May 2007 Archives

I don't know what to say about "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," except that this British film has shaken me.

My friend David and I journeyed to San Jose yesterday, a transit odyssey that involved trams that are too slow, expensive and infrequent to be credible. Never mind, for there we were in a darkened cinema with four other patrons, as this film by British director Ken Loach unfurled.

The piece opens in Ireland, 1920, at the height of the Troubles. It concludes at their close. What happens in between? We experience an uprising close-up, on the ground, moment to moment. This was never a war, especially to Britain which had just lost a sizable portion of its adult male population in the mud of Flanders and northern France. In fact, the scale seems almost quaint. Cornering a few soldiers in a pub. Stumbling into gunfire in a blog. Every bit of the combat seems small, roughhewn and makeshift. No one knows what they're doing. The British have virtually no ability to find the enemy. The Irish have virtually no weapons to fight anyone. Everyone makes do. And in the process, everyone does evil.

The British, constantly losing compatriots to peasant villagers and farmers, are driven to desperation. Any male becomes the enemy. The British resort to torture. And the indiscriminate roundups of men of fighting age drive the Irish population deeper into rebellion. Meanwhile, the rebels are reduced to killing their own, at times, to maintain discipline. And when an imperfect peace breaks out, of course they kill each other.

All these historical events are well known, but the film depicts them on the ground, inch by inch, moment by moment, with a clarity that invites the viewer to address a simple question. What would I do in such circumstances?

Perhaps it's the film's physicality. On the big screen, we almost feel the moss on the stones of Irish farmhouses. When soldiers set fire to a home, the smoldering thatched roof, and later, the charred rock walls linger with a smoky presence. In close gatherings, from prison to barn to town hall, we can almost smell the sweat of people who were lucky to bathe once a week.

The's physical sensations contrast strongly with my own life. Mine is a soft existence. An eight-year-old boy taken to bed starving, men on a crooked narrow pub bench beaming as though there's is the height of comfort, the rifle butt to the jaw, none of this is familiar in my world.

The film is an object lesson for anyone trying to understand Iraq. How an occupying army at war with civilians gets frustrated, demoralized and dragged into the basest behavior. And how when peace finally comes, those civilians are called upon to be worldly statesman and futurists. Beyond any reasonable expectation, of course. So peace doesn't come, or it comes spasmodically, until everyone more or less gives up.

And what of my own life? Am I the casualty of a modest American urban war? Will real war come to America in my lifetime? What stances should I take? How would I face the challenges of the young men in Ken Loach's film? God only knows. But I do know one thing. Events can overtake us. Life can force us to make choices, take stands and propel human history in ways we never desired.

At some point life became all frenzy and no substance. While like Prufrock, I no longer dared to eat a peach. Too harsh? Perhaps, but not too late for a major course correction.

The frenzy, me spinning the Dharma wheel faster than a meth-freak hamster, that got started long ago. Friends in college used to remark that I was speedy. So this phenomenon predates my injury. Suffice it to say, that I've done a lot of running in life.

Now, it's running in place. I even exercise in place, row, row, rowing my exercise machine gently up no stream. Only my carport. Which, I hasten to add, isn't my carport, but my landlord's. Pedaling? An exercycle, of course. The stationary bike. Who ever thought of such a thing? Yes, it's necessary, eminently practical, and little short of miraculous if you happen to be a partial quadriplegic.

And the lack of daring in my day-to-day routine? Well that's the dirty little secret of my middle-aged life. Don't get around much anymore. It's partly the driving. Elliot drives me today, however, with Marlou and his brother Nathan in the rental car back seat. All of us headed for Big Basin State Park. It's only California's oldest. It is only home to some of the largest redwood trees on earth. Which is something like having a brontosaurus at your local petting zoo. Worse, or best if you're optimistically inclined, it's only 40 miles away. It's taken me only 40 years of Bay Area life to get there. No, I had never been to this place before today.

Thank God for Elliot and his sure driving hands, his day off from a Wells Fargo call center 1500 miles away in Des Moines and his brother who can push a wheelchair. Both of them push, in fact. It is taken a ludicrous life effort to get here. Never mind. I'm here now. It seems I've gotten to this redwood grove just in time. The range of motion in my neck barely allows me to glance at the top of trees that are taller than any London office block. Some were shooting out branches when the Magna Carta was being spell checked.

Somewhere, only a few feet above us, the day is warm, actually verging on hot. Here in the shade of these massive trees, groundwater transpiring up their foliage, hundreds of gallons per day, things are cool. To the Iowas guys, the trees are way cool. Particularly Nathan who has the good sense to climb inside several. You're not supposed to do this, of course, and I am nervously glancing around for a park ranger. Not to worry, for the state budget has almost zeroed these guys out of existence. And on the first day after Memorial Day, the crowds all returning to their cubicles, there's no one here but retired Americans and British tourists. And all of us on a one-hour walk on the wheelchair-accessible nature trail number less than ten. So Nathan is inside the burned-out hulk of the Mother Tree. Yes, that's the park's official name for it. But, no, it's considerably more than a hulk. It's a living thing, burned badly over the centuries, as all these redwood giants are. California forest fires occur regularly, just like an oven going on and off. Small things burn, bigger things bake and vast things thrive. Welcome to the redwood forest.

Nathan is where he should be, inside a tree. Inside, he says, it's practically hollow. He doesn't say much else at this point. Neither do I. This is a place for quiet. The green meadow in the clearing is a place to stop, have Elliot turn my wheelchair toward the grass and take things in. Stalks of slender grasses ripple. Wild flowers, white and exquisite as miniature daisies, stand at attention. They have an important job to do, scattered strategically about the grassy tufts. They provide contrast. Their job is to make the meadow perfect.

Sounds of the wind from the trees must descend a long distance. It's like hearing one of the lower tributaries of the jet stream, mixed with the crackle of redwood branches. But look up, and you see nothing. The branches aren't moving. But the fog is, low wisps of Pacific maritime weather grabbing at each other's hands, losing grip, drifting, grabbing again. Clouds delivered to the executive suite on the top floor, out of sight and off-limits. Reached by special elevator.

Back at the car, I stand briefly in the crook of the open door watching the guys fold my wheelchair, Marlou stash our picnic remains in the trunk. Nathan has said that he would like to go hiking in Big Basin Park. I tell him that I am glad I went backpacking when I could. My backpack treks were infrequent. But, at least, they were. I say all this, then wonder why. I could have been a contender. We could have backpacked together. I was not always as you see me now.

Less than 45 minutes later, we sit parked in front of the Saratoga Starbucks. The spring sun is trying to bake the asphalt into its summery skillet. But it's too early in the year. Traffic dribbles out of the mountains. On the quiet streets people at PCs watch their portfolios bob up and down. Others sit in cubicles miles away studying the live web cam view of their backyards. I am here and heading home.

Remarkable what a human being can do on five hours of sleep, I'm thinking as I hurtle north on the morning freeway with Marlou's nephews, Elliot and Nathan. There's no particular reason for not sleeping, except that I've set the Sunday morning alarm clock for 6:30 a.m., and something in me is forever phobic about oversleeping, so a brief glance at the 5 a.m. alarm clock startles me into wake up mode, 5:30 a.m., 6:45 a.m. and so on. Mercifully, the freeway is empty. Even the streets around Union Square, in the heart of San Francisco, are not exactly bustling. A blue disabled space looms on the side of Post St., so unexpected that I jam on the 8:30 a.m. brakes. Twenty minutes later we are on the subway and headed for the Carnaval parade. Morning espresso, bagels for the guys, and we are outside waiting for whatever to come marching down the street.

We wait and wait. A cop smiles sheepishly, explains that despite all the barricades and the crowd control and the press photographers waiting to get a shot of Latin dancing girls in thongs, a parade float has broken down. Once the procession finally gets started, more than an hour late, it's easy to see why things break down. The whole thing is somewhat broken down. It's just an amped up, sexed up, hyped up neighborhood parade. Here are the dancing girls. Here's the salsa jazz band. Here's Emerson Middle School attired like mariachis, followed by their teachers in serapes. Here is a flatbed truck carrying DJs from the San Francisco Latin music station. Here's a U Haul truck without a sign, or a loudspeaker or any apparent purpose. It's just there, along with the Bolivian Friendship Society walking the streets in native colors. We get back on the subway. It's the first subway ride for both nephews. I'm having a wonderful time.

We meet Marlou at the edge of Chinatown and proceed to a midday dim sum. I can tell both guys are impressed to go menuless, food wheeling by on carts, entrees without a name, described generically by the server. Breaded shrimp. Broccoli. Pork rolls. For two not widely traveled guys from Des Moines, they dive right in, giving the cuisine a sporting chance. I check my watch. Amazing what you can do on small sleep and big wheelchair batteries.

We walk and roll, respectively, down Kearney Street, to the Museum of Modern Art. Where I take a 20 minute nap, while Marlou and the boys take a look at the latest photography exhibit. I am perched with one slightly edematous paralyzed leg raised on the bench in front of my wheelchair. People come and go before my eyes from exhibition room to exhibition room. I'm going nowhere. I need to sit here and read Louis Jenkins' prose poems. But after awhile I need to do something else, like paying attention to those around me. Like Nathan who has just emerged from the photo exhibit. Let's go in and have a look, I say. Show me what's good.

Nathan, it develops, has studied photography. In fact, he discourses at convincing length about Ansell Adams' zone theory. I know nothing of photography. I'm not even particularly visual. So I learn something. More important, I instinctively let Nathan know I am learning something. My father did much the same with me from an early age, listening to me and letting me know my thoughts were worth saying. Now it's time to return the favor. I don't have kids, so I get few opportunities, but I know enough to take advantage of this one. We move around the rooms. Weston, Cunningham, Deal. Nathan shows me what he likes and what he doesn't. There are no right answers. Only the right to answer. That's what this is about. The art has spoken, Nathan has answered and I have listened. Thus the march of generations, the successive transfer of power that creates culture. I'm ready for another nap.

Actually, I'm ready for the Louis Jenkins book and the third floor lobby. I put the poetry down for a moment, staring past the page at the advancing Marlou. She has been on the second floor looking at Paul Klee with the guys. I have been in northern Minnesota with Jenkins. And Minnesota has been tilting and going adrift, Jenkins being what he is. And Marlou being what she has stopped to look at something on the wall. From where I'm sitting it's not clear if she is regarding an art piece or a notice. I am regarding her. She takes her time. Maybe time has taken her. She is not in a hurry. She is in the moment. And the moment is on the wall, and she is allowing the moment free rein. And I am enormously grateful for whatever this is. For someone who has a capacity for repose and reflection, and trusts enough in the river of time to briefly allow matters to float. Marlou stares at the wall, and a look of I-get-it-and-that's-enough-of-that shifts scenes in her face.

She walks over to me and begins helping me take off my coat. Outside, it is one of those embarrassingly cold San Francisco May afternoons, and I am so lost in this sense that I have remained bundled up. Marlou pulls on a sleeve. A wave of anger washes over me. She knows better than to do it this way. I have to stand, rise from the wheelchair. Why doesn't she know this? Because, she is having a delightful time with her nephews and me, and she wants to deliver her nurturing in a coat-off gesture, and being more caught up in the mood than the details, she's grabbed at my sleeve. And I grab at my memories of a clumsy, borderline hysterical mother. Who meant well. Doubtless, though at the time it was impossible to say. The difference is obvious. My mother would probably yank at my sleeve until it separated from the jacket. I thank Marlou, stand up from the wheelchair and let things happen as they should. It will always be like this. I may never quite trust Marlou. Nor will I trust my luck for having her.

In early June or late May, Carnaval bursts onto the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The photos show calypso and Latin dancers, all feathers, sequins and and sashes, flinging and swinging themselves through the city's Mission District. Without being there, I can just tell that it's outrageous, excessive, indulgent, and utterly delightful. Actually, it looks like more fun than the Notting Hill Street Fair in West London. The latter tends to drift into hot days, hot tempers and a series of drunken encounters with the police, often described as mini riots. But not this. San Francisco's Carnaval takes over the Mexican-Central American quarter southeast of downtown. And the parade and the street musicians and the food all get consumed without a lot of fuss. There's usually little trouble.

And I know why.

Everyone is freezing to death. It's like the summer scene in a Hollywood western that's been production-scheduled for a 35 degree day on a sunny Arizona plateau. The scenes look great, but it's a little hard on the actors. I imagine that Carnaval is much like this. San Francisco's infamous foggy, misty windblown Pacific weather just doesn't come across in newspaper pictures. Actually, by all accounts, Carnaval is only semi-costumed, in the usual outrageous style of our fair city, so we're talking about a lot of frozen tits and butts.

As I say, I've never actually gotten myself up early enough and north enough to enjoy the Afro-calypso fest. But this is about to change. With Marlou's nephews joining us for the weekend, we plan to give Carnaval a shot. I'll dress warmly. What else is there to do? To an outside observer, Carnaval is one thing and to participants it's another. I'm used to this sort of thing.

The sort of thing around Marlou's cancer is no carnival, of course, but it has its own delusions. One of mine is that I have to be strong while Marlou endures. Which is perfectly true, but only as true as Carnaval. You get up on the float, you make sure your feathers are straight and your jockstrap will hold, then you go for it, shaking your booty at the crowds along Mission Street. The dancing gets your blood going, the music gets your limph going, and before you know it, you're as hot as promised. Okay, so this isn't San Juan, Port-au-Prince, or even Palm Springs. Never mind. You're psyched, you've got a job to do, and despite the fog and the stinging nettles of ocean mist, you might as well pretend you're in Rio de Janeiro.

The same is oddly true of cancer support. When the life of someone you love is slowly being pulled away, you grab on, grip hard and don't let go. The person slipping off the edge of the building needs to look into your eyes. They need to feel the strength, permanence and general reliability of your grip. They need to get a grip themselves, and they don't have one, so yours will have to do.

The grip actually turns up in movie credits. He's part of the team, all right, although he usually appears just before the disclaimer about fictitious persons and places, the copyright notice and the invocation to Dolby. It's just not a big job. The real job is the big story, the survival story. That's the one in the title, and the supporting cast and the supporting personnel and the drivers and the script writer's assistant and the caterers and everyone else is there to make the big thing happen.

The big thing has happened with Marlou. She's off the chemo hook, cancer free and fancy free. Yes, there are worries, but they are so long-term and ephemeral as to be out of reach for someone used to crisis mentality and siege conditions. A miracle. I keep playing and replaying Laura Nyro's old song "Time and Love." Don't let the Devil fool you, here comes the dove...nothing heals like time and love.

And now it's time to heal myself. Whatever role I played in the first movie, I've got my own documentary to attend to now. It's a story about someone who has survived his own healing crises and has, for once, been able to contribute to the healing of someone else. It's way cool. It's also way exhausting. And there's this knot of pain that has gotten way too big. If I find myself getting angry at little things, that's because I'm not paying adequate attention to the big thing. What I've been through. What I've achieved. And what I need to give myself credit for. Time and love.

"We have no brakes and we cannot stop. We have no brakes and we cannot stop."

In the packed dirt playground of Banning Central School, this was what third-grade power was all about. We linked arms, Bill Wing, John Hamill, Bruce Allen and, finally, me, and set off to wreak our version of havoc. Once our bodies were chained together, there was no stopping us. We were the essence of momentum. We couldn't stop, that was our thing. Our particular thing was the group of girls playing hopscotch, jump rope, foursquare and other lame efforts at recess gaming. We moved off the dirt, onto the blacktop, intent on disruption. Which wasn't really disruption, was it? After all, when you have no brakes and you cannot stop, is it your fault that someone gets in your way? Besides, despite their shrieking and protests to the contrary, we were certain the girls were impressed.

Most days, this arm linking thing just got going on its own, often with Hubert Boyce at the center of the formation. At its best and longest, the boys involved described the thing as a flying wing. The latter was the latest, best, most astounding and top-secret thing the Air Force had ever invented, and we were it on the ground, moving and moving. Except that I was only "it" in my mind. Somehow I never quite figured it out, how the thing got formed and when. For if you weren't there at the start, the positioning of arm inside arm and natural falling together of third-grade boys, all instantly achieved momentum and inevitability, you missed out. I watched and watched. Were there secret hand signals? Something was going on, and I desperately wanted to be part of it. Discussion, of course, was not only useless but unthinkable. It was so uncool to talk about a thing so natural, so in, so cool.

So the day the chain fell into formation right beside the ruthless tetherball game in the corner by the oleanders, I finally figured out what to do. Join hands. No, arms, just as the others were doing, without saying a word, and if no one told you to beat it, you were in. In and moving.

We have no brakes and we cannot stop. All of us were now bearing down on the foursquare game. Mrs. Pratt, our recess teacher, had spelled out the rules. Do the no-brakes-cannot-stop thing only on the dirt. Don't dare cross the blacktop. And leave the girls alone. This was the sort of red flag that no boy could seriously resist. Besides, once we got going, and there were five of us now, the mob mentality was heady, insistent and overpowering. We were hot-blooded and baying for combat. Well, not exactly hand-to-hand, more blind opposition. Besides, it wasn't our fault. It was the momentum. We have no brakes.

Mrs. Pratt did, of course. Having slammed ourselves into the hopscotch area, she now slammed into us. She towered, her skirts billowed, and she eyed us with the fixed gaze of the Moral Majority of One. Sit on the grass. We all had to sit on the stupid lawn, the one between the buildings, where no one was allowed to play and, in fact, no one was ever allowed to go. Except for periods of humiliating confinement. The grass was always wet, the requirements of desert watering being what they were. I told Mrs. Pratt my butt would get soaked. She said sit down. What if I got grass stains? She said sit down. She returned to the girls, blew her whistle and got them going again. Then, as though an afterthought, she headed for us, the brakeless. She blew her whistle again at some distant infraction happening by the water fountain. Miguel Chavez was spraying Nancy Finnegan, but stopped instantly, feigned utter surprise and such a look of innocence that Mrs. Pratt seemed genuinely indecisive. She gave up and turned to us.

She was going to be talking to Mr. Custer. She talked to him, the principal, all the time about us. We would probably be visiting him pretty soon. A pregnant pause. Another whistle blast. One minute warning, she said, everyone on the playground ignoring her. Mr. Custer might just be calling us into his office. Whew. I caught the nuance, the critical "might." It was sure easy to get swept up in things, running with a dangerous crowd. But it was sure fun. The knife edge of terror and joy. Guilt and elation. It was a heady moment, and I could see the possibilities, being one bad-ass doctor's son.

Which brings me to my afternoon drive to Half Moon Bay. Never mind that I drove 100 miles in March, each way, to soak in some Lake County hot springs. Driving scares me. And it's this thing about downhill. No brakes. And not stopping.

I've got the feeling, and God only knows where it comes from, that I'm going to lose control. Either the brakes on my van will go out. Or my quadriceps will. My one innervated leg will fail. For reasons that are entirely unclear. Why should the leg fail? Don't know. I guess because there's only one. And driving with one leg feels like, well, like you've probably got one working leg. Not much back up. Which is all true enough.

Of course, it always has been true. And I will rack my brain trying to tell what's more dangerous about one-leg driving now than, say, 30 years ago. I can't say. The foot only has to find, and "find" is the operative word, the brake pedal. I do have brakes. And I can stop. My foot gets occasionally confused, but logical thinking will steer the unfeeling limb to the wooden V that holds the heel in position. Go figure.

Hard to say what out-of-control thing looms behind the driving, the walking in the shower, all the slightly more challenging activities of daily living. Except that in addition to the uncertainties of my own age and physical existence, there is now the factor of Marlou. No signs of cancer, and she's off the chemo hook. But I'm not. I may always be on tenterhooks about her health and our future. And what is there to do but face it? For it's true that in the big picture, fate has no brakes and it cannot stop.

Whatever happened to the psychoanalyst's couch? Oh, it's around, you say. Didn't I just see one in a New Yorker cartoon? Maybe. But even in cartoons, you see them less and less. The couch is fading. Psychoanalysis is probably fading too, being too slow, too expensive, too arduous, too uncertain, too much.

What's not fading are my own memories of the psychoanalyst's couch. I hit one, during a particularly exciting phase of my life, five days a week. Yes, this is the stuff of Woody Allen jokes. And I have, if one adds it up, at least as many years in therapy as he. And I'm 10 years younger.

Back to the couch. That's how my life was for about three years. Get up, face the day and back to the couch. Tomorrow, an entirely different day, and back to the couch. The weekend, with all its variety and opportunity, then with the passing of Sunday, on Monday back to the couch.

Why do analysts use a couch? Well, do they? Perhaps they don't anymore. Perhaps they are not analysts anymore, but something else. Who knows? All I know is that for one very intense stretch in the years following my injury, every day I got myself up, aboard a subway, down a long series of streets, and up the stairs to my analyst. It was the 1970s, and my analyst had studied with Carl Jung. The guy himself. In fact, Jung's photo stared at me day after day. Actually, it looked down at me, as did an entire wall of books. All of them were higher. That's how it is when you're on a couch. You're lower than almost everything. Which may be part of the intended effect. Again, who knows?

Another thing about couches: they're cozy. And cozy was something I'd had precious little of in my life. At first, therapy meant sitting in a chair. I talked. She talked. In fact, I didn't know what to make of the couch that stretched invitingly just to the right of my therapist. One day she noticed I was staring at the couch and asked if I wanted to have a go. I did. And that was that.

Particularly for someone whose paralyzed legs tend to swell and sting, having one's feet up is downright comfy. And cozy? That's composed of so many things, all of them maternal, that it's hard to deconstruct. Let's just say that stretching out on a good couch is as close to being held as one can get. The real thing, throwing your legs across the analyst's right arm and leaning your head against the left, requires a level of health insurance only available to senior members of the Bush Administration and their contributors. And even then, its availability is predicated on the assumption, no, the certainty, that this type of coverage will never be used.

It is probably true that the hardest work I've done in my life occurred lying down. Very few people can say this. Even top tier prostitutes do a lot more of moving around. But the difficult work of getting in touch with me and who I was and my burden and my possibilities for a life, all occurred reclining.

And the point? Well, the point, or the pointed end of the stick, is pointing right at me these days. It is demanding attention. And it is rapping out lessons like a schoolmaster's ruler. Because 35 years later I am back at it. Writing about my painful youth, recording my losses and humiliations and general education. No sooner do I start down a blind childhood alley, words rolling across the screen, when I feel an overpowering need to lie down. I joke to Marlou that I am in a swoon. What's the joke? It's all too much, so exhaustively too much, that I have to stretch out, close my eyes, indulge.

And that's the crux of the issue. Am I indulging or creating? Everything I have grown up believing, all the forces that spurred me into an improbable set of high-pressure jobs, all of this tells me that I am indulgent, indulging, indulged. Probably overindulged.

The trick is to remember. This means recalling what happens when I shut my eyes. I get cozy. I rarely sleep. Various things drift through my mind. Those are the things, if I have the courage, that can keep me writing for the next few hours. Or just as often, send me out the garden to stare at the broccoli. Sometimes you're on. Sometimes you're off. Somehow this has been one of life's hardest lessons.

This problem with my swelling ankles and stinging feet has only worsened over the years. That's why last summer I bought a laptop, a very light one, for the very purpose of sitting in my reclining chair and writing. The idea was that once I had reached the painful end of what physiotherapists call 'sitting tolerance,' I would wrap things up at the desk, then move to the living room to perch in a reclining chair. I wrote this way during last August's holiday in Inverness. Since then, it hasn't happened. I have never tried this in my own home. I have had the laptop for nine months.

That's why we have brothers. Mine was here recently, and in the course of seeking his advice about a new mattress, his gaze settled on something across the showroom. There it was, down one wheelchair-inaccessible aisle of Mattress Discounters. The most expensive thing in the store. Actually, even more expensive than the most expensive thing, for the most advanced, ultra-high-priced version was not even on display. It had to be imagined. A queen bed with a head that raises like a hospital bed, and a foot that does the same. But there's more. It's dual. Marlou's half can go up, while mine goes down. I can raise my feet but she keeps hers level. Up on one side, down on the other, all simultaneous, each side controlled by its own separate wireless handset. You can transmit instructions to your own bed from across the room, just as you do with HBO. I had to make a substantial withdrawal from my Keogh. I have never been more happy.

The quadriplegic struggles to get oneself positioned in bed, somewhere between the comical and the sad, are over. Want to read? Hit the button. Want the blood drained out of your feet? Press here. Want yourself jiggled by sub-mattress vibrations, a more subtle variation on a theme by Motel 6's Magic Fingers? Go for it. Press there. I haven't actually pressed there, the shock of the new being currently too much for me. But I plan to try. Within the next couple of weeks. Or months. Certainly by 2009.

But there's even more. A journey with Marlou and me to Sunnyvale, gateway to Santa Clara. It's a 15 minute drive if one insists on driving. I, of course, insist on the opposite. We went there by train. Marlou rolled her eyes only once and was, afterwards, entirely sporting about the journey. At the other end we rolled across downtown Sunnyvale, stopping to acquire a grilled ahi sandwich or two, then hurtled onto California Rehabilitation Equipment.

What can anyone say of a store whose sole front office employee routinely greets you with a hug? In fact, she embraced both of us. Why not? We were embracing yet another level of furniture automation. A new reclining chair with more controls than the locomotive that had brought us there. I will get my feet up, or get my feet down, get my back up, down or halfway down. This thing doesn't vibrate, but I'm sure that can be arranged. Did I mention that it tilts like its mechanical armchair predecessor? It's a sort of slow dump truck action that, at least, I'm used to.

I'm not used to all of this comfort, or any of it, but I'm getting there. And where I'm really getting is home. Cozy in my own home. With my own wife, currently cancer free and chemo absent. In my own 60s. Just waiting for what comes next. Which will soon come from Marlou's side of the home decorating operation: a new, orthopedically compatible, couch.

?I suppose it's fine if the stock market holds."

Thus, Marlou's assessment of my new status. Retired. This is what I have officially decided. Unofficially, this essential shift in purpose, identity, cash flow and day-to-day activity has left me reeling. What have I done?

What, in fact, have I done with my life? What have I ever done, except survive? This sums up the new possibilities. Less time and energy devoted to survival, more devoted to what? Superficially, the answers are all there. I will write my way to the grave. So much to say, record, observe. Not to mention reflect, consider and deconstruct. But even under the best neuromuscular circumstances, no human can write all day. No human should. A void has opened.

There's a new baby across the way. The parents, Ichizo and Naokao, now have three, and all are headed across the big way. Their home is in northern Japan. They have been here for three years while Ichizo completes cardiac research at Stanford. He resumes his medical practice in Japan at the end of July. And I will miss them.

Their daughters, seven and three, speak rather stunning English. Both are fascinated with the new baby, Joe. His oldest sister corrects us when we call him Joe. It's "Bill," she tells us. Bill. That's what you get for being the oldest kid, a sense of prerogative and responsibility. You get naming rights. You get rights period.

Occupying this position in my own family, you would think I would seize my newfound options, hop out of bed each morning bursting with a middle-aged sense of life's possibilities. But, no. I keep thinking something is wrong. Actually, I keep trying to go to work. California has a large pot of money assigned to solar energy for homes. I'm trying to get some solar writing jobs. There is an eco-friendly project to turn millions of tons of rice stalks into fiberboard. Must be a need for a writer there. This is what I'm used to doing with my time, and these are the socially worthwhile endeavors that give me a feeling of being worthwhile myself. Which is fine. But there's a problem. The portion of my brain that once stretched to embrace technical matters has contracted. I'm into free flow. Actually, I'm into the unknown. What have I missed in life, and what can I rediscover at this late juncture?

Marlou may not have to undergo any more chemotherapy, at least for now. With no current evidence of cancer, her oncologist says why bother. Let's wait. By running Marlou through a PET scan every three months, then every six, they can keep on top of things, spot any recurrence. Suddenly, there are more options, more possibilities for both of us.

In sum, it's like fighting your way through a dense, tangled forest, then stumbling into an open clearing. What should you do? Lie down and enjoy the sun? Sit and read a map? Meditate? Wash everything you own, repair the rest and discard anything left over? Call your friends? Bone up on paleontology? Tend to that backlog of dental work? The clearing is so inviting, but it's, well, clear. Clear of features and signposts and anything but grass and sun. And so inviting that I can't help asking myself, "do I deserve this?"

Surely something awful will happen if I just stretch out and take a nap. After all, there are birds chirping, small flowers dipping this way and that in the breeze. Butterflies intent on looking really good in orange, yellow and black and impressing onlookers with the ability to flap around with wings as aerodynamic as a deck of cards. So you might as well test the orthopedic impact of the grass, stretching out across it, feeling it in your lower back, shoulders, beneath the neck. You are beneath contempt, anyway, having succumbed to indolence and sloth. Pretty soon you'll be sunburned. You'll catch melanoma lounging about in this sunny, grassy space. You'll probably go deaf straining to hear the rustling of the forests that surround. It's surround sound, nature's version, and there aren't even any speakers. Except you. You can be the speaker, speaking your truth, speaking it to anyone and everyone, whether they are present or not. You are present. And you're not alone. And there's time. And for once, you might as well enjoy it.

It's been 24 hours since my eye erupted into jagged lights, and now things are optically sound...to mix sensory metaphors...and I'm off to Trader Joe's. Why? Because it is there. That's why men climb mountains. And why men leave mountains for Trader Joe's. Rolling through the door, I spot Tony, the only Nepalese person I know. It would be pushing things for me to even find Nepal on a map, scrunched up between India and China and elbowing Bhutan in the groin. Tony has this light, who-knows-why-we're-doing-all-this attitude towards everything, which makes his profusion of help feel almost weightless. I can ask him the most absurd, open-ended question, and he'll seriously pursue an answer. On this occasion, I am in search of frozen chopped chicken with Hoisin sauce for rolling lettuce chicken. Naturally, the store has a stock. The problem is this: what to go with it? Which enlarges my question a stage further: what's new in the store?

He runs me down the frozen food aisle, both the Asian section and the vegetable arena. What the hell, I grab at a potpourri of frozen beans and bamboo shoots and carrots and a few other things. Might as well go for Mu Shu vegetables while I'm at it. Not to mention the new chicken quesadillas, just in. I grab a few other items at the same time, my basket spilling over. Which launches me into the next stage: what's for lunch? I really should try the spanakopita, he says, in his offhand Himalayan way. He's a skinny, erudite looking guy with moderately long black hair, and nothing about him suggests any particular interest in food or consumerism. It's all about trying this and trying that, lighthearted and passing the time and helping the customer. I have bought almost $40 worth of things I wasn't planning on, don't particularly need and may or may not eat. Never mind. My eye is okay. Of course, I may still have a brain tumor. It would be one of those intermittent brain tumors, the kind that blossom once or twice a year, then go away. That's fine. Mine has gone away, and I'm going away too, having burst through the checkout stand and departing this caravansary on the route of the great Joe the Trader.

Life is fragile, and sickness is part of it, and the limitations of health are not a failure or punishment. All I know is it's afternoon and Marlou and I have had our fight of the day, perhaps of the week, and I'm heading home where the air is clear and we're both feeling better about everything. And I've forgotten the Hail Caesar salad dressing. It was Tony's fault, distracting me with all his product suggestions. I'll be back to deal with him later.

* * *

Near the end of the afternoon, with the sun slanting in and the day slanting out, I catch Marlou with a faraway look. She is staring out the window, perhaps at the frenzy of spring birds at the feeder. But she seems to be seeing far beyond. Marlou is quite striking with her short hair. She has the look of a nun or a priestess or a cancer patient. And that look is all about life experience and survival and what lies beyond. It's a frightening look. For "beyond" could be life without Marlou, and this possibility unnerves me. But it's also compelling, following the gaze of someone who knows. This used to be my job, more or less. I was the hard-knock veteran, stalwart and available for consultation 24/7. But in the new normal, this, like everything else, has changed. Marlou is courageous and indomitable and keeping on, as they say.

My DSL connection has been out for days, and by the time the repair guy gets here, I am on the brink of murder. It's actually going to be a mass killing, and my first target will be the woman in Bangalore who kept asking me if my phone line was plugged into my modem. But by the time AT&T's tech guy finally makes it up the wheelchair ramp and tells me that I need a new modem, I am feeling downright mellow. He's a black guy, and I have a tension with black guys, but I'm more than 60 years old now and understand my baggage. Which translates into looking him in the eye, full and open, reassuring. For in white Menlo Park a lot of backs must stiffen when he enters a premises. And my premise is that I'm wounded and tired of wounding, so give the guy some warmth and space and let's see what happens.

What happens is a full account of DSL customers. The worst? Not the corporations. Yes, they're anxious to get the line up and running, but they're also used to dealing with people. No, it's not them, but the little old ladies in the retirement home by the railroad tracks. They scream, they demand, they insult. I didn't know that the elderly used the Internet all that much. Wrong. They e-mail grandkids, order stuff, keep in touch with the outside world. And they growl. Will I growl too, in that distant day when I'm pushing 90 and DSL has been supplanted by something else? I hope I will remember Marlou sitting by the window. I hope I remember that when you drop one connection, you can maintain another. I hope I can still hope.

When four-year-old Avery comes running up to me as I wheel into the late afternoon garden, it's clear that his preschooler medium is the message. It's all happening. I'm here. I have had so many fewer days than you that each is extraordinarily precious, bursting with moment. Guess what? It's happening.

What's happening in this case involves garlic. I have told Avery to keep an eye out for sprouting garlic. I know this is an easy task. The recently planted garlic, in fact everything in my mid-70-degrees spring garden, is bursting out of the ground with the subtlety of the space shuttle. I've seen it, I've seen it, he tells me. 1, 2, 3?he counts up the row. Five had sprouted, he tells me. Actually, the number is seven, but as they say, who's counting? Avery tells me that all the garlic have to be moved. His reasons are obscure and, viewed with a critical eye, downright silly. Never mind. Avery has opinions, and my job is to let him know they matter.

I turn the water on the lettuce bed and Avery jumps back as the spray erupts. Now he simply jumps, up and down, for joy. Water, water. Is this fun, or what? He runs into the spray, out of the spray, back in. Am I being silly, he asks? No, I tell him, you are being Avery. This makes him even sillier, which is fine, because I have my eye out for earwigs. I consider them a vile plague, pretty much Biblical in dimension, and I poke around the dead leaves. This gets Avery back into serious mode. He points out the round holes in the broccoli leaves. What do we do? I tell him to summon Marlou. She's been rather down today, somewhat phlegmatic, out of sorts. She could do with a dose of Avery urging her on to spray our politically-correct all-biological insecticide on the broccoli leaves. He's off to our apartment, running down the walkway.

He's back in a flash. Marlou is vomiting, he says. I turn off the water. My first thought is, well, little food poisoning, touch of the flu, but that's only my first conscious thought. My heart-gripping primal thought is cancer. It's blossomed again, hitting her in the gut, and she's throwing up. The afternoon has turned very bright, the setting sun blasting his way toward my eyeballs. I'm surprised to see Marlou appear with the bug spray. "I hear you've been vomiting," I say, as brightly as one can manage. Avery, she tells me, is at the age of making things up. I watch her direct Avery's bug spraying. I am suddenly very tired. I head inside and drift toward the ever compelling PC. When did I last check my e-mail?

Things are awfully bright inside. Well, I'm getting older, and my eyes just don't adjust as they used to. I shut them. There's a familiar jagged sparkling design dancing behind my eyeballs. It's been a good five months since I last experienced this. I strongly suspect it's retinal in origin, the aging eyeball shrinking and tugging at the body's optical screen. I learned about this the hard way, having had a retinal tear, the blood clots from which are still drifting around my eye. I lie down. I try to calm myself, recite an old mantra. Eventually, I summon Marlou. I ask her to hold my hand. Her presence is calming. At some point, the point when I forget to worry, the thing goes away.

In between Hawaiian numbers at that night's choral practice, it comes to me. That, like Avery, I am here, every minute. The other thing comes too, my hope to have no more losses. Being half-paralyzed is quite enough, thank you. But even the paralyzed age and decline. This is scary, and this is growing old, and this is life. Besides, the sparkling thing in my eyeball could be an LSD flashback. I like this idea. It reminds me that I've lived. In fact, I've lived through various eras. And lots of things shouldn't be happening to me, and I shouldn't be in my 61st year, and Marlou shouldn't have cancer. And it's finally settling into me that this has been my life's achievement, that I and my spirit, have survived.

When you're not sleeping well, and the sense of being 60 and unpublished, washed up and washed out, gets to be too much, there's always the Coast Starlight. I hadn't ridden the train to Seattle for almost two years, and it was time. Actually, it was spring time. We've had a dry year in California, but Oregon isn't California, is it? Nor is Washington. That's why the Coast Starlight goes there.

I know better than to go there alone, the rail experience being what it is, so I go with Ollie, a.k.a. Oliver, the 23-year-old son of British friends. He's working at Stanford for a year, young and open to adventure. So before either of us knew it, we were at the San Jose Amtrak station, Ollie pushing me up the platform toward the sleeping cars. No sense in taking the power chair, which doesn't fit in the trunk of my brother's car?or the trunk of any car anywhere?so I was reduced to being pushed in a manual wheelchair. Not my favorite thing.

From the Amtrak bed, night trees wave dark and portentous over the train, branches backlit by the starry sky. The effect is much the same everywhere, the eucalyptus along the track at Richmond, the giant elms near Redding, conical shapes of Douglas firs, dawn light behind them as we curve and swoop along the upper canyon of the Sacramento River. Primal and enclosing, they're enough to make you want to get out of bed and stagger, aided only by your crutch, toward the toilet and the opposite window. There are, incredibly, two windows in the disabled sleeper, one on each side of the train. Downstairs, each sleeping car dead-ends in a room like this one. A toilet, a sink, a lock for the wheelchair, two berths and, yes, two windows. Clinging to the edge of the stainless steel sink, I perform the morning ablutions while Ollie sleeps the sleep of the young.

I wake him up for Mount Shasta, and we set off through the rocking sleeping cars to breakfast. I don't have to hold onto him too much, except in the open spaces of the lounge car, all dome windows and armchairs. Amtrak is enduring another in its endless cycles of cost cutting, so loyal passengers like me try to endure Amtrak. Breakfast?s omelet is barely survivable. The microwave has replaced a fully staffed kitchen aboard the Starlight.

Afterwards, Ollie and I sit in the lounge, a.k.a. Parlour Car. I keep assuring him of the spectacular views, but Mount Shasta has been lurking behind low clouds. I insist on pointing out the geological evidence, the crumbling flows of black lava tumbling down the fog-shrouded mountain toward the train. It's all covered in snow, and the black-on-white contrasts make you want to give Amtrak another few hundred dollars. The lava flow is fairly recent, I tell Ollie. Actually, it dates from the late 1700s, no time at all to a geologist. Trees are still fighting to take root in the cascade of puffy charcoal-colored rock. Stay tuned, I advise Ollie.

At Klamath Falls, there are telltale signs. The conductor makes some vaguely worded announcement about Department of Transportation rules and the train driver having to be off work 10 hours before he heads for Seattle. We wait 45 minutes. For once, this is not the fault, at least not the direct fault, of the evil Union Pacific. Once we're underway, the scenery makes me forget about being late. Upper Klamath Lake, vast and shimmering, a line of snowy Cascades across the far shore, commands my full attention.

We thunder on. There's snow up here, too. The ride flattens out and we roar across snowy plains. I am on the northeast side of the train and can see where we are as the Starlight slows and stops. When Ollie moved from London to Palo Alto last year I asked him if he went downtown on the weekends. What downtown, he asked? Now we have a similar exchange. I'm facing the wrong way to see where we are stopping. Is this a town? No, Ollie tells me. I get more specific. Do you see any roofs, any shacks? Well, yes, he says, a few. I know we are in Chelmut, Oregon. This is the only stop in over 100 miles between Klamath Falls and Eugene, a jumping off spot for skiers and tourists heading to Crater Lake. The train pulls away.

It sails into space, more or less, mountain space. The vast rounded chasm of the upper Willamette gorge opens on one side, my side, of the train. The Starlight creeps along a ledge, hanging at the edge of Valhalla, white slopes rising above us, the enormity of the Cascade Range opening the forests. Across the canyon, the slopes are more like cliffs, yet perfectly conical fir trees mass up and down. The ones above us look like something from a Macy's Christmas window, white flocked tanenbaum forests, anchored to the sheer mountains by mysterious forces. The train slides in and out of tunnels, ducks under snow sheds and eventually turns a curve, revealing its silver streamliner engine and cars. The snow thins, the green predominates, and we roll through Oak Ridge, then Eugene, then up the agricultural valley toward Portland.

It's hard for me to stand, almost impossible to walk, and I'm grateful for an afternoon nap. Who knows how many more years I can do this? I've done it this year. And for once that knowledge will have to be enough.