Laps

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.