December 2008 Archives

We are in deep mission-critical mode, surveying the options, exhausting the possibilities and lining up next steps.  There is, after all, an expeditionary gap looming, and one must take account.  The moon missions encountered a similar moment, slipping behind the lunar mass and losing radio contact with the home planet.  We can see that coming.  No, Scarlet, tomorrow is not another day.  Tomorrow is 1 January, and while the start of 2009 is largely a calendar abstraction, there is nothing theoretical about the closure, lockdown and daylong inaccessibility of Trader Joe's.

That's why I am assessing the situation with a cool eye, a calm visage and a deeply analytical mind.  There's plenty for tonight.  Something to roast, something to stirfry, much to serve.  In fact, there may be too much to serve, but never mind.  My shtetl roots are showing.  I can hear the Cossacks' hooves flying.  The larder is full, and on this day, I am filling it further.  We have a dinner guest, after all, our friend and frequent companion David.  Who knows what he wants for dinner or how much?  Actually, I have a fairly accurate idea, but that is beside the point.  The point is to run through the mental shopping list one more time, scan the store's neon expenses for answers and do what must be done.

There's a sample bar squashed into one corner of Trader Joe's.  Today a sign wishes everyone happy holidays.  I have never seen such a sign before in that location, and this makes me interested.  Something may have been overlooked.  True, I have just acquired the evening's meat course, pre-marinated in a bag.  And with all of the refrigerated items in the bag, as it were, one has to make a commitment.  Either go into freezer mode, seizing items that have a limited life away from a -0°C home.  Or do something else.  That's why I'm heading for the samples counter with the inviting sign, and damned if it isn't a high-end holiday offering.  Baked brie.  Just what I need.  In fact, it is a generously thick slice, caloric load beyond comprehension, but never mind.  I scarf the thing down and chitchat with the serving guy.  I tell him I need an expert.  He points me toward the fat guy in the green shirt.  Thank you, I tell him.  Thank you and thank you.

Marlou said yesterday that she understands perfectly well why animals crawl off to die alone.  I assured her that people don't do this, the two of us seated in the bedroom, me in my wheelchair, Marlou folding clothes on the bed.  And am I right?  It may be that I am entirely incorrect.  When it's time, we all go alone.  Those who have the temperament and the courage to know aloneness doubtless face this fact better than others.  But I was really avoiding, it seems now, the fact that at some point there's nothing I can do for Marlou or for us.  The cancer has its schedule.  And Marlou may know something I don't.  What I do know is that my wife needs time alone this morning, and I need the opposite.  And, yes, Trader Joe's will do.

That's why I am talking to Mike in the green shirt about champagne.  I'm not sure I want any, but this is how one ushers in the new year, and dammit, I'm going to do some ushering.  And, by the way, I ask Mike as we run through the options...authentic French from the actual region, California-style and so on.  I didn't know California had any style regarding champagne, and it seems like this might be a moment to coax this guy into a fuller discourse.  But screw it.  I would be pushing my luck on this crowded holiday eve, tying up the guy while shoppers abound.  Still, I can't resist asking about the weird sparkling red stuff from Italy, which is not a champagne and not cheap.  Oh, Mike observes, that's weird sparkling red stuff from Italy.  He hasn't tried it.  As for the champagne....  I go for the Trader's higher end.  Marlou has said it herself.  This may be her last New Year's.  And thoughts of how it could be mine and may not be hers, however true, feel too much like mental dodgeball.  We have to consider this possibility, her possibility, and I'm happy to throw $25 at the French.

All other possibilities exhausted, it's time for the freezer commit.  We are go.  We are in the window, but just barely, scanning the dessert possibilities.  On the upper end there's some sort of French passionfruit thing, but there's simply too much of it.  Apple strudel will do.  And now that it's in my plastic shopping bin, we are committed.  I grab the frozen potatoes, make a quick determination regarding the frozen hors d'oeuvres...something with puff pastry and cheese...and then the checker has his reckoning, the Trader has my credit card number, and we are off.

Maximum speed to Peet's.  The place is predictably full in its holiday compliment.  I'm not into complimenting anyone, just roll straight to the counter, order the lattes, and head for the wheelchair-sized spot next to the baristas.  Mike.  Another Mike, waits in the coffee bean line.  All the more reason to head in the opposite direction toward the steaming, hissing espresso machines.  This Mike was on the board of the high school foundation for which I worked a couple of years ago.  In the end, things did not go well there.  I've brooded over the details countless times in my mind.  And now I'm going through the aftermath, an inevitable result of living in the same small town for many years.  Here is Mike, waiting to buy his beans, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt and a smug expression.  Not that I am looking at him now as I weave between coffee aspirants.  If I did, his expression would be revealed as expressionless.  He wants coffee beans, Mike does, and I do not figure.

I hide by the espresso machines, metal clanging, coffee spitting.  There's a time to embrace our failures.  Maybe that time is now.  The foundation guys and I were never able to talk to each other.  They were parents, after all, and though I was older than most of them, it didn't matter.  And I have the haunting suspicion that I was, to them, the crippled consultant.  I didn't like what they were doing.  They didn't like what I was doing.  And it's not that things went awry, but that things went silent.

The Peet's barista not only places my two lattes in a cardboard holder, but clamps on plastic lids and sets two additional lids on top to prevent coffee splash as I bounce home.  I doubt that they would do something analogous for Mike.  I really do.  This, whatever it is, is my achievement.  And unlike the high school foundation, Marlou and I are talking.  The days are hard.  Talking is hard.  But it's the best we can do.  And the best is good enough.

He is a shy man, Wayne the wheelchair repair guy.  He arrived in a van, appropriately white, walked into our apartment and with barely a word, had a go at the inert hulk of my wheelchair.  The thing had been sitting next to Sunday's unread newspaper and the equally unused piano.  I waved from my desk in the adjoining office.  No sense in getting up, for the neuromuscular effort was considerable and the payoff of crutching to greet him minimal.  Wayne is a shy guy.  We know each other.  I heard mechanical sounds from the front room, heard Wayne announce that he was taking the chair outside to his van, and I let things unfold.  A phone call to the manufacturer to reset the control (secondhand), and that was that.  I had a wheelchair again.  I had freedom.  

I had a 4 PM date at Peet's and set off at high speed, rolling the familiar route down our drive, bouncing onto the street pavement at the one safe incline from the sidewalk, then roaring, joystick in position of maximum speed, pedal-to-metal.  Wayne seemed to have set the electronic controls slightly higher, and damned if I wasn't flying, more or less, down the center of the ever empty Fair Oaks Avenue.  Not a car in sight, vistas of empty asphalt ahead, freedom, freedom.  

Mentally, I raised a thumb to the sky.  This would do, this gesture in the mind.  There was no other option, of course.  The one working hand was on the wheelchair joystick, and to make a bona fide thumbs-up gesture would require bringing the chair to a full stop.  Which was hardly the point.  The point was forward motion, early detection of pavement irregularities, skillful maneuvering through and around the slalom of asphalt dips and ridges.  Onward.

The quixotic essence came at me.  This was such a small thing, somewhere between ludicrous and pathetic, the paralyzed man bouncing at battery speed for a short distance, exalting in his windswept road warrior moment.  And yet it all seemed right.  This is what we are, vulnerable, small and the prey of circumstance.  Cervantes got it right, after all.  For he learned to blunder on, artless and, even better, styleless.  Zadie Smith pointed this out in a recent article.  Cervantes, she wrote, set down his tale without any concern for manner or consciousness.  He was a storyteller, 'striding about in seven league boots'.  Angst be damned.  I was in that mode now.  I had the open road.

What I didn't have was time, in a manner of speaking.  My watch had stopped days ago in Hawaii.  Doubtless time for a new battery.  Though, waiting at a traffic light a mindless glance revealed the watch to be running.  What to do?  Get a checkup.  So this remained my first destination, the watch guy in the heart of bustling Menlo Park.  I rapped on his window, the front door being hard to reach on a narrow tilting sidewalk.  The watch guy rose from his distant workbench, peered half annoyed at the glass, then saw the low profile of the guy in the wheelchair.  We have been doing business this way for...who knows, perhaps decades.  He opened a side door, urged me to come inside out of the California cold, and I declined.  It was quite pleasant outside.  In moments he was back, declaring the battery sound.  Could I have exposed the watch to water?  Come back, he said, if you have more trouble.

Water.  Well, yes, in Hawaii I had been caught in a tropical deluge rolling back to Marlou's parents' condo, fresh from their swimming pool.  The watch is probably an old one, far from waterproof.  A Seiko, a brand known even to me, one of America's most oblivious consumers.  Marlou had bought it for me a couple of years before.  The two of us had been inside the watch guy's small display area.  With Marlou present, I didn't mind risking the sidewalk tilt and had rolled through the front door.  My old watch was beyond repairing, the man told me.  He had a few on sale.  Watches left for repair and never claimed.  I glanced about.  His watches seemed too big, too small, too old or too expensive.  Why not this one, said Marlou.  She would buy it.  A man, she said quietly, should have a nice watch.

Now, years later, I was rolling toward Peet's, aware of the watch and its origins.  It had a history.  Instead of a shiny box and a guarantee, it had a story.  The watch, it turned out, displayed the days of the week in both English and Spanish.  Cervantes could have used it.  I was moved to speechlessness then and now at Marlou's conviction regarding men and their need for nice watches.  Concern, love, devotion...all came through to me.  And I'm glad I didn't protest.  Marlou needed to buy a watch.  I needed to receive one.  Still, at the heart of this exchange lies a mystery.  Parts of this have come into focus.  I don't think my mother particularly liked men.  Honoring them, equipping them for life, bestowing a token...none of this would naturally have occurred to her.  This was something new, and small yet large, this watch.  With Marlou at home, anxious and irritable about what might or might not be cancer symptoms, I needed to see beyond the current moment.  Which is what a watch does.  It tells us we have time.

It is difficult for a Hawaiian to be prissy, but then she wasn't, was she?  She was a Japanese-American and had matters thoroughly under control at American Airlines gate 17.  There were rules.  Wheelchairs and airplanes fit together in a certain way, and this was all above discussion.  Everyone knew.  The batteries had to be disconnected.

 

Ask her American Airlines opposite at the departing gate in San Francisco and you'll get an entirely different response.  No one needs to disconnect sealed, dry cell batteries, she said with a wave of her gate-agent hand.  So we were off for Honolulu where my wheelchair rolled to the door of the airplane fully electrified and fully intact. 

 

My goal was very much the same now for the return journey.  Get the wheelchair loaded, safely, and minimize the screwing about upon arrival in San Francisco.  The latter includes reconnecting batteries in a hard-to-reach box.  This is physically difficult for Marlou and challenges the hardiest baggage guy.  Which brings us back to this delicate moment at Honolulu airport.  There was the gate agent looming behind her podium.  There was the Boeing 757.  Here was I.  When in doubt, head for the toilets.  Afterward, I rolled back to Marlou and hoped that the matter had been forgotten, more or less, and in the frenzy of boarding, the matter of battery disconnecting might just get overlooked.

 

The baggage guy who followed us to the airplane seemed quite sympathetic.  I showed him the electrical tape on the wire leading to the joystick controller and strongly suggested that screwing about with my wheelchair's batteries was like performing heart surgery on someone who had just had a kidney transplant.  The electrical tape marked the site of a previous insult to common sense...the handiwork of our good friends at Firenze airport.  Nevermind.  We have tilled this exhausted ground elsewhere in my blog.  For now, I am rolling to the airplane door, chatting up a storm with this affable fellow and warning him for a second time about the electrical tape.  After Firenze, I tell him, hearing the epochal ring of this...like after 9/11 or after Gallipoli...I had a simple choice between electrical tape with a quick patch job or the purchase of a $1000 joystick controller.  He laughed pleasantly.  A no-brainer, we both agreed.  I left him with the chair, crutched my way to row 11 and found Marlou there and no one else.  We had an empty seat, a spacious twosome, not an elbow-crowding threesome.  And my wheelchair was on its way. 

 

But not quite.  The baggage man reappeared in a moment to show Marlou how he had disconnected the batteries.  She got off for a look and had a confab.  The man had disconnected a cable in the back, marking one end with a bit of tape.  Which sounded okay. 

 

Naturally, it wasn't.  A small crowd assembled around my wheelchair in the arriving jetway at San Francisco.  Several flight attendants, the pilot and in the end, an actual airline mechanic.  It was the latter who showed me the broken wires.  Two of five had been snapped.  Something in me snapped too.  It was a Friday.  Wheelchair repair is not available on weekends -- this is a rule of life.  A Filipino wheelchair pusher got behind my 200 pound electric chair and shoved me and two lead batteries uphill and into the terminal.  His partner, Vladimir, carried a couple of bags.  An hour later, the three of us stood in the chill San Francisco night and waited for the special, very special, wheelchair van to take me home. 

 

The trip had tired me, and going through the wheelchair-damage-claim process had drained me.  And now Vladimir was arguing, for the second time in the previous 30 minutes.  The van dispatch woman was telling him what to do.  Twenty minutes earlier the airline baggage woman was telling him what to do.  And Vladimir wasn't having any of it.  He was not Russian, correcting his Filipino counterpart, but Armenian.  I now understood.  He came from a long line of arguers.  We had been at the airport for 2 1/2 hours.  Our attendants, each in his 70s, hung with us to the bitter end.  The van driver was naturally Palestinian.  He was full of complaints, and one couldn't blame him.  The man had been orbiting the airport for 90 minutes looking for the guy in the wheelchair, which turned out to be broken and delaying everyone and everything.  I stared into the night sky.

 

In our apartment, the thermostat read a very un-California 52°.  I was that age once.  Now I was a decade older.  I still had considerable determination, but less and less proprioception, the neurological ability to locate one's limbs in space.  And now I was in my space, the home space, and I was feeling pretty spacey.  Understand that at the heart of this drama lies a wheelchair control, consisting of a simple joystick on the order of an old Atari game, five simple chips with an approximate street value of $1.86, one stainless steel arm and a highly inadequate cable terminating in a cheap plug.  All available for a mere $1000 direct from the supplier.  Marlou's advice: you pay them now or you pay them later.  I am sure there is a difference between heroin dealers and wheelchair manufacturers, but the distinction is subtle.

 

Marlou had turned on the heat even before she turned on the lights, and things were warming nicely.  Hot air blew about our living room just as it has since the 1950s when the heater was installed.  For every BTU that entered, two or three escaped through the uninsulated walls.  Each winter I swear I'm going to do something about this situation.  And now it's midwinter and the situation is upon us, and I have other fish to fry.  Principal among the frying is the absence of a wheelchair.  I hobble into the kitchen, drink some water, lean my crutch against the counter and fill the tea kettle for tomorrow's breakfast.  This is one of my jobs.  I make tea, Marlou drinks it, then other things happen.  Actually, my job includes tea delivery, but without my power wheelchair that job responsibility is out.  I cannot carry simple objects without the wheelchair.  I can't do much of anything, truth be told, except hold the crutch grip with my one working hand, try to stay upright as my physical therapist suggests and hurl one spastic foot in front of the other.

 

Life continues in this fashion.  On wheelchairless day two, Marlou gets out the folding model.  She pushes me about in this wheelchair now and then.  But it's mostly then, for it's hard going over our thick carpet.  It's actually easier to push a wheelchair through an Irish bog than to effect a right turn on our acrylic.  All this must be straining Marlou.  It is straining me.  With cancer looming large in our relationship, neither of us has the reserves for extra challenges.  I know the current situation can depress me beyond its true proportion.  There are too many reminders.  I spent six months in a push wheelchair in 1968, and the experience is still fresh.  Still, this is just temporary.  I will be on a battery-powered roll soon enough, but it doesn't feel that way.  Maintaining perspective will be hard.

 

With Marlou pushing the wheelchair now and then and me crutching around the rest of the time, things get done.  In the mornings, I get the lights on and hike across the carpet, crutch clicking, to make our tea.  It's a short trip into the bathroom.  Crutching to the office is no big deal.  I roll up to the table for some meals, sit elsewhere for others.  We even visit friends in Berkeley.

 

On wheelchairless day three, Marlou dozes in the sun.  The December light is fleeting but warming.  Marlou's back has been bothering her.  She needs to call her doctor's office for several reasons but hasn't.  I don't blame her for being immobilized.  I would be in a very similar state.  Marlou looks up from the sofa and says that she can see how difficult it will be to do anything with less and less energy.  I concede she is correct.  Still, human energy is a strange thing.  No one knows exactly where it comes from or even what it is. 

 

These have been a sobering few days for me.  With the wheelchair out of action, my disabled state is stripped bare.  I can walk short distances, with a wobbly and not very safe gait.  I cannot take anything from one room to another unless I hold it in my teeth, which I occasionally do, revealing how something dangling from my mouth, say, a magazine, throws off my spatial sense, making the balance problem even worse.

 

We need help.  We will need help as Marlou's cancer progresses.  We even need help now.  The days without the wheelchair have brought home to me my limitations.  Yet they have reminded me of my general resilience and of Marlou's.  I can see now in this moment something that can easily be overlooked, taken for granted.  I married someone with abundant courage.  Marlou would rather know what's happening.  And so, it seems, would I.

Why do disabled people love to travel? They do, you know. The web is full of advice for wheelchair travelers. And the most obvious recommendation is nowhere to be seen: stay home.

 

At home you are less likely to slide out of control down a cobblestone street, get stuck at the top of 1000 marble steps or break your wheelchair axle a continent away from the nearest dealer. So, why do we travel? I was wondering this while at an airport waiting for a bus. There should have been no wait at all. The driver of the #20 bus assured me that I should catch the #19 bus behind him. And the #19, its operator said, was very much the wrong one, and did the #20 guy really tell me to wait for him? With that, both buses departed. And I had a good half an hour to consider the general merits of, and rationale for, disabled travel.

 

It was a good half an hour, because I went to all the bad places. These include blaming myself for whatever goes wrong in my life. And going to the bad place is the good thing about travel. The bad places are always the most instructive. And they do have a way of bracing the spirit and inspiring action. I resolved that the next bus, whatever its number, would be my bus. I would take it. The driver could say whatever he wished, but I was boarding. And so it came to pass that the #20 stopped, the wheelchair lift extended, and I rose like a deus ex machina into the maw of the Waikiki Downtown Express. The bus's interior was deeply air-conditioned, the refrigeration bringing into stark contrast the abundant tropical warmth, airport kerosene and diesel fumes notwithstanding.

 

The driver refused my fare. The same happens to me in San Francisco and in the suburbs to the south, now here in Hawaii, so this must be part of the universal disabled experience. What does it mean? That being disabled automatically inspires sympathy? That most disabled people are financially strapped? Who can say? I can say one thing. My vibes on boarding the #20 Waikiki are not the strongest. I am very aware of the precariousness of my disabled state. My journey depends entirely on the mechanical fortitude of a wheelchair, the only lifeline to the outside world my mobile phone. Yet, as the #20 rumbles along a street named Nimitz, the adventure of disabled travel begins to manifest. Who in Honolulu takes a bus? This old guy and his apparent wife, he with a U.S. Army cap and she with a sour expression. This middle-aged woman, loose and fleshy in her capacious muumuu, carrying a shopping bag. A family, 45-ish guy with twentysomething kids, all somehow the same age. Until, the bus's recorded announcement tells us that this is King Street and Aleimena, transfer point for the windward buses.

 

Traveling, being down on the ground, where the difference between catching and missing a bus is tangible, one pricks up the ears at "windward." This is how Hawaiians express geography. There is, apparently, wind on one side of the islands, less on the other, and it pays to know the difference if you want to get anywhere. Just as it pays to listen to a London cab driver when he tells you not to request the east side of Queens Park  -- 'don't give me any compass, mate' -- but to say it's near the Duke of York, the neighborhood pub.

 

So, now I'm in central Honolulu, looking up at a high-rise bank, and waiting with other hapless souls for the #55 Windward. I perch my throbbing, swelling, paralyzed leg on a marble ledge and twice within a few minutes someone from the bank comes outside to sponge the rainwater off the bench. The first person appears to be a sort of bank porter, and the second is a bona fide janitor. Both smile at me. This is what they do, post-rain marble drying. Both are doubtless from the Philippines. Thus, Hawaii. I am in what could be called a nice part of town. This, I theorize, underlies the difference of opinion between bus drivers. This route, the longer one, involves a change of buses here. The other, who knows?

 

At last the #55 rolls up and we roll away. I am relieved, feeling more confident now about man and his future. My wife is slowly dying. We both say this now. And my confidence in everything is, well, different. More than ever, I am learning to take things as they come. And they're coming at me right now, as the #55 climbs a small hill and heads away from the center of Honolulu. A native Hawaiian, about my age, has befriended a 30ish guy beside him. The younger man explains that he is a schoolteacher, here in Hawaii to interview for a job in an intermediate school. And on his modest income, he appreciates this $2 transit ride along the northern edge of the island of Oahu. I appreciate it too. The older Hawaiian native can't stop talking. There is this bus and that bus and the other, and the schoolteacher would be wise to take them all. What's that? The schoolteacher is asking about a sign to the Punch Bowl something or other. This, I know, is a famous military cemetery. The older Hawaiian knows it too and expresses himself this way: 'oh, that's where the service guys who have been in the military they give them the graves so the soldiers can be buried there with the veterans' when they die.' There is something authentically Hawaiian in this circumlocution, and I find it pleasing. The bus accelerates, slipping into the fast road over the Pali, the volcanic ridge where Hawaiian kings famously threw human sacrifices over the edge. I doze ever so briefly, perhaps absorbing the knowledge that my ride aboard the #55 will stretch to approximately two hours.

 

We descend into Kaneohe, which might be called a suburb of Honolulu, but really shouldn't. The island is too small for that sort of thing. Kaneohe is its own separate town. My in-laws live here, and my wife and I will visit here shortly, so the look of the place is not unfamiliar. The volcanic mountains in the background make it a spectacular place. The complete absence of hotels makes this a remarkably un-touristy part of a tourist island. Puddles gleam everywhere, and the grass at the edge of the road ripples like a green meadow. This place has had a lot of rain. At one bus stop, ten high school kids climb aboard. At the next, a black woman, perhaps late 30s, and a hobbling white guy about ten years older. One or both reek of alcohol. The woman carries a passel of bags. One, a plastic shopping bag, is full of aluminum cans, empty and half crushed. The look on her face, also empty and half crushed, lies beyond sadness. She sits at the end of a bench closest to me. Instinctively, I pull back, look away. Perhaps she will talk to me, demand my attention, ask me for money. Even if she asks only for pity, my coffers are empty.

 

We pass the main Kaneohe shopping mall, with Sears and Starbucks and Barnes & Noble. People get on, people get off. And just at the edge of town, before the highway slips into an authentic mangrove swamp, the black woman and her limping companion get off with all their bags. I often forget that I live in the soft world and that most of the world is hard. The road now leads somewhere between the two. We are now a country bus, passing the Hygienic Store, its name probably dating from the era of sugar plantations. Further on, the highway arcs along a true tropical lagoon, palm trees in a circle along a bay. Bali hi. Waves lap at the road. The houses set along it are built on stilts, raised high above the frequent floods. At the local branch of Brigham Young University, a beautiful young woman gets off. At the next stop, an aging beach bum slips from bus to forest.

 

The quadriplegic species does not survive because it is the fittest. In Darwinian terms, I should have succumbed long ago. I survive because I have, in the splendid words of Tennessee Williams, always relied on the kindness of strangers. What else can one call it but kindness or generosity or, yes, charity? My existence is fragile, and I can feel this more immediately bouncing west on the #55. Here is one of the lessons of travel, the interdependence of human beings. In the US, where self-reliance, self starting, self everything, is so highly prized, the lesson of disabled travel always comes down to this: we are all on a journey. So don't sneer at the black woman with the recycled cans, the beach bum who is too old to be bumming. We all owe each other something. What it is, and how and when we repay, life will tell us.

 

Now we are passing the shrimp farms. These are unprepossessing ponds, murky and muddy, each square and lined with reeds. Their harvest is for sale from the vans and shacks along the highway. Island's best shrimp. Legendary shrimp van. Hottest shrimp. Much of what's on offer in Hawaii is like this. Splintering and funky and expressed in pidgin native dialect. Shave ice. Store is close. In between the big hotels are many miles of small towns and small shops. Country. As a traveler, I can only pass through it, never know it. There is a culture and a way of life here, and it is immune to assaults by travelers. When we stop at a high school, pass a particular row of shops, speed by the shrimp vans, our bus driver launches into a flurry of commentary. I can tell by his general intonation that he is uttering slogans, satirical or sincerely emblematic, one cannot say. I do not understand more than 10% of what he says.

 

Flowers, hibiscus or something like them, sprout from a carefully tended hedge woven through a fence. A golf course lies beyond. And now the bus turns from the highway, down a private road passing, of all things, a guard station. This is a gated community of sorts. It is my hotel. The bus stops, the wheelchair lift drops me to the ground, and I weave through a waiting knot of hotel maids and golf course attendants to the distant lobby. There, I do not roll through a door, because there is no door. There is not even a front wall. This is Hawaii. Land of the walless. My door is always open, because it isn't. And there in the lobby is my wife calling to me.

 

I tried to call her about half an hour before, as the bus was rounding its lagoon. But I had forgotten her number. Such a thing is not possible. I know my wife's mobile phone number. But such things are happening these days. These days may be our last. And what does this mean? How many are there? Haven't I had abundant opportunity to make some distracted move between Honolulu Airport and here that would end my own life? Is it the fact of death we fear or the separation from the one we love? What happens when there is no mobile phone and no number and no answer?

 

Marlou's parents have driven her from the airport, my 200 pound electric wheelchair being far too bulky for any normal car or van. Disabled travel is built around such realities. The Honolulu taxi company has a wheelchair-lift-equipped van that last year drove me here for $175. The money seems a waste. I got here today for one dollar. Marlou's parents joke about the bus ride. Over lunch, someone in the golf course restaurant heard about my transit plight and offered condolences. I assure them none are necessary.

 

Marlou's parents seem friendly but distracted. They leave quickly. Marlou tells me about her talk with them, all about her and cancer and time left. They all needed some privacy. I needed a journey.

It says something that in December with the trees leafless and my garden barren, Marlou managed to make an excellent soup from our home grown tomatoes.  True, this was something of a team effort.  It was my brother and nephews who tied up the tomato plants last spring.  It was Marlou's nephews who brought gallons of green tomatoes indoors to, I thought, decompose.  It was my sister who supplied the recipe.  I thought of adding the chicken.

Somehow, while Marlou was in Sweden and the heat was off in our apartment, the tomatoes took advantage of the indoor coolness to turn a credible red.  And so it came to pass that in mid-December fresh soup materialized in our cooker.  Marlou even found oregano growing live on our terrace.

At the same moment 'After the Wedding' arrived in the post from our video service, Netflix.  I keep trying to find films we can both enjoy, particularly now.  Marlou feels like going out less and less, and I don't blame her.  The problem is that I gravitate toward serious films.  Marlou would call them somber.  I haven't seen enough films over the years to know what's funny and what isn't, so my choices sometimes arrive with a thud.  But 'After the Wedding' promised to be a film about a distant topic, India.  Wrong.

The story has little to do with India and much to do with heartbreak, growth, and dying.  The protagonist, played by a handsome Dane, is all weltschmerz.  We have some evidence of his losses, but mostly what we have is him.  The man's face says it all.  His heart has been broken, but not his spirit.  The love of his life is poor kids in India.  When he must return to his native Denmark to deal with business, life deals him a series of blows.  He becomes caught up in old entanglements.  Like a true hero, he accepts his fate.  The kids he loves in India have been taken from him, an unknown daughter has appeared from nowhere, and he has new commitments in a new life.  In the efficient way of great storytelling, we know remarkably few details of his past.  What is most credible about the hero is his grief.  It is pervasive, never overdone, the product of a life.

One of the central characters begins dying as the film draws to a close.  His attitudes toward death shift before our eyes.  Manipulative at one moment, raging and desperate at the next, he slips toward his fate.  I had not intended this.  I had thought this film was about relief workers in India.  Instead, it is about love and loss and dying.  I glanced at Marlou as the film drew to a close.  She shed a few tears.  She enjoyed the film immensely.

Some close to Marlou are hoping for a miracle.  I think we already have one.  We are able to be here dealing with loss and appreciating life.  I tell Marlou that I admire her for this.  But the truth is that we share credit.  Marlou and I are making this happen together.  My family experience had left me so scarred that I wasn't counting on much togetherness in my life.  And in these moments, in these days for all their pain, I have been proved wrong.

To say that Marlou is out of town is to say that 1906 left San Francisco shaken.  Marlou is in Sweden.  Her medical news is daunting, she is undaunted and I am heading for the City.  If my journey appears shorter, it's all a matter of perspective.  I am not sure why either of us is traveling.  It is unclear what common thread of mood runs through our journeys.  In speaking to friends, I describe a constant state of agitation.  Who can say what Marlou is experiencing on her genealogical quest?  Certain things are known.  We are both having lunch.  I am meeting my friend Laurel in San Francisco's South Park.  Marlou is lunching with third cousins, people completely unknown to her who have popped out of ancestral obscurity to join her in a western Swedish village.  For what?  Smorgasbord?  Herring salad?  Hot fish soup?  Swedish meatballs?  As the train hurtles north, this is what I want to know.  What is on the menu?

Some trains hurtle, others roll, a few creep.  Having been on all of them, I choose the first.  I have no pressing need to be in San Francisco so early.  Never mind.  Speed seems important.  I like watching the suburbs fly by, stops minimal, progress maximal.  Arriving in San Francisco, I have a straightforward plan.  A shoe shine.  A man in the station will do this for $10, pleasing both me and Marlou.  We all need a goal.

City?  This from the conductor as I board the train in Menlo Park.  I nod in the minimalist way of harried and purposeful commuters.  The fact that I am not commuting and have no purpose aboard the 8:39 express hardly matters.  We are all of us moving northwest toward the urban core, at speed.  This is as much as I can work out right now.  Shined shoes, a double macchiato ahead.  For now, San Mateo slipping by in a blur.

Trains, with their lack of steering wheels and preponderance of inevitability, calm me.  They function like a mantra.  They transport like the wings of fate, and along the way, what can one do but relax?  Burlingame is going to be there with or without me.  The empty urban plain, a disused railyard, just south of the San Francisco city limits can be viewed or ignored.  On this particular occasion, I give it a miss.  As faux commuter, work is pressing on me.  I must complete reading this morning's San Francisco Chronicle, as well as selected parts of yesterday's.  As the train disappears into the first of its three tunnels, I drop the travel section to one side.  With five minutes left to go, I have read all that is necessary about the Trans-Siberian Express.  Life is short, and there's a book review about California's founding Jews.  The latter understood the importance of trains.  They, and I, we are on track.

At the station, the shoe shine man has departed.  His sign explains the odd hours.  Open at 7 AM, closed at 9 AM, open again for the lunch hour.  Momentarily, this throws me.  I pause under the clock, somewhat disillusioned to be out of the commuting mainstream, late to the action.  Nevermind.  I am already bouncing up Fourth Street, dodging FedEx vans, alert to dangerous peaks and valleys in San Francisco's seismic sidewalks.  The other danger, the one I shove into the back of my mind, has to do with the bigger picture.  A quadriplegic, wholly dependent on a battery-powered mechanism, is miles from home, on his own and far from help.  Anything can happen.  A wire can come loose.  A wheel can go flying.  I do not have Laurel's mobile phone number, because I have deliberately left home with out it.  I am a trapeze artist without a net.  

It's wonderful the way everything changes at the entrance to South Park, the city folding itself into a London-style square, small and enclosed and concerned with its own restaurants and fashion boutiques and small offices for architects and software designers.  The scruffy playground at the center has a jungle gym, a merry-go-round, a slide.  The effect is ambiguous.  Norland Square, the West Kensington home of my early 20s, had a private lawn, benches and gravel walkways.  Anyone who lived on the square had a key.  Privacy and residency.  Why not?  This square is different.  It seems that few live here.  This is a working square, and the center is all about playing.  And this, I decide, is fine.  It will do.

It's cold at Café Centro.  The macchiato is hot.  I sit indoors and finish a neglected portion of the Chronicle.  This is what single people do, sitting alone at tables.  The experience will be brief, with Laurel expected in a few minutes.  If in the coming years I find myself single again, seated alone at a table like this one, how will I comport myself?  Better, I think.  This is why I tell Marlou not to worry.  This is what I need to tell myself.  That I know how to occupy a table.  Mine is not a commanding presence.  But it is a presence.  I am not making eye contact with anyone here this morning.  But in the future?  Who knows?  I like the idea of bridging the generational divide that separates me from the metal-studded young man who steamed my macchiato behind the counter.  He was all deference and formality, treating me like his father, which I am old enough to be.  I like to think that if I came in here a few times on my own, some humorous possibilities would open up.  It's important to make people laugh.

I'm comfortable enough in this café not to start when I feel a hand on my shoulder.  It turns out to be Laurel's, and this signals the main event of the day.  We launch into conversation and cover old ground and new, with psychology and personal histories in the forefront.  Laurel has always had a certain calm.  I think of her as calming.  These days, she seems less so.  Perhaps I have achieved some calm myself.  I tell her about my agitation.  She shrugs.  Agitation may be your friend for a while, she says.  We compare notes on faux commuting.  Recently retired, she boarded a familiar rush-hour train near Sacramento for the long ride to San Francisco.  And the irony makes us laugh.

I am laughing again at day's end.  I have dinner with friends at the Japanese restaurant down the street, then we all repair to my place to watch a video.  It turns out to be the right video.  It's British, outrageous and in uniformly bad taste.  The thing is funny enough for me to constantly turn around to see if my friends are sharing the fun.  They are.  I realize, amid the sadness and fear, that there's plenty of reason to laugh.  Each moment is different.  Each moment is only a moment.

Mr. Lee and I are whipping down the 101 freeway, his van humming, the airport receding.  Our topic, and we have found one, is 007.  With Mr. Lee hailing from Vietnam and possessed of limited English, our conversational window cannot open fully.  Nevermind.  James Bond will do.  Our generation understands him and we find easy agreement on the main points.  There was more action in this one than the last one, less sex, and so on.  This airport-to-home transfer is relatively painless, thanks to Virgin America's spiffy terminal at San Francisco and Mr. Lee's chitchat.  Conversations keep drifting back to James Bond, I notice, and this has much to do with Bond's admirable capacity to roll under, jump over and otherwise duck a succession of fiery explosions and sustained bursts of automatic weapons fire.  Somewhere, probably in a warehouse south of Oakland, there's a training school for this sort of thing.

Marlou and I are currently learning disaster skills on the job.  The latest PET scan results have us both reeling.  I worry about Marlou.  She worries about me.  Now we can both worry over a distance of 6000 miles, which gives us an opportunity to worry less.  Marlou and our Seattle sister-in-law are both digging up family histories in Gutenberg.  They are amply supplied with mobile phones, but calls are rare.  Sweden is full of trees, Marlou said on Saturday morning as I rushed out of the bathroom to grab the phone.  Forests and Swedes and modern shopping centers and everyone speaking English, with the occasional opera company thrown in.  Mary Poppins alternates with La Bohème in Gutenberg.  Happy holidays.

Mr. Lee parks in front of the darkened apartment.  He rolls in my folding wheelchair, helps me limp up the ramp, drops my bag on the bed.  He's off, and I'm here, and this dreaded moment is not so bad, after all.  I had feared returning to an empty house.  But anticipation has worked its magic.  Even if our apartment becomes my apartment, the place will not be empty of love.  Marlou has seen to that.  This is what life is trying to tell me, or I am trying to tell myself.  There is, and there will be, warmth.  I turn up the thermostat and begin unpacking my bag.

Be sure to have someone drive you home, a friend advised.  She was speaking of the PET scan results and the meeting with Marlou's doctor.  I remembered that advice dodging through parked cars in the shopping center next to the clinic.  It was perfectly sound, as warnings go, but now it's too late, as the wheelchair lift grinds away.  On the way up, I puzzle over the doctor's behavior.  She kept us waiting for two and half hours.  No explanation.  No apology.  This isn't characteristic, only odd.  We have to be realistic, she said, kicking off her PET scan presentation.  In retrospect, I wonder whom she was speaking to.  Marlou doesn't need to be told anything about realism.  

Inside the van, I stand, drop into the driver's seat and stare at the retail comings and goings.  An outdoor loudspeaker is decking the halls.  I am hitting the deck.  I am hauling.  Actually, I am staying, parked outside a cupcake bakery, staring at the early dark.  This happens every year, the music, the decorations hanging from street lights.  Short days and short fuses as shoppers honk their way through suburban traffic.  It's something one can rely on.  I don't know how Marlou and I are going to get through the evening.  Am I up to the task?  What is the task?  The one I know involves my bass part in the Menlo Park Chorus.  We have choir practice in less than two hours.  I can drive.  I will back the van carefully, in the direction of the slanted parking, drive around the shops and carefully slip into the evening traffic.  A knot in my chest, the thing that clenches just before you cry, has been with me for more than a week.  I have been anticipating, fearing, preparing.  And now, it's time to drive home.

Home seems like the same old home except that something is new and no one knows what it is.  As the evening unfolds, in between our shared moments of grief, I keep thinking it's time for chorus practice.  This is unrealistic.  Neither of us has the concentration.  Still, it's where we go on Tuesdays.  And I would like this to be a chorus Tuesday like any other.  Our community choir is starting to look like that.  Something large enough to represent the town and varied enough to represent the townspeople.  Marlou had much to do with this.  She made it a point to turn up at a summer street festival, talk to passersby, make a pitch.  I may be one of the few people who knows how hard it is for my private wife to project a public presence.  But she did this because she wanted to.  Marlou has a feel for music and its charms.  Currently I have a profound feel for hard it is for human beings to stretch, to reach beyond their limitations.  These days have an excessive poignancy.  It's hard to keep things in perspective.  Marlou making an effort to use her limited time, her foreshortened time, in such a way seems heroic and sad and touching.  Perhaps everything will.  Forever.  More likely, I am learning something about humans and their unfinished business.  I too can lay claim to much that is heroic, sad and touching.  It seems that in order to finish anything in my life, I have to let go of something else.  And one of these things may be the poignancy.