Not There Yet

The neighborhood is full of babies, Leo tells me, as we stroll out of the Noe Valley Bakery.  I need baked goods on this or any other carbohydrate-rich day like Menlo Park needs more Persian rug stores.  Never mind.  It's too late now, for Leo, friend and former professor, has instructed me in the ins and outs of the whole-grain walnut bread, the berry scones and the bran muffins.  My wheelchair satchel is now bursting like a granary, and I can feel the calories-to-be already finding a receptor site just below my navel.  

Good that we're moving down the sidewalk, me rolling, Leo keeping up a good pace.  A new restaurant.  How can there be a new restaurant when the old one, Herb's, was old before I arrived in this neighborhood in 1973.  Incredibly, it's gone, and a glassy lunch and breakfast place has replaced it.  Herb must be gone too.  And Real Foods.  Still empty and boarded up.  Leo reminded me of the history of the place.  A small organic food store run by small organic guys had been gobbled up by a chain.  All the organic guys with their organic wages and an organic union got fired.  And the new owners of Real Foods got real unpopular.  So the store remains empty, despite all the babies in the neighborhood.  Which is what makes the neighborhood a neighborhood.  The notion and its history has gotten past on over the decades.  And 28 years after I departed, Noe Valley remains itself.

Less than two miles away, even before I emerge from the Muni streetcar elevators, Market Street and Van Ness Avenue remains itself too.  A woman rolls out of the elevator as I approach.  She is toothless, the line of her jaw collapsing like an elderly person's.  But she is much younger than I.  Hello, she says.  The woman breezes past me with a male companion.  The neighborhood is full of people sleeping rough.  As I roll up the avenue passing panhandlers passing out, I feel soft, suburban and protected.  Come on, man, a spare changer insists.  I keep going.

The traffic signal is red at Fulton Street, where a man leans oddly against a light pole.  San Francisco's Civic Center area is just urban enough to make me avoid eye contact.  I don't pay much attention to the guy on the light pole.  But he notices me.  "When you gotta go, you gotta go," he says in a heavy Brooklyn accent.  He brushes by me, heading for the Van Ness crosswalk.  There's a yellow puddle at the base of the streetlight.  The man, having peed, is now halfway across the avenue.  He limps badly, things being unwell in his right hip.  I've had similar experiences, particularly in the early years of my injury, bladder neurology being what it was.  Peeing in alleys, even subway platforms.  The only difference was that I never said anything to anyone.  The man is gone now, way down Fulton Street.  I want to know his story without hearing him tell it.  Yes, I am a sheltered suburbanite.

It's only a couple of hundred meters to my destination, the Opera House box office.  Marlou and I have received enough tickets from the San Francisco Opera this year to create an exciting new board game.  The woman in the box office shuffles and I cut.  Simon Boccanegra out.  Boris Godenov expanded.  La Bohème downstairs.  In no time at all I'm back on the bus and heading to the train station.  The driver, a sunny Hispanic woman, folds up the seat in the wheelchair space, ushers me in and urges passengers out of my way.  Someday, I will write an opera about her.  For now, I will simply not pee on her bus.  This is all I have to offer at the moment.  It's my achievement, of sorts, and it's taken years.

Years seem to have passed since I left home.  The morning's writing had not materialized.  A bad night's sleep, a groggy morning, and then I was on my way to the train station, everything burdened and cloudy.  Marlou's latest blood test showed a spike in one of her cancer antibodies.  Something is happening.  But, fortunately, it is not happening the same way for both of us.  Marlou has moments of despair and resignation, but they go.  Mine tend to stay.  

I realize this, as though for the first time, as Marlou describes her afternoon in Oncology.  With her doctor away, she had a frank tête-à-tête with one of the senior nurses.  I listened to the details, marveling at my wife's courage and capacity for getting what she needs.  More important, I knew that none of this came naturally to her.  It's a hard-fought assertiveness she is showing these days.  I know that, and she knows it too.  And that's all we need.

When Marlou's Oncology tale is over, it is pretty clear that she isn't and we aren't.  Yes, her cancer is slowly on the move.  And here we are, sitting on our still new couch, and laughing.  Marlou, having faced some mortal facts this afternoon is not laughing off anything.  She's off laughing.  She's found something ludicrous behind cancer's grave and mortal façade that strikes her as funny.  It strikes me the same way.  If it's black humor, it's our black humor.  No, we won't always be laughing.  But we're laughing now, because we're alive, and alive with each other.  And Marlou looks beautiful, because she is, and because I am alive in ways I never have been before.

So, while Marlou has been off oncologying, what was she doing?  Talking to the nurse about obituaries.  Marlou has been reading them in, it seems, in her private way.  And she's not pleased.  Mr. X died after a long battle with cancer...following a three-year struggle with cancer...having fought cancer since the Magna Carta.  Marlou doesn't want an obituary like this.

Okay.  It's not for nothing I am a corporate writer.  How about....  

"Tap Dancing with Cancer," starring Marlou Imes, recently concluded a 10-year tour that spanned three continents.  Her husband Paul continues to write material for Ms. Imes.

Marlou thought this over and, like a true client, told me my copy was on the way -- but not there yet.