January 2008 Archives

When it's time for a restrained, disciplined quadriplegic to pull out all the stops, what is there to do but head for the Trader Joe's frozen food section? No, not Safeway, which is vast, overlit and anonymous. But Joe's...his personal identity unclear, although voiced in radio adverts by one Joe Cohen...his status as a trader even more dubious...yet anthropology postdocs will sift through the ruins of Menlo Park around the year 2410 and find ample evidence for both Joe and his trading routes. But forget all that, because we are staring at the cheese-and-potato piroshkis in the frozen aisle, $3.98 and looking good.

Marlou is not looking good, and that's why I'm here. Cheesy things are about all she can stomach after getting her fortnightly blast of oxyplatin, one of the cancer-fighting drugs vaguely labeled as chemo. Oxyplatin should make me feel grateful, and in a sense I am. Marlou needs the stuff. But then, Rosemary's Baby needed childcare. The drug, administered every two weeks, seems such an assault. My wife is sicker after the treatment. Side effects, collateral damage, overkill...like the tach squad issuing a parking ticket. Never mind. No mind at all, just emotions...wishing she didn't have to endure this. Which brings me here to the freezer section where macaroni and cheese reside next to mozzarella-rich pizzas, fettuccine alfredo, the aforementioned piroshkis and...dammit if the Trader hasn't been hard at work...some kind of Provençal ham-and-Gruyère tart.

I grab all four frozen foods. Actually we don't have room in our freezer for the pizza, let alone the other packages, but buying this stuff feels great. Perhaps a little desperate, too. Not to mention, unrealistic. Marlou will eat the macaroni and cheese. I know this. She has pronounced the dish satisfactory, and describes it as comfort food. Comfort is a good thing, particularly when the body is enduring a pharmaceutical assault and a cancer siege. We take comfort where we can find it. That's why we take out our wallet and barely blink at the cash register...because it's only cash and nothing is registering these days.

Plasma used to have something to do with blood. But now it's pumping the PBS Nightly News into our living room, glowing and vibrant and revealing Jim Lehrer's facial pores in rich dermatological detail. I hadn't been thinking about buying a TV. But Marlou has been redecorating, let us say. She would say that, strictly speaking, redecoration implies an initial decoration. And moving into my home, utterly lacking in decor, was more like clearing space at a jumble sale. The notion of hiring a decorator was so utterly beyond me, that there seemed nothing to do but agree. If Marlou had suggested hiring an astronomer, the process would have been easier. I've met a couple of astronomers in my life. Frankly, I had never met a decorator. But suddenly there she was, in our living room, with this glint in her eye. And Marlou matching her glint for glint. And getting in the way of what was about to transpire promised to be about as effective as ramming a John Deere tractor with my wheelchair. So, what the hell, things took their decorative course...and now we have all these cushions and a sofa and redone chairs...one of which is brand-new and servo-motor controlled, raising my feet in one direction while my head drops in another. Which doesn't even do justice to the plasma.

Damned if I wasn't going to get into the action. You think it's big in the store, Consumer Reports explained, but you'll hardly notice when the lights are out...which sounds like a 1950s sex education manual, but no, it's actually plasma-TV buying advice. And when the thing was set up in our living room, and one of us finally figured out how to turn it on, we had what amounted to a movie theater within yards of the frozen cheese piroshkis, which adds up to one cozy, homey environment. One you don't want to leave. Which, if Marlou gets sicker, may be a good thing, perhaps a necessary thing.

Economic crises, monetary versus fiscal measures...it's all over the news, but who cares? Time to throw caution to the budgetary winds. Pull out all the stops, rip out all the wires. Which explains why a small team of electricians set up base camp here last week. Because, unlike wine, household wiring does not improve with age. And, no, you don't have to launch a machete-hacking trek through the hanging jungle of your bedroom closet to get to the circuit breakers, just because you turned on the electric tea kettle and the toaster oven at the same time. No more broken circuits, no more broken dreams. The electricians are here. They are all about conduit and are conducive and are well grounded. And if you had been well grounded all these years, it turns out, your bedside radio wouldn't be making all that static. Fresh outlets, electrical lines properly earthed, a new heater in the bathroom, and the kitchen counter bright as a stage set. Task lightening, I thought Marlou had said. But that's because I'd never heard of task lighting...and happen to like the first term better.

I tend to see cobwebs as natural flycatchers, part of the indoor ecology, signs of our arachnid friends at work in the corner. Few women I know share this view. Getting rid of the cobwebs is both a mission and a metaphor. At least, I can understand the latter. The wires snaking through our uninsulated walls were both too few and too weak. Now we're amped up. Volted and jolted. Marlou says, somewhat shyly, that it feels as though the electricians have created some sort of protective ring around our home. She is not given to waxing spiritual, being well grounded herself. But I love this notion of a force field, some sort of electromagnetic ring around our existence. That's because things that make joy don't make sense. We make that, it seems, ourselves. Or we plug into it, connecting, getting turned on. Getting powered.

It's 9:40 a.m. on a particular Friday in January, and it's not summertime, and the livin' isn't easy. The living are, in fact, uneasy. Marlou's next PET scan looms, hanging heavy over our days. Nevermind, for I am re-syncing my iPod. No one knows how iPods get out of sync, but when you're 61 years old and out of it and long out of the habit of reading half the screen warnings that link iPod and iTunes and I Claudius is muttering in the background, "trust no one" -- well, you can find yourself frantically trying to get all those podcasts back in your little plastic player which is the size of two books of matches, if there still are books of matches, what with the decline of cigarettes and fireplaces. By the time you've finally read your current podcast setting and finally re-sync successfully, dammit, your sister is practically at the local train station.

It's a seven-minute overland journey under battery power from home to the northbound platform. But having left four minutes late, by the time I get there my sister has gone. I find her waiting by the old station building across the tracks. She is standing with her dancer's erect posture, rolling suitcase in tow, looking like an elegant refugee...a quality born of various displacements and life experience...which I may be projecting...but, no, this is some strange part of our family legacy. Which adds up to a certain shyness about hugging each other. And because life seems more temporary and fragile than ever, I am into hugging. No holds barred. The real, shoulder-crushing, genuine article. Though on this occasion, we give each other a gentle pat.

We catch up over coffee. My sister and I have been talking to each other across tables for a long time. In one decade, it was the Noe Valley Bar and Grill and the Meat Market Coffee Shop in San Francisco, followed by the Prolific Oven in Palo Alto...and now this somewhat anonymous café by the train station. Fond as we are of each other, we also have something of the quality of strangers. We didn't grow up together, after all, and we've been trying to get to know each other ever since.

So there is an air of discovery about fairly routine experiences. Such as the next day during intermission at Cirque du Soleil. I've bought tickets at the last moment, relatively speaking, and our seats aren't together. Susie and I are sitting in the front row, close enough to the stage for me to rest my edematous right paralyzed foot on its edge. Marlou has disappeared up an aisle to some other seat. With the matinee half over, we all find each other in the twilight of porta-potties and popcorn and compare notes on the amazing high wire act with the trio balancing 30 feet above us on a bicycle. Marlou hasn't seen it. She is sitting behind a post. Well, Marlou is about to tell me, it's Susie's first time here, and at least she gets to see it....

Which, I decide, is neither here nor there, and it's great that the three of us are flying into concerted action. We are headed for the box office. I am building up an irate head of steam, out of my way, you silly people milling for souvenirs and hot dogs. Marlou tells me to turn on my headlight, and uncharacteristically I don't even protest. The lamp is bright enough to part crowds with its glaring cyclops beam, and that's what's happening now. A staffer can't resist hustling us out of the far entrance, muttering about fire regulations while we pause to get our tickets stamped for a brief exit. Never mind, even he can't faze us. By the time I get to the box office, nothing can stop me. Flanked by Marlou and Susie I tell the girl inside that, in essence, don't give me any of your $80-a-ticket-Québécoise crap, because my wife is seated behind something opaque, and don't give me any crap about how your computer says it's not there, because I'm going from pillar to post on this one, Françoise, or whatever your name is. A 30% refund? That's what this silly girl is doing with my credit card, now? Never mind. It's a start.

The intermission is winding down, but I am winding up. Back through the crowds, ramming into, or close to, hapless pedestrians, headlight blazing. Marlou assures me that it's all okay, what the heck. Which is what I'm thinking, what the heck, as I collar an usher. My wife can't see, I tell her. She tells me the place is sold out. I tell her we've just been to the box office, and people are working on this problem, powerful people who work inside a heated trailer and sell tickets so that the rest of you can tear them and point up an aisle...or juggle bowling pins...or ride a unicycle while performing a pas de deux from Swan Lake. The usher finds a cohort, and while they whisper, I yell my discovery. There's room for an extra folding chair...wheelchair spaces being what they are, big enough to accommodate various models of wheels and axles. The ushers eyeball the situation. What the heck. The chair appears, and Susie disappears up the aisle, and moments later there's Marlou...just as the lights are going down. And now the three of us, seated side by side, can watch two of Wotan's netherworld assistants perform demented, suicidal acrobatics on this big spinning set of Ferris wheels. We did it.

Riding the train home from San Francisco, blasted full of Chianti and oso buco, I feel relieved that the day hasn't fallen apart...the circus tickets were there at will call, the restaurant had our reservation, the Peninsula still has a train. Riding in the wheelchair space, leg propped against the bulkhead, I watch the stations drift by. South San Francisco. San Bruno. Millbrae. I've been riding this train for years. The very constancy of it, the warmth in the heated car on a cold night, the reassuring fluorescence of the lights...all this allows me to drift...into a place that is pained and turbulent and constantly in the background. It is my life's screensaver. There's no avoiding it, although most of the time I try. It's a disturbing hour-long ride home. But it's what I need. That night, my sleep is sound and long.

Susie is heading home the next day. We have a ritual morning coffee at a local supermarket...upscale and upstairs. She asks me to tell her what I need, pointing out my tendency toward stoicism. I tell her. First, soup. Next, plants. There follows a dizzying round of shopping at the farmers market, driving to the suburban nursery...Cuisinart grinding, soup bubbling...lettuce and broccoli and spinach six-packs juggled in the air with a deftness that rivals anything at Cirque du Soleil...especially when one adds the two 40-pound bags of steer manure...and something about all this seems urgent and essential. We need to get things on the ground. The rains are coming. We can see it in the turbulent air. Clouds are massing. They drench and pound...and they also bring life. This is the strange reality of these days. Forces threaten and nourish, and it's hard to say what's happening...but we're trying to get rooted and face the rain.

Coastal California doesn't have what could be properly called a winter. Unless you're a Californian and have never actually seen a snow shovel and don't understand why, if they're throwing salt on some road in Michigan, they don't add pepper. But climate change is changing climate expectations. This morning at the very moment NPR said it was 42° in New York, my windshield wipers were scraping against something hard and clear and much like the marbled glass in my bathroom window. Splintery transparent stuff which could be accumulated and packed into a frozen daiquiri or washed away by the sudsy fluid in my windshield wipers. Ice, of the sub-32° variety, which for those of us who reside in a 1950s Bay Area stucco apartment, built when insulation was barely a rumor, represents authentic cold.

Which is why Death Valley represents an authentic miracle. In, say, February you can stand there in the salt flats and gaze into the sand dunes and marvel at how much snow has accumulated on the Panamint Mountains and wonder why everyone doesn't get the message, which is that it's 79° and endlessly clear and sunny. And people are playing golf on what claims to be the nation's lowest course. And you feel so warm and so good that putting around grassy holes and hillocks actually seems like something you might like to do from your wheelchair. Or, after a couple of margaritas, from a gurney.

Taking your colon-cancer-stricken wife to Death Valley does raise eyebrows. Yes, there's the name. And there's the history...the sunbleached skeletons of lost prospectors...teams of 20 mule rib cages pulling wagon splinters through the sand...all victims of a geo-optical illusion. Clear air and heat-fuzzed thinking foreshorten the distance across the blazing valley to the Panamints. Even pith-helmeted British explorers, with both the Gobi and the Sahara under their intrepid belts, cannot eyeball that expanse of rock salt and basalt and come up with anything like a travel time. Which explains why successive generations of explorers and silent movie scouts and hedge fund managers have decided to nip across the whitened plains to check out the hills. And checked out altogether.

Marlou and I intend to check out of the Furnace Creek Inn on a particular Wednesday morning in March. California wildflower fanciers will tell you that in the wake of the autumn rains, Death Valley is going to burst into total bloom around then. We are going there for the Valley, not the Death. If there is a difference.

Our problem...although it may not be a problem at all...is how to incorporate in our everyday lives the specter of death. Marlou has had to face this reality afresh with her doctor's recent change in terminology. Incurable. Which can be said for diabetes and a host of no-cure, a.k.a., chronic diseases. Still, it's a scary word. So so I watch Marlou disassemble the Christmas manger scene on our dining room table, carved wooden figures representing mangers, wise men...and I wonder if she is thinking, "Will I do this again?" Or am I thinking this for her? Since Marlou's cancer has been stopped dead in its metastasizing tracks at least once...isn't this entirely reasonable to hope for, even expect, again...and again?

We don't know. What we do know is that death is not a taboo topic. Take death out of the valley, and you've still got the valley...of the shadow of death. Yea, though I walk. Death seems everywhere these days. In television plots and everyday jokes. Yet the more it surrounds us...the less deadly it seems.

My father was sitting at his desk as I, fidgeting like an eight-year-old, asked what he was doing. Filling in a death certificate. What's that? He told me. And while my father scratched away with his fountain pen, I swung my legs against an armchair, idly tracing splits and fissures in the red leather upholstery. Everything in his office was drying and cracking. That's what you get, my boy mind told me, for having all this heavy old weird stuff. The Persian carpet was fading, the Mahogany legs of his desk had tiny cracks...anyone four feet tall could see these things. Any kid raised near Palm Springs knew my dad's New York heirlooms weren't doing well in the desert air.

Where was the dead man, I asked. My father muttered and scratched away. Was he ever in this office? Yes, my dad said, sitting right in the chair where you are, just a few days ago. On his wall a framed etching depicted a painter, palette in one hand and brush in the other. The artist cocked an ear while in the background a Mephistophelean figure played a violin. He was hearing intimations of his own death, my father once explained. None of this made sense to an eight-year-old. The artist looked awfully perky, what with this ghoul behind him. Besides, he had his hands full with all this paint.

The picture seemed hokey. Today I would judge it cloyingly literal, heavily Germanic and pedantic. Though the best word remains "hokey." Maybe death itself is hokey in its flat-footed certainty. Death is what it is, however feared or dreaded, glorified or romanticized.

Which doesn't lessen the annual impact of my routine physical. I'm 61, after all, and an exam is bound to turn up something, sooner or later. And that something isn't going to signal the return of my hairline, or my waistline...nearing, as I am, the deadline. And even if we remove the "dead" from deadline and call it, say, the finish line....it's still a line, isn't it?

This morning, I had just had my physical, and it was time for the annual drawing of blood. Cholesterol levels, prostate screening, diabetes: go tell it on the blood analyzer. I had fasted, as instructed, and was prepared to follow up blood draining by meeting a friend for a cholesterol-boosting omelet in the shopping center next door. Surprising how many people get their blood drawn at 8 a.m. The 15-minute wait took forever, and finally a kindly Filipino guy was tapping my arm in search of a vein until he hit circulatory paydirt...not that I was looking. I never do. And just when he was over and done with it, he wasn't. I'd moved my arm, he said, starting the process afresh with more vein tapping and arm rubbing. My expectations had already propelled me halfway to breakfast. But the needle unsheathing and fist squeezing were under way, even with plenty of vials of my blood assembled in a plastic trophy rack. My imagined self was out the door and away, my real one still sitting in blood land with my attention drawn, like a moth to a flame, to the red snaking down the clear tubing. Some I've-got-to-get-away-from-here panic rose in my chest. Hurry, hurry. That I am a neuromuscular battle veteran mattered not a jot. Red-draining terror rising, chest-sinking collapse imminent.

"Are you okay, sir?"

"Oh, yes," I told the technician. I forced a smile. Why was my blood draining so slowly? What was wrong with me?

A sickening feeling, the edge of nausea, and a reminder of all such moments...from childhood illness through adult hospitalizations...and this was what Marlou has been experiencing every week for the last year and a half. She's had more blood drawn...more chemotherapy greyness...more surgical terrors...more procedures that don't proceed, but move backward...than I care to acknowledge.

"Okay, sir."

Out the door, up the elevator and omelet-bound, and yes, I was okay. Still feeling a little nauseated, but recovering by the second. And wondering, what is at the core of this? Psychologists say that humans never dream their own death. We seem to be able to terrify ourselves sufficiently with our own lives. So, there's no need to justify why Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" seems like the next book to read. And in the F shelves of the Menlo Park Library fiction section, there's a gap right after "Absalom, Absalom." I stare at this empty place in the Faulkner row, gazing on and on. I can see beyond the spines of books on this side to the white pages of books on the other. Funny how that is. Across the aisle, fiction gets into the Gs. And across from there, it's something else. But I'm here. And there are high walls on both sides. Walls of stacks and stacks of walls. And all I know is that in this instant I derive comfort from being here....in a canyon of soft folded things made of paper...which I may or may not have time to read...but where I do have time to hide.

"Even if I don't have cancer, I live here too."

This is what emerged from my night mouth at the 11th hour on a particular Friday. Suffice it to say that Marlou and I are under stress. On this particular occasion my nighttime T-shirt had slipped behind the bed for the umpteenth time, and I was making rather heroic efforts to maneuver the bed back in place, where it should be, against the wall. Of course, lacking the neuromuscular wherewithal to do this, I turned to battery power, in the form of my wheelchair. Which wasn't a bad idea, and I had aligned my foot rests with the end of the mattress quite nicely, I thought, and slipped the joystick forward. But, wanting paralytic finesse, my hand either jerked or the wheelchair did. The result involved less than jamming, more like slamming, the bed against the wall. Marlou accused me of furniture crashing. I told her I was tired of dropping things behind the bed. She told me the silly T-shirt was hardly worth worrying about. At which I flared into mild rage. Which was more than I, or Marlou, expected...and there we were, stunned. And even with our supposed communication skills, neither of us really had much to say. We went to sleep, or tried to.

Talking came easier the next day. "I'm not perfect at all this," I told Marlou.

"I'm not either," she said. "And I don't want to be."

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, what do you mean by "this?" I'm not perfect at all "this" -- what "this?"

When you're caught in a maelstrom of marriage and cancer and mortality and swinging from fervent hope, to dark anger, to occasional giddy humor...what "this" are you in? The whole thing is happening minute by minute, and there's no time for an ESPN replay, and the commentators are so baffled that they've wandered out of their skybox for one long commercial break.

I settle down to write each morning at a set hour...9 a.m., or so I tell myself. I keep telling myself this same thing about 11 a.m...an hour that arrives as unwanted as your neighbor's shipment from Harry and David. Except that Harry and David themselves are in the box, which you open, and the two of them sit there mute, staring at you while you don't write. And they don't want anything, either of them, except to sit there in a half opened carton, their bald heads pointing your way, their eyes astonished at how two full hours of literary compositional opportunity have been squandered in calls to Comcast, unanswered e-mails, musings upon the Bay Area's transit future and other pressing matters. Or depressing matters. Harry and David sadly shake their heads and say it all with their eyes...you silly bastard, the way this morning has gone, were you really expecting a box full of Oregon fruit wrapped in tissue paper?

Writers complain about writing avoidance under the best of circumstances. But these circumstances are not the best. Which is why in certain moments, rare ones, I'll admit, it occurs to me that one should be grateful for the ability to do anything. Marlou goes to work each morning, and she may feel the same way. Neither rain, nor hail, nor snow, nor chemotherapy shall stop us on our appointed rounds.

We are not exactly comfortable with rancorous outbursts, Marlou and I. But we manage to have them and get over them, faster than ever. We're under pressure. And not just pressure to pay the plumber, or phone the plumber, or remember what a plumber is. But pressure to remember what's important. Not to forget each other. And, above all, pressure to take chances. To risk it all.

Maybe there's no other way. The bullet that entered my cervical spinal cord ended an illusion. My personal myth, well constructed, was about to be shipped from late adolescence into early adulthood...the idea that I was okay and prepared for life. After all, I had friends, vague plans, as much a future is anyone about to graduate from Berkeley in 1968. But the person who was gunned down and now waking up each morning in the student hospital, paralyzed below the neck, had more than physical problems. I was short, demanding, insulting...enraged. The latter had much to do with the return of my parents.

They were gone from my life, or so it had seemed, now that I was paying my own rent in the world. And suddenly they were back, standing around my hospital room making plans for my future...evoking my desperate need for their love...my hope that they would nurture and save me...and the bitter, galling truth which kept running beneath their conversation like subtitles crawling below a TV screen.

In those campus hospital days...less than a month before I was transferred to Los Angeles...the smallest moment seemed full of portent, every utterance momentous, layers of meaning emerging from the casual observations of a nurse, some offhand observation by a visiting friend. I was trapped in bed. My hands were either under the sheets, or over the sheets, and either way, someone had to place them for me. Each moment as preposterously real as the next, my utter immobility...reduced to an angry observer...as people came by to cheer me.

I was grateful to see my friends, my siblings, even a professor or two. Yet the parents, both of them, could set off longings and rages too powerful to master. My father flew into town several times, and when he leaned over my hospital bed to kiss me hello or goodbye, childhood memories of his stubbly cheek flooded back. I'd been angry at him throughout my adolescence. And now our life together achieved a strange focus. It came to me now how his battles with my mother had been infantile and pathetic...and that many of my college friends were already more emotionally mature than my own father...which was a disappointment and a reality. And because there was so much reality surrounding me every moment, every paralyzed moment in which youth had ended and the future had died...and it was impossible to foresee a livable life...and that was only the moment.

After 10 days or so I was past the terrified stage of not sleeping...and no longer feeling what it was like to be shot over and over again...the hospital routine took over. At night, the evening nurse discreetly slipping out of the room so I could slumber, the day's psychic agenda exploded...the first item, the state of my body. My right leg shook, bent involuntarily, then shook again. "That doesn't look good," my neurologist had muttered. I hadn't asked him to elaborate. I didn't want to know what I knew already. Or thought I did. Actually, the fact that I could feel my leg bending and shaking was a good sign. Life is a mixed bag. Even paralysis is a mixed bag. Today my right leg is strong in its own spastic way...supporting my weight when I hobble, just as sure as the Tower of Pisa leans while supporting arcades, columns and a sizable tourist industry.

Those hospital nights, my right arm was jerking too, the fingers clawing, wrist bending uselessly. My head sank deeper in the pillow. On the weekend my father would be here again. He would lean over the bed, discuss my transfer to a rehabilitation center in Los Angeles...and I needed to tell him something. It came out of the darkness, and it was an essence composed of his visits to my bedside and his theft of my childhood...his current devotion to my physical recovery and his wife-hating years of neglect...his affection for me as a child and his narcissistic manipulation of me as an adolescent...care and exploitation...love and hate. That's what I needed to tell him. That I loved him and hated him. Preposterous to even consider saying such a thing to this man.

My shoulder blades drew together involuntarily. They too were spastic. Fuck it. Everything was broken. Each day brought a new discovery...no feeling here, no bowel control there.... Well, if I did really talk to my father, really told him this vivid realization I was having now, quite on my own...that my feelings were like transparencies superimposed, love on top of hate...hate on top of love...both. I stared at the ceiling, the blades of shoulders now relaxed, the plastic cervical collar no longer biting into my neck. No way was I even going to try real conversation with my father. My shoulder blades drew together tight as rubber bands, digging and aching. And yet, if one didn't take chances, didn't try to say the things that hadn't been said...I couldn't finish this thought. But somehow, it seemed plausible, possible that I could say this momentous thing to my father and.... My shoulder blades released themselves. Good to feel my own scapulae leave me alone. No, my father would never understand, and it was no sense trying to explain. My shoulder blades drew together, trying to touch.

Or, maybe I could talk to him. This last thought had been a test, a deliberate experiment to demonstrate or confirm this neurological oddity. That my shoulder blades were talking to me, telling me what I had to say to my father. Resolve to speak to him and they would relax. Decide not to, and they would spasm into painful proximity. It was like being possessed.

Or it was like the body talking. Something deep emerging in a time of crisis that had to be heard...and not only heard , but obeyed. Some force was taking over. One could give this power any number of names, but the best was also the simplest: the truth. I had always wanted to understand what had happened in my 21 years of life. And now my body was explaining. In that instant, it was even telling me what to do. Perhaps, if I listen, it still is.

"It's not normal," says Tom, our landlord, sweeping debris from plywood wheelchair ramp that leads to our door. Actually, Tom is a paragon of normalcy. At 75 years of age, he leads an unvaryingly predictable life. Up and out the door by 9 a.m. each day, backing from the carport in one of his two automobiles. The latter span for decades. The first hails from the mid-part of the 20th century, a 1967 Dodge Charger, its fins turned downward to resemble wings more than vertical stabilizers. The designers must have at least discussed making them flap. When the Charger starts up in the morning of the exercycle, which happens to be every other morning...my routine marching along much like Tom's...the carport fills with a rich and invisible fog of late 1960s air pollution. I slow my pedaling and wait for the purring behemoth to back out from under the overhang and expel its gases into the open air. I expel some of my own, breathing a sigh of pulmonary relief, hoping I can stave off respiratory illness for at least another year. With one of us dealing with cancer and the other confronting age and paralysis, physical maladies seem to be coming out of the woodwork.

"It's not normal at all," Tom says. "Global warming." He hands me our mail. I thank him as though he is a nurse in an intensive care unit. In reality, I have been in Tom's ICU for almost a decade and a half. It was a fluke that brought me to this apartment. I had just been divorced, the bottom falling out of my life. So, hobbling up and down Roble Ave. in search of rented shelter, one retired guy sweeping the sidewalk in front of his four-plex told me about this other retired guy and his four-plex. The latter turned out to be Tom, who had an apartment and, it turned out, a broom.

The current storm, a true deluge of 40-days-and-40-nights proportion, has been hammering for half a day. The drought that preceded it...with squirts of rain that blew in twice a month...makes this a grand event. Tom's observation about global warming gives me a modicum of hope. He is a conservative fellow, given to joking about tree huggers, but he's not joking now...just matter-of-factly stating what he thinks is clear. Things are changing. Marlou has asked me to address another change, the decline and imminent fall of the gutter and downspout hanging off our porch. Should I say something? Not now, for this isn't the time, not with rain still falling and Tom bringing me the afternoon mail. He wants to get inside.

I am content to do the same, having had a pleasant dose of the outside earlier in the day. Clint and Phyllis met me for a late breakfast in downtown Menlo Park. The rain was at its height, but these days I never pass up a chance to see old friends. Marlou and I are doing a splendid job of facing life, but sometimes we need to face other faces. Which was why I didn't bat an eye at rolling through the driving rain to have some face time with Clint, Phyllis and a bran muffin.

What is a poncho? I'm not sure that I've ever owned one before now. But Marlou bought two of them for our European trip, compact and neatly folded in square plastic bags. And now I am donning one, which proves to be remarkably easy. For a poncho is more a concept than a garment. It's really just a sheet of plastic that drapes here and clips there, culminating in a hood...which is the only feature suggesting this is a garment, not a tarp. All of which should make getting into the thing easy, but no. I stick my arm, expecting a sleeve, and the hand emerges into the open air. Ponchos don't have sleeves. We don't need no stinking cuffs. I try again, my hand emerging into a proves to be the hood. Fuck. My temper flares at anything these days. My exasperation with myself can go from zero to 60 within seconds. I'm under a lot of what is generally described as stress. Cool it. The way to get into a poncho is to hang loose, flap the arms more than stick them, and let the plastic fall where it may. It's a lot like getting into a bed.

Three feet down the wheelchair ramp and out into the howling Pacific gale, the hood blows off my head. To be precise, my head remains attached to my neck, but the hood flares like a windsock, generating something of a drag-chute effect. I stop, retie the thing as best one can, and hurtle on. Rain waits for no man. It is currently doing a water cannon thing on my glasses, and I'm not yet out of the driveway. At Roble Ave., I turn my head in one direction and the poncho hood slips over my eyes. Anchoring the plastic, I crank my head the other way. This takes just long enough for any traffic, particularly the stealthy, silent hybrid-electric kind, to bear down upon me without warning. The mother-says-to-look-both-ways wisdom has not eluded me, but the plastic is still not cooperating. Fuck it. I jam the joystick forward, pedal to quadriplegic metal, and burst across the street. Fine. I'm still alive. It's still raining. The drought is over.

But the flood is just beginning. What are the parameters regarding the stalling out of a wheelchair? How many inches of water can this thing take? They cannot be called puddles, these watery expenses, yards wide, depth uncertain, and they block passage from street to sidewalk. Never mind. I am on a roll, out the door, mentally halfway to breakfast. The poncho delay cost me some unexpected minutes, but I'm reasonably certain Clint and Phyllis will still be there. So will the sidewalk, if I can just find a way to get to it. No problem rolling down the street, but the bouncing rain seems to be going up as much as down, making visibility poor. A car honks at me. In this wheelchair, I am a low-rider, hard to see, and it's time to make a move. I splash through a curbside lake, up a driveway and onto the sidewalk. What the hell.

If Menlo Park has a Hollywood and Vine, I'm approaching that place now. Menlo Avenue and El Camino may look pretty tame, but it's what we've got downtown traffic-wise. That's why the prospect of poling barge-style through these deep and turbulent waters gives me pause. The intersection is so flooded that it has virtually disappeared. Something in me has disappeared as well. Fear and prudence, perhaps. Both seem to have vanished, for I am blasting through the crosswalk as though there is one. I only make it halfway. Only a fool would continue. But only a fool would be here, so the point seems moot. A car is approaching and signaling for a right turn, which would take us both into harm's way, as it were. I am stopped. I glance around, feigning confusion, pretending that I don't know what to do. This maneuver reminds me of the hanky-dropping gestures of southern belles. The whole thing is utterly coy, in a cripple sense, and calculated. While I pretend to be stranded, the driver makes an extremely wide right turn around me. Good. I am waiting out the traffic light. The signal will change, and I will hurtle across traffic to the other side.

"Let me pull you." A pedestrian, four-limbed and bursting with able-bodied health, has seized the two handles of my wheelchair. He has the temerity to attempt to drag my 200 pound vehicle back and out of what he perceives to be danger. Thanks, I say, hitting the joystick. The cross light has turned green and, dashing briefly through the middle of the intersection, I skirt Lake Crosswalk, turn ninety degrees and head for the other side.

More land than puddles over here, even halfway protected beneath the overhang of Kepler's Bookstore, and breakfast is seconds away. Death was probably seconds away too, back at the intersection. But that was in the past. For Marlou and for me, life is about the present. We are both taking chances. We make scores of gut decisions every day. We are both trying to cross to safety.

It's time to call Land's End for my long-delayed appointment with destiny. I don't know if my own destiny is genetically determined, divinely inspired or channeled by an out-of-work member of the screenwriters' union. All I know is that it's mine. And it is, or was, 35 inches.

That's what I'm going to say to the chirpy Wisconsin woman at the other end. Her name will be June or Margaret or Grace, and I can just see her in the snowy upper Midwest, chirping through her headset, just like in the Land's End catalog. Good thing she can't see me. She would know I was lying. I am asking her a question that isn't really a question, for I know the answer. In fact, the entire conversation is a dodge. Ideal for Dodgeville, Wisconsin, the company's putative home.

2 Lands' End Lane. Dodgeville. That's where they claim to hang out. Or hide out. Consider that these days if one wants to order by mail, i.e., writing and signing a check, scribbling in product numbers and so on, the company advises "give us a call if you would like a printed order form." I am thinking of doing this. I want to see where the order form originates. I don't believe that June or Margaret or Grace are anywhere near Dodgeville, but much closer to Bangalore. Nor do I believe that they are so inexhaustibly cheery. They may wish me to have a nice day, but they are secretly wishing a nice existence for themselves. They're on the phone 18 hours a day to buy that extra bag of lentils. I just know this.

What I really want to know is if the entire company is into the End Times. The latter is apocalypse-speak for it's all over and, boy, are we fucked. Check out that apostrophe. It's actually Lands' End...as in the cessation of landmass...jettisoning of continents...the big tectonic goodbye. Lands' End. Just look through their chart of women's regular and tall sizes, line it up with the men's short sizes -- and every column adds up to 666. The Beast, I tell you, is marching. The land is ending. No big revelation? Listen in on my conversation with Grace. No, Margaret. Okay, June.

My first question involves the last order. What was it? Blue jeans. What size? Thanks, I'll have three more of those. I'm going to hang up real fast before snoopy June figures out what's going on. It's none of her damn business. She should just lie low, transmit her order from Uzbekistan to Dodgeville, and leave me alone. Have I ever bothered her? If everything goes splendidly, the jeans will arrive, waist size 35, length 30, and no one needs to worry about a damn thing.

Well, there is one thing. Which has to do with the size. It's been a year of personal growth for me. About an inch or two, I'd say. With a simultaneous shrinkage, and not of the ego, but somewhere in the musculoskeletal system. Most likely it's the spine. That's where we lose height, and when I have my annual physical, the doctor's nurse makes me stand straight against the wall, lowers her steel measuring arm and alleges that I am no longer 5'8" but 5' 6 and 3/4". Actually, she kept rounding off to 5'6", and it was only through my personal intervention and the heroic straining of my quadriplegic back muscles, that the 3/4" materialized.

Which brings us back to Dodgeville. We have, I insist, successfully dodged the 35 inch issue for at least another year. Never mind that my blue jeans are looking a little tight. If I have to upgrade to 36 inches, I'll get tight myself. Even though I'm no particular fan of drinking. Tight. Maybe for days. I'm going to get into 35 inch jeans if it kills me. I don't care if my femoral artery is moving like the Hollywood freeway at 5 p.m. It's 35 inches. And that's final.

More precisely, the dining room of the Queen Mary 2 seems to have been final. It would have been wiser to graze on North Atlantic seaweed than to stuff myself at every available meal, leading to the next stage of things culinary in Britain and Provence. Which was only a warm up for the next stage...which I can't remember...but must be this stage. Home. Which being a place of anxiety, uncertainty and frequent grief, threatens to either implode the 35 inches or expand them. One cannot say. Will worry over Marlou's condition make me eat more or less? And why should I care?

Well, I do. And that's because the craving for nourishment, or lack of craving, gives me at least one rough indication of, let us call it, soul need. Marlou's life-threatening illness.... It threatens her life, our life, her future, our future, my future. It threatens...to break down everything. And everything is breaking down, including the barriers between us, our mutual distrusts, the taboos that normally hold relationships in place. Is my waist expanding, or is it my heart, or the entire universe? Marlou and I cry, inwardly and outwardly, several times a day. We laugh as frequently. And, oddly, both emotions come from the same place. We've run out of shallow jokes and shallow laughs. Everything emanates from the belly or the heart.

Now that I'm home and worrying about dealing with Dodgeville, instead of catching yet another Super Shuttle van to San Francisco Airport, it's interesting to see how both of us pass the time. How much time do we have to pass? What are we going to do with it? Anyone with two neurons to rub together will tell you that these are sensible questions for any man on any day. June is asking these questions in Islamabad, because they drift through her being every moment like white staticy bursts on a TV screen. I live in an advanced Western nation whose advances are increasingly hard to define. And where cancer advances faster than cancer treatment. And where the human condition rarely comes into focus, but when it does, proves to be the same as it is for humans everywhere. Though it is unusual, in a planetary sense, to have a human population so luxuriantly concerned with the effects of too much, rather than too little, food.

I keep telling Marlou that I am optimistic about her illness. Frightened, sometimes imagining the worst, but somehow encouraged. We see and appreciate each other and, in fact, the entire world, more clearly. What I now understand about my voyage across the Atlantic was that I was afraid. I ate because the food was there, and so was the emptiness within. Which, I knew in moments, wasn't empty at all. Because the two of us saw the same glorious thing, knew what mattered and where to find it. Up at the bow, where three-story waves crashed over the steely breast. The courage and the will and the surrender it takes to confront the elements, that's what it takes to build a ship, sail a ship...even, under certain circumstances, travel on one.

I want to take you on a slow boat to China. I keep telling Marlou this, in one way or another. Things are unclear and uncertain. We fear the future -- while managing to remember that what's coming next is unknowable. Not to mention unfathomable. And, if one lets go, always more whimsical than anything the fearful heart can anticipate.

I asked Marlou today if she would travel on a freighter. She laughed. Never mind. I've got plans. A slow boat to China, yes, which connects with the even slower overland boat to Montevideo. It's all possible, I keep telling her. The trick is to appreciate the seaweed, its quantity and nutritional qualities, to have some for every meal, but to not have every meal in the dining room talking to people about all the seaweed they've avoided. Life is telling us something else. We've got our own route. It's first-class. No need to overeat.