Watch

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.