Land's End

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.