February 2008 Archives
A cold morning. Well, hardly cold, but less warm, spring having temporarily retreated which, February being February, is hardly cause for complaint. Complaint, however, is in the air. Complaint is about the air. Complaint is everywhere and directed at everything and ceaseless and compelling. It's better this way.
My mornings begin with apparent order. A good 200 abdomen-strengthening strokes on the rowing machine, 30 minutes of recumbent pedaling, that sort of thing. Which, mind you, is overshadowed by the ever alarming news from the geopolitical front coming at me via iPod. Never mind. It's what happens after that, for these mornings I can't quite settle down to what in retirement I arbitrarily call work. I have to have a coffee. I like Peet's dark roasted slant on things, although on this particular morning there's something else on the air. When it comes to getting caffeinated in Menlo Park, Starbucks asserts itself at least three times, and there are a couple of other places, including one upstairs at a supermarket. So, I'm off, and the air is colder than expected, and my mood is grimmer.
I'm not sleeping. Around 4 or 5 a.m. each morning some vague and turbulent fear prods me awake, and my mind spins until the central heating clicks into life at 6:30, and I give up. This morning unfolded like its recent predecessors, and Marlou and I managed to get into a fight over the day's major practical wrinkle. The handyman is coming. And departing, his pickup truck loaded with apartment junk, old drapes, blinds, curtain rods...redundant matériel in the décor war. As for our war, Marlou's and mine, this morning's battle I can't remember. Tensions are high. Marlou is tired of chemotherapy, I am tired of her being in it, and now I am tired of being tired. Nothing like a little domestic quarrel to get the adrenaline going, the rowing machine flailing, the day moving.
Which includes moving toward the upstairs coffee bar at Draeger's, the neighborhood supermarket. What the hell, a little Illy espresso never hurt. Except that the the coffee bar has been taken over by the cooking school, the masonite tables now covered in white tablecloths and set for some sort of lunch hour banquet. I turn wheel and depart, banging loudly into the elevator door by mistake. I'm making lots of such mistakes these days, knocking into things here, crashing into them there. At Peet's there is an inexplicable queue at 10:30 in the morning, and I feel like making a general announcement that it's nice to get caffeinated but even nicer to get a life, so let's all go home and reconsider things...and if you want to discuss matters, meet me in the park across the street...while I get up to the coffee bar for my latte, small, one raw sugar. Thank you.
The queue is barely moving. A fine Colombian mist usually keeps the baristas flying high and fast, the line for coffee moving smartly, but not this morning. Nothing is happening fast enough. Every table is occupied, including the wheelchair-accessible one bearing the international disabled access label, the table currently occupied by a couple of crutchless and non-wheeling middle-aged men leaning toward each other and deep into morning merriment. Everyone moves about the place purposeful and upwardly mobile. I have my $20 Peets card. I have some "work" at home, maybe. I supposedly don't have much time. The guy at the counter asks if I want to go ceramic or cardboard with the coffee. I'd considered ceramic, having brought a copy of the morning Chronicle. But that would mean dislodging two guys from the disabled table...which means a little polite self-assertion on my part...which, for reasons currently unclear, I can't do. I roll close to the espresso machine, keeping my eye on the counter, ear cocked for my name. The elevator-door-banging energy is still with me, and I'm prepared to knock a customer or two down if they come between me and my latte.
This proves unnecessary. The barista emerges from behind the frenzied counter to offer me my coffee in a cardboard cup, mounted in a cardboard carrier, sugared and plastic capped. I have him place another plastic cap atop the first, sipping holes offset to prevent splashing as I bounce over the homeward pavement. More than happy, he says, snapping another lid into its correct place. All this help, this anything-you-want personal attention, throws me off my angry stride. I keep telling these people that I don't want their sympathy. And maybe I don't even want their coffee. Yet thet keep doing stuff like this.
It's hard to take, people being nice to you. If your expectations point in a different direction, if life experience has prepared you for something else...it's safer to maintain a certain distance, to keep the heart closed. Open hearts are for cardiac surgeons who want to take big risks, pay big malpractice insurance premiums and stare at that vital thing pumping and not pumping. My instinct is to keep that sucker closed.
A professor called me up a couple of weeks ago, a man who taught me in the 1970s. He's got his own problems and is not exactly in the spring of his chickenhood, so I was touched when he asked about Marlou and me...and let's do lunch. I was more than touched when he turned up with a colleague, another professor of mine from the same era, so more than touched that I wanted to turn and flee. What were they doing? What was I supposed to say that would entertain for an entire lunch? Either man was much more accomplished than I. The combination, the two of them ordering sushi and talking to me just like I was a normal person, made me want to get down on the carpet and crawl out the door. I found myself stammering during lunch. I've been sending stuff out to publishers, working hard to get a bit of exposure and wanted them to know this. Can't hurt to spread the word around...my feeble effort at networking, God save us. After lunch, we wandered down the street to a coffee bar. And, yes, both of them sat with me and had coffee. We laughed, I brightened, the sun shone. It only lasted a few minutes, but I hadn't had such minutes in quite a while.
Marlou's illness takes hours out of our lives. It threatens to take the life out of Marlou. And in the way that threats take the wind out of your sails...it threatens to take the life out of our lives. I've spent my life bracing to have things taken away from me, because...well, some things have. But bracing doesn't do any good. It's like standing in a doorway in case there's an earthquake. There will be one -- this is California -- so once you've got some blankets and food in the pantry and batteries in your radio and stuff in your iPod, what can you do but live? Live and enjoy lunch with the professors, the 50 inch plasma version of Netflix and the days or years I have with Marlou, complete with chemo and paralysis and hair loss and wheelchairs. It's been proven that we can get through bodily decline. The November elections? We'll see.
My mornings begin with apparent order. A good 200 abdomen-strengthening strokes on the rowing machine, 30 minutes of recumbent pedaling, that sort of thing. Which, mind you, is overshadowed by the ever alarming news from the geopolitical front coming at me via iPod. Never mind. It's what happens after that, for these mornings I can't quite settle down to what in retirement I arbitrarily call work. I have to have a coffee. I like Peet's dark roasted slant on things, although on this particular morning there's something else on the air. When it comes to getting caffeinated in Menlo Park, Starbucks asserts itself at least three times, and there are a couple of other places, including one upstairs at a supermarket. So, I'm off, and the air is colder than expected, and my mood is grimmer.
I'm not sleeping. Around 4 or 5 a.m. each morning some vague and turbulent fear prods me awake, and my mind spins until the central heating clicks into life at 6:30, and I give up. This morning unfolded like its recent predecessors, and Marlou and I managed to get into a fight over the day's major practical wrinkle. The handyman is coming. And departing, his pickup truck loaded with apartment junk, old drapes, blinds, curtain rods...redundant matériel in the décor war. As for our war, Marlou's and mine, this morning's battle I can't remember. Tensions are high. Marlou is tired of chemotherapy, I am tired of her being in it, and now I am tired of being tired. Nothing like a little domestic quarrel to get the adrenaline going, the rowing machine flailing, the day moving.
Which includes moving toward the upstairs coffee bar at Draeger's, the neighborhood supermarket. What the hell, a little Illy espresso never hurt. Except that the the coffee bar has been taken over by the cooking school, the masonite tables now covered in white tablecloths and set for some sort of lunch hour banquet. I turn wheel and depart, banging loudly into the elevator door by mistake. I'm making lots of such mistakes these days, knocking into things here, crashing into them there. At Peet's there is an inexplicable queue at 10:30 in the morning, and I feel like making a general announcement that it's nice to get caffeinated but even nicer to get a life, so let's all go home and reconsider things...and if you want to discuss matters, meet me in the park across the street...while I get up to the coffee bar for my latte, small, one raw sugar. Thank you.
The queue is barely moving. A fine Colombian mist usually keeps the baristas flying high and fast, the line for coffee moving smartly, but not this morning. Nothing is happening fast enough. Every table is occupied, including the wheelchair-accessible one bearing the international disabled access label, the table currently occupied by a couple of crutchless and non-wheeling middle-aged men leaning toward each other and deep into morning merriment. Everyone moves about the place purposeful and upwardly mobile. I have my $20 Peets card. I have some "work" at home, maybe. I supposedly don't have much time. The guy at the counter asks if I want to go ceramic or cardboard with the coffee. I'd considered ceramic, having brought a copy of the morning Chronicle. But that would mean dislodging two guys from the disabled table...which means a little polite self-assertion on my part...which, for reasons currently unclear, I can't do. I roll close to the espresso machine, keeping my eye on the counter, ear cocked for my name. The elevator-door-banging energy is still with me, and I'm prepared to knock a customer or two down if they come between me and my latte.
This proves unnecessary. The barista emerges from behind the frenzied counter to offer me my coffee in a cardboard cup, mounted in a cardboard carrier, sugared and plastic capped. I have him place another plastic cap atop the first, sipping holes offset to prevent splashing as I bounce over the homeward pavement. More than happy, he says, snapping another lid into its correct place. All this help, this anything-you-want personal attention, throws me off my angry stride. I keep telling these people that I don't want their sympathy. And maybe I don't even want their coffee. Yet thet keep doing stuff like this.
It's hard to take, people being nice to you. If your expectations point in a different direction, if life experience has prepared you for something else...it's safer to maintain a certain distance, to keep the heart closed. Open hearts are for cardiac surgeons who want to take big risks, pay big malpractice insurance premiums and stare at that vital thing pumping and not pumping. My instinct is to keep that sucker closed.
A professor called me up a couple of weeks ago, a man who taught me in the 1970s. He's got his own problems and is not exactly in the spring of his chickenhood, so I was touched when he asked about Marlou and me...and let's do lunch. I was more than touched when he turned up with a colleague, another professor of mine from the same era, so more than touched that I wanted to turn and flee. What were they doing? What was I supposed to say that would entertain for an entire lunch? Either man was much more accomplished than I. The combination, the two of them ordering sushi and talking to me just like I was a normal person, made me want to get down on the carpet and crawl out the door. I found myself stammering during lunch. I've been sending stuff out to publishers, working hard to get a bit of exposure and wanted them to know this. Can't hurt to spread the word around...my feeble effort at networking, God save us. After lunch, we wandered down the street to a coffee bar. And, yes, both of them sat with me and had coffee. We laughed, I brightened, the sun shone. It only lasted a few minutes, but I hadn't had such minutes in quite a while.
Marlou's illness takes hours out of our lives. It threatens to take the life out of Marlou. And in the way that threats take the wind out of your sails...it threatens to take the life out of our lives. I've spent my life bracing to have things taken away from me, because...well, some things have. But bracing doesn't do any good. It's like standing in a doorway in case there's an earthquake. There will be one -- this is California -- so once you've got some blankets and food in the pantry and batteries in your radio and stuff in your iPod, what can you do but live? Live and enjoy lunch with the professors, the 50 inch plasma version of Netflix and the days or years I have with Marlou, complete with chemo and paralysis and hair loss and wheelchairs. It's been proven that we can get through bodily decline. The November elections? We'll see.
This just in from the garden: things are bursting. It's spring in coastal California. Check out the trees. Plums, peaches, almonds, their pink petals and white petals and dainty beige petals are already dropping, cherry blossom time having come and gone. Winter is nominally still under way, but not here. Within two weeks my raised beds are going to be flush with chlorophyll, the spinach and rocketing onions in-your-face, as botanically subtle as Dame Edna Everage. Let's hear it for cell activity. Let's hear it for cell phones. But can't we hear it a bit less, particularly aboard the San Francisco Peninsula's commuter train, the Extrovert Express, everyone engaged in one-sided mobilephone soliloquies on such diverse topics as investments, investments and investments?
Cell activity is never far from our domestic consciousness, Marlou's and mine. So pervasive is this topic that it appears everywhere. Yes, in the garden. And rather poignantly in front of the Trader Joe's yogurt display. I can feel it as I stare at the yogurts from New Jersey and Poland. When you are undergoing chemotherapy, the natural acidophilus...not that it could be unnatural any more than a peach can be inorganic...well, it's good for you. Take Marlou, whose intestinal system is regularly napalmed, strafed and cluster bombed by the finest pharmaceutical munitions money can buy. Or insurance can buy. The yogurt from New Jersey is convincingly French and the Polish stuff looks all-American. The only issue is which has more live cells, living acidophilus, to nourish Marlou's good cells in her battle with the bad ones ? It is the simultaneous war of the cells or dance of the cells, or the simple recognition of cellular forces pulling in opposite directions...that makes one linger long over the yogurt purchase.
No lingering at the checkout. In fact, the Trader and I are reaching a moment of truth, certainly a moment of commitment. To take the next step, I have to make a choice. The options are arrayed on a wall, as in some Mesopotamian riddle. Will it be this one, this one or this one? Choose carefully, for each is compelling in its own way. Initially, I choose the one that is most natural, unadorned and seemingly closest to the earth. A soft shake of the head from the checker tells me that no, the burlap will not do, although it is the most subtle, fashioned of timeless organic fabric, the Trader Joe's label printed in red, but only once. I need a larger bag, he tells me. Although, eyeing my wheelchair, he revises this estimate and pronounces the need for two bags. The bags will be blue, made of durable plastic, and there will be no argument, for there is no time. Nor is there room, once the bags are loaded and the two of them swing from my wheelchair handles, wary shoppers stepping aside as $69.75 worth of goods hurtles toward them.
A new era. Permanent, eco-friendly grocery transport, the bags reusable, the food not. And I am bouncing over sidewalk cracks, yogurt swelling, groceries swinging. Less than a block from home, something begins to rub. Ah, there's the rub. It's always there, isn't it? It's the byproduct of change, the thing that happens when one makes a shift, takes a chance. I stop briefly, crane my neck, and try to see if and how one of the grocery bags is hanging where it shouldn't. Turning my head is difficult, but so is getting my head around anything mechanical. I have licensed experts in my life who go at these problems with metric wrenches and a high hourly rate, but none of them is currently present. It's just me and the wheelchair and something rubbing.
What the hell. I push the joystick all the way forward, gun the motor, in a manner of speaking and patch out. More bouncing and, dammit, more rubbing. I pull in behind a parked Honda, twist my torso to the right and, right-handed grabbing being beyond my neurological capabilities, hurl the afflicted upper extremity at the Trader Joe's bag. This proves spectacularly effective. The entire bag now swings free of its perch, revealing what the problem was...the low hanging plastic sack rubbing a tire. Now, half my load of groceries protrudes like an airplane's horizontal stabilizer. It's the Garden Patch, dammit. It always is, all that tomato and celery and onion and parsley juice, weighing me down, and now unbalancing me. The wheelchair's suspension has listed hard, the whole thing tilting rightwards. A metaphor for the nation, doubtless. But there's no time for that. I'm only a block from home. So what is there to do but roll?
I wonder if every disabled person has some baseline of personal vanity, some image of normalcy separating oneself from all those other cripples. At least I can sit up more or less straight, I told myself during an earlier disabled phase. After all, I'd been around all sorts of people in wheelchairs who slouched and tilted...doubtless a function of neuromuscular laziness, lack of conviction and general inattentiveness to postural detail. Not me. After all, I could see myself reflected in plate glass windows. I sat straight. Except for the tendency to lean. And to lean more and more, gravitating and curving with my spine, year after year.
Until this moment, gingerly ascending the driveway cutout, bouncing over the cracked concrete toward our apartment, leaning like a wounded crow. Marlou hears my approach, opens the door. I cannot get through. In fact, neither can she with my saddlebags flaring to either side. I back away from the door and down the wheelchair ramp. She unloads one bag, then the other. A nice idea, she says, eyeing the garish blue bags which suggest, in a series of tableaux, that Joe is not a Trader, but a surfer. But, she adds, what are we going to do for garbage bags?
I don't even think of the obvious, that we're not chopping down Southern Oregon or snagging porpoises with plastic shopping bag handles. Because at this moment I don't care. What I care about is that enough of our domestic life remains to worry about trash liners. One-liners come to mind. Look for the silver lining. For now, the bags are off the wheelchair, the petals off the fruit trees and, back in the garden, the spinach and the garlic are racing for the sun. Some cells are going this way, some are going that. Marlou and I are caught in the middle. It's impossible to say which cells are growing, and which aren't, and what is nurturing and what isn't. It's impossible to know. Still there are questions. Tell me, I say as Marlou loads the refrigerator, what you think of the yogurt.
Cell activity is never far from our domestic consciousness, Marlou's and mine. So pervasive is this topic that it appears everywhere. Yes, in the garden. And rather poignantly in front of the Trader Joe's yogurt display. I can feel it as I stare at the yogurts from New Jersey and Poland. When you are undergoing chemotherapy, the natural acidophilus...not that it could be unnatural any more than a peach can be inorganic...well, it's good for you. Take Marlou, whose intestinal system is regularly napalmed, strafed and cluster bombed by the finest pharmaceutical munitions money can buy. Or insurance can buy. The yogurt from New Jersey is convincingly French and the Polish stuff looks all-American. The only issue is which has more live cells, living acidophilus, to nourish Marlou's good cells in her battle with the bad ones ? It is the simultaneous war of the cells or dance of the cells, or the simple recognition of cellular forces pulling in opposite directions...that makes one linger long over the yogurt purchase.
No lingering at the checkout. In fact, the Trader and I are reaching a moment of truth, certainly a moment of commitment. To take the next step, I have to make a choice. The options are arrayed on a wall, as in some Mesopotamian riddle. Will it be this one, this one or this one? Choose carefully, for each is compelling in its own way. Initially, I choose the one that is most natural, unadorned and seemingly closest to the earth. A soft shake of the head from the checker tells me that no, the burlap will not do, although it is the most subtle, fashioned of timeless organic fabric, the Trader Joe's label printed in red, but only once. I need a larger bag, he tells me. Although, eyeing my wheelchair, he revises this estimate and pronounces the need for two bags. The bags will be blue, made of durable plastic, and there will be no argument, for there is no time. Nor is there room, once the bags are loaded and the two of them swing from my wheelchair handles, wary shoppers stepping aside as $69.75 worth of goods hurtles toward them.
A new era. Permanent, eco-friendly grocery transport, the bags reusable, the food not. And I am bouncing over sidewalk cracks, yogurt swelling, groceries swinging. Less than a block from home, something begins to rub. Ah, there's the rub. It's always there, isn't it? It's the byproduct of change, the thing that happens when one makes a shift, takes a chance. I stop briefly, crane my neck, and try to see if and how one of the grocery bags is hanging where it shouldn't. Turning my head is difficult, but so is getting my head around anything mechanical. I have licensed experts in my life who go at these problems with metric wrenches and a high hourly rate, but none of them is currently present. It's just me and the wheelchair and something rubbing.
What the hell. I push the joystick all the way forward, gun the motor, in a manner of speaking and patch out. More bouncing and, dammit, more rubbing. I pull in behind a parked Honda, twist my torso to the right and, right-handed grabbing being beyond my neurological capabilities, hurl the afflicted upper extremity at the Trader Joe's bag. This proves spectacularly effective. The entire bag now swings free of its perch, revealing what the problem was...the low hanging plastic sack rubbing a tire. Now, half my load of groceries protrudes like an airplane's horizontal stabilizer. It's the Garden Patch, dammit. It always is, all that tomato and celery and onion and parsley juice, weighing me down, and now unbalancing me. The wheelchair's suspension has listed hard, the whole thing tilting rightwards. A metaphor for the nation, doubtless. But there's no time for that. I'm only a block from home. So what is there to do but roll?
I wonder if every disabled person has some baseline of personal vanity, some image of normalcy separating oneself from all those other cripples. At least I can sit up more or less straight, I told myself during an earlier disabled phase. After all, I'd been around all sorts of people in wheelchairs who slouched and tilted...doubtless a function of neuromuscular laziness, lack of conviction and general inattentiveness to postural detail. Not me. After all, I could see myself reflected in plate glass windows. I sat straight. Except for the tendency to lean. And to lean more and more, gravitating and curving with my spine, year after year.
Until this moment, gingerly ascending the driveway cutout, bouncing over the cracked concrete toward our apartment, leaning like a wounded crow. Marlou hears my approach, opens the door. I cannot get through. In fact, neither can she with my saddlebags flaring to either side. I back away from the door and down the wheelchair ramp. She unloads one bag, then the other. A nice idea, she says, eyeing the garish blue bags which suggest, in a series of tableaux, that Joe is not a Trader, but a surfer. But, she adds, what are we going to do for garbage bags?
I don't even think of the obvious, that we're not chopping down Southern Oregon or snagging porpoises with plastic shopping bag handles. Because at this moment I don't care. What I care about is that enough of our domestic life remains to worry about trash liners. One-liners come to mind. Look for the silver lining. For now, the bags are off the wheelchair, the petals off the fruit trees and, back in the garden, the spinach and the garlic are racing for the sun. Some cells are going this way, some are going that. Marlou and I are caught in the middle. It's impossible to say which cells are growing, and which aren't, and what is nurturing and what isn't. It's impossible to know. Still there are questions. Tell me, I say as Marlou loads the refrigerator, what you think of the yogurt.
No doubt about it, the chicken empanaditas at $3.69 are going fast. They all but leap into my basket from their frozen home at Trader Joe's. It's 10 a.m., and technically my workday hasn't started, not that I have a workday. Though, if anyone wants to know, there's considerable neuromuscular activity already behind me. Yes, this shopping expedition is utterly gratuitous. We are bursting with food, Marlou and I. We only constitute two people. But you never know. The next pogrom may be just around the corner. Keep your freezer stocked, your passport ready, your bags packed. And live near the border.
I live near a suburban downtown. Which gives me the option, as Marlou leaves for work, to roll off in search of breakfast at our local bookstore café. The eggs arrive quickly and disappear just as fast. In fact, half way through eating them, I consider having some more. This is madness, of course. I am 61 years old, and a plate of eggs goes a long way. Actually, it goes halfway into next week, caloriewise, but who's counting? It's hard enough to get an accurate count of my emotions, which appear like Bigfoot...unpredictable, inaccurately reported and utterly compelling.
The current emotions have to do with help. Everyone at the café wants to assist me. I ask the waitress to remove the rain hat from my wheelchair backpack. I request a spoon for my double latté. The waitress shoves a chair out of the way to make room for me and my battery-laden vehicle. And, in fairness to me, and fairness is important this morning, I give her a smile. The same holds true for the woman at the cash register. And everyone at Trader Joe's. People help and I smile. Or I smile and people help. The chicken/egg problem in these transactions is also important. For with every exchange, no matter how tinged with Tiny Tim wheelchair pathos, I feel better. My spirit is renewed.
With Marlou in chemotherapy, her absence and physiological preoccupations create just enough emotional vacuum to point me toward dark places. It's my nature, my legacy, my thing. I can feel loved and cherished at 7:30 a.m. and by 8:15, with evidence mounting, there's a good case for my unworthiness and essentially unlovable nature. Worse, I am a failure. Everyone can see this. Certainly the pedestrians on the way to the café. I pass one of them, a young Japanese woman. She says hello. My wheelchair has been in high gear, suburban streets flying by, but now I stop and try to remember who this person is. We wait for the traffic light together, exchanging pleasantries about the weather and the train, and now it dawns on me. She is my neighbor. We live 20 feet from each other. And this being modern life in the high-tech suburbs, I don't know, or can't remember, her name. Whether or not she knows mine, her attention makes my heart open just a crack. In the time it takes to roll across El Camino, I inform her that she isn't walking to the train with just any old guy, but a card-carrying member of the suburban rail line's advisory committee. She seems impressed. I am too. Someone has talked to me.
This level of emotional neediness, which at age 61 seems both inexplicable and embarrassing, has sharpened these days. There seems no end to Marlou's chemotherapy. The latter being so ambiguous, that "therapy" is an ill chosen word. Marlou is going to be in chemotherapy indefinitely...and the Flying Dutchman was on a long cruise.
The thing runs in two-week cycles. In the first, the worst, Marlou is whipsawed by competing chemicals. The stuff is killing bad cells, along with any other cells it happens to run into...like an urban street gang maintaining law and order...and has, well, side effects. To counteract nausea, for example, Marlou gets at least five accompanying medications. Oral and intravenous, popping pills and popping veins, the stuff comes at her. Among the charmers, some sort of steroid. Marlou can tell me its name, but I see its shadow. For days after her fortnightly chemo blast, she speeds along, initially chatty and bursting with projects, not to mention not sleeping and edgy. This tails off into a sort of crash. Her energy collapses, fatigue takes over...until the next week when a milder chemo begins...followed by another bad week. For her, it must be a major fight. For me, it's a fight to remember that I'm not forgotten, that Marlou has other physiological fish to fry. Abandonment? Don't go there. Go to Trader Joe's.
Which brings me back to the chicken empanaditas. As I lunge for them, an elderly woman leans over the freezer display. They look good, she says. My lunge has proven unsuccessful, the packages just out of reach. I ask her to help, and as always happens, she is delighted. I know what it's like to feel useless and ineffective. When in your late 80s and not working, not raising children and not raising hell, it must be easy to feel unnecessary. The old woman asks if she can reach something else. No, I tell her. One of the Trader Joe's staff is heading for the checkout stands, and yelling over my shoulder, I ask him what's good in red wines these days. He doesn't hear, but yelling is just the thing for this old woman. She visibly brightens at the stronger decibels. The best wine, she says, is the Charles Shaw, perennially two dollars a bottle. I thank her profusely, assure her that this advice is excellent, and roll off to Dairy.
On the way, someone says hello. I say hello. What the hell, people say hello all the time, which is really nice. Even nicer, she reappears between the cheese and hummus to thank me for my drash, a.k.a. sermon, at Rosh Hashanah four months ago. It now occurs to me that this is why I go shopping, why I need to get out in the mornings, some mornings more than others. And that I return, yes, caffeinated, but also renewed. I thank this woman, and heading for the checkout, bump into the elderly woman who handed me the empanaditas.
The latter stare up at me from the plastic shopping basket on my lap, still frozen and pulsing with package colors that are not only primary, but include those of the Mexican flag. The old woman is brandishing a bottle, waving it at me. She wants me to have it, this Charles Shaw Merlot. Please, she says, you'll love it. Thanks...you're so kind...not to mention, effective and useful...and excuse me while I run, in a wheeled, battery-powered sort of way...around the corner, where I stash her favorite wine among dish soap and plastic dog bones.
Gotta run. Sometimes it's a good feeling to be in a hurry, feel that one has things to do, that time matters. Just last night, all of us were nervously checking our watches at the monthly meeting of the Caltrain Advisory Committee. Volunteering is splendid, but time-efficient volunteering is better, and after the meeting there's only one 7:18 train southbound, isn't there? But being a public forum, damned if a member of the public didn't rise at an inopportune moment and begin to speak. Speak and speak, while 7:18 draws nearer. He was speaking about a man who was something of a fixture at Caltrain meetings. The man had recently died.
Even in death, that is, someone else's, I was drumming my fingers on the wheelchair armrest. I was thinking 7:18. I was thinking hurry. But the man wanted to talk...he enjoyed talking...and something needed to be said about the dead man. He was a train supporter, the deceased. Others knew him, had known him for years, and he deserved credit for existing. I turned on my wheelchair, glanced at my watch one final time, and resolved to slip out as soon as the words stopped. They didn't. The deceased was a Chinese-American guy with a ponytail who I'd talked to just months before on the cold, windy rail platform.
As for his death, the circumstances were natural. The rail advocate, we learned, had been dead a few days when police discovered his body, around New Year's. The welfare people said his affairs were not in good order. His living companion appeared to be mentally disabled. Did anyone who knew this man want to help? Help get his affairs in order, tie up the loose ends of his life?
I was still drumming my fingers. These meetings are not touchy-feely sessions, are they? We discuss matters of transit, titanium rails, catenary lines and the advantages of four-tracking.
I remembered how it was in December on the windswept platform, trying to talk to the soon-to-be-deceased rail guy. The experience was not unlike talking to any technical person, any nerd or boffin type. I wanted to know what could be done about the Gilroy line, all rough track and bouncing cars. He wanted to talk Union Pacific insider gossip, all rail neglect and bound-for-bankruptcy mismanagement. I noticed that his teeth were bad. His hairline had receded too much for a ponytail. He lacked the smooth, steady attentiveness of someone used to, and confident in, communicating.
A marginal person, somehow. A person on the margins. Hardly one of the winners. A loser, perhaps, but losing at what? On the margins of what?
Time to remember that I am the one on the margins. A loser...absolutely...but a learner. I missed the 7:18, fortunately. When people are speaking of the dead, certainly the recent dead, one does not roll out the door. Especially when the role you are given...by your wife, the old lady at Trader Joe's, the café waitress...may not be clear. Its dimensions will emerge over time.
For now, having a role is what matters, having a piece of the action. In a life that has included lots of physical immobility, action is important. And loneliness and isolation make being part of the action precious. As for the empanaditas, Marlou and I will eat them when the time is right. We do have time. We don't know how much, but neither did the ponytailed transit advocate or Joe Cohen who advertises Trader Joe's on the radio or the bus driver who picked me up after I'd missed the 7:18 train. No, no, he gestured, as I tried to pay the bus fare. He strapped my wheelchair into place, made sure he knew my stop near the Safeway. And off we went.
I live near a suburban downtown. Which gives me the option, as Marlou leaves for work, to roll off in search of breakfast at our local bookstore café. The eggs arrive quickly and disappear just as fast. In fact, half way through eating them, I consider having some more. This is madness, of course. I am 61 years old, and a plate of eggs goes a long way. Actually, it goes halfway into next week, caloriewise, but who's counting? It's hard enough to get an accurate count of my emotions, which appear like Bigfoot...unpredictable, inaccurately reported and utterly compelling.
The current emotions have to do with help. Everyone at the café wants to assist me. I ask the waitress to remove the rain hat from my wheelchair backpack. I request a spoon for my double latté. The waitress shoves a chair out of the way to make room for me and my battery-laden vehicle. And, in fairness to me, and fairness is important this morning, I give her a smile. The same holds true for the woman at the cash register. And everyone at Trader Joe's. People help and I smile. Or I smile and people help. The chicken/egg problem in these transactions is also important. For with every exchange, no matter how tinged with Tiny Tim wheelchair pathos, I feel better. My spirit is renewed.
With Marlou in chemotherapy, her absence and physiological preoccupations create just enough emotional vacuum to point me toward dark places. It's my nature, my legacy, my thing. I can feel loved and cherished at 7:30 a.m. and by 8:15, with evidence mounting, there's a good case for my unworthiness and essentially unlovable nature. Worse, I am a failure. Everyone can see this. Certainly the pedestrians on the way to the café. I pass one of them, a young Japanese woman. She says hello. My wheelchair has been in high gear, suburban streets flying by, but now I stop and try to remember who this person is. We wait for the traffic light together, exchanging pleasantries about the weather and the train, and now it dawns on me. She is my neighbor. We live 20 feet from each other. And this being modern life in the high-tech suburbs, I don't know, or can't remember, her name. Whether or not she knows mine, her attention makes my heart open just a crack. In the time it takes to roll across El Camino, I inform her that she isn't walking to the train with just any old guy, but a card-carrying member of the suburban rail line's advisory committee. She seems impressed. I am too. Someone has talked to me.
This level of emotional neediness, which at age 61 seems both inexplicable and embarrassing, has sharpened these days. There seems no end to Marlou's chemotherapy. The latter being so ambiguous, that "therapy" is an ill chosen word. Marlou is going to be in chemotherapy indefinitely...and the Flying Dutchman was on a long cruise.
The thing runs in two-week cycles. In the first, the worst, Marlou is whipsawed by competing chemicals. The stuff is killing bad cells, along with any other cells it happens to run into...like an urban street gang maintaining law and order...and has, well, side effects. To counteract nausea, for example, Marlou gets at least five accompanying medications. Oral and intravenous, popping pills and popping veins, the stuff comes at her. Among the charmers, some sort of steroid. Marlou can tell me its name, but I see its shadow. For days after her fortnightly chemo blast, she speeds along, initially chatty and bursting with projects, not to mention not sleeping and edgy. This tails off into a sort of crash. Her energy collapses, fatigue takes over...until the next week when a milder chemo begins...followed by another bad week. For her, it must be a major fight. For me, it's a fight to remember that I'm not forgotten, that Marlou has other physiological fish to fry. Abandonment? Don't go there. Go to Trader Joe's.
Which brings me back to the chicken empanaditas. As I lunge for them, an elderly woman leans over the freezer display. They look good, she says. My lunge has proven unsuccessful, the packages just out of reach. I ask her to help, and as always happens, she is delighted. I know what it's like to feel useless and ineffective. When in your late 80s and not working, not raising children and not raising hell, it must be easy to feel unnecessary. The old woman asks if she can reach something else. No, I tell her. One of the Trader Joe's staff is heading for the checkout stands, and yelling over my shoulder, I ask him what's good in red wines these days. He doesn't hear, but yelling is just the thing for this old woman. She visibly brightens at the stronger decibels. The best wine, she says, is the Charles Shaw, perennially two dollars a bottle. I thank her profusely, assure her that this advice is excellent, and roll off to Dairy.
On the way, someone says hello. I say hello. What the hell, people say hello all the time, which is really nice. Even nicer, she reappears between the cheese and hummus to thank me for my drash, a.k.a. sermon, at Rosh Hashanah four months ago. It now occurs to me that this is why I go shopping, why I need to get out in the mornings, some mornings more than others. And that I return, yes, caffeinated, but also renewed. I thank this woman, and heading for the checkout, bump into the elderly woman who handed me the empanaditas.
The latter stare up at me from the plastic shopping basket on my lap, still frozen and pulsing with package colors that are not only primary, but include those of the Mexican flag. The old woman is brandishing a bottle, waving it at me. She wants me to have it, this Charles Shaw Merlot. Please, she says, you'll love it. Thanks...you're so kind...not to mention, effective and useful...and excuse me while I run, in a wheeled, battery-powered sort of way...around the corner, where I stash her favorite wine among dish soap and plastic dog bones.
Gotta run. Sometimes it's a good feeling to be in a hurry, feel that one has things to do, that time matters. Just last night, all of us were nervously checking our watches at the monthly meeting of the Caltrain Advisory Committee. Volunteering is splendid, but time-efficient volunteering is better, and after the meeting there's only one 7:18 train southbound, isn't there? But being a public forum, damned if a member of the public didn't rise at an inopportune moment and begin to speak. Speak and speak, while 7:18 draws nearer. He was speaking about a man who was something of a fixture at Caltrain meetings. The man had recently died.
Even in death, that is, someone else's, I was drumming my fingers on the wheelchair armrest. I was thinking 7:18. I was thinking hurry. But the man wanted to talk...he enjoyed talking...and something needed to be said about the dead man. He was a train supporter, the deceased. Others knew him, had known him for years, and he deserved credit for existing. I turned on my wheelchair, glanced at my watch one final time, and resolved to slip out as soon as the words stopped. They didn't. The deceased was a Chinese-American guy with a ponytail who I'd talked to just months before on the cold, windy rail platform.
As for his death, the circumstances were natural. The rail advocate, we learned, had been dead a few days when police discovered his body, around New Year's. The welfare people said his affairs were not in good order. His living companion appeared to be mentally disabled. Did anyone who knew this man want to help? Help get his affairs in order, tie up the loose ends of his life?
I was still drumming my fingers. These meetings are not touchy-feely sessions, are they? We discuss matters of transit, titanium rails, catenary lines and the advantages of four-tracking.
I remembered how it was in December on the windswept platform, trying to talk to the soon-to-be-deceased rail guy. The experience was not unlike talking to any technical person, any nerd or boffin type. I wanted to know what could be done about the Gilroy line, all rough track and bouncing cars. He wanted to talk Union Pacific insider gossip, all rail neglect and bound-for-bankruptcy mismanagement. I noticed that his teeth were bad. His hairline had receded too much for a ponytail. He lacked the smooth, steady attentiveness of someone used to, and confident in, communicating.
A marginal person, somehow. A person on the margins. Hardly one of the winners. A loser, perhaps, but losing at what? On the margins of what?
Time to remember that I am the one on the margins. A loser...absolutely...but a learner. I missed the 7:18, fortunately. When people are speaking of the dead, certainly the recent dead, one does not roll out the door. Especially when the role you are given...by your wife, the old lady at Trader Joe's, the café waitress...may not be clear. Its dimensions will emerge over time.
For now, having a role is what matters, having a piece of the action. In a life that has included lots of physical immobility, action is important. And loneliness and isolation make being part of the action precious. As for the empanaditas, Marlou and I will eat them when the time is right. We do have time. We don't know how much, but neither did the ponytailed transit advocate or Joe Cohen who advertises Trader Joe's on the radio or the bus driver who picked me up after I'd missed the 7:18 train. No, no, he gestured, as I tried to pay the bus fare. He strapped my wheelchair into place, made sure he knew my stop near the Safeway. And off we went.
It's 3:30 p.m. at Trader Joe's, and while the lines are long and my temper is short...the cheek bones are high, particularly on the blond women. Someone must measure this sort of thing, correlate facial structure with hair tone and decide if, well, after all, you might just be right for Menlo Park. I check my watch. The noise, the queue, I would like it all to end. And someday it will. Years from now, an archaeology postdoc sifting through the ruins of Menlo Park will try to determine who he was, this Joe the Trader. What were his trading routes...and why were these two wheelchair tracks leading to his door?
Marlou, awakened from a frightening nightmare during an afternoon nap, called out my name. She sounded terrified. She regained consciousness, sat up, smiled. What does such a spontaneous cry from a dream mean except that I am essential to her? It's hard for me to remember this at times. Marlou is preoccupied with illness. And I'm very susceptible to feeling overlooked. Even here at Trader Joe's where nothing is overlooked. Everything stacked and priced and moving fast. Would I like help out to my car? No, this is my car, this wheelchair. Everything is complete. Except for my nails.
Sky Nails is next. By now, I'm almost a regular. Mai, the owner, greets me, as though I'm coming here for the first time. Would I like the full treatment? Good question, for there's only one treatment. And it's mildly painful, but otherwise pleasant, to be rubbed and lotioned and recognized and needed. When you have a chronic recognition deficit disorder, as I do, you need to learn what all the women getting treatment at Sky Nails already know. Get attention where you can, when you can. And be grateful.
In the early 1990s, when I was 25% younger than I am now, the crumbling of my marriage sent me into a dark place. One thing about dark places: you can't see very well. Actually, there was plenty to see. My wife's absence, for one. I spent long days in our backyard, gardening alone. Still, one must credit the ex-wife for a splendid idea. Her bodywork guy was in a men's group. Why didn't I consider joining? Why not, at least, give the thing a try?
I drove my aging Chrysler to Palo Alto's Quaker complex. What else to call it, sprawling as it does in these days of high property values, half a block wide, replete with parking, offices and a nursery school. Appropriately, the men's group met in the nursery school. Tiny chairs, tiny tables, big guys. On the first day, I slammed my car door, grabbed my crutch and, being in my semiambulatory era, hobbled inside. What ensued was fairly routine fare. I'd been in therapy groups before. Hell, I'd been in therapy before. The level of self revelation did not intimidate me. What did, was the moment when the meeting was over. Guys stood up, hugged each other, chatted...while I sat to one side, looking on.
Sitting to one side, looking on, is to be expected at times. And times was what these guys shared. At that point the group had been meeting for 15 years. Then, at the halfway point of its 30-year run, a newcomer was a newcomer. Clear enough in retrospect, but at that moment I was the forgotten man. No one no one cared about me, the man ignored. One can psychologize until the cows come home, try to understand why the cows left home in the first place and if the place ever felt like home. But, for the moment, I had to sit there, looking up at others who were looking down, and not at me. I was neither welcome nor wanted, an unnecessary add-on to a well-established group...and I would do best to quietly slip out to my car...and since nothing I do is quiet, and I lack the neuromuscular capacity to slip anywhere...best thing: make an excuse. The guys were heading out to dinner, that being their custom. I had the name of the restaurant, knew where it was, so it would be easy to drive in that direction. Then, of course, turn and head home.
Clint, one of the older members, being both kind and attuned, said he looked forward to talking to me at dinner. See you in a few minutes, he said, hopping on his bicycle. He was off, the cars were off, and I was off course...the homeward course being abandoned in favor of Thai City, the cavernous, echoing and not very good restaurant where the men's group habitually took over a large round table.
King Arthur had it right, seat people at a round table and you solve a lot of problems. People naturally look at each other, even if they have to yell at each other. It's hard to say who is in charge. Not that this was ever much of a problem with the men's group, where anarchy reigned. The dinner ordering process was like dues paying time at the United Nations. In their 15 years, the men at table had drifted toward affluence at one extreme, borderline homelessness at the other. Placing a group order at a restaurant was no small task. Thai City offered the perfect solution. The guys could haggle, argue the merits of salmon in curry sauce versus pad Thai, but in the end it was up to Mingh, the waiter. $10 a plate, he was told...just bring us some food.
I felt better driving home. Better than I had in quite a while. Still, there was that sinking feeling, an emptiness bordering on panic that had occurred in moments throughout the evening. Times when I wasn't part of the conviviality, didn't understand the conversations, had no history and, I kept thinking, had no right to be there. Yes, I felt better for the human contact and the night out, but I couldn't really imagine going back.
I was a junior in high school when, in the middle of the academic year, everything changed. I moved from a small desert town to the county seat, a postwar suburb just beginning to sprawl. My old high school had 200 students, and the new one had 3500. On the first day of classes, I discovered remarkable amenities, such as a cafeteria with more than one lunch option. I entered, found my way through the line, got my food and looked for a place to sit. The cafeteria was loud, trays banging, forks clicking, kids yelling. Occasionally, a pat of butter went sailing straight up like a rocket. In the ceiling above, a series of yellow stains spread across the acoustical tile. I ate my lunch, no one talked to me, kids on either side conversed with each other. After it was over, the trays went on a pile, and I went outside and stood, waiting for the end of lunch hour. It was an ordeal never to be repeated. The library was open, I discovered the next day. The vending machines sold enough stuff to make a lunch. After which I made a break for the library. I spent the next year of lunch hours in there.
Memories of abandonment must have come back to me on that men's group evening. Coming back myself, the following week, was that much harder. Still, I managed to get in my car, crutch stashed on the seat beside me. Getting on the freeway that second time, the wrongness of this hit me. No one expected me that evening, and no one would miss me if I wasn't there. I could feel it then, heading south on 101, how it would be when the meeting ended and all the guys in the room looked at each other. And no one looked at me. I resolved to get off at the next exit, hang a left over the freeway, and head home. That is to say, return to my house and its certainty and routines. I was no longer at home, at home. But this knowledge had, as yet, eluded me. The men's group was like an old nightmare of being out of the in crowd, shunned by the clique. And here was the Embarcadero Road exit, the logical place to turn around. But something in me was Quaker-bound. I parked there and headed for the men.
This went on, this sinking feeling whenever I set out for the group, for a good six months. Until I felt known enough to feel part of things. And when the divorce came, being part of things meant more than I could have anticipated. The group had all the faults inherent in leaderless activity. Human beings need some sort of ritual guidance to open up, face the difficult, reveal the embarrassing. And to do so, in the service of life, we need elders. The men in the group, just entering middle age, did their best. Like the Lost Boys of James M. Barrie, they made their own land. And I made my way among them. Over the years in this group, I shed tears. A true panic attack overtook me one night, just as the group was heading for Thai City. A couple of the men helped me home. By then, home was a bachelor apartment. It was empty, but it was mine. And today, it is Marlou's and mine.
Woody Allen famously says that 90% of life is showing up. He's right. And showing up can be a major challenge. Like Marlou showing up for chemotherapy, which is to say, her weekly poisoning. No experience could be more consummately ambiguous. Chemotherapy seems to be extending, and narrowing, her life at the same time. The treatments tire her, beat back the cancer cells, make her sick, give her life. What is she to do with all this? She turns up for the treatments, I turn up for the post-treatment support. Another week, another month, another scan.
In a sense, I never stopped turning up at the men's groups. I just started turning up at a different group, one led by a psychologist. While the latter was a good move, it wouldn't have come without the first move. There is little to say except that at one point in my life, turning up was very hard and in turning up, I was turning a corner. I didn't see the corner coming, but no matter. I watch Marlou brace herself for another round of treatments...round and round. I brace with her. It's hard to watch. I'm a bystander. Yet in this role, there's a chance to provide what was missing in my own childhood. There's a chance to chisel a lesson into stone.
That it's easier to turn up when someone turns up with you. That being a bystander means standing by.
Marlou, awakened from a frightening nightmare during an afternoon nap, called out my name. She sounded terrified. She regained consciousness, sat up, smiled. What does such a spontaneous cry from a dream mean except that I am essential to her? It's hard for me to remember this at times. Marlou is preoccupied with illness. And I'm very susceptible to feeling overlooked. Even here at Trader Joe's where nothing is overlooked. Everything stacked and priced and moving fast. Would I like help out to my car? No, this is my car, this wheelchair. Everything is complete. Except for my nails.
Sky Nails is next. By now, I'm almost a regular. Mai, the owner, greets me, as though I'm coming here for the first time. Would I like the full treatment? Good question, for there's only one treatment. And it's mildly painful, but otherwise pleasant, to be rubbed and lotioned and recognized and needed. When you have a chronic recognition deficit disorder, as I do, you need to learn what all the women getting treatment at Sky Nails already know. Get attention where you can, when you can. And be grateful.
In the early 1990s, when I was 25% younger than I am now, the crumbling of my marriage sent me into a dark place. One thing about dark places: you can't see very well. Actually, there was plenty to see. My wife's absence, for one. I spent long days in our backyard, gardening alone. Still, one must credit the ex-wife for a splendid idea. Her bodywork guy was in a men's group. Why didn't I consider joining? Why not, at least, give the thing a try?
I drove my aging Chrysler to Palo Alto's Quaker complex. What else to call it, sprawling as it does in these days of high property values, half a block wide, replete with parking, offices and a nursery school. Appropriately, the men's group met in the nursery school. Tiny chairs, tiny tables, big guys. On the first day, I slammed my car door, grabbed my crutch and, being in my semiambulatory era, hobbled inside. What ensued was fairly routine fare. I'd been in therapy groups before. Hell, I'd been in therapy before. The level of self revelation did not intimidate me. What did, was the moment when the meeting was over. Guys stood up, hugged each other, chatted...while I sat to one side, looking on.
Sitting to one side, looking on, is to be expected at times. And times was what these guys shared. At that point the group had been meeting for 15 years. Then, at the halfway point of its 30-year run, a newcomer was a newcomer. Clear enough in retrospect, but at that moment I was the forgotten man. No one no one cared about me, the man ignored. One can psychologize until the cows come home, try to understand why the cows left home in the first place and if the place ever felt like home. But, for the moment, I had to sit there, looking up at others who were looking down, and not at me. I was neither welcome nor wanted, an unnecessary add-on to a well-established group...and I would do best to quietly slip out to my car...and since nothing I do is quiet, and I lack the neuromuscular capacity to slip anywhere...best thing: make an excuse. The guys were heading out to dinner, that being their custom. I had the name of the restaurant, knew where it was, so it would be easy to drive in that direction. Then, of course, turn and head home.
Clint, one of the older members, being both kind and attuned, said he looked forward to talking to me at dinner. See you in a few minutes, he said, hopping on his bicycle. He was off, the cars were off, and I was off course...the homeward course being abandoned in favor of Thai City, the cavernous, echoing and not very good restaurant where the men's group habitually took over a large round table.
King Arthur had it right, seat people at a round table and you solve a lot of problems. People naturally look at each other, even if they have to yell at each other. It's hard to say who is in charge. Not that this was ever much of a problem with the men's group, where anarchy reigned. The dinner ordering process was like dues paying time at the United Nations. In their 15 years, the men at table had drifted toward affluence at one extreme, borderline homelessness at the other. Placing a group order at a restaurant was no small task. Thai City offered the perfect solution. The guys could haggle, argue the merits of salmon in curry sauce versus pad Thai, but in the end it was up to Mingh, the waiter. $10 a plate, he was told...just bring us some food.
I felt better driving home. Better than I had in quite a while. Still, there was that sinking feeling, an emptiness bordering on panic that had occurred in moments throughout the evening. Times when I wasn't part of the conviviality, didn't understand the conversations, had no history and, I kept thinking, had no right to be there. Yes, I felt better for the human contact and the night out, but I couldn't really imagine going back.
I was a junior in high school when, in the middle of the academic year, everything changed. I moved from a small desert town to the county seat, a postwar suburb just beginning to sprawl. My old high school had 200 students, and the new one had 3500. On the first day of classes, I discovered remarkable amenities, such as a cafeteria with more than one lunch option. I entered, found my way through the line, got my food and looked for a place to sit. The cafeteria was loud, trays banging, forks clicking, kids yelling. Occasionally, a pat of butter went sailing straight up like a rocket. In the ceiling above, a series of yellow stains spread across the acoustical tile. I ate my lunch, no one talked to me, kids on either side conversed with each other. After it was over, the trays went on a pile, and I went outside and stood, waiting for the end of lunch hour. It was an ordeal never to be repeated. The library was open, I discovered the next day. The vending machines sold enough stuff to make a lunch. After which I made a break for the library. I spent the next year of lunch hours in there.
Memories of abandonment must have come back to me on that men's group evening. Coming back myself, the following week, was that much harder. Still, I managed to get in my car, crutch stashed on the seat beside me. Getting on the freeway that second time, the wrongness of this hit me. No one expected me that evening, and no one would miss me if I wasn't there. I could feel it then, heading south on 101, how it would be when the meeting ended and all the guys in the room looked at each other. And no one looked at me. I resolved to get off at the next exit, hang a left over the freeway, and head home. That is to say, return to my house and its certainty and routines. I was no longer at home, at home. But this knowledge had, as yet, eluded me. The men's group was like an old nightmare of being out of the in crowd, shunned by the clique. And here was the Embarcadero Road exit, the logical place to turn around. But something in me was Quaker-bound. I parked there and headed for the men.
This went on, this sinking feeling whenever I set out for the group, for a good six months. Until I felt known enough to feel part of things. And when the divorce came, being part of things meant more than I could have anticipated. The group had all the faults inherent in leaderless activity. Human beings need some sort of ritual guidance to open up, face the difficult, reveal the embarrassing. And to do so, in the service of life, we need elders. The men in the group, just entering middle age, did their best. Like the Lost Boys of James M. Barrie, they made their own land. And I made my way among them. Over the years in this group, I shed tears. A true panic attack overtook me one night, just as the group was heading for Thai City. A couple of the men helped me home. By then, home was a bachelor apartment. It was empty, but it was mine. And today, it is Marlou's and mine.
Woody Allen famously says that 90% of life is showing up. He's right. And showing up can be a major challenge. Like Marlou showing up for chemotherapy, which is to say, her weekly poisoning. No experience could be more consummately ambiguous. Chemotherapy seems to be extending, and narrowing, her life at the same time. The treatments tire her, beat back the cancer cells, make her sick, give her life. What is she to do with all this? She turns up for the treatments, I turn up for the post-treatment support. Another week, another month, another scan.
In a sense, I never stopped turning up at the men's groups. I just started turning up at a different group, one led by a psychologist. While the latter was a good move, it wouldn't have come without the first move. There is little to say except that at one point in my life, turning up was very hard and in turning up, I was turning a corner. I didn't see the corner coming, but no matter. I watch Marlou brace herself for another round of treatments...round and round. I brace with her. It's hard to watch. I'm a bystander. Yet in this role, there's a chance to provide what was missing in my own childhood. There's a chance to chisel a lesson into stone.
That it's easier to turn up when someone turns up with you. That being a bystander means standing by.
A golden spike has fallen from my ear.
Think Promontory Point, Utah...joining the Union Pacific from sea to shining sea...only think smaller. This golden spike is barely discernible on my pillow. Joe, my doctor/acupuncturist put it in my ear, observing as an aside, that it would fall out. When or why, I didn't ask. This is best with Joe. His workings are mysterious and hard for my Western mind to grasp. All I know is that his needles put me to sleep. Insomnia, not to mention a certain level of anxiety, have been getting to me. And now there's this golden spike on my pillow. It's small enough to be a working prop in a flea circus. Something a flea acupuncturist could use to great comic effect. For a flea audience. Never mind. The thing is on my pillow, replacing my head, which lifted itself only moments before, having finally slept soundly.
Funny thing, anxiety. When you're in its grip, the focus narrows and options shrink. It's hard to see what's happening, because everything jiggles. Like looking through binoculars while you're riding a skateboard. Which I don't recommend and, lacking the neuromuscular wherewithal, have never tried. Never mind. Don't do it. You want to see what's happening, get the needles. Especially, get the golden spike.
I rolled out of Joe's office feeling better already. Though I was certainly dreading the rest of the week. Marlou's cancer is insidious. There's no way around it. Just like there's no way around Millbrae. And that's where I'm headed on BART, the regional subway system. That's where train and tube, above ground and underground, connect. There's a golden transit spike driven through them, Caltrain and BART, the tracks adjacent, the transfer easy. The only problem is that Millbrae is a long haul from Berkeley.
First, there's a deafening, rattling roar in the concrete tube beneath the waters of the Bay. Near the hour-long journey's end...Colma, South San Francisco, San Leandro...the din erupts again. That's OK. I've been virtually asleep between the two locations, the mysteries of acupuncture sending me to slumberland faster than BART through Daly City. When the train doors whoosh open for the last time, I stare dumbly at the Millbrae platform. I do the same at the pneumatic exit gate for wheelchairs. My plastic ticket goes in the turnstile, then goes out where I inserted it. Able-bodied turnstiles assume the passenger is walking through, so the ticket goes in here and emerges there, two feet away. I know this. I understand that the disabled turnstile doesn't work this way. It's ticket in and ticket out in the same slot, then the gate opens. Something about this mechanical activity seems terribly profound just now. In another era, I could attribute this to recreational drugs. But not today. The profundity of the turnstile and how it works has given me pause the way Joe has given me needles. It's happening in my ear and everywhere else. It's happening in Millbrae.
There's an elevator up from the BART tracks, and another one down to the southbound platform of Caltrain, the suburban commuter line. I check the schedule. Odd, because I checked it less than 15 minutes before. The schedule doesn't change that quickly, particularly the one residing in my pocket. It says what it said a quarter of an hour earlier. That I have 30 minutes in Millbrae. Or, somewhat orthagonally, I could have 45 minutes in Millbrae, then catch the southbound express. Either way, I would arrive in Menlo Park at virtually the same time. The fact of this, the two trains and their near simultaneous arrivals, has left me stunned. Stunned and sleepy. God only knows what Joe puts on those needles.
There has to be a Starbucks around here. There's a Starbucks around everywhere. If you're out darting polar bears and tying an invitation on their claws to attend a neighborhood meeting on global warming...somewhere close, say a couple of ice flows away, there's a Starbucks. In fact, the bear will wake up groggy and probably head there you. Which is why it can't be that hard to get caffeinated in Millbrae. I don't have to point this out to anyone, and no one points it out to me. My wheelchair joystick is pointed toward El Camino Real, and I'm there in 30 seconds, traffic whizzing by.
Traffic is what you take trains to avoid. It's surprisingly loud, the tires and the crunching bits of gravel and the muffled engines. A hundred yards in either direction, there's nothing but cars and office buildings, parking structures, a coffee shop. Urbanscape, familiar and vast. It's disquieting, the general effect of cars. When you're in them, you're moving, and they're moving you. When you're on a sidewalk fronting a musclebound thoroughfare like El Camino, all you want to do is get away. Businesses turn their glass walls to the street. Nothing cozy or even human scale around here. Yes, there's a sidewalk, but note there are no sidewalk cafés. Rolling past the "Welcome to Burlingame" sign, I can't tell if there is considerable distance behind me or a bold newness ahead of me.
There is a shopping center. You don't have to be a nativeborn Californian to intuit that just beyond the Safeway there's a Starbucks. I roll in the door, order a grande latte and consider next steps. One logical option: hang out here. There are old copies of the New York Times wafting about. There's a view of the comings and goings of SUVs in the parking lot. Above all, back at the Millbrae station, there are two trains. It's still half an hour until the second one, which goes twice as fast as the first, and the two of them practically bump into each other like old friends, at Menlo Park. Why not? Why not hang loose and hang free? I don't know. I'm nervous. Better get back to the station. I ask the Starbucks girl to put a price sticker over the hole in the plastic lid. I don't want coffee dripping on me as I bounce along the sidewalk toward the station.
And that's what's happening now. I'm jolting the Joe, brown latte splashing on my jeans. While the other Joe is back in Berkeley, jolting someone else with his needles and his batteries. One would think that acupuncture comprised enough input for this day, that the caffeine was superfluous. It was. But something is driving me. It's also steering me. That's why I turn off El Camino toward the station and, instead of tooling down the sidewalk I remain in the road. Yes, it's what Californians dub an access road, a.k.a., a frontage road. But this is rush hour and lots of people want access...to the station, the commuters in it. And they want frontage or, at least, roadage. Which explains why theres so much honkage. Some driver behind me is leaning on his horn. Just because some dazed quadriplegic has the effrontery to be rolling straight down the frontage road at 8 miles an hour. I would flip the guy the bird with my free hand, the other hand being on the wheelchair. But right-handed bird flipping is currently a neuromuscular impossibility...though a worthy rehabilitation goal. I know full well this is madness, rolling down the street. Honk, I am thinking. Or, to quote the nation's president, bring 'em on.
Wisely, I pull into an empty parking space. I don't know what has gotten into me. But it's something I don't like to think about. Something desperate and speedy and futile. It's born, doubtless, of life experience. But maybe it needs to die. I, after all, have grown into a new role. I am the optimist in a relationship.
At first, my optimism regarding Marlou was simply this: I could die first. While true and mindful of life's cruel ironies, this wasn't the sunniest of outlooks. As Kurt Vonnegut famously put it, man is a dancing animal. And this dancing, I always assumed, requires some starter optimism. But with Marlou, I have learned the opposite. You start with the dancing, and the optimism just might follow.
I need to be wary of a certain grim anticipation. It's my crisis-ready stance, my karmic kung fu posture. Which is okay, if you know what's going to happen. And no one does. It's like trying to stay awake all night in case there's a robber or an earthquake or a call from the Nobel Prize committee. No one knows what's going to happen. And the pain of having love taken away, well, that can't be anticipated either. Yet one can get a preview. I keep telling Marlou that I don't regret anything about our relationship, including its possible foreshortening. This relationship has made me, I tell her, or opened me, or sent me on my path. Nothing about this can be wrong. Including the tears.
When Caltrain rolls in, the coach with the disabled lift is out of position. The guard apologizes and asks me to be patient while he radios the driver to pull forward. And this is what happens, the entire rush-hour train moving a couple of meters south, just for me. I know many of the people who work these trains. I almost feel that I work them myself. It doesn't matter if wait for Marlou's PET scan aboard the train, or on the platform. Life will tell us what it wants, when it wants.
Which turns out to be remarkably soon. Next day, Marlou drives off before 8 a.m., and I drown my sorrow with a morning go at the rowing machine, followed by a latte at the neighborhood bookstore café. No one is selling books at this hour, but there's a rising tide of muffins and a queue of un-caffeinated patrons. The espresso machine is hissing, and so are the Chronicle's critics...they hate every single new movie. This doesn't make sense to me. Friday's movies can't all be bad.
Then it hits me, though my usual critical stance errs on the side of scathing...that discerning pages of all-bad-reviewed movies normally comfort me -- not this morning. When Marlou has driven off to learn her medical fate. This morning, which follows a night of excellent sleep, the first I have had in quite a while. Maybe that's because, there's no sense in worrying yet...it will take days before the doctor phones with carefully chosen words and invites us in for a chat.
Or it may be the acupuncture. My latte is finished now, but I'm not quite done recalling the events of the last day or two. It will fall out, Joe said. I couldn't see what he had twisted into my ear, but I felt the usual twang of an acupuncture needle twirling into place. I wanted to ask if my ear would fall off, if that's what Joe meant. But being in an oddly energized state, I thought about the joke rather than said it. Like any joke, there's a part that isn't funny, a place where truth pokes through. I can imagine my ear falling off. Other parts of my body have, in a sense. Besides, I'm focusing on something else. It's how Joe, the doctor, delights in these audacious moves. The unseen and unexplained ear piercing...the "it" that feels like a major nose stud...the "falling out" timeframe unstated. He's onto the next thing, a mysterious injection. We both delight in this mystery. Joe is a dancing animal.
Which explains why, caffeinated and bran-muffin-fortified I roll back to our apartment just as Marlou rolls in. We exchange pleasantries. The trial is over, the jury out, the verdict expected next week...but it arrives the next hour. Marlou is fine, remarkably fine. Some tumors have shrunk out of sight, or to be more precise, out of PET scan. Others have withered to a borderline range, barely on the medical radar. Not that there won't be more chemotherapy, just be on the safe side. Which is where we've been all along, safe and side-by-side. Marlou and me and Joe and his wife Pam...and without knowing it, we've all been dancing.
Think Promontory Point, Utah...joining the Union Pacific from sea to shining sea...only think smaller. This golden spike is barely discernible on my pillow. Joe, my doctor/acupuncturist put it in my ear, observing as an aside, that it would fall out. When or why, I didn't ask. This is best with Joe. His workings are mysterious and hard for my Western mind to grasp. All I know is that his needles put me to sleep. Insomnia, not to mention a certain level of anxiety, have been getting to me. And now there's this golden spike on my pillow. It's small enough to be a working prop in a flea circus. Something a flea acupuncturist could use to great comic effect. For a flea audience. Never mind. The thing is on my pillow, replacing my head, which lifted itself only moments before, having finally slept soundly.
Funny thing, anxiety. When you're in its grip, the focus narrows and options shrink. It's hard to see what's happening, because everything jiggles. Like looking through binoculars while you're riding a skateboard. Which I don't recommend and, lacking the neuromuscular wherewithal, have never tried. Never mind. Don't do it. You want to see what's happening, get the needles. Especially, get the golden spike.
I rolled out of Joe's office feeling better already. Though I was certainly dreading the rest of the week. Marlou's cancer is insidious. There's no way around it. Just like there's no way around Millbrae. And that's where I'm headed on BART, the regional subway system. That's where train and tube, above ground and underground, connect. There's a golden transit spike driven through them, Caltrain and BART, the tracks adjacent, the transfer easy. The only problem is that Millbrae is a long haul from Berkeley.
First, there's a deafening, rattling roar in the concrete tube beneath the waters of the Bay. Near the hour-long journey's end...Colma, South San Francisco, San Leandro...the din erupts again. That's OK. I've been virtually asleep between the two locations, the mysteries of acupuncture sending me to slumberland faster than BART through Daly City. When the train doors whoosh open for the last time, I stare dumbly at the Millbrae platform. I do the same at the pneumatic exit gate for wheelchairs. My plastic ticket goes in the turnstile, then goes out where I inserted it. Able-bodied turnstiles assume the passenger is walking through, so the ticket goes in here and emerges there, two feet away. I know this. I understand that the disabled turnstile doesn't work this way. It's ticket in and ticket out in the same slot, then the gate opens. Something about this mechanical activity seems terribly profound just now. In another era, I could attribute this to recreational drugs. But not today. The profundity of the turnstile and how it works has given me pause the way Joe has given me needles. It's happening in my ear and everywhere else. It's happening in Millbrae.
There's an elevator up from the BART tracks, and another one down to the southbound platform of Caltrain, the suburban commuter line. I check the schedule. Odd, because I checked it less than 15 minutes before. The schedule doesn't change that quickly, particularly the one residing in my pocket. It says what it said a quarter of an hour earlier. That I have 30 minutes in Millbrae. Or, somewhat orthagonally, I could have 45 minutes in Millbrae, then catch the southbound express. Either way, I would arrive in Menlo Park at virtually the same time. The fact of this, the two trains and their near simultaneous arrivals, has left me stunned. Stunned and sleepy. God only knows what Joe puts on those needles.
There has to be a Starbucks around here. There's a Starbucks around everywhere. If you're out darting polar bears and tying an invitation on their claws to attend a neighborhood meeting on global warming...somewhere close, say a couple of ice flows away, there's a Starbucks. In fact, the bear will wake up groggy and probably head there you. Which is why it can't be that hard to get caffeinated in Millbrae. I don't have to point this out to anyone, and no one points it out to me. My wheelchair joystick is pointed toward El Camino Real, and I'm there in 30 seconds, traffic whizzing by.
Traffic is what you take trains to avoid. It's surprisingly loud, the tires and the crunching bits of gravel and the muffled engines. A hundred yards in either direction, there's nothing but cars and office buildings, parking structures, a coffee shop. Urbanscape, familiar and vast. It's disquieting, the general effect of cars. When you're in them, you're moving, and they're moving you. When you're on a sidewalk fronting a musclebound thoroughfare like El Camino, all you want to do is get away. Businesses turn their glass walls to the street. Nothing cozy or even human scale around here. Yes, there's a sidewalk, but note there are no sidewalk cafés. Rolling past the "Welcome to Burlingame" sign, I can't tell if there is considerable distance behind me or a bold newness ahead of me.
There is a shopping center. You don't have to be a nativeborn Californian to intuit that just beyond the Safeway there's a Starbucks. I roll in the door, order a grande latte and consider next steps. One logical option: hang out here. There are old copies of the New York Times wafting about. There's a view of the comings and goings of SUVs in the parking lot. Above all, back at the Millbrae station, there are two trains. It's still half an hour until the second one, which goes twice as fast as the first, and the two of them practically bump into each other like old friends, at Menlo Park. Why not? Why not hang loose and hang free? I don't know. I'm nervous. Better get back to the station. I ask the Starbucks girl to put a price sticker over the hole in the plastic lid. I don't want coffee dripping on me as I bounce along the sidewalk toward the station.
And that's what's happening now. I'm jolting the Joe, brown latte splashing on my jeans. While the other Joe is back in Berkeley, jolting someone else with his needles and his batteries. One would think that acupuncture comprised enough input for this day, that the caffeine was superfluous. It was. But something is driving me. It's also steering me. That's why I turn off El Camino toward the station and, instead of tooling down the sidewalk I remain in the road. Yes, it's what Californians dub an access road, a.k.a., a frontage road. But this is rush hour and lots of people want access...to the station, the commuters in it. And they want frontage or, at least, roadage. Which explains why theres so much honkage. Some driver behind me is leaning on his horn. Just because some dazed quadriplegic has the effrontery to be rolling straight down the frontage road at 8 miles an hour. I would flip the guy the bird with my free hand, the other hand being on the wheelchair. But right-handed bird flipping is currently a neuromuscular impossibility...though a worthy rehabilitation goal. I know full well this is madness, rolling down the street. Honk, I am thinking. Or, to quote the nation's president, bring 'em on.
Wisely, I pull into an empty parking space. I don't know what has gotten into me. But it's something I don't like to think about. Something desperate and speedy and futile. It's born, doubtless, of life experience. But maybe it needs to die. I, after all, have grown into a new role. I am the optimist in a relationship.
At first, my optimism regarding Marlou was simply this: I could die first. While true and mindful of life's cruel ironies, this wasn't the sunniest of outlooks. As Kurt Vonnegut famously put it, man is a dancing animal. And this dancing, I always assumed, requires some starter optimism. But with Marlou, I have learned the opposite. You start with the dancing, and the optimism just might follow.
I need to be wary of a certain grim anticipation. It's my crisis-ready stance, my karmic kung fu posture. Which is okay, if you know what's going to happen. And no one does. It's like trying to stay awake all night in case there's a robber or an earthquake or a call from the Nobel Prize committee. No one knows what's going to happen. And the pain of having love taken away, well, that can't be anticipated either. Yet one can get a preview. I keep telling Marlou that I don't regret anything about our relationship, including its possible foreshortening. This relationship has made me, I tell her, or opened me, or sent me on my path. Nothing about this can be wrong. Including the tears.
When Caltrain rolls in, the coach with the disabled lift is out of position. The guard apologizes and asks me to be patient while he radios the driver to pull forward. And this is what happens, the entire rush-hour train moving a couple of meters south, just for me. I know many of the people who work these trains. I almost feel that I work them myself. It doesn't matter if wait for Marlou's PET scan aboard the train, or on the platform. Life will tell us what it wants, when it wants.
Which turns out to be remarkably soon. Next day, Marlou drives off before 8 a.m., and I drown my sorrow with a morning go at the rowing machine, followed by a latte at the neighborhood bookstore café. No one is selling books at this hour, but there's a rising tide of muffins and a queue of un-caffeinated patrons. The espresso machine is hissing, and so are the Chronicle's critics...they hate every single new movie. This doesn't make sense to me. Friday's movies can't all be bad.
Then it hits me, though my usual critical stance errs on the side of scathing...that discerning pages of all-bad-reviewed movies normally comfort me -- not this morning. When Marlou has driven off to learn her medical fate. This morning, which follows a night of excellent sleep, the first I have had in quite a while. Maybe that's because, there's no sense in worrying yet...it will take days before the doctor phones with carefully chosen words and invites us in for a chat.
Or it may be the acupuncture. My latte is finished now, but I'm not quite done recalling the events of the last day or two. It will fall out, Joe said. I couldn't see what he had twisted into my ear, but I felt the usual twang of an acupuncture needle twirling into place. I wanted to ask if my ear would fall off, if that's what Joe meant. But being in an oddly energized state, I thought about the joke rather than said it. Like any joke, there's a part that isn't funny, a place where truth pokes through. I can imagine my ear falling off. Other parts of my body have, in a sense. Besides, I'm focusing on something else. It's how Joe, the doctor, delights in these audacious moves. The unseen and unexplained ear piercing...the "it" that feels like a major nose stud...the "falling out" timeframe unstated. He's onto the next thing, a mysterious injection. We both delight in this mystery. Joe is a dancing animal.
Which explains why, caffeinated and bran-muffin-fortified I roll back to our apartment just as Marlou rolls in. We exchange pleasantries. The trial is over, the jury out, the verdict expected next week...but it arrives the next hour. Marlou is fine, remarkably fine. Some tumors have shrunk out of sight, or to be more precise, out of PET scan. Others have withered to a borderline range, barely on the medical radar. Not that there won't be more chemotherapy, just be on the safe side. Which is where we've been all along, safe and side-by-side. Marlou and me and Joe and his wife Pam...and without knowing it, we've all been dancing.
It has never left me, the day in December, 1962, when my father finally shut down his life in Banning, California. Things had not gone well for him professionally, socially and, God knows, psychologically. Now all four doors of his De Soto stood open while he stuffed a few final boxes and lamps in for the short drive to Riverside. What hasn't left me from that day is my final act of gardening. A tomato plant clung to life in the weedy lot behind his office. I clung to the hope that, having watered it sporadically, and having placed a toy hibachi beside it, the thing would somehow grow. Someone in Banning would light a few coals in the tiny barbecue to guard against frost. The rains would come. And...if one gets beyond the pathos and poignancy of the recollected scene...what then?
Now 45 years later, it's still winter, and I'm still trying to make things grow in a patch of land that isn't mine...and working the soil with something between wonder and desperation. The cover crop planted before our autumn trip to Europe, and recently turned under by our apartment house garden crew, should be decomposing nicely. In the realm of quadriplegic agriculture, it's a rather neat trick, this. Grow the grasses and the legumes, have Ramon take a pitchfork to it, give the stuff a week or two to decompose, then plant.
Unfortunately, the rains came. The much feared drought evaporated in a series of deluges, while the thermometer dropped and snow appeared on the Bay Area hills. All of which is splendid and adds a bit of bite to what passes for winter in California. But this wet and cold sent my former cover crop...the green lying facedown with roots in the air, a layer of steer manure to block the sun and speed the rotting...it sent all this into suspended animation. How was I to know? In fact, flushed with the success of earlier cover-crop-rotting experiences, I had moved in the opposite direction. I'd planted vegetables almost instantly. Winter be damned.
My account of planting, gardening, soil improvement and harvesting, omits one essential element. The circumscribed and found-object nature of the enterprise. Somehow, it's become a big deal to start up my van and make the half-mile drive to our suburban nursery. Even in the middle of the day, the garden center populated only by flora, housewives and retirees, even then, it all feels like too much. My world is shrinking. On Sundays, the open-air market offers a narrow range of root vegetables, citrus and offbeat seedlings for the home gardener. That's where I bought the chicory plants, plus a cross between broccoli and cauliflower, along with a spotted lettuce variety. Who knows how the seedling guy came up with this offering, but there's a reason why he's standing outside selling vegetable starts for two dollars, instead of shipping trucks of plants to Home Depot. And there's a reason why I'm buying his stuff. He's close. The farmers' market is only three blocks away, which requires no driving and little motivation. The options are few and so are the risks. As I say, my world is growing smaller.
Growing haute designer vegetables is splendid, if you have absolute confidence. If you don't, it's much more gratifying to watch crops emerge from the Menlo Park soils that you'll find in the neighborhood Safeway. No weird hybrids. No waiting to find out what chicory is or isn't. Just some known vegetable side dish, natural and bursting with authentic botanical life.
The same can be said of soup. I have a very limited repertoire, everyone acknowledges. A variation on a theme by legumes. Beans with this, and beans with that, unless for the sake of variety you want beans with beans. I can do all this and more. Not much more, unless it involves beans. The thing is, quadriplegic energies being finite, why bother? I mean, one can delegate this sort of thing to Campbell's. The answer has to do with nurturance. There's something primal, fruitful, maternal about boiling up liquid dinner in a big pot...the concentrated essence of things that would otherwise go unused, maybe even unnoticed. Like bay leaves, normally swept up in the autumn and burned.
Urban agriculture is another matter. The products may be homey and earthly on the hearth. But the experience is all about forces of nature gone awry. The cover crop still refuses to die. With the incessant rain, steer manure keeps washing off the surface of my raised beds, and just enough to allow light to penetrate to the dormant grass beneath. It shouldn't be dormant. It's green manure, as organic gardeners put it. Rotting is its thing. But not this year. Green shoots keep reappearing, and I keep bashing them down. Die, die. Meanwhile, I keep planting. I don't care. The more I plant, the more what I plant disappears.
Earwigs. A non-native insect, hailing from Brazil, that somehow got loose and got everywhere. Unfortunately, the layer of steer manure and the leafy cover crop material dying underneath are heaven to earwigs. It's the stuff garden books warn you not to have lying around during earwig season. Which is any season. Earwigs, the boys from Brazil.
The remedy for earwigs is capture. Actually, the stupid things capture themselves. At dawn, pincers waving, they give up their nocturnal mission to eat your garden down to the roots and find someplace to sleep. Rolled up newspapers are good for this sort of thing. Or a nice flat board with dry space underneath. Toss out the newspapers, stomp on the board, and the pests are gone. Actually the pests are gone as soon as the dead leaves and other garden junk are gone. Pesticides, by the way, organic or otherwise, are useless. You just have to back off and let nature take its course. And unless you screw up very badly, its course is to give your garden back.
Is it too much to hope for the same with Marlou's cancer? A bunch of rogue cells eating what they shouldn't, hiding among the available organic material. Chemicals somewhat effective. But the better course: let them give up and go away. I cringe at the thought of my 13-year-old self hunching over the soon-to-die tomato plant on the poor patch of land my family no longer owned. Heartbreaking novels may be enjoyable to read, but not to live. I don't like seeing myself as pathetically impractical, warming things that can't be warmed, saving things about to be abandoned. What could I have been thinking about with the charcoal burner beside the tomato...except the smudge pots that orange growers of that era used to keep the frost away? And since I was about to slam the car door on the entire place and head for a new life in Riverside, was I in my right mind?
I now understand that I was in no mind -- but in something beyond mind. Things were out of control. The children in my family had been emotionally abandoned. And I was imagining a fire and a living plant...a ritual. Warmth. Growth. Renewal. I was in no mind at all. The earth was talking to me as it always had. Being young and short and closer to the earth, both in stature and origin, I found a language to answer. Sometimes that's all we need.
Now 45 years later, it's still winter, and I'm still trying to make things grow in a patch of land that isn't mine...and working the soil with something between wonder and desperation. The cover crop planted before our autumn trip to Europe, and recently turned under by our apartment house garden crew, should be decomposing nicely. In the realm of quadriplegic agriculture, it's a rather neat trick, this. Grow the grasses and the legumes, have Ramon take a pitchfork to it, give the stuff a week or two to decompose, then plant.
Unfortunately, the rains came. The much feared drought evaporated in a series of deluges, while the thermometer dropped and snow appeared on the Bay Area hills. All of which is splendid and adds a bit of bite to what passes for winter in California. But this wet and cold sent my former cover crop...the green lying facedown with roots in the air, a layer of steer manure to block the sun and speed the rotting...it sent all this into suspended animation. How was I to know? In fact, flushed with the success of earlier cover-crop-rotting experiences, I had moved in the opposite direction. I'd planted vegetables almost instantly. Winter be damned.
My account of planting, gardening, soil improvement and harvesting, omits one essential element. The circumscribed and found-object nature of the enterprise. Somehow, it's become a big deal to start up my van and make the half-mile drive to our suburban nursery. Even in the middle of the day, the garden center populated only by flora, housewives and retirees, even then, it all feels like too much. My world is shrinking. On Sundays, the open-air market offers a narrow range of root vegetables, citrus and offbeat seedlings for the home gardener. That's where I bought the chicory plants, plus a cross between broccoli and cauliflower, along with a spotted lettuce variety. Who knows how the seedling guy came up with this offering, but there's a reason why he's standing outside selling vegetable starts for two dollars, instead of shipping trucks of plants to Home Depot. And there's a reason why I'm buying his stuff. He's close. The farmers' market is only three blocks away, which requires no driving and little motivation. The options are few and so are the risks. As I say, my world is growing smaller.
Growing haute designer vegetables is splendid, if you have absolute confidence. If you don't, it's much more gratifying to watch crops emerge from the Menlo Park soils that you'll find in the neighborhood Safeway. No weird hybrids. No waiting to find out what chicory is or isn't. Just some known vegetable side dish, natural and bursting with authentic botanical life.
The same can be said of soup. I have a very limited repertoire, everyone acknowledges. A variation on a theme by legumes. Beans with this, and beans with that, unless for the sake of variety you want beans with beans. I can do all this and more. Not much more, unless it involves beans. The thing is, quadriplegic energies being finite, why bother? I mean, one can delegate this sort of thing to Campbell's. The answer has to do with nurturance. There's something primal, fruitful, maternal about boiling up liquid dinner in a big pot...the concentrated essence of things that would otherwise go unused, maybe even unnoticed. Like bay leaves, normally swept up in the autumn and burned.
Urban agriculture is another matter. The products may be homey and earthly on the hearth. But the experience is all about forces of nature gone awry. The cover crop still refuses to die. With the incessant rain, steer manure keeps washing off the surface of my raised beds, and just enough to allow light to penetrate to the dormant grass beneath. It shouldn't be dormant. It's green manure, as organic gardeners put it. Rotting is its thing. But not this year. Green shoots keep reappearing, and I keep bashing them down. Die, die. Meanwhile, I keep planting. I don't care. The more I plant, the more what I plant disappears.
Earwigs. A non-native insect, hailing from Brazil, that somehow got loose and got everywhere. Unfortunately, the layer of steer manure and the leafy cover crop material dying underneath are heaven to earwigs. It's the stuff garden books warn you not to have lying around during earwig season. Which is any season. Earwigs, the boys from Brazil.
The remedy for earwigs is capture. Actually, the stupid things capture themselves. At dawn, pincers waving, they give up their nocturnal mission to eat your garden down to the roots and find someplace to sleep. Rolled up newspapers are good for this sort of thing. Or a nice flat board with dry space underneath. Toss out the newspapers, stomp on the board, and the pests are gone. Actually the pests are gone as soon as the dead leaves and other garden junk are gone. Pesticides, by the way, organic or otherwise, are useless. You just have to back off and let nature take its course. And unless you screw up very badly, its course is to give your garden back.
Is it too much to hope for the same with Marlou's cancer? A bunch of rogue cells eating what they shouldn't, hiding among the available organic material. Chemicals somewhat effective. But the better course: let them give up and go away. I cringe at the thought of my 13-year-old self hunching over the soon-to-die tomato plant on the poor patch of land my family no longer owned. Heartbreaking novels may be enjoyable to read, but not to live. I don't like seeing myself as pathetically impractical, warming things that can't be warmed, saving things about to be abandoned. What could I have been thinking about with the charcoal burner beside the tomato...except the smudge pots that orange growers of that era used to keep the frost away? And since I was about to slam the car door on the entire place and head for a new life in Riverside, was I in my right mind?
I now understand that I was in no mind -- but in something beyond mind. Things were out of control. The children in my family had been emotionally abandoned. And I was imagining a fire and a living plant...a ritual. Warmth. Growth. Renewal. I was in no mind at all. The earth was talking to me as it always had. Being young and short and closer to the earth, both in stature and origin, I found a language to answer. Sometimes that's all we need.
