February 2007 Archives

I did not sleep well my last night in Britain. Talks with cousins and friends had stirred too many old connections, and now I was going home with too many loose ends to face that loose cannon, the cancers cells that still threaten Marlou. 1 a.m., 2 a.m., and sometime before 3 a.m. I drifted off, but not for long. Well before 5 a.m. I was up and worrying about my bags and coins for tips and the accessibility of my passport, and all the myriad things that could go wrong between Todenham, Gloucestershire, and Menlo Park, California.

If one is in the cockpit and actually flying an airplane on two hours sleep, there is cause for concern. If one is simply occupying a seat, staring dazedly at the clouds in endless westbound daylight and struggling with the 40-film video system touted by Virgin Airways, who even thinks about sleep? Well, there are neurotransmitters in your body thinking about sleep and, frankly, they are pissed off. In fact, following a brief staff meeting, they have agreed on industrial action. They're going on strike, and you're going on sick leave. Which explains my cold, which appeared like weeds in a garden, little buds here and there, a bit of dryness, soreness, stuffiness...over several days...until my upper respiratory tract was choked.

I don't really mind the congestion, but I hate the fatigue. Which is in fact, a draining of stamina. I work hard to keep my physical resources up and running. The rowing machine, the exercycle, elastic bands... all of this makes me breathe deeply, pump my blood forcefully, and prevent me from going the way of swooning 19th-century spinsters. But not with a cold. These mornings, muscular fortitude notwithstanding, I arise, sneeze, and woozily make my way from wheelchair to toilet. I feel vaguely faint. Some essence has been drained from me, things slightly waver. My grip on the bathroom sink seems unreliable. My grip on reality isn't all that certain. Perhaps I am 10 years older than I thought, having lost count along the way. Certainly I've lost energy. And now I'm losing will. Belief in tomorrow. Faith in the continuance of things. No, I am actually losing nerve. For when one's physical stamina is always being stretched, a further drain of powers is downright scary. There is a reminder here. You may feel strong, but life and its partner death, are much stronger. The life span is short and fragile, and don't count on dinner. You may make it, and you may not.

As though to prove this point, I set off this morning on my daily run, sometimes a twice-daily run, to Peet's Coffee. Only a fool would embark upon a day's writing without adequate caffeine. Because hope may spring eternal, but it springs higher with a little chemical assistance. And at times one needs the reminder that there are other people out there, grinding coffee beans, hissing clouds of steam from espresso machines, fighting for access to the sugar packets.

After which, goosed into biochemical action and reassured of humanity, I speed homeward. I watch out for traffic, dodge here and zip there, thanking God for sun and batteries. By now, my wheelchair tires may have worn small grooves in the streets...Fair Oaks, University Drive. There is little possibility for variation, but what the hell, why not dispose of the empty cardboard coffee cup in the dumpster behind the Alzheimer's convalescent center? Yes, the driveway looks a bit steep, but life is a bit steep. I roll up the incline, fully appreciating its steepness, while appreciating even more the anti-tip wheels on the back of my wheelchair. The latter are designed for just this sort of situation, those extra wheels, projecting behind the battery like the pontoon on an outrigger canoe. That's why I need not fear the current angle of tilt, for sound mechanical designers have been at work here, and while the wheelchair leans backward, the small set of wheels behind me is just about to catch...and knock me forward. In fact, this will happen immediately...despite the fact that I appear to be going completely backward and, in fact, have now landed upside down, head on the pavement, wheels in the air like a dead animal.

And speaking of air, there's lots of it up there. I can see it now, mottled with clouds, and overhung with tree branches. True, I can no longer see the dumpster or the sidewalk I was attempting to ascend. But what I can almost see is help, in the form of the driver currently passing on the street behind me...or the next pedestrian...or the voices of the two men approaching. We have the predictable exchange, the men and I...are you okay...yes. For I have decided on this point of okayness immediately. There is a reason why this wheelchair is heavy, a reason beyond its lead batteries, and having much to do with its steel frame. Everything has tilted solidly and slowly and safely. Both men want to haul me to my feet, then deal with the wheelchair. No, I tell them. Tilt me forward. Beam me up. Or to quote Dickens, shake me up, Judy.

My rescuers get me righted, checking and rechecking my scalp for signs of blood. I engage them in conversation. We know each other, after all. One is a retired Hewlett-Packard worker who now sells firewood, and the other, I soon learn, is his brother. Brian and George. I give them both a big smile before heading on my way. The experience has been reassuring. I have lived in this neighborhood for 13 years. And while things can go wrong in life, if they goes wrong here, someone will know about it. And even if they don't, or before they do, I will know something else. That early exposure to Monty Python has served me well. Oh, it's Mr. Bendix tipped over in the street, love...just go see how he's doing, and would he like a cup of tea prone or supine? Not to worry, dear, we are all running out of steam. And we might as well run out together.

The day is gray and long, muffled by intermittent rain and Marlou's retreat. She spent most of the morning in her robe, part of the afternoon in sweatpants. She has just enough nausea to render her listless, not enough to send her to bed. The chemotherapy is cumulative, she says, and the last week's infusion is still with her, and still with us. Things being what they are.

In the morning, I left the house. The nearby library had a session for tutors. I am a tutor. I periodically sit down with a woman from Tonga and review the difference between 'live' and 'leave'. The woman cannot always hear the difference, and these days, neither can I. We are not quite living, Marlou and I, but sharing a convalescence. As for leaving, I just did that, for a week, in Gloucestershire. I'm over the jetlag, but not the jet cold. Did I really leave? Did I really live? At the library, I consider my instructional strategy for Venga, my Tongan student. We appear to be off course, according to the library's workshop. There's too much dwelling on errors. Still, I can't resist creating exercises for our next meeting. I live in my house, but I leave my house to drive to school. Did I leave the place where I live? He lives where they leave piles of leaves. Shall I take my leave to live elsewhere?

I can't tell where my cold starts and Marlou's malaise begins. I am reading a book about Ireland family life. There is lots of rain, jam and television. I don't want to be there. I am glad to be here where the fava beans are sprouting in the raised beds, sending their cover crop roots toward China, maybe beyond. Actually, the sprouting is so tenuous, the progress from seed to shoot so agonizingly slow, that one cannot count on root activity. Last year, fava beans planted in November sprouted in December, grew considerably in January, and succumbed to the gardener's pitchfork in late February. This late February, only the most pathetic of fetal shoots are breaking through the soil. We're looking at April for agricultural production. We're also looking at April for a moment of respite, perhaps a trip or two, or maybe a year or two, at home. In that month, Marlou will recover from chemotherapy and prepare for the next step. Possible, even likely, liver surgery. I never liked liver, a fact which came to me in a dream last night, when someone offered me chicken livers as a sort of treat. Yuck, I thought, in the dream and now in the waking, pt notwithstanding.

In the early evening little rain falls, but the dark creeps out of the sky, and I give serious thought to possible diversions. I have a DVD of 'The Commitments', another Irish story. This film from the early 1990s was a favorite of Bob, who died in that period. Why this fact has come at me now, I have no idea. But I remembered that Bob loved the film, and having not seen it, I have secured a copy from Netflix. Why not? The worst it can be is rainy. I know this much: The Commitments are a rock band, an amateur one. Without knowing the plot, I can guess at the action. They are young people, Irish young people, who have a go at life. And this evening, why should I stand in their way?

And why is my horn honking? I am speaking of my van, that enormity by Ford that sits huge and white outside my apartment. It is such a trusty device, rigged with hydraulics to lift my wheelchair, with me in it. Wheelchair in place, locked and braced, and me in place, strapped and secure, I make my way upon the roads, turning the wheel with hyper power steering, braking with my non-paralyzed leg.

The van. The horn is unmistakable, a truck's horn. For the van is a truck, a commercial vehicle if there ever was one. The horn says get the fuck out of my mercantile delivery way. And now it simply says fuck. Marlou e-mailed me about this while I was in Gloucestershire. The van, she wrote, channeled me while I was gone. One afternoon, the horn started honking. Just like that, spontaneously, ghostly. Marlou and my landlord, Tom, wandered outside to consider the spectacle. Horns don't just start honking themselves. Unless the horn is this horn. The horn of plenty. The horn of plenty left to honk about on this afternoon, on the cusp of evening. Marlou walks outside, drapes herself from the passenger seat of my van to the hood release, and gets the thing open. Five minutes with an adjustable wrench, and the battery is disconnected. Automotive activities like this are inescapably tinged with testosterone, I have to admit, and it seems somewhat embarrassing to have my cancer-patient wife working under the hood of my car. Never mind. The Commitments await.

The two of us, me with my cold and Marlou with her chemo, fight our way through dinner. At least we are not fighting with each other, simply fighting to stay awake. Which is why, as Marlou clears the table, I make a beeline for the DVD player. Don't even stop and think, I tell myself, but get right to work on entertainment, or the evening will never happen. The day has been a somber one, slow and lived underwater, it seems, but the night is going to be livelier, thanks to home electronics. I shove in the DVD and wait for the titles. Alan Parker directed this thing, and I'm trying to recall what else he has done.... Nothing is happening. Fuck this remote control, sending out its feeble signals with a long compromised battery. Marlou takes the control and replaces the batteries. Absolutely nothing happens. The player, which also handles VHS tapes, performs its other functions perfectly well. But with anything electronic, one occasionally needs to troubleshoot. Which is why I am proud to have located the manual, its bookshelf home springing from my gray matter like a trout from a river. I tell Marlou that we need to unplug the DVD player for a few moments, plug it in, and have another go. So, as she puts it, the player can reset its little brain. Splendid. If we are going to anthropomorphize the thing, might as well give it a brain.

The brain, the one that's really needed, turns out to be my own -- for in the fullness of time, it develops that I have shoved one DVD into the player atop another. It's jammed. And being jammed, if now emits a steady hum. Which is why we mark the end of day by unplugging the DVD player and going to bed. Marlou assures me that all sorts of qualified professionals repair these things. I don't believe a word of this. I tell her that this is the era of disposable electronics, that repairs went out with cobblers sitting on high stools, pounding nails into high button boots. She tells me that I have no patience. Which is entirely true. I have, in particular, no patience for this day. I want it to end, and so it does, the book slipping off my lap in bed at 8:45 p.m. The rain has started again, and so has my sneezing and the aches. And I can't help listening for the sound of the horn in my van. Sometimes things happen even without batteries.

Caroline, one of my British cousins, has e-mailed me, rushing to my defense in the matter of my most recent account of our Gloucestershire visit. She wants me to know that I am, in my life's accomplishments, equal to her brother. And, by the way, why has she gotten only glancing treatment in my latest writings? With this, she is making a joke -- but only partly. Caroline was absent when they passed out the shyness genes. She is a force of nature, and this force has been present in my life for almost 40 years.

'I like you,' she said to me one summer's afternoon in 1969, seated on the terrace behind her grandmother's flat. Little Pluckett's Way. Buckhurst Hill. I was in English suburbia without knowing it. I was in England without knowing it. And I was living in someone else's body without knowing it. I had entered Britain and my new, neurologically compromised body at approximately the same time. Caroline and I had met that afternoon. We must have chatted for awhile before she announced her verdict. I can't recall. Moreover, I can't recall what I said in response. If there was anything I needed at that time, it was to be liked. No, there was one additional thing. I needed to be respected. Caroline from that moment on gave me her wholehearted support on both counts.

30 years later, now a physician in a West London district, Caroline was pushing me up and down the aisles of a Sainsbury's supermarket, while I devoted myself to matters of cheddar cheese and chocolate biscuits, and tried to get used to yet another new reality. We had gotten to know each other, Caroline and I, at a time when I routinely launched myself down a long flight of stairs, limped with a crutch more than a quarter of a mile to the Holland Park tube station and, without a thought, daily set transit sail for points east. I made my way through London's cavernous, tiled Tube system, clicking my crutch and twisting my hip to throw my paralyzed leg forward in a sort of gait. Nothing stopped me, not even the byproducts of exertion and of tea drinking, which quickly accumulated in my bladder and had to be expelled at inopportune moments, in quiet corners of the Underground.

A darkened doorway at the end of the platform. A dustbin. A passenger-free bend in the walkway. Caroline accompanied me on a few of these trips and heard about the rest. She was an essential part of the process. For left to my own devices, I would have quickly sunk into shame. There were plenty of moments when peeing in the Underground wasn't feasible.

I can recall ascending the creaking wooden lift in the Holland Park station, standing as far as possible from the blue uniformed Nigerian woman who worked the controls. If I stayed for enough away, she was unlikely to see, or God forbid smell, my urine-soaked trousers. What a relief to hear the metal grates slide open, to see the knot of distracted passengers waiting, to hear the traffic sounds from the street. I reached in my pocket to hand the lift attendant my cardboard Tube ticket. It was soaked with urine. Hot blood shot into my cheeks. I was immobilized, knowing that to present this ticket would be like inserting my hands into a village pillory. While primitive, law-abiding American instincts were urging me to comply with The Law. As the lift fully opened, I bolted, meaning that I stuck my crutch forward and hobbled out with ten percent more than the usual speed. The lift attendant said nothing at all. Of course. This was Britain.

Had I been in London for a full year or only a few months? Hard to say. I only recall that the wind, probably autumnal, whipped up the avenue, freezing my soaked thighs. Could passersby see the dark stain on my trousers? No. Yes. How would one ever know in Britain where everyone averts their eyes to almost everything? I was a marked man. I was descended from the apes, and now descending even further. It was a harsh world, populated with winners and losers, and at this moment, sodden like an infant, smelly as an incontinent 95-year-old, there was little doubt about where I fit into the world.

'Darling, you're late, and I'm famished.' Caroline stood outside my building on Norland Square, bundled in her coat. She was smoking, of course, making her small pulmonary comment on medical school. Famished.

I blinked at her uncomprehendingly, standing mute in my urinary shame. Of course. We were going out for a curry. We had made this arrangement days ago, but it felt like years. I mumbled something, stuck my hand in my cold wet pocket, and extracted house keys. The two of us clomped up the long stone stairs to my bed sitting room.

'Have you pissed yourself?' Caroline asked this matter-of-factly.

I struggled to find a witty rejoinder, but my mind would not cooperate. Yes, I said.

'Not to worry, darling. Change your trousers while I have a fag.'

My bedsitter seemed large to me, with its two French windows, small balcony and wrought iron railing. But it seemed much smaller with another person in it. And in those days, particularly a woman. It felt hopelessly uncool to ask Caroline to leave while changing, so I turned a wicker chair around and proceeded to undress. My underwear was soaked. My handkerchief was wringable. The tube ticket had disintegrated. The dye came off on my hand.

'What's the matter, darling?'

I couldn't tell her the whole story. It was just too awful. So I seized on the matter at hand. 'I peed on my tube ticket.'

'Oh, well.' She rustled her cigarette packet. 'If my patients provided a tube ticket with each urine sample, I should count myself lucky." Sounds of a striking match.

I was glad my back was turned, for tears were welling in my eyes. Everything had been normalized, it seemed, and there would be an evening, after all. The two of us clomped down the stairs. The railing was on the right, so I leaned my crutch heavily against the wall on the left. I said nothing, secretly trying to overlook all the paint I had scraped off the plaster with the steel sleeve of my crutch. The plan had been for Caroline to walk up the square and hail a cab for Westbourne Grove, the local Curry Land. But I insisted on heading for the small restaurant around the corner from the tube station. I can't recall why. Perhaps I wanted to be near the scene of the urinary crime. It felt good to be out and walking, however poorly, to have dinner with a true friend.

And so seated in a wheelchair 30 years later and being pushed by a woman, months after my divorce, while not easy, quickly became manageable. If 'manageable' sounds an odd term for passively sitting and letting someone else do the propulsive work, try it yourself. Being pushed in a wheelchair brings one uncomfortably close to the perambulator stage of life. Caroline kept stopping the chair just short of the Red Leicester display. Never mind that it was not my favorite cheese -- the stuff was on sale, wasn't it? I didn't like being pushed, and in particular, I didn't like being pushed inexpertly.

Caroline eyed the shopping of a passing customer. 'Oh, Clive,' she said, 'that's expensive vodka. You must have a date.' The man, like half of the people shopping in Sainsbury's, was clearly one of Caroline's patients. He said that, yes, he was going out that evening.

'Lovely,' she said. 'Do stop by the chemist's and buy some condoms, won't you? I do hate sending you to the clap clinic.'

The man smiled and said that he would. We headed for the Stilton. This exchange, so utterly public, had left my head spinning. I told Caroline I was surprised that neither she nor the man seemed embarrassed.

'The Stilton is too expensive, darling. And, no, I hadn't given it much thought. I'm much more embarrassed by Tony Blair.'

This seemed incomprehensible to me. Not that it mattered. For I was feeling inexplicably better. And not thinking the least about the wheelchair.

Elizabeth Lumley-Smith, whom I last saw in the mid 1970s, declined my cousin's invitation to attend our 60th birthday party. Sorry, Liz said, but I'm not a party person. For some reason, this has stuck with me. Yes, 'not being a party person' seems like a feeble excuse. And yet this may be an entirely sincere response, that the demands of hours of extroversion among thousands of someone else's closest friends, may seem too much. But how much is too much? Once in 30 years can't we attend a party as a nonparty person? I'd like to see Liz. She lives near Bristol. It can't be all that hard to drop by. One of these years.

And it is the shortage of years that makes all of these missed opportunities begin to loom. It is also the shortage of information. Am I a party person, having just made an extraordinary effort to turn up for a four-hour event 5000 miles away? Maybe. Okay, so I find crowds tiring after a point, run out of things to say, run out, full stop. Or maybe I am a semi-party person. It's hard to say what sort of person I am, except an aging one. And even this quality defies easy explanation. In fact, the more I think I know myself, the less certain I am.

Writing is a disciplined business. Everyone knows this, and everyone says it. Writers need business hours, a set time when the ordeal begins, and a closing point when the end is in sight. Office hours. Regularity. I fully intend to become a regular sit-down-at-8:30-and-start-to-work writer. I fully intend this every morning, and I've been intending in this disciplined fashion for years.

Take this morning. I arose, made short work of making tea and making water, making haste through my shower and beyond. As 8:30 approached, I decided to deal with making airline reservations for a March trip. Couldn't this wait? Well, no, because, you know? Airline seats are always been plucked from the websites like eggs from a carton. Naturally, there was something that screwed up in the process and I had to call the airline, cancel the first reservation, and start afresh.

Once I'd done that, I rolled my wheelchair out to the front room to touch base with my co-commander. Our mission, lunch, was going to require some reconnoitering. Thus, the effects of chemotherapy. Marlou was feeling nauseated. And I was feeling worried. She looked wan and troubled. Very well, I told her, in a tone that owes much to my recent time in Britain, we'll just have to have lunch without food. Snappy, bright and upbeat, I was, so much so that I decided to lie down and have a momentary recovery. I do this several times a day, swooning. Stress. Things get too much. I am not a party person.

But I do have obligations, and one of them is to respond to my friend Jim -- his e-mail unanswered for these many weeks. So, I was back at the desk and pounding out my reply. Of course, I had to check hot-spring dates in the month of March. Which led me to check chorus rehearsal dates. Which led me back to Marlou's date with the Tumor Board. Which is a lot like the draft board, although even less fun. After which, I had another swoon and decided to have the shortest of second naps. Just a five-minute lie down. This time, Marlou joined me. I cradled her head, or did she cradle mine? Hard to say. All I know is that we lay side by side for 20 minutes or so, both of us conscious of Marlou's returning hair.

She estimates another two weeks for public display. This, I told her, is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to emerge as a punk rocker. Which everyone but me realizes is a retro phenomenon, by now, time having taken its awful toll. Never mind. I want to see Marlou in some tough boots, brass studs and metal parts embedded in her face, playing electric guitar for onlookers in downtown Menlo Park. After all, she has already gained a reputation for unpredictable public behavior, for dressing down illegal U-turning drivers in front of shocked cappuccino-drinking onlookers. Why not go for a little music in the park?

Because we're not party persons? Because we're cancer persons. OK. And here's our band, and our music, playing live in Fremont Park, our own mini square in our mini downtown. That tough looking chick up there, the one with the screaming, dissonant guitar, and the half-inch green hair, the one who is thrusting her hips toward Oakland and singing "fuck all of you effete latte-swilling liberals," that's my wife. I'm her agent. You got a party coming up?

I can't see taking this much farther, not beyond putting out a CD, going on tour. Which is unfortunate, because Marlou has a nephew who could help. The only certain thing could be the fines. Violating several Menlo Park ordinances involving loud music, creating a nuisance, operating a business without a license, attracting crowds without a permit. All of which would be actually worth it, if we could take our punk act into the chambers of the Menlo Park City Council, not to perform, just to plead our case.

Cancer did this to us. Once one of us had hair, and the other was losing his, then everything was reversed. Once one of us could have been a literary contender, but he got sidelined by excessive naps and head-holding mornings. We had no choice but to make a little noise, turn on an amplifier, shake things up a little. We don't have a schedule. Or maybe we have a different one. See you in the park across from Peets Coffee for our morning gig. And, yes, bring your lattes.

It's hard to say what lags behind in jetlag. But when your guts have sunk to the approximate level of your knees, and you can't muster the quadriplegic will to make it into the shower, there's a good chance that the eight hours you either gained or left behind or exchanged for antimatter...that jetlag has something to do with your current condition. On the other hand, when you find that you and your wife are sitting down to dinner and a familiar liberal-conservative argument over global warming, this can be said to be the point of turnaround in jetlag recovery. Marlou and I got to this point in just over 24 hours, something of a record.

Menlo Park has established a global warming task force, and I threatened to nominate Marlou. She didn't look terribly worried. In fact, her look implied that if her name came up for consideration, I could expect something equally horrible. Nomination to the San Mateo County Republican Committee, or some such. Good thing it was time for chorus rehearsal. Good thing the rehearsal ended early, for within about 45 minutes of madrigals, the bass and treble clefs were crossing like a game of tic-tac-toe.

Travel teaches us things, perhaps everything. This revealed how anxious I am about Marlou's cancer and our future. But even without jetlag, there's plenty to drain my solar plexus. And that I need to get recharged. And that having my cousin's Caroline?s two children insult me while careening about the highways of Gloucestershire is curiously good for the spirit. I haven't laughed so much in years. And I don't know how many years I have left to laugh. Neither does Marlou, and if she is aware of this fact and deals with it 20 times a day?she is facing fear in a way I am not. I don't like fear. It corrodes the soul.

Fear is enemy number one, at least in my life. It is the thing that stops me. It's the thing that makes me want to avoid my own home and what is happening in it. That makes me want to stay on in Gloucestershire or anywhere but Roble Avenue, as though the things that really matter to me are anywhere but under my own roof. What does matter to me? Fear drives me to answer this question. It drives me from my home and to it. Fear is the enemy of truth, and it is truth's messenger. Nothing wrong with truth, but we all need a little break from it. I've had mine. And I'm back.

And then it was party time. The tide had rolled in, left its froth, and was now slipping toward the sea of next things. Worry. Would there be enough people, after all? And had Caroline made too much food? What about those oranges? Were the bottom ones mashed beyond serviceability? What about the tensions? Would Ingrid turn up? Would Caroline talk to her? Would Ingrid talk to Caroline? What about the people in the village, how many names should I know? Above all, how would I have enough time to talk to friends, some of them dear friends, whom I hadn't seen in years? And considering that some of them had made a two-hour drive from London, what kind of cad would only spare them two minutes?

And then, seated at the kitchen table, I received the interested parties, one by one. What a luxuriant feeling. Some had brought gifts. But all had brought themselves. For it is an utter miracle that across years and many miles, I'm still so connected to so many people here. Evie, with whom I shared a wall and a stairway landing 35 years ago, was there along with people she shared a flat with 33 years ago, friends of Bob's. I was actually seated next to Sally, in the phase of the evening devoted to inexplicable English party games, hearing a very distant memory bell clang. Faint stirrings of I know that woman, or should know that woman, until she leaned over and pointed out that she knew me. And then most of it came back to me, in the couple of years after my return to California, when my life was there and my heart was still in London, and on some extended visit I either stayed with Evie and the tenants Tony and Sally, or saw a lot of them. What I remember was Sally's warmth and sexiness, how she seemed to have a lot to spare, even for me, which was why I distrusted her. And now, 35 years later, with those qualities still apparent, it seems that this was really Sally. Nothing phony or put on. Just a truly lovely English woman with a big heart. I wish I had understood this essential fact when I was 35. Or, better, 25. Now We Are 60.

As for Tony, he always had one of those extremely angular English faces. Now his has been squeezed over time to have its angles accented, even caricatured. Because 40 years have elapsed, he now looks more like a political cartoonist's sketch of himself. And I am certain that I must look the same way to him. A Jewish caricature. Now We Are 60.

There wasn't time to talk to everyone, but fate and the need for a comfortable sofa placed me in the tent, a.k.a., marquee, where I sat next to 20-ish Tom, the son of one of my English cousins, Sandy. Tom is bursting with tales of university life. How he is the campus projectionist, walks the Lake District with friends, has already moved into his own flat, one shared with mates. How international Warwick University has become, so that you can hardly study engineering without taking in a lot about life in Poland, Mexico and Rajasthan. His eyes are aglow, and, no, in response to a question from someone, he doesn't mind the least sleeping on the floor upstairs. He asks me several times if I want more food. And although the answer is no, I am tempted to say yes. Just have yet another helpful interaction with the next generation of rosy cheeked English kids.

Which is how the party ends, at 2 a.m., with Alexandra, Caroline's daughter dancing. Others are dancing too, but Alexandra stands out. She is the picture of young womanly enthusiasm, cheeks aglow in the best English tradition, utterly lovely in her dress of layers and frills. An older man is twirling her about, leaning her this way and that, displaying excellent technique at ballroom dancing. And she is delighted in the best tradition of English country girls. She seems comfortable with her own budding self. And in an era of disturbed adolescent girls distorted by someone else's vision of their sexuality, commercialized and hardened, Alexandra is utterly refreshing.

Which is why I feel almost privileged to have her help me take a few things upstairs at 2:30 a.m. The party's over. Her uncle, Bob, helps me take off my plastic leg brace. He started doing this sort of thing 40 years ago, and now I understand that his help, while not strictly speaking necessary, is part of our intimacy. Which is why, seated on the bed, atop the towel which I place there just in case there is an unexpected urinary mishap, that I see an opportunity. I feel I must say something about my last peeing mishap at his home in Paris. I want to tell him about my simple solution, the towel in the bed. After all, I want to visit him again. He listens, looks at me, and says I am wonderful person. Good night, he adds. Jake, yells the same as he hurtles up the stairs. I stretch out, stare into the darkness, and though it is after 3 a.m., I feel I may not sleep ever again, such is my excitement.

I have developed a soft country visitor habit here in Gloucestershire of sleeping in. In the first days this was attributable to jet lag, and although my internal clock may be off, so is my routine. I have none. And for once, this is okay. I have no duties here but to be here. I sit in the kitchen watching my cousin Bob chop carrots and feel a bit useless. But after 40 years of being at the margins of serious domestic projects, I've gotten accustomed to this. He also serves who only sits and comments. I ask Bob about the disastrous running of the Iraq war, and he shakes his head in disbelief. He tells me that America's policy community has been cowed in the most frightening way, adding that Paul Wolfowitz is now destroying the World Bank. He's about to move on to the onions and I make my way out of the kitchen and back to the study where I have another go at The Guardian.

In short, there is no schedule here, not for these few days, and at night I stay up as late, or go to bed as early, as I feel. Last night I felt like staying up. With chicken couscous for 150 quickly evolving in the kitchen, with the phone ringing incessantly, even El Al calling up to announce that the Sternberg's bags had been found and were being taxied from Heathrow to Gloucestershire, while everyone tried to remember who the Sternbergs were, with all this going on, naturally we went out for Indian food.

There's a new Bengali fusion place on the Fosse Way, the old Roman road, now known as the A44. It's called Gloucestershire Spice, and it's right on the highway, has parking around it and looks distinctly American. Unfortunately, it tasted the same way. Not to worry, for the outing was all about outing. Getting out of the crowded house, away from the chaotic kitchen, and letting someone else worry about this meal. Alexandra, my cousin's 17-year-old, was among those driving. She has a fresh, beaming quality, rosy cheeked and as un-Jewish as a milkmaid. Never mind. She has a car and offered to drive me the half-mile to dinner. We set off for the village of Shipston, which her brother in the back seat tells her is wrong, very wrong. And that she is very wrong, wrong to exist, wrong to drive, wrong to be dating a young man from the local fire college. She tells him that he is grotesque, worse than gross. An excrescence. Yes, he tells her, is proud to be these things. Proud and grateful not to be an empty headed country girl fawning over men with hoses. At least the men she knows have hoses, she says, which is more than can be said of Jake. Just drive, he tells her, for driving and talking is sufficient mental strain. The two of them are having a wonderful time, in short. And so am I. Our detour through the village has alarmed me, I tell Alexandra. She asks me how well I can walk these days, and assures me that the hike along the Fosse Way will do me good. This evening is doing me good. This is the new generation, my next set of bonds in Britain. And the bonds are strong. Ridiculing my disability, threatening to throw me out of the car, family.

After dinner, Bob, Jake and I stay up late and talk. We say amazing things. We show our vulnerability, always a difficult territory for men. Bob talks about the challenge of managing people, making decisions, feeling responsible for his band of European policy advisers. Jake is full of regret and failure for his early lapses in studies. I am full of regret and failure for everything. We tell each other these things, crossing generations, crossing boundaries. It's 12:30 a.m. when I head up the stairs. Bob offers to help me take off my shoes. No, I tell him, rushing to the bathroom. Moments later, Jake asks me the same question, and I tell him yes. Defenses are down this evening. Trust is high. And I can receive a bit of help from a man without loss of stature. Jake sits on the carpet, unstraps the Velcro of my leg brace and tells me that I have made a lasting impression on him. And, yes, he is certain that he is not the only one. I thank him. After he has left, I try to take this in, to sort it, to accept the news that through my being I add something to the world. Oddly, Bob and I were trying to tell Jake the same sort of thing earlier in the evening, to assure him that few people are Einsteins, but most are Smiths and Sternbergs. As we exchanged this knowledge, the three of us, I felt something in me shrink and expand at the same time. And now it is my job to absorb the same bolstering news from Jake. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling for a long time.

These days, it's my cousin's 60th birthday too, more exactly my cousins', Caroline and Bob, and the event is assuming epic proportions. The Cotswolds Marquee Company has called round with their heated tent, and the thing is now up and ready for action. God only knows where the heat comes from -- Alastair, Caroline's husband says that something burns, perhaps kerosene or paraffin, and the heater heats...it's that simple. God also only knows where the people are coming from, all 150 of them. That's why what is already a large country home now has a plastic annex, the polythene walls flapping in the latewinter wind. By my guess, at least one third of the Gloucestershire village of Todenham is turning up for this affair. This notion makes me vaguely uncomfortable, but not to worry. That's why God invented introverts. And although I fear the social demands of 100 villagers, virtually none of whom I know, and the few of whom I know having names I don't remember...the whole remarkable thing intrigues me. It's a party, a big one. Now We Are 60.

The kitchen is chaos. Who would guess that this authentically English 18th-century farm home is full of Jews arguing about food? The menu includes a couscous chicken dish, but the recipe is in dispute. In fact everything is in dispute. Not only do no two people agree on how to prepare the meal, there is also wide disagreement on how to preserve it.

Chopping, dicing, mincing, stirring, not to mention peeling and husking, have begun days before the party. At the center of current controversy: what to do about the oranges. Several hundred have been peeled and sliced, and are now being stored in a plastic garbage can. By 'stored,' one means placed outside. The temperature approaches 0 Celsius, so the outside is the refrigerator. This works splendidly at night, but most of us have little faith in the daytime. The temperature approached that of a cold California day this afternoon, and the oranges were on everyone's minds. Caroline insisted they could be left alone, that no harm would come to them in the final 24 hours pre-launch. I was of the opposite opinion, that given another mild afternoon like this one, we would have a sort of crude version of Cointreau ripening in the garbage can. Jake, Caroline's son, had a much more retail-display approach to the problem. Cut up some fresh oranges at the last minute, he suggested, place them on top, and no one will know the difference. Anyone digging down to the lower layer of old, mashed, and bacteriologically compromised oranges will probably be too drunk to know the difference.

Kitchen work is a great leveler. So is time. During my four years in Britain, almost 40 years ago, I watched as my second cousins advanced in careers, developed relationships, got their lives together, it seemed. In my competitive and envious sense of things, I was falling behind. I cut myself little slack, as they say, barely acknowledging that falling behind was probably better than falling over. Which I rarely did. I don't recall falling over on my daily quarter-mile walk to the local tube station, stumbling as I boarded buses or tripping over the heavy old carpets in my bedsitting room. Every disabled day was difficult, from showering to shopping. And the falling behind part haunted me constantly. Would I ever have a job, a girlfriend, a life?

These days, sitting in Caroline's Cotswold kitchen, observing others at work, some of these old feelings return. I do feel useless. Something in me emotionally tightens up when it's time to speak, to take the floor and demand attention. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm not British. I'm not good enough to be here and be part of things. Caroline and Bob have real jobs and real accomplishments. My only accomplishment is that I have survived. Survived to not only fight another day, but to have another day, and make it here for this day. To make it 6000 miles. To make it out the door and through the rain puddles of Todenham. Crocuses are bursting through the grass by the Todenham town hall. How do I know they were crocuses? A passing villager told me. I've had enough isolation and loneliness in my life to appreciate a casual chat with a passing stranger. A passing acquaintance. A passing moment, and one captured on my second cousin's mobile phone camera.

This is really what's made the difference, at least half of it. There's another generation now. Jake and Alexandra readily ridicule me, bring me cups of tea and treat me like an immutable member of the family. Something in me is more or less their age emotionally, so I feel quite comfortable with their badinage. Some things have been healed within me, while others have healed with time's passage in the world around me. It may look like the depth of winter to a Californian, but the crocuses are coming up. It's warmer -- all of it -- than I think.

The solar plexus begins draining somewhere over Iceland. Not that you are necessarily over Iceland. For, in fact, all you really know is that it's night, the cabin lights are off and all wise passengers are asleep. Most went to sleep after dinner, which was only about 7:30 p.m. California time, but the more sensible travelers are already on London time, eight hours ahead. But why be sensible? I haven't made this trip in awhile, and I'm excited. A chance to connect with Britain and things British, to be with extended family. To be with my extended self, which feels at home in the UK?and always imagines returning.

The thing about the solar plexus is that one doesn't really know how much it can drain. I mean, how much stuff is in there? And what is the "stuff?" It feels very much like the stuff of life, and the later one stays up, and the more one sits in an airline seat, breathing airline air and interacting with airline employees, the more sickening the whole experience feels. Why would anyone name an airline "Virgin?" Nothing about this experience seems virginal, let alone pure. The cabin crew have been around the service sector block, one can tell. They are smiling and helpful to the point of excess. Not that I mind, exactly. My real objection has to do with the buxom, red-cheeked and very English young woman who keeps calling me "honey," which just doesn't work coming out of an English mouth. This is an American expression, one that I associate with my wife or a waitress in a coffee shop in the Deep South. Actually, I know why I am being honeyed. I am old. I do wear my trousers rolled, and now I am so safely nonthreatening as to be a British flight attendant's honey.

But soon I'm too tired to worry about this. I have other fish to fry. Intestinal fish, for example. I keep thinking about the distance between my seat and the toilet. I regret drinking all that iodine for my pre-trip CT scan. Either I have a hernia or I don't. There's not much I can do about it over Iceland. But it is over Iceland that I finally work out the obvious. The same iodine mothers used to dab over cuts, producing a nicely antiseptic blood-like stain on the skin, probably does the same thing to the intestinal tract. I cinch my seatbelt a bit tighter, then loosen it. Everything under the seatbelt is loosened already -- that's the problem. And I now understand that this intestinal loosening is due to iodine. Which isn't meant to be dumped into one's digestive system anymore than one is meant to fly. No wonder something in me is losing the will to go on as this trip approaches 1 a.m., California time. I can't read anymore. I can't watch another film. And yet when the lights suddenly come on and I lift the window shade to stare at morning over the Outer Hebrides, my spirits lift too. Who knows if those are really the Hebrides. All one can see is clouds, which do get more impressive as we turn over the Irish Sea, this latter detail verified by the captain. Big, white cumulus clouds, powerful and playful at the same time. And dammit if I'm not feeling playful myself. I am more than half paralyzed, 60 years old, and I need all the play I can get.

The wheelchair pushers employed by the British Airports Authority give the impression of having acquired a good education and a solid knowledge of the world. The man who pushes me through Heathrow seems to get older as we cross an English county or two, such are the distances. There's something happening here, something in the sum total of Czech Airways, Gulf Air and Air Dubai. Why does one need an enormous 747 to fly to a dinky principality on the Persian Gulf? There's something happening here, and it has to do with the modern world, and at 60 years of age, it's too much for me. The Heathrow man fills in my landing card, for which I am infinitely grateful. The immigration woman asks me whom I am visiting. For a moment, I can't recall. Am I visiting? Or do I live here? Never mind, she implies, stamping my passport.

I am pushed into the enormous customs hall, and I'm relieved to find that my real wheelchair, the one with batteries, is fully functional and rolling toward me, with its night lights on. I overlook this detail, hauling myself up from the plastic airport wheelchair and into the real manly thing. We set off, the Heathrow man and I, for the train. I flash my out-of-date British rail card hoping for the disabled discount, and the clerk doesn't bat an eye, producing a bargain round-trip ticket. Not that anything in Britain is a bargain for Americans these days. I don't understand what's happened to our dollar, but then I don't really understand what's happened to our nation. And never mind all that, for the time being. For I'm on a train, and if I wasn't on this one I would be on the next one. Which would have manifested in 15 minutes. And in fact, 15 minutes is all it takes to whoosh from Heathrow to Paddington Station at the edge of the West End. The world is supposed to be like this. And the world gets even better at Paddington where an affable Nigerian drives up in a golf cart with a blue wheelchair symbol, flings my bags in the back and drives me to the handicapped waiting room. Yes, these days there is one. There, the man stacks my luggage in a corner and tells me to keep an eye on the bags. Yes, this is Britain too, the land of petty theft. I'm feeling petty myself, and suddenly have an insurmountable need to read the morning's Guardian. I want to know who Gordon Brown really is. I want to know how deeply Guardian journalists feel the shame of the UK being ranked second in the United Nations' report of countries with bad conditions for young people. The United States is first in this list, and I cringe at the knowledge that some in my country take this as a sort of compliment.

In any event, this is what the Guardian promises, and it's what I need. I roll out of the handicapped waiting room and find myself in a jostling sea of people. In Britain, railway stations are still alive. People actually use them, people in huge numbers. No, I don't want an Evening Standard, the newspaper currently on sale in the newsagents' stalls around the platforms. Though I regularly bought the afternoon edition when I was headed home on the Tube, 35 years ago. And is it possible that I actually walked everywhere, even trudging through cavernous Paddington Station with a crutch? I doubt that anyone here would believe me today. I barely believe this historical fact myself.

For now, I roll inside WH Smith, give a Bengali 70 pence and roll out. Back to the handicapped waiting room before my bags are stolen. Which, of course, is unlikely for there is an actual staff of people in this office carrying elderly persons to and from trains, accompanying wheelchair users like me, and generally keeping the lame, halt and blind on the move around southern Britain. When it's time for my train, I've made it enough into the Guardian to know I've made it in general. The Great Western train blasts towards Oxford and beyond. It actually achieves train speeds in the 90 mph range, although it has to stop frequently for passengers who want to step off at the likes of Kingham and drive through all these beautiful green fields, fresh, breezy and full of standing water. The conductor asks me where I'm going, and I tell her "God only knows." She laughs. Britain.

Morten-in-Marsh, my station, and my batteries are charged, and my solar plexus is once again whole.

Marlou has had it with my fingernails. She eyes them regularly, remarking that they are something out of L'enfant Sauvage. Needless to say, this is a sore point. The amount of time I devote to considering my nails and their condition can be reckoned in the nanoseconds. In fact, with Marlou occupied with the work of cancer recovery, I am surprised that she has any neurons to spare on this trivial matter. Yes, there was a time when she clipped my quadriplegic nails, regarding them like a zookeeper tending to the claws of an untidy marsupial. The curved fingers of my paralyzed right hand collide with the physical world at odd angles, routinely splitting, chipping and roughing the nails. When they grow too long, I sometimes have a go at them with nail scissors - there's a way to work around the paralysis. This is a colossal waste of time, and the strategic use of teeth makes so much more sense, my jaw being neurologically intact. Either way, the results aren't pretty or smooth.

So, one day last week, I rolled through the doorway of the solution. Sky Nails, in downtown Menlo Park. I felt that I had just crossed some sort of force field or invisible shield in entering this girls' establishment. In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that Marlou explained to me that "day spa" had nothing to do with steam baths and Jacuzzis but was, in fact, wholly devoted to nails at either end of both extremities. All nails, all the time, all day. No night spas, apparently. So what makes it Sky Nails? Ask Rupert Murdoch what makes it Sky News. The sky's the limit. And this was my limit, somehow, enlightened though I think I am a vague taboo probably established long ago, that this is a girls' space. Boys go elsewhere. But quadriplegics go anywhere and everywhere sometimes landing in the world of Tupperware and ready-to-wear. Sky Nails.

Vietnam doesn't have a monopoly on fingers, but Sky Nails has cornered the market on Vietnamese fingernail servicing. The proprietor, evident in the tone she addressed the others on staff, quietly directed me to one of the fingernail stations. I got it wrong the first time, turning my wheelchair opposite the work area. I also got it wrong the second time, trying to align the chair with the wrong side of the table. In the end, the proprietor gave up and placed a cushion on my lap. She pulled up a chair and began working over my nails. The process began with some clippers, the average, normal fingernail clippers you can buy at any drugstore. I found this rather galling. The equipment was ordinary, available only a few doors down the same street, and the clipping process took all of three minutes. I was quite prepared to pay and depart, but no, this was only the overture. Now there was filing. Okay. Everyone knows about filing carpenters metal workers the last-minute attention to smoothing out, removing burrs, eliminating snags. The latter, according to Marlou, is what's wrong with my fingernails. They snag her. Splendid. We were at the de-snagging stage of things, fingernails appropriately sized and now attractively smoothed. Time to reach for the wallet? Forget it.

Cuticles. I can anatomically identify cuticles and do not dispute their existence. I do, however, dispute their importance. They do not concern me. They do not weigh heavily upon my soul. They do what cuticles do, acting as a buffer zone between fingers and fingernails. They require no attention, just as the white area around a printed page separates text from binding in an automatic, maintenance-free style. Don't look at your watch while Mai -- as in Mai Tai -- probes at your cuticles. She appears oblivious to such subtleties. She is in no hurry. There is something wrong with your cuticles, something you never considered, which is that they have grown in a natural way over your nails. Stand by. Mai will correct this defect. I stared hopelessly at her probing and shoving. I was certain there would be an end to this.

Of course, there was. But there is no end to a manicure, in the sense of objective. Well, there is, but that end is feminine in the sense of pleasurable and aesthetic. And these are dimensions I am normally attuned to, except that Sky Nails seemed taboo women's space, and I had the acute sense of taking up too much of same. Which explains why I furtively glanced about, trying to ascertain what was happening with the three women who were undergoing various stages of fingernail and toenail work. One had tilted her head back, either dozing or in a state of samadhi, clearly enjoying the work underway on her hands. One was talking about her toenails. The other was chatting about her work at home. Good. Maybe I wasn't in the way, disapproved of, all eyes upon me like Rosa Parks in the front of the bus.

A fourth woman entered. She was older and walked with an unusually stiff shuffle, tilting here, staggering there, a milder version of Frankenstein's gait. She settled into a chair, all smiles, even smiling at me, the unaccustomed male. She presented her hands for inspection, and one of Mai's young women turned her nails this way and that, while I started. The woman's fingers were abnormally short, abnormally straight, even bent slightly backwards like the legs of certain birds. Her hands were flaccid, muscles withered. I took this in, mentally adjusting for advanced rheumatoid arthritis. Another disabled person. My shoulder is killing me, she said to the young woman bent over her hands. There was no reaction. It was entirely possible that the manicurist did not understand. Besides, the elderly woman was staring into space now, smiling in pain. She was attractively coiffed, hair teased up like a forest of parentheses. Nicely made up, too. In short, she was pretty. She bravely forced a smile. I wondered if the manicure hurt her fingers.

I had half forgotten about Mai. By now, she was going through the wash and spin cycle. One hand was to sit in a milky bowl of water, while the other got buffed. The process reversed itself, and just when it seemed over, Mai hauled out another filing stone, followed by a polishing stone. Followed by the return of the cut-and-pick snippers. She was on a search and destroy mission, Mai was, merciless when it came to cuticle irregularities. None were to be tolerated. She kept cutting tiny nibs here, snipping miniscule bumps there. I had to give myself credit for a certain degree of bladder control.

Keep the change, I told Mai when it was all over. I didn't want the five dollars. I wanted her to have a tip, me to have a life. And now I saw that I was not an intruder. Except in the sense that the arthritic woman and I always felt like intruders, wherever we were. Our eyes met for one final moment, me displaying my warm smile of acknowledgment and it's no big deal she beaming in a way that says it's all perfectly normal and okay. Some subliminal truth passed between us, having to do with pain and shame and embarrassment, along with desperation. A sad moment, perhaps, but real as Sky Nails, real as the Mekong.
---

I'm not sure what Avery was doing last summer when we jointly sewed our second crop of butter lettuce. We worked side by side, our sides being more or less at the same altitude when he stands and I sit in my wheelchair. As a nonparent, it seems surprisingly natural to get into joint activity mode with a child. Part teaching, part wildlife observation, with the exasperation potential always high…yet something flows like a river, something that tells you to forget the utility of the endeavor and tune in. If you want agricultural productivity, call Cargill. If you want agriculture at its least mechanized and most primal, call four-year-old Avery.

The problem with seeding a garden with your local preschooler is that in the end you have something pretty far from the original plan. So you have to let go of plans the way Avery lets go of seeds…totally and at the last moment. In fact, our lettuce seed was getting flung around so erratically that there came a point when I was more than happy to have Buffie, Avery's mother, take over. She shook out carrot seeds in neat rows, while talking to Avery, occasionally letting him hold part of the packet, but keeping her eye on the mission. Dammit if everything wasn't getting nurtured, botanical and human. No wonder the experience was inexplicably intense and exhausting. Still, something competitive in me was already relishing the day when I could pointedly eye the sprouting lettuce and muse aloud about the odd absence of carrots. The message being "Avery, we may be a little uncoordinated and paralyzed, respectively, but our thumbs are still green, and we've got that agrarian je ne sais quoi."

And so it was a little surprising when carrot tops shot from the earth in a week -- with not a single lettuce sprout in sight. A month later I had concluded that the seeds were a dud. And weren't we all a little tired of silly lettuce names? Butter lettuce, indeed. Iceberg. The lettuce head that sank the Titanic. I think not. And within six weeks I had given up on the butter lettuce, grateful that I had also planted romaine. We let things go. We move on.

Though certain memories keep chasing me, and they all have to do with gardening. I was maybe seven years old when my mother sprinkled carrot seeds in a slightly raised bed rimmed by desert rocks beside our home. This was the only portion of her extensive gardens devoted to vegetable growing. The rock-bordered bed was adjacent to our front gate, right up against the harsh oleanders and splintery wooden fence that protected us from the outside world. And just across the entranceway sidewalk, with low privet hedges on one side, and that arcing, pie-shaped patch of Juniper on the other. None of these plantings were inviting, not even the irises in their sandy desert patch. But the small vegetable plot felt warmer. I dug around there with my mother, engaged and at peace. I believe my mother may have found relative moments of calm in gardening.

Left to its own devices, southern California soil hardens like a brick, a propensity the late 18th century Spanish explorers found useful in building their forts and Franciscan missions. This hardening proves more problematic for a 12-year-old, and in the autumn of 1959 things weren't going so well with me and my hoe, hacking at the ground beside my father's driveway. By then, my parents had gotten divorced, and my brother and I were living with my father in an apartment above his office. Converted from an old, once prosperous house, the home/office was distinctly un-homey. And the only part of this that seemed changeable to my 12 year old mind, was the grounds. The land hadn't been tilled, turned or tended for decades, and the gravel driveway felt particularly harsh. That's why I decided to create a small, triangular garden, right in a spot where the two sections of driveway split. There were going to be flowers, of what type I wasn't certain, but something green and colorful. I found old sections of wooden trellis, arranged them in a triangle and hoped they wouldn't fall over. In softer soil, it would have made sense to dig a trench and sink the wooden pieces into the ground. But this was unthinkable in the hard desert clay. I devoted all my energy to hacking and picking at the pathetic ground.

I was at work in this garden triangle one Saturday when my father wandered outside. He was angry and agitated. I thought he would be pleased to see my landscaping underway, but his mind was elsewhere. He was delivering a sort of year in review. It had been the year of divorce, the year when my parents took separate trips at the Christmas school holiday, and I ended up spending the next six months with my aunt and uncle in upstate New York, theoretically a better place to be while their marriage split up. Now my father stared at the hard ground. You took care yourself pretty well, he told me. You got yourself set up for a pretty cushy six months in New York while I had to battle your mother, he said. It was understood between us that we were somehow equals, he and I, me a little adult, he a big one, and battling the mother-wife was an unspoken joint endeavor.

His words cut and stung, and I protested, felt crushed and betrayed and ran inside crying. In the following weeks, I made some minor progress on the triangular garden patch, actually getting some seeds planted and growing. In retrospect, they would have grown much better in soil of the sort I now work in my raised beds here in Menlo Park. But I made do, and the flowers did their best, desert ground being always grateful for water. Within three years my father's medical practice had more or less collapsed, and we were moving to Riverside, a small city an hour from Los Angeles. We packed our possessions in boxes. The movers came. And on the final day I stood in the empty and unused lot behind our soon to be abandoned house.

The place had never felt like home, but nothing did. In this, my last autumn in Banning, California, my gardening efforts had retreated to this derelict, weedy ground. I had long since given up on the triangular garden in the front of the place. Now I had a couple of withered tomato plants struggling for life. It was December, and any sensible adult would have told me to give up on tomatoes. But I didn't trust giving up. I tended the failing tomatoes the way a caveman maintained his fire. In fact, even though my father was throwing the last few things in the car, the moving van had long since departed, and I knew I would never see this place again, this strange idea came into my mind.

I would take an abandoned miniature hibachi, a tiny cast iron barbecue toy, place some charcoal in it, and light the thing. The warmth would smolder on and on and keep the tomato plants going. They would make it through the winter, heated the way orange growers lit oil fires in the groves when a freeze threatened. I couldn't let go of the idea, even though I knew it was unrealistic, childish. I stared at the plants, staked and supported by old sections of an Erector Set. I had given up on the metal toy pieces, having outgrown them. But I had not outgrown keeping things alive, daily pouring a hose over the weak soil, watching the plants struggle. I wondered if the tomatoes could struggle on without me and my water and my glowing hibachi, in the dry desert cold. I got in the car and headed to Riverside.

All of which may explain why when Marlou's PET scan results came in last week I couldn't scream and shout. I wanted to, for life demands it at times, times when joy bursts forth…and something Dionysian wants to kick butt. But the PET scan isn't the whole story, or the whole story isn't completed, and the other shoe may drop. So let's be cautious and smile faintly and hope for the best. Even though this may be the best. The best ever.

Even though Avery's butter lettuce seeds, the one he ineptly released in one handful in a corner of the garden, have come to life, nine months later. A succession of crops have come and gone, including, yes, tomatoes. In fact, the entire bed has been raked and seeded with a cover crop, now shifting into warm weather growth.

Marlou's cancer cells were lingering for years, unnoticed and improbable. Just as Avery's lettuce seeds have been hanging out in the garden soil, waiting apparently. For what? To go through a succession of mild California seasons, including the coldest weather in years. After which has come this, an early lettuce spring. With a tight clump of butter lettuce growing and crowding and jostling for garden space. It makes no sense, and it has to be seen to be believed. Or maybe it has to be believed to be seen.

25 January

In one earlier era of my life, in what was a mind-stretching and eminently worthwhile exercise for an artsy type -- I worked with scientists. Ours was distinctly parallel play. And "worked with" is probably overstating it. The scientists did their work, I wrote articles about their work. And everyone was happy, more or less. One of the happiest science writing experiences was Arlon Hunt. He was a solar energy researcher, profoundly imaginative, and years after I left my laboratory job, I went back to write one more time about Arlon for the San Francisco Chronicle. And then about a year ago, I decided it was time to do this again. Arlon and I had an exchange of e-mails. Sure, he wrote, let's get together. We'll talk. We'll do lunch. We'll do an article.

Somehow in the course of life, I let this matter lapse. There was no lunch, no article. But Arlon was a hard scientist to forget about, so when a young friend told me of his interest in solar energy, I knew just the man. I e-mailed Arlon, finally, to set up lunch. Since I collect e-mails the way obsessive-compulsives collect old newspapers in their attics, I pulled my last communiqué with Arlon out of my Outlook reservoir. I was a little wrong about the historical timing. It wasn't "about a year ago" that we had discussed lunch. It was five years ago. Half a decade. I noticed on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory website that Arlon is now listed as "retired" and "former" in several of his research and administrative titles. It's hard to say what this means. People as intellectually impassioned as Arlon don't retire. Usually. But it means one thing for certain. Life is rushing by. Time really is taking on another dimension.

Fortunately, there's the young friend. Oliver. Ollie. He's 22, the age at which I arrived in London, and a perfect opposite. For he, from London, has arrived in San Francisco. It might be said that Ollie is seeking his fortune, finding his way toward independence and career focus in a year off between undergraduate and graduate studies. It might be said that I was seeking a life, in the decades, presumably, between getting paralyzed and dying. Ollie is the son of London friends, people I knew in my early 20s. It's all coming full circle.

I guess it's because Ollie seems a sensitive young man with strong connections to people, that I tend to identify with him. But it's a tricky word, "identify." After all, in its purest definition, it simply means spot, label, ascertain who is who or what is what. The other meaning, which has to do with a sympathetic feeling of similarity between two people, that's another matter. And that's where I get, and perhaps have always gotten, a little confused. Surely this sort of confusion is easily cured by having kids. There's a sharp distinction between adults like me who play with kids, and those who have to raise them, such as Ollie's parents. It doesn't take long to see what that difference involves. Discipline. Lowering the boom. Drawing lines. There's only a certain amount of room for "identifying" with your son or daughter. The rest of the room is occupied by guiding them, disciplining, encouraging and generally raising. This requires a certain distance.

And maintaining that distance does not come naturally to someone who has experienced too much distance in his own childhood. No, distance does not feel good. Yet in adulthood, the opposite doesn't feel good either. The fact is, I'm not 22. I can't be this young man's pal, go drinking with him, hang out with his friends. I wouldn't want to, and he wouldn't want me to. Everyone would be uncomfortable, excruciatingly so. Still, I find it easy to get swept up in Ollie's quest. He's a hopeful young man in a world that badly needs hope. So, I find myself helping him make connections. This feels like something I can give without getting in his face. It's a natural drive, the need to pass on the stuff of life from one generation to the next, regardless of one's parental experience or inexperience. The problem is that I'm not confident in this role, whatever it is.

I wasn't raised by the most reliable and trustworthy adults, so I'm distrustful of authority. And society itself is a fractured place, roles turned inside out, traditions eviscerated. I spent half my time trying to make up for lost ground in childhood. The notion of taking the lead in things doesn't naturally occur to me. I've had to half invent myself and much of my life. This notion is generally pleasing to Americans, self-invention. I find it fatiguing, not to mention essentially false. When it comes to our roles in the community, we need a community. We need a lot of things.

I need something like the badge for meritorious service awarded to the lion in the Wizard of Oz. Symbolic, yes, but absolutely essential, awarded by the elder, recognized by the community. The market of okayness. People like Robert Bly would say that I need initiation. In my case, initiation sounds splendid. I seem to have been through much of the first part, the ordeal. And even if there is another, I'm certainly ordeal-tested.

Still, I feel uncertain of my role. But, then, I'm uncertain of everything. What I have learned is that young people who manifest a keen interest in green businesses, solar energy, and anything that has to do with human survival in a deteriorating world -- they deserve the best we can give them. It's a natural, organic response, and if I'm not absolutely clear about my part…at least I know I have one. This hasn't always been true. But it's true now.

That's why I've got to check my e-mail for word from Arlon. Time is moving on at an exhausting pace. It's time to hand progress over to people with endurance. But the handoff has to be done a certain way. An elder way. The essential rule: someone has to be looking up. Not looking out. But up. And maybe looking upward is the secret of standing tall.

15 January

Everything is transmuting. That is the important thing to understand. I want Marlou to exercise, thinking it may be her last hope against cancer, perhaps the only thing that will magically boost her immune defenses just enough to kill the murderous cells. She isn't sure if she wants to. Exercise, she says, has always been among her least favorite activities. Is she disappointing me? The answer is yes, but not in any fundamental way. For all I know, exercise is an exercise in futility. And maybe it's just not her. More importantly, she is facing everything with such courage, and during this possible appointment with death with such strength, who can criticize the rest? It's up to her, I have said. Disappointment? This is not the way I would do things. But I have left open the possibility that she may know something I don't. That there are more ways to fight. And there are more ways to face death than fighting.

At least we are not fighting over this, not in any protracted way. And this is what has transmuted. Forces larger than ourselves are at work. Including our relationship. Which is larger than either of us individually. Everything is up in the air. I'm holding on and letting go at the same time. To Marlou. To everything.

Well, not quite everything. These days I have one extant corporate job. A website, a small one, that needs a redo. Okay, so I understate the task. Fairly stated, the task involves taking my rusty commercial copywriting skills out of their repository, coming face-to-face with my loathing for such work, and knuckling down. Actually, "loathing" is rather silly in this context. For the truth is that loathing is quite ephemeral. The work you loathe one day can be a pleasant diversion tomorrow. This is moment-to-moment stuff. More to the point, I am now 60 years old. This is not the spring of my chickenhood. Not only is the bloom off the rose, the canker is in the stem, the rot setting into the root, and rust upon the leaves. For a copywriter, it's time for kaddish. The theme here? Give up. The task: revise a website with all the sprightly verbiage you were able to muster 20 years ago. How can I tell Burt, friend and CEO of a small company, that I can't do this shit anymore?

Maybe I can do it. In any case, Burt just e-mailed me my latest web copy iteration with a few comments and corrections. And I fell into a paroxysm of self-loathing. I am stupid. I am foul. I am anxious.

Has this sort of thing changed with Marlou's confrontation with mortality? Unfortunately, no. But there has been a shift in the balance of power. The moments of self recrimination seem to be somewhat shorter in duration. This is the best I can say.

All of which goes to prove something about self-preservation. Even in the face of death, people persist in the most remarkably self-destructive habits. And not just self-destructive, but somewhat milder variants, a self-undermining, let us say. Wouldn't the appearance of the Grim Reaper sober up a person, raise the stakes in a way that raises the consciousness? Such as, enough of this self-hatred, self-criticism, self punishment?

No, because in an odd way the self is being preserved.... Because the spirit won't be crushed. Never mind if someone is trying to force feed us a life-saving medicine. It's still force that must be resisted. Okay, so it undermines the physiology. It preserves the soul -- or seems to. Self-flagellation because a friend/client wants some changes to his website? What self is this preserving? In my case, it's the kid who couldn't get anything right, while his parents tore each other's guts out.

Primal fears demand primal defenses. And, no, they don't make a lot of sense. But they do pack a lot of punch. Fuck you, I'm not taking any of this shitty medicine, and save your own life. The spirit is wilder than we think. The good news is that we think. Okay, sometimes we only think that we think. Still, there is the chance for control and direction and…intelligent life somewhere inside my brain. At least, there could be. I think.

12 January

I had never until this moment grasped the warmth and beauty inherent in the clinics, waiting rooms halls and toilets of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. I want to cozy up in some carpeted corner, recline before a nonexistent fire, clutch members of the staff to my breast. This is home, it would seem. There is a coziness, a sense of welcome about the place. And since moments ago I had believed myself to be exiting the building to return home….

When I do depart, I will now appreciate even the car park in ways not possible earlier in the day. No, it is not a nondescript concrete expanse mounted high on the structure and probably ideal for landing helicopters. It is a terrace, enclosed by faux Moorish colonnades, and it does not only accommodate cars, but embraces them.

I am fresh from an egg-ham-and-cheese gallette, and pleasantly caffeinated by a double latte, served up late in the day by a small restaurant in the adjoining shopping center. The lateness is due entirely to my medical morning. I've just had my annual physical, fasted as instructed by the Medical Foundation's website. And now that it is all over, I've had my fill of a late breakfast. Although I have not yet cleared that final hurdle, the blood analysis, I seem to be in the home health stretch.

No, my general practitioner said, brain tumors of your father's type are not particularly inherited. And where was that tumor located, he asked? Hadn't a clue, I told him, the thought crossing my ebullient mind that it was none of his business. Don't look 60, he added. He even told me that he had doubled checked his computer screen to make sure that the birthdate I had entered on my annual-physical form was, in fact, accurate. Never mind the apparent contradiction in the story, the sense that I might've gotten my own birthday long. Never mind anything. Particularly in the next round with the dermatologist.

Nothing worrisome. No melanomas readying their big cancer guns for an assault on my life. In fact, nothing of any particular interest to either doctor except what may be a recurring hernia. Possible surgery there, but a known quantity. And not exactly life-threatening.

Which is why, medical exams behind me, infused with egg and latte, passing from the shopping center through the clinics to my car, I change my mind. Yes, it is cozy here, and I'll just nip down to Oncology to gather some information on support groups. Perhaps there's a new flyer. On the way in, the receptionist asks if she can help. Wonderful, being offered help. I tell her about my mission, and she directs me down a short side hall rather than through the cumbersome door I usually enter when Marlou is here getting her weekly chemotherapy. The hall is crowded, lined with patients and their families. The cancer support group flyers still appear to be out of date. Never mind. I grab an old one and head home.

Once there, I give the nurse leader of the cancer support group a ring. No, the group described on the flyer for husbands of cancer patients has not been meeting for a year and a half. I already knew this. But there is a monthly meeting for colon cancer patients and families. I already knew this, too, Marlou and I having rejected this meeting in favor of rehearsals with the Menlo Park Chorus, to which we attribute substantially greater healing powers. Although while music's charms are soothing the savage cancer, I will still be wondering about this group. There appears to be no group. Oh, there's a general gathering of assorted cancer patients on Monday afternoons. But this means any and all cancer patients, breast, lymphoma, thyroid. They let just any cancer patient in there, and we have our standards where cancer support groups are concerned.

Life is a dream, Calderón and several others have observed. I seem to have dreamed much of mine in and around the medical world, having been conceived by a doctor and a nurse, then embarking upon a virtually lifelong career of neuromuscular survival. Odd and even a little scary that I find such comfort in certain medical moments. But I have found comfort where I can in life, making the strangest adaptations along the way. But the real way leads elsewhere. It's nice to have a favorable medical verdict on this particular day. But in the end, the jury will decide differently. I am the one who infuses the fluorescent and carpeted interior of a medical building with hope, a survival instinct that projects my own optimism onto the Great Medical Mother. Who exists only in the sense that she exists within us all. In my mind, I am back at the clinic, gazing at the big round apron of a parking area and thinking less about the potential for cars or helicopters, than the way the curving flatness opens to the sky.

Marlou has decided she is beautiful. I decided this long ago. But she has had to decide this again, because conditions have changed. Like all of us, she's older. But like few of us, she is bald. A woman's hair and all it symbolizes, such as femininity and fertility, it's all gone. For now. But because in the face of life-and-death health matters, "now" seems to be all there is, Marlou's restored hair is not always easy to envision. Rapunzel, Rapunzel. Hanging loose, opening up, letting down your hair. Logically, there is every reason to anticipate the return of hair and all that goes with it. But it is hard to say what goes with it. What goes with both of us these days, wherever we are, is the next PET scan. In a few weeks this will reveal the presence, or absence, cancer in Marlou's body.

Meanwhile, Marlou has decided that she has a body, thank you very much, and that she likes it. She likes her face, her smile, and hair or not, she has gone to considerable lengths to have several photographic portraits made. At the time, I must confess, I had my doubts about both the project and the process. Why, at this time, was it so necessary to make all these photos in headscarves? Poses ala Vermeer under way upstairs, another set of shots downstairs, seated in the antique chair of the front room, our photographer friend Clint, ascending and descending the stairs, staying up all hours to Photoshop his work into perfection. For several days, our life had a Hollywood production quality.

Marlou had her reasons for all this and discussing them was something of a conversation stopper. She had seen enough chemo patients in our outpatient cancer center to know what might lie ahead for her. She wanted a portrait for others to remember her as she was now, with her life intact, her head together even while separated from its hair. Time for a portrait. Perhaps the last time. Certainly no better.

The photography came in a month or frantic activity. When Marlou wasn't writing chatty e-mails, she was lining things up with her decorator, planning menus and activities for two parties and mapping out work projects around our two-apartment home. The frenzy disturbed me. Having grown up with a mother who lived her life in a state of controlled hysteria, a wary eyebrow rises around frenzied women. Never mind the fact that I spent much of my youth being attracted to frenzied women. We don't go there, not now, having been there for what seemed like an eternity.

Of course, Marlou is not the frenzied type. If she has a temperamental goal, it is repose. I vaguely knew this last month while domestic activity churned around us. I kept my bearings, mostly trusting that Marlou would keep hers. Because when it comes to bearings, Marlou is bearing a lot. She is bearing up. Bearing a burden. Bearing down on what is important in life.

One of the first steps in healing, according to a book Marlou is now reading, involves a decision: you decide you are beautiful. And what does this mean? That you have beauty, inner and outer, that is not only worthy of appreciation, but worthy of love. And by swift extension, that you are worthy of love. Not only by people, but by life, creation, God. I like this progression of thoughts, of awareness. For whether or not such an attitude heals disease, it certainly heals the losses associated with cancer andwith life. If we all held onto, and forever believed in, our own essential beauty as human beings, we would bounce through the rough streets of existence like one of the better Mercedes.

So, what brought Marlou to this strengthening of her own spirit's shock absorbers and suspension? In fact, could this really be an engine overhaul? If so, I need one myself. Believing that I am okay, let alone beautiful in some core way, is not exactly part of my daily experience. But I'm open to lessons and to change. Marlou is discovering something for both of us. She has gotten to the heart of the matter…and found that heart is what matters. Matter being transient and unreliable, while the heart and our capacity for caring and for love sustains us through and beyond life. Can anyone understand these things? Not if we only think about them. Marlou is actively working in the medium, molding, shaping, staying up too late, and if not taking up smoking, acting like she might. Life has become messy and obsessive and disordered, and in all the right kinds of ways.

I grew up in a state of fear and forever believe that the stuff of life will be taken from me. It is hard to trust. Still, Marlou is teaching me is that we make choices, control what we can, steer life to the extent that it is possible. And Marlou and her portraits and her frenzies probably represent both intuition and fear. A natural voice that guides our better selves, and the terror that makes us cringe and watch a lot of television. They can coexist, these forces. The important thing, especially in the face of terror, is to take action.

4 Jan. 07

The last thing I remembered, I was having this dream about some guys who lived in Marin County in a tumbledown vacation home and were having trouble with their cat, the trouble having to do with the cat's wages -- which the cat was trying to explain, were going up. Until I arrived on the scene and the cat fixed his eyes on me, hoping that I, being a communicator, would bridge the gap between cat language and human language, though I failed in this regard.... And the next thing I knew, I was awake and hot. Being hot is not entirely without precedent, but it's enough these days to convince me that my body is out of kilter and a sure sign of cancer. Why cancer? Because that's what Marlou has, and those of us desperate for closeness and raised by the not most cuddly of mothers, react this way. We merge, we identify, we take on the other person's stuff. No, it doesn't make sense, but it makes up for lost time in a strange sort of way. This is my life's fullest experience of intimacy, and it's what I do.

As for the heat, it has to do with our apartment's thermostat. Marlou sets it high, I set it low, and as weather fronts roll in and roll out, it is entirely possible to roll out of bed and confront a morning on the warm side. It's raining. And I'm sitting on the edge of the bed hot, groggy and, being awash in cancer anxiety, trying to find what the enlightened call one's center. The center cannot hold, according to Yeats, and dammit if he isn't right. This one is oozing and wavering. It's my call center, I decide. It's the place from which responses emanate. It's the place you call with problems. It's supposed to be available 24/7, and it's not supposed to be in Bombay, either. But this morning it is not only unavailable and offshore, it may not even exist. Perhaps it never did. And this is the challenge of living with change and anxiety. Remembering that you are living with change anxiety, not freefalling through a cyclone.

This morning my confidence is so shaken that I skip the shower, get dressed and make for the door. Marlou is up and helping me get my gear on, my keys and handkerchief in place. Somehow, I thought it would be better if I leapt out first this morning. 8 a.m. breakfast with a friend in Palo Alto. Marlou's chemo appointment is at 8:40, which means that I don't have to watch her go. No one is wandering out the door for treatment, or so one can believe. Still, I can't resist a final briefing. Will she ask the doctor about her resurgence of appetite? Marlou wonders if this hunger has something to do with her liver, and not something good.

And the chemo schedule for the next few months. We have this idea about travel. Yes, Marlou tells me, she has written these questions down. She will ask the doctor. I nod. Somehow this exchange is not satisfying. I am not sure what to say, except that it breaks my heart that we have come to this. Life in the balance, every medical appointment fraught with fear, and for me, losses piled atop losses.

I return from breakfast, and Marlou is gone. Although I can imagine her sitting only one mile away in a perfectly comfortable chair, reading while the week's chemicals drip into her veins, I'm imagining something else. This is what it's like with Marlou gone. The apartment quiet and empty, the day stretching on with only arbitrary form. This to do and that to do, with nothing really worth doing. The winter day ending early. The next day silently forming itself out of clouds and darkness.

Forget it. I putter about the desk, shoving papers here and there. An e-mail to answer. A project to read. Knit one, purl two. Until Marlou arrives, three hours early, her chemo day inexplicably over. The wooden-block sound of the door closing, that's how we track our presence, the two of us. And I never think about this, but it certainly is welcome, for there are only two of us.

Marlou stands in the hallway, explaining how things have gone this morning. Her immune system is shot, once again. Today and tomorrow she will be getting immune boosters instead of chemo drugs. A routine setback, she tells me. It happens frequently, the chemo nurses say. The course of chemo never did run smooth, the immune system invariably balking now and then. Not to worry. I agree, no need to worry. Unless one considers that this may be Marlou's only healing window of opportunity. It's a time when the cancer cells may be few in number, vulnerable to treatment, not metastasized all over the place.

Which brings me back to healing. What is it? And whatever it is, can I help Marlou do it? There is only one answer: I can try. And the problem is that although I may not be able to define healing, much of my life has focused on it. Leaving me with strong beliefs, experiences, prescriptions. And, doubtless, biases. All of which point to conflict. Healing has not been a central issue in Marlou's life for the last four decades, as it has in mine. We have different ideas. There is going to be a fight about this, I can tell. So what? We can only do our best.

And what of the center? I think of all the centers in my life, the trauma centers, the meditation centers, the message centers…I have to wonder if the center hasn't been holding for a lot of people, a lot of the time. With my steadily failing proprioception, (knowing where your limbs are in space) and the consequent loss of balance, my center has been failing year by year. I notice this phenomenon particularly now, having had a recent, fortunately rare, fall in the bathroom. Now, every time I go in the bathroom, things seem to be wavering. I could attribute this to the poor light, which Marlou attributes to the energy-saving bulbs in the bathroom fixtures. And I cannot argue the point. But I also have this sense of falling right in the middle of our living room in a sunlit afternoon. And it's not a constant sense, but one that comes and goes. I know its fear.

For when I can get my own bearings, return to my center, I have no problem at all. When it comes to centers, mine is still there. I can feel it at times, a calm and quiet place, reliable, warm and secure. Maybe it's an emotional trick, one's center. The comfy feeling that keeps us going. Hard to say. I do know that in Marlou's arms something in me melts. To be held her by her is to be nourished, thoughts and cares obliterated, as near to amniotic a state as life has ever offered me. In with the new mother, out with the old. It's only taken 60 years.

And while comforting is fine, in extremis we need more. In the midst of battle, comfort is only for the dying. To live, we need to fight. We need the center. The thing that burns and sustains itself and sustains us. And, yes, it's all quite mysterious. But not really. It's the thing I find when life tests me. It's the thing that's left when everything else is knocked down and washed out. It's the center. And it holds, because that's all it can do.

2 Jan. 07

Everything takes so long, and that is the unreality of my days, the fact that I cannot or will not accept this. But somehow it's after 8 a.m., and I'm scrambling to get me in the electric wheelchair and the book and the iPod rolling up the street to the 8:39 a.m. train to San Francisco. I'm heading to a shrink appointment, then lunch with an old friend, and none of this constitutes a high-level mission, but level is irrelevant. I need a mission. In fact, I need a schedule, a routine, something that gets me up and headed toward a definable goal with a deadline, no matter how trivial, every day.

But that's another story. This story has to do with one day and its beginning, unfolding right now. And everything is taking too long. I should have been out of the shower, dressed and finished with breakfast by now. But I'm not. I'm peeing for one last time before heading trainwards, and being in a hurry I already have the iPod looped around my neck, necklace style, as I pee. Which is really cool, you're thinking, kind of multitasking, prepared for one thing while doing another. Which is why, the cosmos being what it is, that as I stare at the yellowing toilet I note the descent of something else. It is the twin earpieces, ear buds in Apple terminology, falling into the toilet. No, not metaphorically, literally. I am peeing on small foam rubber covered loudspeakers designed for my ear canal. But with so many things going awry these days, for once I don't freak. And for me, "freak" means launch into vigorous self recrimination about my inattentiveness, general incompetence and loss of control over life matters. No control has been lost. In fact, I yank the ear cord up, the sodden earpieces ascend, and I toss them under the sink faucet. This is why God invented water.

And by the end of the day, I understand why God invented days. It has taken an entire one for me to journey to the City, get shrunk, have lunch with a friend in the suburbs behind Oakland and come home. I scramble around in the remaining two hours to deal with e-mails, make writerly notes on the day, then have dinner in time to make it to chorus practice. The writerly notes part is what passes for work these days, but it's not fooling anyone, at least not me. The fact is that I have had enough of life upheavals. Cancer, getting older. Maybe life is upheavals, and maybe it's time to get down to business. And maybe the business is something I have to define and choose myself. This is the sort of luxury people aspire to, retirement. The life of supposed leisure. Except that I don't want leisure, and I can't believe that many people really do. It's like eating nothing but dessert.

Marlou's illness has shaken us out of our routine. But like any earthquake, the shaking stops. It's the second of January now, not the first. Holiday time is over, and something else has to begin.

1 Jan. 07

Seated for the first moment of repose in a day that has been all activity and distraction, I tune into the daylight. Through our front window, it's easy to see there is not much. It's 4 p.m., early winter and the sun is doing what it does, setting, giving up on the day. And with the sun's descent, I can feel myself giving up on everything. I can feel it, the general waning, not only of this day, but of all days. And, no, this goes beyond mood. I am 60 years old, my wife has cancer, and we are not immortal. The sun sets. It also rises, as Hemingway and several others have noted. And I wonder at times if I am not more temperamentally suited to the slipping away and declining of life, and more challenged by its inexplicable continuance.

So, what's happening tomorrow? A straightforward account of the events reveals little. Or, perhaps it reveals everything. For these days, nothing is what it seems. Age and illness and unknown or unseen factors have tilted experience in a certain direction. What direction? What am I going on about?

It's New Year's Day, and Marlou has sent out a card, actually an e-mail, to friends and family. There she is with chemo scarf in the recent portrait, me in an adjoining photo staring at Bryce Canyon, the page captioned "Marlou & Paul Look Back on 2006." It's meant to be a perfectly bright and chirpy year in review…but not for me. My feeling is that Paul and Marlou are not so much reviewing the year, as reliving their last year, looking back on what they have lost, having moved on. At the very least, the title feels portentous.

This morning, our friends arrived late, but buoyant and bouncy, for brunch. This holiday season, now officially over, has seen an astonishing number of social gatherings hosted by someone with serious cancer. The friends and the gatherings have done much to buoy my spirits. At times, the presence of family and companions has even convinced me that life is going on as always. Things are the same. But, knowing they are not, all the socializing frightens me. Exercise, diet, deep psychology. This seems like the real work for the new year, healing work. And, yes, it is Marlou's work, but it's also my obsession. This seems to be the healing window of opportunity, the point at which Marlou only has a few stray cancer cells. Enough to be lethal, but also enough to be contained. Such are my thoughts. Surely we have to do something.

Although it's not really "we," and these are only my ideas, and for all I know, Marlou finds something healing in events like this morning's New Year's brunch with two couples.

What I do know is that within moments of our friends' arrival, I am joking about the cover crop. The latter refers to the mixture of ryegrass, vetch, fava beans, and red clover currently sprouting in my raised garden beds. I roll outside in my wheelchair, guests tromping down the wheelchair ramp behind me. Parked beside the nearest planter-box, I point out what there is to see. Which is more or less nothing. Sprouting clover. Bits of grass. Garden refuse composting. Still, I explain what I can, trying to extend the moment in the winter sun, pleasantly bright and warm and Californian.

Why are all the red clover seedlings coming up in pockets and bunches? Because the recent rain has washed the seeds around like a fireman's nozzle. And here they are, the sprouts, bundled together like sheep in a flock. We all stare at the ground, talking about the obvious questions. What will I plant? Will the old zinnias stems really decompose? Something about such discourse gives me heart. Natural processes are under way, some things breaking down, others gathering themselves together in growth. It's all happening together, side by side. Just as we stand side-by-side, all of us over 60, which is simply mind numbing. All except for Marlou, still in her mid-50s, who has finally wandered outside to join us. It's time for brunch.

Was the garden moment the highlight of the day, or is it this, the bleak end of day? Outside it's all fading. We really do have to get those windows washed. Tomorrow I have a shrink's appointment in San Francisco, followed by lunch with a friend in Orinda. It's going to be a day of people and transit. No, that's only the outline. No one knows what sort of day it will be. That's what makes it worth living.

30 December 2006

Two days after returning from Hawaii there is still enough Island air dissolved in my blood to make a trip out to the planter boxes just a little confusing. The nitrogen-fixing red clover I planted there weeks ago is still largely dormant, having sprouted and more or less crossed its botanical legs, twiddling its thumbs and awaiting better growing conditions. And judging by the white frost on the neighborhood roofs, it's going to be a while before much of anything grows except moss. But not a long while. This is California, after all. Even now, it's quite warm in the sun, pleasant enough for my neighbor Buffie to come downstairs and exchange notes on the midwinter holidays. She's been there, I've been here, and her son Avery is all over the map, thundering down the stairs as only a robust four-year-old can do.

Once on the scene, Avery has questions. Avery always has questions. They are his thing. He is making sense of the world, moment by moment, and this moment is as good as any. The raised-bed planter boxes may look dormant, their cover crop barely sprouted, but Avery knows where the garden action is, more or less at his height. He's pointing and laughing at, what else, the wrought iron garden decoration Marlou gave me a few years ago. It's a thoroughly rusty silhouette of a nude woman, slightly crouched, with a bird perched on her bottom. There's a genre for these iron planter adornments, designed to accumulate rust the way bronze acquires patina. As for the design, the iron cutout depicts a slightly plump woman who seems joyously nude and at one with the bird on her rump. In spirit, it reminds me of James Thurber's drawings. Thurber women often frolicked nude, looking half bemused by their own naked pastorale. And Avery has a question. Why does the woman have a bird on her butt?

A faint chuckle from Buffie, crossing her arms and pretending to look the other way. She mutters under her breath that this happens all day long. Go ahead, she says, answer his question. I don't know what to say, and yet I do. Seated in a wheelchair I am, after all, on Avery's level. Our eyes meet. A number of things are running through my mind, one of them being that I am precisely 15 times older than Avery. Well, I tell him, if you had a bird on your butt, wouldn't you think it was funny?

Avery laughs uproariously. A bird wouldn't land on his butt, he tells me, because birds don't like poopy places. Yes, I am on Avery's level. But I decide to get off this level by managing not to laugh and looking at the planter boxes. What shall we plant, I ask him. I stare gravely at the sprout-covered soil, then at Avery. He wants to know what the green shoots are. I tell him they are red clover, but this isn't an explanation. And the whole idea of the cover crop eludes him. Odd, for last year he saw the whole process, from the sprouting of the shoots to the growth of the stems and leaves, and then the day when gardeners went at the planter boxes with pitchforks, turning the roots into the air and ramming the green parts into the ground. He saw it, and he didn't see it. He was only three, after all. Avery is growing his own crop of ideas, insights and understandings. You never know what's going to bear harvest. But in this instance, I have scored a direct hit. Avery is matching me mood for mood, faintly scowling in concentration, such is the seriousness of our problem.

What to plant? Flowers, he says. Just like last year. No, I tell him, we need sunnier, warmer weather for zinnias. Corn, he says. I pretend to mull this over, then sadly shake my head. The nights just aren't warm enough, I say. He studies my expression. We need it to get warm, he says. That's it, I tell him -- so what will grow in the cold? Aha! Spinach. Broccoli. Lettuce. Avery takes this in, then repeats it to me as though the thought is his own. Spinach should go right over there, because that's where it's going to be warm...just look at the sun. What about the lettuce, I ask him. Well, there's no room for it. Too much shade, he says. I consider this heavily, then sit bolt upright at my own insight: I wonder what's going to happen in the afternoon. I tell Avery to check on the garden sunlight after his nap and give me a full report. But he doesn't quite go for it. She's got a bird on her butt, he says. A poopy bird. Goodbye, Avery, I say, rolling my wheelchair inside. It's cold, after all.

It's also imponderable, this matter of the girl and the butt and the bird. Yet pleasant to consider, like a puzzle with no wrong answers. From this perspective, it doesn't matter if you're four or 40, or even, God forbid, 60. The one difference is that the garden figure is a gift from Marlou. She spotted it on vacation at Point Reyes. Which when I think of our times there brings me face-to-face with our days before cancer…days in the daze of summer holidays and weekends, aimless and stupefyingly enjoyable, all the pores open to sea air, Tomales Bay breezes, oysters and afternoon wine.

I recall the day Marlou bought the wrought iron silhouette woman with the bird. She had seen something, she told me, and was going to buy it for me. Hearing this, I was immediately uneasy, even downright suspicious. How could someone know me well enough to glimpse something in a store and decide that's Paul? What was I going to have to do in exchange? What did she really want? I can't remember, but strongly suspect, that she only presented the garden ornament once we are home. Perhaps she sank the iron stick in our planter-box and that was that. I recall staring at the thing in puzzlement. For one thing, it was wholly decorative. The iron piece had no other function but to adorn. And what about it was "me?" Nothing exactly, for it was more us. And more Marlou, perky and spirited and erotic.

The latter is the right word, though it has acquired the wrong meaning. The dictionary is more helpful with "eros." The Greek god of love, son of Aphrodite, progenitor of Cupid, Rome's version. Or in the language of the modern psychiatry, the sum of all life instincts. In other words, something utterly vague and undefinable, yet capable of being embodied in a flat, rusty piece of iron. A shape that is oxidizing, being returned to the earth while springing from it. A naked woman pursued by birds and literally, in the summers, bees. Sprightly, lively, not taking itself too seriously while reveling utterly. Something Marlou wanted to give me for my garden. Which at the time, I now understand, was too much for me to easily accept. And that may be why Marlou purchased the piece as she did, on-the-fly, a retail snatch and grab, then a direct implanting in the ground. Making the piece grounded before I began to think about it unnecessarily. It was there and mine and ours. And it has taken a few years to feel what it conveys about Marlou and me and us. Why does the lady have a bird on her butt? Because she wants to be in our garden, Avery, and that's one of the rules. You have to have a bird in your butt. Understand?

It's still winter in the garden. Hard to say about the red clover and when it will finally get to work and grow. Hard to say about Marlou and her health and her future. But the hardest things to say are now saying themselves. They're speaking to me more clearly than ever. The man who built the raised beds with their wheelchair-height garden soil gave his creation one final touch. He added a metal sculpture with brackets to support a juncture of hoses. His bronze piece shows a bunch of women dancing, sheaves of wheat gathered for harvest. The piece is abstract. It is built of metal and spirit. I cannot say the same of me. Nor of Marlou. But in a miracle, I can say life's truest gift is us.

While my blog site has been down, my writing has kept up -- some of these entries were written around January, 2007, and posted later.