November 2007 Archives

In the end, there was nothing to do but pull out, fall back and retreat. Somehow, the last two days in London, which only amounted to 36 hours, drained something of my vital essence. Not that it wasn't worth every second, for visiting with my cousin's son Jake always lifts my spirits. And within the space of a couple of hours with Sandy, cousin and friend of 40 years, all sorts of frank and honest things got said...three introverts around a table at an Indian restaurant, bonded in curry, overcoming time and distance with spicy papadams. No, London was worth it in every spiritual sense. And I had given up worrying whether or not 36 hours in the Gloucester Road Holiday Inn was worth $600. It wasn't the draining of the coffers, but the draining of stamina and the general sense that I wasn't just a quadriplegic anymore, but a burn victim. Home was looking good.

And so on the final anxious morning, after my eyelids had sprung open like window shades at 4 a.m., and I was up and already worrying about the effects, that is to say, further effects of Provençal microbes on my gastrointestinal system...and thinking that it might be better to prepare for the 11 hour flight to California by checking my lower intestinal tract along with my luggage...and by the time we were actually sitting in a taxi and the cabdriver proposed that for an additional 10 pounds we could bypass the experience of Paddington Station and the Heathrow Express and just watch the A4 go by all the way to Terminal Three...well, we were easily persuaded. It was nice to see the load lighten near the end. Virgin Airways lightened the rest of the day with endless videos. And there we were, the afternoon lightened by global warming, staring at a mid-November San Francisco afternoon that felt a little too much like a Provençal summer. Naturally, SuperShuttle wasn't there. At least these people were consistent.

Jule Styne said it best: the party's over. But there's always something lingering...like the hangover. Like the bag the airline can't find. Or the shaver you left in some hotel. Something. In my case, it was my upper arm and left foot. After an accidental scalding in a French shower, I just didn't have the patience to deal with local doctors. I would deal with it when I got home. Even if home was still five days after the hot water burns in the shower. So what? Marlou was spraying my arm with all the right stuff, nothing looked infected and, no, no signs of fever. But there are always those intimations, small doubts about the body's indomitability. And serious questions about the scope of the blister that had formed along the left side of my foot.

"Oh, my." This from a nurse returning my call from the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. She had just asked about the size of the blister. Three inches was big, she said. Mine was running about 10, maybe 12 inches. Come in, she said. Now. Then she asked, "Any parts turning gray?" Gray? Aside from my hair? Ha ha. I had a grim wait at the Menlo Park Caltrain Station. My van was out of action for the day. I might be out of action forever if this gray area under my huge blister was the sort of gray the nurse was talking about. Delaying medical attention. Self-medicating. Dismissing my wife's worries. I watched the huge locomotive bearing down on me. Fateful, a harbinger of God knows what. And he does know. He knows what's going on in my foot, deep inside that blister. The gray area. He knows all about that.

There it was, Urgent Care, and there I was, inside a room, getting my blood pressure taken. Then moved to another room, where it was taken again. Low blood pressure. And let's have a look at those burns. The doctor, an Indian woman, asked the usual questions. Fortunately, I've got the medical lingo down fairly pat. Important to let these people know whom they're talking to. Me, a guy who can say quadriparesis. A guy who can describe foot swelling as dependent edema. And the discoloration on the right side, more burn? No. More foot. More paralyzed, blood-collecting, end-of-leg...foot. Had a tetanus shot recently? My face whitened. Don't know. Can't remember. Lockjaw. You can't talk. You can't eat. Gangrene. Amputation. I handed the doctor two bottles direct from actual French France, containing the latest EU approved spray-on and rub-on burn treatments. She eyeballed the bottles. Perfectly good stuff, but a little sulfa-impregnated ointment wouldn't be a bad thing. She smiled. The nurse would be in in a second to wrap and bandage.

Okay. The home stretch. In came the nurse, short and Chinese-American. She grabbed a large tongue depressor and a jar of white stuff and went to work slathering up my arm, followed by bandage wrapping, then a repeat performance on my foot. I watched the white bandage mass grow larger and larger. Piles of gauze pads, then more bandages than the average Egyptian mummy sees in, well, a lifetime. Wrapping and wrapping. Gosh. I cleared my throat. Gosh. I wonder how I will get on my shoe. The nurse shook her head. Oh, you won't be wearing your shoe. Oh, I said. Gosh.

Back in Provence, in a quiet moment in the car with my cousin Bob, I had lightly remarked on the general positive effects of my wife. Marlou, long an opponent of cold winds, was out walking in the full force of the mistral, currently bearing down on us directly from the Alps. I wasn't yodeling. I was staying in the car watching her. Oddly, so was the hardy Bob, veteran of cold showers in English public schools. We were both watching Marlou. Well, Paul, he said, you've learned diplomacy and compromise.

Which brought me directly here, to this moment with this nurse. You know, I said to her, I wonder if there isn't a way to redo that bandage. So I can get my foot in the shoe. Without the shoe, I'm kind of, you know, immobilized. Where's your wife? Can she drive you? Not with this 200-pound wheelchair, I said. Oh. She was unimpressed. Silence. More wrapping. My foot was now assuming the jolly holiday proportions of Frosty the Snowman's. Hippity hop. Gosh. This is really kind of important. She sighed, rolled her eyes and muttered something about talking to the doctor. Thanks. I appreciate that. This is really important.

Was it? Oh, who knows? I had more train-borne errands to run, and the bandaged foot with my yellow, aging toenails protruding, well it wasn't the prettiest sight. And it had that whiff of the invalid about it, not to mention a general aura of the street. The bandaged homeless man in the wheelchair. Disability is a great leveler. And I didn't want to go there, not now. The doctor wandered in. I was up to date in tetanus shots, she said. I smiled. Gosh, one small thing, one tiny detail about the terribly splendid bandage job of the nurse. I eyed the swaddling, pretending to admire it. You see, I said, inspiration flashing brilliant in the recesses of my jetlagged mind -- there's this ankle-foot orthotic on my right leg and to balance I need my foot to be in my left shoe. It's dangerous, otherwise. Activities of daily living, such as urination, require me to stand, you see. Frequently. And now, with one foot in gauze, to stand dangerously. I would hate to fall. To be discreet, I let my eyes slide away from hers. No sense in chewing the scenery.

She took this in, computing at the speed of someone working in an emergency room. Urgent care. Urgent thinking. Well, perhaps the nurse could try something. Great, I said, and perhaps with a bit of tape, instead of all this gauze wrapping. Too late, the doctor was gone. And the nurse, when she returned, wasn't hearing anything about tape. But she yanked off a few pads, cut the gauze bandage to shorten things, and gingerly moved my sock into place. Oh, how splendid, I said, cramming my heel into the back of my shoe. Things were feeling a little tight, but they were also a little open. Diplomacy. Compromise. Marlou. The end of a journey in a Palo Alto clinic. Was I home now?

I am leaving France under a cloud, under a gun, and under a shower.

I have been trying to extract some deeper meaning from the latter.  But the more I try, the more I feel like some ancient practitioner of necromancy, poking around the entrails instead of just giving up and letting them be, well, entrails.

In fact, the more I think about it, the entire scene is pure Samuel Beckett.  I have rolled my wheelchair up to the edge of the Novotel shower.  This shower and, in fact, this hotel have been chosen for this very purpose.  Modernity, wheelchair access, safety.  So, it's easy to drop my legs over the edge of the bathtub, carefully position both - one leg moving under its own neurological steam, the other shoved into place like a department store mannequin -- then grab the one hand rail opposite.  By sliding my butt to the very edge of the wheelchair, leaning forward and grabbing the hand rail, I can stand.  I am now vertical, in the bathtub with its hand-held shower head on a stainless steel cable, my soap on its accustomed rope on my hand.  All quadriplegic systems are go for wash.  Turn on the water.

The showerhead is, being hand-held, currently sitting very low on its convenient perch.  The spray is pointing sideways, toward the front of the bathtub, the gentle water washing along the tiles, down the wall, and over my feet.  What happens, in the way of such things, is that the gentle turns.  It turns hot.  It turns that way, because I have just twisted the faucet control slightly to the left.  The water has leapt from tepid to scalding.  My limbs are leaping too.  They are leaping because they are neurologically out-of-control.  I have only one small hand rail to hold onto.  I have to make an immediate decision.  Let go and try to control the temperature, i.e., turn the water off -- and in so doing, possibly fall.  Everything is leaping and jumping, my limbs are trying desperately to flail and toss and knock me off balance.  It's a long way down, and at the bottom it's all porcelain.  My arm is burning, my foot is burning.  I am holding on for dear life.  I cannot control this.  I have to end it.  I scream for help.  I scream again, "help." 

Marlou is there in seconds.  "Turn it off," I say.  Unfortunately, my body is in the way, and so is my wheelchair, and Marlou has to maneuver around both to get to the water.  It's off now.  And so, it seems, is much of my skin.

My left arm has achieved a deep lobster color.  And my foot?  It feels that something is terribly amiss, but no, Marlou takes a look at it, and so do I.  The foot seems okay.  The arm?  Not so okay.  About as not okay as a bad sunburn.  Which isn't reassuring, actually, because all these events have occurred in the neurological haze of quadriplegia.  I can't really feel what's going on in my skin, yet I have to live in it.  My skin, that is.  What to do?  Well, nothing much for the time being.  Marlou and I have some sightseeing to do, after all, and I try to calm her worries, sooth my doubts, and get us both out the door.  To one of the glorious hill districts of Provence. 

After all, Marlou is equipped with a certain amount of first aid gear.  And after a spray of this, and a bandaging of that, we are underway.  In fact, in the pharmacie de l'ocre we buy additional bandages.  The pharmacist offers the traditional French advice.  That is to say, I roll up my sleeve and show the woman the reddened skin.  She doesn't flinch, but suggests this bandage and that one.  We have had an authentic French experience, have purchased some EU approved first aid antiseptic and are on our way.

We had what, for Provence, passes as a modest lunch.  Instead of the pull-out-all-the-stops gastronomie of the previous day, I settle for some roasted Provençal peppers and a lasagna.  Still, I feel that I have eaten what I normally ingest in approximately three days in California.  Never mind, for this repast has been more or less light by my travel standards.  We load the wheelchair back in the van -- that is to say, Marlou does -- and I marvel at how all this wheelchair schlepping has worked out. 

Down the autoroute, back to the hotel, and Marlou makes my electric wheelchair walk the plank for the absolute last time.  Later, I try to have something light in the hotel dining room.  The menu sports a page of healthy alternatives, with an introductory paragraph extolling the virtues of grilling on a plank.  It's a wrought iron plank, and if you believe the copy, "almost no oil is required" to prepare your very healthy meal.  I order the shrimp with mixed vegetables.  What can I say?  There's plenty of Provençal olive oil, some deep-fried vegetables, and some sort of artisan sauce that may be the archetypal precursor to tartar sauce. 

It's gone in an instant, and I would be too, except that it's 10:30 p.m. and my cousin Bob has just blown in from Paris, via the TGV.  We have a delightful drink, the three of us.  It gets late.  I go back to my room, slip off my shoe and stare in horror at the enormous white blister that has risen along the side of my foot.  We call Bob in his room.  We three stare at my foot.  No one likes the look of my arm, either.  I am half resigned to seeing a doctor the next day.  It will make Marlou feel better, and the next morning Bob says it will make him feel better, too.  Being a worrier, a little medical attention will also make me feel better.

Instead, we take the easier course.  The following morning, we have the usual spectacular assortment of bakery goods, accompanied by coffee, and followed by, yes, another visit to a pharmacie.  Actually, this marks our third.  Bob has been out early that morning and purchased a healing balm.  Now we need more bandages, I produce my arm one more time, and both Bob and Marlou cluck approval.  The redness has gone down.  Less lobster, more rapidly improving sunburn.  As for the blister, we now have an entirely second opinion from the second pharmacist of the day: leave it alone. 

After some screwing about, we hit the road again, wheelchair loaded, Bob somehow loaded into his own seat in the back (thus the miracle of our Renault Kangoo) -- and we now have a lunch that does considerable damage to what is left of my body.  Provençal beef stew.  And followed by one of the most imaginative, and utterly decadent, chocolate desserts on record: a sort of chocolate satire on Vietnamese spring rolls.  They even have a dipping sauce (ginger).

Thus the gun, and the cloud, and the shower.  We've been traveling for almost a month now.  My body has had it.  The shower thing?  Just a reminder.  I don't live here.  I live there.

Einstein spent his life trying to develop the unified field theory of disabled travel, and although he failed, we still have this: DT = CC / €1000 x 2. In this famous equation, however imperfect, disabled travel (DT) is represented as a function of the calorie constant (CC) in relation to the value of the euro squared. To demonstrate the underlying principles, the disabled Europe-bound traveler can perform several simple experiments at (or near) home. Such an exercise is essential, as well as illuminating.

Let's start at the end of the equation, because this is where the math is easiest. Think of the euro as a playground kid. In fact, he is the childhood chum at the end of the teeter totter, a.k.a., the seesaw. Yes, these once standard and timeless items of playground equipment have fallen out of favor. Allegedly too many kids have fallen out of seesaws. Nevermind. There is still a teeter totter around somewhere, and imagine it. Imagine you are on one end and the euro is on the other. Be sure to choose a moment when the financial markets enable the euro to go up and the dollar to go down. You love your descent. You laugh as the euro is flung upward and you and your currency drop downward. Ha ha.

In fact, to really revel in this experience and fully prepare yourself for European travel, do what I did. Go into downtown Menlo Park, take several thousand dollars out of your bank account, go into the park across the street from Peet's Coffee and pull out some matches. First, light a $50 bill. Everyone will marvel. Go across the street and have a latte, then return to the park and light a $100 bill. Your neighborly coffee drinkers will applaud. Ready for that $1000 bill? Go for it. Have a triple latte, whip out the matches and light up. You'll be glad you did it. Because lighting up lightens up the burden of turning on the nightly BBC Business Report and watching the value of American dollars plummet. After all, you're spending a lot of them every day, many more than you want to know. Thus, the euro part of the equation.

The Calorie Constant is much easier to understand. It's 3000. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, every day, everywhere, you will eat 3000 calories. You can talk about lightening up. You can gaze bewildered at those trousers you let out just before you set off in your travels. You can do anything, but the Calorie Constant is always just that: constant. 3000. It doesn't matter whether you are aboard the Queen Mary 2, or in Gloucestershire cheese country, London curry land or Provence. 3000.

Next, consider the unknowns. This part drove Einstein nuts. He tried pulling out his hair. Then he pulled out all the stops. Then he pulled out of a bridge tournament, his membership in the local Rotary Club and a course in do-it-yourself hairstyling. Nothing worked. There were still unknowns that could not be accounted for and, as a result, Einstein spent his last years wandering around Princeton wondering if he should take up golf. In the end, he settled on miniature golf. The course was easier to conceive of at once, there was a windmill moving at a constant speed and, if you missed a putt, gravity would take over. Gravity was very important to Einstein.

Chance, unknowns, uncertainties, random events, fortune, fate. Want to see these factors at work? Let's go back home, to Menlo Park, California, sit down in front of a computer screen and take a long, hard and, yes, virtual, look at Aix-en-Provence, France. Why are we looking? Because we have had this simple spatial problem staring us hard in the face. The marvel that is known as the TGV, the world's most stunning and more or less fastest train, requires extremely straight tracks, and there's no way a railway line of this speed and import is going to hang a sudden left just to stop at a has-been provincial capital. No way. Okay, it will stop, but on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence. About five miles out of town. And the problem? There's a bus into town, but according to the website for the local transit agency, the Aix-en-Provence tourist information office and God himself, this bus doesn't take wheelchairs. Five miles is a long way from your hotel room on a cold November night, and a railway station -- even a high-speed one -- is no place to sleep. That's why you have wracked your brain, stayed up nights late, had your wife phone France several times and hired a chauffeur with a special lift-equipped van to transport you (and, as the driver bragged, up to four cripples total) to your hotel room.

Of course, our driver wasn't there -- but miraculously it was no big deal to rent a Renault Kangoo, a van favored by Provençal plumbers and, in the future, all California cripples. And as discussed earlier on this website, problem solved. Actually, the final, ultimate problem was solved the following morning at the French equivalent of Home Depot. There Marlou ordered the most helpful staff to cut a piece of authentic Provençal pine, grown in Norway, to a 5 foot length and 2 1/2 foot width, which cost us the modest sum of $90, approximately (see the above euro seesaw principle for a fuller explanation). This 'planche' (plank) serves quite nicely to get my electric wheelchair in and out of the high-ceilinged Kangoo van. As for our special chauffeur with his van for four cripples, forget it. We have sent him on his Provençal way.

What does this prove? It proves that now that the weather has turned nasty, balmy Mediterranean days over and the more sinister mistral now blowing its way from the Alps, we no longer have plans. Yes, we have a map. But so did Einstein. Did that help him? Don't bet on it. Bet on four-wheeling with Marlou around the town of Saint-Rémy.. Remember, this is where Vincent van Gogh was hospitalized. We are, for the usual perverse touristic reasons, going to see this site of his clinical trials.

But something has gotten into my wife. We are taking what might be euphemistically described as back roads. We are on the outskirts of the byways of the periphery of the unmarked portions of semi-abandoned tracks that are not designed for tourists and, in fact, not on any map, existing solely for goatherds, agricultural workers and small-time olive thieves. The roads are barely one-lane wide, deeply rutted, exceeding 45° in steepness and, at one desperate point, we find ourselves not only lost (Marlou has not mentioned the 'L' word, but we are) and actually slipping backwards down a hill, tires spinning gravel. While my wife burns rubber, engine revving, spirits soaring, because, fuck it, we are traveling. And we know it, both of us, and there's no destination and there is no purpose and, trust me, there's no deadline.

Which explains, without seeing the famous Roman aqueduct up the highway, we decided to park in the magical disabled space that appeared in the center of town. A sign warned nondisabled drivers to 'take my space if you want to take my disability.' We warmed to this sentiment. Marlou spotted a restaurant beside the parking space. That looks nice, she said. No it didn't, I said. I knew what was happening -- she was getting cold feet. And why not? It takes nerve to back the electric wheelchair down the planche, all on her own, while I, the disabled husband, look on.

But it also takes nerve to patch out and spin rubber in van Gogh's back streets. So, it didn't take much encouragement to get Marlou out of the car, the wheelchair on the ground, and the two of us wandering the magical lanes, alleys and streets barely wide enough for a car. A provincial French market town, but a rich one, full of specialty shops for olive oil, linens, spices and, naturally, artworks. Of course, we were having a minor fight within seconds. Marlou accused me of dinking around while the luncheon clock ticked away, and her blood sugar lowered. I counter accused.

Then we both saw it. La Maison Jaune. Any restaurant that can afford to have the entire downstairs of a 18th century townhouse devoted entirely to lobby space is making a bold statement, isn't it? Naturally, there was no way up the sidewalk, no way in the front door, and the eating area was only accessible via an enormous flight of stairs. A flight of fancy, lunch in such a place? Absolutely not. This is why God invented batteries. This is why God invented Marlou. With power, and faith and the kindness of Provençal strangers, we were over the door sill, rolling my wheelchair into the dark recesses of the coat room and ascending the steps to one of the most delightful -- and most expensive -- lunches I have ever had. How did it happen? Ask Einstein.

When my English relatives, really German Jews, began touring me about in my early years in London, much of what I saw left me unimpressed.  Imagine, an entire village intact in the Kent countryside and open to inspection by tourists like me.  Just imagine.  I tried hard to imagine, but I was mostly imagining what it would have been like to be not only physically intact, but emotionally so, confident, open and able to enjoy the weekends on my own.  Instead of driving about the Home Counties with people my parents' age.  As for the villages, churches, pubs, museums and other touristic manifestations, all I could be was polite.  I could not really tell the difference between a village restored by the National Trust and one constructed on the hard clay of Anaheim by Walt Disney. 

Let's have some tea, I would generally suggest.  Tea meant cakes and cream.  It also meant the tea itself, caffeine being welcome to a depressed person, not to mention diuretic.  Thus, tea meant looking for toilets, a task undertaken briskly and aggressively by Wilhelm, married to my father's cousin.  Toilets were usually found in pubs where astonished publicans found Wilhelm at their door clearing the path for me with the helpful observation that there was a cripple in his car.  In short, there was a lot of emotional drama, mostly internalized, attached to my first impressions of Britain.

Which makes it so pleasant to travel around Shropshire, where Marlou has recently gone searching for ancestors.  The beauty of England is more muted and subtle than, say, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.  It is also ideal for a quadriplegic, a person whose world is naturally small, whose journeys are short and confines are narrow.  It did my heart good to see a railway station functioning in one particular Shropshire village.  Buxton.  One of Marlou's 19th century forebears hung out here at one point, and I was prepared to do the same.  The rise of gentle hills, the village nestling in a valley, a short and, doubtless, empty train making its diesel way once or twice a day to the station by the pub...I could get used to this.  No one commutes to London from Shropshire, at least not this part, for the distance is too great.  People live here.  I don't know how they make a living, but it's someone's world.  And I could imagine it as mine.  The surrounding slopes are forested, and traveling by car the trees appear and disappear just as quickly.  But traveling around Buxton, Shropshire, by wheelchair, nothing would disappear.  Except the sun, of course.  But if one can live with that...and in four years of English weather I discovered that I could...the rest isn't a problem.  In Buxton, I could stare out the window on cold days, sit in the shade of the churchyard on hot ones and, when desperation got the better of me, go to the railway station and watch a train rumble by.  England is a small place full of small pleasures, and so is quadriplegia.  We spent less than half an hour in Buxton, such was our itinerary.  But I got the idea.

England's army was in ruins after the Battle of Agincourt, but it didn't matter with young Henry on the throne.  Which is why one shouldn't worry about the Royal Shakespeare Company, now lying in ruins beside the River Avon.  While the troupe's new theater is under construction, plays run on a temporary stage nearby.  'Temporary' doesn't do the new venue justice.  It's a tiered, thrust stage auditorium that will look much like the new permanent version.  In any case, Henry V roared to life upon it, with all the flair and articulation that makes the company justifiably famous.  This one wasn't a modern staging, that is to say, not a production in modern dress.  But that's not really the point.  The Royal Shakespeare Company always teases the modern meaning out of its works.

How chilling to watch the heroic British slitting the throats of their captured French prisoners.  It's only a moment in an epic plot, but there's no avoiding it.  Shakespeare wrote in an era when power and its privileges, war and its necessities, life itself, were all regarded with a different set of values.  The play made me think of my own unheroic life.  I seem to do everything with maximum caution.  In Henry's world, there is little room for caution and even less time.  No one ruminates, everyone knows what they have to do, and fate falls as it falls.  I don't want to fall myself, particularly on my cousin's stairs.  Which is why I pick my quadriplegic way through life gingerly.  This does, I suppose, make it possible for me to travel across several countries, navigate the upstairs of my cousin's Gloucestershire home and generally burn through thousands of tourist dollars without incident.  As for heroics, mine is a different world and, upon consideration, maybe I need a different definition.

At the center of our European journey, the thing around which my current experience orbits, is my wheelchair.  Transporting this bulky, 200 pound thing has required endless planning.  And the wheelchair itself imposes serious limitations.  But overall it makes much of this trip possible.  And, oddly, so do its limitations. 

Take my cousin's home in Gloucestershire.  It's a magnificent five-bedroom transformation of 18th-century agricultural buildings and, like most structures of its era, the house occupies various levels and floors.  This confines my power wheelchair to one fairly small corner of the house, a sitting room by the front door.  This area offers a great opportunity to read, use the computer, roll into the wheelchair-accessible toilet.  But that's about it.  Everything else requires walking, that is to say, limping with my one crutch, up and down steps, and across expanses of sandstone.

Is this bad?  This is the question I have to keep asking myself.  After all, currently I have no other form of exercise.  The recumbent exercycle I use daily in California is far away, as is the rowing machine, both gathering dust in our carport.  While I am gathering weight and joint pain.  When I crutch my way about my cousin's home, it feels as though I am underwater, walking through ancient seas, dragging some enormous load.  This was how I learned to walk 40 years ago, out of doors, across the terrace of a Los Angeles hospital.  A fiendish physiotherapist had attached two five-pound weights to my walker, what the British would call Zimmer frame.  I dragged these metal weights, tied to ropes, for hours and across the terrace.  Getting stronger?  Oh, I supposed I was, but the Sisyphean quality of this experience was not lost on me, even then.  I had a burden to drag, and drag I did.

It is in a similar spirit that I drag myself around my cousin's home, up and down the corridors of our hotel in London, the Queen Mary 2 and even the Sheraton in New York.  These days I move with a steady, grinding pain.  There is a diffuse ache radiating from my upper thighs to my lower back, haunting my knees, biting my feet.  While I am biding my time, hoping that it all doesn't get too much worse.  And yet this difficult walking may be the very thing that protects the musculoskeletal apparatus from further deterioration.  My physiotherapist, his assistant and all the other physical medicine apparatchiks in my life urge me to do the same thing: be in the wheelchair less, walk more.

In short, this trip, at least its physical ardors, is just what the doctor ordered.  It's hard to believe this when I rise from the armchair in my cousin's front room and begin the trek, hips burning, back ripping, to dinner in the dining room several continents away.  But it would be hard to gauge the alternative.  Sitting in the wheelchair is worse, it seems.  Not that I really believe this, for my body is rebelling mightily.  Which, I suppose, is why quadriplegics travel.  It's a stretch, every day, every minute.

For a couple, it's a life-expanding ordeal.  Even the most modest objective -- a few days driving around France -- involves staggering logistics, failures and compromises.  In Aix-en-Provence, the electric wheelchair may only prove useful in our hotel.  Actually, this is no small thing.  What's killing me in my cousin's home is the walks, often fairly short ones.  I tire of progressing from bed to toilet, for example.  No particular reason, but there are perils underfoot.  There always are.  The rugs in our bedroom actually are quite splendid for walking and protect my unfeeling feet from any splinters.  But one has to be careful.  On the day of our arrival, heading to bed, I took a step, leaned on my crutch and felt everything giving way.  My stick was making the rug slip, and I was about to slip with it.  I righted myself in time.

In Provence, we will rent a car and a folding wheelchair.  The idea is for Marlou to push me places and, in between, have the freedom of a conventional car.  The unconventional van required by my battery-laden behemoth wheelchair isn't available in these parts, anyway.  So, it's two chairs, two options and, I'm afraid, too many days being dependent on Marlou.  I don't like being pushed.  Not only do I have to abandon steering and control of my progress overland, but all sorts of minor things become impossible.  Such as buying my own newspaper.  Such as getting a glass of water on my own.  I will be able to do that sort of thing in my hotel room on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, but nowhere else.  I have to ask people for help, otherwise.  Please get me some water.  Did you get my book?  I hope my computer is charging....

None of these things are issues at home, or they don't seem to be.  Actually, it's hard to say.  The doctors insist that this thing that feels so bad, painful schlepping everywhere by crutch, is actually good.  Marlou and I have to do things together that we normally do alone.  Simple matters that normally aren't discussed at home have to be confronted, analyzed and dissected on the road.  Does she really want to take the wheelchair out of the car trunk, get me in it, and push all the way to that church?  What if we can't get inside?  Will she mind going inside alone?  Where is the nearest accessible toilet?  And so on.

It's a stretch.  And although I don't mind stretching, something inside me is rather glad that we are heading, at last, for the home stretch.

The farmer in the home across the road from my cousin knows all about his neighbor, the Jewish doctor.  If Caroline is something of a character in these parts, so is he, John.  There's a tractor and all sorts of impressive farm machinery behind his house, and I assume the fields beyond must belong to him.  But what I really know about John is his barbecue.  He hauls an enormous grill behind his tractor in the warmer months, going from one party to the next.  John, barbecue man.  I found him leaning against a fence with his son.  Actually, we found him.  It was Marlou who said hello. 

Why does this detail matter?  Because in California, of the two of us, Marlou is less likely to approach a total stranger and initiate chitchat.  But we are traveling, after all, and all bets are off, all roles are reversed and nothing is what it usually seems.  Which explains why Marlou remembered John's name, though I didn't, and the two of us approached, me in my wheelchair, to join him by his side fence.  John does not actually chew on a piece of grass, but this is probably only under advice of his dentist.  One has to imagine the grass.  His Gloucestershire accent makes him almost incomprehensible.  So, conversation naturally drifted to the big regional news of the year: cousin Caroline's near-death experience in the Gloucestershire floods.

"The doctor tried to park her car in a river."  That was how John put it.

"The doctor doesn't take advice."  That's how I put it.

"We know that," said John. 

With that, Marlou and I were away.  There was something astonishing up the road, an apparition I had glimpsed from the first floor window of the bedroom that serves as my office in Caroline and Alistair's Todenham home.  A gypsy wagon, painted, carved, and drawn by two draft horses which looked like miniature Clydesdales, had just clip clopped down the road.  Marlou, having seen the same thing, had rushed out to get a better look.  And sure enough, just over a rise, there they were.  One gypsy wagon.  Two horses.  Three generations of Romany.  Plus conventional vehicles, including two old cars and one battered aluminum caravan.  As we approached, Marlou warned me.  You don't have to make a point.  This is who these people are, just enjoy them and get out.  Marlou is recalling that I'm not always generous with Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons and the other religiously demented who occasionally knock on our apartment door.

Sure enough, within minutes the old woman standing beside the circus-wagon-looking hunk of wooden rolling stock had gone rolling off in the direction of fundamentalist Christianity.  What a beautiful wagon, I said.  Oh yes, she said, we have this beauty in honor of Jesus.  Have you found Jesus?  Oh, yes, I said, vaguely nodding and remembering to get a good look at the view of Gloucestershire beyond.  It was, after all, a remarkably sunny and crisp October day, not the sort of thing one takes for granted in autumnal England.  Jesus has saved me, the woman said.  The horses are beautiful, I said, convinced that there was no opener here for Jesus, Christianity or general salvation.  What kind are they, I asked?  The woman stared at them blankly.  They're called piebald, she said.  Even I knew this referred to coloring, not to breed, but I let this pass.  Before she could get in another word about Jesus, I said something about the impressive size of the horses' hooves.  The latter were enormously wide, very shaggy with hair above the shins or forelegs or whatever the horse-savvy call them.  Oh, yes, she said.  When had I found Jesus?

The breeze blew, Gloucestershire wavered, green and glorious, at the bottom of the hill where a horse-drawn railway once headed to the neighboring village of Shipston.  I know just enough of the local lore to appreciate, and increasingly love, this spot.  Which was why even an evangelical gypsy could not throw me off my conversational stride.  Found Jesus?  Didn't know he was lost.  I said none of this.  Just smiled.  Beautiful wagon, I added.  Did you make it yourself?  Oh, no, she said.  You need a special tool to do that sort of thing.  What sort of thing?  Oh the carving and that, she said.  You could paint the red bits yourself, but that's real gold there on those other bits.  You need a special tool.  Where are you from, she asked?  California, I said.  Oh, that's in American, isn't it?  Oh I've never flown in an airplane, but I will now, if I have to, since I've found Jesus.  As this rolled by me, rote and mechanical, I wondered how Jesus had found the Romany.  These people used to be known for picking pockets in the village marketplace.  Now they had gone straight, apparently, and were busily picking up converts.  I didn't get it.  I didn't want to.  I'd seen the cart and the horses and the view, and that would do.  I had a final go at conversation.  Where was she born?  Worcestershire.  I frowned and looked as puzzled as I could.  Worcestershire?  Where is that on the map, I asked?  England, she said.  Ah.  I clicked my wheelchair into gear and bounced back along the road.

The supreme shipboard moment, long imagined and never even close to experienced, looked very much like a chaise lounge, with me in it, staring at the open sea, waiters stopping by now and then to freshen my tea, add an extra blanket to my lap or generally inquire after my good health and well-being.  And oddly, this moment never occurred aboard the Queen Mary 2. 

We came close, Marlou and I, to this sort of thing on the next-to-last day.  We had gone out on the deck, which is to say deck #7, the one that circumnavigates the entire ship, giving joggers a good third of a mile.  Actually, giving them considerably more, when one considers the wind resistance.  Built for the crossing of vast seas with fierce waves and battering breezes, the Queen Mary 2 easily adds its own nautical speed to that of an onrushing wind.  The effect on deck certainly gives pause to a rolling quadriplegic.  I have never felt that my 160 pounds, combined with my wheelchair's 200, could be slowed by wind.  But out on the deck, on that final Wednesday, the Atlantic breezes were blowing me backwards, or so it seemed.  The air was only about 62°, but the wind made it feel like 40. 

Reaching a favorite exercise spot on deck, I lifted myself to walk a few feet around an enclosed area where sturdy handrails made for a natural physiotherapy session.  I only got a few yards down the railing before turning back, for the breeze was fluttering my pant legs like sails, body shivering, balance faltering.  These conditions squelched my one shot at deck sitting, tea sipping, ocean staring.  There was too much breeze, although waiters kept coming by with hot mugs of consommé and there was every opportunity to do the deck chair thing.  But, inexplicably in almost a week aboard, there was too little time.

We had been at sea for a full day and a half when I discovered that the journey could be viewed on Channel 38 of our cabin's television.  A succession of screens displayed wind , temperature, ship's speed, miles elapsed, miles to go, while a thick red line showed our progress across the Atlantic.  "Honey, how come we're only at Newfoundland?" I asked Marlou.  She stared at me.  "Paul, it's a ship."

Good point.  There's a reason why Virgin Airways doesn't go 30 mph and the Queen Mary 2 does.  And since a ship moves slowly, passengers should get a chance to slow down.  But this was not the case.  In fact, being aboard the ship proved downright adrenal, high on frenzy, short on sleep.  It's not just that there were so many activities, although there were -- each day dawns with a six-page listing of lectures, concerts, plays, films, nautical instruction, cooking classes, book groups and miscellaneous sessions.  No, it's the inspiring nature of the ship itself.  It's arguably the world's largest and, arguments aside, the most powerful.  Go to the observation deck behind the bridge.  Or take the outside elevator to, say, the bar one level down, or the library several levels down, and take a high, wide look at the ever disappearing North Atlantic.  This crossing (no, it's not a cruise) included a first-time screening of a British documentary on the Apollo missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The film is all about daring, imagination and lofty goals.  So is the QM2.

High spirits on the high seas.  Evenings in which music emanates from at least 10 distinct lounges, restaurants and theaters.  Some of the best music is on a smaller scale, with the feel of a good evening of piano jazz at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.  Class acts.  In many ways the ship is a class act itself.  Actually, the walkways are like a Cunard museum, with photos and text giving us endless perspectives on the history of passenger steamships.  Immigration, dining on board, life below decks, famous people who have sailed, caring for pets on board, navigation.  In short, the ship seems very conscious of its past.  Sometimes this is a problem.

The interior decor has a jumped up Art Deco feel about it.  Much of the time this works.  Some of the time, it doesn't.  The ship's cinema is most impressive, with aisles and entrance ways lined with statuary and decorations that suggest the 1930s but work perfectly well in 2007.  Of course, the fact that there is a film theatre at all astonishes me.  Sailing, sailing.  That's happening, moving over the ocean blue, while one sits and watches a film in total oblivion.  The same is true of the Royal Court Theatre adjacent, although the name makes me cringe.  The original one in Sloane Square, London, is so associated with playwrights such as John Osborne that I kept shaking my head in disbelief at the Ukrainian dancers doing Broadway routines with wireless microphones strapped to their heads -- that's what transpires in the Queen Mary 2's Royal Court.  Actually, it's a remarkable thrust stage venue for all kinds of performing artists, from the ship's Polish string quartet to recent graduates of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who actually perform abbreviated plays.  A Midsummer Night's Dream in 55 Minutes.  Great Expectations in an hour-long version which, my own expectations being low, I missed.  But I had a go at a couple of the stage shows, the ship's band blaring in the background.  Spotlights, a revolving stage, ever changing scenery.  The production values are high, the Ukrainians' spirits are higher.  And the wages are low, throughout the ship, which did not give me a terribly good feeling.

Wretched excess.  Meal after meal with impeccable service, reasonably good -- certainly beautifully presented -- food, cabins cleaned and beds turned down, all toilets aboard mopped and polished several times a day.  And all this work is done by Filipinos, Eastern Europeans and other poorly paid hard-working people.  It's not just that they do the work, but that one is encouraged to forget about it.  We're supposed to be dining and sailing and gorging.  But for me, it was hard to forget about all the people working.  Marlou and I gave our cabin attendant and dining room waiter an extra tip.  I felt good about that.  The very act kept me conscious.

After all, who were we aboard the Queen Mary 2 but a bunch of middle-class people donning tuxedos and evening gowns to play at a life none of us really possessed?  The dinner table conversation ran to cruises we have known and places we have sailed.  Which got boring.  And things did not improve on the last night of formal dining when the kitchen staff went on a march.  I guess this is some sort of shipboard tradition.  Scores of chefs in chef hats, 72 waiters and an additional 72 busboys, not to mention assorted sous chefs actually go on a procession from the lower level of the dining room, up the sweeping staircase to the second level, and marching on to the third.  Why?  The reasons are unclear, and the effect was somewhat stupefying.  I'd been dining on the likes of pate of partridge liver for days, gotten used to plates that arrived with sauces dribbled in colored patterns and didn't really need to have a procession of cooks or Meistersingers or anyone rolling past my table.

What I needed was the library.  With windows cut into the ship's slanting bow that provided an overhanging view of the North Atlantic, it was one of the most exquisite book rooms I've ever seen.  In fact, the library -- with almost 10,000 books -- would have been the perfect refuge aboard the ship, if the place had been quiet.  Unfortunately, non-readers were always strolling in to have a look, people were struggling with the operation of the ship's personal computers, and the general noise level was persistent.  What to do but head back to the room?  Except that there were all these activities.  Who wanted to miss an afternoon lecture?  Or a concert?  Who wanted to just sit on the balcony of our room and watch the Atlantic roll by?

I wanted to before I boarded, and now after I'm on dry land.  At the time the ship seemed to demand exploration, and that's what Marlou and I did.  As though driven by unseen forces, from dawn to dusk we went about meandering.  Marlou claims she doesn't like exercise, but aboard the Queen Mary 2, she walked miles happily and without comment.  We discovered that lunch in the coffee bar is of manageable size, enjoyed in woodpaneled elegance and provides something bordering on a break.  This was about the only break we got.  We went and went, rolled and rolled up one deck, down another, then out another.

Because even when the entertainment wasn't interesting, the wheelchair-friendly ship was.  It is even possible to stand in an observation space behind the bridge and observe the navigation, steering and general management of the vast ocean liner.  It is also possible to roll a few feet out onto an adjoining deck that projects sideways, out from the hull -- the flying bridge -- and gaze forward into the onrushing Atlantic and backward along the ship's length...the equivalent of four football fields.  Sailing, sailing.  I never got used to it, never forgot it.  We were in the middle of the ocean, the largest thing on the planet, the thing that engenders life and frequently claims it.  The ship's captain let us know when we were passing close to the wreckage of the Titanic.  Much was made of safety, the usual lifeboat drill, and frequent reminders that for all the onboard folderol, cold water and silent depths were never far.  I liked that.  A reminder to me: It's a miracle to be crossing a vast ocean and simultaneously criticizing the tacky look of the proscenium arch in the ship's theater.

As for formal dining, two evenings surrounded by dinner jackets and evening gowns passed without incident.  I was glad that I didn't bother renting a tuxedo.  Nothing about the shipboard crowd seem to warrant the bother or expense.  Black bow tie, white shirt and black suit jacket did fine for me.  Still, something about the feverish excitement of being on board hummed like a guitar string long after the waiter had brought the absolute last post-dessert chocolate, coffee was done and our table mates had fled.  We fled too.  Our suburban lives in Menlo Park are so routine and stodgy that getting home from chorus practice at 10 p.m. feels like a wild night, what with the toothbrushing and teakettle filling before going to bed.  But here, high spirits upon the high seas, Marlou and I headed straight for the ballroom.  In fact, earlier Marlou had even participated in cha-cha lessons.  A dancing partner?  The ship has a professional retinue on board, the "gentlemen escorts," 10 or so elderly men in white jackets whose job it is to dance with the many single, and frequently older, women passengers. 

While the band played vintage material from Tommy Dorsey to Sting, Marlou and I found a table at the edge of the dance floor.  I knew that I had to do.  I knew this black-and-white evening meant a lot to Marlou.  And in some different way, it mattered to me.  Just that we were here, alive and together.  And it had taken 60 years for me to get here, and something similar could be said of everyone else.  Marlou didn't need a gentleman escort right now, for I could stand up from my wheelchair, hold her in my arms and dance the dance of the paralyzed.  The latter involves rocking back and forth, swaying with the music and keeping the backs of my thighs in fairly constant contact with the edge of the wheelchair cushion, just for neuromuscular orientation.  The ship was swaying too, very slightly, and one needed to be careful.  But not too careful.  Not too full of care about who was watching and whether or not I made a quadriplegic spectacle of myself...pathetic in my efforts...grotesque in my failings.  So, that sort of care would have to go away.  What I cared about right now was Marlou and me and Marlou, us, the couple.  And we deserved a dance.  So, I was up and swaying and part of the dance floor action, and I had no capacity for the cha-cha and I had no regrets.

Good to hear from the liner's third officers the next morning, giving a presentation on the technical virtues of the Queen Mary 2.  The thing has a double strength hull, 50% more engine power than any other passenger ship afloat, and most impressive stabilizers.  The latter function like ailerons on an aircraft, controlled by gyroscopes and instantly responding to the slightest rocking and tilting.  When the ship tilted, they did the same, turning up or down to compensate.  They produced the faint fluttering vibration that emanated from deep in the ship, hundreds of feet beneath our cabin.  This subtle shuddering, easily ignored most of the day, lulled me to sleep at night.  It reminded me of where we were, of the ancestors that had given their lives to make all this possible, this art of navigating the planet's waters. 

There was metal humming deep in the water, keeping us upright and stable.  There was a man in the adjacent cabin who, in service of the Hastings Fire Brigade, had been stabbed in the eye, then contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.  We sat in the ship's pub (of course there was one) side-by-side, our wives across from us, comparing stories.  He was, in many ways, the best reminder of all.  That this is life, that it is a voyage, that the essential conditions are rough, and that it all ends.

When the end came at Southampton, I never saw it.  The ship docked, swiveling its 360°-rotating screws to maneuver into port in the dead of night.  The Queen Mary 2 does not require tugboats.  It slips into port, and we slipped off.  A short cab ride to the railway station, an hour into London, and within minutes we were in another pub, this time on dry land, eating chicken tikka with Bloomsbury's lunch hour crowd.  And inwardly shaking our heads and reeling in utter disbelief.