South Park
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.
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.
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