer has altered our plans, not to mention our dreams, our sense of time, our sense of self, our sense of each other. Oddly, this dreaded thing is not so dreadful once it arrives. The problem is: it stays. It arrives on your doorstep like the wrong package from FedEx, though it turns out to be the right one. You open it, look inside and there's nothing but air. Well, air, and dust. Plus other microscopic contents. Which, naturally, you vacuum out, sweep away, dab at with a sponge, even blast with a garden hose. Until your FedEx carton is immaculately, pristinely dust-free. Except that there's no such thing as dust-free. Just ask Intel. There's always that impurity on the wafer that destroys the chip image. And that's the big fear. Destruction.

Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when one considers that destruction is the general direction in which we're headed. Which brings one to the real fear: departure. Being left behind by the person who holds you and hugs you. That possibility, which is a long-range certainty for all of us, informs every moment of handholding, face stroking, night hugging. The smallest, routine touch becomes poignant. A state which simply cannot last, and is already morphing into something like general annoyance. After all, certain things were on schedule. Plans. Trips. Futures.

The doctor, as respected as surgeon as we can find, tells us this is a bump in the road. A diversion. A filling in of potholes, straightening of road signs, a general resurfacing, and then a return to what? Not certainty. Or that is the essence of this experience. Everything becomes uncertain. Life shifts into a moment-to-moment present. And how can that be bad?

Like how long is my wife going to sleep this morning? Should she sleep longer? Is she not sleeping enough at night? If so, why? Why is she having night sweats? Are these cancer-symptom night sweats or just sweating at night? And should I sweat it? If it is the "wrong" kind of night sweat, what could anyone do about it? Chemotherapy will begin when it begins.

And how can anything that begins with "chemo" be therapeutic? For the whole thing sounds, at face value, about as curative as napalm, only not as precise. After all, our bodies are "natural." And washing your cells with a daily dose of polystyrene base mixed with paint thinner is about as attractive as injecting mayonnaise. But apparently it works. And some aspect of our bodies must actually be closer to a Ford dealership then we want to admit. New undercoat. Change the transmission fluid. Juice up on anti-freeze. And roll out the door for another year, or decade.

And the latter is the big question, anyway. How much longer do any of us have? The other question is what's for lunch? And, yes, that question is now somewhat complicated by its corollary: who will make lunch? My wife, after all, is sleeping a lot and not eating very much. But the question is a trivial one, anyway. The little questions have become jokes. The big ones are there anyway. A turkey sandwich sounds good. With a cancer-fighting cruciform (or is it cruciferous?) vegetable salad on the side.

Inside the Burlington Northern tunnel, which is what Seattlites call it, things are dark and dank and alluring. Okay, they are only alluring to those addicted to train trips. For all of the times I have arrived in Seattle, the wide brick tunnel leading north out of King Street Station hummed with mystery and adventure. Okay, so it also hummed with rats and water dripping, along with the coughs of homeless people, but never mind. It promised the great beyond. Once, arriving on the Coast Starlight from California, the train headed into the Burlington Northern tunnel, switched tracks and backed out. Tantalizing. The sort of mystery that keeps prodding you in the side, like a child who wants you to buy him one of those cool air guns that shoot condensed chocolates in the air where they foam into brown meringue-style froths and descend on plastic parachutes. I just made that up.

The Empire Builder, Amtrak's Seattle-to-Chicago train, slips away from the platform, rumbles into the tunnel darkness and in my mind began a long bore under the city's downtown, perhaps heading all the way to the Ballard Locks or even Green Lake. Forget it. The tunnel proved to be only a couple of blocks long, just a shortcut to the waterfront where the train ran on the tracks I had always seen there, passing the ferry terminal, the wharves, the space needle. The train hung right at the water's edge all the way to Edmunds, then Everett, stopping at both places to pick up a surprising number of passengers. Good to see Amtrak sold out. Good to see the Snohomish River Valley, all farms and barns and silos and leaves turning autumn colors, forest rounding, then tilting, then rising sheer and rocky. Until the day disappeared in a tunnel, the longest in the Western Hemisphere, according to the Amtrak route map.

It was here, at this point in the budding trip, that I shoved myself up from the Amtrak seat, grabbed my crutch and set out to face the neuromuscular music. I got as far as steel-floored vestibule, things pounding, swaying and jolting, and stared at the railingless space. I stared too long, for in my moment of hesitation, something began tilting. Or it seemed to be tilting. For I no longer have the neuromuscular wherewithal to feel when or where my body is leaning in space. I can't tell if I am slightly off balance, very off balance, mildly shifting or about to fall. A feeling of the latter dominated, of course, and I could feel my body holding itself upright through sheer force of leg muscles, straining, leaning, fighting not to give way to collapsing on the hard floor. A hopeless 30 seconds of terror, and then it was over, the car level, me headed for the railing that led along the steps to the upstairs dining car.

A long time in the tunnel. Long enough to order dinner, chitchat about Seattle with companions, then roll out of the mountain darkness into the twilight of Wenatchee. The train shunted to and fro, picking up Amtrak Express freight cars full of apples. A dark night. Short on sleep, long on anxiety. The tilting moment in the vestibule had triggered something. Something sad and dark and hard to shake off. Even in the glorious morning approaching Whitefish, Montana, steam rising from a pristine lake, birches and aspens perched delicately over the waters, even here I felt the fear. The train rumbled through and out of the Rockies, descending river canyons and emerging at last onto the Plains. Which are truly Great, and once the train has stopped at Glacier Park Lodge, go on forever. Grasses and fields and hillocks. On a shallow bluff two coyotes stared at the train, wondering if, in the fullness of time, there will be a special coyote fare. Towns too small to stop a train do so anyway, the Empire Builder coming to an inexplicable stop every few hours. Out here, Havre, Montana, seems like a metropolis. Same for Minot, North Dakota. Into the darkness, not that there has been anything else. It has been a dark day, and there's another dark night. I'm happy to get off the train in St. Paul. Even happier to be heading home to California, despite a fine week in the woods. I've got the nagging sense that there are things to tend to. Minor things, like driving my wife to her Monday morning colonoscopy, a routine part of her annual physical. Not that things stayed routine very long. Her doctor called me in a couple of hours later to discuss the surprise finding. Colon cancer. At least I was home.