October 2007 Archives

Oh, you're going to give them a lecture?  This from Marlou as we stood in the remarkably balmy October JFK Airport afternoon, basking in our arrival.  The worst had come and gone, I knew that.  I sensed that our holiday was on a roll when the American Airlines flight attendant asked me in San Francisco if my wheelchair had a quick-release means of disconnecting its battery.  This was a good sign.  There was every possibility now that my wheelchair would arrive at Kennedy intact.  Yes, it took forever for the ground crew to work out the logistics of offloading the thing and getting it up the elevator to our gate.  Never mind.  A quibble.  It was there, and I was here waiting for, yes, another SuperShuttle van.  They kept materializing, these vans.  The first was supposed to arrive within 20 minutes.  So was the second, and the third.  Which was why we were arguing, Marlou and I.  One of us knew the better way to deal with these people, the more daring and assertive way.  Naturally, that someone was me.  Which was why Marlou was asking if I intended to give them, Messrs. SuperShuttle, a lecture.  I did, a long condescending quiz about what they thought "accessible transportation" meant.  Van after van had arrived without a wheelchair ramp.  The truth was simple enough: SuperShuttle wasn't prepared and the one disabled van was stuck in traffic.  Everything in New York is stuck in traffic.  That's why we stayed in the heart of things, 7th Ave and 51st St.  You could sneeze at every famous theater on Broadway.  Stretch out an arm and you'd touch Carnegie Hall.  It was all there, and in the end, so were we.

The streets of New York are broken.  All of them, in all directions.  Is everything under construction?  Or is everything decaying?  In the big scheme of things does it really make a difference?  But the real difference occurs where the rubber meets the road.  For a wheelchair, this meeting is constant and impossible to ignore.  Moving uptown, one short block after the next, means dipping downward into the base material of Manhattan pavement.  It's crumbling, scraped away here, rippling there.  In a wheelchair, one doesn't dare forget about it.  Traffic is threatening on all sides, pedestrians massing, while below, the asphalt roughens and smooths, rises and subsides.  You might as well be crossing the Sierras.

Three days of New York-ish things.  The food off the corner carts smells especially good these days.  But buying food off the streets just isn't a suburban Californian's idea of what's safe.  Good thing Marlou's friends nudged us to buy hot halal on a bun.  We ate on a bench in Central Park.  The world went by on roller blades, pushing perambulators and holding gradeschool hands.  The sun shone, global warming reached the 70s, and our day was going splendidly.  Marlou and I weren't arguing about the airport van and who was more assertive.  We were getting the hang of travel.  We had just asserted ourselves out of the Guggenheim, after all.  It's a classy space, the Guggenheim, particularly seen from the outside.  But with the outside under scaffolding and the inside under siege from conceptual artists, this October day the park was an infinitely better place to be.

Even better was the Morgan Library, the next day.  Good thing J.P. Morgan knew how to make money and, above all, spend it on something other than hookers and fast cars.  His library is a refuge, all about light and manuscripts and clinking glasses in the indoor/outdoor café.  Okay, it's not really outdoors, but with the skylights one can pretend.  The writer Eric Larsen, whom I'd met at the Minnesota Men's Conference joined us for a Dutch style lunch, the café's homage to van Gogh's letters on display next door. 

Van Gogh was corresponding with the likes of Gauguin, discoursing on the cost cutting measures currently available in Provence.  Eating bouillabaisse with aoli was a particularly effective budgetary measure, according to van Gogh, who was particularly cagey on whether or not he could actually put up Gauguin in his flat.  Maybe, maybe not.  And so the letters went on, while Eric and I went on about the display room.  We agreed the whole thing was far too reverential.  The two of us actually laughed at a decibel level approaching out loud, at one point.  People glared.  You would have thought Christ himself was there and getting a promotion.  We all beat a hasty retreat.

Is Mahler's Second Symphony a load of bombast, or is it just a little immature?  I was certainly immature the last time I heard it, on cassette tape.  But it was what Carnegie Hall had to offer on that Thursday evening.  And almost anything Carnegie Hall has to offer will do just fine.  A magnificent place, the sound resonant and thrilling, even after the recent remodel.  A thrill to be there. 

Leading of course to the next day's thrill, the ultimate thrill, the one that arrived on time just outside our hotel and was finally, as though breaking a bad spell, not operated by SuperShuttle.  It came from a limousine service, and the wheelchair ramp was already down and waiting on the 7th Ave pavement.  I rolled onto it, the ramp ascended, and so did my spirits.  True, I couldn't see much of anything as we fought our way through Times Square.  I imagined, rather than saw, the diamond merchants on 47th St.  Why not?  We were on 42nd St, after all, heading for Brooklyn.  Rolling down the expressway along the East River, I saw it as the van turned to mount the Brooklyn Bridge.  It was still miles away, but unmistakable.  One enormous ship across the river.  What else could it be?

Seated in my wheelchair in the back of the van, it still was hard to see things passing by.  Only distance shots, from that perspective.  How could the streets of Brooklyn be even worse than Manhattan's?  As we drew closer to the waterfront, the pavement all but gave up.  I rattled, jolted and lurched, thankful that in a moment of caution and foresight, some force within me had successfully urged closure of my wheelchair's seatbelt.  Bam.  Crash.  Can you see it, honey?  Marlou was asking this question as the van thudded on and on as though crossing an entire freight yard of railroad tracks. 

No, I told her.  I bent low.  The van lurched and flung me high.  I bent low again, and there it was rising above the Brooklyn warehouses like King Kong.  A ship.  Our ship.  We were close enough to even read the letters beneath the smokestack.  Queen Mary 2.  Empty taxis were flooding in our direction.  How many cabs does it take to move 2600 people?  They ship disappeared behind a warehouse, then we turned, the pavement smoothed, and signs for cruise terminal popped up spic and span.  It was pouring with rain.  I had forgotten about the weather and could've cared less.

We didn't have tickets, never had had them, and now I was relying solely on Marlou and our travel agent.  We didn't need no stinking tickets.  We had something better: Queen Mary 2 package tags.  These had been placed on the handles of our luggage which disappeared as soon as it hit the sidewalk.

What is a cruise terminal?  I had imagined something like a huge bus station, and I could see Marlou and I sitting beneath a low ceiling, gazing toward the doors leading to the ship.  But all this had only happened in my mind.  The real Brooklyn Cruise Terminal was the approximate size of an aircraft hangar, exposed girders, utilitarian in its look, but new, bright and carpeted.  I asked Marlou to tighten my fanny pack.  She groaned.  My mother did this sort of thing too, but that's because she was my mother.  Marlou does this sort of thing, because she's nervous, unsure of what will happen next and craving to fit in with the regimental activities of preboarding.  Yes, that sort of thing occurs here.  Inspection of bags, removal and reattachment of fanny packs.  Showing, then showing again, passports.  And the other thing also happens.  The hustling of wheelchairs to the front of the queue.  It was a long queue snaking around the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.  It was a short ride to the men's room, the last delay.  I thanked Marlou for tightening my fanny pack, giving her the measured irony I felt was due...just enough to keep me sane.  Meanwhile, my bladder having been subjected to G forces throughout the hour-long van trip, my lower back jackhammered into contortions, the last pee on dry land seemed part of my mortal entitlement. 

There was no one in the men's room.  Just me and destiny.  I zoomed across the carpet, back to the queue for wheelchairs.  And there we were, at the desk.  No ticket, no problem.  Messrs. Cunard took our photos, savored our passport numbers, scraped life's essence off a credit card, and pointed us to the left.  We rolled.  Down the line of counters, 30, maybe 40, agents checking people in.  Then through the doors and down the hall, stopping for another picture, this one for couples, for posterity and, doubtless, for profit.  But we would worry about that later.  The gangplank wasn't, really.  For one thing, it pointed downward.  For another, it looked like a clear plastic version of an airport jetway.  The "clear" part was good, though, for rolling across the short watery gap from terminal to ship, we could gaze upward at the latter.  And inside, which could easily pass for any good hotel.  A couple of young people in gray Cunard suits smiling, welcoming, and pointing us toward deck 8.

It was all happening too fast now.  A state room, like something out of a film, large enough to hold a king size bed, an ample balcony and a wheelchair-accessible shower.  Then?  The sail away party.  Advertised everywhere, announced periodically...but where?  Wherever the elevator went, through the doors that lay beyond...to the outside, the open-air teak expanses of a ship's deck 12 stories above Brooklyn.  A handful of people milled about.  But was it really only a handful, or atop this ship more than five football fields in length do the crowds only seen to thin?  The rain had stopped and the drinking had started.  Waiters wandered about with trays of champagne.  Another bottle sat in an ice bucket in our room.  The Commodore on the PA welcoming 1200 Brits, 800 Americans and 600 others aboard.  A soul-wrenching bass blast from the horn, then...Brooklyn moving.  No one said goodbye, not in this era of homeland security.  The ship was full, but the pier was empty and the confetti mental.  In the gray afternoon, a yellow light burned in the torch atop the Statue of Liberty.  The wind picked up from nowhere.  Though, gazing at the rate at which Staten Island was disappearing, I knew we hadn't picked up wind, but speed.  The Queen Mary 2 can haul along at 30 knots. 

Don't worry about the Verrazano Bridge, the Commodore announced.  The ship clears it by 3 meters.  I could see this was a lie.  We were hurtling toward the thing faster than a city bus.  First the ship's radar tower was going to get smashed, then its smokestack, and then there was nothing to stare at but the rush-hour drivers on the bridge who were staring at us heading out to sea.

It started with Dave.  Or perhaps it only seemed to start with Dave.  Surely it started days earlier with Marlou.  She had this air about her, this look in her eye that, for the mother-deprived, easily can be misread as uncaring or inattentive.  And, in fact, always is.  Which is a polite and psychologically attuned way of saying that I was in a high state of irritation, rancor and general despondency.  Where had my wife gone?  The answer was, for once, easier and more superficial than I normally credit.  Where had she gone?  Shopping.  While my mind's eye was on the Titanic, seasickness bags and, above all, quite literally missing the boat...due to some horrible and unforeseen mishap in New York--Marlou's attention was focused laser-like on formal attire.  We were going to attend and, in fact, star in that most renowned of public appearances: black-and-white night aboard the Queen Mary 2. 

It is an essential genetic distinction defining men and women along the lines of from-Mars-from-Venus that the existence of black-and-white dining, dancing and celebrating is both known and appreciated.  As I say, the image in my mind, aside from the ship going down and my stomach contents going up, was the nonexistence of the wheelchair-lift-equipped van that was supposed to ferry us from our midtown Manhattan hotel to the docks across the East River in the Redhook section of Brooklyn.

In other words, without knowing it, I was focusing very strongly on Dave.  The body steels and adjusts itself to life's challenges even as the latter faintly appear on the horizon.  Disaster's early indicators are always vague and distorted.  Is that background radiation from a terrorist's bomb, the radiology department of the local hospital or the Big Bang?  Who knows?  If life's Geiger counter is ticking, it's ticking.  So, with Marlou obsessed, the pre-departure household in chaos and a grim foreboding dominant on my side of the bed, I set the alarm on that final night and tried to sleep.  There was nothing else to do.  Super Shuttle would appear at 5:15 a.m., yes, with a wheelchair-lift-equipped van...I had just called the reservation number to confirm.  And that was that. 

I barely slept, of course.  At 3 a.m. my eyes bolted open, my body sagged while my mind raced, and by 3:30 I gave up on sleep and headed for the bathroom.  The shower awakened something in me, and when I emerged from the bathroom, Marlou's voice awakened something else.  She was on the phone.  Her end of the conversation amounted to repeated admonishments that sounded like pleas along the lines of "you can't just call up at 4:30 on the morning of our departure and announce this."  I made my way gingerly from the shower toward the wheelchair parked in the hallway.  A certain steely fight-or-flight countenance already slipping over me, I wheeled to the desk.  Marlou handed me the phone.  Dave.  This was Dave.  He'd been working on the problem for hours.  He couldn't find a van.  Dave was from Super Shuttle.  Super Shuttle was from hell...I knew that and had always known that, and now I knew it more.  Breakdowns.  Sending the wrong van.  Drivers getting lost in the hills.  I had seen it all with these people.  Unfortunately, Super Shuttle has long had me by the quadriplegic balls.  When it comes to vans with wheelchair lifts, they are the only game in town.

I asked Dave why he hadn't phoned one of San Francisco's cab companies.  Many of that city's taxis are now wheelchair-accessible.  Dave insisted he had.  Didn't his company have a permanent arrangement with some van operator somewhere for such a wheelchair-passenger emergency?  Dave suggested that since I had such good ideas, I should phone the cab companies myself.  I thanked Dave for his sarcasm and vowed to have a word with the California Public Utilities Commission.  Go for it, Dave said. 

Mentally, I glanced at my nonexistent watch.  I was a naked man, sitting in a wheelchair beside a distraught wife who was fully prepared for the black-and-white ball.  But not for Dave.  I was.  Mentally, spiritually, I had been bracing myself for Dave over the last weeks.  I hung up on him, recalling that scene in the "The High and the Mighty" in which John Wayne, losing an engine on approach to San Francisco Airport, observes "no time to mess with it."  Which was why I was already shifting gears the way John Wayne shifted propeller pitch.  Socks on, Marlou being very adept at this.  Prescribed trousers and sweater on.  Watch.  Handkerchief.  House keys.  Suture.  Swab. 

Yellow Cab of Palo Alto was there within minutes, and Marlou and the bags were off to the airport.  And I was off myself, up the street, the still, stark 5:15 main street of Menlo Park, California.  The street lights glowed blue.  My wheelchair, battery charger weighing down the back, thudded down sidewalks and over intersections.  There was little traffic but plenty of danger.  There was always that.  And the dangers kept coming until the last one.  So, what the hell.  I went bouncing over the rails to the far northbound side of the Caltrain station.  The 5:30 northbound was on time and so was the sunrise.  By the time I saw it, I had changed from commuter train to subway train to airport terminal train.  And Marlou and I were back to our usual squabbles.  Was there, or was there not, time for coffee before we boarded?  Someone needs to remind us to set aside time for rejoicing. 

Because dawn was slipping over the hills south of Fremont, the southern end of San Francisco Bay, as we slipped into our seats.  And we were slipping out of town together.  Cancer, damaged spinal cords...even Dave.  What the hell.  Black-and-white or bust.

Doug von Koss, whom I know from the Minnesota Men's Conference as teacher, choral director and, yes, elder -- is asking some probing questions about the latter. What is an "elder?" Why do we need these people around? What do we want from them?

An elder is someone old enough to recall when it was politically correct to be a "senior citizen," when the only elder species about was the elderberry. An elder remembers that we have abandoned "seniors" in favor of the more elevated "elders" -- and knows that if he can last another decade or so, some new term will supplant "elders." In other words, an elder takes the long view. An elder senses that certain things are of enduring importance and others are not. An elder knows that much of what we are told is important, in fact, isn't. An elder has his eye on the big picture.

Last night my wife and I sat in a frenzied, oversized brasserie just up from Times Square and around the corner from Lehman Brothers. Being on the brink of elderhood myself, I was struck by how is to be a twentysomething or thirtysomething in our society. Young people are, as I was, essentially rudderless. The powerful forces around them, such as New York's big midtown brokerage firms, hold sway over their lives and point them in certain directions. These days Lehman Brothers' high-rise on 7th Ave displays its name in an endless sweep of letters five stories high that crawl across the lower part of the building like a cable news feed. Gauche, witless and in-your-face American. Wouldn't a normal person be self-conscious working in such a place?

More to the point, wouldn't a normal person find it odd that at 10:30 p.m. there is a line of black town cars, more than a block long, waiting to pick up brokers, financial analysts and whoever else is working at that hour? Presumably workers are being driven home. But who knows? Maybe there's one last meeting.

So, there they were, in this 52nd St brasserie, eating, talking, trying to pick each other up, and generally being young. For someone who is 60, more than half paralyzed and sitting opposite a wife who is only somewhat younger and very grateful to be alive and enjoying New York after a year-long bout with colon cancer, all these young professionals seemed removed from life. Were they running from it? Was I running at their age? What do young people run from in the midst of their carousing?

They run from what elders know. Elders know that whether or not life is long, it has an arc. Something completes itself. And life is not just one life, but a lifecycle. Elders are people who show us, without trying, what naturally endures in a person who has lived well. Elders give us courage. Bond prices may tumble. Rome may fall. But people can still sell stuff, and there will always be Romans as long as there are Vespas.

Elders are people who know they soon will lose life -- and, so, naturally give it to those around them.

I have been quietly counting off the final driving trips. The last drive to the men's group. The final, final drive to my synagogue's Sunday morning affairs program. Then there is the last time getting up from the rowing machine. And the final occasion when I return from a wheelchair errand downtown. I don't expect to return from any of these, not fully, not without mishap. Surely something is going to go wrong before departure.

On Friday, Marlou got a call from her doctor's assistant. And, yes, any call from an assistant is bound to be good, as this one was. Marlou's symptoms were not symptoms of cancer. She is fine. Marlou hung up the phone and we sat in the kitchen, staring at each other. We had been staring at mortality all week. And now we could stare at the future. Which was more real? Is the future an illusion, and our brevity of existence closer to the truth? The question sounds so banal, even mildly comic when posed in this way. Closer to reality, particularly Marlou's reality is this simple question: can I forget about dying for a month and enjoy sailing on the world's greatest passenger ship, then winding up in Provence?

Sitting in our kitchen and feeling the grim weight lift from us, I had to admire my wife. Fear must be a constant presence, blowing in like the Bay fog. Subtle, gradual and darkening. Marlou is back at work, where people have said that with her return things are back to normal. Thus my wife's effect on others. Brushing close to the death force seems to bring out the life force. It's ancient human wisdom, and now it's happening in my kitchen on a Friday afternoon. Thank God. And, no, that's not just an expression.

And, yes, our departure is going as predicted, as my father would have done. We're both engaged in last-minute chores, putting things right, pursuing endeavors that have nothing really to do with departing. Unless you think about departing in some larger sense. Which I do. We departed from our "normal" lives a year ago, and we are never going back. Are we sailing off the edge of the world? Into calmer seas? Storms?

With all these all elaborate preparations, what will go awry? Even more interesting, how will we handle it? We have been stepping on each other's toes all day long, in the process of packing. At day's end, how will this resolve? Will we say to each other what we need to say? How well will we say it? Whatever happens, the real journey has begun...or began some time ago and is only intensifying.

Sometimes it was San Diego, other years Laguna Beach, but in my father's post-divorce and all-male household, summers brought some form of vacation. Money was tight. This wasn't the usual case for a doctor in 1950s California, and I knew it somehow. My mother was the problem, my father said. She was draining him with her demands for child support. I listened, I saddened, I got older. I didn't care about any of it. I wanted a vacation, a time away from our desert town, far from the school and the drugstore and the supermarket and the bakery, where reflections of failed family life came at me all the time.

My father had a very hard time getting off on vacations. It seemed so simple. Put some clothes in a bag, put some gas in the car, and drive. Maps came out, big color depictions of roads and towns as seen by the Automobile Club of Southern California. My father found terrible confusion in highways and directions and getting lost. As a boy, I had no understanding or sympathy. I could have guided him to San Diego myself. Yes, the roads were changing, for California was growing, its suburbs and freeways spreading. Perhaps my father didn't like change. He'd certainly seen enough of it, his marriage gone, living above his medical practice with two teenage boys. Virtually friendless in a small town.

On vacation departure days, August heat rising, my father spent the morning dawdling over small projects. Things in his office needed fixing. He taped electrical wires together. He moved furniture. The day drew on. What time do we have to be at our hotel, I would ask?  None of my business, he would reply. I would wander outside and try to find something to do. I knew that my father was at least considering departure when he went to work on the sign. It was a black plastic pegboard, with white letters that snapped into place. Dr. Bendix is gone until. For emergencies call San Gorgonio Pass Memorial Hospital at. But the letters were difficult to snap into position, and they didn't align well. The lines of type undulated like waves. Like the waves that were currently breaking, one after the next, on the San Diego County beaches. The ocean smell would be overwhelming, when it hit us. But for now, all that was hitting was time. Light was taking on the late afternoon/early evening feel of summers. At last he was done, reluctant but actually loading the car. His door slammed, we backed out of our driveway and things began to change. Ahead was something different, where people thronged and restaurant signs lit up parking lots and the setting sun shimmered in copper luminescence. Algae, my father said. It was always dark when we got to our motel. I didn't care. We were here, not there, and one restaurant was usually still open.

Marlou and I have done a much better job of departing for Provence. Via New York. And the Queen Mary 2. By way of London, Gloucestershire, London and Lille. We've covered all bases, except for the trial run of the international voltage battery charger for the electric wheelchair. Methodical, thorough -- and yet tinged with fate, as all departures seem to be. I understand my father better now. When it's time to get away, you know there's no getting away. Just when you're about to leave, the real things arrive. The plastic sign in the window that says you're a doctor...should have been there all along. You can see that now. The absence of the sign was a sign. And now the presence of the sign reminds you of its former absence. Departure is a time of coming to grips.

And so days before our departure, Marlou paid a visit to her oncologist. The vague abdominal symptoms may not be so vague after all, it seems. Is the cancer back? Don't go there, the doctor said. Go where you're going. Make the trip. And the doctor will make the diagnosis. There will be some tests in the next couple of days. Whatever happens next can happen in November. Go. Depart, travel and arrive, because there's no real getting away. The important thing is to pack your bags, to be aware of everything you choose to bring. Pay attention to the things you forget. And be open to the things you find along the way -- in fact, be grateful. You only get to keep them for a while.

From my desert home, I could see the Chocolate Mountains, 50 miles away. Named only for their color, in 15 years of living in our small town, I never ventured near the craggy range. Which was just as well. Arid, entirely mineral, the Chocolate Mountains could stay where they were. And so would I. Besides, I had much better mountains at home, with snow on the peaks most of the year. Well, much of the year. Actually, one peak was invisible from our house, for the mountain range shot up like a wall, its 12,000 foot summit lost behind foothills and ridges. But the other peak sat there like Mount Fuji, conical, steep and capped with white. Once I was old enough to attend summer camp and climb the thing, Mount San Jacinto was revealed to be topped with white granite. The snow was 20 miles away, as the crow flies, if the crow flies with a miniature oxygen tank and has been working out at the local crow gym. That was the white streak atop Mount San Gorgonio, on the opposite side of the pass, the peak I couldn't see from my home. Visible or invisible, it didn't matter. In between these stark geological upthrusts the desert lay out panting with heat stroke. Low, hot and hopeless. The mountains held the miracle of water. And of snow.

In between the mountain ranges, the land rose to about 2000 feet, high enough for the winter snows to gradually creep down the slopes until they reached the desert. This happened every year or so, as I recall. And I recall poorly, for what kid has a sense of years? There were annual events. Christmas and summer vacations, the Fourth of July. But who was keeping track of snow? I only recall waking up a morning here and another there and hearing nothing. The absence of sound derived from the lack of traffic, the absence of cement trucks that drove up and down the paved road by our home. The quarry had given up for the moment. The town had given up, and best of all, the school buses had given up. Which explained why I hadn't gotten up, sleeping in way past wake-up hour. You could see it before you even looked through the windows, such was the profusion of light, brilliant beneath dark gray skies. Snow.

The white had softened its way down the vast ridges, dropping a comforter over the desert flats, chapparal now subsumed in a sparkling sameness. The dirt road before our house had vanished. The desert fields dipped at the edge of our track, and the barbed wire fence delineating the quarry's edge stood black. But aside from the roadside ditch, desert and driveway had become indistinguishable, everything united in cushiony folds of white. My father trudged across the 8 a.m. lawn, leaving egregious footprints behind him. Green peaked out where he had stepped. He had to be stopped. I was dressed in seconds, sliding past my mother and her oatmeal, and making for the side door.

My father said nothing, smiled faintly and continued his trudge. He seemed gently lost. Perhaps he was curious as to what linked the snows of his New York boyhood with this California moment. From inside, the foolishness of his snow tromping seemed obvious. But outside, I could see less cause for concern. The snow was falling, floating from the skies and filling in my father's tracks and my own. The richness of this, the luxury of walking on and grinding down the stuff as it renewed and replaced itself...it was more than one could hope for. I followed my father.

Building a snowman. Having a snowball fight. I knew about these things from previous years. More typically, the snow would melt fast, and one had to hustle the storybook world into reality. My father knew how to roll the snowman, first straight, then sideways. Three frozen globes was all it took, though we paid a terrible price. This action opened green swaths on the lawn, revealing the snowy day as something of a lie. Some years, the snow was so thin that it took minutes to amass a single snowball. Which I promptly threw up my brother, if he was around. It took him minutes to amass another snowball. The back-and-forth of this proceeded at such a pathetic pace that both of us lost interest. The solution involved driving up a road into the foothills where The Bench, a plateau 1000 feet higher, reliably offered real snow.

But not today. Today the real snow was here, on the ground, and my father was inspecting it, wearing old trousers no longer fit for his doctor's office. White had capped the fence posts around our property, filled an empty wagon on the patio, clung irregularly to the privet hedges. My father, hands clasped behind his back, made a raspy whistling sound. This signaled a contemplative lightness. It was a good sign, suggestive of pastimes and possibilities. No school. No office. I could see my mother at work in the kitchen. She had no interest in being outside on cold days. Something commanded her attention on the kitchen. Soup. I was sure she was making soup.

On the back lawn, my brother had something major under way with the family dog. Frosty, already off-white, raced in pursuit of a piece of greasewood. My brother threw this up and down the snowy lawn, the dog turning and skidding to grab the stick. I envied everything about my sibling. Somehow he had broken free enough to learn how to throw a softball, then a hardball and now this random piece of desert wood. Frosty scrambled over the snow, involuntarily skating sideways, unconcerned by the slippery disorientation. He caught the stick, returned it, and now I insisted on having a throw. My brother was littler, and it was embarrassing to make my under arm pitch in his presence. He didn't understand that my parents' marriage was coming apart, and we had important adult work to do. So I was staying close by my father. My brother was learning baseball.

Frosty caught my stick, fell, tumbled onto his back, and threw up snow like a plow. My brother laughed, my father smiled and I tried to understand. It was funny, our dog's effort in the snow. He was stumbling and confused and delighted. It was just another day. This one had dawned crunchy, white and slippery, but was otherwise as before, except for the addition of humans. Everyone was home. This was home. My father was laughing. My brother and I weren't fighting. On the side steps leading to my parents' bedroom, my mother appeared with my sister. Susie wore a sweater and a puffy jacket, clung hesitantly to the wrought iron railing and watched. She headed down the steps, my mother behind. My father lifted her in the air. For once, I wasn't consumed with jealousy. It was such an odd day, after all. My mother stood outside in her house dress, unconcerned by the cold. She folded her arms and said that she had seen some strange things, but this.... Hang on, she said to my father. Moments later she returned with a movie camera. My father squinted into the ratcheting thing while my brother threw sticks to Frosty. The camera whirred, the snow fell, and my mother stood and beamed.

She seemed to be enjoying herself. The edge to her comments, the nervous rasp of her laughter, all had been absorbed by the white softness. Perhaps it would snow again. Something like this could happen, unplanned. It just came from the sky. Nothing was in its place. Nothing was in its mood. My parents were standing together, outside, as though they were happy together. No one was yelling, and no one was crying, and there seemed nothing but the prospect of a day like this. I could smell the scent of bubbling celery and onions from my mother's soup. We would eat it later, bowls steaming, the kitchen lit by gray light. All of us would eat together, it seemed, all five. There had been a softening.

Diligent Jews attire themselves in white at Yom Kippur to recall the death shroud.  But being non-diligent and barely observant, I figure it's enough to turn up wearing anything, such as a shirt.  Which is why it puzzles me that in ordering two men's white shirts from Land's End yesterday I should feel so burdened.  A pall hangs over everything.  Every move is mortal.

It seems to be the trip.  Which trip?  The Trip.  The trip to England where I've been many times and France, where I've been a few.  This one has been slightly complicated by one extra convenience, a ship.  Hence the purchase of two shirts, the white variety, doubtless matching the racial composition aboard the Queen Mary 2.  A suit.  Some guidebooks for Provence.  It's not as though I haven't traveled before.

But somehow preparation for this trip seems formidable.  The journey darkens whenever I pull it into my mind.  Everything feels cold.  A couple of autumnal days in New York.  The brisk North Atlantic in October.  Bracing rain and the occasional nippy breeze in London.  Even a California wimp can survive early November.  No it isn't the supposed cold.  It's the darkness.  And not the darkness of shortening days.  Or maybe it is.  The days dwindle down to precious few, to quote Kurt Weill.  That kind of thing.

Which is hardly a rousing start to a trip.  This is meant to be a celebratory journey, what Marlou calls her "victory lap."  Which sounds splendid, but for the haste.  We both feel a certain urgency about this trip.  Cancer in remission feels like a wave that hasn't broken.  With luck, it will break late, this wave.  Or break small.  Or break against a reef.  But waves are mysterious.  Powerful, fluid, rhythmic.  They've got their own schedule.

The sinister unknown.  It's enough to make one stay home.  London.  Wasn't I just there?  Am I not there, via dream, several nights each week?  Do we really need to have another go at the British Museum?  Right now?  Why not save the money and enjoy an afternoon at the Menlo Park Library?  Many of the best things in life are free.  Most, in fact.

Who in his right mind would decide to cross the Atlantic in the fabled storm season?  It's not productive to ask "what's the rush."  Time feels shortened for obvious reasons.  Less obvious: what to do about it.   

It's hard to say if this is the "wrong" time to travel or if all traveling is now wrong.  Travel is a metaphor.  Letting go of the familiar, giving up on the routine, embracing the unseen.  Is it travel that's scary or the future?

My week in Provence.  Miraculously, Marlou has found someone to get us from the rail station west of town to our motel.  Yes, it's a motel.  Novotel to you, guy.  It promises a door wide enough for a wheelchair and a shower with an historically high survival rate.  As for the rest?  What does one need except car rental and a folding wheelchair?  By the time we go, all these things will be lined up like soldiers.  They will salute.  When we arrive, they will fire.  And being poorly trained and unruly, several will fire at us.

A wheel will fall off the rented wheelchair.  The wheelchair-accessible motel room will also provide access to authentic Provençal mold.  It will rain.  All the museums will be shut.  France will go on strike.  Marlou and I will fight about who should have planned things better.  We will take the train back to London.  There, we will sit in our hotel room totting up the cost of the last three weeks.  The days will grow shorter during our journey.  We will go home.

And then what?  A few more distracting trips.  Phoenix.  Hawaii.  Then 2008.  Waiting and waiting.  Will Marlou stay healthy?  How stable is my spinal cord?  What if I fall?  If Marlou gets sick, how will I help her?  And who will help me?  How much time do we have?  And what does it take to be content with staying home? 

Everything about preparation for this trip...dry-cleaning, testing the wheelchair battery charger, double checking the train tickets...is taking longer.  That's because everything is taking longer.  As life begins to wear down and slow down the sense of time speeds up, but the working surface slants up.  So, tasks are uphill fights, while life is a downhill run.  Everything more difficult, more hopeless.  But no less mysterious.  It may be the last act, and it is.  But you still don't know if the butler did it.  The worry is that you may not care.  The good news is that once you're past the point of caring, you're also past the point of worrying.  Bon voyage.