Dark Journey

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.