March 2007 Archives

It started where so many things do these days, in the garden. The problem is that I can't say for certain which garden. The thing is, I've had two. In fact, I've had two of everything. Two gardens. Two wives. Two lives...one paralyzed, one not. But getting back to the garden problem, remembering the original garden...no, not the very original Garden with the apples and the serpent and the climate like Hawaii and the Peet's double latte always waiting under a fern and no one worrying about pubic hair and the free parking and the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts available 24/7. Not that one, but the raised beds that my first father-in-law built behind the actual home that I once owned, sort of, in Menlo Park. What I distinctly remember was this: I could use a pitchfork. I could use a shovel. I turned over the spring cover crop myself. Okay, so it probably took a couple of hours, but the task was possible. I do remember sticking the pitchfork down along the edge of the surrounding redwood boards and levering back the first giant forkful of soil. How gratifying. Man in nature. Quadriplegic in action. Suburbanite in agriculture. Ground breaking.

The first raised beds were raised one foot, boxed in by one set of boards. The second beds, the ones I have now, are twice as high, using two boards. Why should I care about the boards, you're asking? Because they mark my physical decline. As my abilities sink, the gardens ascend. The mountain coming to Mohamed. The garden coming to the cripple. Which explains why, as the garden has been fructifying with all manner of ryegrass, vetch, red clover and fava beans, their little roots fixing nitrogen the way junkies fix heroin, the whole thing growing to an astonishing mass in preparation for its soil-enhancing decomposition, I keep thinking about the pitchfork. How it would be if I just gave it a go, sliding the blades down against the boards, two boards now, then lifting up an entire pitchfork of earth and roots and green matter -- then flipping the lot, leaving the roots to dry in the spring sunshine. What the hell.

Something tells me that this might not be the wisest thing for my lower back. Not to mention my left shoulder. Or my right abdomen. Fuck it. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. Especially when he runs into complications. As I did that Wednesday when the blow-and-go garden crew made its five-minute descent from the pickup, rakes raking, leaf blowers blowing. I rolled outside, my wheelchair speed control set to high, cash in my hand, to negotiate our annual deal. I hand them a pitchfork -- they turn the cover crop. We're late, the foreman told me, barely taking the sound protectors out of his ears. I didn't have a lot of other options in my mind, except maybe upping the price from $25 to $50. After all, my landlord pays the gardening bill, so these guys answer to him, not me. A little worrying, this. The cover crop really should have been turned weeks ago. But with Marlou sick, things easily drift off schedule. Important matters drift out of sight. Cover crop or cover bases? You decide.

But Wednesdays have a way of rolling around again. So on the next one I was rolling too, outside to meet the slamming doors of the gardeners' pickup. Which had everything right about it, except identity. These were the wrong gardeners, and the wrong truck, there to blow the leaves and rake the concrete in the four-plex opposite ours. Different landlord, different gardeners, different skills, particularly linguistic. Oh, I was full of self-effacing Spanish idioms about how bad my gringo pronunciation was and would they mind terribly flipping the cover crop. The foreman gave me a blank look. His cohort was cranking up the blower. Amid gestures and nervous checking of my watch -- I had to be on the noon train to San Francisco -- I indicated for him to follow. I stopped my wheelchair beside the raised beds, three-foot ryegrass billowing in the breeze, and explained in rudimentary Spanish how I wanted things done, pitchfork on the ground, dirt and roots pried up, plants dumped face-forward.

He gestured at his lawnmower. No, I explained. No corta, don't cut. Flip. But what is the Spanish word for flip? Flipping out was really more on my mind, what with time running out, the train running nearer. Dirt. What is the Spanish word for dirt? Tierra? Maybe, but there wasn't much tierra in sight, was there? That was under the plants, which as any gringo will tell you, are actually weeds. The gardener grabbed his hoe and showed me how, with deft and assiduous chopping, he could quickly rid me of this garden blight. I checked my watch. Caltrain waits for no man. No. No, I told him. Toda queda, everything stays. He nodded pensively. Everything stays and everything changes--one of the essential conceits of Spanish poetry. And what did I want him to do?

Hours later I was back from San Francisco and staring at an equivocal situation. The cover crop had been chopped and flattened. Everything stayed. A bag of steer manure had been spread atop the squashed plants. Quadriplegics, having lost control of their bodies, like to keep control of their lives. Which requires a range of skills, including Spanish. And the belief in the ability of a 60-year-old man to shove his own pitchfork in his own garden and make, as it were, hay. Bad enough having to rely on others for essential tasks. I mean, what's the point of having your own garden?

Ask Voltaire's Candide. You've been knocked around by Bulgarian soldiers, Spanish inquisitors and Portuguese swindlers, while being seduced by a series of whores, cheats and frauds, and after a lifetime of this you're ready for a small patch of earth, a hoe and some seeds. And you will live out your days, making no plans and few changes worth mentioning. But you will make your garden grow. And, no, it's not about the organic lettuce, whatever that is. I mean, show me an inorganic lettuce, and I'll show you a plastic hundred dollar bill. Though $100, real dollars, probably comes close to the price of each of the lettuce heads you harvest in your raised beds, under normal cost accounting.

No, we're not going there. We're going out to the raised beds in search of raised spirits. That's what happens. Things grow, springing improbably from the earth, and dammit if you don't spring with them. Robert Frost said that after a day of writing poetry, he was tired of finished goods. He wanted things broken or splintered or never put together in the first place. He wanted things raw. Rawness rules in the garden. You can go stick your head in the oven or stick your trowel in the ground. Which would you prefer?

Which brings us back to the problem of the trampled cover crop and the packed earth beneath it. What to do? Wait for the next Wednesday, of course. Unfortunately, the next Wednesday also brought the next overdue appointment with the dermatologist, scheduled at precisely leaf-blower time in the midmorning. Marlou? She would be elsewhere in the same medical complex. Next time, the gardeners, the real gardeners, the ones from our apartment building, had promised. And next time was now, today, Wednesday, and I was cranking up my wheelchair lift, then rolling down the street toward skincare. What a waste of a Wednesday. Though maybe not entirely, for one hour later, rolling back into my parking space, wasn't that the garden crew from across the way, pulling things in or out of their pickup truck? Yes, indeed. I slammed on the emergency brake, opened the sliding door on the side of my van and gazed out to watch the pickup pull away.

Even in the old days, cover crop turning was a lengthy process -- and it was likely to be so now, and the pitchfork was just sitting behind the privet hedge...so why not? Because, I can feel it in my bones. No. I am old and Marlou is sick and I have other priorities. Miles to go before I sleep, and not that many neurons driving my limbs or hormones driving my ambition. Even though it's late, though the spring is here, planting season started a month ago, and the planting is desperately late, and the raised beds should now be at the harvest stage. I have let everyone down. Even Avery, my four-year-old neighbor, my garden apprentice, who when asked the edifying and ego-affirming question any progressive person would direct to a toddler -- what shall we plant, Avery -- answered with an impressive list of wellness vegetables. Spinach, broccoli, green onions and, yes, lettuce type unspecified, but understood to be, here in yuppie land, something along the lines of rouge d'hiver, not iceberg, thank you very much.

Worse, I have let myself down, let down my guard. Giving up has taken over. I have had to abandon another thing, another capability. And I have work to do. Things shall not be off schedule. Things shall not be abandoned, and there shall be no giving up. Marlou is not giving up. For days and weeks and months, we have both been pushing to make life as normal as possible. As normal as possible with your hair falling out, cells with a lust for a life that isn't theirs spreading and proliferating, while a dumb army of chemicals tromps around your bloodstream, making you vomit and sweat and tire and experience unseemly things, like going to bed at 8 p.m. And if I could just turn the cover crop, maybe I could turn the other things. Turn them over, reverse course, keep life and our lives together going. A hopeless delusion I acquired early in an unhappy family life, and being the oldest son, undertook as my personal responsibility. A futile and impotent obsession. My life.

But someone has to shift the scenery, deliver the mail, change the light bulbs and blow the leaves, and it all keeps happening, sometimes too early, sometimes too late. And it's happening now, the second garden crew, our gardeners, is arriving. I almost wonder if I dare to broach the subject. Doubtless they remember the last year, compare it with this one, and wonder why $25 worth of lucrative ground turning went to the garden crew across the way, the imposters. So I'm feeling a little sheepish rolling outside with another $25, not to mention downright stupid...although money, like time, is acquiring a necessarily different dimension. As well it should. Marlou and I are considering expensive trips, costly events, and neither of us is batting an eyelash. Please, while we're throwing $4000-a-dose chemicals at a cancer, let's not worry about a few nights in Inverness. Let's go. Which is what I say to the head gardener. Let's have another go at the beds in the back.

He confers with his colleague, and my Spanish comprehension being much better than my speech, I understand their consternation. Los otros, the others, turned the gringo's garden last week, didn't they? No, the young Mexican man soon discovers, they didn't. I watch as his pitchfork blasts into the earth, deeper, much deeper, than I could ever manage. Up go the roots, down go the plants, which are already yellowing and preparing to join hands with their deceased predecessors in the ritual of soil building. I feel like I am breathing down his neck, but I can't help sitting there in my wheelchair, watching the gardener do his thing. In my mind, it's my thing, or maybe our thing, but no one owns the earth, not really, and I certainly don't own this patch of it. My landlord does. So there's nothing to do but give up and enjoy the moment of ground preparation, however it happens. Whenever it happens.

Which is precisely when the next crew pulls into the carport, the home crew, the wife. She says she has good news. And that she wants to go to Italy. These facts are, of course, interchangeable. And if February memories of sitting on an airplane for 12 hours are still lingering too fresh in my lower back, the pitchfork-lifting sacral region, so what? The news defies odds and predictions and expectations. Marlou's liver tumor has shrunk to the sub-detectable level of stray cells. Her doctor is ecstatic, she says. And Marlou is hardly one to exaggerate such things. I am trying to contain my emotions. I tell her I'm relieved. Along with contained, like the raised beds. But not so contained that I'm doubting for a moment that we're headed for that Rembrandt course in Tuscany. Marlou mutters something about the problems of wheelchair accessibility in Casole d'Elsa, but we both know it's only a nominal concern. The Florentines stormed the place, followed by the Siennans. All of them breaching the walls, swarming around the tiny hilltop town long before Alitalia brought the real hordes. We can do that. It's all in the lower back.

Driving down the mountain from Harbin Hot Springs, it's even more apparent what a fragile moment has slid between the cool winter and baking summer here in these arid hills. The winter has been such a disappointment, underperformance in the rain department, but still there's this, water in the streams, California poppies, grass bursting everywhere, Oaks leafing, air fragrant. There's a reason why they call it spring. Hot spring, cold spring, bedspring. It's all the same. Of course, the drive is the same, rather scary, which is why I turn the iPod to a documentary with Bill Moyers. It seems that the Christian right has discovered climate change, the environment, and creation. It's the latter that's turning their heads around. The way Bill tells it, this is more or less inevitable. His questions suggest the obvious, that Jesus was into lilies and lambs and Birkenstocks, and if he'd ever met John Calvin he would've told the guy to spend a couple of years in the yeshiva, then report for a multiple-choice exam.

The highway banks this way and tilts us that way, and dammit if my brakes don't work fine. They work just splendidly, and before you know it, the outskirts of Calistoga are whipping by, and I'm whipping over the next ridge. By now, I'm tiring of Bill Moyers. I get it. I also get the hang of driving, driving when you're scared, which is pretty much like driving under any conditions, except there's a little more adrenaline, which is nature's free drug. The Napa Hills are also free. Born free. And there's 101, the north-south motorway, and soon I'm on it, rolling toward the Golden gate Bridge, San Francisco, then home.

Except that I'm rolling awfully slowly. Santa Rosa is the center of some mystical traffic curse, a place where bad lines of energy cross from the north and south poles to impede human progress. Petaluma represents a sort of progress, but it comes at a terrible price, a 40-minute price, which is way too high for just another stop along the freeway. Of course, I don't stop. Though I certainly should. My shoulder hurts, the very shoulder that Earthheart just loosened into a pleasant warmth. But the last hour or so of driving with a fight-or-flight body posture, the one available foot braced at all times for crucial action, it's made every muscle wind and tighten. At a small state park, just over the border of Marin County and across the highway from the Marin airport, I pull off the pounding road. Here, I will find shade, roll down the windows, brace my paralyzed leg on the opposite seat, and sleep. Somehow, I find that in the parking lot there is no shade and never was. The trees are some distance away, and even with the window rolled down, the 80 degree heat is too much for me. Of course, this is nuts, but then my spinal cord might as well be made of nuts, ground nuts, so useless is it at these times. Without enough sweat or enough breeze, even mild heat exhausts me. I know what I have to do. I have to start the car, roll up the windows, and drive south with the air conditioner on.

Exact change at the Golden Gate Bridge is always welcome, but not required. In fact, I had lived 12 years on this earth without ever encountering a mad fool anywhere who demanded the precise coinage for anything. But that was before I took the bus down East Avenue from suburban Brighton to downtown Rochester, New York. The first time I boarded the bus, doubtless a Saturday, the exact-change admonition on the till either escaped my attention or didn't make sense. There were no buses in the small town where I grew up near Palm Springs, but I had paid for things. You gave people money, and they gave you change. Not the bus driver. I put too many coins in, waited to get a couple back, and he told me to sit down. Exact change only.

I did as instructed, sitting on the edge of the seat, on the edge of tears. I was probably closer to this edge more than I could feel. With my parents divorcing, I had gladly accepted this six-month exile with my aunt and uncle. My mother couldn't get me here. But I could get her. I had decided to live with my father, such was my anger and fear of her. Without articulating this, I knew that my choice would hurt and anger her. My hurt and anger would become hers. Meanwhile, the long arm of the mother seemed that it might somehow reach all the way here. Thousands of miles from home didn't matter. I was nominally in seventh grade, but my mind was elsewhere. The junior high school had a track made of cinders. I kept asking kids what these crunchy things were, these cinders, but their explanations were circular. Cinders were cinders. Perhaps someone told me that they came from burning coal. But I had never seen coal, burning or otherwise. I had only seen Lake Ontario once, just to the north of the city. It was inexplicable, so much water, no cactus, and all this snow. And all these Jews. At schol they spotted me at once, asking what congregation I belonged to or was planning to join. I was planning to do whatever my aunt and uncle, completely nonobservant and agnostic, planned to do. Which was nothing. I ended up doing nothing with the Jewish kids, or with any kids. I didn't seem to belong anywhere, or to anyone.

But Saturdays belonged to me. Since I didn't have any friends, I decided to do what could be done in a big city. I rode the bus downtown and went to movies. At the Loews Theater there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of seats. The movies played on an enormous screen. It was 1959, and theaters like this were on the brink of closing, but I didn't understand this. The Paramount. The Fox. All fairly empty, all fairly enormous, all downtown. The bus took me all the way down East Avenue, passing the famous Eastman mansion, the place where the city's beloved Kodak got its start. The ride groaned and rumbled on to Main Street. There was so much water in the Genesee River, one could only stand and watch in amazement. Downtown, the river flowed over a weir, churning into brown froth. Pollution, everyone said. Above the river, only a few feet, water spewed from a strange and complex structure. It was a sort of a water bridge, an enormous flume that had once conveyed the Erie Canal in a separate trough above the river. The thing was in ruins, badly leaking, so much water spewing from the cracks and holes that it was impossible to tell what was going on or what had gone on. Still, I watched it in wonder. This was a thing that was wrecked, so old that its function had been lost, and yet bursting with water and, therefore, life. You can take the boy out of the desert, but you cannot take the desert out of the boy.

In the hardest freeze of winter, the Genesee Falls, the ruined Erie Canal conduit, the whole thing hardened and admitted only a few pathetic dribbles. It was mesmerizing in all states. And being in at least two states, California and New York, I felt more at home here. Watching the ruins. Wondering if once things were frozen they really unfroze. Watching and waiting. Learning to hang on. No matter what. Even sighting my mother's green and turquoise Pontiac station wagon outside Fox's Deli a couple of months later, throwing me into near cardiac arrest, before I realized it was a false alarm. My mother was 2000 miles away, at least. And she wasn't coming here, and I wasn't going there. Actually, I wasn't going anywhere. I was hanging on. Just as I was doing now, almost 50 years later, aware that it was too hot to stop and I was too tired to drive, which offered absolutely no options. Except to hang on, one mile after the next, hoping I didn't fall asleep, waiting for the air conditioning to catch up with my own body's heat regulator. Once I get hot, it takes a good hour or two to feel cool, regardless of the air conditioning setting. And now all thoughts of Harbin were long forgotten. This was just a matter of counting the freeway exits, Black Mountain, Half Moon Bay, Edgewood Road. Hanging on, learning about exact change. Learning about change period. Until I was parked and Marlou was wandering across the driveway and I was home.

If you doubt that Earthheart is just over your horizon, think again. Maybe you're confusing

him with Braveheart who has sunk below the horizon, weighted down with alcohol, bad driving

and jew hating. No, Earthheart is another matter, and all you have to know is that he's

north. All good things are north, a sanguine direction shared by caribou and London and

musk oxen and Seattle. Anyway, it's north, and that's why when my friend Jim and I discuss

heading there for an overnight hot spring experience, that's the essential thing that feels

good about it. The direction...north.

It's important to feel good about something. I don't feel good about Marlou's chemotherapy

and my utter sense of helplessness, day after day, as she endures the chemical onslaught.

So, Jim's idea sounded downright attractive. Drive north to Harbin Hot Springs, an hour or

so above the wine country of the Napa Valley, and decades away in every aspect. Harbin is

one of those relics of the 1960s that survives, mostly transformed, but with enough

authentic period flavor to remind me of my baby boomer roots in the 60s. Which in my 60s,

is taking on an entirely different dimension.

Let's not go there. Let's go to Harbin Hot Springs. Of course, before we go, we have to

begin spiritual preparation. Harbin is, after all, nominally a religious community, the

Church of the Open Chakra, or some such, a melange of Eastern, New Agey beliefs and

practices, centered around hot waters. Which are definitely worthy of some form of worship.

Especially if you are an aging partial quadriplegic with more aches than toenails. The

water runs hot out of the arid oak-and-grassland hills of southern Lake County, and the

Harbin folk guide it into a series of pools. The waters must have been a healing godsend to

the native tribes over the centuries. In the absence of HBO, steaming mineral waters must

have made quite an impact. They still do. Today, Harbin has its period charms, Gaudiesque

railings made out of plaster, stainless steel sculpted fish spitting mineral water into

pools. But the thing is run like a business, far from cheap, and attracting a new

generation of beautiful people from the likes of Silicon Valley. The latter aren't very

friendly, but most of the Harbin staff are.

It's important to have fond images, friendly fantasies when thinking about Harbin, because

the place is quite a drive. And car trips are something I almost don't do anymore. At some

point, driving began to scare me. Driving down hills in the Bay Area, even few miles from

home, I've become acutely aware that the only thing pressing on the brake that stops the car

is one aging, neurologically compromised, leg. Of course, one leg is enough. It is for

most people, anyway. Show me a two-legged brake pusher, and I'll show you a nut. Speaking

of nuts, my fear of driving, particularly losing control on hills, has begun to feed on

itself. All the more important to drive somewhere, somewhere north, where everyone is naked

and steaming. Harbin.

Good thing I decided to stop in Sonoma and visit my friends Gordon and Jeanette on the way.

I've known them for three decades, and they've known me through good times and bad. Since

Jeanette is a fellow quadriplegic, we've seen our share of bad. And having had our share of

food and wine in a homey Sonoma restaurant, it was nice to roll a couple blocks to a motel

bed. I slept soundly. For the first four hours, then my eyeballs popped open at 4:30 a.m.,

for this is part of the preparation, the Jewish spiritual preparation. Worry. Of course, I

worried about Marlou and her cancer. Then it came to me, the same way the letter came to me

in the mail, arriving and wedging in a open slot in my mind. The letter from Ford. The

recall letter warning me that my Ford van's cruise control has a way of bursting into flame.

No, I'm not being rhetorical. It actually catches on fire, which is why the Ford dealer in

the neighboring suburb, will fix my recalled van for free. If I simply drive it there,

which I simply haven't. But I do remember now, this untended detail, and I can actually see

what will happen, Ford flambe, hurtling around a mountain curve and right off a cliff.

At 7 a.m. in the Sonoma motel, I was up, sleepless and tending to showering and dressing. I

had the television on. There's a reason why God invented National Public Radio. But I had

stared too long at the clock radio, trying to discern the difference between the dials and

switches and the knobs and the buttons. The TV just took one click, and there it was

buzzing full of middlebrow information about Iraq, cardiac diets and movie stars I have

never heard of. I've never heard of anything, which was why after a morning coffee with

Jeanette, the two of us whirling through the early light on Sonoma streets to her hair

appointment, then my appointment with Harbin...I hit the road.

I hit it hard. At times, my response to what's happening with me and with Marlou and with

life -- is to get pissed off. I was in that mood now, angry and pounding northward, van

revving, map points flying by. And as I said to Jeanette over coffee, what's the worst that

can happen -- I die on a road? Great. I won't know it, and if I do, maybe there's a book

there. Anything to get published.

Over one steep and winding ridge, around corners and past bed-and-breakfasts into

Calistoga...then up another. To pass the time, I play Bill Maher's angry political

diatribes, on the radio. The perfect tone for an aggressive kick-butt drive.

Sleeplessness, caffeine, anger and neurological undersupply in the bladder area conspire in

an unfortunate way as I drive up the hilly road into Harbin. I rule out checking in. From

the road, I can see that there's no wheelchair route into the office. I hail a passerby, an

official looking one, meaning a guy with a tear drop-shaped sort of Mohawk haircut. We're

very countercultural here at Harbin. We're also bursting to pee, which is why the parking

complications are particularly annoying. No, I tell the guy with the haircut, I don't want

to drive this van up the steep hill to the parking area, because my wheelchair won't make it

down. Actually, this isn't true, but it sounds good, and what I really want to do is park

close to my room. So I pull wheelchair rank, as it were, and head for a space I spotted

earlier when turning my van around. Just as I pull into the space, someone else grabs it.

And rather than have an urban-style honking match here in the pristine wilds, I give up. I

drive around in circles, find the man pulling out and, at last, park. I hustle into the

wheelchair, lower myself to the sandy ground and head for the nearest restroom. Of which

there is none. There is no place to pee but in the toilet at the baths, uphill, way uphill.

But, then, life is uphill, isn't it, so what is there to do but hit the joystick and hit

the forty-five degree road? The drive is so steep that I can't help but remember last

week's backwards tip on a Menlo Park street. I drive cautiously, slowly, switchbacking to

avoid disaster. But not quite. The toilet, by the time I reach it, requires one high step

inside. A wet stain of pee descends down my trouser leg. Welcome to Harbin.

Jim arrives. Fortunate, for Harbin is a disabled accessibility nightmare. From the get-go,

Jim is in charge of smoothing the way, helping me do all. The wheelchair can't get in the

room, because there's a step. No one at Harbin has a clue about this, nor do they have

another room. Particularly a room with a toilet, always handy for more bad moments of

neurological bowel and bladder control. Never mind. We'll find a toilet elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I'm getting undressed. Off with the urine-soaked trousers. And I know just what

to do. I roll to a nearby garden hose and have Jim spray my trousers. Once I decide they

are adequately soaked, I look for a spot to hang them. It occurs to me that all of this

pants rinsing regularly annoys Marlou, but she's far away, and this is quickly establishing

itself as guy space. That's why Jim and I spot the logical trouser-hanging location at the

same time. Off the side mirror of my van. There they are, blue jeans swinging in the

breeze, dripping right beside the Harbin foot traffic thoroughfare. A blue badge of urinary

courage. Guy space.

Jim and I talk about women and novels and what it's like to be 60 years old, all the while

moving around the hot springs. I swim in the cold pool. Then I soak in the hot pool,

steaming like a lobster pot, so scalding that the nude bodies of nubile young women climbing

in and out of the water have little effect after a while. That's because the waters are

getting to me. Their effect is everything. In particular, I have this ache in my lower

back, and the waters, sulfurous, with bits of algae and god knows what floating about, are

penetrating to this pain point.

Jim suggests a massage. Harbin has a slew of bodyworkers, a virtual factory for deep tissue

work, oil work, flotation treatments. I say no, then I say yes. Jim has this seductive

effect. He offers playfulness, mixed with the grief of a middle-aged man, and he's an

extrovert, a good balance for me. I sign up for massage. Of course, the massage will be

the next day when I'm driving home, but never mind. For now, it's a New Agey dinner on the

lower-level of the Harbin buildings. To dine there, I have to abandon my wheelchair and

walk down one staircase, then up another. The food is quite wonderful. And afterwards,

emerging into the night, the dark rural sky is lit up like the Hayden Planetarium. Jim

points out some stars. I'm grateful for Jim, for stars, and for sleep. I do a lot of the

latter. And dammit if in the morning there isn't a dawn. By the time I step down from the

room and into my wheelchair, a pink light is rising over the hills. A pink hand is rising

over the espresso machine in the Harbin coffee bar, and I'm grateful for that too. I'm

grateful for everything. This hot springs in a canyon, where there are still a couple of

women wearing tie dyes, a couple of men with hair in a bun and a creek running through dry

volcanic hills. It is all, as Jim says, sweet.

After the coffees, and after the Chinese macrobiotic eggs and vegetables, naturally there's

the hot springs. They've gotten hotter overnight, or I'd gotten older, or both. After my

first dip in the hottest pool, I have a momentary swoon on the slate bench outside. I also

have a brainstorm. I ask Jim to borrow the hose from the bath attendant. He sprays me, and

the cold blast revives enough of my being to submit to another boiling.

Which is the condition I find myself in when I join up with Earthheart in the massage

center. He's about my age, and he's worked there for 25 years. I can't believe how easily

he gets me up on a very tall table. Yes I can. Jim is there to help, and after that, I'm

in another world. Earthheart works over my body in a familiar way, finding the tense spots,

grinding into them with his elbow. Meanwhile he keeps up a sort of New Age patter. Which

is all about my trauma, how my energies got disconnected at the moment of my shooting. Of

course, how well connected was I to start? He's asking this. No mincing words here. As far as

he's concerned, he's dealing not with a paralyzed person, but a victim of violence. He

wants to know where my limbs were when I was shot, if I fended off blows, how it hurt to be

slugged in the mouth, and how I fell.

I'm getting something there, he says. He's talking about the normal spasm in my right

fingers, and "getting something" to him means losing something to me. I am generally

ashamed of these spasms, have taken a lifetime to conquer my self-consciousness, and now

Earthheart is telling me to breathe into them. Very good, he says, we're connecting the

dots, getting this in touch with that, integrating. I'm now reaching the early stage of

overdose on New Age twaddle, but something holds me back.

Earthheart sees the paralysis and misalignment of my limbs not as a neuromuscular

phenomenon, but as a traumatic moment frozen in time. On and on he goes, loosening my

muscles, and inviting me to take part in this dialogue about the night I was shot. Which I

do, although the whole thing feels invasive, but what doesn't to an introvert? Something in

me isn't surprised to see this bodywork session veering toward curtailment, for the usual

bladder situation is upon us. Getting off the high table and finding a restroom is going to

take forever.

Pee in the rattan wastebasket, Earthheart suggests. True, it has a plastic liner. I pee

without getting off the table, we resume -- and for this I am indescribably grateful. For

maybe this isn't the most sophisticated discussion I've ever had, but it's a healing

exchange, and Earthheart has just shown himself to be as paralytically adaptive as I am. I

do know this: no one has ever invited me to try to feel how I hold the aftermath of violence

in my body.

Meanwhile, he keeps talking. Cringing, going rigid, ducking, these are understandable

physical responses, he says. But why not consider other options? There's a way to hold my body, he

tells me, a style and a physical attitude that proudly acknowledges my injury. It's all

matter of fact, this therapeutic chit chat, and by the time it's over I feel something that I

confess is rare in my life. I feel manly. And with that, I get dressed and drive home.

Trips, even the prospect of one trip, sets my heart aflutter and sends my feet atappin'. Metaphorically, of course. My heart valves have not fluttered in 60 years, and my feet only tap involuntarily. What I do know is that I am off to the northern counties, Sonoma and Lake, for two days of friends and hot springs. I plan to soak my body into pre-arthritic youth. I plan to soak up friends. Then return. I need to get away. There is a life out there beyond illness and treatment, and planning around illness and treatment. Marlou probably needs me to get away too, because there's a life beyond relationships. Still, my escape is a mixed blessing. A couple can get up to all sorts of things in and around the languid world of hotels and hot springs. But not us, not right now.

What I do know is that the very essence of quadriplegia has to do with immobility, and this day is all about movement. Low on tea? Forget it, because one can chart the progress of a new shipment, UPS-ing across America, from Massachusetts to Roble Avenue. They have my Visa, I have their order number, and as I set out in my wheelchair whirring and grinding through the streets of Menlo Park this morning, I am acutely aware of these vectors. Me heading north, tea heading west, Marlou heading south to chemotherapy and the gardeners hurtling toward the middle of it all.

This being the middle of spring, practically, which is to say, adjusted for global warming...it is time to turn the cover crop. Turn, turn, turn. To everything there is a pitchfork and a time. And when the gardeners turn up for their weekly blow job, not to mention sweep job and trim job, time is what they're out of. Sorry, the gardener says. He'll turn the cover crop over next week. While I would turn over in my grave to think of how bad his timing is. Worse, I have just sprinkled blood meal over both raised beds, coating the still very green waves of grain with red-black powder. The idea was to sling a bunch of nitrogen at the soon-to-decompose grasses and vetch and fava beans and red clover. An excellent idea, and all part of an unfolding process, all taking place on the very morning of my departure. Up early and out early to the local garden supply store, back and in my parking space for the garden crew to unload the steer manure. The latter being an essential component here. To review: first the blood meal to offset the nitrogen-depleting effects of plant decomposition, then with all the grassroots turned skyward, a nice covering of manure to block out sunlight, hold moisture and -- soon, very soon -- hold the new plants and seeds. Spring is here.

Of course, I won't be, not for the next few days. Which was why I set all these wheels in motion. Things happening in the garden. Tea on the way. Me on my way. And now there's no way much of any of this is going to happen, at least not while I am around to see it. The cover crop grasses, coated in a nice powder of dried blood, will have to grow for another week. Marlou will be here to receive the tea. While I am soaking in hot springs. It's enough to drive a person out the door to the next thing that is supposed to be happening while other things are happening. I have promises to keep, miles to go before...Marlou spots my nails. She has been preoccupied with matters of chemotherapy and its complications, such as a hacking cough, enough to distract her from her major life project of grooming me.

I roll in the door of Sky Nails, once again. And, once again, I feel like a goldfish who has just flopped into a nightclub. Are you supposed to sit at a table...order how many drinks...use a straw...go use the men's room now or later? And is there a men's room? This question underlies much of my experience at Sky Nails. Is it just me, or does a definite hush descend as I roll my wheelchair inside. Surely the womanly conversation -- I am the only man -- shifts gears. In any case, Helen shifts into action. I preferred Mai, my last nails practitioner. Helen is quite nice, but she has the wrong sort of name. I might adopt the name Wing Ho, and there would be nothing wrong with this. And there is nothing wrong with Helen, except that this one is far from Troy. She's from Hanoi, or thereabouts, which I think is splendid. And I think her original name is something different, but who's to quibble? Meanwhile, Helen tries to place me. Are you such and such's husband? Yes, I tell her, Marlou's. She nods. Mary Lou, she says. I'm thinking this is close enough. She's doubtless thinking of someone else. It doesn't matter.

Particularly since she is going at my nails with remarkable speed. Yes, she feels obliged to soak them. Not to mention cut and file and squirt the blue stuff, followed by the pink stuff. Buffing and nipping, along the way. No one else seems to be reading the San Francisco Chronicle in here. Pretty soon, I'm not reading it either, for with one functioning hand and all ten digits involved in various stages of improvement, there's nothing to do but surrender my limbs. In the final stage, Helen has a go at something approaching occupational therapy crossed with deep tissue massage. She runs her hands up and down my arms, a relaxing experience, and a mildly alarming one to notice how thin my skin is becoming. I am looking downright old, skinwise. Never mind, for I'm out the door in record time, heading for coffee, heading for the road.

Who knows where the road leads, except back here. Home. That's where I'm headed, via Sonoma, Middleville in Lake County, not to mention San Francisco. Up and down the map all to get home. Go figure. We are quite a species.

My post-Britain jetlag cold has dissipated, but I maintain a sympathy cough with Marlou who is deep into chemotherapy's side effects. Postnasal drip is among these, and while not the worst, annoyingly persistent. I am persistent too. Driven by the spousal bond, a.k.a. mother bond, I indulge in my own chemo, dosing myself up with a morning double latte with a friend, followed by my usual five-gallon glass of water at home, accompanied by tea with Marlou, driving me over the top in terms of both caffeine and general liquidity. Which means that both of us are running to the toilet at frequent intervals. A retired person needs an occupation.

In the light of day, everything is clearer. Unless the light itself is unclear, which it is, with week after week of faint clouds, all of them non-rain producing, just enough to give mood and tone to things. Which makes it hard for me to separate the grayness outside with the grayness inside. Which today has given way to a sort of sunny grayness, bluish wisps of sky with white-ish wisps of cirrus. The world has muted and stalled, and my cover crop has grown so much that it is covering itself, bending earthward as though something is beating it down. Something has been beating Marlou and me down, or trying to, which is why I take pride in saying, from my vantage point on the chemo front lines, that the enemy has turned tail. We've had a fight.

True, the fight was with each other. The attack point came at the worst possible strategic location, the dining table. We were making the most of a dinner of frozen taquitos and canned black beans, or I should say, Marlou had struggled heroically through the sickness that is chemo to make the most of these things...even garnishing the plate in a fashion with parallel slices of avocado. And I had eaten everything, which includes most of what was on Marlou's plate. Thus, Mexican dining in a state of pharmaceutical toxicity. During which, as I approached taquito number nine, Marlou told me that what I'd said that morning had shocked her. We had been discussing things, serious things, and after a week of tumor surgeons, tumor boards, tumor chemicals, I felt it needed to be said. Particularly now, when the disease appears to be in retreat, life seem more hopeful, and there may be an end, at least a temporary end, to treatments. That if everything gets too much, I told her that morning, the chemo, the surgeries, and whatever else -- well, it's up to you. If it all becomes unendurable, stop this shit. Don't do it for me. Marlou does a lot for me, I must add. It's her second nature.

My second nature is to plan for the worst. To say and do the difficult things at a stage when they are only difficult, not impossible. Which may be a survival skill borrowed from a lifetime of survival. But this is not lifetime, but Pacific Standard Time on a Friday evening when both of us are worn down, when it is hard to say what is possible and what isn't. Because it is hard to say anything without being vaguely irritated.

Why was she shocked? Because Marlou isn't thinking in these terms, she says, even countenancing the possibility of stopping treatment, or of her cancer progressing to a dire stage. She's not going there, she says. So why am I taking her there? I reply that I'm not taking her anywhere. But I'm trying to face facts as I understand them. And, I say, why have we waited all day to discuss what was said this morning? Why couldn't you have mentioned all this at, say, noon? Which provokes a series of defensive reactions, both sides lining up for battle, a serious of probes and sorties at either flank, all flanks wounded. Leaving the battlefield full of crying and bleeding, with all troops retreating to the bedroom for further conflict. Until, 9:30 p.m. approaching and supply lines badly overstretched, the parties reach a truce.

And reach another understanding. Of what? That we are different. That one of us is inside this thing and the other is outside, and it's hard to say which is more helpless. That when we are not fighting with each other, we are fighting with something bigger. Which is the right to have a life. Which we express in different ways, at different times, and wholeheartedly agree upon. And this point brings me to a welcome exhaustion, for I spend much of my time fighting uselessly with life. I want things as they were. I am tired of sickness and fear. Of which I have had plenty in my own life, and the nagging thought persists that no sooner may Marlou recover, than I will succumb to some next horrible neuromuscular stage of things. I'm only 60 years old, after all.

Which brings us back to the fight. It's all I've ever known. Marlou, I think, has known something else. But not now. Now we both know just one thing, which has to do with the daily battle for survival, physical and spiritual. And which, we're learning, cannot and must not, be fought alone.

The cover crop in one of my two raised beds is reaching the 20-inch level, beginning to lean over, looking downright pendulous, not to mention effulgent. In mercilessly honest moments, I attribute many of the same qualities to my middle-aged abdomen. But it's not my abdomen that concerns me, but Marlou's. She has been coughing so much from her cold that things are not feeling right around the area of her surgery. Things are not feeling right in general these days, particularly both weekend days when a grayness hung over the afternoons, and I could no longer separate mood from weather. Which must be one of the lessons of having a sick spouse. Get up, get out, get social and get caffeinated.

Though it takes a lot of caffeine to get up before the Board. And although you can trace a long line from the Draft Board through the College Board, including a brief detour through Britain's Coal Board, Gas Board and Water Board, it is impossible to measure the distance in board feet from start to finish, with everything hurtling toward the Tumor Board. Most friends, it seems, know about the Tumor Board. Every large hospital has one. And our date with the board is coming up, this very morning, in fact. When Marlou faces the facts of her liver tumor, and the best medical minds at Stanford University pass judgment. The whole thing is multidisciplinary, Marlou has been told. There's a doctor of this type, one of that, and they confer until they concur. Is the tumor operable? Is there something to slice away at? I barely understand the implications of all this. Is it good or bad if someone wants to perform surgery? This information can be read either way. No surgery could mean, in Marlou's case, highly effective chemotherapy, with too little tumor to worry about. Surgery could also mean things are so desperate that we might as well have a go with a knife. And of course there's the opposite. Let's operate, because this thing is small, confined and worth our surgical while.

It's worthwhile unraveling all this in an effort to find out why the appointment with the Tumor Board feels so fateful. But understanding is hopeless. I don't have much insight into my own fears here. But every step closer to the reality of a life-threatening illness gets one more sober. Fearful in the short term...more realistic in the long term. I am getting used to this territory.

Doubtless a succession of very rich cancer patients has enabled Stanford to construct an Advanced Treatment Center modeled on the Cancun Hilton. No sense in considering a round of bedpans and food under plastic domes without a few hours of consultation here, amidst airy and glassy expanses of the latest architecture. Even the magazines are relatively up-to-date, some hailing from last November, one actually printed this month, March. We are shown inside by a Filipino who all but goes through a hello-I'm-Dave-I'll-be-you're-a waiter-this-evening sort of introduction. He'll be taking Marlou's weight, he tells us. And dammit if this doesn't occur, right there before our very eyes, Marlou stepping on the scale, Dave taking notes. After which, we are whisked into a small examining room. All examining rooms are small. That's the whole idea. Patients are small. Doctors are small. And wheelchairs, loaded with batteries and more wheels than the average cuckoo clock, are enormous. But never mind. The people in the room at the moment are very slight, and the presence of my behemoth wheelchair doesn't faze them. The nurse, Mrs. Hsheih, darts about her interview with Marlou, piling question upon question, each answer clipped short by the next inquiry. The transcript would read like any other medical history, although the whole thing has the feel of an interrogation. Where was Marlou on the night of February 3?

We wander back out to the lobby. In the far corner someone is giving shoulder massages. Is this free, or is there a charge? I turn to the New Yorker. And within moments I half return to sleep. That's the thing about the Tumor Board. I wonder when we're going to see all these doctors and where. As instructed, at 10:30 a.m. I half wake up and head back to the examining room. Within a few minutes Doctor So walks in. He has been preceded in my life by Dr. No, but there's little resemblance. In fact, he's sort of clipped and self-effacing. He's an old doctor, he tells us, that's why he only performs surgery on Wednesday. His patients are in by Wednesday, out by Sunday, swift and efficient as dry-cleaning. The operate/not operate decision seems to have been made. This multidisciplinary team is nowhere to be seen. Dr. So just wants to get a better picture of things, and rule out any lung involvement. At this, I inwardly shudder, and I'm certain Marlou does the same. She has lost her brother to lung cancer, after all. How effective is this surgery, I ask Dr. So. Oh, he says, there's rarely a cure with cancer. This is usually a chronic disease.

Outside, it's spring. I am exhausted. I can't tell if we've had good news or bad news. It's Marlou's birthday, and she suggests in the parking lot that we have a celebratory lunch. Naturally. I would have thought of this myself, planned it as well. But celebration seem so remote right now that I have to consider this proposal for a few minutes. Of course. We not only have lunch, but had for the Apple Store where, as arranged, Marlou will choose an iPod. I don't quite make it inside. For just a moment I have to put my foot up on the wall of the Apple building. I can't really say that we have entered a new phase. Or that we have entered anything. There's nothing to enter with all this. There are simply moments when we go deeper. It's warm. The cover crop is growing. And after a few deep breaths, and a few minutes in the sun, it's time to go inside and do my bit for the national economy.

It is Friday, and I am old, useless and now describe myself as semi-retired. There's no justification for the 'semi' -- there's nothing partial about it. This fact slams into me occasionally, and I slam back. We are having this slamming match now, this morning, as I line up the tools needed for the journey. The Chronicle. The novel. The cell phone number. I print out the latter on a piece of paper. A competent person would input needed numbers into his cell phone, for this is the digital age, the mobile phone age. But I am into old age and feeling particularly useless as I roll out the door, back already aching. I can't remember why I am doing this. Perhaps I wouldn't be asking these questions if my nostrils weren't jammed full of peanut shells, my bronchia lightly roughened with sandpaper. I'm sure there was a time when I didn't have this cold, but I can't recall it.

On the train to San Francisco, I let my head fall forward and sort of sleep. I would have slept better last night, if I hadn't become obsessed with my own breathing. It's not much to begin with, entirely a diaphragmatic affair, my actual chest being paralyzed. So any interference, say the presence of phlegm, makes me labor a bit. And for some reason, breathing and laboring don't sit well with me today. In fact, they make me panic slightly...just enough to stay awake at 4 a.m. Which turns out to be very much like 5 a.m. Although it's different from 12 noon, when the train arrives in San Francisco and I see Ollie, our young British friend, waiting at the head of the platform.

We head for the Municipal Railway, a.k.a., Muni tram, while I ask how it is going. I am uncertain as to this 'it', and already feel a fool. I don't know what to say to young people. Was I ever young myself, really? And why are we doing this thing, Ollie and I? Who knows, but there's a lot to distract us. Sic Transit Omni, in the immortal words of Britain's Private Eye. We move through the tram station and ascend to the concourse. What on earth is a concourse? Why not call it the ticket hall? Which would require putting a T on the elevator pad, instead of a C. Which would be an excellent idea.

Because there is no real system for handling the subway tickets of wheelchair passengers, I have to insert the BART card into a turnstile, wave my hand across the photoelectric beam, then depart. The agent makes Ollie walk through, then exit through the gate marked with a wheelchair symbol. Why does all this embarrass me? Again, I don't know. The two of us head for the elevator. Although head is all we do. The public address system is announcing elevator status throughout the subway system, and I have had enough experience with this to listen attentively. Sure enough, Sod's Law being very active today, the elevator in the Downtown Berkeley station is out. Okay. Okay. Fortunately, I have stored the mobile numbers, admittedly on paper, but what the hell. I punch in Arlon's.

Who is Arlon? Well, for the time being, he is the person I am delaying. I suggest meeting around the Rockridge station, instead, but this turns out to be far from his El Cerrito home. So that's where we head, El Cerrito. And on the way, I try to make more chitchat with Ollie. How's the job? All of this sounds impossibly banal to me. Fortunately, he tells me about his San Francisco housemates. They are what might be termed him 'wild', but that would be because I am distinctly un-wild myself, and they are actually urban, mildly edgey, at least in San Francisco terms. Ollie and I have a brief exchange concerning sexual values. Meaning, the value of sex. And, what the hell, we have said something significant, after all, across generations.

And in Oakland despite the fact that I have a permanent cold and am staring failure in the face, miraculously, one subway train draws up opposite the other and we transfer in seconds. Getting us to El Cerrito in stunning time. And who is Arlon? Well, he's this man I haven't seen in almost 20 years. Doubtless, he is surprised to find me in a wheelchair, and I was surprised to find him in the process of retiring. He is the senior solar energy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. When I worked there, I found him endlessly fascinating, and wrote about him whenever I could. Now, it's time to introduce him to Ollie. And to reintroduce ourselves, Arlon and I.

Who is Arlon? Over lunch, it becomes clearer, time dissipating, Arlon returning. He is this supremely creative man, who piled research success upon success. Until 1980 when the nation elected its actor president...who had a particular vendetta against solar energy. Reagan tried to zero the solar budget, year after year, and had partial success. The lab's research effort was starved into nonexistence within a few years. But Arlon kept going, somehow. He's something of a star, in my estimation. In the fullness of time, he's even more. For he is modest, open and receptive. Over lunch in a very un-Berkeley shopping center restaurant, all of us brighten under his spell. Ollie is full of questions. Better, he is full of statements. He tells Arlon what interests him, what he knows about solar technologies and markets. Arlon, of course, knows more, but because he is not out to impress or oppress, his information builds nicely on what Ollie has to say. Which makes me order a glass of wine, even though it's bad for my cold. And makes Arlon order a Gibson, an actual cocktail. At the close of lunch, Arlon and I have cooked up another article... something we will work on in April, after Arlon is remarried. He divorced, it turns out, about the time I did. He's marrying a woman who likes to travel.

I like to travel myself. I even like traveling across the bay when I have a cold, and I'm old and worthless, and don't know what to say to a younger person. I do know this, but Arlon said one thing to Ollie. Which was, 'here's my card, so I give me a call and I'll show you around the laboratory'. Which gives me a an odd sense of pride and pleasure and makes me appreciate myself, despite myself. It's a glorious day, after all. How many subway systems give the rider a view of the sun beginning its descent behind the Golden Gate Bridge? I stare at this magnificent scene. Arlon has told me that he's certain my wheelchair could make it up and down the trails of Angel Island State Park. I point out the island to Ollie. Let's go, he says. He also suggests we explore a London-style square near his San Francisco room. Maybe we are getting to know each other. Maybe I'm getting to know myself. Some things, like this cold, take forever. Others end very quickly. I keep discovering the same thing, that all we have is the moment. And this one, it turns out, is just fine.