May 2008 Archives

I have just been reading a chapter of Middlemarch titled 'Waiting for Death,' and damned if this didn't spur me into literary action.  Actually, this represents the first and only accomplishment of the day.  Oh, I managed to drive to a neighboring suburb for breakfast with a friend.  I've dealt with e-mails and last-minute arrangements for our trip.  But bigger, more serious endeavors have eluded me all day.  I'm not sure if it was the title of Elliot's chapter or just the spirit of reading, of getting into a scene in which the young and devil-may-care Fred sets out with hardened equestrian cohorts to sell his horse.  I only read a few pages before it seemed possible to write myself.  

Time is short.  Marlou and I are getting bodywork this afternoon.  Hard going, this life.  The masseur has come to our home, is working Marlou over now even as we speak.  The CD 'Desert Serenade' is quacking through my PC's speakers, making me seriously doubt my ability to label the library's sound discs correctly, mallards traditionally being in short supply in the Mojave.  Never mind.

My mind is rolling, that's the point.  Waiting for death.  Whose?  At this point, it's really not just Marlou's that concerns me.  In my early 60s, my disability seemingly aging faster than its owner, futility is in abundance.  That's why any source of motive power, of whatever spark it takes to get me interested in the next thing, is a sort of marvel.  These days, I regularly complain of not getting anything done.  I have community projects, in my mind virtual obligations, that interest me without spurring me.  The days are filled with inertia.

I take comfort in the garden.  At least, that is my conventional wisdom.  What I really take is energy.  It's June, almost, and something fierce is rocketing up the green stems.  It's decomposing things.  It's germinating them.  It's nibbling their leaves and attacking their roots, brutal and competitive and, at the end of the botanical day, destined for our table.  The tomatoes have stalled.  It's high time for them to be pregnant.  But blooms appear, disappear, burst open again, fade and drop, without a single tomato evident on a single plant.  It must be the bee shortage.  This idea appeals to me with its environmental end-of-days fabulist quality.  But wisely I didn't go there, as we say in California.  

Instead, I went to the Web, font of all knowledge, where I learned that I'm not alone.  Others have trod this tomatoless path and acquired wisdom.  Tomatoes, it seems, have bisexual flowers.  They don't really need bees for pollination.  The plant's own pollen simply falls from stamen to pistil within the same flower.  Bumblebees are a help, because in their, well, bumbling way, they knock a certain amount of pollen free.  According to the Web, a healthy wind will accomplish the same thing.  With my tomatoes planted in a deliberately sheltered spot, I may have undone my own pollination.  Naturally, there's a web-recommended remedy.  My tomato blossoms just need some good vibrations.  The best source: a sonic toothbrush.  Yes, that's what frustrated tomato growers are doing in backyards from Maine to Alaska.  And having recently purchased coyote urine, wandering outside to toothbrush my blossoms will not make me seem any more eccentric than I already am.

Maybe the real miracle is that I am finally able to distinguish between the one-step-after-the-other willfulness that has gotten me through much of life...and the other thing.  The latter, being engagement, arising out of God knows what.  At that time in the afternoon or late morning or in the middle of the night when things need to be said, stories need to be told, and it's happening.

How was it happening for Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a., George Eliot, day after day with quill and ink, spanning 800 pages?  County life, intricate, timeless in its motives and assumptions, yet gradually changing, while the author changed with it, spilling out the yarn, over the space of a couple of years near the end of her life.  No computer.  No spellcheck.  Just time every day.  And I wonder what time, more particularly whether it was the same time, that she wrote.  Which is one thing that I'm learning, late in my life.  That by writing each day, one can open up to what's there.  And the opening up process may not be a pleasant one.  Aimless hours, numb staring at tomato blossoms, empty musings on the carpet.  What the hell.

I don't have much to show for this, my 600th day of retirement.  Or is it my 900th?  I have lost count.  But, then, I haven't been counting, have I?  Counting doesn't count for much with me, anyway.  It's all numbers.  And the same can be said for money.  Take the $20 I just spent on coyote urine.  In fact, take the coyote urine, if you'd really like.  It can't hurt.  The manufacturers promise that with a money back guarantee.  Well, not the real manufacturers which are, presumably, coyotes.  Where they are, how they are domiciled, how much water they have to drink or not drink and whether they are or are not 'paid' in any coyote form of exchange...none of these details are available.  The company is just another producer of eco-friendly products, Bio-Green Farms, or whatever they're called.  And in one sense they're in Missouri, and in another they're in the Web.  And now their coyote urine is on its way.

It's the squirrels, of course.  When I first moved into this apartment, a decade and a half ago, they scampered about quite pleasantly, all bushytailed, furtive and jerky in their rodent way.  But the charm has worn off squirrels.  Now they are an unwanted link in the food chain, burying acorns in my raised-bed garden -- which I can live with -- and assaulting my sunflowers -- with which I cannot.  When a plant is racing for the sun and sold in the annuals rack of your hardware store's seed display, and it's only got a year to be successful, and if things don't work out there's no career counseling, retirement or, God knows, a health plan...the last thing you need is squirrels.  Whose body weight or paw strength is sufficient to topple a 6 foot tall sunflower, or at least, knock off half its leaves in the effort.

I am easily convinced that squirrels fear coyotes, can smell their urine and will be repelled by its presence.  I am repelled by the mere idea, as a matter of fact.  I never thought I would give money to anyone for urine, producing such an impressive supply on my own.  Not only did I send money to this company in Missouri, I specified express shipping.  We are in a hurry, aren't we?  Not only does the squirrel assault have to be stopped, but Marlou and I are journeying to Tuscany.  Defenses need to be put in place before our departure.  Wouldn't want to come home from a euro spending spree and find that our garden wasn't up to snuff, would we?  Yes, it's comforting to know that while one is sipping cappuccino in Val d'Elsa, Chiantishire, one's sunflowers in California are well protected.  Organically, of course.

If this isn't decadence, what is? I don't mean indulgence -- I mean decadence, the decline and fall, Sodom and Gomorrah...that sort of thing.  And curiously, decadence is becoming productive.

I just sat in my garden, overwatering my raised beds.  In a drought year, I'm spraying hundreds of gallons of the Sierra's finest over my cauliflower and beyond, to the very edges of the beds where the basil resides in a sort of rain shadow, a corner zone slightly out of range of the mist from the soaker hose...and eventually watering beyond that, irrigation running down the redwood sides of my raised beds, wetting the wood and ultimately the sand where the Portulaca is sprouting.  It's wasteful and, no doubt about it, decadent.

What's productive about decadence is that it stimulates my mind.  The more I hang out by the raised beds behind our apartment house, and the more I watch water dribbling down the splintery wood to the sandy ground, the more I think.  And the more I think, the more I write.  Hard to say if I think watery thoughts or wooden ones, but by the time it's all over, I'm back inside virtually hitting the keys.  Or hitting the virtual keys.  You get the idea.  For a quadriplegic, it's only ideas, fingers being limited and inefficient, with typing done virtually through voice recognition.

It's the squeeze.  The one squeezing what in my youth was called my main squeeze.  Marlou's cancer has squeezed both of us into the present.  We are learning lessons fast, because we have to.  Decadence?  Indulgence?  These are concepts that belong to another era in our lives, we are learning.  In this period, Marlou is living with rogue cells as determined as Attila...whose hordes are out there somewhere, maybe camping in the Gobi, maybe sweeping down from the Hindu Kush...but ever on their way.  Squeezed by their imminent, or eventual, attack, we learn to live under siege.  Quadriplegia being a more drawnout siege, I suppose, and Marlou's more concentrated.  Squeezed.  Squeezed into action, into knowledge, into decadence.

Marlou and I have been talking about the prospect of capping our extravagant summer by shoveling yet more money, at least not euros, into a holiday rental at Inverness, California.  Neither of us can justify it.  But that's because we haven't quite learned the lesson of the dripping, overwatered vegetable beds.  There's a time for indulgence, for doing what you want, for suspending the sense of proportion and excess and responsibility.  When you want a coyote to pee in your garden before rushing off to your Tuscan villa, you've got to do what you've got to do.  And you've got to do it in a hurry.  You can't board Air France stinking of coyote urine.  You've got to have time to wash the stuff off.  And since you don't have as much time as you have always thought you did, cancer and quadriplegia being what they are, you do what you have to do.  

Hello?  Get me coyote urine.  Forty ounces.  In a spray bottle.  And step on it.

I cannot do anything without a cup of tea, it seems, certainly not writing.  And a quadriplegic with a half-paralyzed bladder needs a diuretic brew the way Boulder Dam needs a leak.  Tea may or may not be one of those British habits I got into and never abandoned.  Or it may be something a bit more complicated.

Certainly tea marked the progression of the 1970s British day.  First thing in the morning.  Then, 'elevenses' if you worked anywhere, and then, of course, around four o'clock.  All this required a level of bladder control that was way beyond my neuromuscular capabilities.  Elevenses would have pushed me over the edge, if I'd had an office job, which I didn't.  This was the custom, in those days remarkably pervasive, of the 11 a.m. tea break.  London office workers assured me that big companies had staff, a whole crew, devoted to the pushing of tea trolleys up and down corridors and aisles, handing out steaming cups and, doubtless, biscuits.

It is just as well that I escaped this.  I brewed a cup in the morning, one Typhoo bag, sugar cube and a splash of milk, and hoped for the best.  The hope was that I could do this early enough to be done with tea elimination before setting out to the morning psychoanalyst appointment.  My session usually begin just after 11 a.m., which was also when the pubs opened and men's toilets suddenly became available.  Otherwise, my options were limited.  One day, taken by surprise near the Holland Park tube station, I desperately pounded on the door of a not-yet-open pub.  The publican opened the door, listened to my plea and motioned me down the hall with barely a shrug.

In the mornings, the sense of pre-psychoanalyst fear was palpable, yet so pervasive that it followed me around like an extra limb.  Routine was good for this.  Up to make the tea.  Down the stairs to have a shower.  Back to get dressed.  A bowl of breakfast.  And out the door.  Activities of Daily Living, according to the occupational therapists who had taught me to do these things in the hospital.  However routine, all this took a nonroutine two hours, invariably.  The metal leg brace, a mass of straps and stainless steel, took forever.  Still, the regularity calmed me.  I had something to do, utterly involving and distracting, before I hit the road, then hit the couch and relieved myself of the day's emotions, the night's dreams.

At session's end, I was glad to be gone.  The day's work was over, or so it seemed.  The emotional cauldron had been stirred, the soul prodded, and by the time I got to my feet, at once relieved and churning, there was nothing on my mind but the stairway down.  Actually, this wasn't quite true.  My mind was very aware of my bladder, and I had been away from my bedsit long enough to need the toilet in my analyst's anteroom.  But something in me was too proud to linger another moment.  The session, with its keen reminders of how much of my life was out of control, left me wanting to feel mastery over something.  My body was a start.  Logic, a quick inventory of bladder contents with a gentle press to the abdomen, either or both would have sent me into the loo.  But most of the time, with barely a thought, something else sent me down the stairs.

There was a pub near the Marble Arch tube station.  The problem was that it was a good quarter of a mile away.  In those days, I could limp the distance in perhaps 15 or 20 minutes.  The time, coupled with the physical exertion, often filled my bladder to the danger point.  I sometimes swallowed my pride and popped into the pub.  Sometimes I didn't.  The whole bladder thing, perhaps the loss of bodily pride, perhaps the psychodynamic sense of smelly stuff coming out of me...something made this quadriplegic determined to power through the experience.  Which often sent me straight down the escalator toward the tube trains, down and down, the wooden steps rattling, moving rubber railing singing.  To the platform, or the stairway leading to it, where too often, I ran straight into urinary reality.  Pinging, filling, whatever it was, it was only a matter of time.

I looked urgently down the tube tunnel.  I tried to calculate.  The time and effort to go back up the stairs, wander through the underground warren to the bottom of the escalator, then through the ticket area and up another flight of stairs to the street, and around the corner to the pub...well, it was all unthinkable.  And there was this other unthinkable thing.  It was the thing that had to happen, it seemed, and could be reasonably accomplished, if one had the nerve or the finesse, and that was to wait until the train had come and gone, then wander into the white tiled corner and unzip one's pants.  An overcoat provided cover, or an illusion of cover, in the winter.  In reality, there was no concealing anything.  The rivulet of pee went rolling across the platform, darkening the hard floor, and in full view of anyone on the opposite platform.  Here class distinction operated with its usual force.  Middle-class Britons said, and pretended to see, nothing.  Working-class observers either cheered me on or lightly scolded.  It was not impossible to understand why some London tube rider occasionally threw himself on the tracks.

At other times, the opportunity wasn't there, or the overcoat wasn't there or the nerve wasn't there, and things took their urinary course.  My pants wet, a dark stain down a trouser leg, I boarded the tube.  At Holland Park station, I made my way up the stairs and waited for the lift.  The lift attendant, usually a West Indian man or woman, held out his hand.  I extracted a sodden piece of cardboard from my pocket and dropped it in his palm.  The accordion door closed.  The lift ascended.

For some reason, one morning I made it out the door too late to take the bus or tube.  I hailed a cab on Holland Park Avenue.  An expensive ride, a budget-busting mile and a half into Mayfair, but what the hell.  It was such a relief.  Traffic in the Bayswater Road was badly backed up.  Foreign dignitaries and their entourages had a way of making a grand show of things with a procession of diplomatic vehicles on Park Lane, and this was such a morning.  The driver asked if I minded going through Sussex Gardens.  Why not?  I didn't drive in London, and his guess was as good as mine.  

Bam.  A collision, and enough force to knock me off my seat and onto the cab floor.  I lay there on the hard rubber, stunned more by the implausibility than the fall.  Cabs simply didn't do this.  One could count on this fact, which was no longer a fact.  The door of the cab flew open.  You all right, mate?  Sure, I told him.  He helped me onto the pavement, asked me again if I was okay then ran off to talk to the driver.  A cab driver.  My cab had hit another cab.

Tell you the truth, mate, I didn't see the bloke.  The cabbie and I were under way again.  Within a couple of minutes, we had stopped at the familiar house in Montague Square.  Incredibly, I offered to pay him.  No, no.  I made my way inside.

The cab wreck had unnerved me more that I grasped until, now, in the emotionally heightened office with the high French doors, and the day streaming in from the balcony and my analyst sitting in her accustomed seat, the reality settled in.  It was only a fender bender, of course.  But anyone attuned to trauma only needs a shove to slip toward the dark and dire.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"  Mrs. Strauss looked very much like Virginia Woolf.  More precisely, she looked like a Leonard Woolf remake of Virginia, that is to say, a Jewish version.  Mrs. Strauss had a German Jewish accent, of course, making her superficially a sort of analyst cliché.  It was the resonance in her voice, and the calm, that suggested something more.  

Tea.  The question stunned me.  She was the analyst, I was the patient, and this wasn't tea time.  Yes, I said.  Mrs. Strauss walked to the door, her servant arriving moments later with a small pot and cup.  Mrs. Strauss smiled at me warmly, expansively.  Drink it, said her expression.  I did not quite know what to do.  I had had thousands of cups of tea by then.  But this one confounded me.  Mrs. Strauss had a smile that I now recognize as deep with weltschmertz.  Years later I learned that she had gotten out of Germany very late, in 1940.

I drank the tea.  No more was said of the cab wreck.  The topic was certainly open and more than ripe for discussion.  But we had had enough discussion by now, it seemed.  Things in life came at one with brutal suddenness, followed by a fearful awareness.

Mrs. Strauss wielded her cigarette holder, her constant prop, whether lit or not.  She smiled again, her eyes heavy lidded.  'Sometimes,' she said, 'we need a warm drink.'

If you set your sights on certain things, say, the Van Clyburn Competition or the Nobel Prize in Physics, you've got to get an early start.  That's why I got in on the ground floor of Loss.  Loss is my thing.  It has been my thing so long that I kind of lost track of my first loss experience.  Even in the womb I may have sensed that things were not right.  At any rate, when it comes to life taking away, I am your man.  Which is why I'm cautious about my own reaction to Marlou's cancer.  Her latest news is, relatively speaking, on the positive side.  Chemotherapy is holding back her body's cellular terrorism the way a dam holds back a lake.  Sure, a little something goes over the spillway.  That's to be expected.  But as one of her surgeons observed, these days cancer, even serious forms, is beginning to look more like a long-term, chronic disease.

The problem is that for those of us who easily go into loss mode, it is hard to say what's happening, as opposed to what was happening...and whether what feels like loss is maybe just a reminder of loss.  A loss leader, as it were.  Which leads me back, the way things do these days, to London, 1969.

I had relatives who lived close to Norland Square, and I saw a lot of them, and they saw a lot of me, and surely it was time I had a life.  Hanging out with middle-aged people...well, there was only so much of this anyone could take.  It seemed that my youth had vanished.  One minute I was listening to the best of the San Francisco bands roaring across the Berkeley campus lunch hour.  The next minute I was spending evenings of discussion and recollection, interspersed with moments of arch humor, in the company of German Jewish refugees who wouldn't know a Fender from, well, a fender.

So I took an evening off.  That is to say, one Saturday I decided to head for the Old Vic.  It was a good place for a young guy, the Old Vic, in those days home of the National Theatre.  I must have attended a matinée, for the play, "The National Health" by Peter Nichols, was out before dinner time.  In retrospect, this was an adventurous choice.  The drama dealt with the health of British society.  The anecdotal workings of the medical system symbolized something larger, we were to believe.  I did believe.  For vibrancy and for clarity, both of voice and of purpose, British actors are hard to beat.

Nichols' play spans several modes.  There's the main scene, a large, drafty Victorian hospital ward, all patients in gowns and metal beds, with an ambisexual orderly, played by Jim Dale, who sees through everything.  There are soap opera vignettes with campy spoofing of the Dr. Kildare genre, reminding us of the romantic and shallow clichés embodied in doctors and nurses...these scenes in an overlit cartoon frame, played downstage and close to the audience.  I could not grasp some of the British social context, but it was an adult play about people with adult lives, and that was enough.  I did not have an adult life, it seemed.

This knowledge gathered and acquired weight as I began the trek home.  My crutch could carry me remarkable distances in those days.  Still, I could feel myself tiring and knew that the 12 London Transport bus would be the better course.  No walking home from the tube station...but dropped right at Norland Square.  That's why I had set out for Waterloo Bridge.  It was November.  Guy Faulk's Day, the 5th, had come and gone.  In America, people were just about to celebrate Thanksgiving.  It seemed terribly sad now to be so far from home, so far from having a girlfriend and having money and having a career.  And so cold.  The wind whipped off the Thames in sudden wet gusts.  The bridge seemed to be receding.  My crutch clicked, my hip twisted, my paralyzed leg hit the stone footpath, the good leg planting itself.  Then again.  Taxis, warm and full of people who could afford them, rattled by, spewing diesel.  The gusts became a wind, steady and piercing.  People scurried along.  Even the British knew better than to linger in such weather.  A few muttered 'mind how you go' as they passed, heads bent, mufflers pulled tight.

The cold and the sadness, each massive in its way, pushed me down and down into the grimy pavement.  There was no stopping, and no place to stop.  For the first time, I could see a certain risk to these London crutch adventures.  One could run out of steam, lose energy and need to sit down.  Yet there would be no place to sit.  A shiver of something other than cold moved through me.  Click and twist and click and twist.  I was making progress of a sort.  The bridge was nearer.  It loomed, dark and arching over the sinister Thames.  It did not matter.  None of this mattered, the street, the cold, the time-to-bus-stop calculation.  Things had run down and run out, and this is what it came to, crippled, options scant and, if one could give it a name, homeless.  

The force of this, a sadness so crushing and absolute, slowed me or slowed something in me to a virtual standstill.  Worse, I was not standing still, but limping, pathetically, grotesquely, toward a bus.  People gave up for a reason.  They came to a crossroads without roads, and they reasoned.  A suicide, or a logical conclusion to a certain array of forces.  Which did not feel so bad.  I had heard stories, after all...in the hospital, the real not-on-stage hospital in California, the one I had hobbled out of a less than a year before.  For some, it wasn't worth it.  They had decided.  Made a decision that, I learned much later, was the leading cause of death among those who survived spinal-cord injuries, within the first five years.

I stumbled forward, blind and mechanical.  There was no reason, as there was no future.  People and things and lives went on, because they went on.  Because they had to get to a bus stop, the apparent goal, empty but there.  A white post down the highway.  Up the steps, stone and sooty and London.  Up and up, and at the top nothing but the cold blast of winter's rehearsal on exposed parapet.  Traffic grinding, passengers huddling, something like the spirit of the play...life failing, falling so short of expectations, and yet worthy of acknowledging, in a three-hour effort, that there was continuance.

I found a place against the bridge wall and waited.  An elderly woman, probably about 40, clutched at her coat and murmured in Cockney, 'not a night for you, love, is it?'  This was becoming irritating, one particular British turn of phrase.  Bit pricey, isn't it?  Lost the race, hasn't he?  Shouldn't be here, should we?  Better off dead, aren't we?  Statements, asked us questions with implied agreement.  Presumptuous, that's what it was.  I barely nodded at the woman.  Where was the 12?  Buses crept over the bridge, one after the next, and finally there was this one, mine...with the conductor ringing the bell to keep going.  The early Saturday evening bus was jammed with passengers heading for the West End just over the river.  And another, this one slowing and stopping, 12 Harlesden.  The woman appeared beside me, grabbing my elbow in Cockney, but lots of 'there, dearie' and 'mind how you go.'  Thank you, I said, it's not necessary.  The latter, I would learn, is a form of politesse among the British, sailing as such expressions do, through one brain cell and out the other.

Inside, the bus was remarkably warm.  A man sitting on one of the benches facing opposite at the end of the double-decker rose and offered his seat.  This always happened.  I had grown used to it, perhaps too used to it.  On this occasion, I managed to squeak out a thanks and collapsed onto the hard upholstery.  Passengers were still struggling aboard, and somewhere to my right someone was talking loudly.  

'A bloody cunt is what you are.'  

The words landed harsh.  I tried to block them out.

'You close your gob, mister.'  The London Transport conductor yelled down the aisle.  She was a large West Indian woman, who stood just behind the driver's perch, taking coins and cranking out flimsy cash-register-style tickets.

'Shit is what you are, bloody shit.'

I was too exhausted to look.  Maybe all this would end.

'A right shitty cunt.  Fucking shitty.'

Everyone was looking now.  He was in a forward-facing seat, head lolling just enough to signal inebriation.  Scents of alcohol, sweat, grime all rising in a familiar London Transport crescendo.  The bus had stopped and not started.  We were sitting in the night, in the cold, on Waterloo Bridge.  I leaned my head against the stainless-steel grip pole.  

'That will do with your F's and you C's.'  The conductor heaved herself off the bus and disappeared.  The bus idled.  

The driver stepped aboard.

'That's it mate.  Out.'

'Fuck off.'

The driver, jacketless and in his white shirt, seized the man by his lapels.  Pulled from his seat, the passenger seemed confused, all his energies working to comprehend rather than to fight.  He growled incomprehensibly, face flushed, body half floppy.  The driver pushed him halfway down the aisle.  The man stumbled the rest.  At the step, the driver dragged him to the pavement and flung him against the wall of the bridge.  

The bus started to move.  Passengers started to murmur.  The lights of Westminster came at us.  Things jiggled and warmed and flung about in the familiar way of double-decker buses making a turn.  I had made a turn myself.  It was cold out there.  It was warm in here.  When the bus stopped, my room with its heat flaming blue from the North Thames Gas Board would be a few minutes away.  Sometimes a few minutes was all we needed.

In my comings and goings from 41 Norland Square, the more I acquired a sense of the building's other occupants, the less I knew about them.  It was important to know something.  Most of the other tenants, except for Mrs. Russell, of course, hit the road early in the day, heading off to work, not to be seen again until evening.  In the mornings, although I got up with the earliest, I was still dressing as, one by one, the London Transport commuters slammed the building's big oak door.  Even if I had my metal brace on, shoes tied, trousers fastened, there was still the matter of breakfast.  I made tea, poured muesli in a bowl and listened to Jimmy Saville on Radio 1.  American and British pops interspersed by Jimmy making inane jokes, sometimes singing over the songs.  Silly and familiar and morning.

In the daytime, there was one mystery.  Céleste.  She occupied the one-bedroom flat, if one could call it that, on the ground floor.  The narrow building, cut up to provide a hallway to the stairs and rooms above, had squeezed what was left into a narrow succession of rooms that, in London, amounted to a flat.  The Frenchwoman who lived there, Céleste, had a baby and an Englishman who could easily have passed for a husband, although not over time.  He was there for one month, gone for the next.  Their arrangement was unclear and unsteady.  Clive...I got these names from the small paper strip inserted by each electric button next to the front door...had the rosy pinch-cheeked face of a truly English man.  And he had an earnest, deeply serious, almost troubled look whatever he emerged from the shotgun flat.  I wondered what was going on in there, passing Clive in the hall.  The baby cried, Céleste yelled, but so what?  Clive was never out for very long.  He retrieved something from his car, ran the rubbish out to the bins and slipped back into his world behind the closed door.

Céleste's appearances were infrequent but much more dramatic.  She smoked in the lip-hanging style of a French film actress and appeared in the hallway wearing a short robe or long blouse, something she had thrown on to provide minimal cover at the time of day when the building was empty, save for the rouged Mrs. Russell or the crutch-clicking American.  Céleste stood at the hallway table eyeing the morning's mail with a world-weary air.  She said hello with the empty, pro forma manner of someone who is waiting for a bus, or maybe Godot or can't remember and doesn't care.  I decided not to take it personally.

This decision was a tough one.  Everything was secretly personal, and this was my personal secret.  Each morning I slipped into my disabled body as though it belonged to someone else.  One morning en route to the tube station I made the mistake of leaning against a tree and idly feeling the bark.  Unnerving to feel how little I could feel...rough from smooth, yes, but not sharp from smooth...the nervous system unnerved.  It hit me with a shudder.  I continued walking, another realization scraping at me, sadness piling up and up.  Which was why it was a good thing that I had a part-time job of sorts, 50 minutes a day, up the velvet stairs to the psychoanalyst's in Montague Square.

On the way back, to vary the experience, I sometimes sailed past the entrance to Marble Arch Tube Station, crossed Oxford Street and waited for a bus.  That's where I ran into Lucy, the American girl who had willed me her room in Norland Square.  Lucy, working her way up in the British publishing world, was no longer at the bedsit level of British socioeconomics.  She had a flat, on her own, and now told me about it as the 88, then the 12, bus sailed by.  I didn't care.  I certainly had time.  How are things in the house, she asked.  Unchanged, I said.  Céleste still smoking and looking existentially burned out at 25.  What about Joséphine?  Lucy stared at me and I stared back.  Who was Joséphine?  Céleste's bedmate, of course.  Was she gone?  Lucy had never heard of Clive.

In the coming months, when the door of the ground floor flat opened, I sometimes saw more than Céleste.  A toddler emerged, gripping the door frame, weaving like a drunk, then bolting like a prison escapee.  If the one-year-old had a name, I never learned it.  Céleste eyed him with amusement, sometimes even smiling at me.  I usually stopped to watch the short-legged antics of her son.  A terror, she said, crossing her arms and surrendering to something like motherly pride.  The moment lasted as long as it could, then sagged, then one of us departed.  Céleste had an oddly light way of holding the boy's hands aloft as he toddled.  She seemed amused, perhaps half surprised, at her own maternity.

Clive became a weekend dad.  He wore a leather car jacket, dark glasses and keys hanging off a ring as he strode in on Saturdays.  Clive looked more together, less pained and overwrought, as he collected his son.  Céleste gave him up without protest.  Sometimes the door stood open as thelittle boy staggered about and Clive came and went, packing and unpacking his car.  It was spring now, and the front door could stand open without dire consequences.  I heard the two parents in the hallway, alternating between French and English, sometimes even laughing.  They had reached some sort of accommodation, a clearing where both could move about.

I kept going down the stairs, and up.  Into the West End to the psychoanalyst's and back.  I'd had the idea, very fixed and emotionally rooted, that couples really weren't.  Their conjunction was about pain and distance.  And things didn't work out.  Walking by Céleste's flat was no longer a drain.  Whatever mysterious knots they had tied, now there were three of them, and one was unmistakably growing.

Nothing arrives like a ton of bricks except a ton of bricks.  Our ton arrived a couple of days ago, and was quickly dispersed by Dave and Juan, patio makers for hire.  It was all dramatic and disruptive.  First, one guy knocking on our door and assuring me that he really did have a ton of bricks, and would I please sign here, and he couldn't get the bricks all the way in the carport, and was this okay?  What followed was a great postindustrial moment, a man in a forklift, origin unclear, bouncing down our driveway with his ton.  Whirring, almost silent, the ton dropped like an ounce.  And then he was gone and then we had a brick pile, taller than a man, easily a cubit, or some portion of a cubit, the measurement favored by Noah, all of it there and shrink-wrapped, just like something you'd buy at Costco.  In fact, like something you would buy two of at Costco.  Stolid, indomitable, immovable.  Like a giant brick of bricks.

Dave and Juan work at mysterious hours, charge mysterious rates, and produce mysterious results.  Our task was simple.  The patio outside our apartment was a little-used affair, approximately as inviting as the Alamogordo nuclear test site.  Although no bomb had gone off there, a sort of time bomb was ticking.  No, it had stopped ticking.  In fact, time had bombed the place rather unpleasantly, some time ago and now had no time for us.  It is hard to say what was wrong.  The concrete was badly cracked, that was part of it.  The ancient shrubs, now of a tree dimension, had crowded out the space the way unpleasant people do in a rush-hour subway.  And like the subway, you didn't want to be there.  Worse, I couldn't really get there, not easily.  Oh, it was possible to park my wheelchair at a slant on the wooden ramp, stand up and crutch to a patio chair.  The only problem for this quadriplegic was that if you wanted to, say, carry a book or a cup of coffee outside, it was more or less impossible.  If urinary necessity overtook you at its usual rate, by the time you were on your spastic feet, it was too late.  I can't recall when I last bothered to actually sit in our patio.

But then came the dawn, and with it Dave and Juan.  Their first construction, a wooden frame, formed around the edges of our existing patio, braced with wooden stakes.  This had the general feel of adobe making in my fourth grade class.  A wooden outline, clay in the middle.  But in this case, sand in the middle.  Now all the mestizo origins are blurring in my mind...sand painting, adobe forming....  It all seems mysterious, transformative.  The sand is as pure as driven...sand.  It comes in bags labeled unmysteriously beach sand from Monterey.  Each bag costs money.  That is the real mystery.  The beach is free, after all.  Free Willy.  Free Monterey.  No free patio, however, for we haven't had an estimate.  Dave, the spokesperson, is evasive on this point.  Not much, he tells me.

The madness underneath all this cannot be fathomed.  One has to hang out at Roble Ave., Menlo Park, and for a considerable time, say, at least five years, before the socio-econometric reality even comes weakly into focus.  I rent.  This is the essential point.  I do not own, and neither does Marlou, one square inch of our supposed property.  This patio, laughingly "our patio," is actually Tom's patio.  Tom, owner, landlord, life partner and neighbor, holds the deed.  He also holds the past, holds it close to his chest, dearly.  The 1967 Charger in our carport is not, as visitors assume, Tom's classic car.  It is, simply, Tom's second car.  Actually, it may not even be second.  It is simply Tom's other car.  It's age?  Irrelevant.  It runs.  It is Tom's.  It has been Tom's since the Johnson Administration.

I was once a property owner, a circumstance bound up in my first marriage, which included in-laws in the construction business and enabled me to learn precious little about dealing with contractors.  Perhaps that's why so much of the patio makeover now under way has eluded my consciousness.  Certainly, it has escaped my attention.  While I have been marveling at the sand and the boards, Dave has been having a go at the camellias.  Marlou is still in tears over this.  I missed the actual event, but then, few people actually saw the planes hit the twin towers.  Suffice it to say that when day was done, so was the camellia.  What he would describe as trimming, Marlou would testify in court was actually clearcutting.  We now have distinctly less camellia than we did before.  Not to worry.  I just found something on the web about camellia pruning, which I have e-mailed to Marlou in the front room, and I will be halfway into the next county by the time she reads this...the gist being that you can whack camellias all to hell, and they might end up trees and they might end up shrubs, or even ground-hugging botanical gnomes like the bristlecone pine.  Never mind.  She isn't happy.

But only on this point.  True, there has been a search-and-destroy mission against the camellias, but the overall mission must be counted a success.  Part of this, I take full credit for.  Standing on the wheelchair ramp, rising to stretch my weary back while Dave and Juan worked theirs, I saw it: the southeast passage.  We had been talking about how to get the wheelchair off its wooden ramp and onto the new brick patio, and it seemed the only solution was a concrete incline.  This would have taken up space, involved some uncomfortable tilting of my wheelchair -- but now, this wasn't necessary.  With the camellias machete-hacked into minimalism, there was an opening.  Now I could wheel myself into the patio from the opposite side.  All it took was a few more bricks, and there it was, the orange brick road.  Follow, follow, follow.

I can't see what is so pleasing about the new brick world of our patio.  There's no mortar.  The thing consists of bricks and sand, and it seems capable of shifting.  So does Tom.  I can tell he's quite distraught over the camellias.  I think they were his mother's favorites.  Marlou would share this opinion of them.  Me, I believe it will all grow back.  Different, of course, but what isn't?  What seems odd to me is that the patio is exactly the same size.  OK, it's a little easier to get into.  But I still don't own it, and the whole thing feels tenuous, and it is absolutely no bigger.  Same size, different surface, comprised of designer bricks that cost 10 times more than the shoddy brick-colored ones on sale at Home Depot.  And I'm happy.  Now we have a patio that feels like our patio, but isn't.  Just as Marlou and I could probably describe similar feelings about our life.  It's not exactly ours.  It can be taken away.  So meanwhile, enjoy it, treat it with respect, and enjoy it.

If in June, 2008, I find myself gazing a mile or two north across Holland Park to my rooming house in Norland Square, here's what I will see.  I will see a man in the early 1970s who had no job, but did have a schedule.  In those days, I left my bedsitter each morning for a therapy appointment in the West End.  At first, my bedsitting room was a very small one.  There was a bed, a sink, a table, a dresser, some shelves and a window.  Mine was a small world, smaller than I was used to.  But my scale was adjusting anyway.  My walking range did not extend beyond the Holland Park tube station in one dimension, the Prince of Wales pub in another.

This meant the morning's descent of the stairs was a long, slow transition.  There was no bounding out the door and up the street.  Everything had to be done carefully, slowly and with vigilance.  The stairway at 41 Norland Square required two flights to get from the ground floor to mine above.  The toilet and shower, shared by other tenants, was on the landing between the flights.  Sometimes I would stop and use the toilet on the way down or up.  Often, I would use the sink in my room.  I never discussed this fact with visitors.  Most probably knew.  In any case, the steps were numerous, the experience formidable and not always solitary.

Sometimes, I would hear a door slam on the landing upstairs, shortly after my own.  In moments, Mrs. Russell would appear, rounding the steeper steps to the upper floors.  She was always dressed to go out.  I am singularly oblivious to details of makeup and attire but capable of grasping the overall effect of a person's presentation.  Mrs. Russell was going out.  She wore a hat, stockings and a skirt of somewhat girlish length and, frequently, gloves.  Her hats were often ornate, a feather, artificial flower or some other adornment setting the tone.  She walked down the steps faster than I did, which was most annoying.  The room-to-outside transition was a precious one, somehow, and a Mrs. Russell seemed like something of an invasion.  Nonetheless, here she was, picking her way down the stone steps with a gait that I now recognize as the combined effect of high heels and arthritis.

"Oh, hello."  She always sounded surprised, albeit pleasantly, to see me.  I was surprised to see myself every morning, still alive and now paralyzed and living in a cold distant climate.  So Mrs. Russell's surprise didn't surprise me.  "It's a fine day," she would say.  Precisely how she knew this always eluded me.  But Mrs. Russell had a window, after all, and had every right to make her own meteorological judgments.  A fine day seemed to mean the rain was not stinging like cold needles, the wind not howling from Siberia.  A fine day meant a day, any day, Mrs. Russell decided to go out.  Which meant every day.  As far as I could see.

I could not see very far.  The therapy I was headed for each morning was of the psychotherapy sort, and mornings were tinged with fear, afternoons sinking into relief.  Mrs. Russell and I were both going out.  I wasn't discussing my destination, nor my 50 supine minutes on a leather couch.  I did not expect Mrs. Russell to discuss hers.  Still, I was a lonely person and recognized this quality in others.  Life was softening me in this way, even teaching me that the slow descent of a stairway was as much an opportunity as a burden.  Mrs. Russell was not going to venture beyond observations of the weather, but I could and would.  For I was young, and this was my prerogative.

Mrs. Russell and I had descended the first flight, and we were now rounding the landing, me sticking my crutch tip against the stone steps that led to the loo.  I told her that I was going to see a play.  Which play, I honestly can't recall.  They were cheap in those days.  I had little money but lots of time, and taking a bus to Leicester Square was no big deal.  So I was going to see a play, and this news seemed to break our pattern, Mrs. Russell's and mine.  "Ohhhhh," she purred, "I was in the theatre."

Several stone steps passed beneath our feet, while I contemplated this.  Amateur theatrics.  Community players.  Lots of people had been in the theater.  What the hell, encourage her.

"Oh," she said in response, "in India, you see.  Before the war, of course.  We played all over, towns and cities.  My husband and I."

Years later, I saw 'Shakespeare Wallah,' James Ivory's famous film about a colonial touring company in the days of the Raj.  But for now, I knew nothing about India and the English hunger for home and people like Mrs. Russell who imported a bit of colonial culture to the land of chapatis and Krishna.  I had little time or energy to encourage her, but this didn't matter because the time was provided, free of charge, by dint of my paralyzed leg and clicking crutch.  As for energy, she provided that.  I learned in the course of descending the stairs many days, over the course of four years, that Mrs. Russell was devoted to her husband, that when they returned from India he could only get small parts in provincial theaters.  She could get nothing.  Eventually they had moved into this rooming house, both of them.  He had died, and now she was on her own, getting dressed every day, going down the stairs.  And out.

Surely she went shopping.  This conclusion was one I reached without much deliberation.  In retrospect, I suppose this was a very American assumption.  Mrs. Russell, living on an old age pensioner's income, had to watch every penny.  There was nothing recreational about shopping.  She went out, that was all.  In fair weather, whatever that meant in London, she could go to one of the parks.  Otherwise, she could simply go.  Up the street, past the shops, among the houses and back.  

I found myself one day changing buses at Notting Hill Gate, the next neighborhood beyond ours.  The streets were crowded, buses belching their diesel smoke in competition with the cabs, maritime weather blowing overhead.  As I gazed across the street, idly staring at people passing the bookmaker's, I saw an elderly woman clutching her purse, her florid hat unmistakable.  She looked up the street, glanced at the newsagent's, seeming to look at everything and nothing, and went on her way, walking remarkably fast and as though she had a purpose.

Near the end of my time in London, after a two-week visit in California, I came home to find my landlady carrying boxes down our stairs.  Eternally flushed in the British way, ever modest, Janet was hard at work.  The cabdriver deposited my bags on the landing.  Janet, with barely a word, picked them up.  I thanked her.  And how's it going?  Oh, she had been busy.  I recognized the pause.  I had been living in Britain long enough to pick up the signals.  I knew it was my turn to say nothing.  Janet took my keys, dropped the bags inside.  On the landing she turned and said that Mrs. Russell had died.  What happened?  Pneumonia.  Janet had nursed her.  She had not asked for much, Janet said.  Only some brandy at the end.

I was tired from a long journey.  In effect, I had been up all night.  It didn't seem right to me that anything in Norland Square could change.  Everything was different when I visited California.  But I expected there to always be an England, always be a Mrs. Russell.  And there was something else.  I told Janet that Mrs. Russell did not seem old enough to have died.  She was 83, Janet said.  She didn't look it, I said.  She did in the end, Janet said.  I watched her pick up the box and head down the stairs.  I didn't ask where she was going with Mrs. Russell's things.  It was enough to see that they were her things, all that was left of her life.  I shut the door.

I just spent almost 3 hours trying to find a wheelchair-accessible hotel room in London.  The experience, virtual, of course, left me vaguely infuriated.  Did my web browsing produce a room?  Not exactly.  There is a strong candidate, a high-rise in Kensington which, I recall from doing the same web search a year ago, seems to be a favorite of British disabled users.  The very fact that I have tilled the same accessibility ground so many times annoys me.  The fact that so little has changed over the past year annoys me even more.  For there is not much to say about wheelchair accessibility among London hotels, except that some are and some aren't.  Some are more expensive than others.  Some are closer to the West End.  I mean, really, what is at stake?  Does a person with a real purpose in life, any significant things that need doing, have three hours to squander on something so trivial?

The 20-story Kensington hotel I currently favor would have me far from the English National Opera, but close to my London roots.  I cannot tell if the latter are shallow or deep, having grown for less than four years, four decades ago...but whatever the root structure, I grew there.  London is the place where I recovered.  From my shooting, from my childhood.  It is where my true life seems to have begun.  Do I go back there to pay it homage?  Or simply to enjoy it?  And do I really enjoy it at all, in view of the hardships any visit to London seems to entail.

Cabs.  I can just see myself in the West End streets, late at night after dinner or a show, trying to flag down a ride home.  That's why the 'home' is so important.  There is no cabbing to a hotel in Bloomsbury, say.  Kensington?  Just the opposite.  I don't know.  Three hours.

Marlou is quite an expert at luring London cab drivers over to the curb, only to spring the news on them that sorry, but you have a passenger in a wheelchair.  Here he comes now.  Moments before, he was hiding in the shadow of that streetlight.  Now he's not.  He's headed your way, and I...Marlou...am chatting you into the next phase of things, which involves getting out of your cab and complying with what ultimately are EU regulations concerning accessibility for disabled people.  She's pretty good at this.  But she's not going to be there.

This fact alone may leave me feeling a bit depressed.  The psychology of abandonment is always with me, it seems.  No, it's not rational.  I could return to California with Marlou and get on with any number of enjoyable things.  London?  I would be back soon enough.  London, the place where I came to grips with loss.  The whole place is permeated with it.

This hotel in Kensington, cab-dependent though it is, is only a few streets away from where my relatives lived.  I got to know my British family there, got established there, tried on the idea of staying and eventually found my own bedsitting room nearby.  So, yes, a few weeks from now I could roll out of my hotel room and, within minutes, stare blankly at the brick townhouse recvalled from the 1970s with the three floors and endless steps.  Then do something else.  Meet friends or cousins.  Get a cab.  There's a strange disconnect between the London of Middlesex and the London of my mind.  I suppose I try to bring them together, but this is mostly impossible.  There's always a tension between being here parking my wheelchair by a fountain in Kensington Gardens, and being there, in the past staring at the same distant gardens from a bus.

I walked in those days, walked everywhere.  How I did it seems mysterious.  But the reality was simple and immediate.  I closed the door on my bedsit and began descending an enormous flight of stone steps.  In those days, I was so preoccupied, so emotionally caught up in the reality of my new crippled life, that details eluded me.  It took me quite awhile, weeks or months, to realize that the paint symmetrically scraped from the wall to my left in the stairwell, the marks at elbow level, were the result of my crutching.  For stability, I leaned my crutch-bearing arm against the wall, and the jagged aluminum tubing dug into the plaster.  Scrape, scrape.

At the bottom of the stairs I checked for mail.  It fell through the slot in the front door, and various residents of the house picked it up and placed it on a large wooden table beneath a huge beveled mirror.  The latter must have been the only remnant of furniture and decor from the days when this had been a family house.  Now, it was something smaller and more fractured, a place where I shut the huge oak door behind me, gripped the black wrought iron fence and turned right up the footpath.  For this was the way to the tube station.  Click, click.  Twist, lean, twist, lean.  I got there in only five or 10 minutes.  Coins in the slot, me in the lift, the door shut by a London Transport Jamaican in a blue uniform, and down and down to the level of rumbling.  Which wasn't, of course, the level of the tube trains.  No, that was another flight of stairs down.  The train pulled in, I stepped on, and so much for Holland Park tube station.

Wheelchairs were actually banned in the London tube system, their presence illegal, until the mid-1990s.  Actually, I can see why.  But I was far from using a wheelchair in those days, or so it seemed.  Now I am so far from using the London Underground that the past seem separated by...I don't know.  Maybe it's separated by the big West London parks, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and Holland Park.  I used to live just off the north side of the big swath of greenery, and now I'm staying in expensive hotels in Kensington, just off the south side.  And when I lived there I used to look south in my mind, toward all the urban action in Kensington and the West End.  If I get a hotel room there in June, I'll be looking north toward my relatives' old place in Abbotsbury Road and my bed sit in Norland Square...stupefied and amazed at the passage of time.  In a wheelchair and weighing more and focusing more on the end of life than the beginning and, with a bit of effort and some discipline, still capable of being grateful that I am here at all.s

Now that Marlou and I are so richly supplied with what the entertainment industry calls "content," we have voluntarily restricted our entertainment to a metal bowl.  That's where we toss our incoming Netflix DVDs.  This also focuses and confines our Culture Wars to a small pewter arena on our coffee table.  There's the Rose Bowl, the Super Bowl and the Netflix Bowl.  The latter contains not only the four video options currently under consideration but the five remote controls required by two middle-aged people to operate home electronics.  What shall it be tonight?  Much of the answer is already certain.  It will be the big Panasonic control, followed by the smaller Panasonic control, followed by the Marantz control and, for a little variety, the DirecTV control.  Neither out of control nor under control, but more like controlled substances, all these remotes, an ungratifying addiction that gets us through our night.  As for the DVDs, Marlou likes comedies, serious cultural fare and a bit more.  I like these too, plus documentaries on families that adopt disabled kids, exposés of the Bush administration and so on.  The Netflix Bowl, with no cheerleaders but chocolate at half time.

At the end of the game, Marlou hauls me to my feet.  I consider it haulage.  It's what you do with a Peterbilt or a construction crane or a forklift.  It's what you need more and more of as you and your disability age.  And it's not that easy.  Every low seat has its odd requirements.  Our sofa is wide, and Marlou's options for footing are slim.  The coffee table is in the way.  I am in the way, it often seems.  It has been seeming that way for 40 years, and thereby hangs a tale.

How much is a disabled person in the way?  No, really, when you come right down to it.  I mean, shutting down half your spinal cord isn't recommended.  You might as well rent a backhoe, dig up El Camino, our local thoroughfare, and rip out much of the fiber-optic cable underground.  Then, Silicon Valley life as we know it would not exactly cease but get awfully difficult.  Not to mention, more expensive.  Thus, the question of haulage.  Who wants to put up with this?  People normally have haulage built in.  Original equipment.  Factory direct.

Much of my life I've had a painful sense of my burdensomeness.  I'm sure this started before my injury.  My mother could barely handle her own burdens, and an emotionally intense son was probably more of a drain than a blessing.  Then came the shooting and the paralysis and the unfolding of events until this very moment when another woman is hauling me to my feet.  At this point I really don't notice and hardly care.  This bodily haulage used to make me cringe.  There's something primal about the man, protector and provider, being lifted to his feet by the providee.  But I seem to be past all this with Marlou.

There are obvious explanations.  We have bigger medical fish to fry.  More important, we now share the haulage.  What it takes for Marlou to get through a day, to keep her spirits going, to wander from cypress-lined Tuscan lanes into another three months in a naugahyde chemotherapy chair and whatever lies beyond...well, that takes a 12-axle big rig, which I help drive.  And although it's burdensome and the freight costs are high, there's a newfound dignity in helping move the load.  The balance of nature, the balance of payments...but things balanced, and even if it's a balancing act, I'm part of it.

It is definitely a bad sign when the background nature sounds running on your PC begin to acquire a noticeable pattern...the woodpecker, then the screech owl, then the wind, then the creaking branch, then the woodpecker....  Time for a change of soundtrack.  Of course, the very need for ersatz woodland noises murmuring through your computer speakers says something about the modern condition.  Or my condition.  Which is turbulent and needs soothing.  And, yes, there is a point when soothing becomes stupefying.  And that point is precisely when you hear the bullfrog burp, then anticipate the splash and the cawing of the raven.  Time for coffee.  Which, of course, is the last thing you need, but never mind.  Think of the raven.  Nevermore.

One problem with the pavements of Menlo Park is that I know them almost as well as the CD sounds of 'Dawn at Trout Lake.'  There's that sinking place where the asphalt was patched at Crane Street.  Watch out for the steep footpath along University Drive.  Try to dodge the man asking for charitable contributions by the supermarket and don't roll into the recessed well for the tree.  Try to get to Peet's without doing yourself, or those around you, too much bodily harm.

For several days I have been in the boiler room of life, shuffling piles of money into the maw of the European travel fire.  The money disappears almost instantly, and there's not much to show for it, except for a steady amount of steam.  It simply goes with being disabled, the uphill nature of travel planning.  And, no, it cannot be true that to hire a small van with a wheelchair lift at Florence Airport one really has to fax a credit card number to San Marino, and not the one in Los Angeles, but the principality on the Adriatic -- then attempt to supply a California driver's license image via fax...which won't do, will it?  So you find yourself at the local copy shop trying to get your passport scanned and converted into a PDF file, while your wife is doing the same thing with her driving permit, and once these things are transmuted, then transmitted, you just know that Elodie in San Marino won't be happy...at the least, won't be happy enough to tell Bruno in Trieste to drive the silly little Renault down to Florence on the appointed day...assuming that Bruno isn't in jail and the Russian Mafia operation in San Marino hasn't been busted.  None of which does justice to the airfare crime.  The Jewish injunction to never pay retail, in this case for airline tickets, has been not only broken, but trounced.  Last minute travel planning doesn't pay, but Marlou's window of chemo opportunity has just opened, and we have done our best.  Everyone has done their best.  The Menlo Park street repair guys have done their level best.  

No, Fair Oaks Drive isn't level, but somehow it is good enough.  It's good enough to conduct me at high speed, aimlessly, to and from the day's distractions.  The latter are inefficient, for I'm not getting anything done.  Yet, in their odd way, my retired-person's errands, my endless coffee breaks, the wandering outside to look at the progress of the broccoli, all this buys me time.  And it reminds me of the outside world, of the continuance of things.

I realize at times that without Marlou's cancer we would have carried on in a jagged way, tense and stultifying.  Our areas of discord would loom like buttes.  This election year would be a rough one...punctuated by tense exchanges or tense silences.  Anything could divide us.  Marlou's not saying what she wants when I want her to say that she wants something, this being my want, and this want of want expression...well, it could be a big deal.  But the deal has changed.  We've been dealt different cards, and we are playing them more seriously, more soberly.  And what's important is very important.  And everything is resonant with a kind of sad promise.  If the latter seems odd, try it.  We are in a bittersweet phase.

Tuscany.  Eleven days in the backgrounds of all those famous Italian paintings.  The entire week colored pomodoro with pesto stripes.  And then Marlou flies home to chemo.  I fly on to Heathrow.  And airline schedules and fares being what they were, this presented an opportunity.  Marlou could spend a couple of nights in Paris.  She considered this prospect and said simply, "how sad to be there alone."  I understood her reaction, for I could sense the same thing.  Or, more exactly, similar feelings come to me all the time.  Will this be our last chance to travel to Europe?  Our last chance to...do almost anything....  Even sitting together on the sofa.  How much more of this do we have?

As for Paris, of course.  Marlou's reaction could easily be mine.  Who wants it, the city of lovers experienced all alone?  What's different about this for Marlou and me is that it's out there, open and unapologetic.  We are both proud individuals, unashamed to travel alone, self-starters, adept at pulling out a guidebook and having a go, solo, at a European capital.  But the hell with it.  Even Paris is not more important than us.  It's taken a major dose of mortality, but our "us" now predominates.  Who cares what's at the Musée d'Orsay? it is as though we have just met.

I don't know what Marlou's experience will be like in Paris.  I can understand her expectation of being sad and alone there.  Yet I do know one thing.  We have to keep taking chances.  Is there a bad day in Paris?  And wouldn't a sad Parisian day be so profoundly and ornately sad that one would never forget it?  Besides, we're learning the difference between caring for each other and taking care of each other.  I expect to encounter sadness in London -- I always do.  It's the place where I found my current life, although I was emotionally too young to have a full life.  A place where I hobbled and bussed and tubed about on a daily basis with a body that, compared to now, barely seems crippled.  It's a place I'm leaving at an awkward time on the wrong airline, because I want to get home to Marlou.

Where is Elodie?  Where is Waldo?  Carmen Sandiego?  They have all split, haven't they?  And no one knows precisely who they are, where they are and why they are essential to disabled travel planning.

Okay, so I can't get my retirement account tax forms into the IRS, my desk looks like a recycle bin, the lettuce in my garden has bolted without being eaten -- but I'm going to find Elodie.  Planning a trip with a wheelchair is so dauntingly complex and taxing of spirit that the only way to succeed is to either inject methamphetamine into this or that vein or become deeply and seriously obsessive-compulsive.  Travel plans are to the committed quadriplegic what a dead mallard is to a golden retriever.  It's that thing you go after, sink your teeth into and just don't let go of.  It's also that thing you don't think about too much, because serious consideration would cost you your sanity.  But let's not go there.  Let's go back to Elodie.

First, it's probably Élodie, her accent aigu having been stripped away by e-mail.  Secondly, she is hanging out in Italy these days and working for 'Accessible Italy,' a firm or organization (one isn't sure) that, among other things, hires out wheelchair-lift-equipped vans to wandering quadriplegics.  I know Élodie exists.  She responded rather promptly to my e-mail the other day, in fact, loaded me up with all the in's and out's of crippled van rental in Tuscany.  Florence Airport arrivals only.  Not Pisa, a real airport with real airlines, including British Airways, with trains that leave right from baggage claim and go to the heart of Florence.  No.  Florence Airport.  And return the van filled with gas or you'll be charged €70.  Got it, Élodie.  Now how do I reserve your silly Kangoo van with the wheelchair lift for 11 days?  Hard to say.  Élodie has disappeared.  So far, our trip amounts to one hotel reservation, no ground or air transportation...and no time to screw around.  Marlou's window of non-chemo opportunity just opened last week with her doctor's PET scan verdict.  We have to hustle.

Thing is, Tuscany is big into villa rental.  Just read the travel section of any newspaper.  But in a sellers' market, there are just too many opportunities for thievery...places with wells that run dry, sewage that backs up, staff that disappear.  I don't know.  It's simply too far away to hassle with, unless you've got some help.  CIT, the Italian state travel agency, has proven a friend to me on at least two occasions.  But those occasions were in the past when I could still hobble around effectively with a crutch.  CIT's London office was just the thing.  Unfortunately, they don't really have an operation in the US.  Still, this didn't stop me from wasting precious days trying to rent a villa, well, part of a villa, from actual Italians, the people who pioneered Italy, in their London, well, Croydon, headquarters staffed by the people who pioneered Chiantishire.  I wasted several days waiting to hear from Élodie before making an online stab at the last three villa apartments CIT was offering online in Tuscany...each of which proved to be up a flight of stairs.  A phone call to Croydon would have helped, but all the website telephone numbers were of the British 800 variety, useless to those outside the UK.  And the clock was ticking.

Élodie, please respond.  Do I dare to book airline tickets without a way to get around Tuscany?  How does anyone in business, the business of renting vehicles or renting anything, just disappear?  Disabled travel arrangements are like this.  The market, if one can call it that, is very small.  It is also an awkward hybrid, falling in economic terms, somewhere between service industries and social services.  Accessible Italy, for example, is a nonprofit, an NGO established to help people make their disabled way to holiday villas, hotels, cultural sites, the best place to obtain dialysis in Ravenna, and so on.  They also rent out disabled vans, described in an info sheet from Élodie.  That's where our discussion ended.  Élodie has been out of action, not responding to subsequent e-mails.   

Should I go ahead and purchase airline tickets?  After all, time is running out, seats are disappearing and fares rising faster than the Venice lagoon.  And what about Venice?  Do they have disabled vans there?  Sure, they've got a few bridges, but so does San Francisco Bay.  Thing is, I'm kind of bound.  Tuscany-bound, that is, where we have a hotel.  What's so special about a hotel?  Well, in Tuscany any hotel with an actual room this time of year is rather special.  One that offers wheelchair access is ultra-special.  A Room with a View.  A view of a swimming pool, even.  A swimming pool may be a good thing, because one shouldn't count on the shower.  Marlou heartily recalls the disabled-accessible room we found in Bourgogne, beautifully remodeled from a provincial French farm building, on the ground floor and level as could be.  But with a pelvis-shattering shower floor so slick one could ice skate without skates and, of course, no railings.

Underlying all this is the element of cost.  But we don't care, so don't talk to me about euros.  There's probably some complex derivative that an arbitrage guy will sell you, based on the size of Marlou's liver tumor, correlated with the relative value of international currencies, pegged against the barrel price of oil...all of these factors fluctuating with estimates of the projected restart of chemotherapy.  But we don't go there.  We go to Tuscany.

Summertime, and the livin' isn't easy, fish jumpin' and cotton height irrelevant.  In fact, it isn't even summertime, but spring time and there is no excuse for the Fahrenheit to exceed 100°.  None at all.  

For the spinal-cord-injured, heat produces an odd effect.  The respiration rises unpleasantly.  One pants like a dog.  Which is no sweat, which is part of the problem for the sympathetic nervous response of sweating is largely out of action.  I can blame a not-so-stray bullet for this.  A neurologist would broaden this explanation.  But in the end, it comes down to the same thing.  It's the reason why the newsletter of the Spinal Cord Injury Association advertises products such as "cooling vests."  It's the reason why weather in the 80s° can push me over the edge.  It's also the reason why I get so edgy that I forget about the edge, can't even see it, in fact.  Forget about it, doubt its existence.

In heat, my brain gets addled.  This phenomenon is probably compounded by a certain amount of denial.  In any case, it is what it is.  As I grow uncomfortably hot, I become decreasingly acute.  Certainly, I'm very impatient.  There's probably a low-level of autonomic panic going on in the background, the sense that the body is out of control.  In such moments, it would be very bad of a Nigerian scam artist to ask me to send him $10,000 so he can tidy up my $5 million inheritance.  Under such circumstances, impatience would trump practicality and common sense.  Here, take my money.  Just leave me alone.  And turn up the fan.

In such a moment, I made a decision to finally master the TiVo in our living room.  I was tired of recording, and not watching, the BBC afternoon news, and so in an inspired moment discovered that one could "select all" BBC episodes...and inadvertently erase the entire backlog of recorded programs...from opera to drama, from winter to spring, tomorrow and tomorrow.  I was compus mentis enough to grasp what I had done.  But not enough to absorb any messages, or care very deeply about anything but the heat.  Which was rising.

The good news in such situations is that the heat-addled mind of the paralytic is largely wiped clean.  Marlou's PET scan, long dreaded and much worried over by her and, of course, by me, couldn't stand the heat, as it were.  So stay out of the kitchen.  Go scan someone else.  Like that Nigerian guy with the scoop on your inheritance.  Me, I'm staring at a blank TiVo screen.  Right now, life is a blank TiVo screen, only too hot and getting hotter.  And fuck you, anyway, whoever you are.  Just turn up the fan.

By the second disastrous day of heat, I had a plan.  Such plans arise in the morning when the thermometer is still in the 70s° and life has nuances and tones.  San Francisco, I told Marlou.  The naturally air-conditioned city.  Reachable by air-conditioned train, half-hourly, and relatively empty at midday.  Marlou took some persuading, after work hours being precious, but at 1 p.m. there she was, meeting me on the northbound Caltrain platform.  And 45 minutes later, there we were, walking up blazing Fourth Street.  And wondering why.  Maybe it wasn't quite so hot as the South Bay suburbs, but it was hot enough.  Never mind.  Here was our destination, coming into view, just around the Shell gas station on Third Street.  South Park.

Anyone who has spent some time in London will recognize South Park.  It resembles any of the small squares that dot the British capital.  There is a garden in the middle, and terraced housing on all sides.  The shape of South Park is an elongated oval, straight most of the distance, rounded at the ends.  By California standards, the place is authentically old.  The buildings are Victorian.  Gentrification has hit in a big way.  South Park was a major center for dot-com companies in the last decade.  Now it's home to restaurants, an upscale shop or two and loads of architects, designers and attorneys.  What the hell.  In the midst of the city, there's a pleasant smallness to it.  Local squares in Islington, North Kensington and other London boroughs project much the same feel.

The sidewalks at Café Centro, at the midpoint of the square, are barely wide enough for one row of outdoor tables and one passing wheelchair.  But this is part of the charm.  A couple of double espressos, one (that's right) shared biscotti, and we were in business.  Which is to say, the business of not having any business but hanging out.  Being part of café society in one of the most European bits of Western America's most European city.  The breeze came up.  It blew straight down the side street, Jack London Way.  I gave Jack a wave.  He had done well.

The woman behind us chattered on a mobile phone.  The wind blew her words up the street, away from South Park, out and over the Bay.  Eventually, the breeze blew her away too.  Marlou and I had the place to ourselves.  I stared at the oval garden, appreciating the miracle of London on no dollars a day.  Marlou talked about present and future.  What she has learned from her cancer experience.  What mark she would like to leave in the world.  The breeze had become steady, pleasantly cool.  It is my natural tendency to think of what to do next.  There were movies.  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art just up the street.  The waterfront.  The problem, as someone pointed out to me recently, is that I come from a family so disturbed, in which quiet moments of togetherness were pierced with such cruelty, that I am inclined to keep on the go.  Even when there is nowhere to go and no need.  It takes a discipline for me to stay put.  That's why I have Marlou.

South Park was designed by George Gordon in the 1850s.  Californians were still dizzy with gold fever, but Gordon came from a cooler clime.  He was British.  Gordon made his fortune in sugar and real estate.  As for the latter, bragging inaccurately that the site south of Market Street was the only sand-free location in the city, he went to work on an ambitious project.  South Park was to be the first of many such places.  His scheme was to "lay out ornamental grounds and building lots on the plan of the London Squares, Ovals or Crescents."  He got as far as South Park, but simple demography soon got in the way.  Workers from the waterfront began traipsing through the swank little square.  Housing values fell.  People fled.  The square became part of a South-of-Market industrial warehouse slum.  The city took over the square as a public park around 1900.  And then in 1906 all hell broke loose, seismically.  South Park broke loose too and drifted toward modernity.  Leveled in the earthquake, rebuilt shortly thereafter, it has, oddly, fulfilled Gordon's dream.

A tangled web, a crooked route, and here we are.  Or there we were, hours later, our apartment still too hot for human occupancy at 8 p.m., sitting outside on our patch of lawn.  No need to go anywhere.  We were home.  Going was over.  At one point, Marlou gazed across what can only be described as our concrete parking area.  She seemed to be looking at the sky.  I asked what she was thinking.  A song, she said, something we had learned in our chorus.  An African song.  Something primal.  Whatever it was, her repose, her capacity for genuine peace, those are the very qualities that tend to elude me in my life.  Before going inside, we remarked on the strangeness of not eluding each other.  That we had met.  And in the heat and in the dark we were for a long lingering moment, grateful.

Life takes us from petting zoos, to petting, to heavy petting, to pets and, eventually, to PET scans.  It is taking us there tomorrow, Marlou and me, and precisely what this means is hard to say.  Except that it's different every time.  At least, this is true for me.  Marlou's experience, at the center of the storm, cannot resemble mine.  In fact, it probably cannot be described.  Marlou says she is scared.  This seems like the truest thing anyone could say of such a time.  It says much for her courage, and something for our relationship.  It says it all, at least for the moment. 

 

Until there is another moment, then another.  And we find ourselves on a Saturday, in the heart of a concrete-Mission-faux-Spanish courtyard, staring at a tinkling fountain, and digesting lunch and Michael Meade.  The latter, author, mythologist and Brooklyn Irish-American, wanders the consciousness/introspection circuit, delivering talks, diving into community crises and generally fighting the good fight for his truth.  Much of his truth jibes with my own, but I wasn't so sure about Marlou, whether Meade's version of things would resonate with her own.  But whatever the disconnects, we both found something of lasting value in the day. 

 

Meade seems to favor Bay Area Catholic high schools for his workshops and lectures.  This particular one, St. Vincent's, sprawls its courtyards and buildings over prime real estate in Eastern Marin County.  The thing conveys the general sense of an English country estate, only larger, green meadows, fenced and orderly stretching to the west, vague and hazy lowlands to the east, probably dissolving into the tidal, with the outline of a tanker or two barely discernible on the distant Bay. 

 

At the lunch break, Marlou and I sat outside in the eastern courtyard, my leg in its brace resting on an eroding concrete bench, paint gently flaking from the wooden trim above us, weeds between the bricks, everything spacious and warm and surprising.  Our meeting room, saved from institutional grimness by a profusion of windows, did not lead me to expect much.  The choir risers stacked in front of the men's room, blocking wheelchair access, clinched the deal.  This place was a loser.  But, no, not so fast.  There was lunch and sun and an expansive enclosed courtyard mostly to ourselves, and quite willingly shared with eight-year-old ballerinas from a dance class across the way.  And there was time.

 

It's the matter of time that plagues us.  That it's only a matter of time.  I've gotten used to living with a certain level of dread.  Actually, this feeling predates Marlou's cancer.  Dread seems to be with me.  As for Marlou, I suspect that anxiety is an almost constant companion.  Which was why what Michael Meade had to say was natural, welcome and simply this: death is a constant companion.  This may sound like the theme of the day, but it wasn't.  We were dealing with matters of where we are in the world, what stage of life endeavor.  What is the charge, which step is next?  But Meade addresses virtually everything through myth and antiquity, which inevitably brings one around to fables and legends, all of which are riddled with life and death, with death a steady fixture, a plot point. 

 

In the fabular world, the fear of death seems natural and minor, often as a device to illumine the character and choices of the archetypal hero.  The thing that seems so primary in my experience is secondary there.  In any case, death is everywhere in tales and stories.  It's everywhere in Meade, too.  From morning to afternoon, Saturdaylong.  And by the end of the day, a quick dinner and an exhausting quadriplegic drive home, the two of us were ready for sleep.  Which we did, heavily, all night.  A rarity, and I don't know whom to thank but Michael Meade.

 

Lunch concluded, I vowed to set out in search of a more accessible men's room, and Marlou undertook in the opposite mission, to find some water.  Still, we lingered for a moment in the sun.  Pretty amazing, I said, this large, sheltered courtyard with its sense of faux antiquity, virtually ours for the lunch break.  Marlou cast an appraising eye over the scene.  Nice, she said, but don't be surprised if the Catholics have to sell it off, or part of it, to meet the cost of child molestation legal settlements.  It was hard to argue otherwise.  But even with my slim historical knowhow, I reckon on the Catholics' survival.  They have endured a lot, even a shareholders' revolt with a split directorate, one CEO taking up residence in Avignon.  Their death has been predicted countless times.  A reminder that helped us drive home safer and sleep easier.  Death is certain for all of us.  But the timing rarely is.

 

We are a rootless people, Americans, but many of us know it and seek our roots, and if you ever doubt this, just watch my wife track, ferret out and unearth her own ancestry.  Mine?  Well, I have a different feeling about it.  I'm bothered that no one seems to recall my grandmother's sister's name.  She died in a Nazi gas chamber, and the least I could do, it seems, is to know how to address my deceased great aunt.  Still, I will admit this issue, if it is that, only occasionally drifts through my mind.  What is more constant is the notion of not forgetting honoring and personalizing the people who made us.  Which brings me to the San Francisco Tenderloin.

 

My wheelchair brings me there on a regular basis.  The theaters, cabarets, restaurants, all thrive at the edge of the City's Tenderloin.  In fact the boundaries between the upscale and the downtrodden blur totally in this part of town.  Parking valets usher patrons into hotel lobbies with one hand, shoo away the homeless with the other.  The Tenderloin starts across the street.  Or maybe it starts at the hotel's property line.  In any case, it's over there, which isn't here but isn't far.

 

The Tenderloin is full of disabled people.  Wheelchairs abound.  Along with walkers, canes and crutches.  Many of the people I see on the streets there have the weathered, prematurely aged looked of drug abusers.  Many do not, and I also see people who are simply driving their wheelchairs up to the local Walgreens to buy milk and a loaf of bread.  That's one of the problems with San Francisco, the shortage of supermarkets. 

 

On the way to Walgreens, my wheelchair brethren roll through one or two cantos of Dante's Inferno.  Alcoholics with the odd running sore, prostitutes beyond retirement with running make up, schizophrenics doing the Thorazine shuffle in someone's running shoes, with a running commentary about the End of Days from someone yelling at passersby and looking remarkably apostolic for 10 a.m.

 

The thing is, I have a sort of link, like it or not, to the woman in the motorized wheelchair rolling up Jones Street.  She isn't wearing makeup, and her hair is not well combed, but there's nothing wrong with her, except that she happens to be stuck in this part of town.  Actually, I have no way of knowing if she is stuck at all.  God knows the Tenderloin is centrally located.  The City houses people who need assistance in residential hotels in his neighborhood.  What's a residential hotel?  What's it like inside these places?  What's it like to live here, getting around in a wheelchair, rolling around the aggressive panhandlers and trying to maintain the prescribed level of cruciform vegetables in your diet?

 

It means that in the morning, on your way out and into the world, you open your door and glance up and down the hallway, ever so casually, revealing not a hint of worry or concern.  Just want to make sure that Spander isn't off his schedule, off his meds and off his moorings.  Spander, a.k.a., expander usually sleeps half the morning, but you never know.  He might just hear the rattle of your door enough to rattle his cage and, feeling rattled, come to talk to you.  Harmless is the word most often applied to him, but it still feels like harm, the general effects of hearing about the enemy agents trying to crawl in through his window at night, the finger pointing and handwaving, not to mention the hyped up air of insistence and implied familiarity that goes with his harangues.  Coast is clear, however.  You pull the door shut, then you lock the deadbolt, then you lock the other deadbolt, the latter installed by your reluctant landlord after repeated phone calls from your social worker that you have been ripped off several times, your possessions rifled, the careful order of your disabled world disturbed.  And who needs it?

 

Ramish on the front desk gives you his nod, which is as much as he gives anyone.  Which makes you someone, and recognition being in short supply, your heart ever so slightly swells.  Outside, on the street, it's all fog and wind and relatively less need for alertness.  No one's going to do much of anything in broad daylight.  Walgreens.  A few things to get you through the day.  And the night.  Until next week when the social services van comes to take you to the Safeway.  Canned chili, a few apples, and at your age that's all you need.  Housing is going to talk to you in two months.  An accessible studio apartment in one of the new City housing high-rises.  That's your dream.  For now, you're not even looking at what's ahead on Leavenworth Street, for that, if you give it any thought at all, is your nightmare.

 

It is important to remember that I was once on food stamps, received public assistance and was generally a welfare case.  This was part of the program of California's Department of Rehabilitation, at least for me.  I was a student, and this was my life.  I handed the food stamps to a cashier at my local Safeway, feeling somewhere between embarrassed and grateful.  My checks arrived every month, and I cashed them.  Once I got a bonus for my seeing-eye dog and cashed that one too.  No, I didn't have a dog, but I had a checking account and figured there was no jail that could hold me.  Or there was no jail that wanted me.  The late 1970s.

I was a student on the way up.  And now, aging and on the way down, I could easily find myself living a more marginal life.  I've done well for myself.  But I've also been very lucky.  I could be making my way across Geary Street to a Walgreens with a pharmacist behind a screen and a slovenly security guard at the door.  I could be stuck in a rented room, with few options for keeping up with the cost of living in one of the world's most expensive cities.  I have worries.  I also have a life.  And I have many reasons for gratitude.

There are moments when I cough, and the cough turns into something more guttural and choking, and the entire thing turns into less of a diaphragmatic experience, more of a realization.  Something in me is desperate, panicky and choked off.  The tendency is to keep the feelings, and the awareness that goes with them, damped down.  But eventually things get coughed up.  Or they ooze out, particularly late at night.

I have come to distrust the notion of going to sleep.  I accept that Marlou and I go to bed, but the day's anxieties awaken as soon as we sleep, or even before.  Our nightly hug is both tender and telling.  Earlier in the cancer saga, when I put my arm around Marlou to say goodnight, we seemed together but not in sync.  Perhaps she was trying to cheer me, lighten my load or even convince herself that the moment contained only routine worries.  Things to do, people to contact, arrangements to make.  Sometimes she slept well, and I didn't.  Or I slept well, and she didn't.  Or neither or both.  Now, none of this matters.

We've entered an era that has the quality of gentle truth.  Now, I put my arm, my only useful arm, around Marlou, ask how she is, and the truth oozes out.  I can feel her tears rolling down her cheeks, through my shirt and beyond.  She tells me her worst fears.  And in this process my worst fears are soothed as well.  Having a mother who was always churning and seething with unacknowledged emotions, I'm actually reassured by our tearful exchanges.  I only have one arm, but at such moments one seems enough.  The one I have feels strong.  And I seem strong.

Of course, there is the choking cough.  Which is my body choking the truth out of me.  And the truth is that I am scared and deeply feel Marlou's pain, or think I do.  For her tears reach the skin of my chest...and then what?  They get absorbed.  That's what I do.  One close adviser has told me that this is my particular, individual propensity.  To absorb other people's feelings.  Marlou has her own version of this tendency.  It is our mutually sympathetic natures that bind us in a deep way.  And it feels momentous and it feels right that we are acquiring the courage, the mutual courage, to share tears.  It's all hanging out or oozing out, and this feels particularly right.

I can only think of the Queen Mary 2.  The actual ship, not the shipboard frenzy, but the vessel.  Noble was the only word I could apply to it.  The vast steel thing parted the cold waters and moved on and on, unstoppable.  Which is what ships do.  But I'd never seen this before, the actual action of casting free of the landmass, turning toward open water and hoping that the cold vastness really had another side.  That between here and the opposite shore, the ships and icebergs and forgotten, secretly surviving and long-persevering Nazi submarines wouldn't get us.  The ocean is the most limitless thing, devoid of features, lethal after a few seconds of exposure and, in any case, a long way down.

The broccoli rising out of the third plant in my first raised bed provides a focus for these questions.  Things are growing and blooming and photosynthesizing and consuming nitrogen and becoming compost, and what is there to do but park my wheelchair in the path of botanical progress and think?  It's hard to say if life is really sad or really short.  What's certain is that Marlou and I are following a path well trodden.  Others have passed our way, generally much younger.  The normal human lifespan is a recent abnormality.  Still, Marlou and I are just getting cranked up for life, and the prospect of a foreshortening sticks in my throat.  It's enough to make someone cough.  It's enough to make someone, anyone, very angry.

We don't know what's going to happen.  Marlou and I both comprise an odd minority, very small, in terms of personality tests.  We may just be part of an equally odd minority of spinal-cord injury and cancer survivors.  After getting shot, I wasted little time in hoping for the best.  I put my energy into bracing for the worst.  Hope or not, I got the best, the best medicine and, for a bad cervical injury to the spinal cord, the best life.

We have a lot of fear.  We have a lot of tears.  And it's all coming out, and it might just save us.  The hardest thing is to explain the truest thing.  Perhaps it's a mystery, defies explanation, and for the time being only deserves respect.  And the truest thing is that at night when Marlou cries on my chest, talks about her fear of dying, recalls the death of her brother and feels the pain of it all, what I'm doing feels absolutely right.  This is the inexplicable truth.  I am supposed to be here, and we are supposed to be together, and what's happening, pain and all...somehow it's meant to happen to both of us in this way.  And the strangest irony is that I am a middle-age person full of midlife regret -- and yet I don't regret this experience with Marlou at all.  Besides, in the great Laptop of Life the same microprocessor that generates pain also creates to it.  Whatever happens, you can count on both. Go figure.  Go figure it out by the cauliflower.

There's this Jekyll and Hyde thing that occurs in the space of a single day.  In the mornings I sit at the edge of a clearing, facing a wild forest, beastial and unexplored.  By the afternoon, a bulldozer emerges between the trees, knocks over a couple of saplings, reverses back into the growth,and picnickers enter the clearing, spread out a cloth and stare at me, munching pretzels.

The morning is the time to write.  The membrane that separates day from night is at its thinnest.  Stuff drifts across it.  By afternoon, everything is different, as though there is no howling desperation and never was.  The sun is gradually heading home, and everything is homey, things as reliable as curbs in a California subdivision.  So, this is the safe time, which turns out to be the bad time to operate in real time, which is what so-called creativity seems to be all about.

Was it Flaubert who told his servant to lock him in his office, and not let him out until a certain amount of time, or a certain number of fresh pages, had elapsed?  I don't see how Flaubert could have survived without the Internet, which will tell you that Tuscany is bursting with villas, pornography is bursting with the breasts, that salon.com is bursting with news, new plays are bursting onto the London stage, the economy is bursting to burst and "bursting" traces its origins far back in the Indo-European linguistic evolution.  By now it's 11 a.m., and the morning's bursting is imminent.  By the time the afternoon comes bursting into your consciousness, you can count on your consciousness being pleasantly drained of anything threatening and substantial.  How wonderful to be a writer.

I can't pinpoint the moment at which I decided I was retired.  The whole shift in job description, or joblessness description, felt like going to Macy's to buy a shirt and coming home with a potted rubber plant.  We need clothing, or think we do, when what we actually crave is more indoor photosynthesis.  I didn't ask anyone's permission, even Marlou's.  It was time.  Something in me had given way, given out and needed to be given free rein.  That was a couple of years ago.  Now, I've got the mornings.

There's a sort of rising panic, a fear of emptiness, I would call it.  Is this what's meant by the fear of the blank page or, more contemporaneously, fear of the blank screen?  At its psychoanalytic core, is this emptiness the same as infantile abandonment?  Does anyone know?  Does it matter?  What definitely matters is that the clock is advancing, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. and even later.  This is my life.  This is my chance to say what I want to.  This is my party and I'll cry if I want to.  You would cry too.  Maybe you wouldn't.  

I don't know, but it's 10:45, and there's only one thing to do.  The thing I was born to do, it seems.  The one reliable creative act in this or any other day.  Go to Peet's.  After all, the espresso is hissing, caffeine wafting about in clouds, patrons hunching at tables.  Think of what I'm missing.  There's the guy with a laptop computer, the one who is always here and always busy.  Because he is the most reliable Peet's attendee, his table provides a social anchor.  There's the guy retired from Sunset Magazine.  There's the guy retired from, who knows?  We are all retired, that is the point.  And this realization hits me just about the time the caffeine does.  I am now bursting with caffeinated urgency, time's winged chariot with its flaps up and hurtling toward...nothing in particular for these guys.  They are hanging out.  One talks about his heart condition.  The laptop guy has had a software epiphany, which he assures us, is fully patentable.  Okay.  I've had my latte.  Time for home.

Home is where the heart is, the hearth is and the screen is.  Cursor blinking, time sinking, the afternoon winking.  Yes, it's almost 12 o'clock, and the spell will be broken.  It felt like a bad spell, something a witch had designed, but maybe it was just a dry spell.  And the problem with droughts is that they come and go, and you've got to have the dam ready and the spillways open.  Or you'll miss the flood.  Because you never know when it's time to not write.  Except that it's best in the morning.

I had one of those waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night moments, round about 1 a.m., when it was so clear that a marvelous thing had occurred.  In fact, the realization was so stunning that it required sitting up, dropping my legs over the edge of the bed and pondering.  I was recalling this moment when I had seen "Little Me," a musical comedy from the 1960s, and I had gone onstage.  Thing is, Sid Caesar, the show's star, had asked me to take his place.  I had wandered up on the stage and, essentially, taken over his role.  I had gotten in the fourposter bed that dominated one particular scene with the show's heroine, Belle, a Hollywood star whose faux memoir the musical depicted in song and dance.  What a pleasant feeling.  I'd completely forgotten this moment.  

Naturally, I had forgotten it, because it never happened.  It was first confusing, then sad, to let this narrative with its feeling of absolute reality and total conviction, drain into the night, seeping right into the carpet, dribbling down the walls and assuming the general importance of my latest New Yorker...fun, but ephemeral.

How do I interpret this dream?  First, there are events and associations around it.  Yes, I saw "Little Me."  During my childhood I had seen a slim handful of touring Broadway companies when they came to Los Angeles.  Each performance was a major event, with years in between.  The drive into LA took two hours from the small town where I was born.  The shows played in a huge barn of a place, Philharmonic Auditorium which, incredibly, doubled as a home for the local orchestra.  I always sat upstairs in the balcony, a gallery, some seat closer to the sky than the stage.

Things were changing in 1964.  They were coming to an end, it seemed.  High school.  Living with my father.  "Little Me" beckoned.  I probably saw the ad in the Los Angeles Times.  And I worked it all out.  I was leaving for the summer.  First stop, Los Angeles and a few days with my friend Joe and his family.  Living in Riverside then, it was possible to go to a local department store and purchase tickets for events in Los Angeles.  The store made a phone call, for which it charged, and the customer got a receipt for a ticket, redeemable at the Philharmonic Auditorium box office.  As I recall, the "Little Me" ticket cost $4.25.  It was a lot of money, but being a Wednesday matinee, extravagant but within the bounds of the possible.

When I told my father, he sneered.  You certainly find ways to amuse yourself, he told me.  I was a rebellious adolescent by then, and the only odd thing in this exchange is that his words sank in.  In fact, they evoked a considerable amount of guilt.  Imagine, amusing myself.  Frittering away life, and only 17 years old.  This guilt, I believe, existed on a somatic Jewish level.  Guilt, its generation and cell-to-cell transfer, occurs on the level of molecular biology and is deeply Semitic.  I leave the rest up to researchers.

So there I was, heavy with guilt, yet walking proud and amazed through the orchestra level lobby of Philharmonic Auditorium.  Down here, there were attractive pictures on the walls.  Upstairs, it was all bare stucco.  Astonished, I took my place in the fourth row.  I was so close that during the show I could hear the orchestra laughing in the pit as Sid Caesar ad-libbed on the stage.

As for the fourposter bed, this turned up in a scene that even as a boy I understood to represent some sort of archetype or cliché.  The brass bed somehow symbolized the memoir heroine's fall, her descent into sin that, we understood, was not sin.  Just as some strong and alive part of me knew that my father's guilt-inducing judgment had to be resisted.  I was on the right track.  My poor father, in retrospect, loved Sid Caesar.  He must have been very jealous of me that Wednesday.  

And out of my misbegotten family background where love and pleasure were scant, somehow I've arrived here.  With Marlou, and if not in a fourposter brass bed, something better.  A fully automated bed that splits into, one half going up while the other goes down, that vibrates, that raises the foot on my side, then lowers it while Marlou, if she desires, can raise the foot of her bed.  Which has nothing to do with anything, except that there's something joyous in all these possibilities.  Above all, the bed is something we share.  And of this too, I imagine that my bitter and isolated father would be jealous.

It's been going on for weeks, and there is no apparent event or immediate source, and the symptoms are vague, but as a descriptor, heartache will suffice.  What worries me is a feeling, natural to an intuitive person, that maybe the fearful, achey sense of things amounts to a premonition.  Marlou describes a similar pain always at the back of our days.  And it's disturbingly pervasive, and it's bittersweet.  Our battles, when they come, don't seem to obsess us quite as much or last quite as long.  We are not quite sure how long anything will last, how long we will last as a couple, alive on this earth.  Thus, the ache.

I attribute the current onset of painful foreboding to Marlou's medical cycle.  It's time for another PET scan, the quarterly cancer report card.  Is it A's or C's or F's?  Will Marlou have to reenroll in Driver Ed?  Plans are on hold, but emotions aren't.  It's poignant every minute.  Whatever it is could be an intimation of doom.  Or the natural deepening that comes with a prolonged emotional challenge.  No one can absorb things all at once.

Sometimes I can't absorb them at all.  Marlou and I are hungry for distraction.  Diversion is the better word.  I want to be diverted.  From Kennedy to Newark.  From Oakland to San Jose.  I want to land in a different place.  Our plasma TV, glowing and expansive can take us into some pretty shallow waters.  But I don't mind the deep sea.  Anything that challenges and illuminates or laughs from the depths.  I'm willing to watch.  Critics Picks, Film Awards, The 100 Best All-Time Movies, none of this helps, most is unreliable.  Never mind what Netflix recommends.  Marlou and I are finding our own way.  Not all the time, but often together.  In a general way, the contemporary, in films or books or almost anything, disappoints me these days.  These days seem particularly finite.  Things that have been around for thousands and hundreds of thousands of days, those are the things I prefer.

The odd thing is that this emotional state may be entirely independent of Marlou's real medical circumstance.  In fact, I have the sense that her next PET scan will give her high marks, an A+ in cancer minimization.  Successful chemical combat.  It's not the news or the fear of the news.  It's the old.  The experience of life in the balance, health as tentative, the future uncertain and possibly brief, it's been getting old.  While I am getting old.  I can't tell if I'm getting worn out like a battery or worn down like a mountain.  The latter would be good.  Things getting reduced to sea level, ground down, rich mineral veins exposed.  All at low altitude.

It's time to think outside the box, I occasionally tell myself.  I've had problems with a magnetic switch on the outside of my van that controls the deployment and stashing away of my wheelchair lift.  The thing has been repaired three times, and the latter was not the charm.  So it seemed to me a sort of illumination when, bouncing down the Menlo Park sidewalks the other day, it came to me.  Don't fix the magnetic switch -- fix the magnetic magnet.  

Dammit if Menlo Park Hardware doesn't have a selection of magnets.  The shop occupies a fairly small space, but every displayable inch contains something useful.  Stoppers for our sink.  Portulaca for our garden.  New keys.  Garbage bags.  Pitchforks.  And, yes, for a mere six bucks, one macho iron-grabber of a magnet.

At home, I freed the magnet from its shrink wrap and brought the thing outside to perform its magic on the van switch.  Sure enough, even in proximity to the switch, inches away, something clicked on.  Just as something had clicked in my brain, rolling down the sidewalk.  Now, to make the van's electrical controls click off, just bring the magnet close.  Well, bring it closer.  Do it again.  Maybe hit the van with your palm, then apply the magnet.  Well, maybe give up.  Because the problem isn't the magnet, it seems.  Or the magnetic switch, replaced three times by a puzzled repair guy.  The problem is...unknown.

I've got technological friends with mathematical backgrounds who probably have a thoroughly logical explanation for the van and its misbehavior.  Such explanations make my eyes glaze over.  At best, I mistrust them.  Technical understanding of my van doesn't seem to help.  What ails my car is not understood, apparently not curable, and the workaround -- a weak magnet and a strong kick -- will, for the moment, suffice.

Marlou's cancer and her chemotherapy rebound may defy understanding, but there are certain things we know.  The two of us have never been closer.  Part of this is spatial.  The new sofa allows us to comfortably sit together.  I admit that it took me a while to try this, to make it a habit to plop myself on the sofa instead of the electromechanical leg-raising wonder of a recliner armchair that arrived with the rest of the new furniture.  Maybe there's some boyish tropism that reacts to closeness with mother-wants-me-to-do-this-therefore-I-won't stubbornness.  Or there's this other thing.  But I can now put my arm around Marlou, cuddle side-by-side and share in the plasma screen amusement, moment by moment.  It's the poignancy and bittersweet feeling, the heartache, that comes in these moments.  At times, it seems too much to bear.  At times, it seems that this is life, and all roads have led to this moment.