November 2008 Archives

James Bond and I have had a loose but constant association spanning almost 50 years.  This is hardly the time to sever our ties.  I saw "Dr. No," which as anyone who is anyone knows, is the first of the Ian Fleming films, in 1963.  I was visiting my friend Joe's family in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne.  If I recall correctly, we saw the film at the Century Theater, which may have actually been some other theater on Century Boulevard.  The place had a curious design with the front 10 rows of seats actually slanting upwards.  This much I swear.  But even if the details have shifted, their apparent persistence says a lot.  I may have been influenced by Joe's father, Max, who pronounced "Dr. No" everything a film should be: escapist, fun and full of tits.  

Half a century later, viewing the latest "Quantum of Solace" with Bob, a non-acolyte of the Bond series, I get a different report as the cinema crowd filters out into the Redwood City night.  The film not only strains credibility, Bob says, but kicks it in the teeth.  Bond emerges lightly cut, but never bruised, from a few too many bludgeonings, not to mention outsmarting an improbable succession of explosions.  I can't argue.  Actually, what I'm thinking is that there must be a Bond film that I missed along the way.  And they are not to be missed, any more than you want to miss fourth grade, with fifth grade looming.  James Bond long has provided a step-by-step instructional guide in surviving disaster, and I have listened attentively.

I roll in the door of my apartment and find Marlou beaming.  We kiss and hug with the newfound conviction of those living normal lives under siege.  Marlou has been away for the weekend, visiting a friend who lives in the Sierra foothills.  In her time away, I have had my own wanderings, all psychological.  I have journeyed from a state of intense agitation to a somewhat milder form.  Marlou has her next PET scan tomorrow.  She isn't expecting good results.  I don't know what to expect.  But for now, Sunday evening, what I find just inside the apartment is surprisingly upbeat.  Marlou has been shopping for her trip to Sweden, heading there in less than five days, and is wearing a new fleece jacket.  New clothes, new stories, new James Bond.  This PET scan eve is proving to be cozy.

Marlou leans against one end of the sofa and tells me the real news.  Someone in Sweden has helped track down long-lost relatives, along with much more information on the peregrinations of her great grandmother's kin.  I take this in, as I do all of our experiences these days, thinking that this is truly Marlou.  The gathering of information is vital to her, and she is now heading to Gutenberg armed to the teeth with essential background.  And, she points out, more may be on the way.

Of course, I want to point out, this is nothing compared to 007 pursuing an enemy agent across the rooftops of Siena, disrupting a nefarious plot as Scarpia booms out his first-act Tosca finale, outmaneuvering speedboats in Port-au-Prince harbor and blinding a pursuing fighter plane with smoke from a crippled DC-3.  Instead, I remind Marlou that she has to avoid carbohydrates on this eve of her radiological scan.  She hasn't forgotten.  Scrambled eggs for breakfast, no toast.  I haven't forgotten either.

Nor her she forgotten the nephews.  She has photos of them dramatically posed against the sun setting over Monterey Bay.  Marlou wants to send them to Nathan in the form of a book of snapshots, easily ordered online.  I ponder this and suggest enlargements, something for the wall.  No, Marlou fires back, she doesn't have time for posters, doesn't know where to order them, and why am I pressuring her?

I've had 10 years to understand this sort of exchange, to know that Marlou not only values knowledge but can feel devalued when she doesn't have it, and this is a moment of great stress for both of us....  I'm biting my tongue, fully prepared to remain silent, but fortunately remember the "us" in "both of us."  We have different ideas about this, I say.  For now, I will leave it at that.  Perhaps forever.  It is important not to stop fighting.  It's part of taking care of me and taking care of us.

I am thinking of Nathan, the easily distracted nephew in Iowa.  Somehow putting Marlou's photos on the wall where they can't be missed makes sense to me.  There's more to it than that.  A book of photos is the very sort of thing Marlou would treasure, and keep track of, and retrieve from its hiding place on a regular basis.  This could be a girl thing.  Or simply a Marlou thing.  But it's not a me thing.  I don't want her photos, or anything of this time in our lives, to be shoved in a desk drawer.

Okay, okay, Marlou says, acknowledging that we have different ideas.  She is not bursting with patience this evening.  She is bursting with stories.  Her friend in the mountains has come and gone from the same small town over many years.  Family and community and history weave in and out of everything that goes on there, from shopping to entertainment.  Marlou recounts tales of the locals.  There's the saga of an old family car, lovingly preserved.  It bursts into flame rolling down the freeway, with a hunter's stash of shotgun shells under the front seat.  Not a problem for James Bond, I want to tell Marlou, but she's already moved on to the next story.  This has to do with her friend's mother.  Marlou has only met her a couple of times.  Yet the mother says she is very worried about Marlou, very concerned.  Thus not surprising, I say.  In another era, Marlou might've tossed this off and moved onto something else.  But we both stay here.  I tell Marlou that she makes quite an impression on people.  Well, she concedes, I guess I'm sincere.  I tell her this is true.  It's the heart of the matter.  It's a matter of heart.

Marlou begins to cry.  I stand up and hold her.  This is so sad, she says.  Realizing things is sad, but for me, not unexpected.  This has been my life, everything revealed in loss.  A succession of losses.  I may feel the sadness of this in a particular way, but the tragic truth behind it is universal.  That's why Grace Paley titled her famous short story collection, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute."

Is this minute the last, the next to last or the first of another trillion? Marlou's hold on life may, or may not, be more tenuous than my own.  I really don't know.  My spinal cord is in a very fragile state, after all.  Everything feels last minute.

Our counselor -- yes, we have one -- recently commended Marlou for making pleasant memories with her nephews.  I took this in as a puzzled onlooker.  Memories reside wholly in the past, after all.  To avidly turn the present into the past makes little sense to me.  But I am an onlooker because of my want of experience.  My youth holds few pleasant memories.  I recall boyhood as sad or grueling.  But Marlou naturally seems to understand that we live in the present so we can build a past.

My present has not progressed beyond the front door.  I have rolled less than a meter inside, everything transpiring at the juncture of sofa and living room.  I maneuver my wheelchair and park by Marlou.  There must be something else that requires my attention this evening.  I try to think of what it is, secretly fidgeting, preparing to pull myself away.  This would be easy enough, my motion being battery-powered.  

Mine is akin to Brownian motion, if I pay attention to my cousin Bob in Paris.  We talked just that morning about the futile activity level of Georgia and the other former Soviet states with which he works.  Lots of governmental churning and little social and political progress.  Meanwhile, inside one apartment in Menlo Park, there are times to stay put, to sit and be.  This is one of those times.  This is one of my life lessons from Marlou, one of my enormous changes at the last minute.

They are baffling, Marlou's nephews, not because they are her nephews, but simply because they are of another generation and experience and are now working in our garden while I supervise and instruct from a wheelchair.  Neither has a clue about gardening.  They hail from Iowa, the agricultural heartland, but their hearts aren't in the land.  They've seen the farms from the freeway, both assure me.  And that's about it.  They know as much about the cultivated prairie as my Arizona niece knows about the lower Sonoran Desert, which she occasionally glimpses on her way to the mall.

 

Our goal at this very moment is to pick tomatoes.  It's a sad task, accomplished at the end of the season when all hope of ripening fruit is past.  I have learned, almost by accident, that throwing several handfuls of blood meal atop late-season tomato roots does for horticulture what methamphetamine probably does for patio resurfacing.  Things speed up and get interesting.  The vines are bursting with tomatoes, but they are green and will remain so.  The garden has fallen into shade.  The nights have fallen into autumn.  We going to have lots of fried green tomatoes or green tomato salsa or green tomato pie or one big Green party.

 

They're quite different from each other, these young men.  The older one has a contemplative, studious air.  He has a hard time finding tomatoes on the vines.  From the vantage of my wheelchair, I gaze up through the leaves and spot at least 20 on one plant alone.  I want to tell Elliot that tomatoes are the green, globular objects hanging off the swollen green stems at his eye level.  But his brother intervenes.  Nathan is currently the object of much family scrutiny and concern, under suspicion for attention deficit disorder.  But quite naturally, out of the corner of one of his ever wandering eyes, he spots the tomatoes and begins yanking them off the vine.  Soon, we have something approaching a bushel of never-to-ripen fruit and a swath of composting-in-place vegetation.  Amazing what a couple of young guys can accomplish.

 

I wonder what I will have accomplished with them by the time they leave us for Des Moines.  We seem to be covering a lot of interpersonal ground.  Both young men want to know all they can about their long deceased father.  They barely remember him, of course, but they feel his absence.  With all of us together, Marlou's cancer, the same disease that struck down Nathan and Elliot's dad, seems like what it is, the present challenge.  Is this too much sorrow for one family?  That verdict comes and goes, and we never know what it is. 

 

For now, the three Imes family members are seated on our sofa, me in my wheelchair.  Elliot asks his aunt, almost in as many words, about the seriousness of her cancer.  They are surprisingly direct and open.  Marlou talks about her situation and her future, and we feel the sadness together, until we feel the lateness together and go to bed.

 

If their ignorance of tomatoes is bewildering, their acceptance of 'L'elisir d'amore' is gratifying.  Opera, I have assured them both in the days preceding the performance, is an acquired taste.  But such observations prove unnecessary.  The nephews are into the Sunday matinee, enjoying the proceedings on stage at the Opera House as much as Marlou and I.  It's an international world, I say at intermission, explaining the casting of the Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas opposite a Russian soprano.  She's Albanian, Nathan corrects me.  These young men haven't had a lot of exposure to Donizetti in West Des Moines, but it doesn't matter.  They are Imeses, after all, have the arts receptor gene, and we are in sync.  I'm grateful to Marlou for anticipating all this.

 

It's Tuesday when we hand them over to United Airlines and resume our life.  Our life includes weekly chemotherapy and occasional meetings with Marlou's oncologist.  In the late afternoon, the three of us huddle in an examining room.  The oncologist is from India, by way of Berkeley, and she is cute and oddly American.  Marlou's blood chemistry looks good, she says.  No need to rush the next PET scan.  It can wait.  And she's not worried terribly about the effects of chemotherapy, this doctor.  Marlou is doing fine, for the moment.  Marlou is about to fly to Sweden, after all, in search of her great grandmother's roots.  After a few moments of such medical chitchat I feel the normalcy of our lives.  I haven't felt this for quite a while, but you learn to take solace in a good blood count.  I wonder if this is Samuel Beckett's kind of solace.  But I don't wonder too long.