March 2008 Archives

I knew something was wrong leaving the train station.  There was no particular hurry about getting to the dentist for my teeth cleaning, yet there I was, ignoring the crossing's electronic advisory, the seconds counting down from one down to zero.  And despite the neon red 0, I found myself perilously in the pavement, dodging the turning traffic and, yes, getting yelled at by a driver.  I could feel it even in the center of the boulevard, where the trams slide in and out.  Something in me was desperate.  I rolled my wheelchair a few inches toward the other tram stop across the street, then back, then rolled up the platform to look at the sign, then down.  Then up again because a tram had arrived.  Then on board.  "Sir, shall I fold down the seat?"  Yes, I told the driver, that would be a good idea.  I needed my own wheelchair space, a stainless-steel corral.  For if the tram's jerkings did not threaten me, my own did.

There's a lot my brother and I do not like to recall about our childhood, but one apparently minor detail made a lasting impression on both of us.  It was our mother's driving.  Not so much her conduct on the road, but her accelerator footwork.  She could not drive around the bucolic roads of our desert town, 25 mph posted virtually everywhere, at an even mechanical tempo.  She jerked the accelerator pedal, up and down, pushing, releasing.  Gas, then no gas.  Her foot was always moving, even when the car was barely creeping.  Forward motion had no continuity for her, no gentle increases or decreases of speed.  In the 1950s, the era I recall, she probably hit the accelerator pedal 10 times each time she pulled out of a parking space.

Which brings me back to San Francisco and my compulsive maneuverings from train to tram.  Something in me was, or felt, as discontinuous as my mother's soul.  Anger, fear, all the suspect emotions could be rounded up, right there on the spot.  Rounded up, branded and herded, although it would take a long time.  That was the thing.  Lots of emotions, lots of stuff bubbling, and a good thing to be journeying on the San Francisco Municipal Railway rather than the crumbling freeways.  Here, aboard the tram, I could do my own crumbling.

I understand as an adult that my mother's emotional absence was not about me.  It's those non-adult moments that still give me trouble.  I have to remind myself that Marlou's chemotherapy, wherein much of the American pharmaceutical industry enters our home and settles in for a long, uninvited stay...that this is not about me either.  It's about time it ended, that's for sure.  But there's no end in sight.  And there are times when this hits me, hits me hard, and makes me not care quite enough if a car hits me too.  One of life's most distressing secrets.  People who are raised without compassion can be dangerous -- to themselves.

They can certainly be confused.  Even the most straightforward of things like the Jewish Community Federation's announcement of a literary evening with a local novelist, a wonderful one, and a former teacher of mine.  Good thing I decided to get the early train the very next day after my trip to the dentist.  That's a lot of San Francisco trains in 36 hours, but what the hell.  Showing up is 90% of life, according to Woody Allen, and since I'm too addled to do anything but show, there I was, on the Menlo Park platform showing up for, at least, the train.

Pounding up the Peninsula, the Cow Palace fading into the late afternoon sun, then the tunnels, and the familiar station.  The Giants baseball park was already aswarm with people, guards on the sidewalks, even an extra Muni transit guy overseeing the streetcars.  I saw this from the window of mine.  A Streetcar Named Ocean Park.  At Embarcadero Station I rolled into the elevator and rolled out into the early evening.  Being early I had a quick look at the makeover of Steuart Street.  The makeover occurred a decade ago, but I'm always the last to know.  Small hotels, expensive restaurants.  Tucked just out of sight of the waterfront.  Nothing tucked about the Jewish Community Federation.  It made its brick and glass presence known, ample and solid and funded.

Hitting the wheelchair access knob did nothing.  Trying to turn the door handle did everything.  Lights burst on, and a guard burst out.  Could he help me?  Just inside the door, the place looked a little less like San Francisco and a little more like the first-class security kiosk at Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv.  A shorthaired shtarker sat in a glass booth eyeing me with the simultaneous disdain and appraisal of either an authentic Israeli or a good imitation.  The guard looked over my invitation.  Actually, part of an e-mail.  Which turned out to be the wrong part.  The Jewish Federation was sponsoring the thing, not housing it.  The event was miles across town.

But the train station wasn't.  It was straight back down the streetcar line, the run along the Embarcadero, where the tankers were coming and going, the freighters heaving and hoing.  The streetcar was jammed with baseball attendees.  My wheelchair could barely fit.  Never mind.  I live my life much like my mother's accelerator action.  A certain amount of discontinuity, obsessive activity, anxiously wasted motion.  And this evening was part of all that.  I wondered if I really liked travel or just the sense of motion.  I decided on neither.  I was sitting in the very front of the streetcar, looking straight ahead, past the driver, right through his windshield.  Directly above us, two miles away, the sunset was still glowing atop Twin Peaks.  Here in the flatlands it was already dusk.  This all seemed inexplicable, the hills shining with promise, darkness gathering below.  Travel, even anxious travel, stirs the restless soul with activity, just enough, the way a cradle rocks just enough.  And if you get into it, especially if you arrive at sunset, you'll see the world re-presenting itself, gathering the ingredients of another miraculous day.

Everything about the Death Valley dawn, the forms and distances assembling themselves for another day, says we will carry on without you.  Even the porter at the Furnace Creek Inn will carry on trundling his baggage cart down the long tunnel beneath the hotel, arched and stuccoed and feeling more like a mine shaft than a corridor.  This place, even the human accommodations, is old in the way of mineral time.  If rocks have a life they show it here.  If you have enough time, which absolutely no one does...especially us, bound for Las Vegas Airport as we are.

In the early morning light, all the strange contrasting earth tones shift and trade places.  The eastward highway climbs more than I remembered.  Zabriskie Point doesn't look like much of anything.  We reach 3000 feet and barely notice it.  The air outside the car may be cooler, but our Dodge protects us from all that.  Marlou takes the mountain turns fast, swinging me crazily in my wheelchair.  Yes, I am riding in the chair.  We have hired a disabled van with a wheelchair ramp for the few days.  I am safely belted and strapped, but there is little lateral support, and the curves make themselves felt.

Vermillion cliffs next to a pouring of beige mineral custard, which is probably sedimentary, the whole moment framed by pitch black lava hills....  And then it's gone, and the snowcapped range beyond Las Vegas protrudes.  Considering that this topography marches on and on hundreds of miles across the inaptly named Great Basin, to Salt Lake City and beyond, with me at this hour coffeeless and not getting any younger, well, it's enough to make one exhausted.  At least Las Vegas Airport all but grabs you, positioned as it is at the western edge, signs screaming, although one sign confuses us with its departure and terminal number.  This is no time for ambiguity.  We circle around once, find the guy from the van hire company at the curb.  And that's it.

Well, not quite.  We board our plane, finally escaping the clanging, ringing, whirring slot machines in the airport lobby...only to find maintenance guys swarming around.  Something's wrong with the landing gear.  Which I would rather they discover here rather than above, say, Fresno.  We are hustled off one plane and aboard another.  I don't really care, except that there's some awful unknown awaiting me at San Jose Airport.

Which also proves to be a non-disaster.  The guy driving the Auto Club tow truck arrives like a modern knight.  He is perched high, trailing a lance-like boom.  I am at his mercy.  The Auto Club 800 phone operator has already warned me.  Your car will be towed.  Where?  I give her the name of a garage in Atherton.  Why, I ask?  She doesn't know.  That's what happens to cars that overheat, apparently.  Atherton.  She's looking up the address.  Never mind.  Here's the towtruck, rumbling through the airport parking structure.  A young black guy hops out.  I want to tell him that I will do anything to avoid a tow.  The complications will prove enormous.  I cannot ride with him, not with a gigantic heavy wheelchair.  He'll be hauling my van up the motorway, I'll be on the train way behind him.

He emerges and in the style of all towtruck drivers, leaves his rig running.  Mentally, I am bargaining, promising God or San Jose Airport or whatever higher power is in current control of my fate that I will be good, or at least better, if somehow this guy can patch my leaking radiator or reattach its hose or do anything to get my Ford up and running for the 20 mile ride home.  I watch as he opens one door, then the other, then the hood.  He muscles something out of the interior of his towtruck.  One tool chest emerges, with another behind it, then a flashlight.  He stares long and hard, flashlight whipping back and forth.  The young man sighs, shakes his head and says this is the worst he has ever seen.  Ever.  No, he has never seen a radiator so dry.  What I need, he says, is water.

The same can be said for Death Valley.  Conditions there, or anticipation of conditions there, may have infused the last several months, those long months in which the California winter rolled on while my radiator dried out.  Death Valley was doing the same, the two being in sync.  This fanciful explanation is all I can summon at the moment.  The other, more likely, explanation is that I am something of an idiot.  It is a tradition when fueling ones vehicle to have a look at the other fluids, the ones that don't burn, at least not usually.  The oil and, yes, the water.

Does he have any?  No, he smiles and slowly shakes his head as though speaking to a child.  He is about to tell me about Mr. Towtruck and why he is different from Mr. Chevron Station, but chooses instead to pause, faintly grin and await my reaction.  Well, can he help me get some water?  He tells me about Mr. Station.  I stare blankly.  Well, I explain, in this era of self-service gas stations, a disabled driver is at something of a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with water and radiators, and....  Oh, he says, I'm not sending you out alone.  We are not done.  We are just done here.  Follow me.  I want to cry.  He is the Black Knight.  He is not like one of the black teenagers who shot me 40 years ago, just in case there is any confusion in what's left of my middle-age brain.  And there is, I confess, a certain amount.

On the way out of the airport, I have a five-minute exchange with the parking guy.  To qualify for the disabled parking discount, I need to prove virtually everything about myself.  That this is my Ford.  That I really am the person in the photo on my driving permit.  That the disabled parking placard really belongs to the person with the photo, and that I not only have a credit card, but a telephone number.  Foolishly, I leave the engine running, not quite believing that things can really take this long.  But they do.  And by the time I'm done, the engine temperature is off the dial.  The towtruck starts up and we head out for Northern San Jose.  

Down one street, around the corner, and around another.  Not a station in sight.  Nothing in sight but the H in hot, which is now well to the left of the needle which is as far to the right as it can go.  I thought that the entire nation was as far to the right as it could go, but every morning I see evidence to the contrary in the newspaper...and there's always more to the right.  I just don't know how much right now.  Unfortunately, accustomed to driving slowly, I have to run a couple of red lights to keep up with the Auto Club towtruck.  At last, we turn, I pull up to the water/air display, and a sort of healing process begins.  A small fountain of water emerges, running at the rate of, say, Panamint Springs in Death Valley.  The parched engine absorbs nourishment, draws the healing waters into its flesh.  Thank you, I say to the man.  Thank you.  And how I get to the motorway?  Follow me, he says.  Two streets beyond, stopped at a red light, he leaps out of his truck and tells me to take the next right turn.  He drives on.  I drive on.  Life.

Death Valley nights seemed to absorb cares and tension more or less the way they absorb water.  They drew Marlou and me into a deep sleep.  They also drew out dreams.  Both of us reported long narrative nights, dreaming on and on.  But the first night back in my own bed is a difficult one.  Hard to say why.  I seem to have no dreams at all.  But the next morning, Marlou goes in for one of her regular pre-chemotherapy exams and I drop by for a visit.  She's propped up in a bed, laptop computer at her side, ready for an hour of tests or a day of treatment, no one can say.  She's got an intravenous going, just in case.  The nurse says she's a bit dehydrated.  I'm not surprised.  There's a low-water theme running through these days.  To add to the dehydration, I roll upstairs to get us a couple of café lattes.  

We resume our conversation, Marlou propped up in bed, me beside her in my wheelchair.  We are talking about plans and arrangements for my brother's weekend visit.  There's a pause.  I think I see something.  A subtle shift in Marlou's expression.  I take her hand.  She starts to cry.  It's very subtle, just a couple of tears.  But we look at each other.  Here we are in the chemotherapy ward, the place we always return to these days.  I want to make the point that we are here together.  It's the only point I can think to make.  And in full disclosure and fair reporting, in particular deference to Marlou, this is just a moment.  We've had four peaceful days in one of the most remarkable spots in nature.  And now we are here.  This is the place one or both of us dread returning to.  But it is one of our current destinations, and the tears are part of it.

"Pig."

This is what I say to myself even before hitting the keys for my afternoon writing session.  This particular epithet comes from the essential belief, looming like the mountains outside, that I have nothing to say and no ability to say it.  Which makes this the perfect way to kick off a bit of blog.

A pig is, after all, reputed to be a greedy guts.  And that's what I'm supposed to be now, it seems, wanting too much and worthy of vicious scorn.  Pig.

Then, there were certain issues around getting started.  These were entirely practical, having to do with what was and wasn't plugged into my laptop computer.  No input device.  Amputated, it was.  And since this desklet, the slick-topped darkwood table I have claimed for my own in the corner of the Furnace Creek Inn conference room, has had a dose too many of furniture polish, plugging things into the computer with one hand proves to be a clumsy, slippery and maddening test of patience.  But, my life being a test of patience, here I am.  It's 5 p.m. and Death Valley outside is living up to its name.

The temperature is probably in the low 90s.  Which is positively mild for these parts.  The bodily impact is discernible, though.  Humidity is naturally zero, and even in mild heat one drinks gallons of water and stops peeing.  Liquidity underlies the Death Valley experience.  Water or the lack of it or the hope for it and the ironic presence of it in saline, mineral sodden springs...that's what defines this place.

This morning's Visitor Center talk dealt with the slim human history of these parts.  On the bench next to me a couple from Belfast took it all in.  A hot day in Ulster is pushing 75°.  That's winter here.  With another 45°, plus or minus 120°, you've got July in Death Valley.  For now, in mid-March, things are only pleasantly warm, and the ranger is telling us about the gold-crazed wagon trains that believed they had found a shortcut to California.  Why not?  Time was of the essence, prospectors swarming over every inch of every piney creek in the Sierra Nevada.  If you wanted gold, you had to get there first.  So, through a low gap in the hills west of what is now Las Vegas, several enterprising families and their wagons and their oxen and their horses and their hopes made a right turn.

Thing is, it's quite a easy drive downhill from the high Nevada desert toward the...well, who could say?  Toward the easy flat route to the California mountains.  Surely that was the way they were headed.  Kind of a brutal shock to emerge at the end of the dry riverbed today called Furnace Creek...the name says it all...to a spot that is at sea level, and look straight across a narrow valley to a wall of 11,000-foot peaks.  The Panamint Mountains don't give up.  They march north and south and never get tired.  But you and the oxen would be pretty wiped out just then.  The choices could not be clearer.  Go straight, that's one option.  And the mountains aren't that far and one can see the promising makings of a snowcone, not to mention a couple of Christmas trees, only a few miles away.

Thus the strange optical illusion of Death Valley.  It must be the clarity of the air.  Who knows?  In any case, the place is about three times wider than it looks.  Furthermore, those attractive snowy white plains are actually ridges and spikes of salt, mile after mile of ankle twisting, axle breaking mineral deposits.  That way lies madness.  North?  Why not?  You might be lucky and find the low, sinuous pass that leads to the next arid, saline valley to the west.  Or you might not.  Better head south.  After all, it's downhill.  Certainly easier on the oxen.  Besides, that's the general direction Spaniard explorers took.  Sort of.  You're only off by a couple of mountain ranges.  Nevermind, the path leads downhill...and since you were at sea level at the valley's edge, now you're hundreds of feet below.  Where weather that was hot now breathes like an oven.  Hell hath no wrath.  No wonder the entire valley has titled its attractions with Hades-themed names like Devils Golf Course, Dante's View and Hell's Cornfield.

Manly, the brave young guy who rescued part of a wagon train stranded in Death Valley, waited 40 years before he could write about the experience.  I fully understand.  The ranger mentioned this near the end of his talk, and the thought stayed with me.  In his diary, Manly records now members of the starving, dehydrating, heat-crazed wagon train party began to disintegrate, physically and psychologically.  He set out with a few supplies, thinking he would be back in about 10 days.  But the nearest Spanish ranch was north of what is now Los Angeles, and it took him 26 days to make it back.  I could barely make it back to the car park, just thinking about all this.

Trauma.  Forty years.  What a thought.  Imagine being a pupfish.  There's not much else to imagine in and around Salt Creek.  Death Valley has a few springs, and this is one of them.  The salty water is undrinkable, which must have driven the wagon train masters around the bend.  But this doesn't deter the pupfish.  It's their world.  They have been here for eons, and if the tourists leave them alone, they've got a shot at more eons.  Their creek actually flows.  In places, the water is even two, maybe three inches deep.  This navigable stretch of Salt Creek is less than two miles long, but if you're a pupfish and one inch long, that's plenty.  Yes, it's a little lonely.  The mastodons, saber tooth tigers and giant sloths you once stared up at have long gone.  Now, the ice age lakes having dried up, this is all that's left.  You, one species of fly, the odd algae, an occasional fish-starved blue heron...and hundreds of tourists tromping past on eco-observing boardwalks.  At 12 noon the temperature was pushing 90°, and we were pushing off for the hotel.

The Furnace Creek Inn.  Old, by California standards, built around 1930.  How and by whom?  For me, these questions haunt every minute here, and rather pleasantly.  Look out certain windows and you notice the hotel is more or less carved out of a mountainside.  A hot spring feeds the swimming pool then, conducted in an artificial channel, feeds the palm grove, the few miraculous square meters of lawn...before being spirited off to some other purpose.  Not a drop is wasted.  I like the fact that the Inn with its old casement windows gives up around May.  Air conditioning becomes futile with the thermometer pushing 110°.  The place shuts down until October.  It's not happening.

Which brings me to my dream.  Marlou and I have both been dreaming here, intensely, night after night, all night.  I like to think that this has something to do with the natural environment.  The place is simply too old to keep the spirit of the outside out completely.  Or maybe it's the effect of being in a place built of real adobe bricks by the local Paiute Indians.  Whatever the cause, I dreamed about writing, my writing.  I dreamed about the book I keep working on, the one about my train trips 10 years ago.  "It's not happening," a voice said in the dream.  The book isn't happening, and I, the horrified dreamer, heard this loud and clear.  Except that dreams are rarely that clear.  That's what makes them dreams.

What's happening is that sometimes I sit down to write and to denounce myself as a "pig."  It's not the kindest sentiment.  But this habit of berating myself...well, at the moment, that's what's happening.  That's what was happening a few moments ago when I began all this.  And maybe that's the sort of happening that's not happening in my book.  Maybe that's why it's important to stay in the sort of desert hotel whose windows can be opened at night.  Air is what's happening.  And it's important to let the air in.  And let the night in.

My college friend Jill used to complain of her mother's verbal ineptness.  Particularly galling was her mom's way of confounding and misappropriating common sayings and aphorisms. 

 

"Oh, Jill, you know your dad.  In one ear and gone tomorrow."

 

"Mom, do you ever listen to yourself?"

 

Her mother didn't listen to anyone.

 

"A rolling stone is worth two in the bush."

 

"Mom, it's a bird."

 

"A rolling bird?  I don't think so, honey."

 

Thing is, Jill's mother had a point.  Life has a way of inflating truisms beyond their reasonable proportion and mixing banalities with profundities.  Take a stopped clock.  It's bad luck.  You should throw it over your left shoulder.  When actually, you should worry about it.  You really should.

 

My watch stopped at 5:45 on the afternoon Marlou and I were getting ready for our quick jaunt to Death Valley.  A portent, I jokingly told her.  Actually, I didn't really see the joke.  But I wanted to pretend.  I wanted to make believe that Marlou and I, one chemotherapy-blasted cancer patient and one aging quadriplegic, can jaunt anywhere but our local espresso hangout.  Which, these days, isn't always that quick.  And, speaking for myself, isn't always that jaunty.

 

Still, the way to reduce the stress of crossing the Sierras in the snowy winter, then driving hundreds of miles through the high desert, is not to drive at all.  It's to fly to Las Vegas, rent a van with a wheelchair lift and head for the Furnace Creek Inn.  A little trouble with a low battery in my personal van, but a quick call to the Auto Club had fixed that days before.  There was nothing stopping us now.

 

We were up and off at the right hour, cruising down the motorway to San Jose Alirport, a modest 20 minutes away...when something nervous and fussy and anxious had me looking at the dashboard.  Awfully high on the temperature gauge.  Is it always like this?  Better have Marlou turn on the heat and cool down the engine.  No effect.  The needle was sliding past the H in hot.  I tried slowing down.  The needle dropped a hair.  Then it started climbing.

 

Why now?  Why, God?  Why at this moment?  And why at the moment when we are finally preparing to park in the familiar asphalt opposite US Airways...must we discover that the parking has been sucked into a huge construction hole.  We have to drive around the airport's internal road one more time and leave the van at the other terminal.  No, Marlou says, she's going to be stuck with loads of luggage, schlepping it herself.  So we drive back to US Airways, steam now pouring out of what's left of the radiator, automotive death flashing before my eyes.  I am livid.  With Marlou, with the situation.  And now I am driving a third circuit about the airport.

 

 

 

A wing and a prayer, I tell myself, sometimes that's all we need.  I go through the usual quadriplegic comedy routine trying to wrestle the electronic entrance gate at the parking structure.  The disabled car spaces are entirely filled.  I see some promising taillights flashing into action.  I also see another disabled driver with the same thing in mind.  Adrenaline and testosterone pumping, I back up, reversing my massive Ford in his direction.  He gets the idea.  I slide into the space.  The van's engine is hissing and steaming and smelling of burning antifreeze.  Never mind.  I am parked, and within seconds I am hurtling toward one of the airport shuttles.  The latter is a model of wheelchair accessibility.  I roll on board for the 60-second ride to, you guessed it, US Airways.

 

A couple of hours later Marlou and I are driing through western Nevada, eying saline vistas, crusted mountains, broken-pottery ridges.  Moonscape beauty.  At least Las Vegas is behind us.  The hyper-stimulating airport with slot machines clanging next to the luggage carousels was bad enough.  The desolate miles of cheap condo developments shoving aside the tumbleweeds...saddening.  And, finally, here we were pulling over in front of a cheap wild-west-themed casino in Pahrump, Nevada, half way to Death Valley.  I hadn't spoken for the last hour.

 

We talked it through.  Marlou didn't know about the inter-terminal bus at San Jose Airport.  She imagined dragging two suitcases, one laptop computer and a book bag through half a mile of construction.  I listened to this, incredulous.  What a bleak world she inhabits, I thought.  Almost as bleak as mine.  In which my wife doesn't care about me and my about-to-explode van...abandoning me so I can face my mechanical breakdown alone on some airport road.

 

We are a little too used to being alone, both of us.  In times of crisis, the tendency is to take care of things on our own.  But now, that's not possible.  We have to take care of each other.  There really isn't any other choice.

 

Nevada highways straightening, turning, leading to the sky.  The earth and its washes and outcroppings and slopes began to twist into the most preposterous shapes.  Just as the colliding Pacific and continental plates did, one subducting, the other upthrusting, over the last several hundred million years...causing more geological mayhem and geographic confusion in this one spot than anyone could ever comprehend.  Death Valley. 

 

There is snow on the Panamint Mountains.  From the hotel lobby, I stare long and hard at the mysterious whiteness on the peaks.  If a big tidal wave hit California, we would now be under 200 feet of water.  The mountains are more than 11,000 feet high.  It's a little more extreme than my desert birthplace, but not much.  The sand dunes and salt flats below, pines and glaciers just above.  The desert is a harsh place, and we have come to this expensive lodge to be cozy.  But we can be cozy anywhere.  It's the contrast between softness and harshness that we seek.  And today we've found both.

The days begin in the garden.  The days begin in the garden whether I am there or not, which makes this an excellent place to be in the mornings when the sun gets over the back fence and hits the front spinach.  Just the idea of things growing and photosynthesizing and recycling last year's tomatoes into this year's onions...well, it's good.  Actually, it's more than that.  Call me crazy, but call Wendell Berry first, because the great American poet would see in my suburban raised vegetable beds everything that needs to be said about the lifecycle and its ways and its lessons.

 

The most recent lessons came from cutworms.  Cutthroats they are, lepidopteran in origin, hellish in intent, wormy, grubby things...they laid waste to the first brave spinach and broccoli seedlings I planted in February.  Where did I go wrong?  Or, an equally sensible question, what did I do to deserve this?  Actually, aside from the anthropomorphic and it's-all-about-me perspective here, I may have played a part.  First, there's the rush.  I proudly grow a cover crop, a density of tall grass and legumes that soldier on through the winter months until the suburban garden crew and I, following an awkward Spanish-English colloquy, move the stuff on to the next stage.  The gardener pitchforks the grassy stuff under and over, roots in the air, leaves underground...and everything composts into spring soil.  This process is normally fairly speedy, but this year's cold and wet weather slowed things down just enough for me to get impatient. 

 

I can see now that the wiser course would have been to leave the garden alone, to let things to compost for another week or two.  And then there are the chemicals.  Five pounds of not terribly organic fertilizer from the local garden store, envisioned as a fast way to make the cover crop decompose, well who knows?  The microorganisms may not have liked it.  The earthworms may have staged a work-to-rule action.  Hard to say.  It all went on underground.  Including the cutworms.  I only saw one of the latter, dug up by Marlou.  She found the cutworm right where the gardening book said it would be, near one of the lettuces it had just devoured, barely underground, soporific from overeating, and remarkably tough.  Level the pointed end of a trowel at one, and you'll discover that it's not so easy to cut a cutworm.

 

And so life and events brought me to the morning's Portulaca seeds.  They were sitting in a paper packet in front of the Romanian hardware store at 8:30 this very morning as I buzzed by, the buzzing being a function of wheelchair batteries and caffeine.  Nothing like a latte at the bookstore café in the center of town to get one going.  Nothing like going out of the house to get one going, particularly when staying at home isn't working.  My concentration has been off.  Dawdling has been on.

 

The first suburban commuter train blows its horn in a muted, hour-appropriate way, about 5:10 each morning.  Actually, it takes a German genetic heritage to conceive of "about 5:10," as though 5:09 would represent a significant difference...but never mind.  Minds awake at anything 5 a.m.-ish are awake, and unfortunately, they are awake for good.  I can tell that Marlou is awake too, but the fantasy persists that over the next hour or so sleep will return.  And when it doesn't, what is there to do but get up....  Just in time to see Marlou take a Kleenex to her morning nosebleed.  She already has the laptop computer up and going, typing with one hand, absently daubing with the other.  This fairly minor side effect of chemotherapy hardly fazes her, and the aplomb is natural, and the nose bleeding is trivial.  And I need to sit by the garden.

 

There seems no end to our physical decline.  Now it's Marlou's turn, but spinal cord injuries being what they are, soon it will be mine.  It's all merging together, chemotherapy hyping up Marlou's gastrointestinal system here, haute cuisine blasting mine out of control a couple of months ago in France.  It's depressing.  No it isn't, it's life, the passage of time, bodies living longer on a mass scale than at any time in human history.

 

Which is the sort of truth I can only discover outside, away from the marriage crucible, close to the spinach.  Close to the truth, that's what happens at the sunniest end of the raised bed where a single sunflower has flung itself out of the ground.  Actually, I've flung more vegetables out of the ground recently than I care to admit.  The green thing popping up where it shouldn't, by the lettuce...which is actually endive...needs to be plucked out, being an intruder.  And once the weed is gone, my memory returns, sparked by the close resemblance between weed and onion.  The week is an onion, not a weed.  But my memory is definitely weedy, having planted a bunch of spring onions in one row in one bed.  And having apparently forgotten the second row...planted by the four-year-old next-door...or maybe planted by me or Marlou...in the other bed.  Actually, things coming into focus, that endive may actually be another form of chicory.  I was lost in a sort of botanical haze when I bought the stuff from the open air Sunday market one rainy Sunday in February.  Now I am more than lost.  More to the point, things that were once being cut down by cutworm, are exploding with botanical life.  There's going to be a garden, not to mention a salad, plus a full refrigerator vegetable bin, plus a wife pointing out the foolishness of planting crossed cauliflower-broccoli, particularly eight plants in an area suited to five...not to mention the effects of cruciform vegetable fatigue.  It's all out of control.

 

Which is about half of what Wendell Berry is saying in his book.  That I don't make things grow.  A higher power is responsible for that.  My job is to shepherd, steward, guide and protect.  To stand by, to stand watch.  Above all, to keep standing.  I won't stand for it...not being an option.

 

Marlou and I have reached the point of talking about death at the dinner table.  Once a topic of heartbreaking proportions, it's become something else, the notion of an end.  Mine and hers, they're both on the table.  Even the dinner table.  We don't know what to say, either of us, about facing this, the prospect of our mutual nonexistence.  All we know is that, barring a precision-guided double lightning bolt, we are unlikely to die at precisely the same time. 

 

The conventional wisdom is that Marlou will go first.  But unconventional wisdom has always appealed to me.  I keep thinking that I'd like to be buried in my garden.  Composted, decomposed, consumed.  To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, send in the worms.  Send away the embalming fluid.  And, being a true liberal and having considered the carbon-footprint angle on all this, no burning.  Best to share the carbon with carrots, tomatoes and whatever else might make effective use of my bodily remains.  The skeleton?  Duh.  You want to spend good money on the local nursery's bags of bone meal?

 

It's easy, says Bill, our accountant.  He is speaking of his near-death experience.  A couple of years ago, during an early morning jog, Bill's aorta separated from his heart the way an old hose breaks free from the back of your washing machine.  He's here to tell about it.  And we are here to listen.  Where is our money going?  Why are we, or aren't we, withholding this, that and the other?  Spend, spend, he says, regarding our current pattern of vacations and furniture purchases, and God knows what else.  He's in sync.  As Marlou puts it, Bill offers an authoritative source on both death and taxes.

 

Still, I'm tired of waking up early.  But waking up, or awakening, happens when it happens.  I didn't explain the Portulaca seeds and their ultimate disposition.  There's a tiny space between the raised beds and the adjoining concrete footpath.  Plenty of room for Portulaca.  It's a succulent, after all, a sort of small, spreading, blooming cactus.  Portulaca likes drought and harshness and thrives under tough conditions.  My kind of plant.

 

 

One man's worry is another's effort at improving life, a definitional gap that is broad, unbridgeable and worthy of fighting for.  It's worthy of standing your ground, phoning your doctor and making an appointment with your local dietitian.

Marlou was rolling her eyes before I rolled out the door.  Never mind.  Let them laugh.  Soon I was sitting opposite this raven-haired beauty in her 30s who is either humorless or used to being hit on and in no mood for jokes.  I was in a mood to lose weight and keep on losing it until I find whatever I'm losing it for.  What I'm losing it for is a youthful weigh-in around the 140s.  I was 158 when my doctor's nurse last put me on a scale.  Which was three weeks ago.

The dietitian began with a chat, an excruciatingly boring one, about my typical day's ingestion.  Let's start with breakfast.  Good idea.  Turkey on pumpernickel some days.  Hummus on wheat toast others.  I tried to gauge the impact of this disclosure.  Never mind.  We had moved on to lunch.  A typical mid-day meal?  Hard to say.  Brown rice sushi being something of a favorite, but often displaced by the likes of a sandwich, a luncheon plate of Kurdish grains, now and then Chinese.  White rice Chinese, dripping in cotton seed oil, billowing with cornstarch.  What did she think?  Well, it depends.  What about you dinners?

Snacks, it turned out, are okay.  Even advisable.  What sort of snack?  Almonds okay?  Ummm hmmmm.  She was something of a poster child for svelteness.  But adding things up in the ways of the male, not much of a bosom.  I compared her to Marlou and easily determined that mine was the better deal.

Is that all?  She was asking me this, but I was thinking the same thing.  Oh, I did have a confession.  Peet's coffee daily.  And not just any old coffee but a latte.  With milk, by definition, but whole milk by choice.  Plus sugar.  Okay.  Just a minute.

She produced what might be described as a pocket calculator, but a greatly stripped down version.  Just a few buttons, which she punched, glancing at a sheet of paper on her desk, rolling up the numbers, physiological and caloric summation on its way.  I knew there was a lot going into all this.  Probably a special numerical factor for the Little Fat Jewish Men, LFJM coefficient, among my forebears.  Grandfather Paul, Uncle Bob, little guys apparently determined to give up walking and start rolling pill-bug style.

Is brown rice a good thing, you know, better than white?  I had to ask, confident that women can do two things at once, which evolutionists attribute to the twin focus inherent in, say, raising a child and keeping an eye cocked for that saber tooth tiger.  Yes, brown rice is better.  More fiber, more vitamins, more appetite satisfaction.  A lower glycemic index, I added.  Yes.

The result: 1700 calories a day, more or less.  Depending on exercise, genetics and, though she doesn't say it, mood.  What about the pumpernickel?  I want her to tell me that this is the most anti-glycemic thing a person can do, fibrous, wholly composed of slow-take up rye flour.  Only just a bit rough and sour and, in some hard to explain way, fatiguing.  Yes, it's okay.

I'm running out of questions.  Except the general one about how I can shave a few calories here and there.  She holds up a plate.  It contains plastic food, like those permanent displays in cheap Japanese restaurants.  The salad, an almost fluorescent chartreuse, looks like it could cosh someone.  There's a chicken breast, breaded I notice, that looks alarmingly like it's frozen cousin.  She takes these components, rearranges them on a plate and shows me how to eat.  Half the plate should be vegetables.  I'm glad parking is free.

My car repair is also free.  I've been worrying about it for years.  Ford sent me a recall notice, at least 18 months ago, urging me to take my massive white van in for repair.  Something goes wrong with the cruise control, it seems.  Since I don't use the cruise control, this news didn't faze me.  But the NPR news story last week about the 60 people who had burst into spontaneous flame driving big Ford vans, well that had an effect.  Thus my appointment with the dealer.  I rolled out to the Palo Alto Clinic's parking structure, ascended in my hydraulic wheelchair lift, hit the ignition.  And hit a brick wall.  The car was making those anticipatory but incomplete sounds, straining and failing.  I tried again.  Now just clicks.  The lights didn't work.  

Fortunately my cell phone did.  There's a reason why God invented the California Automobile Association.  Be there in less than an hour, the operator said.  I told her I was trapped.  In a wheelchair, in a van, in a parking structure.  Are you in a safe area, she asked?  I decided to give this one a long pause.  Well...yes, I think so.  With Italian shoes marked down to only $500 at the shop up the street, the sale crowds could be dangerous.  The auto club woman said she'd send someone right away.

I waited a few minutes, realized there was no playing the radio, gave the ignition another go.  And the van started.  A quick call back to the auto club, and I was on my way.  A little late, but better late than never, cruise control immolation being what it was.  Driving north to Redwood City, a tail light in the car ahead of me glared.  It seemed to have extra light bulbs, maybe a laser or two, blazing in mid-day like a miniature supernova.  Excessive light coming out of things is a probable symptom of a brain tumor.  I decided this on the spot, no evidence to the contrary being available.  I drove on.  

In 10 minutes, I pulled into the auto repair place, a warehouse-sized chamber with floors one could eat off, staffed by guys in white coats who might have just scrubbed for light neurosurgery.  No need to explain that I was a disabled driver.  Just wait here.  I did, and in less than half an hour the offending switch of cruise control death was gone.  A new one was there, and I cruised away.

Home is where the heart is.  As for the iPod, I couldn't find it.  My middle-aged memory is so reliable that I have a set of rigid practices regarding objects.  One thing goes here, the other goes there.  The iPod with its own canvas strap goes around my neck.  Before going on the desk.  It wasn't on the desk, and I kept feeling about my neck, which contained nothing but my head.  Although that was in doubt, now that the iPod wasn't in the living room, in the bedroom, by the kitchen sink.  I rolled back out to the van, opened the passenger door and peered inside.  No sign.  I opened the electric door and looked on the back seat.  I went back inside, bemoaned my general decline and accepted this, the first sign of Alzheimer's or a brain tumor or both.  In desperation, I even lowered the wheelchair lift and ascended.  Inside the van, a suspicious wire trailed into the utility compartment between the seats.  The iPod had fallen there when I slammed the big glove compartment shut.

In the garden there was nothing to worry about but acorns.  The oak tree above has been raining them for months.  Now my lettuce was dotted with small red leaves, prickly ones, bravely ascending toward their parent.  I plucked out the embryonic oak trees, placing the sprouted acorns in the sun to dry.  They would make excellent compost.  All they needed, like everything else on the garden, was time and patience.

They warned me.  Explained it all up front.  Go for it, they said.  Yeah, yeah, well worry about the sound if you want, but you're going to enjoy being close and upfront with Gil.  All this from the box office, advice to throw aesthetic caution to the winds and sit in the front row.

You don't need a degree in acoustical engineering to know better than to sit two meters from the knees and skirts and scuffed shoes and handkerchiefs of the San Francisco Symphony.  But when the other wheelchair spaces are full, and the only two remaining cost twice as much, you do consider sitting down front in row #A. So, what the hell.  There we were, early handing in our tickets to the guy at the door who explained, half apologetically, that the still-new-to-me Symphony Hall doesn't have much of a wheelchair route to the front row.  Never mind, there we were with the air conditioning ducts, asbestos-clad pipes and concrete floors, headed for the side door to the grand hall.

Inside, sure enough, we were close enough to easily stash a couple of sandwiches and cold drinks on our table, the stage.  Good thing this 14-year-old walked out and insisted he was the assistant conductor and was now going to tell us a little about Mendelssohn, but more about Beethoven.  And actually, it was quite entertaining.  Yes, Beethoven was a tortured guy, but he was also a show off.  And if you want to know why the last movement of the Eroica begins with a simple motif, that's it.  Beethoven's way of saying watch me take these couple of notes and wail.

So, with the 14-year-old gone, and after a trip back through the concrete underbelly of Davies Hall to the men's toilets, I was back in place and waiting for the big boys.  Here they were, Michael Tilson Thomas and Gil Shaham, ready to have a go at Mendelsohn's Violin Concerto.  Did I know it?  Oh, doubtless, I told myself when I ordered the tickets.  I just couldn't quite recall it.  But now it was all there, as soon as Shaham sliced into the piece, the familiar opening themes...with this unfamiliar guy being himself.

Gil is a fairly slight man, medium build, who was born far too recently in the US, spent much of his life in Israel, and at not much more than half my age, effortlessly sliding this exquisitely nuanced sound out of his wood and resin.  Mendelsohn kicks off with this in-your-face statement for solo violin, then briefly hands things over to the orchestra...at which point I couldn't take my eyes off Gil.  While Thomas and crew were doing their thing, Shaham was doing his.  Violin hanging inoperative by his side, knees bending, he was swaying maybe davening, with his body saying, yes, yes, this is too much to just stand stock still and wait for my cue.  Rock musicians, sometimes jazz guys, do a certain amount of bending and dancing about.  But this wasn't like that.  You could see it in Gil Shaham's face, open and childlike, amazed as some apostolic figure from Hieronymus Bosch.  Delighted and ecstatic and in the music, and let's bend and lean toward Thomas, cause he's in this too.  Until I straighten up and slide back into this bowing and fingering.  There's a lesson there for me.  Let go, let rip.