Plasma

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.