Dissolution

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.