Bag Man

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.