December 2006 Archives

What brings anyone to the water's edge? The need to obtain fish. The need to cool off. The need to be wet. The need to be warm and wet. For me, it's even simpler. I need to be an old salt, that is, old and salty...conditions which exactly applied to me the day I immersed myself in lagoon #4 at Ko Olina which, from the emphasis on vowels and K's should tell you that we're in Hawaii. Which we are, every December. Although this December Marlou has cancer and, more immediately, chemotherapy and I am 60 years old. The latter impelled me into the blue Pacific waters, prodding me from land to sea. But what drew me, sucked me seawards, well that is the stuff of sea shanties, psychoanalysis, Coleridge and Holland America. Suffice it to say, I was drawn. And something about the urgency of the moment, the uncertainty that health and time embody for Marlou and for me at this juncture, well, that clinched the deal.

Determined to get away from the crowds at Waikiki, Marlou and I were staying well out of town, at the opposite end of the island of Oahu's south coast, and a hotel that is not only far from the madding crowd, but protected by golf courses in the way moats once defended castles. The place is a castle of sorts. Just wander into the lobby at Christmastime and stare at the three-story tall tree, an entirely original creation that is not a tree, but a construction of authentic island materials...shells and native rattan and orchids and just enough of the usual bows and bells and balls and boughs to let you know where we're coming from holidaywise.

I checked in a day early, alone and worrying about Marlou who had been detained for an unscheduled day of chemo, giving us the option of traveling together a day late under massive punitive airline penalties, or just giving up and flying on alone. And so there I was, rattling out of Honolulu Airport, my electric wheelchair strapped down by and under the personal care of HandiCabs of Honolulu, Inc. My native Hawaiian driver, Dominic, went on at length about any topic I mentioned. Where were we? How is the weather? What did he think of the hotel that was our destination? Most interesting was the fact that this man, somewhere in his early 30s, had never been out of the islands. He had never witnessed land that stretched for more than 20 miles in any given throw. As for the hotel, he answered this with a question: a dude like you should be out here with some pretty girl, don't you think?. Not to worry, I told him.

And sure enough, after worrying all afternoon about Marlou getting off the drug-injection table and going home to pack, rise and board the airport van, then sit among the hacking and coughing mainlanders taking their colds to the Islands, sharing their bronchial effusions through her own immune-compromised lungs.... Anyway, having worried myself to sleep in air scented with kelp and orchids, in a room upgraded by the desk clerk to provide an ocean view complete with a bougainvillea-lined terrace, an action both inexplicable and more generous than I comprehended at the time, there the next day while I sat by the pool, better rested and running at approximately 50% of the day's previous pace, Marlou walked in with her parents, beautifully attired in a tropical pantsuit and matching chemo scarf, and asked how it was going.

My truthful answer was that it was going, that is, progressing, advancing, moving from something to something else. I had not yet in my 24 hours there ventured into the pool, but that was only from shyness and excessive caution. The hotel staff all seemed to have graduate degrees in something, and there were loads of them, any one of whom would have helped me down the steps and into the water. Not that I even needed help, the steel railing being more than adequate, the steps wide and shallow, the water the same. But I somehow couldn't quite ask, couldn't quite make a middle-aged, crippled spectacle of myself, not quite yet. But with Marlou at hand I did precisely that, of course, rolling my electric wheelchair to the water's edge, gamely sticking the paralyzed right foot into the sparkling pool, dropping the foot onto the underwater mosaic. And sliding out of control, under the railing, a.k.a. falling, onto the steps. Marlou's account differs slightly. She says that were she not holding one of my arms, I would have suffered a nasty bang. I do not recall this arm holding. I do not deny it, but in my version, there was no real falling, just a sliding. Like a baseball player into home plate. Or is it home base? I will let the sportswriters of the world quibble over this one. It suffices to say that I neither fell nor was pushed, but was floating, remarkably buoyant in a swimming pool purified by that most natural and abundant of aquatic substances: salt.

In short, all the ingredients were there for a true ocean experience. And this hotel had made the ocean experience as tame as it can ever be. Lagoons, half moon-shaped, symmetrically scooped one after the next from the coastline. They beckoned. On closer examination, each artificial baylet had its own breakwater and only the faintest of currents, according to the signs posted at water's edge. Oh, I must go down to the sea again... having done so frequently in my distant, able-bodied youth. Although at that point I never thought much about John Masefield or the fact that he talks about going down, rather than out, to sea. Suggesting that the sea is something basic, rooted, of the earth. A return, rather than an embarkation. A return to the womb? Back to the earth mother? Who knows? I certainly didn't the next day, bright and early, as I rolled my power wheelchair down to the lagoon attendant -- yes, there was one, in fact, an entire crew -- and asked if anyone would be so kind as to help me into the water later that afternoon. Of course, they shrugged. Remember, these people are used to tending to the needs of shrill old couples from Dallas who want to know why the ocean doesn't have a ladder and if the sand is safe to touch. In any case, by the time I was making my way across the beach, it was beginning to hit me, that Death-In-Venice sense of being drawn to the water for a mysterious last time. A Polynesian beach attendant, Rorie, held one arm, while Marlou held the other. Since Marlou's arm already carries two prominent plastic tubes for chemotherapy, I keep telling her not to engage in such foolhardy practices. Besides, Rorie was built like a short linebacker and probably could have lifted me over her Hawaiian head and tossed me into the water while pulling out her cell phone to talk to her daughter. The reason I know about the daughter, three years old, is that we chatted about her on the way down to the water's edge. The two of them had just been to Las Vegas. Neither had ever been off the islands before. Las Vegas? Never mind. All native Hawaiians seem to long for the place. Maybe tourism gets in your veins, just like mercury from tuna. I don't know, but I kept the chitchat going down to the sea, because I was increasingly nervous about all this. Yes, the water looks calm enough from a distance. But, then, so do I. Though I am actually full of strong currents of anxiety, deep thoughts of death, and broad shoals of fear. And suddenly I was there, in the water, the life preserver (my idea) already cutting into my chin and making it exceedingly difficult to move my one movable arm.

Even artificial hotel lagoons have waves, and even minor ripples made for some quadriplegic hard going. Once I was lowered into the water, all I could do was bob. My paddling seemed useless. The minor surges that made it around the breakwater and 100 yards up the lagoon were too much for me. I began to get nervous, quite nervous. I don't like being out of control, and this ocean water experience was already heading in that direction. "Want some help?" This from a thirtysomething Japanese woman wading with her children. Note the operative word here, "wading." She was into water somewhere above her knees, which meant I was in similar shallows. The toy surf, the sort of wave action kids generate by splashing each other, had just flipped me over on my lifevest-wrapped stomach. I was looking much more like a shipwreck survivor than a swimmer. "Yes," I told her. I had had it. I was prepared to call this a day.

It hadn't been much of a swim, but it had certainly been a journey. For even with a lifevest, my life itself was proving too heavy. For these days I am convinced that my middle-aged vision is evidence of a creeping brain tumor. That my minor misspellings or forgetfulness signal a minor stroke. That some malady, or some other fateful hypochondriacal occurrence is stalking me. Which is true. Death is stalking me. And maybe the reason it hasn't struck, not yet, is that I'm supposed to learn something. There's some lesson in the water. And if you don't go in it, you'll never learn it. And even if you do go in, you can only learn it very slowly. A mystery. A fearful mystery. Anxiety about the end of days experienced by someone whose days have probably come closer to ending many more times than he chooses to realize. There is the original shooting...followed by a tenuous life fraught with quadriplegic close calls...on the streets, in the bathtubs, on the roads. And the fact of being 60 years old should be celebrated like a victory, not a bone-quaking reason for additional worry.

Never mind. We are in Hawaii, working our way back up the sands, the electric wheelchair waiting at the beach's edge. Who knows why it's so much harder going back to the chair, staggering uphill over the dunes. I'm probably slightly chilled from the water. Mostly, I am drained. Two people, one my wife, one a sturdy Polynesian woman whose ancestors either inspired or approved of the mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty, are holding me up. I know it's useless to tell Marlou to go away and have a seat while I struggle up the beach. But it's true, there is not much she can do. But Marlou doesn't like to see me struggle. So she's here, and there's no use asking her to let go of my arm and assuring her that Rorie can more than handle the job.

Because, as she tells me on the way back to the hotel room, I expect people to help me. Expect, as in presume. I argue the point, then give up. She's right. I do expect people to help me. Expect, as in make prior arrangements and have a $20 tip being kept dry with Marlou while I get wet. But never mind. Marlou was raised with rugged American individualism, and I was raised with something at least somewhat different. Neither raising is better. And there's no convincing anyone of anything around this. The fact is that we are both under a lot of strain. Exhausted by my long schlep up the sands, as well as exhausted by the chemotherapy she only had the previous day, Marlou wants to head back to the room. I have to remember this when she rolls her eyes at my insistence at washing the sand off my body. Actually, although she heads off on her own while I find an outdoor shower, I still worry about taking too long with the de-sanding process. It turns out that the beach sand, recently dredged from the man-made lagoon, is about as natural as the swimmer-safe coastline. In fact, it is more or less adhesive, clinging to one's crevices like miniature limpets. The sandy particles follow me into bed. They remind me that Marlou is right in a way, that we do have to take responsibility for knowing what is right or wrong for us. It's a long journey, this life, no matter how short.

Marlou and I dine together, and quite romantically, in the hotel bar. The name hardly does it justice. This is a lounge in the truest sense, perched high enough to carry one's gaze across the coconut palm trees to the flat horizon, where the enormous orange tropical sun somehow plummets into the Pacific without sizzling. These are precious days, however many we have left. And we are in sync about important things. Such is the fact that the hotel's midpriced restaurant with its $40 dinners and the upscale one with the $75 dining experience would both depress us. It's only dinner. And here in the lounge, seated close to each other at a small table where I spend a good 15 minutes eyeballing tropical drinks before cautiously choosing a fruity variation on a theme by rum...we know that this cheaper and more basic experience is more us. Can't we celebrate? We are.

Hard to say what it means to turn 60, but not as hard as imagining not turning 60. And since these days imaginings tend to drift in the latter direction, what with Marlou's cancer and my worrying about Marlou's cancer and imagining if my body had Marlou's cancer. So I approached the 60 mark with mixed relief and consternation. It just doesn't seem possible that time could have carried me this far. This far, and still unpublished.

Marlou's attitude toward my 60th snuck up on me like the date itself. One moment she was quietly suggesting that we invite a few friends in for champagne and cake -- that is, friends in addition to the major Siblings Assault planned for the following weekend. And having agreed that, yes, might as well round up a few old buddies to toast the changing of the decade's guard. After which, there came a list of invitees. Well, there had to be one. People don't just materialize out of nowhere. But in Marlou's case, the list was something along the lines of America's Most Wanted. If an e-mail invitation bounced or a person's phone didn't ring the right way, she was on the case. She wrote, she called, she insisted on closing the loop. People were either going to turn up at our apartment on 12 December, or they were going to explain why.

Then the plan. It sounds deceptively obvious...champagne poured from a succession of bottles into a finite number of glasses (plastic), accompanied by cake produced by a cake maker, a.k.a., baker. Napkins, almonds, forks and, yes, decor, which in my mind runs to streaming things and glittering things, all obtainable from Walgreens. But that's me. In any case, I couldn't see very far beyond this version of events. Because I'm not Marlou. Also, I'm not Marlou on chemo and steroids, which is kind of like premenstrual days and Seconal nights, but all at once. Which left my wife purring along in high-speed pursuit of guests and program.

First there was the theme. Broadway. I really don't think of being a Broadway kind of guy. Not even a Broadway Danny Rose kind of guy. I grew up listening to show tunes, and they transported me beyond Banning, California, at a time when I needed transport. To this day, I like clever lyrics. And I like songs that tell a story. There's nothing very meaningful about show tunes, however, so they don't have any deep place in my soul. Just a comfortable place under my left cheek, something to lean against and recline upon and enjoy, like an old leather sofa.

So, it was with some alarm that I listened to party plans emerge, one by one. Not that Marlou and I were discussing plans, more that inadvertently she was leaking them. It's pretty hard to maintain an effective security lid on anything that transpires in a shared apartment. So when I learned about the pianist, the copying of sheet music, the plans for DVDs, all part of a turning-60-sing-along, well, I wasn't in a party mood. It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to. And I'll sing if I want to. And, frankly, if I want to recite the Wreck of the Hesperus, I'll do that too.

But the Broadway themed party was rolling north as fast as Caltrain, only with more momentum. "Don't worry," Marlou would say, when I pressed for details. I wasn't really pressing for details, more trying to get her to envision what it would be like to have a bunch of conversational friends who do not sing, by and large, suddenly having their faces shoved into Rodgers and Hammerstein. Let's play it by ear, I told her. The problem was, I didn't have enough information to develop this play-it-by-ear motif much further. I didn't know what we were playing or what the ear should attend to. It was out of my hands, just as turning 60 was out of my hands, just as everything is out of my hands these days. "Don't you know about party games," Marlou would ask, whizzing by me in a steroidal blur. Yes, I wanted to tell her, they figured largely in my ninth birthday. That was the party at which my mother, inspired by something she had read in Sunset Magazine, baked a birthday cake with metal toys inside. They were small, the metal toys, things like tin soldiers. I was old enough to cringe at the expressions on the little faces around me as kids bit into my mother's novelty cake. I was having a similar feeling now, as Marlou went about the late-night task of scanning mystery music in her office upstairs.

I confronted her on the matter of DVDs, or tried to. I enjoy television in small doses. In social settings, I've had TV on during the Academy Awards and understand the concept of watching the Super Bowl. But that's it. Conversation just doesn't mix with a TV screen full of Gordon McRae singing Oklahoma, if you ask me. Which no one was. Kind of pay attention to the way things are going, I told Marlou. Just see how it feels the night of the party, and let's not push the music too hard. Okay? Marlou gave me a look that suggested that a few steroids, even a little chemo, might not do me any harm.

The day came, then the hour, then the guests. The ceiling of our apartment was aflutter with streamers, and so was my 60-year-old heart. Our dining table was a groaning board of rich cake and bubbling wine. Little sparkling things were strewn about the tablecloth. Marlou had fashioned a tabletop city skyline out of tins and boxes. As people wandered in from the December air, as the champagne corks popped and the place got crowded and cozy, Marlou called the proceedings to order. She asked people to toast not exactly me, but our second date. Being a male, I do not precisely recall our second date, certainly not in such detail. According to Marlou, we chatted about Cole Porter and bonded around old songs. Broadway songs. Which had much to do, I now learned, with this evening and its theme. Which wasn't about me as much as about us. Yes, it was my 60th. And it was Marlou's last certain opportunity -- at least this is as she feels -- to host a party. So people toasted me, and I toasted Marlou, publicly affirming who she is: the love of my life.

And there she was beautifully kitted out in her chemo scarf, both live and in the new photographic portrait she gave me for my birthday. And there were people applauding and drinking and enjoying cake. So I joined them, drinking rather quickly, keeping one mental eye open for musical developments. The opener was Cole Porter, "You're the Top." Or was it "Anything Goes?" The first thing that goes after 60 is your memory, although that's been gone forever. Musical lyrics stick around, however, owing to some special song storage utility in the human brain. And so there we were, all of us, more or less belting out the frothy ballad. And damned if we didn't feel better, once it was done. As my friend Clint put it, group activities take away from intimacy at a party -- yet, if you don't have some shared experience, some group participation, the spirit tends to dissipate. A balance. That was the point. Even if the point of singing "There Is Nothing like a Dame" to the DVD of the 1950s movie South Pacific eluded me. But I gave it a good shot. I really felt that the room's energy was being drained by a TV Robert Preston singing "76 Trombones," however. Time for a break, I told Marlou. She didn't argue. By this time, people were happily into conversation. The singing got things going, and people were staying.

As a boy, I had little exposure to creative family friction. In our home, conflict split people apart permanently. But that was then, and this is now. At 60, I am still learning how to fight. And learning, rather late in life, that the big fight is not for me, but for us.

The thing about being absolutely open, to sticking by a promise to discuss anything at any time is this: at 4 a.m. your wife may want to talk about plans for her funeral. This is on her mind, and since Marlou hasn't been sleeping well, in a sense it is on my mind too. And so there we are in the dark of night talking about the whole thing. The music. Who would speak at her memorial. And this is actually a lighter topic than the matter of the huge black bat that has been haunting Marlou's dreams. And after mutual head cradling and funeral planning what is there to do but sleep? It's 4:30 a.m., after all. And there's a big day ahead. How does any human being sleep after such a conversation? I don't know, but it becomes possible. Like the London blitz, after awhile you adapt. Of course, a few health-foody sleeping pills never hurt anyone. Mine contain chamomile, making them as attractive as the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz.

I awake, and it's Sunday, and the day requires attention. Manon Lescaut kicks off at 2 p.m., and Sunday parking around the San Francisco Opera House isn't for the faint hearted. So I sit up, consider the morning and it's familiar routine, and definitely feel things swim. Perhaps I have tilted my head too much to one side, for the wheelchair I am about to occupy, the wall behind it, and all the space in between do something of a spatial shift. Not to worry. This happens now and then. Cause unknown. Although I usually attribute such things to stress. Usual culprits such as blood pressure issues can be ruled out. I've got other problems, but not that one.

Though one can never be sure. For the same kind of feeling can overtake me at any time, any place. During something as routine as brushing my teeth, the ultrasound thing whirring away, tooth tartar cracking like plaster, which is rather a pleasant thought, the notion that the dentist won't be going at my gums with an ice pick this time. And dentistry is a much more enjoyable topic than funerals and death, which gives one a sinking feeling. The very sort of sinking feeling that doesn't bear consideration when one is on track and on course for the toilet, shower, foot powder, socks and the entire quadriplegic pre-launch sequence. These thoughts are actually fleeting ones, tiny flashes that blow about the mind like breezes. Here one moment, absent the next. And since the real focus is on holding the humming toothbrush steady against the gums, it's easy to lose track of the sinking feeling within and the sinking without. The latter being not a feeling, but a relationship. The relationship to the right angles of bathroom counter, floor, mirror and quadriplegic tooth brusher. Because the difference between a feeling of sinking and an actual sinking of the sort effected by German U-boats during the aforementioned London blitz, a prenatal experience for me, but just barely.... Anyway the difference between feeling that you're going down and actually going down is considerable. Though too subtle at certain charged moments, like this one, which explains why the angularity of things is maladjusting too quickly to perceive or control. Tilting and leaning until I am many degrees off neuromuscular center, and am in fact falling toward the tile floor. The special, nonslip tile floor, designed for wet, imprecise feet. I smack hard on the floor, the silly toothbrush still vibrating beside me.

Marlou comes running. She has been talking to her friend Jill, someone she's trying to set up on a blind date. And my first thought, post-fall, is that I haven't done this in years, maybe a decade, actually falling in my own home. Or anyone's home. That's why I'm so careful, and bottom line, that's why I use a wheelchair. After all, I've got plenty of strength and endurance -- what has vanished over the years is proprioception, the thing that doctors test by asking you to shut your eyes and touch your nose. Where are my limbs in space? If you can't answer that question, you're probably me. But I'm not asking questions right now. In fact, Marlou is asking the questions, principally are you broken? Does anything hurt? Remarkably, the answer is no. Nothing but my pride. For I have not only fallen, but fallen in a way that requires help from someone on chemotherapy, someone who has tubes permanently implanted in her upper arm and is definitely instructed not to lift anything more than 15 pounds. On a good day, you can multiply 15 x 10 and get my approximate weight. However, these are not good days. These are days in which I am eating for two, one might say. With Marlou's chemotherapy-flattened appetite, I am taking up the slack. Anything she doesn't eat, I will. So these days were looking at more than 150 pounds. And whatever the poundage, we're looking at it sprawled on a bathroom floor with a toothbrush giving its ultrasound treatment to the tiles. Marlou switches the thing off. She asks again if anything hurts, and the answer is still no. I have not toppled uncontrollably to the floor, but tilted, grabbing the bathroom counter on the way down. It's the way up I'm thinking about. Marlou is not supposed to lift me. And even if she tries, I doubt that she can get me up and on my feet.

Her doubts are less than mine. In fact, she seems fairly confident. The real problem has to do with my feet and their position. I have been having a fairly consistent go at the exercycle in the carport, which means that my right paralyzed leg actually extends rather well. The only problem is that the neuromuscular on/off switch is hopelessly broken. The leg is stuck on straight, for I have strengthened not only the voluntary muscles, but the others, the involuntary, spastic ones. This leg isn't going anywhere. Wrong, for Marlou knows the neuromuscular drill...tickle the bottom of the foot and it bends obediently. Of course, it shoots out straight again within seconds, but never mind. I hook one leg with the other. Marlou lifts, both legs straighten, and I'm up and where I was, ready to resume brushing teeth. I urge Marlou to get back on the phone with her friend. I want everyone back on whatever horse they were riding, with Marlou again talking to her friend. Among the other 4 a.m. revelations...Marlou told me that to be among the mortally ill, or to feel no longer a player, taken seriously, valued or regarded as effective. I have fought against such feelings all my disabled life. Good to have her on the phone matchmaking.

And what about me? What's this falling over thing, and do I really dare to drive the 101 freeway to San Francisco? I sit on the bed and think this through. I believe the answer is yes, I can drive. But I've had a warning: you can't discuss the death of the woman you love, then go brush your teeth. Even if the teeth are a step on the road to the wife's beloved opera matinee. You have to feel the pain, know the desperation, feel the terror. Because if you won't, your body will. Swooning and dizzying have taken the place of feeling, and the soul doesn't like it. This is a time to be present and accounted for, not missing in emotional action.

Puccini, master of lush musical drama, floods the San Francisco Opera House, sweeping me and everyone else along. Maybe I haven't slept quite as well as I'd thought, because a certain amount of drowsiness overcomes me in the first acts. Besides, Manon Lescaut is such a silly woman. Yes, she likes jewels, but surely she likes being out of jail even better. In fact, at the pivotal plot moment with the heroine dillydallying over jewels, I decide the opera is actually Manon Let's Go. In any case, operatic credibility is pretty much exhausted by Act IV. That's when the exiled Manon turns up in 17th-century French colonial Louisiana. She wanders off the convict boat and flees into the desert. Which is quite a trick in rain-drenched subtropical Louisiana. But I understand Puccini. When you've got major music surging through your soul, you don't have a lot of bandwidth for geography lessons. Let the philistines worry about the rainfall in the bayous, as far as you're concerned Manon is in the desert. She's dying, bit by bit, circumstances vague but utterly convincing. Because we're not thinking physiology, Marlou and I. We don't care if the soprano is belting out enough volume to keep 3000 people rapt on her supposed deathbed. Because the desert hell on stage makes as much sense as chemotherapy, with its artificial desiccation of life. Not to mention cancer itself, which can make its victims thirsty in a rainstorm. And we know that even facing what might be the end of life, no matter how desperate things get, the human spirit still cries out to sing.

One problem with having a sick wife and rolling past the 60 mark in a state of semi-retirement is that you can get semi-retiring. This became apparent shortly after lunch when my cousin the energy consultant, the big biomass macher, led me into a room at the California Public Utilities Commission. We had discussed the proceedings over lunch. And the first thing I knew, we were entering what looked more like a courtroom than a meeting room. In fact, Gregg was explaining to me, proceedings of the PUC are conducted by administrative judges. And damned if we didn't meet one on the way into the room. Gregg said hello. Why not? This is his world. It's where he makes his money, and I'm hoping to make some of my own. High-tech marketing writing being rather thin on the ground these days...and solar energy being such a good cause and all.

We took our places. Down front, front and center, and not in the seats, but at a table. A table in the position usually taken by a defense attorney and the defendant in your standard courtroom drama. Why? I told you. Gregg is a big energy player. He is a consultant to the PUC, and already an official candidate for work on the California Solar Initiative. So, there we were, down front, at the big table, Gregg having earned his place at the table. But not me. I was hoping, no praying, that neither of us would be obliged to speak at this affair. I had read no background material, was only now skimming over the agenda. No sense in getting overly invested in something that may not pay off. Although doing one's homework is a sign of a certain seriousness of purpose. An early indication that one is a real player. And I can't believe I'm here. I mean isn't all this sort of thing behind me, meeting the public, proving myself, being a credible player, wheelchair and all, 60 years old even?

I can't even read the agenda. The print seems to be wavering. I try to focus here, and the type moves there. Something is wrong. It always has been, only now it's worse. The thing that's wrong is me, of course, although this takes different forms at different times. At this particular time, it is taking the form of something curved, a crescent moon or one of those semicircular cinnamon twists they sell at the local espresso emporium. Not just semicircular, but with jagged teeth, like shark teeth, only sparkling and rainbow colored. If this was the 1960s, I would attribute the dazzling apparition to chemical enhancement. But I'm in a different kind of 60s now, and this flashing, jangling, rainbow-colored hallucination along the right side of my right eye, well we know what that is. It's the long heralded brain tumor finally bursting into optical flower. This sort of thing my father died of, and his sister, and his brother. And here it is flashing at me in the auditorium of the Public Utilities Commission, reminding me that it's over. This is as far as I've gotten in life, still unpublished, so give up and go home. Definitely don't go out in public. And working as an equal, a full-fledged contributor to the life of the community? Forget it. Get your wheeled ass on the next train south.

I am thinking a graceful exit. Something to say to Gregg that won't sound too wimpy or implausible. Like, I'm sick. My wife is sick. I'm old. Tired of livin', but scared of dyin'. And Old Man River? Old man period. It's hard enough to keep that rolling along. So what is to be done, having reached the end of the neurological road, right here in San Francisco, during a meeting on Van Ness Avenue? Well, give up and die, of course. This is as good a place as any. Being scared doesn't make it any easier. Besides, a certain amount of relaxation couldn't hurt here. There is tension in the world, and stress can do things to your system. So why not relax, just to sort of rule that possibility out. Which is impossible, the current anxiety level being what it is. In fact, what it is is so exhausting that I'm not sure I can stay awake. I yawn, sinking into a I'm-going-to-die-so-give-up-and-sleep stupor, just for a moment. Which is long enough to make the jagged sparkling eye thing go away. Maybe I'd grown tired of it, or maybe the shimmering optics were a lot like the last time my retina shrank a bit, which tugs slightly at the optic nerve and makes a period of sparkling. In any case, I'm back to normal, visionwise. As the meeting opens and a succession of corporate guys talk about the fledgling solar industry. It's actually quite interesting. Everything is interesting. That's because I'm alive. At least for this moment. Which is all I know. And maybe all there is.

It is very unlikely that lightning will strike twice in the same place, Marlou's doctor tells us. We are in the chemo lounge, the subterranean suite in which patients of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation get infused...and not with passion or marjoram or hope. Chemicals, of course. Marlou is having a chemotherapy restart, the initial kickoff having proved problematic. Not to mention nearly fatal, as even her doctor has acknowledged. Which is why her doctor is now giving us the odds that lightning, in the form of certain dominant genes, will not strike again. Marlou has a rare genetic makeup -- I could have told them that -- and produces a certain enzyme antithetical to one of her chemo drugs. Our medical team here in Palo Alto, in collaboration with the University of Tennessee School of Medicine, came to that conclusion. No one can say they aren't trying. As for the lightning, this refers to the infinitely remote chance that Marlou is genetically predisposed against the new chemo drug. Can't happen again, her doctor tells us, but just to be safe, there is another genomic study underway. As for me, I'm not so convinced about the lightning striking twice thing. I can see the successive flashes going off in my mind.

But for now I am seeing Marlou, rigged for full medical sail with lines from aft to starboard, drips dripping, needles needling, infusions infusing. Her doctor stops for a brief chat. I've got questions about the drugs, questions about Marlou's need for exercise. And her doctor has answers, fairly predictable ones. More important, she has time, time to discourse with a patient's husband. And what is more appreciated now? Time is of the essence. Time is essence.

On this day, starting-chemotherapy-again day, time has slipped away from me. Actually, I have slipped away from much more than that. Perhaps even slipped my moorings. It all started early, even before Marlou had headed out the door to the infusion center. Perhaps I didn't quite want to watch her go, so I rolled out the door first. Headed, of course, for the various supermarkets. No, one will not do, not when one has a critical mission. Black bean soup. Life-enhancing, nutritional and unconditional, pintos negros, sopa del mundo, and all of it bubbling into liquid, frothy wholeness on my, or our, stove. Before my very eyes.

The recipe? Why waste hours on the Internet when there is a cookbook handy? This one is a Sunset Cookbook, a disintegrating tome that precedes Marlou, apparently by enough years to be priced at $2.45, original. The recipes are still original, as far as I'm concerned, for they are relatively easy. And easy is important. Because although we have a compulsion to make the soup, ironically we have little desire. My British cousin Caroline assures me that cooking is all a matter of organic chemistry, that if one follows the directions, no harm can come. Perhaps. But food preparation for me demands a state of high alert, a moment-to-moment attentiveness to details that secretly sends me screaming. For one thing, there's the one-handed doing of things that require not only two hands, but two legs. Endless toing and froing about the kitchen, preceded by lots of aisle rolling in the supermarkets.

I favor Trader Joe's for most ingredients, although this nagging fear is chasing me as I round the corner from the nuts and dried fruit rack. For the store caters to a politically correct clientele and beef stock has long been absent on the shelves. But, no, not today, for there it is, organic at that. All five quarts. The five quarts should have been a clue. But not today, not when I am this preoccupied, chemotherapy thoughts predominating as they are. I fully understand weights and measures. But I don't like to wait, so I take the measure of recipes in a sort of blinding flash. More is good, I generally decide. I think the biochemistry analogy works splendidly here, for why scale up for cooking activity unless one is going to follow the industrial model? Production, output per per unit of quadriplegic time and motion, this is what counts. And, believe me, I am counting. I am counting every second. Because by the time I am back from shopping, I'm dangerously bored with this process. Bored with a process that has barely begun, because nothing's in the pot, not yet. But I'm seriously thinking of pot, thinking that it was too bad I gave up smoking it years ago. For some chemical enhancement seems called for. Surely I'm not going to cook all this soup alone.

But that's the plan. As for the weights and measures, it doesn't take long to see the folly. Five quarts is the total capacity of our crockpot, which is definitely a crock. Never mind, for there is a fallback, Marlou's soup pot, which is tall and stainless steel and surely has plenty of room for a little, or a lot, of black bean soup. Nope. Even that is too small...I can see this early in the measuring and adding of beans to liquid to vegetables. And because I am moving undaunted and nonstop through the recipe process, the solution appears. Two pans. It's a two-pan process. Never mind that one pan contains all the beans and the other all the beef stock and celery and tomato sauce. Somehow all this will combine. Look at London. It used to be Shoreham here and Kensington there, and now it's all one thing. And that's going to happen here. All these ingredients cooking separately, then finding common cause in one container. Like the Greater London Council. Somehow. Details later. Stay tuned.

Our housekeeper arrives. Lordes. She is named for Lourdes, and I consider her presence a healing one. Marlou needs healing. And so do I. There's no telling why I have undertaken this gargantuan kitchen project, one clearly beyond me, hopeless and not even nurturing to someone destined to spend the entire week vomiting and avoiding vomiting. Black bean soup. To go in the freezer. The great freezer of life, where hopes reside and the future gets stored up. Soup, frozen and cold and ready for gastrointestinal action. I wince at the primitive origins of the morning's cooking. It seems that I learned food preparation, of a sort, after my parents' divorce when my brother and I lived with our father in a strange bachelor household. For a while there were housekeepers, one after the next. Did my brother and I drive them away? Perhaps. And look at the result. Cooking with little skill and less interest, while the reincarnated housekeeper Lordes asks politely when I will be out of the kitchen. Un momento, I tell her. There's no salt in the recipe, which seems odd to me. But everything seems odd these days, and I've just said un momento, and that's really what I want, a memento from this day. I don't know why, but this has been another day of transition. And somehow this soup, all beans and nourishment, may take me through it. Which is reassuring until I consider the freezer and how it has no room. Not that I consider this very long. There's always room. It's just a matter of weights and measures.

It's somewhere between toy and tool, this electronic keyboard Marlou gave me last year. I can't read music, and notes elude me at the wrong times...such as onstage with the Menlo Park Chorus when the bass section leaps into periodic action. Thus the electronic keyboard. Hit a key, and a tiny screen shows the note on a musical clef. Even I can stumble through a score, matching written with sung notes. The thing is useful. But it's also silly. The keyboard stores renditions of Jingle Bells, the chorus from Beethoven's Ninth, Home on the Range and so on. Any one of which can be played with marimbas, cellos or tap dance effects. What the hell.

I've been thinking about the thing recently, although not too much. Events, age, or both, have reduced my activity level. I accomplish less and less. Including my proficiency in the Menlo Park Chorus, leaving me poorly prepared for the looming concert. In the past, general stage fright and visions of performance failure goaded me into vocal preparation. But not now, with Marlou ill and new demands on time and energy. Or so I tell myself. I stare blankly at the score, the rehearsal CD, the concert date on the calendar...and stare and stare.

So I found myself staring at Marlou last night when she produced the keyboard from nowhere, sat down on our sofa and had a go at it. "There are lots of things we could do with this," she mused. What these things are, and when they would occur, elude me. Marlou is making plans and plans. Extensive and ever-expanding ideas for the celebration of my birthday. Redecorating the apartments, upstairs and downstairs. New appliances, new car, new terrace. She's writing up a storm, e-mailing everyone, phoning everyone else. She would like to have people over for dinner, perhaps Friday. Which is tomorrow and, I point out, we haven't discussed this idea with those people. Which doesn't mean dinner isn't going to happen, but it's not going to happen without arrangements and phoning and scheduling and all the things that go with working life and middle-age.

Marlou sighs, says yes, acknowledging the last-minute nature of these plans. I lay out the possibilities, how dinner with these people seems more likely on Sunday, and how would that be? Cooking at our place on Sunday? No, cooking does not sound attractive. Perhaps a movie. Perhaps an early movie with the friends, and then dinner. Or just the movie. These days Marlou fatigues easily, and once simple endeavors have become a strain. As for cooking, Marlou's taste buds have been so blasted by chemotherapy that everything tastes the same, she says. And, meanwhile, Marlou keeps making plans. An author's book reading. Matchmaking with old friends. Afternoon craft sessions with Avery, our four-year-old neighbor. And now there are things we could do with the keyboard. Marlou switches on a familiar Sousa march, playing it with first the marimba effect, then the harmonica. A pile of correspondence has fallen off the coffee table and spewed across the carpet. I haven't taken out the newspapers in days, and one chair of our dining room set is groaning under its stack of newsprint. And, worse, I have just watched a pseudo-artsy 1980s film and am cursing Netflix and missing the life we used to have together. Which included going out to movies.

Marlou is still lost in her post-movie exploration of the electronic keyboard and its possibilities. I remember to check the answering machine and, yes, there's a message. We've missed it. And we are missing a lot of things these days. Though there are still possibilities. Think of what's possible with a keyboard. Think of giving up life's disciplines and obligations in favor of childish meanderings. Last week Marlou was trying to convince the chorus director to include a harpist. Now we've got possibilities with the keyboard. While the possibilities for life together seem diminished on all fronts.

Some people believe that our origins lie in dreams. Near the end of his life, Carl Jung had the startling dream that his life was being dreamt by someone else. I have began writing down my dreams, after attending a seminar on the subject. Whether we analyze them or not, the belief goes, simply recording dreams sends a message to the spirit that someone is listening, paying attention, appreciating. And the spirit, one hopes, will respond. And what does the responsive spirit look like? Very much like a child. A child at play.

Marlou and I have this much in common: childhoods in which life squeezed us early into adult molds. Actually, I would describe these molds as pseudo-adult. Much of my life has been spent trying to undo this pattern of origin. Real adults have been real kids. And the real kid remains accessible. Play is fine. Foolishness is essential. Screwing around with keyboards, papers unfiled, errands not completed, all that is okay. It must be okay -- just look at my desk. Which is like a playground for the derelict drug user, with notes on this, reminders for that, CD-ROMs whose purpose can no longer be recalled, file folders that are unmarked and reveal contents that should have been discarded months ago.

Neither of us have had, I believe, sufficient time to play in our lives. And now with the heightened sense of mortality, Marlou wants to feel effective, to try this, be open to that. She wants to play with the keyboard. And, yes, let us use that word. Play, in the sense of toy, with all its frivolous, nonproductive connotations. And I want her to tend to business. To check the answering machine. To pick up the messy papers, hers, not mine. The truth is I am frightened by the aimlessness of play. What will happen to us if we do not have a focus, goal, structure? What is the value of something if its use is indeterminate? What if we let ourselves dangle, spun by the wind? What's going to dissolve? Hard to say, but both of us need to find out.