July 2008 Archives

Limbo is the place one arrives at 4:30 a.m., awake enough to not be sleeping, groggy enough to not be thinking.  At least, not thinking clearly.  Which is the whole point.  Thinking clearly comes of sitting up, getting out of bed, sliding into the wheelchair and rolling out to another room.  The latter can be any room.  Just a room not named for its central piece of furniture, the bed.  Try the living room.  Unless you want to remain above the surface of sleep, below consciousness, in limbo.

One could say I'm a little anxious.  By 11:15 a.m., I'm having an optical migraine, a transient phenomenon that alarms me.  And since the thing disappears right on schedule, what really alarms me is that I'm not aware of what's alarming me.  Marlou's health is always a good bet.  But no, a better bet is that we are close these days, finding a lot in each other to enjoy and appreciate and laugh at.  Which turns out to be one of life's most frightening experiences.  It's actually easier to long for love than to find it.  Finding it is like getting an all-expense-paid trip around the world, first-class, on the best airline.  Only to discover that you're actually the pilot.  Welcome aboard.

By 11:45 a.m., things ocular having calmed down, I roll in the time-honored path of the lost, toward Peet's.  The place is jammed, Menlo Park's need for caffeine seemingly inexhaustible.  Never mind, I order a double machiatto, request the thing in a cup and saucer, knowing that no tables are free.  There's space at the distant counter, but I'm not going there, because I've spotted one of Menlo Park's schizophrenics ordering at the counter.  I know her the way I know lots of locals.  It is reassuring for me to feel part of things, greet people downtown, say hi to this one and that one.  Until I realize that while I am saying hello to the one named Carol, someone on one of the moons of Jupiter is also saying hello, which explains why she isn't taking things in quite as quickly as one would expect.  And just when you're wondering if she is on or off her meds, you realize she could ask you the very same question, and the answer would be no.  Which is why I'm sitting in a corner, unpleasantly close to the men's room, one machiatto steaming on my lap, my lap protected by the San Francisco Chronicle which since its downsizing, no longer affords the thermal insulation it once did.  Not to worry, for the newspaper is folded and still in its plastic suburban wrapper.  A reminder to praise the universe for certain miracles.

There are more across the street.  Because I am dazed and demented, my actions are impulsive.  Yes, I have avoided the schizophrenic Carol and am now fully caffeinated, but there's the problem of the day's schedule.  I'm supposed to see Edna in her nursing home that afternoon, and when someone is pushing 90, what the hell, no sense in postponing.  So might as well have lunch in the park.  I grab some take-out sushi and head for the benches.  For some reason, and in my state of anxiety reason is pretty thin on the ground, I reject the benches.  Never mind.  There is a perfectly empty picnic table in the shade, and shade is feeling good because, as my ophthalmologist's nurse pointed out to me, bright daylight has something to do with optical migraines.  And the latter have to do with things being out of control.  Or, as a friend pointed out, seeing too much.  I'm open to this splendid psychoanalytic interpretation, but not now.  Now, I want calm.  I want to sit in the dark of that redwood shade, place my sushi on the end of the empty table and ingest some food.

There's a bolt on the bottom of my wheelchair.  The thing is designed to slot into a electromechanical lock, anchoring the chair while I drive.  It does this quite well, perhaps too well.  On even slightly uneven terrain, it drags like a ship's anchor.  This condition is serious enough for me to have the bolt removed whenever I go to Europe, cobblestones being what they are.  But this isn't exactly Siena, so I'm surprised when I head off the sidewalk toward the hard ground beneath the redwood tree where the picnic table shrouds itself in shadow.  Surprised and not going anywhere.  There's a scrape, and then there's nothing.  The drag bolt has caught on the sidewalk, the chair tilting toward the ground.  The tilt is enough to have one wheel spinning in the air, the other churning up dirt.  

Because I am in the midst of some strange sort of internal crisis, I can't help abandoning standard practice.  Among the latter is an adaptation to one obvious condition, the breeze.  The one that blows off the Bay, the one that is making this day a pleasant 72° Fahrenheit, and the one that wafts things about.  There's a drinking fountain next to me, dry as a bone, so it provides a convenient shelf.  The logical thing would be to place the plastic package of sushi on top of the paper napkins, anchoring them against the breeze.  But I seem to be exploring the anchor thing from various negative dimensions.  The bolt that anchors my chair to my van is currently anchoring me to the sidewalk.  The napkins that I have placed anchor-free on top of the sushi now begin to blow in all directions, as I could have predicted.  And I am stuck.

Still, and one must be grateful for such things, with the defunct drinking fountain right beside me, there is something to grab.  I need something to hold onto as I stand up, taking my weight off the wheelchair and trying to maneuver it half off the dirt and onto the sidewalk.  This should work.  But it doesn't.  The anchor bolt allows the chair to spin like a top.  Fortunately, this provides enough entertainment for several lunch hour regulars to rise from their benches and pull the chair to safety.  I thank them all profusely.  Safely on the concrete once again, I grab the sushi, note the napkins flying about and see that I am spoiling the earth.  Me, Menlo Park citizen, a napkin flinger.  That's my trash out there, my brown dioxin-free environmental napkins, littering the park.  I am more base then base.  I have no right to do this.  I must fix this, now.

So, taking a slightly different route, I sail off the sidewalk -- and do exactly the same thing.  I am stuck again.  The bolt has caught on another section of the sidewalk.  Utterly unpredictable, yet in view of my state, totally predictable at the same time.  I'm aware that I'm now achieving the status of, say, schizophrenic Carol.  I am chronic.  I am like one of those demented street people who can't remember where they live or why.  This time, interestingly the same people who helped me before do not materialize.  I don't blame them.  I get out of the chair a second time, knock the thing around until a young woman takes pity on me.  Abandoning my lunch hour litter, I head for a shady bench.  I wolf down the sushi and get hiccups.  Some woman in Los Angeles had hiccups day and night for three years.  This is what I'm thinking about on the way home.  Sometimes being on the way home, however familiar, demands one's fullest attention.

Edna.  Might as well leave now.  I load myself into the van, park at Stanford shopping center across from Edna's old folks home and remember.  Shoes.  I've got to find some shoes.  Mine are cracked and so old that the model is no longer in manufacture.  That's why God invented Macy's.  The place is oddly deserted.  Maybe not so odd, reports of the national economy being what they are.  In the men's shoe department, I eyeball racks of the latest styles.  I don't care about the latest styles.  I show the woman my foot.  She shows me, in the politest way, the door.  Nothing in stock is going to fit my plastic brace.  Why don't I try the specialty shop by Bloomingdale's?  What the hell, it's all battery power, and I roll my electric wheelchair toward The Walking Shop.

There is no one inside this place, either.  The shopgirl, and she is a girl, eyes me with something like suspicion.  No, it is only like suspicion.  Actually, it's something else.  It's something that moves in an unpleasant continuum from my fears about my optical migraine to my fears about inheriting my father's brain tumor to general fears of death to a broader terror of age and dissolution.  I'm not one of the beautiful people.  I am not young, my aging features have sharpened and after years of muscular imbalance my head tilts oddly on my neck.  There is a reason why my wheelchair is equipped with a special torso support.  My body is twisting into a giant S.  Viewing myself as I speed by the plate glass windows of the stores, I see the truth.  I am a disabled person in a wheelchair, and my body is bending, settling and distorting under the weight of musculoskeletal time.  I am losing my looks, losing any vestige of my youth, losing in general, it seems.  Which may be why I seem to make this young woman uncomfortable.  And I do.  

This is the sort of perception I have avoided much of my life, but I'm ready for it now.  Youth goes, the body goes, life goes.  I am a reminder of all of these things, which may be why the twentysomething girl who has no one to wait on but me in the current retail drought looks as though she would really like to be in the storeroom, not out here fitting sportif footwear on this cripple.  It's okay.  She doesn't have my size.  And I'm off to see Edna now.  Edna will see 90 before The Walking Shop sees a size 11 EEE.  And I would rather see her.

After my parents' divorce, with my brother and I in the care of my father and living in the upstairs above his office, life was emotionally arid and infused with paternal depression, but it least, there was change.  Every month or so I found myself in Santa Barbara, home to my mother, her erratic mood swings and the Pacific Ocean.  Whatever was unreliable in my life, one could count on the sea.  From my mother's house, it shimmered, the Pacific luminescence glinting, the swells rolling.  Small boats came in close to shore, cutting kelp.  What they did with their seaweed harvest was a mystery to me, though I never cared one way or the other.  The ocean was vast, constant and hypnotic.  I needed all the constancy I could get.

Which may be why, as one of my visits came to its close, that I conceived of a plan.  I was lying on the sands of Arroyo Burro State Park, just up the coast from my mom's, when it came to me.  Take it home.  Pack it up and bring it with.  My high school science teacher would be delighted.  Or, at least, accepting.  I would arrive with several gallons of seawater, anemones, barnacles and sand crabs, pour everything into an empty aquarium, plug in the bubbling aerator.  And voilà.  That was the vision, and in retrospect, the unfolding of this plan would be as revealing as any personality test or vocational aptitude exam.

First, the gallon jugs.  I emptied bleach out of this one, retrieved that one from my mother's garbage and probably scrounged a couple from the neighbors.  It didn't take long.  What I may lack in focus, I generally make up for in obsession.  Once assembled, it was easy enough for my brother and I to fill our plastic containers with gallons of seawater.  My mother looked on skeptically, kept asking questions which I kept ignoring.  Never mind.  A vision was a vision.  Things were going to unfold, mother or not.  I had adopted a certain perseverance during years of sandlot play, and now this was coming in handy.  Yes, my mother's big suitcase bulged ominously once the heavy jugs were inside, but that was why God invented rope.  I wrapped the luggage tight, cinched the knots and hit the road.

The road was the railroad, the Southern Pacific.  And the grumbling began at the station.  Too heavy.  The porter lifted the bag with obvious strain, muttering.  The cab driver in Los Angeles did exactly the same.  "You kids with your damned books," he said.  At the Greyhound bus station, he swore again.  Being all of 14 years old, I did not have to feign innocence.  All I did was watch, keeping an eye on the straining rope around the bag, and hoping.  Hours later, 9:30 p.m. when the Greyhound pulled off the freeway at Banning and paused, engine running, while the driver heaved bags onto the sidewalk, it seemed a miracle had occurred.  The bag was intact, ropes still bound.  And all my brother and I had to do was to heave the sloshing load up the hill to my father's office and home.

In retrospect, what I was doing at that age traveling unassisted with my younger brother through Los Angeles, waiting at a bus station in what, even then, was an unsavory part of town...all of this seems incredible.  Yes, it was another era.  But only partly.  Even then, the experience was a bit frightening.  Yet it speaks of a certain trade-off in my life.  If the Bendix kids had been emotionally abandoned, we also made the most of being on our own.  We learned to travel.  We learned to endure.  Yet what I anticipated in learning from the seawater aquarium was less clear.  My only goal was to set it up, get it bubbling and keep it going.

Did I convince my father to drive me to school the next morning with the bulging suitcase?  This memory has faded.  It is entirely possible that I dragged the bag to school myself.  Certainly I had the motivation.  What I do recall is arriving in the science room with my seaside loot.  I did not expect my teacher to be impressed.  He had studied oceanography in college.  Still, I thought that once my seawater was bubbling and the anemones waving, he would find something encouraging to say.  Instead, he left me on my own, as I poured the jugs into the tank.  A sand crab floated to the surface, legs motionless.  An anemone sank to the bottom, tentacles limp.  The aquarium pump frothed, churning the sand.  This was the sea in a glass container.  Lifeless, not very promising, many miles from the nearest tidepool and any possible reinfusion of live creatures.  I dropped some kelp in the water and decided it was alive.  The next day, it floated in a way that seemed promising.  The day after that, the seawater still bubbling foolishly, I saw the writing on the wall and quietly dumped the aquarium down the drain.

In retrospect, much of my life course stands revealed.  Compulsiveness or dogged perseverance driven by an image but no particular plan -- followed by a premature acceptance of failure.  Down the drain in the end.  In the case of my science teacher, what strikes me is that he was not in the way.  At the same time, he was not at the helm.  In an ideal world, someone would have intervened, shown me how to make lemonade from my lemons.  He was a good guy, I recall that.  He loved science and enjoyed teaching it.  His hope, I surmise, was that I would show some interest, ask for some help, try to turn this thing around.  While I, used to things not working out, was determined to avoid humiliation.  Dump the aquarium, cut my losses, pretend it hadn't happened and wait for the next thing.

The problem, of course, is that in life there are only so many next things.  I'm facing that reality now.  I have a book to finish.  The task seems impossible.  There is much in me that wants to dump and run.  This is what I have done much of my life.  Over the weekend, at a family reunion, I spent time with a young boy, once a foster kid, now recently adopted.  He has had a traumatic background, demands endless attention, yet cannot be still long enough to take in the very love he seeks.  He has learned to keep moving.  He will have to learn how to stop and be still.  Can I?

There's the eye thing.  And there's the I thing.

There's also the I Ching, a staple of my university days, and maybe it's time to give the old text another go.  The Chinese book of changes, and my knowledge of the tome does not extend beyond its English title, offered a perspective on fate.  In my 20s, fate having dealt a rather startling blow to my spinal cord, I was much concerned with the workings of fortune.  Over time, my imagination has drifted in other directions.  But at this point in 2008, I'm grabbing it back, pulling the sucker my way, the way bad vaudeville performers used to get hooked and dragged offstage.

My father-in-law and I are heading off for morning coffee.  He's visiting from Hawaii, and over the last two years, as Marlou's health has been on the line, we have seen more of each other and developed a rapport.  He is an intensely private man, and he tends to conceive of one's life course in highly traditional terms.  Since I'm at a stage of writing about and finally coming to grips with my own biography, the unfolding of a human existence is uppermost in my mind.

Uppermost in his, these days, is one of his grandsons.  The latter has encountered a mishap, has reached an early-20s crisis.  His grandparents want the best for him, so does Marlou, and the nephew-grandson is the topic of the day.  On this day, Dick and I are making our way to Peet's.  This has become something of a ritual, bonding in caffeine.  And we are not fifty meters up the road before the eye thing rolls through my mind.  Is the day bright, or is that the eye thing, what my ophthalmologist's nurse describes as an ocular migraine?  It's neither, I know.  I am becoming panicky.  The day is no brighter than any other.  Panic.  For what?

Inside Peet's, air-conditioned and, yes, shady behind the smoked glass of its windows, the panic has dissolved and our conversation begun.  Marlou suggested it might unfold this way, and it has.  Dick is discussing the grandson.  He lays things out, tells me his concerns, looks to me for my perspective.  Our perspectives are different, but that's why we are having this discussion.  And the panic?  Hard to say.  But the father wound can be deep.  I know some things Dick doesn't.  He know some things I don't.  And here we are.  What is important is that, differences or not, a father figure values my thoughts.  My perspective is worthy.  And somehow, being a modest 61 years old, there's a newfound and threatening power in this.

Threatening?  Two hours later it's lunch time and Alan and I are having a ritual Jewish meal, that is, Chinese.  I've been asked to write a recitation.  Alan's stepdaughter is getting married, and as I did for his own wedding, I am writing a comic, rhymed poem.  My shrimp with black bean sauce is proving too much.  The weather is hot, I am old, and I want this plate of food to go away.  But it's air-conditioned here, and Alan is reminiscing.  He is mercilessly critical in his self-assessment, naturally realistic and committedly unromantic.  So his recollections of his own wedding and the satirical epic poem I read aloud have the ring of absolute truth.  After my reading, he says, people gave up making toasts.  Everyone had laughed so hard, the wedding principals captured so well, there was nothing more to say.  

A conversation stopper, I chime in.  But as my words emerge, they sound false.  The stoppage of conversation was hardly a negative.  I'm trying to absorb Alan's high compliment.  Made even higher by his credibility and grounded, almost glib, sincerity.  I wrote a great piece, he is telling me.  He has told me this several times over the years, even adding that one of his cousins who reads plenty of scripts for the film industry, was hugely impressed by my effort.

Power.  Empowerment.  When it comes at you, it is there to take, acknowledge and appreciate.  Maybe the power isn't all mine.  Maybe fate or the universe or something beyond the I -- maybe that's the source.  Just as creativity flows at us, as artists have always said, from the Muses.  Or from Athena.  Or from Cleveland.  Whatever, wherever.  I think this may be a key to both the eye problem, and the I problem.  True, obstacles to empowerment exist on a psychological level, in the old and twisted links to the parent figures.  But there's another way to look at things.  When life gives us gifts, we must receive them, be thankful, and express that thanks by passing them on.

When Alan's stepdaughter asked me to write her wedding poem, I was in Italy.  From the Wi-Fi lobby of the Relaise della Rovere, I wrote her quite sincerely, and in ways beyond my momentary understanding, that I would be honored.

Another thing about the Good Mother.  She takes feelings, particularly anxiety, seriously.

Anxiety?  The truth seems simple enough.  The more I get close to Marlou, the more we are open to each other, vulnerable with each other...and the more I seem to be going out on an emotional limb.  Why?  Well, there's the obvious explanation, the thought that Marlou may leave me.  But I'm not entirely convinced this is the reason.  Fear of emotional abandonment springs directly from my childhood.  In California psychobabble we speak of "being there" for each other.  And while glib, maybe this expression is as good as any.  After all, it's not that people have to do anything about a kid and his emotional plight.  What can be done, anyway?  Much of the time, all you can do is listen.  The message isn't really a message.  It's an experience.  I'm not alone, you're not alone and we are not alone.

That's why I give myself high marks for phoning the ophthalmology department at my local clinic.  Occasionally, many months apart, I get what looks like the symptoms of a retinal tear.  There's a pattern of jagged light.  Then the thing goes away, maybe 10 minutes later.  I've only got two retinas.  I mean to hang on to them.  These events scare me.  And the fear resonates.  Underlying anxiety, terror of losing my eyesight, the feelings echo about the day.  And simply put, who needs this?  That's why God invented ophthalmology departments.  They are trying to fit me in at my local clinic.  Meanwhile, the ophthalmology nurse reminded me of what my doctor had written me by way of return e-mail.  There's a thing called an optical migraine.  It fits these symptoms.  I had seen my doctor's e-mail but somehow forgotten.

Which leaves me where?  Here.  Emotionally present and accounted for.  I can't say that fear is vanquished, only that dread is reduced.

Certainly, this is the opposite of running.  It contrasts sharply with obsessing, compulsing and avoiding.  The thing is, my imagination and creativity and whatever skill and ability I have requires being in touch with my feelings.  And it's so easy to drift the other way.  The modern world is full of distractions, invitations to distance oneself from the present, escapes.

While Marlou and I are learning to escape to each other.  At our best, we each offer the other a chance to be truthful and accepted.  For me, this is an escape from being pseudo-strong.  Marlou may experience something similar.  Life is short and fragile.  We know this more than most people.  Meanwhile, our vacation escapes consist of escaping agendas, largely.  There was nothing we had to accomplish in Tuscany, no one we had to impress.  The guide books came out now and then, but they were only guides, not tour leaders.  Now, we are considering an August week in Marin.  No agendas, no apologies.  No fears?  Not very likely.  Just no one better to experience fear with.

It makes all the difference. In Draeger's, grocer to the haute bourgeoisie, racing up and down the empty aisles on the day after the Fourth of July, I sailed past those ever alluring chocolate cookies, the square ones with the square of chocolate atop the square of butter biscuit, the redoubtable petit ecolier, France's finest. And, of course, I kept right on sailing. I mean, haven't I done the chocolate thing to death? Haven't I just been clutched to the bosom of Mother Italia for a long, nurturing stretch? And speaking of stretching, isn't that what's happening in the trouser department? I mean, do we really need chocolate cookies, right now?

Having bought sensible sushi, picked up a wise hambone for the manufacture of soup and provisioned us with a quart of whole milk, damned if my supermarket course wasn't beginning to look orbital. Concentric, flying around and around that core spot on aisle four, the chocolate cookie spot. Which is when it came to me, or it returned to me, the knowledge that the pathway to knowledge leads directly through bakery exports. Think Spartacus. The slaves rebel. And then you're fucked. So, by the chocolate cookies already, and try not to eat all of them. That's the life message.

I feel that my life, what remains of it, is being squeezed somewhere between my lower back and my neck. Musculoskeletal achiness, coupled with bad circulation, has been rising like flood waters. The process has been slow, almost imperceptible. But there's a point when the wild, dark waters frothing over what used to be your front lawn, then ascending your front steps...and if you're really hardy, maybe even working their way up the stairway to your second story, to which you have retreated with the keys to your safety deposit box, your computer backup memory stick in one box of French chocolate cookies...in any case, when you have fallen back as far as you can and the flood is still mounting, you can see a limit to things. This is it.

This afternoon, Marlou set me up with a laptop computer while I sat, feet up, in my recliner. There is a confining sense about this posture. Bladder control, never among my proudest achievements, seems destined to interfere with my recliner chair writing session. More important, this seems perilously close to accounts of invalid poets. Poor Smyth, propped up in his sick bed, went about his pathetic tasks...while, unnoticed, the world went about its business...a business that no longer had anything to do with Smyth...or he with it. Confinement. Sickliness. I have spent my working life at a desk.

Plenty of people write with a laptop. This is hardly a matter of shame. But I'm uncomfortable with comfort. And when I think about it, comfort seems to be everywhere. I have the life of a pasha. My armchair electrically lifts me to my feet. And when I sit down, it lifts my feet to me, raising a footrest. My bed does the same, hospital-style, and it even vibrates Motel-Six-style. TV? A wall of my living room is now under the direct management of Panavision. Travel? Why not jet over to the Cardinal's palace in Tuscany?

Do I deserve this? How long will it last? These are the questions that haunt me.

December, 1959, and wasn't it something to see snow on the ground, everything white, fluffy and cold? Monroe County Airport, Rochester, New York, and as we pulled away in my aunt's Chevrolet, something about her son, Gregg, captivated me.  He was wearing a coat with a furry hood, sitting in the back seat next to me, and looking utterly unlike anyone I knew.  There was nothing particularly visually distinctive about him.  It was more his body language and general demeanor.  He seemed to curl into himself, cozily and contentedly.  He smiled at me in a manner that conveyed warmth and deep security.  His mother, Marion, drove and chatted to my father beside her in the front seat.  I was happy, even relieved, to be in Rochester.  I had never met my aunt or my uncle, at least not in living memory.  But I could already feel something settled about them and their family.  There was a contentedness and a quality that, many years and several thousand psychoanalytic dollars later, I would come to understand as security.  I smiled at Gregg.  Gregg smiled at me.  We did not have much to say to each other.  I was twelve and he was six.  But we were having a pleasant exchange.  With his overcoat and coziness, he seemed as bundled up as a chocolate in a box of sweets.

I knew that my family was disintegrating.  My mother had flown to Dallas with my brother and sister.  My father and I were here.  It was 3 p.m. in Rochester, and the Mohawk Airlines DC-3 that had delivered us marked the end of a grueling journey.  One of the big airlines was on strike.  We had flown from Los Angeles to Chicago all night.  Dazed, I waited at Midway Airport while my father purchased tickets that got us as far as Detroit.  From there we flew to Buffalo.  And now here.  It was over, and I had never been so tired.  More than the trip, with my mother's departure with my siblings and my father hard at work on a divorce, I hadn't slept well for weeks.

My aunt and uncle had the oddest of things, a house with not even two stories, but three.  My aunt showed me all the floors.  The bedrooms were upstairs.  Mine doubled as a storage room, with piles of my grandmother's furniture stacked against the edges.  There were other bedrooms, and a very steep flight of steps lead to an attic room.  A college student lived there, someone from the University of Rochester, probably, or perhaps a seminary.  The details have blurred, of course, but the college student was named Doreen, and she helped care for my cousins.  All this care.  It was very strange.

Even though I was impossibly tired, the excitement of travel and the three-hour displacement in North American time, kept me up.  My father was talking to my aunt and uncle, all sorts of things I didn't understand, but being an apprentice adult, thought I should have a go at mastering.  My grandfather, my mother's father, someone I never met...such were the family rifts...had had shock therapy.  What was shock therapy, I asked?  In fact, I had been sitting on the floor, the carpet being very soft, and taking in the sense of cushiness and warmth and permanence.  With the adult conversation going on above my head, both literally and figuratively, the players being seated in sofas and armchairs, I decided to take notes.  Shock therapy.  I could spell that.  But what was it?  When there was a lull in the conversation, I asked my father.  Never mind, he said, looking mildly embarrassed.  My uncle looked faintly concerned.  

I understood in some subliminal way that this wasn't for kids, and the knowledge reassured me.  This wasn't my father's house.  This was my aunt and uncle's.  Here, kids were kids.  And furthermore, my uncle said in his unassuming way, it was late.  The concept of time and time zones had captivated me all day as we had moved east.  It was not really 6:30 a.m. in Chicago, but 4:30 a.m. in California.  Unless you happened to not be in California, which we weren't.  My 12-year-old head sank to my knees, sitting exhausted and depleted in the crowded, on-strike Chicago airport.  And now, white snow reflecting the streetlight off the front lawn while I sat on a carpet and was told, in effect, I was still a kid, my uncle was talking about bed.

Everything okay?  My aunt either tucked me in or conveyed that quality of being cozily prepared for the night.  Despite the bitter cold outside, heat from unseen radiators came at me from all directions.  When the lights were out, the jumbled pile of furniture seemed friendly, massed to keep me company for the night.  The bed had a mahogany frame and was very high.  I couldn't sit down on it, more climbed aboard.  The bed had a satin comforter, shiny and smooth, an odd unknown thing to a desert kid.  With all the warmth from the glowing furniture, the smooth satin, kids being kids and going to bed, I fell dead asleep.  I slept for a full 12 hours, perhaps a lifetime record, except for the occasional medical emergency.  When I awoke the next day, my aunt was making eggs.  It was late for breakfast, she explained, but never mind.

Comfort, peace, contentment, these are not things I take for granted in my life.  At times, they are not things I take at all.  Perhaps I feel undeserving.  Often, these qualities are simply foreign and unfamiliar.  I really wonder if jetlag hits me particularly hard or if I am particularly bad at rolling with the circadian punch.  Certainly, there are times when one has to let go.  When nothing is to be done.  When doing nothing is doing everything.

Jetlag is pervasive, vague and mysterious, highly individual in its effects, impossible to predict, even difficult to communicate.  More surprisingly, this bout of post-travel fatigue has struck me deep in the soul.  For I can feel it.  I am not bouncing back.  I am returning, gradually, to whatever baseline functionality existed before.  But that's not saying much.  And there's something lingering.  A generalized achiness and, let's be plain, enfeeblement.  Standing up, never the easiest maneuver for me, now takes supreme effort.  And underneath it all, there is a simple realization.  I will emerge from jetlag, but not age.  Time is taking its toll.  I am wearing down, loosening, sinking.  My life's possibilities are waning.

I have a book to finish.  Which means I have some time to put in at a desk.  And the truth, sad and simple, is that this is becoming difficult.  Something about sitting.  Holding up my torso.  I don't know.  What I do know is that it hurts.  And there's a subtle drain on energy that goes with low-level pain that I simply have to face.  There is a way of handling this.  I can sit in a recliner chair with my feet up, laptop on my knees.  Not a perfect solution, and somewhat restrictive, but this should work.  It's that other thing.  The will.  How much more of this do I want to put up with?  Such are my thoughts.

I'm used to battling with my disability.  I'm not used to giving up.  But now I'm tired of battling, that's the scary reality.  I sense a general slowing down, even of cognition.  My eyes are gradually failing.  Balance, never my forte, seems to have evaporated.  Better be careful when reaching for the TV control, leaning across the kitchen sink, even venturing slightly beyond my center of gravity.  I can't feel where I am, and it's often an unpleasant surprise to see where my body is heading.  Toppling, listing, before I catch myself.

It's what I catch myself thinking that frightens me.  What's the use?

I am angry, fed up and, it seems, ready to give up.  It's 11 a.m., and I have a train to catch.  What's the use?  I have a meeting, sort of, in the City.  All I need is a newspaper, a notebook...and the one under my desk is too frayed and tacky to take.  So I glance around.  Never mind.  Got to go.  Grab the newspaper, flop down on the bed to put on the fanny pack.  A simple matter of grabbing one buckle with the working hand and wedging the other buckle against the paralyzed one.  Now lifting the back of the paralyzed hand to maneuver the buckles into place.  Something slips.  One misses the other.  I'm going to miss the train.  This is taking too long.  Everything is taking too long.  I can't even get to a train in time.  Even with all morning, damned if I don't find myself flailing about at the last minute looking for notebooks, then spastically messing about with my bum bag.  Time draining on and on.  

Finally clipped, I am up, no not quite, I am actually fighting my way up from the bed, staggering into the wheelchair, getting the footrests snapped into position, then getting the feet on them.  Now, the newspapers and magazines and salon.com downloads to read on the train...and damned if I didn't forget the Netflix video for the mail.  Out the door, backwards, of course to enable me to close the door behind me.  Down the ramp, then out to the street with a quick glance at the watch.  I am going to miss this fucking train.  I've missed everything in life.  Missed the mark.  Missed the point.

I roll straight down the middle of Fair Oaks Drive.  Not on one side or the other, but the absolute center.  The issue of facing or following traffic does not apply, because I am traffic.  I am the rural tractor leading a traffic jam through the hinterlands.  I am the forklift blocking the truckers at the docks.  Worse, I am the hard-to-see man in the small battery-powered chair, a black dot on the black asphalt, moving at 8 miles an hour and worried about the train.  A car swerves to avoid me, and I veer toward the right.  I make a nominal effort to look over my left shoulder, neck turning being rather difficult at the best of times.  Fuck it.  I swerve across the street, now facing the oncoming cars.  Bouncing, joystick all the way forward, trainwards.  At the main intersection, the traffic light is subtly anti-Semitic, deliberately discharging left turns and boulevard crossers before me.  Finally, I slip into the crosswalk, zoom past the bookstore, nearing and nearing and wondering what to do about the level railway crossing.  Such as, if the signal clangs five seconds before my approach, would I stop?  Considering that I am supposedly an exemplar of rail safety, would I halt ?  No fucking way.  I bounce over one set of tracks, then another, and that's it.  I am on the right platform, close enough to catch the train...and thinking "Paul, can you be nice to yourself now?"

Italy is the good mother.  Italy is far away, and the good mother is too.  But I need her.  She is somewhere inside me, and we have to find some way to keep in touch.  We do, in a sense, at lunch.  One of my nonprofit efforts has paid off, as someone explains, and I have much to be proud of.  I am at an outdoor café, faux Italian and staffed by a pleasant band of Hondurans.  I order the gazpacho.  And a little something else?  Oh, how about the grilled chicken panini.  The one with the mozzarella.  My lunch mate tries the Thai potato crisps.  Won't I have a few?  Damn straight.  Plus a latte.  And, yes, a chocolate biscotti.  Why?  Because the good mother is a bad dieter.  Because as someone wise observed, when you have a master-slave relationship with yourself, the slave always rebels.  And, it must be said, that in the midst of any serious rebellion there is little time for "what's the use?"

I see him every day, he is part of my life and our fates are intertwined.  He is the middle-aged black man who wears a hooded sweatshirt rain or shine, summer or winter, and sits on a concrete wall just outside of Peet's.  He is a large man, rather hulking in his presence, and also rather gruff when he speaks.  Which he does.  As I pass him, always avoiding his paper cup, he wishes me a nice day.  He does other things.  Seated by the button for the pedestrian walk/wait signal, at my approach, he presses the thing.  Going inside?  If I nod yes, he rises, lumbers a step or two toward Peet's and opens the door for me.  I always thank him.  I never put anything in his paper cup.

His presence annoys me.  Why?  I have examined my motivations, noted my reactions and always roll away confused.  Something about this man activates guilt.  Which I don't like and react against.  Whatever the emotion, our encounters resonate, and there is no avoiding him and my reaction to him.

Ersatz.  That is my first response.  This man does not claim to be homeless, is relatively spry -- and has his hand out.  Unavoidable.  That is the other thing.  What if I would like to push the pedestrian walk button myself?  In fact, what if I would like to get out of my wheelchair and sit on the short wall in front of Peet's?  And, even more odd, what if I would like to open the door myself?

It's not that this man provides an unwanted service, more of an involuntary one.  And because I never drop so much as a penny in his paper cup, our exchange worsens.  My guilt grows.  For don't I owe him something?  How many times has he opened the door for me?  Would I refuse to tip the doorman at a hotel, acknowledging that I have no choice in the matter of who opens the door?  Why not give this itinerant guy a dollar now and then?

I stubbornly cling to my essential belief.  I have not asked him to be my doorman.  I can push the pedestrian button myself.  And if he wants to come to my aid, I will always thank him.  Which I do.  End of story.  Except that it is not the end.  The story continues.  I feel guilty for not giving him any money.  I also feel guilty for being angry at his presence.

"Have a nice day."  He mumbles this rather hoarsely, and I sense that this is not his normal style.  He seems naturally gruff.  I'm certain that his message is "have as nice a day as you can in view of the fact that I have just opened the door for you, which is no small service to a quadriplegic, and you have not seen fit to give me a red cent."  Have a nice day, white man, affluent suburbanite, and don't even give a thought to those who live on the rough side of town.

And having my white liberal guilt buttons pushed, I speed by the guy even faster, when possible.  If he wants to be a black man sitting in front of Peet's opening doors and pushing pedestrian buttons, if that is what he wants to do with his days, splendid.  No, that's not true.  It is not splendid.  I would like to see him gone.  But why?  What on earth does it matter?  The poor are always with us.  Why not him?  Assuming he is poor, which I am invited to believe, it seems, because he is black and opening doors and hanging out on street corners.  Always unstated, perhaps implied, the paper cup available, nothing clear.  No sign that says homeless.  Or out of work.  Or distressed.

So why do I want him gone, and out of my sight, not blemishing our pristine, haute bourgeoisie suburb?  Because he reminds us of the underclass?  Because much of that underclass is black -- and three black kids shot me in the spinal cord?  Perhaps I resent the fact that he isn't really working.  Perhaps I resent the fact that he isn't really begging, just dooring and buttoning and presenting an empty cup.  The ambiguity annoys me.  It is a space into which I insert myself.  Whatever the man's story, he has decided that this is what he wants to do.  People hardly talk to him.  His service is unsolicited, largely unappreciated, often ignored and, in any case, hardly very valuable.  Especially the pedestrian button pushing.  And yet this is where he wants to be, what he wants to do, suggesting that there really isn't much better for him.  His street shtick seems demeaning, humiliating, beneath anyone to endure.  Why?

I roll up the sidewalk, approaching the intersection, and he rises as though to open the coffee house door.  You going on here?  No, I tell him.  He pushes the pedestrian button.  I roll across the crosswalk, heading for Bank of the West.  Nice to have an ample deposit.  Now, post-Tuscany coffers refilled, I roll back for a double machiatto.  The black guy lumbers to his feet, pulls open the door, and I sail inside.  Have a nice day, he says.  It's subtle.  But there's a struggle going on here.  I can feel it.  But so far, I just don't understand it.

If it is possible to leave one's heart in San Francisco, it is equally possible to leave one's brain in Italy. I am reasonably certain that this is what occurred in a casual moment, perhaps in the men's room at Firenze airport, maybe on the hotel terrace, somewhere. In any case, the sucker has vanished. They call it jetlag. They call it as they see it. They call the wind Maria. No one knows who they are or why they call anything anything. In fact, we are not calling them anymore. They are off our list. We don't have a list. We have jetlag.

Waking up to my first California morning, head aching, body giving a very convincing imitation of a hangover, I rose as much as I always do. That is to say, I stood, turned and sat down in my wheelchair. Marlou attributes the headache to our high intake level of caffeine, Italy being renowned for its cappuccinos, espressos, and so on. It's true. We were tanking up several times a day. Slowed by warmth, sensuality and beauty in abundance, speeded by the odd espresso, our lives achieved a perfect balance. A golden mean. A renaissance evening of things. Which was why, collapsing into my wheelchair in Menlo Park, California, once my butt hit the cushion, and my hand hit the joystick control, one would have thought that the seating procedure was over. But, no, for my body sank into position, and something else kept sinking. Some essence sagged from my solar plexus. It was like cracking an egg over a frying pan and staring, stupefied, as the yolk slides unexpectedly across the white. There was something happening, right on the edge of nausea, and rather alarming if one thought about it. Which one didn't. One had already volunteered to make a daylight run to Peet's coffee.

On the way, Menlo Park placed its hands on my temples and pressed, squeezing my head the way that the curbs squeezed the Sunday morning street pavement. Was I supposed to be in the street, bouncing over the asphalt at 8 mph? Maybe, maybe not. There seemed little choice. I knew the way to Peet's. It's just that I had lost the feel of the way to Peet's. Never mind. A stop for pastries. That's what the bakery department of Draeger's is for. Or was for. There are the pastries. There is the pastry lady. When you talk to the pastry lady, you have to open your mouth. Opening your mouth requires mild muscular activity, which, yes, contributes to the vague headache that currently pervades your day. Never mind. Never more. Quoth the Raven.

Back home with coffee. Yes, it hits the spot. The spot is, however, moving. It's like the sunspot, that thing that flares periodically, messing up your FM reception. Sometimes the spot collapses. It's doing that now, 1:30 p.m., time for a good sleep. And since you are back in bed, feet elevated, surely you'll go unconscious for a few pleasant minutes. But, no, this is fatigue vying with adrenaline, or something like it, a circadian square dance, do see doe.

Jetlag wears on, as it wears off. After a night or two, there's even the sense that you're past it. Or it has passed you on its way to somewhere else. Until you wake up at 3 a.m., alert and fully prepared to solve a complex quadratic equation. Or have a go at the Times crossword. You are fit as a fiddle, and fiddle sticks, there's not much action about. That's when a few herbal sleeping pills come in handy. Pop those suckers, and you'll drift off into a naturopathic neverland. It never fails. The only thing that can fail is supply, which is no problem, because the very next day you happen to be in Palo Alto's Whole Foods supermarket. There they are, one little bottle of herbal wonders, now purchased and occupying the same bag as your tuna sandwich.

You take the train to the wheelchair repair guy. He's never seen anything like the damage to your left wheel. The guys at Firenze airport appear to have bashed in your tire with a sledgehammer. Not to worry. You are where you should be, in the repair shop, and now with your wheelchair back in order, you are back on the road. The railroad, true, but that will do. You're back home in Menlo Park by the time you realize that the herbal sleeping pills, formally in a bag with a tuna sandwich, are now sitting in the trash back at the wheelchair repair shop. You've thrown out the remains of lunch along with the coming night's calmative. You are still jet lagging, a jet laggard, and now you're going cold turkey. Going, going, gone.