Burghers of Calais

Like the Seventh Calvary riding to the rescue of settlers besieged by Indians, the United Parcel Service is on its way.  The horses' hooves are pounding.  The saddlebags are flapping.  Dust flying.  And hope hangs in the balance.  The cargo, the precious 40 ounces of coyote urine, may or may not arrive in time.  Meanwhile, there is suspense.  Everything is suspended.  And I watch, my worldview altered in the way of such things, as yet another sunflower suffers decapitation at the hands, or the incisors, of a squirrel.

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.