Paris

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.