Crossing

"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.