April 2008 Archives

I have to work on the book.  I have to work on The Book because I have had a favorable, or, at least, not scathingly denunciatory, letter from The Publisher.  The weight of The Book is swelling in its unfinished state in the way that dark matter acquires mass in outer space.  I just made up the latter, leaving it in place because I have neither the time nor inclination to do the research.  Which sums up much of my life.  And doesn't explain the ever-increasing mass of The Book.  But one must remember that the Jews are the people of The Book, and if anyone knows about the weight of things undone it is these people.  Who have not only schlepped about Creation bearing, and simultaneously following, The Book.  Until local conditions grew intolerable and they decided to book.

I do not believe that I ever used this expression, to book, with reference to making tracks, departing, hitting the road.  But I recall its use, probably in the late 1960s, or maybe the 1970s.  Certainly the 19 somethings.  For the 20 somethings are another era altogether, not really mine.  None of which matters, because I am already backing away from the computer screen, fluorescent home of The Book, having decided on the only other human option, Peet's.

Naturally, rolling out the door, I have a look at the garden.  The lettuce seeds that Marlou so generously spread have done absolutely nothing in the intervening five days.  The reasons for this are obscure, but I'm certain that some personal failure is manifest in the bareness of the earth.  There has been plenty of time to sprout.  There has been plenty of time for the lettuce seeds to introspect, to acquire personal insight and, well, to grow, during the five or so years they have resided in their packet.  I'm not certain when I purchased the tiny envelope with the butter lettuce label.  Certainly, it was post-9/11.  No, not certainly, but likely.  What is remarkable is that in addition to retaining these seeds, I actually knew where they were.  I still know where they are.  They are in the ground, and they are not performing, and their expiration date...not guaranteed to germinate after July 2005, while that is simply no excuse.

Enough.  I begin the battery-powered asphalt journey to the heart of Menlo Park.  The heart is five blocks away, and I am riding the artery.  Odd that I can't remember the name of the street only one block from my own, having lived in the same location for 15 years.  Fallen Oak.  Twin Oak.  Fair Oaks.  Oak something.  Everything in Menlo Park is Oaky.  Not Okie, of coarse, at least not officially.  The problem is, in terms of social history and secret identity, there's plenty of Okie folk in and about our suburb.  They tend to quietly own things, like property.  But for now, I'm looking for the Oak, the one in the city emblem, which should be on the poster of the Menlo Park Chorus, which should be in the window of Draeger's Supermarket, but isn't.  Fuck coffee.  I roll inside and ask for Dave.  A checker offers to page him.  No, I say, I will track down the sucker myself.  Something has happened, gone terribly awry, and Dave will have to answer.

No sign of Dave at the meat counter.  A guy in Produce has made a recent sighting.  And there he is, striding away from the takeout battered cod display, doubtless trying to escape, knowing full well what he has done.  Or hasn't done.  That is the point, and it's a point I make right away.  Okay, so I kick off with a terribly-sorry-to-bother-you preamble, but I'm on the case.  Where is the poster, actually the two posters, proclaiming the Friday concert of the Menlo Park Chorus?  I am certain Dave is stunned, though he betrays no obvious signs.  The posters, I just know it, are languishing in his office.  They may even have found their way into one of the recycling bins outside.  Will he have a ready answer?  They are cleaning the windows, he says.  Old posters will come down, and new ones will go up.  Thank you, I say.  I check my watch.  I have successfully avoided writing for almost 20 minutes.  No, 25.  Cool.

Even better, I have ensured the continuance of the Menlo Park Chorus.  Yes, choral music as we know it was briefly in peril, my procrastination and negligence being what it was.  But that is over now.  That is in the past.  In the present, Dave is positioning our posters for most prominence and eye-catching effect right in front of the orchid display.  And, at the other end of the store, opposite the cheese samples.  Things are as they should be.  The rend in the social fabric has healed.  I want for nothing, except a completed book and a sufficient level of caffeine.

Hello, Jackson waves, as I roll in the door of coffee land.  I smile wanly.  It is unclear why Jackson shares his name with a town in the Sierra foothills.  Now that I have finally reached Peet's my true inner needs have become more apparent.  I want to sit here and drink coffee while others do the same.  And that's all I want.  I don't want to talk to anyone.  I don't mind that others are talking around me.  In fact, that's good.  The sense of background human hubbub will be welcome.  The combination of me getting sugared and caffeinated and brooding at my lone table while the life of the community proceeds without me, that's what I need.  Unfortunately, I do need to say hello to Jackson, out of politeness if nothing else.  All the tables are full.  Jackson insists I sit with him.  I tell him okay, order my coffee and head for the men's room.

The latter is occupied.  The person who finally emerges is a female barista.  I should be cooler about this sort of thing, understanding the sub-40s unisex world.  But I am plus-60, and I don't.  The man ahead of me in the queue heads for the toilet.  The man behind me turns out to be the hairdresser who works next to the dry cleaner.  How's business, I ask.  He tells me it's like the economy, up and down.  Are you still working here and living in the Sacramento Valley, I ask?  He tells me that when I first met him, he was living in Half Moon Bay.  That was 18 years ago, he says.  This does not make sense, but while I pee, the truth manifests.  I temporarily moved to Menlo Park 27 years ago.  And God knows when I met Jackson.  Or if I met him.  I don't even know who he is or what he does.  He's just here, at Peet's.  And so am I.  And since my inherent sense of well-being is feeble and needs to be continually fanned like a dying campfire, I know that on this particular morning there are no big steps.  Only small ones.  And now, hearing my name called, I will move my latte and myself and my wheelchair and my personal history and my uncertain future to Jackson's table.

I roll up to the checkout at our local grocer, slap my Visa on the counter and keep rolling.  That's because the critical player here is not the member of the Retail Clerks Local #52, but this guy in front of me Guillermo, the bagger.  He is the bagman.  I am the man who needs the things in the bag, and our interaction is critical.  The question is not paper or plastic, but more backpack or laptop.  The knapsack hanging off the back of my wheelchair has every advantage, except that it can only hold so much.  Well, there is that other disadvantage, particularly perilous for the middle-aged, that it resides in back of me, out of sight and out of what's left of my mind.  

The latter is increasingly a memory-free zone, formerly controlled and occupied by the cortex, but recently invaded and partitioned by guerrillas from...well, let us say it, the future.  That aged and decrepit future in which I sit in the garden watching snails, and they probably watch me.  And neither of us watch television, although America being on the course it is, the television probably watches us, but not very closely.  For the TV has noticed that I no longer have enough neurons to trifle with.  But, never mind, for the issue before us, before me and the bagman at Draeger's Supermarket, is this matter of the backpack versus the bag on the lap.  And Guillermo is already at work on the problem.  My knapsack is full, and the overflow stuffed into a paper bag and soon hanging off one of the handles of my wheelchair.  

Everything is present and accounted for except my Visa, which I cannot see, for it is on the counter behind me, foolishly unattended while the groceries are getting bagged.  And with that process complete, I now back up and find that the checker has already swiped my card.  Not in the larcenous sense, just in the electromagnetic.  In fact, he is also signing my name, or his reasonable facsimile.  We have been through this before, all of us, for wheelchair shoppers make a certain mark.  And my mark on the checkout screen is both illegible and, from sitting height, invisible.  So this arrangement, speedy and cooperative, low on technology and high on trust, this is what we do.  And the thing I do, the thing that is utterly astonishing after decades of frugal living on a modest writerly income, is to sail out of the checkout, past the shoppers queuing for Tuscan salmon and lemon-oil asparagus, without having the faintest clue what I've just spent.  A fool and his money are soon...up the street ordering a latte at Peet's.

My familiar suburban environment, the people who pick up the pieces of my quadriplegic life, the small loose ends sparking without shorting out, all this gives me a sense of well-being.  I need this, for things aren't well and the being is uncertain.  It's Marlou's cancer cells, numbers and battle position uncertain, that currently occupy me.  Cancer patients live from     one PET scan to the next, as my doctor cousin Caroline has observed.  There's an ongoing battle waged in the dark with an occasional flare that goes off overhead and briefly turns the cancer night into day, troops revealed crouching on the field, their numbers and position no longer a secret.  After which there's a brief truce in the chemotherapy war or a renewed campaign.  Either way, the colon cancer war has no victories, only lulls.  And what makes it so scary for onlookers like me only becomes apparent during authorized periods of R&R.  Which brings us to Phoenix.

As the name suggests, Phoenix is rising from the ashes, and the only question is: which stage?  The desert has a stark beauty, but Phoenix or, more exactly, Tempe where my sister and brother-in-law live, has a stark urban reality that's hard to take.  It all seems new and rather temporary, all this water-guzzling and electrical-grid-draining sprawl in the least hospitable Upper Sonoran Desert valley one could find.  But thousands have found it, found lives there, found their way there.  And so did I.  What for?  A change.

Marlou and I stare death in the eye on a daily basis now.  Which is a very illuminating experience, I keep insisting.  For it is entirely possible, the actuarial tables for partial quadriplegics being what they are, that I will die first.  However, battles with fate and chance are pleasantly abstract.  Chemotherapy and the next scan are as real as machine gun bullets on Guadalcanal.  So my attention is caught up with the war.  And so is Marlou's.  And as our nerves get frayed, our attentions are drawn to either this war we agree on or some political war we don't, and gradually over the weeks and months there is a distinct draining of mirth.  And, relatively speaking, there's a fair amount of mirth about my sister's home in Tempe.  

Just talk to Augie, which you will frequently, being possessed of a lap.  Which is all a lap dog wants.  Your lap.  My lap.  Which is where Augie scrambles as soon as I sit down.  Once a lap dog, always a lap dog, even if you now weigh over 50 pounds, are adult Dalmation size and should have done your last lap as a lap dog about four years ago.  But, never mind, you are still lapping it up, because my sister's house is Lapland, isn't it?  And there you are, on my lap, tall enough to lick my glasses and my ears.  And this might be described as a canine discipline problem.  Or it might be described as my sister's world.  Susie has made a name for herself, increasingly an international name, for getting inner-city macho Hispanic boys, and girls, to take up modern dance.  She doesn't fear chaos.  She uses it.

During my Phoenix visit, I seem to be full of complaints.  My body aches.  The Arizona Opera shouldn't perform in a symphony hall, where Violetta dies in a space normally reserved for bassoons.  Never mind.  I'm addled and in a state of discontent.  My mind spins, and I dream heavily, and by the time I'm heading back from San Francisco Airport toward Menlo Park I know what to do with the evening.  Marlou and I sit side-by-side on the couch.  I put my arm around her.  We watch television.  We go to bed.  I put my arm around her again.  The next day I do the same.  She says she is sleeping better.  So am I.  We have had a break.  We have stepped out of our roles.  I have eaten my fill of huevos rancheros.  Marlou has attended my Oakland cousin's Passover celebration, an Episcopalian emissary.  Now we are back, and nothing has changed, and everything has.  And we are ready.

I'm in the midst of errands, but secretly I'm in the midst of confusion, hurtling under battery power along the lanes and byways and thoroughfares...all three quarters of a mile of them...that comprise Central Menlo Park.  I have a map of the suburb, but the map of confusion, well, it's not exactly available at the Automobile Association, is it?  And what is available?  Only moments before my shopping expedition began, I rang Menlo Park's only extant sporting goods store, inquiring if they had fanny packs.  This drew a blank from the young woman at the other end, such a blank that I almost thought of describing my desired purchase as a 'bum bag,' the American name being a perennial source of ribald merriment in Britain.  But, no, as the exchange developed, the woman didn't know what I was talking about.  Woman, meaning someone approximately one third my age.  Fanny pack?  Either the name no longer applies, or the product has been supplanted by another, or 'sporting goods' means something it did not mean 15 years ago...and so I gave up.  Perhaps I didn't need a new fanny pack that badly.  What was wrong with the old one?  A complex question.  The simple answer being that I am the old one and rapidly losing confidence in my ability to speak to the young ones in a world changing faster than I can comprehend.

 

What I can comprehend is that the evening waiter at the Kurdish restaurant is on the street posting tonight's menu.  We have our usual jocular conversation.  The man is so erudite, it's like having George Orwell wait on your table in his down-and-out Paris days.  It's pleasantly warm in Menlo Park, we agree.  Unpleasantly warm in Kurdistan, he tells me.  And what do I think of the new menu?  In this moment, I realize that we have reached such a level of frankness that he genuinely desires my response.  I start rattling off the obvious marketing writer's critique.  'Salad' is not spelled with a 't' and King Chicken is utterly nondescript.  King of what, I want to ask, but he supplies the answer.  This is the chef's signature dish and takes upwards of 20 minutes to prepare.  I tell him that he has both a marketing problem and a marketing opportunity, and I will elaborate on how to turn this 20-minute dining lag to mercantile advantage, but there isn't timejust now.  There's no time because I still haven't purchased three cornmeal pizzas for tonight's dinner, the province of Trader Joe's, I have to get back to my desk and I just have to get...getting being a byproduct of caffeine in the form of the afternoon's double latte, consumed just minutes ago.  I am nothing if not predictable.

 

Tell you what, I tell the Kurd, give me your menu and I'll have a go at it, in my home, at my leisure.  He offers effusive thanks.  I watch this, conscious of whatever cultural tradition underlies it, absolutely convinced of its sincerity, and feeling my heart burst open like a ripe peach.  This is what I need, perhaps what fate was steering me toward when my wheelchair burst through the door and bounced up the street, ostensibly to go shopping.  Looking for groceries and finding my place in the community.  You know, he says with the sort of world-weary shrug that links me to our mutual Fertile Crescent origins, we are thinking it's not such a good thing to have a restaurant with a Middle Eastern theme.  I am thinking he's probably right, though I don't like to admit it, not less than a mile from Stanford University.  A good question, I tell them.  Let's go over the menu on Tuesday.

 

In short, retired, crippled, easily convinced that I am not much good at anything but drinking too much coffee and rolling around suburban streets, I now have a job.  The pay?  That is no issue.  Trade is the answer, of course.  I'll take it out in trade.  And this whole caravansary motif is feeling pretty good, destined as I currently am for Trader Joe's.  Where the trade is brisk, but the pizzas remain.  Have I tried the house Pinot, a checker asks me?  Hard to say if I'm talking to the Kurdish waiter or a grocery clerk, but it doesn't matter.  As I say, I'm in the midst of confusion.

 

I got more than a hint of this checking in at the front gate of Harbin Hot Springs only a couple of days ago.  The drive, which takes me four white-knuckled hours, ends just beyond the outer reaches of the Greater Bay Area.  The hot spring, a new age, post-hippie enclave, is in the arid pine mountains of southern Lake County, population nil, roads torturous.  I needed a getaway, some guy time.  And so I was meeting a friend here, a men's group veteran like me.  The guard shack at the Harbin entrance was looking awfully good by the time my two-ton Ford stopped there.

 

Harbin wasn't exactly designed for wheelchairs.  Odd when one considers the marvelous effects of its hot waters upon the orthopedically compromised.  There are some ramps leading here and there.  Mostly there.  And I was here, at the entrance, tired, old and dusty.  I yelled at the open window that I was in a wheelchair and could not approach.  'What's your problem?'  This from the middle-aged French guy currently performing guard duty.  Harbin is international.  I yelled back that my problem was that I was in a wheelchair.  I was also in a mood, a rising mood, the sort that can spark a remarkable neuromuscular recovery in an awesome hurry.  It wouldn't be that hard to pull really close to his window and make my presence known with a few short raps from my aluminum crutch.  A customer waiting at the window spoke to someone inside.

 

A young woman emerged.  She suggested that I park.  I maneuvered the white Ford vastness into an empty patch of dirt.  Let's see, she said, you want to use the baths, is your membership current...I'm sure it is.  This irritated me.  Everything was irritating me.  I have a reservation, I said.  A room, I added.  Oh, oh, oh.  You have a room.  As this information reached her, it occurred to me that I was being short on details.  I was trying not to be short.  But it was hard.  I just want to park this thing, I told her.  I have a friend waiting for me.  Oh, she said, looking inside the van, why don't you and your friend....  It's not an imaginary friend, I told her, but a real one.  He has already arrived.  Oh.  Yes, I think he's wearing a hat.  Just drive on up, and you'll find him.  Thank you, I said, jaw tight, voice clenched.  It would be good to cut this exchange short.  She was urging me up the hill, but I was going to have to turn around, so I took the lower road toward the parking.  No, no, no, yelled the Frenchman.  I found this gratifying.

 

In less than an hour I was soaking my naked, life-battered body in the sulfurous waters of one of California's numerous volcanic zones.  The leaves were appearing on the trees, water was bursting from a stream that by summer would barely ooze.  The water was so hot, the swimming pool so impossibly cold, that my cardiovascular system, not to mention my nervous system and, probably, my operating system, whipsawed from the obliterating to the bracing.  I learned, in the course of two days, that there's a reason why a good washer puts clothes through hot and cold cycles.  This is the secret to washing.  To purifying.  There is much to be said for starching and ironing, but one can't have everything.

 

There is electricity at Harbin Hot Springs, but not much.  At night, the stars predominate.  Jim, my friend, showed me how to find Polaris.  He explained why the North Star remains north, rather than moving about like the rest of the unreliable world.  The firmament stays put.  By the second night, I found this comforting.  The first night, though soaked and calmed to some extent, something kept me awake.  Marlou and I had had the briefest tense exchange on my way out of town.  She asked if there was something wrong with my van...having just witnessed the Auto Association tow truck pulling away.  I reminded her to take care of my watch.  I was already feeling curt and being badgered with unsympathetic questions about my automotive negligence...enough to keep me staring into angry space for hours. 

 

An insomnia, devoid of apparent substance, and indicative of something deeper.  That Marlou and I are under constant strain.  We can irritate each other by breathing.  And at times, we need to breathe separately.  Just long enough to remember that we are more than two bodily afflicted aging people facing mortality and gray fear on an hourly basis.  Thus the wash cycle.  Hot to cold.  Until, after another half day of driving home, feet swollen, lower back rejuvenated, my arms fit right into place, where they wanted to be, around Marlou.

You have to grasp the setting, which is the very thing one becomes oblivious to after living in Menlo Park for...my God...27 years.  The terrace café by the bookstore, the one where I just had my bowl of lunchtime soup, showing signs of the spring molt, outdoor dining cranking up, long sleeves giving way to short ones, conversation at the table next to mine focusing on how things were in the old days, before we were in our late 20s instead of our earlies, back then when the cell phones didn't flip open, remember?  Something about this overheard conversation is depressing me, hustling me on to finish my latte, shove the wheelchair joystick into hyperdrive and hit it.

As I say, one becomes oblivious to the setting.  Just across from the café is an array of investment firms, the regional offices of Fortune magazine, a brokerage or two and the sort of realtor who will help you flip your $10 million home.  It is right here, bouncing down the sidewalk, that I see a truck blocking my path.  The sucker is sitting in the driveway, half backed out into traffic while I, and an eight year old kid, cool our heels.  Nothing is happening, at least not much.  My irritation is already at a high pitch.  My irritation was a high pitch within five minutes of waking up this morning, but that's me.  Maybe me and the effects of Marlou and her chemotherapy, my failures as a writer, the disappearance of my dog Frosty when I was 10 years old, the menacing proximity of the San Andreas fault.  Who knows?  Who cares?  I am instantly pissed, and want this truck out of my way.  Wheelchairs have rights, not to mention right of ways, and I am asserting mine.

I assume the truck is going to pull forward so the boy and I can carry on our sidewalk journeys, but no.  The truck, big but not on the grand scale, eases backwards into traffic.  The driver, shorthaired and glaring, turns out to be a woman.  She speaks to the boy.  What's happening?  The boy peeks around the back of the truck, tells her it's all clear and okay.  Then, wrong, cars are coming.  Too late, because she's already stuck her rig into traffic, virtually blocking all lanes.  Still, she seems ambivalent, probably because she cannot see.  The boy takes a furtive step or two into the street, eyes the traffic and seems uncertain himself.  He tells her that...well, maybe.  Come on, she says.  Hurry.  The boy now runs to the front of the truck, and the door opens.  There's someone on the passenger side, another kid, a little girl.  The door is still open and the boy is trying to close it as the truck backs into traffic.  I get a look at the cab, the front seat a family tableau.  This is a mother, a working mother, and these kids...maybe it's spring vacation.  And she's with them and she is driving a truck because this is a working single mother.  And this is a working American family, and they are trying to get the hell out of this office complex and find the road, the fast road, out of Menlo Park.

Welcome to hard times.  Welcome to reality.  Welcome to the outside world intruding on the inside world of Peninsula suburbia.  The woman's face, more than momentary stress, but that sense of chronic, long haul, eyes-on-the-bleak-horizon resignation...that's what I saw.  Nice kids, I saw that too.  Not used to the road, not used to guiding mama's truck into traffic, not used too much.  Still some reserves of sensitivity and optimism.  But out of place and being tested.  My childhood.

Which, of course, it isn't.  Motherhood is a strain.  This is not an original idea.  But when the mother finds existence a strain, the presence of kids doesn't help.  And if the kids need mothering, curing or at least lessening the mother's strain can become an early career choice.  That's why in the dusty desert town where I grew up Joe's family was a welcome change from my own.  We must have met each other about first grade, Joe and I.  Could we have sensed the bond that comes of having narcissistic Jewish fathers?  Or was it something else?  In any case, Joe's home was something else.  Up a steep driveway and into their Spanishy desert house...and it was all different.  

Joe's mother was on the job, motherwise.  But not in the cookies-and-milk domesticity fantasy of the 1950s.  Dorothy gave every indication of hating housework, but she enjoyed other things, remarkable things.  I can recall one afternoon, or several afternoons...that part is blurred...when her sofa and coffee table and cushions and carpet were spread full of jewelry making items.  Feathers and beads and glue.  While Dorothy talked.  She looked pretty, even stylish, for she was a professional woman.  Not a nurse, like my mother had been.  But a woman who sold advertising for her husband's newspaper.  She had the air of someone who was out in the world, cursed occasionally, laughed frequently...and relaxed me utterly.  Dorothy's earrings were flamboyant and frivolous and fun.  And so was she.  My mother had the charm of a barely controlled cauldron.  But Dorothy gradually convinced me that she was not going to explode or stab or otherwise threaten the sensitive little doctor's son.  In fact, she had me laughing.  

At my home laughter was frequent but mirthless.  There was always an edge to a joke, usually a sharp one, always directed at someone.  But here in the afternoon among the glue and the feathers and Dorothy talking about rent controlled apartments in New York and the weirdness of our grade school music teacher or the last desert bumpkin who'd bought a display ad... well, it was chat.  Idle talk while we hung together.  In my high-strung family, rapport always on the knife edge of savagery, hanging out was a bad idea.  Joe will tell you that his home life was no bed of roses.  Still, it was a pleasant change from mine and an occasional refuge.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that Joe has always had vital caring women in his life.  And one of them, Laurel, introduced me to my own.  I remember the evening well.  I drove to Joe and Laurel's Sacramento suburb, and drove and drove.  Never mind the ever weakening torso muscles.  Something in me cannot accept that freeways tend to be full of cars.  It seems to me they should be more like the artist's conception of the Disneyland Autopia in the 1950s, vistas of pavement, occasional futuristic vehicles skimming along.  Not red tail lights snaking through Vacaville.  But there I was at last, lowering my wheelchair lift on my still new van.  Pretty nifty, I thought.  And inside, already there, the surprise guest.  Oy.  No introvert worth his salt can smile at such an announcement, not without some strain.  But what the hell, for the dinner would be easier than the drive, and Marlou being so utterly warm and beautiful....  The rest is history.  A history which made history of the rest of my life.  Marlou transformed it, and Joe and Laurel got the transformation started.

Which in view of my despair in that era, my suspicion of women and pessimism regarding my prospects for love is something of a miracle.  But for me, Laurel established a calming tone.  She differed from Joe's mother in significant ways.  But there were, in retrospect, some similarities.  On that evening, despite the candles on the table and the sense of a big to do that I hadn't anticipated...I felt completely at home.  Which simply isn't natural for me.  But Laurel has a peace about her, something she shares with Marlou.  And she's offbeat.  I didn't have to impress her.  All I had to do was sit down and eat and drink.  I did all of these things, and Joe did most of them, the drinking never on his list.  And we laughed and something in me felt free and abandoned.

That was because another thing was in the air, or not in the air.  There were no, absolutely not any, even the faintest remote whiff of or the hint of a rumor about anything remotely approaching the even slight or partial or implied acceptability of cripples.  In fact, disabled people have been so much a natural part of Joe and Laurel's Berkeley years, the era of cripple liberation, but the point was beyond moot.  A point I kept getting along with the wine and Marlou's breasts across the table.  Which, I will admit, my reticence and self-esteem and pessimism being what they are, required a Marlou-in-swimsuit display in their backyard pool the following summer.  All you need is friends.

Which, because life turns everything full circle, makes it...well, our turn.  So Marlou and I both turn to Roseville, which is east like Mecca.  We know there's a hospital room there in which Laurel may or, more statistically likely not, have a serious form of cancer.  And we wait and we admire and we see what she has brought to our lives...via Joe and his life and a route so circuitous that it would take, and maybe even deserves, a book to explain.  And we wait.  And we love.