June 2008 Archives
The wake-up call came at 5:25 a.m., as scheduled. Like everything else in this hotel for the able-bodied, there was a catch. Lest the guest fall back asleep, there were two follow-on calls. A splendid idea, unless you are quadriplegic and in the bathroom. Because failure to answer means additional calls, and as the situation escalates, the calls are not of the automated variety, but live human ones from the front desk. I caught one call. I missed the next. More phone ringing, me repeatedly trying to steer my American electric wheelchair like a Sherman tank in this tiny British hotel room from toilet to phone. Missing the call, resuming bathroom activity, back and forth like a quadriplegic Marx Brothers film. And on top of it all, the underlying and essential paranoia of travel. Do I have my passport? Enough money for the cab? And did I remember the wheelchair battery charger?
And there's always a last-minute hitch. Sorry, the 6:30 cabbie in front of the hotel told me, no ramps. It wasn't his cab, he said. I gave him the American fisheye, knowing there are EU rules about cabs and wheelchair access. And knowing how much London taxi drivers hate the slow, revenue-sapping process of opening the boot, extending collapsible aluminum rails from cab to curb. But that's what the next cabbie did. In fact, at Victoria Station he parked his cab and wandered inside in search of help. Early on a Saturday morning London rail stations aren't exactly bursting with porters. Dumped at the curb with my bags, I would have been stuck. Leaving my luggage to search for a porter would have been unthinkable. But my cabbie had a handle on the situation, which lent a certain perspective to the unfolding day.
Traveling and complaining is generally un-advisable, much like driving and holding a mobile phone to your ear or walking and sharpening a butcher knife. First, too much is going on, and complaining only distracts from the purpose. Second, your complaints are aimed at a moving target, for that's what travel is, movement. Third, travel karma is complex, just as a trip is straightforward, but a journey is convoluted. So the cab driver who won't pick up your wheelchair, being a British national, his life impelled by forces that are likely pre-Saxon, that noncompliant cabbie is out of reach. And yelling at him and demanding your rights in a foreign country, however gratifying, will only spiral back at you in ways that are impossible to predict and likely dangerous. Let it go. Because the next cabbie may be like this one, the man who at this sparkling hour of the morning is emerging from the dusky light of the station with a porter pushing a baggage cart.
The British complain bitterly about their present rail system, and doubtless they have a point, but to an American all that's important is that they have one. In fact, train travel is up in Britain. It's way up. The numbers were soaring before the current fuel squeeze, and petrol prices will only drive them higher, one assumes. The Gatwick Express to London's airport in Surrey waited with its doors open. I rolled aboard, and it rolled away. No need to buy a ticket beforehand. Just hand the conductor your credit card. All which had been accomplished by the time we rumbled over the Thames rail bridge, and I bought myself a tea and two chocolate biscuits. We picked up speed, and we picked up more speed while the timeless South London maze of tracks and Victorian brick viaducts, level upon level, bounced beside us. Weeds, sprouting among the gravel, bundles of sooty cables running alongside the track, the no man's land of trains. We were going fast enough, probably about 90 miles an hour, so that the station names were impossible to read in the blur, except for the large print on the largest platform. South Croydon. Almost there. But not before a few final moments of English countryside, tiny ponds dotting the rolling downs. And then we were there, which being an airport, was a vast nowhere.
As for what followed, what can one say of an experience so anonymous and miraculous? Intercontinental travel, traversing eight time zones in a matter of hours, is nothing to sneeze at. Like dentistry, a long flight should be accomplished quickly and with maximum anesthesia. Virgin Airways does a good job of this, flying nonstop from London to San Francisco with an endless supply of movies on demand. But if you book your ticket at the last minute on Air France, you have to count on something else. Cincinnati. And on this particular 767, a bulkhead seat without a window. Nothing to look at but a wall and a crude video map showing, if you are prepared to believe it, that straight beneath your tray table and your chicken parmigiana and your flotation seat cushion lies Greenland.
In the customs hall at Cincinnati airport the chatty middle-aged guy who had pushed me from the plane in a manual wheelchair finally pushed me a bit too far. I didn't so much mind being asked my name. Paul, like the apostle? But now we were into the wheelchair recovery thing, and I was in no mood. My electric wheelchair was neatly parked beneath a sign for Oversize Baggage. No dangling wires, no smashed wheels, everything looking intact. Except that it didn't turn on. A waiting baggage handler assured me that everything was fine, she had reattached the control cable, no prob. Unfortunately, no power. The control lights did not come on.
"Well, now, Paul, you got some kind of battery back in there?" This from the pusher.
"We need an airline official," I said.
"Battery must be in here." He held up my rucksack with the charger.
"An airline official," I said, making no eye contact, all coldness and impatience.
"OK," he said, scurrying off. I was in a mood to see someone scurry. I had had enough wheelchair problems. It's just that my problems weren't his. I knew this too. There had been a moment on the London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel with the view by the Thames. Something had happened...mild, predictable, yet sobering. As the rotating Eye descends, passengers are invited to stand on a mark by the plexiglass wall. A camera mounted on the passing superstructure flashes and takes photos of tourists as they drift by. Once you're off the wheel and making for the exit, your color photo stands ready for purchase behind a counter. Sure enough, there we were, Sandy and me. Well, Sandy and part of me. My cousin stood fully visible, but my face was blocked by an I-beam, revealing not much more than my wheelchair and torso. In a perverse way, I regret not purchasing the photo. It encapsulated all my fears...being overlooked, faceless, a wheelchair and not a person.
Here in Cincinnati, in the easy-going Midwest, it did not take long for someone from the airline to appear. I asked the guy to examine the battery connection. He unplugged things, plugged them in again, and with a beep from the control joystick, the chair was back in action. The wheelchair pusher now became the baggage schlepper, helping me get through customs, then back through security. Making our way to the gate for San Francisco, the skies turned from blue to gray to black. Rain fell in pelting sheets, even making the nearby planes invisible. Things were stormy and could change quickly, and I gave the pusher a big tip for putting up with me.
"Let me tell you one thing, Paul." I braced myself for some personal advice on attitude.
"See, Paul, they've got this aisle chair. Wouldn't have to walk to your seat."
This was a stupid idea for someone whose feet were already swelling like elephantiasis and needed every possible opportunity for exercise.
"That's a great idea," I said. "Goodbye."
In an old Monty Python skit, a Superman-like figure arrives in cape and tights proclaiming that he is 'Bicycle Repair Man.' Even in its day, the joke was only a mild one. Now, there is no joke at all. That's because 'Wheelchair Repair Man' arrived in his white van from Cam, Gloucestershire, with even more irony and, above all, much more impact. This man took a look at my airline-bludgeoned wheelchair, did not so much as bat an eye, plugged a laptop computer into the control and decided that someone had been bashing the brakes. Actually, the brake cable had been briefly disconnected, tripping an emergency shut off. That's all there was to it. There is progress in our world. I may think of my wheelchair as an enhanced forklift, all brawn and batteries, but that is because I'm old. It's digital, like everything else. And now it's running.
I went running up to the Todenham pub with my cousins for dinner. Somehow, I even squeezed the wheelchair into the table by the bar. And the next day, when the 12:13 rolled into the nearby rail station, I was aboard. London. A familiar cab ride, clinging to the yellow safety bar for dear life, and then I was there, in a new, anonymous, antiseptic hotel in Westminster near the Thames Embankment, overlooking the Tate Gallery. The view was indescribably pretty. What followed wasn't.
Everything was difficult. The room was small. I was old. My temper was short. Time was short. I needed to get set up in my room and out the door to my date with a friend at the English National Opera. A tough life. And yet it was tough, for my wheelchair-adapted room had a marvelous roll in shower, but a roll-nowhere layout. All the spaces were too tight, and when it came to reaching for this or that, I was too stiff. My Internet connection wouldn't work. I carefully followed the hotel's instructions, but no line. I needed to check my e-mail or thought I did. I kept dropping things. I couldn't get through the door of the bathroom without banging the door frame. Turning on the water in the sink, I kept reaching my left hand around to the slick modern control on the right, and with the faucet on, water cascaded through the gooseneck fixture and onto my wrist. No problem with that, except that the water kept hitting my very non-waterproof Seiko. And, after repeating this mistake a time or two, already in a heightened state of annoyance bordering on rage, damned if the unbelievable didn't occur. My watch stopped.
Now I couldn't get my suitcase open, I didn't know what time it was, God knew who was trying to reach me from California via e-mail, my wheelchair had slammed into every wall in the room, and I might or might not make it to St. Martin's Lane by 5:30 p.m. Occasionally, I would try to cool out, slow down and try to make sense of my enraged frenzy. But there was nothing rational about it. I had been thrown backwards into some stage of limited mobility and responded in the only way I knew: fight or flight. Actually, I had seen this coming for days. Waking up at my cousin's home in Gloucestershire, it seemed all I could manage to get out of bed. With my wheelchair broken, the walk, all of a few meters, to the toilet seemed onerous, more than a human being could bear. I don't like being reminded of my occasional retreats into diminished mobility. I don't like diminished mobility. I don't like diminished anything.
Naturally, post-opera I was back in my hotel room worrying about the Internet. When some all-night engineer finally talked me through the steps, the e-mail was what e-mail usually is, a bunch of messages, none urgent, most inconsequential. What wasn't inconsequential was the hour, 1:30 a.m. when I finally went to sleep. I had an appointment for next morning with my cousins James and Barbara at the Tate, and damned if the next morning wasn't like the previous night. The wheelchair too big, the room too small, dressing and washing taking too long. Still, this was London and there was no way I wasn't going to have a little sidewalk breakfast somewhere. And there it was, a friendly little café with tables in Vauxhall Bridge Road, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern guys welcoming me inside. And feeling hungry and fierce and not yet late, noting the level threshold, I burst through the door. Bam. I slammed downward. Just inside the door was a step, a steep one, that in my anger and fatigue had escaped my attention. But I had escaped no one's. I was the cripple in the wheelchair who had just burst through the doorway like Elliot Ness. If I had told people they were under arrest, 20 hands would have shot up. Instead, I sheepishly eyed my situation, asked the Mediterranean guys to hold up my front wheels, and burst back out to the street. There, morning traffic humming, I had my cappuccino. Life.
A good thing my cousin Barbara had me take a good look at this famous Epstein sculpture at the Tate. Jacob Wrestling the Angel is the general theme, maybe even the correct title. In any case, it is a work of supreme power, beauty and ambiguity. It is impossible to tell if one is witnessing a struggle or an embrace. I know the feeling. I stared at the statue for a long time. Later that same evening, I stared at London, looking straight down on the Houses of Parliament thanks to my cousin Sandy. This is the sort of aerial view one gets from the London Eye, the huge Ferris wheel that sits by the Thames at Westminster Bridge. When the gondolas reach the top, one can actually see beyond London, past the rise at Barnet and on. The city and its vastness and its richness and its openness seemed overwhelming. An Indian family, as middle-class as could be, asked my cousin Sandy to take a photo. No, actually, Sandy volunteered. This is the most wonderful thing about modern British society, the tolerance, the acceptance and a prevailing sanity regarding homeland security.
And to feel even more secure, I spent much of the next day at the Imperial War Museum. It was only a short run down Lambeth Road. There was something reassuring about getting close to the physical armaments that characterized the war my parents knew. On the way, I rolled into a small café in Horseferry Road. No one paid any attention to me at the counter, which was too high anyway, so I rolled out. I was in no mood to make do. And right at the other end of Lambeth Road, impossibly inaccessible behind a flood barrier, was this charming cappuccino operation. A waitress saw me, seated me at an outdoor table and brought me an English breakfast wrap, along with a cappuccino. It was about to rain. The sky was achieving that familiar English charcoal color. I didn't care. I was on my way to the Imperial War Museum, and I was in a fighting mood.
Summertime in Tuscany, and the livin' is easy. We are taking it easy as well. No sense in pushing things. In fact, we are pushing nothing. One day in fact, we spend in and around the hotel. It's not exactly a torture. Our hotel is, after all, a former palace. It's the Palazzo of Cardinale Rovere who went on to become a pope. So, while merely a cardinal, he had this magnificent stone mansion, outbuildings and grounds. We are staying in what might have been a former granary, now carved into two beautiful stone-floored rooms. Throughout the place, the ancient features pop out of the modern. In the lobby, a spiral fluted marble column rises between the sofas and the bar. In the main hallway, the plaster wall disappears here and there to give you a shot of the original stone. It's a magnificent restoration. Even the marble swimming pool looks as though it might have been part of the cardinal's original setup.
From the hotel's lower level, looking across an ancient stone wall, the medieval town hangs in the distance. Cypresses frame the view from the hotel grounds, and more cypresses march across the hills. It's Italy. It's a Renaissance painting. It's our hotel. In the evening, armed with the name of a country restaurant recommended by one of the hotel staff, we set out in the general direction of San Gimignano. The restaurant is closed, so we drive on. We fly past a small sign, weathered and almost amateurly modest, that points uphill to what might be a restaurant. Marlou heads up a rutted gravel road, parks and we stare at an empty stone building with a deserted terrace. It may not be a restaurant, and certainly it isn't open, but we are here, and Marlou wanders out to have a look. The owner wanders out to greet her. I crutch down some stone steps and into an expensive bastion of Italian haute cuisine, everything served on expensive linen and ceramics, French tourists gradually drifting in as the evening advances. I am stunned, but stunned into excess. How many meals of a lifetime can one have in a few days?
It's a perfect holiday. Which means it has to end. Besides, Tuscany is getting hot. We are beginning to drive around with the air conditioning on. At night, the fireflies are out in force. They appear in the darkness behind the hotel, blinking and flashing in a way that makes you wonder if the 1960s aren't resurfacing in some chemically overstimulated part of your brain. Not that this matters, for what is really stimulated in Italy is the heart. There is so much of it. Our hotel almost feels like a family-run operation. It isn't. But everyone seems to know everyone in some indefinable way. The Italian hotel business is a family business, just as there is no such thing as an impersonal Italian restaurant. In fact, there are also no chain restaurants. On the outskirts of Arezzo we saw small signs for McDonald's, but the arrows all pointed out of town. So, somewhere by the freeway on the outskirts of the city one can apparently find the golden arches. If the marble arches and the stone arches don't suffice, check out the yellow American ones. They are something of an artifact in their own right. The only chain restaurant in this part of Tuscany.
Drained of ambition, almost overdosed on warmth and perfection, what is there to do with the final day but hit a final hill town? Volterra. It's beautiful. And the Roman theater, seen in an aerial view of the town itself, fascinates me. We lunch on bruschetta and then, essentially, give up. Back to the hotel. But not before we have a final look at the town's ramparts. That means going up on the high cliff by the city walls, another steep climb up a medieval street, paving stones polished slick by centuries of feet and donkey carts. It feels as if I'm going to tip backwards or slip downhill. On the way back it feels even worse. Marlou and I try to find another way down, but it's hopeless. There's only one way, and there's no way I'm doing this on our own. Marlou goes off in search of help. It arrives in the form of another Paul, actually Paulo, who holds the handles on my wheelchair while we descend the impossible grade. Enough. We are out of here. The car is where we left it, in a prime disabled parking space by the city walls. It's been perfect. It's been enough.
Things are similarly perfect the next day. The waitress gives Marlou a parting hug. The front desk gives her two bottles of wine. And we are off for Florence Airport. Things have been so perfect, that the minor imperfection -- the cancellation of our flight -- seems like a detail. I'll be getting into London late, but my cousin's husband is driving down from Gloucestershire to meet me at Heathrow. Not to worry. I don't take much notice when seated aboard the plane, moments before departure, one of the ground crew comes on board to ask how my wheelchair can be taken apart. It can't, I say, smiling indulgently. We sit on the ground. The pilot informs everyone that there will be a short delay while a wheelchair is secured in the hold. But that's it. True, there is a white-knuckle moment at Charles De Gaulle Airport, changing planes. It takes no less than four separate handlers to move me between planes, and there is an awkward gap in the transfers, probably less than 15 minutes, while I sit alone in a wheelchair I can't move. But never mind. The attendant arrives at last, and this has all been worth it. I've checked my electric wheelchair directly through to London, certainly the wisest, most sensible course.
I am a little dazed by the time I'm pushed into the customs hall at Heathrow. My electric wheelchair arrives five minutes later, but oddly perched on a baggage cart. I can see why. One of the wheels has been bashed in. The entire wheelchair tilts so badly that it cannot roll. One of the baggage handlers manages to get the wheel back in position, but the wheelchair control light flashes on and off, a sure sign of electronic trouble. A guy from Air France walks over. He eyeballs the chair, pronounces his sincere regret and assures me that the airline will pay for everything. He has seen it all before. At Florence, no one had ever seen a wheelchair before. Somehow, between these two experiences, there is a sort of madness. I and my wheelchair and my trip to London, all of this is now on hold, uncertain, and may not even occur.
Stepping out of Alistair's van hours later, the Gloucestershire rain hits me cold and hard. It is June. I don't go to bed until 2 a.m. It's exciting to be here. Even more exciting, the next day, the rain stops and the cold winds take over. But it's clear. Nothing can be more lush and green than England in the summer. So what is there to do but have tea? Someone in a country home is serving tea to raise money for the Red Cross. So what the hell? That's where we go, some place near the village of Lower Slaughter. Upper Slaughter lies beyond, of course. Somehow, even in 2008, English aristocrats hang on to houses like this. My cousin Caroline tells me that this home is owned by a British banking family. Tea in the conservatory is splendid, but the driveway is even better. Acres of rolling lawns and magnificent trees, including a couple of copper beeches, undulating through the Cotswolds, then across a gravel courtyard to the teas.
Would we like another way out? The lady of the house shows us through the downstairs, vaguely in the direction of the front door. But we never make it there. She decides to show us her Venetian room. After her husband died, she says, she wanted to cheer up her dining room with something Italianate. There are scenes of Venice on the walls, scenes of Venice on the rolling window shades. She's right, the room is fun. She seems to be on a roll, so out we go on a half-hour guided tour of her grounds. She has lost her husband, but not her love of people. Passing her vegetable garden, I tell her about my raised beds in California. We speak the same language. More garden. When Alistair turns my wheelchair around, a manual one purchased from the British Red Cross, I get a sense of the setting. The home and its hundreds of acres occupy one side of a valley. The Cotswolds are full of such vales. And this family has been in this vale for a long time. There's even a haha, a perspective altering drop-off in the 18th century garden to the west. I am crippled, my electric wheelchair is broken, my wife has cancer, my prospects are uncertain, and this English lady aristocrat is urging me to come back next year, give her a ring, and we will see the roses in season. What else?
Marlou says she is aware that this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. We are talking, trying to talk, and always, it seems, talking around this issue of lifetimes and how long ours together will last. For reasons that are unclear, this issue has hung over us ever since we emerged from that sledgehammer-on-the-head experience known as jet lag. By the way, I wisely remember to dread the latter in planning one of these European trips, but mercifully the details always elude me. The details are unpleasant. Worse, they are deceptive. There is that first day of catching up on sleep. There is a second slightly groggy day that ends in a fairly normal night...allowing for some startling moments of alertness, say around 3 a.m. And then there's the third night. And that is invariably the night when the intercontinental time bomb goes off in your brain, in your body, and all biorhythms rebel. Marlou and I, both of us, were awake much of that night.
That's when this thing about Marlou's cancer, and our mutual mortality, and how much time we have together burst into nocturnal consciousness. Of course, it wasn't really nocturnal or diurnal, but some terrible, wrenching night-of-the-living-jetlagged time of darkness when the things of darkness manifest. The night was so disturbing that it didn't seem like a matter of circadian rhythms as much as the emergence of a panicky truth. Oddly, there is nothing new about it. The scope of Marlou's liver tumor is well known. We've had time to worry about it. This should be a time to forget about it.
With a certain level of background figure and disturbance following us about, Marlou and I have been learning to take it easy. The region being what it is, the hotel, the everything Tuscan so enjoyable, we arise each day and commit to only the most modest plans. A drive here. A stop there. And on some days not even that.
Our first tourist goal was admirably modest. Go into the town of Colle val d'Elsa and have a look around. It's not that simple, of course. The Tuscan hill towns are located on small fortress-like peaks, and this one is no exception. Fortunately, the municipality has invested in a new and modern elevator. It zips passengers from a grotto-like passage, all leaking stones and museum-style lighting, alcoves alive with movies of the region, up to the medieval city on top. From there, Colle has the feel of being in midair. Its hill is a narrow one, the town strung out along it, so that glancing over a street or two in either direction, one's gaze falls into space. You might as well be a ship at sea. Certando, another hill town we visited the following day, hangs off a different sort of hill. A funicular railway takes people there, and it's altogether a bigger place, the edges not so close that one feels the rim of the world at hand. Still, in a wheelchair, both places feel remarkably similar.
Electric wheelchairs like mine do a remarkable job, it must be admitted. But they do have serious design limits. And steep hills paved with slick stones are way outside their performance parameters. My tires are good and my wheelchair skills well honed. But each moment leaves me slightly adrenal, knuckles whitening, insecurities rising. Not that I really care. I am here to enjoy Italy, and the pleasures are so many that a low-level fear, however persistent, simply becomes part of the story. It's a bit like Marlou's cancer, always there, not an immediate threat, and one takes maximum precautions.
It's 2 p.m. in Certaldo. It's time for lunch. It really isn't time for lunch, not by any sane caloric standard. Just wander down to the breakfast room in the former cardinal's palace, now our Italian country hotel. One of the waiters is usually playing the piano, just a little mild Euro pop background music to whet your appetite. Which, being Italy, is whetted to the max. Never mind the boring array of breads and cheeses and meats and fruits and coffees and almond pastries that stun me senseless each morning. For the moment, just consider that without trying, one ingests enough at breakfast to keep going for at least a week. And this hasn't been a week, it's only been four hours, and now it's 2 p.m. high atop the hill of Certaldo. So, maybe something light for lunch. Maybe some soup. Which turns out to be impossibly mouthwatering, an item modestly titled bean soup on the handwritten menu. And never mind that my wheelchair is perched precariously outside of a café that looks like it might be going out of business, crude wooden tables with legs long on one side and short on the other to accommodate the slope. My wheels locked, I hope, but the feeling of things slipping always with me. And the soup. It is as though someone has gone into the finest backyard garden, plucked out the freshest Roma tomatoes, stirred them into a froth, whipped the beans in a similar manner, cooked everything for approximately 32 hours, and carefully added olive oil in concentric swirls. One modest bowl of soup is rich enough to serve a family. And no amount of exercise and can work this off.
But that's Italy. Coming at you like a good mother. Reminding you of your past and your present and, yes, our inevitable future. Where things are old and new and stable and sliding and perched atop hills, reminding us that whatever happens, wherever it happens, there's always lunch.
After which, there's dinner. As one relaxes into the holiday mentality, meals become major milestones. Objectives, deadlines, self-improvement, edification, all this has slipped down the hill town, gone and forgotten. All that's left is that pasta with pistachio nuts that you thought of ordering one night, but got seduced by the day's mushroom sauce. And it's all out there somewhere, and what the hell, for a change why not motor into town. Electric motor, that is. The wheelchair van Marlou and I are using proves to be convenient enough. But sometimes one wants to go overland. So, that's what we are doing now. Marlou, having wandered about the neighborhood, thinks she has found a path into town. Our hotel is perched high on what is probably the primordial bank of the River Elsa, and the slopes down to the town pose something of a barrier. Marlou thinks she knows a back route through a neighborhood. I tell her it's worth a try. The worst we would encounter would still be picturesquely Italian. My batteries are charged.
In the 1960s, the film 'Divorce Italian Style' satirized the marital laws of this Catholic country. 'Wheelchair Access Italian Style,' which I am currently filming in my mind, is every bit as entertaining, although not always as funny. Italians like to drive, and they like to drive fast. Colle is a relatively placid Tuscan town, but it does not pay to be inattentive when crossing the road. The reason the chicken crossed the road may still be puzzling some, but the quadriplegic crossed the road because he had to get to dinner and, curb cuts being few and far between, he darted to the other side of the street where he could. Marlow has found one place near a bus stop where the footpath gives way to the road, and that's where I blast, onrushing Fiats be damned. Splendid. And we are now in another, quasi-suburban world.
The street is lined with pleasant modern homes, four-story apartment houses and gardens. The latter are bursting with vegetables. I peer through a wrought iron fence at spinach, lettuce, artichokes and, yes, gradually coming into summer focus, row after row of tomatoes. The Italians have one simple and seemingly unvaried approach to staking tomatoes. They cross long poles in a succession of X's, run a long pole at the junction of the X's and bind the whole thing with string. Presumably the vines grow up one part of the X and dangle their fruit in space. It's hard to say, but to know for sure, I would have to return. Like in about two months. I will be checking the airline schedules when I get home.
Foot paths aren't much in this neighborhood, but the traffic isn't either, so who cares? Marlou and I wander straight down the pavement. Until the pavement ends and we head straight down the hill. I hope the hill will end conveniently, but it doesn't. Marlou scouts ahead and reports that we are stuck. The dirt track will dump us directly into traffic, no footpaths, no sidewalks, just a tight road with Alpha Romeos on a slalom into town. We head back. An old Italian man stops us, explains that he is 86 and wishes us good health. It takes us about five minutes to clarify this exchange, running '86' through the phrase books in our minds, then interpreting the 'salud' part, even though the word could not be clearer. It's not the language that eludes us. Perhaps it's the health. The cancer patient and the quadriplegic, having reversed course, are still seeking a land route into town.
Marlou has warned me about the hill. Just as the dietitian at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation warned me about the scale. How often do you weigh yourself, she asked during our recent consultation. I told her that I didn't. I wanted to tell her that medical people have no imaginations. That's why the Tuscan diet is so splendid, being Mediterranean and therefore good, transcending caloric concerns and transmuting itself into moments like this one, when the sense of the combined mass of wheelchair and olive-oil-bloated body now are beginning to feel out of control.
Because I've seen this hill, seen it from the window of our car as we bomb out of the town and up to our hotel. But I've never seen it this close, never seen it slipping under my tires, as it is now. True, the footpath zigzags, making switchbacks of the slope that cars assault head-on. This seems good. But the last part of the zigzag, surprisingly steep, challenges my wheelchair in unforeseen ways. I am slipping, the simple truth, with the joystick control bent backwards, my tires spinning in reverse, trying to take me uphill, while the batteries and the motors and more than a week of Italian cooking are taking me down. I tell Marlou to do something. I'm not sure what, and neither is she. My advice probably amounts to 'hold on,' a thought directed probably more at me then at her. The tilt decreases, things level a bit and we successfully cross the road that feeds in traffic from the autostrada.
Another neighborhood. This one is poorer, perched right on the river bank, and we are almost at the riparian edge of town. There's another steep stretch, the effect heightened by smooth paving stones, but we are almost there...except for this curious drop-off, an utterly unnecessary curb at the bottom of the slope. Weaving through a narrow passage, one of my tires tilts in the air, then, bam. The wheelchair's front wheels hit the pavement, and we are in town. From here, we cross the River Elsa, staring down at an enormous duck sitting on a flat stone. I am certain, though I cannot prove it, that this duck has dined on the remains of last night's fettuccine with wild boar, discreetly scraped from my plate and into its bill by a sympathetic busboy. There it squats. No scales, no dietitians, just a flat rock and the Elsa trickling by.
What can one say of Italy? Try sitting in a wheelchair in any sort of public place, a microphone strapped to one's head, laptop computer open and writing away with voice recognition -- that is to say, speaking words onto the screen -- and just see what happens. A crowd gathers. As a crowd might well gather in America if one did the same thing. The difference with Italy? A certain collective openness. A gentleness. And the feeling on my part that I want to share almost anything of myself.
This very day, Marlou and I went driving about Chianti. We drove north on the Michelin Guide's blue road and south on its red road. This is definitely the way to design a route through the region -- choose two roads with map colors that don't clash. Aside from that, forget it. There is absolutely nothing to plan, and certainly nothing to worry about, in planning one's day in Tuscany. Simply put, everything is beautiful. First, the people are beautiful. They are almost infallibly kind. Certainly, there are polite. And the only surprises come in their ways of warmth.
We were somewhere north of Castellina in Chianti, growing a little weary of driving and momentarily lost. We thought that the centro of the little town we happened to be passing through would be just the thing for some lunch. But we weren't sure. More exactly, we could not exactly find the centro. But, what the heck, here was a square, there was the one apparently open café in town. And there, modern miracle of Italian miracles, was a disabled parking space. It must be noted in passing that the EU is now doing for disabled people what the US did in the pre-Bush era. But we digress.
Lunch wasn't much. The café wasn't much. The town wasn't much. A grilled cheese and ham sandwich, Italian style, two espressos, and we had exhausted the menu. The problem was the toilet. In a one-horse town like this, one could not expect an ideal level of disabled restroom accommodation. Seated outside in the café's terrace, bladder conditions deteriorating, I asked Marlou to do some scouting. Then I changed my mind. Yes, there was a low step from the terrace to the café's interior, but the sort of thing I could usually deal with on my own. So, batteries charged, fully caffeinated, I headed inside.
The place was genuinely old. Behind a high counter there were no less than three employees. If one considers that there were not many more than three customers, and our bill for sandwiches and espressos came to less than five euros, the café's overhead and operational efficiency defied any principle of modern economics. But this isn't about modern economics. Italy's economics are doing splendidly, thank you very much, at least in this region. This was about.... Well, I actually don't know. It was about Italy. It was about an Italian café. And it was about time I found a men's room. And surely there was one inside. I could not quite bring myself to approach the trio at the counter with my pathetic Italian, which consist largely of gestures and guessed-at words, all in an accent that sounds suspiciously like Chico Marx. So I nipped into the back. Things were looking awfully atmospheric, downright folkloric, what with a smoke-filled room in the dim distance, old Italian men playing cards, drinking and hanging out. Surely this was a place for a men's room. And that line in the foreground, that small step down, the one my middle-aged and slow-to-adjust eyes judge to be about two or three inches...bam, well it's about five inches. Meaning that I am now stuck. There's no way back up this step after crashing down it. No, that's not true, because about four old Italian men are crowding around me, pointing, gesturing for ways to deliver assistance and now lifting my chair, with only moderate help from my battery-propelled rear wheels, back up the step. For which I thank them profusely, and they nod and smile warmly and return to their smoking and their cards. Most of these guys have seen a war, recall when Mussolini posters dominated the piazza and are not fazed by a cripple rolling in from the adjacent room.
The trio at the counter includes a stunning woman. Italy is full of stunning women. They pop up where and when you least expect them, and they inspire the usual hormonal surge mixed with a high level of admiration. Is it their attire? Their stance? Their quality of self-possessed sensuality, understated and uncontrived? I don't know. I don't know anything, such is the effect of this woman and all of her Italian national sisters. I do know, or I am reminded by, my bladder. It is full and filling and I am wasting precious time, or being wasted by time, both of which are so pleasant in Italy that one cannot tell the difference and ceases to care. But urinary necessity transcends all this, and I am now at the counter and asking the inescapable question: where are the toilets? I point helpfully up and down the street, as though this will jog the memory of the counter crew. But really, I'm just trying to show them that I am not a stupid non-gesturing American, that I know we are in Italy and gesticulating is part of what people do.
An old guy behind the counter emerges and motions for me to follow. He directs me out to the sidewalk, and we turn right. We turn together, as we walk together, as we proceed up the street together. For this man is not only pointing the way, but conducting me personally, point to point, origin to finale. Veloce, he tells me. And what can this word be if not the Latin cousin of velocity? Yes, I nod, my wheelchair goes fast. Batteria, I say. Fuerza, I add. We're still walking. The men's room appears to be in the neighboring town. We hang a right, then a left, and even start down the first twenty meters of a country lane when we stop. There is a mahogany door built into the wall. It has no sign. It has no lock. One side opens quickly, then the man fiddles with the bolts on the other side, until both doors stand open. This, it seems, is the town's wheelchair-accessible toilet. It has appeared the way saints appear in old movies. And when I am done peeing, the man appears too. He has been waiting for me, waiting to make sure I am okay. And all I can do is thank him, awkwardly and in a bad version of his own tongue, when what I want to say and does much more than thanks. I want to say that while he was waiting for me I realized that I had been waiting for him and his countrymen all my life.
There came a moment, passing through the stainless steel and class passage that separates the departing from the departed at Seattle Airport, that the journey took over, I gave up and the whole experience lightened. It was too late now. Too late to worry about moving a wheelchair halfway around the world, through Tuscany, London and back via Indianapolis. It was all going to happen or it wasn't. So, as a parting shot to things West Coast, why not have a final bowl of udon noodles, red pepper and sesame salt included, within sight of the Air France gate?
Why indeed? Two hours later we were eating again, high above Edmonton, Alberta. Eating and peeing, of course. The latter took me out of coach and into the strange world of Air France business class, a section of the plane amounting to all of 18 seats (I counted) in oval enclosures...more like 18 pods. Most of the latter were unoccupied, but one could glimpse a head or limb here and there. I let the pod people sleep and tried to do the same myself. But it was hopeless. Conditions were cramped, the hour was wrong. The hour was going to stay wrong for a long time.
Few passengers at Charles de Gaulle Airport get a chance to see the underside of the corridors they rush through. Wheelchair passengers get a close inspection. With barely an hour between planes, I was in no mood to inspect anything. At this enormously overcrowded airport, our plane had parked far from the terminal, double parked one might say. The planeload of passengers walked down a stairway, just like in the olden days, wandered across the concrete, and boarded buses. We waited. The flight to Florence was two terminals away and becoming more distant by the minute. Any minute, said one flight attendant. Wheelchair? Oh, you'll be getting a special bus. In a gesture of intended efficiency, that felt downright magnanimous, I had checked my electric wheelchair right through to Florence. No insisting that the thing be brought to the gate in Paris -- a push wheelchair with attendant would get me through the airport just fine. That was the plan.
The same sort of truck with a lift that raises 300 trays of lasagna and cans of Sprite to your airplane's galley can also offload one cripple in a borrowed wheelchair, it seems. Unfortunately, this involves a circuitous ride through Aeromexico baggage carts, Fly Bulgaria fuel trucks and acres of parked planes to French immigration. We were running short of time, so our truck driver doubled as a wheelchair pusher and helped to hustle us through. The French officials helped themselves, it must be pointed out. In Western Europe border officials know the difference between a Jewish American cripple and an Al Qaeda terrorist. No one in the US has spotted this nuance, so airplane boarding is a tedious frisking and remove-the-shoes affair.
Fortunately, sanity reigned at Charles de Gaulle. Okay, so Marlou had to toss out the free bottle of Air France wine I had sequestered in our book bag. It seemed such a wise and penurious move, saving the small portion of free vin rouge, authentically French, for a rainy vacation day. Nevermind. Even to the French, a bottle of fluid is a bottle of fluid. No frisking, just brisking, and you're free to go, sir. And hope you make your plane. Not to worry. We began the reverse version of what we had just done on arrival. Passengers were boarding a bus, as I was boarding a lift truck for another careening between, through and under terminals. Yes, just look up. The passengers walking down the glass hallway above you don't even know they're on a bridge, let alone that plaster has broken and fallen away from the structure that supports them. Who cares? We are now getting a strange view of Air France subsidiaries. BritAir, for example. I believe it serves Brittany. City Jet is ours. All these short-hop planes bear the Air France logo, as well as the subsidiary's. Travel...you learn things...like the mass efficiency of America does not obtain everywhere. Air France has a bunch of little airlines for a bunch of little reasons, so don't worry your pretty little head. No, don't even worry about how with gas prices exploding Air France is operating flights like ours from Seattle one third empty. Or why this plane we are boarding for Florence is a small four-engine BAC 146, notoriously fuel inefficient. Instead, look down. Where are we? Descending over northern Italy, which turns out to be green and hilly beyond expectation. Somehow, I thought there were the Alps then the flats. Wrong. This hilly region goes on and on, and I don't even know what it is, but I'm certain that I should visit.
Florence Airport looks like a small field for private planes that has been recently, and only partially, expanded. Our plane touches down on a short strip, rolls to the runway's end and simply turns around. There is no taxiway. We roll right back up the runway to the tiny terminal. Florence. It's not hard to find the driver. It's not hard to find anything at Florence Airport, including our disabled van, parked just outside. It's a surprisingly nifty vehicle, and the Italian driver puts Marlou through the paces in minutes. The van's back door opens, the whole thing kneels like a modern city bus, and the wheelchair rolls inside. We thank him and roll away. Of course, we don't get far. It may be 2 p.m. in Florence, but it's 5 a.m. in California, and there is no way, no sane and legal way, out of the airport. Marlou could drive the Kangoo -- our Renault van -- at high speed right through the wooden exit gate, but neither of us is certain that it is wooden. I don't even believe it is an exit gate. Marlou doesn't either. We park. Marlou scouts. Magically extracting euros from some past trip, she pays the parking guy and returns. We hit the road.
Miraculously, it is the right road. It is the road to Siena, not the motorway to Rome or Bologna, although signs offer these tantalizing possibilities. No, we actually get on the Raccordo, the private motorway, the one financed by some Italian bank for reasons that are obscure. And there it is, Colle val d'Elsa nord, our sign. In our sexual role reversal, Marlou doesn't like to ask for directions, but I do. So, naturally, Marlou has been following a set of instructions provided by MapQuest, while I was counting on the hotel's website version. No wonder we are lost. Marlou tells me she is running out of steam. We are running out of Colle val d'Elsa, the town petering out into industrial outskirts. It's somewhere to the left. I'm certain. It's in the country, not the town. I've seen photos on the Internet. Maybe it's up there. It is. The Eagle has landed.
I'm all for the Internet and credit cards, and making advanced travel arrangements, but one can carry this to an extreme. It is hardly necessary to mess about with advance tickets for Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, for the rail journey takes all of 90 minutes, but I insisted. Something in me just needs to flash my 2005 British rail discount card and get away with another year of undocumented cripple travel. So that's what I have done, or attempted to do, though this involved repeated error messages along the lines of 'cannot process credit.' Wells Fargo Visa interrupted this process with a friendly inquiry as to the legitimacy of my most recent purchases. $2.25 to Caltrain. $17.05 to Café Borrone. And, yes, $62.53 to Great Western Railway. I assured the automated voice that everything was okay, impatiently went about clicking the 'pay now' screen button, to no effect, the same message appearing each time...problem authorizing credit. Until, after a call to Wells Fargo, found that with each click I had successfully bought one, and now totaling five, tickets to Moreton. Round-trip at that.
Which is the sort of thing that sends a person out to the garden. Just today I was saying to Marlou, in view of the staggering cauliflower production, imminent garlic harvest, ascending lettuce crop... and the general preservation of the biosphere, everything composted in place, with the addition of some blood meal to balance the nitrogen loss. Looking at this agricultural masterpiece, feeling how Candide would have felt at the end of his life with a Ph.D. in agronomy, it came to me that this might be my crowning achievement. And, I asked Marlou, having reached this pinnacle in suburban farming relatively early in my life, would I still have time for the little people?
No. That's the simple answer. With a garden this bountiful, I barely have time for my public, let alone all those other folks who want an autograph, want the smallest sliver of my broccoflower, and keep buying those signed pictures of my onions on the Internet. Besides, I need time to deal with Air France. Some woman at some reservations desk decided, after I was on hold for 25 minutes, that, yes, it was essential to know that I was traveling with an electric wheelchair and...just a moment. She returned with a set of questions that are unprecedented in my traveling life. Remember, Air France doesn't exactly fly DC-3s from Seattle to Paris. The Airbus is a big, humongous sucker, along the lines of a 747. And why Air France needs to know the height, width and length in centimeters, along with the weight, well, it's anyone's guess. I made up all the numbers. Would that do? Just a moment. After another few minutes she was back on the line with additional news. It's a small plane from Paris to Florence, she said. Air France could not guarantee my wheelchair would fly. Call back tomorrow.
Never mind that the BA 146 is a four-engine plane that holds 70 passengers and can accommodate my wheelchair. Forget all that. Don't argue. Lie. Assure Air France that the last time they, Air France, flew me from Paris to Florence, there was no problem at all. This is what travel is all about, what it does for the self doubting and low-confidence people of this earth. It makes us come on strong, strong as the broccoli, of which we are king. Out of my way, Air France. You don't know who you're talking to.
The fact is, I'm not sleeping enough, staying up late fussing over travel details. In a sense, this isn't such a bad thing. I am, if nothing else, acknowledging the limitations of my aging body. In particular, I've been concerned about the long flight home. I can recall a time, quite awhile ago, maybe 12 years in the past, when I used frequent flyer miles to go to London via Dallas. Even then, in an entirely different musculoskeletal era, there was simply too much sitting. Worse, on the flight from Dallas, I got stuck in the middle of a five-seat-across row, and I'm still working the kinks out of my butt. So, worrying and fretting and what-to-doing about the merciless trip from London-Gatwick to, inexplicably, Indianapolis, and then on to San Francisco. Upgrade? Staggeringly costly. Change flights? It's really too late. Make a call to the airline, well why not? And I got seated in the bulkhead row, which is all that anyone could want. Problem solved. There is a God.
If you don't doubt the latter, check out my garden. I was just about to fire up the electric toothbrush, make ready with the coyote urine, and throw another load of Dr. Earth, along with some chicken manure, into my raised beds, when I saw them. Dangling, swelling, rounding. Tomatoes. Real ones, on the way, without any further intervention from me, and not requiring additional worry. Why not? It's spring. Things are springing. And by the time we spring back from Europe, even if I'm no spring chicken, I'll be ready to spring into agricultural action and bring these puppies home, talking them down, lining them up with the approach, hang on guys, because your Pomodoro destiny is about to be realized.
As for "Indestructible," I hope it will finally turn up in Netflix, and I'll see it on the big plasma screen. The experience would have been better at the Roxie. Some films, perhaps most films, need an audience, the shared breathing, laughter, coughing and simultaneous experiencing that goes with getting out of the house and into someone else's chair. But for me, the experience would have been dominated by transit. And the schedule is just a little too tight. Rushing out the door of the Roxie, down to the BART station and hoping for the 7:14 connection at Millbrae. Marlou and I have work to do. We need to go over travel details tonight, and I want to be here.
Still I will miss something. I will miss the experience of rolling around San Francisco streets alone. For me, there's something inherently stimulating and lonely in these imagined scenes, crossing Mission Street, rolling up the sidewalks of 16th beneath the canopy of Muni electric bus cables, dealing with the Roxie's interior...the last time I went there, I wasn't using a power wheelchair. Doing it all alone, feeling everything I have done alone and feeling, always feeling, the sadness inherent in this. Perhaps, anticipating that I may be alone again. Much of me doesn't really believe this, but I understand that it's part of the work of my life to try on the knowledge, slip into it and get a sense of how it feels. Marlou is doing remarkably well, thank you very much, and we mean to keep it that way. Still, it's not entirely up to us.
So, however rewarding, it would have been a sobering and pensive journey to the Roxie. It would have been a chance to settle down from this frantic pace of trip preparation, and hand matters over to the rail companies and give up for a few hours. It would have been time for me. Time to face my life, on its own, amid the anonymity of trains and cities. Such melancholy times are not to be avoided. They are saddening, but they are grounding. The thing is, what's even more grounding is the ground. That's where the tomatoes come from. That's where I'll be this afternoon.
I want to tell her that there is nothing routine about my ego. It is, in fact, extraordinary. I want to tell her this, but I don't have the energy. That's because I'm thinking of the new mobilephone on my desk, the one from AT&T that arrived in the small carton with the big manual. Just looking at the thing, its tiny buttons and inexplicable screen, places where cords go in, or, perhaps, plugs insert. I don't like it. I must have it. I must not only have it, but have it operational, because as everyone knows, the chances of Sergio actually turning up at Florence Airport with our hired van are virtually nil. My nonroutine ego can see this, can see it here from my desk in California. And yes, it is bad enough that I don't speak a word of Italian and will only be able to plead and wave receipts around at various officials when we find ourselves stranded. And like a Beckett play, there is another act, but it will probably run in reverse. Staged entirely in my head, humidity blowing off the Tuscan plain, authentic Italian smog massing overhead, taxis honking, Marlou despairing, while the great play of van rental runs backwards in my mind, from the moment the deal was closed to the second I saw something on the web about wheelchairs and minivans and San Marino...at that point, I will attempt to leap aboard the great European mobilephone wave and have a word with Sergio.
Do our aging minds really imitate our cartilage, losing flexibility, requiring more and more manual working and stretching to function at all? My mobilephone is no longer functioning. I learned that just hours ago in the course of buying some shoes. Why buy shoes? Really, I make it a practice to never buy shoes, a fact which became evident when the clerk at Nordstrom's eyed my current pair. I assured him that this is where I had bought them, right here in Stanford Shopping Center. Well, he said, glancing about the racks, he had worked there for years and never seen my brand. Years. I didn't want to get into it. Instead, I got into some slip ons. Okay, so they are simply enormous, adding on inches at the front to accommodate my plastic leg brace which requires width, the very lateral dimension that these shoes, the only ones in the orthopedic ballpark, totally lacked. Sorry, only one width.
Anyway, having exhausted the possibilities at Nordstrom's, I rolled back to my van, stopping off to buy Marlou a sandwich, then hurtling aboard the wheelchair lift, up and into the Ford. I pulled out my phone to alert Marlou regarding lunch and.... It wasn't my mobilephone battery, and it wasn't not paying my bill. It was the new phone. The one I just bought and haven't yet activated. The one that's sitting on my desk at home. That is what we call in the high-tech world 'the new phone' -- as opposed to this, the old phone.
Screw it. Good thing I'd just bought new shoes. Nothing like new shoes to make a new man, I always say. What I said to the Nordstrom salesman was thanks for having one pair of shoes I can get my plastic brace into. The ones I am wearing now, and the ones...that are so big to accommodate the massive orthotic that I literally cannot drive. Nevermind. I change back into the old shoes. Just like I'm going to change into the new phone.
Sergio, soon driving down from Trieste, will be one of those cool Italian or former-Yugoslav-Eurotrash hipsters who drives with one finger, smoking and talking on his mobile phone at the same time. He dials with the flick of a fingernail, texts his friends in Riyadh with a spare thumb, while catching a little porn on the Internet. He is cool. He is a mobilephone meister. I am a stupid old schlump, and everyone is going to realize this when I arrive at Florence and fumble around trying to call within Europe, using my AT&T Within Europe Plan, the instructions to which, although printed, will require a return to graduate school. For which it's too late.
That's why, once home and back at my desk, the box and the manual and the only real mobilephone in my possession, the one currently in Styrofoam, remain dormant. After all, I'm getting ready for a trip. First thing: deal with Middlemarch. No sense in taking a book version of a book, when you can get an iPod version. I am loading the entire thing, all the spoken files, into my favorite MP3 player. Of course, I do have the print version. Or will have it, checking the prices of these things. Middlemarch turns up, in successive web searches, as Middlesex. March becomes 'The March,' by E.L. Doctorow, a great Jewish writer whose take on the Civil War I have never read. Which is something to think about, right now, and the silly mobile phone in the Styrofoam awaits my attention. No, it's got my attention. And like it or not, ego routines notwithstanding, mobilephone or no, I am on my way.
How much healing can one expect from a sunflower? With their tops bitten off, will they bifurcate and grow two more flowers? Or will they give up, genetically programmed to abandon reproductive hope and simply die? Most astonishing, a squirrel even bit off the top of a three-inch seedling. The thing was embryonic, not even the hint of a flower, a plant that was barely in its infancy and all future -- and what squirrel would bite that sort of thing unless it was a truly evil rodent? if I wasn't heading for Tuscany on Saturday I would cancel the order for coyote urine and buy a couple of live coyotes. Sometimes travel can really cramp one's style.
But while cramping, it actually goads me into badly needed action. Dammit if I didn't just discover that the ballot sitting on my desk needs to arrive at the county seat tomorrow. So, all of a sudden, I voted. The cauliflower is on the brink of harvest and Marlou and I are on the brink of cruciform-vegetable poisoning, so I have determined who will be our vegetable recipient. Avery, of course. The kid is just precocious enough to actually eat cauliflower without protest. So, Avery, go for it. And you have my permission to get in touch with your boy-hunter energy and kill a few squirrels.
Squeezed and goaded and hurried to get things done. Because when traveling with a wheelchair, the things you forget can make life awfully difficult. And since life is difficult enough without forgetting, you try to remember. The passports. The receipts for flights, hotels, theater tickets and, above all, the paid-in-San Marino-and-transported-from-Trieste wheelchair van. I want to get a look at the driver's face when he finally meets us at Florence Airport. Surely, there can't be many American nuts who do this sort of thing. Squeezed and hurried, and even aware that the July trip to Seattle needs to be arranged now, because by the time we're back it will be July. Another van, even another access problem. The Hood Canal area isn't really designed for wheelchairs. But, then, what is?
Stanford is, most of it. The campus is a mile from our home, but I only find myself there a few times a year. There's no particular reason. That's why when Marlou suggested we drive over to have a look at the Rodins near the campus chapel, I did not protest. No, that's not the real reason. Marlou told me that she had been thinking about the Burghers of Calais, the bronze castings we have passed a few times on the way to campus concerts. They've been on your mind, I said.
It says something about the delicate opening in our relationship that Marlou said "yes" in her quiet way. She is protective of her private experience and in another era, maybe a few months ago, might have deflected attention away from this matter of statuary. But in the newfound trust that seems to accompany our crisis, the topic remained open and so did we. I have learned not to probe. Marlou has learned not to close up. And between the two of us, instinctively working together, we got to the next thing. The Burghers of Calais are facing death, Marlou explained, telling me a bit of background from the Hundred Years War. She wanted to see them.
I was busy. I had things to do. I hadn't gotten in my requisite and regulation 1000 words of writing per day. I had no interest in leaving home, seeing the Rodin I'd already seen. So I said yes immediately. Because whatever the reluctance and inertia, one doesn't say no to someone facing up to death. And the reasons for this are not clear to me. Yes, death is something we all face. But that doesn't mean we have to face it together, or face it right now on a Sunday afternoon. Can't this wait? Apparently not. I could feel it in my bones. The arthritic bones, the old ones, the musculoskeletal infrastructure that increasingly moves with difficulty. Never mind. I could feel the call, hear the imperative. Death waits for no man. And no man waits for death. In fact, we need to honor it, and in so doing, honor everyone who lives.
You would think that the Burghers of Calais were rock stars, or at least Rodin was, the way Indian and Japanese tourists were swarming about posing and clicking. I waited a respectful moment or two, then ignored the picture takers and rolled my wheelchair among the statues. Astonishment, disbelief, agony, resignation and puzzlement. Such are the reactions of the city's elders as they await their likely end. Ropes around their necks, gesturing oddly, they face their captors. The odd gestures, Marlou remarked, are actually physical impossibilities. The hands are not only too big, but turned at orthopedically impossible angles. Rodin gets to us this way, Marlou was saying. Our bodies feel the discomfort of his poses, and this quickens our appreciation.
Nothing quickens the coyote urine. It is either on its way or in a United Parcel Service warehouse or being manufactured in someone's bathtub or never arriving at all, having been replaced by a $9,000 charge to some hotel in Cancun. Meanwhile, we're leaving for Tuscany, things need to be done and, don't forget, make sure your athletic trainer comes by for today's fortnightly limb stretching session with a small roll of athletic tape. You'll need athletic tape soon enough in Tuscany, where there might just be one exercycle at the hotel, and there's no other way to affix your spastic, quadriplegic foot to a pedal. Don't forget. Plan ahead. But while you're planning, remember that all plans fall apart. They are designed to. Marlou is feeling this very heavily these days. She's not alone. And that's our job, both of us, to remember.
