Return

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.